Clone-a-Pone™by darfChaptersSo When Do They Fuck?Observable ConsequenceThe Clone-a-Pone™ Ran Off(Shower Scene 1)Survey Responsesis there a way to make this chapter invisible plsYour Clone-a-Pone™ Quick-Start GuideThis is the chapter I included to determine whether or not I should have written a sex scene before initial publicationSo When Do They Fuck?As with every new boutique technology, crazy early-adopters took the risk between a potentially innovative and life-changing technology, and everyone else stood back a good distance of fifteen feet and waited to see what happened to all the financially irresponsible nutcases who had invested before sensible people had a chance to point out all the flaws in the utopian vision being marketed as a result of a simple product purchase. After two months, it was clear: Clone-a-Pone™ was here to stay. The service proposal was simple: For $599.99USD, Clone-a-Pone™ will produce a 100% faithful, real-life, organic copy of your entire consciousness and being. And it will be a pony. A pony of the opposite sex. The reason for the permutation was never made publicly available. Early-adoption, as a result, was undertaken primarily only by bronies and cat-girl afficionados. After Elon Musk retweeted, though, sales began to rise drastically. Humans who had never watched or even heard of My Little Pony were suddenly ordering carbon copies of their entire dna algorithm, restructured into adorable marshmallow equines. Ponies could be appropriate from show material wholesale, thanks to some creative intellectual property loopholes, and before you could say "Alicorn Twilight ruined the show", Clone-a-Pone™ had become the most popular technological startup since Microsoft. Or maybe Google. Definitely AskJeeves, at least. I got mine a week ago. The first surprising thing, to me, is that you don't get to pick your pony. You supply the questionaire, the DNA swab sample, the copy of your family lineage (available from Ancestry.com for a small accompanying fee), and at least three relevant Buzzfeed quizzes with your answers recorded. Then you wait a week. Then the company emails you back to let you know if they can meet your request. Then they request payment. Then you pay. Then you wait for another week, until they send you an email saying your 'product' is'ready'. And then you wait four-to-six weeks for delivery. And it shows up in a cardboard box on your front step. If you don't want your roommates knowing you ordered a living, breathing Clone-a-Pone™, you can request a disguised delivery, and the company will write "Rob's Cakes: Delivered by Door Dashie" on the box and leave it in a nonconspicious area with enough bottled water and bags of Cool-Ranch Doritos™ to keep your pony sustained for up to three days. After that there's a recovery fee. My pony was tiny, and green. She only came up to about my waist, poking her head and horn out of the box. Was she supposed to look like me? Am I supposed to look like her? Her name is Lyra, she says. That's convenient. "Hi," is my greeting. "Come on in." It's surprisingly casual, consdering I'm not even sure she existed a month ago. Or what she eats. Or if she's even going to be able to understand me. "Okies." Lyra jumped out of the box like a spry cat, and shook her mane after landing, tossing the loose strands out over her foreheard and beside her ears. "This is your place?" She means the apartment. How to explain modern-day capitalist rent-infrastructure to an other-worldly miniature horse? "Uh... no, not really. Like, I pay rent on it, but—" "I didn't mean you own it. I'm not trying to be confusing. I was just kind of, like, leading up... "Oh, this is your place? It sure is nice!"" Lyra shrugged and ran a hoof thru her mane casually. Casually. "Oh... so like, you were doing a, kind, social niceties sort of thing, trying to be polite?" "Pretty much. I don't imagine you'd be happy to see me if first thing out of the box I pooped on your shoes or started running around eating the furniture or something." "I think at this point I'd be happy for any amount of unpredicted stimulus being sourced from another living being." "How do you know I'm alive?" Lyra raised an eyebrow, still standing on the door-mat to the third floor apartment I'd managed to nab for my self, like a mediocre, children's-coloring-book version of a primitive cave, carved out of the face of some giant, suburban edifice... "You like words a lot," Lyra said, stepping inside past me. Her head brushed against my jeans as she walked past. It was surprising not to find myself instantly hard. "I guess." I shut the door and locked it, then remembered I'd left the box on the front step, unlocked the door, opened it, grabbed the box, through it haphazardly into a corner of the room where another pile of miscellaneous items had begun to accrue, closed the door, locked it, and let out a long, pained-sounding sigh. "We've known each other for two minutes and you're already existentially drained? That's not a good sign." Lyra yawned and took a look around the room. For some reason, probably ancient custom alone, there was a couch, still. A television, that you could theoretically watch things on, if there was anything to watch. Piles of dirty clothes. A mostly empty sink, holding only a single bowl, spoon, plastic My Little Pony drinking cup, and a few spilled noodles left-over from the afternoon's attempt at making dollar-store ramen taste both paletable and not so hot it melted your tongue down to its component molecules. "I'm perpetually existentially drained. Just the idea of spending money on something took me like two months to work up to. No one gave me any approvable. I didn't have anyone to ask. And they probably would have said not to bother anyway." "Just becuase of the idea that something that costs money to make you happy is ultimately insufficient?" Lyra took a seat on the couch, laying down and yawning as she fluffed a pillow next to her head. "Maybe... but everyone buys stuff to make themselves happy. You wouldn't be very happy without food, or heat, or that stuff." "Yeah, but we don't really look for those things. When was the last time you decided to stay at home and hold your feet over the heater to keep warm and content versus spending your money to go out to eat or on vacation or buy a new video game that transports you to an essentially entirely different universe?" "So those are bigger pieces than just buying a car or pack of gum or something," I said, sighing and absent-mindedly straightening objects around the room into arbitrarily organized piles. Some things that would get used later, chapstick, a headphone jack, those had mostly collected in this pile... there was some used Kleenex in that pile. A ball of dust that came out from under the couch. There were some more piles too. I don't know, really. "Yeah, but you should get the right to make that decision yourself. Isn't someone else telling you what to spend your money on barely a way to live your life?" I shrugged. "Feels safer. You don't have to blame other people for your mistakes, but at least when things fuck up your brain will say "See? It wasn't our fault! We listened to exactly what they said to do, we're completely infallible, and innocent, and knew this wasn't going to work in the first place wahhhh..."