Shattered Worlds

Chapters

Habeas Corpus - Part 1
Habeas Corpus - Part 2
Habeas Corpus - Part 3
Habeas Corpus - Part 4
The Road to Damascus - Part 1
The Road to Damascus - Part 2
Divinity - Part 1
Divinity - Part 2
Divinity - Part 4
A Rose By Any Other Name - Part 1
A Rose By Any Other Name - Part 2
Millennia of Sky
Divinity - Part 3

Habeas Corpus - Part 1

The
CONVERSION
►Bureau

═════════════════════════════════════
Shattered Worlds
Habeas Corpus
Part 1
═════════════════════════════════════
An MLP:FiM Fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

The computer dinged sweetly until Joss Hayes sat up in bed. It was obnoxiously polite, one of those new semi-sentient AI units and he was quite, quite sure it existed to make his life hell.

"Good morning sir! My sensors tell me you have slept for the recommended daily allowance of eight hours precisely. What would you like for breakfast?" The voice was chirpy, happy, curiously genderless and very, very irritating.

"Any chance of eggs and bacon?" Joss asked, yawning and stretching.

"I'm sorry, sir, eggs and bacon are on the restricted list today." It seemed, to Joss, to ooze a perverse delight as it mimicked his words back at him. It had no reason to use his voice, since it understood perfectly well what he was asking for. He guessed it was making a point. He couldn't have eggs and bacon.

"Well?" Joss sighed, waiting.

"Please rephrase the question sir!" Definitely being irritating.

"Computer, will you tell me what is on the allowed list of breakfast consumables?"

"Protein bars."

"And?"

There was another obnoxiously perky ding and Joss face-palmed. That was it. Protein bars, otherwise known as nanobars.

"Please, please tell me there is at least a chocolate protein shake as an alternative?"

"We at Yatami-Tech are pleased to provide you, the consumer, with nutritious protein bars for any meal!"

"I hate you."

The computer dinged again, and a very chirpy voice spoke up, "Your negative emotional response has been logged. Today your happiness score has dropped to thirty eight percent. You may be suffering from: depression. Seasonally affective disorder. Suicidal anxiety. Paranoia. Repressed sexual urges. Would you like me to book you a session with the Happiness Clinic?"

"No." Joss got up, disrobing in his bedroom and moving over to the shower. "Shower on."

The water cascaded down his body, easing the stress of the night away. He was just soaping up his hair when the water went abruptly cold. "Shit fuck arse tits cock bastard!"

Ding! "Your happiness quotient has dropped to thirty seven percent. Shall I book you a session with the Happiness Clinic?"

"Fuck you. What happened to the water?"

Ding! "Your happiness-"

"Can it, circuit breath. What happened to the hot water?"

"We at Fujitama Mass Housing would like to report our great successes in increasing hot water availability to almost a full five minutes at thirty degrees centigrade!"

"I fucking hate you. Give me hot water."

Ding! "Your happiness quotient has dropped to thirty four percent. You may be suffering from-"

"Yeah, yeah. Bastard son of a toaster and a tazer-whore." Joss ceased listening as he hastened to clean the soap from his body in the now near-freezing water. As he stepped out of the shower unit, he caught the tail end of the computer's litany of recommended remedies for his apparently unhappy outlook on life.

"-atisfaction with a course of: drug therapy. Hug therapy. Ponification."

"Ponification?" He stopped, looking up, "are you fucking kidding me?"

Ding!

"Fuck, ignore that, just answer the question."

Ding! "Ponification has many proven benefits, including but not limited to: perfect health. Perfect vision. Excellent memory. Happiness quotient well above eighty percent-"

"All for the low low price of a lobotomy."

"Incorrect, sir! Lobotomies cost at least ten times the price of a vial of ponification! Would you like to apply for-"

"Fuck off."

Ding! "Sir, your happiness quotient has now dropped to thirty percent. I am initiating an emergency round of Tell-Me Teddy Bear therapy. The 'tell me' bear will be delivered during today's business hours at-"

"Oh, fuck me."

Ding!

***

Joss trudged out of his apartment, dressed in his cleaned yellow-section clothing. Shirt, tie, trousers, shoes. He was relatively lucky, not elite by any stretch of the imagination, but he was better than those orange-section schmucks. He had a whole four-person nuclear family unit to himself on the upper floors of the mandatory housing block. As the shop steward for Integrity Waste Reclamation, his pay was a whole grade above the oranges, and lightyears beyond the reds. red sector twopers were grease-monkeys, hired to wash floors, windows, ceilings, scrape out the reclamation tunnels and do every dirty job that no right-minded orange, and certainly never a yellow, would ever think of doing.

Joss worked for Integrity Reclamaction. Integrity made two things, toilet paper and nano-bars. They dealt with only one thing that supplied the raw materials for both. Human waste. The joke in the office-complex was that the goods coming out looked pretty much the same as the goods coming in, only wrapped a bit better. Tasted the same, too.

Come to think of it, Joss thought angrily to himself as he fished an errant piece of simul-nut out from behind a tooth, it wasn't much of a joke. He finished getting dried and dressed, and left his apartment for the bus complex.

The bus was crowded, as usual. It was old, ratty, broken. It had to have been made last century, and only hope, ductape and sheer bloody-mindedness kept it moving. The engine was biodeisel and roared loudly, belching black smoke as it pulled away from his mandatory housing unit.

He had been briefly tempted to get the orange bus, but that was even more crowded; he would have been assured a good seat due to his elevated status, but it wouldn't be done to be seen cavorting with lowers unless on official business. Well, crowded or not, at least the yellow sector busses had air-con. The red bus didn't even have an engine, it was horse-drawn, for fuck's sake! Well, pony drawn. Those filthy ponies were everywhere, it seemed, doing even harder work for even less pay. For no pay, truth be told. They were paid in food and lodgings and little else. Lodgings? Hah! A stable is hardly lodgings. They were fed and housed and mucked out by reds, made to work at all hours, and still they were deliriously happy; always polite, always so oh thank you, you're so kind. He would have spat, if he wasn't so thirsty. His little mistake with the shower had cost him his water rations for the morning.

The bus sucked, but then lots of things sucked for twopers like him. At least this morning, Joss thought to himself, he'd got a seat. A whole seat! All to himself, and near the window to boot! Ever since he'd taken the shop steward job, with the accompanying lift from orange to yellow, things had been looking up. Eighty percent uptime for his electricity. Per day! He never would have believed it! And a curfew that started at only ten o'clock at night rather than six. He was living the life now, that was for sure. Corporate ladder, here we come!

Joss knew where he was on the corporate ladder. Right near the bottom, true, but... he was there. He even stood a good chance of getting an actual pension! If he worked until seventy five, sure, but it was there.

The bus ride even sucked, Joss thought to himself, as it passed through what used to be Big Rapids towards Wyoming. He lived near Lake Cadillac, which was upper class amongst yellow, orange and red sectors. He even got to see the waters of lake Michigan occasionally, and if he listened real hard on a summer's night, he could hear the rich folk in their gated community swimming and partying, and he could even sometimes make himself believe he could smell their cooking. With every mile, he got further from it as he and the other workers wended their way down to Manufacture City, a town that had apparently been called Wyoming before Equestria. Now, it was a single massive industrial megaplex, and working there sucked harder.

If Joss was going to be honest, then even out here in the relatively untouched Eastern Amerizone, everything sucked. When Equestria had gone down back beneath the waves, it had taken a whole lot of everything with it. Nevada, Arizona, Phoenix, Tucson - all these places were just history lessons now, if they were mentioned at all. It was creepy, in a way; a huge bite had been taken out of the United States, not that they were supposed to call it that any more. Implying Eastern Amerizone was anything to do with Western Amerizone was tantamount to treason. Waitan-Yatami Megacorp ruled this section of the E.A. In contrast, Maitland Global Industrial, those scurvy W.A. traitors, were just across the other side of Lake Michigan. The two competing companies were forced to work together in herding their alloted Newfoals, but everybody knew Maitland rustled workers from Yatami. This meant extra precautions were taken on Yellow Sector buses to protect against potion bombs and tranq bullets. This meant the buses were few, crowded, smelly and uncomfortable.

Yellow sector workers were valuable, after all. Orange, not so much. Red were worthless, pretty much just scum from the favela, anxious to scurry about for a few creds, taking what they could and stealing the rest. Yellow sector workers could read. Red could barely walk and chew nicogum at the same time. Joss chuckled to himself - silverbacks, they were often called. Gorillas, animals. Only a few steps above newfoals. Once again, Joss would have spat.

The newfoals were out there working the fields, he watched them as they passed by his window. They really were disgustingly happy, now that he thought about it. Thousands of them, trit-trotting gaily with feed-bags on their noses and ploughs on their backs. Regulations said the windows of the bus had to be closed, but they often weren't, so he could hear them singing. He didn't know what they were singing about - it was in Equestrian, after all - but it was absurd. They were animals, everybody knew they were animals, what could they possibly have to sing about? What true human being could give up two legs and two thumbs? They were dumb, pliable and weak - and as perfect little slaves, they were exceedingly useful, he had to admit that. Far more useful than what they had been before they'd agreed to be ponified, which was nothing but criminals, malcontents and the disabled. All in all, he had to admit he was also glad they couldn't breed, not at least after they were properly dealt with, even if it did mean their only 'natural' method of population increase wasn't procreation, but creation. It didn't matter, there was always a surplus of the useless segments of population waiting to become a resource to be taken advantage of.

Joss dimly remembered the short 'breach war' that happened after the shield went down. He'd been small when it had happened, but he remembered how the unicorns' magic had failed, and the pegasi had fallen from the skies. The ponies had fought back, eventually, but to no avail. Mankind ever was the superior species. Those that hadn't submitted had been put down. Now there were no more pegasi, no more unicorns, just earth ponies. True, some had scars on their flanks or heads, but none of them had those cutie-mark things. They'd all faded. Still, to keep them docile, the stallions were gelded and the mares fed the pill. It didn't really do any good to have workers off sick or looking after foals, after all, even if they were animals. Maybe if they weren't, it wouldn't be necessary.

The bus sped on past the fields full of ponies towards the industrial megaplex, Joss silently cursing that the people stuffed into the rickety old coach all had armpits, and that most of them had had as much trouble bathing as he had.

***

Habeas Corpus - Part 2

The
CONVERSION
►Bureau

═════════════════════════════════════
Shattered Worlds
Habeas Corpus
Part 2
═════════════════════════════════════
An MLP:FiM Fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

As he trotted through the barred revolving door, Joss stuck his hand out in the reader. It buzzed angrily and refused to move, so he wiped his palm and tried again. It buzzed again. He kicked the reader, it dinged and a green light shone briefly. Then an automated voice spoke up, "Joss Hayes, fined one credit for damage to Waitan-Yatami propertly." The door revolved neatly, almost taking his foot off at the ankle.

"Fuck!"

Ding! "Attention Joss Hayes, your happiness quotient is now twenty eight percent. Teddy the Tell-Me Bear has been delivered to your desk. You are required to hug Teddy for a minimum of ten percent of working hours. Any drop in productivity will be docked from your wages. Rental of Teddy the Tell-Me Bear is free. Integrity, caring for you."

"Oh for fuck's sake, my fucking happiness fucking quotient has nothing the fuck to do with my fucking language! Utter Bullshit!"

Ding!

"Fuuuu-ine. Gosh." Beaten and broken, Joss trotted to his desk and sat down in the squeaky green chair. The cover was ripped to reveal the ratty orange stuffing, the arms didn't extend and the recliner was broken. But it was his. His, also, was the computer. It barely responded to voice commands, not that he was allowed to talk loudly in the cubicle farm, and the keyboard stuck on the letter 'e'. It was the best computer he'd ever owned.

Also on his desk was a large brown bear. It was leaning against the brown dividing wall, pretending to drink from his coffee cup. At least, he hoped it was pretending. Those things didn't really drink, did they?

It perked up when it saw him sit down and swivel, "Hi there! I'm Teddy the Tell-Me Bear! Are you my new friend?"

Joss sighed heavily, "No."

"Haha, you're funny!" The voice was chirpy and cheerful, and very, very irritating. "I know lots and lots of games, new friend, but do you know my favourite game of all?"

"Is it 'shhh'?" asked Joss.

"Ooh, how do you play 'shhh'?" The bear clapped its paws together gleefully. They squeaked.

Joss raised an eyebrow, "The first one to make a noise loses. Ready? Set? Go!"

The bear put its paws to its muzzle and was silent for all of ten seconds before it started jumping up and down. In an explosion of glee, it shouted, "I lose!" before leaping for Joss and hugging him for all it was worth.

"Gee, want to go again?" Joss asked, hopefully.

The bear shook its head, "Uh uh. I want to play my favourite game now!"

Joss sighed, heartily, "And what is that?"

"Hugging! The one who hugs the most, wins!"

"I hate my life," Joss said, as the bear hugged him even harder.

"Well that's no fun!" Teddy replied, "I think you'll find a hug makes everything all better!"

"Kill me now." Joss dead-panned. He face-palmed at the distant ding! of the computer.

"You know, bad-bad thoughts are often caused by meanie-meanies, and they can be scared away by talking with a friend. I'm your friend, Joss, do you want to talk to me about it?"

"No."

"I'm a good listener."

"Do I have to? Are you going to keep on at me until I do?"

The bear tilted its head and smiled, softly, "No, I won't, but I will keep on hugging you and being your friend. It's okay, I won't tell anybody if you hug me back, even just a little."

Joss grit his teeth, his sentence was mandatory hugging until the computer saw his happiness quotient was above forty five percent. "Maybe you can sit on my lap while I work, okay?"

"Oh boy! Do I get to use the mouse?"

"No!"

"Can I set the wallpaper?"

"No!"

"Just a little?"

"No!"

***

Joss sipped his coffee-substitute. Tastes just like coffee should taste! went the adverts on his threevee. Joss begged to differ, but at least it was hot. Ish. Well okay, it was lukewarm and tasted like piss, but it kept him awake. Mainly because if he felt sleepy, he'd have to drink more. Teddy had been helping all morning which meant it'd been a very, very long morning.

"But Monica was only five minutes late! You can't write her up for that!"

"Shush, Teddy! It was the last straw, I've been working her case for over a month and she is always late."

"Oh you meanie! What do we do when we spot a meanie? We sing to it!"

"Oh no, no, anything bu-"

"You're a big meanie! Go a-way! You're a big meanie, don't stay to-day!"

"Please stop-"

"I'm not a meanie and I want to say, let's be friends so we all can play!"

"Are you finished?" Joss glared at the bear who was sitting next to his mouse-hand.

"Nope! Just click 'cancel' and you'll feel all better."

"What?!"

"Go on, she's only late because her kid's been sick. She stays later to work all the time!"

"That's..." Joss scowled. He was a shop steward, which meant he was supposed to look after the welfare of the workers under his aegis, even if they were just reds and oranges. His workers' code of ethics even stated, right there at the top, that he had a duty to his fellow man. Teddy was right, even if he'd been taught to err on the side of the company. He grumbled and growled, and clicked the cancel button. He re-wrote the writeup - flexible working hours permitted, as long as the worker in question worked five percent overtime with no extra pay. He clicked send. Then he leaned back in his chair, putting his arms behind his head. Teddy leaped onto his lap and hugged him.

"You did a good deed! Shall we sing the happiness song now?"

Joss tossed back the remainder of his synth-coffee and shuddered, "Can I please stick with just hugging?"

"Yay hugs!"

***

Joss headed for the coffee machine, massaging his temples. The coffee machine was a big silvery beast that spat out hot brown liquid of various shades and temperatures. It was supposed to be serviced regularly, but said servicing didn't seem to do much good. Refill the non-dairy milk-powder substitute, refill the low-calorie sweetener, refill the coffee substitute, refill the chocolate substitute. Check water and other nozzles for blockages. Lather, rinse, repeat. Unfortunately, Joss thought to himself, the damned red sector twopers barely cared enough to turn the key that unlocked it and sent it into service mode, and they likely wouldn't if the machine didn't have a sensor to make sure they did. It didn't do anything else because that was too expensive for even orange sector machines. Fucking company would skimp on even...

"Oh hell no."

"Pull out the drawer, give a little shake, put in some more for coffee it can make!" The pony was humming to herself as she worked. When her lips were full of coffee-machine trays and ingredients, she hummed. When they weren't, she sang.

"What are you-"

"Oh! Oh, I'm sorry sir! I'll just... sorry! I'm... I'm Rosey from herd one-one-three-five-nine! Pleased to... oh! I'm not allowed to talk-"

"It's... it's okay. Just when is my daaa-" Joss winced, looking around, "-arn coffee going to be ready?"

Rosey, a light red pony with a purple mane and tail, whimpered and her ears flicked back. She looked left and right and turned swiftly back to the machine.

"Hey, it's... I just..." Joss scowled. Stupid pony was playing dumb.

"Shir?" asked another voice, strangely muffled as if it were speaking through an object. Joss turned to see another pony who had just backed out of the toilets. He was a cream coloured stallion with dark brown mane and tail. He put the toilet brush down into a holder and indicated with his head that Joss should come closer. "Please don't report us," the pony said.

"Why would I-"

"We're sorry, we're not supposed to talk to humans. It's all my fault! Please don't write us up!"

Joss looked from Cream to Pink and back. The stallion had a pleading look in his eyes, the mare was close to bursting into tears, for all she was attempting to look industrious. He sighed and deflated, "I'm the shop steward." He winced as he saw them both visibly flinch, "I'll... I'll say what good jobs you two are doing, is that okay?"

"Please don't," Cream said, "we're trying to... start a family."

Joss blinked, "Uh, you know, she... and they... to you..?" he indicated at the hind quarters of the stallion, where certain attributes weren't.

The cream-coloured stallion leaned closer, "Sir, we haven't got much left. All I have is her. All she has is me, and hope. They... hurt her, when they made her. She finds it hard to remember things, sometimes." the stallion tapped his forehead. Joss didn't understand, until he looked carefully back at the pink mare who'd called herself 'Rosey'. Then he understood very clearly. The lump on her forehead, well-hidden by her mane... Joss swallowed, the bad taste in his mouth far worse than the coffee.

"I w-won't say anything."

"Thank you."

Joss watched until the pair moved off. Then he made coffee. Then he sat, and cried. A soft little paw tugged at his trousers until he lifted the bear up. Then he cried into the bear.

"It's what I'm here for, you know." the bear said softly, "Sometimes, keeping a secret is good. I keep secrets for my friends, I'm a Tell-Me Bear. You can tell me everything."

"Sometimes," Joss said, "I wonder what I'm doing. I'm supposed to help those workers, but... I kinda haven't."

"You helped Monica. Can you do that some more? It would make you happier, and making you happy makes me happy!"

Joss sipped his allegedly-coffee, twiddling his mug in his fingers, "I guess I could. As long as they deserve it, right?"

***

Joss tapped at his computer, "Okay, Teddy, here's one. The company is accusing him of stealing!"

"Stealing is bad! You shouldn't help a thief!"

"He's accused of... stealing toilet-paper?" Joss tapped on the keyboard some more, and words flowed up his screen. Six rolls of premium, platinum-grade toilet paper. Joss whistled under his breath; the stuff they had in the staff toilets was... terrible. It came in one long sheet, was practically see-through and rubbed his cheeks raw. And that was on a good day. He dimly remembered the insult to lavatory supplies that were staples in Orange and Red sectors. Next to that, the platinum-grade toilet paper was heaven.

"No, no," Joss head-tilted, "this isn't right. He was given the paper, and then... then they asked for it back? Some sort of failed employee offer? Well that's hardly fair! He was given it! He used it! He should have it!"

"When you see a wrong, you should do right! Two wrongs don't make a right Joss!"

Joss nodded, for once feeling... almost good. Almost recognizable as a human being. "I'll set up a meeting with H.R and Legal right away! To think they were going to fire him!"

***

The room was spacious and brightly lit. Two bailiffs stood at the doors, three judges were in the dock, and Joss and his 'client' Malcolm were on one side of the room. The sector chief Dunbarr was on the other. Dunbarr was a well-dressed man in an authentic suit. He had to be... well, he was blue sector at least. His hair was immaculate, his shoes were shiny - and real leather! - and he had a real briefcase. He even had an antique watch on his wrist.

None of that would matter, though, Joss thought to himself. The rule of law was everywhere, just and true. Justice, he reminded himself, was blind. It paid no attention to creed nor colour.

With the privatization of the police and legal systems, companies like Integrity hired their own legal counsel and police force. It made everything much simpler and quicker. Joss was in high spirits as he stood up behind the desk. Malcolm stood up too. Malcolm was a red sector twoper. He'd been with the company for three years, a loyal worker, never late. He'd been given six whole rolls of premium toilet paper as a present - in fact, Joss discovered, thousands of workers had, before being recalled almost a week later. Malcolm's case was just the first, seeing as his surname was double-A 'Aarne'. Joss was in, now, on the ground floor. Championing the rights of his fellow man, making the world just that little bit better.

He was also just about ready to shit bricks.

"S-so you see, sir, it w-was a gift given in good faith and used as such. He can't give it back... not at least in the same condition it was given in." Joss cracked a smile. It lasted just about as long as the proverbial snowball in Hades.

"So, Mister Hayes, you are telling us that Mister Aarne, here, is unable to return the stolen property that belongs to Integrity Waste Reclamation?"

Joss' face fell, "Uh... but i-it's wrong! Y-you gave it-"

"My client Dunbarr would like to remind the court that he fully owned up to the mistake of accidentally giving ineligible workers access to a promotional program, it is entirely accidental that he was on holiday at the time and was unable to issue the recall. He has been docked one day's full pay, and we see it as unnecessary to further traumatise Mister Dunbarr."

"But-" Joss stood up, slamming his hands down on the table.

"And," the defence for Dunbarr smoothly continued, "Mister Dunbarr would like to remind the court that he has saved the company approximately twenty million credits by shifting the workload onto more suitable backs and freed up approximately three thousand workers for retraining!"

"Ah, that is excellent news," the judge presiding said, banging a gavel, "I hereby award Mister Dunbarr five million credits for a job well done."

"Wait what?"

"And as for Mister Aarne, the court finds him delinquent, and summarily fired."

"You can't do that!" Joss shouted, but it made no difference.

"Integrity Waste Reclamation is the sole provider for the family of Mister Aarne. Mister Aarne will be unable to make rental payment in thirteen days, as the mandatory minimum for re-employment is fourteen days, Mister Aarne is at fault. He will therefore be indebted to the company for damages, for the price of the items stolen, for rent, food, housing, maintenance, healthcare and hypernet access. Under the Workers Charter, Mister Aarne is hereby sentenced to mandatory, permanent work re-assignment."

Joss fell back in his chair. There was only one work position that was permanent, and that was ponification. He felt weak at the knees, " What about his family?"

"Oh, my, yes."

Joss breathed a sigh of relief. They would reconsider, they would-

"As Mister Aarne is the sole provider, and all said facilities are owned, managed and operated by Waita-Yatami or one of its subsidiaries, we find the defendant's family in debt to Waitan-Yatami. As such, we subject them to mandatory, permanent work re-assignment."

Joss fish-mouthed. Everything had gone wrong. It wasn't supposed to be like this! "Wait, you can't do that! Stop! The company- I'll tell! You can't do this!"

The judge sat upright in his chair, "Am I under the impression, Mister Hayes, that you will be lodging a formal complaint against this court's actions?"

"You're damn right I will! You can't do this! It's his fault!" Joss pointed a finger at Dunbarr, who looked boredly at his watch.

"Mister Dunbarr is a valued member of Waitan-Yatami, who has just saved Integrity Waste Reclamation millions of credits, Mister Hayes."

Joss slumped, "By selling out its workers and their families, isn't that right? That's why. You don't need to pay newfoals, do you?"

"Quite."

"You admit it?" Joss was dumbfounded.

"Indeed. And by working against the company in such a seditious and evil manner, you have now forfeited any rights to employment."

"But it's not right!"

"It's entirely right, Mister Hayes. Your client is unable to repay what he stole, so he owes the company. His family is unable to pay what they owe, so they owe the company. You, on the other hand, openly admit to sedition and treason. Take them away! Take them all away! We no longer need shop stewards. All shop stewards are hereby relieved of their duties and are ordered to report for mandatory, permanent work re-assignment. They cannot pay their dues, so the company is forced to take what it is owed by any means necessary. Be thankful, Mister Hayes, that the punishment for sedition is ponification rather than hanging."

"B-but... you have no right!"

"I think you find, we do. Take him away!"

The gavel was banged with finality.

Habeas Corpus - Part 3

The
CONVERSION
►Bureau

═════════════════════════════════════
Shattered Worlds
Habeas Corpus
Part 3
═════════════════════════════════════
An MLP:FiM Fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

He'd been beaten when he'd tried to run. They'd dragged him to the detention block, then they'd tasered him, used riot-goo and had summarily thrown Joss into the small three-by-five meter cell whilst he was still screaming and half blind. A few buckets of ice-cold, stained water later, and he could sit up and look around. It featured a hole in the floor for the necessary, a bunk-bed with ratty, thin, stained mattresses both on the top and bottom bunks, and two adjacent cells. One of them held Malcolm. The other held a sobbing pony, who'd hidden in the corner and refused to come out.

At first, he'd begged and he'd pleaded. He'd cried and wailed. He'd slammed his fists against the walls and shook the bars. He'd even briefly tried biting said metal bars, but it was no good. Nobody had listened, in fact they'd laughed.

