Have you ever made a bet with a friend after a night of drinking only to wake up and realize that you might have made a huge mistake? Well, that was what had just happened to a British man named Anon.
Anon wasn’t actually his name of course, but that didn’t matter for the purposes of the tale. There also hadn’t been alcohol involved, just a lot of tea and jovial laughter. The conversation in question had happened something like the following:
“Haha, you sure are a riot my industrious fellow. If I was so inclined towards homosexuality, I would totally be your wife. Wouldn’t that be so very tittering?”
“What? I was just asking if you wanted to play some computer games with me.”
“Haha, yeah. ‘Computer games’ ‘With me’. You gay people sure do word things in such a queer way. But unfortunately for you, I am straight!”
“I… Are you hitting on me? What the fuck is happening right now?"
At this point, Anon threw himself into a laughing fit and doubled over so hard that he almost threw up, tears streaming down his face as he repeatedly beat his fist into the side of his couch.
“Hitting on you?! Hitingngn… Hitting… ON you… You really do tickle me good sir! Whatever gives you that Idea? I am merely joking around, you queer little fellow.”
“Well, good. Because I’m straight. In fact, I am mainly only interested in cartoon ponies at the moment. Princess Luna is the best!”
Anon suddenly sat up straight like he had been struck by a bolt of lightning.
“So.. You’re saying that if I was Princess Luna, you’d marry me and make out with me and I could be your cute boy wife?” He said, so shaken that he lost his British accent.
“W- No? That’s not wha-” But it was too late, because his friend was already halfway out the door.
Obviously, this wasn’t exactly how the conversation had gone down, in fact it had been a bit slower and had a lot more pauses and the talking hadn’t been quite so fancy, but paraphrasing what had happened, the summary was pretty accurate.
Now unfortunately, becoming a cartoon horse was something that was impossible. But just because something was impossible didn’t mean it was un-possible, it practically screamed “I’m possible” And he knew just the person that might be able to help him obtain his possible dream. The National Health Service was a big thing in the United Kingdom (which, unfortunately, is where Anon lived), but due to the stresses faced by being underpaid and overworked, a lot of Doctors either went private or became wizards.
He knew one that had gone private and became a wizard, and it only took him twenty two minutes to walk to the edge of the city, something that he was more than happy to do with the promise of pulling the biggest prank ever on his friend. His friend happened to be an American and had tried, foolishly, to explain to him that there was no way National Health Service workers became wizards, and that was just something the government of the UK made up to hide the fact that a lot of them were leaving to go to other countries.
Anon found the Americans' lack of faith shocking. Maybe their government lied to them about things, but the government of the UK was a bastion of truth and morality in uncivilized times. The government would never do something as stupid as lie, and he knew where he could find one of the best wizard Doctors in town. They operated out of a condemned Woolworths store, a relic from a better time that was all but lost.
Anon stood before the faded red sign, the bold white lettering now faded and covered in mildew. The automatic doors were sealed shut, and wooden planks had been placed over the glass. He reached his hand forward and gently smacked his knuckles against the wood, which promptly fell over, exposing the suspiciously clean and almost completely empty bare concrete space beyond. This was where the great Doctor wizard did his work. This was the place.
He crouched through the hole the wood board had been covering and examined the place that surrounded him. Suddenly, any jokes or rambling died in his throat, and he tried his best to stay calm as he examined rows of boxes up against the walls.
In the middle of it all was a lab bench or operating table that looked like it had come right out of a horror movie. Four leather clasps decorated it, and above it was illuminated by six stage lights that looked like they had been looted directly from a theater show. Sat in a small plastic chair was a man in a gas mask with four arms laced across his chest, two made out of metal and two made of flesh.
He wore a lab coat, and with the blacked-out lenses of his gas mask it was impossible to tell if he was sleeping or awake. Suddenly, this whole thing didn’t seem like the best idea, but he kept moving forward as a terrible feeling grew in his gut and any attempts at comedy died in his throat. The mood seemed oppressive, the air grew heavy to the point it was choking him, but he moved to twenty paces away from the figure and paused.
“Hello. I’m here looking for the wizard Doctor?” He said, managing to keep his voice just barely straight. In an instant, the figure shifted unnaturally in his chair, those metal arms clamping down against the cheap plastic and pushing his body up from it, where he threw his flesh limbs open dramatically.
“You’re looking at him! What are you wanting? Plastic surgery, cancer treatment, or other?”
As Anon stood there, a lump formed in his throat and threatened to silence any words he might be able to speak. Even with the tinted lenses, he could tell the Doctor was looking directly at him, staring right through him, and their body seemed to shift and jerk in an unnatural way. The four metal limbs weren’t like normal hands either, ending in metal clawed appendages despite an obvious attempt to be shaped after human arms, despite being made out of cold, unfeeling steel.
“I was… Ah… I was hoping… To ask about arcanotech? I heard you can… Make ponies here?”
The Doctor suddenly lurched forward, peering closely at him as he tilted his head at a strange angle.
“Species Dysphoria?” the Doctor accused. Even in his mind he wasn’t calling them Doctor with a capital letter, because at this point he was seriously doubting this man had any medical or wizardly training.
