I.D. - That Indestructible Something

by Chatoyance

Chapters

2. A Cage, In Search Of A Bird
3. The Axe For The Frozen Sea
4. Similes Are Like Songs In Love
5. By Means Of Very Strong Light
6. Neighbor Within The Limits Of The World
7. Splendor Forever Lies In Wait
8. A Key To Unknown Chambers
9. Sitting In The Balance Without Knowing
10. Belief Is Like A Guillotine
12. Whatever We Have Not Sufficiently Desired
13. But From Their Silence
14. Don Quixote's Misfortune
15. Back The World
16. Your Most Intense Obsessions
17. A Gift From Within
18. Not Even The World Of Its Victory
19. Long Since Floated Away
The Injectorverse
1. One Morning From Uneasy Dreams
11. Life Is Merely Terrible
Acknowledgements

2. A Cage, In Search Of A Bird

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

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A Cage, In Search Of A Bird

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”

Franz Kafka

Convincing her mother to let her stay in her room caused a row, but when the shouting was done and her mother had stormed out of the house, and her sister had made sure she understood how she "always ruined EVERYTHING!", and her father had given her a pat and told her he would work on things, only then was Gregoria finally left alone.

Immediately, she broke down and cried again, finding out that hooves were awful for wiping tears away. Hairy fetlocks turned out to be an excellent substitute for a sleeve to wipe snot on, but this was a small comfort. Worse, the snot tended to dry into her golden coat, and made the hairs stiff and unpleasant feeling. Hooves were good for pounding a pillow in rage it turned out, perhaps a little too good - the seam split, and Gregoria felt suddenly grateful that her pillow was foam and not feathers.

The clock on the nightstand showed that half an hour had passed since her parents and sister had left. Gregoria shook her large pony head, angry at herself for wasting time. If she were to avoid facing down some professional, she realized, she would need to find a way to adapt to her new body. 'For now' she appended, rapidly. Hope was all she had left really, hope that whatever had happened to her could be undone, or would reverse itself with time.

The first thing then, was to learn how to walk. Staying in bed forever was a sure ticket to some kind of institutional situation.

Gregoria shifted her equine body over to the edge of the mattress. The sheets had been entirely peeled away on that side, leaving a good quarter of the mattress exposed. She studied the floor and considered what her next action should be. Shortly, she decided to attempt standing normally. Gregoria reasoned that since her family could not see that she had changed, nor feel the difference when they touched her body, perhaps she had not actually changed at all. Perhaps this was just some kind of very intense and consistent hallucination. If so, it might well be that her body was normal, despite what her every sense was telling her.

She slid her hind legs over the edge of the mattress, pushing her body with her forelegs. Pain made her gasp, she rolled onto her left flank so that her tail was not bent sharply backwards. Her tail throbbed for a few minutes, but it did not seem broken. The thought that she was fussing about breaking her tail began to shake her hope that she was suffering a hallucination. She caught herself mentally before she could fall into despair - she had cried enough. Right now, she needed to concentrate on the task at hoof.

Pushing further, leaning to the left, her hind legs dangled, but could not reach the floor. Her legs were shorter as a pony than they had been as a human, and this was very disturbing to realize. Unless she simply pushed herself over on the hope that the length of her legs was an illusion, something else needed to be done.

Gregoria rolled over onto her belly. Now nothing could hurt her tail, and more importantly, she could slide over the edge of the bed until she felt contact with the floor. This way, if she lacked coordination, she would not fall down and injure herself. Pushing with her forelegs, and wriggling with her body, her hindquarters finally went over the precipice and soon she felt her own weight resting on her rear hooves.

Her belly was at the edge of the bed. She figured that she must be about half as tall as she had been as a human, more or less. Using her forelegs, Gregoria attempted to put all of her weight on her hind legs, and stand up normally.

She flopped back onto the bed, her upper body once again on the mattress. She simply didn't have enough strength to support herself for long on only her hind legs, and it was clear that she could not maintain balance either. Fine, she thought, crawl, then walk.

Moving carefully, trying to keep both panic and despair at bay, Gregoria moved herself so that her upper body was increasingly close to the edge of the mattress. She reached down with one foreleg, the other still on the bed. It wouldn't reach. She would have to just drop down to all fours. Steeling herself, Gregoria took a few breaths, then slid the last of her off the mattress entirely.

She caught herself with her forelegs. She was standing, stable and solid, on all fours. The bend of her long neck made her feel as if she were standing upright, almost normally, which was a very curious sensation. Crawling on all fours as a human was a literal pain in the neck - trying to look level with the ground meant bending the neck impossibly. It couldn't be done, at least not for long, and not without great discomfort. This was different, vastly so.

Gregoria stood not on her knees and hands, but on four large hooves, with comfortable legs and a comfortable back, and a perfectly comfortable upright neck. She looked to each side, then behind her. Her neck was very flexible and strong. She stared for some time at her own tail and bottom out of her right eye. She could not turn her neck entirely around, but she could rotate her neck and head far more than was humanly possible. Gregoria suddenly realized that she could probably bite her own knee. Her knee was close to her belly, close to her body. Her ankle stuck out behind her, and what must be her foot was now more leg. Lastly, her toe, her rear hoof was the middle toe, just as her forehooves were the nails of her middle fingers.

She moved her attention to her forelimbs. Her elbows were very close to her body, and partially embedded within her skin. Her wrists could no longer bend upwards, they only bent down, but they could bend much farther. The back of her hand was more leg, which finally ended in a short finger with a vast nail, her hoof. The muscles were strong, and standing was easy. If anything, her forelegs seemed much stronger than her rear legs. Most of her weight seemed to be on her forelegs. This explained why she couldn't stand up normally for long. Her arms had become her most powerful legs.

Gregoria took a tentative step forward. It felt like pointing at the carpet with her hand and finger. She moved her other arm forward too. A quick step with one rear leg, and then the other, finished the job. She had moved six inches. This was not the answer.

Briefly, Gregoria considered trying to stand upright again, but dismissed it. Her body just wasn't built to walk like that anymore. The sinking realization that this could not possibly be a hallucination began to tear at her fragile stability. With effort, she pushed rising panic back down, and sniffed until she had her tears under control. Whatever this was, whatever had happened, Gregoria resolved to beat it. She would beat this muffin thing, and that was all there was to it.

How to proceed, then? Crawling seemed a natural place to begin an understanding of quadrupedal locomotion, so Gregoria attempted to use her limbs as if she were on hands and knees. This proved very serviceable, if a bit clumsy, and soon she was moving carefully about her bedroom. As she rounded the bed she found herself facing the standing full-length mirror. She could not yet see herself, which was a blessing she felt. Still, it was something that had to be faced, sooner or later. Gathering her courage, she approached the angle where her reflection would appear.

Her head was large and round, with a short, narrow muzzle. It looked odd, somewhat more like a foreshortened dolphin nose than that of a proper horse. Her eyes were enormous, the size of small grapefruits. Their appearance unnerved her terribly, and she had to look away, avoiding her own violet gaze for some time, as she studied the rest of her body in the mirror. Finally, she dared to face her own countenance again.

It was so very difficult to look into her own eyes. When she finally willed herself to stare directly into her own reflection, the realization that this was truly her, that this body was truly her body, became inescapable. That was why it had been so difficult. Looking into her new, huge purple eyes, she saw that they belonged to her. That was her in there, this was her form now, this was real, utterly, inescapably real. The tears came, welling up and gushing down her cheeks.

When she finally had her sobbing almost under control, a new problem made itself known. She needed to pee. She needed to pee quite badly in fact, and all the denial would not make that demand go away. Gregoria had been dreading this since the moment she had slid off the bed and the need had first announced itself. It could no longer be ignored.

Gregoria moved to the bathroom. She had no idea at all how to use her new plumbing - and there was no question that her plumbing had been altered as much as the rest of her. She regretted not trying to look under her tail when she had been by the mirror. She decided not to try to return, since the need was becoming critical now. Should she sit on the toilet seat? Could she? It felt like her need to urinate was coming from behind her, farther behind than normal. She briefly wondered if she now urinated from her rear end. It felt like it... only not. She couldn't tell where things were, except vaguely.

Facing the toilet was not doing any good. Gregoria backed up, carefully turned around - ow, bending to turn in the small bathroom made her need to pee even more - and finally put her bottom against the rim of the toilet seat.

Now what?

Gregoria tried to figure out how to get her rear end onto the seat. Her bottom was nearly even with the seat, just a bit above it. She lifted her left back leg and tried to straddle the toilet. She found herself half-on and half off the seat, and worse yet, her tail had fallen into the water. She lifted her tail, the wetness of the tail hair trapped against her bottom and the seat itself, drawing against her nether regions. Oh, that was cold. And wet. And gross.

Her tail off to the side - good lesson there, she decided - she tried to wriggle the rest of her bottom up onto the seat by putting all of her weight on her forelegs. A shock of pain hit her as her rather tender nipples scraped over the plastic edge - she had forgotten their new location. The pain caused everything to let go, and she could not stop herself as her bladder emptied itself. With shame and horror, she could hear liquid splashing against the underside of the lifted seat cover, and draining down to splatter partially on the floor. Apparently her urethra pointed more back than down in this position.

It was too much.

When she was done, there was no feeling of relief, just horror. She had made a mess of herself and her bathroom, and she felt reduced to the status of a small foal, unable to take care of itself. Only she was twenty-six, and her mother would not stand for her peeing all over the toilet like some drunken frat girl. A low moan escaped her muzzle, a wail of hopelessness and utter despair. The moan became a cry, and then the cry became a plaintive, ululating whinny.

Gregoria stood there, her hindquarters still raised up, laying across the toilet seat, howling, for some endless time. Eventually she returned to herself, brought back to some semblance of reason by a sudden thought. She needed to clean up before the others got back. At the very least, she needed to get down and dry herself off.

With effort, she brought her hindquarters down off the seat, though she did manage to scrape herself again. Her oddly positioned nipples felt raw, her nether regions were cold and wet, and her tail was sopping, and there was a puddle spreading on the floor. It would be so easy to just collapse, to give in, to let her mother send her away to some place where perhaps they would simply put her to sleep like the animal she had become.

No! Gregoria shook her head, her dark mane swishing about her withers. Late one night, she had heard her mother and father arguing about their daughters being forced to live at home. She had heard her mother say that they hadn't tried hard enough, that Greta was lazy and that Gregoria didn't take life seriously enough. Those words had burned inside Gregoria. Not a speck of it was the least bit true. There just weren't any jobs, not any that paid well enough to afford both food and a place to live. The jobs were just gone. Gregoria had tried so hard, so very hard. Greta had nearly killed herself doing three part-time jobs, one after the other, every day, and it still hadn't been enough. She did take life seriously. And Greta was anything but lazy.

Gregoria snorted, loudly. Then she wondered why she had done it. It just felt natural, and it felt somehow satisfying. This... thing, whatever it was... it was not going to beat her. One step at a time. That is how to conquer any problem. One step at a time.

The toilet paper spooled out onto the floor with only a few flicks of a hoof. When a large mass had accumulated, Gregoria pushed it about with her right hoof, soaking up her splattered urine on the floor. She pondered, for a bit, over how she would get the sodden mess into the trash bin - there was too much to dare put into the toilet. It would clog it up. Finally, she sat down on her haunches, raised herself upright, and used her forelegs like arms. She pinched the mass of damp toilet paper between her hooves and lifted it, then put the bundle into the bin. Done. In time, it would dry out, at the very least, it could be thrown out. She used much less toilet paper, carefully wrapped around her forehoof like a bandage, to wipe off the inside of the toilet seat cover, and the seat itself. Then she scraped the paper off one hoof using the other, into the trash bin.

Gregoria eyed the bathtub. She should have used this from the start, she realized. In the future, she would. Right now, she needed to clean herself. It did not seem prudent to actually take a bath. She was covered with hair, now, her whole body, and it would probably take forever to get dry. Instead, she chose just to rinse her bottom, and her tail.

The handle was a dial-type, which made controlling the water relatively easy. Batting at the handle part of the dial, Gregoria managed to get the water running, and even to set a decent temperature, which she checked with the area just above her hoof. It felt like her first knuckle. She tried to remember the proper name for such a thing on a pony. The pastern? Fetlock? One of those two, she felt fairly certain. In any case, she could feel with it, and that was what mattered.

When the water was ready, Gregoria laboriously turned around and moved her hindquarters into position. The water ran over her, and using the sensation of it, she began to map out her new construction. As far as she could tell, at the top was her tail. Just under that was her anus, and below that her vaginal opening. From what she could determine, everything felt like it was in the same relationship and orientation as when she was human, just slid much further back, and up, closer to the tail.

That was a relief. She knew nothing about horses or ponies, and she had been worried that she could have been all sorts of mixed up different back there. It seemed just the same, only repositioned slightly. That would be very easy to verify, using the mirror. She decided to do so, when she got out of the tub.

The water off, Gregoria took her towel in her teeth and pulled it down from the rail it had been draped over. Suddenly, she was faced with a puzzle. Her neck was very long, and very sinuous, but there was no way she could reach far enough back to dry herself. How in the world was she supposed to take care of such things?

Finally, she settled for laying the towel down in the empty tub and rubbing her hindquarters over it. This was very clumsy indeed, and not entirely satisfactory - the towel kept sliding and moving until she trapped it under her rear hooves - and she ultimately resigned herself to air-drying the rest of the way.

Frustrated from the effort, she left the towel over the edge of the tub, and exited the bathroom. A quick check in the mirror, twisting first one way, and then the other, looking as best she could over her own back confirmed her theories about her under-tail construction.

That done, Gregoria rested briefly before facing what was likely to be the most trying task yet. Getting dressed.

Her family could not perceive that she was a pony now. They couldn't see it, they couldn't feel it, it just wasn't real for them. How this was even possible was a mystery that Gregoria could not even begin to speculate about. But one thing she had noted - her mother had told her to get dressed. Her mother had seen her as naked. Likely, so had her sister, and her father.

Considering the way they all had acted, it seemed likely that to them she had appeared perfectly normal, as she had been before her transformation, which meant that her coat of golden-yellow hair was entirely invisible to them. It served very well to keep her warm and comfortable, and it felt as if she were dressed already. But to her parents, and almost certainly the outside world as well, she would be a naked human girl. She needed to find a way to get dressed.

Normally, she wore jeans. A quick examination made that a dead end. Even if she could somehow squeeze her new body into her jeans, the legs would be greatly over-long, and she would be reduced to stumbling and tripping over dragging legs. Fortunately, she did have a few skirts that she hadn't worn in years, and that should be fairly easy to adapt.

She picked a knee-length, dark blue knit flare skirt with an elastic waist. It was a terrible skirt, which is why she never wore it, but it had the virtue of appearing dead simple to use. It turned out to not be nearly as simple a matter as she had thought to crawl into it, but once it was past her flanks, and she had scraped it up to her waist with her forehooves and a great deal of determination, it did its essential job. It covered her ass, which, really, was all that could be expected of such a cheap, crappy skirt.

Next came a top, and for that she selected a black, wide-necked, over-sized crop top with no sleeves. The wide neck made putting it on possible at all, but before she began, a realization hit her. She might be able to put the blouse on - but how would she ever take it off again? She had no hands. She had only her teeth to grip with, and she wasn't a unicorn. Oh, everything would be so simple if she had just been turned into a unicorn. Having magic was like having hands. Better than hands, she reckoned - what she had seen of Friendship Is Magic suggested that unicorns could put on clothing in a burst of light. Gregoria had become what the show called an 'earthpony' - strong and tireless, but incapable of magical spells.

The blouse was a trap. If she crawled inside it, she would have no way to pull it back off without help. Greta would probably be willing to assist her, a few times, with enough demanding, but not indefinitely. There had to be something else. But what?

It was spring. Still a little chilly, but not actually cold. It would seem odd, perhaps, but she might get away with it. Gregoria went for her tube-top. It, like the skirt, was just a simple thing, easy to get onto her body, and simple enough to work off. But where should she actually put it?

Gregoria's breasts now resided close to her legs, roughly in what, as a human, had been her crotch. Was she supposed to wear a tube top over or under a skirt? Would that even make sense to however it was that other people seemed to see her? Or should she try to work it over her flat, muscular chest - 'barrel', that was the pony name for it, 'barrel' - and just assume that others would rationalize the physical location as proper, somehow? Considering the length and angle of her new neck - with her head raised, her throat took the front position equivalent to a human chest - maybe she should just wear the tube top as a choker? How did this odd disconnection of perception even work?

Shoes - she didn't even want to contemplate shoes right now. That just seemed impossible. Tube top. OK, what if...

The sound of the front door opening, and of her family coming home interrupted her. They seemed happier, and from what she could hear they had spent the afternoon at the mall, shopping. Oh, my - it was late, nearly four in the afternoon. It had taken her most of the day just to figure out how to pee and to get a skirt on. To be fair, much of the time had been wasted crying and feeling grief for the loss of her body and her human life. Gregoria felt fear again - if her mother caught her still undressed, there would be questions.

Feet tromped up the stairs. "Greggie? How are you doing?" Mother had apparently shifted from her earlier anger into concern once more. She was coming up to check on things. Not good.

Panicked, Gregoria did the only thing she could think of - she began sticking her head through the tube top, occasionally whacking her head with her hooves as she scrambled to work it down her neck. Her plan was to try to wriggle her hooves through it when it was low enough and place it over her barrel, her pony chest, where her breasts would have been, had she still been human. It seemed a reasonable thing.

Gregoria had the tube top around the base of her neck as she sat in front of the mirror when her mother entered the room. "Gregoria? I have a little something for you. We went to the mall and..."

Gregoria lowered her forehooves to the floor, and looked up at her mother, the tube top a crumpled, distorted ring around her thick, pony neck. Her mother stared at her, then looked around the room.

"Anyway, as I was saying, I got you a present. Cinnabon. We got a half-dozen at the mall, and I made sure a couple didn't have frosting, just for you." Gregoria held her breath as she stared at her mother. Her mother looked back at her. "It's good to see you wearing a skirt again! I always thought you looked good in a skirt. Isn't it still too cold for that?" A finger pointed at the disheveled ring of tube-top around Gregoria's equine neck.

"Uh... n-no. Actually, I feel kind of warm." That was true enough, Gregoria was sweating under her coat from the exertion of trying to wriggle into human clothing.

Gregoria's mother walked over and put a hand to her daughter's poll. "Hmm... you do feel a little warm. Maybe you're coming down with something. Maybe that's it." She thought for a moment. "You should take a couple of vitamin 'C's just to be on the safe side, OK hon?"

Gregoria swallowed and softly nickered. "U-h-huh... uhuh, sure. I'll do that." She tried to smile.

"Oh, you should really make your bed, Greggie. You're not a little girl anymore." Gregoria's mother turned and moved to the door. "Pork chops tonight... your favorite! Now hurry up and make your bed, OK?" With that, she was gone.

Gregoria let out a burst of air, relieved. Whatever prevented her parents from seeing what she truly was had fairly simple rules. She just had to get the clothing on, more or less, and other people would see what they wanted to see. Or what they were forced to see. That was a thought. How was any of this happening? Then again, how was it even possible to be transformed at all?

Gregoria turned and regarded herself once more in the mirror. A golden yellow cartoon-styled pony with a black mane and tail. Blue-black, really. And violet, maybe purple, eyes. Wearing a really crappy skirt that did not fit in the least, and a tube-top around her neck. Sweet Cinnabon, this was messed up. Hee.

Hee, hee hee! Gregoria laughed, for the first time since she had awakened to her living nightmare. Sweet Cinnabon. Actually, that did sound really good. Gregoria realized that she was starving. Thirsty, too. She hadn't had breakfast or lunch, she hadn't had anything to eat or drink all day. That could be remedied easily enough. She decided to get water from the sink faucet in the bathroom. She could practice, to make sure drinking wasn't weird or something. She felt pretty sure drinking water would be normal enough. Ponies on the show used cups and mugs and she was definitely a 'Friendship Is Magic' pony.

She had survived the day thus far. She hadn't ended up in a looney bin, or in Secret Area S4 where all the Grey Aliens supposedly were, so that was a win. She had mastered making people think she was dressed, more or less. She still didn't know about shoes yet.

For the first time, Gregoria felt genuine hope. She had survived the day despite everything. If she could keep it together, there was a real possibility she might be able to find out what had happened to her, and how to get it reversed. She wasn't a genius, but she wasn't stupid either. There was hope. If there was an answer to this, then there was a real chance now to find it. She was still loose in the world, nobody saw her as a pony - which meant she was free to move about and seek answers. And she had proved that she could take care of herself. Clumsily, but still - there was hope. Real hope.

Her friend Rachel - Rachel was always going on about how she wished she could be a pony and live in Equestria. She wrote weird fanfiction and collected toys and... if only she knew. If only she knew just how terrible it truly was, to be a pony in a world built for humans.

Or really, to be a pony at all.

3. The Axe For The Frozen Sea

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

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The Axe For The Frozen Sea

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

Franz Kafka

His name was Malus Crown. At least that was the name he used, the name his people called him by. No one in his employ thought for a moment that it was his real name. He was wealthy, more than wealthy, rich beyond all dreams of avarice, or so it was whispered. If true, he did not have complete control over his treasure - there were times he clearly was pressed for access to resources. But in the end, even the most extravagant expenses were as nothing to him.

They said that Mr. Crown had been somebody, once, somebody very famous, very known. The rumor was that he had arranged the appearance of his own death so as to vanish from the stage of the world. It was true that he looked familiar, but everyone in his employ knew to never mention it - those that had any hint were quickly let go, and this was not something anyone wanted. Mr. Malus Crown paid very, very well.

He was a thin man, tall, almost gaunt. His blond hair was long and oddly scraggly. He walked with a curious gait, almost mechanical at times. He always wore tennis shoes, or shoes made of canvas, even with the most expensive of fine suits.

Mr. Crown was on a quest. He seemed to believe that he could see something no other person could, and as bizarre and ridiculous as that was, only a fool would scoff in the face of someone who paid as handsomely as Malus Crown did.

"Show me the closeup again." Malus shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He never sat still long, and always he sat tilted on one cheek. The running bet was that he suffered from hemorrhoids. His spindly, bony finger tapped nervously on the arm of his large leather chair. "No, the face. The face one!"

Guillaume dutifully slid his finger over the iPad he carried, and changed the image currently being displayed on the wall-sized projection monitor. The shriveled face of the corpse of Franz Kafka filled the screen. It looked like a sculpture made of beef jerky.

Malus leaned forward in his overstuffed chair, tapping his chin with his hand. "Picture In Picture. Put up Canterlot Wedding, part two, somewhere near the end."

Guillaume put down the iPad and switched to the Mac on the desk. He nodded to Thibault, always surly, sitting at his own machine, and the bulky man rolled his eyes as he ran the video stream. Thibault was willing to take Mr. Crown's money, and he was loyal to his wallet, but it was clear that he thought his employer a pathetic madman.

Images of ponies dominated the right half of the vast screen now. "A little further, more, more.... wait! Right there!" Mr. Crown waved his clenched hand.

The head of a twisted and strange cartoon creature filled the wall monitor. Its insectoid eyes glowed green, its skin was some shade of dark. The head was vaguely equine with vampire-like fangs, and oddly a horn, like a unicorn, only perforated, as though it were made of swiss cheese. The edge of a beetle-like translucent wing could be seen, near the edge of the image. It looked like some terrible cross between a unicorn and a vampire and a bug.

Mr. Crown stood up, and approached the screen. He looked from the right side to the left, where Kafka's leathern corpse lay, and then back again. "Nineteen Twenty-Four. Does it go forward too? Is there a forward... that's the question. It goes backward, that much is clear. If it doesn't..."

"Mr. Crown, sir? Is that... is that what you see?" Guillaume was by far the brighter of the two who served Malus. He was intrigued by his employer, and not so willing as Thibault to dismiss everything strange as madness. Malus Crown was interesting, if nothing else, and if he did want for sanity, the strange consistency of his eccentricity was intriguing.

Malus Crown turned and stared at his man, wondering whether or not to answer him, and how. Finally he made his decision. "Yes, Guillaume. Though not as a cartoon image, not abstract and whimsical. Imagine one of those things - " He gestured with an arm towards the animated side of the split screen "only dried, dead and utterly and completely real. As a thing that had once been alive. The cartoon is a pale imitation."

"And you see this? You see this thing in the casket?"

Crown returned to his chair, and carefully sat. "Yes."

Thibault spoke up, a rare thing. "I saw this movie once. Had bug men in it, and all the signs were changed when you looked through these special sunglasses. Roddy Piper, the wrestler was in it. Had a fucking great fight in an alley. You could only see the bug guys if you had the glasses."

Crown and Guillaume stared at Thibault. He hardly ever said anything, and now this.

"The guy who made 'The Thing' did it." Thibault seemed uncomfortable now. "It's good. The movie."

Malus turned back and nodded. "John Carpenter. 'They Live'."

"Yeah. That's the one." Thibault cracked his massive knuckles.

"Something like that, actually. Very perspicacious of you, Thibault. That is very close to what is happening for me, only without the need for special sunglasses." Malus tried to lean back in his chair, then suddenly jerked forward, grimacing as if he had felt pain. He always sat at the edge of the seat, and never settled in.

"What? So we're being invaded or something?" Guillaume raised an eyebrow. Thibault hardly had produced more than a grunt and the occasional 'Yes sir' in the past three months, and now he was a positive chatterbox.

Mr. Crown rested his chin on a fist, leaning to the side in his chair, every bit the king on his throne. "I considered that, but I do not think so. This is something much more subtle, and strange... and while I have my theories, I am not quite ready to state them."

Guillaume softly, almost imperceptibly, shook his head in disbelief. In all of the past many months, this exchange was the most enlightening he had heard with regard to what the possibly mad Mr. Crown believed and thought. It was fascinating, if completely bizarre. Guillaume remained silent, in hopes that the conversation would continue, and more entertaining strangeness might be revealed.

A loud gurgle came from the stomach of Mr. Malus Crown. "Ah." He got up from his leather chair and stood. "You can both take the rest of the day off. That's all for now. If anything comes up, I'll be in the puppy room."

Of all of Mr. Crown's many eccentricities, perhaps his obsession with puppies was the greatest. He had an entire wing built as a paradise for what must be two dozen dogs now. They utterly loved him, they completely adored him. He personally attended their every need himself, feeding, grooming and playing with them. Attending his puppies took up the majority of his day, yet it never seemed to wear him out. If anything, he seemed less gaunt and haggard for every hour he spent in their company. Puppies and whatever strange, mad quest he was on. This was his life.

That and his electronics. Oh, Mr. Crown loved his computers, and he was a master with them. Very insistent on the make and model of any piece of equipment his people used, and he seemed to know everything about even the most obscure product in the line. He had terminated the employment of one of the staffers simply because he had bought the wrong phone.

Guillaume stretched and yawned. Thibault had left the moment Mr. Crown had left the room. The monitors would need to be turned off and the machines locked. Guillaume set about the task with resignation. Thibault would probably just break everything anyway.

It was a hell of a way to make money, but it was not the worst, nor the strangest rich madman that Guillaume had worked for. The job was insane, but easy, sometimes exciting - like the business in Prague - and it paid unbelievably well. Mr. Malus Crown could be as batty as he wanted to be, Guillaume had long ago decided.

As long as the paychecks poured forth.

──── ∆ ────

The smell of the pork chops was making Gregoria gag even before she reached the table. They didn't smell good, they didn't even smell like pork chops to her. They smelled like death, like burned skin and rotting flesh. The appearance was no better - the slabs of glutton and bone sat on the serving dish like small road accidents, glistening with pale, greasy ichor, contaminating the broccoli. Dad - who did most of the cooking - had plated the two together.

'Contaminating the broccoli?' The words hung in Gregoria's mind like dead men on a scaffold. Dread filled her, and her heart began to speed up as if she were being chased. Broccoli. Gregoria did not particularly like broccoli, or vegetables in general for that matter - she ate them sparingly and always under protest. Spinach was ghastly, salads pointless, beans were alright, especially in a meaty chili, and the occasional carrot might be tolerated on the periphery of a large slab of beefy pot roast. For color. It could be scraped off, later.

The broccoli was the only thing on the pork chop dish that was the least bit appetizing. The smell of the broccoli was making Gregoria's mouth fill with saliva and her belly grumble and complain with desire. It was unbelievably wonderful, except for the revolting stench of the pork chops. Dinner was madness, it was insanity. Gregoria's tastes had turned upside down.

The salad, in the large ceramic bowl, featured cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, slices of celery and green onions. It was the single most enticing thing at the dinner table. Gregoria found her attention enraptured by the simple contents. Every aspect of her being was shouting that this, this green abomination, was food. Real food. Savory and filled with muzzle-watering deliciousness - while the pork chops, her previous favorite, might as well have been a dump taken right on the table.

She refused to cry. Breaking down now, at the table, would be a defeat. She had been strong thus far, facing her impossible situation with determination and fortitude, she felt. Considering. But now, to have her very tastes in food altered, possibly forever, it... she could feel a tear welling up, and a catch in her throat.

"Are you OK?" Father was expressing concern. Everyone else had taken their portions with rapidity, Gregoria had just sat there, staring and looking abject. "Would you... like some... salad?" He said the last word with some surprise, but had clearly been following her gaze. Gregoria nodded, silent. Leafy greens were deposited in the bowl to the side of her plate. Gregoria kept nodding until the bowl was almost overflowing. Her father seemed amazed.

"You're spoiling her. Let her serve herself. Goodness, Harry, she's not an invalid!" Thanks mom, thought Gregoria. Her mother could be such a mean thing sometimes.

"I think she's had a tough day today. A little kindness won't spoil anything." Harold Samson fixed his wife with a firm look, and she tended to her dinner. "Want a pork chop, hon?" Her father was being super nice, which was the only good thing that had happened to her since she woke up. Tears falling, Gregoria shook her head.

"Just salad... and some of the broccoli. From the top, where the pork didn't get it?" Gregoria felt very hungry, and even more unsure about trying to serve herself with clumsy hooves. The only other alternative was using her mouth like the characters did on Friendship Is Magic. There was no way to tell how that would be perceived by her family.

"What? Are you going vegetarian on us now? First you cause a big fuss this morning, stay home all day, and now pork chops are too good for you? Your father went to a lot of trouble to..."

"Monica, leave the poor girl alone. I mean it." Father wasn't usually so protective, but then Gregoria wasn't normally so obviously disturbed and upset.

"Fine." Gregoria's mother pouted and sulked as she picked at her dinner.

"You just enjoy your dinner, Sweetie. Whatever it is, things will get better." Her father smiled, gently at her, and returned to his own meal. Gregoria appreciated the kindness but his words chafed - she had no guarantee things would ever get any better, and a great deal of fear they would get far worse. But he meant well. And he had served her up food, sparing her having to see what everyone made of her fumbling with hooves or serving herself with her teeth.

Gregoria appraised her meal. Bowl of salad, no dressing, plate of steamed broccoli. Normally, as a human, facing such a thing would have amounted to an insult. It greatly disturbed Gregoria that her stomach was rumbling like a construction vehicle, and she had needed to swallow her own drooling saliva twice already. Although the mortal stench of seared flesh was still making her feel ill, she was fascinated by the scent of the greens in front of her. She had never thought green things even had a smell.

The broccoli dominated, steamed and hot, the rich, savory scent filled her new pony nostrils and seemed positively fattening. Decadent. Her tongue craved to engage with it. But more surprising was the tang of celery in the simple salad, the summery comfort of the cabbage and lettuce, and the sharp jab of the green onions. The tomato hit her the way a steak might have, just a day ago. Somehow her new senses could pick up the qualities of vegetative matter that her human nose was blind to. Gregoria was frantic to begin eating.

She couldn't hold a fork.

She had managed to scrape her napkin into her lap, the wooden dining chair was very uncomfortable to her equine posterior, even sitting - as she must to protect her tail - on one flank. But the issue of cutlery was beyond the capacity of her hooves. She could paw at her fork all day to no avail. What was she supposed to do now?

Gregoria tried to look at the situation as a puzzle. It was better than breaking down and running from the room. Probably, anyway. She had gotten away with a tube top hung loosely around her neck. That had been sufficient to convince her family that she was properly dressed. How could she get away with the matter of eating?

On the show, on Friendship Is Magic, earthponies like Applejack ate with their mouths right off of the plate. They didn't use forks or spoons, though they could somehow lift mugs. There was no way Gregoria could lift her fork except with her teeth, or with both hooves pinching the implement, and either method would be clumsy and likely end up with food all over the floor. There really was only one answer, and that was to bury her muzzle in her meal. It didn't seem likely that this would be ignored, though. So far, whatever prevented her family from noticing her change seemed to require some kind of misdirection, rather like how professional magicians worked. The tube top around Gregoria's neck seemed to be just enough to permit whoever saw her to tell themselves that she was dressed.

Gregoria decided to test this. She was starving, and it was all she could think of.

The golden yellow mare put her right hoof onto the table, bending her fetlock so that her hoof covered her fork. That should be roughly equivalent to the suggestion that she was 'holding' the fork, at the least she was touching it. After a quick glance at the faces of her family, Gregoria gingerly lowered her muzzle to her salad bowl and took a mouthful of its contents.

Her head raised, she chewed the cabbage and lettuce and celery and tomato, the rich and savory flavors filling her mouth. It was like no salad she had ever tasted. There was no need for dressing, the greenery was by itself beyond delicious. There were high minty celery notes, a low satisfying leafy delectability that gave her the same feeling as a juicy cut of steak, a piquant bite from the onions that ravaged her super-sensitive nose, and a sweet yet fierce sapidity from the tomato slices. Her senses had changed as much as the rest of her body, and very likely also the way her new brain interpreted those senses.

She looked around. Her father smiled at her. Her mother was busy cutting off a bite of meat, the sight of her actually eating it made Gregoria's stomach turn. Her sister was oblivious. Apparently, her guess was right. Gregoria lifted her hoof from the fork, and pinched her napkin between both forelegs and brought it to her muzzle. She dabbed her muzzle, and lowered the napkin to what roughly equated to a lap on her new body. No reaction. She reasoned that to them, she was still a normal twenty-six year old woman, sitting at the table eating ordinarily. They saw what they wanted to see, or what they were being forced somehow to see, and all that was required to make this strange effect work was some suggestion of the commonplace to work off of.

Gregoria wondered what it would take to break their curious illusion of normality, or even if it was possible at all. She decided that she really didn't want to, all things considered. She didn't want to imagine how her mother would react if she actually could see a yellow cartoonish pony at the foot of the table. No matter what, the result would not be favorable.

The rest of the meal passed relatively uneventfully. Gregoria's mother complained that she hadn't even tried the pork chops, and her sister had made some comment about how weird she was being today. Drinking from her glass was only slightly troublesome - gripping it between fetlocks worked well enough, and again, nobody seemed to notice at all.

Cleaning up gave Gregoria a momentary fright - her only means for taking dishes to the washer was by carrying them with her teeth. This provided a very curious moment that haunted Gregoria for the rest of the evening. After being scolded for not helping her sister, Gregoria had almost instinctively reached out with her muzzle and taken hold of a plate in order to carry it to the dishwasher. In that moment, her mother had briefly gasped, blinked, and then seemed to settle into a kind of trance for a few seconds. Then she had turned away, slowly, regaining herself. "Good. Your sister shouldn't have to clear the table alone. We're a family here after all."

While Gregoria helped Greta clear the table and fill the dishwasher, she wondered whether or not, for just a moment, the strange blindness to what had happened had failed briefly for her mother. It only happened once - after that incident, Gregoria found she could pick up anything with her mouth and her mother did not flinch or blink at the act in any way. It was as if she were now immune to that aspect of Gregoria's pony existence, presumably seeing every use of muzzle and teeth as her daughter manipulating things with hand and arm.

Some boundary to the pony blindness had been reached, and her mother had perhaps been shaken in her illusions, but then corrected herself and now the matter was stable and settled. If something similar had happened to her father and her sister, she had not noticed, in any case the matter seemed settled for them as well.

Gregoria remembered something from the show, that ponies often carried things on their backs. They seemed to have superhuman balance. Gregoria picked up the last plate on the table, and twisted her neck so that she could lay the plate across the middle of her back to see what the reaction would be, and whether or not she could balance it there. She was beginning to find a fascination with how the strange pony blindness worked, and it was useful research besides, because it would determine what she could get away with in her new existence.

The plate stayed as if it were glued to her back. Her earlier clumsiness had gradually given way to a confident ability that now surprised her. Apparently her new brain and body learned very quickly, and she was adapting rapidly. Gregoria walked to the dishwasher. Greta lifted the plate right off of her back as if it were the most normal thing in the world to do. She acted as if Gregoria had handed her the plate. Perhaps that is exactly what Greta imagined had occurred. Greta closed the dishwasher and set the buttons. Dinner was over.

After the first few minutes, Gregoria excused herself from the family viewing of 'Game Of Thrones'. She couldn't handle it. The tension, the gore, it shocked and disturbed her as if she were seeing the worst tragedy of her entire life. It was literally beyond her capacity to enjoy or stand. She felt harmed by it, shaken to her core. She made some excuse of feeling tired, reiterated her mother's thought that she might have come down with some bug, and repaired to her room on the pretense of getting some sleep so as to beat whatever cold or sniffle had her down.

In her room, Gregoria pulled her pillow down from her still unmade bed and clutched it between her forelegs as she lay on the floor on her side. She rocked back and forth with a push of her left hindleg against the bed frame. The rocking and clutching the pillow seemed to help. It was hard to get the blood and death from the television show out of her head. She felt traumatized. This was another thing lost - 'Game of Thrones' had been her favorite. It would be a problem trying to get out of watching the rest of it with her family, but there was no way she could handle it now.

"Swirl!" The expletive had not come out properly. Gregoria tried to say other swear words and insults, but they all came out as infantile cutesy things like 'Cinnamon' and 'Muffins!' She remembered how earlier she had used 'everypony' instead of 'everybody'. Put together with the changes in how she perceived smell and taste, as well as the incredible speed at which she was adapting to all of this, there was only one conclusion possible.

Her brain, being a part of her body, had changed too. Gregoria spent some fruitless time trying to determine if she was still herself, then ultimately realized that the entire question was absurd and impossible to answer. She had been transformed into a cartoonish species of pony from a children's show on television. She was what and who she was, and worrying about whether pony Gregoria was still human Gregoria was not something that was even possible to determine. How would she even tell? Her family would be no help, because they saw her as she was before. She could be no judge of her own mind, because she was too busy existing, thinking and being. She was too close to the problem.

The best she could do would be to catalog any obvious differences from what she thought she remembered about herself, and arbitrarily hope that her memory was true. So far, all of the differences seemed to be entirely with regard to her senses and some elements of her speech. These were relatively minor issues compared to the vast edifice of personality and identity. There was the issue of watching 'Game Of Thrones', her tolerance for violence, cruelty and psychopathy had been vastly shortened, but this was in keeping with a cartoon about ponies for little girls. It wasn't as if she hated her former favorite show, or that her opinions about it had altered. She just couldn't stomach people getting stabbed through the eye socket with daggers anymore. Or disemboweled. But even if she couldn't bear to watch it, she still felt the program was brilliant.

Gregoria finally decided that, within the context of having been transformed into an entirely alien creature, she was still herself. It was only reasonable and logical that her brain would change as much as any other part of her body, and considering everything, it was remarkable how little of who she was had been altered.

Her essential self was, as far as she could tell, untouched. She needed to believe that, more than she needed even to cling to the hope of being transformed back. She needed to believe that within her was some indestructible something that represented her identity, and that this untouchable core was inviolate even should every other aspect become unrecognizable. She was Gregoria, whether she was Gregoria the human, or Gregoria the pony.

She might as well accept this to be true, any other belief seemed to lead only to hopelessness and the obliteration of any reason to keep going. Perhaps her tastes had changed, perhaps she could not tolerate violent media anymore, perhaps she swore like a cartoon character, perhaps she loathed meat and drooled at the thought of vegetables now - none of these things mattered. She was herself because she MUST be herself. No other possibility or viewpoint was allowable in such a circumstance, lest despair conquer her entirely.

With that settled, at least for now, and with her shaken nerves finally calmed, Gregoria set about trying to make her bed. It was a terribly difficult task, at first, but as she worked, she found it growing easier. Her rapidly adapting body and mind now had fairly excellent coordination, and she discovered that if she just let go of fussing about how she was doing things, and simply used what she had to the best of her ability, everything went much more smoothly. Gregoria recalled watching a TED talk on YouTube about a disabled person who had taken the view that all any creature can do is to make use of what they have. Accepting things and then making maximal, optimal utility of what can be used bypassed all the initial pitfalls of facing disability.

Gregoria decided to give up grieving for her lost hands and instead just do whatever was necessary to make her bed. She used her teeth and hooves in whatever way worked, and lost herself in the effort. Once she had done that, before she knew it, she was finished. It was not an entirely bad job, in fact. Not perfect, but serviceable.

She backed up, and stared at her bed. It was made. She had made her own bed with nothing more than hooves and teeth. Sweet Luna but her teeth and jaw were strong! And hooves, she decided, at least the ones in the front, were not as crippling as she had feared. They were, after all, just big fingernails, and her forelegs were her fingers. There was an expected dexterity there, because she was well used to using her fingers to manipulate objects. She now had two very long, incredibly strong fingers with large nails at the ends. If she sat, she could pinch and push and hold things very effectively. Her neck and jaw acted like a serpentine arm and vice-grip hand. If she didn't whine, and she didn't fight herself, it was possible to get a lot done.

Gregoria turned to look at herself in the mirror. Her human clothing was absurd on her pony body. The skirt had ridden up over her rear end, exposing it entirely. The ring of the tube-top encircled her neck looking more like a tight scarf than a proper top. Not a member of her family had noticed. It was enough that the fabric was there at all. It was what they needed in order to see what they wanted to see. Looking at her reflection in the mirror, no longer fearing her new body, Gregoria resented how stupid she looked with a crumpled ring of skirt around her waist, and a rolled band of tube top around her neck.

With effort, Gregoria managed to peel off the tube-top and scrape the skirt from her body. She stood in front of the mirror again and shook herself, watching as her mane and tail swirled about her. Currently, she wasn't in a state of panic. She felt calm, filled with real hope that she might manage to solve all of this. In just one day she had cracked much of whatever rules controlled how others saw her, cleaned up her own mess, washed herself, survived dinner, and finally made her own bed. Gazing at her cartoon-cute face and soft animal coat, she even had to admit she was not ugly.

The fact was that Friendship Is Magic ponies were pretty, they had been designed to be so, and she was very attractive as a pony. Her colors were pleasant enough, and the form of her body and face were charming, if utterly unhuman. Gregoria had no wish to stay this way, she did not want to be a pony like her friend Rachel did and being transformed against her will felt like an act of war against her. That said, for the moment, standing in triumph after a day that surely would have broken most people entirely, she found she could gaze into her own eyes, her purple pony eyes, and now, not need to look away.

She could do this. She could survive until she could find an answer - and a cure. There must be an explanation out there somewhere, there must be a reason this happened, and there must be a solution to her new state of being. That only made sense - things didn't just happen 'because'. That reason was out there, and if she was going to ever be human again, she needed to learn how it was that she was transformed, and why. To accomplish that, she would need to be stronger than whatever life decided to throw at her.

At the beginning of the day, Gregoria had not been sure she was up to the task, she had not been sure that the human spirit was strong enough, in anyone, to survive such an insult.

In this moment, though, smiling her pony smile into the mirror, Gregoria felt differently than she had in the morning. The human spirit was indomitable. She could do this. Pony body and brain notwithstanding. Anything could be changed about her, and it would not matter. She was indestructible, immutable, imperishable.

Tomorrow should be afraid of her. She was coming for it, and it would reveal some answers!

4. Similes Are Like Songs In Love

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

═════════════════════

Similes Are Like Songs In Love

"In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing."

Franz Kafka

For the next five days, Gregoria played off the idea that she had contracted some kind of illness that had given her terrible dreams and affected her emotions and concentration. She suggested it might have been some food-borne illness, which clicked in her mother's mind - her mother had once read about something, somewhere, that seemed more or less like what Gregoria appeared to be going through.

This made a perfect cover for Gregoria to concentrate on learning how to live with her new body, how to use objects and accomplish tasks, and through it all to remain at home and not face the world at large. Keeping very busy struggling to meet the challenge of her transformation was the only thing that truly helped to keep her fear and the horror of what had happened to her at bay. As long as she felt she was making progress, Gregoria felt she could cope.

Gregoria paid attention to how her family interacted with her, trying to decode the rules behind their blindness about her change. During a discussion with her father one evening, where he asked about how she was feeling and whether or not there was some emotional or other problem in her life behind it all - her father was quite perceptive, really - Gregoria noted that when he looked her in the eyes, his gaze truly followed hers. He did not look over her head, he did not seem to perceive some ghostly image of her in place of her pony body. He looked down to meet her eyes, reached down to pat her head, yet seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that she was half her height. He functioned as if he was dealing with her pony body authentically, but mentally he was simply incapable of being aware of how different it was, for example, to stoop over to pat her new equine shoulder.

Although she was very curious to see what might actually crack or break the bizarre unawareness of her family, Gregoria was keenly aware that doing so would be a catastrophe. Instead, she decided to be grateful for the advantage of their blindness, and to be careful not to upset her situation. In order to discover a solution to her problem, she needed to survive, and to survive, she needed her family to continue caring for her as they always had done. The strange blindness was perhaps her only true advantage in the entire circumstance.

Using her computer, a somewhat old off-brand with Windows XP on it, took some effort. Initially, Gregoria considered the keyboard and mouse as hopelessly lost to her, and began to mope. Watching television with her sister one day, she saw part of a program that featured a person paralyzed by some illness or accident. They had been rendered a quadriplegic, with only the use of their neck, head and face. The remarkable thing was that the individual, a boy, was expert at playing videogames using only his cheek, mouth, neck and jaw. He was astonishingly proficient, in fact.

This shocked Gregoria into shame for her self-pity - if a young man could function so well with far less than she possessed, then she felt she had no right to feel sorry for herself. Immediately, she went to her room and set to conquering her computer as a pony.

The keyboard was actually fairly easy to deal with. Nothing more than a pen in her mouth allowed hunting-and-pecking of keys, though the issue of pressing two keys at once was a problem. The shift key was not too difficult, the edge of a hoof could nicely hit shift without mashing anything else, likewise the spacebar. CTRL-Alt-Anything was right out, as far as she could tell, though the F keys were easy enough with the sharp edge of a hoof used sideways. She could not type quickly, but she could type, and even use capital letters. She felt instantly more powerful and in control, once she had mastered her keyboard.

The mouse seemed impossible at first. It was easy enough to slide it - the curve of her Microsoft mouse fit very tidily into her frog - the arrow-shaped, leathery fold of tough skin inside the wall of her hoof - but she had no way to press the buttons. Initially, she simply moved the mouse, lifted her hoof, used the edge of the hoof to hold the top of her mouse steady, and then clicked a mouse button with the pen held in her teeth. This was slow and annoying.

By accident, Gregoria clicked the mouse button while moving the mouse and wondered how it had happened. It turned out that the rolls of flesh that made up the frog were bumpy enough that they could depress the mouse buttons, provided she rotated her hoof to the left or the right side of the mouse. At first it seemed a difficult trick that could only be managed by luck. By the end of a day of surfing the web she had mastered using the mouse. The mouse fit neatly into the hollow of her hoof, and by rotating her hoof left or right over it, she could hit and click the buttons. Just before she went to bed that night it struck her that if she just didn't press down so hard, the mouse wheel was trivial to roll just by stroking it.

Gregoria spent much of her day trying to find anything on the internet that would relate to her situation. There were archives of stories about transformation, fantasies about humans being changed into all sorts of animals and creatures. It seemed to be quite a desired thing among some subset of the population, a fetish even. Some stories even had similarities to her circumstance, but none gave any possibility of a cure, or even a solid reason for the transformations.

Changing into another creature was not taken seriously except by the most marginal of individuals within truly ridiculous websites, so Gregoria abandoned trying to find others like herself, and instead devoted her attention to what might be the cause of her family's inability to perceive her bizarre change of species.

After attempting many different search parameters regarding perceptual blindness, Gregoria stumbled upon something that seemed to suggest a real answer to why her family could not see her as a pony. She came across a video about an illusion on YouTube that showed a number of people passing a basketball between each other. The goal in the video was to count how many people wearing white passed the ball. She dutifully did so, wondering what the illusion in all of this was.

Much to her surprise, she had entirely missed a man in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. She simply had not seen him at all, and the fact of this utterly flabbergasted her. It seemed impossible - and it was, if she knew the gorilla was there, and made an effort to look for him. But, if she followed the instructions honestly, and only counted the number of passes, the gorilla simply wasn't there. It was literally the gorilla in the middle of the room, and it was utterly invisible.

Following this line of search, she soon found that the same sort of blindness affected the mind in every conceivable situation and manner. It turned out to be a major issue in medical diagnostics - things could be missed which were entirely obvious, if the person studying a lab report or a scan was intent on something specific. In a way, it comforted her to discover that her pony brain could be fooled just like that of any human, and in the same way. She might not be human herself at the moment, but neither was she completely alien, either.

To cap off her research into perception, YouTube Penn and Teller showed her just how easily she could fail to see things with a version of the cup-and-ball trick done with entirely translucent cups. There was no doubt about it - the mind was more than capable and willing to see only what it expected to see, or what it wanted to see. This weakness must be precisely what was being exploited - only in a vastly more powerful form - to render her pony existence invisible to human beings. Gregoria was left wondering what was magnifying this basic perceptual flaw. Was it just a natural side effect of her transformation, or was there some purpose to it, was it deliberate in some manner?

When her mother hugged her, or brushed her mane out of her eyes, she was basically 'counting the basketball passes'. She was not seeing the gorilla right in front of her. The mechanism just seemed so very clear to Gregoria. But it was powerful. Much more powerful than could be explained with a YouTube video. It was as powerful as if it were magic.

That made Gregoria think - although she did not believe in magic, her overnight transformation into a pony from a cartoon might as well have been just that. Perhaps what she needed to do was find out more about what she had been turned into. She tried to look into what there might be on the internet regarding 'My Little Pony'. In an instant she was overwhelmed.

Her friend, Rachel Priss, had told her that there was bit of a fandom, when she had tried to get Gregoria into watching the cartoon. Gregoria had no concept of what an understatement that had been. It seemed less of a fandom than a religion, or even a social movement. The sheer amount of pony material on the web was overwhelming. Gregoria didn't know where to begin, or even what she should be looking for. It was blinding - as blinding to her as the strange transformation blindness that her family had with regard to herself. Gregoria thought about calling her friend and using her as a guide and filter.

That was when Gregoria learned that touch-sensitive phones were useless to the hooved.

Email worked for her, though, and in short order she had managed to write to Rachel.

To: rachelpriss@gmail.com

From: gsamson@gmail.com

Subject: I need your help with pony stuff

Cc:

Bcc:

Attached:

Rachel i really need your help. can i come see you tomorrow? maybe we can hang out and talk pony.

gregoria

Gregoria had met Rachel in high school, they had gone on to the same college just to stay together, Rachel was her best friend in the world. Lately though, the two had become rather distant. Rachel had completely flipped for the pony thing. She seemed to eat, breath, and drink pony. It was My Little Pony this and Friendship Is Magic that, and there was pretty much nothing else she wanted to talk about. Gregoria had tried, she had really tried to show some interest in her friend's Big New Thing, but frankly... it was a kid's cartoon. A show about cartoon ponies for little girls, and it didn't hold any real interest for her.

Rachel had tried to explain about the show having some great stories and an amazing world, and that it was done by some other cartoon bigwig or something, but the fact was that Gregoria had just plain outgrown cartoons. There was nothing there for an adult with adult tastes. If anything, Gregoria had felt pity for her friend Rachel, who seemed to be retreating into childhood and losing touch with being an adult.

Of course, there was a reason for such a retreat. Rachel had lost her boyfriend, Rick, to the War On Terror. Rick had been lost with a bunch of other guys in Afghanistan, blown up by some device buried in the road. After that, Rachel had been a mess and the only thing that had pulled her out of it was the pony cartoon. Rick had loved the thing, so Gregoria supposed that for Rachel, clinging to the show offered some connection to her dead lover. But Rachel had gone into it much farther than Gregoria could follow. It just wasn't healthy. That was what Gregoria's mother had said. It wasn't healthy for a grown up woman to like cartoons.

Maybe mom was right, Gregoria reflected. The existence of 'Friendship Is Magic' certainly hadn't been healthy at all for her.

It took very little time before the email was responded to.

Envelope-to: GSamson@Gmail.com
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha246; c=relaxed/relaxed;

d=gmail.com; s=21123013;

h=mime-version:date:message-id:subject:from:to:content-type;

bh=zVBme/yENuCR7BfY9w0T2L7c9+7FxrZUslE+7lAmNIk=;

t9CQ==
Date: Sat, 18 Nov 23:00:37 -0800
Subject: I need your help with pony stuff
From: Rachel Priss RachelPriss@gmail.com
To: "Gregoria Samson" GSamson@Gmail.com
Bcc: GSamson@Gmail.com

Sweet Celestia, I haven't heard from you in like a month! Yes! YES! I would LOVE to hang out and talk Pony with you! I've missed you so much! Best Friends Forever! I'll make you lunch - I've got a surprise! See you at noonish! I am so happy to hear from you!

your best friend forever, Rachel (Sunflower Feathermane)
<(^,^)>

Rachel always tended to lay it on thick, but since the death of her soldier boyfriend, she'd become really clingy. That was another reason for the distance Gregoria had felt it necessary to place between herself and her old friend. Sticky or not, the fact was that nobody in Gregoria's life could possibly know as much about Equestria and ponies as Rachel Priss.

Tomorrow, Gregoria decided she would finally leave her house and face the world. She would go out as a pony, ride the subway, and visit her oldest friend Rachel. She would talk Pony with her, and grill her to find out anything useful about what she had been transformed into, the world of the cartoon her new body was based upon, and whatever else seemed useful.

