Allen to Ashes
Chapter 1
My name is Allen Fersch. I also answer to “Charcoal.” I am a human being and I had a pretty good life… right up to the point at which I died.
If you’re wondering how I’m writing this while I’m dead, the answer is: with a typewriter. Or at least what passes for a typewriter here. It’s a little like playing a Dance Dance Revolution arcade game and it takes some getting used to.
Before I continue; in case you’re not familiar with the concept of the “multiverse” I’ll give you a crash course (ha!) so that you can better understand my story.
Some people believe that every time a choice is made (and that’s any choice, whether you’re deciding what’s for lunch to whether an electron decides it would rather zig than zag) the universe splits and both potential decisions sail off on their own tangent.
That means that there are uncountable millions of universes out there all running in parallel. There are also millions of versions of you, all walking around, living out lives that have spun off from some decision you made in the past.
Some other people build on this idea by saying that even though there are millions of versions of you, they all have only one soul between them. Each of your multiversal bodies divides the use of your soul like some kind of cosmic timeshare, utilizing it for the barest instant of time before passing it to the next. This rotation happens billions of times per second and is undetectable within any one timeline.
Because of this, they say, there’s a distinct possibility that every living being has a kind of “quantum immortality” that prevents it from experiencing its own death. At the instant when your body in one parallel universe dies, your consciousness jumps ship to the most similar parallel available where you did not die.
The truck swerved at the last second. The power went out. The gun jammed. You were thrown clear and you thank God the Almighty and all the saints and seraphim that you’re okay.
If you’ve ever been in a near-death situation where your life flashed before your eyes, there’s a good chance you’re not in your original body. That experience of “flashing before your eyes” is the download mechanism kicking in. In some lonely universe somewhere, all your friends and loved ones think you’re dead and your parents keep a picture of you on their mantelpiece, which depresses everyone when they come to visit for the holidays.
So what happens if the mechanism goes wrong? Like any natural process, there are quirks in the system. Some people are born with six toes. Some people have a defective downloader. If somebody you know ever had a near death experience and came out a completely different person, you’re seeing what happens when the escaping soul can’t match the parameters of their original universe closely enough. I shudder to think how many perfectly sane people are locked up in mental asylums because their soul skipped a track or two and now they’re living a timeline meant for someone else.
Sometimes you escape death and you never even realize how close you came, sometimes you escape it and the world around you is different in ways you can’t quite place.
And sometimes… you end up like me: completely off the grid.
***
My story begins on the last night of my life.
I was a junior attending classes at University of Massachusetts. I had a partial Humanities scholarship, I got good grades (easy when your major is American Studies), I was getting laid (difficult, when you’re as big a nerd as I am) and I was pretty tall and not bad looking though I say so myself. Like I said before: life was pretty good.
Laura (my girlfriend) and two buddies of mine got invited to a frat party at the Beta Rho house. None of us were Betas, but we were cool with a couple of the bros there and somehow managed to wrangle an invitation.
The party was almost as wild as the frat parties you might have seen in movies like Revenge of the Nerds or Animal House, except without most of the cartoony hijinks. Someone did set fire to the curtains while attempting the “fire breather” trick, but some quick thinking Betas put it out by dumping the kiddie-pool full of Jell-O on it.
By the end of the night, I was pretty well trashed. Laura and Carl and I piled into the back of Eric’s Honda Civic. Laura was howling drunk. Howling as in howling at the moon. She’s got this weird, secret-ironic-but-not-really-ironic Furry thing going on which I don’t get, but it doesn’t dominate her life, so I can put up with it. She was pretty and smart and way into comic books and I could give all the drawings of naked fox people a free pass if it meant I got to see her naked on occasion.
If you think this is about to turn into a tract about the dangers of drunk driving, I’m gonna cut you off right there. Eric was as sober as a judge. He was our designated driver and he didn’t drink a drop of alcohol all night.
If you think Laura’s howling distracted him and caused an accident, you’re also wrong. I only included that detail as a red herring.
No. We all had our seatbelts buckled. The car was in good working order, and even though we were a little rowdy, we’d pretty much settled down by the time we pulled out onto the main street.
Sometimes, your number is just up.
At the intersection of Lincoln and Amity, the driver of a tractor-trailer spilled hot marinara sauce from his Subway sub-sandwich down his front. As he flailed around to get the burning sauce off his t-shirt, he took his hands off the wheel and his eyes off the road, sailing straight through a red light at forty miles per hour.
