Pony Onby FlittyChaptersNo RegretsThe Princess of RoadworksSteep Steps and Slippery SurfacesNo RegretsIt was a normal day in the Williams household. The parents, Matt and Samantha, were lazing on the couch as their youngest son and daughter, Amy and Stanley, sat watching some new cartoon on the medium-sized television screen. Katie and Alex, the two teenagers of the house, were nowhere to be found. Katie was probably out with friends again, most likely playing that new Mario game around Sarah's house. Alex was upstairs as usual, if Matt guessed right. Working on a new experiment, or making something artistic, depending on his mood. Speaking of Alex, a thump from outside the room signaled his abrupt, and probably short, arrival downstairs. Samantha winced and hissed lightly, but Matt held onto her shoulder and she calmed immediately. "Relax, he knows better than anyone what his body can take." Samantha hummed an agreement, but the effect was ruined by her scowl. "I know, but what if he slips or something? I hate having to rush him to-" "Just getting some food and I'll be gone," came Alex's voice from the kitchen behind them, cutting off his mother's rants before they truly began. Matt sent a silent but thankful prayer to the heavens. "Mind getting drinks for the kids, champ?" he returned quickly, then opened his mouth again as his wife did the same. "Also stop jumping down the stairs, your mother's brain can't handle the extra blood-flow." "No promises about the jumping, but I'll get the drinks." Matt knew that was the best he'd get from his son after so many conversations on the same matter, so he just sighed audibly and waited. Five minutes later saw the grey-haired, grey-eyed seventeen-year-old on his back in the living room, drinks supported on a plate by his raised leg. "Sorry, I tripped or something. Help?" Samantha groaned and picked up two of the drinks while Matt grabbed the other two. Alex sighed and lowered his leg, wincing slightly as it clicked, though he made no other sign of noticing the noise. His mother's eyes narrowed dangerously. "Alex, it's getting worse. You should be upstairs, not-" "Wait, what's getting worse?" the boy interrupted innocently, breaking the momentum of the woman's anger. Unfortunately, that backfired as she saw through the ruse with practiced ease. "Your attitude, for one, young man! This isn't just a regular illness that you can shrug off in a few days, It's going to affect your entire life, and might even end it!" The brunette shook off her husband's arm and stood up, grappling Alex under the arms and hauling him onto his feet with surprising grace. "You're getting lighter each day, your limbs keeping locking up and clicking, your hair's going grey already, I just d-don't understand why!" Alex rolled his eyes as she burst into tears, pulling her into a hug and awkwardly patting her on the back. "Relax, mum, I've almost got the cure figured out, alright? I just need a few days to perfect it, that's all." Samantha nodded blearily through her tears, smiling sadly at her first born, her worries somewhat abated by the calming words. The words felt hollow to Alex, though. He'd been working on a cure, but the illness was nothing like he'd ever seen. He was a solver of scientific mysteries, and he was about to be murdered by an illness that disobeyed every single science he'd studied. Hah, what a way to go. Whatever it was couldn't even be called a disease. It wasn't caused by anything apparent, rather it seemed like his body was tearing itself apart, trying to adapt to some change in the surroundings. Except nothing had changed in the surroundings. Except... "I'll be going now, I just had an epiphany." With that, Alex let go of his mother, nodded to his father with a smirk and left the room. Boom. "I'm okay!" Alex groaned as he searched his kid sister's bedroom for... Aha, there it was. That strange gem he'd found months ago and given to Amy. He hadn't seen it before, but that had been just before his joints had started clicking. Honestly, he should really remember to think in all four dimensions. Thinking backwards in time had been the answer to so many issues, like why the universe wasn't made of antimatter (answer:the universe was actually a bi-verse), that it was ridiculous for him to not have thought back before his symptoms had started showing. The gem was pure white and actually quite large, about as big as those plastic tubs of ketchup you get at fast food places. It felt strangely light though, not even as heavy as a marble, but the way the light reflected told him that it wasn't made of glass. He stumbled to his bedroom slash office, cursing his failing body all the way, and tested it under a quark microscope of his own design. "Hmm. Not made from quarks, that's a start. Plenty of particles all over the place, smaller than quarks and not as regular. Don't seem to be forming any structures, so probably stable when isolated." Still looking at the screen, Alex hesitantly tapped the gem with a pencil, raising an eyebrow when the particles rippled in reply. Strangely enough, the material returned to its previous arrangement in a matter of seconds. Four hours of study later, Alex threw down his pencil. There was no way to properly interact with the material, which meant no way to reverse whatever it had caused. He was back to square one, with only twenty minutes until midnight. According to his best guesses, let left him with just over four hours until his inevitable death. Four hours to wrap things up. Alex picked up a pen and began writing once more. ARTICLE I: Funeral Expenses. Gliding down the steep staircase despite the aching of his legs, Alex headed to the front door with as little noise as possible. Unfortunately, his father had ears like... something with good ears. He wasn't really feeling up to using similes at the moment. "Hey champ, you going out?" Alex sighed, glad that his father didn't seem to oppose his leaving. "Yeah, just dropping off a letter to another doctor, I wanna get another opinion on the finished cure." His dad replied in a stern tone. "Just remember to take-" "-the wheelchair, I know dad, I've been doing it for weeks now!" What the rest of his family didn't know was that Alex literally couldn't stand for more than five minutes by this point. He really felt terrible for not letting them know how bad the illness really was, but they'd understand when he was gone, right? ... Right? The dying teen picked up the light-weight wheelchair and headed outside, closing the door behind him before collapsing into the seat. In his hands were three pieces of paper. Two were letters, and one was his final will. As Alex lay on