Author's Note

Not all chapters will have the same tone as *this* one.

No matter what year it is, no matter what alt I'm on, I'm still always penning forth a Depression Simulator.

It was either this weird in media ras thingy or I was gonna launch the fic with a huge expositionary prelude.

So, enjoy this miserable little snippet--or skip past it. Gonna be a while before we get to the dicks anyways.

Hoorj.

Flash Sentry

The worst thing about sleeping is that Flash Sentry did it constantly. As the years under his belt grew more numerous and the days more dreary, the only way to pass the time was to erase it. Thus, whenever he came home from work, sleep became one of three primary pasttimes: the others being eating and stream-watching. And more often than not he attempted all three at once.

This—along with a heaping helping of incurable chronic depression—made for a frumpy bag of a male specimen at age thirty-seven. Hairy in all the greasiest places, shoulders covered with acne, toenails always grimy and un-manicured: middle-aged Flash was just barely unassuming enough of a nobody to make up for his otherwise all-penetrating un-attractiveness. Not that he really needed handsomeness or charm, of course. Four decades of floundering out of high school and pinballing through community college got him a bottom-of-the-barrel job at a car shop. He made for a wish-washy grease monkey, never quite advancing to a supervisory role because he was constantly cutting corners to give impoverished customers little money breaks here and there and the only reason his angry boss didn't outright terminate him was because the privately-owned shop had too few stars on Yelp to bother gaining enough new employees. Plus, Flash Sentry was pretty certain his boss had connections with the mob and was using the shop primarily as a front for several illusive drug deals, but Flash was far too much of a spineless pansy to do anything but quietly, dispassionately tolerate it all.

So day in and day out he crawled beneath other people's cars, risking carbon monoxide poisoning and becoming one with the scent of worn out hydraulics. His back was forever ruined by age twenty-nine. His hands and fingers had become scarred facsimiles of the dashing guitar plucker they once belonged to. Flash resorted to exclusively playing reggae on the shop's radio because it was the only thing that failed to remind him of his past glory—all two and a half blissful years of it spent hammering away at rock'n'roll instruments in a teenagehood long lost.

Flash Sentry had lost a lot of things from his youth—the primary one being friends. They had all gone on to enjoy glorious lives elsewhere. He was certain of this, most especially in regards to Sunset Shimmer—his beloved “ex-girlfriend” of twenty-one years and counting. She her closest companions were magical—in the literal sense. It's hard to believe looking back now, but Flash once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with honest-to-god superwomen in teenage form. He watched with naked eyes as metaphysically-empowered vixens of pure heart-and-mind vanquished the local neighborhood from countless forces of otherworldly malevolence. He even once sang a song on stage for them. Like a cheerleader. It was pure and pathetic and cute and cringey all at once.

He dreamt of those days in his sleep. But not as much as he dreamt of other things... far saucier things...

Flash couldn't quite put his finger on what exact month or year it all started, but at some point he gave up on the increasingly bleak reality of his life and retreated to a far more alluring fantasy in his mind. As the seasons turned into years and he saw his former friends less and less—making far too many bad decisions than a profitable future could afford—Flash started enjoying (more like suffering) an impenetrable dreamworld that would come back to devour his obsessive consciousness day after day, night after night. Maybe it was a porno that he had chanced upon, a gallery of adult fanart he once browsed through, or perhaps even some deeply-seeded Freudian concept from pre-adolescence—but whatever the impetus, Flash developed an unshakeable kink for futanari, fembois, and hyperfeminization. He connected all of these things in his mind with laser-focus and conjured an impossible world where the men were tiny girlish manlets, the women were tall amazonian dickgirls, and the entire culture they dwelled in facilitated a sex-positive harem culture where the tall “futas” banged the petite “traps” and...

...Flash could not stop. He could not stop fantasizing. On the bike on the way to work, it became difficult to remain painlessly seated. On break between cars, he found it hard to piss into the toilet straight. Then finally—coming home and secured in the pathetic isolation of his grimy apartment—Flash did nothing but indulge. This became a nightly thing: visiting bookmarked websites and reading saucy fanfictions and browsing countless subreddits—all centered upon the themes he fixated so unhealthily on, and each colored pinker than the last.

