Anton yawned broadly, and caught the scent of something musky and weird-smelling, along with the unmistakable smell of sulphur residue. The warm shape sprawled across him resolved into the form of Creepette, laying on him in the slight gloom. She was sleeping, peacefully, her side rising and falling gently with every breath.

‘Wait, why aren’t I dead? Wasn’t the lava rising? What made it stop? I hope I’m going to like the answer, though I doubt it would be good, what can stop lava?’

Looking around, back down the tunnel, he saw that the light from the molten rock had disappeared. Blinking, he realized he could actually see the sides of the tunnel. It was gloomy, dark, moody even in lighting, but it was lit. Barely, but lit.

As he was turning and looking around for the source of the light, Creepette squirmed slightly in her place across his chest and belly, murmuring ‘Uhn-gee...’ under her breath. Obviously still asleep, she just curled her limbs around him tighter.

‘Awww. Okay, yeah, I’m pretty darn lucky. That’s adorable.’

Anton kept looking around for the light source, though doing his best not to disturb the mare laying on him. It was still a bit odd with his new physiology. Finally spying a broad crack in one wall with a light barely filtering through it revealed that there was something of a side-passage to the tunnel, produced by a section of the wall being split vertically by some ancient seismic activity.

The light wandering in through that crack was not direct; instead it seemed to have been let in around a corner or bend, reflecting barely from one wall to the next.

‘Well, we need to get out of here, but would it be possible to open the crack more? I don’t know how strong I am, but I’m fairly certain I can’t break a stone wall...’

He lay there for several minutes, debating how he could get to the crack to see how big it was without disturbing his... marefriend... so that he could see if they could escape through it. The biggest snag he was running into so far was the moving Creepette without startling her phase.

He decided to try nudging her slightly, to wake her up, but not scare her or anything.

This resulted in her nuzzling his paw, and wrapping a limb around his in an impressive display of flexibility in her joints. She buried her face in the soft fluff of his chest, just above his scaled belly.

‘Okay... uh, how do you wake someone up without them getting spooked?’

Trying to pull his forelimb away did him no good, as she had both the grip and the leverage to hold on without effort. A particularly sharp tug resulted in her rolling slowly off of him, the direction pulling him on top of her. She didn’t seem to mind the change of position, other than shivering at the cold of the floor.

He decided to try waking her up by talking to her, because physical motion got him nowhere... in a way.

“Creepette? Wake up. I think I found a way out.”

The mare just wrapped all four limbs around him in a fashion that would be disturbingly intimate if they hadn’t already ‘done something’ the night before. In the process, she ended up with her mouth next to his ear, and was nibbling gently on it.

‘Really affectionate, not that I’m complaining, but man she’s a hard sleeper. How do I wake her up?’

This train of thought continued, not many options were left to wake someone kindly. He decided to try just standing up with her attached to him. If it didn’t wake her, then he’d be out of ideas aside from jostling her.

Pulling himself creakily to his feet/hooves, he heard his back pop a few times from the weird position he’d fallen asleep in and the fact that he had a full-grown mare clinging to his belly. Or, at least, up until she fell off of him with a dull ‘thump’.

She was, rather immediately, awake at that point. Flailing a bit, she successfully knocked Anton to the ground, scrambling back to her hooves as she looked around in mild panic.

“Uh- Uhn-gee?”

Her voice, terrified and a little loud, echoed through the tunnel as she looked around. At last, her gaze settled on where Anton was laying in a crumpled heap from her sudden bout of movement.

“Uhn-gee!”

She practically squealed the last syllable, grabbing him and pulling him close to her, leaving him extremely battered and disoriented.

The whole event had taken less than a minute.

“Ugh, ow. Calm down, it’s alright, I’ll be fine. Stop squeezing so hard, it’s hard to breathe!”

She just nuzzled him again, and gave him a small nip on the ear. He was having some difficulties figuring out if the action was sweet or annoying, and he couldn’t decide. He still wasn’t hungry, in spite of having eaten at least several hours ago.

Now that Creepette was awake and no longer on top of him, he moved closer to the crack, hoping he might be able to squeeze through.

As he got closer, a gentle draft of frigid air wafted through, sending a shiver down his spine. Anton peered through the crack and turned his head sideways to let it fit. Squeezing in, he felt an odd, almost painful sensation and heard a double ‘pop’. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he could rather suddenly move mostly flat, like an actual lizard.

“I really hope I didn’t break anything...”

He did his best to slide all the way through without any more odd sounds that might be bad.

Unfortunately for him, he heard a few more pops and snaps as he rounded the sharp corner in the crack. From behind him, he heard movement, likely Creepette trying to follow him or something.

