//------------------------------// // ~ Previously on A Prench Tale ~ // Story: Five Score – A Prench Tale Vol.2 // by Alsey //------------------------------// “Ambre, Sarah, and Laurence. That was us, what feels like a lifetime ago. Just three pretty ordinary young women living in the same city of southern France, who just happened to have been born on the very same day: May First, twenty-five years ago. That was the extent of what we had in common, or so we thought, until on that shared birthday we found strange colorful symbols on our upper thighs. With no idea what was happening, we could only rely on each other and our budding friendship to confront the uncertain future these mysterious marks heralded, because as you’ve probably guessed, this was only the beginning... “Life-changing events, quite literally. We were helpless as we slowly transformed into pastel ponies, creatures right out of a TV show that had ended five years ago, after a dramatic fifth season finale. Only this wasn’t fiction anymore. What should’ve been impossible was now inevitable, and it—” “Oh come on, do you always have to make it sound all... I dunno, grandiose and pompous? We’re just chatting, not addressing the nation or whatever.” “Sorry... But it’s our story, doesn’t it deserve a little care?” “And we both agreed she would be the one to start, so if you think you’d do better, go right ahead, we’re listening.” “Nah I’m good, just get on with it.” “That’s what I thought.” “Then why did you... Right, anyway! Where was I? Impossible, inevitable... Ah yes! So that unprecedented situation left us no choice but to confront this new reality, and find ways to deal with it.” “Did you actually rehearse this..?” “Hush. Go on, Amber.” “Thanks. It wasn’t the first time I’d had the proverbial rug pulled right from under my feet; once before I’d lost everything, but I’d survived, to come out of it stronger and closer to my true self. So walking on four hooves? Far from what I’d have wanted for myself, but I can learn, and adapt, and try to make the most of this strange situation. Oh, and the magical unicorn horn was a nice bonus. “As for Sarah, she took it all in stride. Pushing the uncomfortable implications aside, and leaving her old life behind. Galloping forward without a look back, under a new name that came to him through a strange pony dream: Sweetchard. “... “What, no comment? At all?” “I’m good, I’m good. It’s just the truth after all.” “Right then. As for Laurence, that... You’re all right with me telling, right?” “... Whatever.” “Okay then. But for Laurence, that... was a quite different story. She couldn’t escape the horror of what was happening to her body, to have her humanity forcibly taken from her, her very identity put in peril by these insidious magics... She couldn’t deal with it the same way we did. Still, in the end, hooves or wings we don’t care: she’s still human where it really counts. “Anyway, the three of us took shelter in Laurence’s home, but even with the support of her best friend Sébastien, we knew we couldn’t hide forever, and events unfolded without leaving us much time to get used to these new bodies. Being a bit too confident for his own good, Sweetchard—” “Hey, now that’s my part. Mind if I take it from there?” “Oh of course not, please do. You do have more to say on these events.” “Thanks. So! Was just enjoying my morning run, as you do, when humans jump me out of nowhere! Take me away, chains and cages and all that stuff, but there’s one good thing that came out of it: meeting the mare of my dreams. For real! “Crispy... I’d seen her in that weird Equestrian dream, but now she was there, on Earth! Former human just like us, but rejected and imprisoned by her own family. We hit it off right away, it was like love at first sight!” “Ah yes, truly a match made in heaven...” “Hey, no spoilers! So I convinced her to try and escape. Good thing we had our friends here to help us out, but even then the bastards were out for blood. Called themselves the ‘Brigade’, a bunch of nationalistic, and dangerous loonies. For them ponies are the new trendy enemy, somehow a mortal threat to the safety of the country they claim to love, and they won’t stop at anything to prove they’re right. “We did manage to get away this time... But not all in one piece. “Not only that, now we were on the run. We were able to catch our breath and lick our wounds at that veterinarian friend of Crispy’s, at least. And then, finally a stroke of luck: it wasn’t just us! We got in contact with that group who had gone through the same transformation thing, and they offered us to join them in a safe place in Toulouse, just a short ride away! So we had Laurence’s sister take us there, and we got to meet Violette and her friends. “Violette’s a... law student, I