The eighteen-wheeler flattened Eric’s Honda Civic like a soda can.
The last thing I remember is looking out the left passenger window and seeing the MACK logo.
It’s true what they say; that time slows down in those situations. In the lengthening seconds before my death, the world took on a hyperrealistic quality, like living inside a super-surround ultra-hi def TV. The colors brightened. I could see everything around me as if it were under a microscope. I remember I could count all the bugs on the front grill of the MACK truck (there were sixteen) and I could make out the pattern of the radiator behind the front grill. I could see the wide, terrified eyes of the driver and the red gleam of the marinara sauce on his shirt. My muscles tensed and I remember I wanted to cry. My life flashed before my eyes, the downloader kicking in.
Then: blackness.
Nothingness.
No sense of floating or weightlessness. No senses of any kind. No blackness even, really. My body was gone and so were all my fears and memories and feelings. I was just a mote of consciousness in a universe the size of a peanut shell.
I don’t know how long I was there. Gradually, my identity returned. Feeling in my body soon followed, moving swiftly from numbness to a full on assault of pinpricks all over my body. I jolted awake. I tried to scream in agony but all my stiff throat could manage was a weak “Murrrrrh…”
I was in a hospital. I could smell the hospital air and hear the soft whirring and beeping of the machines.
This is the part where most people flutter into consciousness with all his friends and loved ones gathered around the hospital bed and the doctor says:
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
I opened my eyes.
This time I found my voice.
“Aaah!” I yelped.
There was a horse standing over me!
I flailed backwards, but my limbs didn’t move right and they caught on the tubes and wires stuck all over me.
“Woah, woah!” said the horse “Calm down!”
I didn’t calm down.
“What’s going on? Where am I?” I croaked.
“You’re in Ponyville hospital. You were in a very bad accident and suffered a nasty bump on the head. I’m Doctor Stable.”
It was hard to see. My eyes felt too far apart and it made my vision cockeyed. I tried to feel my head, but my hands were numb and I ended up hitting myself with a distressing “klunk.”
“Easy there! Try to hold still,” said the horse-doctor-thing, reaching forward and pinning my arms to my sides.
I describe him as a horse, but that’s not really accurate. Horses are big, stupid animals with big, stupid faces. This one had an expressive face with a broad forehead above wide, intelligent eyes.
As I calmed down, I recognized a little better what I was looking at.
Laura was way into the cartoon show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and, as her boyfriend; I ended up watching most of the episodes with her. I actually enjoyed it much more than you might expect, but wasn’t as… “expressive” about my enjoyment of the show as some of her other friends.
What I was looking at now was a My Little Pony. Not a cartoon Pony or a toy, but real. The effect of seeing a Pony rendered in actual flesh and blood is a little disconcerting. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the photos of real people who’ve been photoshopped to have anime character proportions, but the effect was much the same. Maybe not quite so “uncanny valley” as I make it sound. It was a lot like being inside a super-detailed CGI cartoon. Once you accept the art style, you can gradually overlook the initial strangeness. At the time, however, I was really freaked out. At least the realization that this must all be a dream soothed the panic in my chest and eased my frantic breathing. It was still one hell of a dream, though.
I looked around the room.
In the show, everything is rendered in bright, solid colors. Here, the color scheme was the same, but everything had real texture and depth. The wood had grain; the paint had flaws and chips. The brushed steel frame of my hospital bed had nicks and scratches in the metal and I could feel the fabric of my bedsheets crinkle beneath my weight. The lamp at my bedside was bulbous and purple and I could see the bubbles on its ceramic surface.
It looked so real, I had to reach out and touch it.
That’s when I saw my hoof for the first time.
I screamed again.
Dr. Stable tried to comfort me.
“Calm down! You’re perfectly alright!”
“Alright?” I cried “I’ve got hooves!”
The doctor chuckled.
“Well of course you do, Mister Charcoal.”
“Why do I have hooves?”
His patronizing smile melted into a look of concern. He reached for my forehead. I jerked back from his touch, but he cooed at me with soothing sounds and I let him feel my head with the back of his hoof.
“The trauma you’ve suffered may be worse than we thought. We’ll have someone in to examine you right away.”
“Examine me? What? What’s going on!?” I demanded. I tried to get up, but ended up falling out of bed.
I sprawled and flailed on the floor like a bug, trying to stand. My body couldn’t move the way I wanted it to. Cables and tubes trailed off me, tugging at my skin. My catheter yanked painfully at my junk and I looked down. It wasn’t just the hooves: I was all pony!
