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The Conversion Bureau - Aftermath of Miscalculations

by Dan_s Comments

Chapter 2: Celebration

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The Conversion Bureau - Aftermath of Miscalculations
Celebration
by Dan's Comments

DISCLAIMER: My Little Pony is the property of Hasbro, Inc.


'The potion is the best thing to ever happen to anypony.' A misquote, but an apt one. There have been endless questions about why Celestia launched her attack on a planet that never did her or her ponies any harm. The simplest answer is she was a god and could do as she wished. That a devout atheist spouted that garbage was telling about the effect the potion had on their minds. I've always been a scientist and an engineer, so that made no logical sense. The sudden influx put a huge burden on their infrastructure, many starved, and some starved to death in the first few years. Then there was the drought of cutie marks, magic being stretched thin among so many new users. But if you accept not what they said, but what they did as their true selves, then it all fell into place.

I was an early 'experiment'. The adoration of Celestia was not as great as in later, more `successful` marks. But I was stripped of my ability to feel anger, and I was stripped of my ability to say 'no'. Think about that one for a moment. As long as some one, sorry, somepony demanded my submission in the name of Celestia, and had a halfway decent justification, I literally couldn't refuse them.

Which explains why I was sent to the Canterlot police headquarters, not as a scientist, but as a `comfort stallion`. I was intelligent enough to understand what they were saying and make appropriately witty conversation, but after a hard day of beating up the ever-shrinking number of dissident, and hiding the sometimes over-the-top abuse of Newfoals who couldn't fight back, they have to have a session, with another Newfoal who couldn't fight back. For a race who nearly exterminated each other on their own hatreds, having something to finally vent their baser instincts on without the danger of summoning the Windingos was a gift from their god. And Hell on Equus for the rest of us.

Yes, that's the big reason for the destruction of our people, our culture, our homes and everything we were, the ponies needed a chew toy. Expecting an end of their bullying nature was too much for even a thousand years of socialization to take care of. That they continually rubbed our noses in how terrible we were, while being worse to us should have been infuriating, if we could have become angry. But we couldn't, so we soldiered on. It was that or die in our billions. Had we known, there would have been far more suicides upon ponification. It was that realization that inspired me.

Getting out of the Canterlot police merely took arriving in `geisha` mindset to a party where Princess Luna was hosting. I doubt Princess Celestia would have cared, but Luna was still smarting from her attempt to exterminate this world. She still had a sliver of a conscience, and she also realized how much of the treasuries money was going to government officials keeping 'pets' like me.

I doubt the investigation went anywhere, but I did get anonymously shipped off to Baltimare, where I got a job as a chemist in a perfume factory. Now I know what you're thinking: poisons/explosives. Yes, I could have made those, but I'd never be able to use them. My conditioning was too strong. So I used that conditioning.

One of the reasons I didn't embarrass my colleagues earlier was I had gone looking for something, and as a `police scientist` I had rights to go places that civilians could not, and as their play-toy, I could always say that I couldn't reveal who sent me to go looking. Newfoals can't really lie either, but I wasn't about to tell them that I sent myself, so it wasn't a lie either. In all the 'failed' versions of the potion, was a secret one that worked on ponies, they all did that, although most ponies don't know/believe that, but this one worked on them slowly. Not days or weeks, but minutes instead of seconds. Since they were already equinoids, all that changed was their mind.

Imagine feeling your will, your entire self, being consumed slowly, and a horrible parody of it being overwritten in its place. All the darker drives that give you ambition and independence being sucked away and replaced with the recent-convert's muddle-headed, fuzzy devotion. Now imagine it happening not too fast for it to register or too slowly to chart the change, but just right, so you are aware of each step along the way. Not driving to the local store in a fast car, but walking there step by step.

The lab in the perfume factory let me synthesize this potion. Perfumes use all kinds of wild ingredients, so no one looked at my requests askance, and I did test some of those materials in blends. Some gave surprisingly useful results, so nopony objected to my 'puttering around with weird stuff'.

It took a few months, but I had a dose. And I had a target, one of the leading PER members lived in Baltimare. I was still a desirable stallion, so when I was sent 'as a gift' to her penthouse apartment, the doorpony just winked and let me in. Before we 'started', I slipped some potion in her champagne. The effect was everything I'd hoped for. She went crazy as her mind was stripped away.

