Atlanta Neighs

by Jojo Salatcia

Rating: teen
Tags: Human, Comedy
Length: 18553

Only during these days of great fear and melancholy does the wise old adage of his aging mother ring like the Bell of Truth in this Valley of Deceit: The Universe is a dick and we live on the edge of the urethra.

It was there, wrapped in that thick, coarse, coyote-skin blanket that he had been brought into the world some twenty-odd years ago. And it was there, wrapped in that very same blanket did he lie in bed, adrift betwixt the realms of the living and oblivion. There, where he allowed the nostalgic warmth and comfort that such a tattered piece of cloth could offer him to pull him into such a trance-like state, recalling the stories of days old, told to him by his aged, but wise father.

And it was there that he found that there was a horse sleeping next to him.

Huh. Well that certainly won't become an issue, now will it?

A not-entirely-serious collaboration fic written by yours truly, The Almighty Lord Siffer, and Crushric of Orléans.

("Sex" tag for occasional sexual humor.)

Feedback is greatly appreciated.

Published 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
Last updated 2014-03-09 21:08:36 UTC

Chapter Two: Breakfast with The Dahmers

Chapter Two: Breakfast with the Dahmers

Believe it or not, it just wouldn’t go in.

Repeated attempt after repeated attempt, the hard, long object thrust at the entrance so specifically designed for it. Each attempt failing miserably—often sliding off right next to the hole or just tapping the outlying area to the visible pain of the wielder—the mare slowly became increasingly frustrated, as belied by the furious look on her face. The sky-blue buck merely cocked a brow at her.

“You’re really not very good at that, y’know?”

“Sh’t up!” The mare growled at him, the key in her mouth preventing her from fully enunciating herself. “I ju—” The key dropped, landing with a soft chink-ing sound as it collided with the cobblestone walkway. Rose hoofed her face. And then she did it again. Once more. “Ugh! I so don’t need this right now! I’ve been going at this for nearly five—wait…”

She turned to Longsteve, the rasp sounds of rusted gears grating against each other as she did so. Eyes widened and slightly bloodshot for some reason that was probably nothing, she stared at the horn jutting from stallion’s shaggy mane. “Yes?” Longsteve asked, suddenly feeling self-conscious and inadequate.

She pointed at him. “You! You’re a unicorn—” she then pointed at the door “—you lock this thing!”

Longsteve blinked. “I’m sorry, what? What does my Freudian forehead have to do with my skills at sealing portals to your personal haven?” A quick glance upwards reassured him of the existence of his new, swanky head-accessory. Yes. Swanky was a fantastic word. He’d have to use it more often.

“Freudian?” the mare queried. “What’s a ‘freudian’?” She shook her head, refusing to let the conversation go off on a tangent. She had a feeling she’d rather not know, anyway. “Nevermind that. Just use your magic to put the key into the lock and then, as you should, turn it.”

“I can do that?”

The mare’s lower eyelid twitched. Nevertheless, she nodded in confirmation, staring dumbly at Longsteve. The stallion let out a completive “Hmm” as he sauntered over to the grounded key. Staring at the lone key, he could hear laughter, the jubilant sounds of mirth distorting over the course of seconds until it resembled a typical Wednesday night at Hell’s Comedy Club. It was challenging him with its haunting giggles and jeers, this much he knew. Looking back at Rose, who rolled her eyes and made an impatient “move it along” gesture with her hoof, the stallion steeled himself, ready to show the demon key a thing or two about love. Or something.

Kneeling on his left forelimb, he glared at the fallen piece of copper and concentrated. His face inched nearer and nearer until his muzzle was mashed against the stone walkway and his eyes bulged and shimmered from the sheer effort alone, beads of sweat forming on his forehead. Teeth gritted and eyelids twitching, Longsteve continued to press his face into the ground until he had his hindlegs dangling in the air, supported only by his head and front hooves. A deep, menacing growl emanated from the depths of his throat. And then it stopped.

Hindlegs finding their natural place on the ground, Longsteve lifted his face from the ground, still staring intently at the triumphant key. The bastard. Behind the stallion, Roseluck continued to stare dumbly, her pupils dilating and constricting at impossibly rapid paces, her mouth simply let loose a silent torrent of what’s.

Turning to face his perplexed, rosie-haired companion, Longsteve simply uttered: “How do I shot magic?”

Rose hoofed at the ground a few times before lifting a hoof up her chin and forcing it shut. She blinked rapidly, willing her pupils pick a size and stick with it for longer than half a millisecond. “Are you—?!” Wait. “Wait a second. You, uh… you can’t do magic?” She enunciated as if stepping on eggshells. Longsteve could almost think she was walking on a metaphorical minefield with that sort of hesitance. Odd.

“Well, no. I can’t rightly say that I can, little lady.”

“Oh,” Roseluck said, covering her mouth with her hoof. “I’m sorry, I’m so so so sorry. I-I-I had no idea you couldn’t… I mean—”

“I’m sorry, but I get the feeling that I may have said something most would find an ample reason to cry over for hours under a running shower head while tightly holding onto their Sergeant Huggy Boo-Boo Bear.”

“What?” Roseluck asked, tilting her head, confused by the stallion’s odd phrase. Shaking her head, she continued, “No, it’s just that, I mean, I know not all unicorns are totally dependent on their ability to directly control magic, it’s just that, I mean, if I couldn’t plant my flowers anymore because my green-hoof just… didn’t work, I’d be completely lost.”

“Green-hoof, y’say?”

“Yeah. You know… earth pony magic?”

“I thought you said only unicorns could do magic.”

“No. I meant that they’re the only ones who can directly manipulate magical energies. Like, telekinesis and teleportation and stuff. Earth pony magic is more subtle, a little more so than pegasi magic.” She paused, having realized that Longsteve’s eyebrow was already pushing itself beyond it arching limits. “You really have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

“I believe only in the power of broship, science, and nuclear weaponry. All I hear from you is heresy. Do continue.”

“Are you telling me that you have no idea what magic even is?”

“I’m telling you that magic, by its very definition, cannot exist. I’m guessing, because of what you said, as well as your reaction when I told you I couldn’t do ‘magic’, that ‘magic’ is a naturally occurring and understood phenomenon. Would I be correct?”

Roseluck nodded, slowly, not entirely sure where this odd stallion was headed with his logic. Likely somewhere just as odd, where logic was a mythical beast that parents would use to frighten their unruly children into more obedient behavior lest it burst forth from their closets and consume their genitals with naught but a plastic spork and plenty of oregano.

“Boom, there it is,” Longsteve declared, pounding his front hooves against each other. “Now that I have proven myself all-knowing knower of all, shall we get going?”

Roseluck raised a hoof and opened her mouth to retort. She caught herself, however, not wanting to continue the line of conversation. She sighed, facehoofing for the fourth time that day, wondering how many more times she would do so before giving herself a concussion. Casting an aside glance at her unlocked door, she sighed yet again.

“Yeah, why not,” she relented. “Besides, Ponyville isn’t at all like Manehatten or Trottingham. You don’t really have to worry about some whack-job breaking into your place.” Her ears tucked backwards as she grinned nervously, staring at Longsteve. “No offense.”

Longsteve held up a hoof. “Some taken. But, ignoring the horrendous horse pun-based naming theme this place seems to fetishize, if this is such a safe place, why were you so adamant on getting the door locked?”

Rose shrugged her shoulders—something which Longsteve was positive would come to haunt him in the dead of night. Along with the albatross—and walked down the walkway, Longsteve following suit. “I dunno, really. I just haven’t felt comfortable leaving the door unlocked lately, for some reason.”

“Ah, a constant fear that something’s always near? A phobia that someone is always there? Sounds like a job for Iron Maiden. Up the irons!” And with that, Longsteve saluted the empty air.

Roseluck simply rolled her eyes and started walking in a seemingly random direction. “Come on, there’s a good breakfast place down this way.”

Nigh a moment later Longsteve was walking beside her, muttering something about “lacking respects for the metal gods” and glancing around at his surroundings. His legs moved with languid ease, not even needing a glimmer of thought for their continued function as he examined the houses of the, presumably, small town he’d somehow woken up in. The houses seemed to be consistently made of wood, with thatched roofing and a very particular flair for balconies and what looked like extra stories attached with super-glue. Well, at least they were all advanced enough to have glass windows, so they had that going for them. They were apparently too good for the pee-smelling leather hides of his youth. Bastards.

One thing that became immediately prevalent was the particular fondness this place held for bright, exuberant colors. The town itself was much more colorful than what should have been possible. Indeed, in such a town mostly comprised of wood and thatching, he would have expected it to appear at least somewhat old and dusty, with an occasional gang of armed orphans dog-piling a helpless passerby in some dark alley, maybe. He didn’t think he was asking for too much. In fact, the only thing more colorful than the town were the inhabitants. Coming in varying shapes and sizes, some with horns, some with wings, others with neither at all, but they varied the most in coloring. Solid or multi-colored, they all came in varying shades of green, white, red, yellow, blue, orange,  purple, pink! Holy hell, now that was a color!

They’d all been going about their daily business and whatnot. He could see a crew of the horse-pony-things in hard hats gathered around a workbench, the timber framing of a small building standing behind them. Looking elsewhere, he saw a mare and stallion huddled closely together, resting contently in a bed of grass under a shady tree. It was there that he realized how remarkably effortless it was for him to differentiate between male and female. And occasionally, a pony-creature passed by the duo, sparing an amicable wave of the hoof or good-natured natured nod. He even noticed a few pegasi flying about.

They were civilized creatures. Granted, they were still heretics who’d yet to pay tribute to the Almighty Machine Spirit. But, at the very least, they were civilized heretics nonetheless.

Suddenly, Longsteve was attacked. A force which could only be the impact of a gigantic turtle being propelled into his body hit him in the side, announcing the coming of the Second Turtle-ocalypse, may their new gods have mercy on their mortal souls. Well, either that or it was Roseluck daintily pushing him into a bush, making him land with a quiet grunt. “What? What’s going on?” He questioned the assaulter. And for that matter, why was there a bush on the side of the road? This town obviously had way too much vegetation just lying around, using space and consuming all of their precious carbon dioxide. Somebody should be fired for this level of negligence!

“Shh!” she said as she climbed in with him. “I need you to be quiet.”

Longsteve’s mouth formed into a small “O” shape. “Ooooh, I see where this is going.” He let out a nasal exhale. Gulping, he stared upwards at Rose with the eyes that a pup with accelerated cognitive prowess did as it stared at the Hummer speeding towards it. The hummer was adorned with puppy heads. “O-okay, I can handle this. I won’t scream. Just be gentle, aye?”

“Shh,” she shushed him in response. Longsteve turned his head to see what his attempted rapist was gazing at, both he and Roseluck able to see out of a small hole in the leaf coverage. At first nothing caught his attention, but after a few seconds he noticed something irregular: a bright, pink horsey—the kind which he’d always wanted when he was a small girl—bouncing its way down the street with a huge smile. It was a horrifying smile. It was the kind of smile that screamed, “I’m on the verge of OD’ing on LSD, heroin, speed and antidepressants! Look at all the small children I just murdered so I could get this raging erection!”

Judging by his new friend’s unwillingness to meet this pink abomination head-on, she could only be a psychopathic monster who terrorized villages and forced small children to read Fifty Shades of Gray out loud to their parents while they fondled each other, lubricated solely by their tears. Or maybe she was just slightly socially awkward to be around. He recalled people having a similar reaction to himself during high school. And by “people”, he meant “highly trained psychological analysts that served in the military”.

“What’s go’en yer knickers in a bunch ’bout ’er?” he murmured into Roseluck’s ear. Amusingly, his breath on her ear made it flicker and bat. “Do ye owe ’er protection money b’cause o’ that time ye tried to open an unde’ground candy-smugglin’ operation, an’ the copp’rs were like—” His accent switched immediately. “—‘Ma’am, this is in no way illegal or a threat to the public safety, and quite frankly we’d like you to stop trying to bribe us with jawbreakers’. Seriously, who tries to bribe their way into prison?”

“Will you be qui—Wha? That made absolutely no sense whatsoever,” Rose deadpanned.

Longsteve shrugged. “Yeah, th-that one kind of just sort of got away from me.”