At last, he found the end of the crevice. It exited out onto a hill, or a cliff. As he pulled his head free, he heard another loud pop, and looked down. Upon doing so, he instantly wished he hadn’t.

He’d seen lizards, like geckos and iguanas, more or less flatten themselves to get under doors and stuff, their stomachs mashed flat against the ground. He’d also seen snakes part their rib-cages, allowing them to slip under or through thin cracks.

Right then, he was looking at the back half of his own body, flattened like a piece of roadkill, half out of the crack in the ground and dirt. There were several large, un-bleeding gashes along his belly and back, and he’d have to see to them soon, but for the moment, every human instinct in him was telling him to get to a point where he couldn’t see the points of his ribs splayed out like that.

“When this is all over, and if I survive, I’m calling Ripley’s.”

He pulled himself free, and heard those double pops again, and saw that it was his rear legs re-aligning with what he’d now forever call ‘walk mode’. He just hoped he’d never again need ‘flat mode’.

As he pondered his new-found state as potential living silly-putty, he heard Creepette calling out from inside the tunnel. She sounded frantic, and he realized that she probably couldn’t follow him through the crack in the stone.

His first thought was to look around for a tool he could use to widen the crack.

His first real look at his surroundings shocked him. He was on a massive, short-grass plains, the forest some distance away. At least, he assumed the block of dark green on the horizon was the forest. Even at this range, though, he could still see the golden-brown of the desert behind it, stretching off even farther than his severely reduced eyesight could tell.

On top of that, a brown-and-gray blob took up a section of his view on the plains, though he couldn’t tell if it was just a cliff, and outcropping of rock, some sort of town, or maybe a massive storm cloud just chillin’ with its groundwater buddy, or what.

The biggest thing he noticed, however, was that the hill he stood on had something important on it. Or rather, an important lack of something.

That something lacked being the presence of anything useful for digging.

A thin carpet of grass and dirt covered much of the stone, but the top of the ‘hill’ was just bare rock.

“Damnit. Come on brain, help me out here, be useful. What can I do?”

He did his best to calm down so he could think clearer, hoping some form of idea came to him. A distant cry of ‘Uhn-gee!’ kept sounding from the cave. Since it seemed that her teleporting was very hard on her, having her attempt to blast a way out of the tunnel wouldn’t work.

He went over to the hole, to see if there was anything he could do, hopefully it wouldn’t involve sliding back in there.

The crack was mostly vertical, and barely wide enough for his head to get through. The sides of it were rough, even jagged in some places. The very edges, where it met the outside world, were smoother, likely from erosion.

He backed up a bit, realizing that this wasn’t helping much. That angled section partway in precluded much he could do.

Another call for him made him sigh.

Just to see if it worked, he flicked his tongue at the cave, and ‘tasted’ the air. All that returned was a glimpse of the fields behind him, most of it in cool blues and a few tiny dots of vague orange.

Growling in frustration, he smacked the ground, only to shake his paw in pain as he got confirmation that punching stone doesn’t work out well.

At last, he was ready to give up, perhaps even crawl back in and hug Creepette for comfort. He took a step back, getting ready to try flattening himself again, when his hoof went through the soft turf.

Sinking into the unexpected hole, he grabbed for the edge with both paws, digging his claws. Not much to grab a hold of, he simply fell back with a scream. He felt himself slam back and forth down a sort of rough chute, finally coming to a stop in a pile of dirt, small roots, and grass, looking up at a mostly-straight tunnel heading to the surface. Looking around, he had enough time to see and hear Creepette heading for him at what he could’ve sworn was close to mach one before she hit him.

“Oof...”

There was only enough time to utter a single syllable of response before all the air in his lungs was pushed out with the force of a rather noticeable impact. The green missile might’ve killed him. How lucky he felt to have such a sweet, adorable, caring, clingy, dependant marefriend who looked like an anorexic.

Actually, now that he got a good look at her again, she looked less twiggy than before. Maybe she’d just been needing some protein...

‘Great, I’m a food dispenser.’

“Uhn-gee! Town, Uhn-gee.”

‘Sure, whatever. She’s like a child. A really big, adorable child.’

He thought that idea over for a moment.

‘On second thought, that would make this whole thing weird. She’s like child with all the parts of a grown-up. Still not getting rid of the creepy. Ah well, comparisons are for losers. Or something.’

He sighed and leaned into her embrace, and she stroked his mane tenderly. He didn’t mind her odd quirks, but she was a bit... ‘much’ at times. He sighed, and disengaged from her hug.

“Okay, now we have to get out of here, earlier on the cliff I think I saw a... populated area.”

He was going to avoid certain words until he could clear a few things up. At least she was brighter than the kids he went to highschool with, those were downright morons.

“Opol-ted?”

“A place with people. Oh forget it, I’ll deal with it when we get to it.”

