Of Everyone You Could Have Picked

I ought to get something out of the way first—I don’t particularly enjoy Friendship is Magic. I watched a bit of the first season, didn’t really find anything too noteworthy. Quit at episode 7 because I didn’t want to waste any more time. So let that sink in while I tell you how absolutely fuckin’ bullshit this Five Score-type shit is. Except now it’s even worse since the Circle series got thrown in the mix for good measure. It didn’t deserve to be dragged into this.

Neither did I, if I’m at all honest. But not all of us get what we deserve.

I’ll go ahead and say that this isn’t even the beginning of it. No, I started in medias res just to grab your attention, but I’m wondering if I should have bothered since the first day was even worse. I woke up without any control over “my” body. At the time, though, it wasn’t really mine. Think of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, except the changes also affect your physical appearance.

Compound that with Mr. Hyde being Rainbow Dash, and I wasn’t having a good time. I didn’t know at the time, so rather than it being an in-the-moment concern, it manifested itself later in the form of a bombshell.

Look, while normally I would question a human with rainbow hair calling herself Rainbow Dash, the fact that I seem to be displaced in what was once my own body is enough to at least give credibility in a “this is not the craziest thing to happen to me today” sort of way that this is some form of the genuine article.

While I have to say my thank-yous to the String-Puller-Behind-the-Scenes for choosing best pony, it didn’t really help that I didn’t have control over “my” own body anymore, and worse I had to lose it to an FiM character. And no, other than the fact that I was just sitting and enjoying the view while Rainbow Dash fumbles around with human things, there was nothing to indicate it was a dream. Nothing else changed, and it’s been going on for longer than six minutes or however long dreams usually last.

It’s been going on for about a week.

Ought I bore you with extremely relevant details? Probably, actually, so sit tight. Or don’t, since these are words on a screen and not a lecture where you’re chained to a chair and forced to participate. I won’t subject you to that because I hate those like I hate communism.

...the reveal of which has caused untold problems I won’t get into just yet.

Rainbow Dash really didn’t know how to human at first. Eventually she got walking, but it took her far longer to realize a couple other things, like, say, clothing. All she had when she… well, we woke up was what I was sleeping in, which was a sweater just long enough to reach halfway to her knees. This was not enough to protect her from Murmansk weather.

Not that she didn’t try.

I know.

Because I felt it.

I have never wanted to be so cold in such places in my life and will never again, and I’m just lucky it was on the apartment’s balcony and not calf-deep in the snow.Even if she had them on, my snow boots would not have protected us from the intense cold. So I tried to communicate with Rainbow Dash that there are things we people things wrap around ourselves to make sure we don’t die of hypothermia in cold and remote places like where I live. Dice, but I rolled a pair of twos. I got her to back down and get some clothes on. Didn’t get to explain why, or even better have this just not happen at all.

I had initially imagined putting clothes on to try to explain it, but then I attempted something unprecedented: audiation. Which is a real word, LibreOffice, so just believe me and stop trying to correct it to audition.

“Hi, can you hear me?”, I thought. I suppose even if she did know what I meant by that, she wouldn’t hear me.

She didn’t.

So instead, I decided to ask again, but spoken. Or rather, I mentally mimed speaking.

“No.”

I wished I could have rolled my eyes at that, but being reduced to a consciousness the most I could try to do is creep her out.

“Well too bad because I’m going to do ghosty things.” Yeah… creep her out. Because there’s nothing creepier than complete and total apathy. Well, there could be, if this wasn’t the Ian MacLeod patented let’s get it over with so I can drink sort of apathy. “Like order you to put on some goddamned clothes before you go out into the Russian outdoors in early March.”

Yes. I will eternally resent her for that.

==========

Okay. What happened?

I was trying out some new spells, and one of them was a teleportation spell. Normally pretty simple, but this one was less taxing on my magic and could move multiple things or ponies at once.

Then it hit me, and the question changed from “what happened?” to “what will happen?”. Not only was I not on the right page, but even if I was, I also missed my aim on a monumental scale. The page was 697 (when I should have been on 591—I blame that on Spike’s bad handwriting), and the spell I had just used was a repair spell. I aimed for Rainbow Dash and nowhere in particular.

I had used a “fix this broken plate” spell on a living being, and I didn’t aim at an object 2.

This was bad news.

“SPIKE!”

Bad handwriting was better than none at all in times like this.

==========

“So that’s what happened?” I asked.