“Get the nurses,” said the doctor over his shoulder.
I continued to flail, helpless on the floor. A pair of ponies in nurse hats and scrubs hoisted me up by my armpits and deposited me back on my bed.
“You’ve got to rest, Mr. Charcoal. You’re still recovering from a serious accident.”
“Why do you keep calling me ‘Mister Charcoal’?” I demanded.
“I’m sorry if that’s too familiar. Would you prefer I call you Mr. Ashes?”
“What? No! Who the hell do you think I am?”
The doc flipped up a page from the chart at the foot of my bed.
“You’re not ‘Charcoal Ashes’, Unicorn. 413 Haystack lane, Ponyville?”
“No, I’m not!” I said “There’s some mistake, I’m Allen Fersch, I go to U Mass and I-”
“Ewe Mass?”
“University of Massachusetts?”
The doctor shook his head, tossing his mane back from his forehead, which I now noticed bore a stubby horn. He examined me, a little more cautious than he was before.
“Mister Charcoal, prior to your accident, did you come into contact with any illicit substances?”
He thought I was on drugs. I wondered if he might be right.
“No. I was drinking, but only beer and some liquor shots.”
Dr. Stable nodded.
“Hmm,” he said “And you’re quite sure nopony might have… say… slipped something into your drink?”
“No, nopony… *ahem* I mean nobody would do that.”
He looked at me over his glasses.
“Hmmm… well if it’s alright with you, we’re going to run a few tests. In the meantime, I need you to get some rest…”
Before I could object, a pair of nurse ponies trotted up. One of them hung a glass IV jar on the stand next to my bed while the other connected it to one of the IV lines trailing from my arms.
Whatever was in that IV was amazing. Within seconds, I had drifted off to sleep.
When I awoke the second time, I was sure it would be in the real world. Well, the real world with which I’m familiar. I was warm and comfortable, I felt so fuzzy and delightful!
“Mister Charcoal, are you awake?”
It was the Dr. Stable’s voice.
I opened my left eye and cautiously scanned the room.
Everyone was still a pony.
Nurses trotted between stalls in the ward and chatted with patients as they adjusted their beds or brought them their medication. The lights overhead burned with gas, not fluorescents. The unmistakable barnyard odor of horse BO permeated the room. All things I’d been too panicked to notice before. I was calmer now, but still on edge. This was starting to feel less and less like a dream.
“Mr. Charcoal,” repeated Dr. Stable. He was still a pony, too.
I surrendered and opened my other eye.
“I’m awake,” I mumbled.
“Good, good,” he said “We ran those tests. You indeed tested negative-”
“I told you, I was only drinking…”
“-Not only for any illicit drugs, but also for alcohol,” he continued.
“What?”
“How much did you say you drank last night?”
I tried to remember. The previous night was hazy and not in danger of clearing up any time soon.
“A lot,” I said “At least six beers and three tequila shots, plus some other random mixed drinks. I dunno, it was a wild night.”
“Hmm…” said the doctor “Well there’s nothing in your urine or blood work that would indicate such excessive drinking.”
He looked at me, his expression serious.
“Do you remember anything before the accident?” he asked.
That, I could remember. I told him everything. He listened to every word and nodded gravely.
“Who did you say was pulling the cart you were riding?”
“Eric,” I answered “And it wasn’t a cart, he was driving a car.”
“And who was pulling it?”
“Nobody, it’s a car.”
“Hmm…” Dr. Stable rubbed his chin with his hoof “Mr. Macintosh made no mention of a cart nor any other ponies when he brought you in.”
“They weren’t ponies, they were people.”
Dr. Stable perked up his ears in curiosity.
“What are ‘pee-pull’?” he asked.
“You know, people? Humans?”
“Hyoo-man?”
“Human beings!?”
“Human beans…?” asked Dr. Stable, “like… kidney beans? You were hauling beans in your cart?”
“Not beans, beings! And it wasn’t a cart, it was a car,” I stopped. The doctor’s earlier words sank in.
“Did you say ‘Macintosh’ as in Big Macintosh?”
“Yes I did,” he nodded “He was very distraught when he brought you in. He was afraid he’d killed you.”
“Big Macintosh… almost killed me?” I blinked “Big red horse. Says ‘eeyup’ a lot?”
“Ah, glad to see your memory is starting to return.”
I shook my head (ow!).
“No, no, no. I was hit by a Mack truck!”
“Yes,” he nodded.