She just stared at him quizzically, unsure of what he meant. He looked around for an exit, then remembered the tunnel he’d slid in there by. Looking up it, it didn’t seem so steep from this angle, he’d simply been caught off-guard.

Gritting his teeth in determination, he proceeded up the chute, towards light and fresh air.

Laying, dirty and disheveled, at the top of the chute, he paused to catch his breath. It was much more difficult to climb stone without opposable fingers, and he’d had to come back down from the halfway point to carry Creepette up, who couldn’t climb at all with her hooves.

“Man, this is frustrating. Okay, now we need a way to the gray-splotchy-thing.”

Creepette just stared towards the gray spot in the distance. Whatever it was about it that fascinated her so, he still wanted to get there and figure out if it was something good or bad. Since Creepette hadn’t freaked out about it yet, he felt he could safely assume it wasn’t dangerous. Her ‘Fight or Flight’ instinct seemed to be stuck on ‘Flight’.

He checked around him, looking for an easy way down, like a path or something, though he doubted he would find something that simple, he could hope for something close.

No amount of looking seemed to bring anything into resolution, but at least he’d gotten closer to the object, which was slowly coming into focus. It was definitely a town, with short stone walls topped wood of some kind. He could vaguely see some sort of flag or pennant flying over what he assumed to be the main gate, considering it was attached to the one road he had found.

What looked to be a shallow river went through the town, originating somewhere within said town. He could see it sparkle prettily in the sunlight, as a cool wind blew by. The river branched nearly a dozen times, forming a half-moat, protecting the ‘front’ half of the town before running to the distance.

He approached the gate, hoping the people there wouldn’t kick him out for looking weird. Or worse, a zoo. Or worse yet, try to hurt Creepette. She trusted him, after all.

Looking around cautiously at the stoneworks now in view, Anton looked at the massive archway. Well, not massive. Mostly wide, he realized, as the actual stone of the walls and gate were only about twice as tall as he was now, and the top of the ‘gateway’ was made from wood. Two large, crude wooden doors, like something from an old-west fort, stood open as he walked up.

“Halt and state your business.”

The voice came from his side as he began walking through the gateway, making him jump. He turned to see a pony with a gleaming green coat, shining like a gemstone or a piece of polished green glass, in a suit of metallic armor. The armor appeared to be a simple ‘breastplate’ styled design, with leather ties and metal clasps. The metal appeared to be bronze.

“Oh thank goodness you speak my language. Sorry, this is th-”

“Just state your business, so I can do my job, sir.”

It sound like he was a guy, and also very bored.

“Also, please be sure to keep your... mare... close to you. We don’t want any incidents.”

“Sorry, we’re just looking for a place to stay, is that alright? She won’t cause any damage as long as she’s not scared.”

“I don’t really care, just keep her out of the way. There’s a couple of inns in town. Neither’s particularly expensive. Just make sure that doesn’t get loose.”

The colt gestured at Creepette, who was busy hiding behind Anton and shivering. Anton glared at the guard for a second before continuing on.

“Alright, where are those inns? A place to sleep should be our first priority.”

“Just down the road. And no eating the townsfolk, alright? This may be a boring post, but I don’t want to have to clean up a mess like that.”

“I eat insects and arachnids, not anything much larger than a rabbit at least in the case of mammals. Thanks for the directions.”

“Well, then, I still say don’t eat the townsfolk. I know a few of them are bugs, but they’d better stay off your menu.”

“Fair enough, have a nice day.”

Anton left with Creepette, heading down the road towards the inns. Hopefully they’d be able to find a way to afford at least one night. Everywhere he went, he saw colorful ponies and a few that looked almost like ponies, some of them with clothes and some without.

“At least I fit in. That’s a plus. I wonder what other kinds of people live here anyway...”

Looking around, he noticed that he and Creepette had a fairly large area in which folks had stopped coming closer. Taking a squint at them, he saw that most of the ponies around were earth ponies, some with noticeably brighter coats than the others, and some ponies with visible insectoid features, such as chitin in place of coats, and a couple had features like spiders or scorpions.

Ignoring the odd menagerie of townsfolk, he kept going down the road, in search of an inn. Something he noticed was that he couldn’t read the signs on the corners of the streets. They were obviously in words, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of the triangles, bars, and circles.

“I can read Matoran, Unown, and even Wingdings to a point, and I have no clue what the hell that is. Great.”

He shook his head, looking around for the inn. Thankfully, he found what appeared to be a sign displaying a tankard of foaming beverage with the background of a bed.

“Alright, good enough. Hopefully I can get an English to Whatever dictionary or something.”

Anton trotted towards the hopefully-an-inn, Creepette in tow. He continued to get odd looks, including the odd sidelong glare. Shrugging them off, he stepped up and pushed the door open.