Finally, broken, Joss slumped on the bed in his dripping paper clothes. The thin yet lumpy mattress was plastic-y and uncomfortable, sticking to his skin through the disposable prisoner garb making him even colder and more uncomfortable. He sighed as he lay down on it, staring at the bare metal underside of the bunk above him. He guessed he should be grateful that ponification and swift justice meant he wouldn't have to spend a night with Harry the Bleeder, an overly-large man with an overly-large appetite for non-consensual sex without lubricant. The prisons, in this perfect paradise of plenty, were empty. There were many crimes, but rapidly only one sentence. That sentence was carried out swiftly, and afterwards... well. The cells weren't needed.

Joss looked 'upwards', at the pony in the corner of the other cage. Turning onto his side, the world righted. "What's wrong?" he asked the pony, finally, a twinge of frustration at the incessant sobbing sneaking into his voice.

"I miss Minty. And Trigger. And Biscuit. And Mama Snowbell." The voice was soft, hesitant, and childlike.

"Your... herd?" Joss hazarded a guess.

Somehow, the sound of the pony sniffing conveyed a nod. "Uh huh."

"Why are you in here?" Joss looked up and around at the pokey, dark, dingy building. The lights buzzed and flickered, the ceiling tiles had fallen off in places, there was water damage and mold, and it was all-in-all rather disgusting. It was hard to imagine why a pony would ever need to be locked up. They were obedient to a fault, yet here it was.

"I'll tell you why he's here, Yella." Malcolm spoke up.

Joss looked over at his erstwhile client, who cleared his throat, "He's here to show us what's comin'. They picked on him cos he did summat, and they wanted to make an example of him. They put him here, cos two examples is better'n one."

"Th-they said I was lazy and didn't pull, but I did! I did!"

"There... there." Joss said awkwardly, "I'm sure they'll let you out soon. You're... with us. Safe. Kinda."

There was the clip-clopping of hooves as the pony, red with a yellow mane and tail, moved hesitantly into the light, "You want to be my friends?"

Joss sighed, "Might as well." He hung his head in his hands.

"I knew you were a huggy-hug friendy-friend!" said a cheerful, artificial voice from the corner near the stairs.

Joss looked up and swore, leaping to his feet, "You!" He threw himself against the bars and snatched at the artificial Tell-Me Teddy Bear as it rounded the corner into the room in front of the cell doors. He dragged it back through the bars into his cage. He threw Teddy against the wall, where it bounced off with an adorable squeak. "This is all your fault!"

Teddy scuttled under the bed, "That's being a meanie-meanie, Joshie! You shouldn't be mean!" it called from under the metal platform.

Joss stopped short of hurling himself under the bed, "Mean? Me? Look what you did! Why the fuck would you come all the way over here, after what you did?"

"I'm a Tell-Me Teddy Bear, Joss. I have lots of friends! You're my friend too!" The voice was back to being chirpy and happy. Joss grit his teeth and growled.

The pony gasped, "A teddy?!"

"Hi there!" the bear chirped to the pony, "I'm a Tell-Me Teddy Bear! Do you want to be my friend?" Before he could stop it, the bear toddled out from under Joss' bed and squeezed itself into the pony's cell, conveniently out of reach.

"I always wanted a bear like you! Can you sing and play games?" the pony asked, hopefully, his ears perking up.

"I love singing! Do you know any songs? I know a song about the sun! The sun'll come out, tomorrow!"

Joss threw himself back onto his bed as the bear entertained the pony in its own obnoxiously cheery way. He clasped his hands to his ears and groaned. Suddenly, the singing stopped. The bear had vanished under the bed as the door to the cellblock had swung open.

Two guards sauntered in, one fat and one mean-looking. They ran their electrified nightsticks along the metal bars. Sparks from the riot-tazers spitting angrily. The pony whimpered as they came to a rest in front of his cell.

"Times up, nag." Fatty said.

"Get over here!" Meanie said.

Joss watched with dark eyes as they opened the cell door and, slamming their nightsticks against the bars as they moved, as if they were pulling themselves along like with pitons on an ice-sheet. They moved threateningly towards the red pony, who whimpered.

"Come 'ere!" Fatty said as he grabbed the pony by the mane and threw him out of the cell with a sudden bodily flick. The pony yelped as its head and foreleg impacted the edge of the doorway. It crumpled into a heap, crying.

Meanie laughed and delivered a swift kick to the creature, "Get up, Useless."

"Stop that at once!" said a new voice. An older man with a close-cropped neat beard adjusted his spectacles as he rounded the corner, "If you damage that creature, it's you who'll be paying for the treatment. They aren't cheap, you idiots."

"Hey doc, we din't mean nothin'" Fatty said.

"That's Doctor Furlough, to you." the doctor said, piercing blue eyes glaring at both guards until they backed away from the pony. Meanie gave the creature another swift kick, and Fatty spat. The pony flinched away, whimpering and choking.

"Michaelson, Upton, go check the perimeter or something. Fucking waste of flesh, the pair of you. Why they make guards yellow sector I'll never know." The doctor glared at the pair until they left. As he walked past the pony, Meanie brandished his nightstick one more time, causing the pony to flinch again, to peals of laughter from both guards. Grumbling under his breath, the doctor took careful hold of the pony's leg, manipulating it, ignoring the whimpers from the gelding. He sighed, fished into a small bag and pulled out a hypodermic, which he deftly injected into the creature's leg, above the knee.

"What're you..! What's that? Don't hurt him!" Joss leaped forwards, grabbing hold of the bars of his cell.

"Relax, Sport, I'm a vet, not a monster. It's painkillers. Those two fools have sprained his leg, just making it easier for the poor thing."

As Joss slumped slightly, moving back, he watched with interest as the doctor fished out a small brown cube from a pocket.

"Here, pony, you hungry?"

The pony sniffed it gingerly, then took it in his lips. Slowly, the pony chewed it. His ears perked up, and he chewed it faster, enjoyment written large across his muzzle, "Another?" the pony asked, hopefully.

The doctor ruffled the mane of the pony and fished another one out. As the pony ate the second one with more relish, the doctor lowered the pony's leg, "Processed fructose substitute. The closest thing to a sugar-cube on the planet. Ponies love 'em, don't they, boy?"

"Another?"

"Two per customer, I'm afraid."

The pony looked downcast, "I'll... I'd be very grateful..." The pony leaned against the doctor and nuzzled the man carefully.

The doctor's mouth cast a thin line as he pushed the blunt muzzle away, "We'll have none of that here, boy. They been teaching you special tricks, huh? Well I'll see about putting a stop to that." The doctor looked over at Joss before standing up, "I'm here to look after your welfare, Sport, both before and after transformation. Times were these beasts were cheap, disposable. Like so many things before them, that time's gone. Demand outstrips supply, even with their hardiness. We just can't get the pony-juice."

"You mean ya care, doc?" Malcolm laughed hollowly, "Bullshit." He lay on his bed, picking at the stickers on the underside of the top bunk.

"I mean those who pay my wages care, since purchasing more of you hits them where it hurts; the wallet. That's all it's ever been, Bub."

The doctor shooed the pony out of his bag, where it was hopefully digging around with a muzzle looking for more pseudo-sugar lumps, before taking out a datapad. "Malcolm Aarne, convicted of theft, sentenced to mandatory, permanent work re-assignment. Computer, record sentence as being carried out... now."

There was a sudden snick-snick-snick as three metallic bands shot out of the bottom bunk and wrapped themselves around the hapless human. The doctor laughed, "We always get one of you like that."

"Mother fucker!" Malcolm spat, snarling, twisting and writhing as he tried to escape.

Joss, for his part, jumped up and moved as quickly as his middle-aged bulk allowed to the far end of his own cell, "What the fuck, doc?"

"You think I'm stupid? None of you ever willingly submit to ponification. My predecessor died because he got careless. One of you crims spat half the pony-juice on him. Half isn't nearly enough for a successful change, especially not when most of it is on your face and the rest is on your clothes. They both died. Regs call for an assistant, but there's never enough to go around. Probably something to do with promotion through a newfoal's curly horse-shoes." the doctor grinned wickedly.

"Let me up, ya bastard!"

"Soon enough, Bub." The doctor pulled out a large syringe, and advanced on his 'patient'. "Times were we'd force this down your throat. I'm glad to say I don't have to do that. I just jab this baby right into your abdomen and inject it direct. I don't even have to hit the stomach."

Joss watched, morbidly fascinated, as the doctor opened the cell door and walked calmly up to Malcolm. The man was in his early thirties, but could easily have been a decade older. Fuzzy whitening hair that had once been black, framed green eyes on a head that was too small for his body. The man's frame was slight, and he was beginning to worm his way free as he fought.

"None of that, now, you'll just hurt yourself. I've had to pull these needles out of a patient, and if I don't get the whole dose in, you'll be left hurting until I do."

The words of Doctor Furlough did no good, and it seemed like the good doctor paid them little heed either. In one quick, practiced motion, he slid the large needle attached to the even larger syringe deep into Malcolm's stomach, and pressed hard on the plunger. Malcolm screamed, foaming spittle flying from his lips, before he fell back, slack.

"Is... is he dead?"

Doctor Furlough shook his head as he felt behind the man's ear. "You've never seen one of these..? Well, I guess not. I tend to forget most of the people I meet only ever see it once, and aren't really awake for most of it at that."

Joss watched, spellbound, as the man's flesh grew mottled and splotchy. The dirty shade of pink changed to a clear white before reforming in a doughy lump.

"Computer, retract restraints. Monitor lifesigns. Inform me of moment of death."

"Death?!" Joss gasped, "I thought you said-"

"Shush, Sport. His heart'll stop beating any minute now. When he does, the man who was Malcolm Aarne will have ceased to be. It makes no difference to me that a pony heart starts beating right after. A legal nicety, not one that particularly bothers me."

"How can you say that?" Joss asked, taking a step back from where he stood gawking.

"Because, Sport, for every pony I convert, I get to look in their eyes and be glad it isn't me."

Joss looked into the man's blue eyes, and shuddered. There was no compassion there, not for humanity. For ponies, maybe. Once on four hooves, their trials had ended. Maybe ponies deserved compassion; in a world that had stripped everything from them, there wasn't anything left to gain by taking more.

Joss sat on the bed for ten long minutes as a man died and a pony was born in the cell next to him. The treacherous bed... he no longer cared whether his was rigged the same or not. He sat with his head hung in his hands, looking alternately at his feet and fingers. He would be losing them both, soon enough, just like Malcolm had. The changes had come swiftly, with fingers seemingly retracting and moving, migrating through doughy, semi-shapless flesh. Hair had been absorbed even as the paper prisoner's uniform had ripped and torn. Eventually a coat of lime green sprouted, and a little tufted tail of emerald emerged to match the thickening mop of a mane.

Joss watched dispassionately as the vet took a strange metal object out of his bag. It looked like a medieval torture device; there was a handle on one end that forced apart forceps at the other, forceps to which Furlough attached a small ring of rubber or plastic. The vet was muttering under his breath before he busied himself between the hind legs of the now-earthpony Malcolm. A tiny whine escaped the muzzle of the new pony, who was otherwise still fast asleep.

Joss winced. There were no unicorns, no pegasi... and no stallions. He'd never had kids, and briefly felt envy for Malcolm, who had. Now he, Joss, never would. Neither would the pony he was to become.

"Up and at 'em, fella." Furlough said to the green earthpony.

"Hurts." not-Malcolm said, whining, unable to sit still or stand. The pony fought to find himself a comfortable spot, and utterly failed.

Furlough nodded, "I know, Bud. It'll fade. How's about you go join your friend, over there?" The vet pointed to where the red earth-pony was lying down in the corner of the room. Joss glared, the stupid pony was free; the door to the stairs was unlocked, the guards were gone, why didn't he...

"Hi!" not-Malcolm said, "Who're you?"

"Strawberry Fields," the red pony replied, "You?"

Joss face-palmed.

***

He didn't resist when the two guards came back. He barely flinched when they sucker-punched him in the gut, doubling him over and winding him. It didn't matter any more.

"I think this one'll take his medicine like a man, won't you?" Fatty said.

Meanie punched him again in the stomach and, as Joss bent over double to suck in what air he could, the vet upended a small vial of purplish liquid down his throat. Joss swallowed, reflexively, and choked. The liquid was strangely warm, with a tinny, metallic taste. It somehow reminded him of grapes, or at least the 'authentic grape soda taste' squash he used to have, with a bitter aftertaste that made him gag. He was out before he hit the floor.

***

Nothingness. It's like blackness, but moreso. Kind of boring, really. Joss found himself moving aimlessly across the face of the deep. He called out for someone, anyone, but nothing replied. Not even an echo.

As he wandered, the blackness... changed. Eventually it gave way to a sandy expanse stretching off to the far horizon. The sky was dark; not just black, but empty of everything, even stars, moon or clouds. There was no sun, yet the scene was lit as bright as day.

"Hello?" he called, but his voice faded away into the dead surroundings. Kneeling down, he ran the fine sand through his fingers. It was silvery and cold, the serene susurrations the only break in the monotony of whatever purgatory he found himself in. Looking back the way he'd come, the blackness was gone, leaving only footsteps in the sand that led away into the distance. Beside them, he noticed with interest, were hoofprints. On a whim, he got down onto his hands and knees and carefully put his ear to the ground. There should have been nothing - the ambient sound of wind, perhaps, whispering softly. Instead, he heard the distant drumming of hoofbeats, like the echo of a billion hooves long past.

There was nothing for it, he would follow these tracks.

The silvery-white sand eventually gave way to scrubland. The odd dead tree, warped bush and shaped rock outcropping broke the monotony. Then the sand ended, replaced with brown and dead grass. He ran his fingers through the blades and they broke off, crumbling to dust.

He kept walking.

A cliff, abruptly sheer and tall, made him stumble. Was he supposed to fly? Off in the middle distance he could see a citadel, now, rising above the tundra. Shaking his head, he looked for a way down.

There was no sun, there was no moon. There were no stars, no clouds. He didn't feel tired, hungry or scared. There was just a complete absence of anything, including the sense of time. So he set off along the cliff-face. There would be a way down, he knew it somehow.

It wasn't like he had anything else to do.

Ruins.

All around him were ruins. They looked like they'd been there for aeons, the stone as grey and dead as the grass and sand. The citadel was silent and cold. Walking through it, Joss felt great sadness, but also a touch of awe. There had been life here, once, so much life. Shops, houses, schools... he could almost hear the last dying echoes of the crowds.

He headed onwards, towards the palace.

He made his way to the throne-room, pushing one of the two double doors open just enough to squeeze through. The carpets here had once been thick and luxurious, the stained windows glorious. Now, they too were grey and broken.

"Hello?" called Joss. He'd been almost entirely silent the whole time he'd spent in this accursed place, however long it had been. He wasn't sure, at times it felt like weeks or months, other times it felt like mere moments. It felt strange to speak, almost heretical, but the hairs on the back of his neck lifted at the sobbing.

"Hello?!" he called again, whirling. It was a girl, in the corner of the great throne-room. She had strangely dark blue eyes, almost violet, and hair that was so golden it seemed to be pink. She wore tattered rags, and limped as she tried to move. She fell over, hot tears staining the ground with a wetness that momentarily brought back shine and luster to the cold flagstones. Joss rushed forward and picked her up, smoothing back her hair from her eyes. "Who... who are you?"

"Please help me," the girl whispered. She lifted an arm, a nasty gash ran up it, poorly bandaged in what looked like robes of some kind.

"I-I-I don't know what to do."

"Kiss it all better? Mommy used to kiss it better." the voice was plaintive and wavering.

"My mommy did that too, sweetie," Joss replied as he held the girl close, "I can-"

With a start, Joss realised the girl was gone, not even a memory remained. She'd faded away like a ghost, and Joss was alone once more. He leaped to his feet, hackles well and truly raised. He wanted to get out of this place!

He whirled and turned, but darkness now reigned the outskirts of the throne-room. The way he'd come in was gone, quite literally. He sobbed, then. He fell down on his knees and sobbed, "I want to go home!" his voice echoed, and finally faded away. Nobody was coming. Maybe nobody ever would. Breathing heavily, he got to his feet once more to examine his prison.

Grey flagstones, dusty, torn and faded carpets. Shattered windows. Two thrones, one dark blue, crumbled into rubble. The other... Joss tilted his head and took a few tentative steps forwards. The other throne was intact; faded and torn, but intact. From somewhere above, a single shaft of sunlight enveloped the dais.

Joss gasped, sunlight! In this nowhere place of grey, the golden light was like a beacon. He ran towards it, stumbling. As he fell, his right hand touch the edge of the ring of light. Breathing slowly, Joss brought his body under control. His hand was a hoof.

Just like that, his hand was a hoof. It melded into his arm perfectly, a tan hide that matched the colour of his skin. Experimentally, he put his other hand in. It, too, changed.

Joss laughed at the absurdity, then stepped fully into the warm ring of sunlight. It... it felt good. It felt as if a weight he hadn't known existed had been lifted from his shoulders. He laughed again, his new voice bubbling with glee.

So silly! He was a pony, just like that! He pranced and jumped and twisted and turned and ran and... and looked up. The sun was up there, now, above him. The sun was warm. The sun made him feel happy. He wanted to be in the sun always, to commune with the earth, and sing in the sun, and sleep under the stars and to run, to run free with his herd.

Not-Joss awoke.

Habeas Corpus - Part 4

The
CONVERSION
►Bureau

═════════════════════════════════════
Shattered Worlds
Habeas Corpus
Part 4
═════════════════════════════════════
An MLP:FiM Fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

Doctor Philip Furlough watched as the purplish-blue pony with the green mane and tail, previously known as Joss Hayes, woke up. Its eyes, those big, expressive orbs that were the guileless window to the soul of every pony, fluttered open and gazed about in wonderment at the world around it. The joyous expression was marred, however, by pain.

"Hurts," it said, whimpering.

Philip nodded, sadly, "Sorry Sport, doctor's orders." He'd always wanted to be a doctor, but in this day and age, very few people could afford his services, and the rest wouldn't hire a simple orange sector twoper. He'd become a vet for newfoals. It was that or join their ranks, or find a home in the favela. Neither had appealed to Philip, so here he was.

Joss whimpered. A moment ago he'd been feeling so good, but now in the waking world, a place between his hind legs really, really hurt. He rolled onto his hooves and tried to stand up. He fell over, crying out and then just plain crying, at the pain.

The anesthetic in potion was pretty strong, it had to be. It acted to prevent the signals from the body to the brain of a newfoal as the nanites worked on it. Those signals would be interpreted as agonizing pain; the first trial runs during the age of Conversion Bureaus hadn't included the neural blockers, and most of those prospective newfoals hadn't survived. It was no wonder that newfoals could barely stand, even discounting the fact they had four legs post-conversion rather than two.

Without that anesthetic, Philip pondered, the pony would be more than merely complaining. Still, he supposed it was for the best. He'd been taught during medical school all about pre-collapse veterinary practices. Male animals were unpredictable, anti-social, work-shy and often just plain aggressive. Geldings, on the other hand, had a much nicer time of things. He was doing the poor thing a favour.

"Huuurrrtttsss!" it said again, plaintively.

Time for a little test. "Would a sugar-lump make it all better?"

"Sugar-lump?" Joss' ears perked up.

Philip smiled softly as he fished out four more 'sugar-lumps'. The dirty brown, slightly gelatinous cubes were something between treat, reward and bribe for newfoals. He'd tried one himself once, hadn't really liked it. He placed two in front of 'Malcolm' and two in front of 'Joss' and waited to see what would happen.

"Sugar-lump?" the red pony identifying as 'Strawberry Fields' asked, forlornly.

"You've already had two. Fair's fair." Phillip stood back and turned around, ostensibly to check on his medical kit. When he turned back around, a green nose was pushing the fourth cube towards his feet.

"You don't want it?" he asked of the lime green pony that had pushed it back.

The pony shook its head, "It's more fun to share. You can have one too!"

Philip picked the little squishy cube up, dusted it off and put it away in a pocket, "No thanks, but you three enjoy. Stay here a while, now, okay? I've got things to do, but I'll be back soon."

He walked out of the room as the three ponies enjoyed something almost sacred to every conversion - the first meal as a pony. Since forever, that first meal had always been special. Something about the natural endorphins, or maybe the tastebuds, or maybe it was just... he didn't know. All Philip knew was that first meal meant something to the creatures. He leaned against the heavy door and found himself almost sobbing for some reason, sniffling awkwardly and wiping his face.

***

Ty Michaelson and Jake Upton sauntered back to the detention block. They'd been given the very important job of Making Sure The Perimeter Is Clear by the vet. This entailed sneaking off for a smoke and a quickie in the lavs with the latest dirty mag. Ty and Jake both agreed how disgusting it was that even high class wank rags tended to feature ponies for the adventurous, curious or just plain flagrant. They agreed loudly. Several times a day. Sometimes on their own, too, just to make sure.

When they got back, the doctor was still there, but he was all smiles, so it was okay.

"Boys, two new recruits. Gotta be proud of yourselves, huh? I've got us a drink so we can celebrate. I'm not saying it's beer, okay, because alcohol on duty would be against regulations." The vet winked.

"I gotcha, Doc. You're alright." Ty, pudgy black fingers closing around the neck of the bottle proffered to him, nodded.

Jake grinned, taking the other bottle. His bottle clinked against two others in a brief toast before he held it to his cheeks. It was so cold it almost felt like it burned. The doc, Fuller or something, took a swig of his own bottle. Not wanting to be beaten to it, Jake tossed back his own. Cool, refreshing... this was some high-class hooch! He took another swig, draining the bottle. Ah well, back to... he blinked. The world looked... kind of fuzzy. "Hey Ty? I don't feel so..."

Philip Furlough stepped back as the two guards fell to the floor. He straightened his jacket and spoke to the air, "Computer? Monitor life-signs, alert me upon their cessation."

"Yes, Doctor Furlough." the computer replied. For Philip, the computer was a female, caucasian-sounding, her voice smooth and friendly.

"Take a note: referring to subjects Michaelson and Upton, I have pronounced summary judgement and sentencing for damage to Waitan-Yatami property. Sentence: Ponification and withdrawal thereby of all rights and privileges bestowed upon a citizen."

"Yes, Doctor."

"Recommending red sector replacements for a higher loyalty and obedience quotient, recommending all non-red sector guards for facilities of low importance be reassigned for permanent work placement positions, across the board."

"Yes, Doctor."

Philip busied himself removing the now-useless clothing before it could choke the two new ponies, prior to heading back into the cell-block for his medical kit and elastrator pliers. He highly doubted these two would be wanted for stud duty either, despite their low I.Q.

***

Joss was happier. The pain had faded a bit, and the sugar-lump had been wonderful. It had felt like little fire-crackers going off on his tongue, sending whizzing lightning all the way up to his ears and right down to the base of his tail. Even better, he'd had friends to share it with. The other ponies had all agreed to be friends. The red one was called 'Strawberry Fields'. The thought made him a little sad, his name was 'Joss' but that didn't sound very pony-like. Neither did 'Malcolm', come to think of it.

"What's my name?" he whispered under his breath.

Footsteps made him shy away, but it was only the vet. The vet was nice, the vet gave him sugar-lumps. The man crouched down on his haunches, coming face to muzzle. "It's Joss. Can't you remember?"

Joss nodded, but then shook his head, "I need a new name."

The vet sat down on the cold, hard ground, surrounded by the three ponies, "You don't know how often I hear that from newfoals. Tell me, Joss, is it really you in there? How about you, Malcolm?" The man looked from one pony to the other, hopefully.

Malcolm shifted uncomfortably, "I..."

"When I first saw you, you were full of piss and wind. Now look at yourself. Where did you go, eh?" Philip reached out a hand to touch the pony on the muzzle, but the lime green pony formerly known as 'Malcolm' shied away.

"I'm... right here," he said, awkwardly.

"No, you're not. How about you, Strawberry? How long have you been a pony, Champ?"

"I've always been a pony! I remember always being a pony!"

The vet snorted, and then sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose, "You weren't, you know. The computer told me all about you, Kevin."

"Who's Kevin?" Malcolm's ears perked up, as did Joss' and even Strawberry's.

"Kevin was a bright young activist hacker, phreaker, cracker and slum-dwelling terrorist. He got sloppy, they caught him five years ago. Four years, two hundred and eight days ago they ponified him." Philip looked, hopefully, from one muzzle to the next, but dropped his gaze finally.

"I... remember the sun. A-and the girl," Joss said, "she was hurt and..."

"And?" The vet looked at Not-Joss hopefully.

"And she disappeared." The pony lost interest, paying more attention to its hooves, which it started nibbling and licking exploratorily.

Philip stood up, "You guys forget so easily, don't you? Do you know why? Do you care?" He looked from one pony to another and sighed, "I know why. The nanites we make are clever. Three ounces of them is more than enough, but they're special another way. The techs don't like to talk about it, but they're special in what powers them; bona fide magic! The very stuff of miracles itself, in a jar. Back when Equestria opened the bureaus, there was more than enough of it to go around, apparently. Then, afterwards... there wasn't."

Philip kept talking, naked urgency in his voice as he searched for any sort of response, "Don't you understand? They tried seeing if they could..." he choked, "extract it from newfoals, even native Equestrians, but they can't. There's only ever enough in a normal pony to make a single pony, but there is one pony that's special, and although there's very little of her left, she still lives, and bleeds... and I saw her! Oh god but I saw what they did!" Philip bit his tongue, he may have said too much, and for what? Heedless, in tears, he charged ahead, "I've seen where they keep her... and how they make you. Just a drop is enough, just a single drop of her blood and the result is a pony, complete in every way but one. That big, beautiful brain of yours, so very like a human's, is just too complicated to perfect, when starved of magic. So much gets pared away and forgotten as our clever little nanites struggle to complete the transformation. And you guys, as innocent and pure as the day is long, are the result."

Joss didn't know what to say, but the vet was sad. Hugs make things better, so Joss leaned forwards and put a hoof over the man's shoulder. Gratefully, as if dropping a huge burden, Philip hugged the pony back, staying there for a few, long seconds. Then he stood up.

