There it was, in the end. Everything rushed past as she fell away, the toxic glow from the vat below staining her mane green – a portent of what was to come. Time seemed to slow as she dropped.
Nopony was there to help her. She’d taken the shift alone, despite all the rumors. She’d dismissed them as pure nonsense – and now she was to pay for it with her life. The figure on the catwalk above her was gloating, sneering down at her. In these last few moments of perfect clarity, she could make out every crease in the stallion’s dark suit, and the gold tooth, two spaces to the right, in his condescending grin.
And then she was submerged. The viscous liquid filled her ears, her nostrils, her mouth – she could not breathe; could not scream. When had she closed her eyes? She didn’t recall, but it didn’t matter, as the liquid was beginning to seep beneath her eyelids anyway. It stung so horribly, but her thrashing was rendered useless. She couldn’t break free. The stinging sensation grew worse; now it burned. It burned, and her every vein was aflame. Her bones cracked as they stretched, growing longer, while her coat and mane seemed to turn inward to attack her. She barely noticed this agony among all the others.
And then it all stopped.
Stillness. She was lying at the very bottom of the vat, the hard metal pressing against her side. The liquid above still weighed down upon her as if all of Maretropolis rested squarely on her back, but she barely noticed. She couldn’t notice much of anything at the moment; she was barely even alive.
But barely was still something. Unaware yet of how she did it, she stretched a limb out, reaching upward to grip the edge of the vat. It occurred to her vaguely that she couldn’t reach even a tenth of that distance, but she didn’t really care.
And so she slowly began to haul herself free of the sludge, whipping out more and more limbs – more than she recalled having – to grab all along the vat’s edge, rising faster now as she tapped pockets of strength she hadn’t even known were there.
And with a great gasp, she broke the surface, sucking in great gulps of glorious, sweet air. The liquid was sucking her back down, but with another heave, she pulled herself completely free, the last of the liquid dripping down her back legs into the vat. She wobbled in midair for a few moments, before lowering herself back onto the catwalk, curling up silently to just feel the sensation of the air around her. She would have stayed like that, too, if not for some worrisome sounds coming from elsewhere.
Reluctantly opening her eyes, she found that the thug from before was gone - but not too far away, judging by the screams. She slowly stood up, stumbling a bit on legs that were longer than she remembered, and looked around the vast room. The vats of experimental shampoos cast various sickly hues upon the darkened ceiling to her right, while the stinging glare of fluorescents shone through observation windows on the left. And that, of course, was where the screams were coming from.
She followed the catwalk forward, her pace stumbling and slow. There was something strange about her gait; everything seemed shorter than it used to be, and she kept tripping over her own legs. On top of that, she was stopped every few steps by spasmodic coughing, doubled over as she cleared the remaining sludge from her lungs. Watching the glowing green liquid slowly ooze through the grating, it occurred to some distant corner of her brain that this was probably a health code violation. Oh, well; after tonight, the health codes would have to be rewritten anyway!
She finally hit an intersection, and turned toward the near wall. Only one row of vats sat below, and she traversed the remaining distance fairly quickly, if still not exactly gracefully. But her breathing was easier now, and she no longer had to cough.
Without lifting a hoof, she grabbed the door handle, and wrenched it completely off of its hinges. That… hadn't exactly been part of the plan, but she didn’t really care at this point. Inside the control room were two thugs, evidently having been assigned to guard the door opposite hers. They were currently backed up in the far corner, clutching one another for dear life and screaming.
“What’s wrong? What are you so scared of?” She asked. Nothing else was in the room, so it must be… “Oh, is it me?” She recognized the gold tooth, two spaces to the right. “Well, I can work with that.”
She rose high into the air, hooves lifting from the ground, as she reached forward to grab her quarry, holding him aloft only a couple of feet from her face. “W-W-What are y-you?” He managed to wheeze out, his panicked breaths made shorter yet by the tight grip she had around his chest. “What do you want from me?”