... something like that, anyway." "Well," Lyra said, surveying the room again and finding it mostly full of scattered books and miscellaneous debris. "It seems like you're safe now. Nopony in here trying to be mean to you. No reason to do anything besides sit down and talk for a bit." Lyra patted the couch cushion next to her. "I don't really wanna talk though. What is there to talk about?" "Wanna talk about sex?" Lyra asked, flicking her tail suggestively and moving her body to give just the tiniest peek of her plush pony-butt. "Yes, but also no?" I sat down on the couch as directed, feeling a vague sensation in my dick trying to prompt me in the more sexually suggestive direction of this particular piece of metacognitive fiction. "I feel like we would save the sex until the end." "Pretty much everyone wants the sex at the beginning. It's like hentai. If you make them sit through fifteen minutes of exposition and set-up, they're gonna be limp and angry by the time they finally get to the part where you want them to cum." On the couch, I raised an eyebrow slightly. "Why is it that every time you say a word related to sex it makes my cock twitch?" Lyra felt a small shiver, then shrugged. "Dunno. Probably the same reason my pussy got a little wet when you said "makes my cock twitch."" "We can talk about it later or we can talk about it now." "I don't really wanna talk. I'd rather fuck." "Can you say 'fuck' again?" "Fuck. Fuck. Are we gonna fuck or what? You wanna fuck my pony pussy?" "Whatever you're doing should be made illegal. It's literally a form of mind control. I'm not even looking at you but my brain is picturing you on the couch. I literally can't get this picture of your butt out of my head now." "The one you used for that story cover?" Lyra asked, leaning more onto her back and showing off more tantalizing hints of her pussy and ass, just visible for a moment before she shifted back to a covered position. It's hard to describe what someone physically looks like as they are doing this. Picture someone naked, lying on their stomach, head-propped up, looking over their back with one of those "I'm the girl getting fucked doggy-style and it's my job to smile at the camera" looks, except instead of having to do it to make money, this is a girl pretending she has to do it to make money, and she's actually totally fine and safe and just likes pretending that she's a porn star looking back at the camera... and if I don't want the girl to look back at the camera, why do I want Lyra to stare at me? "I'm more real," Lyra says, waggling her tail and shaking her butt suggestively. "If you literally say 'butt' one more time we're gonna fuck before the story changes chapters." "Aw, come on. You can't say that. You put me in a catch-22." Lyra stuck out her lower lip and pouted, her eyes wide and puppy-like. "Now if I say it, I lose the sense of control I had, because you told me what the outcome was gonna be. But now I really wanna say it, because now you've got me thinking about it, and contrary to popular opinion, some girls, or girl ponies, or fillies, or whatever, really like when you give their butt a healthy amount of attention..." "Is it that? It's like... a special secret you're not supposed to know or do, because it makes you 'dirty', even though... like, you're admitting it doesn't? It's like... a legal, consent thing?" "Hmm... maybe." Lyra began to wave her tail in my direction, wafting the faint smell of the dampness between her legs towards my face. "It feels like it's definitely something 'illicit', anyway." "Just because it's in the butt?" I was staring now. Lyra's plump, well-formed ass was staring back at me, wiggling and waving and dancing back and forth and reminding me of the way she might look with a cock inside her, grinding onto it and bouncing and throwing her head back with her mane tossed. Like, picturing, picturing it. Dangerous material. "Can we take a break?" I asked, wiping a healthy amount of sweat off my forehead. "I'm like... fifty percent the horniest I've ever been, fifty percent so scared I'm gonna do it so wrong we'll never get to be intimate again." "Has that ever actually happened?" Lyra asked, running a hoof leisurely along her own back, tracing it to her tail and hindquarters, where she ran it luxuriously along her backside once or twice before smacking herself on the right butt-cheek with a playful smack. "Ahhh. Stop. And... no. It hasn't. Once a girl came over like three times and then stopped because the apartment smelled like cat piss, but I didn't really feel that bad about it as a matter of fact..." "We're gonna get into that, right?" "Only if you stop trying to seduce me." "Let's try again in the next chapter." "Okay." Author's Note The unstoppable, unrelenting song is called I Love Beijing Tiananmen, also known as I Love Peking Tiananmen. Peking Duck is a famous duck dish from Beijing. And Scrooge McDuck had his 50th Anniversary in '97! Observable ConsequenceObservable consequence, Day 1: Some people are staying inside. /mlp/ is under quarantine. Observable consequence, Day 3: Pone-fighting rings begin to spring up in urban areas, ethics commission asked "Why didn't anyone think of this", no good general response. Observable consequence, Day 12: People are walking their ponies in the street. Orgies break out at random and have to be dispersed by the police, who in at least fifty percent of occasions become involved in the orgies themselves. Clone-a-Pone™ is officially the second most profitable company in existence, next to another, slightly more profitable company. Observable consequence, Day 15: Mass protests. Rioting in the street. People and ponies living together. I'm staying inside until the zombies come for us. Observable consequence, Day 16: Lyra has a pony-butt. Ponies have butts and butts on ponies are pony-butts. Observable consequence, Day 17: Are ponies inherently sexual? Is a clone inherently sexual? Are human beings inherently sexual Observable consequence, Day 24: Everything mostly back to normal. Everyone who wanted a clone so they could enslave it permanently in their underground sex dungeon has been weeded out by a process perfectly determined to identify those types of people and not let them register accounts or something. Also there's a user agreement at the bottom of the page. Leave us alone. We deny all plausibility. Observable consequence, Day 30: If you're with your clone, and you both get lonely, is it time to give up? The Clone-a-Pone™ Ran OffAnd now... The Clone-a-Pone™! (Shower Scene 1)"Have you put any thought into what you wanna do?" I asked. The two of us had migrated to the bed a while ago, naturally the most comfortable place for two bodies not afraid of cohabitating with each other. Lyra was lying above the covers, sprawled out with her head at the foot of the bed. I was the opposite, shoulders propping me up on pillows. Lyra raised her head and nodded, eyes wide and bright. "Uh-huh. Pretty much all I've thought about, to be honest." Lyra tucked her head into the blankets, rustled around for a moment, and pulled out a small piece of notebook paper with pony handwriting on it. Pony, er... mouthwriting—hornwriting—whatever1. "I started with a list of YouTube clips we could watch... then I got distracted and started thinking about prostate glands... and then I figured we should probably just get the sex thing over with. To make it easier." "I was figuring that too. It's what everyone is going to be wondering about. Hell, I'm wondering it too." "Ditto. That's the whole point, right? The whole reason anypony wanted a clone of themselves in the first place?" "Well, let's address that first." I sat up on the bed and stretched my arms out over my head, cracking something-or-other as I did so. "How are you a clone of me if you're like... a small green pony. And wouldn't you just know everything I was going to do, and vice versa?" "Well," Lyra said, sitting up herself with her forelegs in front of her chest, hind-legs splayed out just a bit. "No. Because I'm a pony, for one thing. So, like, whatever you would do as a pony... that's different from what you'd do as a human. And since I'm a pony, I don't have any idea what a human me is going to do..." "Is this a spiritual thing? Like... our 'souls' are the same or something?" "Maybe." Lyra stuck her tongue out between her teeth and crossed her eyes, as though she was doing difficult math. "I think... how could we tell if we were really the same or not?" "I think that's the sex part." Lyra uncrossed her eyes and stared at me rather intensely. Enough to make me say 'rather intensely', and not really know what to say after that, for starters. "Aren't you interested in what my body is gonna be like?" Lyra asked, tilting her head slightly to the right. "Of course I am. And I'd assume the interest is mutual. But that's the whole thing. We're already expecting—anticipating. The whole exercise is defunct." "Why don't you just come shower with me, and when we get there, we'll discuss how I knew that's what you wanted me to ask you to do." "What? I... but if we..." Big, long sigh. "Alright. I don't wanna question it. Lead the way." "Why would I know where the bathroom was, genius?" Lyra hopped off the bed and shook her head, tousling her mane in that way I like. "I dunno. If you're a clone of me, don't you have my memories?" Lyra shook her head again, following me down the hallway towards the bathroom and questioning the sheer number of gerunds plundering their way through the text. She took a look around the bathroom as I started getting the shower ready, testing the temperature a few times, fighting with the hot water knob, wondering if your hand's sense of temperature is the same as the rest of your body's—you know, the usual. "Nope. No memories whatsoever. Just