Inside, it was a bit darker, and also warmer. There was a bar in the main area, set up like a restaurant or something, and a set of stairs heading towards the second floor of the building.

He decided to walk up to the front desk-bar-thing to inquire about a price. Hopefully not too expensive.

As he walked onto the dirt floor of the main room, he felt the distinctly uncomfortable sensation of being watched, and realized that every pair of eyes in the room beyond his and Creepette’s were on him.

Stepping nervously up to the bar, he prepared to ask how much a room would cost for the night when the bartender, whom he noticed was a grizzled old earth pony stallion, glaring at him.

“Uh, hello sir, I’d like to know how much a room is, if you have an op-”

“No vacancies for you.”

He spat out the words quickly, cutting Anton off mid-word.

“Um, okay, do you know anywhere I could stay?”

“Stay in the manure bins.”

The gruff, rude comment seemed aimed more over Anton’s shoulder, towards Creepette, who had gotten closer to Anton and was shivering with fright. Every single set of eyes was glaring at her, and Anton wasn’t sure why. But it was not making him feel any better.

“Okay, any particular reason you don’t like me? Or do you just hate Creeper ponies? And I’d-”

“Shut it. If you’re going to be dragging a mare around outside, you should have the common decency keep the damn thing muzzled.”

He gave the bartender an odd look.

“What’s wrong with mares?”

“Everything but their damned cooches. Ought to stay in the bedroom or the laundry room.”

Anton just sighed. Even as a guy, he thought that the equal rights for women movement was a good thing, everyone’s a person after all.

“Whatever, I guess I’ll be going then.”

“Keep that thing out of the way, if you know what’s good for you. Valuable property gets stolen some times.”

Disgusted at the idea of suggesting a living being was ‘property’, Anton left, thinking to himself, ‘the whole town couldn’t be like this, right?’ It was sickening.

He left the inn, now noticing that there weren’t any mares in the crowd, just colts and stallions. Anton hustled to the next building with a sign he could identify as an inn, and got turned away in a similarly rude fashion.

It happened a third time further down the road, and felt honestly disgusted with this seemingly bright and happy town.

The part of town he was in now seemed like it had been built on top of itself, as if one building had been constructed on the previous in order to have more floors, resulting in ‘second story’ rooms sticking out several feet in one direction or another.

He sighed, and continued towards the other side of the town from the main entrance, hoping to find another inn to try, or something. He looked about and saw what looked like a sign for an inn, with a picture of a bed with an ivy leaf on it, inside an alleyway. If he’d stopped to look around two steps further back or further along, he’d had missed it.

Anton and Creepette, the latter practically in constant contact with the former from how nervous she was, went towards it.

This time, as the door was swung open with a gentle creaking, he noticed that there were no patrons this time. Stepping in cautiously, he looked around. The previous innkeeper had tried to take a swipe at him, and all of them had been at least mildly hostile.

“Hallo, folks.”

Anton stifled a squeak and flipped around to see a pony sitting behind the dimly-lit bar. He couldn’t see much of the pony, but the voice was, interestingly, feminine.

“Hello, we’re new in town. Any idea why everyone is a chauvinistic ass?”

“Because this is supposed to be a ‘progressive’ town, where the mares are not in charge as they are elsewhere. Hmph, all it’s led to so far is the males being as bad or worse than the mares ever were. Not by much sometimes, I’ll admit. But often enough, it’s a far worse life.”

The mare sighed, and began wiping down the bar.

“So, seeking a place to stay, are you? I have a few rooms, and no customers, so feel free to take one of the ones down that hall. I’m afraid they aren’t very spacious, but they’re something. Perhaps we could talk when you’ve settled in? Get you at least a little accustomed to what you should do around here, to try fitting in.”

A pair of tentacles or something slithered up in the gloom, one holding a ring with a key on it and the other with some sort of sheet. The rough, dry-looking tentacles withdrew into the floor as he took the items, disappearing with a sound like settling dirt.

“Well, thank you. How much is it for one night? I’m-”

“Your mare bears no bruises or burns. That is enough for now.”

“I’m glad someone believes in equality, rather than one-upmanship.”

The mare simply chuckled, and another tendril popped out of the wall to point at a door, the first on the right down the short hallway. After it had gestured, it retreated back into the wall.

“That’s the room that key is for. If you would like a different one, just ask.”

“Anything with a roof is good enough, ma’am. Thank you.”

Anton nodded to the mare as he headed to the room, to see just what her idea of ‘small’ was.

Author's Note

So.
This is what happens when a 'let's fix the inequality!' movement goes so far as to simply tip the scales int he other direction.

Yeah.

Comments, as always, are welcome.