She looked at him intently. “Don’t you recognize me? We did meet only a few minutes ago, after all. You pushed me over the railing out there, remember?”
He stared at her in astonished realization. “Y-you were the factory worker? But you should be dead!”
Her grin grew more sinister. “Oh, yes. I should be, but unfortunately for you, I’m not. Now, I am going to do my job, and then you are going to get your dues.” Without warning, she hurled him to one side, smashing him through a bank of computer monitors so that his back end and legs stuck out. “Don’t run off until I get back!”
She felt out of control; none of her lines, none of her actions, had been planned. Everything was spur-of the moment; she was running on adrenaline and anger and the sheer joy of being alive. It felt… liberating.
The second door came a bit harder, but with a good tug, she sent it flying backward over her shoulder. Ducking down to pass through into the smoky room beyond, she found four silhouettes in disarray, panicking near a massive circular door set into one wall. A fifth figure was crouched in concentration in front of the door, ignoring or unaware of her sudden entrance. She couldn’t have that, now, could she?
The safecracker found themselves being used as a battering ram, swinging back and forth with nasty crunching noises into their own guards, before being tossed to the floor like a rag doll. Blinking back tears, they looked up through broken glasses, to see a demon. That was all they could think of at the time, for in their long criminal career, they had never encountered anything remotely like this.
The mare was abnormally tall, something about her dusky purple coat bringing to mind a small canvas stretched over too large a frame. Her eyes were unnerving, with the double-iris of red and green, and the shrunken pupils that darted every which way. Her grin was too large, too genuinely happy for the situation, and… and her mane defied all belief. It was long, impossibly long, and prehensile, waving madly this way and that through the air. The two-toned green mass seemed to obey her every unconscious thought, the tips turning like small heads to follow her gaze, while several bundles were holding her up, like extremely flexible legs. Her actual legs hung limply beneath her, unused for the moment.
She lowered herself down to the floor, then crouched beside the safecracker. “Why hello, dearie. Trying to get into the secret vault? I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Star Dusk. Oh, yes, I recognize you from the paper. ‘Best code-cracker in the nation strikes Maretropolis, stealing spree unchecked.’ Well, this streak of yours has come to an end.”
“Don’t be so quick to think you’ve won. Dusk is working for me, after all.” She looked up sharply as a sleek stallion walked into the room, with two henchponies in tow. He was dressed in a fancy white business suit, looking more like an entrepreneur than the city’s most wanted. Though of course, the two weren’t mutually exclusive; Spikeshoe Pinstripe was a mogul in organized crime.
“Though it does seem I might have wasted all of this effort after all,” he looked her up and down, completely un-phased by the deranged expression or tentacle-hair. “I’d heard rumors that the new experimental shampoo being produced here had some interesting side-effects… but if this is the result, then those recipes are useless to me. I do have standards, after all.” Turning to leave again, he motioned to his bodyguards, who each pulled a pistol from their jackets. “Kill her.”
If she’d felt pain when she was drowning in the vat, this was sheer agony. The bullets tore through her flesh, the rotation twisting the tissue around them in a spiral. She collapsed to the floor, only vaguely aware of the ponies leaving, as most of her focus was on the pool of blood that slowly expanded from beneath her midsection. It was fascinating to watch, like a train wreck. Feeling the life ebb out of her was one thing, but watching the results spread out across the marble gave it a whole new dimension.
Fascinating as it was, though, she found her mind wandering. Wondering if this was the end was so cliché, but she wondered regardless. To come back from the brink of death only to die minutes later; there was probably some humor to be found in the situation, but for the first time since her transformation, she didn’t feel like looking for it. She still didn’t exactly understand what had happened. Now she may never get the chance.
But as she watched, something else happened; the red stain was suddenly sucked back inside, and her internals stitched themselves up, the bullets being pushed out and clattering uselessly to the floor. Her skin snapped shut, and her purple coat realigned itself. She would live.
