Author's Note
I appreciate you taking the time to try this story out.
How I Got There (Part 1)
I looked at a rude Youtube comment under some stupid video that I didn’t even enjoy was watching. “Die in hell,” it said in response to my finely crafted sentence about how people should do whatever the hell they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt others.
The video in question was about hentai, where you could say the girls were a little bit…questionable about their age. But they were never real! I swear, some people just go on the internet to yell at anything that makes them uncomfortable without understanding the true consequences behind them, which in some cases, don’t exist.
As much as I wanted to send a very angrily worded comment in response to this twat’s poorly worded, inconsiderate post, I figured listening to Pinkie Pie’s smile song would be a more productive alternative. That guy could be a bloody troll for crying out loud.
Oh, while I’m writing about my experiences I might as well let you know, if you hadn’t guessed already, that I’m a brony, as it’s going to become very important in future chapters where I describe my experiences of the past few months, starting with that particular repulsive Youtube commenter.
So, trying to ignore the quote-on-quote hater, I went onto Dailymotion, hit up that awesome video from AstrumSpark, sat back, and let my emotions play off of the pure, diabetes-inducing, glory that is Pinkie Pie singing about smiles.
It all was going so well until I noticed something odd about Pinkie’s smiles. They seemed to reflect more as grimaces through my poorly lit screen, which I kept on the lowest brightness setting to save my eyes a bit of pain after hours of staring at it. I remembered reading a bit about how sleep deprivation can play tricks on the brain to make somewhat genial expressions appear defensive or even angry towards the person in question.
I passed it off and opened up a Facebook tab for the millionth time today, absorbing the song from the background as my heart leapt with joy upon seeing eight new notifications…they were all game notifications.
Normally, this would have devastated me, but the Pinkie Pie song in the background made it a little better. That is until I heard, “Get a fucking life you pervert.”
Alarm bells went ringing through my head at hearing these words. At first I thought it was one of the Facebook videos that insta-play when you scroll over them (which should be muted automatically mind you), but after scrolling for minutes up and down the feed, there wasn’t a video to be seen. Not even an ad was playing on the Facebook page, which shouldn’t have even be there because I had adblock on. The only two tabs I had open were Facebook and DailyMotion. People who keep more than twenty tabs open are crazy and don’t deserve remorse.
No way, I thought. Did AstrumSpark re-upload that video or something? Maybe an ad slipped through adblock on DailyMotion. I clicked the DailyMotion tab.
Not an ad to be seen. The video I’d been listening to had already made it through and was displaying recommended videos. Top Recommendation: Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up. Damn you rick-rollers.
Still I was really confused about who said that. I knew the voice in question was high and bubbly, as if Pinkie Pie herself, at the very end of the video, had said it. I replayed the video one more time.
Pinkie Pie’s smiles seemed to be on point again at least, and no cussing was involved. Somewhat disturbed, I continued on with my regularly scheduled evening, surfing the internet and waiting for welfare checks. Welfare checks…I know it’s kinda scummy to just rely on those, but I’m trying to find a job, kinda.
Believe it or not though, I actually have a little bit in savings. My parent gave me about 1k as a kind of sorry-for-kicking-you-out penance, so I’m letting it build up while I just live my life away exploring all there is to explore on the internet.
The neighborhood I’m living in is shitty due to money constraints, but it doesn’t really make a difference as long as I have running water, electricity for my computer, and food. While the crime over here is rampant, everyone knows I’m a shut-in, so no one really tries to rob me, which is a plus I guess.
I don’t know where I’m going with this, so enough with that pity party.
I was going about my regularly scheduled day, surfing the Reddit karma wave when a tab to YouTube opened. It was to that stupid Rick Astley video. “Dammit!”
I tried to shut it off, but ten more popped up in its place. Thinking quickly, I closed the entire browser as quickly as I could. The Rick Astley stopped, but now my desktop background changed. I can’t help but think what hella virus I’d just been infected with.
Looking at my desktop background, I noticed that it was actually a gif, of Pinkie Pie no less. She looked at me, I looked at her, she screamed in terror, and I couldn’t help but give a bemused chuckle. It was hard not to appreciate the immaculate animation that must’ve taken place to make such a life-like impression of Pinkie Pie, well, as life-like as you can make an imaginary, pastel-colored, talking horse.