And one other thing. Rachel really was her best friend. If anypony in the entire world would stand with her, help her, no matter what, it was Rachel. Rachel had always been the better person, and the better friend - while Gregoria had felt some shame about this reality, never before this night had she felt it so keenly, so cuttingly, so harshly. That, she recognized, was her pony brain affecting her. The cartoon was called 'Friendship Is Magic' and the core of it was teaching the power and value of friendship to little girls. Gregoria's new pony brain was trying to change her, trying to make her a better friend, a better soul. The invasive nature of that chafed her. It reminded her that she hadn't been the best of people, or the best of friends.

Gregoria suddenly realized that it was very likely that the reason Rachel had become obsessed with a cartoon was because her 'best friend in the whole world' couldn't deal with her becoming clingy and needy after suffering a life-changing tragedy. At this realization, her new pony brain reared in disgust and kicked at Gregoria's heart in guilt and anger. She had let her friend down, terribly, just because it was inconvenient and troublesome to stand by her in a time of need.

That wasn't good. That wasn't nice. But it was her choice. Gregoria, right or wrong, had chosen to be a bad friend, and she had decided to deny the fact of that and lie to herself that it was all Rachel being childish and grasping. Oh, that sounded so evil now, so wrong. But inside herself, Gregoria tried to fight against the overwhelming shame she now felt. It was vastly more than the faint shame she had managed to suppress as a human. But this new self-loathing was not her, it was the pony body speaking, the pony brain she had been deposited within, taking over. This wasn't her, this wasn't the Gregoria she remembered being.

It was very difficult to get to sleep. Gregoria kept tossing and turning, alternately filled with upset at the invasion of thoughts and emotions that were not usual or common to her, and then finding herself agreeing with those same thoughts. Initially, she had her rage to fight her pony brain, rage that shouted that she had been violated, altered against her will, changed by unnatural forces. That she had been the victim of a terrible injustice.

But it became increasingly difficult, as the night progressed, to claim victimhood and moral superiority when it could not be logically denied that what she was angry about having been stolen from her was the capacity to treat her best friend like a tool of convenience rather than as... a friend.

When morning came, Gregoria was exhausted and beaten. She felt like she was losing part of herself with each passing day, and the worst part of it was that she could clearly see that the part she was losing was the very thing she most despised and loathed about herself. She lay on the bed and slammed and spanked the mattress beneath her, raging like a baby throwing a tantrum.

Then she wept for a bit, rolled over, got to her hooves, and focused on the issue of what to do about the matter of shoes.

──── ∆ ────

Laying about the house for almost a week, Gregoria hadn't needed to wear shoes. Now, going out into the world, she would seem quite the little hippy prancing about without them, and this was something Gregoria did not want. More than this, it just wasn't safe, not in Brooklyn.

The black boots, on her hind legs, clomped clumsily as she left her Hinsdale Street townhome. Gregoria had needed to stuff scarves into the boots to help keep them on her hooves, packed in tight with the help of a wooden ruler. That was enough, it seemed. Her mother repeated how glad she was to see her wearing a skirt again, and didn't mention the fact that Gregoria's front legs did not also have boots on them. She also did not mention that Gregoria stood half her height, walked on all fours, or nearly knocked over the little souvenir snowglobe on the shelf with her tail. Perceptual blindness - the name Gregoria had discovered more or less fit the phenomena - was a blessing in so many ways.

Thinking about it on the subway to Chelsey - Gregoria had used her pass while holding it in her teeth - it really should be called something like 'sustained perceptual blindness' or maybe even 'verity dissonance' - which was funny for a few moments as an acronym, but which she quickly discarded. Whatever it was, it made it possible for her to lay across an entire seat and not have anyone even think to try to sit down there. She wondered if the other riders saw her sprawled equine body - it was just so much more comfortable than trying to sit unnaturally upright - as a horrifically fat woman taking up two places, or if they just couldn't face the sheer anomaly of her condition and moved on without any consideration at all.

During her walk to the second subway entrance on 14th (she took Livona to 8th, then 14th to 7th), she noted how absolutely nobody took any notice of her at all. It was a completely normal New York experience, no eye contact, and not one person pointing out the fact that a golden yellow unearthly mare was trotting about wearing a cheap skirt, clumsy boots and a sad wrinkle of tube top around its neck.

To serve as a purse for her trip to Manhattan Island, Gregoria had draped her old bicycle bags over her back. They worked as remarkably serviceable saddlebags, even if they were a bit moldy and ratty. Her new pony nose did not like them one bit, but they would do for now. If they worked out well enough on this trip, she intended to invest in some better ones, if not even actual saddlebags made for a real pony - she had no idea how long she would be stuck in this form, and the ability to carry things easily was her single greatest constant problem.

On the second subway leg of her journey, something unexpected happened which set her mind to possibilities. A very young child, a little boy of perhaps two, maybe two and a half, began staring at her as she lay across her seat. The boy's eyes were wide, and he could not stop staring. Soon he was waving his arms. The child's mother smiled in faint embarrassment when she saw Gregoria had noticed her boy fussing. Her efforts to redirect the child's attention were opposed by excited statements of "HORSEY! HORSEY!" that made Gregoria startle. The child appeared to be able to see the truth of Gregoria's existence.

Complex emotions flooded Gregoria. On one hoof, this was validation that she herself had not gone insane - another living creature, a human, if only a baby, had seen what she truly was, and had stated what he had seen. It wasn't just her, it wasn't just some amazingly complex personal hallucination going on - Gregoria was a pony for real, and someone had finally noticed. On the other remaining three hooves, the fact that it was possible to be seen at all represented all manner of dangers and risks.

Fortunately, the word of a two year old carries no weight, and the mother moved further away to end the fuss. During her ride, Gregoria had been near other, older children, and they had seen nothing. She desperately wondered what made this particular little boy different - was it his age, or was there some other factor she knew nothing about? One thing, though, had become clear. The strange perceptual blindness was not absolute, nor was it universal. It had been breached, somehow, if only by a two-year old, and that suggested many things to Gregoria. It suggested that if she were not careful, she could potentially expose herself, which would almost certainly be a disaster. But it also suggested that if she needed or wanted to, she might be able to convince someone of her situation. The event also made her wonder even more about how the blindness took hold, and why.

Out of the subway and down the street, Gregoria made her way to Rachel's apartment. Rachel had actually succeeded in making a life for herself away from her parents, thanks to very good luck, a bachelor's degree in finance, and a solid contact at the SEC. Rachel was an entry-level examiner, and made enough money to live on her own. Gregoria's new pony brain did not need to inform her that she was deeply jealous of her friend, but it had made her feel rather bad about feeling that way.

The sound of her forehooves and the floppity-clop of her ill-fitting boots sounded loudly in the hallway. The door opened at her knock with a hoof. If Rachel felt any resentment at being abandoned and ignored by Gregoria during her time of grieving, she did not show it in the least, and Gregoria found herself held tightly in a clumsy hug. Rachel had dropped to her knees, wrapped her arms around Gregoria's neck, and buried her face in Gregoria's golden coat without a second thought. Rachel's tears soaked into Gregoria, and much to her surprise, Gregoria found herself sitting down on her haunches, wrapping her forelegs around Rachel, and bawling too.

Before she even knew what she was doing, Gregoria had confessed how badly she felt about abandoning her friend, had begged for her forgiveness, swore never to do it again and to be the best of friends forever more. She then finished with more weeping into the shoulder and back of Rachel. When she finally lifted her long neck away from Rachel to part, she felt relieved, redeemed, happy, sad, and shocked - her pony brain had taken completely over, intent on making her a decent person whether she liked it or not. It bothered some part of her that she could not truly resent this fact.

Soon, Gregoria was pinching her fetlocks around a bottle of pop - Red Pop, her favorite - and smiling despite herself into the face of her old friend. Rachel was a dishwater blond with green eyes that was almost nondescript to the point of invisibility. Gregoria, who as a human, had been a striking, dark-haired girl with a more than decent figure if she did say so herself - and she did - had enjoyed feeling more attractive than her comparatively plain best friend. Now, for the first time, she felt envy for Rachel's average appearance.

Rachel, at least, was not a pony. Rachel was still human, and it stung Gregoria that she herself was not. Somehow, even more than dealing with her family, sitting with Rachel brought home the reality that she was not the same species anymore.

Sipping her Red Pop, Gregoria and Rachel caught up with each other. Rachel had found in 'Friendship Is Magic' something that filled some of the empty hole in her life caused by the loss of Rick. He had loved the show so very much, and she was his 'Little Fluttershy' when he was able to write or call. She had managed to keep her job despite a period of low performance due to grief because the show and the fandom had buoyed her up when she needed it the most.

Rachel had been very busy in the fandom. She regularly followed a number of websites that Gregoria had never heard of, and planned on attending a convention. They had conventions for this stuff? Gregoria was surprised at just how big the whole 'pony' thing had become during her distance from Rachel. Rachel went on for some time about the new season, the episodes she liked and didn't like, and talked about writing fanfiction and which authors and genres and sub-genres were her favorites, and about all the online dramas and fusses that went on.

Finally things settled down, and Rachel remembered that she had promised lunch. She was very embarrassed, and set about making what appeared to be sandwiches.

Gregoria tried to find some way to sit down and be comfortable while Rachel made lunch. Trying to sit at the small kitchenette table was very uncomfortable, the seats were hard and hurt her flanks. Finally Gregoria settled for draping herself across the old overstuffed arm chair, and despite laying on her belly, Rachel said nothing and made no notice.

Rachel nattered on about ponies and episodes and online dramas on forums while Gregoria sat half listening. She looked about the small, tidy Chelsea apartment. It seemed to be furnished in the Middle Ikea fashion, with a hand-me-down wooden Krāppö Bookcase dominating the room. On various shelves were pictures of Rachel's relatives, and of Rick in and out of uniform, taken in various places around the city. One image caught her eye as strange, but by then lunch was served.

"Oh, I hope you like this. It's a bit odd, I know, and if you don't like it, I promise I'll take you right down to get pizza at the Greek place, alright?" Rachel was someplace between beaming with excitement and shivering with worry, she was trying something new or daring - for her at least - and it was very clear that she was desperately hoping her work would not be a complete disaster.

The plate before Gregoria - sitting on her left flank uncomfortably at the table - held a sandwich, neatly made. The first thing Gregoria noticed was that it looked familiar - the top of the sandwich had a toothpick stuck through it, impaling a rather large daisy. It came to her - it looked just like the daisy-and-daffodil sandwich Twilight Sparkle had ordered in one of the episodes Rachel had gotten her to watch.

"There's no daffodil! The writers got that wrong, daffodils are deadly poison. I guess they didn't do their research. Or maybe daffodils aren't poisonous in Equestria. Anyway, there's no daffodils in it." Rachel smiled, worried. Gregoria stared at the sandwich. It was filled with lettuce and... daisies. It was a lettuce and daisy sandwich, likely with Miracle Whip or mayo slathered over it, maybe some mustard.

"Honestly - daisies are perfectly edible. People used to put them in salads long ago. I got organic ones, so no pesticides either. It's safe, really!" Rachel looked very worried now.

Rachel had become such a fanatic, so obsessed in her love of My Little Pony that she had somehow reasoned that serving someone a daisy sandwich was a good idea. Gregoria's mind reeled at how far her friend must have fallen into crazy to do such a thing. Her first impulse was to storm out, the girl was too far gone. Time to sever all ties and run screaming from the freak.

Then her new pony mind began to take over.

Rachel was hurting - she missed Rick. My Little Pony was the only thing she had to fill the void in her life, especially since a certain yellow mare had abandoned her. She had gone to enormous effort to make authentic - as much as was possible - Equestrian food as an exciting treat to share. Gregoria felt her desire to flee melt as concern for her oldest friend grew inside her.

And there was another thing.

Her stomach growled like a timberwolf. This was the single. Most. Delicious. Thing. That Gregoria had ever seen in her entire new life. To her new pony senses, this was a feast, a rapturous wonderment of proper, decent cuisine. She had been starving, eating blood-flecked scraps from the nightmare table of carnivorous Man, and her dearest, oldest friend had made her a proper, appropriate meal. This was ethnic pony food, and Gregoria's new body craved it, yearned for it with every tingling, erect hair on her entire golden-yellow coat.

Gregoria didn't even make a pretense, she was too overwhelmed. No hoof on the table, no effort at a napkin. Before she even knew what she was doing, her muzzle was down in her plate gobbling huge bites of daisy and lettuce and mayo-with-a-touch-of-mustard. It was heaven on a plate. Gregoria was in pony bliss, dining on Celestial delights. She came to her senses only when she found herself licking her plate, her long pony tongue polishing the dish in wide, sweeping strokes.

"Wow!" Rachel couldn't be happier. "Want another? I'll make you another, I have a whole bowl of daisies here! Oh, this is fantastic!" Immediately she had turned around and had begun chopping and setting up more bread to toast. Rachel hadn't even touched her own sandwich yet. Her mind was only on pleasing her friend.

Gregoria sat up, winced at the hard, unpadded seat, shifted her flank slightly, and found herself staring longingly at Rachel's uneaten sandwich across the table. She shook her head. What the? Inside herself, Gregoria could feel the battle between who she had been, what she had been, and her new self, her pony self.

Human Gregoria would have already been on the subway home, a lifelong friendship ended because it had gotten too demanding and weird. Pony Gregoria worried for her friend, felt sorry for her loss, forgave her eccentricity entirely, and only wanted to stay and help as much as she could. That and gobble down as many daisy sandwiches as she could get her hooves on. Gregoria sipped the last of her Red Pop. It went far, far too well with daisy sandwiches.

Rachel was singing to herself now, one of the songs from the show she loved. It was about wrapping up winter or some bizarre thing. Gregoria shifted again, relieving her flank, and stared at her own yellow hoof. She was getting too used to this. She needed to adapt, if she was going to survive and get to the bottom of her transformation, but it bothered her how well she was succeeding at the task. She had really, really enjoyed that sandwich. Her hoof did not horrify her anymore. This morning she had pinched her brush between her forehooves so that she could comb her mane. She had liked what she saw in the mirror. She had thought her golden coat was lovely and soft, and only the fact that she caught herself brushing her cheeks had made her stop trying to improve her appearance.

What should she care whether her coat was smooth and shiny? She wasn't a cinnamon-swirling pony!

Only, she was. And it was clear that her pony self could not be entirely denied, no matter how much she tried. It wasn't that she was changing - she had already changed, in one night. She wasn't fighting some invasive alien mindset. The true horror hit her - she was fighting herself. The reason she couldn't win, the reason she couldn't just make the 'pony' vanish, or push it away into some corner of her mind and lock it up was because it was her. It was as much her as her memories of having been human. She was a pony, trying to pretend to be a human now. Clinging to something she wasn't anymore.

No. No. She had her memories. Gregoria had her memories, and they weren't fading, they weren't being lost. Her memory of her human life was clear and sharp. A great deal of it didn't set well with her new pony brain, but that was just too bad. A person is their memories. She still had hers. Therefore, she was still human, inside.

Her plate now held a stack of three daisy sandwiches. Gregoria's mouth drooled. While Rachel looked on, beaming with joy, Gregoria lost herself in pony ecstasy. The sweet, delicate daisy petals, the sour bite of the the centers, the way the mayo and mustard brought it all together, the light crunch of the lettuce... for a while Gregoria only knew joy and contentment. Then she sat back, as best she could, and burped.

It was the best meal she had ever eaten in her life.

Rachel had nibbled at her own sandwich, finding it less appetizing than she had imagined it might be. Gregoria found another opened Red Pop in front of her, and washed down her meal with the sweet soda.

"Wow, Greggie, you really like daisies!" Rachel was reasonably surprised - daisies didn't taste like much to her, and her friend had always been an 'extra meat' sort of person. Only her excitement over having her friend come back into her life and want to talk ponies had made her think daisy sandwiches were a good idea. Reflecting on it all, now, it dawned on Rachel that her friend was acting rather strangely.

Gregoria saw her friend suddenly jerk back and shake her head.

"Rachel? You OK?"

Rachel slowly looked up at her. "It was one of my... things."

"Things?" It bothered Gregoria that she was getting so comfortable with her new voice.

"Sometimes I..." Rachel looked worried, afraid of judgement "...sometimes I sort of think I see stuff. Out of the corner of my eye."

"What stuff?"

Rachel swallowed a sip of pop. "Pony stuff."

"P...Pony stuff?" Gregoria felt a sense of dread.

"Um... yeah. But only for a moment. Little things, when I'm out in the city. And dreams. I've been having these weird dreams." Rachel was clearly afraid, less for what she had been experiencing than for taking the risk of telling her friend about it all.

"Dreams? What kind of dreams?" Gregoria's heart was pounding now. "Wait... Celestia... dreams?"

Rachel's eyes widened slightly. "y-yeah. Celestia dreams. For the past week. Every night the same dream."

Gregoria's heart pounded, and she felt a rushing in her tall pony ears. Little things out of the corner of the eye. Cartoon things. Celestia dreams. Stupid little aberrations that no reasonable person would pay much attention to. Dumb things, easily explainable by fatigue, or stress, or spending too much time watching goofy cartoons. Gregoria's muzzle frowned.

It was exactly what had happened to her, in the week before she woke up in the body of a pony.

5. By Means Of Very Strong Light

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

═════════════════════

By Means Of Very Strong Light

"One can disintegrate the world by means of very strong light.

For weak eyes the world becomes solid, for still weaker eyes it seems to develop fists,

for eyes weaker still it becomes shamefaced and

smashes anyone who dares to gaze upon it."

Franz Kafka

Rachel had run downstairs to grab a few slices from the Greek place. While pleased that her friend had utterly adored the daisy sandwiches, she herself hadn't really liked them very much. With many apologies, she had left Gregoria, who had wanted to sit and think, on the overstuffed armchair with the promise that she would hurry back.

The armchair, though well padded, was not entirely comfortable anymore - Gregoria was well and truly stuffed with sandwiches and pop. She moved to the floor and folded her legs without thinking. It was becoming quite natural to use her body now, and laying down as a pony would was just so comfortable. Flashes of cartoon-like imagery, strange dreams about Equestria, especially the character called Celestia - Gregoria worried that her friend might well be on the way to becoming a pony too.

She had mixed feelings about it, and those feelings needed sorting. It was true that Gregoria felt very alone and freakish because of her transformation. The idea of having even one other creature like herself, to have her best friend be like herself was very desirable. To not be alone. To have somepony to share the situation with, to have even one pony that understood, to confide in, to face the nightmare with... who would not wish to be saved from being a singular, lonely freak?

But it was hard. Life as a pony was difficult, because everything in the world was built for humans. Gregoria was an alien now, a creature not of the earth, forced to find bizarre ways to accomplish even the simplest things because the world had not been constructed for her new species. Even going to the bathroom was a chore. She felt it mean to wish such a thing on poor Rachel.

Rachel was going through a pattern Gregoria recognized. She had ignored it at the time, it had seemed trivial, even silly. Little flashes out of the corner of the eye, odd dreams about a show she barely knew - who would see such things as a sign of such a monumental transformation? It had been only rational to discount them. Anypony would.

If only she had known, she might have been better prepared, and spent less time in shock and terror. She might even have... been able to stop it. If she had known what those symptoms meant, maybe there would have been a way to halt the transformation, or deflect it, or stop it entirely! Gregoria had no idea whatever as to the actual 'how', but at least she could have tried something. Anything. Anything at all!

She owed it to her friend, she owed it to Rachel to warn her. But how could her friend ever believe such a thing? How could anypony ever believe that they could be transformed, overnight, just like that - BAM! You're a pony! Deal with it!

No, Rachel would never believe her. Why should she? How could she? Even as obsessed with 'My Little Pony' as Rachel was - perhaps even because of that obsession - it was entirely likely that she would see any attempt to suggest real transformation as some personal mockery of her. "Oh, you are so crazy, I bet you would actually believe you could turn into a pony, wouldn't you?" It would probably end their friendship. It certainly would if Rachel did such a thing to her.

Or... it would have. Before.

Gregoria scanned the room, trying to think of any way to explain the reality of spontaneous physical transformation to Rachel without losing her as a friend. It was such an insane thing, it seemed impossible. Yet Rachel deserved to know, so that she would not end up alone in her apartment, terrified out of her mind, horrified at her body, completely taken by surprise. And... again the thought surfaced that perhaps the change could be interrupted in some manner, even prevented altogether, somehow. Anything might work - for all anypony knew, maybe just saying "No!" at the right moment might have stopped it! Gregoria began to feel frantic. She had to warn her friend, but how?

How did she know she was still Gregoria? It was because she could remember before, and after. Because she could feel when her new pony brain conflicted with her memories of who she used to be, and how she used to act. Memory conflict. Perhaps that was the answer.

Gregoria unfolded her front legs, placed her forehooves solidly, then shifted her weight and raised her hindquarters while lifting herself to standing. She ambled about the room, hooves clomping on the linoleum, ill-fitting boots floppity-flapping. That was a thought. Bare human feet make almost no sound at all. They're soft. But hooves are hard and clop on a hard floor! It would be quite the anomaly. Gregoria began trying to extricate her rear hooves from her tall boots. She had to lay down and push with her other limbs, but she managed to remove her well packed boots. She piled the scarves that had filled them on top of the boots with her teeth. Gregoria clopped about the apartment, making quite the racket.

Rachel would have to notice that!

What else? Gregoria searched the room again. The bookcase! As a human, she had been as tall as the bookcase, almost exactly as tall as that Ikea structure. Now, she was half that height, coming up to only just past the third shelf, barely to the fourth. She could force Rachel to confront the fact that...

Wait. When Gregoria had first arrived, there was something odd on the bookshelf that had caught her eye, but then lunch was ready. The picture. The picture on the fourth shelf, the one of Rachel and Rick at the Williamsburg Bridge.

Gregoria stared at the image. She had thought it was a silly photoshop job. Something goofy, an attempt to make it look as if Rachel and Rick had been visiting Canterlot, the capitol city in the My Little Pony cartoon. The Williamsburg Bridge behind them in the photograph had been replaced with a painted version of what the same bridge would look like if it had been designed by the art team working on the show. Gregoria had thought it a pretty good job, properly shaded and everything. Maybe even rendered using 3D software.

On closer examination, the Equestrian-styled version of the Williamsburg Bridge was not just pretty good. It was frightening.

Gregoria had gone to the shelves and studied the photograph in its frame. Rachel was hugging Rick in the picture, and behind them was the bridge. There is always some giveaway in a rendered image, especially one done of something unearthly. Software had come a long way, but it certainly wasn't perfect yet. The lighting might be just slightly wrong, the contrast not exactly right, the shadows off just a bit, the colors or textures just a little false, but something always gave a fake image away. Not even Hollywood could do truly perfect rendering. If you know what to look for, the technology always has flaws. So far, anyway.

The Equestianized Williamsburg Bridge was perfect. It was real in a way that no professional artist, however talented, could ever equal. Gregoria blinked, turned away, then stepped back to face the impossible image. The bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, was a cartoon bridge. No, that wasn't quite right - the design was in the style of the cartoon, it was as if the real bridge had always been built in pony style, with curving arcs and pseudo-medieval stonework and impossibly fanciful decorations of gold and marble. Banners hung from it, banners showing the supposed flag of Equestria, the one with the stylized shapes of Celestia and Luna curving round a half-sun-half-moon and stars.

And it was real. It was not photoshop, it had not been painted, it was absolutely, undeniably real. There was no flaw, no fault, no little subtle indication. The lighting was right, the texture correct in that strange way that hit deep in the gut and shouted "Authentic."

But it was worse than that, because Gregoria knew the person who had taken that picture, and who had put it in a frame and given it to Rachel and Rick. That frame had not been touched, the picture had not been altered, and Gregoria knew that Rachel would never have replaced the photograph within it with a ponified version. It meant too much.

It was the last picture ever taken of Rachel that had Rick in it beside her, and Gregoria had taken it just eight months ago.

The door opened and Rachel was back with a bag that smelled of cheese and bread and olive oil - and death. "Greggie! I'm back! Sorry I took so long, but there was a line. I'm so glad you're still here! Hey, I got you a slice of pepperoni with extra, extra meat just like you like - I don't know if you're still hungry, but it's here if you want it!"

The last thing Gregoria wanted after that enchanted feast of daisy sandwiches was a slice of pizza covered with disks of dead animal flesh, but she forced herself to smile and nod even as her stomach rebelled at the thought.

Rachel locked her door solidly and set her bag down on the kitchenette table. Beside it she placed the cans of coke she had also bought. "Hey... whatcha' lookin' at?"

"Um... Rachel? This picture, here - " Gregoria gestured with a hoof at the last picture of Rick and Rachel by the bridge "you haven't done anything to it, have you?"

Rachel looked puzzled. "Like what?" She hadn't a clue. It was clear from her expression that she couldn't see anything strange at all.

"The bridge." Gregoria felt a need to press.

"Uh huh?" Rachel's expression was blank.

"Does it look odd to you... at all?"

Rachel studied the picture for a moment. "No. Why?"

Gregoria swallowed and felt her ears dip low on her head. "The bridge looks normal? Like the Williamsburg Bridge?"

"Yeah?" Rachel started to laugh, then stopped, looked unsure for a moment, then began to half-grin. "Did you do something?"

Gregoria's ears went flat against her skull, then rose slowly. "No, no, no. No, of course not. I just wondered. It must be the lighting is all."

Rachel lifted up the photograph in the frame, looked it over, wiped the dust off with a finger, and put it back on the shelf. "Looks fine to me. We were all there, I think if something was wrong with the bridge Rick would have..." Rachel looked very sad for a moment, and stared at the image of Rick for a short time. "Um... pizza." She returned to the table and began unpacking her bag. Gregoria followed, but draped herself over the soft armchair nearby.

"Rachel?"

Rachel was chewing her slice of double cheese, occasionally taking a sip of her just-opened coke. "Mnn?"

Gregoria tried to think of any way to breach such a subject, or even if she really should. She needed a confidant. She needed somepony else, she felt so alone, so incredibly alone and if anypony in the world might possibly help her, it would be Rachel. And Rachel needed to be warned, too. But this - this matter of changing into another creature, it was just impossible to work out the best way to begin discussing it. But seeing the bridge in the picture had thrown Gregoria over into realizing that she needed help desperately. This change thing wasn't just about her, or even Rachel.

If her family, and all the humans out there in the world, if Rachel - the biggest pony fan she knew - could all be perfectly blind to what had happened to her, then it must also be true that she, when she had been human, must have been blind to such things as well. The Williamsburg Bridge had appeared perfectly ordinary when she had taken that picture of Rachel and Rick. Perfectly, completely ordinary. But it hadn't been, it couldn't have been. Eight months ago, when that picture was taken, when Gregoria had been completely human, that bridge must have already been changed. Altered. Transformed, and not one of them had noticed or seen it for what it really was.

Now Gregoria could imagine what it must be like for everypony else. She had apparently experienced the strange perceptual blindness herself. That bridge had seemed perfectly ordinary. Every part of her memory told her this to be the truth. Yet that photograph, the one she had taken and put into a frame and given to Rachel as a present, said otherwise. And now, changed herself, Gregoria could see the truth she had been blind to eight months ago.

It wasn't just her. The bridge had transformed before she had, only she had been incapable of knowing it. And if a bridge could change, and if she herself could change, then it was unlikely she was alone in the world. There might be any number of transformed humans - or bridges - out there, somewhere in the world. They couldn't be commonplace, not yet - that thought hung in her mind sending a shiver up her withers - but there could very easily be others out there. What was the chance that she, Gregoria Samson, was the very first human to be transformed like this?

No, this was big. This was bigger than just some strange curse, or some passing wizard or some bizarre alien ray from a flying saucer or any of the other thousand insane explanations she had been grasping at. It was more than one little pony on her own could handle. She needed Rachel. She needed... a friend.

"Greggie? Are you OK? You kinda seem out of it there. Did I take too long? Do you need to leave or something?" The look on Rachel's face clearly showed she didn't want her friend to leave, but she was trying to be good about whatever was going on.

"No. I don't want to leave. I came here to see you, I..." Gregoria halted, completely unable to think of what to say next. How do you tell somepony, anypony, something utterly impossible, something totally insane and have them not toss you out on your ear?

"It's alright, Greggie. You can tell me anything. You know that!" Rachel smiled, clearly relieved that Gregoria was staying.

'You can tell me anything' - oh, if only that glib phrase had any truth to it! Gregoria swished her tail. Humans said it so easily, but they never really meant it. Not truly. It was more like 'you can tell me anything so long as it fits within certain parameters which...'

Gregoria's ears went flat, and her eyes narrowed. 'Humans said it so...' That was how she was thinking now. Humans. They. Them. The not-pony creatures. Anypony, everypony, somepony - it was impossible to ignore anymore. Her brain and body and self couldn't deny the reality of her existence. She was Gregoria - she had to be Gregoria, that was an absolute - but she was Gregoria-the-pony. Gregoria AS pony. It was there, it was always there. As much as she wanted to, she couldn't un-see the gorilla anymore. The proof was in her every thought.

Proof.

That was what would work! Proof. Extraordinary claims demanded extraordinary proof. That was the rule, wasn't it? There was no way to just start talking about this without sounding insane. Gregoria realized she needed to start out with proof.

But what proof? How? Every sense was fooled by the weird blindness. Touch, sight - and apparently hearing, too. Taking her boots off had clearly been pointless. She should have realized that - Rachel hadn't noticed her new voice, why would she notice bare hooves clopping about on the linoleum? Besides, Gregoria had no boots on her front hooves so she'd been making clopping noises already anyway.

Smell? Taste? That was silly. What could possibly cut through such profound perceptual blindness?

Perhaps... contradiction. Maybe sufficient contradiction could do it. "Rachel, would you come over here, there is something I want you to see." Gregoria had gotten off the armchair and moved back to the bookcase.

Rachel was mostly done with her pizza. She shrugged and followed. "OK?"

When she had been human, Gregoria had been just about the height of that Ikea bookcase. Maybe a little bit taller. Now she was half that height, standing on all fours. "Rachel, you've seen me stand by this bookcase many times, right?"

Rachel seemed mildly amused. Maybe she expected a trick or a gag. "Yeah, so?"

"I've always been about as tall as the bookcase, right?"

Rachel giggled. "Are you being silly?"

"I've always been the same height as this bookcase." It wasn't a question now, it was a statement. Gregoria said the words with force.

"What is this, a joke?" Rachel half laughed, but the laugh died in her throat. For a moment she seemed far away. "Your head barely just reaches the top. The bookcase is taller. What's the deal?"

"Barely... just?" Gregora noted that Rachel was looking down at her, not above her head. Rachel was looking down to meet her pony eyes. "Just how barely close to the top am I?"

Rachel looked up at the top of the bookcase, then down at Gregoria's face, then back up again. She did this several times, as if trying to estimate correctly. Rachel had a funny look on her face, as if she were confused. "I don't know, maybe... maybe just a little."

"A little." Rachel nodded. "How much is a little?" The way this worked was just fascinating to observe in action. If it weren't so important, Gregoria felt she could have endless fun just playing with the effect.

Rachel held out her hand and made an estimate of distance with her thumb and forefinger. "About this much, maybe?"

Gregoria shook her head. It was less than five inches. Is this what Rachel saw? No, it couldn't be - Rachel looked down to meet her eyes when they spoke. So it wasn't what she was seeing. It was more like what she was believing, in spite of what she was seeing. Perhaps some part of Rachel noticed the vast difference in height, saw it clearly, but processed that information in a way that tried to bridge the gap between what once was, and what she was experiencing now?

"I want you to try something. It may sound odd, but will you try?" This just had to work.

Rachel had no idea what any of this was about, but she was game. "OK. I'll try."

Gregoria stood as close as she could to the bookcase, facing Rachel. "Put one hand on the top of the bookcase."

Rachel smiled, then tried to look serious. "Ohhhh kay?" She put her left hand on topmost shelf.

"Now, put your other hand on the top of my poll."

Rachel giggled. "You used a pony term! Is this something to do with 'Friendship Is Magic'? You said you wanted to talk pony stuff!"

Gregoria winced slightly. The verbal slips her new brain made annoyed her. "Um... yeah. It's fun. Now go ahead and put your other hand on my... head."

Rachel gave a false look of being miffed, but complied. "I thought it was fun when you said 'poll'."

Gregoria sighed. "Alright then. You have one hand on the top of the bookcase, and one hand on the top of my... uh... poll." Grin and bear it, grin and bear it. "How far apart are your hands?" This should work!

Rachel looked quizzical. "Just... just a little bit. Like I said."

Of course. Rachel's brain could overlook this easily, she was staring right at Gregoria, and Gregoria's pony-ness was the cause of whatever the blindness was. No, no, this would never work. Not this way. Wait! Maybe there was a way to still use this! "Fine. Good." Gregoria tried to keep an even tone. "Now I want you to follow my instructions really perfectly, as exactly as you can, OK? Keep your hands exactly the same distance apart, don't move them one bit, alright?"

Rachel had gotten into the spirit of the thing. If it was somehow pony related, she was entirely on board. "Now what?"

Gregoria thought quickly. "Um... now... I want you to close your eyes, just for a moment, not long. I'm going to walk away, but you just stay there, stay right there and don't move a muscle. Then I'll tell you when to open your eyes. Don't move now! keep feeling where your arms are, and don't move one inch!"

Rachel was a very good friend indeed. She promptly closed her eyes and grinned. "Alright? Like this?"

Gregoria moved away and trotted into the kitchenette, around the small corner, and behind Rachel. "You're doing great. Now, Rachel, I want you to remain still, but slowly open your eyes, wait! Don't do it just yet, hear me out, alright?" Gregoria's heart was pounding, she wasn't sure this was going to work, but it was her best guess, and her only decent idea at the moment. "I want you to try to forget, to let go of the fact we were measuring my height, just let that all out of your mind. I want you to just think 'Hey, I'm standing here just... um... measuring my shelves. Forget I was part of this at all, OK?"

"Forget you were..." Rachel giggled again, because this really did sound like some kind of magic trick or something now. "Sure, whatever. Just measuring the shelves. That's me, Rachel the shelf-measurer! Can I open my eyes now?"

Gregoria's tail kept hitting the kitchen cabinet as it swung. She felt nervous. What if this worked? Then what? But she needed this to work. Oh sweet Luna, but this was a mess. "Go ahead, open your eyes - don't move even a bit, just open your eyes." Moment of truth.

Rachel stood silent for too long, then she laughed. "How'd you DO that? I didn't feel a thing!"

Muffin! Her mind was inventing explanations. Perceptual blindness was a slippery thing. "I didn't move your hands one bit. Rachel. Not a bit. They never moved." This wasn't going to work, was it? Gregoria began to feel despondent. What would break the hold of this thing?

"Come on, you must have! You aren't this short!" Rachel was standing in the middle of the room with her hands still widely apart.

An idea came to Gregoria. It just might work. "Rachel! Go back to the shelf now. It's the best part of the... um... trick! Keep your hands the same distance apart, and go back to the shelf. Just stand exactly like you did, please? Exactly the same, with your hands the same distance apart! Exactly the same, alright?"

"Ohh... Kay...." Rachel crab-walked back to the shelf, trying to keep her arms the same wide distance apart as they had been. "I'm back. At the shelves. Same position. Now what? And what does this have to do with anything pony?"

"If it works, you'll see. If it works." Gregoria felt both hope and dread with regard to Rachel actually being able to see her. How would she react? How would anypony react? Gregoria knew how she would have reacted, and it wouldn't have been very nice or very positive. "Stay right as you are and whatever happens, don't move. Don't move an inch!"

Gregoria took a deep breath. She let it out, and trembling more than a bit walked to the bookcase, slowly and carefully. She parked her head right under Rachel's lower hand, making sure her tall, golden yellow ear was right up against the side of Rachel's palm. Gregoria began whisking her ear back and forth against the side of Rachel's hand, and also started sweeping her tail back and forth as well. Sensory overload. Flicking pony ear. Whisking pony tail. Height difference. Slow approach with eyes open. Maybe, maybe it would work, maybe it would be just too many contradictions to ignore, all happening at the same time.

Gregoria carefully rotated her head to look up into Rachel's eyes, all while keeping contact with her friend's hand. She wanted Rachel to feel her coat, to feel her thick inhuman mane.

Rachel stood, frozen, like a robot unable to process instructions. Her eyes seemed glazed, and her pupils were changing size, sometimes small, and sometimes large as if the light was shifting somehow. The expression on her face was slack-jawed and empty. Like Gregoria's mother almost, in that moment before she 'adjusted'. That must be what Rachel was doing, that must be what her brain was working on right now, right in this instant! That couldn't be allowed to happen, if that happened, then things would be 'settled' and probably nothing would work after that!

At the top of her funny, cartoon voice, Gregoria Samson shouted at her friend. "I'M A PONY! I'M A REAL LIVE, YELLOW EARTH PONY WITH A BLACK MANE AND A BLACK TAIL AND I EAT GRASS AND I HAVE HOOVES AND I. AM. A. PONY!!!"

Rachel's eyes suddenly focused, clearly and sharply on the unearthly creature before her. The unearthly creature she was touching, the creature that she could feel the fur of, right under her hand. Huge - oh sweet Jesus such big huge purple eyes! Scary giant eyes, oh god they were so big and ears and tail and yellow all over and oh my fucking goddamn...

Rachel leapt back, crashing into the cheap reading lamp, knocking it over with a bang and a crash. She pinballed off the overstuffed arm chair and fell into the kitchenette, not even noticing the blow to her head from the edge of the table. Rachel was on the floor now, scuttling on all fours, backwards into the cabinets, whimpering. That was the worst part, Gregoria thought, Rachel wasn't screaming, she wasn't shouting, she was whimpering, like a beaten puppy.

Gregoria had followed her to the edge of the corner that turned into the kitchenette. She stopped there, afraid to approach any closer for both of their sakes. "Rachel... Rachel? I know this seems really weird. I know this is scary and I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry. But I need your help. I need your help so much! You aren't crazy and this isn't a trick, it's me, Gregoria, I'm a pony now. I've turned into a pony and I need your help. Please, please try to calm down, please..."

Rachel wasn't calming down. She wasn't even looking now, she was crying, whimpering and crying, pressed up against the cabinets with her eyes tight shut, mumbling about Jesus and her mother and other things that couldn't be made out.

"Rachel... please. I know this is really difficult, but imagine what it's been like for me. I woke up this way about a week ago. I was scared out of my mind. I didn't know what had happened. I didn't know what to do. I don't know about ponies like you do, It's just a cartoon to me, and then suddenly I am one and... Rachel? Rachel?" Gregoria shuffled her hooves on the linoleum. This wasn't working. Rachel was trying to run away inside herself, run away to some place where this wasn't true. She wasn't listening.

Gregoria stepped cautiously into the kitchenette, trying to make as little sound with her hooves as possible. She crept past the table, past the fallen chair that Rachel had knocked over in her mad scramble. Animal comfort. The most basic thing in all of life. Simple animal comfort. Temple Grandin would be so proud. Gregoria stood beside her friend, beside Rachel pressed up tight against the cabinets, eyes shut, whispering and weeping.

Gregoria pressed the full length of her body into Rachel, leaning in, a living Hug Box. She just stood there, silent, pressing against her friend, letting her feel her warmth, her soft golden coat, her slow breathing, her heartbeat. After a while, Rachel stopped crying and whispering. She still clung, muscles taut as iron cables, to the cabinets. She still kept her eyes shut tight, but she wasn't making terrible noises anymore.

Slowly, carefully, Gregoria folded her legs and lay down, still pressing against Rachel. She lay still, trying to control her breathing for a long time, until the light from the windows turned golden with sunset. Rachel suddenly let go, slumping into herself, exhausted. Gregoria startled at this, and without warning, Rachel's hand suddenly reached out and began patting Gregoria's rear, stroking her coat as if comforting a large dog.

It actually felt good. It felt really good. Gregoria began to realize that the whole experience had been emotionally difficult for her, too, and she suddenly felt overwhelmed with the release of her own tension, her own fear and worry. She slumped, and lay her head on the floor. The patting and stroking continued. Gregoria began sniffling, then crying softly. The tension flowed out of her. The petting turned into scratching, which felt even better, and began to work its way up her back. Now Rachel's hand was in Gregoria's withers, scritching around her mane. That just felt heavenly. Gregoria had stopped crying and found herself sighing.

"Oh... oh, right there. Oh Celestia... that... that's the spot. Yeah. Oh... yeah..." Gregoria's tail wagged with pleasure. The spot just at the base of her neck, that felt so very good.

The scratching turned into long, slow strokes down her golden back.

"Rachel?" The stroking stopped. The hand hesitated.

"Y-yes... Gre... Gregoria?" It sounded like Rachel wasn't entirely sure what she was dealing with.

"It's me. I'm really Gregoria. This just happened. About a week ago. I'm sorry I scared you. You bumped your head on the table. Are you OK?"

There was a pause, then the hand began stroking her back again. "I'll live. I got myself pretty good though." Another pause. "Maybe you could take a look at it? I think it bled a little."

Gregoria felt tears run from her eyes. "Y-yeah. I'd be happy to. Now?"

Rachel was running her hand along the length of Gregoria's body, from her poll to her tail, all along her back. "In a while."

"Sure." Gregoria sniffed, then smiled.

"You're..." Rachel began, then trailed off.

"What?"

"I like your color. You're a pretty pony."

Gregoria laughed, softly, though not with glee. "You're the first person to ever tell me that."

"Does anybody else know?"

"No. Nopony can see. That's why..." Gregoria stared at the linoleum tiles for a moment. "That's why I had to do what I did. There's some kind of block. Some kind of thing that keeps humans from seeing."

"'Nopony', 'humans'. You're kind of getting into the whole pony thing, huh?"

Gregoria lifted her head. "I'm kind of a pony now. It seems to go with the territory."

"Yeah." Rachel slid down from her slumped position until her head was closer to Gregoria's. She tried to move her legs to be more comfortable, Gregoria shifted to allow Rachel to lay on her side, back to the cabinet. Rachel supported her head with one hand, and delicately examined one of Gregoria's yellow ears with the other. Rachel stopped after a bit and studied the profile of the golden pony pressed up against her. "I can kind of get that."

"Are... are you... will you still be my... are we...?" Gregoria felt very insecure all of a sudden. She was afraid to turn her head and look at Rachel. She was afraid of scaring her, she was afraid of being rejected.

"I'm still pretty freaked. But... this... is also kinda nice, too. You're warm and soft, and that's not bad when your whole world crashes down around you. Smart move that, it helped." Rachel was stroking Gregoria's mane and back again. "Yeah, we're still friends. That doesn't change. Just because I got scared out of my head, doesn't mean I stop being your friend."

Gregoria's pony brain won this round, and she hadn't any wish to oppose it. The tears of relief felt wonderful, and she found Rachel holding her tight while she cried out her lonliness, and fear, and shame, and grief. When the little storm had passed, and she had wiped her eyes and muzzle on a soft yellow leg, Gregoria sniffed and finally smiled and looked into Rachel's eyes.

"Purple eyes!" Rachel put on an air of mock upset. "Lucky! Purple is complementary to yellow, you know. You're quite the color coordinated pony. Did you get to choose or something?"

Gregoria's head sunk down, and her ears sagged. "No. I had no choice at all."

6. Neighbor Within The Limits Of The World

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

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Neighbor Within The Limits Of The World

"Anyone who loves his neighbor within the limits of the world

is doing no more and no less injustice than someone who loves

himself within the limits of the world."

Franz Kafka

"Can you narrow the field at all, Mr. Crown?" Guillaume was working with Nadzieja, because Thibault was sick with the flu. Nadzieja had once been a member of the old Polish secret service or somesuch, the UOP, the Urząd Ochrony Państwa - whatever that was - and had ended up working for Mr. Crown exclusively. Malus Crown seemed to attract the disaffected and the alienated who also were willing to do pretty much anything for insane amounts of cash.

Really, thought Guillaume, that was pretty much everyone, come to think of it.

"What are you laughing about, Bill?" Nadzieja always called Guillaume 'Bill'. He let it slide because she was attractive for an older woman, and because the way she said it sounded affectionate.

Guillaume stopped chuckling and threw a smile at Nadzieja. "Just thinking about how absurd life is, really."

"I ran out of laughs for that long ago. You must still be capable of surprise then. This, I will note." Nadzieja returned to her cross-checking and searching. Her fingers flashed over the Mac keyboard.

Mr. Crown rotated the chair he was perched so carefully upon, as always on the edge of his seat. "Guillaume. You had a question?"

Guillaume raised his head from his 27-inch iMac and nodded. "I wondered if there was any way to narrow the field a bit. There are just so many stories, and so many authors with so much in common. Isn't there any other clue, any other detail that might help?"

The problem was difficult, perhaps impossible. For days now, Mr. Crown's little team had been tasked with finding a needle in a very large haystack. The goal of their search seemed to be one single man. Who wrote stories. Fanfiction stories.

He had to be a man between the ages of 21 and 30. He had to be obsessed with a cartoon, a children's cartoon about ponies living in a fantasy land. There was a vast number of such men, because apparently the cartoon was strangely popular with an unexpected audience.

'My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic' was a cartoon for little girls that had somehow become intensely popular with adults, including adult men. This was the cartoon that had inspired the trip to Prague, and which Mr. Crown was completely dedicated to. Somewhere out there, in the world, was a single man, a young man, who also liked the cartoon, and Mr. Malus Crown was desperate to find him.

The young man had to also be a soldier. A soldier that wrote a very specific, but also incredibly common sort of story. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of versions of that story, each written by a different author, all soldiers, all men.

The story was fairly simple. A soldier, almost certainly representative of the author, is injured and killed. He might be shot on the battlefield, or blown up by a hidden explosive device, or crushed in a wreck of plane or car. Some versions of the story had no clear explanation of how the soldier character dies, but die they did, in every story.

Next the soldier in the story wakes up. He is a pony, a pony from the cartoon. He might be a stallion, or a mare, he might be a unicorn or a pegasus. He might even be a little foal. Rarely, the soldier wakes up as a diamond dog, or a gryphon, or even as a dragon - all other creatures native to the fantasy land from the cartoon. The core of the story is always the same. The fantasy land, Equestria, is the afterlife. The rulers of Equestria are two pony goddesses, and for varying reasons they grant the reincarnated human soul permanent residence in their land. Perhaps the soldier has been brought to Equestria to save it from enemies, sometimes it is simply a reward, some stories posit the entire thing as an accident, others as a choice made by the soldier's soul.

Hundreds and hundreds of stories, all similar, all with the same basic concept, all written by disaffected soldiers stuck in unhappy places. The majority of the authors were Americans, but there were some British and Australians as well. Guillaume had written to some of the moderators of websites that collected such stories to find that such stories were among the most common that they saw uploaded. There were a lot of unhappy soldiers all wishing the same wish, and dreaming the same dream.

Guillaume had once asked Mr. Crown if he was thinking of Bishop Berkeley and his notion of Immaterialism, sometimes called 'subjective idealism'

Crown had seemed pleasantly surprised by the suggestion. "Heh, that is indeed something that had crossed my mind. You are well read, my good Guillaume."

"Do you think, sir, that the wishes of soldiers are altering the world itself?"

Mr. Crown shook his head slowly. "No, not exactly. I don't agree with Berkeley that reality is created by thought. I find that smacks too much of spirits and gods. I don't see mankind as possessing such power." Crown had shifted uncomfortably, as he always did, a faint grimace on his face. Guillaume sometimes wondered to himself if Malus Crown was a sick man, perhaps a man facing mortality and driven into a mad Quixotic quest as a way to deny his end. He certainly seemed to be uncomfortable much of the time, and he was very gaunt.

"Why is it that we search for this soldier, then?"

Malus had stood, and stretched himself, shaking out his legs. "I think that there might be keys to the world, and that our mysterious soldier may have found one." Crown pondered briefly, tapping his foot. "Perhaps 'key' isn't the right word. A back door. A back door to the world, I think."

All Guillaume could do, of course, was to shake his head when Mr. Crown had turned away. The man would only answer so much, and more he clearly guarded to himself, as if he were embarrassed by his madness, and unwilling to bother those in his employ with the full pathos of it. This had endeared Mr. Crown to Guillaume, as much as it was possible for anyone to do so.

"Nadzieja?" Guillaume, back again to the present moment, had found a possible candidate. He was a soldier, he had written several stories all about the proper topic - a soldier is killed and wakes up in Equestria as his afterlife - though this particular author had posited a curious twist. In his fanfiction, the soldier character begs the goddess Celestia to permit any human who wished to, to travel to Equestria when they died, and to allow them to become any creature native to her world. He had written three stories within his little fantasy.

This writer also fit the last criteria that Mr. Crown had required. It was a fairly morbid one - the author was himself dead, just as the character in his story. Interestingly, the man had died in exactly the same way as the character he had written about - together with the men of his troop in a transport, blown up by a buried explosive device.

"Yes, Bill?"

Guillaume clicked his single-button iMac mouse. "There. Would you find out what you can about mister... um...
Private First Class Richard Deckard? American military." Guillaume thought for a moment. "Please?"

"Of course, Bill. It is what we are being paid for, is it not?" Nadzieja flipped her mid-length, dark black hair with a hand, and dove back into her typing and clicking. "Huh."

"What?"

Nadzieja shrugged. "It is curious. This one man, his records have all been sealed, and from the highest level too. I cannot find any reason, he is otherwise uninteresting."

Guillaume waved his hand. "Mr. Crown?"

──── ∆ ────

Gregoria had needed Rachel to utilize the cellphone, hooves just didn't conduct like fingertips did. Gregoria's mother had no problem with her daughter staying over for a while, one less mouth to feed and it was clear she secretly was hoping that it might mean a second shot at leaving the nest. If anything, she was over-eager, which made Gregoria feel just... wonderful.

"She doesn't mean it that way, Greggie! She just feels glad you are having fun with me!" Rachel constantly tried to see the best in people. It had always been her most annoying trait. Well, it had been, before, when Gregoria's brain wasn't a pony brain. Now, Gregoria found she wasn't annoyed at Rachel trying to cheer her up, or that Rachel was choosing to interpret her mother's excitement at getting rid of her daughter for a while as gladness for a social opportunity, rather than relief from a burden. None of that annoyed Gregoria now, thanks to her new pony brain.

What was annoying, was that she was feeling massively cheered up. That was positively scary.

The two friends had gone out to get groceries, especially things that an Equestrian pony might be able to eat. Gregoria had explained her new profound vegetarianism, and Rachel had gone on at some length detailing the things ponies on the show had been shown to eat. Anything plant based was exactly right, but much to Gregoria's surprise, eggs were allowed. Apparently even native terrestrial horses could digest eggs, so there was nothing bizarre about it. Horse breeders gave eggs in order to supply extra protein, and to make coats shiny.

Apparently, at least for equines, eggs did not count as meat. There was an argument there - an egg was just an overlarge single cell held within a shell. No tissue, no animal, liquid protein for the taking.

At first, Rachel had been nervous, constantly looking about ready to block an imagined horde of black-and-white Frankenstein movie villagers attacking with pitchforks and burning torches. Gregoria's profound 'pony-ness' was so obvious to her now that it stunned her how nobody else could see it.

"I was like that, wasn't I? Like them?" Rachel pointed to the women standing next to the apples and pears.

Gregoria snorted. "Yeah, like just only two hours ago! You remember me when I arrived, right, what did I look like?" She snorted a second time, more softly, but still a pony-ish laugh.

"I... I'm actually not sure." Rachel seemed distant, and stopped in the market. "It's kind of, well, fuzzy. Like my memory now is kind of struggling. I remember you as old-Gregoria, but also as if you were how you are now. It's like I knew but I didn't know, and now I'm remembering... sort of." Rachel knitted her brow. "That sounds kind of goofy, doesn't it?"

"No, maybe not. I don't think the blindness thing is like not seeing, or like seeing something that isn't there." Gregoria and Rachel were walking again, headed towards the produce bins to the side of the fruit. "It isn't some weird veil or shield or cloak or whatever. People see me, they see me as a pony just fine. I think their brains are somehow choosing to interpret what they see as human, rather than pony. I think it's like color."

Rachel pointed out something that looked very pony. Wheat grass, in a little box. Juicers - people who liked to make health food drinks in their mixers - had a thing for grinding up wheat grass, so now markets sometimes carried it. The little boxes looked like squares of lawn. "Color? How do you mean?"

The box of pasture-land made Gregoria drool. She nodded vigorously until she saw the price. Four bucks for a tiny square of grass! "I read once, on some science site, how we don't really see color. We compute it, and sometimes we compute it all wrong."

"So maybe my memory of first seeing you getting all muddled is... sort of my brain realizing its own, um, computer error or something?" Despite the price, Rachel got two of the small cartons of wheat grass. It wasn't enough to make a meal of, but she had noticed how strongly Gregoria-the-pony had reacted to it. Rachel wanted to make her friend feel happy, if she could.

"Yeah... something like that. I'm not having any reaction about the bridge though." Gregoria pointed a hoof at chard, celery, carrots, and some leafy thing she couldn't see the label for because it was too high. The prices for all were very low and Gregoria smiled and the two of them began loading their cart with greenery.

"Maybe it's because that happened so long ago. Maybe there isn't enough fresh memory to make a fuss in your head?" Rachel grabbed a big red beet and dangled it in front of Gregoria who took a sniff and then nodded happily. "Want any lettuce? Do ponies like lettuce?"

Gregoria grinned. "This one does! Cabbage too, if they have any. Ooh! Can we get some apples? That pony on the show was like "Mooaarr Apples!!!"

"You're thinking of 'Jappleack' from those Diggity Demon fan cartoons. She's not really canon." Rachel pushed the cart to the fruit section and picked out some good looking Fujis... and a Braeburn, because, Braeburn. "But Applejack, she grows apples and she loves apples too. Actually, all the canon ponies seem to like apples. Just not to the point of insanity."

"Um... listen, you know I'm paying for all of this, right? I've got my card in my, um, saddlebags." The ratty old bicycle bags were slung over Gregoria's back, and she had her boots on again too. "I'm not a freeloader."

Rachel laughed. "You silly. You're my guest. Besides, you gave me a miracle today, so I figure I owe you big."

