Beantown Bug

by Raster Dreams

Rating: mature
Tags: Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Alternate Universe, Human, Changelings, Original Character, Adventure
Length: 28440

On the morning of May twenty third, Peter Coldbrook awoke to find himself in the body of a young changeling queen, in a world with a total population in the low thousands. This was not the relaxing summer vacation he had hoped for.

People like to talk about what they would do in a post-apocalyptic scenario. They might be farmers, or be scavengers, or maybe leaders of the new world, or even the big damn heroes that save us all from whatever atomic wedgie monster has come to destroy Earth. As for what I would do? Well, I'd die, probably. The early days of a depopulation event have no place for the physically unfit, and rest assured I was not a fit man. Sound of mind, but not of body.

But as it turns out, emotional stability is far more valuable than I originally thought it would be. Nearly all of humanity has vanished, and everybody left behind has been transformed into some variety of small horse, and they're all too busy losing their minds to consider basic self-preservation.

I guess strong minds are just as important as strong bodies. And whatever caused all of this decided I should have both.

I ain't complainin'. Much.

A Ponies After People sidestory.

Published 2015-08-18 19:40:01 UTC
Last updated 2018-04-17 07:36:23 UTC

Search Party. May 23rd, 6:58 AM. Manehattan

Glimmer Glory’s cheek puffed out, while she looked between a small, spiral bound book and a sizable magic circle on the ground—the product of a week of study and a night’s legwork.

She, like many other ponies, had volunteered for a mission to Earth. Travelling to an alternate universe and meeting its significantly advanced inhabitants was, quite literally, a once in a lifetime opportunity. Many unicorns like herself yearned to make the jump, but only a few of them could. Most ponies had worthwhile jobs. Most ponies had families. Most ponies weren’t expendable. But Glimmer?

Her parents were dead, she had no siblings, she never kept in touch with her relatives, she wasn’t close to her friends, and she lived in the smallest apartment in Manehattan. It was all she could afford with her wage, moving small boxes for a living, as the reward for general magicks degree. If she were to travel to Earth and, for whatever reason, find herself unable to return, that’d be just fine. Very few, if any, ponies would miss her.

And the same could be said for her companions, too.

“Dustup, Sage, did you check to make sure we have everything?” She asked of a pegasus pony and an earth pony. The two of them looked over their shoulders and turned away from the wagon they’d fussed over for the past several hours.

“Glory, that’s the third time you’ve asked,” Dustup groaned.

“He’s right,” Sage said, “Nothing’s grown legs and walked away since the last time we checked.”

“She’s just got the nerves,” a second pegasus pony chimed in. Glimmer looked up.

“I’m not nervous, Clarity, I’m just being thorough!” she said.

“Mhmmm.”

“Augh! Fine.” The notebook in Glimmer’s grasp snapped shut and tucked itself into one of her saddlebags’ many pockets. “The sun’s coming up soon—let’s get this done before anymore ‘stray clouds’ from the weather team roll our way,” she said, as she waved her hoof in circles beside her head, the team’s agreed gesture for ‘gather around.’ “Who wants to remind us why we’re on an island in the middle of Manehattan Bay, so early in the morning? Sage?”

“We’re going to Earth, to find the human leaders and bring them to Princess Luna, so that she can help them understand their new forms.”

Glimmer blinked once, then twice. She waited, until it was clear Sage would say no more. “Aren’t you leaving a little out?” she asked.

“Nothing that matters!” Sage exclaimed, as she threw her hooves in the air. “Now quit stalling and cast that spell already!”

Glimmer sighed, and rolled her eyes. They just didn’t quite understand, she told herself, and there was little she could do to show them the light. Without anymore words or protest, Glimmer waved her horn, and the magic circle began to glow. She stepped into the center, followed by her teammates. “Now everypony hold hooves.” Clop. “Yes, just like that. Three. Two. One, and…”

Perhaps the first thing Glimmer noticed upon her arrival on Earth, beyond the fact that the interuniversal teleportation spell had flashed far too many bright lights at her, was that it was rather dark in this alien world. Darker than it ought to be, in Earth’s equivalent of Manehattan, at seven in the morning. She turned her attention away from the remarkably uniform bricks at her hooves, and looked forward. The pavement stretched a ways, before it ended in a tall, wrought iron fence. Beyond the fence, a bay stretched out into what was clearly and ocean. One either side of her view, large monoliths of some washed out material could be seen in the distance, and bizarre, metal objects floated at the edges of the land. Some were vibrant, others were blacker than the night. The objects looked a bit like minimalist steamships, Glimmer figured. She had been told in the brief that the humans were far, far more advanced, since they were unable to solve their problems with magic. Imagine that?

Behind her back, Sage, Clarity, and Dustup all made variants of the typical “Oooh!”’s and “Aaah!”’s, just like any tourist that had been knocked flat on their rumps. Glimmer couldn’t blame them; just a quick glance around was impressive enough. This was supposedly one of the biggest cities in the human world, but it was a far cry from what she’d been expecting. Where did they put their chimneys? Why was it so foggy? It wasn’t the fog that might’ve risen from the water as the sun warmed it, because it didn’t feel like fog. It was chilly, sure, but a smell hung in the air, masked only a little by the salt that accompanied it. Acrid, the same as wood smoke, but heavier. It wasn’t quite a scent, but rather a stink. Far from pleasant. Glimmer took a deep breath. She’d just have to deal with it.

And now that she’d had a bit more time to reflect on the vista, she came to a realization. It wasn’t dark outside. The sun was clearly right there, she could see its glare on one of the distant monoliths. She stood in a shadow, that she had come to realize, but of what? She was a unicorn, sure, but a horn didn’t make a mare psychic. She turned around.

And her butt made a small crater. Her lower jaw might’ve followed suit, if it weren’t so firmly attached to the rest of her skull.

A green statue rose up and cast its shadow over the team. It depicted a peculiar, flat-faced creature, wrapped in billowing robes and stood atop a tall pedestal. In one talon, it held a torch of gleaming gold. In the other talon, it held a tablet that was covered in script. A crown rested on its head. Was this a statue of the human princess?

On a short pole near Glimmer, there was a plaque. Out of curiosity, she scooted toward it. Just enough to make out the letters that’d been carved into its surface.

The Statue of Liberty

Peter. May 23rd 7:58 AM. Lala Land

In the distance I could see something: a mass of colorful blotches all huddled together. Curious to see what the blob was, I flicked my hand and conjured up a pair of binoculars. As is expected to be done with binoculars, I then put them against my face and looked through the lenses.

With my view magnified, I could see a black and white pair of winged unicorns standing together, flanked on either side by a quarter circle composed of hundreds of smaller, wingless unicorns. One of them waved at me, and then their horns all lit up at once. A few seconds later, I saw faint beams of light shoot from each individual horn. A few hundred yards into the air, the beams all collided and the light formed one big ball that shone like a second sun. I flipped the shaded lenses down onto the goggles, to protect my eyes from the sudden brightness. I wanted to see where this went.

Before I knew it, the ground shifted. I looked down to find myself perfectly balanced on the peak of my house’s roof. I turned back to my binoculars to find that my view had gone cloudy. I pulled the binoculars away from my face and looked around to find a fine, pink mist slowly rolling across the street below, and I watched as it rose up to me.

Breathing it in had been a bit of a mistake, I found. My chest tightened up immediately, and it became hard to breathe in the pink miasma. I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I took up my binoculars once more and decided I’d have another look at those unicorns.

A flash of lightning blinded me through the binoculars’ smoked lenses, before said binoculars shattered into pieces. When I looked at my hand, it was covered with strange, pink minerals that had burst through my skin. It didn’t hurt, but I was definitely startled, and when I tried to step back, I found couldn’t actually move. I looked down. A bright pink crystal had impaled my foot when I wasn’t looking, and it kept me pinned to the roof. As the seconds passed, I found more and more of the evil, pink shards exploding out of my body.

The loud crack of thunder and a shadow that loomed over me prompted me to look up.

A mirror image of the earth had appeared above me, and it shoved aside the clouds as it fell. Even without my binoculars, I could see the forests on the land and the waves in the ocean. I could see the little animals, the familiar houses, and I could even see the people. They were strange, colorful, little horses, like the hundreds of unicorns I’d just been observing. Some of them traded their horns for wings. Some had neither. They were all looking down—up—down—ah, whatever, they were looking from their planet to my planet.

I couldn’t help but wonder. Are they seeing what I’m seeing? Another world falling from the sky, intent on crushing them to dust? What were they feeling? Were they afraid, like I was? Had they already made their peace? How much longer did we have?

As the planet drew closer and the clusters of buildings became more familiar, I saw a figure that was larger than the rest. It wore the same clothes I did, and it stood on the roof of what I recognized as my house. Was that supposed to be me? If so, why did this alternate me look so different from all the other little horses on that world? I wasn’t anybody special, so why did I look special?

I was so caught up in the observation of my alternate universe self, that I didn’t realize how close the other world had gotten. The cracked up streets of the city rushed down to meet me, and I held my arms up in the futile hope that I might cushion the blow. The other me did the same, and my hands touched his hooves. We phased through each other until our heads came together.

Clonk.

Peter. May 23rd, 8 AM. Boston.

I awoke with a start, out of breath and bouncing on my bed. As if I had just fallen from some height. Did I sleepwalk? Whatever I was doing, I had a splitting headache.

I put my hand to forehead, so I could massage out the pain. My hand knocked against something rather large sticking out of my skull. Come to think of it, where were my fingers? I brought my hand down and saw that it’d transformed into a black nub. Wiggling my fingers just made the end of my arm flop back and forth. Hey, wait, why’d my elbow just bend the other way? That’s neat.

I launched out of bed as best I could, which wasn’t very well, when it turned out all my joints had swapped positions. I stumbled across my bedroom, bounced off everything in my path, and smashed into the opposite wall. I rebounded backward and came to a rest on the side of my desk, in the perfect position to admire the me-shaped depression in the (now smashed) plaster wall. Where some of it had fallen away, I could see the splintered studs I’d ruined. Whoops. Was I really that heavy?

Whatever. I had to get to a mirror, which was simple enough. All I had to do was open the door and—oh, right, I don’t have fingers anymore! I grumbled and pinched the door knob between my two hands-become nubs, and made an attempt to twist it. The results weren’t very promising; my grip had nowhere near the friction required to actually turn the perfectly circular knob. I sighed and tried again.

It shattered in my grasp. Wait, doorknobs aren’t all metal?

“Jake!” I shouted, hoping that my brother would be around to hear me. I could explain my bad hair day later—preferably once I was out of my room. It’d be a literal oven in here by midday. “Jake!” I shouted again, and I made extra sure to be as loud as I could. I listened for a few more seconds. Nothing. Really? “Jake—” My eyes nearly popped out of their sockets and I shut up immediately when I felt the house shake around me. Was I really that loud? Well, if my brother wasn’t coming after that, he probably wasn’t about to show up for anything else.

I punched the door, right where the knob used to be. I could see the mechanism keeping my bedroom door shut, and I figured that if I could knock it loose, I’d be free as a bird. It wasn’t as though my handnub was in any pain. In fact, despite the damage I’d done to my room during my blunders, I felt pretty numb. Nothing was sore. Maybe I’d feel it later, but I’d rather feel it while not slowly dehydrating on my bed.

It took a few punches, but I managed to bore a hole in the door that was large enough for me to wiggle the ‘lock’ assembly out of it, and it swung open in acknowledgement of its defeat. With my mission still fresh in my mind, I stumbled across the hall and, with a few well aimed bounces, grabbed onto the bathroom sink and pulled myself front and center.

When I looked into the three piece mirror, I found the alternate universe me staring straight back. He looked exactly as he had in the dream, albeit in a little more detail, now that I wasn’t all wrapped up in the Vaseline smear of La-La Land. The reflection copying my movements was enough of a confirmation.

Man, I took one shot. Exactly what had I been up to last night?

“Ah! Aaah!” The vertebrae in my neck popped, my head turned so quickly. Some creature was standing in the doorway, staring up at me with big dinnerplate eyes. Screaming. “Holy shit!” Hey, wait a minute—

It took off before I could finish my thought, headed back for my brother’s room. The door at the end of the hall slammed shut. That couldn’t have been my brother, I thought. I mean, yeah, the little thing had his voice, but there was no way my brother could’ve been turned into one of those little horses from the dream. Right? Ah, who am I kidding? I pushed off the sink and stumbled back into the hallway. I angled toward my brother’s bedroom door and shoved off.

When I got to his door, I didn’t even bother with the knob. I threw myself against it in the hope that my weight would let me plough through. I hadn’t expected it to actually work, but when it did, I smashed my way through Jacob’s bedroom door and clattered to the sweet, sweet, carpeted floor in a shower of splinters. It was a little grimy on the ground, but whatever! There were more important things to take care of. With some traction back under my nubs, I leapt to my feet, braced myself against the doorway, and looked over toward my bro’s bed to see if I could confirm my suspicions.

“Jacob?”

Well, I found the creature, at least. Some brownish, whitish horse thing. Screaming and waving one of its legs at me. It sounded like my brother, despite being half his size, and it was also in my brother’s bed, and it was probably wearing my brother’s tighty whities. My brother had been turned into a little horse? Thing? Like, a pony? If so, I knew I lived under a big rock, but I was pretty confident that was not what a horse looked like. Was this for real, or was this still a dream? If it were the former, well, that’d be impossible. If it were the latter, this was all awful involved to be some freaky dream. I was having real, conscious thoughts at this moment, and I knew for a fact that I was not a lucid dreamer.

I decided I ought to ride it out. If I woke up a few minutes down the line? Okay. If I didn’t wake up and this turned out to be real? I’d take care of it when the time came. I had bigger fish to fry.

“Jake, Jacob. It’s me, Pete! Your brother.” I did my best to point one of my hand nubs at myself. Though, when I finally looked at their shape, they were more like hooves, weren’t they? “You can stop screaming now!” Nah, he was still going strong. “No, really! Seriously. Stop!” I do not admit to being a physician, but between when my ‘brother’ had taken off and when I started trying to calm him down, it’d been at least a minute. It couldn’t possibly be healthy to scream the way my brother was screaming, not for a minute straight. His head could explode! Or he might be hyperventilating! Or something else could happen, maybe a fly could wander down his throat! I’m not sure if what I did next was logical, but it was all I could think to do. I never suspected my brother could have such lungs, especially not as a little horse.

I pushed off the doorway and, for lack of any better description, dove right into my brother. That was apparently an invitation to panic harder, and he started flailing around while I tried to grab him. He managed to smack me a few times, with the ends of his limbs, and holy shit did it hurt, even through my plastic skin, although, plate armor was never known for its effectiveness against blunt force trauma. I utilized the half hour of wrestling he’d taught me one afternoon three years ago, and threw myself on him. I eventually wriggled into a position where we couldn’t clobber me anymore, with my arms and legs wrapped around his. I just sort of held onto him, shushing him like a baby, because that’s about all I could do. I think that, once he got tired of screaming and realized I wasn’t going to brutally murder him or whatever he thought I was going to do, he shut up. Which was actually kind of a surprise.

The two of us sat there for a long fucking time, with our limbs tangled around each other. He didn’t do much beyond staring straight ahead and taking deep, loud breaths. Eventually, I assume once he’d regained his wits and had a moment to think, he turned his head a little and got to I watch one of his giant saucer eyes look back at me.

“Uh. Pete? That really you?” he asked me. His voice was raw, from all the screaming.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Can you let me go?”

“Guess you’re done, then?

“Yeah. I’m good.”

I very casually let him go. Or, at least, I made an effort. It took a few seconds of twisting around before I was finally able to get my limbs free of his, and he tumbled forward and off the mattress. At the very least, he landed assfirst, so there wasn’t too much damaged by the short fall. With the excitement over and done with, I scooted off to the side and flopped onto the floor beside him. “You gonna be okay?” I asked him. He looked down at his new, fingerless limb and rubbed it against one of mine. He just gave me a bug-eyed look, and his irises—not just his pupils, which I found to be a little weird—weren’t much more than a couple brown specks vibrating in my general direction. Didn’t seem like there was anybody there.

It wasn’t as though I could blame him. We were human the night before. He’d gone to sleep without the slightest suspicion he’d awake to find himself as...whatever he was. I was pretty shocked myself, and totally confused as to what we’d become, just out of nowhere. It was some small miracle I wasn’t having the same reaction he was. Although, he’d just been walking around a few minutes earlier. Why did he only just now start freezing up? I’d probably have to ask him later. “Jake? You home?”