think?” “Right.” “So she was all gung-oh over our citizen rights being respected and making sure we even still had those in the first place. Great goal, no question, but there was a whole city between her and that court house she needed to go to, and not that many humans who wanted to help her do that. Gotta respect the mare, she still went through with it, on hoof, with Amber tagging along.” “It was... a little more complicated than that. I had bad memories of Toulouse, it’s where I’m from, where I’d lost everything, but I know the city very well. And Violette was just charging through, like it didn’t matter she was a pony now! I didn’t know yet why I was feeling this connection, this kinship with her, but all the same, I couldn’t let her go alone. If only I knew... “Not only we had to deal with corrupt cops and other shady officials out to get us, but on the way to the tribunal I learned that Violette was none other than an old friend of mine, the very same who had betrayed me all those years ago and caused everything to go downhill for me! Oh how angry I was, how tempted to just let that clueless unicorn go alone and to never look back, but... I just couldn’t. I couldn’t, and that was for the best in the end. We talked, without her even realizing who I had been as a human, and I learned she’d never intended to betray me. It felt so good to realize that no, my best friend hadn’t hurt me on purpose..! “Together we succeeded, our rights were reaffirmed, things were looking up! “That is, until we got the next punch right in the muzzle... See, we didn’t really get why we had been turned into ponies.” “Or at least most of us didn’t...” “Hey, you know I had my reasons. And you didn’t ask.” “As I was saying, most of us didn’t know. We had some pretty awful dreams of the creature Discord attacking Equestria, like is depicted at the end of the TV show, but beyond the traumatic experience of reliving almost every night the tragic end of a pony looking just like us and speaking in gibberish, it felt pretty distant from our immediate concerns. All this to say that we were pretty surprised when one of our new friends explained that we hadn’t been transformed into random ponies, but ones that did exist once, in the magical land of Equestria, until they were betrayed, and cursed. The events of that show were somehow real after all, and we had found ourselves the living refuges of whatever was left of the cursed ponies. Already pretty weird, right? Well, for me it was doubly so, once I found out that the pony Violette now looked like, and the one I had become, Amber Spire, were supposed to be mother and daughter! It wasn’t just that she reminded me of my best friend, but my pony was related to hers! No wonder I couldn’t let her go alone...” “And the same way, the original Sweetchard and Crispy had been an item too. In hindsight this and the other thing should’ve been obvious, but you know how it goes. Anyways, after that, for... reasons, our place in Toulouse wasn’t safe anymore, and we had to make ourselves scarce.” “For ‘reasons’, really..?” “Alright, I made a big dumb mistake. Then thanks to Violette’s boyfriend in the Ministry, we all got carted away to a little farm lost in the middle of nowhere, Coursac – in fact they were gathering ponies from all around the country, we were founding our own little community. “Thing is... You can look like a pony, doesn’t mean you know how to act like one. Most of us hadn’t even heard of the show before. So cut off from pretty much everything we’d known before, we kind of defaulted to the obvious: the three tribes. Earth ponies, unicorns, pegasi, we each focused on our own little group, and each new problem was blamed on the other two. Imagine, Amber here couldn’t even spend time with her pegasus boyfriend without taking pine cones to the head!” “Luisard is not and has never been my boyfriend and you know it, Chard! Don’t make things up, please.” “Spoilsport. Anyways, not only that, but it made life difficult for anyone not falling neatly into one of the tribes. As in, if you’re a mule, or some kind of zebra, or even just a little too weird. Or like Pippin, absolute cutie of a bat mare with mental issues. But with a little work from everybody, we did eventually manage to right things up and leave the silly tribe divide behind. Since then our little pony community of Coursac has been a real success! And, uh... Well, things were better after that. At least for most of us. Yeah, pretty nice really!” “Chard, we... I’m sorry, but can we really leave that out..?” “Uh? Oh. Yeah. That. Broke up with Crispy. Ran away like a dumb colt, and ran right into the Brigade. Couldn't run at all anymore after that. How’s that for a lesson to the stallion who kept running away from things..?” “I... I'm