The Muffin Man

Further Experimentation

     It’s been five years since that fateful day when all my dreams came true. Krug and I eventually reconciled, though he was pretty pissed for a while regarding the whole ‘knocked out and thrown in a storage closet’ incident. I let him take credit for everything but Derpy and he got his bloody Nobel prize. As for the discovery of the ponies, the boys upstairs decided to give it the hush-hush treatment. My studies of Derpy confirmed my hypothesis: the equines are very similar to humans in constitution and intelligence (though as far as intelligence goes, Derpy is a bit of a special case), making them ideal test subjects when using humans would be unethical. Well, I suppose using the ponies is just as unethical, but nobody knows, so nobody cares. Once the head honchos realized how useful these creatures could be, they wanted more. That’s where Derpy really came into her own as my number one assistant and pet. Every day I punch in those same coordinates, and she goes through the wormhole. Sometimes she’s gone but a few minutes, sometimes a few days, but she always brings me back a few ponies. She seems to have gotten smarter – very good at tricking them into following her, especially the little fillies and colts. As soon as they step out of that dark portal the handlers get them. Each one is tagged, catalogued, and contained, ready to be used for one of my latest endeavors: teleportation. Funny thing: It's a hell of a lot easier to use a wormhole to travel interdimensionally than it is to use one to just teleport something from point A to point B in the same universe. We don’t know why, but this technology could revolutionize industries the world over, so they just keep showering us with cash and we just keep tweaking the system.

     My first attempt at an intradimensional teleportation was only twenty feet. That pony never came out the other end. So we tweaked the coordinates. The second pony came out the other end…sort of…it was more like she was sprayed out the other end. Oops! At this point, a few years later, some of them come out almost normal…

     But that’s not the only thing I’m working on. I have a rather lucrative business venture going on. Ask yourself this: who wouldn’t want a talking pony for a pet (or sex slave for some)? When I see one of the cuter looking ones, I take it home with me and sell it to some rich asshole. They are, of course, required to keep it secret, but yes, there are few dozen wealthy people out there with their own ponies to do with as they wish, be it treating them like royalty or raping and torturing. There’s something so torturable about the little equines. Their cuteness, the way they cower helplessly when you beat them, the forlorn little squeaks they make when you poke and prod them…and they don’t fight back. Well, most of them don’t. I learned that lesson the hard way when Derpy managed to lure her friend Rainbow Dash – that’s the other thing, they all have such adorable little names – into the lab. That one fought like a rabid Doberman – kicking, bucking, ramming into the handlers, trying to get back through the wormhole. It seemed like a lot of effort to go through for just one, admittedly beautiful, little pony, so I made the conflict less complicated by blowing her brains out. Anyway, that’s when we implemented the policy of grabbing them as soon as they stepped through. Given time to react some will fight to the death. Lesson learned.

     Today was a fairly typical day at the lab. Derpy brought back three little fillies. One of them, the tiny orange Pegasus with the purple mane, required some serious restraint. She was a fighter. The perfect one to try my new hormone on. We’ve had some success improving the quality of our teleportation returns by injecting the subjects with epinephrine, so Krug and I have spent the last few weeks working on a synthetic hormone that might solve the issues we’ve been having – missing limbs, missing organs, inside-out ponies, brain deads, etc.

     “Well hello, little…” I checked the nametag “…Scootaloo,” I said to the filly, “We’re going to give you a little shot, okay?”

     “Like buck you are! Let me out of here!” She rattled her cage and buzzed her wings, glaring at me. Uncooperative.

     “Somebody hand me the prod,” I said exasperatedly. One of the handlers offered up his cattle prod.

     “What’s that?” the little pony asked, “hey get it away from me hey st…”

     KZZZZAP

     KZZZAP

     KZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZAP

     The third time I stuck her she wet herself. She was in the furthest corner of the cage now, her spunky little attitude annihilated. “Aww, the big tough talker’s just a scared little filly willy now!” I mocked her. I could see the rage reignite in her eyes, and she charged at the cage door, bucking it open. “HEY WE GOT A LOOSE ONE!” I yelled. The handlers were on her in a second, getting their nooses around her legs and neck. She buzzed her wings like there was no tomorrow, but she wasn’t going anywhere.

     KZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZAP

     I jammed her long and hard in the stomach. She collapsed and soiled herself, tears of fear and shame rolling down her cheeks. The other two fillies that Derpy had brought with her looked on in horror from their cages. From what little Derpy had told me about them I gathered that they were friends.

     “Alright,” I said into my tape recorder, “synthetic hormone test number one, subject number one, name…” damnit I’d already forgotten the name, “…um we’ll just call her Puddles because she pees and shits herself.” The handlers all laughed. The orange Pegasus began to cry. I injected her with the hormone solution. “Alright Puddles, time to teleport you. Krug! Punch in the numbers. This might…”

     I heard a snapping noise behind me and suddenly I was floored. She’d broken through the restraints and somehow used her tiny little body to knock me, a fully grown man, to the ground. I turned over to look at her. An expression of absolute fury contorted her face. The whites of her eyes had gone red from burst capillaries.

     “MY NAME IS SCOOTALOO YOU BASTARD! I’M GON…gonna…gonna…guh…” She collapsed, dead.

     “I think we just fried her brain,” Krug said. Fuck. Another failure. I pushed the button on my recorder again.

     “Hormone EP 1.0 is fatal to test subject one. Will commence a second test at a lower dosage.” I looked at the two remaining fillies, but their eyes were on their friend. Blood was leaking out of every orifice of her body. Odds were it wouldn’t end much better for the second one, but as a scientist I had to test at least once more to confirm that the hormone was useless.

     Sigh. None of the fillies even made it to the teleporter today. We tried halving the dosage on the next one, and then halving it again, but to no avail. It essentially acted like some kind of super-adrenaline, causing fits of rage and fried pony brains. Exhausted and disappointed I came home, had a few drinks, beat Derpy, and passed out.

     Back to the drawing board.