woke up in a box, thinking "Huh, I'm a pony. Oh well, I'll probably let myself in in a second." And then you opened the door. And the crate, I guess." "Huh." The shower was hissing and steaming up the room now, so things weren't going to get any more suggestive or less awkward. "What do you think everyone else is doing with their clones?" I asked. I started unbuttoning my shirt (yes, a button up shirt, for my first time meeting my Clone-a-Pone™, there was no such thing as overdressed) before realizing that Lyra was kind of, sort of, already naked. Or she didn't have any clothes to take off, anyway. I wondered if she— Lyra looked to me, blushing. Crouching down a little, crossing her legs over each other. "Uh," she said. "Yeah. Me too. Just now." "Weren't you waving your butt at me like an hour ago?" Lyra shrugged, her cheeks still flushed. I stepped into the shower, starting slightly at the sudden heat, then deciding whether or not it was really hot enough, or too hot, and finally after determining my skin wasn't boiling away, getting all the way inside and letting the water run down over my head and body. As most humans do, y'know. "I imagine most of them are probably fucking," Lyra said nonchalantly as she followed me into the shower. Her horn glowed, sliding the glass door shut. Her mane, which touched the water first, dampened almost instantly, and hung down low over her neck, and forehead, just half-covering her eyes. "Huh. I mean... yeah. Probably. That's what most people say they'd do with a clone, anyway." "You mean a clone of them who's a squishable miniature equine with opposite equipment?" "That's a pretty convenient alteration, when you put it that way." The shower felt nice. Easier than focusing on the foreshadowing. It was time to look at Lyra. To try to describe what it is a naked pony in your shower looks like. She was about waist-high. A little bit more than that. Her nose came up to my belly-button. She was... she looked, or felt, maybe is a better way to say it, small. Like, if you imagine balancing her on your knee, or in your lap, she'd feel... kind of kid-sized. In a, not-really-sure-what-to-do-with-that sort of way. "A kid?" Lyra looked up at me in the shower from only inches away. Her eyes were as wide as she could make them, and her mane was swirling under the hot spray of water. Her bottom lip stuck out a bit too. Damn. "I don't think it's exactly like that," I said, looking pointedly in any direction that did not contain Lyra. But it was too late. Damage had been done irreparably. "So you like the thought of lil' ol' me getting up in your grown-up business—" Lyra nudged suddenly into my leg, causing me to buckle a little bit and brace myself against the shower wall. When I straightened out, she was even closer, her face basically right next to my, uh. Hard-on. "—because I'm tiny, and soft, and innocent-looking? Is that it?" Lyra smirked, letting her tongue loll out of her mouth just slightly. She had the looks down, for certain. Tightening in my chest. A nod. Sudden inability to articulate myself in complete or meaningful sentences. Lyra's hoof, on my stomach. Reaching up to my chest. Staring up at me with her big, begging eyes. "It's okay," she said, lowering her voice to a volume just above the quiet hissing of the shower. "You're safe. 'We got this', remember?" Lyra smiled nervously and removed her hoof from my chest, holding it forward just a few inches away. Deep breath. Feel the shower. The warm water is always a safe place. Happy place. Warm place. Everything is gonna be okay. Everything is gonna be alright. Breathe. After making sure to wiggle my toes on the floor of the shower five times, I opened my eyes and extended a fist to bump Lyra's hoof. Her smile widened, still wavering slightly at the edges. "I know it's difficult. You're putting a lot of pressure on yourself." Lyra tilted her head back and got a face-full of the warm water, closing her eyes and turning her head slowly from side to side to soak at every angle. She sighed loudly, then took a deep, slow breath through her nose. "This is new for me too. I just don't have to be the one to translate it." "I'm scared I won'd do a good job. Or I'll... you're more beautiful than a bunch of words, probably." "Probably." Lyra smiled still, opening her eyes and tilting her head back down to face me. "But so's everypony, probably. And don't get all nihilistic on me—we're showering. No nihilism in the shower." "Okay." "Kiss me. And then tell me what it felt like." I am physically incapable of doing this. Lyra's lips. They felt like... lips. Like the way someone else's lips feel against yours. Like they are another living conscious being that can move its mouth in all the ways you can and has in its mind its own expectation of kissing and how long it should last and what it should feel like and what should precede it and lead to it and all things from and to as a result of their unique collection of understandings. It is impossible to describe this in any capacity. There is an electric yes that is the only word left for it because there are so few elements that mean anything nowadays sensation of this other thing next to you being able to control all of reality, being able to do suddenly anything, and for them to be thinking, maybe hoping, that you, too, are a conscious agent, an operator, someone capable of guiding the encounter in any direction. And what a kiss begins to be to one of you is nonsensical between the two. Your part takes there part and what you have together is the sum of translation. You learn instantly. You can ignore everything. You can be swept away or suddenly an expert mimic. I recommend waiting as long as possible before lips actually touch lips. How do you describe a tongue? Something absurd at a distance. You can intrude on someone. You can make them feel open, exposed, endlessly in or out of control, just by gesturing with a little muscle inside your mouth. You can escalate, de-escalate, you can provoke them to the throes of ecstasy just by communicating that there is a lot more than can be done with a tongue given the opportunity. Yes, this is impossible. We are living the impossible life. I will keep trying. Maybe it is best to articulate the first sensation. You are there, and you can decide to kiss someone. You can decide to ask to kiss someone, or if consent is previously established, you can kiss someone on the presumption that it is welcome. When you decide to kiss someone, you are empowered. You get to tap them on the back, put your hands on their shoulders, pull them close, and kiss them. You get to see the anticipation of something they did not predetermine being visited upon them. You can detect their response to affection, spontaneity, you can have an encounter with them that let's you assess their response to any other stimulus throughout the day. You can make amends or offend someone. These are common traits of language. So what is kissing other than a metaphor for "come let me be the host of your disease"? It's a weird by-product of evolution. It produces a chemical response that makes the body want to engage in sexual behaviour. Sexual behaviour is instinctually rewarded at a genetic level. Does that make any sense? That the more you have sex, the better your genes will do? Why would your genes care? Are they you? Do they experience the physical pleasure of sex? Is the 'physical pleasure of sex' literally just a card-trick programmed into the operational fabric of our DNA? The more and more I think about it, the more it seems like it is, and it makes me really pissed off every time I get turned on. "Why would you be mad at getting turned on?" Lyra asked, pawing gently at my leg under the now-slightly-colder stream of water. "Because it's something literally outside human control. Whether you can control what turns you on is debatable, but even further debatable is how much control you have over when you're turned on, and it's so regressive and primal and absolutely antiquated that it makes me feel like I'm a stupid ant marching in a parade about to be doused by a kid's garden-hose." "And it's a metaphor for magic, probably, isn't it?" "Probably. But I don't understand what that means. I don't even understand the purpose of metaphors. At one point they felt more true than anything else in the universe. Now nothing feels true." Not anything? Not the kiss? Not me? "I'm really sorry," I said, crouching down into a ball on the floor of the shower, wrapping my arms around my tucked in legs. "I knew this would happen the