Gregoria's ears sagged. "I have some money, I'm not entirely broke. There's a lot of stuff here! I want to help!" Was that genuine, or was that her 'helpful Equestrian pony' brain talking? Maybe it was still genuine - after all, she was a pony now. It was really hard sometimes to tell where old Gregoria stopped and pony Gregoria began. It was getting more blurred with every decision she made.

"No, you don't understand. I meant that. You brought me a miracle today. You have no idea what that means to me!" Rachel seemed odd, almost beaming. She'd been sad and clingy for months and months. That was why human Gregoria had abandoned her. Now she was positively bubbly.

"What's up, tell me? What do you mean 'miracle?' My going pony? Seems more like a curse to me." They were in the cereal aisle now, and Gregoria watched Rachel grab several containers of oats, both milled and whole.

"Ponies eat oats. Really. I bet you'll go nuts for them." Rachel thought a few moments, then piled in a big metal container of Scottish oats for 'variety'. "I said miracle and I meant it. Think about it Greggie. You got turned into a pony, overnight, just like magic, zap! You're a pony!"

"Don't remind me." Gregoria began to sulk.

"No, no, don't be like that, it's not a curse, I know that for a fact. It's a blessing, the biggest blessing in the world, even if it's hard for you right now." Gregoria had gone on at length to Rachel about how deeply being a pony sucked muffins. How everything was so difficult and how lost and alien she felt.

"How is this," Gregoria jabbed a hoof at herself "not a curse?"

They had stopped in the pasta aisle. Pasta was grain, and ponies were oatburners, they thrived on grain so pasta had to be alright to eat. Besides, it was vegetarian in any case. Gregoria seemed eager enough, she had liked pasta before, so pasta as a pony had to be at least as good.

"I know you've had a hard time, but try to think what all of this means to me." Rachel crouched down and held Gregoria's face in her hands. "I've lost my sweetie. But along you come, all changed into a pony! You're not dead, you're still you, you just happen to be a talking pony. That's a miracle from where I am. It's completely impossible, completely bonkers, yet here you are. Think about what that says about the world!"

"It says the world is a very mean place that plays dirty tricks on ponies, that's what it says!" Gregoria was far too cute when she pouted now, and it was everything Rachel could do not to start cooing and giggling at the sight.

"It says that anything is possible. Anything." Rachel paused, crouched on her heels, to let that sink in. "If the impossible can happen, then maybe nothing is impossible. Maybe anything is possible. Maybe there really is an Equestria out there somewhere. Maybe space men are real, maybe magic is real, maybe... heaven... is real."

The implication of that last statement was not lost on Gregoria. If miracles could really happen - and being transformed into a real live Equestrian pony was about as miraculous a thing as could be imagined - then maybe, just maybe, Rachel could hope to see her Rick again, someday, somewhere. That was what had made Rachel so happy. Gregoria's transformation had opened the possibility of... previously impossible hopes.

Gregoria chafed at this inside, it was logically unsound. One impossibility being shown to be possible did not automatically toss all previous understanding out the window - but she couldn't bring herself to argue with her grieving friend. Hope was a precious commodity right now, and for Gregoria herself, it was the only thing keeping her going. She decided to let the issue slide, partly because of her over-compassionate pony brain, and partly because she was afraid that in talking Rachel out of arbitrarily assuming an afterlife, she might talk herself out of arbitrarily assuming there was a cure for her transformation.

They shopped in silence for some time, nodding at things - tomatoes? Mnn. Artichoke hearts? Mnn. Chile? Oh wait, that had meat. Huh-uh. Finally, Rachel spoke. "You can't just walk around like a pony, right? You have to wear clothes, sort of, right?"

Gregoria was startled out of not trying to think about the possibility that her own hopes to be changed back might be logically unsound. "Huh?"

"Your clothes. No offense, but... they're not exactly 'Rarity Originals', you know?" Rachel giggled a false laugh to try to ease the tension of effectively insulting Gregoria's ensemble.

"Heh, yeah. I know it's pretty awful." Gregoria's cheap skirt never covered her bottom for long, and almost instantly ended up as a cloth band around her waist which dragged on the ground and sometimes tripped her hind legs. The tube-top was beyond hopeless, more a collar than anything, and the boots just flopped, constantly threatening to come off her pony legs.

"It's necessary, though, right?" Rachel considered a bag of onion-flavored potato chips. "Otherwise everyone would see you as naked?"

"That's the deal. I have to wear something. It doesn't seem to need to fit properly or even make complete sense. I think there's some rules to it, but they seem pretty sloppy. But yeah, shoes on my back legs, something to suggest I'm covering my ass, and something people can interpret as being a top. Without it, I'd just look naked." Gregoria stared at a box of cookies. The Keebler Elves were all ponies. With buckle hats and pointier ears. "Rachel - look at that box, that one, right there. The elves on it?"

"Keebler, yeah."

"Look normal to you?" Gregoria was pointing at the box with a hoof.

"Um... yes?"

"I see them as ponies. It's like the bridge in your picture." Gregoria put her hoof down and leaned in to study the box. Ponies. Dressed like leprechauns or whatever the Keebler company thought elves dressed like. It certainly wasn't Lord Of the Rings clothing.

Rachel squatted and took the box in her hands. She studied it as if trying to force herself to see what Gregoria saw. "I wish I could see it. Pony elves sound funny!"

"Don't wish that!" Gregoria sounded upset, because she was. "You know what I told you before. The flashes, the dreams. Maybe wishes do it!"

Rachel put the box back on the shelf and turned her attention to Gregoria. "Did... you wish to be a pony, Greggie?"

Gregoria's mouth opened and closed wordlessly. "NO!" She shouted the words. "NO! I would NEVER..."

Rachel put her hand on Gregoria's muzzle, shushing her. "Sorry! It was just a question, I'm sorry!" Gregoria stared at the floor. "Greggie... Gregoria, come on, I know you wouldn't wish for such a thing. You barely even tolerate the show. I know it. You put up with it for me."

This made Gregoria feel bad. She looked Rachel in the eyes. "I... It's good, for a cartoon, I just... It's just that..."

"It's OK, Greggie. You're just worried about me. I understand." Rachel had been squatting too long, and she was having a hard time getting up because the blood had gotten pinched a bit. "Ow..."

"Here, lean on me. I have a strong back. Now, at least." Gregoria positioned herself so that Rachel could push herself erect with a hand on Gregoria's pony back.

Rachel moved about, uncomfortably. One of her legs had gone numb and she was dealing with unpleasant spiky tingles as it woke up. "Thanks... oh, damn. I hate when that happens."

"I know what you mean. Or at least I did. I haven't had anything like that since I changed." Gregoria had to admit that her new body was remarkably robust. Her limbs never went to sleep, even if she lay on them. She never seemed to get tired - Rachel said that was an earthpony trait. Endless stamina. And she was scary strong, another earthpony trait, apparently.

The cover on the huge metal trash bin behind the apartment building had been stuck, so Gregoria had given it a kick for Rachel. The heavy, thick steel lid had buckled in the middle as if it were made of tinfoil. They had both looked at each other, Rachel had tossed her trash, then they high-tailed it out of the alley hoping nopony had noticed. Gregoria suspected that if she really tried, she could probably buck down a brownstone building and not even break a sweat. She felt like superpony in that regard, and had since tried to be very careful about her earthpony strength.

Rachel began to push the cart to the checkout. "So, you have to wear clothes. I have an idea. A couple of ideas, actually. You willing to visit a few more stores, or are you getting tired?"

Gregoria glared.

"Oh right. Earthpony. Hee! Silly me." Rachel began putting their items on the conveyor belt.

──── ∆ ────

The evening meal had been quite fun. Gregoria had enjoyed trying all sorts of proper pony foods. She found she couldn't get enough of oats - she preferred the natural to the milled, claiming that she could taste the iron from the milling process. Her new pony teeth crushed the hard oat kernels with ease, something her human teeth would not have enjoyed. The flavor for her was deliciously rich and seemed fattening, something which Rachel claimed to be true, at least for terrestrial ponies.

The leafy produce was another heavenly banquet, the raw beet that Gregoria had shown interest in a special favorite. Rachel laughed with delight watching Gregoria's eyes roll back with each happy crunch. Rachel held the beet and fed it to Gregoria like a slave girl in a movie about Rome feeding grapes to a Praetor.

Carrots turned out to be a special thing too, apparently sweet-spicy to Gregoria's new senses. Rachel sat enraptured by every little detail she could get from Gregoria about how everything smelled and tasted to her. It was quite the experience, to try to imagine what ordinary things were like to a completely alien sapient creature able to talk about what they perceived. Even Gregoria found it fun - inside herself, she was also fascinated, comparing her 'pony' and 'pre-pony' sensations. It was a whole new world to explore.

Or perhaps, more accurately, the old world had been made new for the both of them.

After dinner, it was time to try out the results of their additional shopping. Rachel had gone a bit overboard, which she was prone to do, and bought all sorts of things for Gregoria. They had gone to a leather-goods store, which had made Gregoria's nose burn from the smell of the treated leather. Although she couldn't remain inside long as a result, she had managed to choose one of the three motorcycle saddlebags that fit her. Now she had a very attractive set of saddlebags done up in shiny black leather with studs. It doubtless made for a very 'punk' purse in the eyes of others.

There was a moment of 'adjustment' that Rachel had gotten to see in the store - when Gregoria was trying on the motorcycle saddlebags, the owner of the leather store blinked several times. Then he got a far-away look, and at Gregoria's hint, Rachel paid attention to the man's eyes. The pupils seemed to be having trouble finding a proper diameter, independent of each other. Then, suddenly, the man was alright. He just seemed to ignore the proceedings after that point, as if a human trying on motorcycle saddlebags was the most normal thing in the world.

"Was that what your mother was like? Was that what I was like?" Rachel seemed unnerved by the leather store owner's behavior.

"Yeah... that's what happens. It's kind of creepy. Especially the bit with the eyes." Gregoria found Rachel agreed entirely.

There were some unnecessary dangling straps on the new saddlebags, which Rachel trimmed with an exacto blade, a serrated knife, and a pair of scissors. When the bags were trimmed, Gregoria practiced slipping them on and off like the ponies on the show seem able to do. The stiffness of the leather made it possible to leave the bags standing with an arch between them. Gregoria found she could slip her head through that arch and then slide the bags down her neck. With a little wiggling, she could set them evenly across her back.

"They still stink, though!" Gregoria wrinkled her nose.

"That'll go away after a while. I think it'll go away. It does for purses, I know that." Rachel put on a cross face. "Besides - ungrateful! You should be a happy pony. Not every pony gets fancy saddlebags, you know!"

"What, so I'm your pet now?" Gregoria tried lifting one of the flaps with her teeth. She was pleased she could reach it.

"Hey... I always wanted a pony. Now, you're it." Rachel grinned.

"Then you can muck out my stable. I certainly eat like a horse - guess what I also do?" Now they were both laughing.

"OK, now, let's try to see if my other idea works as well as your new 'purse'." Rachel seemed like she was a child opening presents for herself. Rachel went to her closet, and pulled out her sewing machine and set it up on the table. She lifted the boxes of clothing she had bought for Gregoria - her plan was to adapt them for a pony body, following the designs shown in 'Friendship Is Magic' - skirts that were open and flowed only over the back, blouses easily tied and removed from a pony body with teeth. Shoes small and round and shaped for pony feet - Rachel had a very clever idea to simulate shoes that would free Gregoria from clumsy boots forever. Rachel seemed positively excited to see if she could help her very best friend.

Gregoria found it all quite odd.

She had dropped her supposed best friend because she had become a burden due to legitimate grief. Gregoria had ignored Rachel's calls, deleted her emails, and made herself absent the times Rachel came in person to try to find out what was up. She had refused to acknowledge Rachel's birthday, all to avoid having to deal with a 'clingy' friend.

Now, Gregoria herself was in desperate straits. She had forced her problem onto Rachel, selfishly, because she had nopony else to turn to. By all rights, Rachel should have spit on her. Yet here she was, spending her savings on new saddlebags and other things to make Gregoria's life easier, on special food just for her, and giving Gregoria all of her time.

With a sinking feeling, Gregoria realized how she would have treated all of this back when she had been human.

Without a second thought.

"What's the matter? Greggie? Gregoria? What is it? Are you in pain?" Rachel was there, just like that, while she stood on her four yellow legs and cried.

Gregoria was in pain, oh she was suffering terribly. The tears rolled down her hairy, golden cheeks and splattered on the floor. The beautiful new saddlebags felt like lead on her back, weighing her down with shame and regret... and also with horror.

Gregoria was filled with the deepest, most profound horror she had yet experienced throughout the entirety of her transformation and its aftermath. The horror inside her gobbled and devoured like some terrible creature, some toothed, sharp-clawed abomination from hell, and there was no way to escape it, all the tears in the world could never, ever escape it.

From the moment she had first awakened to her new pony body, Gregoria had known without any uncertainty that she was the righteous victim of a monstrous evil. That her task was to fight the vile cruelty had been inflicted upon her by her forcible transformation into an equine beast. Her cause was just and the rape of her form and shape was something to be avenged. To that end, Gregoria had kept the sharpest division she could between her human mind and the pony brain upon which the software of herself now ran. This was the means, the only means she had, to retain her human identity, to claim that she was in truth really 'Gregoria' and not a little yellow mare.

Comparison and contrast, what was before, versus what she endured now. In every moment, she sought any deviation from her memory of her human self, and counted that alien, inflicted upon her, foreign, awful, and ultimately to be eliminated.

As her tears splattered even harder on Rachel's linoleum, Rachel's generous and loving gifts all around her, her belly full of Rachel's kindness, all of it completely undeserved, the true, absolute horror of Gregoria's transformation finally hit her.

The enemy she inhabited, this alien pony body, this alien pony mind, was innately kinder and more worthy of life than human Gregoria had ever been.

7. Splendor Forever Lies In Wait

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

═════════════════════

Splendor Forever Lies In Wait

“Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness,

but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile,

not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name,

it will come.”

Franz Kafka

Pandit Ramsamooj had spent the entire day praying to Hayagrīva, but nothing had come of it. Pandit was still a horse. Or rather it was to be said that he was horse-like, though no earthly horse that he knew of had ever been bright blue, nor had possessed such wings as he had. Likewise his proportions were wrong for a true horse - he was tiny, with large hooves and a huge head bearing truly gargantuan eyes. His irises now were the color of rubies, and when he looked into them, in his reflection in the water, he somehow saw himself within them.

Pandit had not yet dared to fly, but he had wandered the streets of Khajuraho. Not one person, not even those claiming siddhis or Abhijñā, appeared to perceive his true form. If even the enlightened were blind, then there was only the gods to turn to, and of those Lord Hayagreevar, white, horse-headed, and the most excellent divinity of knowledge and wisdom was surely the obvious choice. Was not Pandit himself now a horse, even if a strange one? Surely Hayagrīva would count him as one of his own. Since a camatkāra had clearly happened overnight - Pandit, a man, had been transformed into a divine steed of some kind - then without doubt Hayagrīva would answer and explain his new role and place to him.

Just not today.

Pandit turned from the ancient monuments and trotted away from the crowds that had come to see them. The sun would set soon, and Pandit was hungry. Fortunately, life as a horse was very easy - there was grass to be had everywhere and water to drink besides. The needs of the body of a horse were easy to satisfy, and Pandit even found that the tastes of the grasses differed from area to area and kind to kind, and in them he found a banquet of delights. He would never go hungry in his new body, and without doubt he was of the most superior health.

It was, he had found, to his best interest not to be seen eating, because to others he still was somehow a man. But this to achieve was not difficult, and when he fed he gave thanks for the blessings of his strong new body, and the supreme ease of its keeping.

One day Lord Hayagreevar would surely answer. Until then, Pandit would pray, and wander the temples, and not need for alms or work or the concerns of Man. He would enjoy this most bountiful and splendid time of grace, before his task or purpose was finally revealed to him, and perhaps one auspicious day, he would teach himself the use of his wings.

──── ∆ ────

Marguerite stared at the Palais de Justice, gawking at the colors. Normally white stone, the Justitiepaleis had become a fairy-castle of pink and purple swirls, curious stripes and elaborate golden decorations. The dome that capped it now was an astonishing sight, even more ornate than before, and possessed of a spiral stripe. The ancient building stuck out now amidst all other buildings in Brussels, no longer because it was grand and old and exquisite, but because it was alien.

How could no one see this? Marguerite walked down the Rue De Wynants and occasionally stopped a passerby to ask them what they saw when she pointed to the Justitiepaleis. In every case, the answer was mundane - they saw the Palais, they saw a column or a window or the original white stonework from before the palace had changed, or whatever else it was that they assumed she was trying to indicate. Not one seemed able to grasp that the proper Palais de Justice had been removed in the night and replaced with a very dissimilar building of the same size which appeared, for all the world, as if it had come from the realm of fantasy.

Weary after another fruitless effort to understand the mystery of how ordinary citizens could completely fail to see the massive alterations of their city, Marguerite decided to make her usual long trek to one of the many scattered parks. Last week she had frequented the Parc de Forestier Bospark, she thought instead to travel to the much larger and more splendid Parc Duden to the south. Duden was near the Gevangenis St. Gilles where she had once enjoyed some lovely potato dishes, but best of all it had many shielding trees and wide, green lawns.

When the night came, and the park was finally deserted for the most part, she could take her supper in peace, grazing long and well as the pony she now was. Margurerite could almost accept that others saw her as an ordinary woman, after all she was but one individual in a vast and populous city. But the entirety of the Justitiepaleis? "Hangt hier de pot!"

──── ∆ ────

Rachel worked intently, hand stitching the last bit of the false shoelace to the hoofcover she had made. Gregoria stood still, careful not to interfere. It was easy to stand - she had learned the trick of locking her pony legs after Rachel had explained that it was possible to do so. Truth be told, Gregoria had nearly drifted off to sleep, and felt slightly embarrassed when Rachel patted her cheek to get her attention.

"Walk around a bit, gently at first, and let's see if it holds, 'kay?" Rachel smiled - she was clearly enjoying making clothing for a real live Equestrian. It was understandable, Gregoria supposed. Rachel did love the cartoon, and getting to play the part of the character who liked to make dresses... 'Rarity' was the name, yeah, 'Rarity'... was probably living out a personal fantasy for her. But it was more than that, Rachel had clearly been very lonely, and there was no doubting she was grateful to have Gregoria keeping her company at all - in pony form or not. The remaining human part of Gregoria found herself occasionally chafing at the sometimes obvious desperation in Rachel, even as the dominant pony part felt drawn to help and fill the emptiness in her friend.

The hoofcovers were a clever invention. They were like cuffs, easy to wrap around a rear hoof, the flaps held together with velcro. Gregoria had quickly learned to sit on her flank, curve her body and bend her long neck to attach the cuff to her hoof. That was how she had ripped the false shoelaces off - she was still learning just how strong her new pony jaw truly was.

Rachel's creation mimicked sneakers. The cuffs looked like running shoes, with the same pattern and even a little machine-embroidered Nike swoosh on the side. A simulation of tied laces was stitched to the front, and the bottom of the cuff used a thin rubbery material to simulate a sole. Seen from a short distance, they made for reasonably convincing costume running shoes that fit perfectly the smaller, rounder profile of Gregoria's equine hooves.

Gregoria, still wearing the denim pony dress that Rachel had spent the previous night and day sewing on her little machine, stepped gingerly about the apartment. Her falsely shod rear hooves clopped over linoleum and wood and carpet, but for all the world it looked as if she were wearing small, round pony Nikes. The velcro held, the simulated laces remained in place, and best of all, the costume cuff did not flap or dance about on Gregoria's leg.

"Pick up the pace a bit." Rachel moved to the couch and flopped down. "I want to make sure they don't fall off easy."

Gregoria moved to a faster walk, and tried raising and lowering her legs in an exaggerated fashion. She even gave a few stomps to make sure the hoofcovers did not fall off. "They're amazing, Rachel. They really work! I have to say... I'm impressed."

Rachel beamed. "yay!" Her voice was soft, almost a falsetto whisper. She was mimicking her favorite character from the cartoon, a yellow pegasus with some kind of social anxiety disorder. Rachel had been working very hard to solve the problem of decent clothing for her friend, and with this clear success, Gregoria found herself grinning back.

Gregoria stopped her parade and looked out the window. It was getting dark, the sun was setting again. This was her third day staying with Rachel, and she had to admit... it had been a lot of fun. Gregoria felt surprise at the thought - since that horrific morning when she had awakened as a beast, even the idea of using a word like 'fun' had been utterly unthinkable. She had felt herself a monster, the victim of a terrible catastrophe, doomed to a possibly neverending nightmare. But the truth was - the last three days had been... well, they had been fun.

The notion was mad, utterly mad of course. There was no question that this strange form into which she had been changed was a disaster. Gregoria still felt desperate to regain her proper, human body - and her proper human brain as well. It was terrible to imagine being stuck for life as a refugee from a barnyard, not to mention that in this form she could never have a boyfriend, never marry, never have children - sweet Luna! That was a thought! - and never hope to have a normal life. This situation was the enemy, and it had to be defeated, the sooner the better. Before she lost all sense of her former self and started to... Celestia forbid... begin accepting it. Or even, far worse, liking it.

Her situation had in fact become even more urgent to her the previous night. They had both thought it wise to watch the entirety of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic in order to try to more fully understand what being a pony meant, and also to see if there were any clues in the show that might explain Gregoria's transformation.

They had watched several episodes in a row on Rachel's computer - she had downloaded every episode just as most fans apparently did. One episode in particular struck Gregoria hard. "Family Appreciation Day", by a writer named Cindy Morrow, told the story of the elder Apple family grandmother, 'Granny Smith'. In the show, the character was depicted in her youth as a member of a group of settlers that had ultimately founded the town of 'Ponyville', the main location for much of the cartoon.

Starting with nothing but a few wagons of supplies, the settlers were shown to be responsible for clearing out a portion of the vast Everfree forest so that the wide, rural landscape of Ponyville could eventually develop. These flashback sequences were done in sepia tones, in order to indicate great age.

And that is when it had hit Gregoria. A previous episode, "Winter Wrap Up" had made as its central concern the fact that earthponies - the very type that Gregoria now was - had built Ponyville without the use of magic, by hoof and muscle. The episode was very clear that it was Ponyville's deepest tradition that the season of winter - ponies apparently controlled every aspect of nature in their world, including the weather itself - should be cleaned up entirely by personal effort. This left out the central character of the episode - Twilight Sparkle, a unicorn - because all she knew how to do was magic.

The tradition was stated to be hundreds of years old.

That meant that Granny Smith had to be at least two hundred years old at minimum. A quick check on the internet by Rachel revealed that some clever wag had used statistical analysis to measure the population and size of Ponyville from the images on the show, and had made an estimate of how long it would take a town to grow to that size. It was most likely that Granny Smith was more like three hundred years old.

Three hundred years old. And there was nothing whatsoever to suggest that Granny Smith was in any way atypical. Indeed, she was a common earthpony, living on a farm, as average as could be. So average, in fact, that the primary conflict in the "Family Appreciation Day" episode was about how every character assumed that Granny Smith had nothing interesting to say. Her own granddaughter was embarrassed through much of the show at this thought.

Gregoria had been transformed into an earthpony from that very television program. She had no reason to assume she was somehow special in any regard. Her transformation into a pony had done more than merely steal her human form from her, or change her brain in ways that drove her to be a better person than she normally would be. The nightmare transformation included the most insidious, horrific, disturbing and nasty trick it was possible to inflict on her.

Vastly more life.

Eighty some years was the average life span for a human woman. Two - more likely three hundred years was apparently the average life span for an Equestrian pony. More than three times more lifespan, the majority of it apparently in very good health. Granny Smith was ancient, yet she could dance, move well, and her single greatest problem was a bad hip from kicking trees for hundreds of years.

If she hadn't abused her hips, she'd probably be completely fit.

Gregoria had seen plenty of seriously messed-up fifty and sixty year olds in her life, and only a handful of people in their eighties that were in truly decent physical shape. She'd met two ninety-somethings, one very spry, the other barely mobile at all. Meanwhile, at three hundred and something, Granny Smith, the earthpony, occasionally had to use a walker. Sometimes. Not on every show. Oh, and her knees looked ugly. Three hundred years of life.

The transformation was ruthless. Heartless. Cruel beyond comprehension. Earthly ponies were fortunate to make it to thirty years. That would be a dire motivation to get her human body back. But a three-hundred year lifespan - two hundred at the very least - it was a temptation beyond measure. Maybe if she had been a religious fanatic, sure of an afterlife, certain that death was nothing but eternal pies and cake - but death was scary to Gregoria, very scary. She was not convinced that death meant reward - or punishment. It nagged at her that death could be just what it appeared to be - permanent termination. Oblivion. And that frightened Gregoria more than anything.

Even hell still meant you still existed.

Three hundred years instead of eighty. It was as if whatever had changed her had deliberately done everything possible to make her suffer for any attempt to undo it.

No, that was not entirely true. If she'd had a choice, Gregoria would have rather been a unicorn or a pegasus, if she had to become a pony at all. Magic or flight would have made things a lot easier in countless ways. No, this change couldn't be a personal attack on her - if it had been, they'd screwed up on which kind of pony to make her.

The revelation that, as a pony, she could expect to live as long as three centuries, far beyond any recorded human lifespan, made her determination to regain her humanity much more desperate. Such a generous bounty of additional years of existence was a temptation that would only become increasingly difficult to fight against accepting. It would become worse as the years went on, as people she cared about - such as her mother, her sister and Rachel - grew old and died around her. The horror of watching humans die right and left of their short lifespans would make the effort to regain humanity seem more and more like a fool's errand and...

"Their short lifepans" - had she really thought that? Gregoria shook her head, her mane swirling over her back and falling to the side. Her traitorous pony brain was increasingly thinking that way. Seeing humans as an 'other', and herself as not among them. "Our short lifespans!" she thought fiercely to herself - but the words in her mind felt hollow in her heart.

"Greggy?" Rachel was off the couch and squatting in front of Gregoria, staring intently at her face. "Are you okay? Is something wrong?"

Gregoria focused her eyes, and tried to look happy again for her friend. "I... was just thinking of... stuff. About the change, and the future." Rachel looked worried, apparently the attempt to look more cheery hadn't been very successful. "It's okay, I'll be okay. Sorry. I'm sorry. Kinda drifted off there."

Rachel lifted her arm from her knee as she squatted, and scratched behind Gregoria's left ear. For a moment pleasure took her, and Gregoria found herself smiling despite her previous thoughts. Luna, that felt good. Oh, there, yeah, right there.

When Rachel had pulled her hand back, and Gregoria regained herself, she was almost ashamed to feel so much better. If she wanted to fight this thing, she needed to keep focused and not enjoy it too much. There were too many temptations already. Food, senses, mood, lifespan, health, and little pleasures just like that one. "Uh, Rachel? Maybe... maybe it's better if you don't do that."

Rachel looked utterly crushed. "I'm... sorry. I... I mean, I just..." She looked like she might cry.

"Oh... ponyfeathers... Rachel, it was good. Great. I loved it, OK?" Rachel looked really confused now, halfway between sad and befuddled. "I liked it too much, understand? Stuff like that makes it hard to fight being a pony. There's so many temptations and it just makes it really hard to focus on... on getting back, you know?"

Rachel wasn't confused anymore, but the sadness was still there, locked down, but present. "I... guess I understand. It's just so fun to scratch your ears, and you looked so down and... sorry. I'll try to not do that anymore."

Gregoria stood in her denim pony-coat-dress thing (it was pretty darn cool, truth be told. Rachel had done an amazing job of it, and it looked like something that could have come from the show itself) and groaned. Her emotions warred inside her. She needed to get her human life back but Rachel was only being affectionate and kind and it really did feel so muffin good and it meant so much to her to show affection and Celestia knows that any kindness was everything right now and why did it have to be so hard, and why did this have to happen and what if Rachel became fed up an didn't want to help anymore and...

"Greg? Greggy?" Rachel had reached out and then suddenly pulled her hand back with an odd look on her face. "Listen, maybe I'm just making things more difficult for you. Maybe I'm not helping and..."

Gregoria stepped forward and pressed herself into Rachel, who nearly tumbled over from the unexpected bump. Rachel sat the rest of the way down and Gregoria found herself pressing her chest into Rachel's sitting body, while curving her long pony neck across and down her friends back. It was a strange sort of hug, but it was a hug. A pony hug, Gregoria assumed, instinctual, perhaps. Rachel raised her arms and wrapped them around Gregoria's neck and withers.

"You're the only help I've gotten, Rachel." Gregoria hugged tighter. "Until I came here, selfishly forcing myself on you, I was completely lost. You're helping. Oh, sweet Celestia, you are helping. Please, please don't think you aren't helping because you are. You absolutely are. I'm just... I'm just afraid."

Rachel couldn't help herself, she had begun automatically stroking Gregoria's soft coat, as she doubtless would any animal. "This must be really scary for you, I keep forgetting because you are so awesome as a pony and I wish that I cou... I'm sorry. I keep forgetting how hard this is for you."

Gregoria noted how Rachel had caught herself. "That's the problem, Rachel. It's less and less scary. The real problem is that all of this is... it's seductive. Oh, Luna, if only you knew. Food tastes better, smells are better, my eyes are better - everything feels so muffin good that its really hard to fight it. At first it was completely scary. But I keep getting used to it!"

"Then that just means you're still human."

Gregoria pulled back, away from Rachel and sat awkwardly down, tilted on her right flank to protect her tail. "What??"

Rachel adjusted her legs, tailor fashion, and leaned back on her arms. "It means you're still human in there. Seriously."

Noticing that her muzzle was open, Gregoria closed her mouth. "How... does getting used... to being a pony... mean I'm still - in any way - human?"

"Humans adapt, Greggy. That's the one thing that defines humans, I think. I mean, gorillas and chimps can talk - sign language, but sign language is still speech, and lots of animals can make and use tools, and all animals care and feel and even squirrels can solve puzzles and crows can do math problems and..."

Gregoria startled "Crows can do math problems?"

"Yeah! It's in New Scientist! They did this experiment with crows where..."

Gregoria tapped a hoof. "Wait, wait... back on topic. How is me being a pony somehow me being more human? Huh?"

"Other animals can pretty much do everything humans claimed - for a long time - that only they could do. That's all been proven to be totally false. So what makes humans human then? It can't be speech, or thought, or emotion, or tools or problem solving or even math, so if it isn't any of those things what's the one thing that humans do better than any other animal?" Rachel settled down onto her elbows, and stretched her legs out past Gregoria.

Gregoria decided to give up on trying to sit upright, and lay down like a pony, legs folded under her. It took a little fussing about to reposition herself, but it was worth it. It felt so much better than having her flank go to sleep while her tail ached.

"I give up, Rachel. What makes humans special?" It was early evening now, outside. They had been talking for some time.

"Humans can adapt to anything!" Rachel seldom wore shoes inside her apartment, she pressed her left foot against Gregoria's barrel, across her leg and hoof. For a moment she wiggled her toes in the soft yellow coat, clearly enjoying the feeling. Not nearly as embarrassed as she should have been, (or at all, Gregoria thought) Rachel smiled. "Out of Africa, through the ice age, into every climate, in the middle of deserts, or the arctic, or jungles or grasslands or mountains or islands in the sea - humans adapt to everything, Greggy. That's what humans are - the animal that adapts."

"But -" Gregoria wanted to argue, but she couldn't think of what to say.

Rachel continued... enjoying... Gregoria's coat. The denim outfit had wide, short sleeves, so that it was easy for Rachel to stick her toes under the fabric. "Humans evolved on earth, right? But they can go into space, into a totally weird environment, no gravity, no up or down, and that astronaut, the Canadian guy, he can play the guitar and sing Bowie songs and be on television and do science and stuff! It's like it's no biggie to him at all, it's like he's loving it, and everything up in orbit is like totally alien to all human experience. Humans adapt to anything! Humans make everything their bitch!"

Gregoria, pony Gregoria, winced at the last word. The 'B' one. Swirl that pony brain, she thought to herself. Still, Rachel's little speech did make her feel better. Humans could adapt to anything. If that really was what made humans special, if that was what made humans... human, then maybe it was silly to say that adapting to life as a pony was a defeat. Maybe it was just proof that Gregoria was still herself. Could a chimpanzee cope with suddenly being a completely different animal? Could a dolphin? Could a crow? It was more likely, Gregoria thought, that such animals would just freak out and stumble about smashing into walls in mindless panic until they broke their neck.

The thought of innocent animals breaking their necks made pony Gregoria shiver and feel very sad. With effort, Gregoria shook off that feeling and regained herself. Just a thought, not real. On top of everything else, her new pony brain was very, very good at mental visualization, and had strong emotions about what she imagined. There were a lot of things to juggle in this new body, a lot of things to...

...to adapt to. To adapt to. She'd had to deal with this, and she hadn't panicked (maybe just a little) and she was adapting, and she was staying on top of it. Body, brain, emotion, everything. Gregoria grinned. Rachel had a point. There was something irrepressible about humans. Something unconquerable. And she, Gregoria Samson, had to still be truly herself, and still human in some deep way, because she was not bashing herself against walls in panic, like another animal might. She was adapting to the strange, the alien, the extraordinary, because that was what humanity did best.

Gregoria considered this for a moment. Rachel... she was really pretty intelligent. Huh. Gregoria looked about at her four legs, and began moving them, trying to figure out how to crawl while laying down. She managed to scoot herself closer to her friend. Her best friend - she was fully willing to admit that now, to appreciate what that truly meant now. She lowered her long neck and wiggled her tall, curving ears.

"Scritchies?"

Rachel positively glowed, and happily began scratching behind her dearest friend's pony ears.

8. A Key To Unknown Chambers

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

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A Key To Unknown Chambers

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”

Franz Kafka

Guillaume clicked once with his one-button mouse and left his iMac to plow through Markov chains, rainbow tables and just plain brute force on the hash list. He'd automated the process with a quick program, more than a mere script, which should handle things on its own, leaving him some time to relax. Guillaume reached for his Ipod, then decided that a spot of brew might go well with his music. Mr. Crown was astonishingly lax with regard to such matters - as long as the work got done, Guillaume was welcome to sip a beer at his desk or even take a nap while his Mac compiled or sorted or crunched data.

Guillaume stretched and yawned. He'd been at this for... oh hell, since ten, and it was four in the afternoon now. The hash list was a major find, one of his buddies owed him a favor for some... business... a few years ago, and his position in the US military was not trivial. Somewhere in those passwords was access to whatever had been deemed so terribly secret about Private First Class Richard Deckard.

Deckard was in every respect an entirely forgettable soldier, as most soldiers were. He was just another speck of cannon fodder tossed at Afghanistan by the US war machine, another turd thrown into the fan. He had died as so many did, anonymously, randomly, by a buried explosive device that ripped the truck he was riding in to shreds. Guillaume shook his head - Afghanistan, the place where empires went to die. He'd seen it happen before to the former Soviet Union, now the Americans were sticking their dicks in the grinder.

But there was something special about Deckard. As far as he could tell, the entire incident hadn't just been hushed up, it had been secured. Contained. Majestic-12'ed like it was the very Ark of the Covenant from Indiana Jones. Maybe the poor kid hadn't been blown up by some buried bomb - this level of security was more like Rendlesham Forest or something. Maybe Mister Crown was into flying saucers? The job was interesting, if nothing else.

Guillaume startled, Crown was there, in his chair by the gigantic screen. Like a proper Captain Kirk at the bridge of his ship, Guillaume thought.

"Tell me, what do you see? Here - " Crown had rotated his chair and waved his arm at an image displayed before him. The beer would have to wait, apparently, Mr. Crown was in a rare talkative mood.

"Ah... well, I guess it's an old drawing. Medieval Europe would be my guess. That old thing about the sky being a big crystal dome, right?" Guillaume had seen the picture somewhere before, he couldn't remember where but it was familiar. It depicted a landscape with trees and buildings. In the distance was a stylized rising sun with long flaming arms and a center filled with a face. The sky around the sun quickly became night, with finely drawn six-pointed stars filling an increasingly dark realm dominated by a crescent moon. The moon had been illustrated to have a face, just like the sun, only in profile.

In the foreground, near a short tree, a man in robes crawled to the edge of the world. There, his head and arm were thrust through a jagged break in the dome of the sky, upon which the sun and moon and stars had apparently been painted or attached. The robed man gaped in wonder and horror at what lay beyond the sky - wheels within wheels and strange concentric disks floating amidst curving arcs of light and fire, cloud and emptiness. The robed man had broken through the fragile sky to witness that his world was just a small little disk, covered with a dome like some serving dish on a dinner cart.

Mr. Malus Crown shook his head. "No, what I mean is, what precisely, actually, do you see? This is the Flammarion engraving, fairly famous, it's from a French manuscript about meteorology. It's not actually that old, it dates to the eighteen-hundreds - though to be fair, it was probably based on a similar drawing done in the fourteenth century." Mr. Crown was being positively loquacious today. Guillaume began to see his beer time dwindling rapidly.

"No, no, excuse me. Fifteenth century, actually. Yes. Fifteenth." Truth be told, Guillaume couldn't care less about this point, but he nodded. Crown was the boss, after all. Malus tapped his chin with his closed hand, thought a moment and continued. "Tell me about the sun, there in the middle, my good Guillaume. Describe the sun to me. Tell me what you see."

One of these things again, then. Crown did this sort of thing occasionally, asking his staff what they saw, asking them to describe things to him. He must be having his 'visions' again, as Nadzieja called them. Guillaume knew that playing along would get him to his beer faster. "I see a face, one of those old-fashioned styles of faces, like on old manuscripts and such. The face is inside the circle of the sun, and... there are... ah... flames coming out. All around. Curvy flames, done with thin lines." Guillaume hoped this was good enough to move things along.

"The face. The face of a man, a person, then?"

It was definitely one of those things. "Yes sir, Mr. Crown. Two eyes, nose and mouth. He looks fat, because the sun is round." Guillaume shifted in his seat. Half the hashes were already cracked. There was still hope, though, the usual methods always cut through most passwords rapidly but there were always a smaller group that took more time. Time enough to sit back and sip a Tsingtao. Guillaume wished the huge fridge in the lunchroom held a nice Saint Rieul Triple, or his very favorite Cuvée Des Jonquilles, but Mr. Crown was a man of rigid tastes. Every machine a Mac, every beer a Tsingtao, every meal vegetarian.

Not that Mr. Crown drank beer. He only ever drank fruit juice. Apple juice was his favorite, though sometimes he had smoothies of mixed fruit. He ate very little, sometimes no more than a single bite. The beer was for his employees alone.

"Ah. And the moon?"

Guillaume stared briefly at the image on the great screen. "Side view." He thought for a moment and added "Of a man. A man in the moon face."

"Now, tell me about our robed friend, the shepard in the foreground. Describe him for me, if you would?"

Eighty percent of the hashes were ashes now, despite coming from the most secret of military sources. The passwords were incredibly simplistic. Guillaume resisted snorting at seeing "password1" used not just once, but five times in the list. Jesus. "Baseball" was in there too. Twice. Double Jesus. Actually, "Jesus" was just below the second "Baseball". The military mind was a simple thing.

"Well... I thought he looked like a monk or something." Malus waited, listening. "He's on his knees, looking outside. Outside the world. He's got a... a stick with him. On the ground." Guillaume felt beer calling to him. "I'm not sure what you want of me here, Mr. Crown."

"Eighteen-eighty-eight. That's when the book that engraving came from was printed. I wonder what I would see if I found the original source the illustrator used. Probably used. I wonder which changed first. That might be a clue. Hmm." Malus Crown perked up. "Guillaume - see if you can get me a copy of... ah... just a moment..." Mr. Crown busily typed something on his own Mac, to the side of his chair. "Yes! Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia of 1544. The cost doesn't matter, as usual. Here, I've sent you an email with the details. Do your best - it's a bit obscure."

"I'll get right on it, Mr. Crown. Right after the passwords finish. I think we may have the story on your jarhead by supper. Ah - " The call of beer had finally grown to such a loud pitch that Guillaume's shiftier reasoning had come into play. "If you'll excuse me, sir, I really need to go to the head now." Guillaume was already halfway across the 'command room', such as it was, and well towards the hall that led to the cafeteria and the fridge. And the bathrooms, of course.

Guillaume stopped. On a whim, perhaps because he felt cranky at being kept from his treat, he decided to press Mr. Crown for a change. "Ah - so tell me... what is it, precisely, that you see in the sun, the moon and that man on the ground, Mr. Crown?" The minute he said the words he regretted it. This was a great paying gig with few problems, and aside from being insane, Crown was probably the best employer he'd ever had.

"Alright. I'll tell you." Guillaume suddenly felt a chill go down his back. Mr. Crown never told anyone exactly what he thought he saw. This offer felt like wandering into a room he had no business being in. "I see the head of a pony in the sun, Guillaume, a very certain pony, and in the moon as well, and the shepard on the ground, well, let's just say he has hooves. That is what I see, and what is more, it looks like it has always been that way."

Guillaume's mouth fell open. This was... this was a very awkward moment. "F-from the cartoon." It was a statement, not a question. Mr. Crown was always all about the cartoon.

"Yes, from the cartoon." Mister Malus Crown swiveled in his chair and tapped a few keys on his machine. "Of course you must think me unsound, it's only reasonable. I would certainly find me a bit eccentric if our positions were reversed." Crown looked up from his iMac and gave Guillaume a level look. "I can't keep being mysterious forever, I've recently come to realize that. Yes, I see the world increasingly reconstructed in terms similar to something from that cartoon, and yes, I am convinced that what I am seeing is not just an aberration of my own mind. Discovering what that means, and how it happened to the world is my goal, Guillaume. I have no doubt that this just confirms to you that I must be completely off my nut but - that said, it is my hope that working for a crazy man is not entirely undesirable to you."

The silence was very awkward until Guillaume finally broke it. "It's interesting, I have to say that." In the instant, beer was now the last thing on Guillaume's mind. "And you pay well. And you treat everybody well."

The moment Guillaume finished speaking his last words, he felt unsettled. "And you treat everybody well." Something wasn't right. That wasn't entirely correct... a memory began to surface inside Guillaume's mind. Thibault.

Thibault... he was trying to get the iMac to interface with the... big screen, with Mr. Crown's huge monitor and... he got it wrong somehow. It wasn't working, Mr. Crown couldn't watch his cartoon and... screaming. Screaming and yelling, Mr. Crown... it was Mr. Crown, his face red and shrieking about how incompetent and useless Thibault was. Loud and piercing, it went on and on for almost an hour it seemed, and Thibault just took it because Crown was rich, beyond rich, but he sure as hell wasn't going to take it much longer and...

Guillaume turned suddenly to Malus. "Wait... wait a damn minute!" He could feel his eyes narrowing, a scowl creeping across his face. Malus Crown had rages, terrible rages! How had he... forgotten that? If Crown didn't get what he wanted, whatever it was, the bastard lost all respect for everyone! He would berate and condemn and screech at the top of his lungs... "Hey! Yeah! Wait one god damn minute now! I... remember last week, I remember... what the hell is going on he..."

Glowing green eyes filled Guillaume's vision. Two huge, insectoid green orbs, shining with an impossible light. He felt himself falling, tumbling through empty space as if from a great height, then suddenly there was utter silence.

The silence was very awkward until Guillaume finally broke it. "Sir?"

Mr. Crown cleared his throat. "I was saying that it is my hope that working for a crazy man is not entirely undesirable to you."

Guillaume shook his head. He felt slightly dizzy. "It's interesting, I have to say that." In the moment, beer was now the last thing on Guillaume's mind. Mr. Crown had just confided in him. He needed to reassure his employer. "And you pay well. And you treat everybody well."

Mr. Crown really did treat everyone well. He never got angry, he was only ever patient and kind. An employer like that was almost worth more than gold. Almost. Fortunately, he had a great deal of gold as well. Guillaume suddenly felt as if his reaction to Mr. Crown's revelation of what he saw sounded inadequate. Thinking quickly, he added "Besides... ah... who am I to judge, right?"

This made Crown give off a short laugh. He paused, lost in thought. "Oh, another thing, Guillaume."

"Yes sir?"

"Find out what everyone prefers for drinks. Beers and wines and such. Cost is no object, the usual. Make a list and order up some cases. Maybe even get some... oh, how about some Cuvée Des Jonquilles? I hear that's a good one. Gotta keep the troops happy, right?"

Guillaume nodded, and found himself grinning. Crown might be a raving looney but he was a generous looney, plus he apparently had incredible taste in beer (even if he didn't drink it himself!), and every bit of that was a treasure to a smart person. Guillaume considered himself a smart person. "Thank you, Mr. Crown."

──── ∆ ────

Gregoria lifted her head, the comforter sliding down her long neck to her back. Rachel's couch had become her bed, and it seemed to be better than her own bed back home. It was small enough that Gregoria didn't feel lost in it, and making it consisted only of folding up the single comforter she used as a blanket. Now that she had a soft, full coat of yellow hair all over, she really didn't need much to stay warm even in the middle of the night. With the pillow Rachel had given her, the couch was far more convenient and pleasant to Gregoria as a pony than it could ever have been to her when she had been human.

The noise came again. It was a moan from Rachel's room. No, not a moan, mumbling. Rachel was talking in her sleep again. She claimed she never talked in her sleep, that Rick would have told her if she had done something like that. There was no question - there it was again - she was definitely talking in her sleep now. Gregoria rotated her tall ears and focused them without even trying. It was second nature now to use her ears like little radar dishes, she didn't even have to think about it anymore.

"...oh... no... no, I... don't... mind..." Gregoria slowly lowered her head, although her ears had decided to remain sharply locked onto the voice from the bedroom. It was nothing. Rachel was probably dreaming about Rick. It must be really hard to just lose someone like that. Probably, she had gotten something in the mail from the army or whatever. 'Hello. The person you love most in the world is dead. Thank you. Your Government.' Gregoria realized that she hadn't even asked Rachel about what had happened, or what it had been like for her.

Then again, Rachel hadn't brought the subject up. If anything, dealing with a pony in her life seemed to be cheering her up. Maybe she didn't want to dwell on what had happened to Rick anymore. Gregoria softly snorted - she had no idea what to say, or what to do with regard to her friend's tragedy, and her new pony brain wanted desperately to comfort her friend, to make up for how her human self had dropped Rachel like a sack of swirl. Oh - Rachel was mumbling again.

Even with her vastly better new ears, it was hard to make out. Gregoria caught a few words, another 'yes', something that sounded like she was talking about Gregoria - the words 'mane' and 'tail' were in there between incoherencies, and possibly a mention of Rick. She was probably dreaming she was telling Rick about her friend turning into a pony and coming to live with her.

After Rachel was silent for a while, Gregoria felt her ears relax. When she had first changed, her pony body was so strange, so bizarre. Now her ears were just part of her. They moved and focused on sounds automatically, in the same way she used her eyes to look at things, her ears 'looked' at sound. She no longer had to think about how to use her legs - all four of them. When she got onto the couch, she just did it. Laying down was still a little odd, but that too was becoming automatic the more she practiced.

Gregoria bent her sinuous neck and grabbed the edge of the comforter in her teeth. She tugged it over her withers, so that she could snuggle into it, with the fabric close to her muzzle. She hadn't thought about coordinating any of those movements, she had just done them. Naturally. 'Hmmph. If being human is adapting, I'm becoming more human every day.' the thought made her softly snort again.

Rachel had ceased mumbling. Gregoria pulled her foreknees up to her muzzle and shifted slightly on the sofa, one rear leg close to her body, the other stretched out. She curled her tail across the inside of her stretched out shank and up over her hock. There was a little indent where her muscles met there, and for some reason it felt nice to lay her tail across that spot.

As she drowsed, Gregoria mused about the trip they had taken to the bridge. The Williamsburg Bridge where she had taken Rick and Rachel's picture months ago. Gregoria had wanted to visit it, to confirm that the structure had indeed altered into an Equestria-styled version of itself, and then if the bridge truly had changed, to see if somehow it could provide any clue as to what had caused Gregoria's own transformation.

The Williamsburg, which connected the Lower East Side to Brooklyn, was a huge suspension bridge, gray and imposing, built of open, radio-tower trusses. For non-vehicular traffic, the inside of the beams and handrails were painted bright red, with lanes for both bicycle and hoof - 'foot', Gregoria sleepily corrected herself - traffic. At least, that was what it had once been. The Williamsburg Bridge was no longer like that at all.

Gregoria stared open-muzzeled at the grand work of fantasy before her. The bridge was anything but gray, now, and it was not made of interlocking beams designed to save metal. The bridge before her was completely the creation of a world that knew no scarcity of any resource, a world where magic, rather than labor, was a valid option. Golden rails capped sweeping curves of impossible marble curlicue and filigree. The entire structure appeared as if almost of one piece, and needed no suspension, but instead just arched gracefully across the wide East River defying gravity and spitting upon the laws of physics themselves. Pale pink and purple swirls of exotic gemstone were inlaid into the curve of it, and every few dozens of feet a gargantuan, golden-set gemstone glimmered and sparkled in the sunlight. Had it been made of earthly matter, the unimaginable tonnage would crumble under its own impossible bulk to sink beneath the waves in an instant.

"Greggy? What do you see? You must not be seeing the same thing I am, not with that expression on your face!" Rachel moved to stand beside her little pony friend, and unconsciously began stroking her flowing black mane.

"I... Rachel... I have no..." Gregoria blinked and closed her eyes, then opened them to see if the vision would disappear. The fairy bridge remained enchanted. It was real, it was truly there. "Marble... and jewels, big as cars, big as buses, and gold rails... and... it looks like Equestria, like the cartoon. It isn't the same bridge, it's impossible. I don't know what keeps it from collapsing, what keeps it up. It's so huge, Rachel, it's bigger than any bridge in the cartoon, it's big as Canterlot, big as... only it's in that style. It's just... it's just mind mangling..."

"I just see the bridge. Same as ever." Rachel sounded distinctly disappointed.

"I need to... to touch it. To make sure it's solid. Can we go closer?" Gregoria felt a strange blend of emotions - part of her felt fear, the human part she felt sure, it somehow understood that the change in the bridge was a threat to it, or at least an aberration that had no business existing. The pony side of her frightened her - it felt eager to go to the bridge, not because it was incredulous, but because it found in the transformed bridge something comforting and familiar. In any case, Gregoria had to know, she had to know for sure if such a thing could be real.

The closer they got to the bridge, the stronger Gregoria felt as if the impossible structure was somehow more real, or at least more proper, than the ordinary, human-designed buildings and streets around it. In the end, she had begged Rachel to turn back, before the climb up to the hoof-traffic level.

"But why, Greggy? I thought you wanted to touch it, I thought that was the whole point of..."

"I can't. I just can't." Gregoria began forcing herself to back up, nearly stumbling over her own hind legs. "It's real, oh it's real all right. I've got no doubts now, no doubt at all. I want to go back to the apartment now. Can we do that? Please? Please let's go back now, alright? Rachel?"

Rachel had stood and stared at her, clearly frustrated and conflicted. "Dammit, Greg! Maybe if we went up there, maybe if we stood on it, then I could see it too! I want to see marble and jewels and gold! I want to see a piece of Equestria instead of a bunch of gray steel! Dammit... can't you... just..."

Gregoria's pony mind was practically thrashing inside her to take over, to prance up those stairs and take her bestest ever friend on a happy tour of the Whinneysburg Bridge, the bridge that connected Manehattan with Hooflyn, just to please her. They could go and have a proper New Horse haydog smothered with onions and dandelion relish and have a day on the town! Gregoria stood with her back to the accursed bridge, the tattered remains of her human will making taught cables of her muscles and rigid suspension struts within her tall pony neck. "Please." Gregoria's gritted teeth chattered slightly. "Please can we go back?"

On the ride back, Rachel craned her neck until the bridge could be seen no longer, presumably hoping to the last glimpse for the gray beams to shimmer and shift into polished stone and gold.

In the apartment, Rachel had needed some time alone after that, and spent an hour locked in her room. Gregoria sat still on the couch, not knowing what else to say or do with herself. She watched clouds drift past the fire escape out the window, and tried to avoid noticing the photograph on the shelf. After a while she became thirsty and went to the fridge. It was still troublesome, but easier now, to rear up to the cupboards to get a glass and bring it down in her forehooves. Pouring the carrot juice almost ended in disaster, but she forced herself to slow down and move more carefully.

For a moment, she became distracted worrying about Rachel, and then found she had not only put the bottle of juice back in the fridge with the cap properly on, but had also somehow obtained some ice and smoothly dropped it into her glass. She wasn't sure, because she hadn't been paying attention to herself, but she felt like she had used a single hoof to do it, after washing the hoof first. Gregoria checked the sink, it was wet. She checked the little towel, it had been used.

Apparently, if she didn't try too hard, her pony body could just do things. She had begun suspecting this, but now it seemed even more likely. It felt like yet another assault on her humanity, despite Rachel's pep talk about adaptation. Just give in, and everything will become easy. Just be a pony, and even lacking hands won't be an inconvenience at all.

"PLEASE! I TRULY DO! PLEASE!"

Gregoria found her neck bolt upright, the comforter still sliding down her withers. She was on the couch. That was right, the couch... she must have been dreaming, she must have fallen back asleep. She was dreaming the day over again, dreaming about the trip to the bridge. It was still night, what did the clock say? Three. Three in the morning. Past midnight, still dark.

"WITH ALL MY HEART, I DO!"

It was Rachel, in the next room. She was shouting in her sleep. Not mumbling, but shouting clearly, almost as if she were awake. The meaning of the words suddenly struck fear into Gregoria's heart. She scrambled to her hooves on the couch and stood there, the comforter falling to the floor. Gregoria's ears were locked onto the door to Rachel's room. The door was open, and Gregoria could see the lump under the covers where Rachel lay. Standing there, on the couch cushions, Gregoria paused, her heart pounding in her narrow pony chest, as she waited for any more shouts. To see if she should...

"...I understand..." Rachel wasn't shouting anymore, she was speaking in a normal voice, slurred a bit, clearly asleep. Gregoria waited, heart beginning to slow down to normal. There was nothing glowing, there was nothing magic or weird that she could see inside Rachel's bedroom. If what had happened to her began to happen to Rachel, Gregoria reasoned, there would have to be some special effects. There was always special effects when transformation stuff happened in movies and on television. The lump under the covers just stayed there, immobile, devoid of sparkles or flashes of light. It was just Rachel, ordinary Rachel, not turning into a pony at all.