All he gave me was a weak grunt, and I realized I probably wouldn’t get much else out of him for awhile. He clearly wasn’t in a speaking mood. So I pushed at the ground and managed an awkward crawl, with my backwards arms straining against the carpet and my fucked up legs pushing me along. I did a bit of a walrus jig, over to the spartan PVC and plywood drawing table my bro had in his room, and pulled myself up, nearly tipping the thing over on my dumb ass in the process. I was looking for his mirror. It was the typical, cheap artist’s mirror that you’d use for making faces while you drew expressions. Stupid light, stupid durable, and stupid cheap. It really wasn’t hard to find and I really didn’t like what I saw, now that I had more than only a few seconds of facetime.

I was kinda gross. There were pits all over my skin, which upon closer inspection, didn’t seem to be skin, but rather a tight weave of plates. They were most likely scales instead of plates, but beyond my joints, they probably passed as a suit of armor. I had ten extra irises around my pupils and a giant spear poking out of my head—probably what I’d felt when I woke up. I had turned entirely black and blue. I didn’t stare into the abyss for more than a fraction of a second, for fear that the abyss might stare back, and clapped my stubhooves around the plastic mirror. I butt dragged myself back over to my brother and held the mirror by squeezing either thin end between my arms, so he could look at his own reflection. He just stared at himself. For a second, he raised up the stump that his hand had become, and rubbed it along his chin. Other than that, he still looked absolutely dead inside. Why wasn’t I, too?

“I’m going to check on mummy and daddy,” I said, after letting him stare for a bit. I set the mirror down between his legs. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, with some water or something.” And I left, struggling my way across the third floor of our house, causing a real ruckus as I went.

I’d like to say that when I got there I navigated the stairs with some amount of grace, but that’d be a bold-faced lie. I took one step before I lost my footing and resigned to slide down on my belly. It wasn’t as though it really hurt too much. I could barely feel a thing, thanks to all the plates covering my body. The most I ever really felt was the dull pressure of the impact as my torso thump, thump, thumped its way down. The kitchen and hallways on our cluttered first floor not only provided a wealth of objects to lean on, but the floors were all some combination of well worn, carpeted, or unpolished, so I was able to stumble forward on my feet and feel about with my arms. Bounce off the kitchen table, slide along the freezer, tilt toward the counter, lean over to the fridge…spread my legs in the hall, use the far wall to brace myself, with my shoulder against the other… It took work, but I was able to navigate with a semblance of efficiency.

“Mummy?” I stage whispered as I inched to the room that she’d taken to sleeping in, ever since her hip went out. “Mummy? You there?” I genuinely asked, a little louder this time. There was nobody in her bed. Maybe she was out. Was it Wednesday? I knew she had something to do on Wednesday mornings. Weight Watchers or something like that. Alright. “Daddy?” I raised my voice, turning to the living room. He’d gone to sleeping in a futon, once my mother was no longer able to climb the stairs to the original master bedroom. “Hey Daddy?” I shouted this time, disturbing the mountain of loose change on the front hall table when I rubbed against it. He wasn’t around either. Maybe they both went somewhere. I staggered backward, turned, clung to one of the hallway doors that we never really closed, and slipped into the first floor bathroom. I leaned up against the sink, much to its displeasure, and peered out the window that gave me a good view of the driveway. Both cars were still in there, and nobody was in them. Had they gone somewhere with somebody else and not said anything? Maybe a friend came and picked them up? Maybe. But it was still the early morning, wasn’t it? The shadows outside stretched pretty far.

But, something else was bugging me. It was quiet. We were in the middle of a residential Boston neighborhood, in the morning, with a main street not more than twenty yards from the house. There were no horns, no sirens, and no sounds of natural gas busses or diesel trucks. No delinquents in their shitty ricers with badly fitted, rattling, glasspack mufflers. No loud neighbors of minority descent. I heard nothing but the birds and the occasional howl of a strong wind against a tall, brick building. I blundered out to the front door and somehow unlocked it—if only because it was real metal. I swung the door open and hung out, holding onto the frame to keep from falling over. I couldn’t hear the city doing its city thing, and it was the most eerie silence I had ever heard. I stepped back inside and closed the front door, but I couldn’t get it locked for the life of me. I considered it a lost cause, and I made my return trip to the stairs at the back of the house.

I dug my face into the pallet of water bottles we kept in the back stairway, and emerged with a bottle between my teeth. It took me a few tries to actually get that far, as I found I now had a pair of folding fangs that loved tearing open bottles of water. No way the floorboards wouldn’t be getting water damaged. When I had finally succeeded in acquiring a bottle that wasn’t full of holes, I turned to my next challenge.

I had been able to go down stairs just fine, simply by being lazy and sliding the whole way. But now I had to go up stairs, and I couldn’t reverse gravity and slide on up, as much as I wished I could. I just sort of sat there and thought for a bit, experimentally flexing my arms as I tried to figure it out. I could grab onto the support beams that held the railings in place, and that would get me most of the way up, but there were a few steps at the bottom and the top that were completely without such handholds. Maybe I could reach up when the time came, and pull myself the rest of the way? With how the door was set up at the top, there was a bit of a rise, that might provide a decent grip if I approached from the right angle. It wasn’t the best of plans.

This was about when I considered how I was seated on the floor. I was sitting like a dog, butt down, legs folded up, arms between. But I didn’t bend like a dog. My arms were more like… Like the front legs of a horse? I growled at the ceiling. Duh! I wasn’t some freak from Amigara Fault, I was a little horse. Granted, I was an ugly little horse, but I was still a little horse, and I had a vague understanding of how horse legs worked. But horses don’t have grippy soles on their hooves. I’d probably slide around. How did horses even climb stairs anyway?

Pretty easily, as a matter of fact. I was surprised how quickly and easily I managed to accomplish a task so monumental as climbing stairs. In fact, I was good enough at stair climbing, I probably would’ve won a medal. The ‘Faster Than ASIMO’ medal. After that, I decided to stay how I was, walking around on all four of my limbs, as though I were some small, armored horse. Which actually felt quite natural. Uncannily so. Because I was an armored little horse. I needed a better name for ‘little horse.’ Unfortunately, the only thing that sprung to mind was ‘pony,’ which, to be honest, was a bit feminine for my tastes.

I found my brother in much the same position I had left him in. Just sitting there. Staring at himself in the mirror. Every once in awhile he’d angle it a little, to take a look at some other part of his body.

“Jake?” He looked up at me when I called his name. Emotionless. Completely broken. It was nothing short of heart wrenching to see what I assumed to be my own brother, completely lost. He was six years older than me, and more of a man than I was ever willing to be. I couldn’t do much more than sigh and walk over to him. I sat down beside him, took the bottle between my forelegs, and bit into the cap. I had intended to use the grip of my teeth to twist the cap off, but I wound up tearing it off instead. My teeth absolutely shredded the thing, and I barely felt the cap assembly come off, until I noticed it floating freely on my wiggly, snakey tongue.

I spat the cap onto the floor some distance away from us, and offered up the bottle. “Here. Drink.” When Jake didn’t immediately reach for it, I turned a little and lifted it up to his lips. “Drink.” He seemed content to let me just tilt the bottle over and give him little sips. He didn’t have near the kind of enthusiasm as I had hoped for, but the simple act of drinking from a bottle was enough to get his attention off that damned mirror. He looked me in the eye and, finally, I saw a little of that spark coming back. This was my brother alright. He knew that as much as I did, and neither of us were alone.

“Better?” I asked, once I pulled the bottle away, having dumped half of it into Jake’s mouth.

“Kinda.” But he hadn’t gotten past one word answers. I rolled my eyes and offered the bottle again. This time, he held it himself. “So,” sip, “How’re Mummy and Daddy?”

“Couldn’t find them. Both cars in the lot. Whole city’s really quiet.”

“Quiet?”

“Abandoned quiet.” Jake looked back to the bottle between his forelegs, before he went bottom up and drained the rest of it in one go. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m going to find out. Let’s get downstairs.”

I stopped my brother before he could actually get moving. “You gonna walk around in your underwear?” He looked at me, then at his butt, with those stretched out briefs on them, and with agility I didn’t know he had, he shook them off. I stared for a moment and blinked at him. “Bit casual?”

“Eh, I like this better. Besides, it’s a dream, I’ll wake up sooner or later.” Sweet summer brother, if only. I felt awful hearing those words out of his mouth, but I couldn’t summon up the courage to try and convince him otherwise. We went downstairs.

Neither of us were particularly fast, but we were able to get around without smacking into anything. Going downstairs still presented a bit of a problem. I made it most of the way, before tripping on air and sliding down, but Jake was surer of his footing. Which was probably for the best, since I had doubts he was anywhere near as durable as I was. We didn’t stop until we were in the living room, and decided to spend some time lounging on our father’s unoccupied futon.

There really wasn’t much to say. We sat there and stared at each other, basking in our newfound horseness. Or was it hopelesness? It was hard to tell at this point. Maybe it simply was our strange crisis, but whenever I looked my brother in the eye, it felt like I was tuning into his soul. Or something. Reading him like a book, discerning his emotions. And right now, all I found was chaos. We were both so frightened, dazed, and confused, that we just kind of shut down. We literally couldn’t hold all these feels, and they were sloshing out all over the place. His coping mechanism, it seemed, was to shut down. My coping mechanism was to not give a fuck.

“I’m gonna check on the neighbors,” I said, after a good fifteen minutes had gone by. “Try and turn on the TV or something. Maybe there’s something on the news.” I rolled off the futon and went back to the front door, pulled it open, and stepped outside.

Yeah, it was just as quiet as before. The birds didn’t count. Neither did the squirrels. I made my way down the porch and opened up the front gate, letting it swing open before I stepped onto the sidewalk and crossed the street. The two old ladies who lived in this house were about as old as my parents, and were easily the loudest folks in the neighborhood. Most outgoing too. So I climbed their porch (which was in much better shape than ours) and knocked on the left door. I rang the bell. I even called my neighbor’s name. Nothing. I wiggled my nub of a hand—a hoof, really—against the mail slot and peered in. No lights, no noise. Not a stir. I called again. Still nothing, except one of her cats walking between rooms. I went to the other door that led to the rest of the apartments, and rang the bells a couple times. No response. I went down the street and checked the other houses, almost all of which I knew held at least two tenants, and not a single person was home. Not one. I went up the hill, to the next street over. The main street, that was always, ALWAYS busy. I looked left, and I looked right. Not a car on the road. Plenty parked by the sides, but none in motion. Not a pedestrian on the sidewalks either. There was nobody around. Not a soul.

I checked around some other streets. Every condo, every house. No response. Some of the doors were unlocked, and they swung open easily enough. So I investigated. No signs of struggle, all the occupants’ belongings completely undisturbed, nothing. Nothing worth mentioning, at least. It was all as if everybody had up and simply vanished.

Whatever happened, I had the sinking feeling that my brother and I were the only human beings left in town. But, were we even still human?

Author's Note

Wanna play a game? Take a shot every time you see the word "just" in this story.

Also, patchwork writing, hooray!

Peter. May 23rd, 9:19 AM. Boston

Needless to say, the idea that my brother and I were alone in a city, that had just yesterday filled its streets with 650,000 people, left me in something of a stupor. It was completely mindboggling. What sort of force could move that many people in, what? Six hours? I’d been up past midnight, and I only went to bed at around two. I woke up at eight, and now, all of this?

This couldn’t be a dream, I’d been conscious for far too long. I knew I was sober. There was no explanation for anything, other than that it just happened. No real reason. Maybe I was in some sort of sci-fi VR tube? But then, how did I get in the tube? Or, was I in it the whole time?

Shit, what if The Matrix was real? Am I about to be swarmed by agents?

The longer I stood there, with my face pressed up against the brick wall of a nearby building, the weirder things got. At some point, the mental list of possibilities went far beyond my control. It wasn’t even conscious thought anymore. My list grew sublists, and then the sublists grew sublists, and the sublists of the sublists had their own branches, too. There isn’t anything inherently bad about that sort of thing, but when you have ten different lines of thought going at once? That’s when things get a little fucky. I was only vaguely aware I was lying in the middle of the sidewalk, I had to put so much focus on keeping my head straight.

If anything, the harder I tried, the worse it got. At some point, my brain just gave up and scrambled itself.

My and mind I could barely was make running this out wasn’t own wild normal thoughts, much my knew. This I was that wasn’t ever living fuck? How supposed to what in. I mean, the thoughts I was drowning! I eight me’s one couldn’t parse think sequence, two, talk at three different Peters, four, five, six in my own, seven, even if I eight different — thoughts once! Eight I all like at it was there were in my head. Eight, all trying to once this wanted to, shit!

Then it was quiet. The lists were done, everything was where it should have been, and I’d organized all the possibilities. Despite being incredibly confused by what had just happened, I was confident I knew the cause all of this: magic! Duh! If there’s no proper explanation, just assume it’s magic. But, how could it be magic? Magic doesn’t—ah, shit, I shouldn’t have asked.

Magic sufficiently is advanced magic, technology that’s any all is there is indistinguishable to from it magic. So or does that is mean magic our magic technology is technology? Is what do think—

“That car is fucking blue!” I roared, pointing my hoof at an old, 90s era sedan. “I am lying on the ground!” I propped myself up against the nearest wall. “These bricks are burgundy! The sidewalk is gray and it’s made out of concrete! Tarmac is black! It’s also concrete, but bound by a substance known as asphalt, which turns into pitch at processing, where it is then mixed with the grain! That is why people call it asphalt, but they’re wrong! They should be calling it tarmac, because that is correct! I think.”

Dumb as I felt, shouting basic observations for all to hear, it was what kept me from turning into a drooling mess. Again. Whatever had happened, I was beginning to realize that it wasn’t just my body that had changed. Significant parts of my brain had probably been rewritten in the process. It was a natural assumption, considering I’d been transformed into a quadruped after a solid twenty-plus years of being a humanoid, and had the sort of basic development it took to hobble around on joints I’d only experienced for maybe an hour. But, without the initial rush of caring for my brother, things had slowed down significantly, and I now needed higher functions than ‘Ew, I look funny,’ and, ‘Wot.’ There was nothing to keep my new wiring in check, and the lights were all slowly coming on.

I was afraid. I could think faster than I could think think. I could think about dozens and dozens of different things, all at once, whether I liked it or not. Every new movement was accompanied by a blast of analysis. Stray, inconsequential thoughts were no longer stray, inconsequential thoughts: they were paths to be followed to their logical end. And whenever it got away from me, I would lose track of myself. I’d be completely absorbed by my thoughts. I could only imagine myself twitching around on the floor, foaming at the mouth as I thought of why they made stop signs into red octagons.

And as I pointed out the differences between the concrete in the sidewalk and the concrete in the road, to nobody in particular, I told myself that there had to be a better way. I had too much to do in too little time to being having a nuclear meltdown every time I had to exercise my critical thinking skills. Pointing out random things until I forgot what I was originally thinking about was most definitely not a sustainable practice. I needed to rein in this problem, and I needed to do it fast.

But not in the middle of these empty streets. I decided to return home. No use straying too far, and I had told my brother I’d only be gone for a few minutes.

When I got home, it was quiet, save for the sobbing of a broken man. I found my brother curled up on the futon. Occasionally, the splotchy, white and orange ball would expand in time to a gasp for air, before it’d settled back down to little whines and squeals of, “It’s all a dream,” and, “This isn’t real.”

So much for the carefully constructed ‘we are alone’ speech I had in mind. Still, I had to do something. We didn’t have time to sit around and cry like this. I sighed, or, I tried to sigh, and looked over to our giant, beautiful, plasma TV. Useless, now. There was nobody around to work the channels’ programming, so all we got was a blank screen. I wouldn’t bother flipping through the hundreds of channels in hope of finding something. If I did find anything, it probably wouldn’t have been worth the effort. Maybe an infomercial for a new vegetable dicer.

I turned back to Jake. I stared at him. This wasn’t a dream, and we both knew it. Looking at Jake reminded me of how I should be reacting. Just freaking out, losing any desire to do anything. Just the shock of it all. I had intended to comfort him, to maybe offer some words of encouragement.

But all I could do was stare at him. Stare at the dim, blue ball of light that floating near him. It moved whenever he did, and after a few seconds, I realized it wasn’t just near him, it was in him. Which was just great, because it meant that, on top of being transformed into some horrible, armored monster horse, being blessed with a supercomputing cluster for a brain, and all the other baggage that comes with such things, I’ve also been given X-ray vision for people’s soul-heart-things. Argh!

When I opened my mouth to speak, and maybe comfort him, all I managed was a strangled chirp.