And it was unhealthy. Never mind the fact that such perverted fantasizing was the only glimmer of joy in his detestable life. Never mind the fact that Flash was consciously aware of how gross, disrespectful, and heinously transphilic he was for indulging in such things constantly. Never mind the fact that he took consciously long routes away from the pink aisles of department stores' toy sections because the otherwise-innocent products gave his sissified mind ridiculously impure thoughts. It was all unhealthy because it was his everything. All Flash's free time was spent in the consumption and conjuration of this undying fantasy world where futas banged sissies and it was somehow all “squeaky clean” fun.

And this consumed him... this plagued him for decades. It got to the point that Flash convinced himself that it was his only way of coping—of pushing away the grief of past joys and friends, all inescapably lost to the forward motion of existence.

But it got harder and harder to drum up mental excuses for it all—especially when he made portions of his obsession manifest in his life. Through frilly pink dresses that he'd order online (and wear like a fat pimply gorilla at a circus). Through princess figurines and posters he'd adorn across random spaces in his adult apartment that he was barely renting by the month. Through the silicon dildos he'd scrimp half-a-year for, stick up his butt without enemas, then leave marinating on the shower stall floor as he cried in a fat heap on the bathroom tile like a bitch before handwashing the fake penises in warm water and hand soap and then repeating the whole fucking cycle all over again next weekend.

It was such a pathetic wheel of habits, and he could have flattened it all... ended it all so easily. So damned easily.

But he didn't. And as the years went by, his apartment got pinker and his belly got fatter and the faces of past friends grew fainter and fainter until all he could see was the shadows that permeated his living space 'cuz he refused to turn on the lights and reveal to himself the sheer filth he had accumulated these past decades through time, neglect, and purely selfish hedonism.

And so, his pasttimes were whittled down to three. Eating, which was only natural. Stream bingeing, which everyone did. And sleeping—which was the closest thing to suicide his cowardly ego could handle.

But it was there—in dreams—that the painterly landscapes were at their most intricate. An elaborate mural detailed through eons of subconscious dedication, where nobody else could stroke the brush but him, and when he slept long enough—gazed long enough—it almost resembled beauty.

At some point—egged on no doubt by a serious need for catharsis—a very desperate Flash at the tail-end of very desperate wits reasoned to himself that none of this could possibly have been his own doing. No sane human being had to go through the mental self-fellatio that his mind endured nightly. This wasn't a mere obsession; it was a curse. Some... gay Equestrian thing had obviously polluted his being. Had jumped out of a bush at Camp Everfree and stung him with its... horse butt. Or something. That had to have been it. He was knocked unconscious at the time, that's why he didn't know. That's why nobody knew...

Somebody had to know... somewhere, someplace... someone had to know why Flash just couldn't stop dreaming of this world. Why couldn't he stop? Why couldn't he just simply stop...

He had to stop. It was unhealthy. He had to stop. The only way to get better was to accept his own real life body and figure out how to clean it up. He had to stop. At this rate, he'd never settle for either a woman or a man in his life because he was too damned obsessed with some nebulous icon of fetishized gender dysphoria in his mind and...

...it was all too much. All too much to change. The more he thought about it, the less merit a lifestyle change had and the more weight a bullet carried. But he hadn't the courage to pursue either.

So...

Flash Sentry simply slept.

And in so doing, he dreamt up more painstrokes to the mural.

Including this latest one. This bothersome one—involving waking up in a strange industrial tomb with giantess versions of former Crystal Prep Shadowbolt rivals showing up to manhandle a pixie petite version of himself and...

It felt bitter. Like arsenic against the tongue. Here he was at nearly forty years old and his own mind was finally committing mental seppuku. Perhaps it was for the best. With nowhere left to go—even in his own subconscious—the only destination worth flocking to was oblivion. Perhaps his brain was doing his existence a favor.

Lord knows it'd be doing the whole universe one.

He'd...

...just sleep a little more. And wake up to a toilet to unclog, a job to do, a car to fix for people far more worthwhile than him.

And maybe—just maybe—he'd find that courage somewhere.

Until then, he had a few sensations to carry on his shoulders from the dream. Like the tears. They were nice while they lasted. Too bad they were just as real as his joy...