Gregoria began to relax, and considered laying down again. She was being silly. 'Please, please, with all my heart I do' - the truth of it was that Rachel was probably dreaming about today too, and the fuss was how badly she had wanted to go onto the bridge. She'd come out of her room in a better mood, and they'd had a pleasant dinner together and even watched a few episodes of the second season, but Gregoria had felt that her friend had still been miffed at possibly missing out on a miracle. She had really wanted to see that bridge the way Gregoria had, and she had gotten it deeply into her mind that maybe walking the thing would somehow make that happen. Maybe it would have, there was no way to know right now.

Gregoria folded her foreknees, and lowered her barrel to the couch, then followed suit with her hindlegs. She curved her neck down and took the comforter in her teeth. Without thinking, she neatly swirled the cover over her body. Huh. It was actually kind of cool. She'd never had this sort of dexterity with her hands and arms. She was lucky to make a toss into a wastebasket two times out of ten, before. Apparently pony bodies, at least earthpony bodies, came with superdexterity as a standard feature. If, of course, she could get out of her own way and let it work for her.

"...Princess..."

The comforter flew up into the air and fluttered down into the space where Gregoria had but a second ago occupied on the couch. Her hooves pounded the floor of the apartment as she dashed for Rachel's room. Gregoria slammed into the edge of the doorway, nearly falling down, her wind knocked out of her by the impact. Gagging and coughing from the blow, Gregoria stumbled and began to scramble up onto Rachel's bed. She felt her hooves slipping on lumpen parts of Rachel's sleeping body, under the covers.

Gregoria fell sideways in her rush, and bounced on the mattress. She was too close to the edge, and the bounce tipped her over onto her back and then right off the bed entirely. She landed with a painful thump on the floor, between bed and wall, her legs straight up like a bug on its back. It began to dawn on her that this was a difficult position to be in as a pony, on her back inside a canyon made of bedframe and wall.

At first, she couldn't get out. She was frantic to get to Rachel and she wasn't thinking straight. 'Princess' - how had she been so stupid? Strange dreams, that was how it started, or at least that was their mutual best guess, and yet she had ignored it because she was afraid of making Rachel angry by waking her up in the middle of the night. Maybe mysterious transformations just happen, maybe there aren't any flashing lights or weird glowing or swirling sparkles. For all she knew, Rachel could be a pony right now, and it was already too late!

Finally, Gregoria took a deep breath - struggling randomly wasn't helping. She sized up the situation. Shaking, her heart pounding, she folded her hind legs close to her frame and worked to ratchet her body onto its side, and then belly, using careful efforts with her forelegs. After a few moments of scrabbling against smooth floor and wall with hard hoof, she finally found herself upright again. Now it was just a matter of pushing her barrel up with her forelegs, and following with her hindquarters.

Standing now, Gregoria reared up and plopped her forehooves onto the top of the mattress. She curved her neck down so she could see - rearing like that had sent her gaze to the ceiling for a moment.

Gregoria found herself nose to nose with Rachel, who was very much awake now, doubtless thanks to being stepped on, fallen on, and then surprised by a loud thump followed by desperate scrabbling and thrashing.

"Oh my sweet Celestia... Rachel!"

9. Sitting In The Balance Without Knowing

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

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Sitting In The Balance Without Knowing

“Let me remind you of the old maxim:

people under suspicion are better moving than at rest,

since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it,

being weighed together with their sins.”

Franz Kafka

When Gregoria Samson had first awakened from troubled dreams to find herself transformed into a golden yellow earthpony mare, she had been filled with a feeling of horror and confusion. At first she had thought herself still dreaming, only with time had it become clear that what had happened to her was no dream but a world-shattering truth that had smashed her sense of reality entirely to ruin.

For nearly a week since arriving at her friend Rachel's apartment, Gregoria had become increasingly complacent and even at some ease about her strange situation. Rachel had given her both acceptance and support enough to allow her to come to an uneasy truce with a universe where people - and megastructures - could suddenly become entities of fantasy, stolen from a random cartoon among thousands.

The truce had been broken, and whatever peace Gregoria had obtained over the last many days had been stabbed savagely through the heart, its throat slit and belly eviscerated. The small stability within Gregoria rushed wetly out of her soul like severed intestines writhing on the bedroom floor.

Gregoria was nose to nose in the three o'clock dark, her yellow muzzle turned orange in reflected neon from the window with the fire escape, just beyond the door to Rachel's room. The lump in Rachel's bed had sat up, alerted by Gregoria's clumsy rush to check upon things, and the resultant fall and scramble to regain the mattress. It must be Rachel she was nose to nose with, in the neon glow, in the dark, but it smelled of vanilla and musk, shone with the colors of reflected creamsickle, and as the blankets fell away, filled the room with shining, tri-colored light.

"...princess..." - that was the word which Rachel had mumbled in her sleep, the word which had brought Gregoria hoof-over-poll to tumble into the space between bed and wall. "...princess..." - Gregoria had feared, deep in her heart, that Rachel had been dreaming the same dream that had besieged herself - a week of nights of meeting Princess Celestia from the cartoon, a week of dreams of being asked if she would consent to being a pony, a week of hearing the voice of her heart betray her waking will, begging with mindless dream logic for that very abhorrent boon.

"R-Rachel?" It had to be, unless madness itself had stolen the world. But whatever the answer that might come, it would be a nightmare - if the creature in front of Gregoria was indeed Rachel, then insanity would reign, and if the answer was that it was not Rachel, then only terror and doom would rule.

"Greggy? I feel funny." Pale, neon-lit eyelids, large beyond possibility blinked, trying to focus. "What's all the light?"

Shifting teal, yellow-green and violet softly bathed the walls of the room, competing now with the insistent neon from outside. As Rachel regained wakefulness, the light intensified, revealing all in pastel softness.

Gregoria knew well who, or what, she was pony nose to pony nose with. Rachel had indeed transformed, in the night, without sparkle or flash, quietly, gently, and without sound or fuss. It could have happened at any time. Gregoria could have been looking into Rachel's room at the moment of her metamorphosis and failed entirely to notice it, hidden under the covers.

Gregoria Samson stared into the waking face of the prime diarch of Equestria itself. Rachel Priss had become the character of Princess Celestia.

"Greggy? Oh... I'm a pony now, aren't I?" She seemed delighted, lifting a hoof and wiggling her new ears. "What kind am I? Oh! I've got wings! I'm a pegasus! I wanted to be a pegasus!"

Gregoria began instinctively backing away, sliding down the bed, pushing herself with her forelegs, trying to vanish within the space between bed and wall that she had only just escaped. She wanted to hide, to shrink, to find a mouse-hole in the baseboards and cower within the walls.

"Greggy? Where are you going? What..." Rachel had finally noticed her mane, waving and softly glowing with the colors of night giving way to morning. "...oh ...oh no. Not this. No." The face of Celestia displayed a mixture of deep disappointment and grief. Gregoria stopped her effort to crawl away down the corridor made by the side of the bedframe and the wall. Rachel, within the body of Celestia, appeared so incredibly sad that Gregoria's pony heart was moved instantly from terror to sympathy. She waited, peeking over the edge of the mattress, and watched her friend slump, the long neck of Princess Celestia arching down, the great violet eyes slowly fixing on a wrinkle in the bedsheets, halfway between her gold-shod forehooves.

Rachel had transformed in the night, but whatever happened had been more than what had occurred to Gregoria - the Celestia body that Rachel now wore was clothed. Gold shoes covered white hooves, a gold circlet armored the base of her neck, a purple jewel set within. She wore a crown, gold also, with another cut gemstone. Rachel had not merely become a pony in the shape of Celestia from the cartoon, she had apparently been granted the trappings of Equestrian royalty as well.

The vast violet eyes closed, and Gregoria saw the beginnings of tears pool along the thick, dark lashes. "Rick always called me his Celestia, his princess. I never wanted to be Celestia, I never wanted to be anypony's princess. I just wanted to be a simple pegasus. Or an earthpony. Or a unicorn. Just an ordinary pony, if I'd had a choice I would have been Fluttershy." Rachel said the words with the voice of the actress that spoke for Celestia in the cartoon, but her words were not grand or sweet, just sad, and lonely, and so very, very let down.

"I kept telling him..." The Celestia on the bed sniffed and wiped an eye with a foreknee. "...I was his little Fluttershy, but no, no he wouldn't have any of that. He always put me on a pedestal. Now just look at..." Suddenly anger flashed across Rachel's muzzle as her eyes flew open "DID YOU DO THIS? IS THIS SOMEHOW YOUR WORK, RICHARD?" At that, Rachel collapsed fully onto the bed, her crown tumbling from her radiant mane to thunk heavily on the floor after a roll over the end of the mattress.

Rachel, the body of Princess Celestia of Equestria, wailed and cried as Gregoria stared, frozen by confusion, insecurity and not a little horror. Before her, her friend had become a truly unearthly creature, an entity strange even by pony standards, an eldritch creature of unknown power and fearful elegance.

Gregoria fought within herself to regain some measure of composure and determination of how to respond to this inconceivable event. The entire issue of transformation seemed set on ruining lives. Rachel would have likely sold her very soul to have what Gregoria possessed, an ordinary pony body, small and cute. Gregoria, for her part, wished devoutly only to be human again, to have her proper life back - she had no special love for cartoon ponies, and certainly had no true desire to become one. There was no doubt in Gregoria's mind that had Rachel awakened as a simple pegasus, it would have been the single happiest day in her entire life.

Instead, she had become something grand, and powerful and terrifying - at least to Gregoria - and could never hope to live the sort of pony life that she so clearly fantasized about.

Her mind swirling with feelings and thoughts, Gregoria suddenly found one idea taking a firm center stage. Around it, her consideration began to focus into diamond clarity. Rachel had become powerful.

Not by any means the most powerful pony on the show - that was clearly Twilight Sparkle, who seemed to command magic better than any other creature in Equestrian history, or so the writers would have it. Luna would come next, surely, she had been shown to at least possess shape-shifting abilities and the power to zap pony guards with what looked like lightning.

Actually, come to think of it, Celestia had never truly been shown to be very good at anything. She was rubbish against that bug monster in the wedding two-parter, and her own sister had apparently kicked her flank off-screen even in the opening pilot. She was the princess of the sun, yet Gregoria couldn't remember her ever doing a trick, not even a card-trick. She must have done something besides sipping tea and making the sun rise. Taken alone, the latter was noteworthy, to be sure, but... as far as she could remember, Gregoria could not think of a single truly impressive thing Celestia had ever done.

She could fly, but then so could a third of all ponies. Teleport? Twilight certainly could... maybe Celestia had teleported in an episode... Gregoria had some vague memory of something like that. "Lesson Zero?" Yes! ...um, no, not exactly. She had just been shown hovering or something, with no obvious power, it seemed. It was hard to recall, there were a lot of episodes and Gregoria wasn't really that interested. Huh. Mostly, Celestia just acted smug and sipped tea. She could float things, that was something at least.

Gregoria didn't like how her profile of Celestia was turning out - she deeply wanted the Celestia that Rachel had transformed into to be powerful, indeed she was desperate that it be so. If Rachel had gained some kind of incredible powers - then she could fix things! If Rachel had become even half the pony god that most of the fanfiction writers and fans seemed to think Celestia was - despite all evidence to the contrary - it would be trivial to be...

...to be changed back. To be turned back into a human again.

"Rachel?" The huge body of Celestia continued to weep. Occasionally Rachel used one of her large, gold shod hooves to paw powerlessly at the sheets and blankets, the whole bed was a mess now. Her hind legs seemed to have torn the sheets toward the bottom, where some of the covers had been shoved off of the bed. Celestia was a really big creature, Gregoria realized. No wonder she had toppled off of Rachel's new body as if it were a mountain under the covers.

"Rachel? ...Rache?" If she would just listen, everything might work out, it might be possible to solve this situation right now, tonight. Gregoria felt frustrated - the answer to her own nightmare had landed right into their hooves, and Rachel was just blubbering because she got turned into a princess instead of a pegasus. Gregoria could feel human outrage, real human outrage overwhelming her pony brain at this thought. How dare Rachel waste time whinging about turning into a magical super-pony when that very thing was the only real chance either of them - perhaps even the entire world - actually had?

"Cinnamon slurping SWIRL, Rachel! Stop blubbing like a schoolgirl and pull yourself together!" Gregoria had moved to the foot of the bed, reared up and stomped her forelegs firmly on the mattress. The entire bed shook, although Rachel's massive Celestia body barely bounced. It must be fairly heavy. "Don't you UNDERSTAND? You just won the muffin lottery! You have the power to..."

"SILENCE!" The command was regal, imperial, stunning, and seemed to echo in the room, but this is not what stopped Gregoria's rant. She felt herself impact the wall above the couch, just beside the window that led to the fire escape. She saw Rachel's long Celestia horn slowly dim as golden light left it. As Gregoria fell, she saw Rachel's eyes widen in horror, the light from both her glowing mane, and the reddish neon shining in their wetness. Then gravity took over and the world became pain in her tail, and tumbling and rolling and a loud, hard whack to her head as she hit the cushions, bounced forward and slammed painfully into the floor.

Gregoria lay still, her vision blurred, the taste of blood in her mouth. She couldn't breath and began to panic. Somehow, she struggled to her feet, and then stumbled to her foreknees again. She fell down, her entire barrel impacting the floor for the second time. That seemed to work somehow, and with tears in her eyes she gasped a long, whinnying breath, filling her starved lungs. She must have had the wind knocked out of her, the blow of falling to the floor shocking her diaphragm.

She licked her muzzle, tasting iron. She must have cut something, maybe part of her lip on a tooth or maybe her tongue - it was hard to know exactly what had been damaged, but it didn't seem to be serious. She must have been picked up and thrown through the door like a doll, then pinned against the wall next to the ceiling. Looking up from the floor where she lay, it struck Gregoria that had that window been just three feet to the left, she would dying now, splattered on the asphalt far below.

"Oh Greggy! I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, are you alright? Are you OK?" Somehow Celestia was there, Rachel rather, beside her, terrified at what had happened. "I didn't mean to do that, I didn't even know I could do that! I don't know how, it just happened and when I saw you on the wall like a bug I... I just... " Rachel was crying again, only this time in horror and self loathing at what she had done.

Gregoria was too stunned to be angry. It had all happened so fast, there was no time to think, and her emotions hadn't caught up either. What she could make sense of was that her friend was really, really sorry and sad, and her pony brain desperately needed to do something about that. "I'm alright, Rachel. I'm a little sore, but I don't think anything's broken."

Rachel pressed her massive head into Gregoria's side, tears soaking into the yellow coat. "I am so sorry. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry... I didn't mean to... I didn't want that to... I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."

"Kinda got the wind knocked out of me, but it's OK now. I think I bit my lip. Do ponies have lips? Are they called lips?" Gregoria was babbling a little, she knew it, but she felt compelled to say something and that was the best she had. "I'm OK, Rachel, really. It was almost kind of cool, if you think about it. I mean, ba-zam, magic, your horn was glowing and everything."

Rachel was sniffling now, trying to pull herself together, and somehow Gregoria talking about pony lips and the word 'ba-zam' was just the funniest thing ever. She started giggling through her tears. "Ba-zam?"

Gregoria was giggling now too, which hurt her bruised ribs but she couldn't seem to stop. "Yeah, 'Ba-zam'. Magic. It's the sound of magic. Ba-zam."

Rachel was full on laughing now, not because anything was funny, but because the entire situation was so bizarre, so overwhelming, so terrible and so sad. "Ha ha ha - that's... that's not how magic... you don't know anything about magic..."

Gregoria was laughing because Rachel was laughing, and she had no idea why. "Hee-hee-ha... Oh, so the great Celestia is pulling magic rank on me now, is that it?"

The laughter died with that, as reality hit home within both of them. This wasn't going to change. This wasn't just going to go away. Rachel had awakened stuck as Celestia, and she had nearly killed her best friend with an idle thought. It wasn't funny at all. It was scary.

"You're bleeding." The head of Celestia nodded at Gregoria.

"Yeah. I know. I think it's stopped." Gregoria found it difficult to stare too long at Rachel. Those huge violet eyes, that familiar Celestia face, the glowing, waving mane were unsettling to see. "Why, is it on my fur?"

"Hair. Ponies have hair, not fur. Yeah. You have a streak of blood on your muzzle." Rachel sniffled again, then snorted. A large mass of glistening snot came out of her pony nostrils and began to drip down her own muzzle. "EWW!!!" She began frantically trying to wipe it off with a gold-shod hoof but she was unsteady with her new limbs. There was no way to know how she had managed to get to Gregoria in the next room. Probably crawling on her belly.

Gregoria calmly lifted her right pastern, bending her hoof away from her friend's face, and sopped up the mucus with a gentle wipe. She just did it without thinking. Only after did it strike her human mind what she had just done.

"Greg?" Rachel was touched, and also surprised and perhaps a little grossed out.

Gregoria had no idea. It must be her pony brain. "You... are the princess."

Rachel scowled. "No. No I am not!" She seemed offended now. "I don't care what I look like now, I never wanted to be Celestia. I'm not Celestia, do you understand? I'm NOT Celestia!" She looked like she might cry all over again, now.

"I understand. I'm sorry, Rachel. You're Rachel, and you're my friend and you are NOT Celestia." Gregoria used a hoof to try to scrap the snot off of her pastern. It only drove the translucent goo deeper into her yellow coat. "Though... you do have an awful lot of jewelry. To be fair."

Suddenly a thought struck Gregoria. "Rachel! Do you have those Harmonic things on you? You had a crown, I know, it rolled under the bed. You've got gold all over, if you had those harmony things..."

"Princess Celestia doesn't carry the Elements Of Harmony, Greg. She keeps them locked up. Or did." Rachel sniffed again, this time carefully, and thought. "I see where you're going though. That would make everything easy. Maybe." She thought some more. "Maybe not, though. It takes six, and there's only two of us. That we know of."

"Oh, yeah." Gregoria tried to lick where she figured the blood on her muzzle was, to get it off.

"A little to the left. There." Rachel studied Gregoria's tongue intently. "No, you had it. Right there. Yeah, that's it."

Gregoria tasted iron again. It had dried into the hairs and took a bit of licking to get it all. "Gone?"

"Yeah..." Rachel stared, huge violet eyes close to Gregoria's jaw. "I think you got it. You're sure you're all right?"

Gregoria took a brief inventory. Bruised, battered, but still in one piece. "Yeah. I'm okay." The neon light edged Rachel's profile in orange, while her glowing mane bathed the rest of her in pale greens and blues. "I think I'd like to wash up though."

The first rays of daylight were beginning to tint the sky outside the window now as Rachel gradually emptied her refrigerator and pantry. Rachel was a big pony, easily seven, perhaps eight feet tall from hoof to poll, and her horn went beyond that. Fortunately she was reasonably thin, or it would have been impossible to get through the doors of her apartment at all. She walked her home with bowed head, careful not to whack her horn on anything. Again, anyway.

"My left hoof but I'm hungry!" The last of the oats vanished inside the ravening muzzle. Rachel used her long tongue to lick the bowl clean. "Oh... that's better, but... oh my." She looked around the table and the kitchen, noting the empty, open shelves. "This is going to be a problem." She stared at the empty oat-bin she had bought just days ago. "No. It's a disaster."

"Rachel... I'm sure we can make this work somehow. Don't lose heart!"

"Greggy - how am I going to work anymore? How am I supposed to even GET to work anymore? If I were an ordinary pony like you, I could do it. If I was just a simple unicorn, I could ride the bus, use my horn to type and file and answer the phone - I don't think I could even get on a bus now. There's no way I could sit down, and I'd probably crush somepony. I'm gigantic, Greg, I know how big Celestia is. Some guy on the internet figured it out a long time ago."

"What? Seriously? How?" Gregoria was constantly being amazed at the insane dedication of pony fans.

"Apples. He took the average size of an apple, and used that to work out how big the ponies and Celestia were. Celestia is like eight feet tall. I mean, look at me!"

Rachel was sitting not in a chair, like Gregoria (always careful with her tail), but right on the linoleum floor. It was the only way, and the table was comfortable for her like that even so. "I'll lose my job, we'll lose this apartment. There's nothing I can do about it." Rachel noticed Gregoria's expression. "No, don't even suggest it. Maybe I can learn to fly, maybe I can't, but even if I did, what would the humans make of a great huge horse flying around because that is what I am. I'm not even a cute little pony. I'm a big, huge horse." Tears were on their way.

Gregoria had no answer for any of this. Perhaps it was time to try to breech the subject of magical solutions again. "Wait! Rachel, I think there is a solution - for both of us. It's what I wanted to tell you before I took up wall diving." Gregoria grinned, trying to lighten the thought of what had happened. "You aren't Celestia, I get that. But you look like Celestia, because you are inside a Celestia body. You clearly have Celestia's levitation thing down!"

Rachel looked momentarily hurt at that.

"No! I didn't mean anything bad by that, what I mean is that you have powers!" Gregoria leaned forward at the table. "Do you understand? You probably have Celestia's magic powers, you can probably do anything Celestia could do. You could fix things, maybe you could even make me human and make yourself into anything you wanted to be!" There, it was said. She had to comprehend, it was obvious.

It was like a light had gone on behind Rachel's eyes, one even brighter than the constant glow of her swirling mane. She nodded her large Celestia head, but then a strange look crossed her face. "I'm not the one making that happen, if that's what you mean." Gregoria gestured with a golden hoof at the first traces of morning light shining through the window. It was still dark outside, but the sky had become a brighter shade of dark, and the edges of the buildings across the street could be seen more clearly now. The traffic was starting to pick up, the sound of it a slowly increasing rumbly hiss.

"No, no, I don't expect you to go raising the sun or anything. But Celestia has to have some serious powers, right?" Gregoria was referring now less to the show itself, and more to the larger body of fanfictions that Rachel had shown her. It had struck Gregoria that whatever the mysterious transformation represented, it clearly wasn't interested in cartoon canon. There was no bridge the size of the Whinneysburg Bridge (it was hardly the Williamsburg Bridge any longer), because there was no city in Friendship Is Magic that was even close to the size of New York. Even Manehattan was clearly massively smaller than the real city it was named after. Truly large megastructures were limited to one thing - Canterlot Castle. There was no need within canon Equestria for a massive bridge like the Williamsburg. Canon wasn't part of this.

"Well..." Rachel looked around for anything more to eat. The kitchen was basically bare. "Most fans think of Celestia and Luna as pretty darn powerful, that's true."

"Those weird ones you like, fanfictions, the one's where people get turned into ponies? They drink grape juice and stuff?" Rachel had tried to get Gregoria interested in some of her very favorite online stories, but that had fallen flat. Gregoria had particularly disliked the ones where humans actually chose to become ponies. That was the last thing in the world she wanted to hear about. That said, Celestia was a minor god in most of them, or so Rachel said.

"If those were what all of this was based on, I should be able to reconstruct the both of us just by wishing it." Rachel seemed uneasy. "Then again, my favorite author says such things aren't easy even for alicorns. If I mess up, I could vaporize us or even destroy the world. I thought of that too, Gregoria, but frankly, it scares me to even try."

"But it's a chance! You could also save the world, too, have you thought about that?" Gregoria didn't like the sound of Rachel not wanting to use powers. Using magic seemed like the only real option, the only authentic hope to her. "Something or someone is turning earth into Equestria! Me. You. The bridge! It could be the whole planet, everypony everywhere! You don't want that, do you?"

Rachel looked at the table.

"Do you?" Gregoria's heart sank. Of course she did. It was obvious she did. Rachel was perfectly happy with the notion, the only part she didn't like was having to be Celestia, rather than whatever image of herself as a pony she had in her mind. The only pony that might have a chance to stop whatever was going on and she wanted it to happen! "You can't be serious... come on Rachel, no... no... you can't want this..."

Rachel sat upright, her horn tall above her head. Her expression was hard, her eyes narrowed. "Pollution, everywhere. Global climate change. Animal species going extinct by the hundreds per day. Starvation, poverty and homelessness in the richest nations purely because of greed. Wars, Gregoria. WARS! My Rick is dead, he was blown up, ripped limb from limb because humans fight all the time, everywhere, over anything, forever and ever!

"Do I want this? I don't want to be Celestia, not one bit, but you are out of your little pony mind if you think I am the least bit happy with how things are. And don't give me that look - none of this is new, there have always been wars and there always will be because that is what humans do. My Rick, the man I loved more than anything in the world is dead off in some stupid place and do you know why, do you Gregoria? Huh? Do you know why he went into the army?"

Rachel as Celestia was nothing less than terrifying when angry. Gregoria could barely squeak out a "no?" in response.

"He couldn't get a job. He tried, everything was outsourced. WHY?" Rachel's eyes were like searchlights, seeking enemy ships, and Gregoria felt like she was on the losing side. "Greed, Gregoria! Sheer, unmitigated greed. That's all, just so some super-rich suit could make even more money than too much!"

Rachel was sitting in the main room, by the couch, staring out the other window. She had clomped off, her royal golden shoes slamming into the floor. Then, with nowhere to go, she had just sat down, her back to the kitchen, her back to Gregoria, and stared out the window, unmoving.

Gregoria sat for a long time, in silence, before noticing that her flank had fallen asleep and her tail hurt terribly. Clumsily, but as quietly as she could - she was frankly afraid of upsetting her Celestoid friend - she had clambered down from the chair, and stretched on the linoleum to get the circulation back into her rear. Human furniture was not ideal for ponies - with the exception of the couch, which worked fairly well as a bed.

Once, Rachel had raised her great bulk to go to the bathroom and also to get water to drink. Gregoria started to speak, to offer her advice about using the toilet as a pony, but the look that Rachel had given her caused her to fall silent instantly. Rachel had returned to her spot in the main room and resumed her silent vigil, looking out the window in the far wall.

Lunch came and went without any change, and Gregoria's stomach began to growl, so she tried to search for any hidden food to nibble on. This clearly seemed to upset Rachel, massive, scary, Celestia Rachel, so Gregoria settled for a big bowl of water. She kept it by herself, and occasionally lapped at it like a dog. She felt like a dog, or at least as if she were in the doghouse.

Finally, as the rosy smog colors of sunset in the city tinted the world in pink, Rachel spoke. At first, the moment didn't entirely register with Gregoria, for she had drifted off into daydreams and brief snoozes to cope with the endless, tense day of silence and uncomfortable stillness.

"I know what to do."

"What?" Gregoria's ears pivoted, locking onto her friend.

"I know what to do. What we should do. What we are supposed to do."

Gregoria tried to answer as gently and politely as she could. Rachel was probably still mad at her, and the fact was, Rachel was magically powerful whether she wanted to deal with that or not. Gregoria's ribs still ached from finding that out. "What?" A silent moment passed. "What are we supposed to do?"

Rachel worked to turn around to face the kitchen and Gregoria. It wasn't easy for her, it was clear her legs had probably gone to sleep, or that her flanks were stiff and sore from sitting upright for so long. Eventually she sat facing Gregoria, her waving, glowing mane flowing behind her.

"We need to cross the bridge."

"Cross the bridge?" Gregoria was incredulous.

"We don't belong here. Not anymore." Rachel seemed more like Celestia now than her usual self - her words were quiet and dignified, like the voice actress from the show. "There are many stories of fairy bridges, Gregoria, magical bridges to other worlds. We can't live here. The lease is up at the end of the month. I can't hold down a job, and I know you haven't been able to find one. We aren't human, Gregoria, this world is not our home anymore."

Gregoria didn't like where this was going, but she had no other ideas to offer, and even if she had - she did not feel entirely safe suggesting anything. "You think Equestria is on the other side of that bridge - is that it? But humans and cars were crossing it while we watched! They didn't vanish into another world - they just went across!"

Rachel finally, thankfully smiled. It was just a small, soft smile, but it spoke clearly that she wasn't angry anymore and that made Gregoria feel intense relief. It wasn't just that Rachel was scary powerful with her horn, it was also that Rachel was her best friend, and the only other pony in the world that she knew of. Rachel was all there was for Gregoria right now.

"Yes, they went across." Rachel sounded almost as if she were presenting a paper on quantum chromodynamics at a TED conference, her voice filled with scientifically verified smugness. "They... weren't ponies."

10. Belief Is Like A Guillotine

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

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Belief Is Like A Guillotine

"A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light."

Franz Kafka

Two ponies, one large and white and glowing, the other small and yellow and dressed in denim waited for the light to change so that they could cross the street.

Gregoria shook her barrel to balance her saddlebags. She'd underestimated the weight of the two juice bottles filled with water in the right bag, which caused her saddlebags to slowly slide down on that side. It would probably make sense to just repack everything, put one bottle in each bag, but that would mean having to move the containers of oats, the muffins and all the other stuff. Gregoria had run to the convenience store down the block with money from Rachel's purse and bought a few things for the journey. They had decided they had no way to know where in Equestria they might end up on the other side of the bridge, so having water and food seemed wise. Also, they were both hungry again.

They had decided to leave just after dark, to minimize encounters and Rachel being seen. Rachel had removed all of her remaining Celestia jewelry - her neck circlet, her golden shoes - because she wanted it clear that she was not princess Celestia. If there was an Equestria on the other side of the Whinneysburg Bridge - both were calling it that now - then it must already have the real princess Celestia living there. The last thing Rachel wanted was to be seen as some kind of usurper or impersonator.

Gregoria had originally wanted to sell the royal Equestrian jewelry, arguing that this could spare them from having to walk the bridge. Gregoria was not keen on leaving the earth forever. "Rachel - come on! This, this shoe, right here, just this shoe could buy this entire apartment building! Do you have any idea how much gold this is? And the neck thing, that gem on it alone... you could buy the rest of the block and two more besides! You don't need a job! We have a fortune right here!"

"And how are we going to explain these things, huh?" Rachel was annoying when she was sensible. It ruined dreams. "Where did this much gold come from? Do you think something like all of this could just be sold without any publicity? And where, exactly would we sell it? Who to? Where do we say it all came from?"

Gregoria thought fast "You... had an uncle, a fabulous gay uncle who loved fancy jewelery and was also an explorer! He found the lost city of Teoten... Teonac... Somewhere-or-another in South America! He had no kids of his own, but you were his favorite niece so he gave it all to you when he died!"

Rachel laughed. "They'll want to know all about him. They'll ask my parents, they'll ask all of my relatives trying to find him!"

Gregoria grinned. "That's why I made him your gay uncle. See, your family are all religious nutbars and they never talk about your uncle because they're all bigots, but you alone were nice to him and that's why he left you the gold!"

"First, promise me you will never write fanfiction. Secondly, that would never work. Thirdly - even if anypony bought that story, gold dug up in foreign nations gets seized if anypony finds out. There are international laws and rules and treasure police. You can't get away with 'great explorer' stuff anymore, the days of Indiana Jones are gone, Greggy!" Rachel rotated the crown - Gregoria had fished it out from under the bed - and used her glowing yellow magic to stuff it into the pillowcase with all the other bits.

"Besides, my family weren't narrow bigots, you met them once - remember when my aunt Sylvia married her partner Lisa? You were there, or so I thought. You chowed down on the clam dip and threw up all over the..."

"Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah..." Gregoria's ears sagged and hung to the sides of her head. Her ears lifted just a bit "It was really good dip!"

"You're a really good dip." Rachel grinned and used her magic to try to tie a knot in the pillowcase to seal it. It wasn't working very well - she could lift things and move things, but trying to use a blob of light to tie a knot was troublesome. "It really would be awesome to be able to cash all of this in. I'm guessing it could be worth billions, Greggy, and that's probably a conservative estimate. This stuff is equivalent to the crown jewels of England, maybe more. And that's the problem..." Rachel frowned. "...there is no way to explain why any ordinary pony would have such a treasure. At best, we wouldn't end up in jail after years of being hounded about it. I don't think there is any way it wouldn't be confiscated as suspicious. We would never see a single shiny bit from any of it."

Gregoria watched, depressed, as Rachel finally managed to tie up the pillowcase that held the treasure. "We could take a hacksaw to it, sell little squares and..."

"No, Greg." Rachel used her magic to open her clothes hamper. She put the pillowcase filled with gold into the hamper and piled dirty laundry on top of it. "They'd question us about that, too. That especially, actually. Unless we went to some really scary place, and then we could have humans following us to get the rest."

"I still say we should take it to Equestria!" Gregoria stomped her hoof on the floor.

"And when we get taken to see the princesses, and we will be taken to see the princesses because - let's face it - I am Celestia's total double, how is also having copies of her royal stuff going to help? You want to spend your super-long pony life banished from Equestria, or thrown into a dungeon? Or banished and then thrown into a dungeon in the place that you're banished to?"

Gregoria stared at Rachel. "I bet you know all the words to all the songs, too, don't you?"

Rachel grinned. "Yup."

The light finally changed, so Gregoria and Rachel began to walk across the street. Since there was no way for Rachel to ride, the only way to get to the bridge was a long, long walk. It would probably take all night, though Rachel argued that it would be faster as ponies, and less tiring too. Gregoria had disagreed, saying that the hard concrete shocked the bones in her legs and made her hooves uncomfortable - the journey would be unpleasant no matter what.

Heading for the corner, both Rachel and Gregoria were glad to see that the few people out seemed to take no notice of Rachel, other than perhaps her size. They had come to the conclusion that she was probably being perceived as a very tall woman - Gregoria reasoned a tall, blond Norwegian woman, considering what Celestia looked like.

There was no clothing that could fit Rachel's huge form, so they had settled on Gregoria's original trick and hoped for the best. Rachel wore a dark blue tablecloth tied over her back like a cape, leather shoes attached with wraps of masking tape to her hind legs, a bedraggled, cut-open tee-shirt around her neck, and a baseball cap which her horn had been jabbed through. It was utterly ridiculous, but it seemed to work. The humans saw what they wanted to see, or more likely, what they needed to see to keep from screaming.

"Why do you like it so much? I mean, it's cute enough I suppose, and sometimes it's kinda fun - not Pixar fun, not Spongebob fun - but it's okay... what makes it worth actually wanting... this? What makes it worth actually wanting to be a pony for real? I don't see it." Gregoria leaned and shook her body again, re-seating her saddlebags for the umpteenth time.

"It doesn't. Not the show, really." Rachel studiously avoided eye contact with a pair of men in leather jackets passing them on the sidewalk.

"Huh? Wait a minute! You wanted, dreamed, of being a pony, right? I got that right, right?" Gregoria was confused.

"Oh, yeah. In a heartbeat. I almost got my wish. Almost." Rachel fell silent for a bit, while their hooves went 'clippity-cloppity' on the concrete. "But it isn't the show I love so much. My Little Pony is a great cartoon, I love it, but it isn't the heart of Equestria, it isn't the real magic. The real heart of Equestria is in the fandom. If you take the show as canon, then most of the really cool stuff isn't there. Equestria is barely better than earth in a lot of ways, and some of the episodes conflict with each other because not all of the writing is very good."

Gregoria made an ugly face as the strong smell of cooked meat filled their noses. The city was filled with smells neither of the two had ever truly noticed before. "So it's all the fanfiction stuff, then."

"Oh, yes, Greggy! Derpy Hooves, Doctor Who in pony form, Celestia and Luna as benevolent goddesses, Equestria as a perfect land, a pony heaven where ponies are always nice to each other and the scary stuff in the show only happens to the Mane six. That's what Richard and I loved, we loved all the stories about Equestria as heaven. He wrote a few, did you know that? He wrote about getting blown..." Rachel looked away as they walked. "...I ...I hope... stories can come true."

The silence and clippy-clopping became unbearable. "Hey - maybe... maybe we can buy a last meal before we cross the bridge, okay? Maybe we could have a snack, something really nice, before we go across? A last treat to remember earth with?" Gregoria felt like she would probably be very hungry by the time they got to the bridge, and the provisions in her saddlebags were supposed to be for surviving in Equestria until they could find a town or a city. Just in case they came out in a desert or something.

Rachel lifted her hanging head and nodded. "Sure. We'll use the last of my cash. Won't be needing it after today, anyway."

Suddenly Rachel stopped. "Wait." She looked around herself and then at Gregoria's saddlebags. "I never put on the little dangly purse. You don't have it in your bags, do you?"

Rachel had put all of her remaining bills and credit cards into an old-fashioned pouch on a long chain. It was something that would fit over her big Celestia neck. It wasn't on her neck now.

"No! Last I saw it, it was on the table in the kitchen, when we were taping the shoes to your legs."

Rachel looked back over her flank. "No money, no snacks. I want to save the packed stuff for Equestria."

Gregoria watched a car slow down as it drove past. Fortunately the men in it went on by. "We're only a block and a half. Let's just go back and get it. It's no biggie."

Rachel turned and began heading in the direction of her apartment building. "Sorry. I feel like an idiot. DERP!"

"Hey, it's no big, like I said." Gregoria followed behind and caught up to Rachel. Rachel could walk faster because of her long legs. "Wait up! Remember? Small pony!"

"Sorry." Rachel reduced her speed. "Oh no! What about keys! I never expected to go back!"

Gregoria grinned, just a little sheepishly. "I have 'em. Just in case. Just in case the bridge thing didn't work out."

That got a dirty look from Rachel, who was clearly betting the farm on the hope that the Whinneysburg led to Equestria. Then the look turned to relief. "Yeah... okay. Good idea, I guess."

The corner they had rounded was ahead. As the street that served Rachel's apartment came into view, so did the line of black, unmarked, windowless vans. They were accompanied by large, expensive black cars. All were parked in the middle of the street directly outside the apartment building. Rachel and Gregoria froze.

The lights were on inside Rachel's apartment. As they stood in shock, they could see human shapes moving behind the kitchen window by the fire escape. The humans were wearing black too, black turtlenecks from the look of it, and black sunglasses in the middle of the night.

Both Gregoria and Rachel began stepping backward, unconsciously, at the same time. "Come on!" They turned on their hooves and left at a fast, but not too fast pace, occasionally glancing back over their flanks at the receding scene. When the corner had been rounded, and the edge of the building blocked the view from the apartment, they both wordlessly broke into a gallop, Rachel ahead, and Gregoria doing her tireless best as a mere earthpony, to catch up.

──── ∆ ────

The black leather gloves had special inductance patches in the fingertips. Mr. Crown insisted that everyone use modified iPhones that he had 'fixed' himself. Supposedly they could not be traced or breached or recorded despite using Verizon. Not even the US Government's secret 'PRISM' system could listen in according to Mr. Crown. He claimed they were among the only truly secure phones in the world, and that only a very small number of people had anything like them. It was something built in, something only for those in the know. "Congratulations, sir, you are wise, you are handsome, and you dance well too."

Nadzieja felt clever saying that. It was an old Polish saying about having gold in the pocket. It was important to be serious on a job, but never grim. "About forty, maybe fifty kilograms, I would estimate. One gold crown with purple jewel, a large gold hoop with purple jewel, and four large gold drinking steins without handles. They were hidden in a pillowcase, inside a dirty-clothes basket."

Thibault held one of the heavy steins - they must be drinking steins, what else could they be - and stared at it like a dog hungry for meat. He hefted the weight of it, the mass of it, and whistled. "Now I know where daddy gets his money. Daaamnn."

Nadzieja nodded, still on the phone. "No, nothing else. It looks like a fast leaving, there is mess everywhere in the kitchen. I am thinking many men eating very much. All the food is gone." She gave Thibault a whack on the shoulder and pointed to the pillowcase indicating he should bag everything up again. "Yes sir. One final sweep and then we place package and leave. Yes sir, Bill is using iPad to photograph everything... yes sir, especially books and pictures on walls. Yes... one scrapbook, no diary. We think a woman lives here normally. Computer is already copied. Bill has done this. Of course."

"Guillaume." Strong, black-gloved hands scanned the room holding an iPad. "My name is Guillaume."

Nadzieja smiled. "Yes, as I said. Bill."

Guillaume shook his head. There was no reasoning with the woman.

When everything but the gold had been replaced as it had been before, Nadzieja set a shining object, tied with a bow, on the dining room table. She carefully placed the card. Guillaume struggled to lift the pillowcase sack full of golden artifacts, only to find the rip that had already started in it began to give way. He motioned to Thibault, and began stuffing the golden objects into the pack on Thibault's back, now empty because of Nadzieja's efforts.

Thibault groaned as they left the apartment.

"Stop complaining, baby, it's not every day you get to walk off with more than a hundred pounds of gold on your back!" Guillaume smirked - he wasn't the one having to haul the weight down the stairs.

"Unhh..." Thibault staggered as he descended the stairs. "At least the beer's good."

──── ∆ ────

Rachel was almost prancing as she crossed the Whinneysburg Bridge. She could definitely see it now, the real bridge under the illusion that humans perceived, and every bit of what she saw pleased her. Occasionally she would stop to just take in the view - not of the water, but of the bridge itself, of the gold and marble and jewels and precious inlaid stonework.

Because it was still night - though morning would soon arrive - there was a new feature that Gregoria simply hadn't noticed. Lamps. The bridge was lined with hanging lamps on elaborate fixtures, ovoid things made of some curious opaque yellow glass. They were large, at least a yard wide, and the smooth, curving surface was divided by metalwork done in an organic, vine-like style. Rachel said they looked like the lamp that hung off of Twilight Sparkle's library tree, though Gregoria couldn't remember it well enough for that to matter.

"It's never been pinned down what makes lights work in Equestria on the show." Rachel was the happiest Gregoria had seen her since her transformation. She was almost giddy now. "Faust herself suggested that magic would run everything, but there was that episode that had an electrical dam in it, and they've shown switches and buttons in several episodes. I don't agree with that, neither did Rick. We always went with magic."

Rachel stopped to study one of the lamps, which hung from a metal curlicue that grew out of the marble of the bridge. "Now a few fan authors have come up with little magical bugs, like fireflies, as the source of all lighting, and that's because it's been shown in some episodes, fireflies in jars for light, stuff like that. Rick liked that one. I bet there are magic insects in there!" The idea made the face of Celestia smile widely in the lamp light.

"Rachel?"

Rachel had moved on, Gregoria was following again, very conflicted but with nowhere else to go. Rachel looked back over her flank as she walked. "Yeah?"

"What do we do if this works? You got a plan, right? You've thought about this at all, or are we just winging it?" Gregoria thought for a brief moment and added "Only you've got wings, though."

"Ah... yeah." Rachel wasn't impressed by the comment. "I've thought about it. A lot, actually. Don't worry, everything will work out pretty easily. It'll be fine."

"Mind cluing me in?" Rachel hadn't turned into the character she resembled, not exactly, but it did seem that having such a grand and impressive alicorn body had made her act a little superior sometimes. Then again, maybe she was trying to convince herself that she knew what she was doing. Gregoria decided Rachel was more likely just whistling in the dark with her pronouncements.

"I figure that the bridge probably leads straight to Canterlot. That's the only place big enough to warrant a bridge like this. But if it doesn't it probably leads somewhere civilized. It would be pretty silly if it just opened out into the Everfree or some desert or something." Rachel nodded at a cluster of lamps near the middle of the arching bridge that were particularly large and elaborate. "Look at this thing, Greggy! This is designed, sculpted, created. I don't know by who or what, but this bridge is a work of art, and that means purpose is involved. It isn't some random thing. So it has to lead to some place, and not just... um, noplace. See?"

It seemed a large number of leaps of logic were involved with all of that, jet-assisted leaps at that, but Gregoria let it lay. "Okay then, so we end up in Canterlot or some other city. Then what? Just walk up to the nearest pony and say 'Pardon me, but we've just strolled in from another world, which way to the immigration center?'"

Rachel giggled at that. "No, no... we're already citizens of Equestria - we're ponies! We're not human anymore, we don't even belong on earth anymore. The only place with ponies like us is Equestria, we don't belong anywhere else!"

More rocket-car Darwin Award logic, but there was no point in arguing now. That could come later, after something terrible happened. Gregoria shook her head and sighed as they walked. At least that part of her human mind had survived transformation. Hopeless resignation was not a pony trait. "Then, granting all that, where DO we go. We'll need help, money, shelter... all kinds of stuff. We're just showing up with whatever is on our back! We're... 'earthbacks' without a green card!"

"Don't need a green card, silly. Like I said, we're already in, because we're ponies. We're going home, not to a foreign land. That - " Rachel stopped briefly and waved a hoof at the city they had come from "...is the foreign country. You're an Equestrian now, you'd better get used to it."

They walked in silence for a while. Then Rachel added "We'll just ask directions, then head straight to Canterlot castle. We'll present ourselves and ask to see the princesses. I think they'll let us in, considering me. Then we just explain everything, probably over tea and cakes. Then we find out."

Gregoria's ears perked up. "Find out what?"

"What made us ponies, of course! There has to be a reason for all of this. Maybe its Discord. Maybe Twilight messed up a spell. Maybe it's some... being... that isn't even part of the show, or even the fanfiction! Maybe Celestia is doing it for some reason. But if anyone knows, or can find out, it has to be Celestia, right?"

Gregoria plodded on, the end of the bridge was finally in sight. "If you say so."

It was a very long bridge, but the end finally came. It didn't look any different than the other side.

"Um... I'm not seeing Equestria." Gregoria had mixed feelings about this fact. On one hoof, answers and help would be very nice indeed. On another hoof, being stuck as a pony in magical ponyland wasn't exactly the worst possible thing, but it wasn't what she wanted, and it felt exactly like failure to her. She would have to give in, to just completely go native and be a pony simply to survive. The last of her humanity would only get in the way in Equestria. On a third hoof - if this didn't work, they were out of options. She kept her fourth hoof open, in the hope some idea or new hope might appear.

Rachel was clearly becoming upset, her voice sounded nervous, and her movements, previously grand and flowing, had become jerky and halting. "Um... I would have expected some change by now, I expected the view to sort of slowly change, but... that's not... maybe we have to cross some threshold or something." The thought seemed to cheer her. "That's it, it's probably like a flat barrier, like a wall, and it's invisible, and we just haven't passed through it yet!" Rachel began trotting to the stairs that led down from the bridge. "Come on!"

As they clopped down the echoing stairwell, Gregoria felt her heart begin to sink. This was not working out, only Rachel couldn't admit it yet.

"When we reach the bottom, we'll walk out into Equestria! I can feel it! We're nearly there Greggy!" Rachel sounded frantic now, she was trying to convince herself that her faith was real. She had constructed a religion for herself, and it was failing in the face of cold reality.

Then they were out, standing under the bridge, on urban sidewalk, in the light of early morning. They were beaten, they were hungry, they were thirsty.

And they were clearly in Brooklyn.

Gregoria briefly considered just heading home. Rachel was the only one really in the Everfree because of this. Gregoria knew she always had a bed with mom and dad. Rachel wanted to be a pony, well, she got her wish. Leave her to it.

The pony mind inside Gregoria reared up then and bucked her hard, right in the conscience. "SWIRL!" She couldn't abandon Rachel and her insane fantasies. It wasn't because Rachel had made her clothes, or let her sleep on the couch, it wasn't because Rachel was the only other pony in the world that Gregoria knew of.

She tried to fight it, she tried to do what she would have done if she were human. But her legs wouldn't move. Gregoria started to cry, tears running down her yellow muzzle. She couldn't leave, even though she had a home to go back to. Rachel's parents were gone, she didn't have a home to run back to, and Gregoria knew her parents wouldn't be willing to support Rachel for long.

The pony brain had won. All the 'Friendship Is Magic' pony swirl had finally won, it had beaten her. This was a sour deal, there was no solution for Rachel, she was a loss, this whole bridge thing was a failure, the sensible thing would be to part ways and there was no way Gregoria could do that.

Because Rachel was her friend and friends didn't ever abandon or betray friends.

"SWIRL!" Gregoria stomped her hoof. "SWIRL! SWIRL! SWIRL!" She couldn't even swear right because of the pony brain, and she couldn't do what she would have done as a human, and she couldn't be Gregoria Samson because now she was a pony and she had to take care of little miss precious princess over there and share her fate because pony friends stuck together no matter what. "SWIRL!" the tears made saying the infantile curse burble and distort.

A long, massive pony neck lay over her own. Gregoria felt herself being held tight by the large frame of Rachel's Celestia body. "Shhh.... shhh.... come on, let's head home. We'll figure something out. Come on. Come on Greggy." The voice was soft, motherly, kind beyond measure. This must have broken Rachel's heart utterly, yet there she was, thinking about her friend first. Rachel had been a pony before her body even changed. The last shred of humanity within Gregoria had just enough fight in it to be offended at that.

The key in Gregoria's left saddlebag was levitated out, wrapped in glowing, golden light. Gregoria stood silent, as she had been on the long, numb walk all the way back. It wasn't that she was physically exhausted, it took a lot to wear out an earthpony, though she was fairly sleepy. Rather, Gregoria was emotionally wrecked. The last two days had been fear, horror, confusion, hope, and finally, having that hope utterly crushed.

As they approached the apartment building, both had been alert for any sign of black vans or strange humans. There was no sign the bizarre invasion had ever occurred. Rachel just wanted to get into her apartment, and Gregoria was too destroyed to argue. Besides, they really had nowhere else to go.

There was a nervous moment when Rachel opened the door with a glowing blob of magic, but there were no lurking ninjas in the rooms. The door had been locked when they got there, and everything seemed untouched. The black vans and cars and humans in the window seemed like a dream. Maybe it had been. Maybe it hadn't really happened.

Then they saw it. On the kitchen table, surrounded by scattered oats and bits of carrot and wheat grass from their messy meal. A brand new iMac, tall and flat and shiny, with a metallic keyboard and a single, white, soap-shaped mouse. It had been built onto some kind of custom base, unlike anything either Rachel or Gregoria had ever seen - though to be fair, neither knew much about Mac stuff at all.

The base looked custom, tacked on. It wasn't corporate design. It had a light, it had power, it probably was power for the machine. The Mac was active, it was on, but it wasn't plugged into the wall or hooked up to anything external.

There was a note, a little card, set up near the flatscreen. The flatscreen had a bow around it, a pretty pink bow.

Rachel used her magic to lift the card. Gregoria had forgotten her funk with this development, this was truly bizarre and all she wanted now was to see what this was about.

Hello.

Please accept this little gift. It will allow us to talk.
I think you may find we have a great deal in common.
I have been watching you, not for long, just a day.
I have information about Richard, Rachel.
Or should I say - Celestia?
One Equestrian can always see another.
I look forward to being friends.
Friendship is magic, after all.

Malus Crown

Rachel lowered the card to the table, the golden glow fading from horn and card simultaneously. She quickly looked around, as if afraid she was being watched in the moment. Then she looked at Gregoria, a mixture of fear and wonder in her huge violet eyes.

"W-whaddya... what do you think?"

Gregoria stared back, stunned. "I guess... I guess we talk to the guy."

"How do you know it's a guy?" Rachel tilted her head slightly.

"It sounds like a guy."

"Okay." Rachel looked down at her hoof on the linoleum, and idly scraped a bit of carrot with her hoof. It had been a very messy meal. "Why?"

"He sounds like a creepy stalker."

Rachel blinked. "No, I mean... why should we talk to... this guy?"

Gregoria's ears sagged on both sides of her head. They were just flopped sideways, as if they had given up. "Got any more bridges?"

"...Um ... no."

Gregoria stepped forward and pressed her head into Rachel's tall neck, feeling the comfort of her warm, soft coat. "Then... we talk to the guy."

12. Whatever We Have Not Sufficiently Desired

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

═════════════════════

Whatever We Have Not Sufficiently Desired

"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist,

we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired."

Franz Kafka

Gregoria found the soft leather, padded, benchlike seat remarkably comfortable. It was built for a pony, a large one. Another bench faced hers, which Rachel had found perfectly suited to her in every respect. The back of the black truck was extremely comfortable for a Celestia-sized pony, and positively royal for the smaller Gregoria.

Track lighting illuminated the interior, the green carpeting provided good purchase for hooves preventing them from sliding even when the vehicle was in motion. There was a refrigerator and big screen near the far wall towards the driver. Rachel and Gregoria were encouraged by the electronic voice of Mr. Crown to help themselves to anything they wanted. Inside the refrigerator were assorted fruit and vegetable juices, unusual sodas, ice water, and several bottles of Martinelli's cider.

"I've seen these benches before, somewhere." Gregoria was sipping cider out of a large, old fashioned goblet. The shape of the cup worked very well with her hooves, and that fact did not seem to be accidental. "I don't know where, but... they're familiar somehow."

Rachel levitated a goblet of Fentimans's dandelion and burdock soda, which she was amazed to see was a real, commercial product. It tasted like a sort of strange sarsaparilla, an odd not-quite rootbeer. "I've been thinking about that too." She took a sip, savoring the unusual beverage. "Oh! I know! I know where these benches came from! These are more plush, more padded, and the backs are not transparent but, I am sure that's what they are from!"

Gregoria turned from the highly tinted, panoramic window that served as a wall to the truck-van. From the outside, the entire thing looked black, but from inside, behind the big green apple logo, most of the wall was a translucent material. It seemed to be polarized, and Gregoria suspected it could be made entirely opaque with the touch of a button. "What? Where are they from?"

"The Friendship Express!" Gregoria tilted her head, she had no clue. Rachel smiled. "From My Little Pony, of course, the train. The train you see in the opening credits? The Mane six rode it in several episodes? All the benches with transparent green backs? Look at the design."

Gregoria studied the curving swirls of the padded, leather back of Rachel's bench. "Yeah... okay. Yeah. I guess so. Mr. Crown seems pretty obsessed with the show, then. And rich. I mean, this thing is completely custom."

"He knows what we are. He must be a pony too. He must have changed, just like we did." Rachel took another sip of Dandelion and Burdock. "If I had that kind of money, I'd have a house all done up like Canterlot Palace - OOH! What if he's done just that? Wouldn't that just be the most awesomest of awesome things?!"

Gregoria studied the goblet between her fetlocks. "Uh... yeah. Sure."

"Oh, come on Greggy! Equestrian design is cool. Admit it." Rachel lay one of her forelegs over the other and relaxed. The ride was smooth.