his back in the dark, he reflected on his life, or what little he could actually remember. It was mostly just snippets - Accidentally shouting too loud in maths class; sitting in his aunt Tracy's house with Katie, waiting for his mother to come back with twin babies; coming home with a massive grin and a scar on his elbow from a bike accident - that sort of thing. It was a nostalgic moment, but it also passed far too quickly before he ran out of memories. What happened to the ice skating trip? The jet skiing? Those times he just sat downstairs with the rest of his family, watching his favourite movie of all time, WALL-E? Where had all those memories gone? Oh right. He'd forgotten. It was strange to think that he'd ever done anything other than sit in his bedroom, tinkering with microscopes and test tubes, figuring out the basic mechanics of a bi-verse that loved to prove him wrong. Maybe the illness had been Fate's way of saying, 'Get your ass downstairs and bond with your family!' But no, he'd wasted those precious weeks searching for a cure. Cancer had taken over seventy years to just guarantee an eighty-percent survival rate, and he assumed he could tackle an entirely new illness in a month? It had been sheer idiocy to even contemplate his success. Oh well. It was all the past now, just like his life would be within the next... Three hours, according to his watch, which he now removed along with the rest of his clothing, pulling on some loose pyjamas. No regrets. Alex crept down the hall, spotting the door he wanted to his right. He silently pulled on the handle and push the door open, barely flinching when the hinges gave a squeak. Katie was a heavy sleeper, and he doubted a plane crash could wake her if she was clipped by the wings. Sitting down on the floor next to his fourteen-year-old sister's bed, Alex caught his breath after a few minutes and stood up, budging the quilt over so he could see her face as she slept. "Goodnight, Katie." He ghosted out of the room as silently as he came in. The next twenty minutes would see him inside his parents' bedroom, and another ten with his five-year-old twin siblings. At two in the morning, Alex returned to his own bed, staring up at where his ceiling would be if it weren't for the dark. The darkness slowly shifted into a dull grey, then back to the regular black as he stared. "No regrets." And this time, if only for a minute or two, he could actually believe it. The Princess of RoadworksWhen Alex awoke, the first thing he noticed was that he wasn't dead. Or at least, he probably wasn't. For all he knew, he had died and been brought to a world full of Aurora May lookalikes. There wasn't really a way to know what a person experienced after their death, after all. Quite honestly, he felt like he'd been stuck in a washing machine with hammers tumbling alongside him. But hey, at least now he was up for a simile or two. Still bleary-eyed, Alex kicked the quilt off himself with numb feet, leaned on numb arms and pushed himself out of bed, feeling for all the world like he'd need to re-learn to walk when this was over. He blew his once-brown hair out of his once-navy eyes and made his way blindly to the wardrobe, leaning against what he knew was the desk for support. Come to think of it, his hands and feet weren't quite numb. There wasn't any of the telltale pins and needles for one, and he actually could feel the surface of the desk and the carpet. He simply couldn't wiggle his fingers or toes. It didn't feel like there were any to wiggle in the first place. Maybe his hands had fused together from the disease, and he'd just guessed his time of death wrong. He'd probably die later in the day, but still, no regrets. Finally at the wardrobe, Alex squinted at his reflection, cursing himself once more for not being a morning person. He rubbed his eyes with the backs of his fused hands and looked again, but still couldn't see more than an orange blob. With each blink, though, the world slowly got clearer. Blurred grey dots became wide eyes, larger grey shapes morphed into his hair, swept to the side as it always was, and the orange blob transformed into... fur? Yup, that looked a lot like a coat of fur, if he was seeing things correctly. So he'd been turned into an animal of some sort. "Wow," Alex heard someone mutter. Strange, he'd been testing his own voice, but that sounded like someone else's. Of course, now the human-turned-animal had nothing to say without sounding entirely stupid. Contemplating his predicament, he absently lay on his side, attempting to get his breath back, figure out an explanation and test his voice all at once. Naturally, he ended up relaying his observations to himself. "So I've turned into an animal with bright orange fur and grey hair, no idea why those are separate but there you go. I have hands and feet, or I guess just feet, that don't have toes, so maybe they're hooves? Maybe I actually have a single toe on each foot, like the Widow from the Binding of Isaac... Ooh, my ears move like a cat's, but they're longer... Wow, I have a horn! Unless that's something else. It's pretty solid so it could be either or..." The only thing he looked remotely like was a cross between a unicorn and a traffic cone. Also his voice was oddly high-pitched, almost like a girl's. Actually, it was exactly like a girl's voice, which disturbed him far more than a minor transformation into a mythical farm animal. Either way, he promptly put his observations to the side. What he really needed now was a plan of action. One better than 'pretend I'm not dying and look desperately for a cure', preferably. Alex laughed at the irony. He was actually learning to walk again. Here he was, solver of the bi-verse's puzzles, inventor of the quark microscope, learning to stand up. That this time he was walking on all fours did nothing to make him feel better. It didn't feel like crawling, either. For one thing, you crawled on your knees, not your feet, and that hurt a lot. This didn't hurt at all; in fact, it felt more natural than walking normally, understandable given the current condition of his body. He'd tried to walk normally of course, but that felt like his back was dying if he did it for too long, and his centre of balance was way off thanks to his longer neck and lighter body. The horn didn't seem to do anything but sit on his head and look pretty. It would have been cool if he could do magic with it, but that was for magicians' wands, not Alex's forehead... Although maybe he just needed to think of an activation word, or find the power within him. Yeah, right. The orange flavoured unicorn looked himself in the mirror. He was really