Ponyfication Nation
by
Princess Columbia
(a.k.a. Christy “Dame Helen” McFarland)
Disclaimer: My Little Pony - Friendship is Magic is not mine, now go away before I banish you to the moon.
Author’s note: Yes, there’s quite a bit of Self-insert-Mary-Sueism in this fic. If you don’t like it, don’t read it. Yes, I’m aware I’ve driven away my audience with that.
Chapter 1
The Night. That’s what the press have started calling it since the change started happening. Nobody is really quite sure why, but the changes only happened once a given timezone had rotated away from exposure to the sun.
The changes were, of course, first notice on Twitter. At first no-one took it seriously. It was assumed that “OMG, woke up as a pony! #ponyfication” was a joke, a new meme that rode on the popularity of the TV show “My Little Pony - Friendship is Magic,” but then the video hit YouTube.
Amongst the usual cat vids and yet another dumbass kid dropping their crotch onto a stair rail as they attempted a skateboard trick came a video of a talking pony. Pastel colored, as one would expect from the show, but shockingly lifelike. Interacting with physical objects in the room, perspective was perfect. Within seconds accusations that the video was faked and was a stunt from Hasbro to promote the upcoming season of the show from which the meme came. Debates started raging on 4chan, ponychan, Equestria Daily comments, Facebook pages...even the transgender social network Pink Essence got in on the act since the pony in the video was a female who claimed to have been male before it happened, presenting a sort of twisted ray of hope to the transgender community site.
It remained something to be dismissed as a trivial fan phenomenon with an odd twist until eight hours after the start of the phenomenon. With the first tweet of the phenomenon coming from Hawaii and the video coming from Australia, it was only natural that there be no serious societal problems that should arise. While the idea of a person spontaneously transfiguring into a pony wasn’t one that could ever be taken seriously, at the least the inclination in so-called “western” nations would be to first quarantine then examine the subject. The third-world nations of asia and the middle east were not quite so...liberal.
The next video was the game changer. It showed a pony, a pegasus, tied by it’s neck and hooves with a horrible clamp fashioned from jumper cables pinning it’s wings together. It was being slowly dragged behind a car as veiled women and heavily bearded men threw stones at it. Even to this day, the poor pony’s gender has never been determined, due to the poor quality of the video and what happened next.
Some sicko backed another car up to the pony, and the jumper cables, still clamped to the wings, were looped over the car’s tow-hitch. Later analysis of the video’s audio track revealed the men driving the car’s counting down. It was hoped that there would be something to identify them, but all that could be heard was the arabic words for “three...two...one...” The revving of the engines, the chanting of the crowd, and all the background noise was drown out briefly by the terror and pain filled shrieks from the pony as it’s wings were ripped off. When it wouldn’t stop screaming, a terrible mix of a human-like voice and the high-pitched neighing screech equines have, some of the men from the crowd stepped forward with makeshift clubs from rebar, broken chairs, whatever they could find, and silenced the pony with their violence. It was dead in minutes.
The worst part, and what caused the entire free world to stop and take notice, was that the pony was clearly a child. It was a tiny pony, and there was no cutiemark.
The executives at Hasbro were woken in the middle of the night by media inquiries. The mainstream media was still treating the videos and social media storm as nothing more than a publicity stunt, now taken a terrible turn for pure tastelessness. The PR department from Hasbro, now on very good terms with the brony community, quickly and vigorously denied any involvement and began making calls.
At first the calls didn’t make it through to the nominal “leaders” of the bronies, the ones who’d organized events like BroNYcon and sites like Equestria Daily. Indeed, the mostly American editorial staff of EQD were in bed and weren’t expected to be awake for several hours yet. The European bronies who were awake and able to receive emails and Skype calls also denied any involvement in any viral campaign or marketing stunt. It was only when the Down Under bronies were finally contacted on video-chat that things went pear-shaped.
When the first brony who’d been ponyfied managed to answer, (hooves being significantly harder to use a mouse and keyboard with quickly) Hasbro and the bronies started comprehending the full import of what was happening.
Naturally, the governments were trying to keep things quiet. The middle eastern governments, especially Pakistan, where the first pony torture video came from, denied the phenomenon was occurring. The more progressive government were stuck. They didn’t want to openly acknowledge the issue, but as usual for governments they were slow to move. This proved to be a saving grace for the ponyfied ex-humans, as by the time any western government might have actually done something on the national level, it was already too late.
