Living A Lifetime In Someone Else's Skin
“Alright guys,” Twilight said, looking over the lineup assembled before her. “I know none of you want to do this, but we have to get physicals at least once a year to make sure we don’t all get crushed to death by whatever horrifying monster or entity we have to deal with next.”
“That was a nice expository dump there Twilight,” Starlight said, flashing her a cutting smile.
Twilight stared blankly into Starlight’s eyes, the overwhelmingly crushing weight of her dead soul compressing Starlight’s fragile essence into the spiritual equivalent of crude oil. “That was a nice self-referential jab, Starlight, I’m sure everyone’s not over your overtly cynical attitude.” Starlight stopped talking.
“Anyway, now for whatever reason psychology is being considered a ‘legitimate science’—”
Everyone present immediately burst into raucous laughter. “Oh man,” Rainbow said, wiping a tear of mirth from her eye as Fluttershy and Rarity collapsed into a ball of unrestrained chortles beside her. “You always pull the good ones, Twi!”
“No, I’m being serious,” Twilight said, her expression of the cripplingly depressed unchanging throughout the laughter of her friends, each resonation of which cut through her like razor wire lining the perimeter of a Danang Compound. “For whatever reason they think that psychology is a real medical science now.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” Rarity said, clearing her throat and still unable to hold back a few small titters.
“I know,” Twilight said, staring at the floor. She closed her eyes, gritting her teeth as a single tear rolled down her cheek. “I know...”
“Well whatever,” Starlight said. “What’s different? What did they add to the physical?”
“They’re not going to cut open our skulls and weigh our brains again, are they?” Spike asked, scratching his cranial scar.
“That’s phrenology, and no, even that would be more scientifically sound than this garbage,” Twilight said. “The only thing that’ll be different for us is that we now also have to go through psychological screening as well as physical screening.”
“Which means?” Rainbow asked.
“We’re gonna have to answer some questions on a sheet of paper in addition to running the gauntlet, scaling the lava wall, and plumbing the endless pits of chthonian nightmares,” Twilight explained. Everyone groaned.
“At least you should be eating this up,” Rainbow grunted as Applejack broke down into tears at the mere thought of having to read, much less write.
“One would think, but the devastating news that this introduction of psychology has created on the general Equestrian scientific structure has completely destroyed me,” Twilight said, her voice unwavering in pitch, note, or tone. “I’m essentially just wandering on brute animal instinct and responding blindly to the very first bit of stimulus I receive at any given point.”
“That sounds bad,” Starlight said.
Twilight shrugged.
The next morning, the eight of them met up once more, each of them in significantly more distressed states than they were previously.
“How’d everyone’s screenings go?” Twilight asked, turning her head to hack up a bloody gob, which immediately started to creep away from her upon hitting the floor. “Eugh.”
“Well,” Rainbow said, smoothing down her mane and picking out pieces of broken ceramics and bone from within. “It was going fine, right up until that stupid psychological screening. They made me think! About my life! And the things I’m doing!” She shuddered. “Give me another round with the horny manticores, I’m over that stupid screening.”
“It gave me a bit of trouble as well,” Fluttershy said softly. “A lot of those questions were... really personal. I didn’t feel comfortable answering most of them.”
“I just wrote down “B” for all of them!” Pinkie exclaimed happily. “I used to do it on tests back in school and I’d usually get about a fourth of them right, so I feel pretty good about this one too!”
“Pinkie, you were supposed to evaluate how much you agreed with the question presented on a sliding scale of zero to four,” Twilight said, her brow furrowing.
“Hey wait a minute,” Starlight said. “You seem a lot less... soul-crushy than before; what happened?”
“Oh, I came to a valuable conclusion during my nightly meditations,” Twilight said. “The establishments and conventions of respected science will come and go, but my rage and sorrow will last a lifetime. I also have been in numerous life and death situations for the past twelve hours, as I’m sure the rest of you have been, so there’s probably more adrenalin than hemoglobin in my blood right now.” Twilight’s eye gave a twitch as she ground her teeth together frantically.
“How long until we get our results?” Applejack asked. “That test has got me mighty worried. I can’t help but to think that there may be somethin’ else goin’ on here...”