Rose shoved a hoof into Longsteve’s mouth, crouching lower to the ground as the mirthful-looking pink pony bounced past, humming a jaunty tune that coincided with rhythmic falls of her hooves. It was a she, Longsteve had noticed. And not because it was pink. Longsteve had always believed in the notion that pink was the very essence ofover-flowing testosterone.

Over the course of several seconds, the oing-y, boing-y sounds of the bouncing and the humming and the screams of the damned drifted further away. Roseluck tentatively raised her head, scanning the area for any signs of the pink menace, having heard of her mysterious teleportation and reality-warping abilities.

With a sigh of relief, Rose stepped away from grounded stallion and walked out of the bush, offering Longsteve a hoof as she noticed him flailing about like a de-tentacled octopus. Pulling him out, and brushing off the twigs and leaves lodged in his coat and mane, she apologized, “Sorry about that. I just don’t think you two should meet for now.”

“Oh? And why’s that?” Lonsteve inquired.

Rose huffed, blowing out a leaf stuck in her mane. “Look, Steve—can I call you Steve sometimes?” Longsteve nodded in confirmation. “Okay then, Steve. I’m gonna level with you: You are, without a doubt, the strangest stallion I’ve ever known. And my brother has this obsession with jelly like you wouldn’t believe.” Rose sighed again, massaging the bridge of her nose, feeling the oncoming signs of a headache. “I just don’t think Ponyville would be able to afford the repair costs if you two met.”

“Oh… well, I guess that that makes sense. Except for that it doesn’t. What makes you think she’d notice me anyway?”

The pair continued their walk, the passage to breakfast now safe from the terror of the pink menace. “Like I said,” she started, “Ponyville isn’t exactly as big as a place like, say Canterlot—”

“Woah.”

“—or Manehatten. It’s the kind place where most of us know each other.”

Longsteve rubbed the back of his neck, his legs still somehow carrying him with ease. “That still doesn’t explain why she’d come after me.”

“Pinkie Pie—”

“Adorable.”

“—has this odd notion that she needs to personally welcome each and every newcomer to Ponyville with a large party. While this sounds innocent enough she has a few… bad habits, which I’m afraid nobody’s ever discouraged in her. At least, not enough for her to stop.”

“One, how would she know I’m new? And two, what bad habits might we be referring to?” His money was on random crucifixions every two hours when the lights went out, and leaving hair in the punch. Hair in the punch. The horror! The horror!

“As for your first question, well, Pinkie just seems to know everybody in Ponyville. I don’t know how she keep track of everybody, but frankly, it’s creepy. As for your second question, well… let me explain with an anecdote: a few years back, at the day of my birthday, something… odd happened, I guess.” She grimaced with one side of her face. “I haven’t really felt comfortable with Pinkie since. After a completely normal day of work, nobody having congratulated me or anything except my two co-workers, Lily and Daisy, I went home. I unlocked the door—and it was very specifically locked at the time—stepped into my house, and all of a sudden all the lights turned on and tons of ponies stood there, screaming ‘surprise’.”

“That sounds sort of like breaking and entering.”

Roseluck folded her ears backwards at that. “Well, I might be blowing this out of proportion, since she was just trying to be friendly and all, but honestly… it scared me. A lot. I, uh… I actually ended up running all the way to Lily’s place, and I kinda sorta… cried the whole way. It took me three days and an apology from Pinkie before I could go back into my house, and even now, sometimes when I try to sleep, I get these anxiety attacks just thinking about Pinkie sneaking up on me for some stupid prank or something.”

“Ah. I get it now,” Longsteve said with an understanding, sage-like nod of the head.

“I-I mean, she really is a sweet girl and I know that she means well and stuff, but I mean, she’s just so…”

“Invasive?”

Rose nodded, letting out a nasally exhale. “Yeah.”

⇛LOOKATTHISSCENEBREAK⇚

“I’m gonna make you an offer you… can’t refuse,” the mare said, voice smooth as honey, yet sharp as the edge of a finely-honed steel blade. She leaned towards Roseluck, making the mare inch back in her seat. The gaze of the cream-coated mare had the intensity of a murder of crows, but not a misfortune of ravens, because that would be weird. Indeed, the mare’s stare gave off an aura that commanded both fear and respect. The eyes of one who’d not only survived the fast-paced brutal life of the Manehattan slums, but thrived in them. The eyes of a mare who, when she was naught but a little filly of age seven, had already known how to shank a pony, and make a damn fine piece of candy. Laced with poison.

Never had her father’s sweet-tooth been so convenient.

Suddenly, she lightened up with a friendly smile. “Since he’s new I’ll give him a fifty percent discount.”

“On organs?” Lonsteve queried. “Because that’s a lot of money.”

“No, on your breakfast,” the cream coated mare replied.

“Oh, good. I would be mildly disturbed if a shop as nice and cozy as this one harbored an organ-vending operation.” Longsteve threw out a hoof, gesturing at the interior of the small, warm shop. Like others, he and Roseluck were sitting at one of the wooden tables, lounging back in their delightedly well-padded chairs. As comfortable as sleeping on a harem of curvaceous chicks. “Mildly,” he restated grimly, his eyes narrowing into slits.

Roseluck gave the mare an even larger smile. “Thanks, Bon Bon, I really appreciate it.”

“No prob, sweetie. So what’ll you two lovebirds have?” Bon Bon clicked her tongue and perked forth her ears in a motion that seemed to deliberately say “I’m all ears”. The implications of such a statement being true was horrifying, after all, wouldn’t that mean the horsies had self-awareness based in their ears? Brain-ears. Where was the sharply-honed crucifix when it was needed?

“Well, I was wondering if you serve pancakes with ice cream. Vanilla and nougat. Oh yeah, and why does your voice change all the time?” Longsteve smacked his lips at the prospect of voice chan—pancakes with ice cream, that is.

“Birth defect—” she very casually explained in a way that sorta-kinda sounded like: “I was a failed egg in my mother’s womb that got birthed solely because my father was giving mom such good, deep head that he accidently bit me and pulled me out. With his mouth.”

“—and yes, yes we do. Regular or double portion?”

“Well, I’m really hungry, so a double portion sounds good right about now. I just want you to know that you sound really silly, but I respect you for being okay with your birth conditions and for doing customer service yourself.”

“Thanks, sweetie. And what’ll you have, Roseluck?”

Roseluck just stared. Nobody had ever questioned Bon Bon about her voice before, a fact which had culminated in the creation of several dozen crack-pot theories, ranging from “She’s a changeling” to “She’s just really good at changing her voice and uses it to mock us every day”. Finding out the truth was… world shattering. Like all of a sudden, roses were white and the local dress-maker had stopped nitpickin about every detail and had gone wrestling in the mud.

“Roseluck, sweetie? What can I get you?” Bon Bon quirked a brow at her.

“Oh, sorry! I just realized that I’ve never, well, bothered to ask about your voice, really. I guess I was afraid I might offend you. Oh, um, and I’d like some waffles with rose petals—”

“Haha. Gross.”

“—and syrup,” Rose finished, glaring at Longsteve for his outburst.

“Coming right at you, girl. And don’t be afraid of getting under my skin over something like that. It’s never really been an issue, to be honest. Now, I’ll leave you two sweethearts to get on with your thing.” And with that passing remark Bon Bon made her way towards the kitchen.

“This is a nice place,” Longsteve remarked, taking another look around. “But I got the impression from the front of the shop that this was a candy-specific confectionary.”

“Oh, Bon Bon mostly makes candy, but she offers a really good selection of breakfast items in the morning. It’s sort of a special offer she has between a certain set of hours.”

“Neat. Her business doing well?”

Roseluck gave a wry grin at that. “Of course! Her only competition is Sugarcube Corner, but they’re mostly specialized in baked treats: cupcakes, muffins, cakes and the like. While they also serve breakfast foods, I honestly prefer Bon Bon’s, plus…” Roseluck’s grin turned into a grimace. “Pinkie works at Sugarcube Corner.”

“I am cognizant of your point, and I must agree that coming here is the superior option, although only with a basis in what you’ve told me. Bon Bon seems like a very nice person, although I’m a bit confused as to why she keeps referring to us as if we’re on a date.” Spoon.

“Well, can you blame her? We did wake up in the same bed this morning, so you probably smell like roses. A lot. Because my bed does.” She leaned over the table, sniffing at the air. “Yup, smells like roses alright.”

“Your sense of smell is kind of creepy.” And then he waggled his tongue at her. Not for any particular reason, mind, but just because he could.

“I’m sure my sense of smell is very normal. You, on the other hand, aren’t. Since we’re going to be friends how about you tell me about yourself?”

“Oh, well, I’m a human named Longsteve, I’m some-some years old, and I like bathing in the blood of virgin ducks. Don’t ask me how I can tell they’re virgins.”

Roseluck arched her right eyebrow, the eyelid of the opposite eye twitching slightly. “What… What is a human? And again, that’s incredibly morbid.”

Longsteve clopped his forehooves together, yet his face remained eerily deadpanned. “I know, right?” He crossed his forelegs, resting his chin on his left hoof, cycling through his brain for the right combination of words to rightly illustrate an idea on what exactly a human being was. His ears perked. “Ah-ha! A human is… Huh.” Then they flattened against his head. “A human is… It is…”

Roseluck found herself leaning forward, her front hooves placed firmly on wooden oak table that sat between them, eye widened with anticipation. “It is…? What?”

The befuddled stallion ran a hoof through his shaggy blue mane, beads of sweat colonized his countenance. He thought as hard as he could, taking up the word in his mind. Human. Humongous, humoristic, huge, hubris, Houston? A human was a large, funny, but prideful thing? No, what? No, no, no, no, no, this was wrong. This was very, very, very not right. “A human is…” He knew this. He knew that he knew this. A human was a… It was a… “I-I’m sorry, this has never happened to me before.”

The world faded out of focus as the answer eluded him. The only thing he could hear was his own breathing, mocking the silence in his mind. His hooves lost feeling and his eyes glazed over as his chest started to ache, like a large hand was reaching in there, grasping his heart and squeezing, squeezing hard. Breaths became wheezing, harsh intakes, roaring like wind in his ears, and his stomach roiled, paining him, assuring him that he was about to release whatever contents in his stomach all over the table.

“Longsteve…?”

“No! I-I-I remember. J-just give me a second, aye?” He had hardly even realized that his teeth were pressed so tightly against his bottom lip, the bitter taste of liquid iron barely even registered to him. “My mom!”

“Your mom?” Roseluck asked, hesitantly reaching out towards the bewildered stallion.

“Yes! Yes yes yes yes, my mom! Very racist old broad. Hated Germans, I believe. Really pessimistic, too!” He brought his left forehoof to his head, tapping it with specific rhythm: four sluggish taps, followed by followed by seven taps in rapid succession. “C’mon, c’mon, let’s see… Civil War reenactment, black girlfriend-hand-thing, little Timmy at the orphanage. What I learned in driving is!” A sharp inhale. “What I learned in driving school is!”

Grasping Longsteve’s right hoof with both of hers, Rose gently massaged them, nervously assuring: “Hey, i-it’s okay. Just take a deep breath and calm down and—”

The blue stallion growled—literally growling at her—and aggressively yanked his foreleg from her grasp, the momentum pulling him from his seat. “No! Don’t—don’t interrupt me. Just give me second.” He found himself slowly backing away. “Just give me a fucking second,” he whispered, his head tilting downwards.

 Rose was at a loss. Gone was the odd, yet happy-go-lucky stallion that had woken up with her in bed that morning. Now, standing before her was a volatile pony barely holding himself together. He’d even used the F-word, a word seldom used by most ponies. Or at the very least, most of the ones that she'd known. Rose herself had only ever heard the phrase from two ponies in her life: that one stallion she dated a few months back, and a couple of times from Bon Bon. And that was only when she became truly upset. An event both rare and incredibly frightening.

 Looking at the pony before her, it was slightly scary, sure. But as seconds passed, Rose found that his demeanor had him looking almost too pathetic and confused to be truly dangerous. With that in mind, Rose swallowed her trepidations, sat up from her seat, and slowly hoofed her way towards the distressed stallion.

“Longsteve?”

He did nothing. He said nothing.

Within a forelegs reach of him, she reached a hoof outwards, gently placing it on his shoulder. “Steve, are you okay?”