“No, Mack is a kind of truck!”
Dr. Stable chuckled indulgently.
“Well, he’s certainly a fair size, but I don’t know if it’s fair to call him a ‘truck’. As I said, he’s very sorry about the accident.”
This was going nowhere.
“Whatever. There was no one else with me?”
“Mr. Macintosh didn’t mention anypony, no.”
“They weren’t ponies.”
“He didn’t mention any ponies or beans or anything. He was hauling a cartload of anvils and didn’t see you step in front of him until it was too late.”
I raised my hoof to massage the growing headache out of my temples, but put it back down. Looking at it made me feel dizzy.
Dr. Stable looked at my sick expression with concern. His horn glowed and the air was suddenly thick with the smell of ozone. Something in his pocket twitched and leaped at me!
“Ahh! I’m blind!” I yelped, shielding my face with my arms.
“Hold still. I need to examine your pupils,” he instructed.
Slowly, I lowered my arms… forelegs… whatever. Hovering in front of me, like a metal dragonfly, was a pen flashlight.
“Are you… doing that?” I asked, remembering that, in the show, Unicorns could manipulate objects with their magic.
“Yes, hold still.”
He watched me track the light across my vision for a few passes, then switched off the flashlight and put it back in his breast pocket.
“You don’t appear to have any residual concussion,” he said, standing back “I’d like to keep you under observation for a few days… Just in case.”
“Wait, no!”
He was gone.
***
Nurses came by later to unplug all my electrodes and IV tubes and remove my catheter. Every time they came by, I tried to explain to them that I shouldn’t be there, but they never said a word, pretended they couldn’t hear me.
The first time they brought me food, I was completely at a loss for what to do. I was starving; hungry enough to try eating whatever this mush was, if only I could figure out how. The little tray had a plastic knife and fork, and a small paper cup of water, so obviously they expected me to use utensils.
I immediately made a mess. Grasping with my hooves was nearly impossible! In my frustration, I threw the whole tray on the floor. The nurses just came by and cleaned it up. They didn’t look at me. Somehow that tray just ended up on the ground, do dee doo.
They brought me more food at dinner. By then I was so hungry I was ravenous. I gave up after a few seconds of trying to work the fork and knife and just mashed my face in the food. I guessed by the sick expressions of my fellow patients that this was rude, but I didn’t care. I spilled the water all over myself and threw a small tantrum that drew frightened looks from the rest of the ward. They avoided my gaze and I avoided theirs.
That night, I had to pee. I hadn’t drunk anything during the day, but I guess those IVs eventually make it through you.
I knew where the bathroom was. I’d seen it through the open door at the end of the ward.
The trouble was getting there.
For starters, I was naked.
I know ponies walk around naked all the time. Frankly, it freaked me out a little. It’s not something they show you in the kiddie cartoon. The little girls don’t see Dr. Stable doing his rounds with his bat and balls bouncing around between his legs like a perverted Jell-O mould. Nobody else thought there was anything weird about it at all, but that knowledge didn’t go far to assuage twenty years of psychological conditioning telling me I needed to cover my shame. I looked around to see if anyone were watching me.
The other patients were asleep, snoozing quietly with their legs up in casts or their necks in braces. I wondered briefly what they would have thought if they knew what we did with ponies that broke their legs where I come from.
It didn’t seem like anyone else were awake. I pushed my blankets off.
Night air swirled uncomfortably around my nethers. My balls were cold and there was an unsettling breeze under my tail (this was also the first time I’d ever seen my tail. It was a pale, unassuming bob of hair, chopped short and neat by the doctors.)
I slid out of bed onto the floor, balancing uneasily on unsteady legs. So far, so good.
You probably think that learning to walk on four legs is easy, like learning to crawl.
Guess again. It’s not like crawling on your hands and knees. Instead, take two pairs of stilts and work one set with your legs and the other with your arms. That’s how I felt. At least with two legs you have arms to catch you if you fall.
From where I stood, the floor seemed miles below at the end of two long stilts. At least I was standing up.
I took a step and promptly fell on my face.
“Shit!” I cursed. The other patients stirred uneasily. I grumbled to myself. I was trying to walk by bending my elbow, which was apparently somewhere up by my shoulder. I worked my front leg underneath me and managed to push myself back to a standing position.
This time, I took a step, bending my leg at the wrist and elbow. I picked my hoof up and put it down an inch ahead of where it had been.
“One small step for pony… One giant leap for man…” I whispered.