"Rachel..." Gregoria drank the last of her cider. "I never wanted to be a pony. I don't care about pony stuff the way you do. It's just a cartoon to me. I get that it is a big deal to you, and that you really love it, but... if it hadn't been for you, I probably wouldn't have ever even known it existed."

The two rode in silence after that, for some time.

"Excuse me, miss Priss and Miss Samson." The artificial voice of Mr. Crown was back. "One of the primary purposes of the vehicle you are riding in is observation. I use it to travel in comfort - and to observe things discretely. My team has informed me that one of the examples I wish to show you has appeared, and you will arrive at that location in a few moments. Please pay attention and follow instructions carefully, this is the start of the explanation I promised you."

Gregoria's ears stood straight up, slightly angled forward as she studied the big screen on the wall. Still no picture. "Explanation? You mean why we are ponies?"

"Yes, miss Samson. The vehicle will be stopping soon. Note that the viewing ports are now opaque. I want you to use your ears, first. The transport is equipped with high quality microphones, the sounds you will hear will be coming from directly outside, on the right. Listen carefully and then tell me what you are hearing. Describe the circumstance of it to me."

Gregoria looked at Rachel. "So now he's a docent? It feels like being back in school."

"In a manner of speaking, you are, miss Samson." The machine voice paused. "Please listen now."

The sound from the speakers changed. Rachel and Gregoria could hear the noises of the street, of cars going by, of people talking in the background, a bus pulling away somewhere. This was shattered by a loud, gruff, drunken voice, the voice of a madman, raving and speaking only to himself.

"...NESIS ONE-TWENTY SEVEN! Genesis one-twentysevensevenseven, genesis, genesis, and HE made them IN HIS OWN image, he made them in his OWN image, not the some other image, not some other NO! He made them GENESIS! One, one, one twenty one twenty one twenty seven HE MADE MAN IN HIS OWN IMAGE he did, he did, all damned, all damned, YOU ARE DAMNED SIR! YES YOU! Who do you think I'm talking to anyway one twenty seven own image, one twenty all damned! All damned. All damned, I'm damned, I'm damned.... damned... one... one... GENESIS!!! GENESIS!!! It says so right in right in there right in one two seven one two..."

The sound dimmed greatly, so that the artificial voice of Mr. Crown could speak over it clearly. Behind his voice the man continued to rant, saying the same things over and over again.

"Now, please tell me what your ears tell you is going on outside."

Gregoria shook her head. She couldn't see the point of any of this, but she might as well play along. "That's some crazy. Street crazy. Probably on drugs, booze or something. These guys are all over the city. It's some homeless guy annoying everypony."

"Greggy!" Rachel was frowning. "I feel sorry for him, whoever he is. Humans have such difficult lives! He probably has a mental disorder but there's no funds to help people like that anymore. They just get dumped onto the street when whatever insurance or money they had runs out. He probably lives out in the cold!"

The voice of Mr. Crown returned. "You both did well, that is precisely what any human would perceive about mister Thomas Clements there. Let's take a look at Mr. Clements now, shall we?"

The polarized viewport brightened slowly, allowing a clear, if tinted, view outside of the transport truck.

The bus stop was filthy, the sidewalk old and cracked. People walked by, deliberately avoiding the corner where what could only be mister Thomas Clements stood and ranted. He stood on the sidewalk, yelling and raving biblical verses while flapping his reddish-brown wings.

In his front right claw, he held a large bottle, a cheap wine, which he occasionally tipped into his sharp beak. His feathers were soiled and in some places torn from his body and wings. Clement's feline hindquarters somehow managed to still have pants on them, the cuffs torn, the zipper open. His hind legs had shredded remnants of what had once been white socks just above the clawed paws. His long lion tail had ripped through the back of his trousers, it had red marks on it where it looked as if it had been injured in various ways.

"It's a griffon! He's a griffon, like Gilda! Like the griffon in that episode!" Gregoria remembered Gilda, she was one of the few characters she actually liked. Then it fully hit Gregoria. "...hey ...he's not a pony."

Malus Crown broke in. "No, mister Clements is not... a pony. Mr. Clements was apparently once a family man, active - as is perhaps obvious - in his faith, which was, I am informed, a fairly severe and narrow one. As far as can be researched, he transformed about five years ago, and was unable to cope with the experience. He was put into several institutions, given numerous pointless treatments which seemed to only make things worse, and as miss Priss so accurately put it, he was dumped out on the street when the money ran out."

Clements continued to rant, screaming to the sky, cursing himself for not being human. Rachel could not bear it. "Please! Please... either help him or... or turn the sound off and drive on. I can't... I just can't..."

The viewport instantly dimmed, becoming black and opaque. Gregoria could feel the truck accelerating away from the corner, stopping briefly, and then turning and accelerating again.

"Wait." Gregoria felt something was wrong. "Rachel! When did My Little Pony start? When was the first episode?"

Rachel was staring at her empty cup, which she set down on the floor. "Ah... 'bout three years ago. Why?"

Gregoria turned to the screen. There was nothing to see, but Mr. Crown could apparently see them, and she wanted him to see her now. "You blew it, Crown. You said that the Clemens guy turned five years ago. That was before the cartoon even came out!" Gregoria snorted. She had caught Crown in a lie.

"Very astute, miss Samson. A very sharp observation. You are correct. Mister Clements was transformed into a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic griffon one full year before Lauren Faust even conceived of the show, two years before the program was first released. Mister Clements became a griffon at least a year before that particular vision of such a creature had even been sketched."

"That's impossible!" Rachel had been brought out of her grief for the poor man by this new information. "Unless... wait a minute! Are you suggesting that Equestria predates Lauren Faust? That Equestria is real, that it exists out there somewhere, and that Lauren Faust just somehow tapped into it? I KNEW it! Equestria is too amazing NOT to be real! Oh, WOW, this is fantastic! And you have the means to get there! That's what you meant by 'your little Equestria' back at the apartment!"

The electronic voice was plain and direct. "No. That is entirely incorrect, miss Priss. To the best of my understanding and knowledge, there is no Equestria. Equestria is a fiction, miss Priss, invented by many talented artists working together. It is a completely false, nonexistent fantasy land, with no more substance or reality than Middle Earth or the Land of Oz. Or Pepperland, for that matter."

"Pepperland?" Gregoria had no clue on earth what that was, worse, it sounded silly to her.

"But we're ponies! I'm Celestia, for Luna's sake! Well, I'm not really Celestia, but I'm in a Celestia look-alike! It even came with all of her jewelry and everything!" Rachel was on the verge of tears. The last thing she wanted to hear was that Equestria was a lie.

"I am sorry, miss Priss. If you think about it, the fact that you wear Celestia's body confirms that there is no real Equestria. If there truly was such a place, wouldn't it be more likely that you would have been transformed into some anonymous, ordinary pony rather than an actual character from the cartoon? And the fact that the character you have been transformed into is such an important one - does that seem reasonable to you, were Equestria a real place?"

Tears were now running down Rachel's white cheeks. "Maybe... maybe Celestia needed a double here on earth... maybe... she's in trouble and needed a decoy, or maybe it's a reflection of a higher... or maybe..."

"Rachel... Rachel..." Gregoria was off her soft bench and down on the carpeted floor, her forelegs wrapped around her friend as best as she could. "Okay, Crown, then what is going on then? Just tell us what the deal is!"

"I will tell you. But there is one more thing you need to see before my explanation will make sense to you."

Gregoria felt frustrated and angry. "Look at what you've done to her! Come on, just talk to us, no more of this supervillain swirl, okay?"

"You need to see this with your own eyes. I am sorry, but it is necessary." The voice of mister Crown fell silent after that, and would not answer further.

The second example took some time to be located. The target had escaped the eyes of Crown's team and they took an hour to find him again. Gregoria and Rachel were served lunch during this time by a young woman named Bethany who brought them a large basket.

Inside the basket were two sealed containers of a very rich vegetable and barley soup, some rather excellent watercress and dandelion sandwiches on toasted ciabatta bread, and two entire peach pies. Rachel easily downed her meal in its entirety, Gregoria wanted to finish the pie but just couldn't. Rachel was more than happy to finish what she could not.

Bethany came and removed the basket, and politely asked Gregoria and Rachel if they needed anything else. Gregoria needed to use the restroom, and so a stop was arranged to that end. By the time the two friends had returned - Rachel had decided to make use of the opportunity as well - Crown's team had found their man.

The drive was surprisingly not long, and when the transport stopped, the viewing port was not made opaque, but remained translucent.

"Miss Priss, miss Samson. This time it is not your ears I want you to use, but instead your eyes."

The big screen by the refrigerator finally showed an image. The image was of the very scene directly outside, and must have been taken from a camera built into the transport truck, probably from the roof. A digital circle was drawn around one of the homeless men sitting in the shade of an overpass.

"This man, indicated on the screen, is not human. He has been transformed, just as we have been."

Gregoria glanced at the ordinary looking man, dressed in dirty clothes. "Nuh-uh. I don't see it. It's just a human guy. Are you seeing the same thing we are?"

The computer voice was flat, but the words suggested amusement. "Yes... and no, miss Samson. This is the correct man, though I use the word improperly, for I assure you he is not a man, and if you will make the effort, only then will we be seeing the same thing."

Rachel stared at the man, then at the screen, then back at the man through the transport window. "How? I mean, what are we supposed to do. Greggy's right - it's just a man. He's not any sort of Equestrian."

"You are correct that he is not an Equestrian. Far from it. Try this - look just to the side of him, left or right does not matter. Look at him as you would a distant star, out of the corner of your eye, not in the center of your vision. Look at him and let your mind drift. Do not concentrate on him, just look at him." This was perhaps the strangest instruction Mr. Crown had given them thus far.

Gregoria tried to do what Crown had said. She first looked at the homeless man, sitting under the bridge - after checking the screen to be sure she had the right one - and then moved the center of her vision off to the side just a little. It was surprisingly hard for her, her eye kept locking back onto the man because she was waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. "It's not working, mister Crown, I don't see..."

And then there it was. Only for a moment, because the moment it happened, Gregoria's pulse quickened, she became excited, and her vision locked squarely onto the man to see things more clearly - and with that it was gone. "Muffin! I saw something! But it vanished! But I saw it, I saw it - Rachel! Did you..."

Rachel was very quiet, it was clear she had mastered the trick and was letting her mind drift while she took in what she could with her peripheral vision. "My left hoof..." Rachel blinked, frowned, and then reset her gaze - apparently she had lost the effect just as Gregoria had.

Gregoria set herself to try again, and this time to not let herself become too fascinated, to keep her mind calm and her eyes steady and to the side. More easily now, it came again, and she began trying to interpret what she was almost seeing.

The man in her peripheral vision was dingy and dull, the color of faded clothing and the grind of living on the street. But as she let her mind settle, the shape of the man changed, and he became brightly colored. She tried, as best she could, to work out what he truly was.

The man was tall, and intensely blond, but he still looked like a man. His clothing was now green, an intense green, and cut in a very strange fashion. It seemed to be stage clothing, from some period play... no, not period, not history... fantasy. It was some kind of fantasy costume, bright and clean and exotic.

Gregoria could not bear to not know more. Her eyes locked on the strange, green-clad spectral form. For just an instant, for just a flash, she saw him clearly as he sat, back to the overpass. He was an elf. His ears were sharply pointed, his hair nordic and long, his head graced with an elaborate crown. His clothing was grand and elegant, with woven gold threads in strange, curving patterns, the sleeves done in some graceful script.

"He's Elrond." Rachel stared at Gregoria. "Not the Elrond we know, not Elrond from the movie. Not Peter Jackson's Elrond. He's book Elrond. Elrond from those paintings, um... those brothers... the Hildebrandt brothers! You know, they did all the paintings of Middle Earth, way back in my mom's day?"

Gregoria shook her head. This was deep geek stuff. She'd seen the Lord Of The Rings at the theater, and that was it. And that only because her sister Greta wanted to see it. "Huh?"

"Once again, you impress, miss Priss. The man is indeed Elrond, or to be more specific, an incidence of Elrond. His earthly name is Neil Walter Allen. He was a private first class during the Vietnam war. He escaped an ambush, but his best friend did not. The best friend, another private named Hervey Lewis Taylor was a Tolkien fanatic. During the sixties, many people, both in and outside of the military became obsessed with the Lord Of The Rings. This is the primary reason those books became culturally relevant at all.

"The level of fanatical obsession with Middle Earth during the sixties approached or exceeded the level of obsessive fanaticism seen with regard to the Oz books in the early nineteen hundreds. Like the Oz craze, many people wanted to believe that their perfect fantasy world was real. Fanfiction was written revolving around the concept of somehow gaining permanent admittance to the world they yearned for. People created art and crafts, trying to make their fantasies real.

"You may also find it very interesting that Mr. Allen's lost friend had a nickname for him, a nickname that he always used."

Rachel looked shocked, then resigned. "Elrond."

"Yes, miss Priss. You are beginning to understand."

Gregoria was not following any of this. "What? Rachel, is there actually something to all of this gobbledegook?"

Rachel gave Gregoria a nod, and motioned with her hoof. Gregoria tried to settle down. "Mr. Crown... we can't see Elrond clearly because he is from a different fandom, a different... belief, or wish or whatever. But we can kind of see him because we've been changed too, because we're not human anymore, is that right?"

"Yes, miss Priss. Go on."

Rachel looked at her hooves, then back to the screen. "His friend... his friend died. In war. His friend that called him 'Elrond'. His friend was a Tolkien fan, wasn't he. I mean a total fan, just over the top, like... "

"Yes, miss Priss?"

"Rick. Rick called me 'his princess', he called me 'Celestia'. That was his nickname for me. I wanted to be Fluttershy, but he saw me as Celestia, and... and... he died in war. He died in an ambush, sort of. Unexpectedly." Rachel sniffed, mixed emotions sweeping across her features. "Is that it? Last wishes come true?"

The big screen was silent for a time. "No, not precisely. You have a remarkable mind, miss Priss. But it is not wishes. There is no magic to this, although it would be nice if that were the case. But you have understood correctly that a single human can cause unimaginable changes to happen under a specific, unusual circumstance. No, it is not the fact of being ambushed, that is merely a coincidence. But war can be a factor, as can any disaster or event sufficient to take men, and perhaps the world itself, beyond proper functional parameters."

"Okay, I am, totally lost here. I am not getting any of this. Can anypony explain things to the dumb little earthpony!!!" Gregoria was breathing heavily, and she had stomped her hoof on her soft, leather bench covering, which only achieved a dull 'plumph'.

"You said 'functional parameters', mister Crown?" Rachel reached out a long, white foreleg and rubbed Gregoria's back to comfort her.

"That would be the term I prefer, yes."

Rachel carefully got off her bench, easing herself onto the carpet, to be closer to her friend. She wrapped her forelegs around the little yellow earthpony and held her close. "Greggy... oh, my dear, sweet Gregoria... Greggy, you like video games, right?"

13. But From Their Silence

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

═════════════════════

But From Their Silence

"Now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song,

namely their silence...

someone might have escaped from their singing;

but from their silence, certainly never."

Franz Kafka

The shiny black truck with the green apple on the side entered the multistory parking garage and drove to the third level. It parked next to a black 1965 Ford Econoline van, which had no markings at all.

The artificial voice of Mr. Malus Crown spoke to the two mares. "Please cooperate fully with my team, and remember that they cannot see you as you truly are. They do not comprehend that you have been transformed, they will refer to that circumstance ambiguously as 'The Event'. Answer all questions as accurately as you can, your own survival could very well depend on it. If all goes well, you will be transported to my compound, and we shall meet in the flesh."

The rear doors of the custom transport truck suddenly opened and Gregoria and Rachel found themselves in a swirl of activity. Two men entered, one tall and blond, the other shorter and dark of hair and complexion. "Hello! Mr. Crown has told you what we're doing here, correct?"

Rachel nodded. "Yes."

"While you are being scanned, I need to ask you both some questions. Please answer completely and honestly to the best of your ability." The shorter man had brought a case of electronic equipment. While the taller man flipped pages on his iPad with a finger, the shorter man began running a paddle-like device over every contour of Rachel and Gregoria's bodies as they lay on their padded benches.

"First, have you seen a doctor, gone to a dentist, or sought the services of any medical, cosmetic, or other bodily care services since the 'Event'?" The tall man read from his iPad while the shorter man changed his paddle for a cylinder-shaped sensor.

"No. We just kind of hid out, mostly. We went to get food, but that's it." Gregoria lifted her right foreleg so the short man could scan her chest.

The tall man looked at Rachel.

"No, nothing like that." Rachel looked at Gregoria and shrugged with her ears.

The tall man moved his finger slightly. "Since the 'Event', have you experienced any form of blackout, loss of awareness, loss of time, or unexplained feelings of grogginess or forgetfulness?"

Both Gregoria and Rachel shook their heads. The short man had moved on to something that looked like a supermarket barcode scanner now. He worked quickly.

"Okay... since the 'Event', have you noticed anything within your apartment, home or dwelling that seemed to have been moved without explanation, or anything which was noticeably out of place? Has there been any sign of new construction or alteration of walls, ceiling, floor, tables, room corners, mirrors or ventilation gratings?"

"You're kidding, right?" Gregoria found the questions bizarre.

"No sir. At least not until that computer was left on our table." The tall man seemed uncertain, so Rachel continued. "Mr. Crown left us a computer. It's how he contacted us." This seemed to satisfy the blond man.

"Since the 'Event', have you discovered or felt any unexplained or unusual bumps, lumps, soreness, cuts, rashes, or injuries of any kind on, or inside your bodies, especially after waking up following a sleep cycle?" The tall man studied their faces, while the short man finished a last scan with a tool that resembled a strange inverted cone.

"Um... no. If anything, I've felt really healthy." Gregoria grinned at Rachel. "Healthy as a horse, right Rache?"

Rachel frowned at that and gave Gregoria a harsh look. "Nothing like that. Nothing I can think of."

"They're clean." The short man was busy rapidly packing up his devices. In an instant his case was shut and he was out of the custom transport truck, leaving them alone with the tall, blond man.

"Alright. Last question." The tall man looked briefly at his pad. Then he whispered "Majestic Majik Umbra. Eisenhower saw dark sunglasses. We are among friends."

Rachel looked at Gregoria. Gregoria looked at Rachel then back to the tall man. Gregoria giggled. The tall man seemed to be waiting for something. Finally, Gregoria stared at Rachel with an exasperated look on her face. "Is this really worth it? I mean, seriously? Rachel?"

The tall man was still waiting.

Rachel turned to the tall man. "Honest. I don't have a clue what to say to that."

"Good enough." The tall, blond man backed out of the van and stood on the cement outside. "Outside. Quickly. Into the van over here, fast as you can." He gestured to their left, beyond the back of the fancy transport.

Gregoria and Rachel clambered out of the shiny black truck and were hurried into the fairly beat-up Econoline. The doors were slammed shut as soon as they were inside, and they barely had time to fold their legs and lay down properly on the bare foam pad that covered the floor before the van accelerated away.

They could see nothing out of the sides or back of the windowless vehicle, but to the front they noted a man and a woman sitting in the seats. As the Ford van drove around and around the down ramp to get to the exit of the parking garage, the woman turned partially about and Rachel felt slightly relieved that she recognized her. It was Nadzieja, who had spoken to them over Crown's 'present'.

"Hello again. It is good to meet in the person. We are traveling to the 'secret hideout' now, just like in the movies! Is very exciting, I am sure. Do not fear, Thibault here was once semi-professional race car driver. Try to be comfortable, journey is long but there will be stops and one more change of car. Welcome aboard!" Nadzieja smiled, and turned away again, and immediately began talking on a cell phone to someone.

Gregoria and Rachel huddled together. The ride was not smooth like the fancy truck had been, and there were disconcerting bumps and jolts. Neither could think of anything to say, so they ended up laying fully down, back to back, and dozing.

It was dark when they were fed, watered and allowed to go to the toilet. Nadzieja followed them in, and kept an eye on them at all times. When they returned it was to a new car, another van, but of a make and model neither knew, though Gregoria thought it was a Volkswagon of some kind. For a while, the two friends talked with each other about television programs - but deliberately not My Little Pony - and Nadzieja asked if they would like the radio on. Eventually Rachel and Gregoria fell asleep again, bored, road weary, and unable to think of any other way to pass the time.

After two more stops, assorted snacks and beverages, and more dozing, they were awakened. They were led out of the vehicle to a meadow of grass, surrounded by trees. This was the first time either of the two mares had felt grass and soil beneath their hooves. The smell of it made their stomachs rumble, and their saliva flow. It was twilight, the sun was just setting, and Rachel noted that she could hear insects, probably crickets, in the distance.

They were led through a gate in a long, solid wall, and then down a cobblestone path to a large and rambling ranch house with a midsection A frame. To the side was a classic red barn, and both Rachel and Gregoria could smell hay and working farm in the air.

Dinner was delicious, though Mr. Crown did not attend. They were left alone, after the food was served, which Gregoria thought was a great thing - she didn't have to pretend to eat like a human, and could just stick her muzzle in her bowls with abandon.

The meal featured a delicious vegetarian Avgolemono soup, beside broiled slices of potato seasoned with spices, and a very fresh hummus which they decided to dip the slices in. There was a savory red lentil dish with tomatoes and basil, and large bowls of what appeared, at first, to be oatmeal, but was instead an amazing mixture of lightly spiced mixed grains over a bed of garlic fried hay. Neither Gregoria or Rachel had ever imagined that pony food could be so elaborate or delicious.

"This is better than I imagined Bureau food to be! Sweet Luna, Mr. Crown puts on the feedbag doesn't he?" Rachel was burping happily, the quantity they had been given was prodigious. Crown clearly understood how much a Celestia-sized pony would need to feel full.

"He's rich. But... cinnamon muffins, Rache... I could eat like this for the rest of my life, easy." Gregoria felt over full, but it had been totally worth it. "Of course, I would end up super fat. Any fat ponies on the show?"

Rachel pondered for a bit. "Maybe. I can't remember. Probably."

"That'll be me, if this is typical. Wow." Gregoria took a careful sip of cider. There had been cider with the meal.

"Mr Crown would like to see you now." Nadzieja was at the door to the large dining room. Gregoria and Rachel managed to get up from the large, padded benches they had enjoyed reclining on, and waddled behind her, through several areas of the house.

The room was large, with a high ceiling. The walls were partially covered in acoustic foam, like a recording booth. There were multiple work stations with chairs, with iMacs and other iDevices on them. One recessed area of the room formed a small theater-like enclosure, dark with a truly gigantic screen at the back. In front of the screen was a large white sphere on a pedestal. Rachel, ever the science fiction fan, instantly recognized it - it was a replica of an Eero Aarnio ball chair. It was turned, facing away, and Rachel was instantly jealous of it.

"Please wait here. Mr. Crown will address you. Be good girls now." Gregoria stuck her tongue out at Nadzieja's back as she left, and snorted at her comment.

The recorded sound of Rachel's voice filled the room, once the door had been shut - and as both mares exquisite hearing noted - locked.

"I'm not Celestia! I may look like Celestia, but I'm not her. I can't raise the sun, I don't have the secrets of ponification, I can't send anypony to the moon. I just got stuck with Celestia's body. Don't expect any miracles."

"Is this still true?" It came from inside the ball chair. The voice was very strange. It did not sound human. It did not sound entirely male, but neither did it sound female. It had a faint hiss to it, an almost malevolent quality, yet also oddly vulnerable.

Gregoria and Rachel looked at each other. If this was the voice of Mr. Crown, they had no idea what to make of him. Rachel finally replied. "Yes. I am not Celestia. I may look like her, but I'm still me inside. Mostly. I can feel something different, but I guess it's just part of being a pony. But I am not Celestia, I only look like her."

"The griffon was not a real griffon, he was a man shaped like a griffon. The Elf was not really Elrond, he was a man, who just ended up looking like an elf. There are instincts..." The ball shifted, but did not turn around. "... that change us in some ways, but you would agree that despite that, we remain ourselves?"

The voice of Mr. Crown was haunting and weird. Gregoria felt a slight shiver run down her withers. "I... at first, I wondered if I was still me. Stuff did change in me. I have a pony brain in here now, and it... it makes me different. But I'm me. I'm a little different, maybe even for the better but... I'm me, and Rachel is still... um... Rachel."

There was an awkward silence, then the eerie voice spoke again from within the ball chair. "Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible within himself, though both that indestructible something and his own trust in it may remain permanently concealed from him." Another pause. "Franz Kafka. I have a very great interest in Franz Kafka. You will understand why, shortly. Do you know who he is?"

Gregoria shook her head. "No. Some mad scientist?"

The strange voice had an even stranger laugh. "Perhaps, in a way. He was a writer, during the early twentieth century. He was also... a Changeling."

"A what?" Rachel knew very well what Crown meant, she just couldn't accept what he had said.

The giant screen lit up and displayed photographs, one after another. The images were of an opened grave, with an old casket, the lid was off. Inside the casket, shriveled and dry, lay the body of a very real, very dead My Little Pony Changeling.

"Franz Kafka died - supposedly of laryngeal tuberculosis - though I suspect it was from a lack of positive emotional energy - in the June of nineteen-twenty four. I cannot be sure just when in his life he transformed, but he was not always a Changeling, I am certain of that. He had no basis to understand what he had become. My Little Pony would not be created for almost a century, and there is nothing quite like the appearance of the pony Changeling in any ancient culture. The best he could describe his new form was as a "monstrous vermin". He used that very phrase in a story he wrote about a man metamorphosing into an inhuman creature.

"It was not just a story. It was nearly autobiographical. Miss Priss, Miss Samson - Franz Kafka spent the rest of his life in the body of a Changeling. He had lovers, he wrote books. More than a few called him an angel - he was kind, honest, deeply compassionate. You are ponies, but you are still you. Franz Kafka was a Changeling, but he was not an evil monster. He was still himself. Understanding that, I am trusting you to understand... me."

The Eero Aarnio ball chair rotated on its base, and the open side began to show. Inside the ball sat something green, and black, horned and winged. It was the inverse of an alicorn, a Dark Side opposite to Celestia. Mr. Malus Crown was a Changeling, a Changeling king.

My Little Pony had never shown a male Changeling, only possibly sexless drones and Chrysalis, the horrific and villainous Changeling queen. Crown had not become the character of Chrysalis. He had become a king, or a prince Changeling, something likely out of a fanfiction. His eyes glowed green, and his appearance was dark, frightening, and insectoid - roughly alicorn-shaped, but with nightmarish swiss-cheese hollows through his pitch-black legs and twisted horn. His sickly green, angular wings were insect wings; membranous and striated.

"Sweet Celestia." Gregoria felt weak in all four knees. The fanged horror in the ball chair blinked at her, two green lights flashing on and off. "Sweet, eternal Celestia."

The strange voice clearly belonged to the creature in the chair. "I had to be very careful with our... introduction. You are not the only functioning Equestrians I have discovered, and I lost one to incaution on my part. I did not want to lose you, as I did her."

"What, did she flee in terror?" Gregoria was still very doubtful about the monster in front of her. She was afraid to look it in the eye. Chrysalis had been one of the few characters that had caught her attention, and she remembered the episode very clearly.

"Yes, she did." Crown looked at the floor between them. "She thought me a real Changeling, evil, like in the cartoon. She could not separate fantasy and reality. She ran away, and they found her. It cost me my last, larger compound, and I was nearly captured myself. It was a catastrophe."

"They?" Rachel remembered Crown had mentioned there was a threat of some kind out there.

"My Little Pony, Tolkien, Oz, the Roman and Greek gods - transformations have been happening for as long as man has existed. There are cave paintings of humans with animal heads - I believe they were changed people, just like us. Such a thing, even if rare, becomes noticed miss Priss. There are government - and independent - agencies devoted to capturing, containing, and using people like us. We often have powers, you may have noticed. That makes us either dangerous, or useful, and in the deadly and cruel games of those who rule, you never want to be either."

Gregoria almost choked. "Wait. You mean... there really are X-Files people, the SCP Foundation exists, there are really secret bases with cages and..."

"Yes, miss Samson. That and more. There are hangers with flying saucers in them, and little gray aliens - only those aliens are people, just like ourselves, changed. Changed into something someone believed in with all of their heart and mind, someone who became an anonymous John Doe Injector." Malus' horn glowed, and across the room a small fridge opened. A bottle of fruit juice glowed and floated out. "Care for some juice? Bottled water? Iced tea? I feel thirsty."

Gregoria was a little nervous accepting her bottle of Lipton from the magic of a Changeling, but she kept reminding herself that Rachel was not really Celestia, thus Crown was not a real Changeling.

"Mr. Crown - that's not your original name, is it? You're very, very wealthy. You must have been someone, before you went into hiding. Who are you... really?" Rachel was looking around the room, at all the iMacs and iPads and iPods and iPhones. There was hardly a single device that was not built by Apple. This creature - this man - seemed to be very at home with computers, and the terms he sometimes used...

"Ah. I suppose it doesn't really matter if you know. Even if you left, and were captured, you would not be believed." The Changeling king sipped his juice. It was apple juice. "Before I arranged my... exit... I was a captain of industry. A leader among men. I was an entrepreneur. I miss my old life. I surround myself with bits of it. I suppose you could..."

"Malus... 'apple'. Crown. A king wears a crown - the king of apples!" Rachel felt very smart indeed. "You... you're Steve Jobs! ...or ... you were."

"You are very quick, miss Priss. Yes, that is who I was. But I changed, about seven years before My Little Pony went on the air. I became... erratic ...from the trauma. I moved in some ...exclusive circles, and I was found out. It was partly my fault - I was looking for answers. I arranged my 'death' - it was surprisingly easy, because I have certain abilities native to my Changling body. I can make others believe whatever I wish, to a point. Actually..." The creature in the chair chuckled "...I suppose that was true before my transformation. I guess nothing new, just more and better." The smile bared pointy, vampire-like teeth. Gregoria involuntarily shivered. Crown - Jobs - couldn't help being creepy.

Gregoria and Rachel settled down with juices, tea and water. Rachel sipped her bottled water and set it down. "So, the world, the universe... it's a Bostrom Simulation, isn't it?"

"A what?" Gregoria did not want to be left out of things at this point. She wanted to know what was going on, and above all else, how to fix it.

Malus Crown - it was easier to think of him as that, they had known him by that name longer, and his old life and identity was, after all, officially dead - cleared his throat. "Ah, miss Priss. So clever." He took another sip of his juice. "Miss Samson, if your friend will indulge me, I will explain."

Rachel nodded.

"Miss Samson, surely you've seen The Matrix, correct?" Gregoria grinned and assented. She had loved that movie before she had become a pony. Now, probably, the violence would render it unwatchable. "So you are familiar with the concept that one day we may be able to create simulated worlds so perfect that they cannot be distinguished from reality? Good."

"So we're all living in the Matrix, the Matrix is real?" Gregoria was almost thrilled at the prospect.

"Not exactly. Not the Matrix. We're not batteries for machine intelligences - that was just stupid - and we are not alive in tanks of goo somewhere. But we are inside of a virtual reality, a simulation of reality, and we... are programs. We are characters in a big video game. We are the machine intelligences."

"What? We're robots now?" This was cool, but also creepy, and Gregoria didn't like the notion as well as the thought of the Matrix being real.

"No, miss Samson. We are not... robots. Robots are physical machines, we have no physical existence. We are constructions of code, we are sprites on the game screen. You, me, everyone that truly thinks - and not all of the observable human race is actually really there - are nothing but information, running on a system beyond anything we currently know." The Changling shifted in the ball, and adjusted its wings.

"It isn't the entire universe, by the way. I have... inside knowledge ...from those rarefied circles I once ran in. Voyager One, the first probe to leave our solar system, as well as every other probe, has encountered the 'edge of the screen' if you like. It's been covered up, there are secret satellites up there just to feed scientists comfortable lies. It ends, the universe is a false backdrop, very detailed, but ultimately just a skybox. That's the answer to Fermi's Paradox, by the way. We are alone. Entirely alone, in a simulated solar system with a fake skybox for a universe." Crown used his magic to bring more juice for himself, and tea and water for Gregoria and Rachel.

"So... we're all characters in a video game, the universe isn't there, what's the point? Who's behind it all?" Gregoria had Rachel open her second bottle of Lipton. It was pretty crappy iced tea, but Gregoria didn't want juice or plain water.

"The Simulation Argument. Sorry. There is this clever professor at Oxford, Nick Bostrom. He came up with a bit of reasoning that cannot be refuted - but in theory, it could be proven. In fact, it has been proven, though only a select few know this. Not even Nick himself knows the truth. His argument involves three propositions, and one of the three has to be true. The propositions are that, first, humanity will die off, completely, before it can go 'posthuman'. What I mean is that the human race will go extinct before it can make technology so powerful that it becomes possible to upload human minds into virtual reality worlds, where they can live potentially forever. So that's the first argument, that we all die before we can become immortal computer minds.

"The second proposition is that if humanity actually does make it to the point where they can upload their minds into virtual worlds and live forever as emulated beings, absolutely nobody will ever want to play 'Sim City' anymore, or play 'Civilization' ever again, or in general want to run a simulation of history, of the past, to see what it was like."

Gregoria interrupted. "That's dumb! We play things like that now, I've played things like that. Of course we'll still want to play with history and stuff, even on holodecks or whatever!"

"More than holodecks, miss Samson. We are speaking of humans actually becoming emulated minds, and completely living inside computer generated realities. We would be the holograms, if you like."

"Um... that's what I meant." Gregoria swirled her iced tea with small movements of her pasterns. "What's the third one?"

"The third proposition is that if we don't kill ourselves off, and we still enjoy simulations of history, then it is utterly statistically likely that we must be living in a simulation right now. The reasoning for this is simple - if the human race uploads in the future, and starts running simulations - playing games - then some percentage of those billions are going to be running our world as it is right now. Even if only a few hundred thousand wanted to play 'Earth: The Game', that still means hundreds of thousands of copies of our world, which means hundreds of thousands of chances to one that you are a character and not a real person living before all the simulations happened."

"Huh?"

"Let me put it this way - there is only one original world. One real earth, before the Singularity. That's one chance. But, after the Singularity, there could be hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies of 'Earth' being simulated, each with billions of simulated people in it. That's billions or even trillions of chances that you are a simulated person, and only one chance in all of those billions or trillions that you are a meat person before the Singularity. It's a trillion to one shot that you are flesh and blood. Do you understand?"

Gregoria's mind spun. She tried to refute the argument. She tried to break it, but she couldn't. If humans ever got to the point of making simulations of reality, of course they would play history games. They do now. History is always important and interesting. Renaissance faires, reenactment groups, war gamers, history buffs - historians! They'd run history sims, no question.

And if they did, there would be a lot of copies. How many copies did Sim City sell? How many people played Civilization? Or Age Of Empires, or Assassins Creed, or Red Dead Redemption, or... there were a LOT of history games. Each game would simulate the lives of all the people in the world. Billions of people. Billions of chances you are a program, only one, single chance you are flesh and blood.

"And this is real? It's been proven?" Gregoria felt dizzy.

Malus Crown spun like a child, slowly, in his ball chair. "Yes. Voyager. Pioneer, edge of the simulation. And more, too, there are hints all over, if you know what to look for. It's been thoroughly proven. And kept quiet. It keeps itself quiet, actually. Maybe it's part of the simulation that this is the case, but I think it's just that most people don't want to accept it. It's just not something they even want to know."

"So why are we ponies, then, mister Crown? And what does my Rick have to do with all of this?" Rachel set her water down and stared intently at the Changeling in the chair.

"In the big computer - it's more than any computer we understand, it's probably more than we actually CAN understand, I suspect there is something like a corrupted pointer caused by a buffer overrun. Or an uninitialized pointer. Could be a corrupted stack, if the thing even uses stacks as we know them. Stack overflow. There's a bug in the program, miss Priss, and sometimes, when things get too complicated or too overwhelming for emulated human minds - as in war, or natural disasters, or plagues, or any desperate, extreme circumstance - the bug strikes. The pointer starts writing somewhere it shouldn't.

"The result is that things change. I think they change based on certain human minds that effectively inject code into the running program of the simulated earth. John or Jane Does, we can generally never hope to know who they are or were, whose dearest dreams or beliefs or thoughts are read as instructions for the generation of reality. Or at least for some aspects of reality. I believe your lover, Private First Class Richard Deckard, was just such a code injector. Those that chase people like us certainly think so."

"Why, why do these people think this? Is there something about Rick?" Rachel trembled at the memory of her beloved.

"One of his friends, several of the people with him, saw it happen. They aren't with us anymore - I don't know if they have been tucked away, or just killed outright, but they are not available anymore. Their reports though, are consistent - when mister Deckard's vehicle ran over that device, it was destroyed, but Richard, Richard somehow became a buffer overrun. His last thoughts were almost certainly read as the code for defining aspects of our simulation. And as it always happens with this bug, it spreads, affecting reality randomly.

"Imagine a pebble, tossed into a pond. It goes 'Bloop!' and ripples radiate out in all directions. Now try to think of a video game, one that has a story, like a role-playing game. The story has a beginning and an end, it has events that must be triggered in sequence, it has a predetermined script that represents the story, the history of the game narrative. Playing the game, you, as a player, have free will to the extent that you can make choices about your character, you can choose this armor or that sword, you can do the side quest or not bother. But the overall story is fixed. So are certain key characters, who you meet in a specific order.

"When a code injection occurs, the effect ripples through the living code of our reality. It affects objects and elements in the 'game' from the start of the simulation to the end. Randomly, things become corrupted, the pointers change so that when elements are 'drawn to the screen' they might look differently, or have different stats. Things get altered in the narrative future, and the past, randomly. The degree of change might be small, or total. People who are changed might end up as anything... even a pony from a cartoon show, as described in the fragments of a man's dying mind."

Rachel was in tears now, crying, her water bottle tipped to the side, the water spreading across the floor.

14. Don Quixote's Misfortune

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

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Don Quixote's Misfortune

“Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza."

Franz Kafka

Mr. Crown assured them that it was no burden to him, and indeed was entirely to his benefit. Put simply, it was a very lonely thing to be a refugee from a world that never existed. His wealth was unfathomable to Gregoria and Rachel. Crown's riches were such that the total upkeep and support of every human and Equestrian within his compound was not something he ever thought about. It had been a minor faux pas even to momentarily worry about the issue.

"Once a certain threshold has been reached, there is no longer any consideration given to the necessities of life, they are a given, expected, an absolute. We could support hundreds here, even thousands, for the entirety of their lives, and it would barely cause my accountant to blink. Actually, if it were thousands, he would certainly question my sanity, but he would not be worried. Imagine, then, how very little the act of offering you all you need to live represents to me. Don't bother either of us with such matters again." Crown had frowned slightly, and moved on. It was as if the concern of taking care of another pony's needs forever was as annoying to him as rambling on about pocket lint. It was worse than irrelevant - it was an imposition to mention it.

Over the last two and a half weeks, Gregoria and Rachel had nearly become established fixtures of Mr. Crown's 'menagerie', as Gregoria had described it. They were not the only ponies within his compound, nor were ponies the only Equestrian creatures under his protection.

The diamond dog that kept the stables had been a hardware testing engineer for Apple. Mr. Crown had recruited the troll-like creature just after he had transformed during an all-nighter in the lab. His name was Michel, and he still had never watched a single episode of My Little Pony. "I've heard a little about what... this thing is that I'm supposed to be, and ...I'd rather just be my own dog, with no outside influences, right?" He kept the big red barn in order, and had such tremendous strength that he could toss entire bales of hay around as if they were pillows. Michel could dig through the ground as if it were air, literally swimming through packed earth, his claws melting through stone. He was careful not to let the humans working for Mr. Crown see his abilities - Crown became cross when he was forced to erase memories to keep order, and to keep secrets.

Mr. Crown did not trust his humans with the reality of transformation. "Humans are a naturally xenophobic species. Humans can't even be expected to naturally deal well with other humans who have slight physical differences from them. It's hardwired, it is an evolutionary matter. It's a shame, really. They can work to get past it, yes, and often do - but are you willing to bet your life, and the life of your friend there, that every last human working here won't freak out and run to some authority?"

Even Rachel could not argue with that and shook her head. It was asking too much to expect every human to just accept Randal - the disturbingly large dragon who slept in a modified quonset hut an acre away from the main house - blithely and without panic. All it would take would be one single frightened human running to the authorities, and dark forces would descend to secure, contain and protect the public from the threat of monsters in their midst.

Rachel and Gregoria felt the greatest kinship with Damon and Joanna, two other ponies. Crown had found Damon when he had taken the trip to Europe to dig up Kafka's grave. Damon, a unicorn, had been trotting down a sidewalk as carefree as could be when Crown noticed him while being driven about. Damon had instantly signed aboard at the promise of free food and shelter for life. Joanna had been indirectly detected by others, and deliberately tracked down by Crown's team. She was a pegasus, and enjoyed flying over Lake Charlotte, Nova Scotia. She had been reported as a UFO, the closest thing the curious perceptual blindness allowed the humans who saw her to define her as.

"The program of reality works to maintain the status quo... more or less. I think what you call 'perceptual blindness' - good name for it by the way - is competing subroutines failing to interact in normal ways." Mr. Crown had put a great deal of study into every aspect of the code injection effect. It was the focus of his life, now.

Gregoria, a little miffed at ending up as an earthpony, had no end of questions for Joanna the pegasus. "Clouds! Can you walk on them?"

Joanna had pawed the ground and shook her head. "Clouds aren't like in the show. They're just fog." She looked up at the sky as they stood in the wide fields of Crown's farm. "They look like solid things from here, but... you get close to them? They just get fuzzier. By the time you are there, it just looks like a fog bank. All the details are gone. There's nothing there to walk on. It's real gradual... it just gets thicker and thicker, there's no boundary or surface." Joanna sighed. "I was really disappointed by that. I was going to build a sky house." She grinned. "Or even a castle!"

But of all the members of the menagerie, it was Chelsea that had the greatest impact on Gregoria and Rachel, especially Rachel. Chelsea, it seemed, had been error corrected.

It was something every member of the menagerie worried about. Especially Randal the dragon, who was too large to do anything but hide out in his hut. Humans reacted badly to him on sight. It seemed that the convenient miracle of perceptual blindness was not without hard limits. If something was too anomalous, if something went beyond some hidden and ill-defined limit, the blindness was not enough. This was the very thing Gregoria had used to force Rachel to finally perceive her. And according to Crown, in some specific cases - such as humans transformed into classic gray aliens, or into sasquatches - the blindness towards transformation utterly failed to occur at all.

Randal was partially such a case. He was gigantic and unearthly, and while from a distance humans thought him an elephant, close up the perceptual blindness rapidly failed, and humans would panic. If humans became too disturbed by the disruption of the perceptual blindness, if too many humans noticed a discrepancy in reality, then apparently, the running code of the world had an error checking routine. An error correction routine.

Chelsea had been a pegasus, just like Joanna. Like Joanna, she had enjoyed flying, but unlike Joanna, Chelsea had possessed no concept of trying to be discreet about her condition and status. Chelsea was young, only nineteen, and completely immersed within pony fandom. She had believed that her random transformation was the beginning of a rescue mission by the real Celestia, who was coming to save humanity from itself by turning them all into ponies. She had been thrilled at this fan fiction notion, and had decided to be loud and proud about being a pegasus representative for her princess. Chelsea had named herself 'Cloud Cover' and began flying everywhere she went, living the life of a pegasus openly and blatantly.

She had dined on the lawns of her neighbors while they watched, and helped with roof repairs by flying tiles up in saddlebags she had bought online. She went around without clothing, and insisted she was fully dressed in a proper pegasus pony coat of hair and feathers. She was adamant that others should recognize her as a living, breathing ambassador of Equestria on earth.

And it had worked. For a very short while. The entire town, in an overwhelming moment of shock and wonder, finally saw her as what she truly was. For half a day, the people around her marveled or ran in terror as their sense of reality was utterly shattered. And that was when the error correction routine had activated.

The people of her town, her family, her friends, her neighbors - everyone aware of her in that moment - simply forgot her. She had never existed, and all proof of her life had vanished. Her attempt to break into her own, conspicuously empty room had been a disaster. All of her possessions had been erased from reality along with her identity, and her struggle to buck down the door to get into her house had resulted in her nearly being tranquilized and taken away as rogue livestock. She had barely escaped. All humans now consistently saw her not as a My Little Pony Equestrian pegasus, but as a very ordinary Shetland pony.

The reason all humans saw her this way was because in an instant, that is exactly what the ontological error correction routine had corrected her into.

She could still think, and she could still talk, if with some difficulty. She could still breath through her throat as well as her nose. She possessed vocal chords. Her insides were not one-hundred-percent earth equine, thankfully. But from the outside, except for a slightly oversized skull with a high forehead, Chelsea was a perfectly ordinary looking Shetland pony. She had lost her wings. She had lost the magic to fly. She had lost the color red, having become a dichromat like a real horse. Also like an earthly equine, her vision had lost most of the capacity for binocular sight, and what little remained needed to be quite a distance from the front of her head. She now saw the world in three hundred and fifty degrees of monocular vision, flat, without depth of field. For all intents, she was a talking horse, ordinary in every way save for the capacity for human thought and limited human speech.

Worse, Mr. Crown strongly suspected that her Equestrian three-hundred year lifespan gain had been reduced to less than three decades. He'd had samples of her cells studied, and they were more like earth equines than the cells of Joanna and Damon. Her situation was a tragedy - and a warning to the others.

Chelsea lived in the big red barn. The barn had been reconstructed with a show-accurate Equestrian house appended to it, on the far side, away from the view of the ranch house where Crown's humans worked with him. Michel the diamond dog looked after her needs, and kept her company when the other, still anomalous Equestrians were in the human house. Chelsea wasn't allowed in the ranch house, because any humans there would see her clearly - as the Shetland pony she had become. She was careful not to speak when any human was around.

Rachel was gravely disturbed and upset at what had happened to Chelsea. The poor creature had genuinely wanted to be an Equestrian pony, just like Rachel, and her innocent exuberance had cost her her wings, her lifespan, and every last bit of magic. Up until meeting Chelsea, Rachel had felt terribly sorry for herself. Now she realized that by comparison, being a big immortal alicorn was nothing to complain about. It made her feel ashamed for having complained at all.

"Ith's okay... ith's not that thad. Ein sthill a thony, and I can run in the thields, and thlay all day. I hath thriends, Thichel and Randal and Joanna and Thanon - and nowh you, thoo, Rathel and Gregoria! I thith thy things, oth courth, I thith thlying aroundth. Thision is kinda thrange, thut... ethen thith all that - I an thill throudh to thee a thony!"

Rachel put on her best princess Celestia gentle smile, and held back tears. Even after such dire 'correction', Chelsea was still glad just to be a pony. She could have spent her days crying, and rightfully so, but instead she had found a way to take as much happiness as she could from what remained of what had been - for her - a divine gift of pure joy, her dearest wish come true.

Chelsea's plight nagged at Rachel as the days turned to weeks, as Mr. Crown the Changeling took personal interest in discovering just what powers the alicorn might actually possess. Rachel wanted to somehow make things better for Chelsea, but it was difficult just to interact with her. Chelsea couldn't help from bowing every time Rachel visited her, and it was clear that the little Shetland mare desperately wanted Rachel to actually, really be Celestia somehow. Rachel, for her part, found herself unable to entirely avoid trying to act Celestia-like for the poor mare, just out of compassion.

Every day, Rachel would visit with Chelsea, in the barn, or in her little Tudor cottage appended to it, and sip tea and talk pony with her. Chelsea would bow in reverence in greeting and parting, and Rachel would wince but try to accept it gracefully. It seemed to make Chelsea happy, and it was such a tiny thing to bear.

Meanwhile, Damon and Joanna worked with Gregoria every day to help her to find her earthpony powers.

"Yes, you have powers - you really haven't read any of the good fanfiction, have you?" Damon was annoyed with Gregoria today, and Gregoria, for her part, couldn't imagine the point of learning to use earthpony magic.

"No, and I don't intend to. Being a fanfiction writer is the only thing that isn't as low as being a furry, and face it, if you read that crap, you might as well just put on a fake tail and burn your 'coolness' card on the spot." Gregoria got a perverse satisfaction out of saying that - the training hadn't been going well. Perhaps more accurately, being able to feel the ground, and all the living things in it through her hooves severely depressed her, every time she looked at Damon's horn or Joanna's wings. Every time Gregoria learned how to do a new earthpony magic power, she just felt more lame, and more envious than before.

"You want I should buck you right in the chops? I could do it, you keep that up."

"Damon! Alright, take five. Damon... go take a walk or something." Joanna's wings flapped with frustration and upset.

"Fine!" Damon stomped off, heavy hoofed and angry.

Gregoria glared at the unicorn stallion as he ambled off across the fields in the direction of Randal's quonset. She stuck her tongue out at him.

"Okay, listen up miss grouchy-pants. We're trying to help you! You do understand that, right?" Joanna's ears were not exactly back, but they were not upright.

Gregoria scraped a furrow in the dirt with a forehoof for awhile, before answering. "Yeahhh... yeah... I know. I know."

"Then what's the problem? Why so hostile? It's not very pony, you know." Joanna kicked at a clod on the ground, which shattered at the impact of her hoof.

Gregoria glared. "That's exactly the problem!" She stomped a hoof. "I never wanted to be a pony, I don't like pony stuff, but here I am, bam, one day that's exactly what I am - a pony! And I didn't even get to be a cool pony, I'm the lame one..."

Joanna shook her mane and slapped her own flank with her tail. "So THAT'S it. You're upset that you ended up an earth pony. Sweet sugar cubes!" The pegasus looked out at the small shape of Damon, still walking away. "If you weren't so high-and-mighty, and actually read some of that fanfiction you think is so dreadful, or really paid attention to the show, you'd know that being an earthpony is cool. You never get tired, you could make things grow, if you bothered..."

"Yeah, some super-power. I'm ready for the X-Men. I'm Plant-Grow-Girl, only I'm not even a girl, I'm a mare. I'm the mascot." Gregoria looked at her furrow bitterly.

"So you think that if you had some buck-tail super power, like in comic books, that would make up for not being human anymore, that it?" Joanna's wings fluttered. "Well I've got news for you. You're not human, you're a pony now. And there is no way to change that. This is permanent, as far as Crown can tell. You want to be a superhero? How about starting with the Hulk? Earthponies are basically the Hulk, only they don't have to get angry to buck trees over! That good enough for you? Or how about Poison Ivy, from Batman? Growing things sound a little more 'cool' yet? If you would get your head on straight, you're basically the Hulk with all of Poison Ivy's powers, and then some. I need a break too."

And with that, Joanna spread her wings and flew off after Damon, leaving Gregoria feeling like an idiot, standing over a furrow in the ground.

Rachel was having tea with Chelsea in her little Equestrian cottage. Although she was loathe to admit it now, when the error correction had happened to her it had broken her heart. Malus Crown had rescued her before she had become property - or worse, likely worse, because she lacked the sense to stop talking and act her part - but she had taken a year to come to terms with the full extent of her loss.

Crown had arranged for a show-accurate pseudo-Tudor cottage to be appended to the barn, just for her. He needed her to have a reason to stay alive and to remain functional. As the first clear example of an error correction, she was invaluable to his effort to understand the nature of the bug in reality that allowed the transformations to occur, and he was highly motivated to secure her loyalty and stability.

The cottage had worked. Inside her little Equestrian home, Chelsea could live in a private fantasy where she was a proper magical pony. Rachel had soon realized that Chelsea coped by playing a game with herself, where she pretended that the real Equestria existed outside her cottage door. Having 'Celestia' over for tea played into that fantasy, and gave the poor mare enormous comfort, if only for a short time.

"Do you like the tea, thrinthess?" Chelsea had trouble carrying things, because her authentic equine jaw was not as versatile as an Equestrian one, yet she still managed to carry both cups and pot to the low table using flat trays. Chelsea had lost the perfect balance of a magical pony, so sometimes she dropped everything, but she succeeded more often than not. Crown had obtained unbreakable cups and a Japanese metal teapot, so accidents were wet, but not overly destructive.

"Yeah... it's... it's very pleasant tea, my little pony." It was such a little thing, to put on the air of Celestia now and then. It made Chelsea beam. If the little Shetland had been a dog, Rachel was certain that she would have squirmed and wagged her tail while making squeaking puppy noises every time she dropped a Celestia-ism. Limited vision, less than thirty years of life, no compensating magic - Chelsea had been struck down hard by the implacable code of the simulation that apparently was the world.

"Thrinthess?" Chelsea folded her foreknees and lay down near Rachel. "I neen Rachel. I know you arnth really Celestia, thut you thust hath thome oth her thagic thowers! I thas a thegusus, unce. I could thly, right uth into the thlouds! And Thanon ith a unicorn! He can do thagic! You thake things thloat hith your horn, and you are an alicorn!" Chelsea lowered her head reverently. "Thlease, Rachel, try. Justh try, thlease! Thix ne, thake ne thack into a thegusus, or an earth thony, anything, I thont care! Just... thlease, Rachel, thlease... just thry. That's all I ask. Thust thry, thlease!"

Rachel had expected this moment. It was inevitable, really. Chelsea was in a hopeless, desperate place, and it was only natural that she would cling to even the smallest hope. Rachel sighed.

Mr. Crown had spent many days trying to encourage Rachel to make use of the Celestia body she had ended up with. It had been a hard sell. Rachel had found herself becoming surprisingly skeptical since her transformation, and the concept of doing magic - real magic - which might have once appealed to her imagination, just seemed impossible now. Rachel felt bitter, she knew she was bitter, she hadn't wanted to be stuck as a poor replica of Celestia. She had so wanted to be her own original pony, or if she had to be a replica, Fluttershy.

"What humankind refers to when they speak of magic is really just the iterative process of trying to establish repeatable conditions for bugs in the simulation we exist within. Magic, human magic, is debugging." Crown had smiled at that, he was proud of that insight.

"Humans can't do magic. Magic is just another dumb myth." Rachel had been feeling particularly cranky, the effort to do Celestia-like things had been going nowhere.

Crown laughed. "That... is what a hard-core materialist would say, and they would be wrong, because the world is not made of material at all. It's made of ones and zeroes... or more likely something far more exotic. Probability states in a quantum matrix, or maybe some technology we literally can't imagine at all. Materialism is a dead end, when reality isn't material!