Seeing my brother so broken was a reminder of what I should have been doing. Crying, screaming, flailing in a sea of denial. A reminder of just how fucked we were. I wasn’t me anymore. He wasn’t him anymore.

Really, I probably needed this. A good cry to start my day. To get it all out of my system, so I could focus on what really mattered. If we were the only two human beings left on this planet, were fucked six ways to Sunday. The world we knew would come crumbling down in mere hours, if it hadn’t already.

But I couldn’t even cry, really. I didn’t have the necessary equipment to cry. I couldn’t even fake it. Something inside grabbed onto the ‘I want to cry’ command, ran off into the distance, and buried it under a rock. Despair would be a waste of energy, and I was hungry—so my body told me—and looking at the little ball of light in my brother made my mouth water.

Salivating at somebody’s soul was a little hard to ignore. I mean, do you know what a soul tastes like? I don’t. My body does, but it won’t tell me. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never felt so excited for mystery meat. Either way, I certainly wouldn’t be eating my brother, because, well, he’s my brother.

I felt like a massive dipshit, just watching a man cry. But I was too busy dealing with all the mixed signals rushing through my body. Really, it was a small miracle my face wasn’t in the carpet at this point. It took far longer than I would have liked for everything to calm down. I wasn’t staring at some sort of meal, as my stomach wanted me to think, I was staring at an opportunity. I had a chance to to turn somebody’s frown upside down. I wanted that.

Not because, you know, this was my distressed brother, whom I cared for very deeply, but because of some other, nebulous reason. Because making people happy was good. It was a benefit to me, and I wanted to comfort my brother, not out of the goodness of my heart, but because I would get some reward out of it. So I thought. This reward wasn’t the warm fuzzies of doing a good deed, but something else, something… Something...

Fucking hell, the clock’s ticking, and here I am, contemplating my navel! I was going to do this, because Jacob was family, and I loved him as any brother would love his sibling. Not because I’d get a gold star.

I crawled onto the futon and clung to my brother for the second time that morning. This time, I didn’t have to wrestle my way around him. There was no struggling; only the quiet acceptance of a brother’s support. The sentiment went both ways.

Such went the first time I had hugged anybody even remotely in earnest in a long, long time. I wanted so badly to just take in the feeling, that reassurance that I wasn’t alone, that I had a shoulder to lean on through all the trials ahead. It was beyond mere temptation to close my eyes and bask in that warm glow. It was a need.

Then and there I understood what that nebulous reward was. Because I felt it. You know what it felt like? Elation, confusion, warmth, the lingering desire for more. Perfect stimulation. The beginnings of an addiction.

Your first orgasm.

Search Party. May 23rd. 9:42 AM. New York City

Glimmer and Sage sat in a small boat while Clarity and Dustup flew nearby, tugging the vessel across the water, with a couple lengths of rope. Glimmer kept her focus on the wagon, and occasionally gripped it with her magic, adjusting it so that it wouldn’t get any ideas about going for a nice swim in the cold, morning harbor. Sage turned over a miniature of the massive statue they had arrived beside, taking in its details with wide eyed wonder.

“Lady Liberty,” Sage mumbled to herself, as she read the etching on the base of the figurine for the tenth time. Glimmer couldn’t help but roll her eyes, which drew Sage’s attention. “What do you think she’s like?”

Glimmer let out a long breath, as she looked at the figurine between Sage’s hooves, then back at the island they’d departed some minutes ago. “I don’t know,” she said, after a while, “Whatever she’s like, people obviously liked her enough to build a huge, metal statue.”

“Do you think these,” Sage wiggled the figurine, “Are like some sort of shrine idols?”

“Like the little Celestia woodcarvings from late eighth century shrine houses?”

Sage nodded. Vigorously.

“Maybe. We could always ask.” Glimmer shrugged, and leaned back in her seat. She took a moment to jostle the wagon, and make sure it was still stationary. “Probably.”

“Probably?”

“Yeah, probably.” Glimmer was silent for a second longer, taking on a contemplative pose with her chin on her hoof. “You remember how Luna briefed us on the mechanics of the spell? How it would only return a human to Earth once their soul was ready for their new body?”

“Uh, yeah.” Sage tilted her head. “What about it?”

“What if nopony’s ready yet?”

“What? No way!”

“Think about it.” Glimmer rolled onto her back and looked over to Sage. “That island we were just on, with the statue. In Equestria, that island had a statue of Celestia to welcome visitors from across the ocean. There were always tourists around. Then we come here, and nopony’s around to greet us? Not even a couple guards? We were walking around the island for a couple hours, and nopony came.”

Sage pursed her lips and looked back down to the figurine in her hooves.

“And all the time we’ve been out here, I haven’t seen any signs of activity. Equestria, the port’s busy at all hours, but here?” Glimmer waved her hoof all around. “It’s quiet. Too quiet. Don’t you think?”

Sage leaned back and planted herself against the wall of the boat. For a few seconds, she looked off into the distance, with a thoughtful expression on her face. Her ears flicked back and forth, tracking the sounds of the waves and sea birds. She turned back to Glimmer, with a small smile. “Maybe they’re still asleep.”

Glimmer’s muzzle scrunched up, and she rummaged through her saddlebags. “I don’t think so,” she said, as she levitated a small clock in front of her, “It’s a quarter to ten.” She turned the clock around to show Sage. Nine fortyfive, on the dot. “Somepony should be awake by now, especially in a city this big.”

Sage sighed, and watched as Glimmer adjusted the wagon again. Her fellow groundpounder had a point. It was the middle of the morning. Around this time, she’d be on her way to the noon market, with a cart of her freshest herbs. In the briefing, they had been told there were over seven billion(!) of these humans on the whole planet—and there were millions(!!) of them living in Earth’s equivalent of Manehattan. The numbers were far larger than anything she could grasp. Her lips formed a little O shape as it sunk in. If there were really millions of humans on the shore just a few minutes away, she would have heard something—anything. But in the past fifteen minutes they’d been on the water, they hadn’t seen any evidence of the city's inhabitants. “You think we scared them when we warped in?”

“At seven in the morning?”

“Maybe?”

“Come on, Sage!”

Sage licked her lips and looked down to the figurine in her hooves. She turned it around and looked into the face of Lady Liberty. “Well, uh…” She rolled onto her side. “There has to be somepony out there. Right?”

Peter. May 23rd, 9:51 AM. Boston

I forgot how long my brother and I held each other. I didn’t keep track. I couldn’t keep track. I was too busy soaking in one of the greatest sensations I had ever felt in my life. It wasn’t fleeting, like the end of a good fap—it was a lasting feeling, that never went away. It filled a hole I didn’t even know I had. In fact, it felt like my stomach was a little a swollen, even though I hadn’t eaten any food. What, was I eating the good vibes of brotherly love?

Ha. Yeah, sure.

The hug came to an abrupt end at some point. Jacob flinched between my armlegs, made a small gasp, and slumped. The sensation vanished with his strength, and his noodly body slipped from my grasp. Confused, I looked down at him.

The light in his chest had shrunk. Considerably. I could barely see the little speck of orange it had become. The last time I’d seen it, it was about the size of my fis—about the size of my hoof. Or maybe my giant eyeball. That was odd. What could have—

I blanked, and just stared at the ceiling. My brain latched onto the confusion and had a field day. I wasn’t anywhere close to following every thread, but even being able to piece together one of them, in a mess of dozens, was progress. I’m not sure how long I sat there, staring at our cobweb-covered ceiling, like a doofus, but I was eventually released from my deep thinking, with a few conclusions. The most likely one was the weirdest.

I fed off of people’s souls. Or something like that. Not freaky and potentially self-destructive at all. But it was probably true, if my painfully full tummy was any indicator. Still, it didn’t seem to manifest in physical contact, or I would have done this to my brother when I first wrestled him down. I wasn’t sure if I could even do it at will. I certainly wasn’t trying to eat his soul. I knew that much.

I looked down to my brother, and saw the effects of whatever I’d done. His body had, somehow, desaturated. There were deep bags under his eyes, and his mane had become messier than it already was. As if he’d been in some midnight marathon.

“Jake?”

At the call of his name, he looked up at me, with dull, tired eyes, and mumbled something completely incomprehensible. This is how you spoil the afterglow of eating somebody’s soul. I leaned over on the futon and took one of Daddy’s pillows between my hooves.

“You look tired. Take a nap.” I pushed Jacob onto his side and tucked the pillow under his head. “I’m going to figure out what we’re going to do, uh, about all, all this,” I said, as I tossed my forelegs up and shimmied off the futon.

With Jake asleep, there wasn’t much for me to do here, except pray that souls grow back. And we didn’t have time for that. I had to put my nose down, and keep moving.

I stepped outside again. The clouds had cleared away, leaving the whole of Empty Boston to sizzle in the summer sun. This wasn’t going to be a rainy summer. I could already tell.

I couldn’t lock the door behind me. Knowing my past experience, I’d probably sheer my key in half and get it stuck in the lock. It’s amazing what simple tasks become nearly impossible when one loses their fingers. But dwelling on such things will only remind me of the futility of my situation. I didn’t have time for that. The voice, deep down inside me, told me I had to keep moving.

There were a few possibilities I had to cover. There was still nothing to tell me what was going on, and if the empty streets were any indicator, I’d never find anybody who did know. If there were any structure to what had happened last night, I could only think of one governing body that would be there. The police.

It was quite convenient that there was a station just a couple blocks away. Up on the main street, then down a little way to the west. It was easy to find, and the glass doors were always unlocked.

There wasn’t anybody to greet me at the front desk, but I expected that. It would have been a surprise if there were any police officers around. It would have been a surprised if there were anybody around.

“Hello?” I called out, just to be thorough. It crossed my mind that a police station would probably have some pretty sweet loot. They wouldn’t mind, if there weren’t any officers left to use their gear.

With that said, I was both disappointed and elated when I heard a quiet thump from the depths of the station. Then, I saw a little spark, a ball of swirling energy, just like the one I’d seen in my brother. It was faded, and winked in and out of existence, no doubt because of all the walls that were between us.

“H-hello!” I called again, louder this time. The spark swayed a bit, before it began to move. “Is anybody here?” It was moving faster now. The image resolved as the spark’s carrier came closer. It was swirling with yellows and oranges, spiked along the top, jittering side to side. Was the spark happy? Excited? I couldn’t quite tell. I didn’t have a large enough sample to understand what this new sight meant. With luck, I would soon.

I could hear it now; the sound of hooves on tile. Another small horse—another pony, like my brother. Maybe another monstrosity, like me? I couldn’t tell, not yet. But I was happy to see somebody else, regardless of what they might look like.

“Oh, thank fuck—

The carrier of this new spark fumbled with a door to the side of the desk for a moment, before they flung it open and barreled into the lobby. A little, red orange pony, with wings outstretched, stumbled on the tile floor, their hooves caught up in the folds of their now oversized police uniform. She took one look at me, let out the highest, girliest scream I had ever heard, and collapsed in a mess of red feathers and navy fabric.

The spark changed color, to white and blue, as she screamed and did her best to run from me. She didn’t get far, though. In her panicked mad dash, she slammed into the reception desk. Face first. I just watched her curl into a ball at the foot of the desk, her nose bloodied from the impact. I waited. I would wait until she’d realized I wasn’t going to tear her guts out. I would wait for the moment, and then I would descend to comfort her. I could get the talents of a police officer on my side if I played my cards right.

In the back of my mind, a more sympathetic voice echoed. Was her nose broken? I hoped it wasn’t. That would be bad—I knew jack shit about horses.

Eventually, the winged pony curled into a ball on the floor, front hooves over her eyes. I could hear her muttering the Hail Mary to herself—a prayer I recognized from my catholic school days. I was not expecting a religious woman to be a police officer. But who was I to judge? We all need something to guide us through the darkness. Some of us bring flashlights. Others look to the heavens.

I could relate. Probably. When she looped back to repeat her prayer again, I joined her, and put a hoof on her shoulder. She felt light and fragile, unlike my brother, whom at least had some solidity to his body. I had held many different glasses in my life. My brother was like a common dinner glass: robust, made for daily use and washing. The kind you could hold extra tight when it was full of a heavy liquid. The lady under my hoof however? She was like the set of festive Christmas glasses we’d fill with eggnog and pretend to like. She felt like a thin glass that, if held just a little too tightly, would shatter in my grasp. It was fascinating. So fascinating that I almost didn’t catch it when her voice died down and the prayer stopped.

Carefully, she peeked up at me from beneath her hoof. Her spark still swirled white and blue, and shuddered, but the motion had calmed, even if just a little. Progress.

“I’m a friend,” I said, “A good Samaritan come to your aid.” That got her attention. “Is your nose alright?”

“I-it’s a little r-runny,” she stammered and looked up at me with wide eyes while I took her head between my hooves and turned her muzzle toward me. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting from a closer look at her nostrils. Her nose was bleeding, and that was about all I could tell. There were a ton of capillaries and other blood vessels in the face, I was pretty sure. For heat dispersion or something. I am an artist, not a biologist.

Come to think of it, if I hit my nose hard enough, would it bleed? Would my blood still be red?

I looked back down to the officer. “What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Beth,” she said. Her name came out like a grunt. A single syllable. Just like Jake.

“I’m Peter,” I said, before I drew Beth into a soft hug, careful not to snap her frail bones. She didn’t struggle. The feeling from before returned—the same intense, orgasmic feeling I’d gotten from hugging my brother. Then I remembered what he’d looked like when all was said and done, and I released her. I couldn’t do that to Beth. I needed her to be able-bodied. It probably helped that I was full to bursting with whatever was filling my gut. It hurt.

Quit overeating, one of the voices in my head reminded me.

“W-wow,” Beth breathed, as she slumped backward against the desk, “Thank you, Peter. I didn’t know I needed that.”

I smiled. I may have done what I did for the rewards, and to feel that amazing feeling once more, but I also knew that I had done good. Just as I would have before my brain got all fucked up. Before I was turned into a monster horse with an inch of ceramic armor between my flesh and the world. Before my selfishness led me around by the nose.

I wasn’t looking for people because they would make me feel safe. I was looking for people because they would be useful.

I rose to my hooves, and I saw Beth’s heart sink a little as I towered over her. I ignored that and helped her to her hooves. “Where’s the bathroom?” I asked her, “Let’s clean off your nose.”

“We keep a box of baby wipes behind the desk.”

I smiled. A woman after my own heart. It would sure beat heading to the bathroom to wash my hands every time somebody came to the desk. And the hand sanitizer never really made me feel clean.

“Here, let me just…” She broke from my side and flopped her side against the front desk—and her hooves immediately slipped out from under her. She fanned her wings in what I could only assume was reflex, before she scrambled back to her hooves and awkwardly crawled around behind the desk, assuring me that she was, “Just fine!”

A few seconds of watching her spark bob around behind the desk later, I heard the sound of a plastic container falling to the ground.

“I’m okay! Just gimme a second,” she said.

I looked to the ceiling and shook my head. “I’m coming to help, whether you like it or not,” I said. I had expected to slip and slide on the tile floor, just like Beth had, but instead, I found my hooves planted far more firmly than they should have been. Almost as though I were still wearing shoes.

Beth snorted. Exactly like a horse. “No, no, I can handle this!” she insisted, as I rounded the corner of the desk and saw her pawing at a towelette that was still partially inside its container.

“I’m sure you can,” I said, while I rolled my eyes, “But we don’t have time to fuck around, so swallow that pride, officer.” I flopped down beside her and dragged the plastic container out of her reach. I grabbed at the towelette with my hoof. Well, I ‘grabbed’ at it, with my phantom fingers that no longer existed, and wholly expected my hoof to just sail over while the wipe daintily bent out of the way. But it clung to my hoof as though it were magnetic, and then I saw why I couldn’t slip ‘n’ slide so well: the bottoms of my hooves looked kinda funny.

‘Funny’ as in, Jesus fucking Christ, that’s scary. My hooves’ undersides were incredibly flat, and covered in tiny hooks. I could barely make out the little shapes, and some unconscious effort made them twitch around. I had magic velcro hooves. Man, what were these things picking up while I was walking around outside? I’d have to make sure to avoid any gum that assholes might’ve left on the sidewalk.

“What’re you staring at?” Beth asked me, after I’d almost entirely forgotten she was there, “And how’d you do that?” She pointed at me hoof, still half covered by the baby wipe. What, could she not see the gazillion tiny fishing hooks? If she couldn’t, then it wasn’t worth talking about. Not right now.

“Oh, nothing,” I lied, “I just spaced out for a second. C’mere.” I hooked my other leg over Beth’s shoulder and pulled her close to me.

“Ow!”

“Sorry.”