first time." Lyra sighed, and hung her head, letting the water wash over her head like a downpour under a streetlight. "No, it's... I'm sorry too. It's just as much my fault." "Can I turn off the water?" "Yeah. Go ahead." Author's Note 1: Can we include a list to the amount of times the show has referenced the word 'hands' here? Let's do that. 1.5: This was the best we could do. Survey ResponsesSurvey Responses: We polled every pony currently available to us, and here's what they had to say about a reverse-species cloning proposition! Apple 'Applejack' Jack: "Well, it'd be real nice to have an extra pony to help around the farm. And if it's just the two of us, we could take turns splittin' up the work that's too hard to do all by ourselves. Heck, we might even have enough time to start makin' our own batches of fresh cider again. We could sit around the fire at night and drink a warm glass and feel all relaxed on account of there'd be no more work to do even if we wanted to. Sounds... nice." Rainbow "I'm Not A Lesbian" Dash: "Okay, so I'm just saying. Even if I like colts, even if I'm alwaysgonna like colts, can you imagine any situation better to test yourself out than a clone of yourself? It wouldn't be weird at all, it'd be like, you know, your friend has a bug in their hair or an itch on their back they can't scratch or something... I could just try it, to see if I like it. And if I didn't, I wouldn't even have to tell anypony else! Not that I'd mind, I mean. I mean. Uh. We'd probably just, uh. Play... hoofball. Yeah... Heh... Uh... Can you stop recording what I'm saying, please?" Pinkamena "Remember That One Time I Went Psycho" Dianne Pie: "This is the best! Any time I think of something to say, or even if somepony else thinks of something to say and just uses my head for it, all I have to do is say it out loud, and there I am to say something back! I used to feel, when I got lonely, sometimes, like there was a really loud buzzing inside my head, and it got louder and louder the longer I stayed by myself, the more quiet it was the louder the buzzing got until my head felt like it was going to pop! And I'd say things out loud to myself like "Everything's okay Pinkie!" or "You're never going to wake up from this!", and it would be like I hadn't said anything at all! It's like, if nopony is there to hear you, do you make a sound? You know what I mean? Anyway, after that we did coke and fucked for like fifteen hours. What were we talking about?" Twilight "I'm-A-Princess-Suck-It-Bitch" Sparkle: [UNAVAILABLE FOR PERSONAL COMMENT. FORM RESPONSE SUPPLIED BY ROYAL COMMUNICATIONS LIASON.] Rarity Nolastname: "Did you make sure to get that down? It's not two words. Just, 'Rarity'. Like Prance. Or Maredonna. Understand? Now, I have to say I put a lot of thought into this. Whether we would see each other as equal, knowing that I might nevertheless be the original... whether or not a heirarchy would be useful, determing how to resolve disagreements without any prickly feelings—imagine doing that for fun with a version of yourself, haha!—and from there, what it would make the most sense to devote our new energy towards... a restructuring of our workflow at the boutique, perhaps some time spent between work and leisure, increasing our library of available suitors on call... but at the end of the day, really, we just looked each other dead in the eyes—it was like the sun and moon, meeting in the sky, I really can't put it any other way—and then, just like that, without even saying anything, we fell into the bed and made passionate love until our bodies were too exhausted to continue. I mean, I just assumed that was what everypony had done... self-love isn't just a figure of speech, if you catch my drift, darling. Do you? If you'd like, I could have my drift come behind that recording desk before I see myself out..." Flutter "Discord's Main Bitch" Shy: "Oh, my. I, um. I don't suppose I know what we'd do. I imagine there are a lot of other ponies that would be better off having somepony exactly like themselves around. I don't, um... I don't think I'd like myself very much. You know? I might kind of get on my nerves. Though, if I had somepony to help with the animals... no, I couldn't. They'd miss me so much, I have to do it all myself, I couldn't... Well, no, she wouldn't be exactly the same as me... you did say clone, didn't you? Oh. Well, I didn't know that was an option either. How big could you, um... does it get to, do you, can you choose, you know, the, um, color, or shape of... oh, my. Yes, please. May we talk after the interview? I've got quite a few bits saved up from petsitting... Can you just please make it have a knot at the end?" Random Green Background Pony We Interviewed To Satiate the Demands of the Individual Behind the Recording Desk: "If I do this interview, will you guys buy me a sandwich? I haven't eaten in three days. Cough/. Satisfied Customer: "It was awesome. I have no complaints. This review was a pleasure to write and I am satisfied in perpetuity by this company and its products." is there a way to make this chapter invisible plsDid we decide whether or not to have an intro paragraph explaining the premise? I think we decided to start in media res and let the background story present itself naturally through environmental cues and well-paced exposition. You're saying 'well-paced' in regards to your own creative output. That's like saying in the title of your story "Please read this story, it is very interesting." I was saying I was going to try, not that I was going to succeed. You've already wasted a bunch of time. No one is going to enjoy this section. It's practically mandatory that you take it out. If I leave it in, it's a statement of defiance and an act of metanarrative heroism. It's basically laziness and an admission that you haven't read a piece of immersive fiction in at least five years. Probably more like three, I'd say. On the Road is nonfiction, by the way. Okay, four years. Books you've read before don't count. Alright, fine, probably more like six. Only Revolutions? That's barely a book. It's actually concretely and obstinately a book. You can't read it as anything other than a book. Having the physical object in your hand is the only proper way to ingest it. Why does that mean it needs to be a book? Well, this needed to be a story. A story is just a way to translate an idea into reality. You're not 'translating' anything. You're writing down the thoughts in the back of your head and then chopping apart the ones that get in the way. That's all of them. Just start the story, please. Okay. Author's Note We will sell your original S-NES games, 1/3 of the gross profit will be yours. We welcome games of any kind. So please send us your floppy. Your Clone-a-Pone™ Quick-Start GuideTHE WORLD’S FIRST SECOND EVER INSTANT PETS! You are about to begin a NEW amazing hobby that is so fantastic, it STAGGERS THE IMAGINATION! With only ~~water~~ a single DNA swab and the ~~“crystals” in your Sea-Monkey® kit~~ $599.99 USD in your bank account, you will create INSTANT-LIFE®! Yes, you will raise up the world’s only living, breathing INSTANT-PET® amazing live ~~SEA-MONKEYS®~~ Clone-a-Pone™! WELCOME TO THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF SEA-MONKEYS CLONE-A-PONE™ With the act of giving your ~~Sea-Monkeys®~~ Clone-a-Pone™ life, you join in the immensely rewarding experience of fellow hobbyists throughout the world! As a creator of ~~Sea-Monkeys®~~ Clone-a-Pone™, you share with them, the knowledge that through your willingness to explore the unknown, you have stepped across the threshold of one of the strange worlds of tomorrow’s science … TODAY! HOW DOES IT WORK? You, along with thousands of others of satisfied customers may find themselves asking questions like "What is this strange magical creature?", and "How has this company come into being overnight and suddenly fulfilled my every wish and dream?" Worry not, your queries may quander you no more! Read further for an answer. Here at Clone-a-Pone™, we take the finest ~~brown apple cider~~ care in ensuring your DNA sample is handled carefully as it's transported to our analysis and production teams. There, we use a complicated, patented process to transform your single swab of saliva and mouth-tissue into a real life eating breathing huggable ~~fuckable~~ lovable pony! Your pony may not resemble you physically, but thanks to our patented process of rearranging your DNA according to a random number and then adding a bit, you should find its appearance caters to