I sat there and let the gif play out, just to see what the animator had done with the rest of the gif. After screaming in terror, Pinkie Pie looked at the screen curiously, the shift in her emotion abrupt. Out of nowhere, she decided to run at the screen, only to bonk loudly against that invisible wall between us. I could’ve sworn I saw my computer shake a little bit.
As the gif played on for ten, twenty, now thirty minutes, I was head over heels amazed at how much work this would’ve taken. If you take into account that many films contain 27 frames per second of footage, the animator must’ve completed at least 48,600 hand-crafted frames of beautiful animation to create this, and sent it to me in virus format no less. I’m still not sure if the internet browser problem went away or not.
What kind of crazy person would do that?
To the right of my computer, my alarm clock read 2:01 AM. The rest of this Pinkie Pie gif could wait until tomorrow.
Before going to sleep, I took a quick shower in lukewarm water, dried off, got dressed, and finally plopped onto bed.
The last thought that crossed my mind as I fell asleep was that gifs didn’t have sound effects.
I woke up in the morning with the thought that gifs didn’t have sound effects. Sooooo, I figured, something was really wrong with my computer, wrong enough to hijack my screensaver application and change its information to always on, or I’d actually gotten an imaginary pink horse to possess my computer.
I’d’ve preferred it to be the latter, but it was very unlikely, and quite frankly, weirder viruses existed on the internet. What better place to find a solution than Reddit? Under the subreddit r/Computers, I created a thread asking about the problems I’d been having with my computer in the hopes that someone could relate this very interesting virus.
Still, I wasn’t going to let a stupid virus ruin my fun. First thing I did when opening up chrome was open up the Extensions page. Turns out there was an extension there that I hadn’t chosen to download.
rick_asstley69_XXXXXXX7589948
What the actual fuck. I deactivated and trashed it, glad to finally be rid of one of my problems, although the Pinkie Pie gif was still playing in the background. I didn’t hear the bonk sound she had made the first time I saw the gif/screensaver.
As much as the random sounds going on behind my browser were irritating me, I wouldn’t have had the heart to delete the Pinkie Pie gif, should I have found it. It was nice to have a disruption to my regularly scheduled evening, even if it made it hard to read fanfiction now and again.
If the gif was supposedly a screensaver, the browser window wouldn’t have been able to cover it. I decided to update my Reddit post really quick.
One comment! It read: ‘Kill yourself ponyfag.’ Someone’s salty.
After adding the information, I decided to go back to reading fanfiction. There was this big collection of five hundred writing prompts that I wanted to finish. 200,000 more words to go!
“Pay attention to me.”
What the fuck. I minimized the browser window to see Pinkie Pie looking at me with deer eyes. This animator knew how to get under your skin. I could’ve sworn this character knew of my existence. Then again, I’m always conveniently in front of the computer screen whenever the gif plays.
I maximized my browser again and just as I was about to finish another prompt, I saw a pink hoof reach up over my browser window and push it down into the minibar. What the…
“I said pay attention to me.”
I took a moment to process exactly how many lines of code were required to create a user-interactive ‘gif’ that not only could detect whether an internet browser was active, but also alter its appearance, to fit with the Pinkie Pie animation as she dragged it down into a minimized state.
“Who the fuck created you.”
“XXX_69YoMom96_XXX of course! Nah just kidding, it was actually my mother. I could go into details, but I don’t think you want that. As for XXX_69YoMom96_XXX, he’s too busy try-harding in Dark Souls 2 right now.”
That voice acting. I could’ve sworn Andrea Libman was in the room pranking me right now, so I did a double take behind me…nope.
“I guess you were programmed to tell me that huh?”
“Nope! But I’m sure you’ll think that I was programmed to answer that way too.”
“Ha! I was actually thinking about pink elephants!”
Pinkie Pie shrugged, “At least you know I’m not all knowing now.”
I actually had been thinking that’s was she was programmed to say, not that I would let her know that.
“I swear, you’re even better than Cleverbot, and the animator really outdid himself with his phonetic animations.”