“N-No. I just.. My friend likes the pretty ponies and I want to make him happy. I hear you’re.. You do… The thing.”
At this point, the Doctor gave a laugh. Unlike all the other noises he made, this one didn’t seem muffled by the double filtered gas mask. He twirled his way across the floor in the pair of black wellington boots he was wearing like a jerky ballerina and then straightened up, marching his way towards the rows of boxes that decorated the edges of the room.
“What pony are you looking for? One of the My Little Pony ones?” asked the Doctor.
Anon lit up upon hearing those words. They were like a beacon in the dark after how terrifying this had all seemed so far.
“Yes! Make me Princess Luna, please.”
From behind his mask, the Doctor let out a noise that sounded like he was choking, then he strolled down the lines of boxes like a general parading before his men, stopping before a large wooden crate that he picked up with both sets of metal arms and hefted into the air like it weighed nothing.
He brought it back from the dark edges of the room and placed it down in the middle of the stage lights with a soft thud. It was marked with a small white label, reading ‘Princess Luna, Full’. The Doctor wedged his clawed, metal fingers between the gaps of the wood on the front of the box and pried it free of the nails like it was nothing.
A sea of little white packing peanuts poured out onto the floor, something the Doctor didn’t seem to care for in the slightest, and there at the back of the box was… Well, something approaching Princess Luna. It wasn’t an exact replica, it looked too robotic to pass for the Night Princess herself in the flesh, but it was clearly her. Tinted visored eyes stared at him, the head being the only part visible like the poor thing was drowning in the sea of packing peanuts. It had no mane either, at least from what he could tell.
“This one?” The Doctor asked.
“Yes! But… Ah, does she come with a mane? How does this work?”
The Doctor shifted and pulled Princess Luna’s form from the sea of packing peanuts, pulling the horse sized thing free like it was nothing and setting her down on the floor. She was stiff and lifeless, made out of cold black metal where flexibility wasn’t needed, and smooth looking rubber where it was.
“She does come with a mane, let me just power her up…” The jerky figure of the Doctor mused as he reached one of his metal arms forward. Several symbols that looked like runes glowed to life on the cold steel, and as he touched the metal hand to the robotic figure of the Princess, symbols and markings glowed to life on her as well.
These symbols were purple, and for several moments nothing seemed to happen, before several ports down the back of the Princesses’ neck suddenly glowed with a purple light of their own and her mane suddenly appeared in all its holographic glory.
It was real, a projection of the night sky flowing down the back of her neck and over the top of her head, decorated between the very real image of the night sky with white lined consolations. Her mane almost looked like fire, swaying in some ethereal wind as he stared at the beauty of her construction.
She stood six foot tall, her face was almost entirely made of midnight purple metal with two glowing sea green eyes that shimmered brightly. The front of her neck and throat was made of rubber, the back made out of black metal that had holographic projector ports set into it for her mane, the same ports decorating the top of her head.
Her legs were long and graceful, clad in rich silver horse shoes that were adorned with little images of the moon, and moving up her legs the joints were made of midnight purple rubber. Then, moving onto her flank, a holographic tail that matched her mane flowed gracefully from the base of her spine, which was on full display and made out of numerous black metal plates that had been expertly crafted to fit down the gutter of her back.
Her cutiemark was made out of some kind of polymer, a crescent moon glowing a soft shade of white on both sides of her flank. She was perfect.
“Of course,” The Doctor began, “She doesn’t do much for now. She needs an organic component to do much moving around.”
“What does the procedure involve?” Anon asked, already feeling excited.
“Well, breaking and reshaping every bone in the body… Organ removal… Well, it basically involves tearing you apart piece by piece and then rebuilding you. That’s why I don’t charge people currently, I’m still working out the issues… Ah, a lot of the patients that survive the procedure tend to go…” He pressed a metal hand to his chin, picking out his next words carefully. “Well, batshit fucking insane. Something stupid about the human body doesn’t like having itself broken down and put together again. That’s why I had to stop working for the NHS, they didn’t get my genius.”
Anon shuddered. Going insane did sound pretty bad, but being Princess Luna herself was everything he had ever wanted since he had decided he wanted to be Princess Luna to prank his friend thirty minutes or so ago.
“Let’s do it!”
The Doctor seemed shocked by this, his head straightening up, “Don’t you want to read the waiver or find out more about how the arcanotech works first?”
“I said let's do it, now stop with the warning and start with the operating,” said Anon.
At this point, there was a brief pause. They studied anon intently from behind their gas mask, then shrugged, “Works for me, lie down on the table and I’ll get my things ready.”
After lying down on the table, he watched as the Doctor went about preparing for the operation. Anon wasn't a Doctor, but from what he could see everything was pretty professional. He pulled out a weed sprayer and misted the air with a pink fluid that smelled strongly of disinfection, then did the same to the tray of medical implements across from the medical bench.
As the Doctor pulled up a rather scary looking medical saw, a thought suddenly occurred to Anon. "Wait, am I meant to be awake for this? Don't you have, like, laughing gas or something?"