sorry, I know how difficult these days were for you, how it's still difficult, and...” “Don't sweat it Amber, I get it. And you're right, nothing good comes out of hiding from the past. T’was hard enough to get that into my noggin, best to live with it now. Besides, you didn't exactly have a grand ol' time yourself if I recall?” “Ugh yeah, where to even start..? You know how we talked about why we were changed into ponies? Well turns out we had it wrong. We hadn't been just, like, at some cosmic ‘wrong place, wrong time’ thing during our twenty-fifth birthday, to end up hosting these poor ponies' souls after they'd been cursed by Discord, no. “Instead, these ponies had been cursed twenty-five years ago, and forcefully reincarnated into human newborns... Ponies then forced to unknowingly live as these humans, for ‘Five Score, Divided by Four’, or twenty-five, years, and to then change back, minus their Equestrian memories. “So Violette had really been my mom in this previous life, I'd always been some form of Amber Spire, even as Ambre the human, and Sarah had always been Sweetchard, and... Well you get it. In retrospect, it made a dreadful amount of sense.” “Would've been easier to figure out if the dumb draconoodle had been speaking French...” “Well that too. But that's not all! Not only was Equestria real, and we had been the ponies cast off to Earth all along, we also learned that the very heroes of the TV show, the ‘Mane Six’, were also around and trying to find a way back to bring the fight to Discord! Princess Luna herself came to me to tell us that, and to do our best to come join them. “Only problem was... well, they're in the US, and we're here. I didn't know what to do, it felt like everybody was expecting me to find the way there, ‘cause it's supposed to be my special talent, but... But instead I found something else. Or it found me, I'm still not quite sure... “Something was lurking under Coursac, something old, and not from Earth. It wanted back to Equestria, just like us, and... And it used me. Got its dark magic inside my head, and deeper still... Made me turn against my friends. Against Mom. If not for them all I wouldn't have made it, but I... I still have that stain in me, I can just feel it, always threatening to crawl back to the surface, making me angry, and... Well, let’s just say I couldn’t bear staying in Coursac anymore after that.” “Yeah... I'm sorry I just wasn't in a good headspace to help, Amber.” “It's all right Chard, I understand.” “Wasn't anything close to what you went through, but I couldn't stay either. Too painful to stay around Crispy after what happened. We agreed to keep our distance, for both our sake, even after we found out she was with foal – and don't get any ideas, that's something that must've carried over from Equestria! But uh, yeah...” “Yeah indeed... Oh, Laurence? Don't you want to say something too? We're both pretty much done, but we didn't get your side of the story.” “What, you want me to spew out my whole life history too?” “Er, that's kind of why we're here...” “Dammit. Okay, uh... I'm Laurence, I'm human. Yes I know it doesn't show, and no, no other name, so don't even think about it. Lost an eye in a stupid attempt at getting myself killed, gained the knowledge I carry a legacy of everlasting shame. Followed these two around and fought bad guys on the side. Got myself a little tyke named Dusky who follows me around like a lost puppy. “Had to go see my parents, ended up improving my relationship with my mom, if you can believe it. Met this poor Élise girl at the same time, who was going through the same shit as us. Helped her out, fought more bad guys, she stayed with her own family to try and do some pony awareness stuff on her side of the country. Left Coursac for good because as you saw I can't leave these two alone or they get into all kinds of trouble. Violette wanted to go directly to the top to try to improve things, and that's why we're in Paris now, working with the Ministry, and feeding this ‘get to know us better’ spiel to anybody like you they have us meet. There, done.” “Er, that's...” “Oh come on, you didn't even mention the fight in the meat locker, or the rooftop escape, or the Discord thing!” “Ugh, fine. Dusky got possessed by Discord. Did not-so-great things under the influence. I practiced exorcism illegally, now happy adoptive mother of a small foal with an adult's life experience in his head. The end.” “Dang you're really no fun. There was a whole showdown in a house of mirrors and everything!” “I don't care for your definition of ‘fun’, Chard. I like ‘boring and predictable’. We’ve managed to avoid any kind of ridiculous shenanigans since we’ve got here, and I damn sure hope it stays that way! “... “Fuck. I've jinxed it again, haven't I..?”