“Can’t decide, can we?” She grinned, though this time she wasn’t quite feeling it. The adrenaline rush had worn off now, leaving a wave of exhaustion to crash over her. Her mind was fracturing; she felt it break under the stress. Everything had happened so fast; only a few minutes before, she had been an average mare, one of the supervisors of the new experiments. Now she was… something. She was stronger, and taller – and how had she been able to lift herself up and grab things far outside her reach?
Well, it wouldn’t be too hard to answer the last one. She waggled a limb experimentally, and found that it was part of her mane. Of course; it was shampoo that she’d almost drowned in, after all.
She laid her head back and closed her eyes. Everything from before seemed to be fading. Her old life, her old name… it was all disappearing, and she wasn’t terribly bothered. She was someone new, someone with a strange mane and strange sense of humor, and that was okay. She just needed to decide on a name, a mission, and a favorite brand of ice-cream.
She stood up, making long strides with her tentacle-hair, and ducked back into the observation room. Spikeshoe Pinstripe and his cronies had long made their escape, but the thug she’d jammed into the wall was still there. She extracted him, and set him down in the only surviving chair, before sitting down across from him. The bright fluorescents and the whitewashed walls were blindingly bright, but didn’t seem to bother him as much. Perhaps another side-effect?
She was getting off-track again. “I’m back! Good boy, you stayed put after all. I may just let you live a few more hours for your good behavior!” That certainly got his attention; the stallion went from bleary and dazed to wide-awake in a heartbeat. “Now, do you think I should choose chocolate or banana fudge first? Or should I just try them all first before deciding? Also, why did Spikeshoe Pinstripe want the recipes?”
The henchpony just stared at her, apparently unable to process what he was hearing. “Uh, try all of them? And I’m just a low-level guy, I don’t know the boss’s plan. But…” He trailed off and frowned.
“But…?” She prodded (literally; she was poking him in the chest with her mane) him to continue.
“But I have heard rumors. Some people have been saying that he’s getting bored with just running the crime in town; he wants to run the town as a whole. He’s been doing all sorts of weird stuff lately, and there’s been whisperings of some sort of secret army of super-soldiers. It all seems beyond even him, but who knows? Nothing” he gestured at her “makes sense anymore.”
“Oh, I can relate!” She said brightly. “Like, why do we even follow the laws anymore, when ponies like you or Spikeshoe Pinstripe don’t? It just doesn’t seem quite fair, but I’ve only just realized this now!” She chuckled a bit, while the stallion edged back in his seat.
She quickly frowned, though, mulling over his words. “Spikeshoe Pinstripe has more-or-less run Maretropolis for the last two decades already, and nopony’s tried to stop him. Maretropolis is a second Tartarus because of him, and nopony has tried to stop him.
“I need to destroy the city. A place like this doesn’t deserve to exist.” She abruptly smiled at her captive, pupils becoming pinpricks. “Besides, it might be fun!”
He stared at her in growing horror. “You’re insane! A maniac!”
“That I am, that I am.” A piece of her mane wiggled in front of her face for a long few moments before she made the connection. “Mane-iac!” She lifted him up and twirled him around, before setting him down on the ground. “You’ve given me my new name! And really, though the intent was murderous, I’m starting to think that being knocked into that vat was the best thing that could have happened to me; I see everything in a whole new light, now!” Her terrified hostage tried to flee, but was blocked by a part of her mane. “Thank you, from the bottom of my warped and mutated heart. I owe you a great service, and I shall fulfill it by letting you live!”
As she watched the thug scamper out the door and down the catwalk, she rested her head on a hoof. “Mane-iac. It fits, somehow. Maretropolis will burn, and everypony’s hair shall be perfect.”
“Hmm, maybe I should start with trying vanilla.”
Author's Note
This was written from 8 PM to 2 AM, so bear with me.
Author's Notes