Peter. May23rd, 10:24 AM. Boston

Author's Note

Holy cow, this chapter sat in editing/writing purgatory for far, far too long. It's probably never left it, really. I just want this done with, so I can move on to the next part. Sorry in advance.

Peter. May23rd, 10:24 AM. Boston

Helping Beth clean herself up gave us ample time to take stock of our situation. That is, we are vaguely horse-shaped creatures, she’s adorable, and I’m not. Beth had been doing office work when The Happening happened, and this made her the first of us ‘survivors’ to have been awake at the time. You would have hoped she could shed some light on what had gone down. You would have hoped.

“—And when I woke up, I was face down on the keyboard and I was…” Beth held up her forelegs and awkwardly gestured at herself. “I-I was this… This thing!” Her voice cracked.

“So, you were filing a report, then, poof?” Beth nodded. “Seriously, that’s it?”

She sighed, and pressed her hooves against her cheeks, squishing them up and down. “Yeah, seriously.”

“Well do you remember what time it was?”

“A little after six.”

“Hm, six in the morning.” That was as convenient a time as any. Just before most sane people with regular day jobs would be waking up. Anybody who liked partying their night away simply conked out before whatever happened, well, happened. It was a disappointing revelation that gave the rabid background thoughts nothing new to work with. Although, the mental image of every night shift worker knocking out at once was kind of amusing. Of course, then I got the mental image of everybody falling asleep in a car, or in a train, or in a plane. Suddenly, this wasn’t so funny. What else could go horribly wrong if the operator fell aslee—Beth is wearing blue, and her fur is orange.

“What’s up?” Beth reaching out to poke me was enough to bring me back to the real world—a land that wasn’t entirely occupied by lists of horrible accidents.

“Ah, I was just thinking—” I wasn’t lying— “We should get moving.” I turned to look down at Beth. “I mean, I can’t tell if this is even real, but I don’t want to be caught with my pants down.”

“You’ve already got a plan?”

“Yeah, but first, we’re going back to my house.”

It didn’t take much at all to convince Beth to follow me to my awful pigsty of a house, even if we had to walk in the middle of the street to avoid the knotweed that was creeping onto the sidewalk. As soon as we were back indoors, I brought her to the living room and parked her next to Jake.

Jake’s spark, fortunately, had grown a little from the last time I saw it. It was a relief to see that the damage I’d caused wouldn’t be permanent, but his recovery was progressing slower than I would have wished. Although, I shouldn’t have complained, since it was a miracle that he’d recovered at all. I didn’t want to think of what might have happened if my stomach were just a bit larger.

I wanted to let him sleep, but the clock was ticking.

“Hey, Jake, you have a nice nap?” I nudged his shoulder until he woke up. He was obviously still all kinds of weak, but he had his faculties and could focus his eyes. That would be enough, for now. “Welcome back. I’ll go get you something to eat, okay? Hey, Beth, watch him while I go forage in the kitchen. Oh, and, sorry about the mess.” On my way out of the room, I conveniently tripped over a stray extension cord.

Once I’d fed and watered my brother, and given Beth equal treatment, I sweeped the clutter off the coffee table and hopped onto the new clear surface. I told them of my plans, and how we’d set them in motion. Just about every utility was going to fail in the next few days. The water system would lose pressure somewhere, something in the gas lines would break, and the power plants would bust eventually. These systems could only run so long without any kind of intervention. Boston’s power was almost entirely natural gas. The only place I could think of that might run off ‘renewable’ sources would be somewhere out on Cape Cod. I liked Cape Cod, but it was Cape Cod—that place was a giant sandbar hanging off the southeast corner of Massachusetts, and far as I knew, it was maybe only a couple feet above sea level. Any inclement weather would mean floods, and the snow would be horrendous.

Beth was a police officer, my brother parked cars, and I was a bum. As a group, we were short on both specialization and time. We needed information and we needed supplies. Our hierarchy of needs was being reset, and how we prepared now would heavily influence how we lived then.

At least Beth knew something about guns—not like we would be able to use them in our current state—and a better working knowledge of the city than either of us men. But, before we got started on anything, we needed a real base of operations.

I looked over at Beth, then Jacob, then back at Beth. They looked back, and I came to a realization. They were waiting for me. I was in charge! I had units, waiting for my command! And their ears perked up when I opened my mouth. “I want to use the internet, but I can’t have you two sitting around. You got a PC at your place? If there’s anything you want to get from your own house, we oughta kill two birds with one stone.”

After a few more minutes of messing around and tripping over various objects in the house, the three of us decided to get our rears in gear. The beige Camry in the driveway next to our house chirped and flashed its lights twice, and I let the keys dangle with the ring around one of my longer teeth. “I’m driving,” I declared, as we approached the vehicle.

“But, you don’t know how to drive!” my brother protested.

“Wait, you don’t have a license?” Beth shouted at me.

“He doesn’t even have a learner’s permit,” Jake said to Beth, looking at her over his shoulder. Beth was about to say something else, before I cut her off.

“I do too know how to drive! I do it in simulators all the time. Give your baby bro some credit, he ain’t a total loser,” I growled, before I ducked down beside the car. I managed to wiggle my horn underneath the door handle, and with a few painful tugs, the mechanisms holding the door shut released. “Besides, if we’re abiding the law, are either of you even tall enough to sit in the front seat?” I asked, looking over the hood of the car at them, as I pulled the door open. Of course they weren’t.

It took some work to get car going, but once I put the automatic transmission into ‘drive’, it only took a few minutes before I was confidently wheeling the people mover around the vacant city streets.

We found Beth’s place pretty quickly. It was a nice little house somewhere in the tight, hilly neighborhood between the Green Street and Stonybrook subway stations. The tiny streets were just as tiny as they’d always been, with cars parked on both sides, but it wasn’t as though parking were an issue. Nobody was using these roads anymore, and with nobody to inconvenience, the law against double parking didn’t really matter.

We all just sort of barged into Beth’s place. Once we’d explained how everybody just vanished, she didn’t have much hope of seeing her family again. Naturally, we didn’t see her family again. The house was empty. She told me where to get at her computer—which had no password protection, might I add—and went off to grab a few things. Jake just kind of looked around.

We’d need a place that could ease us into living without the benefits of modern city infrastructure, given that most of it would be gone within the week. As it was, there were also some other needs that would need to be tended, and sooner or later, we’d very likely be forced out of the city, but we needed a better base of operations than my barely maintained, barely clean, hundred year old house.

Finding what I was looking for was easy enough with Google, since the servers had yet to die. I homed in on a totally hip and green design firm’s website within the first non-ad hit of ‘boston green homes’ and found a place in Brookline that not only had solar panels, but a storm drain cistern. Or something like that. Partially self-sustaining electric and water systems were about all I figured I would need. That way, if I found that those systems had to be expanded when the grid went down, I’d have an example to go off of.

The catch? No address was listed—for the client’s protection, I assumed—and I didn’t know Brookline that well. To be frank, I’m not sure if I’d ever even been to Brookline. I was a massive homebody, and I barely went out for anything other than school. I mean, with the ‘modern’ architecture the way it was, it would be hard to miss the place, but I had no clue where to start, other than that it might be near the country club Google Maps told me was also in the neighborhood.

The second problem was that Brookline was pretty much the beginning of the suburbs. Compared to the inner city, it’d be teeming with critters—probably the perfect hunting grounds for the packs of wild dogs and shit that’d rise up in a few days. If we set up there, we’d have to set up fast. I could probably handle a fight, considering I was covered in ceramic armor and had all sorts of nasty pokey bits on my body, but Jacob? Beth? They were these little horse things, not more than three feet tall. We weren’t yet dextrous enough to run fast, and they’d probably get torn apart by anything with teeth.

Both were, understandably, a bit unsettled when I told them this. But they also agreed that we needed a place like this Brookline house. It wasn’t as though any of us were plumbers or electricians. The prospect of finding a single house out of hundreds, with no real clues, and in a reasonable timeframe—hours, in this case—was not something I liked. So I continued my search, while Beth and Jacob talked out their problems and thought of what else we’d have to do.

I had to get a bit more ambitious in my Googling. ‘Brookline green home.’ Nah. ‘MA brookline home for sale solar power water cistern.’ That didn’t lead me to the house I’d seen on that architect’s site’s portfolio, but it gave me results. The first one was a place in Belmont, which I found out was in Cambridge, once I did a little further research. Nah. I didn’t know shit about Cambridge, which, while basically close enough to be a part of Boston, was really a whole other city. I knew where some things in Boston were, and I knew what I could find downtown. I didn’t want to stray from that, not so soon. So I kept looking.

I found a website that apparently specialized in houses like the one I was looking for, but, of course, all the offers they had were out of town. That Belmont place, mansions in Weston, Needham, Marblehead, and Concord; places I didn’t really know the location of, but knew weren’t nearby. They might’ve been close by car, but gasoline had a shelf life. Google told me so.

I probably spent a good hour searching and writing down addresses, ordered roughly by distance from Boston’s ‘center’ area. I found a place in Jamaica Plain that could work out, but Google’s streetview car hadn’t been by since 2013, when the place was still under construction, so whether or not it’d actually been finished was a tossup. All of us agreed that it’d be worth a shot to check it out.

So, with Beth’s double barrel, some shells, and a few of her keepsakes, we all jumped back into the car and took off.

As it turned out, the house was finished, which was great news! Unfortunately, it was in JP, which was hardly a step down from Brookline in terms of suburban-ness. The front door was locked and, well, we didn’t have a key. So, the three of us stood on the sidewalk, looking at the place. As shelter for the rest of our lives, it was okay. There wasn’t too much room for more than a small garden, unlike many of the self-sufficient homes further away from the city, but it would do us well enough, until we got our feet—hooves, underneath us and knew what we were doing. Keeping just a couple mouths fed wasn’t going to be a big deal in the middle of a city—there were plenty of canned goods just lying around.

“Beth, you know a good, non-damaging way to get into a house?” I asked. She just kind of looked at me. Guess not. “Alright.” So I kicked the door in. What would you have done? Smash a window? I considered it, but once again, Beth and Jake were three feet tall, and I was maybe four, if I didn’t count the forehead spear. I might have been fine, but the two of them would most likely get all cut up, climbing over shards of broken glass. Never mind that if we, a trio of uncoordinated horse things, could get in through a broken window, what else might? At least I knew that, with a little elbow grease, we’d be able to replace the door, rather than a window that was probably custom made.

Besides, if there were a better way, I wasn’t about to waste the time it’d take to find out.

The house was everything I expected it to be. Nice on the inside. Clean. Vaguely minimal, stylish furniture. It was all I’d come to expect out of a new, $600,000 house in a slowly gentrifying neighborhood like JP. I told Beth and Jake to stay at the front door while I scouted the place out. The house definitely felt lived in, even though it’d probably only been owned for maybe a year before the occupants disappeared. If they had a toothy dog or something, I’d rather it try and bite through my exceptionally hard ass, than Beth’s, or my brother’s. Fortunately, I found nothing of the sort, and was happy to report that the coast was clear. We found a reasonably heavy, movable chair, and slid it across the polished concrete floor and used it to barricade the front door, while we set our stuff out in the clearest place we found.

I sent Jake to see what food these people had around, and told Beth to check the windows and see what we could do to fortify the property while I dug into these poor people’s tech. It wasn’t as though they would be needing it anymore, and it was their fault for not passwording their shit. Well, they did, but they used passwords like ‘Boston’ and ‘password.’ I did a bit more research on this place and found that it wasn’t simply energy neutral—it was energy negative. Which actually changed things quite a bit, since that extra electricity would be better off in batteries than earning pointless credit with a local power company that probably didn’t exist anymore.

This was about when I realized just how much work we had to get done. Like, metric fucktons of work.

Search Party. May 23rd, 11:42 AM. New York City

To say that Earth’s Manehattan (Manhattan, as a sign had helpfully pointed out, which was equal parts amusing and surreal) was a spectacle, would be an understatement. It was absolutely nothing short of stupefying.

Tall, square structures of reflective glass, gleaming iron, and smooth stone rose hundreds of feet into the air. They stood so tall that their lofty heads swayed in the wind.

“It’s hard to appreciate just how huge these things are, until you’re on the ground right next to them,” Clarity thought out loud. Her statement summed up many of the feelings the party held. Such tall buildings were nothing short of an architectural miracle. Nothing so large in Equestria could stand on its own. These monolithic buildings were free of the arches and flying buttresses that surrounded many of Equestria’s grandest structures. The only truly comparably large building was the royal palace in Canterlot—so tall and utterly massive, that it was a city in and of itself, a maze of columns and supports, with buildings made to hold up larger buildings that held up even larger buildings, that served as leaning posts for buildings even larger still.

And then there were these: simple, glass boxes, comfortably swaying in the breeze.

There were no cobblestones on any street Glimmer Glory and her search party passed through. Instead, the roads were made entirely of concrete, smelly and black, and nothing like what they had ever seen. While the surface itself was quite smooth, it was very abrasive. And the bizarre, metal carriages that lined the edges of the black concrete were no more familiar.

“Where do you even hitch onto these things?” Sage asked, as she butted her muzzle against a particularly large, particularly boxy carriage. The vehicle could have easily fit a hundred, and then some, ponies into its absurdly spacious passenger compartment. The whole thing was covered in signs—advertisements, as far as Glimmer could tell—depicting all sorts of things, from a brand of orange juice, to a PSA about something called a ‘sharknado.’

Glimmer looked to the clear skies. She had seen plenty of strange and wondrous things during her time at the Fillydelphia Magical Conservatory, but even a twister full of flying sharks sounded far-fetched. Still, if there were public warnings of such an anomaly in a world without magic, she presumed it would be worth watching for.

After all, she’d hate to be swept up in a sharknado; that didn’t sound pleasant at all.

It didn’t take long for the party to find the big, central square of Manhattan. It was dubbed Times Square, and glowing, moving billboards stretched as far as the eye could see.

It was hard to focus on any one single object. Everything moved, everything flashed. Colors everywhere, mixed in with the sun gleaming off glass windows and storefronts.

Then, they looked again.

Times Square was a mess. Some of the storefronts had had their windows smashed. Random pieces of junk were strewn all over, rolling in the breeze. Total chaos. And yet, save for the moaning wind, it was completely silent. It almost reminded her of Canterlot after the changelings’ wedding crashing stunt.

The sound of shattering glass echoed from the distance. The party all looked between one another, and silently agreed that they should investigate.

Glimmer Glory hummed and tapped her hoof on her chin while she looked down at a large puddle of broken glass. Peculiarly, the glass had shattered into very small pieces—so small in fact, that she had initially mistaken the shards for clear pebbles. The tiny shards cracked and popped, slowly breaking into smaller and smaller pieces. “Novel,” she mused aloud, “All these little bits of glass have rounded edges, so you can’t get cut so easily.”

The store itself—a candy store from the look of things—was still dark. Without any of its employees, it never opened for the day. Which was quite a shame, really. Glimmer sighed. If only she could have seen what this city might’ve been like, teeming with the millions of cheery ponies she had been expecting. She’d probably see more ponies on one street than she could in all of Canterlot. Oh, if only—

The whole party flinched and covered their eyes with a unified chorus of, “Oh! Ack! Ah!” as the dim interior of the store suddenly became very bright.

By the time any of them had recovered, the sound of hooves on smooth tile could be heard. They were irregular, too: stumbling, careful, unsure. Every once in awhile, the hooves would scrabble and slip, punctuated by a meaty thud and a few grumbles.

“Who’s there?” Clarity called out, first to recover. The hooves stopped. “Hello?”

“Oh, holy shit!” a voice echoed from somewhere deeper inside the building. Clearly a stallion. “Wow, hold on, I’ll be right over! Jduwa—” thud— “Aahgh, motherf… Ugh. I’m coming!”

Glimmer held in a little giggle at another pony’s comic misfortune. Sage wasn’t quite as strong-willed. Still, whatever amusement they felt was weighed down by a certain amount of guilt. This mystery stallion clearly wasn’t so sure on their new hooves, through no real fault of their own. It had barely been a few hours since the spell was confirmed to have hit, and no sensible pony would’ve been awake for even half that time.

Shortly afterward, a tall, lanky stallion stumbled out from behind a corner, swimming in what could only be assumed to be his pre-spell uniform. He immediately tripped over his own hooves and came crashing to the hard, tile floor. It wasn’t funny this time. “Ooow,” he groaned as he flopped to his side.

“Hey, here, let me help you up,” Sage said, trotting over to his side and wedging her shoulders underneath his neck. “Come on—” she grunted, using her legs to heave the stallion up and onto his hooves. She huffed and pressed herself up against his side.

