I woke the next morning feeling distinctly unlike myself. A foreign object flew at my face and slammed into my new muzzle.

Oh, yeah. I'm a horse now. Thank you for the reminder.

AJ's tour was lengthy, especially considering the sheer size of the farm. It nearly circled a whole half of the town. This was the kind of farm that could feed thousands of people, but there were only a few hundred living in the town centre. I couldn't imagine them exporting them anywhere, but maybe I was being presumptuous about how good this operation was.

Mac had spent the entire dinner avoiding looking at me. A sobering realization had hit me when I'd laid in bed that evening, maybe he wanted to smash me. I was a mare now, and I wasn't so virginal as to not understand what the average guy is thinking about when an attractive woman is nearby. Not that I know what's attractive to small, coloured horses anyway. So an ominous air had started to linger over my head; like a stormfront approaching the west coast. Eventually I'd have to accept the idea that horny ponies would be thinking about fucking me.

What a world. Maybe little baby ponies were born through immaculate conception.

Thankfully I had work to look forward to, to take my mind of such horrible things. I trotted down the stairs and into the living room area. AJ was already up and about, even before the sunrise. She sat in front of the fire, casting a harsh shadow across the darkened room.

"Good morning Applejack," I greet her. The cowboy hat wearing pony turned to me with a smile.

"Good mornin', nice to see that you've got the hardest part out of the way already!"

"I'm used to early mornings, I did this for a living you know. Is Mac up?"

"He sped off, he was up before me, when was the last time that happened?" AJ pondered. She turned back and slided a metal plate towards me. On it was... hay? "Breakfast, can't get to farming on an empty stomach!" I pulled the plate towards me with no small amount of hesitation. Obviously I could eat it, otherwise AJ wouldn't offer but...

When in Rome...

I held the plate up to my face and slurped up the hay like stiff, unappealing spaghetti. The interior of my mouth was much tougher, so it wasn't so much of a problem to eat as I thought. The taste was another matter entirely, dry like cereal without milk. The texture was also pretty poor, it crumbled to pieces in my mouth with every bite. I felt like I was eating sawdust.

"Not sure I'm a fan of this," I said with a grimace.

"Aw, I'm sure you'll get used to it. Ya' don't eat hay to enjoy it, it'll keep you going until lunchtime."

"Well it's no worse than the food I got on the old farm I guess."

"That's the spirit!" she hollered, clapping me on the back. Applejack was a pretty big mare, much larger than Twilight, but being so close to her really drove home just how big I was. Was this a result of the transformation conversing my mass, compressing my big human body down into a small package? I had a million and one questions and no answers aside from the few that Twilight let slip.

"Alright Toffee, this here is your classic Sweet Apple Acres apple tree," Applejack said, posing towards said tree. It was quite large, with a bushy green top and several apples spread throughout it's branches. "Now, most ponies go about harvesting their crop by picking em', but these are tough old stallions, selectively bred through decades of apple farming! Which means..."

Applejack swings around. I could see the muscles underneath her coat tense as she reared up and unleashed an almighty kick against the trunk of the tree. Despite the impact, the bark doesn't even shatter, instead the whole tree shakes and wobbles, forcing nearly every apple to fall from the branch and into selectively placed baskets.

That was... something. Applejack noticed my slack-jawed stare. Suddenly she became bashful, blushing and crossing one leg in front of the other. "Hah, we're uh, kinda' famous for this actually."

"So you want me to learn how to do that?"

"Yup! It makes the work fly by! Now, I 'ain't taught nopony how to do this before, but you look like you can handle doing it."

"Have you seen the size of me, I might end up cracking the tree in half."

"Don't be silly girl! Come on over here and try it out!"

I approached the tree and turned myself around to face Applejack. I'd learnt how to control my body enough to kick something, hopefully. "Now, you don't wanna' hit the side of the tree, that's how you end up chipping off the bark instead of shaking it. Take your time, aim carefully at the middle there," she explained, pointing to the centre of the tree, slightly below the height of my rear. For Applejack, that was an upward kick, but for me it was actually lower. "Make sure you get both hooves on it at the same time so you get the maximum impact."

I sighed to myself and orientated my hooves to a wider stance, just kick it, that's easy enough right? I tensed my legs in preperation, for some reason Applejack looked increasingly worried. With my eyes on the target I let loose witha thunderous kick. There was the sound of my blunt hooves hitting the wood, but also a much higher crack. I daren't look back and witness the damage that I'd just caused. Applejack covered her eyes with a hoof and grumbled something under her breath.

"I messed up your tree, didn't I?"

"I shoulda' told you to hold back. Darn it."

I glanced back to witness the huge fissure that I'd somehow managed to create in the middle of the trunk. I could see through it to the next row. "Has this ever happened before?"

"Mac did it once. I shoulda' guessed with your size and all. We'll live with one less tree, but uh... maybe hold back next time."

The next time had gone much better, with me holding back a little bit. This time the apple wobbled themselves off of the branches and into the buckets just like she'd shown me. Applejack told me that learning how to put the baskets in the right place was the real challenge, but that I'd get used to it with experience. After that AJ had asked me to go around the orchard and kick any tree that was ready to be harvested while she went and put out more buckets.