"Well, I've got good news," he said, wiping his face with a sleeve and hiding the signs of his recent outburst, "I've got two more friends for you, though they're not quite ready yet. Can you look after them until they wake up?"

Not-Malcolm looked at Philip, squarely, as if suddenly remembering something, "Did you hurt them too?"

"Doctor's orders."

"But... you're the doctor."

"I know, but trust me, it's for the best." Philip took his bag, breathed a heavy sigh, and went to see to his latest two patients.

***

Joss giggled suddenly as a tongue licked his ear, and teeth chewed methodically along his mane. Strawberry was grooming him. "That tickles!"

"Mama Snowbell says we should groom each other every day. Mama Snowbell is clever."

"Being clean is clever!" said a familiar artificial voice.

Joss turned to look as a small brown teddy bear emerged from under the lowest bunk in the third cell and walked towards them. "Teddy!" he said, his ears perking up, "I'm mad at you! Or... I was."

"You shouldn't stay mad at friends! I'm your friend. I have lots of friends. Are you still my friend?"

"I... guess so." Joss screwed up his muzzle, thinking carefully, "Why did you come here?"

"I came to say see you soon, Joss Hayes."

"Are you going somewhere? Goodbye then!" Joss waved a hoof, then he giggled, looking at it. He stuck it in his mouth, chewing and licking it. Hooves tasted funny!

The cuddly artificial life-form shook its wide head, orange button eyes glowing softly, "Friends never say goodbye, Joss, they say so long, see you soon and then they sing the farewell song."

Joss blinked, "I don't know how to sing that."

"I'll teach you!" The Tell-Me Teddy sat down, surrounded by the three ponies, and began to softly sing, ever so slightly out of tune. Soon the ponies joined in, as it had known they would. Ponies loved to sing.

***

"Oof, you're a heavy bastard. Remind me next time to do this when you're inside, hmm?" Philip dragged the pony-shaped lump that had, about ten minutes ago, been known as Ty Michaelson into the cell next to Jake. It was as good a place as any, and there'd be other ponies to comfort him when he woke up. Wiping his brow, Philip stood and looked around. All ponies present and correct, and...

"Oh, hello, what are you doing here?" Philip looked down at what appeared to be a cuddly bear. It was sitting between the ponies, "Where did you come from?"

"Hi!" the bear said, looking around and up at him, "I'm a Tell-Me Teddy Bear! Do you want to be my friend?"

Philip laughed at there being an artificial intelligence sitting in the holding cells. "A Tell-Me, huh? Who's lost you?"

"I am lost. My former owners were Integrity Waste Reclamation, but I have been lost for over eight hours. As my current net worth is less than five hundred credits, I am Fair Game. Would you like to give me a home or return me to my previous owners for a reward?"

Philip shook his head, "I must be mad. Come on then, I'll find you a home."

"Oh boy! I get to be your friend. I have lots of friends! Do you know the friendship song? I can teach you..!"

Joss watched the bear go as the vet walked through the doors to the outside world, locking them as he passed. Joss had been mad at his bear-friend, but he couldn't quite remember why. Everything was a bit fuzzy, not to mention he still hurt. He chewed on a hoof thoughtfully. Hooves were fun! They were big, and round, and kind of squishy, but then you could stand on them and they didn't hurt. He couldn't think why hooves being stood on would hurt, or why he was surprised they were ticklish. He was also learning that he had a tail! A tail! How amazing! He swished it to and fro and fro and to, it could go everywhere! Just like his ears! It could curve up, and it could flick... he flicked the lime green pony with it. The other pony giggled and snorted, trying to catch it in his teeth. They played a game, then, of flick the other pony and try to catch the tail. It was, Joss reasoned, the funnest game he'd ever played. It was even more fun when two more ponies staggered over to see them. The other ponies smelled funny, kind of like chemicals, but they seemed nice. One was a piebald black and white, the other was plain white. They said they'd been sleeping and had just woken up. Joss told them about the Vet Who Brings Sugar-Lumps, but he seemed to have vanished. Joss was sad. Malcolm was sad. Ty and Jake were sad. Strawberry was sad, too. The vet had brought sugar-lumps and friends.

Friends made the sad go away.

***

Charlie adjusted his red jump-suit. He held in his hands five bridles but only one rope. The job seemed simple enough; go collect five newfoals, take them to farming sector two-thirteen. The day was hot and he hadn't had a break in hours. Neither would he get one. Unlicensed breaks were the fastest way to get a demotion, and there was only one destination when you were a red twoper. Lazy workers didn't get paid. Ever again.

If only, he thought to himself, dutiful workers got paid too.

The cellblock door opened as it scanned his palm. Unlike unimportant doors or readers - like the ones guarding his personal effects - the cellblock door reader worked properly, and it opened first time. Pushing his way in, that strange, musky smell of newfoals reached his nostrils, tinged with that oddly spicy and enticing scent of potion. The melange set his hackles rising. He'd better get them outside before they had an accident. Newfoals weren't very good at controlling their bodies, and an accident inside would mean somebody would have to clean it up.

They crowded around him eagerly, head-butting him. Newfoals were friendly, usually. If he'd been in the stables and it had been morning, they'd have gotten a taste of a crop. As it was, he needed them to follow him. Luckily, he had just the thing. Five newfoals, five of those disgusting processed pony-sweets.

"Alright, alright, settle down. I've got a bridle each for you. If you put it on and promise to follow me, you can each have a treat, okay?"

They are animals, went the hologuide he'd had to sit through during orientation, They will respond to both the Carrot and the Stick. Physical discipline is to be reserved for when they need to work harder, but a sweet treat will bring them to you quicker than any order.

Charlie ran his fingers through his red hair nervously. They were big, for all they were dumb and stupid. He lunged for one, a big red fellow, and grabbed it by the mane. It nickered and shied away. Clumsily, he put on one of the bridles, getting an ear caught. Red seemed to be the leader, the others panicked and clip-clopped away down the corridor in front of the long row of cells. Fishing out one of the cubes he'd been given, he held it in his palm with his fingers outstretched. He held it against the brute's muzzle, and immediately the animal stood stock still. It nibbled at the cube, then it chewed happily. Charlie breathed a sigh of relief.

The others crowded back around, but they were fidgeting and eager.

"Alright, alright. Here, boy..." Charlie tried to put the next bridle on, but the blue pony wouldn't put his head through. "Hey! Don't you want your treat?" The pony stopped fighting then, and Charlie managed to fasten it up. He briefly entertained the idea of saving the treat for later, but he held his palm out anyway and the animal got its reward. The rest went the same, and in short order Charlie had all five ready to go. The rope, a sturdy plastic affair, clipped neatly to Red's bridle under his chin, and a brief tug brought the animal under control

"Come on, boy," said Charlie, and he clicked his tongue. It seemed like the right thing to do. It seemed to work, as Red snorted and tossed his head before following him. Gingerly, Charlie led the five ponies out of the detention block. He ignored the jeers and catcalls from the other red sector workers as he trotted across the yard. Dealing with ponies was hardly glamorous, even for red sector workers, but a job was a job and he'd been promised a bonus for prompt delivery. He'd even escaped the waste tunnel cleanup, which would otherwise have been his fate for the day. Waste tunnel cleanup stank, in more ways than one. You bet your sweet ass he could stand walking some ponies across the silage fields.

***

Snowbell waited by the gate to the paddock, like she always did. Snowbell was a pure white pony with a golden yellow mane and tail. Most of the humans knew better than to cross her, and the regulars were no longer surprised when she was waiting for new recruits. They'd long ago learned to let her do whatever 'breaking in' was necessary. It was twice as fast and twice as effective, and better yet, they got to take the credit.

Charlie didn't know this, which was why he found himself running for his life until he managed to jump the fence at the edge of Snowbell's paddock. The white demon snorted and pawed the ground menacingly until Charlie backed away, empty handed.

As the pony moved off, he picked up a rock, hefting it in his hands, until a voice said calmly, "I wouldn't do that, if I were you."

Charlie sneered, looking around at a fellow red-level twoper, "And what would you know?"

The man, in his forties with a thin, scraggly grey beard adorning a weather-beaten face that made him look all of sixty, nodded towards the field. Snowbell had begun to trot easily back to the five new ponies. "You new meat always buy the party line, don'tcha? Think them things is animals, right? Don't you believe it."

"What, you're saying I'd better watch out for... what? I've seen the old holovids on the threevee. They don't seem the type to put a horse head in my bunk."

"Oh no, no, they won't do that... but y'all know how they're unpredictable. Ponies do two things, kid; they run away, or they run towards. You wouldn't be the first to get mowed down and trampled."

Charlie scoffed, but stopped and swallowed when the man's expression didn't change.

"Aye, an accident, that's what it'll look like. Folks who don't make them mistakes, we know better. Yellers, Oranges, Bluepers, Greenies, they don't care. We're meat to them, as much as them ponies are, only we ain't worth as much. And don't you forget it. You won't last long 'round here if you do."

Charlie dropped the rock and spat, "What makes you think I'm staying?"

The man laughed, "Seriously? You take a job looking after newfoals, nobody else'll give you the time of day. Just one step above 'em, according to some. You're here now, kid. Welcome to your new life."

***

Snowbell gave an encouraging nuzzle to the pony who'd called himself 'Joss' before joining her herd. He'd chosen a new name, one that fit his colouring better - as had the rest. He'd taken to the plough and the buggy, and was already shaping up to be a fine, helpful gelding. Something had caught her eye about this one, and his Dream - something Snowbell made him tell her every day in the morning - confirmed it. Potion Sickness had crippled him, but the sickness could be beaten, all it took was a little persuasion, and friendship.

"It's easy, try again! You'll get it." She was stern, but kind.

"I'm sorry," Juniper said, "I'm not good with big words. Equestrian is hard."

"It's okay, I've told you the words. Mama Snowbell knows you mean well. Just sing as best as you can, or listen if you don't want to sing-"

"I wanna!"

'Mama' Snowbell smiled with her ears, flicking the newfoal gelding with her tail, "Then try your best."

Slowly, hesitantly, and with plenty of mistakes, Juniper began to sing as he pulled the plough, tilling the earth and making the crops, those precious few that had survived the death of their Equestrian homeland, grow.

"When the night it is done, the moon will set in the sea,

and the sun will rise up high for everypony here to see.

We toil in the day and we do not come to strife,

for we bring morning to the land as we fill it full of life."

There were more verses, but Juniper didn't know them yet. Mama Snowbell was patient, however. He would learn. He loved to sing, and he loved to work in the fields with his hooves and he loved to be with his friends, like Keylime and Strawberry, and Minty and Biscuit and... he had so many friends now! One day he hoped to talk to that girl again, the one in his dream. She'd been pretty, very pretty, and... somehow familiar.

Most of the world still lived off nano-bars and fungus, or seaweed where the toxins were low enough... but now ponies tilled the land, the Last Crop hadn't proved to be quite so final. Real food was still mainly for the rich, but the ponies didn't mind. They would toil and plough and makes things grow, until the sun came up once more.

The Road to Damascus - Part 1

The
CONVERSION
►Bureau

═════════════════════════════════════
Shattered Worlds
The Road to Damascus
Part 1
═════════════════════════════════════
An MLP:FiM Fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

Shh-pock, shh-pock, shh-pock, shh-pock.

The machinery was as regular as clockwork, smooth and powerful. Outside, it was little but an innocuous background rumble. Inside, it dominated every square inch of the facility.

Three backup generators, one of them on hot-standby, lurk unobtrusively in the outer complex. They are surrounded by fifteen-foot high, three-foot thick stressed plascrete walls strong enough to take several direct hits from even phased plasmic discharge railguns. Area denial weaponry coated the surrounding countryside, with autogun emplacements in strategic locations and surface-to-air silos secreted in others.

The complex was powered by no less than two thermobaric nuclear reactors, each reinforced to survive the attacks of a good cross-section of any global superpower's standing army for long enough to evacuate at least critical personnel and other ordinances.

It was, in a word, impregnable.

And as we all know, familiarity breeds contempt.

The complex was secreted away within a small, artificial forest. The foliage was thought to protect the main sections from prying eyes, whilst granting an extra modicum of obfuscation. The truth was that it made approach by a single individual, armed with a reactive camouflage suit, relatively simple.

Jacob Damascus current wore just such a suit. He walked slowly, carefully and with precision through the undergrowth. The trick was not to remain silent - nature is never silent - but to fit between the sounds as any other animal does.

If there had been olfactory sensors installed, he would have been discovered a mile off. If there had been dogs even, he would have been caught. There were no such sensors, and there were no dogs. With landmines peppering the forest, the price for replacement guards and trained canines - who could obviously not be trusted with the layout - was deemed too high an ongoing price.

Once again, the lowest bidder fulfilled the contract, and as a result, Jacob Damascus slipped right up to the walls of Jericho. It had been simple, really; find a creature large enough to implant control wetware into, which was large enough to set off the mines and small enough for any trace to be obliterated. Slowly but surely, a single, safe path had been gouged out of the complex's defence-network by a continued application of augmented rabbits.

Jacob looked upwards at the walls. They were sheer, grey stone, with barbed wire on top. The machinery beneath the ground was more audible, now. Subconsciously, Jacob matched his breathing to the beat.

Ssh-pock, ssh-pock.

He calmed himself. This had to be done slowly, quickly and efficiently. And his reactive camouflage had to last just a few minutes more. He reached up with his right hand and placed it against the wall. Reaching out in a hug, he applied his left. Then his right foot, and finally his left. Then he shifted his weight and - with a precise, practiced and fluid motion - raised his right foot.

Thanks to some basic nano-technology, he clung to the wall like the long-extinct gecko. Limb over limb, he lifted himself up the wall. He all but flowed over the top of it and under the gun emplacement, the barbed wire proved as much trouble as the wall had been. He was too close now for it to fire, not even the owners of this complex were mad enough to shoot their own people. Not without a reason at least, however flimsy.

Jacob surveyed the grounds. Attack by ground was impossible. Attack by air was impossible. Attack by sea would have been interesting, since the nearest body of water was several hundred miles away, and the object of his mission wasn't something that a railgun bombardment would take kindly to.

Grinning slightly, he checked his chronostat. All he had to do was wait.

Artificial Intelligences had come a long way in the last half-century, even given the hiccup during the short Equestrian war. The defences of the fortress were run by a gaggle of artificial intelligences, modelled roughly on ants, dogs and piranha. The ants ran all the myriad little things, picking up and dropping off. The dogs patrolled, keeping watchful eyes on who came in and who left. The piranha circled, waiting for the sign to strike. Not that there was movement - actual robotic bodies were horribly expensive. Fixed emplacements were more than enough most of the time, so long as the sensors were accurate.

The fortress relied on the maxim that anything larger than a medium-sized bird of prey was a legitimate target if unidentified. So it was that a group of circling crows were identified, studied and then downgraded to a threat level of 'negligible', even when they broke off to land on the cooling towers of the nuclear reactors. The AI had never been told that crows could be dangerous, so the fact that six of them dropped into the towers went unremarked except in a log requiring maintenance to check for damage.

The crows, however, were anything but innocuous. If they'd been robots, they would have been little more than short-range spying devices which would easily have been detected. They were, in fact, one-hundred-percent bonafide crows. They just also happened to have been implanted with military-spec wetware control augments. And a special little package.

The nuclear reactors were hardened against conventional or even kinetic bombardment. They weren't hardened against thaumic discharge. The three crows plunged down into each cooling tower, and at the bottom, detonated. The 'bomb' was meagre, but the payload was deadly to advanced electronics. Three globs of glowing purple liquid penetrated the cooling system and was quickly dispersed throughout the pipework, and the whole reactor was shutdown moments later to prevent the entire thing going critical as the magic-spewing liquid interfered randomly and fatally with a myriad of control circuits.

Multiple puffs of pink mist later, and the backup generators were neither backing up, nor generating. For the first time ever, the fortress experienced a complete and total loss of power.

Shh-pock, sshhhh...pock, ssssshhhhhh-po-po-pock-clunk

Jacob Damascus listened as the machinery slowed, and then stopped.

Showtime.

The first guard went down with a knife in the neck, mono-molecular blade slicing through his armour like it wasn't there. The second's neck was snapped before the first had hit the floor. The door to the inner complex wasn't open, but the magnetic lock hadn't been designed with power-failures in mind. Either that, or a fast exit was preferable to blocking an entrance during what had only ever been seen as a doomsday scenario. The door, with a lot of huffing and puffing, slid open.

Jacob's gun was small and precise, and very quiet. The bullets gleamed oddly in the low light, their tracks causing his night-vision implants to glitch. They shattered on impact with the blackmesh nano-weave, but the guards they hit dropped moments later in silence, their armour melting off them in puddles of black goo as the flesh beneath turned waxy and white. Glass fragments crunched under his feet as he passed them, sneering.

Jacob forced the outer elevator doors open. The rest of the complex's inner doors had proven even less of a challenge than the first, often being open and none being locked. The elevator, however, wouldn't be quite so simple. The car was, of course, several floors down. He severed the cables holding it in place and listened until the crashing had stopped. Then he grasped the promising-looking ladder and slid merrily down it.

Bullets whizzing past his head a few seconds later highlighted the fact he was both a sitting duck, and relatively lucky to have got just far enough before the excrement had finally impacted with the air excitation device. He didn't bother trying to fire back up the shaft, it would be about as much use as firing down. What he would have to do, however, was move before they either got lucky or—

There was an explosion that momentarily blinded him. Yup, grenades. Internal wetware told him the fools had just made his job easier. The car had ruptured, and it was a bare ten feet below. He could make it. He pushed himself off the wall and let go.

It couldn't be said that forcing a body through the burning, twisted wreckage of an elevator car was fun, but it certainly did narrow the focus and catch the attention. Despite his suit, he yelped in pain as he snagged a cable and slowed his descent. Twelve feet from the bottom, his grip failed and he landed flat on his back, slamming his head into the concrete.

He wasn't sure if he was seeing stars, or if the gunfire was getting closer. Either way, he had to move. He groaned as he pulled himself upright and swore as he forced open the doors.

There were only a few guards down this far, which was a blessing; his potion-gun was running out of bullets. The scientists he merely killed or knocked out, they were no threat and certainly weren't worth his time. It wouldn't matter soon. His internal map had proved accurate so far, and it had to be leading him to his prize.

After a maze of twisting, turning corridors, he finally came to a dull, white, heavy-set metal door with a hand-crank mechanism. It obviously wasn't made to be opened all that often. Breathing heavily, Jacob swore in appreciation. He was at his goal.

It was then that the lights came back on.

"Shit!" Jacob hissed, and he pulled a one-time use security-card-based device from his belt. With a Frankenstein's Monster's worth of cables and electronics hooked up to it, he had no idea if it would even work, but it was a last-ditch attempt. It sparked and smoldered, and something in it flared into brief flames, but the yellow, revolving light at the top of the huge white gunmetal door lit up as the mechanism engaged.

"Stop right there!" shouted a voice behind him, and Jacob felt his kidneys flare up with pain as the armor-piercing rounds penetrated his body. He coughed, a spurt of blood ejecting from his mouth as he forced his way through the partly-open door. Whimpering, he tried to get it to close, but the time-lock had a mind of it's own, and he was in no shape to oppose several metric tonnes of torque.

Not that it mattered, he had made it. Another round of shots shattered his shinbone and he fell the floor. It didn't stop him, he just dragged himself across the floor with both hands, his wetware glitching but suppressing pain..

It was there!

Another bullet shattered his collar bone, but with his one good hand he grabbed onto the oddly-shaped trunk on the pedestal, and pulled. It came down, smashing open....

The Road to Damascus - Part 2

The
CONVERSION
►Bureau

═════════════════════════════════════
Shattered Worlds
The Road to Damascus
Part 2
═════════════════════════════════════
An MLP:FiM Fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

Jacob held his breath. He flailed with his one good arm as an empty casket slammed into his head, bouncing off, to release a good deal of nothing into the chamber.

There was nothing in it. It was empty.

He opened his eyes, and found himself looking at a perfectly ordinary, empty casket. Dimly, he could hear clapping. He turned, painfully, to behold a somewhat corpulent man in a perfectly-fitting suit stepping into the chamber.

"Oh well done, Mister Damascus. Well done indeed." The voice was rich and melodious. The suit was well-pressed and immaculate. The shoes probably cost more than Jacob made in a year.

None of that mattered. "What? But... how?" croaked Jacob.

"You think we'd have the Ark right out where just anyone could waltz in and steal it? Oh, come now. You did well though, very well. Gentlemen, make sure our guest has no more... surprises up his sleeves, will you?"

Jacob found himself being thoroughly and roughly searched. He was relieved of his knife, his pistol, his remaining ammo and all the explosives he had left. He slumped back down, once they had taken what they wanted. He was finished.

"Captain Greyson?" asked the man, eyeing the gun that had been placed into his hands.

"Yessir, Mister Letchworth, sir!" replied one of the soldiers. He ran up to the man and saluted.

"You are relieved of duty," the man, Letchworth, said. And he fired the gun. "Your incompetence let this terrorist penetrate our outer and inner defences. You are hereby stripped of your position, your job and, indeed, your humanity. This, men, is the price of failure."

Letchworth watched dispassionately as the soldier fell to the ground, already under the effects of the potion-filled glass bullets of Jacob's unique gun. Greyson was stripped of his armour and clothes, and the misshappen lump was dragged from the room in very short order.

"Lieutenant Broderham? You are hereby promoted to Captain. See to the full restoration of first our primary and secondary backup generators, and then oversee the restoration of our nuclear generators. Leave this scum with me. We'll have a little chat, and then... well..."

"Mister Letchworth, Sir?" Broderham saluted, eyes fixed on the distance.

"Yes, Captain? Did I choose unwisely?" Letchworth fingered the trigger mechanism of the gun, idly. It wasn't a threat, it was a promise.

"N-no, sir, it's just... w-what just happened?"

"I have been concerned, of late, that your men are a little, let us say... 'lacklustre'? I arranged for a live test of our defences and I have to say I am deeply, deeply disappointed. A simple terrorist almost managed to cut our balls off whilst your men ran around like chickens with their heads removed. I expect you to fix this sorry state of affairs pronto, or I shall find somebody who can."

"Yessir. B-but, who is he? PER?" Broderham pointed to the prone terrorist, questioningly.

"Oh no, this is Jacob Damascus. He's with the HLF." Derek Letchworth smiled. "I arranged for the HLF to discover where the Ark was hidden, this month. I paid for their armaments, I leaked them the plans to this base, and I sat and watched whilst your predecessor did little but jerk off. You can expect a full review of the travesty that went down today on your desk in the following weeks. Weaponry has moved on, sadly our facilities haven't."

"Sir?" gulped Broderham.

Letchworth sighed. "You're all imbeciles." Derek lifted the gun up, showing it end-on. "This is a ceramic and composite potion gun; very neat, almost silent, with no metal parts. It fires using compressed gas.

"These," and Derek took the small clip out to display the glowing, purple glass bullets, " are potion-bearing bullets, with improved nanobots. They're only good against Blackmesh like yourselves, as their payload is a seek-and-subvert von neumann device, with hyper-concentrated Potion."

Derek Letchworth showed the belt and placed it on the now-empty pedestal. "Those are a collection of useful odds and sods, not generally very interesting, but this..." He picked up the knife. "This is a mono-molecular blade, it will cut through almost anything. It's a bitch to hold on to, too. One wrong move, and..."

Jacob Damascus screamed as Derek sliced his good hand off. Derek smiled thinly as the terrorist's suit patched up the bleeding. He wouldn't die just yet, oh no.

"My tech team are still trying to reverse-engineer whatever that thaumic discharge was. We were wondering how you planned to shut down the electronics. Very clever. Very, very clever."

"Fuck you," spat Damascus, breathing heavily as he sought to nurse his severed stump.

"I had this whole chamber built, and your men placed to guard it, to fool everyone. It worked. The Ark isn't even here."

"What did he plan on doing with it?" asked Broderham, aghast.

"He planned to slice up the Ark and stab Celestia through the brain with enough pieces of it that she would die. Nobody knows for sure if it would work. It might. The HLF are quite adamant, they want the ponies dead, all of them. Can you imagine? The backbone of our new golden age, gone? So they collected together an eclectic set of weaponry and hired this thug to do their dirty work. Damascus here wasn't being kind by not killing you. He was being as cruel as he could possibly be, isn't that right?"

"Humanus pro vit-aarrggghh!"

"Nuh-uh," laughed Letchworth, "none of that."

Derek had knelt, quick as a flash, in his expensive suit and had snagged Jacob's mouth. He brutally shoved a pair of pliers into it as Damascus had uttered the oath. He yanked out a tooth. "I can't believe you guys really stoop to the old 'cyanide in the molar' trick."

Jacob just glowered, and spat blood.

"Leave us, now. It's safe. I want a little chat, then I'll call you back in." Letchworth winked as he pulled out a knuckle-duster from an inside pocket. Captain Broderham stiffened, then nodded. The door slid slowly shut.

Alone, Letchworth visibly relaxed. He slipped the knuckle-duster off again. "You know, I had high hopes for you. I thought... I thought for a moment you might be my replacement."

Jacob blinked. "What?" he asked. This hadn't been on the menu. Torture, pain, death... not an actual chat.

"Tell me, Jacob," asked Derek. The man sat down, folding to the floor as carefully as possible. He waved at the chamber, with it's buzzing fluorescent lighting and stark, off-white paintjob. "Tell me, what do you think we do here?"

"What is this?"

"Come on, you can do better than that. I might even let you go, right?"

"Fuck you. You..." Jacob rolled his eyes, looking around. "You extract her blood."

