“Owo what’s this?” asked Snoozlerazz.
“It’s your face,” replied Toola-Roola , and it was indeed her face. Which was frankly astonishing considering the fact that faces hadn’t been invented yet, which would make that short exchange somewhat anachronistic but not all that out of the realm of fiction.
Perhaps some context is needed. Snoozlerazz had just been kicked out of “Princess Cadance’s Dank Heart Stash”, and was looking for a new Ponyhoof group to troll. She was mostly sure that this was the proper way in which serious discourse was discussed because it was all anyone ever seemed to do, and frankly she was decent at it so why not? Also it was fun and one got a good return on energy invested. Also also also because the frustration of others can easily become the emotional sustenance of otherwise troubled individuals or lonely folks who just want to create ripples beyond themselves, alienated from the products of their labor by inhuman systems or by their material conditions.
She was, of course, a type-C changeling. Unlike type-A changelings which ate love and type-b changelings which didn’t exist, type-c changelings found strength and nutrients from annoying people. Not unlike the sirens, except for less hip-swaying and dicking around at a high school. Or hanging out at Waffle House, or wherever they are at the start of Rainbow Rocks. I mean seriously, like, what is the 1 to 1 for EQG world and like the Prime Reality? Is everything the same but with horse puns? Like is it Hayfle House or something? Like does that imply that there is the exact same history but with people who have a weird fascination with horses and odd and inconsistent naming conventions? Would it be Haydolf Hitler or Neighdolf Hitler? Like who figures out how that works??? Like what if they run out of two word names. Was there a humanpony World War at some point? Is there a analog for Ghandi? Wouldn’t that mean that there was a Ghandi pony in Equestria or something? How would that work--
The point is that there is a lot of things we don’t know and we should probably not think about them. Ever. It’s Like Welcome to Nightvale, except with ponies instead of People drawing purple eyes on their foreheads.
So anyway, having discovered faces too early to understand the seriousness of inventing an entirely new way of identifying fellow creatures, the recently defrocked Changeling was now left with a dilemma. On one hand, which is weird because where did that come from? Why did she make a hand? But on one hand, she was hungry. For love. Possibly for other things. Mostly love. Also Waffles, because unlike possibly the sirens, she hadn't experienced the magic of ~~friendship~~ waffles, and our girl Snooz relished new experiences. Or just annoyance. Like, honestly, and don’t tell anyone, like it really doesn’t matter ‘cause they’re eating your soul but shhhh. But on the other hand, this being the second of a set of two to potentially three hands that she had manifested without really considering the ramifications of this action, Toola might not appreciate having her soul/emotions/waffles devoured without ceremony or remorse or foreplay because she’s a savage apparently. Honestly. Or perhaps she's just a sad son of the sad south writing sad stories about sad horses. Who knows, they're pretty similar. They both start with “sa”.
So instead, Snoozlerazz went to the DMV. Yes, this being the Equestrian girls universe, they had cars, which meant they had the kafkaesque absurdity of the dmv. Surely this would be s great place to feed on annoyance.
But to her horror…
It was litterally just the dmv. There wasn’t anything different. There didn’t need to be.*
*The DMV is a curious subject. G. K. Chesterton once remarked that the poets had been strangely silent on the subject of cheese, but people often forget that he also mentioned their odd, fearful silence regarding the existence and proliferation of the DMV. You see, we often forget (purposefully) that no one actually *built* those. They appeared one day, fully formed like Athena out of the mind of Zeus and within we found befuddled but oddly numb comrades we had known before slaving behind the desks, the light gone from their eyes, and since then more and more poor innocents have been known to vanish only to have been in the DMV all along, working for some unknown dark master, to unknown ends. Our incorporation of these dark altars to the gods of Entropic meaninglessness into the process of licensure was purely budgetary in nature and was a much later innovation, but of course she didn’t know that. Yet.
Like so many others, Snoozlerazz ambled in through those doors without even a thought of what lay ahead of her beyond the dim prospect of preying/feeding upon the unsuspecting and half-asleep patrons. It was a fairly sound plan, by one way of looking at things. After all, bored and sleepy ponies I mean people are easier to consume. And by consume I mean like in a metaphorical sense not in that she was literally unhinging her jaw because while, yes, technically she could do that it wasn’t really very polite and Mother had always stressed politeness. Also slavish acceptance of all orders and ruthless crushing of inferior species for the glory and survival of their glorious hive. She tried not to think of Mother.
