They were the stories that charmed generations. From G1 all the way back in 1983, through to Friendship is Magic, generations of children and adults have grown up with My Little Pony, and come to love its cheerful and brightly coloured cast of characters. But the truth about My Little Pony is no children’s story. Indeed, the truth...is horrifying. I know this, because I was there.
My name is Cheryl Lee Armstrong, but most people just call me Cheerilee.
That's me, on the right.
I come from a small place called Ponyville, in Maine. For a long time, it was a most unassuming of American towns, destined to be forgotten forever. But that was soon to change forever.
Cast your mind back to 1971. Watergate is yet to break, Nixon is President, and Vietnam is still raging on the other side of the world. However, Ponyville is relatively untroubled by these things, but is still crucial in world affairs. Due to its secluded location, the Government often used it as a place for housing scientists defecting from the Eastern Bloc. That’s how the professor came to be here.
What Professor, you may ask? Does the name Yaroslav Spyakla ring a bell?
He was born in 1929, in Leningrad. During the Krushchev years, he was a key scientific advisor in the government. It was clear even then he was working on something dodgy.
The Kremlin tasked him with cracking the genetic code. I’m aware that he says he had no idea what the Government wanted, and that he fled because what the Commies had planned scared him. However, I have no doubt he did it only to save his own skin. Truth is, Brezhnev found his work hard to stomach, as it seemed like he was messing with the natural order. It transpires early research was being done in the Mental Hospital network, and that this was destroyed as part of a cover-up.
Anyway, in 1971 Spyakla and his son Andreev, born 4 years earlier, fled to America. The Government put them here. Whilst here, Andreev anglicised his name, becoming Andrew Sparkle. It made some people laugh, but trust me, there was no denying this man was smart. In 1985, he went to Yale, studying biology and chemistry. It was here he became most famous, as he proposed a revolutionary new idea regarding genetic research.
He dubbed it ‘anthro-fusion’, in reference to a similar idea which had been field tested on an island of the coast of Britain. He never stated exactly what the process was, but he lacked the resources to implement it anyway.
Returning to Ponyville, he founded a research centre, alongside his father, and several expat scientists came to join him. That’s how I met Yuri Golovich.
I worked on an adjoining farm, and the centre rapidly specialised in medical technology and horses. Working together, the discoveries made there changed farming as we know it. But that isn’t the most significant part of our tale.
One of the local women, Tara Wellsley, worked at the centre when she and Andrew fell in love. It surprised nobody when they announced their wedding, or when there child was born.
Twyla Sparkle was born in 1994. She was a bubbly, energetic, popular girl locally, who loved horses. In a town like ours, who wouldn’t? I often saw her down at the paddock watching them, there with her vintage camera. I can be seen in a couple of them, waving to her. She would always greet me in the same way; “Good morning, Cheerilee!”
Sadly, our work had drawn the attention of bigger companies. A large research firm dispatched one of its advisors to assist the company. Her name was Celestia, and she was one of the rudest women I ever met. When we first met, all she said to me was to “get off my fucking paddock!”
The place became hopelessly dysfunctional under her leadership. Things became unnecessarily bureaucratic, new language regimes were introduced; it was an absolute mess. She seemed happy to drive us out of business via poor performance.
That is, until a tragic accident in 2004 changed everything forever.
Twyla was often found at the paddock, but she didn’t pay attention to any warning signs either. That would prove to be her undoing.
She got too close to one of the horses, and spooked it, causing it to rear up and trample her. It was not a pretty sight, I’m sorry to say, a vague mass of blood and flesh to indicate where a girl had once been.
Andrew was devastated at his daughter’s death, and had what was left moved to one of the Stables he had converted into a research room. He and his father locked themselves in there for a whole year. People were asking what on earth was going on in there, but neither of them would answer. No secrets came forth from Stable 17.
A whole year later, the doors were opened as part of a public open day, when I saw what they had done. This...thing they had created.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing at first. A unicorn? Is this really what they had been working on, the whole time?
But then it turned its head, looked at me, and said; “Good morning, Cheerilee!”
I’d seen enough. I ran around the side of the stable, and vomited. People were horrified at the sight, a woman fainted, but Twyla (or Twilight, as she was called now) just seemed totally oblivious. It was now very obvious what Andrew and his dad had done.
Yuri filled me in on the details later. They had reprogrammed Twyla’s body and DNA, remoulding it into the form of the ponies she loved so dear. Apparently, they had chosen a unicorn because that was her favourite mythical creature. This had raised her from the dead, but people wanted to know our opinions on it. I appeared on National TV stations a few times, such as PBS and CBS. Last time I do that.
It rapidly became clear that Twilight would not be put to work on the farm. It was too unpredictable, and they had no idea what her new body was capable of. As a result, they built a new town nearby, at pony scale, and dubbed it Ponyville.
It was also clear that there would be no further anthro-fusion operations. That is, until Celestia took over the company in not entirely legal ways. The whole facility was rebuilt to allow these operations to proceed on masse, and it wasn’t long before we had an entire town of ponies of 3 species; Unicorns, like Twilight, Earth Ponies, which were closest to conventional horses, and Pegasi, who could fly.