“Oh great, not another one of Applejack’s notorious conspiracy theories,” Rainbow said with a roll of her eyes. “Remember the time she thought her trees were all being consumed by ‘weevils’? Or the time she thought these two con-ponies were trying to put her out of a line of work with a more efficient product that was produced on a mass scale much better suited to Equestria’s growing population than traditional farm settings?”
“Or the time she thought that Nightmare Moon was coming back to enact revenge on those who scorned her?” Twilight chimed in.
“That was you!” Applejack shouted at Twilight. “And I was right about those other things too, Rainbow!”
“I mean maybe not about the market economics—”
“Shut up, Rainbow.”
“I WANT MY CIDER YEAR ROUND DAMMIT!”
“I SAID SHUT UP!”
“YOU CAN’T STOP THE FUTURE YOU INBRED HICK!”
“Applejack, please!” Twilight yelled. “Calm down!”
“That was Rain—” Applejack briefly lit up like the most spectacularly built hearth’s warming tree, her entire skeleton on display as roughly ten thousand volts of electricity coursed through her supple and conductive frame. Starlight’s horn sparkled and crackled with energy.
“Must be faulty wiring,” Starlight said with a wry smile and a shrug of her shoulders. Everyone shared a hearty laugh, even Applejack who wasn’t quite sure of what they were laughing at. Once they had all settled down, Twilight sighed and wrapped her gross forelegs around the knobbly shoulders of the two nearest equines.
“I love you guys,” she said, looking each of her pony friends in their wide eyes in turn. “I love you all!”
“Even me?” Spike asked, breaking his previous spell of silence and alerting them to his presence in the corner.
Twilight turned her head slowly and mechanically, her smile looking more like a grimace now as her eye twitched. “Spike, of course I love you,” she lied through her teeth, as she often did to him. Faggot.
Twilight turned back to her proper friends, and her smile became genuine once more. “Anyway, we’ll get the results from a professional evaluator tomorrow sometime after lunch.”
“Oh, I hope it all went well,” Fluttershy said, looking around at her friends nervously. “What happens if you fail? I-I think I need to retake it...”
“You can’t fail them,” Rarity pointed out. “Not unless you have no personality like Applejack.” They all shared another hearty laugh at their friend’s expense, Applejack still chuckling along mindlessly as her body arced with small strands of electrical energy.
Twilight smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry, girls. I’m sure it all went fine and we don’t have to worry about anything.”
“Dear Sweet Celestia, how are you not all locked up in an asylum?” The psychologist assigned to them, Professor Cheap Trick, yelped.
“Hm,” Twilight said. “Bit more aggressive and pessimistic of an outcome than I initially foresaw.”
“Okay,” Professor Trick said, rubbing his temple with a hoof and pouring over his notes. “By these reports that you’ve given, plus your preliminary background information and several responses from third party sources—” He gestured at Rarity, “You’re a borderline narcissist whose ego has constructed such an elaborate facade that being overly and disproportionately generous to ponies is the only way you can live with yourself—” He faced Starlight. “You are a functioning psychopath who is only kept in check by the aggressive and constant shame that’s pressed into her by everyone else around you—” His hoof turned to Pinkie. “You I don’t even want to talk about—” Pinkie giggled as the professor turned to Rainbow Dash. “You’re dealing with such crippling and crushing inadequacy issues and self-esteem problems that I’m surprised you haven’t already collapsed into a two-dimensional plane—” He finally got to Fluttershy, pausing for a moment before throwing his hooves up. “And quite frankly you should have hung yourself in your garden shed a year and a half ago!”
“I just get a little anxious sometimes,” Fluttershy mumbled. “And sad. And hopeless... and I feel like nopony out there will listen to m—”
“And you,” he said, turning to Twilight. “Oh-ho-ho-ho, you... even ignoring the several horrifyingly complex new mental structures and disorders only present in your brain, the obvious eating disorder, and the piles and piles of rationalizations and flimsy justifications you’ve constructed, your OCD has advanced to such a point that I’m surprised you’re not rearranging atoms as we speak!”
Haha! Twilight thought deviously to herself as her horn emanated a vague, functionally imperceptible aura. I’m doing just that! Soon, soon! Soon everything will be perfectly symmetrical! Yes... perfectly symmetrical...