glad he only liked baggy clothes - strange as he looked, he was fairly comfortable in the blue zipup hoodie and black sweat-pants. Actually, he'd have to get used to using feminine pronouns for... herself. That discovery hadn't exactly been the most settling in history, and had involved more swear words than most drunk sailors would think up. Really, the eyelashes should have given it away. Alex walked down for breakfast as his... her family were just starting lunch as normal. She was going to use the shock factor to explain without interruptions, flee before anyone had recovered, then lock herself in her room until her mother had put down that rusty knife she'd found at the back of a drawer one day. Then she was going to apologise profusely and ask for more... appropriate clothing. Quite honestly, it was a suicidal plan, and that was usually the mark of a workable plan. She hoped. Literally trotting up to the table after a few minutes of fumbling with the door handle, Alex's plan-if-you-squinted-hard-enough was put into action. "Hi everyone!" His mother was the first to look up, akready on a hair trigger from worry about her son. She just stared for a second or two, blinked, rubbed her eyes and repeated. Alex rolled her own eyes and sat down awkwardly at the table, noticing a quick glance from her father. Three, two, one. A fountain of coffee sprayed over the table, broken by a quickly upended plate in front of Alex. Wondering how she'd managed to do that with hooves, the polymorphed scientist decided that it wasn't exactly the most important issue and turned to face his sputtering dad. "Hey, the cure worked. Thought you should know. I got the letters back from the doctors and they said to go ahead with it, so I did, but it had a few more side-effects than I'd planned for. I've learnt my lesson and will never again design a cure without knowing exactly what it does." It took everyone a moment to process that, but Katie spoke up first. "So... you're a pony?" Alex glanced at an orange hoof, trying to figure out how to use the knife and fork. "Am I? I almost figured that I'd accidentally made a hallucinogen. And I'm actually a unicorn, see the horn?" "Huh..." Alex rather thought her family was taking this well, all things considered. She glanced over at her mother, who now wore that blank face she used whenever she looked at her son/daughter's experiments, and her father, who had just let out a tremendous sigh. "Well, I want to have a word with you about warning us beforehand-" "Beforehoof?" Katie snickered, and Matt's forehead came into contact with the table. "I just want to have a word with you after brunch, champ. Katie, stop making this awkward. Al, I'll get you something you won't need cutlery for, you look like you're having trouble with that." With that, the father of the house left the table. Alex's eyes flicked nervously around the room, resting on the twins, who were... staring at her in awe. "Pony..." Amy whispered in wonder, looking at the once-a-human like she was a dream come true. Which she probably was, being a unicorn and all. "I'm Alex, remember? Blue eyes, brown hair, genius and saviour of the world?" She wondered if she was actually getting through to them. Stanley turned brightly to the parent still in the room. "Mum! Alex is a science pony!" Samantha just forced a smile as Matt came back with some buttered toast. "I-I know, dear, he's a unicorn." Brunch passed fairly smoothly, albeit silently and awkwardly, until finally, everyone but Matt and his son-slash-daughter filed out, leaving them sitting next to each other. Being the dad, Matt started first, and rather abruptly. "You didn't find a cure, did you." It wasn't a question. It was a fact. "No I didn't. The illness shouldn't exist, and I kinda feel like it isn't from our universe." "So from the bi-verse, then?" Alex stifled a laugh. "You didn't listen very closely to that, did you? The bi-verse is made from two universes, identical except one's made from antimatter. If something shouldn't exist in one universe, it shouldn't exist in the other." She took a drawn out breath to allow the explanation to sink in. "I think it might be from some parallel dimension, or maybe the world is actually a computer simulation and some hacker's changing things. Either way, I'm a unicorn now." Matt gave a little hum, then closed his eyes for a second. "And the letters to the doctors? That was a will, am I right?" So he had guessed. "Yeah, guess you aren't a detective for nothing. I also mailed some letters so my friends could be ready to sign it when I got to their homes. Post's way faster since they got quadcopters." Matt gave a humourous grin. "I never thought that'd actually work. The announcement was even on April fool's day!" He gave a short laugh, then sobered and trained a questioning look on Alex. "So are we telling your mother?" This time Alex laughed for real. "I'm not suicidal, and didn't you say something about blood pressure yesterday? Her head might pop off if we tell her." "I can just imagine her diary entry today. 'Dear diary, today my son is a unicorn. That is all.'" Oh god, of course this came up quickly. Alex pawed the ground nervously, a grimace set onto her tiny snout. "Heh, funny thing. Technically, your daughter is a unicorn." Matt blinked twice, then tumbled to the floor in a heap of hysterics. Steep Steps and Slippery SurfacesTomorrow was going to be a stressful day. Rewinding two months, Alex had been contacted by a nearby university and asked to appear there on October the second so that the Science students could meet a prodigy and exchange knowledge and information. Alex had agreed immediately, of course; he'd decided not to apply for uni until he was a little older, but he'd still desperately wanted to at least see the inside of one. Now in the present, however, she was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Should she or shouldn't she go? If she didn't, she'd be letting down the entire science department of the university. If she did, she'd have to reveal that she was an orange-flavored talking unicorn. Actually, the irony of that would be pretty damn funny. Watching her audience's reactions would almost be worth the embarrassment of being turned into a girl. And a pony, but most important was the being a girl part. Actually, she could just make a tiny fib, and nobody would ever notice. The smallest lies were the best, after all. Mobile phones weren't allowed in the university after somebody hacked into the systems from an iPhone 16 Flex. Cameras also weren't allowed in assemblies for fear of interruptions. How lucky was that? It was like the universe wanted to give her a chance