“Write something about yourself.” The doctor said as he took another puff from the long wooden pipe that fogged up the stuffy library with a constant stream of smoke.
“Are you sure sir, I mean what would that-”
“Just do as I ask, I may not be the one paying you but by the clans I’ll ship you back to whatever authority you claim to be from quicker then I’ll let you talk back to me.”
“The Pegasus council sir.”
“What?”
“I’m from the Pegasus council.” The doctor leaned forward in his chair and adjusted the glasses on his face. The young stallion in front of him unfurled his wings, allowing them to be seen more clearly by the aging doctor. “So you are.” The doctor said as he eased himself back, “so you are.” The young stallion opened a saddlebag beside him and took out a quill and paper. After a moments thought, he began composing a short description of himself.
I was born during
“You wont get much done if you don’t put any ink on that.” The doctor said.
“It’s an enchanted quill sir, no ink required.”
“Is that so? Next you’ll be telling me they’ve got one that doesn’t need paper.” The student hadn’t exactly pegged the doctor as the most technologically advanced pony. A quick look around the room he was currently in, with its rows upon rows of books that looked to be rotting in their covers. Along with the thick layers of dust on everything but the black saddlebag the doctor had placed on the desk in front of him didn’t exactly paint the doctor to be in a very modern state of mind. It was still possible this assumption was wrong, but the young stallion didn’t think it was.
I was born during the migration of the clans, my father tells me he had to pull a carriage with my mother all by himself for two months as she recovered from the ordeal. He was a messenger under Commander Hurricane, not a war pony, so despite what you may think this was actually a very impressive feet. I grew up in one of the many camps that formed on this side of the mountains and spent my teenage years helping to build up my hometown. When I was thirty I graduated from the first class to come out of university in Equestria, and
The sound of a door slamming against the wall as it was flung open jarred the student from his train of thought.
“Doctor!” came the voice of a gruff earth pony as he barged into the room practically throwing himself at the desk behind which the doctor sat. “You have to come quick, my-”
“I don’t know who you think you are barging in here like this!” The doctor shouted, interrupting the plea of the stallion before him. “But this colt was here long before you arrived, what makes you think your woes are great enough to interrupt our meeting?” colt the young stallion thought as he looked on at the exchange between the doctor and this new intruder. I’m quite a bit to old to be called colt.
“Please, my son needs your help doctor, nopony else can tell us what’s wrong.”
“Unless your son is lying on the floor dying then it can wait until I am available to-”
“Doctor please! He is cursed, he is hexed, he is all manor of bewitched! There is nopony else that can help us, we have tried everything, please!”
“There is no such thing as curses or hexes, if your son is anything he is foolish to live with such an ignorant and rude gentlecolt such as yourself! Now go home before I-”
“Please!” This last cry was almost choked on by the stranger, as he had begun to cry a light stream of tears. “You’re our last hope.” The young stallion felt a wave of emotion run through him as he observed the grown stallion sobbing practically at the feet of the doctor.
“Sir,” he said. “I do not mind waiting if it means you will assist this pony.” The doctor turned to the young stallion, and then back to the sniveling form before him.
“Now we can add disrupting to the list, you best have a hefty sum to reward my efforts.”
“Anything you want, just please hurry!” The doctor stood and put on his saddlebag urged constantly by the stranger. As the young stallion stood and put on his saddlebag to join them, quickly packing his quill and paper into it, he heard the doctor say a short phrase under his breath.
“This best be worth it.”
* * *
A loud racket sounded from the house the stranger guided them to. The young stallion could only guess at what was happening, but he wouldn’t of been surprised to see the entire neighborhood had come over for a party had the sounds of shattering porcelain and occasional shouts from what he could only assume was the mother not lead him to believe otherwise.
“He’s just inside here, please hurry and help him!”
“Until I diagnose the patient I will move at my own pace. Should his illness prove to be of a nature that warrants haste I will of course act accordingly. As long as you have a way to repay my efforts I assure you I will do my best to help him.”