“You’re the only one with any sort of mental stability, and yet you’re under so much stress and mental repression you’re likely to burn down the whole town if one more thing pisses you off!” The professor yelled at Applejack.
“I ain’t sayin’ you’re wrong,” Applejack said more to herself than anypony, staring down at her hooves and smiling briefly. Everyone else gave her several long, scrutinizing stares.
“I mean,” she stammered. “Apple?”
“Good enough for now,” Twilight said, narrowing her eyes at her. “Watch your step.”
“Alright, what do you know?” Rainbow spat at Professor Trick. “You think you can just analyze us with some stupid tests? You think that’s all a pony is?”
“No, which is why I used background checks with third parties close to you and—”
“Rainbow, don’t let him get you with his pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo!” Twilight called out frantically. Rainbow nodded, and immediately sealed her ears with fast-generating earwax plugs, a common pegasus evolutionary defense tactic, saving herself from further mental pollution.
“Whatever,” Professor Trick groaned, reaching into his lab coat and producing a quill and clipboard. “I’m recommending you all to my colleague, Doctor Sugar Pill.”
“Sounds tasty!” Pinkie piped up happily.
“Yes, she’ll give you all sorts of ‘tasty’ Benzodiazepines and SSRI’s to sort you lot out,” Professor Trick said through his teeth as he clenched the quill between it, scribbling out more and more of their prescriptions. “She’s a psychiatrist, graduated with me before going on to medical school.”
“See, now this is how you can tell psychology isn’t a real science,” Twilight remarked loudly to her friends. “They let earth ponies get doctorates!”
Everyone except the professor was soon roaring at Twilight’s classic joke, slapping their knees and splitting their sides in all manner of jubilant mirth. Cheap Trick crushed the quill between his jaws in anger, looking down at the spilled mess on the half-finished prescription he was writing for her, and then back at Twilight again. Reaching into his pocket, he retrieved a fresh quill and began to jot down much more than he originally planned to put on there.
“So what’d you all get from the plug?” Rainbow asked the general room as she settled down into her chair around the great crystal friendship macguffin.
“Oh dear, it’s the most wonderful thing,” Rarity said lightly, her hoof trailing about in the air before her. “It’s this delightful thing called ‘alprazolam’, and it...” she sighed breathily, sinking down in her chair. “It makes me very happy. Why, I could just float away...” Rarity hummed to herself as she leaned back fully, her eyes rolling back in her head as her body achieved a near-perfect jelly-like consistency.
“I got this... um... these two different ones,” Fluttershy said, pointing towards her bottles on the desk. “These red ones help me fly when I’m feeling really low, and these blue ones help me fall when I’m far too high strung... I think they’re called ‘bupropion’ and ‘fluoxetine’, but it’s hard to keep track of these names when everything blurs together in a confusing, stressful whirlwind like this.”
“Ain’t that just the feelin’ you were tryin’ to avoid with these?” Applejack asked.
Fluttershy’s pupils shrank to pinpricks. “Oh goodness, you’re right! I better take more!” The pegasus threw herself on the bottles, struggling with the foal-proof caps as she desperately tried to retrieve her medication.
“What’d you get then?” Rainbow asked Applejack.
Applejack snorted. “Just something fancy called ‘aripiprazole’ or somethin’. Don’t affect me too much none, just keeps the voices down at a nice manageable volume like the soft purr of a kitten.”
Rainbow pursed her lips. “Wait, voices?”
“Yup,” Applejack said loudly. “Don’t affect me too much none. And what about you? You’ve been awfully quiet about what you’ve been takin’.”
Rainbow grit her teeth. “It’s...”
“Come on, spit it out!”
“It’s just some dumb thing called m-methyl... meflythen... ‘Methylphenidate’! It’s for uh... curbing my sheer awesomeness! Haha, yeah apparently that stuff is a bit deadly if I come on too strong so I gotta just—”
“It’s ritalin,” Fluttershy said, reading off of Rainbow’s bottle. “It says it’s used for treating ADHD, other attention deficit disorders and learning disabilities.”
