Job One 1.4
Fluttershy is the best veterinarian in town. She's got a knack for animals, and manages a fairly large clinic located at the city limits. The clinic itself had a central building that resembled a small hospital, large glass windows, waiting room, smell of chemical disinfectant soap and all. The main building was flanked by green grass and a number of satellite buildings used to house larger animals and specialty cases. Some of them were specialized too. I had seen a large aquarium setup in one of them, and another resembled a large terrarium. There was a modest cottage perched atop a small hill farther away in the distance, maybe half a mile or so, that I presumed was her house.
There was a crowd of ponies at the clinic's entrance, right beside the large sign near the entrance that stated, simply, "Every animal deserves love and compassion." As I came closer I heard various sounds of panic, distress, and anger all coming up from the rabble. A sleek yellow form hovered a few feet above them, wings gently beating, head pivoting anxiously back and forth from face to face, mouth moving up and down faintly— though I couldn't tell if she was actually saying anything. Her normally gorgeous pink mane was heavily disheveled, as if she hadn't taken care of it in a few days.
I wondered what was going on. I hoped Blue was alright.
"Alright, alright folks! Simmer down now y'all!"
The crowd did just that, quieting down into a din of hushed whispers and grumbling. A light orange mare— earth pony, I noted— pushed her way through the crowd. She had a straw colored mane, most of it tucked underneath a brown cowpony hat, and she had a trio of apples for her cutie mark. She walked like she meant business, and moved through the crowd without bothering to wait for anypony to get out of her way. The mare made a one-eighty and leveled a stern glare at the crowd.
"Ain't none of this rabble rousin' is going to do a darn thing to fix the situation, now is it?" she asked. "How 'bout we all shuddup and let the gal speak?"
The yellow pegasus closed her eyes for a moment.
"Thank you, Applejack," Fluttershy said, nodding to the cowpony, looking like she was about one-quarter visibly relieved, and three quarters mind-numbing anxiety. She turned to the crowd, opening and closing her mouth a couple times.
"Um. I'm sorry that you're all so upset," she said, her voice as soft and quiet as a mouse. "Dr. Fauna and I are still investigating what's going on, but it seems a lot of the larger animals are experiencing some pretty bad digestion issues. Hopefully, we'll have everything sorted out within the next day or two, so if you can come back then that would be better. We're doing our best, but I'm sorry that you all have to wait a little longer, but if you want to go visit your pets, then you certainly can."
Fluttershy floated down to the ground. She seemed to deflate, almost literally, her neck and head slinking down as she appeared to halve her size. She looked down at her hooves as she gently tapped the grassy lawn with them.
"Thank you for understanding," Fluttershy finished, lamely.
I don't think anypony had the heart to argue with that. The crowd dispersed, most of them scattering in a bunch of different directions, while a few stayed behind to go see their animals in the larger holding pens behind the clinic. I approached Fluttershy and the cowpony— Applejack, apparently — to talk to them. The cowpony gave me a bit of a look, and raised a hoof as if to head me off. I quickly averted my gaze so that I didn't keep eye contact for more than an instant.
"Now, listen here missy, I think..." Applejack said. She looked like she was about to start in on me, but then she trailed off and got this puzzled look on her face. "Huh. I don' think I've seen you 'round these parts before."
Applejack pronounced her I's in a very country drawl, more like an "uh", really. I wondered absentmindedly which region of Equestria her dialect was from. Somewhere south of here, for sure.
While Applejack was getting ready to treat me like another member of the angry mob, Fluttershy looked over at me and her tired and sleepless eyes brightened slightly.
"Oh, I remember you," Fluttershy said, her voice more of a breath than not. "Twilight, right? You were here the other day to drop off that large blue rhinoceros beetle. You're new in town, here to be the new librarian?"
"Ayup," I nodded, "That's me. Twilight Sparkle, here to see my pet beetle."