“Woah, you’re candy horses too?”

“Ponies,” Glimmer corrected him. “We’re looking for your princess—Lady Liberty?”

“Lady Liberty?” the stallion’s face scrunched up in confusion. “You mean The Statue of Liberty?”

“No, we aren’t looking for the statue, we’ve already seen it. We’re looking for who the statue’s of. We’re looking for your leader—your princess. Do you know where we might be able to find her?”

“Wha—” “America doesn’t have any princesses.” “This country’s a democracy!”

“Then...who’s in charge around here? Who moves the sun?”

“Uh?” If the stallion’s face could crinkle anymore, it’d collapse into a miniature black hole. “Where the hell are you people from? Tenochtitlan?”

“Tek-knock-tit-what-flan?” Sage squeaked.

“Well, if there’s nobody in Times Square, there’s no point searching the rest of the city,” Geoffrey said, crossing his forelegs over one another. At least, he tried, clumsy as he was with his still new limbs.

“Why’s that?” Sage asked.

“‘Cause it’s Times Square!” Geoffrey threw his hooves up—and immediately regretted it as he toppled over. “With all the tourists hanging around, there’s no way there wouldn’t be anybody hanging around.”

“So, you were the one who broke all the windows.” Clarity’s accusal made Geoffrey’s brown eyes pop a little.

“Wha—! No! That wasn’t me!” he shouted, in the middle of propping himself against the counter. “I thought it was you guys who broke the windows...”

Silence fell over the five ponies that were huddled among the colorful surroundings of enameled candies. A very serious silence, accompanied by a small side of hope. Glimmer Glory sighed, brushing aside the bangs of her bleached, golden mane.

“There’re others,” she quietly announced, before she turned to the rest of her search party. “Let’s get moving.”

As a unit, Glimmer, Sage, Clarity, and Dustup all stood up.

“Uh,” Geoffrey began, before he forgot whatever it was he wanted to say. “Uhm…”

“If we find anypony, we’ll tell them you’re here,” Glimmer said.

“Wait, wait, no.” The words fell out of Geoffrey’s muzzle as he stumbled to his hooves. “I still have, uh, questions!”

“Like?”

“Whuh, uh… What am I supposed to do?”

“You can…” Glimmer began, before her lower lip puffed out. What could he do? This clumsy stallion hadn’t been in his new body for more than just a few hours, and he was already being held to the standards of a native Equestrian. That wasn’t fair at all. Glimmer glanced around, before she pulled a small notebook and a pencil from her saddlebags. “You can tell us about your world!” She offered him a small smile, before shooing off Clarity and Dustup with a hoof. “Clarity, Dustup? You two circle the area for a little and see what you find, alright?”

The two pegasi looked at one another, before Dustup shrugged and led his winged companion outside.

“So—” Glimmer plopped on the ground, ready to write— “Let’s get business out of the way. Do you know any other place where we might find a lot of pon—er, people?”

“Not really. City hall, maybe?”

“How would we get there?”

Geoffrey clicked his tongue. “It’s, uh…” He scratched his neck with a hoof. “It’s… That… Way.” The same hoof pointed off in a direction. Glimmer stared for a moment.

“In this building?” she asked.

“Nah, outside.”

“Oh. South.” Glimmer scratched a few words in her notebook.

“Was it that building with the columns out front and stuff?” Sage asked, “It looked way different from everything else.”

Geoffrey noded. “Yeah, that one.”

Glimmer sucked in a cheek, when she heard his confirmation. “We’ve already been there,” she quietly said to Sage. She sighed, turning back to the human-turned-stallion. “Do you know of any other major population centers nearby?”

“Nearby? Well, there’s, uh, New Jersey?”

“New jersey, that’s...that’s the name of a city?” Glimmer could only barely tolerate the vagueness of the answers.

“I...think?” Geoffrey shrugged. “I haven’t been there myself, but it’s right over the bridge to the...west, I think.”

“And what about to the east?”

“Oh, that’s just Brooklyn.”

“‘Just Brooklyn?’” Sage parroted, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s a borough. Different island, but still a part of NYC.”

“And NYC is…?” Glimmer sighed, twirling the pencil she held in her magic.

“New York City. Y’know, in New York state? Where we are right now?”

“Geoffrey, we’re from an alternate universe. It’s a miracle we can even speak the same language.”

“Oh. Right, sorry.”

Glimmer huffed. “So, what about to the north?”

“Uh, there’s Boston, I guess. That’s where MIT is.”

“And what’s MIT?”

“The Massachusetts Institute, of Technology. I’m pretty sure. Also, I think that’s where Harvard is, too.”

“Institute, like a school?”

“Yeah.”

“Is there anything else to the north, other than Boston?”

“Well, there’s Canada.”

“Another city?”

“Nah, it’s a different country.”

“Can you think of any big cities in Canda?”

Geoffrey shrugged.

Glimmer’s eyes rolled into the back of her head.

While Sage and Glimmer Glory interviewed Geoffrey, Dustup and Clarity perched themselves at the edge of a skyscraper’s roof and stared down at the dense, urban sprawl beneath them. The buildings slowly tapered off to the north and west, contained by hills and shallow mountains, with the ocean providing the east border. But the city continued southward about as far as their eyes could hope to see.

“It really just goes on and on, doesn’t it?” Dustup muttered.

“Even with wings, how the hay are we supposed to find anypony in all this? The whole city’s completely empty!”

“Yeah…” Dustup sighed, “Not a single carriage on the street. Still, we oughta try. After all, sis, this is what we came here for. I mean, yeah, it’s not as glamorous as we were expecting, but...”

Clarity huffed, and Dustup scooted over and poked her with a knee.

“Besides—” he grinned— “Maybe we can pick up a few souvenirs while we’re at it.”

Glimmer flipped to a fresh page in her notebook. “So, here’s something a bit more personal. What’s it like, being a pony?”

“Aren’t you a pony too?”

“Well, uh, I was born this way. I meant it more in the context of you not having been a pony all your life. What’s it like, going from being human, to being an earth pony?”

“Oh, it fucking sucks!”

Author's Note

Jump cuts! Jump cuts!

Peter. May 23rd, 1:46 PM. Boston

With our new shelter secured, Beth, Jacob, and I met up again. We talked for an hour, and did our best to drink water out of plastic bottles without spilling any. We found a box of cereal, and they took turns dumping Cheerios into their mouths. I declined. I wasn’t hungry. I was still riding heavy on my morning of soul sucking.

We split up again. Beth and my brother broke into one of the neighboring houses and found the keys to the big pickup truck that was parked outside it, and took that off to Home Depot, or wherever. I hopped back in the camry and headed to nearest supermarket I knew of.

I was there for produce, mostly. When my brother told us about what the previous occupants of our new home had in their fridge and freezer, he described the meat with an uncharacteristic amount of revulsion, for a man who loved steak. Given his new form, I could only imagine it was simply because he couldn’t eat it, and maybe his mind had altered a little to let him know as much. I didn’t have the same reaction, though. The cuts of beef tucked in that freezer sounded awesome. So I grabbed a few packs of meat. Ham, chicken, steaks, whatever I felt like, really. I set it on one end of the cart, with all the fresh produce I could get my grubby, buggy hooves on stuffed into plastic bags to keep the two food groups from mixing. I filled the cart to the brim, and only just managed to stuff it all into the car’s trunk.

I took a second trip into the market, with my eyes set on preservatives. That is, salt. I started with the big, economy size buckets, and I prioritized whatever came in containers and probably wouldn’t rot. After the salt, came the spices. Pepper, cinnamon, whatever was readily available and packaged in some variety of metal or plastic. Most of it all went in the back seat of the car.

The third trip, I’m not sure what I was originally looking for, but I wound up with a whole assload of sweets. Now, as a human, there was a damn good reason I was a fatass. I was never good at resisting temptations. Ever. In my middle grade school days, I very nearly sweet toothed myself right into an acquired diabetes-based oblivion. I was bad.

And here I was, pushing around a shopping cart full of edible trash, in one of, arguably, the most stressful times of my life. What do you think I did?

It took more work than I anticipated, but with the application of my sticky hooves and monster dagger fangs, I got that little Reeses pack opened. I clumsily peeled off the wax paper wrapper, and fumbled the whole thing into my mouth. I flipped it around on my tongue a little. I bit it in half. I flipped the pieces around a little more.

“Huh,” I grunted. This wasn’t what I remembered a Reeses peanut butter cup tasting like. Maybe I just never realized how shitty American chocolate was, and the time I’d spend specifically avoiding regular chocolates had changed my tastes. Because I certainly didn’t taste chocolate.

In fact, I didn’t taste anything.

I stopped fumbling with the candy, and wiggled my tongue around a bit. There was definitely something there. I could feel the ridges of the unbroken pieces of the cup. I even felt the squishy, slightly grainy texture of the ‘peanut butter’ on my tongue. If I couldn’t taste the chocolate, I could at least taste the peanut butter. Right?

“They don’t make ‘em like they used to, I guess,” I said to myself, and continued on. Maybe something not riding on decades of brand recognition would taste better. I found my way to the baked goods section, and picked out a cake. Carrot cake, with vanilla frosting. No chocolate.

Like a civilized, armored bug monster, I bit down on the cake’s plastic cover and tore a huge chunk away. With nothing significant standing between me and my sugary prey, I smashed my nose right into it. It was more satisfying than I originally expected, to just send bits of cake flying everywhere. But I wasn’t here to make a mess—I was here eat my troubles away. So I turned my head and took an absolutely monumental bite out of the poor carrot cake.

Soft, with a little spring. The frosting’s grain was satisfactory. There were a few little, hard chunks here and there; probably the cake. All the little air bubbles in the batter were just right. It was everything I expected out of prebaked, storebought carrot cake.

Only, I couldn’t taste it. I knew exactly what this cake should taste like. But all I got was some gross, warm mush in my mouth. I couldn’t even taste my own saliva mixing into it.

I spat the gooey mess onto the floor, and turned my attention to a nearby coffee cake.

No, that was just flavorless mush, too. Another mess in the baked goods aisle, I guess.

Maybe this new body just couldn’t taste sweets? I couldn’t think of any real evolutionary advantages to not being able to recognize and desire pure sugar. I went back to the produce aisle, and picked out a pear. No manners, just take a big bite out of it.

Well, it certainly felt like eating a pear. A bit like an apple, but a little squishier, a little grainier. But, none of the pear flavor I was expecting. Just, juice and mush.

Maybe I could only taste meat? Worth a shot. I doubted I could find anything already cooked that was also warm, but hey, even raw meat had some flavor.

My stupidly sharp teeth tore through the quarter pound steak cutlet like nobody’s business, but no flavor. Maybe only liquids?

The orange juice was pulpy, I knew that much. But it was just fluid. I may as well have been drinking water with some bits of cellulose in it.

Maybe I was just trying the wrong things? There’s no way a living being could live without a sense of taste. That’s just stupid! How could you tell edible foods from poisons? What sort of dumb monster am I? Maybe, compound flavors confuse my senses. Pure chocolate should work. No? Okay, what about straight sugar? No? Cinnamon. No? Strawberry wafers. No? Shitty kids’ cereal. N-no? Well, what about these—

-= = =-

“Pete? You okay?” Something prodded my shoulder. I looked over. Jacob was standing over me, poking me with his hoof. Beth stood a little distance away.

“What?” I asked, dumbly. I looked around to get my bearings. I was still in the super market, but there was crap all over the floor around me and I was lying on my side. The shopping cart that I had been filling with junkfood was overturned and mangled into something barely recognizable, and every single package, bag, and wrapper had been torn to shreds. My whole body was covered in what I could only describe as stuff. Fuck me. “Yeah, yeah, I’m… I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? What happened?”

“I, uh… I just had a bit of a, a moment. It’s nothing you should worry about,” I said, stumbling back to my hooves, before, “Hey, Jake, can I lick you?”

Jake’s face twisted up into some kind of white and orange rorschach as he backed away. Under any normal circumstances, I would’ve bust a nut, but I was still recovering from my meltdown.

“Hey, Pete?” Beth called, the sound of my name stopping me from trying to taste test my own brother, “Are you really sure you’re feeling alright?” I blinked, and looked down at Jake, curled up into a ball at my hooves. My shoulders slumped under the weight of my guilt.

“No…” I mumbled. “Whatever changed us, it, uh, it did… It did something to my brain, too.” I nudged my brother until he gave up his armadillo imitation. “I guess, I’m still, a little scattered. I just... I don’t feel so hot. What time is it?”

“It’s almost eight o’ clock!” Beth shouted at me. Huh? “We were getting really worried—”

“WHAT!?”

I looked toward the front of the supermarket and out the glass building. The sky was orange.

With the sun setting, we decided to call it a day, and put some extra blockading on the front door, since we still hadn’t replaced it. Everybody went upstairs and slept in the master bedroom. Except for me.

I wasn’t tired. Just like I still wasn’t hungry, after a whole day of not eating. I’d been changed, but I didn’t know how. Not at the time.

Unable to sleep, I considered going out at night to do more runs—and hopefully not have another incident. It’d be safer now, only having to deal with maybe a raccoon or a stray animal that’d keep away if I shouted at it. Night would only get more dangerous as the days went on and the animals got more desperate. But, I had no clue how long the grid would stay, and I didn’t know enough about this house to be confident whatever solar power it got was being stored. I imagined it wasn’t.

My research told me that, as I had expected, most of Boston was running off of natural gas power plants. Exactly what kind of natural gas power plant, I wasn’t able to figure out, unfortunately. Which meant I could have anywhere between one and three days, to maybe a little longer, before the pressure faded and the turbines stopped turning. That was assuming nothing went wrong. Really, as a rolling blackout hadn’t knocked out the entire country, within the first hours of sunlight, things weren’t as bad as they could’ve been.

I spent the night on the internet, taking advantage of the servers and the electricity while they were still around. Coal powered plants were already failing—those couldn’t be expected to last more than a day, and I had no clue whether or not any important servers were on coal power. The biggest server farms probably had their own plants.

I was searching for information. Whatever I could find. How to install water catchment systems, how to safely hook photovoltaics to batteries, reminding myself how circuits worked, farming techniques, the lifespan of various fossil fuels, survival tips, anything and everything I thought might be useful. I even printed out directions to other towns and places of interest. What if we decided to go to NYC? Virginia? Cape Cod? What if we wanted to go somewhere in the midwest? California? I built up a list of routes and highway numbers, just in case. I wasn’t prepared for any sort of doomsday scenario when I woke up. But by sunrise of the next day, I was absolutely brimming with ideas. You can do this, I reminded myself. They’re counting on you.

Author's Note

We're finally putting a close to day 1! :pinkiecrazy:
Just one last chapter with the search party and it'll officially be the 24th.

Search Party. May 23rd, 1:52 PM. New York City

Author's Note

"Chapter's got a beginning, an ending, and only three quarters of a middle. Let's post it anyway, because I just want to move on! (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻"

Seriously, this chapter's been WIP for way too long, for reasons that are my own doing. If I write about the search party again, it'll be in their own story, because I can't do it justice in side chapters like this. Only reason I'm actually posting this chapter is because there's setup for future events on Pete's side in here.

Search Party. May 23rd, 1:52 PM. New York City

For what was definitely not the first time, silence hung over the room. Sage and Glimmer Glory exchanged awkward glances, before looking at a strangely pleased Geoffrey.

“Oookay. ‘It fucking sucks,’” Glimmer muttered to herself, innocently transcribing Geoffrey’s words. She looked back to him, once she’d finished writing. “Could you elaborate? The more details, the better.”

“Jesus, where to start?”

“Wherever you want.”

“Well, when I woke up this morning, I almost suffocated under my bedsheets. Then I almost broke my nose. I mean, all of a sudden, I’m this…” Geoffrey looked down at his outstretched forelegs, “This thing!”

“So, how you wanna do this?” Dustup asked Clarity. Clarity scanned the horizon, then lifted her wing and dug through the saddlebag that was hidden underneath it.

“D’you still have your flare gem that Glimmer gave you, before we went through the portal?” she asked, using her hoof to wiggle an oblong, green crystal out of her saddlebag. The crystal tumbled out and clattered on the gravel covering the roof of the building.

“Oh, that thing?” Dustup watched Clarity scoop the crystal up, with her mouth. “Yeah, of course!”

“Wehl, I wuffinking, we fwit uh.”

Dustup blinked a few times, his muzzle wrinkled up. “We...frit—” then he understood what she meant— “Oh! Split up! Right.” He lifted a wing, and began digging through his own saddlebag. “Yeah, you go one way, I’ll go the other. We use the flare if we find anypony… Wanna start with this big island and meet up after a couple hours?”