I lifted my back leg and promptly fell on my ass.
My knees weren’t where I remembered them either, and my heel, or whatever my human consciousness mapped as my heel, was halfway up my back leg!
Okay… just put one hoof in front of the other.
Learning to walk took most of the night. The foals back at home who learn to do this twenty minutes out of the womb deserve a lot of credit.
By the time I’d staggered my way to the bathroom, I had to piss like the proverbial racehorse. The fear of soiling myself was a powerful motivator. The doctors already half believed I was crazy anyway. The last thing I needed was for them to discover me sobbing on the floor in a puddle of my own urine.
I was too scared of falling to lift my hoof to push the door open, so I pushed with my face. I was past dignity and just wanted to get to the bathroom before I burst. I made it inside and pushed the door shut with my butt.
That was when I got the first look at “my” face in the mirror. For the moment, I forgot all about needing to pee.
In a weird sort of way, I recognized myself. My same expressions, attitude and facial tics were all there, or at least enough of them that I knew who I was looking at. I made some experimental faces at the mirror and watched the pony me make them back.
I was a unicorn, with a pretty good-sized horn, though I say so myself. My coat was all dark blue-grey, fading to ash white around my muzzle, mane and hooves. The doctors had wrapped my forehead in bandages and shorn my mane down to the skin. I looked like a lobotomy patient.
In the dim reflection of the bathroom mirror I spotted a colorful blotch near my butt and thought briefly that I must have landed in something during one of the twenty or so tumbles I took on the way to the bathroom.
I suddenly realized that colorful blotch must be my cutie mark!
A pony’s cutie mark is symbolic of its life’s purpose. Human beings don’t have the luxury of knowing what we’re meant to be but, as a pony, I might actually get closure on a mystery that haunts most humans to their graves! Maybe this accident was the universe’s way of revealing to me the meaning of my life!
And my cutie mark was:
A flaming charcoal briquette.
What the aitch, man!?
Was my pony self some kind of expert barbecuer? An arsonist? A… A… I dunno! How do I work with that!?
I was no closer to discovering my purpose in life and my bladder was about to burst.
I looked over. There was no toilet. Just a hole in the ground.
That’s ok, I was only going number one, I’d just…
Huh…
I have no hands.
I looked down between my legs. My junk was way, way back there. I gave an experimental wiggle with my hips; there was a lot of sway. How was I supposed to aim? Oh well. I spread my forelegs wide and said a prayer.
I immediately made a mess.
Pee everywhere.
It hit the wall behind the toilet first and, as I tried to readjust, I lost my balance and ended up spraying it all over my front hooves before falling over completely, splashing pee up on the walls and sink.
God. I was like a baby. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t feed myself, I couldn’t go potty. At least I could talk so I could explain what happened when the doctors found me lying here covered in pee.
You see, I’m used to being a human and…
My new number one priority was now staying out of the pony loony bin. I figured I knew enough about ponies from the show that I could at least fake my way out of the hospital. My next priority was finding out what happened to my friends. Did they survive the crash? Did they get turned into ponies, too? Together, maybe we could piece together what had happened so that I could get home.
First things first I thought, I gotta get this cleaned up…This typewriter is a full body workout...
I'll write more later…
Allen to Ashes
Chapter 2
I cleaned up the bathroom as best I could, even though it meant basically rubbing my face on the grimy floor while I held a wad of paper towels in my teeth. I ended up using all the paper towels in the dispenser by the time I was done and I still couldn’t reach the places high up on the wall where I’d splashed. I stuffed the used towels in the trashcan and tamped it down as best I could. The toilet-hole looked pretty heavy-duty, but I figured the “don’t flush paper towels” rule probably held pretty consistent across parallel universes or coma fantasies or wherever I was.
Thankfully, whoever invented the sink here made it more hoof-friendly than whoever invented their utensils. The tap was pedal operated and I was able to wash my forehooves and face, though I still ended up splashing water all over myself and onto the floor.
By that point, I figured it was better to cut my losses. I stumble/walk/fell/crawled back to my bed and hauled myself up to sleep for the rest of the night.
***
The next day, the doctors had a lot of questions for me. Doctor Stable introduced me to a trio of unicorn “nerve specialists” that I guessed were what passed for psychiatrists or psychologists here. They all had thick glasses, long beards and German accents, though I have no idea if there even is a Germany here. From what I know of pony naming conventions, it’s probably called “GerMANEy” or something similar.