Blue Beetle— who I affectionately called
The Blue Beetle, because it sounded pretty awesome— was named after a comic book character that I really liked. She had the heroic responsibility of being my trusty ride as we went to and fro, battling annoying minor errand after annoying minor errand, all in the name of eschewing meaningful amounts of exercise and anything resembling cardiovascular fitness. It was only natural that I thought the heroic naming scheme was fitting.
"Pardon my manners there, Twilight," Applejack said, now looking a little abashed. "Names Applejack, nice to meet ya." She stretched forth a hoof, and I put forward one of my own to give hers a light tap in greeting.
"I probably already introduced myself when you came by a few days ago, but just in case, I'm Fluttershy," Fluttershy said, stretching forth a foreleg. One more hooftap later and the round of introductions was complete. "I was just taking Applejack over to the same building, actually. Feel free to join us on the way there, although you don't really have to."
Okay, that was… surprisingly thoughtful in how it was worded.
"That sounds good to me," I said, falling in step with the other two as they turned to head towards one of the buildings in the back of the property. "So, it sounds like you've been having some sort of situation here?"
"Oh, yes," Fluttershy grimaced. "Dozens of animals with serious indigestion all at once. Either a bug has been going around— oh, dear, pun not intended, I'm sorry."
Wow, that's an almost pathological amount of consideration.
I waved her off. "Don't worry about it. Anyway, you were saying?"
"Right," she said. "Either somethings been going around the clinic and it's only been bothering the larger animals, or something is wrong with the animal feed. I can't think of anything else it could be. That's why I asked Applejack to come over today, actually, her family's ranch provides some of the produce that we use."
"And I said already, that I reckon it ain't something like that," Applejack said, bluntly. "We sell ya the bruised and battered ones for feed, which means you get a pile of random assorted fruits and veggies. "If it was something dangerous in
all the produce, then we'd be seeing a whole lot more than just a few big animals puking up their lunches. Sweet Apple Acres sells to the whole town."
Huh, that's where I get my feed from too, I thought. That could be a problem.
"That does sound pretty strange," I commented, as we arrived at a building with a sign that said "Large Insect Pen #3".
"Here we are."
The building was mostly empty, except for a reddish-brown pegasus at the other end that was walking from pen to pen with concerned interest. Blue was in the second pen from the right, and she looked absolutely exhausted. The poor girl was slumped down on the ground, mandibles and horn resting against a bed of hay. I walked over to the pen's fencing, and she perked up. I reached a leg through an opening in the fence, and she slowly scuttled over.
"Hey there girl," I said softly, tapping her chitinous exoskeleton lovingly. "Who deserves some headpats?"
Blue was a massive insect, her thorax was large enough to seat two ponies riding butt to butt, and her abdomen had enough space for a few more riders or a particularly large pile of luggage— that was exactly how I moved most of my stuff over here. She ate about two bushels of apples a day, along with an assortment of various other vegetable refuse and some light afternoon grazing.
(It was somewhat concerning to me that on average, and going purely by the financial data, I ate the
least out of my entire household by about an order of magnitude, especially given that one of the members of our household was about a fifth of my size. Perhaps that's not a fair way to measure it, but I'm the one paying the bills there. Oh well.)
I could tell that something was wrong. My mane stood on end, and I suddenly felt a greasy feeling in the pits of my stomach, as if I had swallowed a bucket full of butter.
Magic.
Duh! I almost kicked myself for not connecting the dots sooner: this was probably related to the thing from Celestia's letter! What were the chances that they just happened to be two entirely separate events that were completely independent? No, no, this was not a coincidence.
I looked down at Blue, and started opening up my Sight to try to investigate.
Remember how I was talking about how magic was similar to a force of the universe, like gravity? That's true. It's also all around us, in various subtle ways. The Sight was a term for the sense that wizards have the ability to use (once you're trained in how to properly open yourself up to See, that is) and it allows the wizard to sense the undercurrents of the arcane that flow all around them, and most importantly, actually process that information as various types of sensory input. The most useful of these was obviously vision— hence the name— but sound, taste, smell, touch, all of those senses were completely hammered with feedback when you used the Sight. It was an incredibly useful tool, and I would probably be using mine
literally all the time to satisfy my titanic curiosity in all sorts of ways, if it weren't for one massive, glaring, critical flaw:
The things you experienced with the Sight were burned into your memory. Forever.