She shook him a bit. Again he neither said, nor did, anything. She stepped a little bit closer, bringing her opposite hoof around and—

“Hello! There we go!” Longsteve exclaimed, jumping back, out of Rose’s reach. She squealed in response. The suddenly revivified stallion trotted merrily in place. “Ah, yes, yes! Nothing like a few minutes of that there ol’ angst and stuff to clear the synapses and whatnot.” He stopped and placed a hoof on his chest and inhaled, then pointing it outwards as he exhaled. “Mmm… yes, that is some good angst right there. Still, I do not know how the typical pretty-boy, white/spiky-haired, great sword-wielding, anime anti-hero with the tragic past filled with wet bags of dead kittens and the distressing lack of therapists nearby, is able to hold it for so long.” His ears perked. “Oh hey, it’s more of those things again. Weird.”

“L-Longsteve…?”

“Huh, wha?”

Rose took a half-step closer, her ears tucked. “You’re okay, right?”

“Eh? Oh, yeah, I’m fine,” he answered nonchalantly. “I just needed to have a little freakout to take the edge off. Which is a good thing for me, I guess, considering the fact that I woke up as a horse and was like, ‘Huh. Coolio’. That’s not the proper reaction, I don’t think.”

Such a peculiar choice of words. “‘Woke up as a whorse’? Did you, uh, expect to wake up as something else?”

“Well, I certainly did expect to wake up as a non-equine, old sport.”

Rose opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. Pressing her hoof into the bridge of her nose, she inhaled, then exhaled. Inhale. Exhale. Just like Nurse Redheart had recommended. Now that Rose thought about it, Redheart may have been the only professionally trained therapist in Ponyville.

“Longsteve,” she started, her voice eerily leveled.

“Yes?”

“Why did you just do that?”

“I-I told you,” he said, pointing behind himself. “W-was time for—for angst.” Why did he do that? There was nothing behind him. Unless—oh, no, wait. No. No, there were no albatrosses behind him. Good. That meant he was spared for another day.

Rose’s eye twitched as she repeatedly tapped her hoof to an unreadable beat existing only in her head. Her brain did not possess the rhythm needed to form that smooth jazz band it so desired. Oh, the dreams it had of making it big. Deciding it was something she no longer wanted to continue dwelling upon, she huffed. It was like dealing with an mentally-deficient tadpole with mommy-issues and dreams of becoming a real colt. “Just… just don’t do that again. Okay?” She rubbed her foreleg. “You had me freaking out there for a moment.”

“Only if you aid me in the total eradication of the brain-ears and the albatrosses, as well as spreading the word and love of the almighty Machine Spirit,” he answered, his voice dripping with the grim determination of a true zealot.

“Is everything alright over here?” somepony asked. “My customers are getting a wee bit nervous.”

Longsteve and Roseluck swiveled their heads in the direction of the voice. Indeed, they had become the center of attention, all eyes trained directly on them. Roseluck grinned sheepishly, her head sinking further between her shoulders. Longsteve simply stared into nothingness.

In front of them, an eyebrow raised, stood Bon Bon. On her back she balanced their breakfast trays, eldritch whispers of the Old Ones oozing out from the delectable foodstuffs, thereby explaining how anybody could balance trays so well.

Cthulhu aided Bon Bon.

Longsteve crossed his forelimbs over his chest and bowed his head. “Welcome back, Holy Warrior of the Great Old One. Worry for me not, as I was only having a small mental breakdown.”

Bon Bon blinked. “Oh. Uhm, you’re okay, right?”

The stallion smiled and nodded his head vigorously. “Yep. No worries; I think I’ll be fine until I inevitably discover whatever horrifying atrocities I must have committed that drove me to this.”

Roseluck and Bon Bon tilted their heads simultaneously, eyebrows raised. “What are you talking about?” They both asked. Again, they were near perfectly synchronized.

“That’s what usually happens, ain’t it? You know, I either took part in or orchestrated what is basically the second Holocaust, or tax evasion—always remember to pay your taxes children, or I’ll cleave the flesh from your very bones, and you’ll find that your eyes and testicles have swapped places all of a sudden,” the stallion said, looking and pointing at the conveniently-placed nothingness beside him and flashing it a winning smile.

“Steve, who are you talking to?” Rose asked, cringing slightly.

“No one!” he hastily snapped, turning his attention back to the two mares before him. “Anyway, it traumatized me so much that I turned myself into a horse and wiped my memory clean in order to cope with the fact that I was a terrible, terrible person.”

Bon Bon simply made a face and looked at Roseluck, who, herself, simply shook her head, spinning a hoof around her ears.

“Oy vey, don’t you give me that. What would you do if you were slowly going mad from the guilt of having facilitated a genocide, eh?”

Bon Bon chuckled, shaking her head. “He’s got a point, Roseluck. Who are we to judge? Anyway, I have your breakfast right here.” She snaked back her head, grabbing the trays in her mouth one by one and placing them in front of their respective recipients. Longsteve watched this, mortified. “You two enjoy now, alright? And if there’s anything, anything at all that worries you, don’t hesitate to come ask me, alright?”

“Sure thing, Bon Bon, and thanks. We’ll just get to enjoying your wonderful treats.” Roseluck briefly touched her hoof to Bon Bon’s withers, reassuring her that everything was fine from their side.

“Yes, go and cater to your customers. Oh, and if the King in Yellow drops by, tell him Cthulhu is in the tea and Shub Niggurath’s children are the food.”

Bon Bon held out a hoof in his direction, clicking her tongue and winking at him. “Will do, sweetheart.” And then she left to take an order for another table.

“I like her, she’s very tolerant and understanding and stuff.”

“She is, isn’t she?” Roseluck pulled her tray, upon which was situated a plate plus various utensils of torture, closer to her. “She’s one of the sweetest, nicest mares I know. Really, the only time I’ve ever seen her get mad was when a friend of ours, Lyra, ate some candy she wasn’t supposed to. I’m not quite sure what Bon Bon said to her, but for the next two months Lyra didn’t seem to have a bit to her name. Really, it wasn’t uncommon for we girls to have to invite her over for dinner during those two months. Wouldn’t want her to starve, after all.”

Longsteve looked down at his tray, and saw the devil. The devil’s in the details, after all, and he just realized a tiny detail concerning his current morphology. “So I notice that this is a fork.” He pointed the tip of his hoof at the offending article. “And this here is a knife.” Repeat motion. “But how am I supposed to wield them with hooves instead of hands?”

Roseluck looked up at her breakfast companion, quickly munching a piece of waffle into nonexistence. Ponies didn’t actually have stomachs, you see. There was just this infinite dark void in their bellies. “I’m not familiar with the word ‘hands’, but usually a unicorn would use their magic to hold the utensils. Since you’re, uh, not used to that I guess you can just do like earth ponies and pegasi do and eat with your mouth.”

“Really? And that’s considered socially acceptable?” She nodded in confirmation. “Awesome! That’s my favorite way of eating!” Longsteve made as to headbutt the plate, but faltered in curiosity. “So, wait, there’re utensils on your tray, too. Why do you also get them  if you can’t use them?”

“It’s considered good taste to always serve with utensils so that unicorn customers don’t have to ask for anything, and can have an enjoyable experience. That’s why the food, in this case, came on trays: so that the knife and fork could easily be transported with the plate.”

Longsteve responded with a speech so bold, so beautiful, and so revolutionary that every single individual who heard it would fall to the ground a cry, only to become better people afterwards, taking in homeless orphans, giving love the the unloved, investing in universal healthcare and the progression of the sciences. Indeed, every one that heard it would become enlightened, hail Longsteve as their new emperor, and dethrone Celestia in order to try, and succeed at, creating the ultimate utopia with Longsteve as its head of state. The world would have become complete.

Oh, if only his mouth wasn’t stuffed with pancake at the time of enunciation, and everything he said sounded vaguely like “harrflarr, gablarghaharr”.

“I have no idea what you just said, so I’m going to assume you said ‘I love you for buying me this glorious meal, please allow me to serve as your eternal servant’.”

Longsteve nodded in absent-minded agreement, then started making out with the ice cream. Gosh. Wow! Look at that tongue-action! Roseluck turned her attention towards the rest of the shop, muffling her giggles with a hoof. A quick scan of the room later and she had found Bon Bon, whom she then proceeded to signal secret information using a super secret, super awesome spy language. It consisted of an “I am sipping tea” motion and Roseluck clopping her hooves together twice. Bon Bon signaled her understanding, leaving Roseluck to return her attention to Longsteve, who had moved onto moaning into the few remaining pancakes while he tried to tongue them into smaller pieces that he could eat in one go.

“So, Steve?” Rose’s voice had snapped the voracious blue stallion from his merciless onslaught. He looked up, his shaggy mane even more bedraggled, and his face covered in a mix of maple syrup and ice cream. “I still think we should get to know each other more, even if you have wiped your own memory, so since you’re a pony now, I was thinking we could talk about your cutie mark.”

Stillness settled over Longsteve’s chiselled, rugged body like Your Mom settled over everything in existence, because Your Mom denoted an omni-capable, omni-present character. “I’m afraid I’m as familiar with that term as I am with being molested on the eight o’clock train in Japan.” Intricately. “No, wait, that doesn’t make any sense.” Far too intimately. “No, wait, I think it does, since I’ve never been molested on the eight o’clock train in Japan.”

“I’d hope not. Anyway, the cutie mark is something all ponies get during their lifetime, a special symbol which appears on their flank, often around puberty. Cutie marks represent something you’re exceptionally good at, like a special talent, things you really like, or even what kind of pony you are.” Roseluck motioned towards his sides. “I’ve sort of been eyeing your cutie mark all day, but I can’t seem to figure out what it’s supposed to mean.”

Longsteve squirmed around in his seat, tilting so he could get a better look of the side of his body. “So what you’re saying is, you’ve been staring at my ass?”

Two steaming mugs were placed on the table between the two companions. “Here’s hot cocoa, sweethearts,” Bon Bon said with a knowing grin. “Don’t let things get too heated over here, now, I’d hate for the children to get traumatized.”

“Oh, shoo, Bon Bon. Longsteve and I are just getting to know each other after he woke up in my bed this morning. We’re just friends,” Roseluck merrily chided while she reached for her mug with both hooves.

“Well, sugar, that’s too bad really. Did you at least get laid?” Bon Bon turned to Longsteve. “She could really use a good lay, that girl.”

Roseluck snorted. “Bon Bon!”

“What? I worry, sometimes,” she said, grin adorning her face. Y’know, one of the really big ones. The kind of grin that tells you “I just had sex with your sister, ate your pizza, but I’ve got tons of alcohol in my bag and Tekken in my hand. Let’s rock”. It was very bro. Once again, Bon Bon turned to leave. “You know, it feels like I keep coming back to this table. Wonder why?”

Roseluck blew a raspberry at her, which Longsteve grinned at, and then slapped Bon Bon’s flank. “It’s because you love me, obviously. Now get going, I’m sure you have other customers.”

Bon Bon left and, for a short time, silence fell over the wooden table, broken only by the sound of slurping coming from the two ponies occupying it. Slurping was the sound of enlightenment and inner tranquility, as all know.

“So yeah, about that cutie mark of yours?”

Longsteve looked down at his flank. Indeed, it had been adorned with an odd symbol, but not one he could glean any meaning from, despite its simplicity. The image depicted three orbs, with tails like comets, except not really. Instead, the orbs were three eyes with different irises, one red, one blue, and one green. They were placed right next to each other, such that they almost touched, and their comet-like tails—which individually shared the color of their respective eye—curled in such a way that they formed the illusion of motion, of the eyes circling themselves.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen so detailed an eye-related cutie mark before,” Roseluck said, scrutinizing the image with the intensity of a thousand goats. Longsteve gave the mark another look with that in mind. True to her word, the eyes were done in exquisite detail. The perfect circle of the iris bordering the whiteness of the sclera; the small, almost unnoticeable patterns in the iris, like a thousand small, white strings reaching inwards towards the center of the eye, interweaving and overlapping; the pupil, blacker than ink and deep as the deepest well, like an all-consuming void placed to eternally consume its surroundings. The overall effect was breathtaking, the eyes seemed to even reflect the light of the room, casting it back as they stared into the minds of any observers. They were intelligent eyes.

“I think my brain just went metaphoric on my ass trying to describe this ‘mark’ of yours,” Longsteve commented. “So, you said it was supposed to represent something?”

“Yes. Special talent, personality, or favorite things. Although your cutie mark is a bit… confusing,” Roseluck said, tapping her chin meanwhile. “You weren’t supposed to wake up as a pony today, right?”

