“Hey, Poop,” said Meh.
Poop clambered into the light blue teleporter—the Plot Initiator 2000. He yawned. “Hey, Meh.”
Meh dragged his tiny finger across the control display. “Ready for another exciting day of work?” he said, slowly and monotonously.
Poop raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know you could be sarcastic, Meh.”
“I can’t,” Meh said. “I’m just repeating what Smiling Face with Open Mouth said the other day.”
“Ah,” Poop said, “that explains it. Well, whatever gets you through the day, I guess. Can’t say sitting in a grid and waiting to be touched is all that exciting, but eh, to each his own, I guess.”
“Oops,” said Meh.
Poop rubbed his eyes. “ ‘Oops’? Why ‘oops’? What did you do?”
Meh pointed at the screen. “I accidentally touched the My Little Pony app instead of the Messenger app.”
“All right, well, go back to the home menu and select the Messenger app.”
“I can’t,” Meh said. “It’s already loading.”
“What do you mean?” Poop pressed the home button and waited. Nothing happened.
“It’s an older model. It’s still… thinking.”
The teleporter whirred, the blue floor pulsing a bright white. Vibrations from the machine tingled at Poop’s feet and traveled up his thin legs. “Meh, we can’t go to the My Little Pony app,” Poop said. “We’ll be late for work, and then we’ll be in trouble!”
“Oh, okay.”
Poop tried touching anywhere on the screen, but the device didn’t respond. He mashed the home button. “Come on… come on!”
Meh, by contrast, did not mash the home button.
“Oh! Oh!” Poop said as the screen changed. It went from the loading symbol to a bar, with a cast of small pony characters posed above it. Poop hit the home button again. “It’s… it’s still not working.”
“Yeah, that’s the second loading screen,” Meh said, pointing with his tiny finger. “See, there’s the bar there.”
“Gah!” Poop stomped on the ground as the whir got louder and the flashes from the floor became more obnoxious.
Then, with a zap, they disappeared.
~ ~ ~
They reappeared in a forest.
Immediately and conveniently, a small yellow pegasus just happened to be out in the forest on that particular day, at that particular time.
Poop approached the pegasus. “Excuse me, do you know where we are?”
“Oh, you poor dears,” Fluttershy said. “Don’t be afraid. We’re in the My Little Pony app—”
“No, I know that,” Poop said. “I mean, do you know where the nearest teleporter is? Should’ve started with that.”
“Well, are you two okay? Are you hurt? Do you need me to take you in and care for—”
“No, thank you,” Poop said, crossing his arms. “We’re fine. Fully awake. We’d just like to know where the teleporter is. It’s kind of urgent.”
Fluttershy nodded. “Right. Well, we don’t have a teleporter here, but the Friendship Express goes to a station that has one. I’ll take you to the train station.”
So off they went. Poop and Meh followed Fluttershy as she led them out of the small 100x100 square pixel forest and towards town.
As they crossed the bridge over the river and into Ponyville, a loud and distant gasp echoed from the center of town.
Poop looked at Meh. “I have a feeling we should be worried.”
Meh shrugged. “I only have one feeling, and it’s not worry.”
“Oh, right.”
As they approached, they could see that the source of the gasp was a very pink pony hopping towards them. Poop sighed. Somehow, he knew that she was the Laughing until Crying type. As she came bounding closer, it became clear that unfortunately, that was the case.
“Oh my gosh! Nobody from outside our app ever comes here!” Pinkie zipped away and came back with a disoriented rainbow-maned pegasus by her side. “Come on, quick! We have to invite everypony in Ponyville to a party before we become outcasts again!”
Poop started to drag Meh away. “We’re good, thanks. We’re kind of in a hurry. We have to get back to our app before the premiere of The Emoji Movie, in theaters July 28.”
Pinkie grinned. “Then we have plenty of time! That’s only five hours and twenty-four minutes away! Don’t worry, we can keep the party down to five hours and twenty-three minutes!”
Poop halted. He turned Meh towards Pinkie and pointed to his face. “Look at this face. Does he look like he wants a party?”
Meh, apathetic to the situation before him, blinked as he stared at Pinkie.
Pinkie rubbed her chin. “Looks like just the kind of face that needs a party!”
“No, you don’t understand,” Poop said, as Pinkie took him by the tiny hand towards a giant house made of gingerbread and frosting. “Meh’s entire being is one emotion. He doesn’t have any emotional complexity whatsoever.”
“Says you!” Pinkie said, cheerfully dragging Poop and Meh away against their will. “Maybe this will help him! You know, some ponies have told me my parties give them mixed feelings! That’s feelings with an ‘s’. I’m sure we can give him more than just one.”
Poop sighed, trying to wrench his wrist from Pinkie’s pink iron grip.
~ ~ ~
After about ten minutes, Poop only felt one feeling about Pinkie’s party.
“This is stupid,” he said.
Pinkie came by with a tray full of cupcakes, all decorated to look like Meh, and oddly enough, none decorated to look like Poop. She nudged Poop in the shoulder, or at least near that area—it was hard to tell where exactly his shoulder was. “Having fun yet? How’s your friend doing?”
Poop looked at Meh. “He’s still Meh,” Poop said. “I’m still Poop. And we’d still like to leave”
Pinkie pursed her lips at him. “Aw, come on, don’t be a…”
“Don’t say it.” Poop frowned at Pinkie. “Don’t do it.”