The first one we comprehensively tested was Rarity.
She had been a dressmaker who had come on hard times before the operation, and agreed to live here in return for having her needs covered. We wanted to see how good she truly was. So, we gave her a sewing machine, and set her to work.
She rapidly tired herself out, indicating that we had to find an alternative. We kept surveillance footage of all of these incidents, and her desperation to complete the job rapidly caused her dialogue to devolve into gibberish. As a result, we stopped the test.
More and more people came to see them. As they wanted to see the ponies going about their everyday lives, the workload increased. And that led to accidents.
The first to have problems was called Applejack.
She was a farmer, and as part of a documentary she was asked to demonstrate apple bucking. Whilst this was seen in that television series they ultimately made, it didn’t happen like this.
This screenshot was taken a moment before the incident in question. Her legs buckled and were thrown out of their sockets, leaving the poor mare howling in pain. She did survive, though, but we had to be very careful from them on.
We had another one, Ditzy.
She asked to be a Pegasus, and so we granted her wish. But we didn’t want to risk an accident due to her eyesight, so we grounded her. It was a truly tragic accident which changed things.
There were a number of school-age kids who had been converted into ponies. Such as this kid.
Diamond Tiara, her name was. Daughter of one of the company donors, and possibly the most annoying, stuck-up brat I’ve ever met. We had her at work one day running the student newspaper alongside some of the others.
That’s when things got out of hand.
We don’t know exactly how it happened, but she got hurled across the room and through the printing press-straight into the ink storage tank.
We fished her out, eventually, but by then it was too late. She’d drowned. I even felt sorry for the poor thing, I have to say. Celestia responded by removing any potential sources of problems.
At the same time, we worked meticulously to ensure none of this got out. Nobody had any clue that this was happening, and as a result we started selling the technology overseas. Many other nations had no proper safeguards, however, which led to a lot of deaths. And one question sat at the back of our minds; why did Twilight work perfectly, when the others didn’t?
Yaroslav saw what was happening, effective slavery, and chose to end it all. Andrew simply resigned from the company in disgust. Of course, Celestia had us cover that up as well. It took us ages; pixels everywhere.
But the world would finally know the truth after a very public accident in 2009.
Her name was Rainbow Dash. Incredible athlete, and she wanted to be able to fly. We were terrified of letting her go up in the air, but Celestia told us to let her.
We fitted cameras in the area to keep an eye on her, and all seemed fine at first.
Then she suddenly went into a dive.
It was here it all went wrong. Her wings came flying off, snapping like twigs. She plummeted toward the ground. The end result wasn’t pretty.
In the crash, she struck the control building, which left a lot of people injured. Celestia refused to let us call an ambulance to help them, as it would expose what was going on here.
So, Ditzy got the honour of airlifting them there instead. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out that didn’t work either. Due to her flight patterns being so erratic, she crashed into another building.
There was no covering it up now. It was obvious what had happened. Celestia ordered the remains of the dead ponies burned, and got Fluttershy and myself to do it.
Fluttershy was another Pegasus, and hauled the cart filled with bits to the incinerator. We did it at night, to avoid detection.
One night we got lost, and ended up at Stable 17. Problem was, all of these stables looked the same in the dark. I unlocked it, and in Fluttershy went...only to bolt a moment later.
I didn’t look in. Not worth losing my life over. But Fluttershy had seen enough.
She confronted Celestia in a shouting match that went on for hours. She eventually left for the Gold Oak Library, where Twilight lived, and went to see her. She warned her to stay away from Stable 17. In doing so, she signed both their death warrants.
The next day, Celestia sent Fluttershy into the Everfree forest, a dangerous place. There she suffered an ‘accident’.
It wasn’t an accident, of course. Somebody had stretched a bungee cord over the path, which would have been almost impossible to see at night. Naturally, that vanished when we got there.
Celestia told Fluttershy she was sending her to hospital. Nope, they sold her to an abattoir. I wonder who got the result, not realising they were eating what was left of a beloved children’s character.
Twilight learned of what had happened, and realised they had got rid of Fluttershy because of what she had seen. So, in the pouring rain, she set off for Stable 17.
When she got there, it was deserted. But the truth was there for all to see. The reason Twilight had worked, and all the others didn’t, was because she wasn’t the first. Or the second. Or even the fifth.
The two doctors had cloned her over and over again in order to perfect the process. The remains were dumped in that Stable, which was why it was off limits.
Twilight didn’t take it very well.
The next morning, we found her, swinging from a rope. She had no idea she was a clone, none of us did. We were just glad she was alive again. We guessed that the village would bring in some extra revenue, and these ponies could help us. To each other, they were best friends until the end of time. To us, however, they were just My Little Ponies.
Author's Note
Well, there ends my first creepypasta! Interesting change of direction. I did decide to tone it down a bit from the source material though.
From now on, I can't guarantee a regular upload schedule. Stuff will be uploaded as and when I can write it. Please be patient.