“That is correct, Lady of the Roses.”

“And I’ll assume you’ve never been a pony before, so I guess you wouldn’t be able to tell me what you were doing when you got it, would you?”

“Nawp. These eyes are really creepy, though,” Longsteve uttered while poking the artistic eyeballs on his ass. “They follow you around the room.” He leaned over, the awkward arch in his back looking quite uncanny to his rose-haired breakfast companion. He stared deeply, unblinkingly into his ass-eyes. He arose to find Roseluck gaping at him with a moderately spastic eyelid. “Y’know, this reminds me of that one time I woke up in my sister-in-law’s basement, chain-ganged to a bunch o’ surly Taiwanese midgets.”

“I-I haven’t the slightest of what ‘Taiwanese’ means, but how does—”

Longsteve shrugged. “I dunno, I just kind of say the first thing that comes to mind sometimes. It’s always gotten me into trouble.” He put a hoof to his chin. “I think.”

Rose huffed, suddenly just realizing how much of a theme it was becoming that day. She almost even wished that she hadn’t lost count so long ago. As it stood, she may have even topped the world record for “highest number of consecutive mentally-fatigued sighs ever accomplished in a single day”.

“As stated earlier: you’re an odd stallion.” She shot him a wry grin. “Perhaps your cutie mark reflects your weird personality, if I may be so blunt?”

“I don’t know, but that there terminology’s pretty damn swanky.”

 Another huff. Why couldn’t she have kept tabs on them? Wasn’t there some kind of special prize she could get? Like a coupon for half-off at Aloe and Lotus’ day spa? Or free apple cider from Applejack’s barn? Or maybe that pet T-Rex she always wanted as a little filly that she could use to ride to school and teach all those that mocked her a thing or two about classical music? His name would be Snuffleupagus, King of Beasts, and Supreme Maker of Dining Room Furnishings.

Across from the mare, her blue-coated eating companion stared silently at her as she in turn stared upwards at nothing, a contented sigh escaping her lips. He followed her gaze, using that weird, yellow dotted line jutting from her pupils. That was probably totally normal, he told himself. No reason to get an ophthalmologist to check that out. Yes, the further he stayed away from them the better. Not that Longsteve held any form of ill-will towards eye doctors, with their impossibly sharp objects, and the lasers, and his eye, made up of naught but liquid and nerve tissue. More to do with the word “ophthalmologist”, the very same word that murdered his pet salamander in the war.

Wait, that did happen, didn’t it? He honestly couldn’t remember. Longsteve always did have a tendency to flashback to wars that he’d never taken part in, or even ever occurred in the first place.

He shook his head. “Dammit, Rose, stop staring lustfully at what is doubtlessly a giant, hungry, penis-legged spider suspended above me. I’m starting to have flashbacks again.” Pupils expanding, a cold chill shot down his spine, sending an intense, reverberating shiver throughout his body, visible to anyone who cared to look. “Papa, I don’t wanna wear the pink rhino costume. Why do you make me wear that anyways? Dad? W-why are you getting the nipple prods…? No… No!

“I feel that the less context I’m given about this, the easier I’ll sleep at night,” Rose said.

“No, dad! You can’t make me take my medicine! No! No! No, I’m eighteen, daddy!I’m eighteen!” he squealed, arms flailing about like an epileptic squid with serious cocaine and soap opera addiction.

Suddenly, across from where the two enjoyed a heavenly breakfast—and the emergence of traumatic memories that were going back into the vault in three, two, there we go!—there was a dull, but heavy thud coming from the front door of the diner, attaining the attention of all present. “Dammit! That’s now how it’s supposed to work at all!” Another thud. “Ow…”

“Who da buck ist kic’ting on mah door?” Bon Bon demanded, exiting the kitchen with a soup ladle in her mouth.

“Hah! I get it!” Longsteve cried out.

The door opened slowly, a deafening creak echoed throughout the diner. Standing inside the doorway was a black unicorn stallion with black lipstick, and wearing black leather all over his body, a mane of silvern dangling low over his face, which he had to occasionally flick to keep out of his eyes. “Roseluck,” he said in a flat voice like a dying frog with dreams of starring in B-list drama films. “I’ve come to take you back, with, or without your consent. I cannot bear to cry and cut myself without you there to listen and nod as I command you to write down my troubled memories so that I’ll be famous after I end it all and…”

His monologue trailed off as he looked blankly at the seated mare, who was, at this point, trembling like a chihuahua in negative twenty-degree weather. Seated across from her was a light blue unicorn, with a shaggy mane of darker blue, who simply stared back. It was only then that Longsteve had noticed that the newcomer had a sword, that was clearly twice his size, slung over his back. When the two males locked eyes, the black stallion hissed like a cat facing off against a can of aggravated baked beans.

“Fuck,” he said in the same voice, “who is this stupid-ass, gay-faggot, cunt-hole, dipshit, and what’s he doing with the girl that I lost because I refused to go out and get a job?”

To the right of the potty-mouthed newcomer, was a family of four: a married stallion and mare, with a young filly and colt that couldn’t have been no older than six-and-a-half. They had decided to move away from the hustle and bustle of Manehatten, the rampant gang turf wars were turning the city into a place too hostile to properly raise their small children. You couldn’t even walk down the street without being splattered a stray pie for Celestia’s sake! It takes, like, three hours to get those stains out!

“Mommy…?” The small, yellow-coated filly, tugged on her mother’s bright-green mane with her teeth. “What’s a ‘stwupid-ass, gway-fwaggit, c-c...cone-hole, dwipshit?’”

The mare looked to her husband with widened eyes. He stared back at her. His son stood alongside him, standing in his seat and using his little hooves as leverage, engrossed by the recent turn of events.

Silently nodding, the two grabbed the children and hastily escaped, slowing down only to hesitantly trot past the black stallion, who barely even noticed them.

Longsteve continued to stare at him with a blank expression, not even blinking when the stallion’s sword levitated out in front of him, mostly because he was watching as the guy still trying to fit the damn thing through the door. “Shit, hold on, gimme a second. Ah, there we go.” Once he was inside, he raised his blade skyward and declared, “My name is Trinity Darkness Shadowmere Insomnia of Worthington!” He pointed the blade forward. “And now you must die, blue bastard!”

“Oi!” Longsteve roared, slamming the table with his hoof, the plates and utensils shaking from the impact. Leaping from his seat, he jabbed his hoof. “That’s just racist!”

“Fuck off, you shit-eating bitch! You’re gonna regret trying to steal my true love from me!” the sword-wielding maniac, Longsteve noted, had a voice not so very different from the sound made by a thousand lobsters as they were dropped into boiling hot water.

“Whois this git? This is the most hilarious and dedicated emo-protagonist cosplay I’ve ever seen,” Longsteve said, turning to Roseluck with a grin. To his surprise, Roseluck was not, in fact, enjoying the show. Instead of laughing at the funny man with the obviously-made-of-foam-sword and bad choice in hairstyle, Roseluck had turned into a furry pony ball, grimacing as she averted her gaze from the newcomer. “Huh.”

“Take this!” Longsteve blinked and turned just in time to catch a foam sword to the face, producing a dull whap upon collision. “And this!” Whap! “And this!” Whap!

“Oi.” Whap! “Would you stop tha-” Whap! “Oh, go suck your mother’s co-” Whap! “Quit it!” Longsteve’s hoof shot out, punching the gigantesque sword halfways across the room. “There, look! It’s gone! What are you, five? No, seriously. What were you trying to accomplish, even?”

Trickletown Dankness Shadowmane Amnesia of Worthlessness leaped back with a growl. Shaking a menacing hoof at Longsteve, he spat, “Curses, you cock-sucking, fuck-burger, you! You possess far more skill and resilience than I had assumed.”

“This guy’s great,” Longsteve commented, chuckling. “But seriously.” He pointed to Roseluck’s tail, which was hoisted in the air from under the table she had been hiding under. “You’re scarin’ my breakfast buddy here.” His tongue poked against his cheek as his eyes stared off to the left. “Breakfast buddy is a fantastic thingamajig, y’ken?”

“I shall go no where unless she—” he shot an angry hoof towards Roseluck, who, if she had tried to sink any lower, would have collapsed into her own gravitational radius, thereby absorbing all of Equestria within a swirling black void of nothingness and stuff. “—comes with me!”

“G-go ‘way!” the cowering mare demanded, briefly crawling from under the table in order to shoo the stallion away. She squeaked and ducked back under the table as he made his way towards her.

The black stallion shoved past Longsteve, who narrowed his eyes. Huh. Eye-lashes looked funny. “Come on, Rose. I want you to listen to this poem I wrote, called: ‘The Black Death Roses of—”

“Limit break!” Longsteve roared, his hoof slamming into the black stallion’s cheek, sending him careening into a vacant table. “You want another one?! Just wait until my meter recharges!”

Trinket Daddyissues Shablagoo Itchysack of Wankington groaned as he lifted himself up. “Ach! You bast—” He blinked. “Holy shit, you broke my tooth, you... you... jerk!”

“Quit yo’ bellyachin’, boy! It’s scruffle time!” Flapping the tip of his tongue against the roof of his mouth, Longsteve uttered a rhythmic chain of bizarre guttural noises horribly attempting to masquerade as some kind of battle theme.

“What… what in Celestia’s name are you doing?” the stallion asked, somewhat hesitantly.

“Dundundundun-dun-dundundundun-dun-dundundundun-dun-dundundundundundun—!”

“Knock it off!”

“Alright, that’s enough,” came the voice of Bon Bon. She had, in her forelegs, a broom with some particularly dusty, coarse-looking bristles. Her expression was neutral, but there was an air of business around her so thick, it was almost palpable. Jutting a foreleg towards the silver-maned stallion, she hissed, with a dangerously low pitch in her voice, “I want you out of here. Right. Now.”

The stallion rolled his eyes. “Oh? And what if I don’t leave right now, hmm?” he jeered. “As I told this blue cocksucker—”

“Oi! Male-on-male fellatio is not an inherently negative activity!”

“—I’m not leaving without my Roseluck!” His muzzle twisted into a toothy, mocking grin. “Besides, what do you think you’re gonna do with that dusty old thing, anyway?” He taunted, regarding the broom in Bon Bon’s forelegs. “Irritate my sinuses?”

“Actually,” Longsteve interjected, “those bristles look pretty coarse. Like, ‘rip the flesh from your very face from the sheer abrasiveness’ coarse.”

“What are you still doing here?! This does not concern the likes of you!” The stallion barked, jabbing his hoof at Steve.

“Why don’t I just show you what I think I’m gonna do with this?” There was an edge in her voice. Like a particularly honed banana. Filled with razors.

“Well, I’d like to see you try.”

Bon Bon said nothing, just smiled. A deeply unnerving expression, indeed. If she had canines, she would look downright predatory. And, for a split-second, the room seemed to had gotten just a little bit colder.

⇛AWYEAHWORDSANDSHIT⇚

A family of four trotted the streets of Ponyville. After escaping the escalating incident at Bon Bon’s Place, they wondered if whether or not investing in a home in Ponyville was such a fantastic idea after all.

“Mommy?” a small filly said, nestled in her mother’s long, bright-green mane. “You still ha… ha-habbent towld me what a ‘stwupid-ass, gway-fwaggit, c-c-c-cone… c-cone-hole’ is.”

The mother just groaned, rubbing the bridge of her nose with her hoof. They should have eaten breakfast at home. Or mayhap that other nice-looking pastry shop. “Now, Lemon Drop, sweetie. What did mommy say about using those words?”

“Oh.” The child’s ears perked. Then they flattened. “Sowwy, mommy.”

“It’s okay, sweetie,” she assured, reaching up her hoof and gently petting the small child.

She cast an aside glance to her husband, a dark brown pegasus. Carrying with him on his back was their sleeping little colt. His wings were expanded, allowing the colt lay with his limbs extended, occasionally flailing about, muttering something about total global anarchy. Oh, what a cute little rebel this one was.

The family decided to take a brief recess from their morning stroll as they passed a beautiful, white fountain, depicting the a rearing Princess Celestia.

They took a seat on a bench that sat near the statue. Reaching up and grasping the now sleeping Lemon Drop by her sides, the mare gently laid the child next to her, giggling softly as the filly’s legs flailed about. The father did the same, placing the sleeping, brown colt beside him.

They both sighed.