for once! No cameras or phones meant that the information probably wouldn't spread past the science department. Or at the very least, it wouldn't spread quickly. The fact that unicorns, especially talking ones, shouldn't exist would dissuade people from sharing it with their friends, and if they did, it was unlikely that anyone would take them seriously. The mare's second order of business was to get a suit; she could hardly go to a formal meeting in her usual human-based attire. Donning the sweat-pants and hoodie, she came to a rather surprising obstacle: the stairs. How she'd gotten down them before she didn't know, but she chalked it up to achievements in ignorance. Now they stood in their full glory, steep and foreboding. What kind of idiot put stairs on a sixty degree angle, anyway? There should have been laws about that sort of thing. There were three options. The first was to stand like a human and go down, but the motion would probably hurt her spine, and god forbid she fell like that. The second was to slide down on her butt, but she'd need to do that every single day, and it'd make her feel like she was disabled. The third option was to... pony up and go head-first, walking like a horse, or a unicorn as the case may be. Alex took a deep breath and placed a shivering hoof on the first step down, slowly shifting her weight forwards and lifting her right leg to keep up. She pulled up her right front leg from the safety of the upstairs landing and set it on the second step. So far, so good. Placing her left hoof on the third step, Alex reached forwards for the next one... And froze. She'd forgotten about her back legs, which were still on the landing, and now the only way to fix it was to lift one. She chose the right one on a whim, brought it up off the stair, and slipped. The tangerine-coated girl squinted open an eye. Surely she should feel something, right? A bump on the butt, or a broken snout or something? All she could she was a carpeted ceiling. With her father hanging upside-down from it. "Uhh, Al? You okay, champ?" Alex's eyes snapped open and she scrambled about, finally realizing that she was being dangled upside down. Strange, it really felt like she was... She looked up at her legs. "Wait, so I can fly now?" Matt scratched his head before flipping Alex back the right way up, where she wobbled before tumbling to the ground in a heap of pain and suffering. "Looks like it, I guess. What happened? Your horn was glowing." "I realized too late that walking downstairs was difficult," Alex muttered, rubbing her forehead. "I wonder if I can make other things float..." Her dad's look of perplexion made her chuckle, hiding her mouth behind a hoof as she reminded herself of the issue at hand. "I probably shouldn't break physics much until the university meeting's over, though. I doubt they'd react well if things started flying around the room." Matt made his woes clear to the world with a sigh. "I take it you're still going to the uni, then?" Alex nodded and he let out another calming breath through his nose. "I guess I'll take you there, unless you think you can drive when you're up to my waist with no hands or feet." Well that was something she'd forgotten. With all the worry about the meeting itself, Alex hadn't even thought of the trip there and back. "Sure thing, just put a blanket and a chew toy in the- Ow!" Glaring at her father, Alex held her nose the best she could where he'd flicked her. Matt just smirked back and poked her in the forehead, right under the horn. "You being a unicorn doesn't change the fact that the boot isn't safe. Seriously, what is with you and sitting in there? You aren't supposed to be the reckless one, that's my job." "You've just been fired-" "-And you've just been grounded unless you sit in the front with me." The scientific genius stared down the detective genius. Ten seconds, twenty- "Damnit, I had something in my eye." Matt thrust a fist into the air. "YES! Still got it!" Well, she'd put it off for long enough. It was probably best to be humble and apologetic if she was going to be facing her mother. Taking a deep breath, Alex steeled herself and... reached up... and... fumbled with the door handle... It was hard to keep any tension in the air with that pathetic sight. Matt twisted the handle and let her in, snickering not quite silently as his newly-made daughter grumbled about pity and indirect but extremely painful revenge. Stanley and Amy were in the middle of the room as was usual at two in the afternoon, with Samantha watching over them like a hawk from the armchair. Alex stumbled into the room, her hooves finally contacting something other than carpet. Unfortunately that something was a polished wooden floor, and it took a lot of maneuvering and some help from her dad to get to a sofa, at which point the man just picked her bodily off the floor and dumped her on the seat, much to her noisy disagreement. "Feet off the sofas," her mum scolded her automatically, then she raised her hands to her mouth as if she'd witnessed a murder. "Oh I'm so sorry, Alex! I-" "-didn't mean to," the daughter finished tiredly. "I know, but you have told me every day for the past five years at least, so I really can't blame you." She let loose a tiny smirk, but hid it behind a less frightening smile as she joked, "I wish they did some pony-shaped clothes in a shop or something, I keep tripping in these sweat-pants." Samantha's ears almost literally perked upwards as she leant forwards a little. "What kind of clothes? We'll need all the regular stuff, some suits... Alex, what are you doing in the near future?" Hook, line and sinker. "Just that university meeting that I told you about, and that's tomorrow, but-" "But nothing, Alexander-slash-Alexandria James-slash-Jamie Williams! I will not have you at a formal meeting in that outfit! I'll need some underwear for you-" "-I have fur-" "-And soon you'll have underwear to match. I probably shouldn't make it lacy, though..." Alex felt the blood rush to her face. "If you have to make underwear, at least choose boxers, for the love of all things coated in caramel!" Her mum just brushed her off. "Sure, sure. I'll need to make you a skirt, too-" "I don't think skirts go with boxers, mum." "I never said I was making you boxers, dear. Now be good and stay put, I'll go get the tape measure!" Alex gave a long-suffering sigh, feeling that somehow, the conversation had not gone as planned. She shot daggers at the man rolling on the floor laughing, before her face split into a grin at the opportunity. Glancing over at Amy and Stanley Alex pointed a hoof resolutely at her father. "Sic 'em." Legends would later be told of the ghost of the Williams family.