your every fancy and desire—often sexually! Outside of that, you and your pony will share every manifestation of your consciousness. Your pony should have your personality, your likes and dislikes, and an intense and inescapable desire to make you happy at all times. Some have debated whether or not this process can truly be called cloning. We hope you enjoy your new Clone-a-Pone™ in a means of your choosing. Please consult our fully downloadable user manual for more information, available on our website at aych tee tee pee colon slash slash double yoo double yoo double yoo dot clone dash a dash pone trademark symbol dot com. We'll see you there! Ecksdee! This is the chapter I included to determine whether or not I should have written a sex scene before initial publication Author's Note It was a toss up, but given how much other sex writing I've been doing, did it seem feasible, or even desirable? Anyway, if you read the story wondering "when do they fuck" and then finished and are thinking "aw man, they didn't fuck yet!", then this is the chapter for you. Tell me what you hated the most and why, and check back in three weeks for your chance to win a trip to Cancun! Any winning of said prize would be entirely unrelated to me or this story, but if someone happened to show up and randomly give you a trip to Cancun, I say, take it! Take it and bring plenty of toilet paper. The end.
So When Do They Fuck?As with every new boutique technology, crazy early-adopters took the risk between a potentially innovative and life-changing technology, and everyone else stood back a good distance of fifteen feet and waited to see what happened to all the financially irresponsible nutcases who had invested before sensible people had a chance to point out all the flaws in the utopian vision being marketed as a result of a simple product purchase. After two months, it was clear: Clone-a-Pone™ was here to stay. The service proposal was simple: For $599.99USD, Clone-a-Pone™ will produce a 100% faithful, real-life, organic copy of your entire consciousness and being. And it will be a pony. A pony of the opposite sex. The reason for the permutation was never made publicly available. Early-adoption, as a result, was undertaken primarily only by bronies and cat-girl afficionados. After Elon Musk retweeted, though, sales began to rise drastically. Humans who had never watched or even heard of My Little Pony were suddenly ordering carbon copies of their entire dna algorithm, restructured into adorable marshmallow equines. Ponies could be appropriate from show material wholesale, thanks to some creative intellectual property loopholes, and before you could say "Alicorn Twilight ruined the show", Clone-a-Pone™ had become the most popular technological startup since Microsoft. Or maybe Google. Definitely AskJeeves, at least. I got mine a week ago. The first surprising thing, to me, is that you don't get to pick your pony. You supply the questionaire, the DNA swab sample, the copy of your family lineage (available from Ancestry.com for a small accompanying fee), and at least three relevant Buzzfeed quizzes with your answers recorded. Then you wait a week. Then the company emails you back to let you know if they can meet your request. Then they request payment. Then you pay. Then you wait for another week, until they send you an email saying your 'product' is'ready'. And then you wait four-to-six weeks for delivery. And it shows up in a cardboard box on your front step. If you don't want your roommates knowing you ordered a living, breathing Clone-a-Pone™, you can request a disguised delivery, and the company will write "Rob's Cakes: Delivered by Door Dashie" on the box and leave it in a nonconspicious area with enough bottled water and bags of Cool-Ranch Doritos™ to keep your pony sustained for up to three days. After that there's a recovery fee. My pony was tiny, and green. She only came up to about my waist, poking her head and horn out of the box. Was she supposed to look like me? Am I supposed to look like her? Her name is Lyra, she says. That's convenient. "Hi," is my greeting. "Come on in." It's surprisingly casual, consdering I'm not even sure she existed a month ago. Or what she eats. Or if she's even going to be able to understand me. "Okies." Lyra jumped out of the box like a spry cat, and shook her mane after landing, tossing the loose strands out over her foreheard and beside her ears. "This is your place?" She means the apartment. How to explain modern-day capitalist rent-infrastructure to an other-worldly miniature horse? "Uh... no, not really. Like, I pay rent on it, but—" "I didn't mean you own it. I'm not trying to be confusing. I was just kind of, like, leading up... "Oh, this is your place? It sure is nice!"" Lyra shrugged and ran a hoof thru her mane casually. Casually. "Oh... so like, you were doing a, kind, social niceties sort of thing, trying to be polite?" "Pretty much. I don't imagine you'd be happy to see me if first thing out of the box I pooped on your shoes or started running around eating the furniture or something." "I think at this point I'd be happy for any amount of unpredicted stimulus being sourced from another living being." "How do you know I'm alive?" Lyra raised an eyebrow, still standing on the door-mat to the third floor apartment I'd managed to nab for my self, like a mediocre, children's-coloring-book version of a primitive cave, carved out of the face of some giant, suburban edifice... "You like words a lot," Lyra said, stepping inside past me. Her head brushed against my jeans as she walked past. It was surprising not to find myself instantly hard. "I guess." I shut the door and locked it, then remembered I'd left the box on the front step, unlocked the door, opened it, grabbed the box, through it haphazardly into a corner of the room where another pile of miscellaneous items had begun to accrue, closed the door, locked it, and let out a long, pained-sounding sigh. "We've known each other for two minutes and you're already existentially drained? That's not a good sign." Lyra yawned and took a look around the room. For some reason, probably ancient custom alone, there was a couch, still. A television, that you could theoretically watch things on, if there was anything to watch. Piles of dirty clothes. A mostly empty sink, holding only a single bowl, spoon, plastic My Little Pony drinking cup, and a few spilled noodles left-over from the afternoon's attempt at making dollar-store ramen taste both paletable and not so hot it melted your tongue down to its component molecules. "I'm perpetually existentially drained. Just the idea of spending money on something took me like two months to work up to. No one gave me any approvable. I didn't have anyone to ask. And they probably would have said not to bother anyway." "Just becuase of the idea that something that costs money to make you happy is ultimately insufficient?" Lyra took a seat on the couch, laying down and yawning as she fluffed a pillow next to her head. "Maybe... but everyone buys stuff to make themselves happy. You wouldn't be very happy without food, or heat, or that stuff." "Yeah, but we don't really look for those things. When was the last time you decided to stay at home and hold your feet over the heater to keep warm and content versus spending your money to go out to eat or on vacation or buy a new video game that transports you to an essentially entirely different universe?" "So those are bigger pieces than just buying a car or pack of gum or something," I said, sighing and absent-mindedly straightening objects around the room into arbitrarily organized piles. Some things that would get used later, chapstick, a headphone jack, those had mostly collected in this pile... there was some used Kleenex in that pile. A ball of dust that came out from under the couch. There were some more piles too. I don't know, really. "Yeah, but you should get the right to make that decision yourself. Isn't someone else telling you what to spend your money on barely a way to live your life?" I shrugged. "Feels safer. You don't have to blame other people for your mistakes, but at least when things fuck up your brain will say "See? It wasn't our fault! We listened to exactly what they said to do, we're completely infallible, and innocent, and knew this wasn't going to work in the first place wahhhh..."