The Conversion Bureau: Time of the Season

The next day a dozen unicorns and I sat on the floor in a classroom. If standing was like sitting, sitting was like lying down. But I wasn’t worried about falling asleep, because I was about to learn magic. A genuine Equestrian unicorn came in and talked to us.

“Hello, and welcome to the wonderful world of being a unicorn! My name is Amethyst Star, and I’m from Ponyville in Equestria. I’m sure you’re all keen to start casting spells, and I’d like nothing better than to teach you. But the best mage in Equestria, Twilight Sparkle, designed this course and insists that I teach you some theory before we get practical.”

She picked up a large sheaf of paper and started reading. We all looked at each other as though saying, “Is she serious?”

She began to read. “The human philosopher Plato spoke of the theory of forms, suggesting that each object that we see is in fact a reflection of the conceptual form of what the object is. The basics of magic involve using your horn to sense and understand the forms around you, and in turn allow your horn to transcend its own instance to bring you to the ideal of being a unicorn.”

My eyes glazed over. I didn’t understand a thing she was saying, and I wasn’t sure that she did either.

She kept going on and now I saw other ponies put their heads down in boredom. Some dried leaves had come in through an open window and I amused myself by crushing them under my hooves.

Finally, an hour later, Amethyst put down the scrolls and said, “All right, now that you understand how magic works, let’s try to move simple objects.” Her horn glowed and a box of pencils distributed itself amongst the class. I stared at it and tried to get it to move.

For a long time, nothing happened for anypony. I strained the muscles in my head trying to do what I thought telekinesis was. Then I saw a few get their pencils standing upright. Darn. I wanted to be first.

Come on, pencil, I thought. Cut me some slack. Stand up and write. That’s what you do, right?

To my amazement, I saw out of my peripheral vision a gray light from my forehead and the same light surround the pencil. It stood up and started to scrape across the floor. It didn’t write more than a few scratchings, but it was moving. I looked around wondering if somepony wasn’t playing a prank on me. But all the other unicorns were still staring at their own work. I had actually done it. I had cast a spell.

It seems silly to say, but I almost had to make friends with the pencil before I could get it to move. It wasn’t like I had to be nice to it, but the pencil did half of the work. I’m not sure I’m fully explaining it, but go down to a conversion bureau and if you become a unicorn yourself, then you’ll understand.

Everypony else eventually got the simple spell to work, and by then the boredom of the lecture had gone. We were all chattering again and talking about how cool magic was. I reflected that, as annoying as it was, the narcotic lecture had burned off some of the excess energy that the class had and made us focus. I didn’t know who this Twilight Sparkle was, and she wasn’t my favorite pony, but I sure wanted to meet her.

With my horn working, I went from a pony invalid to a pony with the potential to get by in the world. The world of Equestria.

*********************************************************************************************************

Expeditions for Equestria happened every week or so. Ideally, everything in a Bureau would be perfectly scheduled. Classes, ponifications, expeditions. But this was Earth, and nothing was ideal. That was why Happy Monday left earlier than her friends despite coming in at the same time. Two days after I was ponified, we got the word that we could go. Getting ready took no time. We had nothing to pack. We would walk into Equestria with nothing from our old lives.

There were seventy-six newfoals in our group. We were all milling about and chatting the way you do before an expedition as we waited for our escort. There was apparently a person who did nothing but accompany newfoals to Equestria and then return to the bureau. Nice work, if you can get it.

I sidled up to Becca. Even though I’d only been ponified a few hours before her, I still felt protective, like I should be watching over her or something. She was chatting with an orange Earth pony. Have you ever been at a party where there’s a circle of conversation, and you try to insinuate yourself into it, but they close ranks? That didn’t happen. They sensed I was there and invited me in. Becca introduced me.

“Car, this is Sleep Tight. Sleep, this is Carmen.”

“Caramel, if you please,” she said. “Caramel Icing. I get to keep the short name either way, but only the ‘Car.’ No ‘men’ in Equestria.” She chuckled. Were all ponies into bad puns? Are they ponies or punnies? . . . I did not just think that.

“So, you’ve known Becca a long time?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. Ever since we were young. We’re like sisters. Even more so now that we’re ponies. If she doesn’t fly away and go live with the pegasi.”

“Hey, I’d never do that!” said Becca.

We would have continued, but our group leader came out and called us to attention. She had a clipboard in her hands which she made a mark on as she addressed us.

“OK, one thing before we start. Has everyone picked out an Equestrian name yet? It’s not required, but the native Equestrians will look at you a bit funny if you say your name is John Smith or something.”

I was thankful that I was Sleep Tight. I didn’t know how that name would play in Equestria, but I was going with it. But Becca raised her hoof and got the representative’s attention. “Miss? I had thought of going by the name Honeydew, but then I turned this color. I haven’t thought of anything different.”

“Well, that’s fine. A color name doesn’t have to be perfectly accurate, especially when it’s also a fruit. Anypony else?”

There were a few others with questions, but eventually we got sorted.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll be walking in formation. It’ll be about a day’s walk from here. We could just stick you all in horse trailers and drive you there, but there are a few reasons we don’t do that. In the first place, it’s unpleasant. It’s a lot nicer to be out in the open air. Second, we want to keep the road to Equestria as secret as possible, and cars would just attract attention. And the third reason is that there’s good grazing land between here and there. It’s not likely you’ll ever need to, because food is plentiful in Equestria, but you should learn to forage for grass and berries and things. If you have any questions, my name is Karen.”

We trotted out, spirits high. The sound of three hundred four hooves on asphalt and then dirt was a cadence that kept us going. Conversations bounced from one group to another as we moved to the fore and rear in Brownian motion. I couldn’t tell if anypony else noticed, but along the way tree branches had been laid along the road, almost like a curb. I made my way up to the front and talked to Karen.