No RegretsIt was a normal day in the Williams household. The parents, Matt and Samantha, were lazing on the couch as their youngest son and daughter, Amy and Stanley, sat watching some new cartoon on the medium-sized television screen. Katie and Alex, the two teenagers of the house, were nowhere to be found. Katie was probably out with friends again, most likely playing that new Mario game around Sarah's house. Alex was upstairs as usual, if Matt guessed right. Working on a new experiment, or making something artistic, depending on his mood. Speaking of Alex, a thump from outside the room signaled his abrupt, and probably short, arrival downstairs. Samantha winced and hissed lightly, but Matt held onto her shoulder and she calmed immediately. "Relax, he knows better than anyone what his body can take." Samantha hummed an agreement, but the effect was ruined by her scowl. "I know, but what if he slips or something? I hate having to rush him to-" "Just getting some food and I'll be gone," came Alex's voice from the kitchen behind them, cutting off his mother's rants before they truly began. Matt sent a silent but thankful prayer to the heavens. "Mind getting drinks for the kids, champ?" he returned quickly, then opened his mouth again as his wife did the same. "Also stop jumping down the stairs, your mother's brain can't handle the extra blood-flow." "No promises about the jumping, but I'll get the drinks." Matt knew that was the best he'd get from his son after so many conversations on the same matter, so he just sighed audibly and waited. Five minutes later saw the grey-haired, grey-eyed seventeen-year-old on his back in the living room, drinks supported on a plate by his raised leg. "Sorry, I tripped or something. Help?" Samantha groaned and picked up two of the drinks while Matt grabbed the other two. Alex sighed and lowered his leg, wincing slightly as it clicked, though he made no other sign of noticing the noise. His mother's eyes narrowed dangerously. "Alex, it's getting worse. You should be upstairs, not-" "Wait, what's getting worse?" the boy interrupted innocently, breaking the momentum of the woman's anger. Unfortunately, that backfired as she saw through the ruse with practiced ease. "Your attitude, for one, young man! This isn't just a regular illness that you can shrug off in a few days, It's going to affect your entire life, and might even end it!" The brunette shook off her husband's arm and stood up, grappling Alex under the arms and hauling him onto his feet with surprising grace. "You're getting lighter each day, your limbs keeping locking up and clicking, your hair's going grey already, I just d-don't understand why!" Alex rolled his eyes as she burst into tears, pulling her into a hug and awkwardly patting her on the back. "Relax, mum, I've almost got the cure figured out, alright? I just need a few days to perfect it, that's all." Samantha nodded blearily through her tears, smiling sadly at her first born, her worries somewhat abated by the calming words. The words felt hollow to Alex, though. He'd been working on a cure, but the illness was nothing like he'd ever seen. He was a solver of scientific mysteries, and he was about to be murdered by an illness that disobeyed every single science he'd studied. Hah, what a way to go. Whatever it was couldn't even be called a disease. It wasn't caused by anything apparent, rather it seemed like his body was tearing itself apart, trying to adapt to some change in the surroundings. Except nothing had changed in the surroundings. Except... "I'll be going now, I just had an epiphany." With that, Alex let go of his mother, nodded to his father with a smirk and left the room. Boom. "I'm okay!" Alex groaned as he searched his kid sister's bedroom for... Aha, there it was. That strange gem he'd found months ago and given to Amy. He hadn't seen it before, but that had been just before his joints had started clicking. Honestly, he should really remember to think in all four dimensions. Thinking backwards in time had been the answer to so many issues, like why the universe wasn't made of antimatter (answer:the universe was actually a bi-verse), that it was ridiculous for him to not have thought back before his symptoms had started showing. The gem was pure white and actually quite large, about as big as those plastic tubs of ketchup you get at fast food places. It felt strangely light though, not even as heavy as a marble, but the way the light reflected told him that it wasn't made of glass. He stumbled to his bedroom slash office, cursing his failing body all the way, and tested it under a quark microscope of his own design. "Hmm. Not made from quarks, that's a start. Plenty of particles all over the place, smaller than quarks and not as regular. Don't seem to be forming any structures, so probably stable when isolated." Still looking at the screen, Alex hesitantly tapped the gem with a pencil, raising an eyebrow when the particles rippled in reply. Strangely enough, the material returned to its previous arrangement in a matter of seconds. Four hours of study later, Alex threw down his pencil. There was no way to properly interact with the material, which meant no way to reverse whatever it had caused. He was back to square one, with only twenty minutes until midnight. According to his best guesses, let left him with just over four hours until his inevitable death. Four hours to wrap things up. Alex picked up a pen and began writing once more. ARTICLE I: Funeral Expenses. Gliding down the steep staircase despite the aching of his legs, Alex headed to the front door with as little noise as possible. Unfortunately, his father had ears like... something with good ears. He wasn't really feeling up to using similes at the moment. "Hey champ, you going out?" Alex sighed, glad that his father didn't seem to oppose his leaving. "Yeah, just dropping off a letter to another doctor, I wanna get another opinion on the finished cure." His dad replied in a stern tone. "Just remember to take-" "-the wheelchair, I know dad, I've been doing it for weeks now!" What the rest of his family didn't know was that Alex literally couldn't stand for more than five minutes by this point. He really felt terrible for not letting them know how bad the illness really was, but they'd understand when he was gone, right? ... Right? The dying teen picked up the light-weight wheelchair and headed outside, closing the door behind him before collapsing into the seat. In his hands were three pieces of paper. Two were letters, and one was his final will. As Alex lay on his back in the dark, he reflected on his