When she demanded to know why I did this, I told her, 'The potion is the best thing to ever happen to anypony.' I left her, after telling her all she could expect as a Newfoal, once everyone figured out that she was. And that there would be nothing all her money, hero status, or contacts could do to save her.

She had a bottle of sleeping pills in her cabinet, I got them out and left them on her table as I slipped out. Her mind and will was still degrading when I left, but I knew she had a little willpower left. And considering she was feeling it, I knew I had a winner.

The next morning confirmed it. She'd taken the pills and overdosed. Part of me, the part grafted on by the potion was utterly horrified. A pony taking her own life? After being exposed to the potion? Despite literally knowing the whys and hows, that part of me could not believe anyone could do it.

The police ruled it a suicide and dropped the investigation. I had some vacation time, so I traveled to a nearby city of Fillydelphia, and looked up a prominent member of the PER. And dosed them. This time, I was careful that my visit was known only to my recipient, I cannot think of them as my victim, despite as much as handing them the gun and watching them shoot themselves. This time though, I stayed around to ask him questions. If he enjoyed his new status as a Newfoal, if he thought he'd fit in with his circle of friends once they found out, and if he thought the humans he'd done this to really were out of line by being horrified by having this happen to them. I left the home without answers, but reading about another suicide in the papers told me what I needed to know. That while ponies might talk about the wonders of ponification, and the Newfoals were programmed to think it wonderful, when a thinking, sentient, sapient creature was subjected to it, they were horrified and when possible took their own life as their last act as a free being.

Even true believers did, when faced with it happening to them. It's always okay when it happens to the other guy, but when it happens to you, it stops being so wonderful.

Over the next couple months, I hit random, proudly pontificating PER ponies. Soldiers and spokesponies, terrorists and propagandists. Six targets, six suicides. I decided to kick it up a notch. The Grand Galloping Gala next year would bring all the PER members for an awards ceremony, as well as the Element Bearers and the viceroys of the Crystal Empire. I had nearly a year to get ready.

Every town would be part of the planning and set up committee, to highlight each city's participation in the xenocidal campaign. Getting on to Baltimare's was a cinch. Getting a high-access position was equally easy. It's amazing what ponies will let you do, as long as you let them claim credit for all your hard work. They'd let you into the holy-of-holies, as long as they got to keep the high priest's robes, title and salary for themselves.

There would be a canopy of balloons that would rain down in the honorees at the beginning of the Gala, or that was the plan. To clean up the resulting mess, a heat flash spell, provided by another city, would burst them all. Filling the balloons with a gaseous version of the potion was child's play. And took this particular child only eight months to master and create. The best part is that until the heat flash, it would be essentially safe to handle. None of the ponies who filled those thousands of balloons would be affected, unless they walked through an oven before they washed up.

I was supervising the breaking of the set up camp when the Gala started. Very pony music and songs drifted through the air. At the moment the balloon deluge started, I heard nothing. I calmed myself, reminded by the fact that no plan survived contact with reality, and if nothing happened, there would be no way to trace it back to me. Several moments later, the music faltered, and the screaming began. I turned like every other pony and stared at the chaos in the Great Hall. I gasped in shock, with every other pony as somepony threw herself out of a window onto the wrought iron fencing around the garden. I reminded them that we had orders from Celestia herself to get the camp packed up. And the Newfoals returned to their tasks, hearts brimming with love for Celestia and firm purpose that this task would bring her honor and glory. The ponies continued to stare in horror as dozens brutally took their own lives.

I had no problem with the disturbed expression at the continuing screams of despair coming from the palace. They didn't know, so they worried. I knew, yet part of me couldn't believe that a pony being potioned wouldn't rejoice at the change. It eventually became quiet, even the screaming laments had faded. I doubt we would have heard Celestia's laughter or whimpers, so I don't know what her reaction was, but I knew that the reality had descended on those who hadn't been effected. Those without the courage to survive would be swept under the rug. Those who'd survived would probably be disappeared as well, so others would not learn that a potion to destroy ponies existed. And that by inference, so did one that would strike at every other race on Equus.

The flames coming from the palace were the first clue that at least one other had been affected. I don't know if Philomena mourned Celestia, or the other way around, but one of them decided to turn the building into a funeral pyre. That column of smoke and fire would be hard explain away. I grinned at the thought of it all. For the first time in a long time, I looked forward to the future.

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