... something like that, anyway." "Well," Lyra said, surveying the room again and finding it mostly full of scattered books and miscellaneous debris. "It seems like you're safe now. Nopony in here trying to be mean to you. No reason to do anything besides sit down and talk for a bit." Lyra patted the couch cushion next to her. "I don't really wanna talk though. What is there to talk about?" "Wanna talk about sex?" Lyra asked, flicking her tail suggestively and moving her body to give just the tiniest peek of her plush pony-butt. "Yes, but also no?" I sat down on the couch as directed, feeling a vague sensation in my dick trying to prompt me in the more sexually suggestive direction of this particular piece of metacognitive fiction. "I feel like we would save the sex until the end." "Pretty much everyone wants the sex at the beginning. It's like hentai. If you make them sit through fifteen minutes of exposition and set-up, they're gonna be limp and angry by the time they finally get to the part where you want them to cum." On the couch, I raised an eyebrow slightly. "Why is it that every time you say a word related to sex it makes my cock twitch?" Lyra felt a small shiver, then shrugged. "Dunno. Probably the same reason my pussy got a little wet when you said "makes my cock twitch."" "We can talk about it later or we can talk about it now." "I don't really wanna talk. I'd rather fuck." "Can you say 'fuck' again?" "Fuck. Fuck. Are we gonna fuck or what? You wanna fuck my pony pussy?" "Whatever you're doing should be made illegal. It's literally a form of mind control. I'm not even looking at you but my brain is picturing you on the couch. I literally can't get this picture of your butt out of my head now." "The one you used for that story cover?" Lyra asked, leaning more onto her back and showing off more tantalizing hints of her pussy and ass, just visible for a moment before she shifted back to a covered position. It's hard to describe what someone physically looks like as they are doing this. Picture someone naked, lying on their stomach, head-propped up, looking over their back with one of those "I'm the girl getting fucked doggy-style and it's my job to smile at the camera" looks, except instead of having to do it to make money, this is a girl pretending she has to do it to make money, and she's actually totally fine and safe and just likes pretending that she's a porn star looking back at the camera... and if I don't want the girl to look back at the camera, why do I want Lyra to stare at me? "I'm more real," Lyra says, waggling her tail and shaking her butt suggestively. "If you literally say 'butt' one more time we're gonna fuck before the story changes chapters." "Aw, come on. You can't say that. You put me in a catch-22." Lyra stuck out her lower lip and pouted, her eyes wide and puppy-like. "Now if I say it, I lose the sense of control I had, because you told me what the outcome was gonna be. But now I really wanna say it, because now you've got me thinking about it, and contrary to popular opinion, some girls, or girl ponies, or fillies, or whatever, really like when you give their butt a healthy amount of attention..." "Is it that? It's like... a special secret you're not supposed to know or do, because it makes you 'dirty', even though... like, you're admitting it doesn't? It's like... a legal, consent thing?" "Hmm... maybe." Lyra began to wave her tail in my direction, wafting the faint smell of the dampness between her legs towards my face. "It feels like it's definitely something 'illicit', anyway." "Just because it's in the butt?" I was staring now. Lyra's plump, well-formed ass was staring back at me, wiggling and waving and dancing back and forth and reminding me of the way she might look with a cock inside her, grinding onto it and bouncing and throwing her head back with her mane tossed. Like, picturing, picturing it. Dangerous material. "Can we take a break?" I asked, wiping a healthy amount of sweat off my forehead. "I'm like... fifty percent the horniest I've ever been, fifty percent so scared I'm gonna do it so wrong we'll never get to be intimate again." "Has that ever actually happened?" Lyra asked, running a hoof leisurely along her own back, tracing it to her tail and hindquarters, where she ran it luxuriously along her backside once or twice before smacking herself on the right butt-cheek with a playful smack. "Ahhh. Stop. And... no. It hasn't. Once a girl came over like three times and then stopped because the apartment smelled like cat piss, but I didn't really feel that bad about it as a matter of fact..." "We're gonna get into that, right?" "Only if you stop trying to seduce me." "Let's try again in the next chapter." "Okay." Author's Note The unstoppable, unrelenting song is called I Love Beijing Tiananmen, also known as I Love Peking Tiananmen. Peking Duck is a famous duck dish from Beijing. And Scrooge McDuck had his 50th Anniversary in '97!
Observable ConsequenceObservable consequence, Day 1: Some people are staying inside. /mlp/ is under quarantine. Observable consequence, Day 3: Pone-fighting rings begin to spring up in urban areas, ethics commission asked "Why didn't anyone think of this", no good general response. Observable consequence, Day 12: People are walking their ponies in the street. Orgies break out at random and have to be dispersed by the police, who in at least fifty percent of occasions become involved in the orgies themselves. Clone-a-Pone™ is officially the second most profitable company in existence, next to another, slightly more profitable company. Observable consequence, Day 15: Mass protests. Rioting in the street. People and ponies living together. I'm staying inside until the zombies come for us. Observable consequence, Day 16: Lyra has a pony-butt. Ponies have butts and butts on ponies are pony-butts. Observable consequence, Day 17: Are ponies inherently sexual? Is a clone inherently sexual? Are human beings inherently sexual Observable consequence, Day 24: Everything mostly back to normal. Everyone who wanted a clone so they could enslave it permanently in their underground sex dungeon has been weeded out by a process perfectly determined to identify those types of people and not let them register accounts or something. Also there's a user agreement at the bottom of the page. Leave us alone. We deny all plausibility. Observable consequence, Day 30: If you're with your clone, and you both get lonely, is it time to give up?
(Shower Scene 1)"Have you put any thought into what you wanna do?" I asked. The two of us had migrated to the bed a while ago, naturally the most comfortable place for two bodies not afraid of cohabitating with each other. Lyra was lying above the covers, sprawled out with her head at the foot of the bed. I was the opposite, shoulders propping me up on pillows. Lyra raised her head and nodded, eyes wide and bright. "Uh-huh. Pretty much all I've thought about, to be honest." Lyra tucked her head into the blankets, rustled around for a moment, and pulled out a small piece of notebook paper with pony handwriting on it. Pony, er... mouthwriting—hornwriting—whatever1. "I started with a list of YouTube clips we could watch... then I got distracted and started thinking about prostate glands... and then I figured we should probably just get the sex thing over with. To make it easier." "I was figuring that too. It's what everyone is going to be wondering about. Hell, I'm wondering it too." "Ditto. That's the whole point, right? The whole reason anypony wanted a clone of themselves in the first place?" "Well, let's address that first." I sat up on the bed and stretched my arms out over my head, cracking something-or-other as I did so. "How are you a clone of me if you're like... a small green pony. And wouldn't you just know everything I was going to do, and vice versa?" "Well," Lyra said, sitting up herself with her forelegs in front of her chest, hind-legs splayed out just a bit. "No. Because I'm a pony, for one thing. So, like, whatever you would do as a pony... that's different from what you'd do as a human. And since I'm a pony, I don't have any idea what a human me is going to do..." "Is this a spiritual thing? Like... our 'souls' are the same or something?" "Maybe." Lyra stuck her tongue out between her teeth and crossed her eyes, as though she was doing difficult math. "I think... how could we tell if we were really the same or not?" "I think that's the sex part." Lyra uncrossed her eyes and stared at me rather intensely. Enough to make me say 'rather intensely', and not really know what to say after that, for starters. "Aren't you interested in what my body is gonna be like?" Lyra asked, tilting her head slightly to the right. "Of course I