They bombarded me with questions. Sticking to my strategy for staying out of pony Belleview, I clammed up when they asked me about “human beans,” a cart that ran by itself or the whereabouts of my alleged friends. Unfortunately, I also couldn’t answer any questions about “my” (that is to say Charcoal’s) life or past, and this was nearly as suspicious to them as any wild ramblings about being human.
It also didn’t take them long to figure out I couldn’t walk. Nature called again during the day and though I held it for as long as I could, I eventually had to make the long trek back to the bathroom.
Watching me try to walk must have been quite a sight. The only way I could get from place to place without falling over was to walk my front legs forward as far as I could stretch, then walk my hind legs to catch up with them in a sort of “slinky dog” motion. I could feel the eyes of everypony in the ward on me as I inchwormed my way down the aisle between the beds toward the lavatory.
I’ll spare you the gruesome details of my second trip to the bathroom. Suffice to say I made a huge mess. I had to go number twos and the result more or less cemented in the doctors’ minds the idea that something was seriously wrong with me that their x-rays weren’t picking up.
I wasn’t allowed to leave that day, nor the next, nor the next. The only advantage to being cooped up in the hospital was that while I was there, they put me through physical therapy that, among other things, taught me how to walk a little more like I’d been born with four legs instead of none. I also learned a little bit about unicorn magic.
When Charcoal had his accident, he suffered a hairline fracture to the horn, which gave me a good excuse for being clumsy when it came to manipulating objects with my mind. It would heal, but for a long time I sparked excessively whenever I tried to use magic.
For those of you humans who might be reading this, using magic is nearly impossible to describe, as I can only analogize it to one of our five senses and it’s not really like any of those. I’ve never taken psychedelic drugs (unless I’m on an extended trip right now), but if you have, it might be whatever is comparable to when you experience one sense switched with another. “Feeling smells” or “hearing shapes” or something. It was amazing and terrifying at the same time.
Using it to move things is even more of a trip. I’ll try to explain:
Take one of your sense organs. Your eyes, for example. Imagine if they not only received light, but could provide feedback through the same medium. I’m not talking about if your eyes could glow, I mean what if you had an input on what you saw. You observe a green object, but you decide it should be red. It becomes red. Not only for you, but for anyone else who sees it as well.
This is a rough sketch of how unicorn magic works. There’s an ambient magic field (I’m sure human scientists would identify it as some sort of gestalt psychic phenomenon or electromagnetism or something) that permeates everything. In some places it’s thicker or more powerful than others, and it has ebb and flow like a tide. Living organisms generate their own fields that add to the atmosphere while inanimate objects passively accept whatever comes their way. Solid objects act like sponges for magical energy, and the greater an object’s density, the more magic it takes to achieve a desired effect. Unicorn horns are like transceiver antennas for this magic field.
As I sent my magic feelers out into the world, I noticed that some spots in the magical field were significantly denser than others. At the center of these dense patches were little knots of energy that were almost organic in their way. They creeped me right the eff out and at first I was sure they were some sort of otherworldly parasite that would leech onto me and try to suck out my soul. I learned later that these were what unicorns called “spells” (as opposed to how we typically think of spells being a set of symbols or spoken words). The one that ran the artificial lung for the comatose patient across from me looked like a squat little sea anemone that constantly squashed and stretched as it worked the bellows keeping the patient alive.
In order for a spell to function without continuous input from the casting unicorn, it had to have a self-sustaining structure that could draw energy from the ambient magical field and apply it to its task, while at the same time replenish itself, hence their organic appearance. Each spell is essentially a simple organism with a digestive tract that absorbs magic and converts it into kinetic energy (or light, or whatever the spell is supposed to do). A unicorn skilled in spellcasting is one that can memorize all the requisite organs and structures of a living creature and then reproduce them on command.
I couldn’t do any of that. I was just satisfied when I could levitate a forkful of food and not jab myself in the eye.
***
As much as I was learning about my new body and how to function normally, I wasn’t any closer to being released from the hospital. I spent long hours talking to the psychiatrist trio, trying to sound as sane as possible and wincing whenever they asked me questions about Charcoal’s life. I knew nothing about his past or his current relationships, and the subtleties of human idiomatic speech sounded strange to their ears. I didn’t consistently use the phrase “everypony” to replace “everyone” and any reference to something being “handy” or “on the other hand” or “a handful” raised curious eyebrows and provoked furious scribbling in notepads.
