So... the president got turned into a pony. Great. Not big surprise. She’s clearly not happy with it, but that’s no surprise either, especially considering who our current president is. The amazing thing is a few members of her entourage... didn’t get turned into ponies.

Thus I find myself once again walking—trotting past honest to gosh full blown human beings. Dressed nicely, head to toe, compared to the ponies of the president’s group, who are universally naked, except for the president herself, who managed to fashion a sort of... formal decorative collar.

It looks really familiar. I wonder if she watches the show.

In the past two or three months, I’ve been a pony, a girl, a captive, an enemy of the state, and now a hero of it, I guess. Or whatever you call someone who got a president to apologize to them. I walk on four hooves as if I was born that way, just a cute little pony before these towering, beady-eyed human beings.

I’ve been eating well since we discovered grazing, and then—after Twilight screwed us over—meat. I’m still pretty skinny, but roasted squirrel isn’t exactly cream pie and orange soda. I’m more active than I’ve ever been, and I have more friends in our shared adversity than I’ve ever had. I don’t have a horn, or wings... or opposable thumbs. But I can still do some incredible things, relative to the total failure I used to be.

And now we stand, a small group of us ponies, out on an asphalt roadway in front of the president and her entourage. Most of our members are hiding in silent observation, while a few of us played bait for the president’s entourage, in case they were organized and deadly. Fortunately, said entourage is clumsy and uncoordinated, and apparently at the end of their rope. They’re pretty much entirely in our power, though I’m not sure they realize that. But they do let us check through their vehicles to make sure there’s no nasty secrets waiting for us if we bring them to the farm. It turns out they had hoped for us to do just that.

The armored vehicles don’t seem to have anything “weapony” within them, though one of the handful (ha) of humans has a handgun in a holster. No, instead the vehicles are full not of armory or troops, but what look like packed supplies. As in actual food! Beyond that, there are only about a half dozen ponies besides those humans, so Patricia flies up into the air and gives the all-clear: wherein the unicorn stallion I now know as Robin fires a light globey thing from his horn up to Patricia, and Patricia backhooves it, making a bright flash in the air, and a distinctive ringing sound.

Maybe there is something to be said for what Twilight taught us, after all.

We had a system here where if something happened to the four of us, and also the ones hiding nearby, a few would linger far away, who could run to warn the others. But nothing bad happened, so the ponies watching from the trees let the more distant ponies know, and pretty soon a whole group of ponies is crowding up onto the asphalt road. Wait, would that be a herd of ponies? Do we really come in herds? Is this really a thing now?

...I’m going with group.

The whole entire group isn’t here, but the ones who weren’t too afraid to risk coming forward are, as are the ones who were sure it was going to go badly, but wanted to see for themselves. Our hooves sound strange on the asphalt, a multitude of solid thumps, where I had been used to only clomping on dirt and grass before. Most of us are pretty filthy, with patches of dust marring our coats, and tails scattered with twigs and other debris. It’s definitely not the most sophisticated front we could put on for the president, but it’s all we’ve got.

Turning into a pony certainly hasn’t hurt the president’s ability to give speeches. “Friends, thank you for coming!” she says in a powerfully projecting voice, “I want to say again that I truly regret what you’ve been put through, and I would like to make things right. But our nation is in a crisis. Justice will be served for the pony who wronged you, but we have to deal with the here and now, first, and here and now, we need your help.”

To the assembled ponies surrounding her, she declares, “People around the world are struggling to deal with this strange transformation. Things are changing, whole world views have been undone. And to top it all off nobody even knows how to walk like this!”

We probably should nervously laugh at that, but she’s really right. You pick up walking quickly, but it takes weeks to figure out all the different gaits, and stop falling over your hooves at the slightest bump and... stuff that’s kind of painful to remember.

“I want you to know that none of you are to be held accountable for Twilight Sparkle’s actions,” the president goes on, “I’m issuing a full pardon to all of you. You are not to be arrested or detained, and you may freely return to your families.”

That does get a murmur going, but she cuts over it saying, “But you have all learned to walk, to fly, to use your natural abilities in what is nothing less than magic! I need your help, the people need your help, to share what you’ve learned, and help people get back on their feet.” Lifting a hind leg and glancing back at it, she adds, “Er... metaphorically.”

Okay yeah, that gets a chuckle.

“I want you all to know you are not being detained,” she repeats, “You are free to go wherever you like, provided you obey the law of the land. I’m not ordering you, or forcing you, but begging you to help. We need to get our critical infrastructure back online, and we need people to know how best to make use of their new situation. I’d like to invite you all to the city of Ainsworth. They have more supplies, better food, and they need your help. The activity of Twilight Sparkle has been highly classified, so you shouldn’t find anyone there holding a grudge.

“Make no mistake,” she addresses the crowd, “Something needs to be done, to bring that evil unicorn to justice. Your country needs your help, and your expertise in the magic that she taught you, but not today. We need to make our plans, and lick our wounds. You’ll see some high ranked officers returning to you, once we’re ready to call on your help, but for now just try to help the Ainsworth community, and live day by day.”