“And I thought this was supposed to be a family-friendly little town,” the father huffed.

His wife did the same. “I guess you just sort of find bits and traces of city life no matter where you go, it seems.”

“Cobblepots!” he exclaimed. “This is exactly the kind of influence we tried to shield our foals from in Manehatten!”

“That’s true. Well, at the very least it isn’t as violent here as it was back in Maneha—”

The sound of distant screaming cut her off. As seconds passed, she and her husband could hear the screams becoming louder and louder until it reached its plateau when a shadowy blur pass them by. A loud crashing sound accompanied it soon after.

“What?! Huh?! What happened?!” The young colt jolted awake and leapt to his feet. “Did we finally topple the rule of Celestia’s oppressive regime? Was there…” his eyes narrowed and his lips puckered as he whispered. “...revolution?”

His sister stirred in her sleep for a moment before finally waking up. She lifted a hoof to her eyes and rubbed them. “What wa… was tha’?” the small filly sleepily asked.

Peeking from behind bench, the family marveled at the deep, five-meter-long dirt-trough before them. From deep within, they heard we they had believed to be the tormented moaning of the grotesque denizens of Tartarus. Huddled together, they watched and waited. They weren’t entirely sure what it was they were waiting for. Mayhap the long, sinewy appendages of some kind of giant, perversely mutilated demon spider. Or a puppy. With a knife.

Instead, much to their great relief, was not the legs of a demonic arachnid—or bloodthirsty ninja puppies—but instead was a black hoof. Soon after, a mane of silver poked out from the dirt trough.

“Sweet Celestia’s clitorcock…” the father murmered. In his peripheral, he caught his wife glancing at him with a raised eyebrow. “What? It’s a valid theory!” She simply rolled her eyes.

The black-coated face of a stallion soon emerged. With a pained grunt, he swung his hindlegs, using their momentum to pull himself back onto the surface. Another groan. The stallion rolled until he was on his belly with his legs splayed out. So many cuts and bruises, he looked like he’d just tried to cheat a manticore at a game of Appleloosa hold ‘em. “I can taste the pain…”

“Mwister…?” Lemon Drop asked, her forelegs dangling over the bench. “Can you tell me what a ‘stwupid-ass, gway-fw-fwaggit, cone-hole, dwipshit’ is?”

Chapter Three: I'm Just A Teenage Outer God, Baby

Chapter 3 - I’m Just A Teenage Outer God, Baby

“We should totally go for ice cream.” Longsteve glanced around the busy marketplace of Ponyville, his roving eyes lazily scanning for delicious, frozen treats. “We should totes go for ice cream.”

A moment of silence stretched its long, sloth-like paws into the air. Longsteve turned around to look back at Roseluck, who very notably had not agreed with his desire for the frozen treats of the Gods. She looked like she could use some ice cream, what with the way she was just sort of trudging along behind him, head moping near the ground. She was being a mopey-head, was what she was being. Mopey, mopey, mopey. This could not stand! This should not stand!

So Longsteve poked her. “Why you bein’ a mopey-head, Rosie?”

When she didn’t respond, Longsteve merely poked her skull again. When it produced an out of place, dull and hollow thumping noise, Longsteve merely giggled and did it again. And again. And again. Soon he was bumping in tune to a rhythm that was known only by he, humming a jaunty rag-time tune that belonged to a song sung to him in his dreams by Nyarlathotep. The Crawling Chaos was a known admirer of Scott Joplin. This much he knew.

Suddenly, Roseluck let loose a roar that was more on par with a slightly aggravated tabby kitten rather than the fierce, premenustrating lioness she was aiming for as she flailed and batted her front legs about, attempting to vigorously dissuade Longsteve from using her skull as though it were some sort of percussion instrument with dreams of becoming a real pony. It worked, as Longsteve had backed off, a foreleg dangling in the air like a puppy’s wounded paw. He even went so far as to make small, whimpering noises.

The mare’s angry mewling soon died down, although her legs continued to do mortal battle with the open air. Eventually they, too, did stop. She landed back on all fours with a dejected sigh, not even paying any attention to the dozens of eyes that were focused upon her. She probably didn’t even notice them. Ears drooped and head hanging, Roseluck continued to trot through the marketplace, apparently not at all caring whether Longsteve had decided to follow or not.

He did. Although this time approaching with a tad bit more caution. It had been since breakfast, he noted, that her attitude had undergone such a major shift. Like an earthquake, or some other major seismic event. Soon after the mysterious, silver-maned, anime stallion attended what could best be described as a “curb-stomp symphony, as performed by the lovely and talented, Miss Bon Bon”, Roseluck had apparently lost the ability to vocalize through any means other than depressed sighs or, as Longsteve had recently discovered, angry cat calls.

Trotting carefully to Rose’s side, Longsteve spoke, “Are you alright, Rosie? Your somberness is totally harshing my mellow, man.”

She sighed.

“Because, like, my mellow is super mellow. I’m basically that one guy from every bad teen dramedy who’s perpetually tripping balls on some kind of whacky experimental super drug.”

Another sigh.

With a grunt, Longsteve skipped in front of her, facing her direction and walking backwards with almost ridiculous ease. “I mean, that isn’t to say that I do drugs. Because I don’t.” He placed a hoof under his chin. Good Lord, was moving so incredibly easy. He hadn’t even been in this body twenty-four hours and he was already swaggering about like a local. “Well, okay, there was that one time when my old man forced me to smoke pot. I mean that. He literally pinned me to the ground and forced me to me to get high. Seriously, how many folks do you know that have fathers that force joints down their throats and go, ‘Son! You better toke it, and toke it with love! Or else you get the fist!’” He shook a hoof for emphasis. “Coolest. Dad. Ever. Am I right?”

She stopped in her tracks and stared up at Longsteve. There were faint dark rings along the underside of Roseluck’s eyes as she regarded him with a weary, quirked brow. Longsteve did the same, tilting his head to the left causing his left ear to flop to the side. Angling her head downward and peering woefully at her own hooves, Roseluck pushed yet another sigh from her lips. Nonexistent lips. Which was odd, Longsteve noted. She quite clearly had lips, seeing as she could speak, but they were almost indistinguishable, as they looked more or less like the rest of her face. They were, overall, more like a defining line than actual lips, as opposed to the lips of a… the lips of a what? What other type of lips existed—if you know what he means—other than the ones of a pony? He didn’t remember seeing any others.

His right ear twitched, then flattened against his skull. “Huh. That’s weird,” he muttered. Ears flapping up and down like the epileptic pair of wings upon the back of that hippopotamus that stalked his nightmares, Longsteve wrapped a gentle arm around Roseluck. “C’mon, Rosie. Tell Uncle Patches what’s wrong. Was it because that bad cosplay stallion ruined our breakfast bash?” Yes. Yes, that was perfect. From then on, morning meals would be called “breakfast bashes”.

Rose pushed another sigh from her lungs and stared ahead, ears drooping pitifully. It was only thanks to a Herculean amount of effort on Longsteve’s part that he didn’t take the forlorn earther mare into a brutally loving bear hug that would have physically and emotionally traumatized her from the sheer, awesome force of his love, leaving her naught but a vegetable for the rest of her adorably tragic days. The duo continued to trot down the dirt street—Longsteve managing miraculously with only three legs—in silence for several seconds before the first utterances of something resembling words tumbled from Roseluck’s muzzle.

“It’s just, I—would you stop doing that thing with your ears?” she insisted flatly. In an instance, Longsteves ears settled upon his skull, effectively making him look like a sad, sad puppy. Another sigh. “Look, it’s not something I like to talk about, alright? Let’s just say, he and I have a bit of a history together and leave it at that.”

Longsteve’s ears once again raised themselves at this, readying themselves for glorious combat in the name of Chosen. “Aw, c’mon, you can’t give me that!” he exclaimed with a tiny frown.

“Give you what?” Roseluck frowned right back at him. Now neither of them were looking where they were going, a fact which ended up saving their lives when a magical gorgon possibly maybe zapped into existence in front of them for one-tenth of a second. Perhaps.

“That overly ambiguous, dramatic, we-have-a-dark-and-mentally-scarring-history-together crap. Honestly, this isn’t some bad piece of fiction.” He quirked a brow at her, frown forgotten. “So, how’s ‘bout you just tell me? We have the time, we can rebuild—I mean, it can’t be that long a tale.”

“Well,” Roseluck started, “alright then. A few years ago, four give-or-take, I met…” she seemed to take a moment to think, a long-drawn shudder marking the conclusion of her pondering. “Trinity Darkness Shadowmere Insomnia of Worthington, or rather—”

“Met who?” Longsteve queried.

“That emotionally unstable stallion you decked in the face. Now, as I was saying, it would be more accurate to say that he met me. So anyway—”

“You guys have the cutest names,” Longsteve teased, shooting Roseluck a cheeky grin and ruffling her mane. Now she looked like a member of an 80s English metal band. Longsteve held back a malignant chuckle. Yes, yes soon he would assemble a mighty band of adorable horse-people and harness their power to conquer galaxies!

“S-Steve?” Roseluck stammered.

“Yes?”

“Could you maybe stop grinning like that?” she requested, smoothing out her mane—No, Roseluck, what are you doing?! “Y’know, all evil and insane-like. It’s honestly kind of freaking me out over here.”

“Oh right. Sorry.” His face straightened. “My apologies, please continue.”

“Right.” Rose took a deep breath, exhaling through her nose. It had aroused imagery in Longsteve’s mind, of hot steam fuming from a sizzling-hot network of pipes. It had reminded him of the bittersweet Saturdays of his youth. Sitting on the floor, a bowl of cereal in his lap that would probably give any lesser man diabetes on sight, and watching old Steamboat Willie cartoons with his old man. Well, sometimes. Usually his father kinda just sat on the couch behind him. Sleeping in his robes. His legs spread out. And no underpants.

Roseluck continued her story, only barely taking note of Longsteve’s comment about never eating cereal again, “So anyway, we met a few years back when I was a freshman at Trottingham University. That’s a lie, by the way—the ‘university’ part? It was actually a community college trying to appear all prestigious and junk.” She sighed. “Best two years of my life, let me tell you. So yeah, I would always catch him stealing glances at me from time to time. He was cute, if not pretty foul-mouthed. I mean, what girl wouldn’t want a handsome, mysterious-looking buck with a badcolt streak as their secret admirer, right?” Roseluck huffed. “But after a while it just sort of delved into some really uncanny territory.”

“That’s what she said,” Longsteve muttered under his breath.

“I mean, I just started seeing him everywhere,” she said, putting emphasis on that last bit with a horizontal swipe of her hoof. “Dear Celestia, it was creepy. So one day, out of nowhere at all, he walks up to me goes on about how he’s been admiring me from afar—” Roseluck was cut off as trio of caped fillies dashed between she and her companion. “As if I hadn’t known that—and then, he just, asked me out.”

Longsteve continued to walk alongside monologuing mare, nodding his head emphatically. Where were they even going, anyway? “And you said?”

“I said ‘yes’!” Rose cried, stamping a hoof and facing the heavens. “I don’t know why, okay? I was just young—er, and horny, I guess. And he was kinda cute, so I just figured he might’ve, I dunno, been too nervous to ask me out until then or something.”

 Longsteve paused his interpretive dance sessions to quirk a brow at Rose. “My common sense is telling me that it didn’t really work out. Be it correct?”

Another sigh. “Well, the first couple of dates were, how would I say, awkward but enjoyable, to a degree. It was around date number three that things started to become really… unpleasant.” She cringed. “Half-fancy restaurant, good food, nice atmosphere, all that good stuff, right? But during the whole thing he was kind of… antsy, fidgeting and sweating. So when we finished we went for a walk by the part, pretty romantic, right?” Roseluck huffed at that. “Well, not for long. We’d barely even sat down for a few minutes to gaze at the stars before the—the creep tackled me to the ground! I tried to push him off, but he just lay on top of me, muttering about how beautiful I’d look with black mascara, trying to force his lips on me!”

Roseluck curled in on herself, her mouth forming into a grimace while her hoof pawed at her ribcage, trying to get to the tightness in her chest, to stroke it and alleviate it. The painful squeeze didn’t last long, though, as Longsteve pulled her into his side using the arm he had around her. The sincerity of physical contact calmed her down, and she nuzzled into his neck in gratitude.

