Dead Space: Awakening

"Wha... wha! Ah!" Isaac barely managed to sound out as he collapsed into the hospital bed.

"Isaac!" Fluttershy said as she went up to his side.

Isaac began to turn his hoof over to examine it as he panicked internally.

'No, I-I can't... No! This can't be real anymore!' the Engineer thought to himself.

The nearby heart monitor began to beep far more erratically as Isaac's pony form writhed in the bed. Isaac held his hoof to his chest, trying to find where his heart had been relocated to as he hyperventilated. Thankfully, he found it. The cardiac muscle was located in a similar place according to what he felt, and it was somewhat relieving to Isaac to know that he still had a beating heart.

However, that did little to distract him from the fact that he's now a completely different species.

"Isaac, deep breaths," Fluttershy said, trying to manage damage control. "Just calm down."

Isaac couldn't keep calm, however, no matter how much effort Fluttershy put into her caressing of his short mane. He could feel the heartbeat incline further and further, until...

Blackness encompassed his vision as Isaac felt himself slip away into the all-too-familiar embrace of unconsciousness.

\\\//////

Fluttershy's heart froze when she felt Isaac go limp in her grasp.

"N-no," she whispered.

"He's perfectly fine, Fluttershy," Discord assured her as he floated downward. "Just passed out from shock, but knowing him, it'll only be for a few moments before he's back up."

Fluttershy slowly released her hold on the transformed man-to-pony as she examined the scars of his new body.

Isaac, for some reason, had come back as an Earth Pony, and she could see the worn muscle underneath his thin sheen of fur. His left foreleg, however, was still cut as his arm was during... There were many signs of lacerations, a burn on the base of his neck, and a few patches of fur falling off of him.

Looking over to the side of the room, Fluttershy saw X-rays of Isaac's insides with chicken scratches of doctors' notes. Some of the more notable ones were those that were circling joints and small organs that didn't look natural, as though they were morphed inside of his body. There were some that trailed off of his digestive track that resembled small bats, and one that hung off of his stomach, which seemed to filter something into his stomach directly.

"I know, it's disgusting, isn't it?" Discord said.

Fluttershy looked to Isaac.

"He's alive because of it," she stated. "I... I don't care."

"But don't ponies always say, 'it's what's on the inside that counts'?" Discord pointed out. "It's why I've hollowed myself out, you know," he said as he pretended to play his midsection as a xylophone.

Fluttershy approached Isaac's sleeping form as the heart monitor slowed down as his chest rose and fell at a slower rate.

"I still can't believe it took so long for him to come back," Discord said. "What's it been, almost two years?"

"So much has happened since then," she noted. "Tirek, Starlight... the Changelings... I can't believe it. He's back, though."

"Indeed he is," Discord said. "And I feel as though this is the dawn of a new era."