am. And I'd assume the interest is mutual. But that's the whole thing. We're already expecting—anticipating. The whole exercise is defunct." "Why don't you just come shower with me, and when we get there, we'll discuss how I knew that's what you wanted me to ask you to do." "What? I... but if we..." Big, long sigh. "Alright. I don't wanna question it. Lead the way." "Why would I know where the bathroom was, genius?" Lyra hopped off the bed and shook her head, tousling her mane in that way I like. "I dunno. If you're a clone of me, don't you have my memories?" Lyra shook her head again, following me down the hallway towards the bathroom and questioning the sheer number of gerunds plundering their way through the text. She took a look around the bathroom as I started getting the shower ready, testing the temperature a few times, fighting with the hot water knob, wondering if your hand's sense of temperature is the same as the rest of your body's—you know, the usual. "Nope. No memories whatsoever. Just woke up in a box, thinking "Huh, I'm a pony. Oh well, I'll probably let myself in in a second." And then you opened the door. And the crate, I guess." "Huh." The shower was hissing and steaming up the room now, so things weren't going to get any more suggestive or less awkward. "What do you think everyone else is doing with their clones?" I asked. I started unbuttoning my shirt (yes, a button up shirt, for my first time meeting my Clone-a-Pone™, there was no such thing as overdressed) before realizing that Lyra was kind of, sort of, already naked. Or she didn't have any clothes to take off, anyway. I wondered if she— Lyra looked to me, blushing. Crouching down a little, crossing her legs over each other. "Uh," she said. "Yeah. Me too. Just now." "Weren't you waving your butt at me like an hour ago?" Lyra shrugged, her cheeks still flushed. I stepped into the shower, starting slightly at the sudden heat, then deciding whether or not it was really hot enough, or too hot, and finally after determining my skin wasn't boiling away, getting all the way inside and letting the water run down over my head and body. As most humans do, y'know. "I imagine most of them are probably fucking," Lyra said nonchalantly as she followed me into the shower. Her horn glowed, sliding the glass door shut. Her mane, which touched the water first, dampened almost instantly, and hung down low over her neck, and forehead, just half-covering her eyes. "Huh. I mean... yeah. Probably. That's what most people say they'd do with a clone, anyway." "You mean a clone of them who's a squishable miniature equine with opposite equipment?" "That's a pretty convenient alteration, when you put it that way." The shower felt nice. Easier than focusing on the foreshadowing. It was time to look at Lyra. To try to describe what it is a naked pony in your shower looks like. She was about waist-high. A little bit more than that. Her nose came up to my belly-button. She was... she looked, or felt, maybe is a better way to say it, small. Like, if you imagine balancing her on your knee, or in your lap, she'd feel... kind of kid-sized. In a, not-really-sure-what-to-do-with-that sort of way. "A kid?" Lyra looked up at me in the shower from only inches away. Her eyes were as wide as she could make them, and her mane was swirling under the hot spray of water. Her bottom lip stuck out a bit too. Damn. "I don't think it's exactly like that," I said, looking pointedly in any direction that did not contain Lyra. But it was too late. Damage had been done irreparably. "So you like the thought of lil' ol' me getting up in your grown-up business—" Lyra nudged suddenly into my leg, causing me to buckle a little bit and brace myself against the shower wall. When I straightened out, she was even closer, her face basically right next to my, uh. Hard-on. "—because I'm tiny, and soft, and innocent-looking? Is that it?" Lyra smirked, letting her tongue loll out of her mouth just slightly. She had the looks down, for certain. Tightening in my chest. A nod. Sudden inability to articulate myself in complete or meaningful sentences. Lyra's hoof, on my stomach. Reaching up to my chest. Staring up at me with her big, begging eyes. "It's okay," she said, lowering her voice to a volume just above the quiet hissing of the shower. "You're safe. 'We got this', remember?" Lyra smiled nervously and removed her hoof from my chest, holding it forward just a few inches away. Deep breath. Feel the shower. The warm water is always a safe place. Happy place. Warm place. Everything is gonna be okay. Everything is gonna be alright. Breathe. After making sure to wiggle my toes on the floor of the shower five times, I opened my eyes and extended a fist to bump Lyra's hoof. Her smile widened, still wavering slightly at the edges. "I know it's difficult. You're putting a lot of pressure on yourself." Lyra tilted her head back and got a face-full of the warm water, closing her eyes and turning her head slowly from side to side to soak at every angle. She sighed loudly, then took a deep, slow breath through her nose. "This is new for me too. I just don't have to be the one to translate it." "I'm scared I won'd do a good job. Or I'll... you're more beautiful than a bunch of words, probably." "Probably." Lyra smiled still, opening her eyes and tilting her head back down to face me. "But so's everypony, probably. And don't get all nihilistic on me—we're showering. No nihilism in the shower." "Okay." "Kiss me. And then tell me what it felt like." I am physically incapable of doing this. Lyra's lips. They felt like... lips. Like the way someone else's lips feel against yours. Like they are another living conscious being that can move its mouth in all the ways you can and has in its mind its own expectation of kissing and how long it should last and what it should feel like and what should precede it and lead to it and all things from and to as a result of their unique collection of understandings. It is impossible to describe this in any capacity. There is an electric yes that is the only word left for it because there are so few elements that mean anything nowadays sensation of this other thing next to you being able to control all of reality, being able to do suddenly anything, and for them to be thinking, maybe hoping, that you, too, are a conscious agent, an operator, someone capable of guiding the encounter in any direction. And what a kiss begins to be to one of you is nonsensical between the two. Your part takes there part and what you have together is the sum of translation. You learn instantly. You can ignore everything. You can be swept away or suddenly an expert mimic. I recommend waiting as long as possible before lips actually touch lips. How do you describe a tongue? Something absurd at a distance. You can intrude on someone. You can make them feel open, exposed, endlessly in or out of control, just by gesturing with a little muscle inside your mouth. You can escalate, de-escalate, you can provoke them to the throes of ecstasy just by communicating that there is a lot more than can be done with a tongue given the opportunity. Yes, this is impossible. We are living the impossible life. I will keep trying. Maybe it is best to articulate the first sensation. You are there, and you can decide to kiss someone. You can decide to ask to kiss someone, or if consent is previously established, you can kiss someone on the presumption that it is welcome. When you decide to kiss someone, you are empowered. You get to tap them on the back, put your hands on their shoulders, pull them close, and kiss them. You get to see the anticipation of something they did not predetermine being visited upon them. You can detect their response to affection, spontaneity, you can have an encounter with them that let's you assess their response to any other stimulus throughout the day. You can make amends or offend someone. These are common traits of language. So what is kissing other than a metaphor for "come let me be the host of your disease"? It's a weird by-product of evolution. It produces a chemical response that makes the body want to engage in sexual behaviour. Sexual behaviour is instinctually rewarded at a genetic level. Does that make any sense? That the more you have sex, the better your genes will do? Why would your genes care? Are they you? Do they experience the physical pleasure of sex? Is the 'physical pleasure of sex' literally just a card-trick programmed into the operational fabric of our DNA? The more and more I think about it, the more it