Pinkie’s mouth opened the tiniest amount possible. “Party pooper,” she whispered.
Poop groaned. “All right, we’re leaving.”
“Wait!” Pinkie said, sweating. She reached out behind her and pulled up the rainbow-maned pegasus from before. “You haven’t met everypony in the app yet! Look! It’s Rainbow Dash!”
Rainbow Dash nodded. “Yo.”
“Hey,” Poop said. “All right, we met Rainbow Dash. I guess we can go now.”
Pinkie grabbed on to Poop, her eyes brimming with tears. “No, please, don’t go…”
“You know, Pinkie,” Rainbow Dash said, putting her hoof on Pinkie’s shoulder. “I’m with them on this one. If they want to leave, maybe we should let them leave.”
“Yes! Thank you,” Poop said. “As I said, we’re really in a rush. We have to get back before the premiere of The Emoji Movie, in theaters July 28.”
Rainbow Dash huffed. “Okay, can you quit it with the movie thing already? We have our own movie premiere to worry about—The My Little Pony Movie, in theaters… uh, Pinkie, did they give a release date yet?”
Pinkie shrugged. “October 2017-ish.”
“Right, okay,” Rainbow said, shaking her head. “Still. If you’re so worried about your movie, you could just… I dunno…” Rainbow’s eyes fluttered, her raised eyebrows lowering. “You could leave. You could stay here. I dunno. It doesn’t really matter to me.”
Pinkie’s crinkled eyebrows slowly relaxed. “Yeah. You can leave, I guess. Maybe I’ll just call the party off. Whatever.”
Poop glanced at Pinkie. “Wait a second. Why are you suddenly way less annoying than before?”
It was then that Poop noticed that the noise from the party around them had died down. Ponies looked much less like they were having fun and more like they were watching The Emoji Movie, in theaters July 2017.
Poop looked around. “What’s going on?”
“I dunno,” Rainbow Dash said. “Feels like it’s started ever since you guys arrived. Probably something to do with magic. Or the source code. Whatever. Who knows.”
Poop looked at Meh, who only stood there. “I have a feeling this is being caused by us. So what you’re saying, then, is…”
Rainbow shrugged. “I don’t know. I just feel kinda meh.”
Pinkie nodded slowly. “And I feel like crap.”
“Well, crap,” Poop said. “Then we really have to get out of here. We’re already late for work as it is. I don’t want to be blamed for breaking an app, too.”
He approached the crowd of ponies around them and tried getting through, but the ponies were all sluggish and limply resisted being moved. Poop had to shove ponies out of the way, one by one, which was difficult given his arms were very thin and weak, and had been used less than the falling line graph emoji.
“Come on, Meh,” Poop said. “You gotta help me.”
“Eh,” Meh said. “Don’t feel like it.”
After clawing his way to the front door, Poop stopped and looked around. “Okay, we have to get to the train station, and fast.”
Meh shrugged. “A’ight.”
“Excuse me, miss,” Poop said to a bystander pushing a wheelbarrow full of flowerpots. “Train station?”
“Meh,” she said, lazily lifting a hoof in a direction.
“All right, let’s go!” Poop bolted off in that direction, running a full twenty yards before realizing Meh was not by his side. He turned around to see Meh barely taking his first step. “Meh, hurry—oh, right.”
Poop ran to the pony with the wheelbarrow and pried it out of her hooves. “Mind if I borrow this?”
“Eh.”
“Thanks.” Poop dumped the flowerpots on the ground. “I assume you don’t mind if I leave these here.”
“Mreh.”
“Great. All right, Meh, in you go.”
After some encouragement and a lot of pushing on the part of Poop’s noodley arms, they were off and racing towards the train station.
Poop swerved the wheelbarrow through the streets and barreled down to the train station. Left and right, ponies around them slumped to the ground as the growing sense of dread spread further out.
Poop skidded to a stop in front of the train station, parking the wheelbarrow inside an open passenger car on the Friendship Express. Once inside, Poop shouted out the window of the train, “Hey conductor! Take us out of here, and fast!”
The train did not take them out of there, nor did it take them out of there fast.
Poop frowned, trying to catch his breath. He jogged up to the conductor’s car as fast as his little legs could carry him. He knocked on the door to the train. “Sir? We need to leave as soon as we can. …Sir?”
He slowly opened the door to the conductor’s compartment, only to find the conductor lounging in front of the boiler, warming his hooves up to the coals of the engine, which were barely even lit.
“Nah, no thanks,” the conductor said. “Don’t feel like it today.”
Poop found it suddenly harder to breathe.
~ ~ ~
“So then what did you do?” Eggplant asked, leaning further against the break room table.
“We walked out,” Poop said. “It was pretty easy after thinking about it for a minute. I mean, we had a wheelbarrow, so I just walked out along the tracks to the next station, where there was a teleporter. Once we were gone, the emotions left with us, from what I heard, and everything went back to normal.”
Eggplant slumped back in his chair. “Well, that’s kind of a disappointing ending, isn’t it?”
Poop shrugged. “Yeah, well, I mean, it’s kind of fitting.”
“How so?”
“It’s just about as disappointing as The Emoji Movie, in theaters July 28, 2017.”
Eggplant nodded. “Yeah, that’s a good point. Can’t be disappointed if you had low expectations to begin with, right?”
“I guess so.” Poop rubbed his chin. “That begs the question, though: why’d you have anything but low expectations for a story about two emojis accidentally ending up in a My Little Pony app?”