“If you can keep him still long enough to fix him you can have whatever you want!” The stranger made his way to the door and pushed it open, narrowly dodging a plate that sailed threw the air and just barely missed his head. The young stallion didn’t see where it went but the sound of it shattering was quickly followed by a screaming voice from inside the home.
“That’s the doctor baby, please just sit down so we can help you! Please come down from there!”
“I can’t! It’s not my fault!” The stranger gave a pleading look to the doctor as the doctor rudely shoved past him through the door. Followed by the young stallion who gave the stranger an apologetic smile as he entered.
The inside of the house was a mess. Bits of furniture and various keepsakes were scattered around the ground and huge holes littered the walls, one of which had a table leg sticking out of it. The noise appeared to be coming from the next room, which the young stallion could only guess to be the kitchen. (It was hard to tell as there were broken dishes on both floors and the majority of them were in the room he currently stood.)
“Is this the work of your son’s illness or do you usually live in this fashion?” The doctor inquired. The stranger started to give an answer but the doctor wadded his way through the mess on the floor and into the other room before he had the chance to hear it. The scene there was not much better, although the walls of this room had remained slightly less damaged then those in the previous. A mare stood in the center of the room on a chair trying desperately to reach a young colt that was walking on a clothesline strung between two cabinets.
The young stallion on any other day would have stopped to question this, if it wasn’t for the fact that something else about the colt caught his eye. All over his body, covering him from head to hoof, were cutie marks. No two of them were the same and several were elaborately placed to layer with others.
“Thank the clans you’re here!” the mare said, anything but relieved. “I’ve been trying to get him down for the past ten minutes but this curse is just to crafty. Every time I almost reach him it gives him another mark and catapults him off to a new room!”
“Doctor, please do something!” pleaded the stranger from the doorway. The doctor stood for a moment taking in the scene; the colt was nearing the middle of his makeshift tightrope and was beginning to perform several tricks (much to the displeasure of his mother) the expression on his face showing extreme fear as he starred down at the ground below him. Setting down his bag, the doctor pulled out a pair of surgical scissors and made his way under the foal next to the mare.
“Miss, I’m going to have to ask you to step off of that.” The mare did as she was asked; her eyes focused on her son. The doctor climbed onto the chair and without hesitation reached up and with the extended reach of the scissors was just able to cut the rope. The colt began tumbling toward the ground, but before he made impact a bright flash resonated off him and he rolled into a ball avoiding injury. “Hold him still!” the doctor called as the colt began tumbling around the room.
The young stallion tried in vain to catch the colt as he rolled past and watched as he somehow managed to avoid everypony’s attempts to stop him. In the midst of this scene the doctor produced a tablecloth (most likely found discarded amongst the other refuse scattered around the room) and shoved one end into the hooves of the young stallion.
“We’re going to guide him into a corner of the room, when I give the signal pull two corners taunt and I’ll do the rest, got it?” The young stallion nodded. What followed was almost a blur as the doctor hollered rushed instructions to the colt’s parents and had them rush about the room after the colt. Eventually they trapped him in an ever shrinking circle in a corner of the room under a high window relatively full of broken furniture giving him little room to avoid them. “Now!” the doctor shouted as he sprung forward with the makeshift net held between him and the young stallion as they snared there young victim along with one or two pieces of a broken chair.
The colt struggled furiously as the young stallion and doctor held him down. Soon they were joined by the colt’s father who made short work of pinning the center of the cloth to the floor, but even as he was held in place the colt tried desperately to free himself from there collective grasp.
“Doctor,” the stranger said as he continually shifted himself to try and stop the colts movements, “I don’t want to question you but how is this supposed to help him?”
“I can’t diagnose his ailment without some rudimentary observation, just hold him still as I-” Another flash of light, bright enough to show the colts form through the cloth, and suddenly he was able to slither his way out from under his father. The young stallion tried to grab him, but the colt delivered a sharp kick to his face before bouncing backward, right out the window. The colt’s mother screamed as the sound of shattering glass followed by a thud in the grass outside sent a wave of fear rippling through the room. The colts father wasted no time in running outside, soon allowing his own wail to take the place of his wife’s terrified scream.