“I don’t have a learning disability,” Rainbow said defensively. “I’ve been reading for nearly two years now, and talking for almost twice as long!”
“Rainbow, what’s the capital of Equestria?”
Rainbow froze, and there was a small snapping noise not unlike a bit of plastic splintering. In a matter of moments, smoke began to pour from Dash’s ears, the pegasus making small noises in the back of her throat as if she were a dying engine.
“I really like what they gave me,” Pinkie said in a deadpan, staring straight ahead before her. “It makes me feel juuuust fine.” Her voice stayed perfectly monotone.
“Uh, yeah,” Starlight said as she walked into the room. “What did they give you?”
“What did they give you?” Applejack quickly interjected. Starlight took a step back almost at once, her pupils shrinking for a moment before she righted herself.
“Well, I actually wasn’t prescribed any medications. Unlike the rest of you, I seem to have much stronger mental fortitude!”
“Alright, Miss Glimmer!” Doctor Sugar Pill said. “Looks like you’re in a fairly advanced state of mental unrest, so we’re going to skip most of the orally administered methods and jump straight to electroshock!”
“Wait a minute,” Starlight said with a nervous chuckle. “For a second there it sounded like you were going to—” Sugar Pill lifted a pair of paddles, a high pitched whine and the smell of ozone filling the air.
Meanwhile, in the Royal Canterlot Palace, Princess Luna was beside herself. “Look, sister! Come quick!”
“It’s a lightbulb,” Celestia remarked, raising an eyebrow.
Luna beamed. “I heard you wanted to modernize things around the palace, so I asked several of the servants what they thought would be most helpful, and as it turns out these bulbs of light do not blow out in a heavy wind! I think they’ll be pleased.”
“How many did you install?” Celestia asked.
Luna lifted a hoof and gently caressed the glass of the light bulb as if she were cradling the head of her very own foal. “Just this one for now, but I envision if they prove to be half as useful as the servants state they are—”
The lightbulb flickered and went out.
“I hate the future,” Luna grumbled.
“Yes... stronger mental fortitude...” Starlight droned as her entire body recoiled impulsively, little sparks crackling along her coat like a swarm of luminescent fleas. Shaking her head and clearing the cobwebs, Starlight immediately hopped right back into the offensive. “But enough about me; Pinkie, what exactly did they give you?”
“All sorts of things,” Pinkie said, who had been sitting obediently in place and perfectly still the entire time, even when a fly had landed directly on one of her gargantuan eyes and crawled right up into her nostril. She slowly lifted up a bag which had been resting at the base of her chair, and painstakingly turned it over, dumping out a pure deluge of pill bottles. All the medications that the others had mentioned and more tumbled out, and after a few seconds of a solid wave of bottles emerging from within, a heavy slab of text thumped out to signify its completion.
“By Celestia’s nipple spittle, you need that whole thing right there just to detail the side effects?” Starlight yelped in exasperation as she saw the heavy book tumble out.
“No, this is my schedule for taking my medications,” Pinkie said, flipping open to somewhere roughly in the middle. “Which reminds me. I have to take my pill so I don’t forget the details of my medication schedule.” With that, she started to slowly and blankly inspect the pill bottles, one by one, the fly exiting out of her ear.
“Okay, this isn’t good,” Starlight said, looking over the five of them. “Where’s Twilight? Normally she’d be able to devise a way for us to get around this.”
“But we have to take our medications,” Fluttershy said. “Or we’ll all die from horrible, self-inflicted murder-suicides that drag so many unnecessarily innocent ponies into a horrible mess that will forever scar the lives of any survivors—” Fluttershy began to hyperventilate, chest heaving back and forth as she broke out into a cold sweat her hooves desperately fiddling and pawing at the still-resistant cap of her anxiety management medication. “I need more bupropion! I NEED MORE!”
“Woah, I think it just kicked in,” Rainbow said, gently drifting down into her seat and sitting calmly in place. “What do you think we should do, Starlight? We should try and think of a plan if we want to do anything. Just let me know how I can be helpful.”
Starlight stared in utter and abject horror at Rainbow for a second. “Oh fuck, I gotta find Twilight.”
