Hands, shoulders, knees, no toes.
A mint green pony stood firmly in her living room. All the furniture around her was laying on the ground, due to her practice and failings of standing on her hind legs, imitating the one thing she had been studying her whole life. The horn atop her head stood proudly and tall, prepared to preform an ancient spell. With this magic, she levitated a book which spun around her, with a dozen papers flurrying through the air. She shut her eyes tightly, and let her horn glow every shade and hue of gold, yellow, and a tough of mint green. The coils of those colors wrapped around her horn. Soon enough, they left her horn and wrapped around her body, lifting her up into the air.
Everything dropped at once, even the pony who was overly exhausted. She opened her eyes and found herself on her knees, staring down at the floor.
Wait... knees?
The spell had worked perfectly. She had finally reached her life goal. Her vision was very blurry as a side effect from the transformation, but she could still make out what she was staring at. She was staring at her new hands. Upon this, she brought them up to her face and smelled them. She hauled them atop her head, and began brushing her bangs and short hair. Her hand glided towards her forehead, which was missing an important factor to her old self. Her horn was gone.
Her vision cleared up in the span of approximately a minute. A hand mirror hung off of the coffee table which she had landed next to. She put her shivering hand on it, and proceeded to slowly wrap her fingers around it. Her hands brought it to her face, and titled it all around so she could see her whole face and head. She pinched her nose, repeatedly raised and lowered her eyebrows, and shifted her jaw side to side, looking at her teeth.
She jolted up, only to fall back down again. Reminding herself of her practice, she lifted herself up very steadily. Her arms extended to assure her balance. They flew through the air in circles to center herself. After a while of falling down and getting back up, she stood in her now wrecked living room for a minute or two. The book she had been levitating during her transformation was all the way across the room now, and almost fried. Great, now she had to walk over there.
"Put one foot in front of the other..." she sung to herself. "And soon you'll be walking out the door..." She allowed herself to do just what she sang to herself. Her feet were lifted up into the air, and slammed down on the ground. After she trudged over to the book, she bent down very slowly and picked up the book. She let the pages slip through her thumbs and held the cover of the book with her free fingers.
Then, she felt a little sting on her thumb. It increased in pain more and more. She turned her thumb to her and spotted blood dripping down from it. Her thumb was lifted up to her mouth to lick the blood off and continue flipping through the book.
She inserted her finger into a certain page and opened the book completely. The sides of the pages of the book were charred because of her spell, which blurred out some on the words on the edge of the articles which covered every page. Her finger slid down the page and stopped at bolded words that read;
Starswirl's prime-ape spell
Only ponies with deep study in anthropology could preform the spell, and she had done so. She continued to read the paragraph on the spell she had preformed.
Effects last 24 hours. Appearance may vary.
A deep sigh escaped her lips. Without a horn, she thought she would never become pony again and would be shunned from society as a different being never seen before. She would be tested on, maybe even dissected for research. No pony had ever studied humans besides her and Starswirl the Bearded, and nopony actually believed his studies, leading to him abandoning them.
Lyra wasn't going to abandon anything if it were anything about humans. She had just reached her life goal, and would not give up like Starswirl, even with all the ponies in town disapproving of her studies.
The book's leather cover slamming on the floor left an echo in the room when she dropped it. Her arms raised in the air, and she remembered the song humans would sing all the time as youth. "Hands..." she clenched her hands. "Shoulders, knees..." she touched her shoulders, then knees. "...and toes," She paused and stared at what should be her toes. Instead, her foot was more like a hoof, but no actual hard bottom. It was like her leg was smashed down to look like a hoof, but there were no toes. What was really balancing her was just her "hoof" split in two, like a pig's hoof.
Her arms dangled from her shoulders as she just stared. She grabbed the book when she regained consciousness and flipped to the same page she had open before she slammed it on the ground. After skimming the page, she stopped a particular article about the human anatomy available. She guided her finger through the article and glided her eyes through it until she reached the sentence about the feet. There was a picture displaying the human body, according to Starswirl's studies. Next to every body part, a small number stood. The number next to the end of the foot was 6, so she looked at the list of footnotes under the picture.