“Maybe we should talk about something else, eh? This discussion isn’t really making anybody comfortable, I wager,” Longsteve whispered at her side, to which he got a quick snort from Roseluck.

“We’re not even at the best part yet, though,” Roseluck calmly replied. “That, that

“Git,” Longsteve supplied.

“—that git thought I’d look good in a Celestiadamned choker! Saying something about showing that I was his.” Roseluck’s scowl turned to a smirk. “He got what he had coming, though, soon as I saw that thing I kicked him right in the ‘nads.” She giggled. “I didn’t know bucks’ voices could get that high.” Her giggled soon evolved into a roaring guffaw. Longsteve joined in, although somewhat hesitantly, unconsciously squeezing his hindlegs against each other.

“Uhm, Sugarcube?” Roseluck looked to her side, where an orange mare in a stetson, with hay-blonde hair done up in a ponytail was keeping her booth. She was looking at Roseluck with a wary gleam in her eyes. “What’re y’all laughin’ at?”

Longsteve’s ears perked. Ever so slowly, his head crooked in the direction of the voice. That accent. That beautiful southern drawl. It filled the recesses of his mind with sweet, sweet imagery of apple pies on the windowsill one sunny afternoon. Wholesome family values! Racism and incest! He gasped. It was just like home.

“Holy shit-captain…” the stallion whispered, tears forming in his eyes.

“Beg pardon?” the orange mare queried.

“Oh hey, Applejack,” Roseluck greeted, finally calming down from her hysterics. She cleared her throat and smiled. “Sorry, I was just telling my friend here—” she jutted a leg in Longsteve’s direction. He did nothing, however, only staring at the blonde earth mare in near reverence. “—about my University days.”

The blonde mare, Applejack, as she was called, tipped her hat off at Longsteve, a pleasant smile adorning her face. “Well, ‘s a pleasure t’ make yer acquaintance, Mister…?”

“I am hight many things,” the stallion declared. “To some, I am ‘He Who Walks Amongst Kings of the Southlands’. To others, I am ‘The One True King of Phanar Lono’. But to most, I am simply referred to as ‘Oh God No’. You may call me Longshore Steve Patches, Horse.”

At the utterance of the word “horse”, Applejack’s cheeks burned with the intensity of a thousand suns. It required a great deal of willpower on Longsteve’s part to remain impassive in the face of such heat, for he knew that the sun was always out and about. Watching him, studying his weaknesses, and hankering for his blood.

“Eh, uh, well, Ah’m Applejack, Mist—uh, King Longshore,” Applejack hesitantly introduced herself. “Mah family n’ Ah own a sizeable little apple orchard, Sweet Apple Acres, lyin’ right outside town.”

Longsteve gave her a dismissive glance, slightly perturbed by how well she took his introduction. You’d almost assume she was used to obviously dysfunctional individuals, or something. “That’s all nice and good, Mister Applejack, but…” Longsteve got into Applejack’s face with an aggressive burst of speed, his eyes gazing into hers with the agonizing intensity of somebody very deliberately looking somebody in the eye. That kind of shit is awkward. “Where do you keep the guns?”

Applejack, swayed by how awkward eye contact had suddenly become, glanced to the side. “Uh...guns, Miste—King Longshore?” Applejack grasped an apple and held it tight to her chest, like a shield.

“Y’know? Them there shoot-bangs?” The False King jutted a foreleg in Applejack’s direction, the hoof twisting into some malformed abomination attempting to pass itself off as a Mongolian fishmonger’s heavily callused knuckle with aspirations of becoming a nerf pistol. “You know… those things. Loud, cool, important to people like you and me, and good for keeping the king of England out of your face.”

“Uh...Sugarcube, maybe y’all should talk to a friend of mine,” Applejack said, her tone bringing Longsteve memories of home, and the asylum. “‘Er name’s Twilight Sparkle. Ah think she could help y—”

Applejack never got to say what she had in mind, for in that moment Roseluck—nimble as a ninja—blocked her, as she muttered, “bloody stupid mouth” with a hoof. “I think that’s quite alright, Applejack, we don’t need to see Twilight or anything,” Roseluck affirmed with a gentle smile and killer eyes.

Applejack, in turn, tried to say something to the effect of “Are you sure?”, which just ended up sounding like “Would you like to sex me?”. Roseluck recoiled mildly in disgust, but ignored it and turned to Longsteve, who was imagining… things. “Maybe we should get going, Steve?”

“Yeah, you dirty thing, you. That’s right… All the tartar sauce…”

“Longsteve!”

“Huh? What?” His head snapped left, then right, and then back to center. Both Roseluck and Applejack affixed him with inquisitive glares. “What happened? And where’s the tartar sauce?”

“Tartar sau—”

In that instance, Longsteve’s hoof smashed into the ground with the force of an anorexic Asian elephant. He then raised the very same hoof into the air, the sun gleaming down over his magnificent figure, and casting a massive shadow over the small weed growing from beneath the wheel of Applejack’s stall. He held that pose for about ten seconds. Roseluck and Applejack never took their eyes off of him—in exasperation and befuddlement, respectively.

“Okay, right, we’re leaving now,” Roseluck sighed. “Sorry about all of…” She made a gesture in Longsteve’s direction. Longsteve, who was still holding his dramatic pose. “…Whatever this is.”

“T’ain’t no trouble at all, darlin’,” Applejack reassured. “Just be sure t’ do somethin’ about all that energy he’s got goin’ later, yeah?”

“Oh, don’t worry, I fully plan on—hey wait, what are you implying!?” Roseluck demanded as she stamped the dirt road beneath her, cheeks aflame.

“Sex,” Applejack stated blankly, although Roseluck could make out the nigh-invisible grin on the apple peddler’s mug.

To hell with her cheeks, her entire damned face just looked like it’d gotten into a slapping match with a drunken barracuda. Barracudas slap now, shut up. “I-I… No!” Roseluck shouted, resolutely. “No. I’m not having this conversation a second time, so nyeeeh!” she sneered, sticking out her tongue with such force it nearly popped free of her mouth and did a little song and dance routine before promptly getting lynched by the Ponyville masses on the sheer instance of it being too pants-on-head retarded. Which is why it never had a girlfriend. Come on, Roseluck’s tongue, get your shit together.

“Real mature, sweetheart,” Applejack retorted, chuckling despite herself. “Welp, go on, git!” she shooed with a chuckle. “Y’all’re scarin’ away potential patrons, now.”

Roseluck’s face twisted into a visage of pure, unrestrained hatred, glaring with complete and utter malice at the apple salespony. She continued to smolder in unending contempt, even while Applejack slowly got further and further away, looking at her with a blank, uncomprehending expression.

“Come on, let’s go,” Longsteve muttered, Roseluck’s tail in his mouth proving to not inhibit his rather glib tongue at all. “I just realized, does this mean I’m ‘getting tail’? Eh? Eh?” The effort of dragging Roseluck along wasn’t making itself known in his voice, either. Longsteve was pretty boss like that.

⇛THATBITCHBESITTINFUNNY⇚

“How long has she been like that?” the some-color-of-green unicorn asked, looking worriedly at Roseluck, a cute frown framing her golden eyes.

“Huh, what?” Longsteve muttered. It was when he was shaken from whatever stupor he was in that he had realized that he and his companion—whom he’d been dragging by the tail for the better part of ten minutes—had wandered into a small park. At least Longsteve thought it was a park, as there was notably more vegetation in this area, it seemed. Ahead of himself, Longsteve spotted a stream that periodically erupted with some kind of weird-ass-looking fish. He couldn’t help but shudder when, just for a moment, he and one of the little fishies established eye contact. Peering deeply into his soul. It was like it knew him. His fears, his weaknesses, his deepest, darkest desires. All of it, it knew.

All of it.

And then it smashed into a jagged boulder in the middle of the stream, flopping and flailing about for dear life. If one looked closely enough, one could see a solitary tear leak from one of its creepy little eyes.  Longsteve smiled. Life was good.

He turned to the direction of the enigmatic greenish-but-maybe-probably-not-for-Longsteve-was-an-Anthropology-major-and-therefore-knew-shit-all-about-math-unicorn.

He tilted his head when he saw the creature. And then his eyes bulged. It was beautiful. The most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life. So beautiful his eyes were moist with tears. That style! That posture! So much skill! He spat his mouth of Roseluck’s tail. Roseluck, who had now settled onto her belly, legs splayed out, teeth bared, and eyes furious, yet staring at nothing. Not that the terrified, teary-eyed, filly before her knew that.

Longsteve ignored this, however. He ignored everything with the sole exception of the magnificence that had graced him with its presence. The unicorn tilted her head, an eyebrow cocked. She looked as though she couldn’t whether or not she should offer help or call for it.

“Uh? Are you doing okay?” she asked.

Longsteve gasped and flinched backwards. He didn’t understand. Was she angry? Had he offended her? Oh God he had, hadn’t he? Good God, Lonsteve, you had one job, one job! Getting real tired of your bullshit, you stupid son of a bitch fu—

“Why are you growling…?” she asked, her eyes glistening with moisture.

“Wh—oh, pardon, I wasn’t—” Longsteve’s gaze scurried around the picturesque park, seeking refuge but finding none. Realizing his desolation, he fixed his gaze upon she and threw himself before her, prostrating his lowly body in honor of her majestic greatness “—you are so beautiful! The most magnificent I’ve seen all day!”

The teal-green-but-who-gives-a-fuck fur that covered her cheeks glowed with fire-red. She giggled shyly as she batted a hoof at him, the other one propped up against her cheek. “Oh, stop it you, I don’t even know your—”

“Please! I beg of you!” Longsteve cried, sinking to his knees. Oh dear God, how were they able to bend like that? That wasn’t right! That wasn’t right at all! That was like, five different stages of horrifically not-right! “Teach me how to sit like that!”

“Well… If you want, I suppose I can—What.” That was no question on the unicorn mare’s part. Just a blank statement.

“Yes, oh Radiant One!” Longsteve’s grin stretched into the realm of the absurd and slightly creepy. “Your posture shines with such magnificence like I’ve never seen before!” He slid forward over the grassy ground like a slug, his position never changing. “Please, Fair Lady, teach me how to sit like that, like a—like a human!”

Silence seemed to settle over the park in a pocket around the two mares and single stallion, painting a quiet scene. On the ground, a blue stallion leering devotedly and slightly creepily up at the mare on the bench. The mare herself, sitting with an irregular posture, putting weight on her rump and leaning her spine against the back of the bench. Unnoticed to Longsteve before, she held a mini-harp-thingy in the hoof furthest from him, and a small, puzzled frown was adorning her face. The second mare was just doing her thing on the grass. Nobody cared.

Alas, the silence was not meant to last, and finally the mare on the bench broke it. “What’s a human?” She asked, clearly having no idea what the everliving fuck was going on.

The blue stallion shuddered. “Don’t ask. I almost had a complete mental breakdown the last time I was asked that.” He puffed his cheeks, then sighed. “Did you know my mother wanted to kill all Germans? Probably in order to atone for my misdeeds of my great-great-grandpappy. Mom did and said a lot of funny stuff when drinking her happy-juice.”

A pause. “Alright?” the mare drawled, “First of all, my name’s Heartstrings—Lyra Heartstrings, what’s your name?”

Longsteve jumped to his fee—hooves, squaring his shoulde—withers and adopted a proud posture. “I am a Great Lord with many titles, they call me—”

“Longsteve,” the mare on the ground moaned from the side.

“—yes, that!” he nodded vigorously to show concordance with Roseluck’s comment.

“Oh hey, Rose. How’re you this fine afternoon,” the green unicorn, Lyra, greeted cordially, just noticing the slumped earth mare.

Roseluck, on her part, simply let out an exasperated groan and waved a forelimb around before allowing it to drop limply to the ground, crushing the small ant family that had been passing by into paste. Why did Roseluck have to suffer the worst? “Eh, could be better.”

“Blah, blah, blah, your needs,” Longsteve snapped. “Lady of the Lyre!” he cried, bowing his head in reverence. “Please! Take me, Steve, son of Kyle, as your student!”

Lyra tilted her head in the position of Roseluck, who merely continued to lie on the grass, legs splayed as though she were attempting to make dirt angels and lost interest midway through, and locked in an intense staring match with a monarch butterfly.

