Twilight Sparkle and the Stupid Original Pony

I turned off my equipment and grumbled my way to the door – the pounding showed no sign of abating. I didn’t hesitate to open. Bear would tell me if it wasn’t safe.

“Edna!”

The woman at my door was wearing grimy black fatigues so I assumed that she wasn’t here for a social call.

“Can I crash here?”

“Of course, what’s wrong? Where’s Beulah?”

“Hospital. She’s not badly wounded but we gotta spring her before they make her injury worse—”

Suddenly she reached out and cupped her two hands on my breasts, groping them through my thin camisole.

“What the fuck happened to you, boy?”

Squeeze.

“You didn’t used to have these, I’ve seen you naked.”

Nipples hardening under her touch, I pushed her hands away.

“My Twilight –the purple girl– is a magic user. She thought it would be fun to switch our genders and bang. I stayed like this, and she’s temporarily stuck on another world.”

“So, dick gone, too?”

She answered her own question when I failed to block her swift hand.

“Fuckin’ a’. Did you at least get plugged?”

“You could say that.”

Edna cocked an eyebrow.

“She knocked me up. I’ve got a daughter who’s almost five and she’s never met her father.”

“I can’t wait to see the tyke. But I need to shower and sleep, I’ve been up for four days straight and wearing the same clothes for a week.”

“Use the shower in my bedroom.” I pointed to the correct door. “I’ll see what I can do for Beula.”

“Roger, out.” Edna saluted and staggered in the appropriate direction.

As soon as the door closed Bear spoke.

“Tanna, how do you know that woman?”

“Is anything wrong? She was one of the monster hunters Twilight and I met while you were turned off.”

“That seemed the most likely explanation. Nothing is wrong; she and her associate could be valuable resources. I’ve never worked with them, but I am very aware of their reputations. Now get going to the hospital. I’d like you to tell Beulah to play along, and I’ll send trusted personnel to transfer her out of the hospital as quietly as possible.

—

“Miss Beulah, there’s a young lady here to see you.”

“I didn’t send out for any young ladies, I’m too fucked up to fuck one.”

“Thank you, Beulah,” I said, “I’m not a whore yet.”

I stepped inside the privacy curtain around the bed.

“Who the—”

At last she broke her silence, “Is the purple girl a boy now?”

“Last I saw her, she was. I had her baby. How are you?”

A stubborn look passed over her face, and then softened. She nodded me closer and whispered.

“I got shot in the shoulder. No big deal, but I lost a lot of blood so I ended up in a regular hospital instead of with our usual medical crew. There is a bit of a disagreement on my treatment. I can’t pull any strings to get out of here without blowing my cover. You got any ideas, girl?”

As a matter of fact I knew someone who did.

“Already taken care of, you’re getting transferred.”

“How did you—” she cut off when a nurse poked her head around the curtain.

“Miss Beulah, you didn’t tell us that your primary care provider was arranging for a transfer.”

The nurse spoke disapprovingly.

“Sorry.” Before turning to face the nurse, Beulah allowed her face to go slack as if she was dazed. “Must be the pain killers.” She looked almost geriatric, a far cry from the iron lady I knew her to be. The ploy worked and the nurse’s satisfaction with her patient’s seeming helplessness assuaged her professional annoyance about the surprise change.

Moments later three figures in non-specifically official looking paramedic uniforms emerged from the elevator. One of the women made a beeline for the nurses station, the other accompanied the man pushing a wheelchair.

They moved with easy, casual comfort layered over military precision, medic uniforms just loose enough to obscure the fact that they were armed to the teeth.

My own initial sweep of the space had revealed four hallways, two elevators, and a stairway door as possible ingresses. As the two assault medics transferred Beulah into the wheelchair, they covered each other, leaving no approach un-monitored.

I kept still, with my hands in sight. If they were working for Bear, they’d have some briefing regarding myself, but I might as well make their jobs easier.

As soon as Beulah was comfortably situated, the male medic took the hold of the chair grips to push her. With a slight nod I offered and he stepped aside to allow me. There was a subliminal relaxation in his bearing now that his hands were free. The two medics took positions one step behind me and one step to my right.