“Son! Get up son! Listen to your father and stand up this instant! Don’t let this curse beat you!” The young stallion could barely take the string of emotion that stung harder then the inevitable bruise he would receive from the colt’s kick. What in the name of the clans could have made that colt resist them so furiously and was going to be all right? What was with the cutie marks that riddled his body and why did he release such great flashes of light? The young stallion started to head outside to see if the colt was ok but the doctor called to him before he reached the door.
“We best get back to my office, I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this disease soon.”
“But what of this family? That colt could be-”
“I am a doctor, not a mortician colt. You heard the tone of his fathers voice, it is best we go.” The young stallion couldn’t believe what an even tone the doctor had taken as he said that. It was not completely devoid of emotion, but there was an ice to the words that made the young stallion shiver. When the doctor walked out of the house the young stallion almost considered staying to check up on the colt, but when he picked up hushed crying from outside, he let his ears fall back, and went to pick up the doctors bag.
* * *
The doctor was indeed right about them seeing the illness again. A line several ponies long had formed in front of the doctor’s workplace to greet them when they returned and as the days crept by with little to no progress toward discovering the natures of the disease, a body count had slowly begun to collect itself. The first real victims were young children, to young to have actually earned their own cutie marks. But the disease slowly began to affect older and older ponies until even grown mares and stallions began to catch it. The doctor’s office became a quarantined hospital with patients shoved together in a locked room to keep them from infecting others and to control the more violently affected.
The young stallion was made busy assisting the doctor in restraining and observing the sick to identify some way they could be helped, or at least what they were really dealing with. Nothing the young stallion could recall from school, nor anything the doctor was able to find in his vast library had any information on how a pony could get multiple cutie marks or why it was causing them to act so crazy. Many of the patients developed vastly different symptoms, but one thing the young stallion soon found out was the more cutie marks a pony got, the more violently it controlled them, until eventually it caused them to do something resulting in there demise, or more likely the demise of those around them as well as themselves.
The colt that had first shown them the disease had been very lucky with the way he perished. The young stallion had seen at least two patients unwillingly walk themselves out windows and one who tumbled down a flight of stairs trying to appease the need to perform the new special talents there cutie marks created for them. However with the few unfortunate ponies that died as he and the doctor made a mad dash to find a way to save them, it was perhaps a lot harder for those that the young stallion had watched being saved. One particular instance where a young Pegasus mare had symptoms of the disease spreading through her wing had lost him many hours of sleep over the past few nights.
He was sitting in his usual spot for examination procedures, in the corner of the room next to all the supplies the doctor might need with his quill and parchment in hand to record the procedure and its effectiveness. (The doctor had instructed him to write everything he could about there attempts to combat the infection in hopes that should something be successful they would have a reference of what they did.) The mare was lying on a table that now doubled as an examination bench while the doctor checked for any sign the infection was spreading. The mare’s father and mother held each other as they stood near their daughter’s head; their eyes focused on her. Before long the doctor discovered six cutie marks on the mare’s left wing, and explained the situation to her parents.
“Mister and misses, this is going to be hard for you to hear but your daughter definitely has the disease.” The mother almost fainted as she heard this. “I don’t know how quickly it’s going to spread, but her wing is covered with it… I’d like to perform an amputation to try and save her.” The young stallion almost ripped a hole in the paper when he heard those words. A one winged Pegasus? They’d be no better then a glorified Earth Pony! Apparently the filly’s father had the same reaction as he was going to have none of it.
Through the shouting of the father and the annoyed and angry looks of the doctor the young stallion observed the filly squirm and cry as she struggled pointlessly under the makeshift harness that had been fashioned out of an old rope to hold the more fitful ill in place.
“Sir it’s your choice! This might be the only way to save your daughter and every second you waist yelling at me will only decrease the chance this will be successful! Now may I perform the procedure or do I simply lock your daughter away with the other patients!”