life, or what little he could actually remember. It was mostly just snippets - Accidentally shouting too loud in maths class; sitting in his aunt Tracy's house with Katie, waiting for his mother to come back with twin babies; coming home with a massive grin and a scar on his elbow from a bike accident - that sort of thing. It was a nostalgic moment, but it also passed far too quickly before he ran out of memories. What happened to the ice skating trip? The jet skiing? Those times he just sat downstairs with the rest of his family, watching his favourite movie of all time, WALL-E? Where had all those memories gone? Oh right. He'd forgotten. It was strange to think that he'd ever done anything other than sit in his bedroom, tinkering with microscopes and test tubes, figuring out the basic mechanics of a bi-verse that loved to prove him wrong. Maybe the illness had been Fate's way of saying, 'Get your ass downstairs and bond with your family!' But no, he'd wasted those precious weeks searching for a cure. Cancer had taken over seventy years to just guarantee an eighty-percent survival rate, and he assumed he could tackle an entirely new illness in a month? It had been sheer idiocy to even contemplate his success. Oh well. It was all the past now, just like his life would be within the next... Three hours, according to his watch, which he now removed along with the rest of his clothing, pulling on some loose pyjamas. No regrets. Alex crept down the hall, spotting the door he wanted to his right. He silently pulled on the handle and push the door open, barely flinching when the hinges gave a squeak. Katie was a heavy sleeper, and he doubted a plane crash could wake her if she was clipped by the wings. Sitting down on the floor next to his fourteen-year-old sister's bed, Alex caught his breath after a few minutes and stood up, budging the quilt over so he could see her face as she slept. "Goodnight, Katie." He ghosted out of the room as silently as he came in. The next twenty minutes would see him inside his parents' bedroom, and another ten with his five-year-old twin siblings. At two in the morning, Alex returned to his own bed, staring up at where his ceiling would be if it weren't for the dark. The darkness slowly shifted into a dull grey, then back to the regular black as he stared. "No regrets." And this time, if only for a minute or two, he could actually believe it.
The Princess of RoadworksWhen Alex awoke, the first thing he noticed was that he wasn't dead. Or at least, he probably wasn't. For all he knew, he had died and been brought to a world full of Aurora May lookalikes. There wasn't really a way to know what a person experienced after their death, after all. Quite honestly, he felt like he'd been stuck in a washing machine with hammers tumbling alongside him. But hey, at least now he was up for a simile or two. Still bleary-eyed, Alex kicked the quilt off himself with numb feet, leaned on numb arms and pushed himself out of bed, feeling for all the world like he'd need to re-learn to walk when this was over. He blew his once-brown hair out of his once-navy eyes and made his way blindly to the wardrobe, leaning against what he knew was the desk for support. Come to think of it, his hands and feet weren't quite numb. There wasn't any of the telltale pins and needles for one, and he actually could feel the surface of the desk and the carpet. He simply couldn't wiggle his fingers or toes. It didn't feel like there were any to wiggle in the first place. Maybe his hands had fused together from the disease, and he'd just guessed his time of death wrong. He'd probably die later in the day, but still, no regrets. Finally at the wardrobe, Alex squinted at his reflection, cursing himself once more for not being a morning person. He rubbed his eyes with the backs of his fused hands and looked again, but still couldn't see more than an orange blob. With each blink, though, the world slowly got clearer. Blurred grey dots became wide eyes, larger grey shapes morphed into his hair, swept to the side as it always was, and the orange blob transformed into... fur? Yup, that looked a lot like a coat of fur, if he was seeing things correctly. So he'd been turned into an animal of some sort. "Wow," Alex heard someone mutter. Strange, he'd been testing his own voice, but that sounded like someone else's. Of course, now the human-turned-animal had nothing to say without sounding entirely stupid. Contemplating his predicament, he absently lay on his side, attempting to get his breath back, figure out an explanation and test his voice all at once. Naturally, he ended up relaying his observations to himself. "So I've turned into an animal with bright orange fur and grey hair, no idea why those are separate but there you go. I have hands and feet, or I guess just feet, that don't have toes, so maybe they're hooves? Maybe I actually have a single toe on each foot, like the Widow from the Binding of Isaac... Ooh, my ears move like a cat's, but they're longer... Wow, I have a horn! Unless that's something else. It's pretty solid so it could be either or..." The only thing he looked remotely like was a cross between a unicorn and a traffic cone. Also his voice was oddly high-pitched, almost like a girl's. Actually, it was exactly like a girl's voice, which disturbed him far more than a minor transformation into a mythical farm animal. Either way, he promptly put his observations to the side. What he really needed now was a plan of action. One better than 'pretend I'm not dying and look desperately for a cure', preferably. Alex laughed at the irony. He was actually learning to walk again. Here he was, solver of the bi-verse's puzzles, inventor of the quark microscope, learning to stand up. That this time he was walking on all fours did nothing to make him feel better. It didn't feel like crawling, either. For one thing, you crawled on your knees, not your feet, and that hurt a lot. This didn't hurt at all; in fact, it felt more natural than walking normally, understandable given the current condition of his body. He'd tried to walk normally of course, but that felt like his back was dying if he did it for too long, and his centre of balance was way off thanks to his longer neck and lighter body. The horn didn't seem to do anything but sit on his head and look pretty. It would have been cool if he could do magic with it, but that was for magicians' wands, not Alex's forehead... Although maybe he just needed to think of an activation word, or find the power within him. Yeah, right. The orange flavoured unicorn looked himself in the mirror. He was really glad he only liked baggy clothes - strange as he