Frustrated with my confinement, I became short tempered and agitated, which did nothing to help my situation. My appetite waned. I snapped at the nurses and doctors when they asked me questions and isolated myself from conversation with the other patients. The doctors developed the vague notion that I suffered from some form of dissociative identity disorder.
In my second week, I started attending group therapy sessions where I got to see the face of pony insanity. Every morning at ten, I sat on a cushion and shared my feelings with a circle of caricatures straight out of a politically insensitive 40’s cartoon about crazy people. There was an honest-to-goodness “Napoleon” there, as well as a pony that was literally “barking mad.” Most of their cutie marks were all eerily appropriate to their situation. I saw a lot of flanks with screws, nuts (the seed and the fastener) and cuckoo clocks and there was much lip-bibbling and off-key opera singing.
As chilling as the idea that there were ponies out there whose special talent might actually be “being insane,” at least they seemed happy enough. The scary ones were the ones like me; seemingly normal ponies that were nonetheless deeply disturbed. I learned quickly that in contrast to what we saw on the TV show in our world, ponies could have problems just like us. Their parents could beat them, their creepy uncles could molest them. They burned themselves with cigarettes or cut themselves with razors just to prove to themselves they could still feel. It was really depressing and I always left the group therapy sessions thankful to be sane and well-adjusted… to certain perspectives anyway.
If it helps you feel better, from what I understand, instances of mental illness are far, far less common among ponies than they are among humans. This was a good thing for all the happy, well-adjusted ponies out there, but not as great for the handful (see?) that did suffer. With fewer instances of mental illness, the incentive to develop a comprehensive science of psychology was nearly absent, and they were barely coming out of the “electroshock therapy and laudanum” stage. All the more reason for me to find a way out of there.
***
I had just about resigned myself to living out the rest of my miserable life sharing a padded cell with Screwloose (what kind of parent names their kid that?) when I got a visitor.
I was on the treadmill, perfecting my prancing when someone called me from across the ward.
“Hey, Charcoal!”
I couldn’t believe my ears! It was Laura! The last time I heard her voice, she was drunkenly trying to explain to me what it was like to be an animal soul in a human’s body (a situation with which I could now readily sympathize) and making out with me while growling like a wolf. This Laura sounded sober, but there was no mistaking it was her.
I looked around, frantically searching the gym for any glimpse of my girlfriend and praying I wasn’t hearing things. If Laura was here then she could prove to the doctors that I wasn’t insane and get me out of there.
She giggled.
“Charcoal, over here!”
She waved at me from behind a high and tight-cut pony that was learning to use his artificial hind-leg. My heart fell. It wasn’t Laura. The pony that spoke in Laura’s voice (it wasn’t just like her voice, it was her voice, down to the last subtle quaver) was a seafoam-green unicorn with a pale blue mane and a lyre for a cutie mark.
“Laura?” I asked, peering at her. Just as Charcoal’s face strangely resembled mine, this pony looked as much like Laura as a pony could, she even did that goofy, wide-eyed grin Laura used to do.
“I just heard about the accident,” she said, trotting up alongside the treadmill “I was so worried after you disappeared. Everypony freaked out when they heard you never made it to the meet in Fillydelphia. Why didn’t you try to contact me?”
I pulled the emergency stop key on the treadmill and dropped it in the tray.
“Laura, I had no idea you were here! Jesus! I’m so relieved! Nobody-”
“Why do you keep calling me Laura?” she cocked her head “Gee-zus?”
“-here believes I’m human… Wait, you are Laura, right?”
“I’m Lyra. Your mare-friend? The doctors told me you were confused, but did you really forget me?”
“No, no. It’s me! Allen.”
Lyra looked around, her expression suddenly tense. She lowered her voice.
“Charcoal, have you been telling the doctors that you’re human?”
“Only the first day. Nobody here believes me. Even you probably think I’m crazy.”
“I believe you,” she said, lowering her voice even more.
“Thank God, you do? So you’re really Laura?”
“I’m Lyra,” she huffed a little “And of course everypony else thinks you’re crazy. Normals never understand. I don’t know what got into you that you thought blabbing about being an otherkin would be a good idea here.”
“What? Normals? What are you talking about?”
She searched my face for any sign that I might be messing with her, but found none. Her face tensed with worry.
“Please, you have to get me out of here. I can explain everything!” I pleaded.
“Of course I’ll get you out. Just stay calm and try not to act crazy,” she said.
“That tactic’s been working great so far.”
“Celestia, even with amnesia you’re still a sarcastic asshole.”
“Luh-ay-ra… please.”