seems like it is, and it makes me really pissed off every time I get turned on. "Why would you be mad at getting turned on?" Lyra asked, pawing gently at my leg under the now-slightly-colder stream of water. "Because it's something literally outside human control. Whether you can control what turns you on is debatable, but even further debatable is how much control you have over when you're turned on, and it's so regressive and primal and absolutely antiquated that it makes me feel like I'm a stupid ant marching in a parade about to be doused by a kid's garden-hose." "And it's a metaphor for magic, probably, isn't it?" "Probably. But I don't understand what that means. I don't even understand the purpose of metaphors. At one point they felt more true than anything else in the universe. Now nothing feels true." Not anything? Not the kiss? Not me? "I'm really sorry," I said, crouching down into a ball on the floor of the shower, wrapping my arms around my tucked in legs. "I knew this would happen the first time." Lyra sighed, and hung her head, letting the water wash over her head like a downpour under a streetlight. "No, it's... I'm sorry too. It's just as much my fault." "Can I turn off the water?" "Yeah. Go ahead." Author's Note 1: Can we include a list to the amount of times the show has referenced the word 'hands' here? Let's do that. 1.5: This was the best we could do.
Survey ResponsesSurvey Responses: We polled every pony currently available to us, and here's what they had to say about a reverse-species cloning proposition! Apple 'Applejack' Jack: "Well, it'd be real nice to have an extra pony to help around the farm. And if it's just the two of us, we could take turns splittin' up the work that's too hard to do all by ourselves. Heck, we might even have enough time to start makin' our own batches of fresh cider again. We could sit around the fire at night and drink a warm glass and feel all relaxed on account of there'd be no more work to do even if we wanted to. Sounds... nice." Rainbow "I'm Not A Lesbian" Dash: "Okay, so I'm just saying. Even if I like colts, even if I'm alwaysgonna like colts, can you imagine any situation better to test yourself out than a clone of yourself? It wouldn't be weird at all, it'd be like, you know, your friend has a bug in their hair or an itch on their back they can't scratch or something... I could just try it, to see if I like it. And if I didn't, I wouldn't even have to tell anypony else! Not that I'd mind, I mean. I mean. Uh. We'd probably just, uh. Play... hoofball. Yeah... Heh... Uh... Can you stop recording what I'm saying, please?" Pinkamena "Remember That One Time I Went Psycho" Dianne Pie: "This is the best! Any time I think of something to say, or even if somepony else thinks of something to say and just uses my head for it, all I have to do is say it out loud, and there I am to say something back! I used to feel, when I got lonely, sometimes, like there was a really loud buzzing inside my head, and it got louder and louder the longer I stayed by myself, the more quiet it was the louder the buzzing got until my head felt like it was going to pop! And I'd say things out loud to myself like "Everything's okay Pinkie!" or "You're never going to wake up from this!", and it would be like I hadn't said anything at all! It's like, if nopony is there to hear you, do you make a sound? You know what I mean? Anyway, after that we did coke and fucked for like fifteen hours. What were we talking about?" Twilight "I'm-A-Princess-Suck-It-Bitch" Sparkle: [UNAVAILABLE FOR PERSONAL COMMENT. FORM RESPONSE SUPPLIED BY ROYAL COMMUNICATIONS LIASON.] Rarity Nolastname: "Did you make sure to get that down? It's not two words. Just, 'Rarity'. Like Prance. Or Maredonna. Understand? Now, I have to say I put a lot of thought into this. Whether we would see each other as equal, knowing that I might nevertheless be the original... whether or not a heirarchy would be useful, determing how to resolve disagreements without any prickly feelings—imagine doing that for fun with a version of yourself, haha!—and from there, what it would make the most sense to devote our new energy towards... a restructuring of our workflow at the boutique, perhaps some time spent between work and leisure, increasing our library of available suitors on call... but at the end of the day, really, we just looked each other dead in the eyes—it was like the sun and moon, meeting in the sky, I really can't put it any other way—and then, just like that, without even saying anything, we fell into the bed and made passionate love until our bodies were too exhausted to continue. I mean, I just assumed that was what everypony had done... self-love isn't just a figure of speech, if you catch my drift, darling. Do you? If you'd like, I could have my drift come behind that recording desk before I see myself out..." Flutter "Discord's Main Bitch" Shy: "Oh, my. I, um. I don't suppose I know what we'd do. I imagine there are a lot of other ponies that would be better off having somepony exactly like themselves around. I don't, um... I don't think I'd like myself very much. You know? I might kind of get on my nerves. Though, if I had somepony to help with the animals... no, I couldn't. They'd miss me so much, I have to do it all myself, I couldn't... Well, no, she wouldn't be exactly the same as me... you did say clone, didn't you? Oh. Well, I didn't know that was an option either. How big could you, um... does it get to, do you, can you choose, you know, the, um, color, or shape of... oh, my. Yes, please. May we talk after the interview? I've got quite a few bits saved up from petsitting... Can you just please make it have a knot at the end?" Random Green Background Pony We Interviewed To Satiate the Demands of the Individual Behind the Recording Desk: "If I do this interview, will you guys buy me a sandwich? I haven't eaten in three days. Cough/. Satisfied Customer: "It was awesome. I have no complaints. This review was a pleasure to write and I am satisfied in perpetuity by this company and its products."
is there a way to make this chapter invisible plsDid we decide whether or not to have an intro paragraph explaining the premise? I think we decided to start in media res and let the background story present itself naturally through environmental cues and well-paced exposition. You're saying 'well-paced' in regards to your own creative output. That's like saying in the title of your story "Please read this story, it is very interesting." I was saying I was going to try, not that I was going to succeed. You've already wasted a bunch of time. No one is going to enjoy this section. It's practically mandatory that you take it out. If I leave it in, it's a statement of defiance and an act of metanarrative heroism. It's basically laziness and an admission that you haven't read a piece of immersive fiction in at least five years. Probably more like three, I'd say. On the Road is nonfiction, by the way. Okay, four years. Books you've read before don't count. Alright, fine, probably more like six. Only Revolutions? That's barely a book. It's actually concretely and obstinately a book. You can't read it as anything other than a book. Having the physical object in your hand is the only proper way to ingest it. Why does that mean it needs to be a book? Well, this needed to be a story. A story is just a way to translate an idea into reality. You're not 'translating' anything. You're writing down the thoughts in the back of your head and then chopping apart the ones that get in the way. That's all of them. Just start the story, please. Okay. Author's Note We will sell your original S-NES games, 1/3 of the gross profit will be yours. We welcome games of any kind. So please send us your floppy.
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This is the chapter I included to determine whether or not I should have written a sex scene before initial publication Author's Note It was a toss up, but given how much other sex writing I've been doing, did it seem feasible, or even desirable? Anyway, if you read the story wondering "when do they fuck" and then finished and are thinking "aw man, they didn't fuck yet!", then this is the chapter for you. Tell me what you hated the most and why, and check back in three weeks for your chance to win a trip to Cancun! Any winning of said prize would be entirely unrelated to me or this story, but if someone happened to show up and randomly give you a trip to Cancun, I say, take it! Take it and bring plenty of toilet paper. The end.