“Right,” Lyra muttered, turning back to the revering stallion. “First of all—no, wait, second of all, I sit like this because I have back problems. I don’t know anything about any… ‘humans’, you said? Jeez, and here I was hoping you’d ask me out on a date or something. I mean it isn’t like I just fell in love with you at first sight, but it would’ve been flattering, at least. Maybe even a little fun,” she huffed, ears drooping.

Longsteve ran his hoof along the underside of his chiseled, handsome mug. It was then that he wondered if his face fur actually counted as legit facial hair. Matter it did not, for on an Adonis, facial hair meant but nothing. “Huh. Didn’t think of that at all, actually. I mean, if you wanna grab coffee or something sometime, I’m totally down with that, but I don’t think I’m ready for a relationship right now, seeing as I have literally no finances as of now. It wouldn’t really be fair for me to enter into a relationship with someone only to then smack them in the face with ‘you now literally have to pay for my existence. Whoops.’ That, and I am a hor—”

“Don’t say it!”

“—I am an equine for an indeterminate length of time.”

A blink from Lyra. And then another. “Uh, sure?” She peered behind the blue stallion, eyes locked on his prone, rose-maned companion. She daintily waved a hoof in the direction of the downed pony with a bemused frown. “Is she alright?” she asked, tone more bemused than concerned.

“I… actually do not know,” Longsteve replied, eyebrow raised. He and Lyra gazed awkwardly at Roseluck, who had gone back to staring at the grass. Her expression was as blank and still as an undisturbed pond, and as they watched, she slowly reached out her hoof, moving it up and down and up and down in placid, relaxed movements. Longsteve craned his neck towards Lyra, initiating a stage whisper. “I think she’s pretending to murder Applejack.”

Roseluck’s hoof movements, and face for that matter, were taking on some decidedly violent and rather manic characteristics when Lyra decided to speak up. “Rose, sweetie, do you wanna come up on the bench and tell me about what Applejack did?” Stillness settled on Roseluck. Slowly, like some kind of amorphous blob, Roseluck dragged herself towards Lyra’s bench with sluggish and vacant movements. Under her companions’ watchful eyes she reached up and pulled herself onto the bench from a lying position on the ground, squirming over to Lyra and placing her head on Lyra’s stomach with an adorable whining sound, like a puppy having its first experience with anal. The green mare brushed a hoof across Roseluck’s soft, silky red mane and gently cooed, “Now, tell Aunty Lyra all about your murderous impulses, hmm?”

“Hey!” Longsteve chirped, blithely trotting over to the seated mares. “You know what’ll cheer her up? A good ol’ fashioned bonfire! Let’s grab the closest nerd and force them to allow us to use their books for fuel!” He paused, staring ahead as though he were peering into a cavernous void crawling with giant, exploding rape-spiders. His pupils became pinpricks, his ocular capillaries steadily encroaching upon the white of his eyes. A shudder shook through him as a solitary bead of sweat dropped from his brow, falling, and falling, and falling. Finally, it splashed onto a pebble with a thick, heavy, ‘blub’ that echoed deep within Longsteve’s canals over the thunderous drummings of his hammering heart. “Or their bodies. I’m not picky,” he shuddered, breath labored and eyes narrowed.

“Uh…” Lyra slurred, gaping at the stallion as though he were a group of large, combustible  arachnids that had just expressed interest in brutally copulating with her.

A lone, beige hoof reached up and firmly grasped Lyra’s attention, drawing it towards existence of its master. “Ignore him,” Roseluck deadpanned. “He has this tendency to make the atmosphere needlessly creepy and/or dramatic.”

“So…” Longsteve murmured conspiratorially, “it has come to this.”

“Zip it!” Roseluck snapped.

Lyra gently cleared her throat, regaining Roseluck and Longsteve’s attention. “So, about those murderous impulses?”

Roseluck huffed—an act that was quickly becoming redundant—and nuzzled Lyra’s belly again, clearly now in direct violation of her adorability rationing for the day. “Celestia damned Applejack, Lyra,” Roseluck said while Lyra smoothed her mane calmingly, “Celestia damned Applejack. Steve did that thing where he called himself a “whorse”, except not really, and Applejack assumed straight up that I was paying him for sex!” Roseluck flapped her ears with her full wrath, too cuddly to bother with any larger motions. “I don’t care what Bon Bon says, I don’t need a lay that badly!”

“‘Whorse’? Oh.” Lyra nodded imperceptibly. “That thing with the interrupting and the ‘don’t say it’, gotcha. Why’s he say that, anyway?” Lyra looked down at Longsteve, who was now sliding underneath the bench like a giant slug.

From behind the park bench erupted Longsteve, his teeth bared and mane even more chaotic than usual. “Because we’re all horses, of courses!” One ear stood erect, convulsing violently as though possessed by an epileptic sea rodent. The other lay limply against his head, reminiscing about the war.

]The two stared at the crazed-looking stallion in total silence. Roseluck lazily peered back up to Lyra, taking in the look of apprehension that bled through her features. “Ah, don’t worry,” she drawled, waving her hoof in small, circular patterns. “He isn’t completely crazy, I don’t think. Trust me, he’s quite harmless once you get to know him somewhat.”

A calm settled at those words, one of friendliness and relaxation. Lyra continued stroking Roseluck’s mane—getting a subdued cooing in response—while she grasped her lyre in sparkly sparkly magic, strumming a relaxing melody. Longsteve, bracing on the bench’s back in order to stand on two legs, was thoroughly enjoying Lyra’s musical proficiency while he batted at her ear with his tongue. Indeed, the quiet sounds of their party shaped like a bubble, isolating them from the hustle and bustle of the outside world, leaving them with a minor pocket of calm. Until one of the trees at the other end of the park caught fire.

“Well,” Lyra said, lifting the non-stroking hoof to point at the tree, “at least you didn’t have to deal with the Cutie Mark Crusaders.”

“Did somebody mention the Rapetastic Genocidal Crusaders?”

“What are they doing now?” Roseluck mumbled, squeezing her eyes tight for just those few extra moments of blissful ignorance.

Longsteve gazed long and hard at the fiercely, yet unrealistically, burning tree. The flames had practically enveloped all the leaves, and yet it showed no signs of dying down, neatly illuminating the three, small figures sitting a safe distance from the base of the tree. “It would appear that they’re trying to summon Satan. Goddamn Luciferans—Faustian supremacy!”

Lyra sighed, and the calming sounds of her instrument came to an end. “I really with Applejack would keep a better leash on her sister. And her sister’s friends, for that matter.”

“Hmm? One of those three kids is kin to the Maiden of the Apples?” asked Longsteve as he rotated his ears in the direction of the blaze. Vague chanting was starting to become audible, emanating from the Witch’s Mark Crusaders. Oddly enough, one of them sounded not only really good, but also way too enthusiastic, whereas the other two sounded hesitant. No way would they get to hang out with Satan with such a paltry performance.

Lyra tilted her head to the right, the corresponding ear flopped limply about. “You mean Applejack?”

Longsteve nodded vigorously. The loud, sickening pops at the base of his neck bothered him none, as he’d heard that from a very reliable source that all the hip, young kids were into tetraplegia.

“Oh, well, yeah,” Lyra affirmed, “the yellow one with the red mane and the bow. Oh, and the accent. Those three always get into horribly dangerous—not to mention suicidally stupid—attempts to get their Cutie Marks.”

“Ah, youth,” Longsteve sang, wiping a tear from his eye.

“Still,” Lyra interjected, “if it wasn’t because Applejack and Big Mac had a monopoly on apples and a huge orchard, they wouldn’t be able to pay off all the damages those three cause. I swear, if the Apple Family wasn’t so loaded, the entire town would probably end up a pile of ashes and other such wreckage.” She sighed. “But they’re just too darned adorable to become truly angry with.”

The proverbial pin of the proverbial gramophone dropped to the proverbial ground, where the proverbial music screeched to a proverbial halt. Proverbial now meant rapetastic, deal with it. There was an oppressive cowl of silence that blanketed the area, kind of like when you discovered that the hooker you just had really filthy intercourse with was actually your long-lost biological father.

Longsteve’s eyelids twitched. Both of them, yeah. Hardcore. “They’re loaded?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah, I guess you could say so.” Lyra looked up to the blue afternoon sky, seemingly not noticing the warning signs emanating from Longsteve. Roseluck, more in tune with his patterns, had contented herself to a fate of willful ignorance as she hummed a quiet tune, her whole body tense. “I mean, the bits might not be flowing, but they’ve got a huge land area when compared to most Ponyville farmers, and they have the Zap Apple monopoly, so I guess they’re pretty well off.”

Lyra looked down from the sky, gazing in Longsteve’s direction. He was gone. Surprisingly, not a sound had been made at his exit. Neither mares spoke for an elongated while, a peace broken suddenly by a diminutive “Shit.” coming from Roseluck’s mouth.

⇒OHFUCKDOTCINNAMONTOASTCRUNCH⇐

“Thank ya kindly, mister,” Applejack said, accepting a sum of three bits for a small peck of apples from an orange maned pegasus stallion with white fur. She handed—fuck, mouthed him the sack of apples with a pleasant smile on her muzzle. The stallion accepted the apples—using. His. Mouth—and smiled back at her. He nodded graciously before trotting off with his prize in han—mouth. She waved him away, calling out, “Do come back now, ya hear?”

It was only a moment after she had uttered those words that she caught a flash of blue in her periphery. It was even less than that before the blue blur smashed into her. Applejack, caught flat-foot—hoofed, no, fuck you—footed, by the suddenness of its appearance

“Applejack!" screamed the blur. The eponymous mare shook her head, allowing reality to reinsert its grip on her view. She looked up to see Longshore Patches standing, out of breath, next to her booth.

“Applejack your sister’s doing something really dangerous you have to go stop her!” he released in one quick breath, sounding so rushed he even forgot his commas.

“Wha’s wrong, Longshore? Where’s the fire at?” To say he looked distressed would be like saying Twilight’s a mite tad nutty in the head. At her words, though, he took a deep breath, as if readying himself to impart the news of the decade.

“Eh… wha’? Wait, what’s Applebloom doin’?

The stallion’s eyes widened in abject horror, his pupils became pinpricks. “I’m not even sure, but it involves cupcakes, a noose, and endless gallons of industrial lubricant! Endless. Lubricant.”

Applejack needed to hear no more. She took off sprinting as fast as she could, faster than she had ever sprinted before, for she knew that such a random combination of items could only herald danger. Only later did she realize she didn’t know where she was sprinting to. Only after scouring the town for an hour did she learn that the Cutie Mark Crusaders were doing no such thing. Only after finding Applebloom and giving her a big hug and an “I love you” did she go back to her stall. And then, only then, did she realize that her stall was as empty as Longshore Patches’ words had been.

“What.”

Chapter One: The Rape of Lucrece by the Seven Dwarves of Notre Dame

Chapter One: The Rape of Lucrece by the Seven Dwarves of Notre Dame

It was here, under the very coyote skin blanket where he was born, that he woke up. Unlike most days when he woke up, he didn’t feel like he was in need of a shower, nor was his morning need angry at him and attempting to declare its independence in the name of the South.

Ever since that Civil War reenactment he’d been drafted into, his penis had been obsessed with the Confederacy, even tattooing itself with the Confederate flag. His black girlfriend at the time was not amused. Being as though his only girlfriend at the time was his painted-black hand, he couldn’t masturbate for a month straight.

So, when he opened his eyes to see a horse in his bed, he wasn’t exactly surprised. Nor was he exactly perturbed by its weird color scheme; he’d probably just spray painted it, like that time when he was a boy and did the very same to his pet cat. It was thanks to this cat that he had his pornstar name, though, “Longshore Patches”, and he reminded himself to check his PC for any new videos in the “Longshore Patches” folder, which were to be summarily deleted.

It wasn’t until the horse turned around, regarded him, and screamed like an orgasming goat that he wondered if something was wrong.

Then, like a child wondering why the baseball was getting bigger, it hit him: he’d forgotten to turn the oven off last night when he was trying to use it to dry his pet dog.

The horse flopped out of bed, squealed like a pig and ran in circles as he asked, “Oh God, I didn’t cover my penis in peanut butter again last night, did I? If so, I sincerely apologize for fooling your tiny pony mind into thinking that my penis was filled with even more yummy peanut butter.”

It ran straight into the wall and collapsed.