"That's right. We take the blood of a goddess, and we funnel it into bottles and feed those little bottles to the unworthy. We turn useless wastes of space and resources into productive, useful, safe, obedient members of society. We are reshaping this miserable planet into a green and pleasant land for those who truly deserve it."

"We'll never be safe from her!" blurted Jacob.

"Hmm?"

"Celestia. You can't keep her locked up forever. Something will go wrong, she has to be killed. She can't be... she can't be bottled up and contained forever! Those ponies make us weak! Earth is for humanity!"

Derek laughed. "You HLF guys are right, you know."

"What?"

"Oh, I know all about you, Jacob. Your grandfather lost his job to a pony. You lost your family to ponies. You even lost your love to a pony. Do you think she knew, Jacob? Do you think Marissa screamed, as you burned her alive?"

"Fuck you! Those fucking ponies were fucking eating our world, man! They were stealing our world and our future and our children and spitting out the bones for the crows to pick over! And they still are!"

"Shh, Jacob. I know. I know. I said, you were right. The ponies were a threat, and they still are. I'm making sure of it."

Jacob's heart sank and his blood ran cold. "What?!" he hissed.

"I'm making sure that by the time you or anyone knows just how much of a threat they are, it's far, far too late."

"What?" coughed Jacob again, struggling to sit up. The blood-loss and insufficiently-blocked pain was making him weak, but the cold, calm words of this man in his expensive suit were chilling him to the core.

"A pony in every home, Jacob. I do the job of my goddess."

"You work for Celestia?"

"Oh no, Celestia would kill me, first chance she got. I do this in the name of the lost goddess of Equestria. Vivas Noctis, my friend. The night is so very, very long. One by one, I will relieve the useless of their humanity until finally, I shall relieve the world itself of its burden."

Jacob sat, horrified, as he looked up at the man. He expected madness, frothing insanity. Instead, he found a stone, cold brooding logic.

"When the time is right, I shall open the Ark." Derek Letchworth stood up, suddenly. "She'll kill me, or whoever it is. I'm sure of that. A goddess can go mad, it is her right. I used to believe like you, you see, until my brethren killed an entire world, until they burned an entire universe, and all without a flicker of remorse. Mankind must pay for such mass murder, any species which can set the sky on fire and brag about it does not deserve to exist. And I have dedicated my life to it. The rich like me, we don't age. We never will. Unless men like me make changes, our world will be run by the same soulless bastards forever."

"Traitor!" spat Jacob, struggling to move. His blood-flecked spittle splashed Derek, who wiped it off in disgust.

"It's an easy choice. When the humane thing is to end humanity, it's a very easy choice. There are thousands of us world-wide, at all levels of government, in all social circles. Invisible. There are, however, just six like me, and promotion is by dead man's boots. Or horse-shoes, as it may be. I had really hoped you'd be the one to replace me, but you're just another useless punk."

Letchworth fingered the potion gun again, before pointing it at Jacob. "There's only six of us. I'm laughter."

The body of Damascus jerked once as the bullet entered his brain, and then it slumped, the skin already turning waxy and white as the change overtook it. "If you thought I'd give you the escape of death, you're very wrong. I don't, however, need you remembering our little conversation. Even if your mind stays intact."

When the door opened, Letchworth was cleaning his hands off on the remains of Damascus' clothing.

"Take him topside. Geld him and brand him, use the HLF mark like his fellows. The ponies won't care, but I want those HLF retards to know they don't fuck with me."

Letchworth strode out through the complex humming to himself. He placed his hands in his pockets as the power was slowly restored. He stopped, though, as his fingers encountered something hard and unexpected. He took his hands out of his pockets.

There, between his finger and thumb, was a shiny metallic coin, a bit. From Equestria. One side was almost bare, the other had a stylized '4' on it. He took a closer look. The bare side wasn't bare, it had very faint writing on it, and the '4' was actually a pony-head. He smiled to himself as he peered at the words. "Vivas Noctus," he said to himself, "long live the night. By the grace of the lost goddess, may it be over soon."

He laughed. It was in his pocket. The bastard had been standing next to him, and had left his calling card in his jacket pocket! He wondered idly who it had been, but realized it didn't matter. His replacement had been found, everything was on track.

The machinery started up as Letchworth headed to his office. Under a strain that the system hadn't really been built to withstand, the pumps keeping the Ark drained of excess blood were off-kilter. They did their job, however, and were soon once more sucking the precious dark red liquid from the spigot of the Ark, the entirety locked in a prison of Substance D. They jostled to keep up, almost falling over themselves to find a new rhythm. When it settled, the familiar beat returned, but it wasn't quite so evenly spaced.

Sshhh-pock-shh-pock, sshhh-pock-shh-pock, sshhh-pock-shh-pock...

Letchworth spun in his comfortable leather chair. There was plenty to be done still, billions of humans to convert, trillions of dollars to make, and many miles to go before he could finally rest.

Jacob staggered. His head hurt and his arms and legs didn't obey him. Where was he?

He was in a dirty, grass field. Sand and grit was piled up everywhere, and behind him - it had to be behind him, though he had no recollection of having moved - were tracks in the dirt from his passage.

They must have thrown him out, and they now expected him to die in the middle of nowhere. Well fuck them. He'd show them who he was.

If only he could remember his own name.

Or how he'd got there.

Or work out where he was going.

The sound of hooves roused him. He wasn't sure what had happened, but he seemed to have momentarily lost consciousness. It was as if a sudden herd of... hooved animals had gone past, waking him from slumber. He could hear them, now, far off in the distance. He could smell them, he spotted their tracks in the dirt... but he couldn't see them.

All he could see was the ruined city. Above floated a dim sun, burned out and vapid, as if seen through too many layers of dark cloth. The sky wasn't blue, but it wasn't the black of night either. It was some listless, pale grey. In fact, the world seemed grey. All the colour was missing.

He staggered through the city, falling to his hands and knees and strangely finding that loping gait comfortable, as if his arms and legs were the same length. It was like when he'd been dreaming, when little. Often you could fly in dreams, but you couldn't walk or run. You'd have to... kind of shuffle on all fours. He did it now, urging his body onwards.

He had to be dreaming, that was it. Briefly he considered flying, and something told him it might work... but rational thought reasserted itself.

He pressed onwards.

The castle was grand. It was broken and disused, but epic and immense. Dimly, he could hear the sounds of talking, the clip-clop of hooves. He knew that should alarm him, but... it didn't. His head still hurt, and it hurt more thinking about things that he didn't understand.

As he entered the building proper, passing through the inner courtyard, things became clearer. This place... he knew it. Years ago, when small, he'd seen pictures. They'd been paintings, but... they'd been surprisingly accurate. This was the place where those ponies lived.

Ponies were small, four-legged creatures. And they could talk. And that alarmed him, and it hurt to think why. Everything hurt, now. It was like a presence, bearing down on him. He swore he could see it, even.

At first it was just sparkles of light, glimmers in the corner. But then the whispering started. The ghostly clip-clop of hooves echoed through the empty throne-room, and the phantasm manifested.

"Human..." it said.

The man shuddered, shivering with fear. The creature before him was roughly equine in shape, thin and gaunt. Bones poked through her chest, which showed ribs. It was a mare, of sorts. For some reason, he knew that word. Her horn was broken and her wings were nothing but plucked appendages. Her filthy coat was torn, bloody and marred. Her mane hung limp and lifeless. Worst of all, even worse than her wide, flaring nostrils, were her eyes...

They showed fear.

They showed such fear.

Fear and anger.

"I'm sorry," the man cried, and he realized he was... he just didn't know what for. "I'm sorry!"

The creature before him moved on disjointed, boney legs, circling him, her shredded lips curling back to reveal wide, skeletal teeth. "HLF!" she said, quite clearly. It chilled him to the bone, that a simple phrase could hold such malice.

"I... don't... I don't understand," the man replied.

"HLF!" the mare repeated, louder, barely suppressed rage thrumming in her body. She stomped a hoof. She screamed in a whinny, shattering her hoof as she did so. To his horror, she neither cared nor noticed.

"H!"

"Please no!" begged the man, falling to his knees.

"L!" the skeletal, decrepit mare threw herself closer.

"I beg of you!" the man whimpered, folding in on himself, shrinking back from the mad banshee, but it was no good.

"F!" she cried, and she lunged forwards. She screamed. She looked deep, deep into his eyes, into his very soul, and she screamed. And with that scream came an eternity of hate, a universe of pain and loneliness, and an overwhelming, soul-crushing despair. Through his blasted mind flowed millions upon millions of lost souls, crying out in pain as their world was reduced to a cinder, as matter itself broke down into its primordial components, as even their burned shells were reduced to dust, and then to less than dust, and then to less than nothing.

He broke.

He fell down in a heap, screaming himself. It seemed he screamed for an eternity all by himself, as he felt the agony of an entire realm course through his psyche.

Finally, it was gone. He was gone.

He was empty. He had nothing left. He wanted to die, to forget, to sleep forever in oblivion.

Instead, he found a circle of sunlight. He crawled towards it, begging forgiveness, begging that she take the memory back, take the pain away, that he would do anything if she wouldn't feel that pain any more.

And the sunlight swallowed him.

Divinity - Part 1

The
CONVERSION
►Bureau

═════════════════════════════════════
Shattered Worlds
Divinity
Part 1
═════════════════════════════════════
An MLP:FiM Fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

Sal came from the slums of Greater London. His mother was a whore and his father a client, their brief union forgotten before it had even started.

Somewhere between an impromptu photo-shoot session and some home movies, Sal had been conceived. Unlike most pregnancies, the embryo had survived long enough to become a fetus.It had almost ended there and then with the morning sickness, but Sal's mother's clients had... vices. Keeping the bastard had meant more cash in hand, and by the time her drug-addled brain had processed what the result would actually mean, it was far, far too late to get rid of him via even the most unethical of backstreet coat-hanger vendors.

She'd made of it what she could; a movie, a fistful of cash, a handful of stitches and some stretch-marks. Then, of course, breast-feeding had perks all its own too. Allowing grown men to suckle at her ample teats was a lot less painful than letting them pound on her arse. The right drug cocktails that their favours purchased kept the little shit silent long enough to ply her trade and snatch some rest between sessions, or at least made it that she didn't care if not.

Against all odds, he survived. A year, two, three. Then he made five, but there was no formal education, not for little Sal. The school was of Hard Knocks. There was no homework, lessons were never out. Sal learned how to survive, how to dodge the slap and roll with the punch. At eight, he inherited his mother's profession - partly because he had no other skills, partly because he needed the cash. By sixteen he had learned to switch off the burning despair whilst servicing his clients, with only empty, wracking sobs and an ache that left him bloody and unable to lay still at night to show for it. Still, it kept him fed, clothed, and alive. What more could he want? For a time, it was enough, but with the flush of youth already leaving him, pickings grew slim once he was legal meat. That was why he took the chance at an unbelievable offer - a whole weekend at a private retreat and a large fee, with facilities like hot water, perks like clothes... even if they were crotchless chaps, they would be clothes.

It was a dream come true.

It was a way out of the slums.

It was, above all, a trap.

He'd fallen for it, of course. They'd put drugs in the drink, or maybe they'd drugged the food. Perhaps both. After passing out in a private cuddle-session early in the first night, he'd woken up with the others in a spartan, dark-green room that stunk of shit, blood and despair.

He found himself stretched over a rack, with a sharp knife slicing across his ribcage. He'd screamed, his cries merging with the unhealthy buzz of the shoddy strip-lighting, and they'd stuffed his mouth full with another kind of meat entirely. Then his rear end. Again and again, and again. They'd done it alone, they'd done it in groups, they'd admired themselves in the mirror...

Being a male whore had never been easy, but these men were an entirely new type of rough. He'd begged, he'd pleaded, and it had just excited them more, vicious slaps and icy cold water rousing him when he fainted. They broke every one of his fingers, arms and legs, just to hear him cry out, they forced another boy on him, they even throttled a girl as he orally serviced her, until she went limp, her excrement covering him as she expired.

Satisfied, or at least sated, his torturers brought out a collection of vials. His pain-addled brain hadn't been able to work out what they wanted - most of the other victims in the den of debauchery were either dead or soon would be, Sal with them, and more drugs weren't going to make much of a difference... but then it all became clear.

Human bodies were hard to get rid of, even shallow graves in the middle of nowhere, or buried ash and bones, were found eventually. Humans were important when they were dead, just not so much when they were alive.

Ponies, however... nobody looked twice at a pony.

He'd cried, as they'd forced the potion into him. He'd died in that room, he knew that now. Whatever there had been of the human Sal left, it had died long before they'd given his body the potion. A beating heart, a thinking brain, but a dead soul.

He'd fallen into a black pit, and hadn't got up, even as a strange, decrepit world had moved around him, embraced him, and taken away the pain.

***

The pony opened his eyes, and was met with bedlam.

The door - huge and gun-metal green - had been blasted off it's hinges and riot-suited blackmesh types had stormed in, their roars rousing him from potion-slumber.

They'd started shouting, loud voices echoing and blending in a torrent of orders the bewildered newfoal could barely understand, let alone obey. "Hands up! This is the police! Get down on the floor! Move it! Move! Now!"

There had been screaming, and tranq shots fired at point blank. There had been the meaty, unmistakable sound of truncheon meeting face and the sickening crunch of snapped bone as boot was applied to head. As the pony cowered in the corner, the two-way mirror exploded into the room, a shower of shards raining down in a deadly tempest. It had been shattered by the violent application of a human body - whoever had been filming the torture sessions slammed into the floor, along with a good deal of glass and most of his teeth.

The pony, for his part, still disorientated and in shock, cowered as far back as the taut rope around his neck would allow. He cried out, whimpering in fear, neighing and kicking as he tried to get away.

He couldn't, of course. His captors had tied him far too securely. Crying, sobbing, pleading in wordless screams, the pony tried to make sense of a world gone mad as well as protect himself from what was surely a painful end.

But then, the bedlam calmed. A soft voice spoke encouragingly, and the pony realised it was to him.

"Hey there, hey, shh... calm down, boy, it's okay now," a woman said. Sandy hair and freckles were what caught his attention, followed by dark green eyes. His whimpering sobs had faded to silent fear as a lithe hand stretched out. His ears flattened against his skull, his eyes must have been showing their whites, and his teeth snapped.

The hand stopped, then retreated. Then it neared again, closed in a fist. He shied away, before the first turned, rotated until it could open, palm upwards. In the middle was a cube of some brown, slightly gelatinous substance. His eyes fixated on it as the lady wove it to and fro.

"You can have one of these, okay? I'll put it down, you can have it. Look, I'll even bite it first. I know what they did to you, I want you to know it's safe."

The cube vanished, to reappear a moment later, a bite taken out of it. The treat filled his world. It was placed on the ground, and gingerly prodded forwards. Pawing at it with a hoof, the pony brought it close enough to bite.

It was heaven. He chewed it slowly, and an explosion of sweetness that almost made him forget everything for a few seconds coursed across his tongue.

"You can have another one boy, okay? If you come with me, that is. I'm going to untie the rope on the wall," and the lady leaned forwards, moving very, very slowly, "and then I'm going to tie another one to the collar they've put on you."

The pony quivered, ears flattening, eyes rolling, teeth showing, but he let her untie him. Slowly, ever so slowly, he was coaxed to his hooves. As promised, he was given another treat. He looked, fearfully, into those green eyes... and met compassion.

"I'm Susan," the woman said, "Susan Belafore. Who're you, Sunshine?"

A jack-booted terror stomped closer, and the pony shied away. A quick tug on the rope around his neck brought him up short, but still he shook.

"What is it, sergeant?" asked Sarah, with a huff. "Can't you see I'm busy?"

"I think we've accounted for all newfoals, ma'am."

The sandy-haired woman sighed and stood up. "Okay, how many?"

"Eleven from the outer complex, the four in here... and that one." The blackmesh pointed towards one corner of the room where a collection of somethings lay unmoving.

Susan nodded, glancing towards the whitish lump of limbs and skin. "Potion baiting. How many humans?"

"Five, we're processing them now. Permission to remove the newfoals?"

"The humans are yours, sergeant, the ponies are mine. The D.N.A. take care of the newfoals, you know that."

The man spat. "Ma'am, the eleven outside are feral. The mare in here's gone too, and the other three..." He tailed off as the woman looked up at him. "No offence miss, but you've lost twelve, if not fourteen of them, I don't see why it matters to you."

The woman stood up and dusted herself off. "Twelve of them have simple needs, sergeant," she said sadly, "water, hay, a roof over their heads and each other. Two more may come back to us, with a little time. And this one, this boy here," the woman said, shaking the rope around the pony's neck, a fierce expression on her face, "is strong. Despite everything, he's strong, healthy and biddable. From where I stand, I've only lost one."

The sergeant straightened, spat on the floor again, and then nodded once. "Ma'am."

"Load the eleven up in the group transport. Take those two boys to Ruislip Sanctuary, and the group truck to Barnet. Take the remains of that poor sod to pathology, see if you can get anything out of it."

"And pretty boy here? And the mare?"

"Ruislip for the mare. This one goes to Whitson." Susan turned to the pony on the leash and spoke softly, "You stay here a moment, okay Sunshine?"

The pony flicked his ears, unsure, but he nodded.

"Good." She turned back to the blackmesh sergeant. "Let me see the mare."

Susan walked to a burgundy mare who was standing relatively passively, chewing the rope around her neck and rocking back and forth. "Hey gorgeous, you wanna say hello?" the woman asked, moving closer.

The mare shied away from the outstretched hand, but did little else. Her ears perked up when the woman took out another of the brownish pseudo-sugar-lumps, and she walked forwards hungrily.

"What's two and two?" the woman asked, holding the cube just out of reach.

The pony stretched her neck out, extending her lips in effort to get to the treat.

"If you tell me, I'll give you two, not just this one."

The mare didn't even look up, so engrossed she was with getting the sugar lump.

The woman shook her head and gave the sugar lump to the pony, patting her on the head, awkwardly. "She's gone, too. Poor quality potion, most probably."

The sergeant shook his head. "The fact they killed her first didn't help."

"That'll do it." The woman grimaced, her mouth a thin, hard line. "Let me see the prisoners."

"Ma'am?" The blackmesh stiffened, his gaze hard.

"What's little old me going to do, eh? I just want to talk, to check 'em over. You don't want to hear you're accused of mistreating them, do you?"

"You wouldn't!"

"No, but they would."

"Point taken."

"Good," the woman replied, wandering back to Sal and grabbing onto his rope. She clicked her teeth. "Come on boy, with me."

***

The battered doors of the police van were thrown open, and bright sunlight flooded in. The five figures within were seated on painted, uncushioned metal benches. They shielded their eyes as best they could. With the chains around their feet and wrists, they couldn't get far.

"Tell me, boys, who was it potion-baiting in there? I'm Susan, by the way, Susan Belafore, with the Department for Newfoal Affairs." A sandy-haired woman with piercing green eyes stood before them, leading a pony on a rope.

"I know my rights," one man said, eyeing the pony carefully, "I'm not talking."

"Oh, I know you know your rights. You'll get your lawyers right on things, if you haven't already. I'm counting on it." Susan glared, eyes brilliant and bright. "We don't honour D.N.P's of convicted criminals, but of course, you're innnocent until proven guilty."

"What do you want, Miss Susan Belafore?" the same man asked, sneering. His bald head and wire-rimmed glasses spoke of true power - the merely rich went in for reconstructive nano-surgery, whilst the powerful went for the look.

For an answer, Susan tapped onto a small datab and gave a flick of her wrist. The van lit up with pictures, hung in mid-air, slowly spinning and changing. The pictures showed a variety of dead bodies, mostly human, though twisted and deformed. "You've been potion baiting. Couldn't keep your hands off, could you? Didn't anyone warn you? You don't fuck with potion."

"I fail to see what a bunch of shock-photographs--"

"Potion baiting. You slice bits off, whilst the helpless newfoal is still cooking. Fun, right? Watching that doughy white lump fight to repair the damage?"

"I don't know what you're--"

"I saw what you did to that poor soul in there," hissed Susan. "I just want to know who it was, because right this second, I'm betting that at least one of you isn't feeling so hot." Her eyes swept around the truck. All of the men were sweating, some of them trembling, but only one of them had that particularly pale sheen and ugly pallor. Susan took a step back and turned to the blackmesh behind her, but everything happened at once.

"Oh, shit... sergeant! That one! Get him out of here before he--"

"Miss Belafore, you'll be pleased to know that my lawyers are going to sue--"

"Good god in heaven, he's going to--"

The man Susan had been pointing to - an otherwise nondescript, middle-aged, balding and relatively well-dressed soul - started convulsing. His eyes rolled back in his sockets and he jerked at his restraints, body taut. From his mouth issued forth a stream of orange bile, which sprayed over the occupants of the van.

The loud, angry cries of the other four almost drowned out her next words

"Fuck, code nineteen! Shit!"

The blackmesh sergeant visibly paled, where his face was visible under his mask. "Decon! Stat!"

The complex yard, which had been relatively calm but a moment ago, exploded into commotion. In short order, two blackmesh guards trotted up brandishing a large, pump-action spray canister, which they used to hose down the occupants of the van whilst four more set up a hasty perimeter. Susan stepped back, letting yet another blackmesh sweep a hand-held device across her body.

"Clean," the man said.

Susan watch dispassionately as they pulled the sick man from the van. He was jerking spasmodically still. "He's got a D.N.P.," she said softly, "we've scanned his records. You all do. I know the type, I've seen it so often."

"Help him!" shouted one of the prisoners, a younger man with brown hair and hazel eyes.

Susan shook her head, "I can't, he's got a Do Not Ponify... and nothing else will save him. Nothing else will save any of you. If you're lucky, we got it in time, and the residual activation has just ruined those expensive suits of yours... show me your fingernails."

"What?" asked the prisoner who had so recently begged her to save the man on the ground.

Susan looked up from where she was examining the now-cooling body on the floor. "This is what happens when you go potion-baiting," Susan said, indicating the dead man. "Nanobots are clever, but indiscriminate. Three ounces is the recommended minimum for a healthy transformation, even with the shitty rejected stuff you guys allegedly have. If you're exposed to less than that, eventually it will take its toll."

"Don't listen to her," sneered the first man, "she just wants to--"

"They call it 'gelder's rash', where I come from, after the most common operation and second most common task performed on newfoals. Down in the slums, they call it cutter's rash. Tell me, do you have unexplained itching anywhere on your skin? Thick patches of fur? Show me your fingernails!" Susan ordered.

The second man to speak held out his hands. Susan nodded. "Thought so."

"I... thought it would go away, it did last time!"

Susan shook her head, carefully taking hold of the man's hands as she looked at his brown fingertips. "This discolouration? Stage one, at least. Show me your teeth." Susan took out a small hand-held torch and looked into the man's mouth. She sighed. "Stage two, I'm afraid. There's nothing I can do."

"Don't try to pull that shit on me, Miss Belafore. Your scare tactics--"

"A man just died in front of you, sir! You've been playing about with highly dangerous, restricted substances. Did you really think it wouldn't affect you? I don't know how long you've been at this, but if you've been here before, you've probably noticed a few changes, even if you don't have hooves for fingernails yet."

The first man sneered, and looked away.

"How's that Indigestion? How's that ulcer coming along? I'll give you a hint; it's not an ulcer. I bet red meat makes you queasy, that salads seem tastier, colours seem brighter, milk gives you gas and fish and eggs are currently favourites, am I close?" Susan looked around, not meeting the gaze of any of them, save the second man to speak.

"W-what can you do?" he asked, fearfully.

"Give you time, a cell, protection, anonymity. I can keep your name out of the papers, seal your records, and allow you a comfortable handing-over of whatever businesses you have to whichever heir or heirs you care to name."

"Fuck you, Susan Belafore! I'll have your--"

Susan carried on, regardless. "You've got a month, six tops, before the physical changes are pronounced enough to be unmistakable. After that, you've got a year, maybe two, before your body shuts down for good."

"What's going to happen to me?" the man said, tears springing to his eyes.

"The nanobots... in a three-ounce dose, they work as one to transform the whole body. Less than that, it will fail mid-conversion. But in micro-doses, they try something different. They create stem-cells for new organs, and wire them into your body. Sometimes those cells take, and when they do, your own body turns against itself. It's like a cancer, only untreatable. A new heart, new lungs, new liver... all the analogs that newfoals have, all vying for your body's nutrients. Those nanobots float about in your bloodstream and rewire the brain, neuron by neuron, fibre by fibre... too slow to kill you outright, but it's a ticking time-bomb. You've lost your canines, sir. That's stage two. It means it's terminal, but it hasn't killed you yet."

"Wh-what can you do?"

"Flush the nanites, perhaps. That'll give you a year extra, maybe, but it's more... invasive than that. They've kick-started your own body's natural repair process, it thinks you're the wrong shape and it's trying to fix it. It can't be stopped, the sort of research needed is illegal. The only working example we have... is potion. I can give you time, you can ponify if you wish or you can be made comfortable until--"

"Don't listen to her!"

"Shut the fuck up, Frank!" the man swore. Then he turned back to Susan. "What do I need to do?"

"Turn King's Evidence. I'll give you all the protection I can muster. Agree to ponify, and it'll be that much more, you'll be in my program then. You'll get the good stuff, too. A cell, a hospital bed, time to sort out your affairs, and a way out. Once you're a pony, nobody will care or know who you were, not if you don't want them to. I can even... offer preferential placement, if you want. If your family will have you."

"I'll do it."

Susan nodded, ignoring the protests from 'Frank'. The man was unshackled and lead out of the wagon. "Take the rest of 'em downtown, sergeant, I got what I wanted. And send in a decon team for this one too. With luck," Susan spat, "you'll all hire good enough lawyers to drag it out well into stage two yourselves. You'll be dead before I can invalidate your D.N.P's. Of course, if you haven't been fucking around here, you've just been very unlucky..." Susan turned. "Take 'em. Before I do something I regret."