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6. See page 68
She did so, and it guided her to a page full of information on the human foot. After a good 15 minutes of reading the whole page, she found herself sitting on the floor and staring at the wall. Starswirl's interpretation of the human toes were similar to that of a pig's. Which, of course, meant that she was probably the only one in Equestria that knew the actual anatomy of the toes.
It seemed harmless at first, having no toes. All she really cared about as a pony before the transformation were hands. But, the toes she now had bugged her even more than she expected. She wiggled them for 20 minutes tops after looking through the book. Also, after leaning on her arm and brushing her new hair, she realized her thumb was still bleeding from the paper cut. She lifted her hand off the carpet and revealed a red stain. Her thumb was really bleeding, in fact, the cut was deeper than she expected. She stood up and headed for the kitchen. Her roommate, Bon- Bon, was out on a day trip to Las Pegasus, so she had no reason to worry about her finding out.
The band- aids were on top of the ice box which stood tall and was around 6 inches from brushing the ceiling. Her new form was about 5 feet tall, yet she could still not reach them with her arms extended and balancing on the tip of her toes. To her left was a pile of books about monkeys that she had been using to study. She hauled them over to the box to give her a boost and reach the first- aid kit.
This did not go as planned. Unsurprisingly.
She was still not high enough to reach the kit. Instead of using a tall chair (which was right behind her) she snagged a vase off of the counter and put that on top of the books, then put a large phone book on top of that. She jumped on top of the pile she made, and was tumbling side to side, as the tower was very unstable.
Her fingers skimmed the top of the box, and soon they felt a silk pouch. They grasped it and pulled it down to her face. She jumped down from the tower and set the kit on the table to start putting the items back on the counter.
After they were set in their original position, she turned around and opened the kit by the zipper trailed along the perimeter of it. Band- Aids were on top of the pile of all sorts of items, set there by her roommate who predicted that she would need them. She peeled off the wrapping and applied it around her thumb to continue the day.
The day that she would spend in her room the whole time. Literally, she sat on her bed and read books the whole day.
Except at 15:00, when she got up and did something. Wait, this isn't part of the story! What?!
Oh well, let us follow our mint- green heroine into the kitchen. She clenched a glass from the cabinet above her and lowered it down to the sink. Her hand turned the knob, allowing water to flood from the faucet. The glass slipped from her hand when she brought it to her lips to sip, and the contents spilled all over her toes. Or, what would be her toes. When she looked down in shock, she was reminded of the error in her body and freaked out. Not because of the water, but because of her pig feet.
An hour passed by of tearing up napkins and ice, and pouring them into a bowl out of her craze. She even walked over to the window closest to the window of the house next to her.
"Hey, Twinkleshine!" she hollered. "What!?" her neighbor responded in annoyance. "I have no toes!" Lyra shouted back. All she heard in response was a loud sigh.
After realization of her psychopath moment, she ran upstairs and decided to go to sleep. At 4:00 in the afternoon. However, she actually did fall in slumber for the rest of the day. When she woke up, she was a pony once again. She convinced herself that it was a dream, and went downstairs for a nice brew of caffeine. On her way, she tripped on a book with charred pages in the same place she had left it in her 'dream'. She picked it up with her magic and flipped through the familiar pages. The band- aid on her hoof slowed down the process, but helped her notice a blood stain on the side on a page.
What she experienced the day before wasn't a dream. She then freaked out once more that she had wasted a whole 24 hours of being a human. And, the spell could only be preformed once in a pony's life time, and she had wasted her chance.
Suddenly, a pony burst through the door with a large sun hat, sun glasses, and a suitcase with plenty stickers of all sorts of attractions assorted on it. It was her roommate, Bon- Bon, who she was glad to see.
"So what have you been up to?" she lowered her sunglasses to get a clear look at the living room that held tipped furniture and dozens of paper on the floor.
"Oh yeah, I turned into a human without toes. It was freaky," Lyra said. "Cool," Bon- Bon said.