So, definitely not thinking of Mother because she never did ever she swore so to everyone except for anyone who asked because usually she just like mumbled awkwardly and fled if anyone asked because like, why would they if no one knew she was a changeling? But she wasn’t thinking about that and instead she started scanning the room.
Except that she didn’t do that at all.
Blinking, Snoozlerazz looked down in confusion to find a slip of paper in her hand with a number. She didn’t know what number because she hadn’t learned pony I mean human numbers and/or letters because that required effort better used in SUBJUGATION AS MOTHER DEMANDS or like, napping. When had she acquired this? HAd she intended to get a number? OR sit down and wait, because she was doing that now. She was sitting and waiting like a normal not-pony human thing like you do in the DMV, just sort of staring into the infinite expanse beneath existence mindlessly viewing the oblivion waiting all flesh or like watching anime on your phone or something.
She shook her head. Something was happening here.
But then she didn’t care anymore. She waited in line. In her seat. The line was, like, a socially constructed abstract thing. It was all numbers on paper so you didn’t actually queue up or anything. Look, she didn’t make the rules.
But the rules made her because like clockwork she got her license renewed and was blinking in the sunlight a few hours later, still hungry and without any memory of what she had been doing. How Kafkaesque. Or as they say in Human Equestria, Snoozlerazzesque. Spoiler alert, she later got into writing existential fiction. But not, like, that much later. Because that would be ridiculous the world wasn’t going to last that long.
With her latest failure, the changeling who was nominally our hero found herself in a predicament. She was starving, had wasted some of her last reserve of magic manifesting extra hands she didn’t actually need to make an obscure point to herself in public, and could probably only manage one change of shape. There were options, of course, but none of them were promising.
She needed a target. A good target, one that could be easily convinced to lower their defenses and provide her with sustenance. Names and faces flitted through her mind.
That’s not to say she was actually, like, really applying herself to the problem. DeLoveation is a hell of a drug.*
*Much like dehydration in humans and presumably in not pony humans in not pony world, deloveation had all sorts of adverse effects on the body. Ironically, dehydration leading into malnutrition makes eating food difficult as everything makes you sick and you start to go sort of loopy from lack of vital ingredients to life and soon you’re two days into the wilds of New Zealand halfway up a mountain raving about recursive baked potatoes.
So she was really just sort of half-hallucinating while also thinking randomly about people and/or ponies she knew and/or had seen before ever and got half of their names wrong because seriously how do you keep up with some of these bullshit names.
So of course she went to school. Because she went to school, like, on a regular basis. Despite not actually being school age, which also kind of brings up the question of how old is Twilight? She seems to have easily fit in as a high schooler but in Equestria she seems more like a young adult, if a little naive sometimes but also of course v. loveable. But she went there and it was school time so she went to class.
She wasn’t really sure what the class was about because for her it was about staring with unmasked hunger and/or vague erotic analog which all Changeling activity becomes inevitably in fiction because we are influenced by the sexual undertones in gothic literature regarding vampires and also by the discourse on power found therein. But anyway she was there and even though it was a high school she had a professor whose name was, frankly, ridiculous and also long.
Professor Shimmer Slimmer Shim Sham Lit Fam was just finishing some really profound expounding on something that SnoozLord totally didn’t catch because she just wanted to sink her metaphorical teeth into the metaphorical love/annoyance steak that was her teacher who was totally normal and not anything other than human when the bell rang and everyone began filing out.
In the distance, the totally also not out of place folk-rock indie band Lord Huron gathered around one of the windows and began softly playing this song which was probably difficult to replicate without, like, any source of power for amplification but hey they did it and it was really damn atmospheric and also very relevant in some way. SnoozerMcSnoozia rose slowly, filled with trepidation and that weird and partially unexamined lust/hunger hybrid emotional state that we constantly employ both in vampiric fiction and with changelings because it seems to make sense but we should probably really plumb the depths of because it’s probably meaningful.
She walked up to the desk.
She took a pencil, which she had had the whole times since the beginning of the story but it wasn’t yet relevant at all so it hadn’t been talked about, and tapped a rhythm on her teacher’s desk.