Shuddering, she declares solemnly, “It’s not my or anyone’s authority on this earth to tell you where you must go. You need to decide amongst yourselves what you’re going to do. It’s not my command, but my earnest request that you help your nation in her hour of need. Thank you for your consideration, and if you remain in Ainsworth, we’ll send word once we’re ready to make our move.”

Well, if the president’s words don’t convince us, the actual gasoline powered vehicles packed with actual supplies are an uncontestable argument. For better or worse, we’re opening negotiations, and coming out of hiding. They didn’t bring just food, but blankets. Like actual blankets. I never thought I’d feel so glad to see a blanket, than when I had to sleep under straw for the past two months. You know potato chips? They have actual potato chips, and they’re so salty it’s amazing. Another thing I didn’t ever think I’d be having, a mouth orgasm from eating potato chips, but here we are.

It’s... not enough supplies to last any amount of time, for all of us back here at this forgotten farm. Combined with our er... food acquisition techniques, we might have stretched it out. But people are tired of stretching things out. They want to see their families again. They don’t want to be public enemy #1 anymore. And that’s truly the greatest gift the president brings. People can go home now. I could um...

...

So Ainsworth is a dirty little farming town, with a tiny commercial sector, and the merest smattering of suburbia. With the fliers among us confident that it’s a place where we could be welcome, we all start making preparations to head over there. There’s not a lot of preparations we have to make, but y’know... no opposable thumbs and all. We have to figure out how to get ponies like me carrying what fresh rainwater we’ve collected in bottles.

It’s somewhere around a 30 mile journey, I’m told, and with the slowest of us being small children in the form of ponies, that takes quite a while to traverse. But before long, I’m a mobile watering station, without any trouble to hold my weight under the mildly heavy bottles. We uh... finish the meat we’d been saving. I don’t even remember what it’s like to be this full. We have to get rid of everything that isn’t dried, and well... I feel about as content as I could be, with musky meat settling pleasantly in my pony gullet. Which for some reason likes that sort of thing.

Then it’s up down the highway for us. The president’s entourage has since left for raising support in other places, and also to keep their few humans a moving target. The days of preparation and cleanup are complete. The fire pit’s nothing but ashes, heavily stomped and rained upon. And with a frightening thrill in my chest, we leave the farm, and go trundling down the road. We’re a... a herd of ponies, I guess. I don’t feel particularly herdy, but I do trot along with the rest of them, and I hope deep in my heart that we can stay together, and that these friendships we’ve formed over the past months will not be in vain.

I also notice a lot of the farms we’re passing are totally empty and untended. The emptiness is nothing new, as big commercial factory farms take very little human maintenance, as long as you’ve got the petroleum to power the farm equipment and the factories. But these crops look way more weed choked than usual. As much as could grow in two months, I suppose. I wonder if we’ll ever get those... farm machines working again. Unicorns could, probably. Or bat ponies with their hand-wings.

Heck who am I kidding myself, it’s really only earth ponies who’d be unable to operate this stuff. I’ve seen what pegasi can do with their feathers. It’s pretty crazy, though not as crazy as what I can do with my... tongue. Wait.

Puzzled, I gaze at the farms again, imagining those tractor combines, and my tongue... are there any of us ponies, who couldn’t operate them? Well if nothing else, none of us are nearly big enough to see over the dashboard and reach the gas pedals.

The farms grow more numerous, until we’re walking past hundreds and hundreds of acres of nothing but farms. There’s no ponies out in these farms, since everyone’s been living closer to the city, or so I’m told by the pegasi of our group. Lucky them, they know exactly what we’re walking into, while I’ve just been back at the farm like a dumb earth pony. Then we pass... uh... wow... holy crap...

We pass some cattle.

I know we’re just a ragged bunch of colorful little horses, trotting along down the road, and I know I mean little, as in little. As in barely waist height to a human, if that. But when we go pony-jogging past these cows who chose to come right up to the side of the road, they’re not just cows. They’re cow mountains. They’re huge, hairy beasts the size of a small building. Acres of meat and muscle that could eclipse the sun. And Applejack jumped on top of one of those things?

I mean granted, I’ve leaped that high before, but I dunno if I’d wanna land on something that big. And Applejack was taller than the rest of us when she did it, since ponies in real life seem to be even more little than the ones on the show. So that makes the cows here seem even more big.

Their droning lowws are bizarrely quiet, because I’d think that something this big would be as loud as a foghorn, and I feel like they should shake the ground every time they plant a foot down, but it’s just the thump and crunch of grass. But it’s not that bizarre really. The whole scenario seems really eerily normal, in fact! Just a few cows grazing on the side of a quiet farm road. It’s just that we’re a bunch of tiny, colorful horses trotting hastily down the road, not a few of us pausing to gawk at the cattle, but ultimately running along and praying on some primal, instinctive level, that the cows don’t notice us.

