Beep….
Beep….
Beep….

“Ugh...w-what…?”

Eff Stop slowly opened his eyes and looked around the curtained-off room. He looked down to his left foreleg to see an IV connected to it. His eyes followed the tube off of his forehoof and to the bag on the rack. He looked over to his right hoof to the pulse and O2 saturation monitor.

The memories of the night before came back to him – the advisor… the party… the booze. Ugh! By Celestia – he had drunken the entire bottle of Buckardi!

He pressed the button on the side of his bed and a nurse came in soon after.

“Hello, Mister Eff Stop. I am glad to see you awake!” She walked over, checking his vitals and making sure that his IV bag was still mostly full.

“What happened…?”

“You were nearly hit by a cargo carriage. They tried to wake you up and get you out of the road, but you were non-responsive. When you were admitted, you had a BAC of 0.38, and because of that, we began to try purging it out of your system. It mostly worked.” The nurse smiled, proud of herself.

“Huh...and it only took a few hours?” He looked out a window to the sun barely rising over the horizon.

“A few hours? Actually, you were out for a day and a half,” she snickered. “The attending doctor should be around soon to check up on you. Let’s see if we can’t get you discharged sometime today,” the nurse said in a practiced cheerful voice as she left, leaving the dumbstruck earth pony in the bed.

Eff Stop closed his eyes and waited until he heard another voice. It took about an hour until he heard the clip-clop of hooves. He sat back up and opened his eyes, nearly head-butting a violet changeling in a doctor’s white coat.

“Ah, Eff Stop – you’re awake! I was starting to wonder if you would wake up.” She started to chuckle softy until she felt the emotions coming from the earth pony. “Is everything alright? I know it might be scary to wake up in a hospital but I assure you that everything is fine now.”

Eff looked at the doctor for a moment. “Yeah, is there any way I can be discharged as soon as possible?”

The doctor appeared to ponder that request for a while. “Unfortunately, no. We were able to mend the light physical injuries and the alcohol poisoning, but you were... saying things in your sleep that are a cause for concern, so we have a referral for you.”

The earth pony drooped. “I can’t afford a referral, and sad to say, I won’t be able to afford you. Honestly, I’d rather just be on my way. I learned my lesson – don’t drink and walk around in the middle of the night.”

He started to sit up only for the doctor to push him back down onto the bed. “We still need to get your levels normalized, and then you will use the referral. I am sorry to say that if in one week I do not see that the referral has been used, I will be required to take other measures.” The doctor put the referral on Eff’s nose.

“In a few hours, I’ll have the nurses discharge you.”

The doctor left the earth pony alone to further recover.

#

Eff Stop looked over to the doctor from the sofa he was lying on, but he said nothing, and neither did the doctor for a long while. Eventually the yellow changeling spoke up.

“So why do you think you are here today?” The doctor looked over as he smiled warmly, trying to encourage the earth pony to feel safe in this room.

“If it’s what I think it is, I imagine I'm going to have a lot of explaining to do. Listen I have been to counsellors and psychiatrists before, off and on, so why don’t you start asking me the introductory questions and we can go from there?” Eff deadpanned before lying back onto the sofa.

There was another long silence until the yellow changeling started to speak.

“Okay, first off – do you have a history of drug and alcohol use?”

“I know that you might not believe it based on the last few days, but I actually don’t. I never saw the point in it. I’d burn through all my money to be high, but in the end I'd be right back at square one. I mean if I had enough money to be perpetually high, I would do that because I would never have to return to reality. Now booze, on the other hoof, before last week I drank maybe a year and a half ago? I don’t drink for the same reason as drugs, but sometimes things hit me so hard that I get myself passed-out drunk so I don’t have the faculties to take myself out.”

“What do you mean by take yourself out?”

“We both know you know what I mean.”

“So why haven’t you acted on it?”

“Because I have to wait for two conditions to be met, actually.”

The changeling sat forward with his note pad. “Conditions? What are those conditions?”

“Well there are just two of them. First – I tend to be a rather logical pony as I rely a lot on facts and figures. At least in this situation there are two figures – let’s call them figure X and figure Y. X is my contribution to society, and Y is what I take from it. X minus Y equals Z. It’s a simple formula but there are other things that go into it. In a nutshell though, as long as I am giving more than I am taking, I am viable, and existence is assured. If it is a negative number and that number stays too deeply negative for too long, I am insolvent and I should cease to be.”

The changeling nodded as he continued to write on his note pad. “And the other condition”?

“That condition… is a little more personal, and there is a long story behind it.”

“Well we have time.”

“So, Celestia moves the sun, Luna moves the moon. Everyone knows that, but what most people don’t know is that the movements aren’t perfectly in synch and they aren’t perfectly aligned. If you take enough measurements and do enough calculations, you can determine where the moon and sun will be at any given time.”

The changeling blinked. “Didn’t you say that your degree is in photography?”

“I used to be smarter than I am now.” Eff continued where he left off. “These inaccuracies add up and peculiarities happen. This is why we get eclipses but they are very rare. The last one that happened over Equestria nearly a hundred years ago, but in about four years in the month of August, the shadow of the moon will cross over Equus again, and for two and a half minutes, the noon day sun will disappear and it will be nighttime. It will be the validation of the last project I accomplished before the fever hit.”

The changeling perked up. “What fever is this?”

Eff ignored him and kept going.

“So… I am waiting for that event. Once that event has passed, the condition will be met, and if things keep going like they are, the other equation will be negative. With those two conditions met, I can pass on with nobody to miss me. I imagine I would do it either during or shortly after the eclipse. Not for a misled spiritual nature, but really just a vindication of my former more actualized self.”

“What about your family?”

“All dead. Nothing tragic – they were just old when they had me, but that’s okay. I never really spoke to them once I moved away anyway.”

“And friends?”

“They have their own lives, and they are getting ready to start their careers; they don’t need me in their life dragging them down.”

“Significant other?”

“I haven’t had one in years, I snapped one night, freaked out and broke up with her.”

The changeling by this point was overwhelmed; not only by the casualness and the muted, almost non-existent emotions coming from the college pony, but also by the fact that he was talking about the end of his existence from such a disassociated point of view.

“Well… this is a lot for me to pull together. I look forward to presenting you with my findings and recommendations during our next meeting.”

“I’m sorry, but there isn’t going to be a next meeting. I have to leave the Crystal Kingdom now so I can make it to Las Pegasus. I am going to stay with my old elementary school friend to run down the clock, so to speak,”

“Eff Stop, it only takes a few days by train.”

“I’m not taking a train. I’m selling everything off, putting my few essentials in a carriage and walking.”

The doctor’s eyes widened.

“But that would take weeks!”

“It’s why I’m leaving now so I don’t get stuck in the weather before I’ve gone far enough south.”

“Can I persuade you not to take this course of action, Eff Stop?”

Eff smiled a weak and hollow smile and shook his head. He held out a hoof to shake the changeling’s.

“Good luck, Eff Stop,” the changeling counsellor said sincerely.

“If anything, I’m a planner, doctor. With only those two goals in mind, I can make anything happen. It’s only four years, after all.”

Eff Stop left the room and the changeling frowned deeply before going back into his room to complete his notes.

#

Later that week in the middle of the night, Eff Stop looked at his kart. It wasn’t the best, but it was rugged and wouldn’t break like the newer, fancier models. In it, aside from some bare necessities, he had his precious cameras and a journal.

“Let’s see where this takes us,” he murmured.

The earth pony hooked up to the kart and began walking, starting his journey down the southern road hours before the sun would rise.

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