“Neat.” He sat up straight in the bed. “Huh,” he said, “this isn’t my parents’  basement. And this isn’t my favorite tattered coyote blanket. How depressing.” His eyes scanned the area. It was an average-sized room. The walls were a plain, but warm, beige color, and, as he looked to his right he could see a rose-red draped window leading out to a balcony. The bed was king-sized, although its design, rose-shaped, was decidedly less king-orientated.

“Huh. Did I accidentally break into the orphanage again?” He called out, “Little Timmy, if you can hear me, I’m sorry for stealing your bed again. And for convincing you that my penis was filled with yummy peanut butter.”

He looked down on the unconscious horse, giving it an extra glance, just for good measure. Seemed to be the pretty standard American version, four legs and hooves, as opposed to those weird five-legged Canadian versions, with two eyes, a nose, equipment—no, wait, “What the bloody bowels of ’ell is that? That’s not right! That’s not right at all! The shape is completely messed up!”

Given all his mathematical know how, he was sure that this was a direct result of force-feeding the pony far too much propane and propane accessories.

With a groan, he rolled out of bed as enthusiastically as a turtle challenged by a Jewish T-rex to a game of Texas Hold ‘em. The Texan Jewish T-rex was well known for its card skills. Not so much its boxing skills, where he was certain he could defeat one within the first, or possibly second round, by way of technical knockout.

“Oof!” he grunted as fell the the floor, belly-first. He sighed, blowing at a tuft of blue hair that fell over eyes. Wait. His hair was black. Or at least he thought it was. He’d developed a theory that he was actually blonde, and that his mother had secretly snuck into his bedroom, every single night since the day he was born, to dye his hair its standard midnight black because she, and he frequently quoted this: “Did not want him looking like a damned Kraut.” She was horribly racist like that. Ironic, considering that he was pretty sure that his great-great-grandfather had helped orchestrate the Holocaust.

He rolled onto his back, feeling the demonic emptiness in the deepest recesses of his gullet. A roar sprang forth from the belly of the beast, like a thousand lions, or perhaps a slightly wet, very pathetic gurgle. Nevertheless, ‘twas breakfast time. Spying to the right, he once again looked at the horse—with the horribly malformed equipment, how did he ever?—and considered his choice of meal. He’d heard that horse meat was both leaner and sweeter than bovine meat.

He raised his arms to his eyes to wipe the sleep from them, stopping midway through the motion. A sky-blue hoof-like limb dangled over his face. He squinted, leering at it with the scrutiny of a seedy business executive that watched on as a scantily-clad velociraptor tearfully danced to the beat of Caramelldansen. He blinked, his deadpan expression never wavering. Looking down, he noticed that his case of blue-body was not, in fact, an isolated incident. Well, at least it could be worse; God save us from the blue waffles. Literal blue waffles. He’d had them once. Bubblegum was the worst flavor.

With a shocked, though belated, gasp he flipped onto his knees, his elbows bending in the exact opposite direction they usually bent for the last twenty-odd years. It felt distinctly like waking up one day with morning eagerness, only to find that your member curved in a corkscrew pattern.

Placing his “hoof”—unless his elementary school gym teacher had finally made good on his promise to amputate his hands and and spray paint a random color of his choosing in that exact order, something that probably never actually happened—on his face, he prodding it gently. It felt longer, if only vaguely, as his hoof-like stump wasn’t getting very much sensory input. He did, however, feel something very much like fur brushing against his flesh as he continued pressing softly. He raised it higher, jutting from his forehead was something long and phallic to levels that Freud himself had considered filing a sexual harassment suit.

He threw his head up, his neck swerving left and right, his eyes scanning for anything with a reflective surface. “Ah ha!” he cried. Three feet to the left of the unconscious horse was a small desk with a smaller, oval-shaped mirror attached. He jumped to his hooves and bounded towards the mirror. Although “tripping after the first step and rolling the rest of the way while shouting every obscenity in seven different languages” would be more accurate.

He looked up from his crumbled position, glaring at the pale-pink mirror-desk-hybrid abomination as it silently taunted him for his inability to burp the Canadian national anthem. He’d never forget the humiliation. He reached his short, blue limbs towards the edge of the desk, and with a growl of effort, he pulled himself up. Placing his chin on the desk for leverage, he raised himself to a standing position, his arms, which felt more like forelegs—although he was not entirely sure how he'd known that—still holding onto the desk so that he was standing on what felt to be his hind-legs—trippy.

After a couple of deep breaths, he stared into the small mirror before him.

“Oh. Well then.” To his surprise, staring back at him, a light blue horse-like creature, not unlike the one that sprawled out on the floor beside him, who he noted, was appearing to come to. Its shaggy hair, or mane rather, was of a darker variation of the rest of its body, a small blue horn emerging from the forest of dead cells like the Tower of Babel erupting from an orgy of blue werewolves.

He blinked, and it blinked back. He rose his hoof to his furry cheek, the horse-creature mimicked the action. His eyes widened as realization dawned on him. “Oh God…” he moaned, his voice cracked and his eyes stung with threats of erupting tears. “I don’t even like blue!”

The small horse-thing beside him let out a soft whimper of agony. “Oh quiet! God! Why does everything have to be about you?” the man-turned-blue-horse-thing growled. It whimpered again. He sighed, shaking his head. “And you wonder why I feel we aren’t working out anymore.”

He looked at the small creature again, this time closer. Its coat whitish beige, and its mane dark-pink, with a lighter patch of pink running through like a skunk-stripe. He shivered, the color pink arousing feelings of dread powerful enough to dent the steel vault of memory repression that kept at bay the trauma born of bearing witness to the atrocities committed when those mice declared jihād that one St. Valentines Day.

Still, the physiology of the thing, and not just the color scheme, was also very unusual. It wasn’t actually that deformed, now that he looked at it—that is to say, severely deformed by horse standards, but there was something decidedly anthropomorphic about the horse’s intimate features. Salvation from his nightmares!

He gave himself a winning smile in the mirror before he turned from it, planting himself firmly on his four limbs and hoofing his way over next to the odd equine which managed to be more disturbing by being less disturbing. When you went to bed with a thing, you sort of expected said thing to look like said type of thing. This specimen was downright bizarre.

The mare—and he knew it was a mare—groaned, opening her eyes dazedly with her eyes spinning comically and deeply impossibly in her sockets, unfocused and staring at nothing. “I… I didn’t realize cute bucks could materialize in beds. That’s slightly…” Her eyes finally found focus, and on him no less. “…creepy.”

“Hullo. My name’s Longshore Patches XIX, Defender of the Turkey People and professional toilet diver.  You may call me by my Christian name, Steve.”

Silence.

“Nah, just call me Longshore. No one ever calls me Longshore.”

Another pause. The sort of pause that preceded horrible news, like “Good sir, you have cotton cancer!” or the ever-popular “I’m afraid your horse has diabetes. Yes, the liquor is that bad.” Then the mare screamed, a high, haunting sound like a thousand Russian banshees on their period, all aware of the fact that their sister-in-law just stole the last absorbent. The bitch.

Miraculously, the mare stopped screaming, instead taking up far more productive hobbies, such as communication. She blinked. “My name’s Roseluck.” Blink blink. “I-I grow and sometimes eat flowers. But you can call me Rose.”

“It suddenly strikes me that you can talk, but then it suddenly strikes me that so can I, and I sort of look like you, so why am I even surprised?” He furrowed his brow in thought. “In fact, this is all very normal in the context of interaction between two sapient beings, which worries me because, firstly, I’m now worried if I’m gonna be have to call you later, which I certainly did not sign up for when I went to bed with a horse, and secondly, ach noo, Oi’m goin’ ta the prisoon hoose noo!”

“I... what?”

“Because of breaking and entering, plus you can probably press molestation and rape charges against me no issue.” He waggled his eyebrows knowingly. “Trust me, I’m familiar with this scenario. Less than you’d think, but more than I’d like.”

“I’m… not sure if I could do that.” She gazed around the room. “Did I get laid last night?”

“Wait, does it even count as beastiality if I too, am technically a horse? Oh ho ho ho, these… these are the questions, lass.” He giggled. “I’m a horse.”

“Wait, I paid for this? I don’t even remember drinking last night!” she said as she threw her hooves up into the air, no doubt trying to flip an invisible table. An evil, invisible table. You thought you were safe, table. Oh, you thought so.

“Not to worry, m’ dear, you can repay me by offering me free lodgings, food, and any available information!”

“That doesn’t sound like a very good method of payment.” Her tongue pressed against the inside of her cheek in thought. “In fact, come to think of it, I don’t remember Ponyville having any prostitutes.”

“Prostitute? Why’d yew assume Oi’m a prost’tute?”

“I’m sorry, what—oh, ‘why’d you assume I’m a prostitute’?” He nodded his confirmation. “Well, you said you were a whorse, so I just sort of assumed. Was that bad of me?”

Our dashing and handsome and brave and sexy hero cocked an eyebrow at her questioningly. “Ignoring the fact that you consider horse to be synonymous with prostitute—a fact I’m certain we’ll get to the bottom of soon enough with some healthy social exchange—I just realized that we’ve been having this conversation while you’ve been lying on the floor. Need a hand?” he asked, extending his left forelimb.

She tilted her head, peering at the young buck inquisitively. “Sure…” She reached up, the wrist of her right forelimb hooking around his. He did his best not to cringe, which really only resulted in him clenching his teeth tightly, his lips quivering until he was practically foaming at the mouth like an slightly aggravated dish washer. Lifting herself to a standing position, the young mare spoke, “Also, your accent tends to keep—A-are you okay?”

Roseluck took an uneasy step back, cautiously eying the stallion as his mouth foamed like that of a rabid dog leering at a defenseless orphan, his bottom right eyelid twitching sporadically. Her right forehoof raised slightly off the ground, preparing to flee when the situation took the inevitable turn for the worst.

Almost instantly did the mysterious stallion—or Longshore, or Steve, whatever he was supposed to be called—cease to froth like a Nickelback fangirl at a live concert. Whatever that was. She wasn’t quite sure why she made that comparison, attributing the mental outburst to the imaginary booze she had the night before. “Aw! Lookit!” the stallion squeed, thrusting his forehoof in her direction! “Isocute!” he giggled, trotting in place.

Roseluck craned her neck to look behind her, gaze searching for whatever Longshore Steve the XIX had pointed out. “I don’t see anything cute back there.” She looked back at him. “What in Equestria are you talking about?”

“Really?” He deadpanned. “I mean, really really?” He took a second to wait for it to zip in, but all he received in return was a confused shrug. “I was referring to you. You’re cute.”

Her cheeks flushed. “Y-you really think so?”

“Actually, I was talking about the hoof thing you’re doing. That’s ‘burn an entire third-world country village down that’s been totally evacuated save for every single puppy ever’ grade cute.”

Rose’s ears flattened against the top of her head before instantly perking back up, her eyes widening. “That’s… both disappointing and incredibly morbid.”

“I know, right? Wanna get some breakfast?”

“Why are you even still here?” She frowned at her unwelcome guest, her patience with this funny yet abrasive personality running out. “Don’t you have something better to do than harass me? I’m still not even sure if I got drunk and laid last night, but all signs point to ‘no’. Because then I’d have a hangover. And I’d probably be sore.”

“Because I’d rock you like a hurricane, am I right?” he said, trying to eyebrows to wiggle in a wave-like pattern, but really all they did was rise and contort in ways that made it look as though his forehead was having an epileptic fit. And was also squid.

She simply glowered at him, unamused.

“Aw, c’mon, aren’t we, like, the bestest of friends? You can’t just throw me out.”

“And why can’t I, hmm?” She quirked a skeptical eyebrow at him.

“Well, to be honest…” The sky-blue buck seemed to hesitate, rubbing the back of his neck. “To be honest, I kinda have nowhere else to go. I don’t have anywhere to live or anything to eat, I literally just woke up in your bed without knowing where I was.”

“O-oh… R-really? That’s, uh…” The mare seemed to falter, her face drawing into the beginnings of attentive sympathy. “You really have nowhere else to go?”

“Yeah, I mean, I don’t want you to assume I’m trying to deceive you or get free food from you, but I’m sort of at a loss as to what I should do here.”

“Well… I-I guess we could go for some breakfast while we figure things out.”

The stallion’s face lit up in gratitude. “Really? That’d be awesome! You, ma’am, are awesome!”

Roseluck smiled in return. “Thank you, and you’re awesome too.”

“Hey Roseluck?”

“Yeah, Longsteve?”

“Penis.”