Starlight charged down the hallway towards Twilight’s bedroom, her heart pounding in her ears. “Okay, Twilight will fix this... Twilight always fixes everything, she’s your duct tape, your band-aid, your dues ex—”
She threw open the door to Twilight’s bedroom and froze. “—machina...”
Twilight sat in the center of the room, the curtain having been drawn fully so that the entire place was shrouded in darkness. Five candles were lit around her, flickering gently in the draft Starlight had sent into the room by her careless entrance. Spike was little more than a dessicated mess, his corpse hardly recognizable as it had been nearly fully disassembled. His tattered, leathery hide and a few bones amidst a small pile of viscera and pulsating goo sat before Twilight, who held in her aura a scalpel, a pair of scissors, and what looked suspiciously like an improvised machete. Spike’s entrails were stretched in arcane glyphs and figures between the candles, and his eyes and testes sat side by side in the jaws of what looked horribly close to a pony skull, but with clearly impossible and non-euclidean features and angles about the jawline, cranial ridge, and teeth.
“It’s customary to knock,” Twilight said, a silver ritual dagger dropping into sight from an portion of her aura obscured in darkness.
Starlight’s jaw dropped open, and she looked down at Twilight, and then at the ritualistic mess she had made, and then to the bottle of pills lying besides her. “Wait a minute...”
She levitated it up before her, read the label, narrowed her eyes, popped it open, and placed one in her mouth. “Ow! My cavity!” She spat it out, rubbing her jaw. “Twilight, this is a placebo.”
Twilight stared blankly at Starlight. “Your point? Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll be returning to my work before you so rudely interrupted...”
Twilight lit her horn, a small strand of magic extending outwards to touch the skull right between the eye sockets. Immediately, the eyes of the skull began to glow, as did the four orbs that had once belonged to Spike. Twilight’s head began to warp and expand like a cheap plastic toy in a microwave, before the back of her head popped open and expelled a spray of half-baked gelatinous ooze across the curtains.
“Well, that was bound to happen sooner or later,” Starlight said with a groan, watching as Twilight’s corpse slumped into the little mess of gore that had been Spike. Her horn, detached in her death throes, rolled under a dresser.
“Right, this is going to suck,” Starlight said, her horn lighting as she ripped a curtain from the wall, late afternoon sunlight flooding in to cast a new and horrific view over the whole scene. Stepping carefully towards the center of the room, Starlight placed the curtain over the ritual scene and carefully scooped it up as if she were cleaning up the crushed remains of an overly ripe cockroach. Wrapping it all up into a neat little sphere, Starlight shoved the horrible dripping mess of fabric and organic gunk into the closet while her mind raced to come up with just what the fuck she was going to do in this scenario.
Her next stop was the library. Thankfully, as she passed through the main room where the other five were still gathered around the friendship table or whatever the fuck that is, thoroughly occupied with their various side-effects.
“Isn’t Rarity supposed to be breathin’?” Applejack asked, prodding Rarity, who was slumped over her chair, eyes rolled back so completely that one could see her optic nerves trying to pop out of their cranial restraints. Her mouth was open in a wide gape, a faint gurgling emanating from her as saliva pooled in the back of her throat. Every now and then, her hoof would twitch, or her tail would flick, albeit nearly imperceptible each time.
“Twitching and gurgling are just side-effects,” Rainbow said, reading the side of the pill bottle as if she were literate. “I think she’ll be okay.”
Rarity’s chest gave a small heave and then stopped moving.
Starlight had little time to deal with those loons, so she pushed right on to the ~~book repository~~ library and began to haphazardly shift through books, ripping them open and scanning them briefly with her eyes before throwing them to the side in a lackadaisical heap.
“Wait a minute,” Starlight said after about five minutes of laying waste to the library in this manner. “I bet I could get even more information by reading the books when I do that!”
Five minutes later...
“Why does Twilight like to read?” Starlight groaned, slamming her head against the side of a bookcase. “This is so... well, it’s gay! It’s just plain gay!”
Starlight set down the copy of Atlas Shrugged she had been reading and tossed it into the fireplace. “Well, I guess I should move on to spellbooks now,” she said, turning her attention to the literal tens of volumes she still had to go through. She threw her head back and cried to the ceiling in desperation: “If only somepony had placed a spell on the library that allowed me to find the perfect spell immediately when I need it!”