"The fact is, Rachel, that humans can do 'magic', of a sort anyway, by making use of all the little bugs and errors in the running code of the world. The simulation we are in seems to be a bit on the shoddy side, frankly, which is to our benefit in the end."

Rachel glared at Mr. Crown. "If there were magic, I would have seen it before I became a pony."

"You have, probably many times. Everypony has. And you already know many of the rules, also like almost everypony."

Rachel used her horn to get herself a bottle of juice. She offered one to Mr. Crown, but he refused with a wave of a perforated leg. "What rules? Magic doesn't have any rules. That's what makes it dumb." She was in a very sour mood indeed.

"Voodoo. Take a little doll, stick pins in it or hurt it, and the human it looks like becomes ill or even dies. The effect is documented and real, but it's devalued as being nothing more than an example of the placebo effect. Thing is, it has been documented to work even when the victim has no idea that it's being done. That... just gets dismissed outright. The fact is that it's a bug, and it is repeatable. There are rules to earthly 'magic' - voodun, or voodoo uses what is known as the 'Law Of Similarity'."

"The law of similarity?" Rachel sipped her juice. Strawberry and coconut. It was a smoothy, one she particularly liked.

"Back a few decades, there was a human who got a degree in magic. Seriously. And he was serious about it. He was named 'Bonewits', and he wrote his thesis about the universal laws of magic that were common to every human culture and civilization, regardless of how isolated they were." Crown curled up in his big ball chair.

"Bonewits? That's sounds like a pony name!" Rachel giggled. Crown was being silly today.

"Phillip Emmons Issac Bonewits. Fancied himself a Druid, he was also quite scholarly. Only human to ever get a degree in magic, and he did it because his research was impeccable. Turns out that all humans, everywhere, throughout time, always agree on a set of rules by which 'magic' - real magic, not stage magic - is supposed to operate." Crown used a swiss-cheese leg to slowly spin the ball chair. "Funny thing that. If there wasn't something real going on, how do all people, everywhere, in every age, somehow come up with the same rules about magic? Apply that to physics, and any physicist would be quick to say - because that's how the world works. Everyone agrees on the rules of physics because they are repeatable, because they are factual.

"Magic is real, and the rules are real, because all they are is discovering repeatable ways to abuse the bugs in reality. That's the first step in trying to debug a program - see if the fault can be induced, see if it is repeatable. I bet you know other rules of magic already, Rachel. The Law Of Names - names are supposed to have power. Every religion - religion is just magic, theurgic magic to be precise - makes use of that one. Call on a deity, and the name is supposed to make something happen. Know the true name of a magical being, and you can control them - I'm sure you've encountered that in a story or a show before. The Law Of Similarity - wear the skin or the trappings or the image of a fierce predator in order to gain their power and strength. Every human culture used these laws, and humans still use these laws even without knowing them. They are truly universal, as universal as the laws of physics."

"Doesn't that say more about the human mind, than reality?" Rachel was having none of this. "Magic is just humans being irrational."

"Says the physical incarnation of princess Celestia holding a bottle in her telekinetic grip." Crown's Changeling grin was disturbing to see, every time. It was those two sharp fangs. He couldn't help it, but it always made Rachel feel creeped out.

"Um... yeah." Rachel studied the bottle of fruit juices hovering in front of her, encapsulated in a mass of glowing, golden light. "I guess I'm being a little bratty today, aren't I? Sorry, Mr. Crown."

"Listen, Rachel - I can do magical things. You know that. You saw me make Thibault forget about running into poor Randal the dragon the other night. If I lacked the power to alter minds, Thibault would likely have ended up in an asylum, or worse, in their clutches. Then we'd all be sunk. That's magic, Rachel. Joanna flying - that is impossible, you know. There is no way a pegasus could ever actually fly according to the accepted laws of physics. Not enough lift, not enough energy for those tiny, tiny wings and that big heavy body. Magic. Reality isn't real. It's a simulation, and we changed are all really just living exploits and cheat codes, if you think about it. Your code describes you as princess Celestia. You almost certainly have some very impressive powers."

Rachel levitated the last mouthful of smoothie out of the bottle and made the sphere of pink liquid hang in front of her like a pink planet with a golden atmosphere. Then she leaned forward and gobbled it, while releasing her telekinetic grasp.

Crown stopped his slow spinning in the ball chair and smiled at the trick. "What did your Richard think Celestia could do?"

Rachel had looked concerned, almost worried at that. "Almost anything. In his eyes, she could create and maintain a universe."

"Thease?" Chelsea was looking up with her terrestrial Shetland face, the face of an animal, not an enchanted sapient from a magical cosmos, the face of a creature on death row, her three centuries stolen from her, relegated to less than three decades of flightless life as a barnyard animal.

Rachel set her tea cup down on the low table, her golden, glowing, telekinetic field vanishing as she released it. She thought a moment, seeing her reflection in those small, brown, earthly eyes.

"Yeah, Okay. Crown's been teaching me, or trying to. Let me get a few things first. I don't know if they'll help, but we might as well go all out on this. I really want to help, but you have got to understand - I'm not really Celestia, you know that, right? It may not work." Rachel studied the reaction by the little Shetland mare.

"I know. I know you're not really Thrinthess Celestia, thut you're the only Celestia I'th got!" Chelsea was limited in the facial expressions she could make, she couldn't properly smile or grin like an Equestrian could, but she did bare her large equine teeth, and Rachel understood.

Rachel trotted back to the main house, and tried to find Mr. Crown. Damon was in the 'mission control' room, surfing the internet at one of the work station desks. "Crown and all the humans are gone. They got a lead that there might be another one of us out there that isn't completely messed up, and they're checking it out. Why?"

"I just want my stuff. My jewelry. I'm going to try to help Chelsea." Rachel tapped her hoof anxiously. Mr. Crown had explained that his team had found her golden and bejeweled Equestrian regalia and taken it away. Rachel - if not Gregoria - had been okay with this, she understood that such a treasure would only cause trouble, and Crown had made a point of showing her where it was kept safe, and giving her the means of access. It was hers, he had no intention of stealing it, but it was too precious an artifact to be lost or melted down.

"Huh... what, you're going to try to turn Chelsea back?" Damon looked stunned. "I... she's pretty bad off, I know. If you can do it, that would just be... I didn't know your studies with Crown had gone that far, wow!"

"Actually, I haven't learned a muffin thing... but I promised Chelsea I would at least try. I'm not expecting anything to happen at all. But, I kinda have to at least try, you know? If he comes back before I'm done, don't let him get freaked out because my stuff isn't in the vault, okay?" Rachel trotted away, trying to keep moving. If she didn't keep going, she was sure she'd lose her nerve, and Crown had been clear that confidence was a big part of all forms of real magic - of trying to force the world to glitch and allow an exploit.

"Hey, good luck - I hope it works. She got a really rough deal." Damon turned back to the internet.

Rachel went past the room she shared with Gregoria. Gregoria was trying to play Skylanders Giants on the Xbox 360 with Joanna. It was a little violent, but it was very cartoonish, and so it was within pony sensitivities. Rachel had been surprised to see a Microsoft box allowed in the house, but Crown had explained that he bore no animosity towards his old rival. "We're frenemies. Bill even helped us out, once."

Gregoria was not doing well, because she was still clumsy with her hooves. Joanna was remarkable. With the controller on the floor, she used one hoof on the left stick, the analogue switch tucked into the rolls of her frog. She used the hard edge of her other hoof to press the buttons with an uncanny accuracy. Games with trigger functions were a problem, of course, but by curling up, she had a way around that, too. Gregoria was trying to learn how to do the same thing.

"What's up?" Gregoria's controller skidded away as she moved the left stick. She grumbled and slid it back.

"I'm going to get my Celestia stuff and try to magic Chelsea." Joanna was so engrossed in defeating some weird green thing that she hadn't even noticed Rachel.

"You can do that?" Gregoria had managed to finally get her character - a crystaline dragon Skylander with glass wings - to move correctly, and she was overjoyed.

Rachel shook her head. "No, probably not. But I promised I'd try."

"Uh...huh..." Gregoria was trying to move and hit the buttons now, but her hoof kept impacting too hard and making the controller bounce and skid.

Rachel turned away, and went on. She had to do this before she lost the last of her confidence.

"Um... Good luck!" Gregoria called out after she had left.

Rachel went down the stairs into the basement, an area generally off limits to the humans. She used her telekinesis to enter the code into the electronic lock. A lot of fan fictions had made much of magic destroying technology on contact, it was an interesting but beneficial anomaly that this trivia was not true for the changed. Then again, she thought, Rick never agreed with that notion. She had come to accept that he was the most likely Doe to be the source of the pony code injection, and she took some slight comfort in seeing patterns to it that reflected things he held true. It was like having some part of his spirit woven into reality itself, always near, always around her.

The great vault door unlatched. Inside, along with gold bars, stacks of money, some very strange antiques and objects - and not a few old computers and bits of electronics - was the case that held her regalia.

For the first time since the night she and Gregoria had left for the bridge, Rachel put on her golden shoes, and her jeweled peytral - the collar like artifact was called a peytral, she had discovered - and, of course, her crown. It was odd - the things were heavy, very heavy, being made of gold, but when they were actually on her, they felt weightless, and completely comfortable. Perhaps they were magic, in some way.

Rachel closed the vault door with her telekinesis, and made her way upstairs and out of the ranch house, determined to put on her very best impersonation of the solar princess of Equestria. That was a big part of tricking the computer that ran the world, Mr. Crown had insisted. The Laws Of Similarity, Invocation and another one - Rachel couldn't remember all the stuff he went on about. The bottom line was that pretending to be something sometimes made it almost so. The rest was hacking the system by acting out in ways that seemed to work at all. She would do her best to 'be' Celestia, and do what the 'real' Celestia might do, and hope something good came of it. At least it was a way to show she cared, and it meant so very much to Chelsea.

Rachel trotted across the fields to the big red barn. Rounding it, she approached the outside door of Chelsea's Equestrian cottage. Although it opened into the barn, Rachel was trying to put on the best show she could. Celestia, the 'real' Celestia would knock at the front door, not sneak in the back. She would come to call like a proper princess, and be regal and refined and ever so gentle too. Ritual, Crown had told her, was showponyship, putting on a strong performance that the sometimes dumb code of the universe might confuse with a real reality, and process as such.

Chelsea opened her door, moving her head from one side to the other so that each eye, in turn, could see. "Your thajesty!" she almost squealed the words, before she bowed low and reverently to her beloved and true princess.

15. Back The World

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

═════════════════════

Back The World

"In the fight between you and the world, back the world."

Franz Kafka

Gregoria Samson lay covered in cool, freshly dug earth. She lay fully prostrate, as low and flat within the ditch she had bucked out as she could. It was only three feet deep, but there wasn't much time left, not much time at all. Her hooves were half buried in the wall of soil in front of her, and that was what allowed her to 'see' what was going on in the distance. Damon, by her side, could do little else but concentrate on maintaining the wavering bubble that covered them both. He had embedded leaves from the forest floor within his telekinetic barrier, so as to hopefully render the two of them invisible from the air.

The thudding of the chopper blades rent the air like not-so-distant drums. They were half a mile from Crown's compound, deep in the forest to the south of it, yet the massive helicopters pounded in their pony ears. They were making no attempt to try to be stealthy, or to not be noticed. Piercing shafts of fulgent light swept the distant Crown compound from high in the midnight sky. Gregoria and Damon were too far to clearly hear the crackling commands and shouts barked from speakers on the copters, but it was likely that commands to 'freeze' and 'assume the position' were still a major topic.

No, not long now. Inside her earthpony mind, Gregoria deliberately gave in completely to her Equestrian nature and sent her will fully into her hooves. Dark earth became as water to her inner eye, and around her an upside-down forest of roots and fungus created a twisted mirror of the above-ground forest that sheltered her. Gregoria pushed through the darkness, past tunnels with sleeping creatures, past buried stone and ancient gravel. Further, faster her mind pressed, rippling magically just beneath the alien grass that surrounded the compound, washing through and around the vastly altered vault underneath what had once been the Crown ranch house, out towards the foundations of where the big red barn and the faux Equestrian cottage had stood.

Her earthpony awareness tingled, filled with the remnants of a golden, impossibly powerful glow permeating the very earth. The arcane energies filled her with awe and sublime dread. They were disbursing, into the ground, altering it still, albeit very, very slowly now. Gregoria could not sense any living creature on the ground, anywhere now. Either everypony had escaped... or been taken up into the air. But the weight, the terrible weight that had been dropped through the roof of the cottage was still there, and it vibrated, every second, a regular pulse, faint and sharp and distinct. The pulse of a timing mechanism.

Gregoria came immediately back to her body, her awareness so carefully stretched forth snapping back like a fantastically powerful rubber band. Her entire essence screamed in agony with the shock of the violence of her return. She screamed into the night, ending in tears and sobbing.

"...DOWN! Don't mind her, she can't help it, YES! FLAT ON THE DIRT! NOW!" Damon closed the low, leafy bubble of telekinetic force he was struggling to maintain as the diamond dog entered. Gregoria curled herself into a ball, still whimpering, trying to cope with having been stepped on and brought out of her deep concentration so suddenly.

"This won't do! MOVE!" Michel the diamond dog rudely tossed Damon and then Gregoria aside. Damon lost his mental control, and the leaves fluttered down everywhere as his softly glowing field collapsed. He landed on the right side of the ditch, in a spiny bush. Gregoria landed hard, against a tree, which woke her from her state of shock at being violently returned to herself. "What the flying pegasus is..."

"It's an air-fuel bomb you shit-for-brain morons!" Michel did not share in the pony mindset. "This won't work!"

Michel was digging, digging like a diamond dog, swimming through rock and root and soil as though it were nothing. Dirt and debris blasted out of the tunnel he was creating, the jet of matter ripping branches and bark off of the trees in the way. Finally, deep under the ground, he shouted "GET IN HERE IF YOU WANT TO LIVE!"

Damon was standing and peered around the incredibly deep, wide slanting shaft.

"Get... IN!" Michel was not in a good mood.

Gregoria hobbled to the edge of the entrance, and then suddenly felt herself thrust down the tunnel like a bag of horsemeat. Damon had bucked her, hard, right in the flanks, and she had tumbled poll over hocks down to a pitch black chamber that smelled of dirt and dampness. The chamber was abruptly illuminated in harsh orange-yellow light. Gregoria could see the ends of roots dangling from the ceiling, and the gleam of rocks in the walls embedded in the earth. Blocking some of the light was the hunched-over body of Damon, just in front of her in the small cavern, his horn blazing with effort as he maintained a wall of force to close off the entrance of the open tunnel.

Beyond Damon's magical barrier, all was fire, just fire, the very air itself was fire, and if there was a forest beyond that horrifying conflagration, it had become hell itself. The soil began to smell burned around Gregoria, as the ceiling grew increasingly warm. The last thing Gregoria saw before the light was sealed away, was Michel ferociously blocking up the open tunnel, his powerful diamond dog hindlegs packing dirt and crushed stone solidly against Damon's barrier.

In the warm, steaming dark, Gregoria's hearing began to return. Her ears were ringing, the high, faint rock-concert sensation that indicated potentially permanent damage. She hadn't even heard the explosion, or else it simply hadn't registered, but, as she sat, her ears hurting, she began to realize she had felt it. Her insides felt bruised, and her bones ached. The air was thick with toasted, hot dust, undoubtedly blasted from the earthen walls during the initial shock.

It was hard to breath, but at least none of the flaming atmosphere outside had entered. If it had, she realized, they would all be burning corpses now. A fuel-air bomb. That was what she had sensed, heavy and ticking, placed carefully at ground zero, the Tudor cottage. Gregoria wept, unable to see the muddy streams of her own tears steaming in the dark.

──── ∆ ────

Joanna was showing her how to use the triggers on the controller. "I half lay on my side, like this..." Joanna curled her flanks close to her belly, and stuck out her legs carefully. "Then I pinch the controller between my rear pasterns... these bits here."

"I know what pasterns are! I'm not a foal!" Gregoria frowned her hardest frown at the pegasus.

Joanna grinned. "But do you know your plot from a hole in the ground?"

Gregoria tried to get angry, but ended up grinning back instead. "You are one funny pony. In the head."

"Ooh... I'm telling Crown. Not very pony, there." Joanna looked thoughtful for a moment. "Actually, that was kind of Rainbow Dash, come to think of it. Not very good, but pony enough." Joanna returned to her instruction. "Alright, so, with the controller tight against the sides of your rear pasterns, you've got it locked, solid. Use the back edge of your forehoof, the part where the frog starts, the little shelf there? Use that edge to press the triggers. Tapping the bumper buttons doesn't change, just use whatever part, but that edge of your hoof is perfect to catch the triggers." Joanna studied Gregoria's efforts. "No, from above, see? Over the top, you catch the trigger from over the top, not underneath. Yeah, like that."

"It's weird doing it like this." Gregoria's leg twitched from strain, and the controller fell from the grip of her hind legs and skidded across the floor. "BISCUITS!"

"It's weird being a pony. Use what you got. That's the first rule of disability." Joanna's voice was severe, almost bitter.

Gregoria retrieved her controller with her forehooves, then wiggled back so she could see the big flatscreen. "You... I never realized. You don't like being a pony, do you?"

Joanna looked afraid, like she had been caught. "I... I wouldn't say that. Exactly. I miss my hands, that's all. Hands are useful. For controllers and stuff. Flying is great. It's a pretty good compensation, to a point." Joanna studied her controller. "Besides, thanks to your roommate's boyfriend, we're all kinda stuck this way, so we don't have any choice... in anything."

"It wasn't deliberate, you know. It isn't like he did this to us on purpose. Lots of humans have been injectors, according to Crown. Besides, he paid for it. With his life." Gregoria had been spending a lot of time with Joanna, what with Rachel always off trying to be an alicorn with Crown. Gregoria was coming to the conclusion that Joanna put on a front of being a contented pegasus, but it was seeming more and more false the more time she spent with the mare. Something big was bugging her, That much Gregoria was certain of.

Gregoria decided to finally press the issue. "Jo, what really is..."

The light was intense, golden, it cast shadows on the walls and glared off the flatscreen television. Suddenly, the power cut off, the screen going dark, the Xbox shutting down, the lights in the ranch house instantly dark.

The pulsing, yellow light turned everything into gold edges and dim shadow. Gregoria and Joanna leaped to their hooves and dashed to the window over Rachel's bed.

The barn was a silhouette, large and boxy, behind it a pillar of gold shot up like a spear into the heavens. The column of shining, sparkling light began to widen, expanding in all dimensions as it grew. It began to intersect the barn, passing through the barn, devouring it within a golden fog. Wherever it touched the barn, the barn... changed.

Half the barn, now easy to see in the intense, day-like blaze of light, had become an accurate vision of Applejack's barn from Friendship Is Magic. The other half, rapidly being converted as the shaft of energy expanded outwards, was still an earthly barn, still the barn they knew. That didn't last long. In seconds, the entire barn was fully Equestrianized, and the swelling pillar of light was still growing in size.

Before she left the window, Gregoria noted the ground around the barn was no longer dirt and patches of dried-out grass. It was green, lush, and unearthly, dotted with dinner-plate sized multicolored flowers. It was Equestrian land, Equestrian grass and flowers, and the unearthly zone was coming closer and closer to the ranch house.

Gregoria suddenly remembered. "I'm going to get my Celestia stuff and try to magic Chelsea." Fear made Gregoria's pony knees tremble. She ran out of the shared bedroom, heading for the back door, the door that led to the barn. As her hooves skidded around the corner into the large living room that filled the A-Frame portion of the rambling house, she nearly collided with Joanna, who had left the bedroom before her.

Joanna was shouting into a cellphone, placed on the floor. It wasn't an iPhone. "...WHAT YOU WARNED ME ABOUT! YES! AN INCURSION!"

Gregoria's mouth opened in dawning shock and anger.

Joanna stared back, unrepentant. "They have my family!"

Gregoria thought, briefly, about bucking Joanna's ugly pegasus muzzle across the room. Instead, she abruptly turned, and ran on, to the back door.

The impossible tower of gold light was like a skyscraper now, hundreds of feet in diameter and still expanding. It's height was beyond measure, it rose straight and perfect, shrinking with distance, until it was a needle against the dark velvet of the night.

As Gregoria froze at the back door of the ranch house, she could only stare in horror and wonder as the immense circle of daylight crept towards where she stood. It was just before midnight, yet there was a growing, thousand foot circle of daylight sweeping toward her, changing everything within it into the magical land of Equestria.

Finally, Gregoria managed to move a hoof. The sight before her was just so overwhelming, so overpowering, that she had felt rooted to the spot. The shock that had trapped her was fading now, and with that she began to reason again, to consider what to do next. Her best friend, Rachel Priss, had to be at the center of the expanding shaft of magical force. She must have released some unimaginable power laying dormant within her Celestia body.

Gregoria remembered the 'The Cutie Mark Chronicles' episode of Friendship Is Magic. Filly Twilight Sparkle had lost control of her powers entirely in a flashback within that episode, going Akira with an overload of uncontrollable, godlike power. Was Rachel suffering a similar fate? Her stated goal had been merely to help poor Chelsea, yet the inexorable expansion of the pillar of gold was nearly at the ranch house and showed no sign of stopping. If anything, its transforming powers were picking up speed.

Gregoria put a hesitant hoof in the direction of the center of the expanding tower of unimaginable forces. Rachel. Maybe she could talk to her, or, if it was the only way, buck her hard enough to snap her out of it. It was then that Gregoria noticed the barking, mindless terror that had seized Randal the Dragon's boston terrier, Sunny.

Sunny kept Randal company, out in his Quonset hut, but sometimes wandered the farm, looking for treats and interacting with the other members of the menagerie. Sunny was a good dog, clever and well behaved, and he often cheered Chelsea up. As the increasingly vast magical storm captured more territory, Gregoria noted Sunny barking furiously, eyes wide and rolling with the whites showing, ears back. Sunny was terrified beyond all doggy rationality.

As she watched, the golden-green edge of Equestria-On-Earth nearly to the back steps, something in Sunny finally snapped. He must have been backing up from the moment that the pillar began, now his short bulldog tail was to the ranch house and he was running out of space. Perhaps the presence of Gregoria nearby gave him courage. Whatever the reason, Sunny the Boston terrier rallied and decided to run straight into the golden wall of light, doubtless to save Chelsea and Rachel at the center of it.

As Sunny penetrated into the magical golden zone, he rapidly changed. His contours rippled and became out-of-focus, then solidified again. Sunny was no longer a Boston terrier. He had become Winona, Applejack's dog, and instead of being terrified, he sat down and panted, contentedly. All upset was gone from him. He had been completely Equestrianized. He was home, now, a proper vision of the only ordinary canine ever shown on My Little Pony. He was not the same entity that had barked and backed away in abject horror.

Gregoria was running, now, galloping, her hooves heedless of tile or carpet. Joanna was gone, but Damon was there. He had been watching from well behind Gregoria, now he watched as she fled past him, her great pony eyes wide in mindless fear. Sunny had been completely changed, personality and identity, everything. It had been too much for Gregoria to process, too much for her to handle. She ran and ran, incapable of stopping herself, every instinct forcing her to flee for her very soul.

As Gregoria left the front door of the ranch house, and began running blindly towards the treeline at the edge of Crown's property, she vaguely became aware of Damon running beside her, equally terrified, his eyes also wide. The sight of him beginning to pass her only heightened her horror, and now it was a race to the false protection of the equally helpless forest. There was no sanctuary, because Rachel had apparently somehow unleashed Ponygeddon itself upon the world.

As the unicorn and the earthpony pushed themselves to their limits, the sound of helicopters, massive, military helicopters hammered the air. Loud voices barked through speakers while searching shafts of light scanned the distant acres of the farm.

In an instant, Gregoria's legs gave out. She crashed to the grass at speed and tumbled like a racecar out of control. The same thing had happened to Damon, he rolled over and over, gasping from the impact with the ground. As Gregoria's mind began to try to make sense of what had just happened, she realized there had been a sound that had not been a sound. It had struck past her ears, straight through her flesh, right into her bones. Somehow the burst of sound from on high had shut off her motor control. A sonic weapon. It must be. She vaguely recalled reading about the military having such things, mostly nonlethal weapons for dealing with large crowds of civilians.

Gregoria tried to get up. Her legs felt rubbery and clumsy and difficult to control. Damon seemed to be having the same trouble, he looked drunk, even though he never drank. It was hard to focus her eyes, and her thoughts were muddled.

The helicopters, dark masses visible only because of the shine from the gargantuan pillar of golden light, were converging. The pillar was shrinking. It was rapidly contracting, back to its source. The sonic weapon must have been directed at Rachel's location, that it could still affect a pony so far out filled Gregoria with worry for her friend. It must have stopped Rachel's overload, if that was what it was. Perhaps Rachel was unconscious now, in need of help.

Gregoria wasn't able to move towards the house, now that she had managed to stand. Damon had her tail in his teeth.

"Let me go! Rachel!" Gregoria dug her hooves in, scraping up large divots of grass and soil, trying to tear loose from Damon's grasp.

"Unh-Unh!" Damon would not let go.

"But Rachel!" Gregoria pleaded, her eyes beginning to fill with tears.

Damon had regained his full capacity for thought. He had been an exceptional student under Mr. Crown. Gregoria found herself being pushed by a wall of silvery light that she could not breach. Damon was herding her now, with the field from his horn. "Copters!" He said the word like it explained everything.

"I know! Rachel!" Gregoria reared and hammered at the shimmering wall with her forehooves, but the wall only pressed forward, toppling her onto her backside. Still it moved, pushing her along the ground.

"It's them! Hundreds of them! With guns." Damon was forced to shift his advancing barrier - Gregoria had found her feet and was trying to move to the left and then the right to get around the magical wall.

"I - DON'T - CARE!" Gregoria made a perfectly hopeless effort to leap Damon's expertly mobile wall.

Damon fixed Gregoria with his eyes, muzzle to muzzle in the dark. "If you are ALIVE, you can try to rescue her. Alive and UNCAPTURED!"

Some of the massive black helicopters had landed already, humans with weapons and helmets swarmed from them like ants. Crown's farm was already utterly lost. Above, more helicopters circled, searching, hunting. Damon put a dirt-encrusted hoof on Gregoria's chest. "They won't hurt her. She's power, and power is what they want. But they can't let this place exist!" The eerily calm words burrowed into Gregoria's reason.

They would already have Rachel. The copters were beginning to lift off again, rising above the huge circle of alien land and unearthly buildings that had replaced the barn, the cottage, and the ranch house entirely. Where there had once been a human dwelling, a terrestrial farm, now there was a part of Equestria, and it was clearly visible to the humans. The beams of light from the circling helicopters were all focused on it now, scanning it, now and then converging on the purely Equestrian architecture. There was no perceptual blindness now, not there, not within that impossible zone. They would erase it. They would have to.

It was huge, though. Gregoria's mind tried to imagine how such a large change to the world itself could be removed. Whatever it was, it would have to be tremendous. Gregoria imagined fire, explosions - nukes. She didn't know what these humans had, but it would take something terrible and destructive to erase nearly a circular half-mile of alien land from the world. Damon's words returned in her mind. Only if she was alive, and uncaught, could she do anything to help her friend.

Instantly she turned and ran again for the forest, Damon right behind her, trying to put as much distance behind them and the farm as they possibly could, before trying to find a place to shelter. Running entirely away would be impossible, they weren't that fast. A pegasus could do it, perhaps, but they were both ground-pounders, earthpony and unicorn.

What they needed was a bunker. It was clear from the sound that the helicopters were pulling back, and that meant danger was immanent. Gregoria stopped and began bucking at the dirt with every ounce of her almost endless earthpony strength and power. The countryside was flat, but a berm of earth was better than nothing, a ditch to lay in was better than standing should there be an explosion.

──── ∆ ────

The ceiling beat down upon them with waves of heat. The small chamber was stuffy and felt like an oven and still Damon and Michel would not open the blocked tunnel. "Fuel-air bomb! Bad as a nuke, only no radiation. Worse in some ways - it burns the air itself!" Damon had trouble saying the words, his voice sounded scratchy from the dust and how much coughing he had been doing.

"That's... that's why I sealed us in. Gets into everything, through even tiny cracks. Air holes, you're still dead. It's a bunker killer!" Michel panted in the absolute darkness. "Takes... time... for the heat to rise, the air to clear."

Gregoria felt sick and on the edge of panic. She felt trapped, buried alive, which she was, and the only thing that kept her laying still was forcing herself to focus on how quickly Michel could move through earth and stone.

"I can't breath. I'm... I'm losing it here, guys. Seriously. I don't know how long I can hold on." It was taking every bit of Gregoria's efforts to cling to the image of Michel's diamond dog powers being able to free them all in seconds. The air was hot and musty, it smelled like burned dirt. Gregoria's throat ached, and her lungs were stinging like she had somehow breathed in a mist made of hot sauce.

"Hang in there, dammit!" Michel growled between panting. "We're all hurting here, pony!"

Pony. Pony - Gregoria sought out her pony brain deliberately, desperately now. Maybe her pony brain could calm her down somehow, maybe some herd instinct or cutsie-poo pony friendship magic could work where her human mind was desperate to start bucking her way to freedom. Trapped in the dark, trapped in a sweltering oven of stale air, underground, made her feel like she was going mad. "Please?" Gregoria was whimpering now. "Please... I can't do this. I can't take much more of this. Please... please..." She began to cry and wiggle as she fought to keep panic at bay. Her barrel and limbs kept pushing and prodding the too-warm bodies of Damon and Michel pressed close against her.

"I... I'm losing it too." Damon's voice was shaky. He was not himself. "I think... I'd rather burn alive than... I really can't..." He was shaking now, obviously fighting a complete breakdown.

Michel was panting faster and faster. "Alright. Listen. Do your barrier - no, wait! Make your horn glow, find the tunnel, make sure where it is. Then put your barrier up. If it's still fire out there..."

The small chamber became visible, illuminated in silver light. The air was foggy and thick. Damon's eyes were wide and shook slightly in their sockets. The sight made Gregoria feel worse herself. Michel was trembling. "There? I'm pretty sure it was there?"

Michel wrung his paws in anguish. "Be sure. If it's fire, even a crack, even the tiniest gap..."

"I can tell." Gregoria fought to maintain control, but her voice was plaintive and filled with fear. "Earthpony. I can tell."

"WHERE?" Damon was just about to break. There was not the slightest doubt of it.

"There!" Gregoria tried to point with a hoof, but there wasn't room to turn around. She motioned with her head, instead.

Damon immediately projected a wall of force which partially interpenetrated the curve of the earthen chamber. The silver light of the barrier shimmered and made the dust and particles in the air sparkle.

"No... to the... right more!" Gregoria began to struggle to get a foreleg over Michel, but it was difficult, and the feeling of being trapped was rapidly destroying her self control. "THAT'S TOO FAR! Go left... no, not that far, a little... AUGHHHH!!!"

Damon was yelling back at Gregoria now, both beginning to wildly flail in the small, hot oven of earth and root and rock. Michel was being battered between them, and the roof of the chamber began to drop small chunks and more dust from their thrashing.

"STOOOOOOPPPP!" The intensely piercing screech of Michel the diamond dog left Gregoria and Damon's pony ears ringing. They had frozen in shock, stunned by the overwhelming sound.

"I... I have a better idea." Michel almost whimpered the words.

"W-what?" Damon dissolved his barrier, but kept the glow from his horn constant.

Michel panted for a moment. "Greg... oria... you can tell... stuff? Dirt stuff?"

Gregoria tried to swallow, but her saliva was muddy. "Y-yeah. I can see through. Through dirt."

"Rarity... Dog and Pony Show... look." Michel was panting in short quick breaths now.

"Thought you... didn't watch..." Gregoria tried to grin in the dim, dusty light, but her lips stuck to her teeth.

"DO IT!" Michel wasn't interested in explaining his secret viewing habits.

Gregoria tried to calm down. It wasn't possible. Instead, in terror and desperation, she pushed herself out through her hooves, already half buried in the floor of the burrow, and into the dark space that was her earthpony awareness.

The earthen chamber was a bubble in a dark sea of soil. Above was heat, terrible heat, the ocean of earth roiling as if brought to boil. Death awaited above them, as far as Gregoria could tell. The roots she could sense were dead, charcoal, and at the limit of her earthpony senses lay only a surface of sterile, baked desolation. Her powers could not reach into the air, so she had no way to know if fire still burned the very atmosphere, or if the heat was only confined to the ground. Things did not seem hopeful to her, though.

Gregoria widened her perceptions, expanding her strange, magical vision of the alluvial realm beneath and surrounding her hooves. Stones and boulders floated in lithic layers, a curving, splitting immobile river of pebbles, the bed of some archaic river long buried ran below and to the side of her. And then she found the hollow. A chamber, astonishingly vast and cylindrical, perhaps a thousand feet deep and half as wide, with gravel at the bottom soaked with water. Water ran down the sides of the subterranean chasm. It was an undiscovered sinkhole, dozens of feet below Crown's farm. It had not collapsed all the way to the surface, but lay as a ticking time bomb that would one day implode to create a deep shaft in the ground.

"Chamber! Underground chamber!" Gregoria carefully opened one eye and lifted a hoof, pointing it carefully in the direction of the hollow below and ahead of them. "DIG!"

Michel began applying his diamond dog magic, slowly and deliberately by comparison to his previous, violent effort to dig the burrow originally. He moved the earth and rock that shattered at the touch of his claws carefully behind him, always leaving room for Damon and Gregoria to crawl beside, into the new space he created. He compressed the dirt, squeezing out all of the air trapped within it, so that the plug behind them became dense as brick. In time, they had more room in which to feel less trapped, and the air felt marginally fresher from the release of trapped oxygen within the structure of the soil.

Below the blasted forest, the earth was cool, and the additional oxygen allowed the three to regain some emotional balance. Damon kept his horn bright, and occasionally Gregoria would shove her forehooves into the walls and suggest course corrections for Michel to make. She had misjudged how far away the undiscovered sinkhole was, but this was tolerated, grudgingly, because at the very least they were not baking or suffocating any longer.

"Careful!" Gregoria had her hooves in the dirt, up to her pasterns. "It opens. Just a few feet, and it's a muffin of a drop. Be really, really careful, Michel!"

The diamond dog nodded and moved his magically powerful claws with care. A sudden blackness appeared, beyond which Damon's unicorn light simply vanished. The scent of fresh water and cold air filled their nostrils.

Michel delicately widened the opening. Utter blackness and cold air was beyond. It was as if the tunnel had opened out into a starless night sky.

Gregoria closed her eyes and projected herself through her hooves once more. "We're... um... about halfway up the shaft. It's really big, a drop would be fatal. It's bigger than an apartment building in there. The bottom is pebbles and stones." Gregoria tried to think. They had air now, and lots of it. There was water to drink too - about five hundred feet below them.

"Minecraft!" Gregoria heard her voice echo from beyond the black opening.

Damon grinned in the silvery light from his horn. "Yeah! Minecraft!" He laughed with delight. "Michel - you think you can dig us a staircase down, following the wall?"

Michel grumbled but nodded. "Not a staircase. Too much work. But I can do a slanting tunnel, easy. Same deal."

It took over an hour, and twice Michel nearly went over the edge, but with Gregoria's earthpony 'soil-dar' they finally emerged onto what looked like a gravel pit at midnight.

In the eerie glow of Damon's horn, they could not tell that they were in a hidden, cylindrical chamber a thousand feet high. They stood on a floor of gravel and boulders, beside a river that ran slowly along. The feeling of being above ground on a starless night was only broken by the strange acoustics, and the utter, tomb-like stillness of the air.

"It's probably natural. Karst suffosion." Michel had already drunk his fill of the fresh, underground stream. "Then again, they've been messing with the water table a lot. Too many humans, too much demand. I don't know enough to tell."

Gregoria licked her lips, water dripping from her muzzle. "You know more than me. Am I gonna have to learn stuff like that?"

Damon finished gargling the last of the dust from his throat. "You're the earthpony. I guess geology is your science, huh?"

Michel laughed. "Geology is coolsville, man. I can dig it."

The two ponies groaned as the diamond dog howled at the distant ceiling.

Damon was resting his horn, so they sat in the darkness. Doing magic made him tired in some way he couldn't explain, and he had been making light for a long time. Gregoria also felt a strange exhaustion, from her forays into lithic awareness. Michel said his paws hurt. Everyone agreed that was only reasonable.

They had rested, breathed, coughed the last of the dust out, and drank and peed several times. They were safe, hidden and secure, and they had survived an air-fuel explosion. Whatever had been brought into existence above, whatever patch of Equestria had been created must now be a smoldering crater, lost forever. Gone also was Rachel, Chelsea, and Randal the dragon. Crown and his team were fortunate to have been far away. They would return to a disaster - and probably capture.

"How do you think they'll spin it?" Damon yawned, weary from everything that had happened. The sinkhole was surprisingly cold, and all three were huddled together for mutual warmth. "A gas main blowout? Chemical tank explosion? That's what I'm betting, because of how big it had to have been. You wait, Fox will be reporting a chemical tank went up, acres of forest destroyed, millions of dollars lost. CNN too."

Gregoria was sobbing, gently to herself.

"They're alive." Michel petted Gregoria, and scratched behind her ears - after feeling out where they were. "Your friend, she's a powerful one. That's what they like. As long as she plays ball, of course. They're alive, bet on it. As far as they're concerned, we're weapons, tools, and she's gotta be one of the better ones with that stunt. They saved her, and Chelsea too, I'm betting. Randal - I don't know, but those choppers are huge. They could carry him."

Gregoria sniffed. "You really think so?"

Michel smiled, invisibly in the dark. "Yeah, I do. I know so. They came quick, didn't they? This was planned. They were gonna do this already, they were just waiting for the time. Probably had us all marked. She's alive. Absolutely, she's alive."

"It was Joanna. Joanna called them, I heard her do it. She told me they had her family." Gregoria wiped her nose with her foreleg.

"Joanna?" Damon was aghast "I liked Joanna!"

"I did too. They had her family. That's what she said." Gregoria wiped her eyes.

"Still... to sell us out like that. You really saw her?" Damon seemed personally upset.

"Yeah. I did. Heard almost every word, we were together when it happened. She was teaching me how to use a controller with hooves. I was right there." Gregoria blinked, feeling blind in such absolute darkness.

"Family. For some, family is everything." Michel yawned, feeling exhausted. Yawns followed from Damon and Gregoria.

"She's alive. They all could be alive. You're sure about that, right?" Gregoria yawned again, setting off another round.

Michel flexed his diamond dog claws. "They probably'll take 'em to S-4. That's where they take all the weird stuff - UFO's, little gray men, all of it. Nevada. Near Papoose Lake, so I read. 'Course we know there aren't any aliens, it's all just us, the changed, fulfilling some injector's deepest desires. Doesn't matter to them. If a saucer flies, it doesn't matter if it's fake, as long as it's useful. Supposedly the Grays are telepathic. That's their magic. Good for spying."

Gregoria's ears lifted up. "Wait - are you saying you know where Rachel is?"

"So I hear, yeah. S-4. Super-secret facility, above top secret, actually. Majik-12 Umbra clearance bullshit, not even presidents get filled in on that." Both ponies cringed repeatedly at the diamond dog's ease with human obscenities.

"And you think you know where that place is?" Gregoria was very alert now.

"Roughly, sure. I mean nobody knows exactly where it is, it's secret! But generally, everybody knows. Well, everybody that is into all the weirdy shit. I love the weirdy shit, man. Love it. Used to watch all the UFO shows." Michel yawned yet again, and lay his head down on his paws and closed his eyes.

"Then we get some sleep. When we wake up, we dig our way out of here, it's gotta be cool up top by then. Then we get to business!" Gregoria stretched out, back to Damon, cuddling close for warmth, trying to get comfortable.

"Business? What are you talking about, pony?" Michel was already half asleep. "It's all over. We need to find a new gig."

"If they're what you say they are, then they'll be waiting for us up there, Michel." Damon snuggled back with Gregoria. "I'm on board. I don't want to be snatched the moment we stick our heads up, or be on the run the rest of my days. Crown promised me food and board for life. He's going to keep that promise."

Gregoria felt warmer now, between unicorn and dog. "That's why we get to Crown first, and warn him away. That's the first priority."

"What's with all this crap you two are going on about?" Sleep was not happening for Michel with the two ponies jabbering on. "It's over. Your friend is alive, but she's not coming back. Be glad they didn't get you. It's over."

Gregoria gave Michel a poke in the back with her hoof. "No, it's just beginning. We're saving Rachel. And Chelsea. And Randal too, if he's there! And you're guiding us, saucer dog!"

"THE FUCK?" The ponies cringed, but Gregoria recovered and gave Michel another jab. Michel was not impressed. "I've read about this stuff - they have secret sensors in the ground, cameras in the rocks, laser trip wires, mines, infrared scanners, stuff the public doesn't even know exists! There is no way anyone could possibly even get within ten miles of S-4, even if they could find the goddamn place!"

Gregoria smiled in the pitch black. "I... am not just anyone. I am a pony - and ponies, working together, can do anything!" Gregoria's smile turned into a grin. "Powers, remember? Crown said it - they want us because we are either useful, or a threat, and after what just happened, I do not feel the least bit useful."

"We're muffin superheroes!" Damon snorted with delight at the thought. They had escaped a fuel air bomb, only because they had powers.

"You are fucking insane, is what you are." And with that, Michel the diamond dog made a point to ignore the ponies at his back, and fiercely went to sleep on the gravel covered ground.

16. Your Most Intense Obsessions

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

═════════════════════

Your Most Intense Obsessions

"Don't bend; don't water it down;

don't try to make it logical;

don't edit your own soul according to the fashion.

Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."

Franz Kafka

Digging out of the hidden sinkhole was more difficult that getting into it in the first place. It wasn't that Michel was unable to use his diamond dog abilities effectively, rather it was that the entire area was now swarming with humans.

Gregoria could sense their weight and movements on the blackened surface of the land above, and there was a lot of activity going on. "I think... lots of cars, or trucks, or something. All I know is that there are a lot of heavy things moving around. And stomping, walking - there are lots of human boots up there. All over!"

"Makes sense." Damon crouched low in the hard-packed tunnel that Michel had been excavating. "Probably a whole army of reporters, news crews, crowds of lookey-loos come to see the destruction - oh, and police too. To keep the gawkers back. Big explosion like that? It's gonna be the hot item for a few days at least."

"Michel... how long do you think you can keep going?" Gregoria had reason to be concerned, they were all desperately hungry, and Michel was doing all of the work. Worse, the only source of water was a thousand feet down a curving tunnel. Just getting a drink was a serious trek.

"I'm... I'm kind of reaching the end, to tell the truth. I don't feel so good. I'm thirsty, but I don't think I can face another run down and back up." Michel sagged where he sat. "I... am so tired. And hungry. Fuck am I hungry."

Gregoria's ears went flat briefly, and then recovered. She was slowly getting used to the diamond dog's non-pony swearing. For a brief moment, she felt conflicted again - her human mind still resented the demands of her pony brain. On the other hoof, her pony brain - and powers - were the most valuable thing she currently possessed. "Hey! I just thought of something. I'm an earthpony!"

Michel raised his troll-like head and stared at Gregoria in Damon's silvery light. "Just figured that out, Ms. Smartypants?"

Gregoria made a face. "No, what I mean is, I can grow stuff! Why can't I just grow some food, right here, right now?" She set her hooves wide and stared at the dirt in the dim light. "Grow! Grass! I command you!"

Nothing happened. Michel smirked. "Seeds? You're magic, but you aren't that magic. Also, grass is good enough for you barnyard types, but I'm a dog, remember? We only eat grass when we're sick."

Gregoria stopped her pointless performance and let her ears fall sideways in defeat. "Hadn't thought of that. Fudge."

"Language, pony! Behave your fucking self, okay?" Michel clearly enjoyed seeing the unicorn and the earthpony jerk and cringe. "Alright then, pick a place, close as possible please, where I can go for the surface. We need to get out of here now. I can't do this much longer. It's walkies time." He grinned at that. If he was stuck being some kind of a dog, then he intended to have some fun with it.

"Yeah... I agree. Is there any place we can surface that is hidden, or safe or..." Damon was looking straight at Gregoria along with Michel now.

"I have no idea! I can't tell stuff above the ground. You want to know if there is a big chunk of quartz to our left? I can confirm that. It's huge. Wanna know if the burned-out tree behind and to the right has really deep roots, guess what, it does! But I can't tell you who's looking at what up there!" Gregoria's stomach made a sound like a bear being slowly turned inside out.

The dog and the pony stared with wide eyes.

"What? I'm really, really hungry!" Gregoria stared back.

"Um... O...kay.... then. Up it is!" Michel began digging at a sharp vertical angle, aiming for the surface.

"But... wait! We don't know what's up there!" Damon moved behind Michel, up the ramp of the tunnel, trying to provide light.

"We know what's down here. Shit all." Michel dug faster, forcing Damon to back down again, his muzzle covered in dirt and bits of root fiber.

While the diamond dog burrowed, Gregoria sniffed at the bits of roots. She nibbled at one. "Huh." It wasn't bad. It wasn't good, but... it wasn't bad. "Appetizers!"

"I already have enough of an appetite, thank you." Damon tried to ignore Gregoria's nibbling, but his nose kept insisting that if it wasn't proper food, it was at least digestible. Soon both ponies were scraping through Michel's mine tailings for bits of the crunchy root.

"Sunlight!" Michel's whispered word was followed by the sound of beeps and squawks from a police radio, and the murmurings and chatter of a crowd. In the distance, a news reporter spoke almost certainly to a camera.

"...since the large chemical tank exploded, utterly destroying the small farm. Currently no casualties have been reported, though property as far as..."

Damon leaned close to Gregoria. "Called it. Spin doctors for the win!"

The inside-out bear in Gregoria's stomach growled. "You said it would be a... wait, you did say they'd call it a chemical explosion. Huh." The bear was apparently trying to turn itself right-side out again. "You're pretty good."

Damon smiled. "I knew someone in the news industry. Some things are true. If they don't matter."

"I think we're under a truck. Or something." Michel slowly widened the opening of his tunnel. As Gregoria worked her way up behind the diamond dog, she could see the underside of some large vehicle, daylight from the grass reflecting off the undercarriage.

"Peek. See if we can get out." Gregoria gave Michel a gentle jab with a hoof.

Michel carefully raised his eyes and muzzle over the lip of the tunnel. In all directions, the burned, blackened grass had cars parked on it. The wheels of dozens or more could be seen in every direction. Three cars down were four pairs of feet, moving away. They must have just driven in. Six cars away a vast crowd was gathered, talking and milling around.

"It's like a parking lot up here. Not many people close by. I think we can leave unnoticed. Come on!" Michel dug toward the nearest side of the vehicle he had come up underneath, and crawled out into the blinding day. His eyes stung from the painful brilliance of it.

Gregoria and Damon followed, Damon swearing in pastry when his horn caught on a part of a wheel well. All four lay low on the cinerated stalks.

"Smells like hay bar-b-que." Gregoria nibbled a Cajun-styled stick of Timothy grass and spit out ashes. "Yuk. Definitely overdone."

"Um... I don't mean to be the bearer of bad news, but... clothing?" Damon studied the crowd of feet in the distance, under several cars, watchful for any that might move in their direction.

Gregoria looked at Damon, then herself, and then Michel. Only Michel was wearing anything, and what he had was pajamas. With little pictures of bunnies on them. Presumably that was the size that fit. Or else Michel was... interesting.

There was no need to cater to human sensibilities in the off hours at Crown's ranch. It had become habit that when the human team went home for the night, or if they were away entirely - as they had been - that everypony could enjoy the comfort of their own coats. When the humans left the farm, Damon, Gregoria, Rachel, and Joanna would race to dump their duds. Clothing was binding and sweaty - with a pony coat, it was like wearing clothes over clothes.

"Chocolate Cheesecake!" Gregoria's tail flicked in annoyance. "Bananna Cream Pie!"

"Language...???" Michel chuckled. What had happened to the equine's brains was hilarious to him.

"Sorry... I..." Gregoria caught herself and grimaced at the diamond dog. "Sweet Muffin of Apple Dumpling Cinnamon Pudding!" It sounded like she meant it, too.

"Come on, ponies. Let's see if we can't sneak our way out of this. Keep an eye open for clothing to steal in the cars." Michel began to move out, on all fours, crawling rather than walking. He was surprisingly adept at quadrupedal locomotion. It kept his head down.

Gregoria felt the pony brain object within her. "Steal? I'm not stealing clothing!"

"Fuckin' ponies." Michel peeked around a van and motioned for the others to follow as he dashed across rows of cars.

The open window of an SUV provided the opportunity for some light burglary. Gregoria found a sun dress thrown in her face. Damon had an oversized tee shirt dumped at his feet. "What?"

"Which would you rather feel bad about - taking some human's spare tee, or being discovered by them while you sat in jail for public nudity?" Michel gave the two ponies a humorless look.

Damon levitated the sun dress to help Gregoria wriggle through it, and then did the same with the tee for himself. "I don't like this."

"I don't either!" Gregoria joined in.

"You don't have to. Fuckin' ponies." Michel peeked inside other cars as they fled. A Dodge truck bed provided a ratty pair of jeans, which Damon accepted with a grumble. He had to hike them high, and still he found himself tripping on the legs.

At the end of the mass of vehicles, Damon called a halt while he used his horn to tie knots in the legs of the old jeans, so he wouldn't keep tripping on the dragging ends. "Now where?"

Michel looked around. One dirt road led past burned forest to the highway. Then it was eight miles to town. In the distance, unburned forest stood across the interstate. "There." He pointed with a claw as he stood up. "First those trees. Then town."

The three bedraggled unhumans made it to the highway and then to the next section of forest without incident. Several cars drove past them as they walked, but they were mostly ignored. The few stares they got were attributed by Gregoria to how dirty they were. They all were caked with soil. That and the bunny pajamas.

"What's in the forest?" Damon shrugged with his ears, looking around at the infestation of trees and bushes.

"Food, dolt." Michel took off his pajamas. "You two play bunny. I've got some hunting to do. Don't wander." With that, Michel was off into the woods as if he knew what he was doing.

"Wait... he's going to go eat... animals?" Gregoria was horrified. "Proper little werewolf, isn't he?"

"I think he used to go hunting when he was a kid or something." Damon began sniffing around for things he could eat.

"But... disease! Parasites! Tics!" Gregoria's stomach demanded food. The tall stems nearby smelled like a buffet.

"Have you been sick once, since turning?" Damon began stuffing his muzzle with forest salad.

"But...mmnff" Gregoria chewed, happily, "Mnn... no. Course not." Clover? She loved clover!

"Crown says we're immune. To everything." Damon took another huge mouthful of stems. "Probably."

"Probably?" Gregoria's ears met her skull. "Probably isn't good enough against trichinosis."

"There's parasites hiding on plants too. You better hope probably is enough." Damon chewed with vigor, his stomach rumbling in delight and need.

Gregoria froze in mid chew of a large mouthful of tender clover. "Pffarathites? Ong Pfantfth?" She stood there wondering if she should spit out the banquet she had been enjoying. In the end, her rumbling supreme mistress, Pony Stomach Queen Of Abdomen, won. 'Probably' was good enough. For now, anyway.

──── ∆ ────

"I honestly do not advise this. I understand how you feel, I know what a loss this is but frankly I think you are overestimating your own abilities. There is no denying that you have powers beyond those of human beings but that does not make you a match for a trained, capable and dedicated military presence. I beg you to accept that there is heroic, and there is hopeless, and I don't believe you can succeed here. You will be captured, or killed. Our friends would not want that. Would you want that to happen to them, if the situation was reversed? Don't do this. Please."

Malus Crown's softly glowing green eyes pleaded with them as much as his strange, eerie voice. Only now had his initial rage at Gregoria and Damon's plan died down to begging. He had started with incredulous shouts, now he was left with mere reason, something that seldom works on the young or the desperate.

Gregoria, Damon and Michel had not made it to the town, and apparently this was a very fortunate thing. Rather than them saving Crown from capture, Crown had rescued them. The town was a trap, with agents and devices everywhere. Malus had been alerted that something had gone terribly wrong from afar. Apparently he monitored everything that transpired on his farm, a fact which - while beneficial and obviously necessary - thoroughly disturbed the three of them when it was revealed.

They had been picked up by Guillaume, driving a school bus. He had switched them to the tight confines of a Volkswagon Beetle inside of a tunnel, leaving the bus behind. Then it had been a three hour drive to one of Crown's safe houses, 'Bolt Hole 23'. Gregoria's mind reeled at the idea that Crown had at least twenty-three safe houses.

They had been fed - properly - and watered and even reassured that their forest snack would leave no permanent damage to their transformed bodies. Damon had been right - the changed were safe, as far as Crown could tell, from the diseases that plagued ordinary terrestrial life. Their transformed biology was different in some fundamental way that left bacteria, molds, viruses, and parasites unable to affect it.

They were, he hastened to add after hearing of their scheme to save Rachel, Chelsea and Randal, still vulnerable to bullets. And nerve agents (probably). And radiation, heat, cold, electricity, sharp spiky pits - and severe, brutal beatings just to begin a list they should really think about.

"Rachel is my best friend, mister Crown." Gregoria hung her pony head. "I wasn't a good person before I changed. I wasn't a good friend to her. I was an total Marzipan Chorley Cake, to put it bluntly. She took me in, helped me, forgave me - she was a pony before she became a pony, mister Crown. I would... I would... " Gregoria swallowed, and took a breath, knowing her next words were literally true. "I would rather die, than turn my back on her now. I will get her back, or I will die trying."

Damon nodded at Gregoria's words with awe. "I didn't get to know Rachel as well as Gregoria here, but I knew Chelsea, and Randal too, a bit anyway. They could be us. They are us, they're Equestrian, part of the same injection. We're all we have, Crown. In the whole world, we're all we have. There isn't a real Equestria, just us misfits. If we don't help each other, then we truly are nothing."