As we moved towards the elevator, the remaining tech fell in with us, taking point. Her credentials must have been good: the thickness of her clipboard had about doubled. She had Beulah’s paper medical chart and I could predict that the corresponding electronic records would likely go missing very soon.

Down in the depths of parking, the transport looked nondescriptly worn – from the outside. Inside, the appointments were spotless and comfortable if not quite luxuriant.

Beulah didn’t say a word until they secured the wheelchair and left us alone.

“Who are these people?” She didn’t bother to whisper. “They’re good.”

“No clue. But they were sent by someone I trust with my life.”

“Fair enough. Lets clean out the mini-bar!”

I opened the refrigerator to see what there was.

“Okay, we got fresh orange juice, whole milk, or spring water.”

“Alcohol doesn’t mix with your painkillers, ma’am,” came an amused voice over the intercom.

“Fuck it, can we at least stop for a pack of smokes? I lost a bet. Gimme an orange juice, toots, and if you’ve got a flask of vodka somewhere on your person I’ll be your friend forever.”

“I don’t know why you wanted sprung, but after a caper like this, I think you already owe me that friendship.”

“Cheers,” she agreed as the transport emerged into late winter drizzle.

—

There was no sign of Edna in the living room so I left Beulah and went looking. I found her in my bedroom. She was lying spread eagle in the center of my bed. My favorite vibrator lay just beyond her fingertips.

“Eris Ð. Discordia! I hope you washed that! I was using it when you came banging on my door.”

“Wash it? Closest damn thing I’ve had to young pussy in ages! I really doubt you could be infected with anything my immune system can’t deal with.”

Logically, I knew damn well that I was clean but for her to just assume—

“Oh, the look on your face, girl! Of course I washed it! I’ll wash it again as soon as I catch my breath, couldn’t you have taken the stairs and got here five minutes later?”

It would have taken me a lot longer than five extra minutes to push a wheelchair up a hundred and thirty eight floors.

“You’re awful. Beulah too.”

“And that is why you love us.”

“Come on out, she’s here.”

That got her attention– Edna rolled off of my bed and ran past me to the living room.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “How did you get out?”

“Ask Miss Akos. I got no clue what’s going on.”

“It was my doing, actually,” Bear said. “My name is Bear and I am Mrs. Sparkle’s guardian.” The two monster hunters noted Bear’s correction but did not interrupt. “Please tell me what treatment you require for your arm. Edna told Tanna that the hospital was going to make it worse. I’ve looked at your x-rays and seen the injury. Typically a prosthetic joint would be the correct—”

“Wait, wait, wait!” I interrupted, “Bear, is it safe telling them about you?”

“I believe that we will find a common ground for mutual trust,” he said. “Now about the arm?”

“They wanted to put in that artificial shoulder joint,” Beulah said, “but my shoulder will heal in about six months. But not if they remove what’s left and put in a metal joint. I just need to be left alone. I’d rather take the downtime to grow a new joint than have a bunch of metal in me. It’d just end up getting rejected, which would take years.”

“You can regrow a shoulder joint after getting a bullet through it?” As far as I knew, not even the goldboost I had been given could enable that level of regeneration. “Can anyone actually heal like that, Bear?”

“We will have to accept her explanation, nothing like that is documented on any system I can access. Perhaps she was part of the Life eXtension Program; that information is paper-borne only.”

“Yeah, I’m one of the first crop of long-livers. We got hella crazy healing.”

“Me too,” Edna added.

“I’ll never tell,” I whispered.

“Of course not. And we won’t rat out your pet A.I.”

“Did you happen to know—” I mentioned a name from long ago, a name thoroughly vilified in the history banks.

Edna and Beulah both snapped to perfectly neutral expressions as fast as a switch clicking.

“Does your keeper let you say names like that out loud?” Edna asked as she casually studied the wall somewhere to my right.

“Only in the domicile,” Bear informed her, “it’s safe here. I have Tanna better trained than to spout forbidden vocables in public.”

Instead of answering my question Beulah levered herself out of the wheelchair with her good arm and walked over to me. With her hand on my chin she turned my head this way and that, to study my face for a long silent minute.

“You’ve been through a lot since we met you,” she said at last. “Yes, girl, I knew your father.”