With a curious noise, the Doctor launched himself across the room and after a few moments of looking pulled up a battered metal canister with a clear plastic tube attached to it. He lifted the canister up to his eyes and briefly studied it. "Nitrous Oxide?" He shook the canister and lifted it to his ear. "Yeah, there's some left. Hold on." With that he lifted the tube up to his mask and unscrewed one of the filters, shoving the clear tube in its place. He took a deep inhale and then gave an excited giggle, before offering the tube to Anon.
He lifted his face up to the tube and took a deep breath of the sweet smelling gas. Yeah, his head felt light and he fell back against the table with a dopey smile on his face.
The buzz saw was spun up and then driven straight into Anon's chest. For a moment he thought that his chest had been ripped open, but somehow the saw had only gone through his clothing and ignored the flesh beneath. The Doctor then flipped him over with one of those metal clawed limbs and ran the saw gently down his back.
“Right… I gotta start with replacing the spine before anything else… That way it can handle the weight of your new robotic parts without shattering into pieces.” He peeled their clothing away casually and then rubbed what appeared to be hand sanitizer down their back. And then there was a strange sound, of trumpets, saxophones and other instruments suddenly firing to life from off of the Doctor.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I find jazz music helps me work.” And then before anon could even properly respond, there was a sudden sharp pain down his back as the multi-limbed Doctor got to work, cutting away the flesh around his spine and fixing the straps into place firmly around his limbs so that he couldn’t move as the surgery began.
Anon couldn’t even focus on the leather straps holding him down. The feel of the scalpel running down his back was the only thing that he could focus on, and the dull sensation of pain that came with it.
The nitrous oxide hadn’t taken his pain away, it had simply made it feel as though it was no longer his problem. As the Surgeon began to work, he paused to take a hit of nitrous oxide every few minutes, then when his gas mask filter was secured firmly back into place, he offered Anon a hit, then he’d go back to cutting.
Time, too, lost its meaning as he was carved into, starting at the base of his spine and working its way up. Each cut was precise and mildly painful, but it was more of a soft stinging sensation like a graze compared with the agony that would normally follow having your back cut open. So far it seemed the Surgeon was good, each cut was precise and measured, and even though he was high on laughing gas, it didn’t seem to affect his work in the slightest.
Anon could see out of the corner of his eye that the Luna Robot had been placed next to the operating table, and honestly he felt a tinge of excitement knowing that he was going to look exactly like it in just a few hours. Once the first few cuts were complete, Anon was surprised to find that he could feel the air breezing past his wound, bringing pain with it, and he briefly wondered where the breeze was coming from.
Finally, the first of the robotics were ready to go in. There was the whir of a bone saw, and then a sharp pain in the base of his spine, and then all of a sudden he lost all the feeling in his legs and strangely, his left arm. He wasn’t sure if that was an intended side effect, but after what might have been another few minutes of work, he suddenly regained feeling in his legs again.
This time there was something different about his body though. His spine felt heavy somehow, metal and cold. He could feel it against his flesh, feel the strength of the metal and he knew that he would never have to worry about being weak again. It was incredible, this… Creature working on him might have been utterly insane, but with that it was also utterly brilliant to the point that Anon could barely contain his excitement.
The next few cuts robbed him of the feeling in the right side of his body and his fingers. Most of the suffering for this part came from the overly excitable sounding jazz music. Anon liked a lot of different genres of music, but the lack of bedside manner shown by cutting someone up to swing music was… Well, it was exactly what he would expect from a mad creature working out of an abandoned Woolworth’s store.
The results couldn’t be argued with however. Every few cuts and a few whirs of a bonesaw later, he would lose feeling in a different part of his body, slowly working upwards and replacing more and more parts of him with the cold metal.
Strangely, he never lost feeling in more than a few parts of his body at once, and his addled mind tried to figure out just how that could be the case. Eventually the Doctor reached the base of his skull, and here the Doctor paused, staring down at his implements.
“Alright, hopefully I don’t need to do any big work on your brain. That is an important part that needs to be handled carefully to stop your soul leaking out. We’re going to attach the hooves next, but first I need to reinforce some of your joints so that they don’t break…”
Stepping away from the table, the Doctor picked up the weed sprayer again, something Anon could only be sure of because he heard the hiss of it spraying into the air, then felt the slight mist of cold fluid against his back.
Then the Doctor became a mechanic for a brief moment as he began to take the next few parts off of Luna. It was poetic and beautiful in a way, the less parts of Luna this robot had and the less identifiable it was, the more parts Anon had, and the less like himself he looked. His friend was going to get pranked so hard once this was all done.
The Doctor unstrapped one of his hands and then jabbed a needle into his wrist, dispersing a cold fluid into his veins that made his hand go numb rapidly, and suddenly he wasn’t able to move it.
“If you start to move around you’ll fuck the operation up, so try not to do that,” the Doctor mused down at him, and for the first time Anon did his best to respond.
“ehguoj”
“That’s normal with the amount of drugs you are on, try not to worry,” the Doctor said as he waved one of Luna’s metal limbs at Anon.
The entire limb seemed to have come detached at the hip joint, and through some unknown magic the Doctor caused the back of the hip and a section of the metal tube to open, musing to himself in an absent minded fashion.