“Yep.” She looked around and put on a pair of boxers and bell bottoms I had lying on the floor. It was Sunday, so…

Thoughts kept nagging at me, ringing through my imagined head about how I would explain this to my boss. Sick days would only get me so far.

As far as the rest of Sunday went, it went okay once Rainbow Dash got used to a human body. She made food for herself, learned about our Earth, and became a metalhead in about eight hours. I have never heard so much of Dokken or Megadeth in one span of time, and that’s including the days I’ve listened to Breakin’ the Chains on shuffled repeat, and shy of myself being brought to Equestria, it won’t be the last at all.

She went to sleep and I woke up in control of my own body. I was a quadruped. A gryphon based on the fact I have claws. So while I’m face down because I have no idea how to walk on four legs, I’ll just summarize Monday: Similarly to Sunday, with the roles reversed. As it turns out, it’s a bit like crawling on all fours, really. With control over my own actions, and once I was no longer tripping over shadows that protruded out of the ground enough, I tried to get revenge on Rainbow Dash by going outside with even less clothes on. It didn’t really do anything, though, since the fur kept us warmer than we were as a human.

I explained to her how to communicate with me as a mind, and we had a little bit of a talk. More of an argument.

In the meantime, I had opened up Pluma and wrote down the events of the last two days, in as much detail as I could think of.

Including the time I punched myself in the face to see how much pain felt by the host would be felt by the guest.

The answer, seemingly, is all of it.

With nothing better to do—after verifying my voice hadn’t changed enough to be easily heard over the phone, I called in sick for the week—I started Rhythmbox and rocked out to as much Judas Priest starting with Sad Wings I could fit in one day.

One advantage to gryphon biology is omnivorous biology. Or at the very least pescetarian. All being said I didn’t get any pains by eating beef, so all seems fine. If I had been a pony I just might have razed a couple cities.

Another is that I didn’t have to be humanoid to have hands, so I could still shred or slap G strings to my heart’s content. Aside from several things that I was taught not to talk about doing in polite company, one of which is liking Stryper, that was all I could do for the week. Or, presumably, as long as I’m a gryphon. Rainbow Dash can go out and get groceries, but I’m grounded to my apartment until I got back to Norway.

Knowing I was likely months away from leaving Earth, possibly for good, I started learning as much of the music I like as I could. Both guitar, bass, and drum parts. Disco, rock and roll, and heavy metal, it didn’t matter. Apart from dinner that was how I spent that evening.

I slept.

==========

Tuesday went well. We went to get groceries, after which I ended up showing Friendship is Magic to Rainbow to see how accurate it was. Other than a few inconsistencies, it checked out.

It had to happen at some point, so I just tried to ignore all sensory input while we took a shower. It didn’t quite work. However, at least I could forget all about it once I had a separate body, if not my own back. Still, I asked her to at least look away, which she thankfully did when she could, after an explanation of why exactly American humans found nudity and personal hygiene as, well, personal of a deal as we did. Yes, Norwegians had a different understanding of this situation, but I didn’t decide where I spent the first 31 years of my life and I wouldn’t have made a different choice if I could.

It was, as it happened, not actually a bad shower. The fact I could feel everything she could made it both relaxing and incredibly odd and awkward, for identical reasons. I didn’t want to feel how the water felt on her body at all, to be honest, I just wasn’t interested. Which is kinda funny since I know of a couple thousand people who would absolutely love to take this situation I’m in.

It was during Wednesday that I wish ghosts or whatever I was could sleep, or that gryphon me could sleep without giving control over to Rainbow. Not only would it have been nice to sleep through the shower session, nothing at all of note happened that day. I was pretty much forced to stay awake for that long, with nothing of anything resembling note happening. I suppose this is what living in Wisconsin is like. More music, some video games, some exercise. It was awful. My job was great, I would rather be doing that than this, and I probably could if I found some way to get my body to go anthro so I could get some clothes on.

I could imagine the reaction on Monday morning. “Tycho, why are you a gryphon and also not wearing clothes? It’s rather unprofessional.”. Tuesday; “Tycho, why are you a female with rainbow hair? It’s rather unprofessional.”. The cycle repeating until it just became a fact of life that I was either a nude gryphon or a rainbow headed chick.

It wasn’t all bad, not only did I get to take control every other day, but gryphons are also pretty cool. Rainbow Dash would even be pretty cool if I didn’t have to watch every time she used my bathroom.

Having opened LibreOffice to write all this down, I raise my drink in defiance of a couple months of this.