So if you Saw the wrong thing, if you heard the wrong sound, smelled a smell that was never meant to be experienced, touched a horror beyond imagining, or tasted a thingy most foul…
It could be goodbye, sanity. Each time you used it, it could be a one way trip to the loony bin, if you weren't careful. Even in the average case, you wanted to be careful with the Sight, because stacking together a massive pile of intensely-unforgettable memories just wasn't something that mortal minds were meant to cope with.
But I knew Blue, and I had no reason to believe there was anything around me that was particularly dangerous, so hopefully it would merely grant me some info that I could put to good use.
I opened up my Sight, and the world entered technicolor. I tried very hard not to look back at Applejack or Fluttershy — though my curiosity at what they would look like with my Sight up was eating me alive. I just looked at Blue. Blue was still a massive rhinoceros beetle, which was something I expected. I saw the sapphire color of her insect body starkly and how it starkly contrasted with... it was almost like the entirety of her body was covered with this cloud of weird yellow-green smoke. As I looked, the smell of rotten eggs suffused my nostrils, and I tasted gunk and bile on my tongue. Eugh.
That's definitely new. Maybe some sort of… magical sickness? A vomiting curse? Who would do something like that? That didn't really fit into the category of "black magic" though, now that I thought about it, so that was sort of weird. Well, at least I had some tangible info on why all these animals were sick.
I twitched as a loud bang — the sound of a bucket clanking loudly into a bunch of others, I think— rang out from behind me. I swiveled instinctively, accidentally Seeing a whole lot more than I expected.
Applejack was like looking at the ponyfication of a stone pillar. A strong wooden support beam that simply
existed, as plain as the day is long. There was a quiet strength echoing from how she stood in the pen, as if she half expected to have to put the world on her back and start walking forward. As if she woke up this morning knowing that what awaited her was a day of ceaseless and thankless work, and knew that she would go to bed tonight only to wake up to the same thing the next morning, and so on, a thousand thousand times. I could See all of that, and I could See little frustrations and fears and regrets, as if she was wearing her heart on her flank.
It was… oddly refreshing. Fluttershy though?
Looking at Fluttershy while using the Sight was like getting blasted with the mystical equivalent of a bottle of anti-anxiety pills mixed with ten cups of Manehattan espresso with a shot of adrenaline and a soothing massage on top. The trio of pink butterflies that made up her cutie mark floated gently off her skin, and orbited her head. It was like… she was simultaneously the mortal
incarnation of a mental health breakdown internally, but that externally she was… just…
Smiling.
She was just smiling anyway, just to make you feel better, just for you.
And it almost made my eyes tear up, to See somepony like that.
But unfortunately Applejack and Fluttershy weren't the only ponies I saw, since I also managed to get a glimpse of the other pony in the stable as my head swiveled.
And that
terrified me.
Because that pony? That pony wasn't a pony at all. When I glimpsed that pony under the Sight, I saw a heaving mass of flesh and sinew being drawn tight over a quadrupedal monster, an insidious, fanged, furry,
batlike creature that was only pretending to be a pony. I looked at that… that
thing, and I could feel sticky liquid running down my face, a coppery taste in my mouth, and a sick sense of wrongness in my gut.
I shut my Sight off immediately and closed my eyes.
Deep quiet breaths, Twilight, deep quiet breaths. Don't let it know that you know.
"Are you alright, Twilight?" Fluttershy asked. "You look like you're in a lot of pain."
A rasping breath escaped through my teeth.
"Yeah," I lied, as my adrenaline shot through the roof, and then some. "I'm totally fine. It's just painful seeing her this way."
I was not, in fact, totally fine.
I was, in fact, twenty feet away from a vampony of the Red Court.
And it was walking this way.
Fudge.
AN:
Pros: Early chapter, decent wordcount.
Cons: Enjoy yet another cliffhanger!