So I did.

The orchard was truly massive, I couldn't believe that the entire thing was managed by just two or three ponies. There isn't much else to say, other then that I kicked many trees for several hours. I was only pulled away from the work when Applejack approached me and said it was break time. We treaded back to the house and into the kitchen, where Big Mac was already chowing down on some kind of salad, of course, it had apples in it.

I liked chicken a lot when I was back home. But the Apples took it to another level, they were named after them, had apple themed furniture, worked on a big apple farm and ate almost nothing that didn't have apples in it. Surely they must get sick of Apples once in a while? They were good, really good, the best apples I'd ever tasted. But that can only get you so far when there's a world of other things to try as well.

I'm getting off track again. Mac was so hyper-focused on eating that salad that he didn't even notice us until we took our own seats at the little horse table. He nodded to his sister, but seemed to shy away from doing the same for me. A deep feeling of second-hand... second-hoof embarassment settled into my chest like a lead weight. I silently hoped that AJ would never mention her brother's obvious crush in my god forsaken presence. I shot her a glance that could cut steel, and whatever words were building in her mouth faded away. She rolled her eyes instead and wordlessly began to eat her own meal.

An awkward silence had settled in the room again. I was really good at doing that it seemed. The three of us polished off our plates without sharing a single word. Applejack, as brave as ever, endevoured to break this silence. "Looks like you've got right to it Toffee! I saw a lot of apples on the way back."

It's an orchard, there's always apples...

"Ya' didn't break open any more trees, did you?"

"Nope."

"See, nothing to worry about, you're a natural!"

"Eeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyup," Mac drawled, delivering perhaps the longest euyp ever spoken by anyone. "Be gentle with tha' trees," he continued.

"You should have seen the look on her face," Applejack sniggered, her freckle covered cheeks redening.

"Huh? You should have seen yours!" I responded angrily. "I thought I was gonna' get in serious trouble you know."

"Nah, we'll just ask Twilight to help fix em' up. I'm sure she has some crazy spell that can help." I wasn't so sure about that. Twilight was amazing, the magic was amazing, but part of me felt that she couldn't just solve every problem by using it. If it was that easy I'd be home already, and not sitting having lunch with two talking ponies.

Mac looked upon the conversation with his usual range of emotion, none. Perhaps he found something interesting about the way me and Applejack spoke to each other. "Where ya' from?" he eventually asked. My mind scrambled for a second as I thought back to the Twilight Sparkle approved backstory that she'd given me. "I heard that ya' got a fancy degree in farming. You from Manehattan?" A lightbulb turned on in my brain.

"Oh, yeah, I'm from Manehattan. My family... aren't farmers though. It's more of a personal passion. I worked on other ponies' farms mostly." Big Mac nodded along with my tall tale as I explained how I came into possession of a degree that didn't exist. I had the knowledge, but the piece of paper was still back on Earth.

"She's a good fit Mac. She's got a big noggin' so maybe she can help make the farm even better than it is already!" Mac nodded along to the sales pitch. Despite the lecture that AJ had given me about being honest back in the library she backed me up, I suppose explaining that I was an alien from another world who got turned into a (allegedly) attractive mare was a step too far even for her. Would Big Mac even believe her if she said that? If honesty was as big of a deal as she said, maybe he would.

I re-told some of my old stories (ponified for a new audience.) I needed to project something about myself, to make Toffee seem real.

Peer pressure sure is a bitch.

A few days ago I was distraut at the idea of losing my old body, but now I was bullshitting other people and telling them that I'd always been like this. Was I worried about the way other people would react if they knew the real me? The foul mouthed, lonely little farmer from bumfuck nowhere? Some things stay the same no matter how much I try to change them.

This pony, Toffee, the pony that Applejack introduced to her brother abruptly the other day to work on their farm. What was really different about her? Her looks? Her way of speaking? In the end I'm still me, I just look different. I could lie, but I know that I'd be found out eventually, a slip of the tongue, or AJ walking back on what we'd said and the whole thing could come crashing down around me. What'd even happen if that was the case?

Toffee is me, but a liar.

I didn't have the right to even step into the same house as Applejack, knowing what I know about her now. In retrospect, it was amazing that she even did what she did for me. I crossed a line that she never crosses, I made AJ lie for me. It's equal parts flattering and terrifying. What kind of pony is AJ to do that for a stranger? And after all she'd done for me at the point as well.

I rounded off my tale with these kinds of things swirling around my mind. I repeated it to myself to commit the story to memory, to make sure that I wouldn't contradict myself later. I lived in Manehattan, born to a normal family, at a young age I earned my cutie mark after cultivating plants on the balcony of our home. I went to school and college, one of the few in the country, and earned a degree in agriculture. I moved out and started doing odd jobs across the country, advising farming communities on how to be more efficient and protect the enviroment around them. Eventually I ended up in Ponyville without a job after my current one fell through. I embelished it with as many small details as I could, picking up on the things I'd seen and heard while staying at the library.

Mac squinted though.

He saw right through me from the very start. Their honesty was genetic, an instinct drilled into them by years of living among family.

But Mac is polite. So he didn't say a word; and maybe that was for the best.