"Miss Samson, Mister Knight, I truly do admire your courage and your loyalty, but..." Crown looked surprised to be interrupted.

"These two are fuckin' insane. But they won't make it ten feet without me." Michel shook his head and stared at the unicorn and especially the earthpony. "I want you to know I hate you for this. Fuck you to hell, ponies, you hear me? None of this 'swirly sugar candy' shit. Fuck. You. To. Hell. With razors. But... you gotta understand... if you do this insane thing, you are killing me, you are dooming me, because I will be rodgered with a wire brush before I let you try this without a dog that can dig." Michal's claws clutched air and released. "You just think twice and then twice again before you commit us to anything, understand?"

Gregoria was too busy trying to not look like she had tears running down her cheeks to flinch at the diamond dog's obscenities. Damon stared at the ground and pawed the tiles of the safe house floor with a hoof as if he were trying to dig a ditch.

"Well, shit." Mr. Malus Crown sagged back and crossed his perforated forelegs.

Of course he could swear human-style, mused a shocked Gregoria. He was patterned after the image of a villain, after all.

──── ∆ ────

"Okay. Let's go over this again." Mr. Crown had done his best to prepare the three for their perilous task. They had moved from the safe house to a property Crown owned near Las Vegas in Pahrump, in the desert beyond the town. Crown had made use of his team to acquire information that was beyond the reach of most people, dangerous information that despite the risks he was taking, might be entirely wrong anyway. He had provided Gregoria, Damon and Michel with equipment and supplies. And of course, transportation.

Gregoria had come to the conclusion that deep down, Malus Crown had always wanted to take the fight back to those that stole away the changed. "A jag, or ridge in the mountain, part of it touches the dry flat of Papoose Lake, or comes close. It has at least nine big rollup hanger doors, angled to match the rise of the mountain. They're textured to look like sand and stuff. The place runs right through the ridge, dug right through it. On the other side from the doors, pretty far away, there might be a chain link fence, and supposedly a dirt road, but don't go that way because that's where they used to shuttle some of their staff before the tunnel was finished."

Malus nodded. "Good, so far, go on."

Gregoria swallowed, trying to get things perfect. "The whole thing is probably at least six hundred feet long, and it's made to not be visible. There is probably an underground rail or highway that runs through a tunnel, that's how they get people there now, so there probably isn't even the road anymore. The facility has at least four levels. One is at ground level, where the hangers are, then there are three below that. The tunnel road is on the second or third level down, and runs all the way to Groom Lake.

"Um... The facility is called 'Doughboy', but it's real name is S4B. It is sometimes called 'Majik Castle', or the 'M-12 Mine'. Everything, everywhere above ground is watched, all the time. The ground is probably monitored too, through ground-penetrating sonar and maybe other stuff. You can't walk on the surface without your every hoofstep being sensed. You can't fly, because they have autoturrets built to look like boulders. There is a nerve agent minefield, or several. There may be additional, buried protection or barriers, so we have to be constantly alert, even when digging." Gregoria tapped a hoof. "Oh! never dig constantly or in the same direction for too long. And never, ever, ever go above ground."

The large, dark Changeling shook its angular head in despair. "You did listen to your own words there, right? I just need to be sure you understand what you just repeated to me."

Damon scowled. "Crown, come on. You're just badgering us now. We get it, really we do. It's the Death Star, manned with wall-to-wall Darth Vader clones. It's Mordor, and we're unarmed hobbits and there is no distraction at the Black Gates to save us. We get it." The unicorn put a foreleg over Gregoria's withers. "We're going anyway."

Crown looked at his ebony, swiss-cheese hooves. "Michel, if you back out, they have to as well. They know they can't do this without you. Do you really intend to facilitate this insanity?"

Michel stared at the sky through the window of the old bus. "When it started, I was in the barn. I heard this music, it was like music, I don't know what the fuck it was, it tinkled. Like bells or something. And then the light started, gold light, it came through the rear door of Chelsea's cottage. Everything it touched, turned into that show. I watched the hay fork on the wall turn from rust to perfect. The wood stopped being old and shitty. The bales turned golden - hell, they even looked tasty to me."

"Michel..."

Michel bared his sharp fangs. "It spread, quick like, and I wanted to run into it. I wanted to run into it so bad, so fuckin' bad. Because in there, through there? In there was home, Crown. Home. No bastards, no assholes, no monsters - and don't give me that look. I'd take an army of your kind over an army with guns and heads filled with nationalistic bullshit. At least the Changelings only wanted to live. Let me tell you something - "

Crown fidgeted.

" - That Rachel, she did that. I ran, I ran like a coward. Maybe that was right, at the time. But the only way I'll ever get a second chance at home, is if we get our Celestia back. Do you understand, Crown? You talk 'injectors' and 'John Does' and how we're all refugees from nowhere, but this time, it's different. This time we have one changed, one of us refugees that can actually give us our nowhere. You think about that, Crown. This world so fuckin' great you're happy to sneak around for the rest of your life in it? Or would you rather live in Equestria? She can't change us back, but she could make this world our world. She could give us home."

Gregoria gasped at that. This was the reason Michel was helping?

The meaning hit Gregoria almost like a physical impact. To save Rachel meant potentially ending the reign of Man on earth. If she lost it again - or did it deliberately - there might not be an earth. The entire Earth simulation that was existence might be changed into an Equestria simulator instead. It was one thing to face never being human again, but to choose ponydom for every self-aware person in the entire world? To choose which world would be the real one? Just so a few wouldn't have to be misfits? Would it even be allowed by who or whatever was running the simulation of existence?

"It's happened before. They know that. They won't give up Rachel without a fight." Crown spoke with measured gravity.

"What do you mean, happened before?" Damon's tail swished nervously, his ears were back.

"The human world. Naked ape world. Brutal, unforgiving Earth. It replaced the last one." Crown sighed. "Sometime probably around eighteen-sixty, the world changed into the one we see out there." An ebony Changling hoof pointed at the desert. "The British took Beijing in ironclad ships to win the opium wars, and in the process cracked the belief that held the old world together. A Victorian materialist, a profit-mad rationalist, bone-sure that the universe was a big ticking clock was the John Doe Injector. It was a nearly complete reset. The old world faded away, and we ended up with our Blind Watchmaker universe of humans, unforgiving physics, and permanent death. A world for profiteers and merchants. A world for scientists and rationalists. A human world."

"What... what was there before?" Gregoria was stunned. Why hadn't he told them this before? Then again, she'd never even considered the possibility of such a thing until Rachel went Akira... there was no way to even know to ask Crown about such cosmic matters. How much more was the Changling keeping to himself?

Malus Crown looked sad. "You've known your whole life. Fairy tales, Gregoria. Lung Dragons and Ki-rin and pixies and fairy bands riding in finery between the worlds. Thomas The Rhymer and The Great Spirit and Coyote and The Great Buffalo. Kachinas and Devas and spirits and reincarnation. What we think of as the different races of Mankind were anthropomorphic animal people. Not humans. The change rippled forward and backward in time from some nameless Victorian soldier, and changed the entire simulation."

Damon's mouth dropped open. Michel grinned. Gregoria shook her mane to clear her spinning head.

Crown brightened. "Before that, I can't be certain, but I think everything was like dinosaurs, or birds, only intelligent, and very, very alien. At least we can kind of understand the fairy tale version of the world. I suspect that started about twenty-thousand years ago, in a big war that nearly killed their world, and led to the fairy tale one. Then the Victorian change, that made the reality we know today. And Rachel... maybe Rachel is the next complete re-write of the simulation. Maybe. Maybe."

"It can't be accidental." Damon shook his head. "The bug, the thing that lets injectors happen at all. It's not a bug, Crown. It can't be a bug. This universe, our simulation... its been deliberately built to allow it to change. That's got to be it!" Damon's eyes grew wide. "We're in an evolving program - a simulation that is... trying to make something. Generations come and go, and occasionally the universe changes and the game changes and... maybe the point is to finally make a decent game!"

Crown shook his head. "Who knows? I don't. I really don't!" Gregoria had stared at Crown, doubting him. "Seriously, I don't know any more than what I have just told you, and most of that is speculative at best. Why do you think I never mentioned it? It's beyond the pale, it's not something I can prove. I feel reasonably sure this is the true story of history, but - so what? It's just crazy talk until..."

"Until Rachel happened." Gregoria double checked the pack on her back. Canteens, food concentrate, assorted tools - nothing had fallen out. Everything was still properly packed. "Enough metaphysical Punschkrapfen. You know what?"

Crown looked puzzled.

"I don't care anymore if Rachel changes the world into Equestria or leaves it be. Only one thing matters, only one thing ever mattered, even though I was too human once to see it." Gregoria stepped out of the air-conditioned car and set her hooves on alkali and sand. "Friendship." Gregoria stared at the forbidding scrub-brush and rock ahead. "Friendship... is magic."

17. A Gift From Within

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

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A Gift From Within

"Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within."

Franz Kafka

Michel cautiously scraped the sandstone away until Gregoria assured him that the distance was three inches. The diamond dog crouched in the tunnel, his right forepaw raised over his head, deep in the rock above. Using only one sharp claw, Michel cut through the last of the stone to the air above. The perforation to the external world was only two inches wide.

It had been too long since the last patch of stone, so the three decided to sit for awhile, and allow Damon to become a living air pump. Damon's horn grew slightly brighter as he focused on driving air through the hole in the sandstone down to them. Gregoria felt the hot breeze blast from above, warming the cool underground space. The air felt good, but more importantly, it smelled and tasted fresh.

Michel lay flat, rubbing the muscles of his forelimbs with his massive, dextrous paws.

"How you holding up?" Gregoria studied the dust drifting through the tiny shaft of sunlight from the hole above. Considering how small the carefully dug, narrow shaft was, the sun must be at its zenith in the sky. A tiny spot of day glowed on the stone floor she lay on.

"I'm sore. Tired. Not too thirsty. Yet." Michel began rubbing the upper muscles of his powerful limbs. "How long you think it's been?"

"I can tell you exactly." Gregoria squeezed carefully past Damon, who was in his usual 'circulation trance'. Pumping air around was somehow difficult to do. He'd tried to explain it - it was easy to lift an object within his silver glow, but air had nothing to 'grab' on to. So, instead, he had to constantly imagine some construction of telekinetic force and make it work. He had started with making fan-like blades, but now preferred a sort of peristaltic effect - disks of force rippling down, pushing air along between them. It took deep concentration on the unicorn's part, because he had no idea how to make it into an actual, automated, 'spell'.

Gregoria tried to stretch her legs as best as she could while she walked back to the supply sled. The 'sled' was an eight-foot long strip of material coated on one side with a slippery but durable, teflon-like coating. Piled and tied to this carpet was what had been a huge collection of sacks and canteens and packs. The massive pile was significantly less impressive than it had been when they had started their long, difficult dig, the missing contents having passed through their bodies over time.

She gripped the harness in her teeth and tossed her head to flip it over her neck. Turning, she shook the harness until it settled properly, and began to pull. Gregoria hauled the sliding, scraping mass forward for a bit, stopped, counted to three, and pulled again. She counted to five, then pulled for a shorter time. Then two, and a longer time, mixing up pulling with waiting as randomly as she could. Shortly she had returned to her teammates.

"Hmph." Michel was rubbing his claws now, and picking out stone and dirt from the impossibly sharp nails. "Gimme a mint. My breath smells like shit."

"Mints don't help, but sure." Gregoria unbridled herself, and followed the scent of peppermint to the zipped pack that contained the Altoids. She nibbled at the zipper, caught it and pulled. Digging around with her muzzle, she found the tin and pulled it out. A flip of her head tossed the container to Michel, who caught it expertly with one paw in the dim light.

"Nmm. Not many left." Delicately pinching a candy between two nails, the diamond dog slid it into his muzzle, and began sucking on it. "Whoo. Stings."

Gregoria turned her attention to the largest pack which contained their special iPad. Crown had some fancy toys in his collection, and the special iPad was a donation to the cause. The device could not be tracked, was shielded against passive and active detection, and it had a special interface with extra-large icons and buttons. Normally, it never contacted the outside world. The large buttons made it possible to be easily used with pony lips. Gregoria stared down her yellow muzzle and lipped her way to the page with their mapping app. She noted the time and date.

"This is day eleven. I thought it was twelve. It's eleven." Gregoria studied the special map and used her lip to continue the line that approximated their overall progress.

"Shit." Michel sucked on his candy for a while. "How much further?"

They had been making reasonable progress, but not as much as Gregoria had hoped. It hadn't helped that the push on day eight - or was it six? - had forced them to lay low for a day and a half doing nothing. The sand had been loose, and Michel's special powers were not enough. The tunnel began collapsing behind them, despite Damon's brave efforts to support it through sheer telekinetic power. Michel had been forced to dig quickly, and if they hadn't found a large zone of sandstone, they may have been forced to the surface to avoid being buried alive.

The surface would have offered no salvation - while they hid within the edge of the sandstone region, no less than three, and possibly four (Gregoria wasn't sure about whether one group was actually two groups or not) squads of men swept the area immediately after their perilous dash. This had proven beyond all doubt that even the very earth was being constantly monitored for unusual vibrations or movements. The level of security being applied was nothing short of incredible.

Then again, what such an effort was working to hide was itself even more incredible by far. If only what was hidden away within the Majic facility was merely flying saucers and little Gray men. No wonder, Gregoria had mused, the government didn't just open up about extraterrestrials - they couldn't, because there weren't any. There never had been. The real truth, which was indeed 'out there', just a little bit farther in fact, was very possibly beyond the ability of most humans to even comprehend.

Compared to trying to wrap the mind around living inside a tiny, mutable simulation of reality run for some unknown purpose, the notion of space aliens was positively mundane. Crown had said the secret somehow kept itself. It might simply be that it was too mind-mangling to cope with for most humans, Gregoria often wondered. It was hard enough for her, and she had been changed by errant cosmic source code into a real-world representation of a cartoon pony.

Gregoria studied the line she had just drawn, then used both lips to move the map on the iPad screen slightly. "Two more days and we have a decision to make. Highway or defense wall."

Damon opened his eyes and sagged. His horn ceased its labors entirely, leaving them all in darkness save for the tiny shaft of dusty light from the surface above. "The underground highway. We have to cut through there. It's got to be the weakest point, they're going to have the actual walls of the facility seriously hardened!"

"Michel can cut through solid rock with a finger, Damon." Gregoria, after replacing the special iPad, decided to have a candy herself.

"No... not hard, hardened." Damon lay down, exhausted from his telekinetic efforts. "It's a... military styled term. I mean that there is probably going to be traps, sensors, and yeah, super-hard alloys and stuff too. They're not going to do that for thirty miles of underground highway tunnel."

"Howdya know that?" Michel scraped some dirt out of his left ear in the dark. "For all you know, they did the highway tunnel too."

Damon sighed. "Yeah, okay, I don't know. For sure anyway. But come on - doing sensors and traps and stuff is expensive, and trying to cover a thirty mile long tunnel just seems ridiculous."

"You're forgetting the big problem, pony." Michel sat up, because his back was getting a cramp. "We pop out in the tunnel, we still have to get past whatever big door and defenses they have. We come in through the wall, and we're in. No checkpoints, no big doors. I say breach the fuckin' wall."

Gregoria thought for a moment. "Hey, what if we dug down. Way down. Say... four stories down. Go under the wall, defenses, sensors, traps and whatever. Come up from below. They can't be expecting that! We come up through the floor of their basement. I bet they wouldn't even consider that."

"Unless they read old superhero comics." Michel chuckled.

"Huh?" Gregoria was baffled.

"Mole men from inside the Earth's core?" Michel didn't need to see the shrugs to know they happened. "Kids. Never appreciate the classics."

──── ∆ ────

In the dark sea of the lithic world, the buried nets of metal burned like incandescent bulb filaments. The Majic complex stood out like a beacon because of the protection it used, and Gregoria was able to guide Michel with ease. The steel nets were electrified, and doubtless were intended to block the efforts of any who would dare to tunnel their way in from the side. There was no doubt in the minds of any of the three Equestrians that beyond those grids were even more perils.

As Michel dug them down, farther and farther into the ground, his guess about the base construction was shown to be true. The bottom-most layer of the installation was protected only by solid, nearly impenetrable rock. The engineers who had designed S-4 in the fifties could not have imagined the capabilities of an Equestrian diamond dog.

It was slow going, with Michel digging in erratic bursts. There was no doubt that the bedrock was being monitored for vibrations, and all were sure their approach had been noticed and was likely being studied. By keeping their efforts as random as possible, the hope was that the humans would be unable to define whatever their instruments were perceiving as a deliberate action against them. With luck, they might consider Michel's erratic scrabblings as a natural phenomena of some kind.

Michel had carefully widened the chamber he had made below the ceiling of concrete and rebar. Their ceiling was the lowest floor of the secret desert base. Gregoria pressed her hooves against the stone walls of Michel's chamber, and the concrete above, trying to sense anything that might help them.

"I... there is thrumming. You know, like wum-wum-wum-wum... like that. And some kind of really faint grindey thing. It feels like machine stuff. I wish I could hear it, but... I have to interpret what my hooves are telling me." Gregoria was struggling to remain upright on only her back legs, as she raised her forelegs against the ceiling. She staggered to the left a few feet. "I think... augh... my flanks... I think this is an open space. I think." With a groan, Gregoria dropped to all fours and bent her long neck back and to the side, so she could nibble at her own flank. The muscles quivered from the strain of standing on two legs for so long. They almost itched from the painful effort.

"So... right here, I should dig here?" Michel tapped a claw to a portion of the gray surface above them.

"Yeah. As best as I can tell. I don't do so well on concrete and stuff." Gregoria stretched her hind legs, grimacing at the soreness. "I think pony powers prefer organic stuff. Pony powers are 'Green' powers I guess."

Damon brought his glowing horn closer at a wave of Michel's massive paw. Michel began scraping with a single nail, in seconds he had dug out a hollow, which he proceeded to slowly and carefully widen. Occasionally he had Gregoria try to estimate the distance left before he breached the upper surface of the concrete foundation. Each time, Gregoria had to stretch herself up on her hind legs farther and farther.

"Hey, how are we going to climb up there, once you break through?" Damon could easily picture the diamond dog pulling himself up with his finger-like claws, but it didn't seem very easy for a pony.

"Watch." Michel went to the stone wall and began carving out a zig-zag shape. He was very quick, to him the hard stone was soft as peanut butter. When he had finished, it required all three of them to push his impromptu stairs into position. "Should... have cut... bricks... and piled them... instead." Michel panted, sitting for a rest.

"Pretty impressive though. You can build my summer castle when Rachel makes Equestria." Gregoria grinned in the silver light.

"...and the... you... you rode in on." Michel grinned back.

"Do you really think she's going to rewrite the world?" Damon ended his magical light, since nopony was using it. All had gotten used to sitting in utter darkness when resting, to allow the unicorn to regain his energy.

"It's... a possibility, I suppose. Frankly, it scares me." Gregoria spit a bit of gravel out of her mouth. That too was something they had all gotten used to - sand in everything, everywhere. "I'm worried that if she tries something like that, and they find her before she can do the job, they won't just try to capture her. I'm also afraid that she might lose herself and not be Rachel anymore."

Damon rested his head on his forelegs. "Like Sunny, like how he turned into Winona - you're worried she'll go full Celestia? Lose herself in the role?"

"Yeah." Gregoria lay on her side in the dark and focused on relaxing her overworked hind legs as best she could. "Crown said the world has changed several times, right? Complete rewrites, only all we know about it are myths and stories. What if reskinning reality also changes all the data, right down to everypony's minds? Maybe none of us would remember the world or our lives anymore."

Damon blew out air in something that was less a whistle than a sigh. "I hadn't considered that. Maybe we would end up thinking the world had always been Equestria, and all we would ever know about the human world would be half-remembered fantasies and stuff. Whoa. That would be a nightmare, wouldn't it?"

"Fuck... you ponies, Jesus." Michel laughed, a curious, bitter laugh. "What about the poor anthropomorphs that lived before the last change? A whole world of magic and animal people, probably had amazing powers. Pixies and elves and shit. Whole fucking 'Lord Of The Rings', 'Dungeons and Dragons' world, and some capitalist, greedy, dope-pushing bastard erased it so we could have A-10 Warthogs and third-world poverty." Michel snarled. "You pansy-ass rich-bitches think everything is just peachy, don't you? All iPads and big screens for everybody, huh? Fuck you. I've seen the world, the real world, and most people - real people - live in shit and die hungry. That's the human world, that is real. That is a fact. So, you going all liberal guilt about the plight of robber-baron humans and permanent death - you remember that part? Clockwork Victorian universe, you die and you don't come back? - Fuck you whining about 'the poor humans'. Tell it to the animal people before them!"

Both ponies were speechless for some time. Finally Gregoria dared to break the silence. "I... I didn't know you felt that way."

The diamond dog growled softly. "You ever seen the world, the real world? You ever leave your little suburban neighborhood?"

Gregoria shook her head in the blackness. "No. I... I haven't. I didn't have the money to..."

"Didn't have the money... you know what most humans live on? A dollar a day. Or less. That's most humans, the majority of humans. The money you spend going to fucking Mickey Dee would feed the most common human family for a week, maybe a month. That is human life, right there, taken on average. You think you are poor, 'oh, I can't get a job' - bullshit! You are part of the elite, privileged pony. Like all of us." Michel grumbled to himself. They could hear his claws scraping the rock. "Humans killed the fairy tale world. I don't have any pity about the loss of their take on things, because their version of life sucks."

Neither Damon nor Gregoria knew what to say to that, so they just sat in the dark, waiting for the next shoe to drop. It did occur to Gregoria, though, that they didn't know anything about Michel's human life, only that he had worked at Apple once. Gregoria had just assumed that Michel had been an upper-class, white, American computer geek. Maybe... maybe that wasn't his background at all.

"Damon. Party's over. Let's rescue us a pony princess." Michel growled the words, still upset.

Damon's silver light revealed the diamond dog already at work, standing on his stone steps, digging cautiously in the hole above him. Chunks of concrete fell to the stone floor of the chamber as he worked. "Okay, this is it. Any idea what to do if alarms sound?"

Gregoria looked around at the chamber, the pile of supplies, the tunnel that led away and eventually up... to a wall of collapsed earth. "We make it to Rachel somehow, no matter what. We free her - they must have her bound somehow, or she would have gone Celestia on them already. And then we let her take it from there."

"Your plan sucks ass. But I was dumb enough to follow you, so fuck me. Let's do this." Michel stuck a claw through the concrete and revealed darkness above. They waited, breathing quietly. No alarms - that they could hear. Michel widened the hole.

They had come up between two very large, metal, boxy chambers, from which led thick conduits. Whether it was plumbing or wiring, none of them could say. Everything was painted battleship gray - the concrete floor, the conduits, the metal structures, everything. Around them, the sound of machinery pulsed and thrummed and ratcheted. "It's like a cargo ship in here." Michel was whispering. They were all whispering.

"Where do we go now?" Damon kept his silver glow very low, very dim.

"We find Rachel. You try to scan for magic, I guess, and I'll do what I can with my hooves. Stay together, and search." Gregoria sniffed the air, hoping for a guiding scent. Only old dust, lead paint, metal and concrete presented themselves to her.

The entire room was bank after bank of blocky metal cases with conduits leading up and across the ceiling. Occasionally the monotony was broken up by a panel of controls that looked like something from World War Two. The basement was old-tech, and it felt like a museum, but apparently everything was doing the job, whatever it was. As they crept along, constantly on the alert for anything that might set off an alarm, they finally came to a large, half-open vault door.

"This place looks like the Fallout games, you know?" Damon studied the doorway. No sound or light came from beyond it.

"It was probably built during that time." Gregoria peeked around the corner of the door and into a room filled with pipes and handles and pressure wheels. Another, smaller door was visible on the far side. It was closed.

After they entered the next room, Gregoria put her hooves against the far wall and floor and door, alternately, trying to use her earthpony senses to tell anything about what was on the other side. Damon and Michel were busy reading the signs they discovered on the walls - apparently there were rules about overloads and various conditions, as well as warning signs about not messing with electrical boxes, but the only thing that might indicate where they were amounted to a string of letters and numbers. "S4B-PRT-H4" Damon read out loud.

"Shit For Brains, Perfect Retard Trap, Holds Four." Michel intoned.

"At least we're not over the limit." Damon grinned.

"Will you shut up! I'm trying to concentrate!" Gregoria pushed her mind as hard as she could into the concrete, metal and paint, but she was getting nothing useful. Only the buzz of electricity, somewhere, and the distant vibrations of slowly turning fans... again, somewhere. The substance of the facility was not like living soil, or natural rock. It was hard for pony powers to work through. "I can't sense anything beyond. We might as well try it."

Michel and Damon walked to the sealed, metal door. Michel took the round, wheel handle and tried turning it. One direction worked, and something inside the heavy door unlatched. Michel pulled the door open, and dim light spilled into the room.

Michel, Gregoria, and Damon walked carefully out onto a wide balcony walkway. The wall behind them led left and right to more doors like the one they had just passed through, and then to doors at either end of the massive chamber they had just entered.

It looked, at first, like a huge warehouse store, or a strange supermarket. The lighting was dim, apparently deliberately so, and below them, some two stories down, were what looked like endless multicolored backlit racks and displays of ice cream, fish, and frozen foods. As they tried to make sense of what they saw, an uneasy feeling came over them.

A large set of stairs led to the floor below. The racks and displays were glass-fronted containers. Some were boxy, others round, some looked like caskets with domed, transparent lids. These were arranged prone, or upright. In the upright position, they resembled fancy frozen food refrigerators. The contents were not ice cream at all.

The jaguar-man was very clearly dead. He had a hole through his spotted, fur-covered chest. His hands were part paw, and part human-like. He was upright, preserved in some reddish liquid, lit from below and above within the case. "Animal man." Michel spoke the words reverently, quietly. "Anthropomorphic cat man. Some... must have survived the rewrite. I wonder how?"

"He... he doesn't..." Damon was having pony problems dealing with the dead being "...he isn't old. I mean he isn't... Victorian old."

Michel gently laid a paw on the glass-like front of the casket. "No. He survived to our time, or close to it. Somebody shot him, with a gun."

"How... how come..." Gregoria was also having her pony sensibilities offended by the dead humanoid in the glowing fluid. "...how come we can see him. For what he is?"

Michel slowly pulled his paw back. "Crown said some changed people don't ever get the benefit of that blindness thing. Grays, Sasquatches, things like that. Things in the culture. But I think this guy's different. He's from a previous version of the world. I bet there's no magic blindness to protect something like that. I'll bet only brand-new injector stuff is invisible to normals. Someday, it will probably stop for us, too."

Gregoria studied her hooves. Looking at the dead anthropomorph was difficult. "What... eventually normals will be able to see us clearly?" The thought was terrifying. The perceptual blindness was the only way she could walk around unharmed.

"Yup. Once we're old news." Michel took one last look at the proud, fanged Jaguar face. He noticed small holes in the tall ears. "This guy wore earrings, once. Probably clothing, too. Fits. Once, his kind were probably the real Incas and Mayans and whatever. Now, everyone is hairless and boring. Fuck Victoria."

As the three moved on, in silence and awe, they found the cases and racks contained an endless selection of impossible creatures. One very large case held a Yeti, another what must be a Sasquatch, each preserved in a different color of translucent fluid, lit from behind. A rack held glowing, lit-up tanks that were filled with bizarre, tiny animals. At least Gregoria thought they were tiny animals, until Michel pointed out that several were Jaguar-man babies, with fingers and toes. Yes, they were animals, but they were animals in the same way humans were.

There were far more than Jaguar-people. There were shaggy monkey-people, a large buffalo-humanoid, and a strange, shriveled, unwrapped mummy with the head of a Jackal, all preserved in brightly lit, multicolored fluids. Most of the exhibits had clearly been dead for centuries, but some were as new as the Jaguar-man.

"Stop." Michel's voice was calm, but authoritative.

"Why, what is..." But it was too late. Gregoria had caught a glimpse, just the tiniest glimpse, yet it was enough, more than enough. There was no question. Michel couldn't stop her from being certain, and then they had to wait while Michel and Damon held Gregoria and fought to keep her as quiet as possible. She couldn't help crying. Neither could Damon, despite his best efforts. Even though she had betrayed them, Gregoria had known her personally.

The freshly installed case with the lemon-yellow fluid held the body of a partially dissected Equestrian pegasus pony. Not long ago, it had been Joanna.

18. Not Even The World Of Its Victory

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

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Not Even The World Of Its Victory

"One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory."

Franz Kafka

"You know, there's something that has been bothering me." Gregoria had apparently finished being sullen and moody after leaving the specimen containment chamber. The three Equestrians had been making their way exceedingly cautiously through what appeared to be a set of store rooms, then a commissary, which featured a very large kitchen, and finally a rather cavernous dining hall. Everything had been done in stainless steel and gray.

Damon frowned as he sniffed at one of the many trays of food that remained, cold, over every available table. The kitchen had been filled with uneaten, recently prepared food, also cold. It appeared that dinner had been very suddenly interrupted, forcing every human to leave their meal. They had not, seemingly, ever returned. "What? What's bothering you, Gregoria?"

"We're still alive." Gregoria stopped and looked around the brightly lit hall. Everywhere, trays with uneaten, cold, congealed food surrounded them. "That, and all of this. I think there's a connection."

"Of course there's a connection, Jesus." Michel picked up a pork chop, sniffed it, then wolfed it down. He dropped the bone back onto the plate. Gregoria and Damon stared at him in disgust. "What? It's only been there for a few hours. It's not like it's gone bad!" The two ponies looked as if they were having trouble keeping their stomachs in check at that explanation. "Fuck you, I'm a goddamn dog, okay?" Michel growled at the two equines until they changed their expressions.

"It's like a ghost ship in here." Damon noted the cold cups of coffee and other beverages beside the trays. Some were half empty, most were full. "You know, one of those ships they find that have nobody on board and everything is like this - just left as if in the middle of something?"

"Something happened." Michel began to lope on, towards the double doors at the end of the commissary hall. "That's the only reason why we aren't in those jars with Joanna back there." Gregoria jerked at the statement. "Look at the trays, what, a hundred, two hundred - I'm not good at estimating numbers. A lot. There are a lot of humans stationed here. They should be here, they should be everywhere. But they aren't." The double doors were metal, with bar handles. "Something big happened. Really big."

"Everything's cold." Damon gave Gregoria a quick pony hug with his neck on the way to the door. "If they didn't come back in that length of time, then..."

"They aren't coming back." Michel put a claw on the long rail of the door handle. "We just won the lottery, kids."

"I still think we should be cautious." Damon watched as Michel slowly opened one of the double doors.

"You think?" Michel peered around the door. "Um... you might want to get your pony heads in order. I found our missing humans, and... they're not in good shape."

Gregoria and Damon worked hard to keep from throwing up as they joined Michel in the large corridor beyond the double door. Up until now, what they had seen of the S-4 facility had been gray on gray and steel, all in well maintained condition - even the older sections, like the lowest level. The corridor was not in good condition at all.

Forty feet from the double door, the hastily built barricade was broken and scattered. Bodies, some blackened and burned, lay about like rag dolls made of overdone meat. The smell of cooked flesh filled the passage and the two ponies suffered occasional heaves. Beyond the smashed barricade was some very impressive destruction.

The walls of the corridor had been smashed, on both sides, and a bit on the ceiling. Flakes of burned paint and ceiling tiles covered the floor along with even more bodies. Pools and streaks of sticky dark red mixed with splotches of what looked like blue cleaning fluid. As Michel led the way, the two dry-heaving ponies following him stumbled over the half-melted weaponry that the deceased humans had either dropped, or still clutched in seared hands.

"My... Celestia... Oh..." Gregoria did her best to just concentrate on following Michel's lumpen shape as he made his way through what must have been a very short fight.

"It must have been big. Really big. Like a rhino or something. Bigger. Oh... fuck." Michel stopped. Fortunately they were now past the pile of debris and bodies, the remainder of the long corridor was streaked and heavily damaged but free of corpses.

"What?" Gregoria stood, her legs shaking, not looking back as hard as she could.

"Not what, pony. Who." Michel, normally gruff, sounded sad. It was the first time Gregoria had seen the dog even capable of that emotion. "He accounted for himself with honor. Damn."

Damon walked to see the diamond dog's face. "Randal. Randal did this, didn't he?"

"You, Gregoria, you ever spend any time with Randal?" Michel's question was almost accusatory.

Gregoria still felt queasy and shaky. "N-No. I... I was going to, but..."

Michel bared his fangs, and then calmed himself. "Yeah, fucking quonset hut waaayyy too far out there for ponies." The diamond dog walked to the scorched wall, and ran his paw over the flakes of blackened paint. "I know, I know, dragon. Scares you guys. It's in the show, it's in you. But know something." Michel fixed the two ponies with his eyes "Probably the only reason we're not caught or dead, the only reason we even have a chance, is because Randal, poor, lonely Randal, out there in the back forty, busted up their shit for us."

Michel looked back at the carnage behind them. "He must have gone nuts. You don't know..." Gregoria and Damon stared at their hooves, their ears down "...Randal wasn't some big nasty monster. He was a total sweetheart. He did crochet, with his long dragon nails, you know that?"

Michel turned around again and faced forward, down the remainder of the corridor, to the smashed, half-melted door at the end. "If he did all of this, then... things must have been bad."

Gregoria shook her head. "Wait... you sound like you know he's dead or something! What's with all the past tense?"

Michel glanced briefly back. "Dragon blood is blue. That isn't floor cleaner."

Only then did it register, in the flickering, broken lighting that remained, what the slick of blue goop on the floor, and the streaks of blue ooze on the walls, must mean.

The three were somber as they approached the broken doorway at the end of the corridor.

Beyond the broken door was an access chamber, which featured several elevators, some very large and clearly designed to carry heavy loads. Two stairways ran upwards, one with a crushed door, offering an alternative to the lifts. The chamber branched off into three other corridors, like the one that the three Equestrians emerged from. Overhead, an orange-red light flashed and spun, silently, indicating for the first time that an alarm of some kind had been activated. The floor had wide slicks of blue ichor.

Gregoria studied the walls as they were painted in alternating shades of emergency. "Whaddya think? Search the rest of this floor or what?"

Michel stood at the largest cargo elevator. He forced the door up and held it. Behind the door, what was left of the elevator appeared torn to shreds. Also torn to shreds were several uniformed humans and what had once been some kind of stationary gun. "He followed them down, and took out the gun crew in the elevator here. They probably got a few rounds off. Then he must have heard noise down the commissary way, took those guys out, then turned tail and left again."

Michel went to the other doors leading away. "No, didn't go this way. Randal could sense things. He had, like, Predator vision. He could see heat. Nobody down these other ways."

Gregoria and Damon watched Michel follow the splotches and scrapes on the floor to the stairwell with the broken door. The very door frame had been buckled by some terrible mass. "He came down and went back up, using these stairs. Slippery. Be careful." Michel began ascending the stairs.

"I don't understand." Gregoria followed behind, unsure why she was letting the diamond dog lead. "Why did Randal - if it was Randal - come down here, then go back up?"

Michel turned a corner and continued the ascent. "Oh, it was Randal all right. Nothing else like him in probably the whole world." Michel panted slightly as he climbed. "He was doing the circuit. S&D - search and destroy. I don't know if he imagined us coming to the rescue, or he just lost it entirely, but Randal was on the hunt. He wasn't sightseeing. He was clearing and securing." Another corner, another ascent. "He probably just went after any pocket of heat he could find. Like Godzilla, going after reactors."

Gregoria tried to make sense of what Michel had said as they climbed. "Wait... you mean Randal, from the farm, deliberately went around this place and... hurt... all the humans?"

"F'n ponies." The door to the next level lay in bent and twisted pieces, some painted with sticky blue ooze. Several charred human bodies lay strewn about, still clutching their rifles. Michel waited, and listened intently, then shrugged. "Not 'hurt', Randal took the bastards out. Kacked them. Burned them with fire and ripped the guts out of any who could still stand after that. Probably waded through bullets to do it. Randal's a sweetheart, like I said, but in the end, dude's a dragon."

Gregoria shuddered. Within herself, she decided that maybe it had been best that she hadn't visited much with such a frighteningly violent creature. Then again, if he was still alive somewhere, maybe she should have been bringing Randal cakes.

The next floor up from the lowest level was much more modern. Gregoria thought it looked like a hospital, and it had once been sterile white and pale green. Red, blue, yellow, and red lines on the floor led to various sections. It was a probably a research and development level, likely where most of the work at S-4 was done. The bottom level, with all of the pumps and electrical systems, the commissary and the storage and specimen room almost certainly served as a barracks too. Likely, it was considered the safest level, the 'bomb shelter' of the facility. The place had been built during the cold war, so the mentality of that time doubtless influenced its design.

The sterile white and green was not sterile any longer. What had once been a laboratory was now a ruin. Walls were caved in, partitions destroyed. A heavy support beam not far from the elevators and staircases was partially broken. The space was bathed in red and blue splashes and smears, with red dominating. It became apparent that there were bodies everywhere - lumps and tubes of charcoal turned out to be the torsos and limbs of soldiers and scientists. Both ponies choked at the barbecue stench that filled the air.

"I'm... I'm sensing something. It's weird, but it's kinda like how radar works in the movies, you know, 'PING!', like that." Damon closed his eyes to concentrate, but that only made the smell of dragon-roasted human more intense. He opened his eyes and began moving his head from side to side, trying very hard not to actually look at the carnage around him.

"What does that mean?" Gregoria tried to press her right pastern against her nostrils and breath only through her mouth. "Is it Rachel?"

Damon's ears clung to his skull, flat and low. "I don't know, but it's something, and it feels like it could be. But..."

"What?" Pasterns could not press hard enough to stop the horrible smell. Gregoria put her hoof down in resignation.

"...it feels wrong, somehow." Damon's eyes held a serious expression, and a worried one.

"Let's go. This base won't remain empty like this forever. When they come, they'll come in force, and they will not ask questions." Michel waved his paws to shoo Damon on. Damon began following his strange 'ping', his horn glowing silver as he walked.

The level was divided into concentric rings, each section sealed with security doors. Each ring was wide, and subdivided into areas presumably devoted to specific subjects. It soon became clear that Damon's unicorn senses were superfluous, all that was necessary was to follow the path of destruction. Something large and impossibly strong had smashed its way through thick walls, bending metal and crushing concrete on a truly incredible scale. The path bored straight through wall and door and beam, winding a zig-zag path through the rings straight to the center chamber.

Everywhere spinning alarm lights flashed, and Gregoria found her mind trying to create the missing klaxon sound that the scene seemed to demand. But there was no audible alarm, despite the clear state of emergency. The research and development level was silent as the tomb it had become.

As the three passed through the ragged breaches between the concentric rings, they noted the blasted remains of defensive positions that had been set up, presumably to counter the threat of a large, raging, magical dragon ripping its way through both architecture and personnel. Gregoria stared at the remains of a mounted gun the scale of which boggled her mind. It was like something out of a movie, set on a heavy tripod, with a feeder belt that did not seem to have bullets so much as small rockets set along it. The floor was slick with blue here, and it came to her mind that this was probably the weapon that had finally pierced the scales of a dragon.

Randal had clearly responded in kind.

"It's Rachel." Damon didn't need to say more. The three Equestrians began to move more quickly now, following the path that Randal had presumably created right through the very walls. If there were any traps, they would have been obliterated along with the walls, portions of the ceiling and floor, and anything else that had impeded any part of the raging wyrm.

As they rounded the last zag of Randal's erratic course to the center, they found Randal.

The huge green mass of blue-stained scale and muscle lay prostrate as if praying. They found the tail, first, long and sinuous, gradually widening until it met the dragon's hindquarters which nearly blocked the breach in the final wall. Michel, Damon and Gregoria walked slowly between concrete and rebar, and razor-sharp scales, to enter the center chamber of the research level. The floor was littered with blocks that had been the wall.

Randal's long neck lay coiled around the base of a large, round, transparent chamber. The dragon's massive forelimbs lay on either side of the chamber, protectively. His vast, leathern wings, torn and shredded by what must have been a constant rain of bullets, were bent back as though Randal no longer cared what happened to them in his eagerness to force himself into the room. The floor was awash in thick blue goo which had long ago stopped flowing from within the monstrous creature's body. Randal's enormous, dull and sticky eyes stared at oblivion, impossible rubies set into a horrifically fanged face.

Gregoria stood, unable to process what she was seeing for the longest time. Damon had turned away, staring at nothing. Michel just stood, his massive, troll-like arms at his side, useless.

The cylindrical glass chamber was fifteen, perhaps sixteen feet in diameter. It was at least as tall, all set into a solid base and cap that went into floor and ceiling. In the center of the chamber was a large metallic rack set into a powered gimbal which allowed the rack to be put into any position. Stainless steel tables covered with medical drills and saws and other strange instruments and tools surrounded the centerpiece. From the top of the glass enclosure drooped cables and tubes placed for easy reach by human hands. Large, bright lights flooded the space, providing clear and clinical illumination. Half of the sealed glass chamber had been rotated open, to allow access.

On one of the metal tables were arranged the heavy, jeweled, solid gold barding of the solar princess of Equestria. Beside it, panting, shaking and wide-eyed, sat a fog-gray pegasus pony in a deep state of shock. The little pony had a sky-blue mane and tail. Her orange irises were lost within the milk seas of her unblinking, horrified eyes. Her body was criss-crossed with blue-stained, bandage-like straps which trailed broken and torn cables which lay around her. Presumably, Randal had freed her, whoever she was.

Strapped to the rack, bound at every limb, the body of Celestia, of Rachel Priss, gently squirmed. Her movements were slow and intermittent. Her breathing was steady and unpanicked. Rachel seemed calm, almost content, except for her occasional restless wriggling.

Rachel was alive! Some other pony had made it too, and the thought came to Gregoria's struggling mind that perhaps it was Chelsea, perhaps Chelsea had been given her wings back by Rachel on that night. But Rachel wasn't saying anything. She should be saying something, calling out to them, she should be amazed to see everypony come to rescue her.

The wide, staring eyes of the grey and blue pegasus mare inside the glass chamber slowly turned and began to focus on Gregoria. Tiny pupils quivered, as the pegasus continued to pant in fear and despair.

Gregoria looked up, as if in a dream, to Rachel's face.

Rachel was speaking, after all, just very, very quietly. None of the words made any sense. She couldn't seem to keep her eyes on any one thing for long.

It was then that Gregoria noticed Rachel's bare, shaved poll, the pink skin around her horn, and the rest of her head. Tiny dots of red made little crimson flowers on the bandages above her eyes, near her horn, and by her ear. Something was missing. Rachel was not glowing along her back. She had no rippling magic mane, nor tail, no eerie fields of glowing energy at all. They hadn't been shaved off - Gregoria couldn't even imagine how it would be possible to shave ethereal force - Rachel's glowing mane had simply been extinguished. In the place of the luminescent expression of divinity was only an ordinary, cloud gray mane and tail, bedraggled and dull.

Gregoria's dumbfounded mind finally made sense of what Rachel was trying to say.

She was mindlessly singing 'Giggle At The Ghostie' over and over, very, very poorly.

19. Long Since Floated Away

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

═════════════════════

Long Since Floated Away

"I am away from home and must always write home,

even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity."

Franz Kafka

Gregoria lay on the moist grass, watching her best friend graze. Rachel seemed happy enough, her pale gray tail twitching occasionally in pleasure at the rich flavor of the Pensacola Bahia. The grass was a deep emerald green, with wide, juicy blades, and it was delicious.

Entre Ríos had been an excellent choice. Crown's expansive Argentinian estate had provided a safe and isolated home. Fifty acres on a side, 'El Rancho de la Manzana Rey' afforded the new, growing menagerie a profound sense of security and peace. Crown had finally decided he was permanently done with the Estados Unidos. The place had become too totalitarian, too much of a panopticon. Cameras everywhere, zero privacy, and total surveillance of the civilian population had convinced him that there was no future for him, or those he cared about, in that crumbling empire.

Argentina demanded fluency in Spanish, but this was not an issue for Gregoria. She had no desire to mingle with the human population, nor to visit Nogoyá, the closest - but still fairly distant - city. She did not feel the need to learn the local speech, she had nothing to say to anyone now who walked on two legs - except, of course, for the members of the small colony of diamond dogs.

Malus Crown had spent the past year working hard with his new team to find any and all Equestrians lost upon the globe. The Ranch of the Apple King now had a population of fifty-three unhuman residents, and more trickled in constantly. Most were ponies, a small number were diamond dogs or griffons, and all were easy to care for. The rich, flat, semi-tropical grassland was ideal for equines, and even without the pigs and chickens, there were many free roaming rabbits and other small game for the burrowing canids and the sharp-beaked griffons. Crown had not yet discovered another dragon. Randal, perhaps, truly had been one of a kind.

One other addition had been discovered in Aix-les-Bains, France. Another Changeling. Her name was Thérèse, and while she was not - perhaps thankfully - a queen, she was a cultured, if somewhat stern drone who was expert at altering her appearance. Crown had Nadzieja training her in Polish espionage techniques.

Only two of Crown's original team remained with him, Nadzieja and Guillaume. Malus had suspected that some of his team had been compromised, and while Gregoria, Michel and Damon were busy in the desert, Crown had cleaned house. He refused to go into detail as to what, exactly, he had done, but he had assured Gregoria that there was no longer any threats remaining.

Nadzieja and Guillaume knew completely now about the Equestrians in their midst. They seemed so utterly nonplussed and totally compliant that Michel had suggested that Malus had used his Changling powers ruthlessly on the two. Certainly the raid of Crown's American ranch had made of Malus a new person. He was polite always now, and never showed his temper any more. Sometimes, though, he became strangely distant, almost brooding. He spent most of his time with his puppies and dogs, feeding on their unconditional love. The raid had shocked him. He had been sure he had been safe within the country of his birth.

Rachel trotted over to where Gregoria lay in the warm grass. The day was hot, and the air filled with moisture. Rachel finished chewing her mouthful of South American grass, and nuzzled Gregoria affectionately. The scars on Rachel's head, even the stitches, had all healed up. There was no physical sign at all of what had been done to her, save for the lack of her flowing mane of mystical energy. She looked healthy and seemed happy - for the most part.

Occasionally, though, a look of awareness would seem to appear in her eyes. Her gaze would steady and focus, and for a brief moment, Rachel seemed like her old self. She would start to try to say something, and then the curious moment would fade, slowly, as if Rachel were forgetting a dream. Once, when this had happened, Gregoria was certain she had seen a small tear.

Gregoria nuzzled her best friend back, and then relaxed as Rachel began nibbling at and grooming Gregoria's mane. Above, through her half-closed lids, Gregoria saw the gray and blue form of a pegasus circling. She would land soon. She never strayed far from Rachel.

Gregoria sighed as she enjoyed the careful, loving grooming of her mane. There was no doubt that despite everything, Rachel still knew and felt love for Gregoria. There was so very much that had been stolen from Rachel, but even without speech, or apparent thought, friendship, love, had turned out to be something truly indestructible.

──── ∆ ────

"Will Rachel ever be able to talk again? Or... think? Is she just... gone... or what? What did you learn?"

Once a week, Crown held a little dinner party of sorts for what Gregoria figured must be those he felt closest to. She was sitting with Damon and Michel, with Chelsea to her left. The little gray pegasus with the sky blue mane had turned out to be the young former Shetland. Rachel had succeeded in returning her to proper Equestrian form that wondrous and terrible night. Chelsea seldom left proximity to Rachel now.

Rachel, for her part, stood behind both Gregoria and Chelsea, eating her dinner from a large bucket. It was her favorite meal, a mixture of grains and corn and bits of fruit, and it was her favorite bucket, the one with the flowers painted on it.

The shiny, green eyed Changeling levitated a glass and drank from it, then placed the glass back upon the low table. Crown shifted on his large pillow - they all lay with folded legs on soft, comfortable cushions. Malus no longer made any effort to live as humans did. He cleared his throat. The sound was a strange, insectoid noise.

"One day, yes. I think that is entirely possible. Rachel was patterned off of the version of Celestia that her lover, Rick, held in his mind and heart. That Celestia was a goddess, a deific entity that had constructed Equestria, in his belief, from utter chaos. Rick's Celestia was immortal, all powerful, but not all-knowing. Rick Deckard truly put his Rachel on a pedestal, perhaps as high as any human man could.

"There is no doubt that Rachel is at least immortal. I would find it unlikely that she would not be able to eventually heal completely, and regain her mind. I do not know what will happen when that event occurs though. I know what I hope might happen..." Crown's angular, fanged muzzle dropped, his expression unreadable. His moods passed like clouds across the moon now, leaving Gregoria often unsure of what he was thinking.

"How do you know she's immortal?" Gregoria felt shocked at the revelation.

Crown shifted again, uncomfortably. "There is no point in keeping it from you. It's been long enough. Rachel is content, and she is safe, we are all safe, at least as safe as it is possible to be on this earth." Changling eyes fixed on Gregoria, green and expressionless. "I know that Rachel is immortal, because they killed her. Several times."

"WHAT???" It wasn't just Gregoria, Chelsea was shocked, and Damon was outraged. Only Michel seemed calm, and a glance at him revealed not indifference, but grim, cynically fulfilled expectations.

"Please! Look behind you - our Rachel is alive, she's safe, she's right here!" Malus Crown shook his head slowly. "I was afraid to tell you about what they were doing, what they did... try to be calm. That was months and months ago. Now, do you think you can stand to hear this? I know pony sensitivities are..."

Gregoria stared, her eyes watery, but steady. "I need to know. I think we all need to know." She looked around, Damon nodded angry assent, Michel nodded resignedly, and Chelsea... Chelsea just looked at her plate.

"Chelsea?" Crown's green mane fell softly across half of his face as he looked at the emotionally fragile pegasus.

Chelsea nodded, silently.

"Alright, then." Malus used a hoof to sweep his mane from his eyes. "I've only understood the whole picture, at least what I think is the whole picture, for about a month and a half. It's taken time to crack the codes and access the information in the boxes that you brought back from S-4. That was a smart move, by the way."

"It was kind of a last minute idea. Know your enemy, right?" Damon had thought of taking a few of the tower cases on the research level with them as they left. Michel had carried them back down to the basement, and then to the tunnel below. There was quite a bit of free space on the teflon 'sled', so it was easy enough to drag them when they made their escape.

It had been a very straightforward exit from the secret base - there was no human left to monitor their movement, or to send out squads to investigate the rumble of Michel's rapid digging. There were no squads to send. Randal had been most thorough, and the facility had been quarantined when the entire population suddenly perished. That is what had kept more humans from arriving in force while the three Equestrians had been there.

"Indeed." Malus used his horn and sipped his drink. "Especially when our enemy is so... ruthless. Psychopathic, really."

Crown paused, lost in thought.

"I don't know how to put this gently. Try to bear with it." He set his glass down again. "The humans within the Black Projects Group are not of one mind. They are... in conflict... over what they believe about reality. Some are very aware, and understand things just as we do. But others, a larger faction, are in disagreement, and they are sure the universe is really out there, and that little gray men really come from other worlds. It is a conflict of ideology and cosmology, both.

"S-4 was staffed with humans from both camps. Rachel... Rachel represented a way for the group who knows the world is a simulation to... prove their position. This would mean dominance and control for them. Despite demonstrating, rather... disturbingly - and that is all I dare say about it - that Rachel was truly immortal, they still failed to make their point. The other faction became convinced that Rachel was an... artificial life-form from outer space and... they endeavored to figure out how her... batteries... worked."

"Jesus fuck." Michel stared at his claws, as if he were imagining them around human necks.

"Even that, of course, did not kill her. She truly is immortal." Crown stared at his fluted glass.

"Why doesn't she wake up then?" Gregoria felt numb, unable to take in what Crown was implying. "Or heal up or... basically come back to us?" The surgical wounds on her head had vanished during the escape from the S-4 facility, though it had taken weeks for all of her shaved poll to grow back. Big injuries seemed to heal faster than small ones.

"It would not be safe to try to have her head scanned, or to bring in the equipment and staff to do it here. Right now, I must concentrate on protecting us all, and finding those like us, lost in the world. I can't speculate on what might or might not be damaged in her brain. I can say that... she must be healing, if slowly. Were she a mortal being, she would not have survived... what they did to her... head." The words came out of Malus Crown like something he had to force out of his body. It was clear there was more he knew, much more, that even he was having trouble with thinking about.

'What was with all the pickled stiffs we saw?" Michel was never burdened with the weight of delicacy or tact.

Crown jerked his head up at that, and half smiled, the Changeling fangs gleaming in the light. "Ah. Yes. That. Those were partly preservation for scientific reasons and... partly trophies. Like big-game hunters from the nineteen-hundreds, the various secret groups operated - and operating - the major nations of the world like to show off their... achievements. It's a bit of an old-boy's club, I'm afraid, and that room of 'pickled stiffs' as you put it was done up like that to show off the... trophies... to impress special visitors."

"No, the animal men! What's the deal with them?" Michel licked chicken off of his claws.

"Apparently there are, or rather were, a few little errors during the Victorian rewrite of reality. Total reconstructions of the world are not truly total. There seems to always be little pockets, little areas that escape being completely overwritten. Maybe an island in the middle of nowhere, maybe a single patch of forest somewhere in, say, South America. A single, hundred meter circle in Antarctica. That was from the rewrite before the Victorian one, actually. Nopony knows why some things escape a total reconstruction. At least our enemies in Majik-Umbra don't."

Malus speared an olive from the remains of his salad, and gobbled it. "It seems that these little exceptions are considered a challenge to the dominant paradigm, and must be eradicated for the mental well being of the world population. That is one big reason they want us, by the way. They want to maintain the status quo. If the world were suddenly to be rewritten, as Equestria, say, then the big men in power are convinced that they would no longer be gods among men. And they are certainly right. I think the cartoon has well demonstrated that dictators and despots are not tolerated under pony rule."

Gregoria felt Rachel, who had finished with her bucket, sniffing and nuzzling at her back. Just as Chelsea clung to Rachel, so Rachel seemed to cling to Gregoria. "Is there anything I can do to help Rachel heal? Why aren't we doing anything?"