”What’s with the branches?” I asked.

She chuckled. “It’s a joke from one of the ponies I took to Equestria early in my career. He was something of a classical scholar. So here I am, Karen, ferrying souls across the river Sticks.”

“Charon ferried people to the land of the dead. Not a very nice joke.”

“Depends on which way you look at it. According to myth, the ferry ran both ways. Hercules, Dionysus, Orpheus—they all came the other way. Maybe Earth is really the land of the dead.”

I ducked my head and thought about that. Karen reached into her purse. “Normally I wait until we’re at the border to hand these out, but since we’re talking about it, let’s complete the legend. People had to pay Charon a gold coin to go across. But here too, it goes the other way. This is your first bit. It’s what they use for money in Equestria.”

I floated the coin to me and looked at the obverse. Two heads that I recognized from my dream were facing each other. On the reverse, there was a scene of the sun behind the clouds above a field where crops were growing. Something was off about the coin and I couldn’t place it, other than the fact that it was real gold.

Then it hit me. All the coins I’d seen had one motif on both heads and tails. But this coin had two heads and three pictures on the tails. I looked back at the other ponies all in a group. I thought about Karen’s bag, which must have seventy-five more bits in it, and I felt no temptation. They weren’t mine, so I couldn’t take them. And this coin was mine, but I could leave it by the side of the road and count on all of them to leave it there, since it wasn’t theirs.

Land of the living versus land of the dead, indeed.

*********************************************************************************************************

When we stopped for dinner, everypony was a little tired. Karyn said that we would break for ninety minutes to let us all forage and rest. Everything was wonderful, but I wanted to stretch my legs and have a good gallop after I ate. I hoped to get one last view of Earth. Whatever it was, it was once my home.

Climbing a hill, I reached a clearing in the trees and looked over the land. The road wound back to where I had come from, turning back from dirt to pavement. The foliage thinned the farther I looked out, and the horizon blazed with brown and yellow smoke, like a nicotine stain on the sky. There, in front of me, was the ultimate descriptor of two worlds, a number line that pointed to negative. I turned around to head back.

I wasn’t alone. Honeydew née Becca (neigh Becca? Stop that!) had come the same way as I had. I smiled at her. I was glad to have her as a friend, but I wanted to head back to where the air smelled cleaner.

I smelled something else. I couldn’t place it. It was nothing I’d smelled before, but it intoxicated me. That feeling was augmented by the look that Honeydew was giving me.

When I had talked to her after her ponification, all sexual desire had gone. I was more concerned with the practicalities of pony life than with getting off. What was explained to me in class was that humans were one of the few species that didn’t have a mating season. For ten months of the year I wouldn’t even think about sex.

It wasn’t one of those ten months. I suddenly understood my feelings. Honeydew’s too. She was in estrus. The instincts that I had developed as a pony had a second layer that took over.

The feeling grew and I could do nothing to stop it. She was no longer a friend. She was a mare that I had a right to mate with. I advanced on her and she could sense my power and intention. She turned and tried to take off to the air, but I focused my magic on her legs and tripped her. She went sprawling on the hill and I approached her.

As a human, I always tried to have proper give and take with sex partners. One more way that they were a flawed species. I was male, and therefore dominant. I snorted into her ear and saw her legs go weak. Good. She opened her wings as though she was going to try to take off from a lying position. I nipped at her shoulder and mane and forced her back down. No more of these futile escape attempts.

She lay there with her face in the ground and looked so deliciously helpless. I felt myself get hard and I could feel it so much stronger now that I was a pony. My dick scraped along the ground. And I used to not be long. Now I looked between my legs and saw the three-foot monster I was now sporting. I was going to love shoving it into her. I did regret that my favorite piece of foreplay was unavailable to me. No more boobs.

But she did have wings. They were still spread behind her from when she tried to take off. She tried to fold them back to her body, and I used my magic to keep them open. I took her left wing and licked the feathers at the end. I kissed my way down until I found the sensitive nerves in the fleshy part of the wing. That got her crying in ecstasy. My saliva soaked her feathers and I folded them back. Then I let go.

“Please. . . please,” she said. I had my magic and the gray glow was stopping her wings from moving. But I was still new at magic. I couldn’t have done it if her body didn’t want me to. “Please don’t stop!” she cried.

I moved to her right wing and licked the place where it met her back. Her cries reminded me of the innocent schoolgirls I had heard in hentai anime. I had been a tit man. Now I was a wing stallion. I rubbed her left wing with my hoof, reveling in the feathery softness, while I kept licking and sucking her feathers on the right. I felt like I was even bigger, maybe four feet long.

I had to put it in. It felt like I was ready to burst with all the blood in my dick. I got to my feet and raised her haunches with my magic. She playfully swished her tail at me, but I just brushed it out of the way with my head and charged forward. She was dripping wet. I positioned the head of my dick right at her pussy and thrust it in all at once.

The instincts I had grown took over and my haunches moved on their own. It wasn’t long before I felt my seed bubble within me. I wanted to come inside her, but I also didn’t want to deny her an orgasm. Inspiration came to me and I focused my horn on her clit. The clitoris is the only organ whose purpose is pure pleasure, and I could stimulate it directly and magically. She broke out in a sweat and her back legs started to buckle again. I could sense her button and I felt the power to make her come at will. I used that power.

Every muscle inside her tensed, and her wings stretched out as wide as they could. That brought me to the edge and I fired my cum deep into her. I could feel it traveling all the way through my long pony pecker into her womb. I looked into her face as she looked back at me, and we sealed our status. She was my mate. I collapsed on top of her as we both passed out.