“I need to attach all your nerve endings to your new limb, then remove and replace your shoulder joint. Can’t handle the weight of your new frame.”
With that, the Doctor laid Anon’s hand out in the metal tube, which he couldn’t quite feel due to the drugs, but he managed to lift his head up and watch as the Doctor suddenly and cleanly cut his fucking hand off!
His hand fell limp almost instantly, and he let out a shocked cry before the Doctor fit a copper ring around half a foot down the stump, a copper ring that shrank and bit down around his limb, stopping the bleeding.
“MTYHand!” Anon cried and the Doctor simply scoffed, placing the appendage into a plastic bag and dropping it by the side of the lab bench.
“You don’t need it anymore, your highness. You’re going to have hooves!”
With that the Doctor leaned in and pinned Anon against the bench, starting to work with his tools along the length of Anon’s arm, stripping away flesh and attaching wires and probes in a number of precise places, reworking existing nerve endings in the same way as wires to skillfully plug them into the wiring of the limb.
Once the limb was wired in, the Doctor began removing the shoulder bone, painstakingly and skillfully removing and sealing blood vessels and nerve endings that weren’t needed, using all of his limbs to hold different tools and working to strip the bone away.
Once this was all complete, the lens clad eyes of the insane Surgeon peered down over his work, before he pulled out a strange tool and slid the limb forward so that it was flush with where his shoulder had once been.
Then he leaned forward and began using what appeared to be a soldering iron to seal the limb in place. This took a while, Anon’s perception of time was off, but it took about the same amount of time that replacing half his spine had, and once it was done, he stepped away and examined his work.
Anon could tell that behind the gas mask, he was smiling.
“Well, give it a try?”
Anon tried to move his new limb. It refused to move.
He stared up at the cold mix of black metal and midnight purple rubber with a frown. The hooves ended in shiny silver horse shoes, but at the moment he couldn’t feel anything.
“Cahfg,” Anon said intelligently, his tongue still hanging heavy in his mouth.
“Yeah, I haven’t attached everything yet. I just wanted to see if you were still with me. I had a few wusses go mad from just having their limbs attached. You seem to be holding up well.”
The Doctor offered him another hit of gas and then began to work on the other limb of the recently made cyborg, cutting and slicing away at it with the same skill that he had the other one. This time things seemed to go a lot faster, and Anon was mainly focusing on self reflecting about how weighty the metal felt against his organic parts.
Mentally, he didn’t know how he was holding up so well. He had wanted to prank his friend, but he’d had both his hands sliced off and then his arm had been taken apart and the inner workings exposed, only to then be wired up to some kind of robotic limb. It should have been more traumatic, it should have made him panic more, but the weight of the metal and its firmness felt… comforting to him. He could still somehow feel through his new metal skin, and he could feel even more around the rubber, but…
Something about this was off. Why did it feel so good? He glanced down to his other arm as the Doctor removed his shoulder and slotted the metal replacement into place. He didn’t know how it was any different to just sawing his arm straight off, but as he watched the Doctor begin to use the soldering iron, he leaned back against the table and stared up at the sky.
Pain. It was little more than a dull ache. He knew that there should have been more. Anon was allowing himself to be taken apart and pieced back together into something new merely for a prank. Was this too far? Was he insane to be doing this?
No. This was going to be one of the best pranks in history. Nobody would be able to match him and he would be happy in his new metal shell. It was going to be good. He just had to trust in the Doctor and his work. He was overthinking this. People didn’t put this much thought into getting a tattoo or a piercing and this was basically the same thing.
Yeah, that made sense he guessed. It was no different from a tattoo. A tattoo that took several hours and required invasive and highly experimental surgery. Anon didn’t have anything to worry about. He should just lie back and try to chill out.
The Doctor finished attaching the other hoof, and he stared up at it, then down to the robotic form of Luna that was still on the floor, now missing her front limbs and her spine.
Piece by piece. The less this machine was itself, the more he became it. The thought briefly made his head spin and he decided to not focus on it too much. It might bring him too close to the edge of insanity.
The Doctor’s metal limbs had blood on them, and he was looking more and more like some kind of horror movie monster with each passing second, but he briefly stepped away from the table to spray more antiseptic, or what Anon assumed was antiseptic into the air, then lifted up a bottle of pink fluid and began using it to wash his hands off.
For now, Anon wasn’t focusing on that. He was thinking about how much his life was going to change once the rest of the parts were attached. The human thought of the arcanotech shell as a machine. Would people see him as a machine? Would they even know that he had once been human?
There was a pain in his feet, sharp and sudden, first in the left, and then the right. He knew that he had lost his feet and the thought suddenly hit him like a truck, smashing over his thoughts and filling him with a feeling of melancholy. Was he really going to be able to do this? Was this really all for a prank?
Hot tears began to streak down his cheeks, and he realized just how much he hurt inside. Was this all an escape from something? Was this really what he wanted? His head spun.
It took him a few moments to get his bearings, out of touch with the world as he was, able to focus and feel each and every cut that the Doctor was making into his leg. It was too much, maybe he wasn’t tough enough to take this? Maybe he had made a mistake. The back legs were comparable to the front ones, but his leg took more work to get through and less work to reattach nerve endings and other things.