She closed her eyes and waited.
Sixteen and a half hours later...
“Ugh, finally!” Starlight said, groaning as she ripped a page from The Complete Arcana, Volume Seventy-Three. “Twilight sucks; I would have thought ahead for this exact situation and put that spell on the library...” Her gaze fell back down on the page held in her magical grasp and she gave a weary, yet smug, smile. “But I’ve got it... and now I can fix everything!” She chuckled to herself with a manner of unhinged-ness that would have made Twilight proud. Would have...
Starlight closed her eyes and began to whisper to herself quietly as a coil of magic unhinged itself from her horn like a python, slapping heavily against her body and wrapping about her until she was fully entombed in a cocoon of pure energy.
Twilight Sparkle re-entered the main room, clearing her throat. “Hello, girls! Everyone quiet down!”
Everyone stayed put in their seats as they had been doing for the past twelve hours.
“Yes,” Twilight said. She cleared her throat. “Right then! Starlight and Spike have... gone away for a while. They’re doing a... friendship thing? Yeah, that sounds plausible. They’re going off to find some lost treasure in some...”
“Cave?” Applejack supplied.
“Cave. Sure. Now, I know you all will be tempted to keep taking your medications, but please, until I can figure out just what’s going on with them, I think it’d probably be best to Fluttershy how many of those have you taken?”
Fluttershy stared at Twilight with pupils the size of pinpricks, her body vibrating softly as an empty bottle clattered to the floor and rolled away beside her. “N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-not th-th-th-th-th-th-that m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-many.”
Twilight sighed, cupping her hoof against her forehead. “Right then. Just... if any of you need me, I’ll be outside.”
Twilight began to walk towards the door before she gave a small start and whipped around. “Aren’t any of you going to ask what I’m doing?”
“Nah, you seem like you’ve got it all under control,” Rainbow said, staring blankly ahead of her with a vacant smile on her face. Pinkie simply ground her cheek against the table, blinking off time with each lid.
Twilight sighed and stepped outside.
“Well,” she said, looking at the ground and prodding it with her hoof. “This looks like as good of a place as any.” Her horn lit once more, and a large section of the earth before her began to crumble away and lift from the ground around it. Grunting, her aura acted like a giant scoop, wrenching out a large, roughly spherical clump of rock and soil. Looking down into her pit, Twilight cringed slightly as she saw she had gone right through several water mains and sewage lines.
“Oh man,” she said as she watched a puddle of rancid liquid begin to saturate the dirt around it, turning it into a stinking, muddy bog within moment. “I’ll just—” She grunted, horn sparking as the curtain from before, now stained and dripping with iron-rich juices, and heaved it over the side into the impromptu pit she had formed. The bodies and their improvised containment landed with a wet splorch at the bottom. Nudging little bulges and tucking several loose corners into place, she maneuvered the bodies into place so the pipes she had unwittingly torn through were more or less plugged.
“Haha! Good as new!” The pipes strained and bulged from the water pressure, one of them blowing a coupling every few stretch of line as the water was forced back. There was the sound of a flush from a nearby house, a resounding roar that could only be compared to the top of a mountain had been ripped off, and a faint scream. “Good as new...”
Twilight turned back to the mound of earth she had displaced, and gently pushed it back into the hole, haphazardly filling the gape in the ground. Patting down the dirt, it has hardly inconspicuous; the entire back lawn had essentially been reversed, the expanse behind the home now more of a grungy, rubbley dirt lot than anything else. To make matters worse, she was fairly certain that there was a small damp spot growing in the center of where she had filled the pit.
“Yeah, I can’t deal with this right now,” Twilight decided, her transformation spell flickering for a moment and exposing her true eye color. Refocusing her energy on keeping it uniform, she felt a sharp stabbing sensation run directly down her head, as if someone had jammed a sword vertically down through her skull.
“Really wish this used a lot less magic,” she groaned, her horn beginning to smoke slightly. “And that I didn’t have to keep it up all the time.” Resigning herself to her fate, Starlight Glimmer trotted somberly back into the castle of her former mentor, trying to think.