looked, he was fairly comfortable in the blue zipup hoodie and black sweat-pants. Actually, he'd have to get used to using feminine pronouns for... herself. That discovery hadn't exactly been the most settling in history, and had involved more swear words than most drunk sailors would think up. Really, the eyelashes should have given it away. Alex walked down for breakfast as his... her family were just starting lunch as normal. She was going to use the shock factor to explain without interruptions, flee before anyone had recovered, then lock herself in her room until her mother had put down that rusty knife she'd found at the back of a drawer one day. Then she was going to apologise profusely and ask for more... appropriate clothing. Quite honestly, it was a suicidal plan, and that was usually the mark of a workable plan. She hoped. Literally trotting up to the table after a few minutes of fumbling with the door handle, Alex's plan-if-you-squinted-hard-enough was put into action. "Hi everyone!" His mother was the first to look up, akready on a hair trigger from worry about her son. She just stared for a second or two, blinked, rubbed her eyes and repeated. Alex rolled her own eyes and sat down awkwardly at the table, noticing a quick glance from her father. Three, two, one. A fountain of coffee sprayed over the table, broken by a quickly upended plate in front of Alex. Wondering how she'd managed to do that with hooves, the polymorphed scientist decided that it wasn't exactly the most important issue and turned to face his sputtering dad. "Hey, the cure worked. Thought you should know. I got the letters back from the doctors and they said to go ahead with it, so I did, but it had a few more side-effects than I'd planned for. I've learnt my lesson and will never again design a cure without knowing exactly what it does." It took everyone a moment to process that, but Katie spoke up first. "So... you're a pony?" Alex glanced at an orange hoof, trying to figure out how to use the knife and fork. "Am I? I almost figured that I'd accidentally made a hallucinogen. And I'm actually a unicorn, see the horn?" "Huh..." Alex rather thought her family was taking this well, all things considered. She glanced over at her mother, who now wore that blank face she used whenever she looked at her son/daughter's experiments, and her father, who had just let out a tremendous sigh. "Well, I want to have a word with you about warning us beforehand-" "Beforehoof?" Katie snickered, and Matt's forehead came into contact with the table. "I just want to have a word with you after brunch, champ. Katie, stop making this awkward. Al, I'll get you something you won't need cutlery for, you look like you're having trouble with that." With that, the father of the house left the table. Alex's eyes flicked nervously around the room, resting on the twins, who were... staring at her in awe. "Pony..." Amy whispered in wonder, looking at the once-a-human like she was a dream come true. Which she probably was, being a unicorn and all. "I'm Alex, remember? Blue eyes, brown hair, genius and saviour of the world?" She wondered if she was actually getting through to them. Stanley turned brightly to the parent still in the room. "Mum! Alex is a science pony!" Samantha just forced a smile as Matt came back with some buttered toast. "I-I know, dear, he's a unicorn." Brunch passed fairly smoothly, albeit silently and awkwardly, until finally, everyone but Matt and his son-slash-daughter filed out, leaving them sitting next to each other. Being the dad, Matt started first, and rather abruptly. "You didn't find a cure, did you." It wasn't a question. It was a fact. "No I didn't. The illness shouldn't exist, and I kinda feel like it isn't from our universe." "So from the bi-verse, then?" Alex stifled a laugh. "You didn't listen very closely to that, did you? The bi-verse is made from two universes, identical except one's made from antimatter. If something shouldn't exist in one universe, it shouldn't exist in the other." She took a drawn out breath to allow the explanation to sink in. "I think it might be from some parallel dimension, or maybe the world is actually a computer simulation and some hacker's changing things. Either way, I'm a unicorn now." Matt gave a little hum, then closed his eyes for a second. "And the letters to the doctors? That was a will, am I right?" So he had guessed. "Yeah, guess you aren't a detective for nothing. I also mailed some letters so my friends could be ready to sign it when I got to their homes. Post's way faster since they got quadcopters." Matt gave a humourous grin. "I never thought that'd actually work. The announcement was even on April fool's day!" He gave a short laugh, then sobered and trained a questioning look on Alex. "So are we telling your mother?" This time Alex laughed for real. "I'm not suicidal, and didn't you say something about blood pressure yesterday? Her head might pop off if we tell her." "I can just imagine her diary entry today. 'Dear diary, today my son is a unicorn. That is all.'" Oh god, of course this came up quickly. Alex pawed the ground nervously, a grimace set onto her tiny snout. "Heh, funny thing. Technically, your daughter is a unicorn." Matt blinked twice, then tumbled to the floor in a heap of hysterics.
Steep Steps and Slippery SurfacesTomorrow was going to be a stressful day. Rewinding two months, Alex had been contacted by a nearby university and asked to appear there on October the second so that the Science students could meet a prodigy and exchange knowledge and information. Alex had agreed immediately, of course; he'd decided not to apply for uni until he was a little older, but he'd still desperately wanted to at least see the inside of one. Now in the present, however, she was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Should she or shouldn't she go? If she didn't, she'd be letting down the entire science department of the university. If she did, she'd have to reveal that she was an orange-flavored talking unicorn. Actually, the irony of that would be pretty damn funny. Watching her audience's reactions would almost be worth the embarrassment of being turned into a girl. And a pony, but most important was the being a girl part. Actually, she could just make a tiny fib, and nobody would ever notice. The smallest lies were the best, after all. Mobile phones weren't allowed in the university after somebody hacked into the systems from an iPhone 16 Flex. Cameras also weren't allowed in assemblies for fear of interruptions. How lucky was that? It was like the universe wanted to give her a chance for once! No cameras or phones meant that