For a good minute, Anon cried. He cried because he was scared of what he was becoming. The metal didn’t feel like part of him. These weren’t his limbs, they didn’t belong to him. Why was he doing this? Was he even real?
It took the Surgeon loudly clearing his throat to snap him back to reality, and he realized that he was no longer strapped down to the table.
“We need to pause. Your mind is starting to give. Get up and share some tea with me.”
He tried to stand. He willed his new alien limbs to move, and they ignored him. His remaining organic leg kicked around uselessly, and it was almost enough to bring him to tears again.
Eventually, the Doctor helped him get his new limbs under him. They ached against his flesh and he fell over in a clatter of metal, landing on the floor before the Surgeon sighed and helped him lay the limbs lengthways along the floor, his leg touching against the cold concrete and all the alien metalwork chiming in to tell him it was cold too.
The Doctor sat right in front of him, a mere foot away. One of his metal limbs firmly clasped onto a white mug filled with tea that was held two inches away from Anon’s face, so that he could lean forward to have a sip. Meanwhile, the Doctor sat cross legged and looked down at him.
Anon could tell there was no pity in his expression, he was simply there, looking down at him with the tinted lenses of the gas mask making his intent impossible to read beyond this.
“It sucks, doesn’t it?” He asked as Anon leaned forward and drank some of the tea. Almost instantly he wanted to recoil and pull his head away. His tongue tingled in his mouth.
“Yesah. I feel like shish.” Feeling was coming back to his face. There must have been other stuff in the gas that he had been given that was having an effect on him.
“Yeah. That’s normal. Losing so much of yourself puts a lot of stress on the brain, and it often leads to freakouts like this. Some people freak out so bad they’re never the same. Take a breather. I tried to warn you about all of this, but you didn’t want to hear it.”
Anon worked his tongue around in his mouth, then once most of the feeling was back, he tried his best to ignore the metal limbs attached to his body and focus on the conversation instead.
“Does it go away?” He asked.
“Depends on the person. If you don’t want this suddenly, I can attach some prosthetic human limbs, just as good as your old ones, and send you on your way. Or, you can take a minute to gather yourself, and we can carry on.”
A few moments passed in silent thought, before Anon leaned forward and sipped at the tea again. He looked up to the operating table and pictured himself strapped down to it, being carved apart for the purposes of a prank. Was this really what he wanted?
By the time he reached the bottom of the cold mug of awful tea, he had gotten more than a few minutes to think. He’d come this far, and as he looked back to the metal hip and hoof attached to where his leg had been, it was decided. He could picture the shining crescent moon cutie-mark on his hip. His cutie mark.
Anon wanted this. He could handle it. This was going to be the greatest prank ever.
He turned his head back to the Doctor and gave a nod. “We’ve come this far. Let’s finish it.
Once again, the mad Surgeon rose to their feet and he could feel in their posture just how happy he was with that decision.
Luna’s body… No, his body was set down against the table. It looked like an iron lung or iron maiden to Anon, opening up sideways like some kind of clamshell, with holes for his limbs to slide in, looking like it slotted over his hips and then he would be wired into it.
Excitement was tingling through his body and most of the fear had faded. He was ready for this. He could do this. He could handle it. Once his other hip was in place, he knew that he had made the right choice.
The metal was comforting to him, and he felt happier in it than he ever had in his own skin. It sounded stupid but it was true. His new spine had slotted into place in the clamshell like design of the chest, and he was rolled over onto his side, looking more like a horse then a man at this point, with only his human head sticking out the top of the device really remaining to remind people of what he had once been.
Now that he had fought off the body dysphoria that was an unfortunate side effect of replacing your entire body with that of a magical alicorn, the Doctor seemed to be paying more attention to his bedside manner and his job as a Surgeon.
The painkillers had been upped, although they worked in the same way that the gas had in that they only dulled the pain and didn’t actually do anything to help.
After a few cuts however, the Surgeon suddenly paused. Anon tried to stare up at him in a drug addled haze. His tongue was almost completely useless now, so he couldn’t communicate, but the Surgeon seemed to have a grasp on what he was thinking.
“I need to go and get the blood machine. I’ll be back in a minute, try not to move around or think too hard while I am gone.”
Yeah, maybe his bedside manner still wasn’t the best, because with that short explanation, he walked off. Anon was left on the table with the dull throb of pain getting more intense with every minute that passed.
It was worth it though. His new body was going to be perfect. For now he needed something to distract him from the distant pain, and to this end he found himself staring down at one of his new hooves. Shiny metal skin and rubber at the joints. He could somehow feel the whole thing despite it being made out of metal. That might have been where the arcane part of arcanotech came from.
There was a very faint sensation of air currents he guessed must have been coming from outside somewhere. It was barely possible to feel it, but he tried to focus on the sensation of his new limb, feeling its weight, feeling it as a part of him, and that faint breeze became slightly more intense.
His new skin might have been even more sensitive than his old skin. It was incredible, beyond his wildest dreams, and soon he was going to be the Princess of dreams, so that was highly appropriate.