Clarity nodded, and she was gone before Dustup could say anything else. Unable to find his own flare gem in the left saddlebag, he turned to his right.

“Hm.” Glimmer looked back down to her notepad, scratching a few more notes into it. Sage laid by Geoffrey’s side, and the two earth ponies occasionally dunked their muzzles into a big bowl of enameled chocolates—M&Ms, he’d called them. “Not that I lack empathy for your frustrating situation, but I was sort of hoping you could highlight more of the...mechanical? Differences between a pony and a human.”

“That’s even harder,” Geoffrey sighed.

“There’s no rush.”

“But I really don’t know where to start, this time!”

“Well, we’ve sort of seen what a human looks like. Maybe you can describe an average human for us?” Glimmer suggested.

“Oh yeah, they’ve got…” Geoffrey paused, his eyes flicked back and forth, and he stood up. “I’ll just go get pictur—oh!” The second he tried to take a step, he tripped. “Fucking tiles,” he grumbled.

Dustup sighed, looking down at the city below, forelegs draped over the edge of a tall building’s rooftop. He’d only just set off, but he was already feeling overwhelmed by the task set out before him. The awe of his first impressions still lingered, and it persisted the more he thought of how his surroundings. Where Canterlot or Manehattan might have blended into farmland and forests, the concrete blocks extended onward, tall as, if not exceeding what he’d thought to be the limits of architecture. There was hardly any green to speak of. Where were all the farms? Where did any of these humans get their food from?

He groaned and held his head in his hooves. “Millions,” he muttered, “Millions of them.” He looked around once more, at the maze of stone and glass that sprawled far as the eye could see, and sprawled out like a deflated balloon, precariously balanced over a hundred foot drop. “They could be right under my nose and I wouldn’t even notice. How the heck is anypony supposed to find anything in a place like this?”

He slowly fanned his wings as he stared at the park below. It was the only patch of greenery he could find, and it stretched a mile and a half in either direction. It was a perfectly wide, flat area to search, even if the trees somewhat obstructed his view. It seemed a bit peculiar that a society that had so ravenously expanded would leave any room for a city park. Dustup couldn’t imagine a life where he never saw a tree again. That much, it seemed, he had in common with humans.

He huffed and lazily scanned the roads, not that there were many within immediate view. A rectangle of rodway circled around the park, while a few unoccupied bridges stretched the width of it. At the least, they looked unoccupied. Dustup scooted forward, dangled more of himself over the roof’s edge, and squinted. In the tiny gaps between the branches lining one of the roads, he could see little flashes of color. A few more seconds with his imaginary binoculars coaxed out the shape of three ponies. Three!

Dustup reached around his neck and, took his flare gem in his front hooves, and squeezed it tightly. Under the pressure, the object glowed red and launched straight up in the air, and it tugged itself free of the string around his neck. With Clarity notified, Dustup pushed off the building and glided his way down. One of the new ponies—the first to see him—grew massively in size when they noticed him approaching. A little closer and it became apparent that she was a pegasus!

“Hey there!” he called to the ponies, while he landed a few body lengths away. The one pegasus in the group squealed, her wings flailing about as they did their best to keep her balanced.

“I knew these wings are good for something!” she squeaked, before turning to the two earth ponies beside her, “I told you! I really can fly!”

Dustup couldn’t help but smile at the mare’s enthusiasm. The smile faded a little, when one of the stallions approached him, stumbling briefly. However, the misstep hadn’t done anything to his rather serious face.

He opened his mouth, as if to say something, before he closed it again.

“Do you know the M&M Store? Near Times Square?” Dustup asked him.

“What about it?”

“That’s where my friends are. We’re combing the city, trying to gather up all the ponies we can.”

“Wait, that’s what we’re called? Ponies?”

“I guess we do...kind of look like horses, but—” the mare began.

“Uh, yeah. I can explain it a lot better back at our base,” Dustup said, as he looked to the mare, busy flapping her wings in a poor attempt to fly.

“Woah, Dustup, look!” Clarity called over the wind, pointed down with her hoof. “It’s one of those carriages, all smashed up!” At her prompting, Dustup looked down at the ground.

A lump of brown metal sat on one of the many bridges in the city. It had the recognizable shape of the driverless carriages that’d been described to them, albeit, this one was bent out of shape. Little bits of debris were scattered all over the road, and what looked to be a wheel and some other components were wadded up around one of the cables supporting the bridge. Something glossy and black wriggled about a few yards away.

“What a mess,” Dustup muttered as he set down on the black concrete, looking around at the scene. Four pitch black marks along the road perfectly marked the carriage’s path as it had careened into the barriers along the side of the bridge. He knew this certainly wasn’t an intentional crash, even with as little as he had experience. Looking inside the carriage, he could barely get into the seats, let alone operate the controls. How could anypony be expected to work such a thing? Maybe Celestia could, but then again, Celestia could do anything.

Dustup started, remembering why he was here. “This looks recent. Clarity, where’s—” he turned around, and stopped dead.

Lying on the ground, directly in front of Clarity, was a changeling. Wearing what were unmistakably the remnants of human clothing.

“Don’t get me wrong, I loved working here,” Geoffrey said, “But I was just tryin’ t’keep on top o’ my student loans—”

“Student, loans?” Glimmer interjected, looking up from her notepad. She’d never heard of such a thing. She certainly hadn’t needed any sort of loan during her time at the conservatory. “What for?”

Geoffrey blinked. “For school,” he said. “College is expensive.”

“How expensive?”

“Around fifty-thousand dollars a year.”

Glimmer’s brow raised a little. “Dollars are your currency?”

“In America, yeah.”

“How much is a dollar worth? What could you buy with just one?”

Geoffrey sat back, and thought for much longer than he wished he’d have to. “Do you know what a pound is?”

“The weight measurement? We use those in Equestria.”

“One dollar is a pound of apples,” Geoffrey declared, and Glimmer took a few seconds to perform some basic arithmetic.

“That’s, a lot of apples,” she grunted.

“A-ah…” Clarity rocked backward on her hooves and looked to Dustup. “W-what should we do?” She took another glance at the changeling and let out a little squeak. Dustup bit his lower lip, looking between Clarity and the changeling.

“I-I-I, I don’t know! Don’t look at me!” He threw his forehooves out.

Clarity whinnied and trotted in circles.

Dustup spun around and flapped his wings.

“Ooogh,” the changeling moaned, “That hurt!” Dustup and Clarity froze in place. Their heads slowly turned to regard the shiny, black creature as it pushed itself onto its knees. A pair of lime green eyes shone through an equally green mane. The two ponies’ eyes widened when the changeling finally looked at them.

“Don’t look it in the eye!” Dustup shouted, and he and Clarity immediately slapped their hooves over their faces. The changeling looked on.

Time passed.

“Psst, Dusty!” Clarity loudly whispered, her eyes still covered, “Is it eating you yet?”

Dustup uncovered his face and turned to Clarity. “Seriously?”

“Why would I eat a horse?” the changeling asked, sitting right beside Dustup. Dustup vanished and reappeared, clinging to Clarity for dear life.

“B-bu-b—run!” Dustup screamed.

The two pegasi didn’t make it very far—their wings tangled within seconds, and they collapsed into a wriggling mass of feathers and panic a few yards away from a very unamused changeling. While the two ponies were still very much afraid, their blunder had made something quite apparent: neither of them had been eaten yet. Or, really, harmed in any way whatsoever.

Dustup separated himself from Clarity and slowly beat his wings. “Uuuuuhm,” he droned, slowly turning to look at the changeling. “Whuh, what’s your, uh...name?”

“Horace.”

“Oh, that’s—” Dustup tapped his hoof against his chin— “That’s not a very changelingy name.”

“Well of course not, it’s a Roman name,” Horace said, without missing a beat. He blinked and shook his head as he took a step forward. “Wait, wha—”

“We’ll explain later!” Clarity interjected, then immediately squealed when she Horace’s contorted, scowling face. “Ah! Sorry! Sorry!”

“We’re going to the M&M store! Y-you know where that is...right?”

“Really?” “Candy, at a time like this?”

When the day finally came to its twilight hours, the eight ponies—and one changeling—gathered in a hotel room overlooking Times Square. Glimmer Glory, being the only functioning unicorn out of the group, did most of the cooking. Sage helped here and there, while Clarity and Dustup sawed the legs off a dinner table, so that it would sit closer to the ground. The returned humans, now a trio of earth ponies and a pegasus, spoke with one another, reminding themselves of the world that once was. Horacio, the male changeling, sat by the window, staring out into the dead city. He was by his lonesome, not for the ponies’ lack of effort to integrate him into their group, but of his own volition. He was uncomfortable in his own shell—overwhelmed by a self consciousness he had never felt before. He could barely stand to be in the same room as the ponies. He felt indecent. Exposed.

The former humans all ate what would likely be their last straight meal for years to come, whether any of them realized it or not.

The Equestrians picked at their food, glancing between one another, then at the humans, the changeling, and back to themselves. This food had been stolen, as far as they were concerned. Even if the law no longer mattered.

The changeling looked between the two parties, eating even slower than the Equestrians did. He was entirely unenthused by the spaghetti squash, or the asparagus wrapped in fried hay, or anything around him. Whatever he ate satisfied him less and less, and while the humans might not have understood, the Equestrians knew too well that he was a wolf among the sheep.

Dinner was finished as the sun set, and the returnees all piled into the bedroom. Even the changeling joined in. None of the former humans seemed bothered by the closeness of sharing a bed; they even welcomed it. The shock of the day had been enough to bind them all together.

The Equestrians stayed in the main room. At a small communications station that’d been set up in the side of the search party’s travel carriage, Glimmer tapped out a message:

[ DAY 1 - CHANGELING TAMPERING CONFIRMED - SPELL TOO STRICT - RATIO OF RETURN LESS THAN 1 : 5,000,000 - RECOVERY UNEXPECTED WITHOUT INTERVENTION ]

Glimmer sighed, and held her head in her hooves.

“So, what do we do tomorrow?” Sage asked her, sprawled across the floor.

“We move on,” Glimmer said, rubbing her cheeks, “We go to Boston, see what we can find. Then Canada. Another team’s heading south, so that isn’t our problem.” She licked her lips as she glanced out the hotel room’s window, then turned back to Sage. “I just...I wish I could’ve seen what this world was like before the event. If I knew it’d be like this, I-I…”

“Wouldn’t have even bothered coming?” Sage finished for her.

Glimmer whined and bonked her head against the side of the carriage.

Peter. May 24th, 7:16 AM. Boston

I only truly knew morning had come when Jacob took it upon himself to pry me from the screen and interrupt my studies on the creation of gasoline from wood chips. He tapped the edge of his hoof against my shoulder with a quiet ‘clok’ and in that moment, I felt a rush of warmth spread through my body. Unfortunately, the sensation faded as quickly as it came, and all it did was make me keenly aware that I was a touch peckish.

“Pete?” His voice was low, and I could sense something bitter in the air whenever he spoke. “How’re you feeling?” I looked to my brother. The little, quivering ball of soul stuff in his chest had returned to the size and strength it was when I first laid eyes upon him, but looked distinctly blue. It occurred to me that my brother was shaking all over.

“Uh.” I rubbed a hoof against my forehead—not like I accomplished much other than make a little scraping sound. “Better. I’m feeling better.” I nodded at him. “A little hungry, though. Did—” I stopped dead when I saw his soul flash a brilliant, deeper shade of blue and physically shrink away from me. I paused, before I looked up into his eyes, with their jittery, dilated pupils. There was no denying it. “Jake?” I blinked. “Are you afraid of me?”

He shook his head, but didn’t say anything. I slowly reached up with both my long, porous forelegs and pulled him into a hug. He wriggled and squirmed in my grasp, and made pitiful, whimpering noises. “N-no…! No…!” It wasn’t long before I found myself physically recoiling at a sharp pain in my chest and a bitter taste on my lips. I looked up at Jacob, dumbfounded, only to realize he was on his back, halfway across the room.

“Sorry! I’m sorry!” I hissed, when I realized I’d sent him skidding across the polished concrete floor. “I just...I don’t, I, I—” I rolled onto my side and turned a blank stare in his general direction. “You’re really—I just.” I cussed an almighty cuss; loud enough that the house shook and summoned Beth. She scrambled into the room, flailing her wings for balance while her hooves slipped and slid around.

“What’s wrong?” she wheezed, wide-eyed and a little winded. She looked between us, but neither of us answered. Jake was curled up where he landed, and I was busy wallowing in my own self pity. “Guys?” she tried again, “What just happened? What’d I miss?”

After a few more seconds of dreadful silence, Jake muttered something.

“What?” Beth leaned in closer.

“I‘snot a drim,” I heard him mumble. And then he burst into tears. Beth looked on for a few seconds, then turned to me. I looked up at her, folded over myself in a mess of black and blue ceramics. She was pitying me. I could feel it. I could see it. And I couldn’t help but be disgusted that it made my mouth water.

I rose my head a little, and the tangled, blue mass I called hair draped over my field of view. I could see the look on her stressed face. Even from my terrible angle, I could count the ridges in her brow. “Are you afraid of me, too?” I quietly asked her, even though I already knew the answer. I could see her soul, blue with fear. Not so brilliant and violent as my brother’s, but notable all the same. “It’s okay,” I groaned, “I don’t blame you.”

I heard her hooves on the floor, before I felt her trembling hoof on my shoulder. “You look even worse hiding your face behind your hair,” she said, before she scraped her hoof over my face and pushed my messy locks aside. “I… Peter, you’re absolutely terrifying. I’m pretty sure you’re a demon. But you haven’t led me astray yet.” She paused, before quietly adding, “Admittedly, we haven’t actually done much yet.” She huffed. “Whatever The Lord’s plan may be, I’m sure this will all work out if we stick to our principles.”

My cheeks twitched. It was a little uplifting to know Beth was willing to put her trust in me. It was something I wanted on my deepest levels. The trust of others. I needed that trust, to give me the strength to go on. I couldn’t survive by myself. I couldn’t survive for myself—that much I realized very quickly. I pushed myself upright and craned my head around until I could get a clear view. Jacob was still where he’d landed, losing his figurative shit. I looked between him and Beth, and made the motion as deliberate and noticeable as I could.

She didn’t need much prompting to settle down next to my brother and wrap a foreleg—and a wing, I noticed—around him. It didn’t seem to help much, but at the very least, I could see a reaction to the contact in both of them.

“Not a dream, not a dream,” Jacob repeated to himself, over and over again. I couldn’t help but scowl. His denial of our reality made me angry. Frustrated. That he had the gall to simply refuse to act like a functioning human being. We didn’t have time to spend hugging it out. We only had a couple more days to set up a secure homestead in the city. Or find a new home, or something that would see us better off than we were currently.

“Jake?” I prodded at him with my voice.

“Aaah, it’s not a dream!” he responded.

“Jake.”

“No way, no way, no way—”

“Jake—”

“Nonono not a—”

“Jaco, come the fuck o—”

“Peter!” Beth yelled, glaring at me. I immediately deflated, ashamed.

“I just. I can’t.” I laid back down. “I can’t deal with this.” There wasn’t much to do but wait it out.

Only, we waited for an hour. Then we waited for two hours, and then almost three hours. All three of us, doing nothing but feel sorry for ourselves. Three hours wasted on their weak minds.

“What happened to my brother?” I mumbled to myself. And to my shock, he answered. Although, it was hard to hear him at first, muttering something about nightmares.

“It was terrible,” he croaked. I waited, and when he didn’t elaborate on his own, I took my chances.

“Do you want to talk about it?” When I spoke, I saw his soul flash something unfamiliar. It was gone as quickly as it appeared, much to my frustration.

“Not right now.”

His answer didn’t sit right with me. My brother was never one to give in to such intense feelings—never in my presence, at least. Suddenly, that flash made a lot of sense. He’s hiding something, I thought, but, the situation was already sensitive. I would have to try and interrogate him later.

“Maybe, you and Beth should go out and do something,” I suggested, “Take a walk, pick up some groceries.”

I was surprised when he agreed. He didn’t seem keen on talking to me, but he at least listened to what I had to say. The two of them wasted no time firing up the big pickup truck outside and rolling away, and, in a way, I was relieved to be rid of them.

Having the two of them occupied with scavenging for the day left me to something more important for my own mental health. I had personal belongings, many of which I had abandoned in yesterday’s confusion. I took it upon myself to return to my old home and retrieve them.

Fortunately, the walk back to my house wasn’t a very long one.

Finding the front door already unlocked confused me, at first. It took a few seconds to remember that I’d deliberately left the door unlocked—one part for my own convenience, and another part simple lack of ability. I pushed it open and stepped into the front hall.