the information probably wouldn't spread past the science department. Or at the very least, it wouldn't spread quickly. The fact that unicorns, especially talking ones, shouldn't exist would dissuade people from sharing it with their friends, and if they did, it was unlikely that anyone would take them seriously. The mare's second order of business was to get a suit; she could hardly go to a formal meeting in her usual human-based attire. Donning the sweat-pants and hoodie, she came to a rather surprising obstacle: the stairs. How she'd gotten down them before she didn't know, but she chalked it up to achievements in ignorance. Now they stood in their full glory, steep and foreboding. What kind of idiot put stairs on a sixty degree angle, anyway? There should have been laws about that sort of thing. There were three options. The first was to stand like a human and go down, but the motion would probably hurt her spine, and god forbid she fell like that. The second was to slide down on her butt, but she'd need to do that every single day, and it'd make her feel like she was disabled. The third option was to... pony up and go head-first, walking like a horse, or a unicorn as the case may be. Alex took a deep breath and placed a shivering hoof on the first step down, slowly shifting her weight forwards and lifting her right leg to keep up. She pulled up her right front leg from the safety of the upstairs landing and set it on the second step. So far, so good. Placing her left hoof on the third step, Alex reached forwards for the next one... And froze. She'd forgotten about her back legs, which were still on the landing, and now the only way to fix it was to lift one. She chose the right one on a whim, brought it up off the stair, and slipped. The tangerine-coated girl squinted open an eye. Surely she should feel something, right? A bump on the butt, or a broken snout or something? All she could she was a carpeted ceiling. With her father hanging upside-down from it. "Uhh, Al? You okay, champ?" Alex's eyes snapped open and she scrambled about, finally realizing that she was being dangled upside down. Strange, it really felt like she was... She looked up at her legs. "Wait, so I can fly now?" Matt scratched his head before flipping Alex back the right way up, where she wobbled before tumbling to the ground in a heap of pain and suffering. "Looks like it, I guess. What happened? Your horn was glowing." "I realized too late that walking downstairs was difficult," Alex muttered, rubbing her forehead. "I wonder if I can make other things float..." Her dad's look of perplexion made her chuckle, hiding her mouth behind a hoof as she reminded herself of the issue at hand. "I probably shouldn't break physics much until the university meeting's over, though. I doubt they'd react well if things started flying around the room." Matt made his woes clear to the world with a sigh. "I take it you're still going to the uni, then?" Alex nodded and he let out another calming breath through his nose. "I guess I'll take you there, unless you think you can drive when you're up to my waist with no hands or feet." Well that was something she'd forgotten. With all the worry about the meeting itself, Alex hadn't even thought of the trip there and back. "Sure thing, just put a blanket and a chew toy in the- Ow!" Glaring at her father, Alex held her nose the best she could where he'd flicked her. Matt just smirked back and poked her in the forehead, right under the horn. "You being a unicorn doesn't change the fact that the boot isn't safe. Seriously, what is with you and sitting in there? You aren't supposed to be the reckless one, that's my job." "You've just been fired-" "-And you've just been grounded unless you sit in the front with me." The scientific genius stared down the detective genius. Ten seconds, twenty- "Damnit, I had something in my eye." Matt thrust a fist into the air. "YES! Still got it!" Well, she'd put it off for long enough. It was probably best to be humble and apologetic if she was going to be facing her mother. Taking a deep breath, Alex steeled herself and... reached up... and... fumbled with the door handle... It was hard to keep any tension in the air with that pathetic sight. Matt twisted the handle and let her in, snickering not quite silently as his newly-made daughter grumbled about pity and indirect but extremely painful revenge. Stanley and Amy were in the middle of the room as was usual at two in the afternoon, with Samantha watching over them like a hawk from the armchair. Alex stumbled into the room, her hooves finally contacting something other than carpet. Unfortunately that something was a polished wooden floor, and it took a lot of maneuvering and some help from her dad to get to a sofa, at which point the man just picked her bodily off the floor and dumped her on the seat, much to her noisy disagreement. "Feet off the sofas," her mum scolded her automatically, then she raised her hands to her mouth as if she'd witnessed a murder. "Oh I'm so sorry, Alex! I-" "-didn't mean to," the daughter finished tiredly. "I know, but you have told me every day for the past five years at least, so I really can't blame you." She let loose a tiny smirk, but hid it behind a less frightening smile as she joked, "I wish they did some pony-shaped clothes in a shop or something, I keep tripping in these sweat-pants." Samantha's ears almost literally perked upwards as she leant forwards a little. "What kind of clothes? We'll need all the regular stuff, some suits... Alex, what are you doing in the near future?" Hook, line and sinker. "Just that university meeting that I told you about, and that's tomorrow, but-" "But nothing, Alexander-slash-Alexandria James-slash-Jamie Williams! I will not have you at a formal meeting in that outfit! I'll need some underwear for you-" "-I have fur-" "-And soon you'll have underwear to match. I probably shouldn't make it lacy, though..." Alex felt the blood rush to her face. "If you have to make underwear, at least choose boxers, for the love of all things coated in caramel!" Her mum just brushed her off. "Sure, sure. I'll need to make you a skirt, too-" "I don't think skirts go with boxers, mum." "I never said I was making you boxers, dear. Now be good and stay put, I'll go get the tape measure!" Alex gave a long-suffering sigh, feeling that somehow, the conversation had not gone as planned. She shot daggers at the man rolling on the floor laughing, before her face split into a grin at the opportunity. Glancing over at Amy and Stanley Alex pointed a hoof resolutely at her father. "Sic 'em." Legends would later be told of the ghost of the Williams family.
