Red Meat

"I'm dying," he said, wringing his hands as Applejack and Rarity traded glances.

"Well," said Rainbow Dash, "you don't exactly look healthy."

“That’s just super-duper sad!” Pinkie said as she sidled up next to him and threw a foreleg around his shoulder. “I bet you’d feel better if you ate some cake.” She held a three-layer cake with her other hoof, and gestured somehow with her eyebrows. He knew better than to ask where it came from, or even how she could balance it with a single hoof.

Twilight spoke up. “It’s not cake he needs to eat.” When she had the attention of the other four ponies, she continued. “He needs to eat meat.”

Rainbow Dash picked Pinkie’s jaw up off of the floor and held it in place while Rarity finished her petite gasping. Applejack pulled her hat off of her head and held it over her heart. “I know some folks frown on it, but wouldn’t nobody say nothin’ if you ate some fish. I know Fluttershy feeds it to her pet bear and whatnot.”

He ran his fingers through the shaggy brown mop that hadn’t seen a barber in months. Twilight cleared her throat. “We’ve already tried that. We’ve tried everything.”

Five pairs of eyes met his as he looked up and sighed. “My species is fundamentally different than yours. We evolved from carnivorous apes. Please, you have to understand. There’s no magic on my world. The animals we raised for food were no more conscious or aware than your apple trees. But here…” He looked at the ponies gathered around him, and recalled each of the deer he had butchered. Different cuts of meat appeared to his vision, squirming under their skin as they shuffled uncomfortably in the silence; tenders, steaks, shoulder roast.

His fingers were numb and cold; a symptom of the vitamin deficiencies that were slowly degrading his nervous system, but the same cold that seeps into the bones of one’s fingers when butchering an ice-cold animal. The kind of numb that lets a cut escape notice until there’s too much blood, all mixed together. And all the blood looks the same. An involuntary sob escaped his throat.

Rainbow flapped up into the center of attention. “Isn’t Fluttershy kinda the expert on feeding exotic animals? How hard could it be for her to find some sort of fancy monkey-chow?” She looked sideways at the human. “No offense.”

“None taken, featherbrain.” He stuck out his tongue. She returned the gesture.

The wave of giggles died out quickly as the gravity of the situation returned to the forefront of everyone’s mind.

“Red meat.” He tried to swallow past the lump in his throat. “The flesh of a mammal. We raised cows. Goats.” His voice lowered to a whisper. “Horses.”

“We ain’t gonna blame ya for what ya did back in your world. You’re here now, and you ain’t killin’ ponies for food. Which we surely do appreciate. But Dash had a good point. Why ain’t Fluttershy here?”

“I didn’t want to put that kind of a burden on her. To choose between me and picking an animal to kill…” He shook his head. “I couldn’t ask her to do that. I couldn’t look at her again.”

Rarity waved a hoof toward the tangle of tubes, beakers and multi-colored flames. “You can’t find some sort of a substitute with all your sciencey… whatever that is?”

“There were a number of dietary deficiencies we have identified since he arrived,” Twilight said. “His gums stopped bleeding when we gave him a citrus-heavy diet—”

“Vitamin C,” he interjected.

“Which,” Twilight continued, “we didn’t even have a word for, because our bodies synthesize it naturally. We never even knew it existed. Normally, a carnivore like him would get enough of this ‘vitamin C’ from eating animals like, um—” she chuckled nervously “—well, animals which can synthesize it.”

“OOH, OOH!” shouted Pinkie. “So my lemon meringue pie saves lives. I knew it!” She began shuffling various fruit pies like a deck of cards; sideways, vertically, looping spirals that defied gravity. “Just gimme an alphabet of vitamins and I’ll whip up a smorgasbord of pies that’ll—”

Twilight stuck out a hoof, halting Pinkie in mid-shuffle. A cascade of pies fell like rain, pelting everyone with pastry shrapnel and bits of multi-colored fruit. Rarity paused to flick a single crumb of flaky crust off of her mane.

Twilight shook her head. “Sorry Pinkie, there’s a number of compounds that just don’t naturally occur in fruits or vegetables. We can survive on a diet of nothing but fresh grass, but—”

Rarity and Pinkie shared a horrified gasp and clung to each other, looking at Twilight as if she had just declared her intention to take over the world. She ignored them. “Our digestive system is optimized for this diet. A predator has no evolutionary pressure to force its body to manufacture these nutrients, when it can simply absorb them from prey species.”

Twilight rolled something that looked like a chalkboard in front of the human, revealing his internal organs on its screen. He stood up and leaned over the top, looking at his own insides. “Sure, why not,” he said with a roll of his eyes.

“Rarity, would you please join him behind the viewer?” Twilight asked.

Rarity began shuffling away from the screen. “Despite what they say in the storybooks, beauty really is only skin deep, darling.”

“Ooh, pickme pickme!” Pinkie shouted, waving one hoof in the air and bouncing where she sat.

The instant that Twilight nodded her assent, Pinkie zipped across the room to throw herself behind the screen. As she stood up and joined the human in looking down at her own organs, Twilight levitated a pointing stick to indicate ghostly figures that were displayed. “You can see that a pony’s digestive system makes up a larger proportion of body mass than does a human’s. With a less complex gut and no need to manufacture complex nutrients, the decreased metabolic cost of digestion would be a decided evolutionary advantage. In a world without magic, it’s nearly a foregone conclusion that the first species to develop sapience would be carnivorous.”

Rainbow landed in front of the screen. “Forget about the mega ball player, or whatever. Can we get this guy his vitamins or what?”

“I’ve had no luck magically replicating the nutrients he’s incapable of synthesizing. So the question is this. Can any of you think of a way to get red meat without, well, you know?”

“Ah may not be a scientist, Twi, but I’m pretty sure there’s only one way to get—” Applejack shuddered “—meat.”

Twilight said, “That’s pretty much been my conclusion. And if there’s no way to get meat without killing an animal” – she glanced at Applejack – “then we need to find a mammal that’s not aware.”

Rarity raised a dainty hoof. “I’m absolutely certain that Fluttershy can talk to any animal with fur.”

The human spoke up again. “I’m not going to kill an innocent animal that—”

Twilight interrupted him. “Then we need to find an animal that isn’t innocent.”

“Wait,” he said. “You want me to eat an animal that deserves to die? Where are we going to find something like that?”

“Angel.”

“Angel.”

“Angel.”

“Angel.”

“Yeah,” Rainbow added. “Angel is a dick.”

Author's Notes:

No, it's not scientifically accurate.

And yes, it was a thousand words of angst, drama, and hand-wringing, just to get to the punchline. I'm not sorry. You can blame this guy.