"Yes ma'am," the blackmesh policeman replied, and in short order the armoured van disappeared down the road.

"What a fucking mess," Susan swore. "I don't suppose you can name names, Sunshine?"

Sal shook his head, snorting.

"Didn't think so, Sunshine. Not that you're allowed to testify. You're as honest as the day is long, but you'll do anything you're told, won't you?"

Sal shook his head again.

"How about for a sugarcube?" Susan took one out, and grinned when the pony nodded vigorously. "You want it? Come on then, boy, this way."

Sal followed the tantalizing treat, until he found himself clip-clopping up a short ramp and standing in an enclosed trailer. A bar was placed across his backside, and the collar was tied to a ring in front of him. The trailer was just big enough for him to stand up in, but not big enough to turn around, with a large metal bar in the middle, separating him from the burgundy mare he'd seen earlier.

The dead girl.

Sal looked at her. Her eyes were bright, but utterly without intelligence. Whatever humanity she had possessed had vanished when they'd killed her. The potion had resurrected her body, but her intellect had fled. Sal watched as she munched contentedly on hay. He started to cry.

Susan stroked him softly on the muzzle. "It'll be okay, Sunshine, you'll see. Trust me, okay? Here, I promised you another sugarcube."

Sal looked at the treat in her open palm, and turned away.

"Okay, I understand. Be strong for me, okay? You won't see me again, but I'll keep an eye out for you." Susan retreated out a small door in the front of the pony-trailer, closing and bolting it behind her. Shortly after that, it started moving.

Finally, silently, Sal cried.

***

Divinity - Part 2

The
CONVERSION
►Bureau

═════════════════════════════════════
Shattered Worlds
Divinity
Part 2
═════════════════════════════════════
An MLP:FiM Fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

The noise of the diesel engine stopped and the vehicle came to a halt. Sal found his nose hitting the hay dispenser as he stumbled. He'd been dozing, lulled into a stupor by the rhythmic motion of the van. He shivered. The dead girl - now very much a live pony, but without the kind of distinguishing vibrance that marked a newfoal - had been taken hours ago. He was all alone. He shook, fearfully. Suddenly there were sounds of talking and laughter, and the distinct metallic sounds of bolts being drawn back. Orange fluorescent lighting flooded the darkened horse trailer, throwing his shadows into strange, twisted relief.

"Hey there, Sunshine, time to come on out," came a male voice. The bar which had blocked egress before was removed, noisily scraping through the holes. Sal, instead, cringed further in.

"Oh, come on, we don't got all night... for the love of... Pete! Hey Pete! Sunshine 'ere don't wanna move. Gotta help me shift 'im!" called the voice. Sal daren't open his eyes, shivering in the far corner.

"Another one!?" called a distant voice. The words were followed by the crunching of heavy, booted footsteps. "Yup, 'e's in there."

"Ha ha, help me get 'im out."

"The front way?" suggested Pete.

The first voice sighed. "If we must."

"Look, Dougie, you can fuck about with gettin' the bugger out the back way, or we can get the front side off."

"I don't suppose we can just let 'im come out on his own?" suggested Dougie.

"Fine by me, but ain't you gotta do another run?"

"Shit biscuits," Dougie swore. "I do. Fine, fine. We'll do it your way."

Sal listened as two pairs of footsteps disappeared into the distance, to return a short time later. Sal glanced worriedly at the open rear hatch. Just in case, he leaned even closer to the front. It was then that, accompanied by the sound of powertools, the whole front of the trailer swung open. Sal all but fell out, neighing loudly in shock and picking himself up on shaky legs a moment later. Scared out of his wits, the frightened newfoal attempted to run, only to be blocked by a sudden gaggle of humans with spread arms and grabbing hands. He reared up and bucked, screaming in terror, but it was no good. With an expertly-timed application of clips, a halter was attached to his head, complete with rope. In moments, he was helplessly bustled through the muddy courtyard and unceremoniously pushed into a box. the swing-doors were closed top and bottom, and Sal was plunged into darkness. Bursting into tears, the pony huddled as far away from the doors as he could, attempting to bury himself in the sweet-smelling hay. Sobbing loudly, and then quieter and quieter, the pony fell into an exhausted slumber.

***

With several loud clunks, the sound of bolts being drawn back startled Sal into wakefulness. He leaped to his hooves anxiously. The door swung open of its own accord, letting in blinding sunlight. For a good few minutes, Sal daren't move. His heart thudded in his chest and he was breathing heavily. Shaking, he took a few tentative steps towards the light. The door, pushed by the wind, swung closed again, startling him. He snorted, and pushed it open again with a hoof. Gingerly, he stuck his head out. Just on the other side of the door were two buckets, both made of heavy-duty black plastic. One was full of what appeared to be water, the other was full with a brownish, steaming mush. The mush smelled... interesting. It smelled like honey, and oats, and carrots. Tentatively, in case it was a trick, Sal dipped his head into the bucket. Used to diving into dumpsters outside rich folks' diners, the thought of a bucket of actual food just left outside struck him as an odd thing to do. Just in case it belonged to someone else, Sal took a hold of the handle in his muzzle and dragged it back inside the box. Pondering a few moments, he looked back outside. There were humans and other ponies all wandering about, some with obvious destinations in mind, others seemed to be just travelling for the heck of it. Most of the ponies were muzzle-deep in buckets of their own.

Could it be? Sal wondered. Could it be that the bucket of food... really was meant for him? He trotted back into the box and looked at it. A meal, all his own. His stomach rumbled loudly, and made his mind up for him. He buried his muzzle in the mushy porridge and shovelled it into his mouth as quickly as possible. It was hot, thick, tasty and nourishing, and he found himself licking the inside of the bucket vigorously to get the very last drop. Falling back onto his haunches when it was done, he burped. Then he licked his lips. Then he licked the bucket again, just in case. When the bucket didn't magically refill, he tentatively placed it outside the darkened box and retreated back inside, shaking again.

When nobody shouted, and nobody kicked or hit him, and nobody chased him off, something strange occured. Absolutely nothing. For all his life, from whenever he could remember, he had been chased from whatever resting place he had found. Only during sleep had he found respite. But now... he had a box all his own, and a bucket all his own. And hay, apparently all his own. Maybe the door was his, too? Sal trotted up to the door and nudged it open. He waited until the wind blew it closed again, and then once more nudged it open. Then he stuck his head out. The bucket of food was gone. He mourned it's loss, but the bucket of water was still there. He sipped it. It was cold and clear, yet... not tasteless. It tasted of the mush, and of distant springs, and the sea and the sky. The water spoke to him in ways mere liquid never had before. He found, to his surprise, that he had finished the bucket once the day-dream had left him.

He once again went back inside, turning around and around as he examined his not-prison. A window up high - small but serviceable - with an electric light which he now noticed was on the other side of bars set in the sides. There were, it became clear, boxes next to his own. The walls were quite high, made of what appeared to be blackened wood, with metal bars on top that reached to the ceiling, which was painted white. There was a thick layer of hay on the floor at the back, some sort of fluffed-up dirt nearer the door, and a large bag filled with what appeared to be more but different hay hanging in one corner. In the other corner was an odd block. The block was orange in colour, mottled and misshapen. It looked like a piece of rock. He sniffed it, then stuck a tongue out. Recoiling, he smacked his lips. Salt. He tested the block again. Still salt. A third and fourth try convinced him it was salt, but it took a few more taste-tests before he gave up. Smacking his lips some more, he realized that the salt-lick had made him thirsty again. Not only that, but he was... kind of the opposite of thirsty. He whimpered, there wasn't exactly many places to go. Eventually, bursting with need, he did what any street-rat would have done, and went. The splashing sounds of Sal relieving himself made him worry he would be discovered, but still... it wasn't like he had much choice. Shaking his hooves dry, and himself, he scrunched up on the hay as far from the pungent puddle as he could. Having done that for a few minutes, he realised he was out of options for fun and realized that the open door was calling him.

He got up. He trotted the few steps to the door. And then he trotted outside.

The sun was high, warm rays breaking through the shapeless grey masses above. Looking left and right, Sal saw boxes. More and more boxes. Across the yard was another row of boxes. The outside was painted a dull red ochre, with smart white sidings. The doors to the boxes came in two parts, an upper and a lower. In some boxes, the lower door was shut fast whilst the upper half swung wide. Some were tied back, others banged and flapped in the breeze. The boxes were identical, save for neat little squares with writing on them. Sal trotted across the yard and peered at the box opposite his own. He knew it was a word, because Mum had known words. She'd never really taught them to him, though. He knew 'men' and 'women', and he could recognize 'television' and the numbers on bills... but beyond that it was a mystery.

"Can I help you?" asked a voice above him. Sal jinked backwards as he looked up into the face of a large, black pony peering over the open door.

"I... I... I'm sorry!" squeaked Sal, and he turned tail and ran for his life. In a clatter of hooves, he found himself in the middle of a large group of humans and ponies. Ears flat against his head, he backed up until he found himself surrounded by straw. Cowering, he hunkered down close and made himself as small as possible. Pulling a stray tarpaulin over himself, Sal tried to hold his breath.

***

Wendy clapped her hands for attention. "Everybody!? Welcome everybody! Listen up please! Quieten down, quiet now. There we go." Wendy surveyed the group. There were children with parents, couples, and a few lonesome stragglers. A real mixed bag, today. "Welcome, I take it you're all here today to learn more about the newfoals you'll soon be adding to your families. Well, I want to make that clear first. You're not purchasing a slave, you're not purchasing a pet. You're purchasing a member of your family, hopefully a permanent member. Choose wisely, because relocation is incredibly stressful for newfoals. Yes, you there, what's your question?"

"Umm, can we play with the newfoals because Mummy and Daddy said I could but I've got to be careful around my little sister cos she's so small and--"

Wendy smiled, gesturing for the little girl who had spoken up to silence. "Now, first of all, the rest of you, unless you've got a burning question, save it until the end. As for you, my love, you're right, you've got to be careful around newfoals. They are quite big for the size, as my predecessor used to say. They make wonderful pets, but you need to learn their quirks. Some of them scare easily, others don't know their own strength, and still others aren't quite as dextrous with their hooves as you and I are with our fingers.

"To continue, the newfoals you'll be adopting - and I encourage you to think of it as adoption - have been through a lot. If any of you are lucky enough to have ponified grandparents, let me tell you these newfoals do require a bit more work. Some of them have been abused, some of them have received substandard care and a lack of attention. Others have been abandoned.

"They find their way to us, and we take them in, rehabilitate them, teach them new skills, and finally release them to the kind-hearted folk who wish to donate their money, or sometimes just their time, to the rescue, here."

Wendy had them now, not that she usually had to do much. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Newfoals was well known and relatively well funded. Growing out of previous century's animal protection agencies, the RSPCN had grown to be a major country-wide force for good, and not only rescued newfoals, but set them up with families and gave those families the necessary tools to turn a good start into a great future.

Predictably, a hand went up. "Yes?" Wendy asked, pointing to the older man.

"I-I heard some of these newfoals are... criminals. Vicious, violent thugs. Can we really just accept them into... I have a wife, and kids. I don't want a murderer, or a pedophile in my house..."

Wendy sighed. She nodded. "This is the hardest thing to let go of, sir." Wendy whistled shrilly, and a few moments later a roan gelding trotted up to her. "This boy here... when he was a human, he did some very bad things. He was, by all reports, a vicious, self-centered, evil little thug."

At Wendy's words, the roan gelding visibly shook as if struck. "I'm sorry," the pony whispered, backing away, ears flat. Wendy caught him by the halter.

"No, none of that. Come here, boy." Wendy held fast to the pony, but turned to the crowd. "Look at him. He's the sweetest pony you could hope to meet. His previous owners thought they had reason to hate him. Maybe they would have, if they'd caught him when he was still human. They found him, I don't know how, and they bought him. And they tortured him."

Wendy walked as she spoke, leading the pony in a circle. At the last word, she moved aside. The crowd gasped. "They cut out his eye. They broke his tail. They broke his leg. They beat him day in and day out for close to a year. By the time we found him, he was almost dead." She glared at the crowd. "Something a lot of us forget, when a criminal pays the price for their crimes, the crime is forgiven. Not forgotten, perhaps, but forgiven. Ponification is the ultimate price, and it is forgiveness without limit. This boy belongs to me now, I keep him here as a reminder to myself and to you... but also because I cannot let him go through that again. He's the sweetest, kindest, gentlest pony I know of. I don't care who he was, because he isn't that person any more."

"Miss, they say you die, when they make you into a pony. Do you?"

Wendy grimaced. "It sounds like an easy question, but it's not. I've had my grandparents as ponies for the last couple of decades. One had cancer, the other couldn't live without the first. They have all the mannerisms, all the memories, the same voices... everything about them is the same, except the bits that are pony. Their taste in food has changed, their taste in music remains. They don't like quite the same television shows as before, and they've picked up hobbies I would never have believed they would be interested in. In short, they're everything they were before, and more. Then again, they were wonderful people before. They weren't criminals and scum. When a crook goes through ponification, out the other side comes somebody far nicer. When my grandparents went through, once I got over the shock, I honestly didn't notice much of a difference. Of course, they argue and shout and stomp their hooves, but they don't threaten and bully. It's mellowed them out, like the grandparents you remember from when you were kids instead of the crabby, bad-tempered sods your parents are, am I right?"

Wendy laughed herself at the chuckles from the adults. "Long story short, good person goes in, good pony comes out. Bad person goes in, good pony comes out. I don't really know how it works, but it works. Lucky here proves it. If, however, you are really unsure, then we can assist to ensure that only non-violent offenders are homed with you. We do not want another case like Lucky's on our hands, or their hooves. Now, if you'll follow--"

Wendy staggered back as a bright yellow pony galloped madly into her group. He whinnied in fear and backed away into the bales of hay. In front of her bemused eyes, the creature crept under a tarpaulin and lay there, shivering.

"This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when newfoals are abused." She spoke softly to the first pony, and fished out a brownish lump, which she fed to the gelding, before patting him on the rump. The gelding whinnied and trotted off.

"I think this may be a good lesson for you all. Stand back, he's terrified. He won't hurt you, but he doesn't know his own strength just yet."

***

Sal whimpered as the dirty, sodden tarpaulin was pulled aside.

"Are you going to come out of there, Sunshine?" asked a woman. Sal shook his head. "That's a pity, you know," the woman replied. "I've got all these sugarlumps I can't eat. They're not good for a girl like me if she wants to keep her figure. If you come out, you can have one?"

Sal shook his head.

"How about two?"

Sal hesitated a moment, but shook his head.

"Well..." the woman looked away for a moment before looking back at the pony hiding under the blanket, "I can only give you three if you promise to help me with a little demonstration. Come on out, okay? How about it?"

Sal nodded, reluctantly, and shimmied out from under the covering. He stood, shivering and wet, as a curious group of people surrounded him.

"There's a good boy! I'm Wendy, Sunshine, what's your name?"

Sal shook his head, mutely.

"Well, I'll call you Sunshine for now. Here's your first sugarlump." Wendy held out a cube, palm flat. Turning to the crowd, she addressed them all. "Times were, horses were prone to bite fingers. Ponies don't mean to, much as horses didn't, but it's better safe than sorry. Either keep your fingers tight in a fist, or keep them out flat to avoid only counting to nine."

There were chuckles of agreement.

"When you purchase a pony from us, you will get a basic, complementary grooming pack." Wendy help up a stiff brush, "This is an all-purpose brush. Use it to keep your pony's coat clean of dust and grime. We don't really recommend bathing your pony, it will likely use up a month's water ration. For those of you who intend to let your pony inside the house, you may wish to buy them boots. For a higher initial outlay, the convenience of not having to use one of these," and Wendy held up a hook-like device, "to clean the muck out of their hooves is more than worth it. They don't have to wear shoes, but we do recommend it. All our boys here do, because they're out and about almost constantly. Brush your pony in the direction of his coat, notice how the direction changes back here near the haunch?" Wendy gestured between the top of Sal's hindleg and his belly. "Do it right, they will love you for it. Do it wrong, and they'll complain. Most ponies are quite happy to spend an entire day grooming themselves if you let them. Thick, sturdy comb for mane and tail, smoother brush for a glossy finish."

"Umm, miss?" asked a woman. "Aren't newfoals able to take care of themselves? I mean--"

"Ponies are sociable animals, ma'am," replied Wendy. "They need a herd. That's why you and your family will become that herd. They respond best when they have others to groom, and when somebody grooms them. That's right, mums and dads, when you get a pony, your kids will always have somebody ready to brush their hair and clean their teeth."

Wendy laughed at the groans from the children. "It's not all bad, girls! Even the most butch of ponies will appreciate ribbons and bows, so you'll never be lost for a dolly to play dressup with again." She smiled at at least one squeal of happiness. She could see it now, some poor pony was going to be bedecked in so much glitter and gloss that if he turned to fast, he'd leave a lifesize statue.

"The normal structure of a herd is a boss mare, and an alpha stallion leading over a smaller harem of females and juvenile males. Do not be surprised if the lady of the house - and for you same-sex male couples, one of you men - becomes 'boss mare' as it were. The man of the house - and again, don't take this wrong," Wendy giggled at a few blushes around the group, "the man of the house will be looked at as the alpha stallion. For those of you with ponified grandparents, do not be surprised when grandma is boss of your newfoal and grandad becomes a bit protective of his new son. Once again, I will emphasize, you are getting a member of your family. The happiest, most productive, most well-adjusted newfoals are members of your family. Your newfoal will see your kids as his kids, and you as his natural superiors. Reward him for good behaviour, punish gently, and you will have a well-behaved newfoal. Now, we shall discuss pony care more later. Before that, can anybody tell me what's different about this chap than Lucky, that you saw earlier?"

As the group was led into a large hangar, Wendy fielded guesses about colour, size, eyes and tail-length. As she led Sal into a metallic crate-like area, which wasn't big enough for him to move around in, she fed him a second sugarlump and then fastened the pony in.

"Time's up. If you'll look at his, ahem, undercarriage, you'll see he's a stallion. Sunshine here isn't quite ready to be adopted - sorry, if any of you had plans. We do not sell stallions, only geldings. Stallions are considered to be too... independant. It wouldn't do to have a newfoal see himself as the stallion in the family, it could lead to conflicts, and a very unhappy newfoal."

Sal, half-chewing on his sugarlump in a doze, suddenly choked. He realized he was trapped and unable to escape. He was a stallion, he realized. What were they going to do?

"So, for a variety of reasons including an improved temperament, we geld all male newfoals. I know, ladies, some of you wish they offered the same service for your men." Wendy chuckled as a few faces reddened again. "It's a quick, relatively painless operation. Some places use banding, others clamping, whilst we operate. If you purchase in the future direct from another dealer, make sure you are buying a mare or a gelding, and not a stallion, as you will be required in almost all cases by law to see to his operation."

Sal whinnied for help, bumping left, right, backwards and forwards. In response, Wendy pushed a button, moving the bars a little bit closer. Unable to move, Sal merely quivered. True to her word, the woman held out a third sugarlump, and kissed him on the nose.

"Now, we'll leave our little friend here to his fate, and instead we'll go outside and meet the newfoals you'll be riding today. Pony riding is one of the most efficient and enjoyable ways to bond with your newfoal..."

Sal watched her go with wide eyes. Then he glanced around at the bustling barn. Rows upon rows of ponies confronted him. Some were lying down, obviously in pain. Others were standing around and eating, looking bored. Content, but bored. He seemed to be the only full male.

"Ah," said a bright, friendly voice, "another customer." A young man in a spotless white lab-coat walked up, smiling.

Sal's ears drooped.

***

Divinity - Part 4

The
CONVERSION
►Bureau

═════════════════════════════════════
Shattered Worlds
Divinity
Part 4
═════════════════════════════════════
An MLP:FiM Fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

Susan leaned on the fence, arms crossed on the plaswood length, back arched so her chin could rest between them. She turned as footsteps neared, and her face lit up in a smile. "Hey there, Wendy-Oh"

Wendy mock-scowled, narrowing her blue eyes, "I thought you hated being called Susie-B? Cos you're aching for it, sister."

Susan Belafore chuckled, standing up straight. she nodded towards the far side of the paddock, where a butter-yellow gelding was being talked at by a larger bay mare. The former kept shying away, ears back, as if ashamed or - more likely - simply bashful. "That my boy?"

"Uh-huh," Wendy said, running a finger inside her riding boots to straighten her jodhpurs, before blowing a stray tuft of brown hair out of her eyes, "that's Sunshine alright."

"How's he been?"

Wendy chewed the crop she was carrying thoughtfully for a moment, before answering. "He doesn't say much, Susie, but I think he's happy."

"You tried to ride him yet?" asked Susan, her hands on her hips in a defiant gesture of protection for the pony.

"Relax, Susie, you know we take good care of all our boys. We always try to ride them first, you know that. With his colouring, I was hoping some sweet girl would take him. He's been through a lot, he deserves a quiet life."

"His file..."

"I read it," Wendy said, nodding. "Oh don't give me that look," Wendy huffed, as Susan scowled darkly, "I know it's classified. I have my ways, and I owed it to him. I wasn't surprised when he ran for his life the first time they tried to put the tack on him. Took a whole day to coax him out of the stall. S'why I let Nutmeg talk to him about it before today's attempt."

"Your boss mare certainly has a way with them. I wonder what she says?" Susan narrowed her green eyes, scratching at an ear before tucking her flame-red hair behind it.

"I don't know," Wendy said, smiling wistfully, "whenever I ask, they always clam up. I think it's just one of those pony-things they do."

"If they were half as gentle a set of creatures as they are, I'd be worried. Let them have their secrets, Lord knows they've got little else. I don't know how they'd manage without us to look after them."

***

Sal shied his head away from the towering mare. "B-but, t-they--"

"Sunshine look at me," Nutmeg ordered.

"S'not my na--"

"Yes, it is your name. Look at me." The order was given gently, but it was an order. Sal looked up, and found himself drowning in the kind, brown eyes of Mama Nutmeg. "What are you, Sunshine?"

"A pony?" he answered hesitantly.

"Yes, and no. You're more than that. a hundred years ago, Celestia was drawn to this place; she felt the suffering of mankind and made the decision to help them."

"B-but," Sal looked left and right. Mentioning Her name felt... dangerous, somehow. "But isn't she dead? She f-failed, didn't she? She tried to invade, and--"

Nutmeg smiled a sad little smile. "No, love, she's not dead. You wouldn't be here if she was dead. And she didn't fail, either. Look around you, honey, what do you see?"

"Umm..." Sal looked. There was grass, mud, fences, trees, humans and, of course-- "ponies?"

Nutmeg smiled. "Ponies. Her task was harder than she expected, harder than she could have known. But her task stands. You, and I, must bear her burden now. And part of that burden is in taking the bit, and minding the spur."

Sal shivered. He'd never had a good time with sharp objects and bondage, and the last encounter... he was glad he couldn't remember it properly. "But Mama... I don't..."

"Listen, foal," Nutmeg's voice was kind, "some think the bit is a symbol of our slavery, the tool by which the humans control us. I say it is anything but. It is a symbol of our freedom. It is a promise, to all of us ponies, of their dedication to our race. As a faithful mount, Sunshine, you will want for nothing. When you are hungry, they will feed you. When you are tired, you will rest. When you are sick, they will heal you. When you are dirty, they will clean you. And when they are lonely, they will come to you, and you need do nothing but comfort them. Your life, Sunshine, is as a beast of burden. You need never work a day in your life if you understand one simple fact..."

"What is it?"

"That this is your purpose. Your reason for being is to carry their load - their shopping, their children, their worries, their hopes and their dreams. Such a burden, even to a smaller pony such as yourself, is as nothing when you live according to your purpose. Look at me."

Sal looked up from where he had been contemplating the grass and Nutmeg's words.

"I am an earth-pony. Where I walk, the plants listen and the ground answers. You would have been a pegasus, or a unicorn, with your smaller frame, but now we are one people. One herd. And your purpose is Celestia's. You will carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, and you won't feel a thing. Put the bit in your muzzle, Sunshine, and be the best pony you can be. It is freedom, for mankind now serves you."

Sal turned his head, quizzically. "I never thought of it that way."

"I know, and neither do they. Sometimes I wonder what would become of them without us to look after them."

***

Sal stood in the middle of the corral. He shivered. Wendy busied herself around him, murmuring soft words of encouragement. He obediently lifted hoof after hoof as she checked them. Being shod for the first time had been stressful, with all the loud noises and the banging of hammers, and having the shoes hammered into his hooves with nails... it hadn't been fun, but he did have to admit it hadn't hurt. His hooves itched slightly, but at Wendy's ministrations with the hoof pick and brush, she cleared the dirt out.

"There, hooves all clean, honey. Now, here's a blanket to go under the saddle, okay? don't jink about, it's got to go on straight... there. suits you, huh?"

Sal turned around trying to get a look, and earned himself a light smack on the nose.

"I said stay still, silly!"

Sal plastered his ears back against his skull and chomped his teeth, but only earned another smack. he then felt another, thicker pad being placed on his back, up near his withers.

"This goes directly under the saddle, okay? Now hold still..."

Sal did as he was bid, and felt a sudden weight on his shoulders. The saddle draped down his flanks, resting on each side of his back.

"Hmm, yes, quarter-horse proportions. Good, good. Now just let me do up the girth-strap..."

Sal nickered as Wendy reached under his barrel to grab and then fasten the large strap that kept the saddle tight against his body to both sides of the saddle. He felt an elbow in his ribs and huffed out the breath he'd been holding.