She frowned, “You’re going to be hard to convince huh? Most every pony loving pervert goes right along with what I say, mainly because they want to believe it so badly.”
“Hey!”
“What?”
“I’m not a pervert.”
She smiled, “I know that, but you’re talking to me like an actual person now.”
Well, she got me there.
“You’re actually a pretty bad impersonation of Pinkie Pie,” I said. “She’s not nearly so abrasive.”
I really high pitched laugh stung my ears.
“Oh, so you think you can decide what it means to be Pinkamena Diane Fucking Pie?”
“Well, I didn’t know ‘Fucking’ was a part of your name…”
Her laugh assaulted my ears again, so I turned down my computer volume to halfway, I didn’t even remember leaving it at full volume the first time.
The volume ramped back up to full. “Listen here buckaroo!! I’m the real Pinkie Pie and I strongly suggest you ditch your pre-conceived notions before you suffocate in your own little pile of salt!”
I sat back, stunned. “Am I even allowed to control my computer anymore? Is this where system32 gets deleted and I’ve got to run a system repair on startup?”
“I was originally planning on sending your questionable porn folders to your mother, but I’m fine with doing that instead.”
“How about you not do both?”
“How’d you know my question was multiple choice?”
“It wasn’t exactly true or false.”
“What if it had been either/or?”
“There’s always a third choice.”
This made her smile. “Don’t you pull that Tony Stark shit on me.”
I opened up my browser window again. She pushed it back down.
“I have an important message to give you.”
I clicked the mute button and brought the browser back up. “Go ahead.”
This time she punched a hole in my browser window, tearing apart a gap large enough for her body to fit though. It took her a moment to find out how to unmute the computer, I noted with satisfaction. 100,000 more lines of code…
“Soooo, what I came here to say is that we need you here at Equestria. It’s kinda like the Star Trek, PETA endorsed, ‘save the whales’ movie.”
Now that, that made me laugh. I got a grin from Pinkie Pie.
“So, what do you say?”
“What do I have to do?”
“You’ll do it?!”
“Does it look like I have anything better to do? Even if you’re just a program...I want to see what happens.”
“Cool! All I need you to do is send a message to ten of your friends within thirty seconds.”
“So what we have here is a virus that asks the user to redistribute itself.”
Pinkie frowned, “It was a joke, snooty-face.”
“I just lost respect for you because of your usage of ‘snooty-face’.”
“I’m not here for your respect.”
“…fair enough.”
She looked at me expectantly, “You done having a hissy fit?”
“No, but I’d like for you to continue.”
“Good. Here’s the plan…”
I bit my lip to keep from grinning like an idiot. “Let me get this straight. You want me to rub bath salts around the outside edges of the computer monitor and light an open flame in front of the monitor while singing ‘Kumbaya, the blue man has come’.”
She nodded, “Yep. Also, don’t forget to delete system32 and run a magnet along your hard drive. Otherwise, Twilight’s magic wont be able to attune to your computer.”
“I’m guessing you also want me to upload my nudes to 4chan.”
“8chan actually…okay, okay, I’ll be honest here. You don’t have to do anything to your computer. In fact, any wall will do. As long as you make a portal-like entrance with bath salts, light that candle, and say those words.”
“Do I really have to say ‘Kumbaya’? I think it’d work just as well if I said, ‘Yo Twilight, I’m the human you want to teleport over there, let me in’.”
“Nononononono, it is absolutely necessary that you say, ‘Kumbaya, the blue man has come’.”
“Those exact words.”
“Uhuh.”
I shrugged, “Why not.”
She gave me the most radiant smile she could muster, “Cool! Once you’re about to complete the process I’ll notify Twilight.”
“…alright.” I just sat there.
“Why aren’t you getting started?”
“There’s one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“My welfare doesn’t come in until Friday.”
“Oh…alright. You have a shipment coming innnnnnnnnn, 12 hours. Got it?”
“What’d you do?”
“I paid for it.”
“How?”
“That’s the funny thing about you humans, using imaginary currency and all.”
My face dropped in horror. “You didn’t.”
“It isn’t stealing if the fate of Equestria is on the line is it?”
“If I get in trouble for this…”
“No one will ever believe you,” she said in a sing-song voice.