The musty smell of home washed over me, and the sight of the ancient wallpaper, browned with age brought a smile to my face. A smile, despite the eerie silence that hung over the house—that hung over the whole city. In a city like Boston, you noticed the quiet. I could no longer hear the trucks and buses rumbling along the main street just up the hill. There were no more trains roaring through the trench in the parkway a couple blocks downhill. No shouting children on a pleasant summer day, or loud neighbors, or anything. Just birds, and the buildings moaning in the wind.

From the front hall, I followed the small path of destruction my brother and I had made yesterday morning, all the way back up to our bedrooms. I ducked into mine, and only gave the hole in the wall a passing glance.

It was here where I faced my first true obstacle inThe Fine Manipulation of Small Things. I had a ‘safe’ built into my desk that had to be unlocked with a key. In truth, it was only safe from sunlight and maybe some critters; it was entirely wood, and any dedicated criminal could break into it in short order. But it had a lock all the same. I used the tiny hooks on my hoof to open the top drawer of my desk and peered down into it. Exactly where I expected it to be, was a small key, attached to a springy ring of steel. It was the key to my safe, the container of all my most precious belongings. It took far too much effort to get the thing clamped between my lips, and the only bright side to the ordeal was that I eventually mastered the art of maneuvering my freakishly long tongue into a hook.

The second challenge was that the key to the safe’s door also doubled as the handle. That is, I had to hold the key turned and use its friction with the lock to help me pull the door open. Suffice to say, I failed that part with flying colors. Not only was I unable to maintain a proper grip on the key, I also broke it in two—inside the lock. It was at that point I held my hoof up to the door and smashed it to pieces with a quick shove of my weight. Getting the locked cabinet open was a cinch after that, specially with one half of the door missing.

I cleared away the debris and began pulling things out. Old papers, my medicine, the prescription labels for said medicine, my copies of Pokémon Red, Blue, and Silver, and the Gameboy Color I’d played them on, a homemade rosary...the list went on and on. I swept it all aside and, with the greatest care I could muster, squeezed a little, black box between my hooves and set it on the desk in front of me, took a moment to prepare myself. Then, I slowly opened the lid and felt my heart melt.

Inside the box was a golden pocket watch. My father gave it to me as a birthday gift just this past winter. A few years before then, I had bought a pocket watch of my own. A Mechanical one. I never did it for the fashion or for use as an actual timepiece—I had my phone for that. I got it because watching the tiny gears in motion fascinated me. I would hold it to my ear and listen to the faint, rapid tick-tock it would emit. It was such a simple thing, and I loved it. Then, one day, I dropped it. It was barely an inch from my hand to the desk, but the impact was enough to misalign the delicate machinery inside, and that was that. It was so cheap, getting it fixed would have cost more than buying a new one. Then, two years later, my father called me into the kitchen and handed me this little, black box.

And as desperately as I wanted to fiddle about with my greatest treasure, I resisted the temptation and closed the box. It snapped shut on its own, and I left it there. I pulled open my wardrobe and dug around until I found my favorite coat. That is, my only coat: a tundra camouflage, double-layer coat I’d gotten from the army navy store downtown. And despite being made of fabric, it was durable, water-resistant, and most of all, familiar.

I pawed one of the coat’s pockets open and swept my boxed pocket watch into it, and I was satisfied. I had what I came here for, and I no longer had a reason to stay. If my brother wanted any of his important keepsakes, he’d have to get them himself; I had no clue what he considered important.

When I made it back to the first floor, I stopped in the doorway to what had become my mother’s bedroom. At one point, it had been a nice dining room, with a linoleum floor and a big table, with fancy patterns carved all over it, and when I was young, we’d all gather around it and eat together.

“Together,” I mumbled to myself. “Wouldn’t just fucking grab a plate and retreat to my cave.” I looked down at the floor, then up to my mother’s bed. “If I’d known I would never see you again...if I’d known.”

When I was still in high school, her hips collapsed. She couldn’t climb stairs anymore; we had to cut a ramp into our back porch. And now she spent her days sitting in the same chair, in the same spot, sleeping in this hospital bed, with her husband—my father—in a futon in the den.

Before I knew it, I was curled up on my mother’s bed. I laid there for hours. In the first of those hours, I noticed the small depression the mattress had gotten from where she always slept, and I spent the rest of my time wallowing in it.

What the fuck are you doing? I thought to myself, eventually, You have better things to do. You have more important things to do. And so I got up, with not a single tear shed, nor a sigh huffed, and not for a lack of trying.

I went straight back to my new home after that, and neither Pete nor Beth were around, although I did find more produce in the refrigerator, and a shrinkwrapped palette of soft drinks on the bottom shelf. I hadn’t even looked at the drinks for more than a few seconds, before I tore the wrapping and picked out a lime and strawberry flavored one. It tasted like the depressing nothingness I had experienced in the supermarket yesterday, but the fizzy, carbonated texture gave me something. It wasn’t enough to compel me to finish it, so I opted to dump the rest down the kitchen sink and stuff the bottle into a trash can that popped out from beneath the granite countertop.

I took a moment to check the internet and see if I could do any more research. But, the world was closing in on forty eight hours since The Happening, and I quickly discovered that the world wide web was no more. Or at the very least, on death’s door, judging by all the ‘This website does not exist,’ errors I bumped into.

“Well,” I sat back and mumbled to myself, “This is really happening.”

This is really happening.

Author's Note

The chapter where nothing particularly exciting happens.

Peter. May 24th, 4:33 PM. Boston

With the internet—my primary data gathering source—gone, I had finally awoken to the gravity of my situation. Rather, I’d finally awoken more to the gravity. Or, whatever. The point is, I—we—are in serious shit, and no amount of web surfing could make it go away. The realization combined with the morning’s events and the painful hunger eating away at me, and it all formed into a mass of terrible shit.

It was a disturbing realization, that was for sure, but it that was all that it was. My boat was simply rocking, not capsizing and sinking to the briny depths. I couldn’t say the same for Jake or Beth, unfortunately.

Things were rapidly spinning out of control; our world was crumbling around us. Provided we managed things correctly, the supermarkets in the city could sustain the three of us until we all inevitably met our tragic deaths, be they through disease or injury.

But, that’s just survival. Merely surviving isn’t enough. As I had once learned in my youth, people need stability. Normalcy. The shock of the past day had already taken its toll on my brother, and there was no telling how much longer Beth might last. It even pained myself, browsing the aisles of an empty supermarket. The terror of daily life had been replaced with that of life in a dead world. Someday, this would be the new normal, but until then, it was abnormal—and the rapid transition would destroy us, given the opportunity.

Hence, I took it upon myself to instill a sense of normalcy in the house, with proper meals. No more grazing from a box of plain Corn Flakes.

With neither of my fellow survivors present, I had taken a quick trip to the supermarket to gather ingredients, and I made damn well sure not to try and sample anything off the shelves. The last thing I needed was to have another one of my episodes—especially when nobody knew where I was. With a defined goal other than ‘grab stuff’ I made record time, and found the house to still be empty when I got back.

The concept of a ‘comfort food’ had never eluded me, but it wasn’t something I had ever indulged. Eating for the sake of eating was not some sort of refuge I could hide away in. All my life, I was fat. Undeniably fat. I had too much baggage to enjoy food the way I wanted—I would always be overcome by feelings of guilt after dessert or unnecessarily large meals. I was too concerned with trying to not gain weight.

But, I was confident that Jake and Beth were free of such restraint. Even if they had similar feelings to my own, they’d be glad to have a square meal, certainly. I would give them pasta, the one kind of food I adored above all the others. Something that I, myself, enjoyed eating, despite my feelings after the fact. The food where portion control ceased to exist.

I would sit them down at the dining table and set their plates before them. There’d be a moment of confusion, before their faces would glow with recognition of my work. They would ask me what I made, and I would tell them: cut ziti, al dente, with a liberal coating of pesto, and a caesar salad on the side. They would eat. They would enjoy. And then I would eat. And then I would enjoy. And then I would no longer be hungry.

“Wha—” I grunted, and blinked as I found myself gazing at my reflection in the bottom of the kitchen sink. My messy, blue hair hung over my face in a tangled mass. From the darkness of my own shadow, two sets of bright, blue, concentric circles shone from the darkness. My long muzzle protruded through the webby curtain, my jaws marked by a row of needly teeth, with two massive fangs hanging down from the top corners.

“What the fuck am I?” I asked myself. I was something horrifying. Something monstrous. Suddenly, I couldn’t blame Jake for having a nightmare. I was that nightmare. Holy shit.

I was so lost in that realization I didn’t hear the sound of hooves behind me.

“Peter?” It was Beth. “Are you okay? You’re…” I slowly turned to look at her, while I still leaned on the sink for support, “Uh...shaking?” She took a step back, and I saw it again. The color of fear in her soul.

“No. I’m not okay.”

“Does something hurt?”

“Nah. I’m just...dealing with shit.”

“Oh. Okay.” She didn’t seem so sure what to do with herself, the way she swiveled back and forth around her hind legs. “I, uh, I am. Too. Do you, do you want to talk about it?”

“Nah, I just, need some time on my own,” I lied through my teeth. “Thanks though, Delicious.”

“Wha—wh-what’d you just call me?”

“Sweetheart?”

Peter. May 24th, 5:25 PM. Boston

Peter. May 24th, 5:25 PM. Boston

Beth pursed her lips and gave me a long, hard stare. I looked back, innocent as the world. I hadn’t realized calling her, ‘sweetheart,’ would cause such offense. After a few seconds, she shook her head. “What’re you doing by the sink?” she asked.

“Oh! I’m washing up,” I said. I pushed up the handle on the faucet and let my hooves soak under the running water for a few seconds, before I finagled my way into the hand soap. “I was thinking I’d try and cook supper, so...figured I ought to clean myself before I make the attempt.”

“We— Well, okay?” Beth didn’t sound so sure of her approval. “What’re you making?”

“Nothing too complicated,” I said, before quietly adding, “I hope.” I pushed off the sink and shimmied my way over to the counter. “Just some mixed pasta, and a little pesto sauce. Trying to keep it simple.”

“That...doesn’t actually sound so bad.”

“Right? I thought it’d be nice to give you guys something normal. God knows we need it.” I forced out a laugh—my body seemed incapable of genuine laughter, no matter how many jokes I told myself. “Especially after today.”

“Yeah.” Beth was quiet for awhile. Even though she made no sound, and I didn’t look at her, I could still tell she was there. I could feel her presence. “You need any help?” she said after a minute of watching me fuss around with a bottle of olive oil and a packet of pine nuts.

“No, no. I’ll be fine. Where’s Jake?”

“He’s with the truck, unhitching the trailer we picked up earlier today.” A trailer? Nice.

“He’s working?” I asked, rhetorically, “That’s good. Look after him when I can’t. Please? He’s—” I paused, having finally gotten the nuts into a bowl, “He’s everything to me.”

“Yeah...okay,” Beth said, before she turned away and started off. Her hooves stopped clicking against the concrete floor for a moment. “And hey, Peter?”

“Yeah?”

“If you ever change your mind...about the talking thing. Let me know, okay? I was thinking, while I was out today, y’know? We’re the only things we’ve got, now. It’s just us, and maybe God.”

Yeah. Maybe God. While it took some effort not to roll my eyes, it was beyond me to sneer out loud at anybody’s beliefs. Whatever keeps a person going, keeps a person going. “Don’t worry,” I assured her, “I will.” It was enough to convince Beth, and she left me to my business.

Now that I was peacefully alone in the kitchen, I looked back to the task ahead of me: cooking without hands. At first, it seemed like it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossibly so. But the longer I sat and thought about it, the easier it seemed. I could still grasp objects in my mouth, and a bit clumsily with my hooves, but I could still grasp. I would have to take it slower than usual—not that I was ever particularly fast.

I folded my forelegs up against the kitchen counter and surveyed my ingredients: a family-size box of spaghetti, a package of ‘fresh’ basil, a plastic container filled with pine nuts, sealed, grated parmesan cheese, olive oil, and garlic. Pesto was a simple enough sauce to make—and I already knew the proportions for a good blend.

I turned my attention to the blender I’d picked up during my supply run. At the time, it seemed like a great idea to use a blender and save myself from a night in front of a mortar and pestle. Now, however, I came to the slow realization that my hooves were just too big to effectively work the buttons.

After that, I would have to fill a pot with water, strain it out without losing the noodles, and—before I had even finished thinking of the problems I might face, they’d already been solved. By the time I finished one thought, I’d also finished a dozen others.

“No sweat,” I mumbled, dragging myself along the counter, getting all my prepackaged ingredients in one big bundle between my forelegs. Time wasn’t exactly of the essence; I’d make the sauce first, then cook the pasta, and mix it together at the end. No need to try and do it all at once. I’d more than likely fuck up and overcook the pasta or splatter the sauce everywhere in my rush. Without much more deliberation, I got to work.

I had to use my teeth to get into the childproofed seals on all the containers. They had clearly been made with the intention of being opened by a person with decently long fingernails, or with a knife, or with a pair of scissors—none of which I had at current. It was a sloppy job, but the plastic actually felt kind of nice to bite through, if only to test the frightening sharpness of my teeth.

Once I got the packages open, I pulled the blender over and set about removing the little safety tags that would prevent its operation; again, using my teeth. I absolutely decimated the twisty tie that kept the power cord all bundled up, and I nervously fiddled it into the outlet with my hooves. The risk of biting into it if I used my mouth was far too real.

With the blender plugged in, I set to work adding the ingredients. Half a cup of oil as the base, let the basil float on top, weigh them down with the pine nuts, and dump in the peeled cloves of garlic. I added the cheese last. Just as much as I thought would work out.

The grip I had to take to be able to reach the buttons on the blender with the curvature of my hoof was awkward to say the least: I had to wrap my leg around the back of it and brace it against my other so that I could keep it from getting pushed around on its shitty rubber feet whenever I tried to push the buttons. Much to my surprise, the thing did not wrench itself from my grasp when I revved the motor. In fact, it was more stable than I could’ve kept it if I were still a human. I hadn’t realized it first, by the hoof I’d been using to stabilize the blender had glommed on, its whole shape changing to grasp it better. I barely even felt the kick of the blender’s torque whenever I pulsed it!

It didn’t take long to turn the ingredients I’d put into the blender into a somewhat fine, very slightly chunky, green paste. I couldn’t taste test it, unfortunately; I would have to settled with eyesight alone. And, I mean, it looked alright, and that’s all I had to go on.

With the sauce taken care of for now, I had to suss out how to fill the pot with water. Well, that wasn’t the hard part—it was getting this giant pot of warm water out of the sink that was the hard part! The weight itself didn’t actually seem to bother me. I was already quite unstable, having to balance with my chest pressed against the side of the counter and squeezing the pot between my hooves like some sort of toy crane.

Perhaps what impressed me most during that ordeal was the strength I could bring to bear. This huge pot, easily the size of my chest, hardly weighed a pound between my horrible, chitinous hooves! I could barely believe it when I’d finally set it down on the heating coil. In fact, I wasn’t even sore from the effort. Not even a little creak from the plates all over my body.

With the water ready for heating, my next step was to actually turn up the heat. Should be simple, right? It turns out, child-proofing is actually pretty good at keeping more than just children out of things. The dials for the heating coils were what could be expected out of any respectable stove; they wouldn’t turn unless you pushed them inward. Normally, this wouldn’t be much of an issue, but the problem was that the dials had a very low profile. Normally, there’d be a sort of spine to pinch your fingers around, but these were bizarrely flat—with little divots I’d assume were meant to be for fingers, a bit like the holes in a bowling ball. I managed to leverage my hooves’ sticky properties to press the dial down and use friction to turn it.

But once I got the heat on, I set it all the way, then left it. This was my break time: watching a pot boil. It would take a minute or so for all that water to heat up, but I couldn’t trust myself to multitask. A couple days ago, I would’ve already started toasting bread and cutting vegetables for a salad, but I also had fingers a couple days ago.

Eventually the water hit a rolling boil, and that was my cue to dump the spaghetti in. The box wasn’t much an issue; I just bit the top off of it. With the noodles free, I haphazardly dumped them into the pot. One or two strands escaped, but I wasn’t terribly concerned with accuracy at this point.

What I did need to be concerned about, was stirring the spaghetti. I had a nice, long wooden spoon, sure, but no hands; It would be quite hard to see what I was doing. I initially tried holding the spoon in my mouth and stirring like that—but I quickly found that a nontrivial amount of my own hair also got into the water, and that wouldn’t do. I might contaminate the food, and that’s no good! I settled for clasping it between my hooves and hoping for the best. I didn’t get the best, but I certainly didn’t get the worst.