By the time the United State’s eastern seaboard started waking up, the Eurobronies were nearly to the last one ponyfied. Only those countries with an exceptionally high count of migrants from third world countries had any problems with violence, and those movements were quashed almost as soon as they started, especially when some of the police turned out to be converted bronies. It turns out that unicorn police, even those with less than three hours of experience with their magic, can hurl a shockingly large number of tear gas canisters with startling precision, and pegasus ponies, even when they’ve only been flying for the few hours since they woke up with hooves instead of hands that morning, are unbeatable at crowd control.
As news reports began showing more and more ponies, now in the uncountable tens of thousands and climbing, emerging from their homes. Some fearful, some proud, some just plain too happy for words, it was suddenly clear that there was a new minority population in the world and they were it. The morning news was blanketed with pastel furred faces, some with wings, others with horns, and not a few bouncing and doing just plain impossible things as the made their way to school, work, or just to be out in the world as ponies.
A mere five hours later, the remainder of the Americas was being swept into the light of day, including the state of Arizona.
This is where my story begins.
I was woken up with a scream
While I wish I could say that waking up to my wife screaming was unusual...it wasn’t. She had a habit of slamming her toes or knees or shins into things, or stepping on one of our daughter’s many plastic toys which had a habit of landing with their sharpest point up. Many people do that and it’s not a huge deal, but the problem in my wife’s case is she tends to scream like an axe murderer is charging her even if the problem is merely a stubbed toe.
Never the less, given she isn’t always over-reacting and sometimes actually has something truly important to be screaming about, I started awake and promptly smacked my head on the ceiling.
...what? I’m tall, but not THAT tall! Now hissing swear words under my breath, I flopped back down to the mattress, a couple of pieces of drywall raining down around my head. Instinct only kept any of it from landing in my eyes, and all the while my wife was still screaming.
“OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO ME? WHAT’S GOING ON? WHO ARE YOU?” and on and on, pretty much simply repeating those three questions over and over again. This, of course, set off our four year old daughter.
My gorgeous daughter, quite literally the best anti-depressant God could ever have given me, is also “on the spectrum.” While not diagnosed with Autism, she displays some autistic qualities, most notably difficulty with language, so when there’s some sort of crisis that requires immediate attention to either my wife or my daughter, I usually pick my daughter so as to calm her down and get that under control, then I’ll move on to my wife.
While my home, no matter where I chose to make it, has never been...tidy, I did not expect that when I launched myself out of my bed aiming for the general direction of the door the untidyness of it would cause me to take any sort of serious tumble. For the record, while Ikea furniture is inexpensive and looks good for the price, having it impact one’s ribcage at any angle is decidedly unpleasant. Practically growling in frustration, pain, and the slow process my brain has of waking up, I wasn’t quite connecting the problems I was having with standing up on two legs with something I should be particularly worried about, as I was still making good progress on all fours, pretty much the same wobbly, weaving, seemingly drunken gait I usually have when I’m woken from deep sleep.
Out the door of the bedroom, ‘round the bend into the living room, casually flicking the occasional toy out from under me whenever I happened to land a limb on it, past the kitchen, aim my bleary, sleep-knackered vision at the back door, stop short, turn left and...
...there was a small white alicorn filly in my daughter’s bed, crying in my daughter’s voice, calling for Mommy. Her mane and tail were a bright pink, cut in the style my daughter went to bed with, tussled and mussed like it usually was (she ALWAYS looked like she had bed-head, even right after brushing, which somehow just made her look more cute). The filly turned her head to face me, eyes looking at me like she’d never seen me before, and said, “Prinsis Slessea?”
When one is a parent, the longer one interacts with their child the more one recognizes the different quirks of personality. In the case of a child where every single word, be it noun, verb, or (in this case) proper name that is correctly connected with the concept it represents marks a huge milestone in that child’s development, said parent can pick that child out in a crowd of hundreds based on their pronunciation alone.