The silver horseshoe clad limb was feeding him sensations from the outside world, but his body was still refusing to accept it as his. His body was stupid. This was his limb now. He stared intently at it, focusing on the sensation of it at the end of his new robotic shoulder. It was heavy and powerful.
Move. Move. Move! The stupid limb didn’t respond to his orders. He pictured a hand at the end of his shoulder, he pictured moving his arm, it didn’t work. Whatever had been done to his arm had taken it out of commission and he wasn’t going to be moving it any time soon.
Hopefully he wasn’t bleeding out at the moment. Thankfully, he heard a noise off to his side and saw the Surgeon returning with a large white rectangle shaped device that looked like it had been ripped straight from a server room.
“I know it looks scary, but this machine is simply going to provide oxygen to your blood while I work on modifying your internal organs to stop you from dying, so it’s nothing to worry about. Don’t look so worried.”
Anon decided that he was going to keep the worried look on his face. That sounded like a lot to worry about, but at the moment he couldn’t tell the Doctor just how worried he was about the whole thing because his tongue was still numb in his mouth and there was no getting his words out.
The Surgeon got to work, and because of the metal chassis that was currently wrapped around his chest, he couldn’t see what was happening, but he could still feel the pain of every cut and slice against his flesh.
Now, Anon could certainly argue against the bedside manner, and the fact that the operation was currently being done while he was awake, but each cut was exact, and the pain wasn’t bad provided he didn’t focus on it.
The machine began to hum and then whir as it set to work. Then it began to make the most horrifying thudding sound he had ever heard in his life, and for a few moments he was convinced that it was broken. THUD. THUD. BADUNK. BADUNK. BADUNK. He realized after a few horrified seconds that the sound was almost an exact match for a heartbeat, a hellish mechanical replica of his own heart.
One tube went in, with dark red blood flowing into it, and then after a few moments another tube let out light red blood that flowed back towards him.
“Don’t mind the noise!” The Doctor half shouted over one of the worst noises Anon had ever heard in his life, “That’s just so that I know it is working. It’s a good noise.”
Anon felt cold all of a sudden. Doubts began to cloud his mind once more and he did everything in his power to try and not overthink this too much. Sure, it might have been terrible, but this was what was needed if he was to get what he wanted. Everything had a cost in life, and this was merely the price of entry for his new life.
Seconds ticked by into minutes, minutes ticked by into about an hour, and then-
Suddenly, there was a weight lifted from his chest that he had been carrying his whole life and never known was there. Suddenly he knew that he should have been dead. Suddenly every nerve ending in his body was sending shivers down his new cybernetic spine.
The Doctor lifted up a red mass that looked like a large fleshy and bloody fennel. Comparing his heart to a herb wasn’t one of his best moments, but his poor mind refused to admit that it was his heart. If it was, he should have been dead. For the first time in his life, he was a machine, his every function being supported by steel and arcane magics. It felt terrible, it felt like he had violated every principle of common decency.
And yet he knew, nothing would ever be able to stop him again. He was unceasing. He was unstoppable. He began to laugh madly, and the Doctor looked confused for a few moments, before staring down at the organ currently held in his metal claws.
“Oh fuck, sorry, sorry! That’s very bad for you, don’t look at that.” He said, suddenly digging dropping it to the floor with a wet, meaty sound cut through with the rustle of the plastic bag the bio waste was kept in. “Fuck, shit. Bollocks.” The Surgeon said, using his human hands to frantically dig around somewhere out of sight, before he pulled up a stuffed shark plushie.
“Eh.. Look at this instead! It’s fluffy, see?” He pressed it to Anon’s cheek and tried to hide the bloodstained claws behind his back. “I did have some pony ones, but I gave them all away besides….” The Doctor turned away, leaving his head locked into place with the shark toy pressed into his nose. It was soft, its eyes were soulless and empty, but it looked happy. “This one!”
The Doctor swapped out the shark toy for a plush Sci-Twi, that is, Twilight Sparkle, the small purple unicorn, but with glasses. This one even had a little lab coat, and its mane was done up in a ponytail. Someone had sewn little plushy replicas of metal limbs to its back.
“This is my personal plushie.” The insane Doctor said, “She will keep you safe, and in turn you have to keep her safe. Okay?”
Anon blinked. He surprisingly felt better, and the Doctor got back to work, not showing him the parts he was installing, but Anon soon felt a weight in his chest again. How long had it been? He’d lost count, too busy staring into the eyes of the plush toy and trying to keep himself together.
Going insane was for cowards that couldn’t face reality. There was a weight in his chest again, and the terrible thudding of the machine stopped. His chest hurt, quite a lot actually, and the Doctor stepped back into his view, allowing him to see a blurry outline of their legs around the plush that demanded the center of his view.
“I have replaced your heart. I will need to replace your lungs and digestive system. Thank you for being patient with me, patient….”
For a moment the Doctor seemed to freeze up and look very confused, as if someone had thrown a wrench directly into the gears of his mind. One of his metal clawed hands moved up to press thoughtfully to his chin, before he noticed the blood on it and decided against doing so.
