Author's Note

You spent too much time on /mlp/ and ponychan, reading too many transformation stories. Their tales were idyllic, and eventually, you wanted that to be your life.

Your wish comes true. Hope you're happy.

A questionably-logical subversion of a years-old 4chan story prompt.
Heavily inspired by tfanon's story of Zephyr.

Wish Fulfillment: Chapter One (a)

It's a day like any other, except for your latest e-mail. It's not another rejection letter from a minimum-wage job. It's not telling you they want someone with experience, or that you're too late and the position is already filled. It just says, "Yours?" There's an attachment, and your antivirus says it's clean. A picture of your OC pops up when you open it - one that you remember. A friend of yours drew it for your deviantArt account, and it actually turned out pretty well. That really brings you back, and you spend a few minutes reminiscing.

It's been a couple of years, but you used to be pretty active on the MLP:FiM boards, the chans especially. Pony Transformation General was a frequent favourite, especially when someone introduced a story prompt:

So like, a bunch of popular bronies get a plushy of their OC, and after touching it, they slowly turn into their OC over the course of a few days or weeks. Hilarity ensues, and shit happens

Boy, did that ever speak to you. You weren't popular, but you were a brony, back then. You were into everything to do with the show, with the fandom, and with the merchandise. Your bedroom wall is still a morass of Princess Luna-themed wallpaper that you custom-ordered, back when you could still hold a job. Of course, its lack of subtlety probably has something to do with your success in bed since then, and you'd remove it to re-paper the wall - or maybe just paint - if you could afford to. You're already between jobs and living on ramen, corn flakes, and peanut butter straight from the jar, though. Your budget doesn't stretch that far, but shaking your head, you return to more pleasantly nostalgic thoughts.

The responses to that story prompt got you thinking. Eventually, you got to writing as well. The digital adventures you had through the lens of your OC fascinated you, even if nobody else really cared. You drilled words into cyberspace, and as he came into an abstract kind of existence, Night Shift the black-and-purple alicorn danced to their tune - but over time, you made changes. The fandom didn't really like alicorns, so he became an earth pony; you wanted to write an F/F clop chapter, so he became a mare; readers complained about the colors of your "overpowered" character, and you revised away what was left of the original completely.

The pegasus staring back through your computer screen with grinning confidence is pastel-blue, and her mid-length mane, swept forward almost into her face, is a brighter shade of pink. You'd even renamed her - the caption, written finely in the same colored pencil as the rest of the drawing, reads "Candy Crash." As far as you've written or roleplayed, she isn't particularly special. She is just a touch small for a grown pony, she loves to try out daring aerobatic stunts - which she has no knack for, so she usually ends up breaking something - and she has a sweet tooth the size of Manehattan. That's what ended up driving her to discovery of her special talent: hard candies. She makes and sells them in all kinds, and enjoys sampling her own product. Her cutie mark is a pink lollipop and a butter toffee, along with a white tablet you added as a joke when someone told you "candy" was street-ese for Ecstasy.

Who would still have this, though? And how would they associate it with this address? You took down your DA months ago, and this e-mail account is for job-hunting only. You suppose it couldn't hurt, though, and you might get a little information back. You send a reply:

Yeah, that was me. Did you have a question about her? Mail back and we can talk.

You wait a few minutes, but all that comes is another rejection letter - it's starting to feel like even the local grocery wants ten years' experience and a Master's degree in bagging. Bed calls, and your dreams aren't any worse than usual - something about showing up to a job interview without your clothes, but the only reaction these once-nightmares elicit anymore is numbness.

Days keep blurring together, and sometimes it feels like summer is passing you by. Revived memories bring you back to old MLP forums, and you end up posting an unfinished chapter of Candy Crash's story. Maybe one person remembers her and is happy to see the story updated. Whatever, you kind of enjoyed it. You start re-reading your story to date for nostalgia's sake, and that leads you to browsing other FiM fanfiction between job applications.

Over the course of a few weeks, you notice a curious trend. Pony transformation stories were always a big thing in the fandom, but a lot of the authors with the most popular ones seem to have disappeared completely, without notice and with little fuss. The readers, as always, move on, but you decide to investigate. The more you read through their old blogs, the more you pore over brief discussions of their absence, and the more personal details you dig up - these people really need to learn to protect their identities better - the more common themes emerge, and the more you're convinced something is happening.

You start tracking the current big-name transformation authors. It's late Fall now, and you have to organize your search time around your hours working a register, but you press on, and talented young writers continue to disappear. The ones you follow are vanishing one by one, approximately three weeks apart - every third Sunday, one will stop logging in, like clockwork.

It's mid-Winter, and you're letting yourself shiver in front of your computer to keep the heating bill down - you can't seem to keep a job in this economy. But you've built a story that's plain to see on the spreadsheet in front of you. The people who are disappearing aren't just popular. They're all easy to dox (almost all of them are in the eastern United States, or they were), they all became popular for their passionate self-insert stories, and they're all (as best you can tell) age 16-26. Nervously, you build one more author profile out of what you can find on the internet.

It barely takes twenty minutes to put together.

It's your profile.

It's all too easy to look up your fanfiction username, reverse-image-search your avatar, and find several of your older profiles on social media. If someone wanted, they wouldn't just know your name. They would know your age, your relatives (except those grandparents who disowned your dad's side of the family), your unemployed status, your address - even your banking company and a few of your exes you'd given "in a relationship" status on Facebook.

And one time, you wrote a short side-story about turning into Candy Crash.

You immediately drop a private message to the fanfiction account of your best friend. If this is real, you need to react quickly.

I have to show you something. You're not going to believe this. When can you come over? It's urgent - I think.
Also, don't write that story you were planning. Seriously. You know I believe in you and your ability. It's not about that.

With the message away, you lean back in your chair - and you jump right out of it when someone knocks heavily on your front door. "Too late" and "Wow, that was fast" are the first thoughts to rush through your mind, but three deep breaths later, you can reason with yourself. Life is full of funny coincidences, and it's probably neither your friend nor the mysterious source of disappearances. A glance at the date and time confirms that it's been nowhere near three weeks yet - you're safe. By the hour, you guess the person who just knocked a second time is just carrying the mail.

You hoof it to the front door, and open it just in time to see a brown-shirted man give you a friendly wave from his big, boxy UPS truck as he pulls away from the curb. You scold yourself, and move the package he left behind - it's a light box about the size of a duffel bag - to the kitchen table.

Maybe, you guess, it's just all the searching and profiling getting to you that gave you a scare. And the more you think about it, the less your own system makes sense. Sure, you know the kinds of people who are going dark, but you don't know anything about why - maybe it's a quitting agreement among elite authors who have gotten tired of the fandom, like a suicide pact except pony fanfiction. You also don't have anything to profile the sort of person who would be responsible for their disappearances, if anyone but the authors themselves is even responsible.

"It's probably nothing," you mutter to yourself. You can't un-send that PM to your friend, and she probably won't let you live it down for a while, but as you cut the tape to free the box's top flaps, you wonder if you should just forget your crazy theories. Sure, there's a pattern, but people see patterns in everything. Even string theory