Next, I had to strain the boiling water from the pot. Now that, I knew, would be a challenge. I set out the strainer in the kitchen sink, which was, thankfully, quite close to the stove, and stalked back to the pot. I set the dial in the ‘off’ position and propped myself up against the counter. I did my crane impression again, but very, very slowly. I couldn’t squeeze the pot between my hooves as I did before. I tried to at first, but I could very quickly feel the sting of intense heat racing up my legs—one of the few things I could feel.

There was no clean way to dump the water. In the end, I just set the pot on the side of the sink and tipped it over, directly onto the poor, defenseless strainer. I lost a few more strands of spaghetti, but they were a necessary sacrifice as far as I was concerned.

Once I had finally gotten that harrowing leg taken care of, I set the pot back on the stove, and brought the cooked noodles back to it. I dropped them in, then poured in the sauce, stirred it all around a little, and put a lid over the pot to help retain heat. I didn’t bother to make it particularly secure; air pressure would keep it closed all on its own as the pot cooled off.

“Now...bread,” I grunted to myself. I had to make garlic bread. It wouldn’t be complete without a starchy side for such a starchy entree! I picked up the loaf of French bread I’d grabbed while on my ingredient run and set it out on the counter; it seemed clean enough, and I certainly wasn’t walking all over it, so I made an assumption. That said, getting the bread set out was the easy part—now I had to cut it!

I found a knife block the previous owners of my new home had left behind and, fortunately, they had exactly what I was looking for: a bread knife. A long, serrated edge, with a flat, rounded tip, perfectly dull. It was, essentially, a miniature saw, intended for cutting into something that would be keen to crumble under any other treatment.

This was how I discovered the dexterity of my tongue; I wrapped it around the handle of the knife and held it all tight between my jaws. After that, it was a simple matter of pinning the bread with the back of my hooves and head bobbing it to pieces.

I had to do the same with the cheese, and the garlic I was able to use a spoon for.

I took it all and sandwiched it between the halves of bread—cut with a flimsy hinge left on one side, so the halves wouldn’t drift away as I nursed them onto a metal baking sheet and set them aside while the oven warmed up. It was a small miracle that this fancy, electric oven used real buttons for the controls on its panel. If I had to rely on a bunch of sensors detecting my more than likely nonexistent bioelectric current, I’d have been shit out of luck.

In the meantime, I was free to work on the salad. A big bowl of carrots, lettuce, mushrooms, and croutons, with a sane, light dressing drizzled over the top. Simple. It was actually the easiest part of my preparations, given the things I’d learned preparing everything else.

When the oven finished preheating, I giddily stuffed the bread in, careful not to bonk my chin against the racks. With the bread on its way to crunchy perfection, I took my time tossing the salad, if only to give myself something to do while I waited.

Cooking is meditation.

Meditation that was immediately disturbed by a presence milling about in the doorway behind me.

“Hey Pete,” Jake muttered. He shrank back a little when I turned to face him, and I let an awkward silence form between us, out of nothing more than spite. The little asshole had known me for over twenty years! Why now would he suddenly be such a puss—

“‘Ey bro,” I muttered back, and watched him jump at the sound of my voice. “W’sup?”

“What’s cooking?”

“Spaghetti.”

“Oh.”

“Hey, can you grab Beth and go find us some guns?”

“Oh, uh, yeah. Yeah, sure.” And then he was gone.

My ears flicked about as I “felt” their souls skitter around the house for a bit, then trundle out the front door. I waited for them to hop in their truck, and listened to the big, obnoxious turbodiesel whine and hiss into the distance, and when I could no longer feel their presence, I flipped my shit.

Author's Note

Taking a months-long break from writing a chapter never ends well.

At least it's done—now we can move on to more talking and being confused!

Peter. May 24th, 6:10 PM. Boston

When Beth and Jake returned, they found me in the midst of gnawing the legs off a very nice—very unfortunate—dining table. Of course that was just what they caught me chewing on—I’d mauled the living shit out of just about everything in the room. It was like a tornado had come through. A very frustrated, black and blue tornado, making noises that could best be described as coming from the offspring of Stitch and the Alien.

I couldn’t blame them if they were afraid of me now. I had my fangs out and everything.

“Ian ickshplain!” I shouted through a mouthful of mahogany, before swallowing it, like a mutant termite. That only seemed to appall my housemates further. “All the chairs and this table were too tall to sit at, so I shortened them!” I waved a leg and, with nary a second thought, flipped a somethinghundred pound dining table back onto its legs. I gestured toward it. “See? It’s very even.”

Beth only stared at me. Jake shook his head and slurred out a little, “Wha?”

“Well—I mean, I looked for a saw, but I couldn’t find any around,” I said, “And I had to keep an eye on the food, so...yeah. Y’know what, nevermind, I’ll go find, uh, I’ll go get dinner, just—” I staggered over to a couple of the recently-chewed chairs and set them beside the just-chewed table— “Just sit down, I’ll be right back.”

Whether or not they heard the pot’s distressed squealing as I bit into it, neither of the two ponies mentioned it. They seemed content to stare at me as I brought it in and dropped it on the table, like a dog delivering the news. They were eerily silent while I brought out the salad and bread as well, and still hadn’t deigned to speak with me by the time I dumped some silverware on the table. And at that point, I’d had enough.

“Okay, what’s wrong?” I growled, looking between the two. Beth bared her teeth, lifted a hoof, and wiggled it at her mouth.

I swung my stupid tentacle tongue around and folded up my fangs. Better?

“Did you hear that noise a little while ago?” Jake asked, after a few more seconds of silence.

“No?” I furrowed my brow. “I mean, I hear plenty of shit. What was it?”

“It kinda sounded like one of those,” Jake trailed off as he searched through his head. He looked at the table, then back to me. “Like one of those old screamers, you remember those?”

“Like the ones your friends would send you, if they were dicks?”

“Yeah.”

I shook my head. I knew exactly what they were talking about, but I certainly didn’t want to admit it. To do so would be a sign of weakness—weakness I couldn’t afford to let them see.

Then Beth spoke up. “It was really, really loud, Peter, how could you not hear it?”

I shrugged.

“You probably could’ve heard it from a mile away—”

“Gonna be honest, Beth, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. This transformation shit is just driving us all crazy, that’s all—”

“Pete,” my brother cut in, and I looked straight at him, “This happened literally seconds after we drove off, and it came from the house! There’s no way you didn’t hear it.”

“Yeah, if something bad happened, we need to know.” I looked to Beth, then Jake, then Beth again. My brain went into overdrive, trying to find a graceful way out.

I sucked my teeth and shook my head. “I stubbed my toe.”

Jake and Beth just looked at me.

“Hoof, thing, whatever!” I exclaimed, holding up aforementioned limb for them both to see, “It hurt like a motherfucker, and I haven’t felt pain in the past two days, so why don’t you cut me a little slack? Now come on and eat, I worked hard on this. Here, I’ll go grab one of those toothed ladles and be right back.”

Dinner was not the joyous, food-filled affair I had hoped for. The three of us had collectively poisoned the well with our conflict, and I couldn’t help but wonder who was more at fault.

The blame may have been uncertain, but my hunger sure fucking wasn’t.

Peter. May 24th, 7:52 PM. Boston

Despite dinner’s rocky start, Jake and Beth were entirely willing to eat. Their souls lit up with what I could only assume to be delight, as the food I’d prepared took their full attention. Over time, the taint out of our previous conversation had dissipated, and there was a clear avenue for me to sustain myself. I could feel the positive energy circulating the room, and I tapped into it as subtly as I could. Paltry in comparison to what I’d sponged out of my brother that first time, but if I could pull this off every night, I figured I might just survive.

About three quarters of the way through his spaghetti, Jake looked up from his plate, muzzle covered in pesto and pasta bits. “Pete. You’re not gonna eat?”

“I don’t eat,” I said, “Not anymore, at least.”

It was Beth’s turn now. “You’re not even going to try your own cooking?”

I shook my head. “I don’t have a sense of taste. There’s no point.” I looked between her and my brother, and I saw genuine concern from both of them. I could see it on their faces and I could feel it in the air. It took a conscious effort not to immediately latch onto that feeling and milk it for all it was worth. This was not the time.

“Bro, if you don’t eat something, you’ll starve.”

“What do you think I was trying to do in the supermarket yesterday?” I asked him, “Get diabetes?” I let the question hang for a few seconds. Neither of them had a novel answer to share. “That beef jerky did nothing for me,” I hissed, “Not the apples, or the oranges, or the Snickers, or the Reeses—I couldn’t taste it, I couldn’t feel it, if anything it made me sick!” I sighed and let my head rest on the table. I could still feel all that mushed up junk rolling around inside me. Undigested. Festering into some strange schlock. It felt as disgusting as it sounded. “Worst of all, I could tell I was full. I knew I couldn’t eat another bite. But I was still hungry,” I said, my voice falling into more and more of a mumble as I spoke. “Last time I wasn’t wasting away was just after I’d slurped up Jacob’s soul—” my mouth clamped shut with a click. I looked between Beth and Jacob.

They heard that.

The longer they stared, the more I could see their feelings change. The gratitude, the enjoyment, the appreciation of what I’d done for them slowly burnt up. The tiny tether of sustenance I’d found on the table was no longer such a sweet thing—it had turned cold and bitter. Not inedible, not palatable either. They were afraid, and poor Jacob was more than just fearful, he was absolutely mortified. He knew what I’d done to him, yesterday. What I’d taken.

I stopped eating. It was too much.

“I need a moment.” I didn’t wait for their confirmation before I left. I didn’t care. The second I abstained from sucking up their delicious soul-whatever, I regretted it. I could feel myself slowing down, and my legs were heavy. I was a sluggish, clumsy monster, whose, stupid, gangly legs only added to the effect. I tripped several times on my way to the third floor, but I made it. I made it, in spite of the tangible disconnect between my intentions and my movements.

I was entirely numb by the time I made it to the bedroom, and climbing onto the mattress proved to be a struggle. I sprawled out in the middle of it, thoroughly exhausted. I couldn’t even bear to lift my head anymore.

I replayed the moment when my secret came out. Again and again. The confusion. The destruction of their trust in one fell swoop. The way that bitter feeling gutted me. It was like poison.

“Poison,” I mumbled to myself, only to realize I could no longer hear my own voice. The wall in front of me blurred in a whitish mess, with a little brown on the bottom. That was when it hit me. “No, not like this!” I moaned. I was fine just a couple minutes ago! I needed help. I needed my brother. I had to get up—and when I did, I came crashing to the wooden floor below. “Jake! Jake, I—Jake!”

Oh shit.

Oh shit.

Author's Note

It's been awhile. Don't worry, the next chapter's actually three quarters done already.
Everything's going to be just fine.

Xxxxx. Mya 52th, X:67 XX. Xxxxxx

“W-woah, woah!” Before I knew it, I’d found myself stumbling through a foot of snow. I didn’t have much trouble steadying myself. Tromping about in the snow was hardly a foreign act. If anything, fresh powder was what made living in the northeast worth it.

Although, the presence of snow seemed a bit peculiar. It was May, and I hadn’t seen mention of any freak blizzards in the forecast. With a huff, I crossed my arms and surveyed my immediate area.

Hey—wait. Arms?

I shook my head and looked down. True enough, I saw my arms folded over one another, elbows jutting outward. I didn’t have to deal with a scraggly blue mess blocking my view either. I twisted my arm upward, and stared at my hand.

My hand. Hidden beneath a heavy, black glove. I took the glove off, and wiggled my fingers. It was definitely my hand, down to every little, braided crease, including the nice ‘M’ shape in my palm, developed from years of holding gamepads. I even had that scar behind my thumb, from when I’d burnt myself with a hot glue gun in high school. I put the glove back on, and turned to my surroundings once more.

At some point, I had stepped into a garden. Where from, I had no clue—there wasn’t an entryway behind me. Of course, also I couldn’t remember swapping bodies.

From the pagoda, something waved at me—the creature I’d become just a couple days ago. Me? It? With little else to do, I trudged my way through the snow cover.

“Hey,” it said to me, once I’d stepped beneath the pagoda’s roof. “How’re you holding up?”

“I’m okay, I guess,” I said. A couple seconds of silence later, I furrowed my brow at the odd, black and blue creature. It was almost my height. The longer I stared, the more and more I sensed a wrongness about it, a sense of uncanny disgust that crept up my back. “What are you?”

It laughed. It laughed in chorus. Chorus shoved through a light vocoder. “I’m you!” the creature exclaimed, pressing its nose into mine, “This is what they see. What your brother sees.”

“Bullshit,” I muttered, pushing it away. Well, pushing myself away, because the thing didn’t even budge when I leaned into it. “I’m me, and that is definitely a fact. You’re just that...thing I transformed into yesterday.”

“Yeah.” It glanced to the pond on the south side of the garden, then fixed its huge eyes back on me. “In other words, I’m you.”

“Ugh—”

“I’m your body.”

I held up a finger. I wanted to protest, yet, I couldn’t. It was right.

“And stop thinking of me as ‘just some creature,’ I’m just as human as you are.”

“That’s…”

“What? Are you going to say I’m wrong?”

“No,” I huffed, “Not anymore.”

“Good. So, let’s get down to business. You’re starving, pal. You gotta eat.”

I leant up against the pagoda’s railing and looked out over the garden. I’d eaten plenty. Physically and intangibly. I’d stuffed myself as much as I could, and it was one of the first things I’d done when I woke up in my new body. There was no way I could be starving after just two days. “No I’m not. What, are you gonna knock me out and nag me whenever you could use a snack? Are naps off limits now?”

“You, you—” It growled and shook its head— “You don’t get it, do you? You fell asleep. Something you’ve tried to do for 48 hours and you only just now manage it, when you’re wasting away and skipping meals. Like, seriously! You had a feast right in front of you, and rather than taking that opportunity, you got all—all—”

“All what?” I shouted back, “All conscientious about what a piece of scum I am? That I’m slowly turning into some psychic vampire that preys upon the only two people left in the world?”

“You are on the verge of dying. We are about to die!” It yelled. “You have to march down those stairs, grab them, and eat, no matter what you think. Or you will die. There’s no afterlife for us, you know that, right? We’re not like your precious brother, or that little cop. They have souls, they’ll go on and get recycled. We, we’re just this patchwork.”

“And what, we’ve gotta keep gluing ourselves back together with their soul juice?”

“Yes.”

“That’s dumb.”

“That’s life. We have a purpose, and you’re too busy being human to realize that purpose.”

“At least we aren’t playing the pronoun game anymore.”

“You dense motherfucker, you don’t eat, you don’t drink, you don’t sleep, you don’t feel pain. You can lift a car all on your own, you’re covered in barbs, you can even fly! You’re too busy being a mopey dope to capitalize on your potential. You are a predator.”

I didn’t say anything. What was I supposed to? Where had this even come from? When had we gone from mere survival, to realizing our potential? And—”Wait, I can fly?”

“You, are the single most powerful being on the planet. Imagine that. Think for a second. What’ll you do with that kind of power?”

I looked over at the creature. I looked it up, then down, took in its features. The segmented plates, glowing eyes, jagged teeth—everything. And behind the chilling nothingness I saw in it, there was an aura of power.

“You are not a human. Not anymore. You, are me. We are one. And we exist for a purpose—a purpose I’m not about to let a few insignificant morals hold us away from. You’re going to wake up, and you are going to shed this pitiful skin you call humanity. Or I’ll do it for you.”

Suddenly, I was back in bed, staring at the headboard, bathing in the feeling of a home not my own, and the lukewarm air of a spring night. There was a pressure on my barrel, and without even looking, I could sense something sour, something rotten. I looked over my shoulder to find Jacob draped across my side. His face was emotionless, and the fur on his cheeks had been matted down in an unmistakable pattern. Poor Jake had been crying. Over my corpse, no doubt. He looked to be half asleep, too. How long had we been like this?

“Hey,” I whispered, and his whole body jolted. “Remember when you called me a pussy the last time I cried—”

A tidal wave of emotion rolled over me, and I happily gave in to my instinct.

Sweet sustenance! Sweet guilt.

Author's Note

Original comment was going to be "dude" and nothing else.

This is the chapter that killed the fic for months. I very much wanted to write a chapter in Peter's heart sanctum, but I could never quite figure out how to tackle it. So I let the story sit and hoped I might come up with something better than what I already had. In the end, nothing came. Only real reason I'm publishing it as is is because it's key to P-swizzle's future behavior.