“In the Biblical sense,” muttered Edna.

“Pot, Kettle! I don’t think she needed to know about that, but yes, it’s true, we’ve both had your father. He was a good man.”

“Thanks. I only ever met him once, in a dream.”

“He’d still be alive if he hadn’t tried to counter the putsch. We tried to get there in time. The army dropped a conversion bomb on the prison when the guard found his cell empty. Just in case he was still somewhere on site.”

“I wonder if he made it out? He told me it was the night before his execution and he didn’t plan to hang around.”

“No pun,” muttered Beulah.

“You! You can’t joke about the girl’s dad getting killed!”

“You were the one who told her we slept with him.”

“I only told her that you slept with him.”

“You two are the worst, just the worst. Imma go get Gloam from kindergarten. Are you staying for dinner?”

—

“So, Tanna,” Edna said after dessert, “if you’re his kid, you should have inherited some good longevity genes. All you need is to get your hands on something called ‘goldboost’, it’s the other half of the LXP technology—”

“I got goldboost already.”

“What about your daughter?”

“I got treated while I was pregnant. I was told she would get the benefit too.”

“Damn. You two might live forever.”

Once more the idea that death might offer some solace for my loneliness was snatched even further away.

“Wha- what about her kids?”

“They only get the base LXP. Goldboost doesn’t integrate in the gonads, that’s one of the ways they control access to true immortality.”

“You make it sound like the Life eXtention Program wasn’t a failure,” I pointed out.

“Trust us, it wasn’t.”

“But almost everybody who was injected, died of it.”

“There were thousands of experimental formulas. Only one needed to work – and that’s the one that went to the people at the top. It wasn’t always the LXP trial that killed the ones who died.”

This was not jiving with recorded history – but they had lived through the experience to bring me this eyewitness testimony.

“It wasn’t just one kind of stuff?”

“They used many individual candidates, and then there were combinations of those, too.”

“How did they get so many people to take the shots if it was just a big random trial.”

“It wasn’t voluntary. The people in control used the masses as guinea pigs. Many of the subjects died from what the were injected with, more were killed off when the experiment was over. A few of us lucked out and got the good stuff and slipped through the cracks.”

“If that’s how the LXP was developed, what about goldboost, where’d it come from?”

“Imperial tech. Good stuff, and with Terran LXP technology, not even the Gee Kay of Em has anything like this.”

It was a helluva lot to take in.

“How did you get boosted? That stuff is hard to come by.”

“Well, after…”

I related the experience that had resulted in me and Gloam being dosed with a forbidden technology – the two hunters fidgeting angrily as they listened.

“Fuckin’ bastard is lucky to be dead. I’d skin him alive for treating any woman like that.”

“I wish I’d learned some necromancy, I’d pull him outta Hell just so I could kill him again!”

My tale had omitted the part about Hel – the death seemed too grave a subject for a late night confab around a bottle of wine.

“Are you okay, honey?”

“I think so,” I answered very frankly. “Gloam’s father is a Princess of Equestria, I gotta keep it together so I can take care of the Princess’ child.”

“Helluva girl, I like her.”

Edna vigorously nodded her agreement.

“Mommy loves her to pieces.”

“She’s a fun one. You barely got her home and she tried to put a whammy on me. She wanted to know if I had candy and she thought I’d be an easy mark ‘cos I’m hurt.”

“I’m sorry, Beulah, that is so not happening. I’ll talk to her in the morning, at Chez Sparkle we do not hoodoo our guests.”

“Cool yer jets, I’m not exactly helpless. Didja notice her clean her room without you even asking her?”

I chuckled, realizing what had happened.

“It’s too bad your mother isn’t part of your lives,” she continued, “a girl like that deserves to have a grandma to spoil her.”

“Well, now she’s got two!” Edna averred.

“Gaia help us all!”

—

With my guests settled in the living room, and Gloam tucked into bed, I could finally attend to some interrupted business. A mechanical aid soothed away certain physical stresses and brought me to a state of relaxation. As I hovered on the border of sleep a random snippet of memory yanked me back into full adrenalized wakefulness. Did Edna remember to wash the vibrator?