“Heart… Legs, hooves…. Ah! Private parts. I always forget about reproductive organs. They’re little more than trouble a lot of the time as far as I am concerned, always pumping hormones and chemicals into your blood that make it hard to think… Far as I care, ponies are better off smooth, more time to focus on friendship and other things then…”
A long sigh escaped from the gas mask and he slumped his shoulders forward slightly. “But I know that you’d likely be pretty upset if I didn’t give you the choice, so wait here while I go and fetch the parts I need.” He set down the Sci-Twi plush back in Anon’s line of sight and then left the table.
Anon stared at the plush again as the Doctor’s footsteps moved away. His insides were still exposed to the outside air… At least he was pretty sure they were. Being certain of anything at the moment was hard because his mind was barely hanging on by a thread. He was lost in a sea of madness with the only rock to cling to being the happy looking plush toy that he was currently staring at.
He was going to be the prettiest pony princess. It was going to be the best prank ever. Clinging to those facts helped a lot, his friend’s face was going to be an absolute picture once the operation was complete.
Still, his private parts? He was worried about what that might mean. He liked his private parts quite a lot, and having the Surgeon go at them would be… Painful, not only physically but psychologically as well. Was this really worth it?
Yes. It was. The commitment to the bit was what made it funny to begin with, and he couldn’t just feel like Luna, he had to be Luna, or as close to her as it was possible for him to get.
It didn’t take the Doctor long to find what it was that he wanted, returning with a cardboard tube that he ripped open with ease using his metal limbs, which he had apparently taken the time to wash while he had been away.
Inside the box there were two items, one that he could easily identify and one that he couldn’t. The first seemed to be a metal disk with a number of runes, symbols and wires sprouting from it. He didn’t have the slightest idea what it was, but the second item he could identify with ease as a fleshlight. Silver metal formed the outer shell, and midnight purple rubber formed the inner, which was clearly designed for pleasuring men.
He tried to ask any of the burning questions that were currently flooding through his mind, but his body was still unresponsive. Helpless, even. He was a little scared, but whatever was going to happen next he knew that he could take it. Anon wanted to be the Princess of The Moon and she wouldn’t be scared at a time like this. Well, she might, but she certainly wouldn’t let it stop her.
Anon wasn’t going to let it stop him either. Anything to get him closer to his goal was worth it. There was no barrier that he couldn’t overcome with enough determination.
“Pleasure is such a simple thing. The disk is installed into your body, then the … The…. Toy, goes into your metal frame and interfaces with it wirelessly, where it then stimulates nerve endings to cause feelings of pleasure. Such a simple thing to tap into… A waste of my talents… But…”
The Doctor didn’t follow anything up after the but, and it was clear that he was fairly annoyed by needing to do this, but he was dedicated to his craft and wouldn’t let something that he didn’t completely like stop him. As a skilled Surgeon he was just as dedicated to making Anon into Princess Luna as Anon was determined to become her. Dedication and determination went hand in hand.
Another needle suddenly stabbed into his flesh, and once again he was floating away from his body. The drugs helped.
Having his private parts operated on still hurt a lot though. Far away he could see himself screaming as the Surgeon got to work, his cuts were still as precise as ever, using all four of his limbs this time, but even with how skilled he was it was possible to detect the annoyance from the Doctor.
It didn’t take as long as Anon would have thought, just a few cuts. Installing the disk took a lot longer however.
It seemed the Surgeon had been lying when he had said that interfacing with pleasure nerves was easy.
Anon’s form was still trying to scream, choking on them now, his poor body so battered that it could barely take it.
But it could. He could take it. He could take all of this. He was ready.
With the disk installed, the Surgeon stepped back, pausing just for a moment, halting his almost ceaseless labor. Not because he was tired, but… Almost as though he was sickened by what he had just done.
Then he set back to his work, even faster than before now. His stomach, intestines, kidneys, and a bunch of other parts that he couldn’t begin to identify were removed from his body, then were slowly replaced one by one with their counterparts.
He couldn’t see any of this, but he could feel the weight moving around in his chest, and the odd dull throb of pain that reminded him he was alive. The worst part was the lungs, he was only half awake during that part, so it all passed in a strange blur, but he had to go back on the blood machine, and while he was on it his lungs were removed, leaving him feeling as though he was choking and suffocating on land.
It got so bad that the Doctor eventually had to hold him down with his organic limbs while the metal ones did the work. Thankfully, it didn’t take long, and when he pulled air back into his lungs, blood wasn’t pooling in them and he didn’t feel like he was choking anymore. Those breaths felt sweeter than any he had taken before.
Even better, the only part of himself that needed modifying was his head, the last part of the robotic Luna that needed installing onto her was the head and neck.
With all the operations that he had undergone so far, his body was starting to feel tired. He was starting to feel the weight of his organic parts pressing against him and weighing him down. The steel was as strong and unmoving as ever, but his body had just undergone a massive procedure and he was paying the toll for it. First he had paid it mentally, and now he was paying it physically.