“Daddy! Daddy please don’t let him take me away! I don’t want to stay here! Please!”
“This pony’s insane!” said the filly’s mother. “You can’t possibly be thinking of letting him do this to our little girl!” The young stallion watched as the father and daughter shared a short moment starring into each other’s eyes. The young stallion knew it happened in an instant, but the many things that must have run through that fathers mind as he looked down at his daughter must have made it felt like a year to him.
“Is there no other way?” the father asked.
“Not that I yet know of, this might be her only chance but I have to act now!” The father took a pause that the young stallion felt would never end before nodding his head and letting the doctor call for a saw from the young stallion. The foal and her mother never stopped screaming as the blade began its work.
* * *
The stallion now sat in front of the doctor’s desk again, this time with a look of sadness to rival the doctors on his face.
“Is there any way we can help them?” the stallion asked.
“We do the best we can while there here and when they get better, or become unable to do so, we release them to the town or to the morgue as is convenient. I’m sure that with time a solution to this problem will come.”
“And what of those suffering now? Do you know how many have perished because of this virus? Ponies are afraid to go outside their homes and we have a virtual cesspool of disease that nopony in there right mind wants to visit. We need to find a way to help them now or-”
“Or what! You think that it’s so easy to find a cure for a new disease it can simply be done on command? That just because you want it to be so it can be? I’ve been in this field a lot longer then you colt and I can tell you if it was that easy ponies like me would go out of business! This disease has never been seen before, it’s origins and dangers are of unknown magnitude, it doesn’t even have a name! And you want me to help every poor soul out there? Rule number one of this business, nopony, no matter how dedicated or how good, or how well funded can save every patient. Some of them are too far gone.”
* * *
The doctor coughs and shakes as he makes his way around the ward that has gradually been constructed for the ponies of the town that contracted “the marks” as it had come to be known. The quarantine had worked in a since, as very few new cases were being reported. However this was not the reason the ward was as empty as the stallion found it. A huge amount of the patients had inexplicably gotten better, suddenly developing immunity to the curse that had plagued them for weeks now. Nopony could say why, but many attributed it to a miracle. The stallion made his way beside the doctor and began to speak.
“You sound like your getting sick yourself, perhaps it is best you leave the next round to me.”
“I’m not sick, and if I was I’d have myself fixed up in a jiffy. You stick to your business and I’ll stick to mine.”
“This ward becomes less and less full by the day it seems, any idea what caused the turnaround?”
“It doesn’t matter really. Maybe it was a particular mutation of the infection didn’t mesh well with pony anatomy, maybe there was something in the fact that we put them all together, maybe one of there cutie marks gave them resistance. I don’t think we’ll ever know.”
“Do you happen to know the death count?”
“Not even a hundred, but enough to get the town talking for a few months, the next pony pox they’ll call it, saviors of the community they’ll never call us.”
“And what makes you say that?”
“They never have, not once in my life have I ever been thanked for this job. Doctors are the first ones to be condemned when something medical goes wrong and the last ones responsible for cures. I’ve heard your own Commander Hurricane thanked more often then ponies have thanked me in this room.” The stallion considered this.
“Do you think, if we had known more, if somehow we could have seen it coming or helped just one more-”
“Don’t trouble yourself with the what ifs. There are ponies to save in the present that need far more attention then we can afford to pay to the past. Regret will eat you alive if you let it; attachment will do even more damage. Know who you are and what you’re doing, that’s all you need in this job.” The stallion thought over those words as he followed the doctor through row after row of now empty cots, as much as he hated to admit it, that was probably true.
* * *
“Write something about yourself.” The doctor said to the young stallion that sat in front of him. He was fresh out of the university, a colt if the doctor had ever saw one.
“Really sir? Why do you want-”
“It doesn’t matter why, just do as you’re told colt. There’s a reason behind it.” The young stallion before him produced a quill and paper from his bag, and began to write on it. Unlike the doctor before him however, the stallion did not ask if he wanted ink.