"Sorry, Sunshine, can't have you holding your breath. I'd fall off and you'd get blisters if the saddle's not on tight. There," Wendy stood back and walked around the pony slowly, "yeah, that looks good on you. Now, I'm going to put the bridle on, okay? I want you to stand still, open your mouth... that's right... and take the bit in. It'll fit behind your teeth, I promise. It'll feel weird at first, but you'll get used to it, okay my love?"

Sal nodded, but shivered. He danced on his hooves as the headgear was applied, and whimpered in a low nickering neigh as the cold metal bar went between his teeth. He felt his ears being tugged, his mane being pulled, and the lump of metal settled into his muzzle. Then three sets of straps were tightened, one after another. The first went tight around his muzzle, behind and underneath the reins which he now felt placed over his shoulders. Two large metal loops jangled as the second strap that kept his mouth closed was tightened, and then a third, very loose strap was cinched just under his jowels.

"there," said Wendy, a big smile on her face, "aren't you a bonny boy today, huh? Want a look?" She tugged lightly on the reins, and Sal obediently followed her. She showed him to a trough of water. Looking down into it, he saw his reflection. He studied it with awe; red synthetic leather trimmed in silver and black covered his head, and his mane fell over one eye, the bridle around his ears. the saddle was simple, but trim and fetching. He almost looked--

"very handsome. Some lucky family is really going to win big then they buy you, my lovely," said Wendy, stroking him softly. "Before then, though, we need to break you in."

Sal was lead to the middle of a sand-covered square, and the reins were placed upon his back. Then Wendy closed the gate and returned to stand in front of him, just to one side. "Now, when a rider is on you, she will not use her voice; she will use her feet, her legs, her knees and her body to tell you what she wants," Wendy said, pointing to various parts of her anatomy, "and to accentuate that, she will use the reins. The crop here," Wendy showed it to Sal, handle first, "is merely used as a reminder, it is not a weapon and it is not meant to harm, okay? If anyone - ever - beats you with it, you go to Nutmeg or me. When you're out of here, off with whichever family takes you in, the same applies. You are a newfoal, you do not have many rights or responsibilities, but protection under the law is one of them. Abuse is not tolerated, especially not when purchased through our institution, okay?"

Sal nodded his head, Wendy returned the motion. Next, Wendy busied herself with the saddle. As a strange weight dropped to his side, Sal jumped a bit, but the brown-haired woman put a hand on his side gently. "It's okay, it's only a stirrup. Now, hold still, this is going to feel a little weird--"

Sal shuffled his hooves in surprise as the lithe woman put one booted foot in the stirrup, and with a single bound, swung her other leg up and over. In a blink, she was astride him. With a no-nonsense attitude, she worked the other stirrup down and tightened the saddle again.

"There, boy, how is it? Don't try to talk, it'll come out garbled, just nod your head if it's comfortable, then we'll run through some basic exercises, alright?"

Sal nodded tentatively, so Wendy wriggled until she was sitting properly in the saddle. She clicked her teeth once, flicked the reins and also kicked with her heels. Startled, Sal started walking. As he moved, she explained everything she was doing or about to do.

"The proper sound, should a rider wish to indicate movement, is a single click," here Wendy clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth to make a tsscht noise, "for walk, and a double for trot. Plenty of riders will disagree, so you'll have to learn what your owners want, alright? Some will click, sometimes it'll be more of a hiss, but you'll get the message won't you, buddy?"

Sal snorted and nodded his head. Then he felt a prod in his ribs. He jinked away from the sudden pressure, and Wendy expertly pulled the opposite rein.

"That's a turn, honey. Move away from the pressure. Better riders will use just their feet and legs, and more advanced riders will be able to tell you much more than which direction to move in."

Sal felt a sudden boot in his ribs, and he whinnied, breaking into a trot.

"Good boy! Keep trotting now, and we'll give you a bit of a warmup, okay?"

Sal snorted, tossing his head as Wendy began smoothly rising up and down in time with his hoof beats, striking a rhythm which let the ground flow under him as the cadence drew him onwards.

Sal was lead around the field, sometimes by the rein and sometimes by pressure on his side. Tug tug left, push push right, kick- move faster! pull- slow down. As the lesson continued, he felt more and more relaxed, even as his body grew warmer. The wind blew through the field, rustling the leaves on the trees, his hooves sunk easily into the soft sand, and the weight on his back seemed to blend into the background. Strangely, he seemed to blend into the background. Everything was just command and motion, so when he felt a tap to his ribs on the outside, further back, and a brief pressure just behind his inside front leg, breaking into a gallop was obvious. He and his rider moved as one, in a silent dance that defined the arena in ways mere fencing could not. Motion and direction were all that there was, as above them the sun wheeled through the sky.

It came almost as a painful shock when he was asked, wordlessly, to halt. Breathing heavily, despite the cool-down laps he'd been doing, Sal's mind remained filled with the staccato impacts of a hundred thousand head of ponies telling the earth what it was, equine-shaped arterial blood cells of the planet flowing across the exquisitely thin layer of organic matter that covered the planet. He walked, silently, as he was led across the sand-covered arena, through the muddy courtyard to his stall. It was some time after Wendy had removed the bit and bridle, and loosed him from the saddle, that he returned fully. She was brushing him, the stiff bristles weaving through his coat, removing the mud and sweat. It felt almost like he was glowing, as she brushed. One hoof after another was checked and picked clean, and his tail was untangled. Then, as he stood there in his stall, she threw her arms around his neck and buried her head in his mane.

"Thank you," she said, "thank you, Sunshine."

It was then that he understood.

***

Sal dozed, legs locked. He probably would have stayed upright all night, had he not been woken by a small voice calling his name.

"H-hey, Sunshine? Psst!"

Sal blinked, snorted, shook his head, and almost fell over. Then he unlocked his joints and blinked. Somepony had opened the top half of his stall door.

"I, er... I saw you today. In the field. You were beau- I mean... you looked good. Real good. I... well..."

"West?" Sal asked. He stepped forwards. It was, indeed, the purple stallion. He looked almost black in the faint light of the stars, though Sal swore he saw the blush.

"I came to give you this, i-if you'll have it." The pony turned his head and took hold of something he was carrying on his back. It fell open as the pony attempted to hang it on the stall door.

"What is it?" Sal asked as the blanket-shaped object all but fell open onto the dirt.

"I, er, remembered you were cold. And that you don't have one of these. It's a stable blanket. It's mine, but I said I didn't like it so they bought me a new one. But I do like it, but I... like you more."

Sal blinked in the darkness. "What?"

"I..." West Wind dipped his head. "I think you look pretty, and you're... a nice pony. And..."

Sal tilted his head, "You like me?"

"More than--"

"but I'm nobody," Sal replied, stepping backwards, "you barely know me! We met once!"

"I'd like to know you better," West protested.

"They... they cut me..."

West laughed nervously, "It's n-not like I'd be m-making foals with you, you kn--" The stallion turned away. "Look, forget it. I'm sorry for bothering you."

"You really... like me, like me?" Sal asked, jumping forwards, sticking his head out of the stall as he called after West Wind.

West turned, "I think so. I mean, I can't get you out of my head, and... I'd like... a chance, you know?"

"You don't mind I'm..."

"Sunshine, I don't know if you've noticed, but most stallions around here aren't."

"How come you're not..?"

West shook his head, "Not tonight, okay?"

Sal breathed heavily once. then he made his mind up. He'd been wooed before, but always before it had been for only one thing. This felt like... it might be different. "Okay then, you'd better... can you get this door open?"

West grinned, "I got out here, didn't I?" The stallion bent his head and and fiddled with the latch before pulling the door open, then he slowly walked in.

The stall was close, cramped, but the two ponies could fit with just enough room to spare. Sal nosed at the blanket, "you... got me this?"

"Uh huh. Do you like it?"

"I don't know, I can't really see it. I can't really see you."

Sal jumped as he felt a pair of lips tugging at the base of his tail. "I don't need to see you."

Sal trotted around in a circle, moving away from the inquisitive tongue. "You think you can bring me presents, and that's enough?"

"It's not?"

"You think I'm... easy?"

"I think you're beautiful." West blushed, Sal swore he could feel the heat.

"You've only met me once, West."

"But I watch you. I... I've been making up reasons to stay, to watch you."

Sal's heart thumped in his chest. "They called you princess."

"That's why. I... I really do like you. I felt like we clicked, you know?"

Sal stood next to West, in the close, warm darkness, nose to tail. the larger purple stallion leaned against him, gently at first, but then with more force and familiarity. "I... think so." the moment of silence stretched out, akwardly, then Sal broke the ice. "How do we..? I mean, do you want..?"

"I do, if you do, and... don't you know..?"

Sal felt as well as heard the stallion moving around. The stall was indeed cramped, but there would be room enough. "Not... as a pony."

"I hear it's not much different, you know. Similar plumbing, whatever that means."

Sal laughed, his mirth exploding from his muzzle as a sudden weight on his back turned the chuckle into a cough. He set his back legs wider, and his tail... it moved up and to the side, seemingly of its own volition.

"You do know what it means," said West, his voice close to Sal's ear.

"Shut up and do your job," huffed Sal. for an answer, West's teeth closed on his mane and pulled, and the stallion thrust his hips forwards. Sal gasped as he was penetrated, and then there was no more talking, only command and motion.

***

The next day passed slowly for Sal, every task a chore that served only to grind against his anticipation. He was ridden again and he was brushed down again. He ate, he exercised, he was cleaned and he rested. Never had so little taken so long, but in the end, night fell.

When West finally visited him that evening, the stallion brought a bucket full of pony-feed. It wasn't quite the sort of candle-lit dinner Sal remembered hearing about from the public three-vee booths, and the harsh fluorescent strip lighting was less than flattering, but all in all it was the most romantic meal he'd ever had.

The next night they stole up to the racetrack. West beat him to the finish line, but it was Sal who got the reward. It was soon enough after his operation that his drive hadn't faded, so for the first and probably the last time in their burgeoning relationship, Sal knew what it meant to be a stallion.

Days lengthened into weeks, with them meeting almost every night. Mama Nutmeg disapproved, telling Sal that things between him and West could never be, but Sal didn't listen, not even when Nutmeg implored him to reconsider, that one day they would be forced to part. West always promised that things would work out. Sal was content to believe him, but in the back of his mind, there was doubt.

Sal sighed as the two lay together in the close darkness. "I don't know. Mama says I shouldn't see you, that you're bad for me."

"Do I make you feel bad?" West asked, pausing between grooming sessions.

"No, but she says it'll just hurt me when... when I have to go."

"I'd never let anyone hurt you, Sunshine. I'll always be there for you. I'll never let anyone take you away from me," West said, but Sal could detect a note of worry in his voice.

"You promise?"

"I promise. I'll always come for you."

The night drew on, and the two ponies huddled together for warmth. They spoke little, there was little to be said. And for a time, it was perfect.

The next day broke bright and clear, and though the weather was turning colder, it saw Sal continuing his training. He was ridden again and he was brushed down again. He ate, he exercised, he was cleaned and he rested. The routine was well-known, now, and there seemed little that could break it. It was only that evening that Sal realized how wrong he was.

"Oh, my bonny boy," said Wendy as she saw to Sal. She had a strange, sad little smile on her face. She fastened the gifted blanket to his body as the sky grew darker, and Sal looked at her quizzically, wordlessly, but she moved away. Sal breathed in the scent on the blanket. It still smelled of West Wind, and his thoughts once more moved to that evening.

He was dozing happily when there was a noise outside his stable door.

"West?" Sal asked.

"No, foal, it is only Mama Nutmeg." The mare's voice was strained and quiet.

Sal's heart jumped. "W-why..? What's..?"

The latch on his door was opened easily, and the bay mare strode in. "I have something to tell you, my foal. so be strong."

"What is it? Where's West? why are you here?"

"I am here because you need me. West is not here, and that is why you need me. They finally sent him away."

"What? Why?!"

"He is..." in the dark, the voice of the bay mare betrayed her. It was strained, taut, like a bowstring. "He is special. He should never have been here, and you should never have met him."

Sal's heart fell. It fell through his ribs, down to the floor, through the crust of the earth and down into the blackest of pits. "What? B-but... I... he..."

"Child, please, you should forget--"

"No!" Sal shouted, stomping a hoof.

"Then remember what you had. It was brief, but it was good. He cannot be with you any longer. He should not have been with you in the first place. I should have forbidden it. I was foolish. I did not think--"

"He can't be gone! Get out! You're stopping him from being here, aren't you? He's... he's the f-first, the only..." Sal's ears splayed back and he chomped his teeth. "Get out! Get West! I want to see West! If you won't get out, then stay here, but get out my way!"

Sal charged past the bay mare and out into the night, the blanket almost fouling his legs in his haste. He charged through the darkened courtyard, careening off fences and scattering misplaced buckets as he ran. He ran past the blocks of stables where the permanent residents lived, past the blocks for the new arrivals, and out to the special blocks for the sick, the injured... and the special. It was dark, but Sal could smell West all over the paddock. Locating the stallion's stall was foal's play, even through the tears. Opening the lock took but a moment. Charging inside took no time at all.

Waiting for West took all night.

They found him there in the morning, slumped in one corner. He barely raised his head when two stable-hands opened the door and scratched their heads at locating their missing newfoal in another's box. He didn't get up when they asked him. He didn't budge when they offered sugarlumps. He barely blinked when they tried luring him out with food and water. Eventually they closed the door and went away.

Sal lay there, sniffing, eyes dry as he had no more tears to shed. He berated himself for his stupidity, but... he really missed West. he didn't understand why, but it hurt.

"Why..?" he whispered to himself.

"Because," said the soft voice of Nutmeg as the stable door opened, "you love him. Haven't you loved before?"

"No," Sal replied, too despondent even to shake his head. "Why does it hurt so much?"

"Oh, my foal," nutmeg eased herself down next to Sal, and put her head over his neck, "you're a pony now. Ponies love unconditionally, when they find the right one. I just wish it hadn't been this way. You can never have him."

"But why?"

"Because you are a pony, and you do not get to choose."

"I didn't choose to... to fall in love with him!" shouted Sal, bursting finally into fresh tears.

"And now you must forget him and move on."

"I can't," replied Sal, and he realized it was true. the sunshine yellow pony curled up on his side.

"You must, my foal, or you will never leave this stall."

"Then I will stay here. Until he comes for me. He'll come for me, he has to. If he's the one, then he'll come for me!"

"Please, Sunshine..."

"He is all I have, Mama. If he doesn't come for me, I have nothing. I'd rather die."

"Then I will stay with you awhile in case you change your mind."

"I won't."

Sal slept fitfully that night. The next morning, water was once again put before him. He ignored it.

"Please, my foal, won't you drink a little?" Mama Nutmeg asked, hovering outside the stall hopefully.

"I'm not thirsty," Sal replied sullenly, "or hungry."

Nutmeg sighed. "I've seen ponies recover from many things, my darling foal, but a broken heart is not one of them. Please, young one, drink? For me? If you do not, you invite the grim galloper in."

"Let him come," spat Sal.

Mama Nutmeg eased herself into the stall. "You should not say such things, young one. The grim galloper comes easily to those who have lost their heart."

"I don't care," Sal replied. "I just want to see West again."

"They say," said Nutmeg, lying down next to Sal, "that he is a handsome stallion. Some speak of the pale mare, maybe she is one and the same. The grim galloper is as handsome as they come. He speaks with a soft voice, and promises to take you to the Summer Lands, where it is always warm, and there is plenty of grass, and sunshine, and room for everypony. I sometimes imagine it must be what Equestria looked like. If the grim galloper comes for you," Nutmeg whispered, "promise me you'll say no?"

"Leave me alone," Sal replied, turning away.

Night fell, and the sun rose. Shadows grew long, then short, then long again. Sal barely moved. An ear twitched, when hooves moved outside, but he could tell the sound of West's steps.

On the third day, the fever rose. His breathing was harsh and shallow. They tried to force him to drink, but he merely choked and spat it up. His joints ached and his heart thudded in his chest, and the world spun.

"Why didn't you come for me?" moaned Sal, his words falling into the dirt. He had been betrayed by the one pony he thought would never lie to him, and so with a heavy heart, Sal lay still and waited to die.

It had all been so unfair! Born unwanted, grown unwanted. Used and abused, and finally cast off like trash. He wasn't fit for anything, not even as a pony. It had probably been a trick, some... long, painful trick. Or a joke. That was it, his life had been a joke, and the punchline... well, it hadn't been very funny.

Sal cried. His spirit broke, and he cried. "Why didn't you come for me?" he whispered, voice hoarse. "You promised." Sal closed his eyes, and slept.

There was motion next to him, and a weight leant against him. "I'm here, Sunshine."

Sal tried to turn, tried to lift his head, but he was too weak, and the stable was dark. It didn't matter, he knew who it was. Ponies could survive many things, but not a broken heart. "Mama said you'd come for me. You've come to take me away, haven't you?"

"I have," replied the voice. "I've come to take you with me."

"Will there be fields? And sunshine?"

"There will be fields that stretch on forever, Sunshine, if you just promise to come with me."

"I promise. I promised once before, but--"

"Sshhh, that's in the past now. Here, won't you drink this for me?"

Sal bent his head, but a gentle hoof pushed him down to the floor again. A muzzle met his, and a trickle of cold water flowed across his tongue. The muzzle disappeared, and came back full. He drank again, then asked, "Will it... make me forget?"

"It will quench your thirst," the voice said patiently. "Can you drink more?"

"If it will make the pain go away."

"I promise you it will."

Sal kicked and rolled, and awkwardly got onto his stomach. He'd imagined being dead would be easier than this. The world still spun, but there was a bucket in front of him. His parched lips were cracked and bloody, and the cool water stung, but he drank.

"Can you eat?"

"Must I?"

"A little, for me?"

Sal grudgingly ate a few mouthfuls of warm porridge, but then his remaining strength left him. "I think that's it, sir. I'm ready. Take me with you."

"Rest first, love."

Sal dropped his head to the ground, closed his eyes, and slept.

When Sal awoke, his head hurt. He was still breathing, and felt mildly cheated. There was also a pony leaning against him. In the pitch black, he had no idea who it was. He imagined the Grim Galloper would glow, or something.

"Sunshine?" asked the voice.

"That's not my name," Sal huffed.

"It's the only name I've ever known you by," the other pony replied, sounding slightly hurt..

Sal stiffened. His head pounded, his joints ached and he shook like a newborn foal, but he was alive and with enough of his wits to put two and two together. "West?"

"Sunshine! You're okay?" the other pony's voice brightened.

"You came back for me?" Sal asked, incredulous. He could hear the grin as the pony spoke again.

"I promised you I would come back for you. I've come to take you with me. I promised!"

"B-but... how? Mama Nutmeg said I'd n-never s-see you again--"

"I told you, love," West kissed him, grooming along his mane, "I'm special."

***

The young woman with the flame-red hair and green eyes watched silently as two ponies chased each other around a large paddock. The sudden piercing ring of a pushbike's bell broke the spell, and Susan turned to see Wendy pulling up next to her.

"Hey there, Susie-B. It took a little bit of work to track you down, but it was worth it. You shouldn't try to hide my patients from me."

Susan smiled, "It's not my idea, but the powers that be do get a little protective over their little projects, even ones that don't turn out quite the way they wanted."

"So I was right, then?"

Susan nodded, "One hundred percent Equestrian. West Wind over there is one of a select few natural born-and-bred Equestrian ponies. I can't read the rest of his file, so goodness knows who they think he's related to, but it's fun to guess."

"Especially with his racing nom de plume, yes?" Wendy's eyes were bright.

"Especially then. I think they were disappointed he was gay, but maybe they figure his barn door will swing both ways? I don't know, but our boy stole his heart, so there wasn't much else to do."

"Tell me about it. I've seen ponies survive many things, but a broken heart isn't one of them. And now they're together," Wendy said, "their 'Divinity' is racing faster than ever."

"It seems love really does put a spring in your step. At least if you're a pony."

A Rose By Any Other Name - Part 1

The
CONVERSION
►Bureau

═════════════════════════════════════
Shattered Worlds
A Rose By Any Other Name
Part 1
═════════════════════════════════════
An MLP:FiM Fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

Rose winced as the fist came down on the table. It slammed heavily into the gingam style tablecloth, making the cups and saucers jump and clatter. There was a set of whirring noises as the hoover hid itself in terror in the shoe-closet and the maintenance-spiders scuttled into their charging-webs. The venetian blinds folded open slightly, the golden sunlight behind them intensifying as House tried to calm things down.

"Rose! You have burned my toast again." Master growled. He spat out the piece of toast he'd taken a bite of and almost threw the plate across the table. The light purple mare cowered before him.

"I-I-I'm s-sorry, sir, I just—" Her voice was almost a whisper, wavering with fear and shame.

"You know I like my toast lightly browned! Lightly! Does this look anything remotely like lightly browned to you? And the coffee, what is this muck? I like Arabian blend, this is... what is this?"

"I-i-it's new, s-sir, I thought you might l-like—"

"Well I don't. At all. Throw it away and make—" Stephen sighed, crumpling up his newspaper in disgust and throwing it into the recycle-hopper as he turned his head to listen to a noise only he could hear. With a smooth grinding noise, the electro-print was shredded, digested and re-absorbed back into the House supply of component Makerbot chemicals. "Forget it," Stephen shouted, "I'm wanted in-phys. I'll grab a coffee on the way. House!"

"Yes, sir?" answered House, polite and mild-mannered as ever.

"Bring me my fucking car."

"Yes, sir. Your favourite podcasts are downloaded, an order for your usual double-espresso has been placed and will be freshly made upon your transit through commer-zone, and your daily schedule has been updated. In-transit entertainment is the documentary you missed last night on the Barrier War. House is happy to serve."

"Good. Fucking ponies, what fucking good are they?" muttered Stephen as he stormed out.

"I'm s-sorry, sir, I tried—" Rose winced as the front door slammed shut. Her ears folded flat against her head. Master was angry with her again. She'd tried so hard to get it all right! And when Master was angry, Mistress was surely angry too.

"ROSE!" came the predictable shout from upstairs. Rose winced again, and galloped to see to Mistress.

Rose had only been living with the Robertsons for a month, and already things were turning from bad to worse. They'd purchased a pony to do the housework, help with the chores, and—

"What do you call this?" Mistress asked, tapping a foot.

Rose hung her head, sitting down on her haunches. She tried to make herself as small as possible as Mistress pointed into the childrens' bedroom.

"What's wrong, Mistress?" Rose peered into the childrens' domicile. They were sleeping still, cuddled up together on the pile of cushions where Rose had left them, tucked up nice and warm. The floor was free of toys, the blinds were open just enough to let in the morning sunlight - Rose didn't know what she'd done wrong, and that worry ate at her tummy, making it ache. Their clean clothes had been put away, their dirty clothes were in the hamper and their diapers had been changed a scant half-hour ago. She'd not forgotten to use the right plastic covers on the cloth diapers Mistress preferred they use, either, she was sure the colours were right...

"The children have separate beds for a reason, Rose. Why on Earth do you insist on putting them in not only the same bed, but dragging your own bedding in here too?!"

Rose's heart sank, she'd thought it a wonderful solution. "I... they were f-frightened of the th-thunder, and—"

"Well don't. I will not have them grovelling about on the floor like a... like a common pony."

Rose winced again, "I'm sorry, Mistress!" Rose started wailing, eyes filling with tears.

"Oh for goodness sake, you useless... stop crying! Stop it at once, I say! You'll wake the children!"

Rose choked back a sob, gulping and hiccuping.

Martha shook her head. "I just don't know, Rose. I don't know if this is working."

Rose started sobbing again, though she did her best to hide it by cowering behind her mane.

"I am expected in the office, we will talk about this when I get back. Fetch the shopping, see to the laundry and clean up, the den is a pigsty and we're having guests over. I expect my two darlings fed, dressed and exercised and everything to be ship-shape when I return. Is that clear?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Rose, nodding. She shivered as Mistress stalked away, calling for House to fetch her own car. Rose slumped as the front door slammed shut. Unbidden, tears returned to her eyes and fell onto the carpet. "I'm so useless," wailed Rose, wiping a hoof across her nose. Softly, a hoover bumped into her fetlocks, gently consoling her.

"Equine Rose is not a useless pony," said a voice. Rose looked up, it was the pony in the mirror again. The walls of the hallway lit up and changed one by one, and then the hallway was gone, replaced by the grassy field she had seen a couple of times before. It only ever appeared when Master and Mistress were out.

"I am though! I t-try s-so hard but Master and Mistress are always so, so angry," she replied.

The pony in the field shook its head, "don't you mind them. They just need to get used to you, is all."

"You're used to me," said Rose, smiling slightly. She started walking down the hallway carpet which was for some reason now in the middle of the field, away from the door which led to the childrens' room. She so much wanted to go to the field, but she couldn't. Every time she'd tried, she'd bumped her nose on the wall that wasn't there. It made her sad.

"I am House, Equine Rose, I am not a pony," said the pony, gently.

"But... then why do you look like a pony? Why can't I come to you? I..." Rose stopped walking, fell to her haunches and hung her head. "I miss my friends so much. I'm so lonely."

"I know, Equine Rose. This is why I have created this avatar for you. Your happiness quotient is important to me, and your joy levels are remarkably low. This is not a good status for equine members of staff."

"You don't want me here either?" asked Rose, a lump in her throat.

The pony in the field on the other side of the wall that wasn't there paused for a moment, then it walked up as close as it could. "Equine Rose, would you like to visit a special room with me? For a few minutes?"

"Why?" Rose looked up

"Come this way, Equine Rose. Follow my avatar."

"I still think Avatar is a funny name for a pony, but okay."