Except that it wasn’t just any rhythm. It was slightly off. Every fifth or sometimes seventh beat she would fall out of sync and ruin the tempo. It was the pencil drumming equivalent of playing a long string of nothing but the same suspended chord and never, ever, ever returning to the tonic or resolving the chord or anything just this grating incompleteness that is the absolute enemy of the nominally ordered human brain.
In effect, it was the most annoying thing that could possibly ever happen. Trust us.
Professor ~~Neutonium~~ SSSSLF grunted in annoyance. “Yes, dear student who mysteriously appeared in my classroom for the first time today, what can I do for you?”
Snoozlerazz put on her best Bambi eyes. Note how most of today’s kids probably have never seen Bambi, so it is only through cultural osmosis that that phrase has any meaning to most people. “Why yes, handsome professor. Would you like to make out?” Unfortunately, Snoozlerazz remembered slightly too late that she was the type of changeling that fed on annoyance, not love. Fortunately, she was a really bad kisser, so it all worked out anyway.
“Uh, sure?”, one of Shimmy Shammy’s many heads replied. And no, that’s not a penis joke. He literally had about five or six heads. What a surprise, what a twist! What’s going on here? Well, let’s just say Starswirl had gotten a little sloppy in just banishing random creatures he didn’t want to deal with to the Equestria Girls world. Jokes on him though; he never understood the power of friendship and died alone. So sad. Anyway, Snoozlerazz and Professor Shimmer Slimmer Shim Sham Lit Fam had several hours of really bad make out session in the staff lounge. None of the other teachers noticed because they were all doing the same thing.
Three hours later
“Professor Shimmer Slimmer Shim Sham Lit Fam, how could you do this to me?” pleaded Snoozlerazz, hanging upside down from her ankles in the school gymnasium at about 6:30pm on a Thursday afternoon. “I thought we had something special!”
Professor Shimmer Slimmer Shim Sham Lit Fam sighed. “Oh Snooze Button, I do love you. But student-teacher relationships are forbidden. Also, your tongue game could use a ton of work, and that thing you do with your nose isn’t endearing; it’s disgusting. Thus, I am forced to eat you, lest the truth come out!
Snoozlerazz really should have thought twice before initiating a sexual relationship with a hydra. But this raises further questions: why was a hydra allowed to teach at Crystal Prep academy? Well, why shouldn't it be? Are you just assuming hydras are violent creatures? #notallhydras! #makeequestriagreatagain #eatallthechangelings2017 wait what?
Snoozler the bamboozler sighed. “Well then, I have no choice then.” And with that, having been re-energized by her powerfully-poor kissing skills, she transformed into a beautiful butterfly and flew the fuck out of there. “Later, bitches” she tried to yell out to the gym, but she was a butterfly and butterflies cant talk. Anyway, the Prof was too stunned by this revelation to really do much of anything, so Snoozleberry got away. It JUST SO HAPPENED that that mirror thing in the statue in front of Ponyville High School was open, but Snoozlerazz as stated earlier had gone to Crystal Prep, so she transformed back into a poor facsimile of a human and took the 7:10 bus from the Crystal Empire or whatever it’s called in EQG world to Ponyville or whatever it’s called in the EQG world. Equestria Girlsville? But yeah she got off at 8:37 (The entire Equestria Girls Universe is only about the size of New Jersey) and ~~trotted~~ walked nonchalantly over to the statue and dived into its side. No one noticed because seriously who hangs out in front of a highschool at 8:40 on a Thursday night?
Well, Crankie Doodle Human noticed! He had been staying late grading papers, and had seen with his own eyes a suspicious human disappear into that weird statue. Part of him wanted to investigate, but he was three months from tenure and preferred not to mess that up so he got in his car and drove home to his beautiful wife Matilda who after a ten year separation, he had rediscovered a few years ago thanks to the power of Ponyhoof. Ponyhoof: Bringing ponies together!
Anyway, Snazzleroozerdoozlerdandydoorknob went into the portal and swirled around through space and time like a psychedelic toilet flush and popped out into the pony world, once again in (disguised) pony form. She shook her head out and looked around. She was in a basement. She needed a new victim target individual to annoy. She needn’t wait long for that though, because she heard a pony galloping towards her.
“Owo what’s this?” asked Starlight Glimmer.
Author's Note
Many thanks to Cynewulf for being such a cool cat. Go support her on Patreon!