“F...Freya?!” I gasped out, and upon doing so I heard my own voice clearly for the first time that morning. That, more than anything else, cut through the fog of sleep that seems to occupy my skull for the first half hour of any given day. I raised a hand to my throat, only to find that my hand felt very strange against a particularly fuzzy throat. I glanced down and found my hand...wasn’t a hand. I was looking at a massive wedge of what looked like hardened, compacted fingernail in horseshoe shape wrapping around a pad of flesh that twitched and flexed when my brain sent commands down the limb to flex fingers that weren’t there. This was and wasn’t an equine hoof, though my knowledge of equine anatomy was fairly scant, so I chose to put the oddness aside for the moment and focus more on the current issues, notably that in addition to the hoof I was staring at was white, so was the fetlock, and the hair on what I was now realizing was an equine limb...
“...holy cats, I’m a horse!” aaaand there was that voice again. Yes, I said the words, but that wasn’t my voice. Or more accurately, the words came out of my mouth, and the vocal chords in my throat flexed and vibrated to produce the sounds, but it was pitched at least two octaves higher than the voice I went to bed with. Plus, I’ll be candid, it sounded nice! My normal speaking voice was...OK. I’ve been complimented on how I use it on the podcasts I used to do with some friends online, and I’ve made good use of it in singing groups in the past, but I held no illusions that it was spectacular or anything. In fact, If I wasn’t careful, I could easily slip into an irritating, nasally, monotone that irritates more than anything else. But the sounds my throat were now producing? They were flat-out gorgeous.
Meanwhile, the little filly in my daughter’s bed had resumed her crying. My Daddy Instinct reared up in my brain and started bludgeoning my critical thinking skills and started demanding immediate action. “Freya?” I started, getting the small creature’s attention. She paused her crying and looked at me incomprehensibly again. “Freya, it’s Daddy, really!”
She took a shuddering breath, “...daddy?”
I smiled at her, “That’s right, munchkin! Come here, give daddy a hug!” Carefully, mindful of my drastically different center of gravity, I lowered my dock to the floor and sat as best I could while holding out my forelegs, wiggling my hooves like I would normally do with my fingers to beckon her closer. I watched as she used her front hooves to push her hindquarters to the edge of her bed and lower her rear hooves to the floor. Thinking fast, I said, “You’d better crawl, kiddo...” I was really hoping whatever groove her brain was using for communications wouldn’t skip for this. Fortunately, she seemed to get the idea and dropped her forehooves to the floor. She started moving toward me, very tentatively at first, then rushing as fast as she could across the remaining three feet that separated us, plowing into my freshly re-located breasts. While she had done similar impacts against my sensitive bits before...whatever...happened, the sensation only further highlighted the physical changes I had undergone in my sleep. I was in no position to confirm “for sure” that I was a mare, but it was quite clear from what I could see of the space between my legs that I was not a stallion.
“...ooooowww!” I groaned, holding my daughter close as my body kicked out endorphins to overwhelm the pain.
As my daughter’s sobbing started quieting down to sighs and hiccups, I heard her say in a questioning voice, “Prisses Luna?” Curious, I looked down to see Freya looking off to her right, so I turned to my left and saw...
I suppose that I shouldn’t have been surprised, but when one sees what appears to be the Princess of the Moon in one’s apartment, no matter what the surrounding circumstances, one can find oneself pretty damn surprised, especially if said pony princess was apparently coming from one’s bedroom.
It was about that time I realized that I could no longer hear my wife’s screaming...from the bedroom.
I will say that the connection was more intuitive at the time, but in retrospect it was a fairly obvious connection to make, what with me holding my ponified daughter and apparently having turned into a pony of some sort myself, “...JoLene?”
Freya looked up at me, and showing that her language development problems were simply covering up a massively talented intellect, turned to face the newest mare and said, “Mommy?”
The darker mare, wings flexing on her back and eyes flashing with uncertainty and fear, shakily replied, “C...Chris? Freya? Is that you?”
I looked her in the eye and said The Word.
To clarify, what came out of my mouth was not “the word,” exactly as you have read it here. The Word, in this case, is the one word that, by common agreement, we would use to let the other know that, “Yes, this is me, I’m the one communicating it to you.” It was my idea to have A Word, but I admit the actual Word came from my wife. I got the idea from a Superman comic, wherein Clark Kent, a.k.a. Superman, would be able to pass messages to his wife Lois Lane-Kent via third parties and both would be able to trust the message and the messenger. In their case it was a phrase, Beef Bourguignon with Ketchup, but through circumstances that I cannot reveal here as they are very personal and private (and my wife would kill me if I told it), we wound up with a single word.
JoLene slumped down, and fortunately made it nearly to the floor before she fainted out cold.