“Okay, okay. Keep your horseshoes on,” she said, turning and trotting off to find a doctor. I watched her go. She walked with such natural ease, there was no way she’d been the victim of the same transformation that affected me. It was as if she’d been a pony all her life. Nevertheless, it was definitely Laura. She even bickered like her. Did my other friends have pony parallels here, too? Were there a pony Eric and a pony Carl?
I prayed that maybe one of them was in the same situation. I don’t know if Laura/Lyra was really a pony or if she just played the part better than me and didn’t want to give herself away, but I had the sinking feeling that the Laura I knew was in another time and place, as inaccessible to me as yesterday.
Lyra spoke to the doctors. I don’t know what she said, but she talked them into releasing me into her custody. Surprisingly, it didn’t seem all that difficult. I don’t know how pony HMOs work, but I got the impression that keeping me there for an extended stay was going to start costing someone a lot of money and they were glad for someone to come and take me off their hands…
Hooves.
Anyway, I didn’t have any personal effects at the hospital so checkout didn’t take long. I signed a bunch of discharge papers and was rolling out of the hospital in a wheelchair before lunchtime.
The orderlies dumped me unceremoniously to my feet once we got outside and took the chair with them back into the hospital. I dusted myself off and got my first look at the pony world that wasn’t through a window.
It was as if I’d stepped out of a dreary, period drama about mental asylums into the rolling, green hills of Narnia, or Middle Earth, or at least New Zealand.
The scenery was breathtaking. I’d never been in the midst of nature so lush, and I lived in rural New England for most of my life. The sky was a rich blue and the air was crisp and clear. We tune out the garbage smells of life in the city, and even the air of small towns is heavy with car exhaust. Here, there was nothing like that. I was breathing air like most Americans hadn’t breathed in hundreds of years. The atmosphere was so clear; I could see mountains that must have been forty or fifty miles away, and even make out the delicate, gleaming latticework of a palace that had been been built right into the side of a distant cliff. Colored specks drifted around the distant, gilded city and my heart did a flip when I realized they were airships.
I spent the walk into town gawking at everything. Even after life in the hospital proved to be all too realistic, I guess I’d still assumed that the world outside would look like a cartoon; trees that were just green lumps on brown sticks and grass with only by a few strokes to indicate individual blades. What I saw was quite different. The trees, the leaves, the birds. Everything was just like ours. If kept Lyra out of my field of vision and forgot I was walking on four legs, I couldn’t have guessed I wasn’t in my own world.
The ponies here might have had exaggerated, cartoon proportions, but the other animals did not. Squirrels and birds and other critters looked just like they did in our world, even if they didn’t necessarily behave so. I got the idea that they might be smarter than they let on, as they watched our passage with a curiosity that almost seemed intelligent.
I tested my theory by stopping and waving at a squirrel. I nearly jumped out of my skin when it waved back.
“Did you see that?” I asked Lyra. She’d trotted on ahead.
“See what?”
“That squirrel, he just waved at me!”
“Oh, do you know him?”
“Know the squirrel?”
“Yeah. You said he waved at you.”
“No… no. I don’t know him,” I said, a little disappointed. Back home, this would have been big news.
Lyra gave me a funny look and we continued on down the road. Eventually, I realized we’d nearly reached the edge of town and I had no idea where we were headed.
“So… where are we going?” I asked.
“I thought we were going back to your house,” Lyra answered.
I shuffled uneasily. My ears rolled back involuntarily, betraying my apprehension.
Lyra watched me.
“You don’t…” she began.
“I don’t remember where I live. No.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Come on, we’ll go to my place.”
She picked up the pace and I did my best to keep up. My stomach growled and I realized I’d only eaten mashed potatoes and gelatin (seaweed-based, I’m going to go ahead and assume) for breakfast.
“Do you have anything to eat at your house? I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.” I said.
“Yeah, sure, we can-”
Lyra did a double take. She fixed me with the look of fear and revulsion society normally reserves for dangerous psychopaths.
“What did you just say?”
I backpedaled as fast as I could. Betrayed again by human idioms. Thank God I hadn’t used that one with the doctors.
“Sorry, bad mental patient joke. I’ve been on the ward too long,” I laughed, nervously.
She kept her eyes on me, but she took a few cautious steps and, when I still didn’t murder her, started walking again.
“What in Tartarus is wrong with you?” she grumbled.
“Sorry. I am starving though.”
I really am starving…
I’ll write some more after dinner…