For a moment he feared that he might be expiring, that his body might finally be giving out after all it had been put through, but as he drifted in and out of consciousness, all his worries seemed to melt away. The Surgeon was good at his work, and he had faith that this wouldn’t be the end for him. He could survive this with his newfound strength!
He was lifted from the operating table and onto a set of metal chains that clinked loudly as they strained to support his weight. His new body must have been heavy. In the distance, the Surgeon was saying something that sounded important, but he was too far away to hear. It felt like he was detached from his body, drifting off somewhere hundreds of miles away where all his worries and woes held no weight.
Something closed in towards him, something slipped over his head, and everything went dark.
It didn’t stay that way for long, as a few moments later there was a sudden searing agony, perhaps the worst agony he had endured so far, but thankfully he was well away from the writhing mound of flesh that couldn’t handle the pain.
No, he wasn’t dying. The Doctor had done something so that he didn’t have to experience whatever that was. He could take it of course, he could take anything knowing that this was going to be one of the greatest pranks ever, but he was glad that he didn’t have to take it all.
And then just as quickly as the pain had come, it began to fade away, and Luna found herself looking out at the world through new eyes. His field of view had shifted, it was much wider than before, but it didn’t seem like anything had changed beyond that, at least until the Surgeon began to move around in front of him, and he realized that he needed to move his head a lot more to get clear tracking of them when they were right up close.
She tried to speak, tried to ask how the operation had gone, but her mouth wouldn’t move and her limbs were heavy, the metal chains digging uncomfortably into her body. How she was able to feel so accurately despite her body being made of metal she couldn’t be sure of, but it was an incredible feat of science and engineering that she would have to marvel at in full later.
Why wouldn’t her body move then? If the robotics were so advanced, why wouldn’t they listen to her? She tried to get her limbs to move, but it felt like they were weighted down with concrete and just as unmovable.
“Can you hear me?” The Surgeon asked. She tried to respond that his words were coming in loud and clear, but her mouth still refused to move. “You haven’t gone insane, right? It might be difficult to move your body at first, but the trick is relaxing and not putting any conscious thought into it.”
Have you ever tried to not think about something? It was basically an oxymoron, there was no way to force yourself to not think about something. She was angry, and she tried her best to tell him so.
“Thou should go and fornicate oneself,” a voice said. It was her voice, Princess Luna’s voice booming in a commanding tone from out of a set of speakers hidden somewhere. Her jaw didn’t move when she spoke, and that wasn’t how she had been planning to word it exactly, but she could speak.
The Surgeon laughed in response, “That’s good. It should have linked up with your brain automatically. Congratulations, Princess Luna, you are now my latest artwork. Perfect in every way. I just need to hook your wings up and get started on some basic functionality tests.”
She just swung there in a mildly displeased fashion. She had managed to get one of her hind limbs to do a weird spasm that she barely had any control over.
“We are most displeased physician, what hast thou done to our voice?!”
The Surgeon smiled behind his mask. She could feel that smile as she tried to get her limbs to move. For the moment they were having none of it.
“I didn’t do anything. You wanted to be Princess Luna and I have given you everything that you need to be her. Now I need to get at your brain to make sure everything is connected properly in about a week or so, but until then everything should be connected enough for you to start moving.”
The chains lowered her down to the floor. She felt her hooves connect against it and a cold sensation spread up her body. She was a regal ruler. She was an immortal cybernetic alicorn. Slowly the supportive weight of the chains dropped away from her body and she attempted to take a step forward.
Her legs moved, but unfortunately for her they all tried to move in different ways and opposing directions. A wise man had once said something along the lines of ‘A horse divided against itself cannot stand.’ Luna soon discovered that this was the case when she suddenly collapsed in a heap of metal and various other parts.
“Yeah, it turns out that swapping from two legs to four legs is difficult, your Majesty. This is why I didn’t hook up the wings right away. Walking is hard enough without having anti-gravity propulsion systems to worry about. Worse, there’s not all that much that I can do to help because it’s like trying to teach a child to walk. There’s only so much I can do.”
Luna was not happy. She stared up at the Doctor with her greenish blue eyes glowing in their new sockets, and willed her body to move, if only so she could put this peasant in his place.
With a gentle scoff, the Surgeon moved around behind the Princess, seeming to examine her like a cat would examine a mouse. She didn’t feel any fear having this happen of course, even if it wasn’t possible for her to move, she was a Princess now. This man was merely a Doctor. If she wished, it would be easy for her to destroy him.
Moving around to her flank, the Doctor made a soft tutting noise, then he suddenly slid something inside of her. It slotted into place with ease, and suddenly she was attacked by a whole new range of sensations.
She was able to feel, quite distinctly, her new vagina between her hind legs. It was much more sensitive then her penis had ever been, and an electric rush ran up her spine as her holographic tail moved down to cover her new parts.
Luna still couldn’t control her body completely, but for protecting her new sensitive spot it was like it moved automatically.
“I am going to sort your wings out later, but for now that should do you. I think getting used to the limbs you have so far is a good idea before I go tacking any more on.”
Luna stared at him. She could feel herself blushing, but it wasn’t possible for her face to display such a thing. “You are a cold subject, Doctor. Thank you for your work.”
It was going to be a long road to recovery.
