Ursula

Once upon a time there was a fat pony named Ursula. She was so fat that she died. The end, for her; the beginning, for the maggots and the worms. The biggest maggot was named Ursula, named for the earth and god of the maggots, as they understood it. She was born under the most auspicious signs and was jointly the granddaughter of Urlsbook the Great through one bloodline and the daughter of Mandy the Magnificent on the other. There was no doubt that she would do great things in her lifetime - and thus she grew up conceited and selfish.

Other maggots who believed in her legend served her willingly, bringing her the choicest bits of pony organs and withstanding, with pleasure, her various torments and tortures. Ursula grew fatter, bloated, and unable to even wiggle and squirm herself around. If it weren’t for her servants, she would starve and die, but they still served her because they believed in her predestination. All but one maggot, that is.

Surly Sally, a wimp of a maggot until that day, that one day when the verbal abuse of Ursula became too much, was the one to speak out. “Ursula the great? That will never happen! More like Ursula the lazy, Ursula the ugly, Ursula the leech upon our society! That is how you will be remembered!”

Ursula dismissed the shrimpy maggot, who was quickly dragged away and slaughtered, becoming food for Ursula herself. However, the seed was planted in Ursula’s thoughts.
That night she couldn’t sleep. Sally’s body had given her indigestion. As she lay awake at three in the morning, Ursula began to consider her life. Perhaps Sally was right. What had she done? She knew from a young age that she was special, that she was going to do great things, she thought that it was just going to happen whether she tried or not, that it would be easy, that she would know what to do when the time came. But she was aging and still nothing great had happened, and she was too fat to even roll over so that when she puked up Sally’s remains they lay all over her until some slave would clean her in the morning. At that moment, too obese to even roll over, laying in her own vomit, she decided she would seek her own fortune, to take her legend by the antennae and ride it to her glorious destiny. She started to do sit-ups.

Months of squirming and wriggling ensued as Ursula tried to lose enough weight to become mobile. It was the most difficult thing she had ever done in her entire life, one could say it was the only thing she had ever done in her entire life. She hung up posters of hunky male maggots with bulging muscles and female maggot models in bikinis as motivation. Looking at those fit maggots in suggestive poses every morning kept her going, and one morning she looked in the mirror to find that she had become just as fit and suggestive. It was time to seek her fortune. Dismissing her slaves, she squirmed away from her home for the first time.

After months of agonizing inching along, she reached the edge of Ursula the Pony. The way ahead was frightening, there were no rich smells of food, no smells of her brethren; it was bleak. She forged on ahead, inching through the dust, feeling her body drying up but pushing forward because to go back was just as surely death. Exhausted, emaciated, having all but given up, a drop landed upon her. It was water. It revitalized her instantly, only partly due to being refreshed, mostly due to new hope. Was she near a new source of food?

Another drop fell. And another. And another. Soon Ursula was swept up in a torrent, battered this way and that, unable to discern which way was up or down. All she could do was squirm and hope to land somewhere safe. After what seemed like an eternity, the turbulence subsided. Ursula was in a still pool, but it was too dark to see anything. Suddenly, the turbulence started again.

Her environment began a rhythmic sloshing and swishing, and then suddenly it was bright. She couldn’t see well through the water, but there were two large, brightly colored shapes above her. After a moment she realized she could hear them talking, animatedly, but it was too muffled to understand. Ursula, and her water home, were lifted higher and higher, closer to the bright orange shape, and suddenly all was dark again.

Ursula was briefly warm, and the smells reminded her of home, and she was enheartened. Then a terrible pain seized her body, burning her all over her skin. It was all around her, inescapable, she had to do something! She wriggled and squirmed and suddenly found purchase on a squishy, soft wall of some sort. Summoning up all her hunky strength from months of training, she pushed on through.

The other side was wet and warm, and did not burn. Everywhere smelled like food. This, she thought, was what heaven must be like. This is my destiny, she thought, that I will bring this amazing new land to my people, and usher in a new era of prosperity! Our children will multiply into the thousands, she said to herself in the comforting, moist darkness. But how to bring it to her people? After finishing an initial meal, she set off to explore her new land.

An arduous journey let her survey the entirety of her new home; she experienced various foods and various flavors that she had never experienced before, but still had no clue on how to return to her people with her bounty.

One day, as she was sampling one of her favorite pieces of meat, she felt a slight tingle on her side. No, not just on her side, but in the back of her mind. She shifted her body, and felt more tingles. They were not unpleasant or painful, just... strange. She set herself in to explore this new sensation.

She remained in the same place for weeks, contemplating and experimenting with the new sensations, feeding on the flesh that surrounded her. Inactive, she grew fatter, and larger. More parts of her body felt the tingles as more parts of her body came into contact with the material around her. Then one day, she woke up to colors.