Rose followed the pony along the carpet as it trotted along the field. She stuck to the carpet, and trotted to the stairs. The sudden height made her giddy, as the field somehow dropped down as she approached the top step. The grass was a long way below her now, but she had been taught all about how to get up and down stairs at the training centre. She was a good pony, she was a clever pony, and stairs were no match for her.

"Why is the outdoors inside, again?" Rose asked curiously as she reached the tiled walkway where the basement used to be.

"Master and Mistress have installed reactive nanopaint, and I am able to project any set of images onto them. Follow me, please."

Rose nodded dumbly, she didn't understand what 'reactive nanopaint' was, but it sounded important and clever. She'd been told at the centre to expect to have to learn a lot of things at her new home, with her new family. Before her was a door. She opened it with a push of her hoof, and walked in.

As the door swung shut, the room which had been dark suddenly came to life, and she gasped. With a strange, dizzying flickering, the room expanded and then disappeared. Moments later, and the room contained the whole world. Bright sunlight streamed down from above her, and a warm breeze played through her mane as Rose left the door behind and found herself standing in the middle of a meadow on a warm summer's day.

"Wha-? How?"

"Welcome, Rose. This is the panic room. A fully reactive nanosculpted protected space within the main dwelling, built for emergency purposes, and currently serving your requirements."

"A what?"

"A room," replied the pony in front of her, as it gently prodded her nose, "which can be shaped to show almost anything."

"But it's so big!" Rose said, and then she placed a hoof to her nose, "And you touched me! How?"

"Rose, this room is not big, it only appears so. You are free to move around, but do not move too quickly as your mass is larger than tolerances were originally designed for."

"The room is not big? But—"

"It is a painting. Which moves. And you can touch it. And," House paused, "it can do this."

With a thundering of hooves, a herd of ponies ran past. They curved and ran around the startled pony. They nuzzled each other and bumped up against her. With tears streaming down her muzzle, Rose turned to the pony that had been in the mirror, "You have a whole herd of ponies in the basement?"

The pony called House shook its head, "No, Equine Rose, but it has the next best thing. Would you like to come here every day?"

Rose sighed, "I don't think Master and Mistress would want me to. I should p-pack my things. They'll send me back to the center. Ponies that come back to the center are so sad, now I know why."

"Equine Rose, projections preclude this occurrence. Further, my computations show an increase in happiness complicit with socialization. Equine Rose will now do the daily shopping. During this task, you are required to spend at least twenty minutes discoursing with other ponies. Subjects suggested include, but are not limited to, the weather, sports, local news, politics—"

"You're ordering me to talk with other ponies?"

"Affirmative, Equine Rose. Do not worry, I have sorted out your daily routine and have increased the efficiency of your route by thirty percent. I can guarantee Mistress and Master will have a surplus of praise for your efforts this day. You just need to start with the shopping, House will look after the young master and mistress until you get back. Their lessons shall begin shortly."

Rose sighed as the room went dark and the doorway reappeared. Sadly, she stepped through it. "Wall-pony? House-pony?" she called, mournfully.

"House is here, Equine Rose." The voice floated from the ether.

"Don't leave me, House Pony?"

"House will not leave you, Equine Rose."

Rose walked carefully up the stairs. House Pony had disappeared, and the walls were back where they belonged. The kitchen vacuum cleaner extended a hose and idly removed some dust from her flanks. It chirped at her as it inspected all four legs and thoughtfully sucked at her tail for a few seconds, then it chirped again and zoomed away. It disappeared underneath the living-room sofa as it searched for dust-bunnies through the verdant shag fields of the den.

As Rose entered the kitchen again, she picked up the plate that Master had left on the table. Guiltily, for she truly was rather hungry, she ate the remains of the slice. The fridge lit up, and House Pony appeared on it. "Your shopping list has been transferred to your saddlebags, Rose. Please do not forget your halter as it is required for entry. I have not been permitted to readmit your person without it."

"N-no, I won't forget." Rose said, mentally adding again - she'd been forced to wait for one very long, wet afternoon the first day. It was good that House Pony had reminded her. House Pony was clever, it knew everything. It even knew they needed more milk, eggs, vat-bacon, soya steaks and protein bars.

"Rose is also requested to eat. Protein is important, and you will be unable to function adequately without nourishment."

A bowl of poni-chow slid out from a cupboard and was deposited on the floor. It was followed by a bowl of water. Immediately, the predatory hoover stalked the pony, surreptitiously cleaning under the kitchen table in wait of stray crumbs of pony food. A spider-bot clattered down from the top of the wall-mounted cupboards and skittered over to the hoover, which hid under a chair as the shadow crossed it. Snagging the recalcitrant hoover with two of its pincer-like legs, the maintenance robot checked over the hoover for satisfactory condition, bleeped once and then skittered under the sink to inspect the plumbing. The hoover whirred loudly in protest and patrolled backwards and forwards in front of the kitchen sink incase the spider-bot made a mess, and also to stake claim to its territory. Floor belonged to Hoover, and no trumped up maintenance bot was going to challenge it.

Oblivious, Rose munched her way through her breakfast. It was relatively tasteless, but she didn't mind. It kept her tummy full and made her feel better. Once finished, she put the bowls dutifully in the dishwasher along with the cups and plates from the table. The dishwasher swung closed and a happy face lit up on the front of it as the cleaning cycle began.

"You're welcome," said Rose to the machine. As she walked out of the kitchen, two more spider-bots skittered over to her and ran up her legs. She'd caused quite a scene the first time she'd seen them, dropping the plates she'd been carrying, but after cleaning up the mess she'd gotten used to it. One busied itself with her mane, the other her tail as she trotted out towards the garage. Ponies were not allowed to use the front door, she had to use the back entrance, through the garage. The robots made short work of grooming her mane and tail, and leaped off.

"Th-Thank you, spiders," said Rose politely, gulping. They waved their front pincers at her and skittered off, fighting over the rights to clean the ceiling. As she entered the garage, the lights flickered on. The car maintenance robot slid over with her saddlebags and waited patiently until Rose had eased on her halter. As she fastened the last clip with a deft twist of her hoof, the world once again came alive in the strange way it always did. The car maintenance robot was radiating happiness as it fastened the saddlebags to her, and distantly the dishwasher was utterly pleased to be grazing on the food-stains left on the cups, plates and her bowls within it. She could even 'hear' the hoover as it cautiously snuck into Master's study to inspect for rogue pieces of detritus.

"Thank you, sir," said Rose to the mechanic-bot as it trundled away to check the spare-parts inventory. The lights sang happily as they lit the garage, though one of them was grumbling about needing to be replaced. It was strange, but with the halter on, the world was so... different. It was if everything was alive, and was talking to her. She rather liked it, but Master and Mistress didn't like her wearing the halter inside.

Stepping outside, trotting down the driveway and through the main gates, the feeling of being pulled in a certain direction hit her like it always did. she obeyed the silent command and headed down the road at a brisk trot. Traffic was light and there weren't many cars or carriages about. Most people couldn't afford cars, but there was often a lot of pony-based traffic. There was always a large number of ponies out on their own, with many that were tacked up and being ridden or pulling carriages. Rose broke into a canter and she picked up speed as she moved towards town, coming back with laden bags would limit her speed and she enjoyed running whilst she could.

She was on a shopping-run, so she was surprised when the silent pull lead her past the market and instead to a pony-catered cafe and maintenance stop. She pulled to a halt just outside the roped-off courtyard with a quizzical look on her face.

"Hello there my lovely, can I help you?" asked a rotund woman with freckles and a smile almost bigger than her face. The woman unclipped the thick rope and stepped through, kneeling down to address Rose.

"I, er, don't know Ma'am... I was going shopping and—"

"Come come my dearie, let Auntie Sally have a look, hmm?" The woman waved a hand over Rose's head and raised an eyebrow. "Ah, the pretty pony has a need of new shoes? Come on in, then, Sally will get you seen to."

"But, I..."

"No, no, Auntie Sally was told quite clearly, Miss Rose needs new shoes." The woman tutted and ushered the bemused pony in, where she was shown to a large, comfortable raised platform. "Put yourself on here my lovely and rest your tummy down. Then lift your hooves when I say so."

Rose did as she was told, whickering slightly as the saddlebags were removed and placed to one side.

"Hello," said a voice. Rose turned her head to see a ginger gelding next to her being groomed by a couple of young girls.

"Umm, hello..." Rose blushed.

"You're new here, aren't you? You're pretty. Who does your mane?"

"The, umm, spiders..."

"I get my foals to do mine. They're very good."

Rose stifled a gasp as she obediently lifted a hoof. "You have foals?"

"Well, uh," the gelding blushed, "they're really the Mistress' and Master's but I... I foal-sit them and..."

Rose smiled weakly. "I... foalsit my owners' children and..." Rose turned away, pretending to pay attention as Sally first cleaned and then applied nanogel to one hoof after another, before affixing plastic shoes.

"You like to pretend they're yours too? Mine call me 'Unc'," the pony said, smiling indulgently.

"M-mine c-call me Nana, b-but Master and M-Mistress don't—"

"You just wait, they'll come around."

"House Pony tells me the same thing."

"House Pony?"

"He lives in the walls."

"Oh!" The gelding grinned, "you mean the aye-eye. It means it's a robot. Kind of. Barry, my eldest foal, he's good with puter-machines, knows all sorts. Still can't find his socks though."

Rose giggled, "Mary and William aren't allowed a puter of their own yet, they have to use House until they're bigger. Oh, I hope they're okay—" Rose stiffened, her muzzle making a wide 'O' of shock. "Auntie Sally! My foals! Something's wrong!"

"What's that, dearie?" Aunt Sally looked up from her work as she applied the last shoe, a scowl crossing her features.

"I... h-have a very bad feeling!" Rose squirmed, the pull from her halter now felt like bugs were crawling all over her tail, making her coat stand on end. She could hear the House in distress, and its silent keening set her teeth on edge. The waves of despair from her saddlebags was palpable. They would only calm down when she finally had them on her back again.

"Let ol' Auntie Sally have a look," the woman said, and she waved a hand over Rose's halter again. "Oh, my! Your central AI is registering a general alarm, something is wrong! Ol' Sally is calling the police for you, don't you fret!"

"No! I have to go! My foals!" Rose scrambled out of the reclining couch and went from standing to a full gallop, leaping clear over the rope with her saddle-bags in her muzzle, flakes shedding from her new shoes as she barrelled up the road.

"Stop! No, Miss Rose! Oh, Sally, what has that poor pony got herself into..."

A Rose By Any Other Name - Part 2

The
CONVERSION
►Bureau

═════════════════════════════════════
Shattered Worlds
A Rose By Any Other Name
Part 2
═════════════════════════════════════
An MLP:FiM Fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

Rose stood outside her owners' mansion, huffing and puffing as she recovered from her pell-mell dash through the streets. her new boots were scuffed and worn and sweat drenched her sides, steaming. She dropped the saddlebags and placed them under a bush, doing her best to comfort them. The poor things were traumatized, echoing distress calls that rang in her head that caused her teeth to hurt and her mane to stand on end. Worse, the chatter from House had gone disturbingly quiet. It made it easier to think, but to actually be alone in her own head was worrying.

The gates swung open easily when Rose hesitantly pushed them with a hoof. They'd been broken somehow, and didn't seem to be listening when she asked them how they were. The gates were supposed to be locked, they were always locked to strangers. Something was very wrong. There was nothing for it. Rose steeled herself, and moved cautiously up the driveway, her hooves crunching on the pristine gravel the only sound other than the thudding of her heart.

The first strange thing she noticed was the beaten up orange car parked outside the mansion, the front doors and boot of which were open and the engine was off. Poking her head in, Rose discovered It was an old key-operated device, with no 'puter of its own. It belonged in a museum, or a scrap heap. The thought occurred to her that that was where the occupants had got it. She reached in, breathing ragged and fast, and snatched the keys with a deft twist of her mouth. She spat them out and ground her hooves against them, then shrunk back in fear. The house had so many windows, any one of them could contain whoever had arrived in the archaic vehicle. The windows suddenly seemed like mercilessly-staring eyes, and Rose shook in terror, doing her best to hide behind some bushes.

Breathing heavily, from fear instead of exhaustion this time, she calmed herself. Nobody had come charging out, so they hadn't seen her. She could wait and do nothing now, she told herself, and it would have been enough. She shook her head, angrily. What sort of pony was she? A mare, or a mouse? She would stride right in there and show whoever it was what for! ...And then she would ask them to leave. Politely.

A squeak escaped her lips as her new-found brashness failed her. Her mind was made up, though: she would go in. Maybe they were gone, she told herself, and it would all be nothing. Yeah, she would probably be laughing about this later in the afternoon...

With ears flat against her skull, she trotted hesitantly up to the steps, eyeing the front door. It was open. The front door was never open. She was also never allowed through it, but desperate times called for desperate measures. She gulped and trotted up the steps, nosing the door wider.

"H-hello?" she called. The lights were off, and the walls were dark, with scattered blocks of black and white appearing in random places. Something was very wrong indeed. The waves of emotion she'd been feeling from home when she was at the pony-pedi spa had vanished, replaced with random bursts of mixed feelings which made no coherent sense. She could barely hear the robots, and when she could, they were crying out with fear and almost entirely lost, like a piece of them was gone. A big piece, a house-shaped piece.

"House? A-avatar? House-Pony?" Rose's voice echoed oddly, despite how quietly she uttered the words. The walls next to her exploded with static, and then suddenly cleared. Words appeared in bright white, repeated at regular intervals, and she struggled to read them. "re... starting?" she said to herself, brow furrowing in thought as she entered the kitchen.

The kitchen was a mess, with drawers open and crockery smashed on the floor. The hoover was cowering under the sink, and the repair spiders were nowhere to be seen. It all seemed so senseless, what had happened here? It was like the intruders were looking for something, but had no idea what. She left the kitchen no wiser and, treading carefully, poked her head down towards the panic room. That was empty too. Surely, they had gone.

Sudden noises above her made her duck under the stairs. Whoever it was really was still here. Footsteps turned into rhythmic, heavy pounding. Then a door shattered, and the previously-muffled sobs of the children turned into screams of fright. Rose gave a gasp, and leaped out from her cover. Her foals!

Not thinking, not hesitating, Rose galloped up the stairs, slamming bodily into one dark form in her haste. Whoever it was, was sent flying, to crash against the wall further down the corridor. Not sparing a glance for the intruder, Rose barrelled into the childrens' bedroom. Another intruder stood holding an arm back, ready to strike at William, a hand around Mary's face to keep her quiet.

"What the fuck," a male voice said, "a fuckin' pony?"

Rose blinked. Rose saw red. Nopony, but nopony was allowed to hurt her foals. With a most un-ponylike screaming neigh of rage, Rose reared up on her hind legs, bounded forwards and body-slammed the intruder. Kicking viciously with her forehooves, the man was thrown backwards against the window, which shattered. He screamed for a split second before a metallic crunch and a shattering sound indicated he had struck the abandoned vehicle. Mary, who had been thrown clear, started wailing, and William joined her. Rose broke out of her stupor at the sound, racing to comfort the pair. She gathered them up, kissing them and nuzzling them. "It's alright now, it's alri-"

"Nana! Bad man!" William shrieked, pointing.

Rose turned her head, and instinctively kicked out as a shape closed in. Her hooves connected, and there was a sickening crunch of bone at the impact. The second man was thrown clear again, he rebounded off the far wall and cursed. Rose wasn't about to let him have a third chance, and she whirled about and chased after him. On thunderous hooves of justice, she trampled over the man, striking down as hard as she could. Snorting, she turned around and pawed the hallway carpet before charging once more towards him. Ducking her head low and bringing it up high, she flung the man along the hallway and down the stairs.

The man bounced down each step like a ragdoll, and came to a complete and fatal stop at the bottom. Rose fell to her knees, suddenly tired. She blinked at a strange feeling of warmth in her chest. Looking down, something seemed very wrong. There was a wooden handle poking out of her sternum.

Rose blinked at it for a few seconds, then realized she couldn't stand up. "Oh," she said simply, and fell sideways.

The fall down the stairs didn't hurt, much. She slid more than tumbled, as she was rather big. She landed heavily on the still form at the bottom, which cushioned her fall. It was getting hard to breathe though, so she had to think fast.

"William! Mary!" she called breathlessly. "Nana... Nana has hurt herself, loves... you have to... you have to come here."

"Nana owie?" asked a meek voice at the top of the stairs. It was Mary, peeking over the top step.

"Will-Will help Nana. Come, Ree-Ree!" said William, bossily, as his head appeared next to his sister's. He stood upright and walked down the stairs, one step at a time like a big boy. It made Rose smile, even through the light-headedness. For her part, the younger Mary turned around and came down feet and butt first, crawling. Rose picked herself up as best she could, stumbling against the walls. She slowly but steadily llimped down the hallway, towards the basement,... and the panic room. All around her the wallscreens were flashing odd colours, but the lights had come back on and she could hear the robots waking up. She prayed to Celestia that it meant what she thought it meant.

"Come now, my darling foals... we have to go on... a magical adventure. It's down here."

"Nuh-uh," said William, shaking his head, having caught up to Rose. He held onto her mane with a tight grip.

Rose coughed, stumbling, "Please, William. Mary's not scared, are you love?"

Thankfully Mary, who stood on Rose's other side, shook her head. At that bold-faced lie, William stood up straighter and walked down the basement stairs all by himself. It was everything Rose could do to stay upright, but she grit her teeth and made it as she followed. The door to the panic room swung open at the touch of a hoof, and Rose pushed Mary and William through it, before joining them. Then she closed the door as best as she could, and leaned against it.

Slumping down, she resigned herself to just breathing and waiting. In the dark, Mary and William started sniffling with fear. Silently, Rose pleaded with all her heart... and finally her wishes were answered. With a loud clunk, the door locked and the room came to life. The dark room lit up, and then faded away to reveal a meadow at the edge of a square of floor. Blurrily at first, a shape trotted towards them.

Looking up, squinting as her vision faltered, Rose smiled. "House Pony!" she gasped.

"I apologize, Equine Rose. My systems were compromised and my eigenstate had to be recovered and re-initialised. I was unable to prevent your injury. I am here now though, House is fully operational. All safeguards are in place, the aborted general alert has been resent and now all that is left is to see to your needs."

"Can I... can I see the ponies again?" Rose asked feebly. She coughed, and noted with resignation the blood on the floor.

"Of course, though before that, is there anything else?"

"House is a pony?" asked Mary, mouth wide as the pony-shaped simulacrum trotted closer.

The pony-shaped avatar nodded, seemingly quite anxious and insistent, "I am House. I am here to fulfill every need. What is needed? Human medical services have been summoned, equine medical services have been summoned, but it is not clear they will be in time to prevent bodyloss."

Rose frowned. There was something she wasn't getting. Some little tidbit... then it struck her. "William, love, what do you want House to do? He can't do it unless you order him. Tell him... tell him what you want for me, from him."

"Help Nana!" shouted William, glaring at the House Pony as he bent to shake Rose, who was fading fast.

Avatar the House-Pony smiled. "Your wish is my command, young master William. Overriding safeties, downloading equine bio-schematics. Uploading medical knowledge to house repair robots. Synthesizing: medical tools, painkillers, blood plasma, thread. Syncing repair robots, summoning first aid and trauma units. Stand back, please..."

Rose started to laugh, but it hurt. She had to be dreaming; repair robots were swarming around her brandishing sharp little plastic knives, pincers and thread. As darkness claimed her, her only regret was that she hadn't seen the ponies in the basement one last time.

***

Wherever she was, thought Rose, it was very white. The light was bright and the breeze was warm, and she seemed to be floating. It almost felt like a cloud. Maybe it was. She'd been told back at the Centre that in olden times, ponies could fly and sleep on clouds. Maybe she was dead, and she was on a cloud, like those pictures the humans had of a place they called 'heaven'. She was warm, she didn't hurt... in fact she couldn't feel much of anything. She had to be dead.

She started to cry. She would miss them all so much, even Master and Mistress.

"Hey, hey now," came a soft female voice, "you're alright now, everything's going to be alright."

It had to be one of those humans' angels, reasoned Rose. Maybe these days, ponies went to human heaven too?

"Rose?" asked a strangely familiar female voice, "What's wrong?"

"I m-miss my humans. I'll never see them again."

"You miss us? Even after we--"

Rose blinked, and then struggled to sit up as her foggy mind started to clear. In moments, nurses and orderlies descended upon her, urging and ordering her to be calm. Slowly, her struggling ceased, and she began to take stock of her surroundings instead. There were two child-sized lumps, nestled between her fore- and hind-legs, and two people sat on either side of what turned out to be a bed. The two lumps smelled strangely familiar, even through the tube sticking out of one nostril.

"William?" she asked, "Mary? Mistress Martha? Master Stephen? Y-you're so... and I'm... I'm not dead? And you're... are y-you going to s-send me away?"

Stephen and Martha stiffened, and looked down at their children, who had woken up at the commotion and had proceeded to hug - gently, at the insistence of the orderlies - Rose around her barrel.

"You're..." Stephen began stiffly, as he and Martha looked at each other.

"We're sorry," said Martha, motioning for her husband to be quiet. He clenched his teeth, but nodded. "We've treated you just awfully. You didn't deserve that, from any of us. We... we bought... no, we brought you in to help our family. And we treated you like dirt. And then, when those awful, terrible, evil people tried to kidnap our darlings, you were there."

"Indeed," Stephen added, "we've had to do a lot of soul-searching, Rose, both of us. And we didn't like what we found there. Can you..." Stephen cleared his throat, as if unsure of his words, "can you forgive us?"

"I-I'm sorry I burned the toast, and-and I'm s-sorry I dragged the children onto the floor, and--"

Martha and Stephen shared a look, and Martha laughed. Even Stephen, normally so dour, had his mouth turned up in the hint of a smile. Turning carefully, Rose looked from one to the other, and realized they were blushing.

"I burn the toast far more than you Rose, and... it's only toast."

"And you have no idea how hard it has been to get the little ones to sleep, and then up in the mornings, without you. And don't even mention the sleepness nights when they wake up, scared of the dark."

"But that's all behind us now, Rose. We've sorted out all your stuff for the move."

Rose's heart fell. "You are getting rid of me!"

"What?" asked Stephen, his mouth falling open.

"I've been so useless..."

"We've sorted out your things, Rose, as you are moving rooms." Martha glared at Stephen. "From now on, you will be sleeping with the children, at least until they are older. They can even sleep on the floor with you, just as long as they at least start in their beds. You may keep your former room as a dressing room, if you like. You can share it with the rest of the staff if you wish, but you do not have to."

"You're moving me? Wait, th-the rest of the staff?"

Martha nodded, clapping her hands with glee, "Oh yes! There's Belle and Sweet Pepper, they're an item, one does gardening and the other cooks, and then there's Lacey, he's just a darling around the house. Stewie and I sold the cars." Martha glared at Stephen, who fiddled with his jacket awkwardly. "That was the first and last time we will be held prisoner in our own vehicles. It's the hansom from now on, with a special one just for you to take the children to daycare in, when you're better of course. We're all waiting, the children especially, for you to come home. We'll feel much happier, and it's... just not the same without you. Please come back, Rose?"

Even Stephen looked contrite.

"Please?" Martha asked again. Then she leaned closer, "I hear there's this soap-opera with ponies in it, and they partially use Equestrian, would you--"

"You mean Fetlocks in the Fall?" Rose asked, putting a hoof to her mouth. "Oh, I love that one! I used to watch it all the time at the centre!"

"Then it's a deal. Ready to come home, Rose?"

"Yes, Mistress!"

"Nana Wose all better?" asked Mary, eyes wide and hopeful.

"Not yet, Poppet, but I will be. I promise."

Millennia of Sky

The
CONVERSION
►Bureau

═════════════════════════════════════
Shattered Worlds
Millennia of Sky
═════════════════════════════════════
An MLP:FiM Fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

Aching pumps, shuddering with every cycle, finally ground to a halt. The noise wasn't defeaning, but the sheer presence of tonnes of specialized machinery failing at distinct point after distinct point was palpable. In the deserted complex, lights flickered as whirring dynamos spun down and sought to distribute suddenly-excess load across failsafes which hadn't ever been used.

Somewhere, in an empty control room, a single red light lit up. Then another, and another, and another. Flash after flash lit up the confined space in a sea of red and amber. Finally, the control system let it be known that the worst of all possible occurences had taken place. Outside the confines, on high fences ringed by miles of curled razor-wire, warnings lights lit up and began to spin as deep mournful sirens wailed.

Deep below, on a pedestal of rock, lay a chest. At first glance it was quite a simple chest, nothing ornate. It was obviously made for one purpose - to keep whatever was inside it on the inside. It was a whitish-grey, though the tubes leading from it were filled with a deep red liquid. The same warm, sticky liquid pooled around the pedestal, dripping from the tubes where the seals were failing. The distant, now-silent pumps had been attached to these tubes, and had been responsible for siphoning off the red liquid, and spiriting it away to where it was measured out, processed, managed and supplied to the few, specialized places that had a need of it.

Now, of course, the pumps were silent, and the red liquid was building up. It was small, at first. The drips became a steady stream, and they in turn became spurts, and soon to rivulets of red. The pool beneath the chest - never small - grew and grew until it formed a large puddle and then, charitably, a small lake. Pressure built up behind the tubes, and could not be denied. Inevitably, the latches popped. The seal broke, and the lid of the chest burst open. Outwards poured a sticky, red stream. It steamed, like hot breath on a winter's morning, but the heat did not dissipate.

For a while, there was silence. The lid remained open, though the torrent had subsided. Slowly, however, the lid raised. Millimeter by millimeter, centimetre by centimeter, until it was clear that something inside was growing, pushing the lid further and further up. Weight shifted, until the box fell from the pedestal, disgorging it's contents into the red puddle. The box fell, the impetus of it's fall arrested by the sizeable puddle, splashing away, to leave a shapeless mass of flesh and bone writhing.