The tall Changeling raised his head. "Because there is nothing we can do. Human medicine is not going to fix her. If I did take the risk of exposure to have her head scanned, we might discover that her brain has been cut or damaged. Now what? Humans can't fix that kind of damage in themselves, much less an Equestrian. Need I remind you that we are not the same as earthly animals? We aren't from around here. Human doctors could only make things worse."

Gregoria put up with Rachel licking her cheek. It seemed to be some kind of a kiss, it was certainly an affectionate action. It made Rachel happy, at least, and that was enough.

"Unicorn medics!" Gregoria had begun reading the fanfiction that Rachel and Rick had loved so much, in order to understand what principles were determining their situation. "In the stories, there are unicorn doctors, and not like on the show, real magic doctors who can look into a body with their powers and regenerate flesh and rewire nerves and cast healing spells and..."

"And all sorts of amazing extrapolations that have nothing to do with the cartoon. I know. Name a unicorn we know that has the specialized training that also is described in those fictions? Which one of us has attended the Royal Equestrian College Of Thamaturgical Medicine? Point them out, and let's get to work!" Just a touch of Crown's old temper could be heard in this outburst.

Rachel had folded her legs and set herself down on the floor next to Gregoria. She lay her head on Gregoria's middle, her nose tucked into the earthpony's flank. Gregoria had become used to being Rachel's comfort pillow. "Okay... okay..." Gregoria forced herself to calm down, so that her tone would not upset Rachel. "How about this - what if we try to make our own college? How about we find out which of our unicorns has any ability even close to the stuff in those stories and get them practicing and learning? They could study human and equine medical stuff, and practice magical healing on any or all of us. Sweet doughnut holes - I'd be willing to let Michel there cut me with a claw, if it would help train somepony to cast 'cure light wounds'!"

"Cure light wounds?" Michel found that hilarious "I thought Rachel was the nerd." Over the past months, Gregoria had talked incessantly about Rachel, about their friendship, and about how much she wanted her friend entirely back.

"I've... I've been studying... Rachel stuff. For when she comes back." Gregoria hung her head over Rachel's own. Rachel's violet eye stared back, the lights on, but nopony home. Gregoria lowered her muzzle and gave Rachel a gentle lick on the cheek. It made Rachel smile and close her eyes in contentment.

Gregoria slowly raised her head. "I'm gonna be the best friend she ever had. I want to do all the stuff she likes to do with her. I can be ready. That's... that's what I can do, you see. I can be ready for when she wakes up and... and..."

Chelsea scooted over and pressed against Gregoria, the weight warm and comforting. "Me too. We'll be ready, Greggy. We'll all be ready."

──── ∆ ────

The gash wasn't very long but it seemed to have hit something important. Gregoria had been trying to dig out a yam to give to Rachel, and hadn't expected there to be an old, rusted knife buried in the soil. She and the other earthponies had ploughed the pralines out of the rich soil, they had walked it and sung to the crops and done their special magic. Gregoria had been over this very spot multiple times. Somehow, they'd all missed a six-inch long dagger just under the surface. That, or it had been churned up by the plough from deeper still. In any case, it was especially embarrassing considering how Gregoria could reach right into the ground through her hooves and count the very roots.

Of course, she had not had any reason to actually bother to do that, and so she hadn't. As she watched the blood gush out of her foreleg, she resolved to use her talent and search the fields for any other buried surprises from long, long ago. After that thought had passed, Gregoria realized she was in serious trouble. The furrow was filling up with crimson.

Chelsea was already fast on the wing to the new pony village, yelling for help. Gregoria tried to staunch the flow with her other hoof, but it didn't seem to work.

Soon Chelsea was back, two unicorns in tow.

Pledget and Anodyne, two of the new medical unicorns studying at the clinic Crown had arranged to be constructed, arrived. They were being strongly encouraged to hurry by a worried Chelsea. Rachel had never left Gregoria's side, and had tried, several times, to stop the flow of blood by licking the wound. It hadn't helped.

"What is your level of pain?" Anodyne was being very professional, as he always was. He was a very serious pony. He had once been called 'Carl', but he had changed his name when he started study as a thaumatic physician. Taking new Equestrian-styled names had been catching on among the hundred and fifty 'citizens' of El Rancho de la Manzana Rey... or 'Little Equestria' as it was gradually starting to be called.

Gregoria felt a little dizzy, but she didn't actually feel much pain. Just a stinging feeling. "Not much. I'm not in any pain, actually. I feel a little weird, but I'm not in any pain."

Anodyne frowned at that and gave Pledget a concerned look.

Pledget was busy, horn glowing, eyes shut. Finally the unicorn mare opened her eyes. "Transverse laceration of the anastomotica magna. I need to initiate TK clamping with thaumatic support and localized regenesis."

"Is she going to be okay?" Chelsea pressed into the body of Rachel, who stood nearby, pawing the ground with a hoof.

"We're going to do our best." Anodyne turned to Gregoria, who was swaying slightly, Quite a large pool of blood surrounded her leg. "I'm going to numb your leg. You need to stay still. Once your leg is numb, lock all of your joints in place so you cannot fall. I'd rather you don't try to lay down, because that could increase the loss of blood. Ready?"

Gregoria nodded. She felt very woozy now, and her leg had finally begun to hurt. "Yeah... I'm starting to feel some pain now. Real... dizzy."

"That's understandable. Here we go." Anodyne's horn began to glow, a gentle orange, the color of his coat.

Gregoria looked drowsily surprised. "Huh! The pain is gone. Can't feel my leg though."

"Lock them. Lock your legs now." Anodyne maintained the glow from his horn. He knew exactly where the correct nerves were, because he could sense them, and he was maintaining a field which blocked the passage of any signal along them.

Gregoria locked her legs with some difficulty. She felt clumsy.

"Now just stay still. We'll take good care of you." Anodyne generated a pair of planes of force and positioned them on either side of Gregoria's body. Multiple telekinetic entities was one of the first things medical unicorns were trained to do. It made sense - the more grasping fields, the more that a single unicorn could do. The unicorn medical school had needed to imagine what medicine would be for a nonhuman civilization, and over the past eight months since the school was started, it had been an exciting and fascinating mixture of study and invention working together.

Pledget had been an intern practicing at a clinic in Scotland when she had awakened after a long shift surprised to be a unicorn. She was normally a bit of a comedian, but she was very serious in her work. Her dark emerald horn glowed with viridescent light as she pushed her mind deep into Gregoria's leg. Her magic worked as both tools and microscope, and soon her inner eyes beheld the ruptured artery, the dissected flesh, and the rushing blood as if she were a miniscule pony working on a miles-high giant.

Green force flowed along the slice in the vessel, and Pledget grasped the edges with her will. She gently pulled the divided walls together and held them in place, her verdurous energies strengthening the layers of cells.

The next step was tricky, because it needed to be done without letting go of the now closed artery. Pledget wished that Uberty, her trained, earthpony regenesis nurse was here, but it was her day off, and she was apparently out with her friends enjoying the pond at the far end of the ranch. Earthponies had a natural talent for regenerating cells and inducing cell division. Guided by a unicorn, they would work miracles. Pledget was on her own, though, and hoped all of her practice had been enough.

Pledget had regrown small cuts and tears in the skins of ponies, abrasions that were easily fixed. This was the largest wound she had ever faced, and it would have to be an emergency. She tried to induce the feeling, the curious sensation that Uberty had taught her. Uberty called it the 'song of life'. It was almost what a sound would be if music could be eaten.

Under her thaumatic gaze, a single cell divided before its time, and vastly more quickly. Then another, and another. Pledget widened her magical awareness, and ran the silent song of life like a suture, round and through and round again, all along the length of the damage to the artery. Wherever her virent glamour played, the cells divided and met one another across the gap, joining walls, healing in accelerated time.

When Pledget finished, and she could finally withdraw and open her eyes, she found her poll dripping with sweat, and her legs wobbly with exhaustion. She studied the leg, and the only evidence of the deep incision was a thin, white line beneath the blood-drenched hairs. It was a simple blessing that bacteria and viruses could not attack Equestrian cells. Pledget studied the ancient, rusted blade laying in the dirt. No, not a simple blessing. It was a Celestia-send. "I'm done." Pledget's voice was shaky.

"Pledget!" Anodyne looked frightened. "You were really deep this time. I've been trying to get your attention! This pony is in shock. I think she lost too much blood. Can you do sanguinous regeneration?"

The emerald green unicorn shook at the thought. "I wouldn't know where to start! I mean... I know where to start, the marrow of the femur, but I don't know which cells to activate, or how many, or how to use Uberty's song for that - I could end up churning out millions of clots waiting to happen! I'm worn out just doing what I did!"

"Run... find Uberty. Or get Samantha, she knows most of Ub's stuff. Or anypony!" Anodyne's horn was bright and pulsing. "I am keeping this pony alive by cyclic tissue suffocation and systemic compression. I'm trying to rotate the blocks on her limbs and organs so that they all get a bit of blood, but... I can't keep this up forever."

Pledget ran immediately off in the direction of the growing pony village. Anodyne was using his telekinetic fields to decrease the volume the remaining blood needed to fill. It must be an incredible strain to not only carefully compress all the major arteries and veins, but to cycle through body parts, opening up some for a whiff of life, and then closing down to move onto another. Pledget knew she couldn't do that. The number of separate telekinetic entities was difficult to imagine. Anodyne must have a hundred thamatic 'hands' at his disposal. She hadn't realized just how accomplished he had become with his horn.

Gregoria's head drooped to the ground. Her eyelids fluttered, twitching. She was barely aware, and found herself dropping in and out of consciousness.

"What's going on?" Chelsea hadn't understood much of what the two medical unicorns had been talking about, but she understood that it wasn't good, and that Gregoria was in trouble. "What can I do to help?"

Anodyne kept counting, cycling through limbs and organs. "... seven... do you know Uberty?... eight... tan unicorn, pink mane?... nine..."

Chelsea shook her head. "No... there's a lot of ponies now. I haven't met all of them. I just stick with Rachel and Gregoria."

The cycle had started over. "... two... Samantha? You know her?... three..."

"No! I don't mingle much. I stay with Rachel and Gregoria. I know Damon and Michel!"

"... six... I need a... seven... medical earthpony... eight... fly! Get one... nine..."

"I don't know any!" Chelsea's eyes filled with tears. What had happened in the human base had been so horrible, she'd just wanted to stay with her two friends. Other ponies frightened her. Everything frightened her. Only Rachel and Gregoria were safe.

Chelsea turned to Rachel. The tall body of Celestia stood, nervously flicking her tail and twitching her ears. The white face pointed off, not looking at anything in particular, but it was clear that whatever was left of Rachel was upset and afraid.

"Rachel, please. Celestia, please... this is... this is bad. Greggy's in real trouble. She needs your help. I can't do anything, and the medic is doing everything he can, but... I'm scared, Rachel, princess, please. Save Greggy, fix Greggy, she needs you, I need you, please..." Chelsea trailed off, tears running down her cheeks.

Rachel continued to stare at the horizon, her ears flicking back alternately, a hoof mindlessly digging a trench in the earth.

Anodyne was at his limits as a unicorn. "... three... four... three... No! Four... four... SWIRL!... five..." It was hard to concentrate on so many things at the same time. All those discreet instances, using just the right pressure - not too much or the tissues would be damaged, not too little or the blood pressure would plummet - trying to act as a universal cuff over vein and artery and organ and limb, then cycling through them so no single part would die... it was too much.

The orange unicorn found himself losing control. He was already beyond exhaustion, his head felt like it was being beaten with a mallet. Why wasn't Pledget back? Why couldn't this pegasus just try to find somepony, anypony? This poor mare could die at any moment and...

Anodyne was surprised to find himself laying on his side. What had happened? He raised his pounding, aching head. Ah, he had fallen over. He had collapsed. The unicorn medic tried to get up but found his legs weren't obeying him.

Suddenly he was awake again. Some pegasus was screaming at him, sweet Luna, it wasn't time to get up yet, class didn't start for another - oh! Great Baker Of Cupcakes, the mare! The earthpony mare! Anodyne tried to block out the screaming and yelling and crying which was only making the pain under his horn worse. He struggled to get to his hooves, managing to roll onto his belly. Anodyne struggled to lift up his body with his forelegs.

With a thump he crashed back to the ground. The pounding was even worse now, if that was possible. He must have used up almost all of his thaumic reserves. Ponies needed magic as much as they needed water or air. The theoretical possibility of a unicorn killing themselves through thaumic depletion suddenly entered his thoughts, and he felt fear. What if the reason he was this bad off was because he had fatally overextended himself?

Anodyne rolled his eyes to get a look at his patient. The yellow earthpony with the black mane was immobile, legs still locked, still upright because of that, but she didn't look like she was breathing. Her eyes were open, but rolled back into her head. Her muzzle gaped, the tongue hanging out, touching the grass. It was a horrible sight.

She was his patient, this nameless Equestrian. Anodyne decided he couldn't live if he just gave up. Even if it killed him...

Anodyne forced himself back to his forelegs. His rear legs still wouldn't obey, but he was up enough to clearly see the unresponsive yellow mare. He sent his will into his horn, to return to acting as magical life support. Instantly everything exploded in white searing pain and he found himself flat on the ground again.

"I will take over from here. Rest and heal, my little pony."

Chelsea stopped crying and saw, through her tears and shock, the princess of the sun standing over Gregoria. Celestia's shining, multicolored mane of light waved and rippled in the anagogic winds that only she could feel. A golden glow enveloped Gregoria, covering her and lifting her into the air. Gregoria's legs unlocked and her body became limp, like a doll.

The solar regent winked a violet eye at Chelsea as she wove odylic energies in and through the dying body of the little yellow earthpony. For a moment, Gregoria became constructed of currents of light, a pony-shaped circuit diagram of esoteric design and purpose.

Then the moment was gone.

Gregoria watched the little beetle, crawling on a verdant stem. She looked up, across the flat grassland. She didn't remember laying down. Had she fallen asleep? It was a particularly warm and humid day, and Rachel had been so very content grazing. Rachel liked to graze.

There was an orange hoof nearby. Gregoria raised her head from the ground and noticed the unicorn stallion laying beside her. It wasn't Damon. Oh. Maybe somepony came by and got into a discussion with Chelsea or something. Maybe they had been chatting and fell asleep too. That was okay. Only the orange unicorn didn't look okay. He was laying there, but he was awake, and his head was up, and he was staring at her. No, not just her. He kept looking behind her too. He seemed... what? Frightened? No, not exactly. More like... like he had seen a UFO or a triple rainbow or something.

Gregoria turned her long neck to look behind her. Chelsea was there, also possessed of the same, overawed expression. Doughnut holes! Had something cool happened while she'd been asleep in the grass? Gregoria felt disappointed at the thought. Even though she knew that things like flying saucers were just evidence of unknown injectors, she'd always wanted to see one.

Gregoria looked around, trying to discover if whatever amazing thing Chelsea and Mister Orange Horn had seen was still visible.

Alas, all there was to be seen on the wide, lush field was gray-maned Rachel, poor, sweet, far-away Rachel, contentedly munching on the long, tender, blades of grass.

THE END

The Lost In The Herd Series:
One: The Big Respawn,
Two: Euphrosyne Unchained,
Three: Letters From Home,
Four: Teacup, Down On The Farm

The Conversion Bureau Novels:
27 Ounces: A story of eight and one half ponies
The Taste Of Grass
The Conversion Bureau: Code Majeste
The Conversion Bureau: The 800 Year Promise
The Conversion Bureau: Going Pony
The Reasonably Adamant Down With Celestia Newfoal Society!
Recombinant 63: A Conversion Bureau Story
HUMAN in Equestria: A Conversion Bureau Story
The PER: Michelson and Morely
Little Blue Cat
Cross The Amazon
Adrift Off Fiddler's Green: The Final Conversion Bureau Story

The Short Stories:
Her Last Possession
The Conversion Bureau: PER Equitum
The Conversion Bureau: Brand New Universe
Tales Of Los Pegasus
The Poly Little Pony

The very first and original
Conversion Bureau Group
archives only the best Three Rules Compatible stories!

Optimalverse Works:
Friendship Is Optimal: Caelum Est Conterrens
Leftovers: A Friendship Is Optimal Story
IMPLACABLE
My Life In Fimbria

Injectorverse Works:
I.D. - That Indestructible Something

The More Conventional Fanfics:
The Ice Cream Pony Summer
Around The Bend

PRIDE related works:
Transspecieality

My FREE virtual radio station!
Rare, personally chosen anime, SF and fantasy television, movies, and comedy music. A truly unusual collection to listen to, featuring Spot Announcer Dr. Sandi - and many more!

The Injectorverse

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
THE INJECTORVERSE

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The story of Gregoria Samson and her friend Rachel Priss has come to a conclusion. The ending is hopeful - it is certain that Rachel is healing, and possibly inevitable that she will one day regain full sapience. A happy, thriving secure colony of Equestrians has been established in Argentina, and they are creating, from scratch, Equestrian magical technology and culture.

But questions abound! When immortal Rachel recovers, will she be Rachel... or Celestia? Will she transform the entire simulated universe into Equestria, or not? Are there other godlike entities with such power waiting to enforce their own reality on the world in competition to Rachel? Are there Lovecraftian secrets hidden in that unaltered patch in Antarctica from a time before the Victorian rewrite? Who or what is doing the simulating, and what is the purpose of the simulation of the world? Can the simulators be contacted? Should they?

The governments of the top nations are out to control everything and to eliminate or contain the victims of Doe Injection. Will they come after the pony micro-nation? Are there still animal people, or fairies, or elves from before the Victorian transformation that want their world back? What about the Grays and the Sasquatches and the other lost victims of bugs in the cosmic program? What if some human with a nightmare fantasy became an Injector? Are there good groups out to help the changed?

If the world was converted into Equestria, what of the humans in the pockets that would resist the rewrite of reality? How much transformation can be allowed before the simulation is shut down? Could whatever happens when a John Doe injects code be used to escape the simulation entirely? What would out there, in the Big Machine?

These questions can be answered!

Just not by me.

This story is a manual. It provides the details and rules and structure of an entire new universe within which stories could be written. There are a lot of questions, so that means there is a lot of drama and potential available to anyone who might want to play within the Injectorverse.

Transformers meet ponies? Star Trek overlapping Dr. Who? Westerns intermixing with comic books? Anything is possible, any faction or group or crossover could happen. All it takes is one poor, doomed John or Jane Doe being written into the code of the universe.

We have a hopeful ending, but we also have a very large beginning.

If you want, of course.

My story is done. I hope you enjoyed it, or if it was too troubling to be enjoyed, I at least hope it blew your mind. 'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.

I open the Injectorverse to anyone who wants to play in it, and if nobody does, that is fine too.

I thank you all kindly, and with love, for reading my story.

Petal Chatoyance, 2013

1. One Morning From Uneasy Dreams

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

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One Morning From Uneasy Dreams

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams

he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect."

Franz Kafka

Dry, ancient grave-soil fell from the bucket of the Kubota Mini-Excavator. The small team of men and women worked quickly in the early light, the excavation had taken longer than anyone had expected. They had struggled frantically through the dark, night-vision goggles alternately helpful and blinded by the lights from the surrounding cadastral district of Žižkov and the rest of Prague. They had permits, forged, if they were caught, because the quest for permission had failed. Getting caught was not an option, if necessary, they would do whatever they had to. The world was at stake.

He sat in the van, outside the cemetery, his driver ready to take him to safety and escape whatever happened. They would call him when it was done, when it was safe, and only if it was safe. No matter what, they would take photographs, he could still use those, but he wanted to see, with his own eyes. It was risky, but it was his money, and of that, he was almost without peer. If he wanted to see for himself, then he would see.

The dawn was breaking now over the New Jewish Cemetery, forcing the team to remove their increasingly useless goggles. There wasn't much time left. Someone would come, someone would notice. The police might be called. That would be bad. Very bad.

They worked with shovels now, they were near the lid. One of them struck wood, and a frantic effort to clear enough soil without breaking the coffin began. The old wood was damaged by the work, but it lifted with effort. Inside, dressed in simple clothes, a shriveled corpse lay, sunken, closed, leather eyelids exposed to light for the first time in almost ninety years. One of the team spoke briefly on his cellphone as the others took pictures and readings with curious instruments. In the van, outside the cemetery, one word was heard: "Come."

The team moved aside as he approached. He was dressed not in his usual fine suit, but instead in nondescript clothing, jeans and a hoodie top. He wore sneakers, he always wore sneakers, or canvas shoes, never leather, even with the most expensive of clothes. His driver stood with him over the grave. He was tall, and muscular, and clean-shaven, and very blond. He put his hand on the shoulder of his driver as he stared down into the exhumed grave, down at the body that lay in the old coffin.

After a short while, he finally let out his breath, a long stream of vapor in the cold air. His eyes were large with fear and wonder and horror too. That meant it must be true. The team looked down at the moldering corpse, but saw nothing unusual. He, however, clearly saw more.

Just before he left, just before they all fled, in van, on motorcycle, in car, leaving all the equipment behind, he said just one single, quivering statement over Franz Kafka's grave.

"Sweet... Celestia."

──── ∆ ────

Greta was banging on her door, which always angered her, but today she just didn't feel angry. "Hey! Get up! We're going out to have pancakes! I'm HUNGRY, Gorilla! Get your hairy ass up already!"

'Gorilla' was Greta's favorite pet name for Gregoria. She liked it precisely because Gregoria did not, yet today it did not seem so grating. Gregoria found herself chuckling at it, strangely happy that her sister was teasing her. Teasing, after all, meant affection, deep down.

That thought suddenly brought Gregoria Samson to full wakefulness. She never thought things like that. Her little sister was a pest. She had always been a vile, verminous bug. It bothered Gregoria even more that remembering thinking that way made her feel ashamed. It must have been that weird dream.

The dream was already fading, which was sad because it had been such a pleasant one. It was rare to have a happy dream, so Gregoria lay still, trying to cling to it. It had been a pony dream! Yes, a pony dream, she had dreamed of... of what? Running, she had dreamed of running, she was certain of that much, and she remembered talking with... with princess Celestia in her dream, though she couldn't remember about what. It was fading away so fast now. In a moment, the last details were gone, and inside herself Gregoria felt sad, because there had been something wonderful about her dream, and it was gone now.

Gregoria yawned and stretched, what remained of the covers falling off of her. Her bed was a mess, the sheets untucked from the mattress, her pillows scattered to the floor. She didn't remember putting on pajamas - she didn't even own pajamas. She always slept in the nude, yet even with the covers off she...

Her eyes were wide now, her pupils small. She wasn't wearing pajamas, that wasn't what was keeping her skin warm and cozy in the cool morning air. Gregoria stared in horror at her forelimbs, covered now in thick, short, golden yellow hair. The hair lay flat and smooth along her limbs, not the fuzzy fur of a bunny, but the neat, slick coat of a short-haired dog... or a horse. Her hands wouldn't stretch, and with mounting terror Gregoria realized that she could not move her fingers apart. She had no fingers... no, that was not right. She had only one finger, on each hand, the middle finger, which now was gigantic, with a huge and heavy nail at the end.

Gregoria curled her single finger on her right forelimb, and stared at the thick, heavy nail that went nearly all the way around. It was a hoof. Her right arm ended in a hoof, as did her left. Wildly twisting on the bed, raising her nightmarishly long and muscular neck, Gregoria tried to take in her utterly changed body. Everywhere golden yellow hair, except for a small patch between her rear legs, where two flat bumps rested, topped with small nipples. Her chest was flat and tall, her sides narrow. As she struggled, her flowing black tail slapped the bed, and stung the inside of her squirming legs. Her legs were equine legs, and they too ended in hooves.

Her proportions were not natural, they were not the proportions of an earthly creature. She was a living cartoon beast, made of flesh and bone and blood, but there was no question that she was a pony, an Equestrian pony, right out of Friendship Is Magic. Gregoria's heart pounded within her new, oddly shaped chest, as panic began to strip her ability to think.

A dream! She was still dreaming! Of course! This had happened before, it had happened several times before - those awful, awful nightmares where one thinks one is awake and then goes to pee and suddenly really wakes up only to find the bed wet and... oh, this had to be a dream! Absolutely! The thought sent waves of relief flowing through her, and made her laugh out loud. Her voice was high and cartoony, a proper pony character voice, not her own. A dream. She would awake now, that's how it always happened. Realize that it's a dream and wake up. Yeah... any moment now.

Gregoria flopped her limbs down, her ears twitching high on her head at the sound of the impact of her hooves on the mattress. Any moment now. Only a dream. Hee! It was almost cool. She certainly liked My Little Pony, it was fun enough, her friend Rachel had gotten her into it. She wasn't the pony fanatic Rachel was, but it was something they could share.

Any moment now. "GORILLA! OOK-OOK! WAKE UP ALREADY!" Greta was at the door again, pounding as if she were trying to break it down. "Come on, Grilla-willa, get up! We don't get to do this very often!"

That was true. With the economy the way it was, getting to go out for pancakes was a treat. It was hard on her parents, having to deal with two failed launches from the nest - both she and her sister had been forced to return home. They just couldn't afford to live in their own places right now. "In a moment! I'm waking up!" Gregoria had spoken before thinking, the words had just tumbled out, all in that strange, cartoon voice.

"Well hurry up and get dressed! Don't make us wait!" The sound of stomping faded down the hall. Greta hadn't seemed to notice anything wrong. That proved this was a dream! Gregoria's new voice sounded utterly different, kind of like Twilight Sparkle, but really more like Tara Strong trying to be overly cute. It was kind of a silly voice, really. Greta would have noticed and said something, so this had to be a dream.

It was an awfully long and oddly lucid dream. Oh... that must be it. This must be one of those 'lucid dreams' people posted about. Gregoria had always wanted to have a lucid dream, they sounded amazing. Supposedly, lucid dreams were realer-than-real and you could do anything in them just by wishing. Ooh! Excitement built where previously fear had reigned. Gregoria rolled over onto her side, her hooves clocking together loudly, the sensation vibrating the bones of her legs - all four of them. 'Ow, actually', she thought. That wasn't pleasant. OK, then, wish time.

Gregoria closed her eyes and with still pounding heart wished to turn into Arwen from The Lord Of The Rings. She opened her eyes. She wasn't in Rivendell. She was still laying on her side, on her torn-up bed, staring at... her hooves. Her golden-yellow hooves. No. This isn't how it was supposed to work. "I want to be an elf!" She spoke the words out loud, in her odd pony voice. Fear returned, rising like a rocket inside her. "I want to wake up!" She waited. She carefully, gently, tapped her forehooves together three times. "There's no place like waking up!"

Nothing. "I WANT TO WAKE UP NOW!!!" she found herself screaming the words. Her heart leapt against her chest like a caged bird. "WAKE UP! WAKE UP!" Gregoria flailed in her bed. She tried to pinch herself, but flat hoof met foreleg to no effect. She brought a hoof to her head and saw stars for a moment, reeling from pain. Her world was terror now.

"HELP!" Gregoria found herself screaming, helplessly, almost out of her mind. "HELP! HELP ME! MOM! GRETA! DAD! ANYPONY! HELP!"

It seemed like forever until Greta and her mother burst into her room. "What? What's the matter?"

Gregoria was sobbing, crying, as her mother held her, stroking her head. "Mom - I can't wake up! I just can't wake up and I don't know what to do and I need to wake up, oh PLEASE help me wake up!" The tears ran down Gregoria's hairy cheeks and dribbled onto her forelegs, soaking into her coat. She stared, helplessly into her mother's eyes. "Please mom, please help me... oh sweet Celestia, I can't wake up!"

"Gregoria?" Her mother was puzzled and concerned. "What do you mean, dear? What do you mean 'you can't wake up?"

Greta stood by, looking a little scared by her sister's bizarre behavior.

"MOooOOM! Look at me! I can't wake up! Just look at me!" Gregoria pointed a yellow hoof at her flat, pony chest. Her ears lay flat against her skull, she could feel them, and her tail was thrashing because of her fear.

Gregoria's mother stared at her daughter. "I don't understand, Greggie. What, are you in pain? Is there something else wrong? What is it?"

She began hitting her head with her hooves. "WAKE UP! WAKE UP!"

Gregoria felt her forelegs restrained by her mother's hands. "Stop that! What has gotten into you? Everything's OK! I'm right here!" Gregoria was sobbing now, unable to cope, unable to think. "Come on, it's OK, I'm right here. Just relax, you're awake. Shhh... Shhhh...."

It took some time before Gregoria could stop crying. Finally, some shred of reason returned to her. She was still terrified, but she could think. She held up her right hoof. "Mom. What do you see?"

Her mother was startled. "Huh? What do you mean?"

"Look, here." Gregoria waved her hoof in her mother's face. "What is this, what do you see here?"

"I don't know what you're asking!" Her mother released her, and sat more upright on the bed.

"HERE! What is this? Right here?" Gregoria shook her hoof violently, letting her joints wiggle.

Her mother stared, blankly. "...Is it something about your hand? Does your hand hurt?"

"THAT'S NOT MY HAND!" Gregoria pulled back, her mother strange to her now. Why was she pretending everything was normal? Why was she acting this way? "Look at it! Do you see any fingers? Do you?"

Now her mother looked frightened. "Do you want me to call the doctor? Maybe we should have you looked at?" Suddenly, her mother's expression changed "Wait... you're just pulling my leg, right?" The voice was almost pleading. Her mother wanted to believe the question, she wanted to hear that it was all a joke.

Something in Gregoria jumped a gear. Her original fear was replaced with a sudden new terror. She didn't want to have a doctor look at her. Somehow, that was even more frightening than what was happening to her now. Dream, or insanity, or whatever was going on, thoughts of being locked up, experimented on, maybe even cut up for research - these thoughts flooded her mind now. No. No doctors. This was getting out of hand. No doctor could help this, whatever it was.

If it was a dream, then going to the doctor could become an even worse nightmare - she'd had terrible, terrible nightmares about doctors offices before. If she had gone crazy - and the thought was very prominent in her mind now - then what would they likely do? Lock her up, shoot her full of drugs... she might never see daylight again. Get put away, and you might never get out. No... no... this was getting way, way out of hand.

She needed time. Time to think. Time to wake up, time to try to get sane on her own, first. Time to try anything except getting locked away somewhere, alone, apart, afraid. No. This situation needed to be settled down. Everything needed to settle down.

"Ye...yeah!" The cutesy voice came out of her muzzle, so strange to her new ears. "Yeah. Sorry... sorry mom. Sorry sis..." Greta was looking very, very worried, more than mom was. "I... I was having a real muffin of a dream and..." What was she saying? Even her words were odd, not just her voice, but... no doctors. No getting locked up. Not yet, anyway. "I guess I just lost it there for a bit. I'm sorry. I kind of ran with it after that. Kind of a jerky think to do, right?" Gregoria hoped the insincerity and fear in her voice would not be too obvious.

Her mother was dubious, but it was clear she desperately wanted things to be alright. Mom always wanted everything to be right. She was willing to accept Gregoria's words, because she wanted them to be true. "Don't ever pull that again! You had me half-scared you'd lost your mind. That was a mean thing to do, Greggie. Don't think you're too old for a paddling!"

Her mother was up and off the bed. "I guess you really did have a hell of a night. Your bed is a mess." She turned to the door, eager to leave, clearly still nervous from the outburst. "You can clean it up later. Get dressed and get downstairs. Your father is probably furious by now."

Greta stayed a moment longer, after mother had left. "You really pissed her off, Gregoria. That was a fucking stupid thing to do. You had me worried too, you idiot!" Greta stormed out, affecting anger, but Gregoria's new nose smelled fear coming from her sister. It was a very strange thing, to smell fear and know what it meant. "Get dressed, I'm hungry!"

Gregoria sat up in her bed, as best she could. She felt clumsy in her new body, all legs and no arms and everything so strange. Her heart had calmed down, and she was breathing shallowly now. Nothing had changed. She was still a pony, the bed was still a mess, and she could hear her mother and sister downstairs fussing and fuming over the 'rotten trick' she had performed on them. Her mother had held her, touched her, looked at her close up and had not seen anything different at all. Her sister was oblivious. Only she could tell she was a pony.

She wanted to cry. She began to wonder if maybe she should go to the doctor, maybe it was a brain tumor or cancer or that she really had gone completely insane? Gregoria put her weight on her forelegs on the bed. It was all solid, real, unchanging. She felt the pressure on her joints, the tension in her muscles. She felt her yellow coat, and her long, flowing tail. She moved her tongue around inside her longer, flat-toothed muzzle. She snorted with her new nostrils, and a world of impossibly strong scents and smells informed her in ways she had never even considered possible.

No. This was much stranger, far weirder and more dangerous than a brain tumor or going crazy.

This was real. It was utterly impossible, yet every sense, every part of herself told her this... was real.

She wasn't ever going to wake up. She would never-ever-ever just wake up.

Because she already had.

11. Life Is Merely Terrible

I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something

By Chatoyance

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Life Is Merely Terrible

"Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do.

Often - and in my inmost self perhaps all the time -

I doubt that I am a human being."
Franz Kafka

The dark-haired woman on the screen said her name was Nadzieja. She was in her late middle ages, had a bit of an accent, and reminded Rachel of an economics instructor she had liked. Serious but warm, was how Rachel put it later.

"Mr. Crown is concerned with your well being, miss Priss. Also that of your friend, miss Samson. This is good thing, I assure you. He has arranged for certain items of usefulness to be delivered to you. These are for your benefit, and nothing is expected in return. It would be in your interest, I am thinking, to listen to what he has to say. I am working for Mr. Crown now for two years, I have found him to be most excellent as an employer, and in every way a good man."

Gregoria shifted in her chair, she was sitting upright, trying very hard to appear human. It had become clear within moments that the woman on the screen could not see either of them as ponies. More than that, she did not seem to know anything about what had happened to them. They had expected quite the opposite, considering the note on the card, and almost gave themselves away.

Rachel sat on the linoleum, there was little else she could do. She sat upright though, with her hooves on the table as if she were resting hands there.

It was noteworthy, though, that Nadzieja had not considered it the least bit strange, during the initial confusion at the start of the video call, when Gregoria had asked her what she saw when she looked at them. She saw Gregoria as a dark-haired woman, and Rachel - as they suspected - as a very tall, very blond woman. Though she rattled off the descriptions as if being asked to describe such things were a daily activity for her, she did ask a curious question afterwards.

"I would ask you a question, if I may. This wanting to know what you look like, this is some kind of password, correct? I am not privy to such things, so it is being wasted on me. I answer, as I always do, but whatever this means, I am not member. I say this just to make things clear between us, so that there is no suspicion in you."

Rachel just looked at Gregoria who shrugged. Everything was starting to sound like a spy movie now, and Nadzieja's comment did not make either of them feel less suspicion at all. There was nothing to do but to play along in any case, so Gregoria simply turned back to the screen and tried to sound confident. "We... appreciate that... admission."

"Yeah! All suspicions are allayed! No suspicions here! Right Greggy?" Rachel was not the best actress.

"Um... yeah. Rodger dodger on that." The minute she said it Gregoria regretted it. There was no way either of them were sounding like they were in on any secrets at all. The bemused look on the woman's face on the screen only seemed to rub that little fact in.

"Good! Mr. Crown will be contacting you at ten, precisely. Please be present at this time. And remain at home, the delivery will be soon, and I am told that it will be very much what you need. I am happy to have been meeting you, and I wish you a good day."

The screen went dark, and the custom app that made communication possible shrank, leaving them at the desktop. The customized iMac had very little actually installed on it. There was, however, one folder down on the row of icons at the bottom that brought tears to Rachel's pony eyes. It was photographs of Rick, taken in Afghanistan, images that he had never lived to bring home to her.

The images must have come from the cellphones or other personal electronics of the members of Rick's platoon. He had several friends among his Squad that he spent time with. Rachel recalled Thomas the Limey, with the British accent, Well-Hung Chung and Chucker The... well.

Rick smiled back at her in his fatigues, barechested in a tent, grinning while shaving, Chung reflected in the mirror taking the picture with a Nokia. She couldn't look at the image on the screen any more, because everything was blurry now, and she had to drop down to the floor because it was hard to cry sitting up like a human.

Warm forelegs embraced her, it was Gregoria, trying to hold her, trying to hug her huge body. "I'm sorry, Rachel. I can't know what if feels like, but... I... I care. I wish I could help somehow!"

And the odd thing was, Gregoria knew she really meant it. She did care. She did want to help and she had no idea how to do so. She no longer knew if this was just her pony brain manipulating her, or if her human mind would have done the same thing. She wasn't sure she cared. Her friend was in pain, in grief, and she wanted to help, and it didn't matter now if old Gregoria would have bothered or felt the same way.

Gregoria held Rachel as tight as she could, considering how awkward it was to try to grasp a much larger pony in her forelegs. After a while, Rachel stopped crying, and with sniffles bent her head and gave Gregoria a grateful, sad-sweet smile. Somehow, holding her had been the right thing to do, apparently, and Rachel's tiny smile made Gregoria's heart feel like it was swelling up. It felt good, it felt somehow good to know she had helped her friend.

There was no fighting it, Gregoria decided. Pony kindness couldn't be denied, fighting her own brain was bound to be a losing struggle. And it felt good. Positive reinforcement had destroyed most of her internal resistance already. It felt good to be nice, it felt good to help, it felt good to be loyal, and it hurt to try to be selfish. The pony brain was not insidious, as she had thought, it was just what it was. It just thought... pony. And it had not escaped Gregoria that perhaps the reason she felt lonely in her human life was because she hadn't been a very good friend, and that just might be the reason she didn't have many good friends in return.

Just Rachel, really. Everypony else she had known in her human life really didn't care about her. And, truth be told, she hadn't really cared about them. They were just there, like objects. Expected accoutrements. You just had them, because. They could be traded, lost, and new ones obtained. They had uses - some for going shopping, some for seeing that new movie.

But Rachel had always been different. Rachel wasn't 'for' anything. She was just... she just... Gregoria couldn't find a word. But one thing could be said - Rachel couldn't be traded, or a new Rachel obtained. And losing her, as Gregoria had nearly done after Rick's death, would have been a catastrophe.

"Thank you." Rachel wiped her muzzle with her foreleg and sniffed again. "The pictures."

"I know. But at least you got to see him again, a little." Gregoria unwrapped herself from Rachel and lay down on the floor next to her.

"Yeah. Yeah." Rachel lifted her long Celestia neck, she was so large that even laying on the floor she could still look over the edge of the table to see the screen of the Mac. Rick's lathered face grinned back, his friend Chung behind him holding a phone. She lowered her head again. "I miss him, Greg. I miss... him."

Gregoria had nothing she could think of to say. What could be said? She deliberately let her pony instincts take over, relying on them now to fill the gaps within her. They could be trusted, she decided, for things like this. She found herself nuzzling Rachel, her head gently rubbing against the side of Rachel's neck and jaw. Rachel pressed her cheek against Gregoria's for a time. They just sat there, like that, and somehow it was right.

"Come on. Apparently we've got a shipment coming." Rachel was getting up now, slowly, carefully, so that she didn't tip the table over and break Mr. Crown's little 'present'.

Gregoria joined her, raising herself to her feet effortlessly. She felt some pride in finally mastering her new flesh, she could rise and lay down with confidence, and walking about was trivial now. She didn't have to think about how to move her body at all. It almost felt sometimes as if she had always been a pony. That had frightened her, now she was trying to see it in a practical light. There was no way to tell how long she would be this way. It only made sense to get good at it.

"What's the plan?" Rachel was moving to the closet, her horn glowing yellow. Gregoria watched as a broom and dustpan were floated out, each wrapped in separate golden fields of light.

"This place is a mess. If we're going to have more mysterious ninjas over, I don't want them to think we're messy ponies!" Rachel smiled and winked. "Ninjas are notoriously obsessed with cleanliness, you know."

Gregoria laughed. "I thought ninjas were obsessed with 'flipping out' and riffing on electric guitars while being totally awesome!"

There was still a tear on Rachel's cheek as she gave a soft chuckle. "I see you like the old stuff."

"Nothing on the internet ever goes away." Gregoria decided to try to help by holding the dustpan for Rachel. "Ee inheret ith ah hyutheum!"

"What?" Rachel hovered the broom to the side.

Gregoria set the dustpan, which she had been holding in her teeth, down. "I said the internet is a museum. There's all kinds of cool stuff to dig up. Internet archeology. I guess I'm an internet archeologist. Think I can get a grant to study Pre-4Chan Cultures?"

That made Rachel properly laugh. "I hear the Smithsonian is looking for a curator for the Hall of Memes, maybe you could get funding there! Planning an expedition?" The broom, covered in golden light, began sweeping the table, removing the evidence of their sloppy 'last meal'. Rachel's stomach grumbled with hunger at the sight of the bits of food.

Gregoria shifted the dustpan with a forehoof so that it might catch some of the falling debris from the table. "Yeah, the plan is to use the Tron Laser to enter cyberspace and explore the ancient ruins of Geocities on hoof. My plan is to use mail daemons as native guides and see if we can find the mysterious path through the serverlands to the fabled Internet Wayback Machine!"

Rachel began sweeping carefully into the dustpan while Gregoria held it and positioned it with her teeth again. "You did promise me you wouldn't write fanfiction earlier, right?" Rachel's grin was only slightly evil.

"Uffum Ooo, hoo."

"Such language from a sweet little pony!" Rachel seemed to be in a much better mood now, she had always been the sort of person who used activity to distract her from her feelings. "I would remind you who has the broom here?"

Shortly after the kitchen had been swept, and the table wiped and dried, the bell rang. Gregoria ran to the window and looked down onto the street. A large commercial truck had stopped in front of the apartment building. The end was open, a ramp was down, and several burly men were busy with hand trucks unloading things.

Rachel tried to peer through the lensed peephole in her door, but recoiled as her horn impacted the doorframe. Apparently alicorns weren't built to use peepholes. "Hello?" Rachel carefully touched a forehoof to her horn. It seemed to help with the strange sore-tooth throb.

"Delivery for miss Rachel Priss, apartment three-oh-two? From a mister Maloose Crown? Mayloose? Em-Aey-Ell..."

"YES, yes! That's for me!" Rachel approached the door and used a small blob of her golden energy to unlatch the many locks and finally open the door. She stepped far back as the door swung open, so that her large body would not block the entrance. Unfortunately, she was still not used to how long her frame was now, and she kicked over one of the chairs near the table. "Muffin!"

"Hello, sign here, please?" The man at the door held out a digital pen with one hand while presenting a pad-like device with the other. Rachel stared at the pen, unsure how to handle this problem. What would the man see if she took the pen in her teeth like a normal pony? Would it be better to use her telekinetic field? Would he imagine arms where none existed, or would he run screaming as the pen moved of its own accord, floating in the air? "Ma'am?" The man was waiting.

Gregoria had moved from the window to the door. She lifted her right forehoof and held it near where the man held the pen, then she took the pen in her teeth and quickly scribbled randomly on the electronic pad. She held the pen in her teeth until the man quietly took it back from her. Only then did she lower her right forehoof.

The man hadn't even blinked. Apparently, it was just enough of a suggestion to work.

Rachel grinned at Gregoria, as she righted the fallen kitchen chair with her magic while vaguely following the motion with a foreleg. She intended to remember Greggy's clever little trick.

Box after box was brought in and placed in the kitchen while Rachel and Gregoria sat, as best they could, on the couch together. Lastly, they noted with pleasant and impressed surprise the delivery of several bales of hay and several more of alfalfa. The delivery men were unsure where to put such bizarre items, but Rachel simply told them to stack them in the kitchen, near the cabinet, she would deal with it later.

"So, what, you have a goat in here or something?" Apparently his name was Antonio, and he and his brother owned the delivery company.

"It's... uh..." Gregoria thought quickly "Um it's actually for small theater. Local production, we're doing a version of Oklahoma. You know, the musical? We've got our own crew to take the stuff from here."

Antonio nodded. "I know a guy who does off-off-off broadway. Hey, if your crew craps out on ya, remember us, okay? We deliver."

"Um, yes! You certainly do! Thank you!" Rachel suddenly got up off the couch and maneuvered herself carefully into her bedroom. A few moments later she returned with a twenty from the little stash she kept under her mattress. She levitated the money beside her raised left hoof. Antonio took the bill with a smile. "And thank you. An' break a leg!"

Both ponies shuddered at the thought.

When the delivery men had driven off, Rachel and Gregoria began examining the contents of the boxes while snagging large mouthfuls of hay and alfalfa as they went. They were both starving, their bellies had begun rumbling like formula racers at the first scent of the hay coming up the three flights of stairs. Between bites, the two friends noted that the mysterious Mr. Crown had been most thorough in his consideration.

The boxes held containers of oats and other grains, which both mares began eating right out of the box. "Oh, sweet Luna, but I was soooo hungry!" Gregoria stuck her muzzle right into a cylinder of oats and munched happily.

"Oh sweet me, I'm still hungry!" Rachel watched Gregoria choke inside her tub of oats at that.

"*COUGH* *HACK* *COUGH* ...goodness... Ha ha ha... I thought you weren't Celestia!" Gregoria sniffed, and tried to clear her throat. "Hey! Juice! There's juice here. Whole fruit in this one!"

"Right now I'll be 'Morning Wood the Dress Club dancer', if it will get me more of this!" Rachel laughed and took another huge mouthful of alfalfa.

"Morning what?" Gregoria wasn't sure she had heard correctly.

Rachel finished chewing and swallowed, then took a glowing, levitated swig of carrot juice. "Fanfiction. The Bureau stories I told you about - the ones you don't like? Pony strippers put on clothing in them, instead of taking clothing off. You know, because they usually don't wear clothing."

"Um... yeah. Whatever. Hey!" Gregoria had just ripped the top off of a sealed cardboard box with her teeth. "I thought so! Bananas!"

"I'll send you to the MOOOOOON!" Rachel was grinning and filled with oats and merriment.

Gregoria blinked. "Huh?"

"I'll show you later."

The two sated mares lay on the main room floor, legs folded, nodding occasionally with stupefied satisfaction. They were truly, completely full. There was plenty of food left - and also a big mess to clean up. But they were full, there was food in the house, and for the moment at least, everything seemed fine.

The noble, exquisite, royal body of princess Celestia, solar prime diarch of the magical land of Equestria let out a long, quite stentorian burp. "So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being." she recited carefully, clearly from memory.

Gregoria lifted sleepy, overfed lids. "um... what?"

"Just a quote. From an old existentialist writer." Rachel smacked her pony lips. "That... was good."

Gregoria nodded. "Thank you, Mister Crown. I don't know who this pony is, but I like his style."

"Thank you. I am glad the selection was to your liking." The voice was artificial, a computer voice but a very good one. One of the expensive, high end voices that almost sounded completely natural. Almost. Rachel and Gregoria immediately woke from their post-feast torpor and stared at the modified iMac on the kitchen table.

It was ten in the evening. Precisely.

"Hello?" Gregoria was up, not quickly, but up - Rachel was still struggling to her hooves.

"Please, there is no need to rise on my account. I quite understand. My team has informed me that both of you have very likely been without sustenance for some time, please relax and be comfortable." There was no image on the screen. Mr. Crown could see them, but would not show himself, it would seem.

Rachel gave up trying to rise - her belly was very full, and she had been very comfortable - so she let herself sink down again. Gregoria stood for a moment, then gave in and folded her legs as well.

"You must be Mr. Crown, then. Thank you very much for the food. We actually haven't been hungry long, just a day - though it felt like a week, I have to say." Rachel looked in the direction of the iMac while she spoke.

"I think you will find that your Equestrian bodies prefer a large amount of food compared to your old human ones. Ponies are creatures of a world without scarcity, and their metabolisms reflect that." The artificial voice paused for a moment. "I am curious about your expedition to the Williamsburg Bridge yesterday. Did you find out anything interesting?"

Gregoria looked at Rachel, a concerned expression on her face. "You... know about that?"

"Yes. I waited until you left to send my team in. I mentioned that I had been observing you in my note, did I not?"

Gregoria tapped a hoof, nervously. "Yeah. You did." Rachel's ears dipped and lifted, somehow Gregoria understood that as a shrug. Gregoria looked up at the computer on the table. "I don't want to be rude here, we are really grateful for the food and everything, but... if you know what's going on, if you know how to fix us, we'd ...um... we'd really like to know."

The iMac was silent for what seemed a long time. "I believe I have a decent understanding of what has caused us all to change into equinoids from My Little Pony. I have been researching this issue very carefully now for several years, ever since my own transformation. The answer is quite... astonishing, and not easy to explain over an audio link."

Rachel frowned at this. "If you know something, just tell us!"

Again the computer was silent for some time, and Rachel wondered if she had angered their benefactor. "If I were to simply state the facts..." the artificial voice was smooth and even "...you would not be able to accept them. I do not mean to imply that you could not understand them, I feel confident that you could, especially you miss Priss."

"Hey!" Gregoria's eyes narrowed at the computer.

"What I mean is that the cause of this is quite extraordinary, and would be difficult to accept for anypony - without proof at every step of the explanation. I need you to comprehend what has changed you, because I have been waiting for a long time for you - or someone like you - to finally appear." Mr. Crown had apparently not noticed Gregoria's outburst. Or he had ignored it.

Rachel thought about this then shook her head. "I'm not Celestia! I may look like Celestia, but I'm not her. I can't raise the sun, I don't have the secrets of ponification, I can't send anypony to the moon. I just got stuck with Celestia's body. Don't expect any miracles."

Eventually the computer spoke. "You have much more power than you realize, miss Priss. The transformation does not overwrite our identity, as you have already discovered. But the change does strongly represent aspects of the cartoon, and the fandom, and levitation, flight, and affecting plants are only the beginning, I assure you.

"Miss Priss, could I ask you to confirm something for me, something private?"

Rachel blinked, surprised. "I... I guess so. How private?"

"Nothing overly intimate, I hope, anyway." The computer paused, then continued "Your... lover... Mr. Decker. His pet name for you... it was 'Celestia', correct?"

Rachel stared at the computer. "How... what? How do you know..."

"The answer to that, and much more besides, awaits you, if you will agree to visit me. I have a special home, safe from prying eyes, with acres of forest and grassland around it. It is my... little Equestria, if you like. I would like to invite you, and your friend, miss Samson, to come and visit me. We can meet face to face, and I will explain to you properly just how it is that you were changed into ponies.

"You will finally have answers to all of your questions, and you may also find out just what you can do with your Celestia body as well. And more than this, I have accessed the secrets surrounding your Mr. Deckard as well - and you may be surprised to learn that he is important in all of this. Will you be my guest?"

Rachel and Gregoria were now both standing up, their eyes both narrowed at the black-screen of the custom iMac.

Gregoria stomped her hoof. "What is with this MUFFIN' 'Dr. Horrible' routine, huh? Are you getting off on playing evil genius or something? How dare you..."

Rachel put a hoof gently against Gregoria's pony shoulder. Gregoria snorted, but fell silent, still breathing heavily. "You already know we have no choice. I cannot work, we will lose this apartment, and we have nowhere to go in the world. We tried to cross that bridge thinking it would take us to Equestria, thinking it would save us. It didn't work. The bridge doesn't go anywhere. Not anywhere else, anyway.

"We're grateful for the food, but I don't like the way you do things, Mr. Crown. Invading my apartment. Going through my things, probably. Not showing yourself, and using a fake voice. I don't like that one bit." Rachel did her best to control herself, but it was difficult. "You don't inspire confidence, this whole thing reeks of bad movies, but you already know I'll come. We'll both come, I suspect - you don't have to, if you don't want to, Greggy."

Gregoria shook her head. "I go where you go. But I think it's a bad idea, okay? I just want that on the record. This is a bad idea."

Rachel nuzzled her friend. "Thank you Gregoria."

The computer voice spoke. "I know this seems overly melodramatic, I do. But there is a very good reason for every bit of it, as you will find out when you get here. I sincerely apologize for all of your concerns, and I can offer nothing else but to ask that you try to trust me just a little. If our positions were reversed, and you had the resources, would you not send in a team to make certain everything was safe? It must have occurred to you that creatures such as ourselves are vulnerable and endangered among a world of humans? There are humans that know of us, unchanged humans, dangerous humans, and we are seen as a threat - and a resource - to them. Our situation is more perilous than you perhaps realize."

Rachel swallowed. "No, I didn't know that."

"It would be for your own benefit, as much as mine, for you to join me. I am well hidden from such humans, and with me, you would share in that protection. But I needed to be certain you were not bait for a trap."

"A trap?" Gregoria was stunned. She had been certain that the trap was Mr. Crown himself.

"Yes, miss Samson. There are those who would ...collect us. And such collection is not pleasant or desirable. Transport will arrive for you within the hour. You will be informed at the moment of their arrival. Expect a large, black truck with a green apple painted on the side. If anything else arrives, you would be advised to flee, however you can. If that happens, I will find you, in time."

Gregoria was still upset. "If it's that desperate or serious or whatever, why did you send us food and let us lay around until now? Why the big rush all of a sudden?"

The voice from the computer was still flat. "Because I needed to watch, and see if you were bait. Just like I said."

"Uh..." Gregoria looked at Rachel, who looked frightened now instead of angry. "...I guess... we'll be waiting. Black truck, green apple. Um... and... thank you... I guess."

"We will see each other soon." The computer voice paused. "With luck."

Acknowledgements

"Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible within himself,
though both that indestructible something and his own trust in it may remain permanently
concealed from him". - Franz Kafka, 1913

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the creation of this particular story, I feel it necessary to acknowledge the inspirations for certain aspects within it. Some important elements have been derived from the works of many dozens of authors laboring in at least three different shared universes approximately a decade ago. I wish to lovingly acknowledge the following inspirations:

►The Blind Pig Universe (and its spin-offs) originally created by Mark van Sciver, and written within by over three dozen incredibly talented writers.

►The Paradise Universe originally created by Jon Buck and written about by over two dozen astonishingly talented authors.

I also wish to acknowledge the influence and inspiration of the following resources and individuals:

►The Transformation Stories Archive

►Shifti

►The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

►Nick Bostrom, Professor, Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School

►Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann, physicist

Chatoyance, 2013

Side Notes:

The chapter titles come from quotations by Franz Kafka

Gregoria Samson is obviously based on Gregor Samsa