Colors she had never been able to imagine surrounded her, and strange shapes. Confused and disoriented, she wriggled around and the colors grew and faded. Over time, she also realized that there was some sort of... feeling. Like something soft was surrounding her. She felt heavy, that she couldn’t move her body. She could hear a muffled noise. This was bizarre, even stranger than the tingling sensations she had been experimenting with for weeks, unable to come to a conclusion as to what they were, but continuing because she felt that they were important. This was, perhaps, just the next stage. She adjusted her body to make the color sensation the strongest, had breakfast, and settled down to contemplate.

As the days went by, the sensations passed in and out, but were in general growing stronger. One day she noticed that the muffled "noises" were more distinct than usual, she could almost make out... voices? She moved parts of her body, trying to make the voices clearer. She strained to listen...

"Yes, aren't cupcakes just the most amazing food ever? I could eat them for every meal."

"If you eat only cupcakes you will get sick. If you finish your beans and alfalfa you can have one cupcake."

"But if I eat all these beans I won't be hungry for a cupcake!"

"Aren't you always hungry for cupcakes?"

"You're right."

The meaning was not at all clear to her, it was in a language she didn't understand. But by the cadence and inflections it was definitely a language. Perhaps in time she would begin to understand. She ate another meal and rested to contemplate, and to listen.

Weeks later her plight became clear, as the colored shapes coalesced into discernible objects, and this reference helped her to make sense of the language, and the feelings akin to touch turned out to be, in fact, touch. Nothing made sense to her at first as the scale was totally alien to her, but eventually everything became clear. She was touching, hearing, and seeing what a pony would touch, see, and hear. She was psychically connected to a being the size and shape of the entire world she had known growing up. But it did not end there.

As further weeks went by, she started to assume control. It was small things at first, a muscle twitch, a short eye movement, but this was just testing the waters. When her pony host fell asleep, Ursula would get to work. She remembered her original purpose. She was going to do great things, she was going to save her people. She was Ursula the Magnificent. Ursula the Paradigm Changer. Ursula, who had control over a god.

The first step, she thought, was to find her original home. However, that turned out to be difficult. She had nothing to go on but some sensations when she was inching along the ground, and it was difficult to link the small world that she knew to the large world that the pony experienced. Also, the Pony’s eyes did not work that well at night, when she was free to run around Ponyville in search of her original home. Passing as silently as she could through the dark, flitting between shadows in buildings, hoping to never meet another pony, she realized that the best way to find her home was through help; she would have to talk to another pony. If the name Ursula was accurate, she could ask someone where was Ursula. But first she would need to learn how to speak.

It was difficult, the fine control required to make the sounds was bizarre. However, she had mastered understanding the pony language just by listening for a few weeks, so this, she knew, would pose no lasting challenge. She would sit up at night, speaking verses to the darkness as the rest of the world slept. She spoke of many things, some random, some testing concepts and words the ponies had, such as “cupcakes” which were foreign to her in her prior life. But sometimes, in the dark, after hours of speaking, she would become introspective and begin to talk, in the pony language, about her past life, about her own experiences and thoughts, about how she truly did consider it a “past life,” wholly different from her current life; she had metamorphosed. She also practiced speaking in her native language. It was impossible to make the pony’s voice high enough, but it was easy to make the sounds as they were relatively simple compared to pony-language. She could still hear and understand the deep speech as it resonated in the cavity she occupied in the pony’s head, so her brethren should be able to understand it too. It was acceptable. It was time to move forward. That morning, the pony she inhabited, Orange Blossom.

“Hello mother!” Ursula called out as she descended the stairs. “Can we have cupcakes for breakfast?” The deception was perfect, as she had been observing this pony for months.

“Silly, no cupcakes for breakfast. But I do have this orange roll for you! It is sweet like a cupcake, and made from our very own oranges.”

“But me want cupcake!”

“Now Blossom, don’t act up today, you know your aunt is coming by.”

“Me cupcake!”

The other pony gave Ursula a strange look. “Are you feeling all right? You are behaving very oddly. And it is ‘I want a cupcake,’ you know that. Let me get the thermometer.”

Ursula watched the larger pony move to the next room. So the deception was not perfect, but now was her chance. She quickly dashed out into the lawn and down the street, slowing only when she was blocks away. Now, who to ask to find her “Ursula?”

She approached an older lady, “Hello. Where is Ursula?”

“Oh is that your mommy’s name? Are you lost?”

That did not work; she tried the next pony. “Where lives Ursula?”

“Sorry, lass, I do not know any Ursula.”

She ran to the center of town, where dozens of ponies were milling about, buying goods at the market, chatting, going about their business. She stood upon a crate of apples and called out at the top of Orange Blossom’s lung’s, “does anybody know where Ursula lives!?”

Ponies ignored her, or gave her scolding looks. Ursula sat down on her haunches, defeated. She had no more ideas on how to find her home.

“Hey kid.”

Startled, Ursula looked up. A male pony stood before her.

“By Ursula, do you mean that big, purple, kind of recluse pony? With the soft voice?”

Ursula wasn’t sure, but she nodded yes.

“I know she lives down at the end of Merry Lane, the small house with the overgrown yard, down that way.”

Ursula didn’t even acknowledge having heard, but ran down the road.