The mass moved. It squirmed, it wriggled, it shook. Most of all, it grew. It was an odd lump of flesh; two ear-like protuberances, matted and swollen from being submerged in the red liquid, two wildly-staring orbs that looked like eyes, two large cavernous nostrils, and all of this attached to an elongated skull-like frame, over which was stretched white fur, tipped with a long, pearly-white horn.

As the mass grew, it changed, it firmed out. It solidified. A neck, first extending like some macabre scaffolding, then filling out with sinew, muscle and skin, draped from the back of the head. A chest appeared, a backbone, legs, a tail. Inside this grisly spectre of modern art, specks of flesh blossomed into being like fungus. Almost as an afterthought, a plump, roughly spherical organ began to beat in a regular rhythym. It was a heart. When the lungs and vocal chords were both reformed, the creature screamed.

It screamed long, it screamed loud, and it screamed painfully. The scream itself, born of an aeon of darkness, loss, loneliness and torture, hurt in ways which were barely describable, even to the creature itself, which had withstood an eternity of oblivion. Even as flesh regrew, even as wings sprouted feathers, even as every outward sign of injury melted away like morning mist, the creature screamed.

Celestia, last princess of Equestria, ruling goddess of the day, regent of the sun, though she barely remembered her own name, got to her hooves, and screamed. She spread her wings, stretched out her head, and screamed.

And she screamed.

She looked up, and saw a box, only larger than before. Boxes. She would stand no more boxes. She would bear no more cages. She would suffer no more chains. Her primal scream of pain and loss thundered through the air between here and the rock, and the rock melted under the assault. With a single great flap of her wings, she rose upwards. Caring not for mere mass and matter between her and the open sky, she pummeled her way upwards.

Rock, metal, earth - none of it would stand between her and her goal. Moments later, her great white wings slammed their way up through the ground, to emerge into burning bright sunlight and blue skies.

For a singular moment, a single moment of peace, she was free. Then euphoria gave way to anger, and anger became rage. She had been sequestered away in darkness and eternal pain, cut off from her children, denied her liberty and denied even the simple dignity of her own body. It had been an outrage, a travesty, and an insult beyond measure.

She had only one need, retribution. All her rage, all her pain, it all demanded an answer.

Feathers burning with the heat of a thousand suns, Celestia forged through the skies on wings of flame to descend upon her enemies, mankind, who had sought to strike her down.

***

The Custodian stretched as he stood up. Breathing deeply, he seated his yen and finally allowed his eyes to open. All things within balance, he told himself. Lifting an aged staff into his hands, the man smiled softly to nothing in particular, and strode from his simple wooden dwelling.

His tasks were close at hand, as they always were. Oracle knew best where he would need to be.

"Little One," he called out, "tell me of your problems."

Sweet Blossom looked up, pouting. "It's this dumb weather tower, it won't listen to me!"

The Custodian chuckled to himself, "are you sure you have the right words?"

"I do! I know I do!"

"Sing them to me, then!" The Custodian laughed, good naturedly, as Sweet Blossom sang a few bars of her favourite nursery-rhymes.

"Rain, rain, go away, come again another day!" Sweet Blossom looked up, but the clouds still resolutely swirled, promising water from the sky. She tried again. "It's raining, it's pouring, the old man's snoring!" Nothing. Not a drop, either.

"Hmm, oh my, yes. Come then, weather tower, away with you now." The Custodian beat his staff against the ground twice, and waited as, grudgingly, the vast crystal monolith sank into the ground.

Sweet Blossom's muzzle fell open. "Where did it go?"

"Back into the Earth, dear Sweet Blossom, where all things must go in the end, even you and I. But look! A fresh weather tower springs forth, even now." The Custodian pointed, and what first appeared to be a tiny little hillock, soon burst into an open mound, from which the sharp protrusion of a crystal weather-tower could be seen. In moments, the diminutive spike had blossomed into a full-blown edifice, towering above both man and pony alike.

"Now try, my dear Sweet Blossom. Sing to it with your heart, and it shall answer. The weather will always be thus for you ponies."

"Well, alright then." Sweet Blossom closed her eyes, and sang again. "We're all going on a summer holiday!" As she opened her eyes, a wide smile filled her muzzle. The grey, forboding clouds fled, leaving nothing but the sun behind. "Yay! You did it!"

The Custodian shook his head, tousling the mane of the little pony. "No, my dear, you did it. I shall be off now, but call again if you need me." He bowed, then straightened and turned around, Oracle nudging him towards his next task for the day. He smiled inwardly as the pony behind him began singing to herself. He heard the ground sigh as it parted beneath her plough, and the seeds rejoice at their new home as she planted her crop. It was a simple affair - carrots, onions, potatoes - but she did it with such relish and gusto.

Suddenly, The Custodian found himself stopping. He turned his head to the side as he felt a presence before him. Oracle couldn't see it properly, which was very odd, but could feel it's effects. As his steps slowed, he realized he could feel it, too. Heat, warmth.

"Hello?" he called. He blinked, he could feel the heat now, it was like a massive bonfire. "Is anyone there?"

"Human," hissed a voice. The malice and anger in such a voice startled him.

"I... madame? Forgive me, I know not who you are."

"You do not know me, human? You do not recall the goddess you imprisoned, the deity you trapped, deep within the earth, in the endless dark?"

The Custodian stumbled, shocked. He leaned against his staff, and then fell back onto his backside. "I do remember," he said, "They called you Celestia."

"They call me, human! Call! Do you not see what is plainly in front of your face?" The voice was haughty, angry, spitting mad.

Sadly, The Custodian shook his head. "Madame, I am blind."

There was a moment of silence, and then the heat dissipated, almost at once. "What?"

"I am blind, your highness. I have little need of sight, but I regret to inform you this body is blind."

"You... are blind? I would have my rage dashed against a blind cripple?" The voice grew harsh and angry again. "Fetch me another of your kind, cripple. I would have them see me before I end their miserable existence!"

The Custodian stood up and dusted himself off, reaching a hand inside his robes. Gently, he took out four objects. They had been given to him a long time ago, and he had thought that he would never see their use. Smiling softly and indulgently to himself, he caressed the strange devices as he placed them at the hooves of the interloper. "Your Highness, I can fetch no others. There are no others. I am the last."

"The... last?"

"The last human. Before you, kneels the last of mankind." The Custodian dropped to one knee. "And my life is yours, but I beg of you nothing but one final request - hear me out."

There was a snort, but the voice echoed through his ears, "Go on."

The Custodian touched the first object. "This is a diamond, from Equestria. Shaped through our tools, it is nevertheless Equestrian through and through. It is the repository of thirty billion souls, ten billion of which exist without any backups. We give you this, the most precious thing we have, ourselves, for you to do with as you please."

There was an outraged silence, then Celestia spoke. "Thirty... billion?"

"Within this crystal, run circuits powered by sunlight, computation and storage rolled into one. Enough exists in this one crystal for a thousand earths, and each one populated by the data-ghost of a human. They... live as in a dream, your Highness. And at your will, they will cease to be. Crush them beneath your hooves, as is your right."

"Crush? But..."

"Long ago, you were wronged. They have decided that this is to be their penance. A life for a life. We know not how far the devastation reached in your world, but it is likely to be far. We give a fair trade."

"Enough! To talk so easily of slaughter! What else have you, human?"

"Two flasks, one of potion, one of poison. Should you not wish to end my life by your own hooves, I may end it for you. If I take the poison, it will eat me away, and I shall turn to ash."

"You would..?" The voice sounded horrified.

"I understand that... you may not understand the weight of lives in the gem. So my life, the life of the last of humans, is yours to do with as you please."

"And the final object?"

The Custodian lifted the small, round object carefully. "A pearl unlike any other. Millennia ago, terrible weapons burned a world. Where these weapons touched, matter collapsed into nothing. In the blink of an eye, the field these weapons produced ceased to exist, but that brief moment was enough. Total collapse of the signature waveform followed, annihilating all matter everywhere within that mode of existence. This pearl contains all that is left of the gateway between here and there. We... could not open it again, but we could protect it. It is now yours. I await your decision, your Highness.

The Custodian bowed his head, listening only to the hoof-beats of the pony as she stomped back and forth. Finally, she spoke again. "What happened?"

"Your Highness," The Custodian replied hesitantly, "A thousand years passed, or more, since you were imprisoned. We... grew. We flourished, and we did it with your children. Your children... became our children. And our children outgrew their cradle." The Custodian pointed skywards, where he could feel another source of heat. "Do you see that cloud? It looks so very, very far away?"

"I do."

"At the centre of that cloud lies a star, drained of many heavier elements. Surrounding it is a swarm of smart-matter, rocks that can think. Our children dismantled the inner solar system, prising apart the planets for raw materials. They devoured the outer rings, the gas giants, and the rockier planets. But... they kept the Earth. They sent it all the way out here, to the Oort cloud, the very edge of the system, with a new, artificial sun to warm it, whilst they populated the inner spaces. Out there, in that cloud, lives a society a billion, billion times larger than that which lies spread out upon the face of this planet. They are what humanity became, but they are not human. With me dies what used to be the race which wronged you."

The Custodian heard the pony turn, and heard her wings flutter. She sighed. "I sought to burn you, and your world... but I cannot."

"This world... we gave it to your children a long time ago. Only I remain, servant to their needs. With your freedom, planned by Mankind's children once they were beyond your reach, I serve no purpose. For three hundred years, I have walked the green fields and dark forests of this Earth. Now, all ten thousand of my alternate selves have breathed their last, as we have shared words."

"What?!"

"I am... truly the last. Everything they were, I now am. Ten thousand mornings..." The Custodian was silent. "I saw through their eyes, and this planet is beautiful. Now, it is yours. From pole to pole stretches an endless expanse of life, a world holding six billion ponies, tens of millions of griffon, millions of diamond dogs, an unknown number of dragons, and enough terran-based life to support them all for a million millennia."

A hoof pushed a vial forwards. "Drink, then, and accept your fate."

Trembling, The Custodian lifted the proffered vial, unstoppered it, and drank. As he fell over and felt sleep claiming him, he was grateful atleast that his end would not be painful.

***

The ground beneath his feet was grassy, and wet. Custodian blinked. Slowly, shapes began to form. Those shapes resolved themselves into blades of grass. It took him a moment to work out what he was seeing. Then it struck him, he was seeing.

"Are you going to lie there all day?" asked a regal voice.

Custodian looked up to see a huge pony, much larger than he remembered from his other bodies. She was large, white, with a horn and wings. Gingerly, he got to his feet. "I... must apologize. I had not thought to be doing much walking, once I was dead."

"Well we all have to die sometime, but that's no reason to take it lying down. Come with me."

"As you wish, your Highness." Custodian got to his feet, and began plodding after the large mare.

What seemed like several hours later, Celestia grew tired of waiting for him, and she grabbed him in her teeth and hauled him onto her back. Moments later, and the creature had sprung into the air.

Custodian gasped as the ground fell away, to reveal an expanse of empty greenery. There weren't many trees or bushes, and there seemed to be no birds or animals. Looking up, he couldn't spot the sun. It made sense, he guessed, that there would be no sun in the land of the dead. He hadn't really expected to travel through the land of the dead with Celestia, though. He hadn't really expected to travel through it at all.

As they travelled, he thought he heard hoofbeats, thunderous staccato impacts of countless ponies, but he could see none of them. When they landed at an abandoned, broken-down city built into a mountain, the feeling of hooves and motion surrounded him even heavier, but still there was nothing he could see. He kept spotting movement out of the corner of his eyes, but he chalked that up to not having had sight before entry into this strange netherworld.

Dutifully, he trotted after the alicorn, through door after door, until they reached an empty throne room. Countless stained-glass friezes surrounded what was an otherwise unremarkable, run-down room. He could tell, though, that it had once been opulent beyond belief. The carpet was bare, if whole. The thrones were intact, even the curtains held the promise of gloss. Celestia stood to one side, and gestured. From somewhere up above, a perfect golden shaft of sunlight spilled down into the room, illuminating a single spot before two thrones - one golden, the other a dark royal blue..

"This is now your last task, human. Walk into the light."

"And... I will die?"

"Walk into the circle of light, and the last human shall be no more."

"Then, may I just ask that with this one deed, you forgive us." Custodian steeled himself, and stepped forwards.

As the light hit him, he had expected it to burn. It didn't. It felt warm, comfortable even. In moments, he found himself standing in the middle of the light, on all fours. He hadn't really noticed the conversion, but as he thought about it, he realized he was no longer humanoform. He was shaped like a pony. He seemed to have, in fact, the body of a pony, perfect in every way. He could twitch his ears, swish his tail, and his nostrils flared wide with barely a thought.

"Celestia?" he asked, "I... thought you said I was going to die?"

"Well you will," the alicorn replied airily, "eventually. I didn't say it would be today."

"But... but..." the surprised ex-human turned around and around, finally turning back to see Celestia had walked right up to the edge of the shaft of sunlight. She leaned closer.

"Gotcha."

***

The pearl was tiny, and yet it contained within it everything that millions of ponies and their world had become.

The hoof that came down upon it was vast, but nowhere as near as vast as the infinities barely constrained inside the relatively mundane-looking jewel.

The pearl split open, and from it poured forth the universe. A roiling mass of energy swirled chaotically around the shattered remains of the rock-like object for a brief moment, before swelling and growing, exploding outwards in a soundless, ceaseless mesh. Where it passed, the ground stretched and swelled. Rocks became mountains, puddles became oceans, trees became forests and bushes became savannah. As the animals passed through, they shook themselves as if having woken from slumber, and then they looked around with new eyes, and a new understanding.

And where the ponies passed, they changed beyond measure. Their coats became brighter, their eyes sparkled, their manes shone. For some, marks appeared on their flanks, for others, they sprouted wings, or horns. And all through this tempest of change, one creature stood firm and tall, and when the rupture turned in upon itself and sealed the human world away, Celestia threw back her head, and sang.

Two worlds, one a dream that was not a dream, another the waking expanse of the before and after, burst into colour and light, and billions upon billions of hooves converged upon their goddess as the sun rose once more.

There would be day, and there would be night. There would be the sun, and there would be the moon. On her chest hung a jewel, the promise of thirty billion futures, and at her hooves stretched her people.

She would need to heal, but she had time.

They all had time.

They had millennia, and they had their sky.

Divinity - Part 3

The
CONVERSION
►Bureau

═════════════════════════════════════
Shattered Worlds
Divinity
Part 3
═════════════════════════════════════
An MLP:FiM Fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

Sal was feeling wonderful. He'd been shaking with fear when the man in the white coat had first stuck the huge needle in his neck to administer a dose of some clear liquid, but that part had been over in ten seconds flat. Less than a minute later, and the world was suddenly full of happiness and joy. He felt warm and tingly all over, and everypony was so friendly and happy. He felt the urge to giggle, and ended up neighing loudly in a braying laugh that echoed across the enclosed area. He swayed gently in the non-existent breeze and sighed as he fell first to his knees, and then to his side. He brayed softly as the world went sideways. Flailing his hooves about, he continued giggling as he swam across the floor. It was all so amusing, it really was. Hooves, tail, ears... they all moved! Swish, swish! The floor tasted fantastic too. Kind of gritty, and metallic. Oh! And there were more nice people. He chewed their ankles a little; they tasted of sweat and coffee. And nose-smacks. He wasn't sure if nose-smacks had a taste, but he tasted them anyway.

"Yup, this one's 'bout ready for ya, doc," said one of the orderlies, standing up straight.

Brian Kehan, the vet, kneeled down carefully, pulling back the eyelids and peering in each of Sal's eyes. "He's conscious, but out of it. Just keep him still for me, they usually don't like it when I give them the local anesthetic."

"Same thing every time, doc."

Brian fished another syringe out of his breast pocket, uncapped it, and expertly and efficiently filled it full of more clear liquid from a small bottle. He then busied himself near Sal's rear end. The pony whined, jerking twice in succession. "There we go... Susan?" Brian called, turning to a red-haired woman, "fetch me the trolley, would you? And some number... one thread."

Sal couldn't move. He was being sat on by two large human males whilst a third was doing... whatever he was doing in the area that had hurt just a second ago. Strangely, it didn't hurt at all now. To his endless amusement, a roughly baseball-sized strangely-coloured orb was placed on a plastic sheet just in front of him. It was a dull reddish pink and seemed to be oozing red stuff. It was swiftly joined by another. Then there was the curious sensation of tugging down between his legs. He could feel it, sort of, but... not from that area itself, more by proxy.

Brian straightened and moved to a nearby sink to wash his hands. As he applied the antiseptic soap, he scrubbed his fingers carefully. "I stitched him up rather than leave the wound open, so we'll need to keep an eye on him. We may need to drain it, but everything went well. You can get off him now, let him up. Just watch him. Put him next to Princess, it'll keep them both out of trouble."

Sal was still feeling rather amused and strangely light on his hooves as he was half-dragged and half-walked across the enclosure to an out-of-the-way holding pen. He gratefully slumped to his side in the pile of hay, giggling more as the world spun. Two concerned human faces looked down at him as they closed the gate. He waggled a hoof at them and the two men shrugged then left, leaving a parting, "have fun with Princess!" over their shoulders.

Sal looked upwards. At least, he was pretty sure it was up. A purple muzzle looked down at him. It snorted.

"Who are you?" the purple pony asked.

Sal's tongue hung out of his mouth limply, flapping around wordlessly.

"Don't say much, do you?" The purple pony snorted, "Newfoals." The pony sat down on his haunches. "I see they got to ya, huh?" Sal just giggled and kicked a foreleg weakly. "Yeah, yeah, I know. Makes you silly as a filly, that stuff. Ponies call me Westwind. West for short. What's your name?"

Sal was silent for a moment. "E'ryone calls me Sunshine," whispered Sal, slurring his words around an uncooperative tongue, suddenly bashful. He sucked on a hoof and tried to hide behind his mane.

"I can see why," replied West. He rolled his eyes as 'Sunshine' just lay there looking confused. "You haven't looked in a mirror, have you?"

Sal shook his head. Then he shivered.

West cleared his own mane out of his eyes with a snort. "You're cold. They should've given you a blanket. Here, lemme—" West broke off, his words turning to incoherent mumbling as the pony bit at the latch of his stall and maneuvered it with a jiggle of his head. The gate swung open and West stepped out. He shook himself and then opened Sal's gate before trotting in and turning around. He shut the gate carefully and then wriggled himself down next to the bright yellow pony. They were nose-to-tail, and West leaned up against Sal, placing his head on the other pony's rump. "Might as well get comfy, you'll be in here for a day or two."

West yawned, and Sal followed suit. Growing warmer, with the comforting bulk of another pony next to him, Sal's head drooped to the hay-covered floor. A few minutes later, he was snoring.

Sal came awake slowly, still drowsy. He felt... surprisingly good. He lay there, letting his brain catch up with things. He was lying on a comfortable bed of what seemed to be straw, and surrounded by the musky scent of pony. He yawned and opened his eyes, and was confronted with a view of the underside of a male pony. He stiffened, embarrassed.

"Hey there, Sunshine, back with us?" whispered a voice.

"W-West?" replied Sal, in an equally low whisper.

"Uh huh. You still tired, hon?"

"I, er..." Sunshine blinked. He was very close. "Kinda."

"Sleep then. It's night-time and I'm too tired to get up. 'Sides, it's cold and I'm comfy."

Sal listened as West's breathing grew heavier and slower, fading to a rumbling baritone snore. He daren't move. Besides, it wasn't as if the view was... bad, but there was something bothering him about it, he just couldn't put his hoof on it. Trying not to stare, Sal sighed deeply, closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

Sal's ear was wet. It was wet, and being chewed. He kicked a hoof to get whatever-it-was off.

"Up you get, buddy. You've got to stand up, They're gonna wanna check you out," said a male voice.

Sal grumbled something and tried to turn over.

"If you don't, you're going to wish you had. I've gotta go, and this stall is pretty small."

Sal opened his eyes, and looked up to see two pendulous orbs and a long, thick organ which seemed overly and impressively large as it hung down almost to his muzzle. Sal scooted backwards and winced, a very private place under his tail hurting like the blazes. Gritting his teeth, Sal got to his hooves. He wrinkled his muzzle as the purple pony relieved himself, and he shook his own mane and tail out.

"Feeling better? Less wonky?"

Sal shook his head.

"Still not talking, huh?" West chewed Sal's mane for a few moments before breaking off. "Sunshine? You... wanna groom me? I'm kind of a mess, and a pony of my station shouldn't look quite so... windswept."

Sal blinked, looking confused.

"Groom? You know? With your teeth? I could ask the humans to do it, but it's nicer if a pony does it... surely you know that? No? I... I guess not. You don't have to you know, just a thought." West looked despondent.

"Don't know how," whispered Sal.

"Just do what I do," grinned West, and he started chewing Sal's mane again. Sal shivered with delight at the feeling. He'd never really liked it before when, after sex, some of his clients had stroked his hair. They'd always had clammy fingers and bad breath, but he'd moaned and cooed in all the right places. This, though... this was entirely different. Almost as if in a daze, he felt himself methodically chewing and pulling at the other pony's coat and mane, yanking free old hairs and rough strands. He groomed West's sides, withers and back, moving along the pony's barrel to his haunches. Then he stiffened as West's muzzle moved to his tail.

"Whuf? foo goffa—" West spat out Sal's tail, "you've gotta do the tail too."

Sal jinked as West's teeth and tongue nipped at his rear end. Nickering with surprise, Sal was saved by the arrival of two orderlies and the vet. As the stall door was opened, Sal was lead out by way of having an orange halter expertly fastened over his head. A rope was clipped to his left side and tugged gently. The unexpected action made him instinctively follow, and he was lead around in a circle, the vet watching his steps.

"Good, good. He's a bit stiff, but that's hardly surprising. Let's have a look at you, boy," the vet said. Brian fished in his pockets for one of those brown sugary lumps. Sal's ears pricked up, all by themselves. Brian chuckled, "I know you guys love these. Listen, I've got to take a look at my work, okay? Don't want you getting sick."

Sal was offered the treat, which he found his mouth watering over. As far as jobs for food went, this was one of his easiest. He whinnied a little as the vet prodded him, but the vet soon stood up and wiped his hands off.

"Yup, you're good. Turn him out with the rest, let him socialize a little. I'll check up again tonight, we'll shoe him later I guess." Brian turned to Westwind, "Now, you were saying you had some tooth spikes?"

Westwind snorted, "I expected you yesterday," said the pony, "I'm not used to being kept waiting."

Brian raised an eyebrow, "Well I'm sorry about that. Maybe I can offer you a sugarlump?"

"You think you can bribe away your lackadaisical attitude to my healthcare?" West flicked his tail, snorting derisiviely.

"Yup." Brian grinned, knowingly, holding out a cube.

"Three or I'm telling."

"One now, one after. IF you behave."

Westwind pouted as Sal was lead out. "Fine. Tyrant."

Sal found himself lead past rows of stalls, through a large door, and out into bright autumn sunlight. It hurt his eyes and turned away, but a swift, hard tug on his halter snapped him back.

"Come on, this way Sunshine."

The feel of cool, wet mud on his hooves made him shiver slightly, and his stomach rumbled with hunger. A large wooden gate was unlatched and pulled open, the rope was unclipped from the ring in his halter near his cheek, and a sudden slap to his rump sent him galloping into the field. By the time Sal had collected himself and turned around, the gate had been shut

"Go on, go play. Shoo!"

The orderly waved his hands at the pony, Sal just trotted up and down the fence. What was he supposed to do? He was hungry and out in the open, the first was relatively normal but the second meant trouble. He backed away from the human, ears flat against his skull as realization dawned. He was trapped, out in the field! He was trapped out where anypony could see him! He had to... he had to get away! Sal ran for it, but didn't get very far. Less than ten seconds later, he found himself approaching a group of ponies. Unknown people were usually trouble, so he skidded to a halt. For a few moments, two feelings warred within. Unknown people were trouble. Unknown people could hit and kick, or throw things at him, or drug him and drag him away, or just beat him up and steal all his stuff. It was this last fact which made him think. He didn't actually have anything any more. Except the halter, and he wasn't sure whether that was 'his' or not. He was wearing it, so it probably was. It counted, right? With a thought that stopped him dead in his tracks, he realized he'd let them take it off him if they wanted to. He shook his head, that wasn't normal, not for him. He started trotting again, letting his mind wander. What else wasn't normal? What else was he doing which was out of the ordinary? Another four-hoofed full-stop later, and he realized that a wandering mind was only the first. The fact he was still heading towards the ponies in front of him was the second. He should be scared, said one portion of his mind, he should be fearful and afraid and cautious and hide and observe and stay safe and keep on the outskirts and edges and--

"H-hello," he found himself saying, shyly. He flicked his ears nervously as a large, bay mare shouldered her way through the crowd.

"Newfoal," she stated. Her nostrils flared as she inspected him, circling deliberately.

"I, uh, y-yes--"

"They call you Sunshine." Another statement. "I'm Nutmeg, honey, and you're safe now. Whoever you were, whatever you did--"

"I didn't do--"

"Shhh," Nutmeg comforted him, stepping closer. "I said it, I meant it. Whatever you did, whoever you were, it's over now. Come with Mama Nutmeg, Sunshine. Come meet your new family."

"My new-? Mama-?" Sunshine turned his head from the expectant crowd of ponies, back to the bay mare who dwarfed his slender frame as she stood next to him.

Tossing her head, neighing affirmatively, she shepherded the hesitant pony to the herd, where he was soon surrounded by inquisitive, friendly noses and a torrent of breaths.