Okay, maybe a little bizarre.

A few of the cows are frighteningly close, but most of the cows stay nice and far away, in the seemingly endless pastures we run along. The only indication that the lands aren’t wild are the miles and miles of barbed wire fence, claiming an unimaginably large area as owned by one man alone. And also keeping the cows from wandering off into someone else’s unimaginably large territory.

I feel really out of my element here. I didn’t know things could be so... big! Not just the cows, but the whole land. It just keeps going on and on. It’s hard to even comprehend just how big the earth is, until journeys like this over a tiny portion of it drive home just how insignificant you are. Driving the distance in a car can’t do it, but with my hooves beating the earth one after another, it almost feels like I’m trotting in place, for how little the world changes around me.

I’m just really glad all the rest of us are here, clustered together, vaguely bumping into each other. It’s... nice to have a place to hide from all this space. I don’t know if I could take all this openness alone, but with my comrades of necessity jogging alongside me, I feel a warm affection in my breast, that drives away any cold fear of the expansive unknown. One of them has one of the younger foals riding on her back. Just a bunch of cute little ponies bustling along through this huge world full of fields, fences, and giant cows. And that’s okay.

At last, I see ponies on the horizon. The city buildings can be seen from quite a distance, but they rapidly approach as we all sort of collectivly break into a gallop. It’s not a herd, it’s just... making sure you’re running the same speed as everyone else, but all I can think is that those ponies in the distance are real people, who need our help, and who can help us. People we desperately need, or at least, people whose land, water and resources we desperately need. But I don’t like to get pessimistic.

One thing I notice is nopony’s pushing around clouds. There are occasional colorful swatches fluttering around above the horizon, but so much fewer than with our group, and they seem somehow aimless, and uncoordinated. Twilight was a unicorn, but she needed the pegasi to clear the clouds for her spell. She had to teach the pegasi how to do that, didn’t she? How would she even know how to do that?

As we approach, I start to see other individual ponies instead of just bright dots in the distance, and other ponies start to see us. It’s surreal walking up to this town in the whispery quiet, such that the sound of a pony’s galloping hooves is the only thing you can hear. No leaf blowers, no air conditioners, no highway traffic, just... our hoofsteps and birdsong. When the ponies in the distance see us, and go hurrying off back towards the buildings on the horizon, I can even hear their hoofbeats. Even they sound loud in the silence, way over there.

I’d like to say I wander into town, and take in all the strange sights of people whose lives have gone pony, but our group doesn’t even make it into the city limits. “Alright, everypony!” Patricia shouts at the head of our group, with an impressive clarity to her voice. “See that barn on the left, there? Right where Dawn is uh, hovering! That’s where we have permission to set up! Barn 2.0!”

There are a few grumbles of dissent, but we all know how lucky we are to have this. We’re actually a sizeable group, and we can’t just go camp out on someone’s lawn. But most of the real land owners are out of state, and quite unavailable due to being ponies. All the lease holders would be able to do is shrug helplessly and point us on to the next city. It’s something I never had to deal with until the end of humanity, but it really is limiting, and kind of scary. It’s not hard to land a cheap, terrible job that basically ruins your day for the rest of your life, like say for instance at a call center. So it’s not hard to get the money to pay for an apartment, or even a mortgage, or property tax. But if for whatever reason you don’t, it’s not even legal for you to sleep, pretty much... anywhere.

Given extenuating circumstances, such as the police all being ponies, we could probably take over someone’s house and nobody’d be able to stop us. I don’t even want to contemplate how upset someone would be if we went and took over their house, mini-mall, or auto dealership. Maybe we’d have to do that if the people in this town had devolved into roving press gangs waging war on one another, like in that one movie. But as far as I can tell, people are just... trying to make do with what they have as usual, and nobody in my group wants to ruin that by forcing ourselves on someone.

Still, if we’re not going to illegally camp on that distant abandoned farm whose property owner is nowhere to be found, then we’re going to have to find a place closer to civilization to live. And that’s why this gift is so valuable. Dawn and some others found a local property owner who was happy to let us use an old barn in exchange for teaching them how to walk right. Since the property owner’s local, they can give their permission, and since we’re mostly here to help people, they have every reason to give permission, at least on a temporary basis. Barn 2.0, this one once used initially as extra storage for feed, then for holding livestock, then us. So I guess it’s still holding livestock, as it were.

It occurs to me that first night as I settle down in our new home cuddled up with Mike, Sue, and Nick ...John, and Mira, that we just walked 30 miles. It didn’t even feel like a mile or two, when we were walking. Yet now as I lay, my muscles are twinging and warm, and I did spend a good part of the afternoon grazing on the wildly growing grass in the poorly tended fields, just to get my energy up. So as I drift off to sleep, I wonder at the journey we made. It took a greater part of the afternoon, but it still seemed... not as far as it had seemed. Maybe the world isn’t that big of a place after all?

The first thing our group does is set up the garden area again. We’re not the only ponies who thought of growing vegetables thank goodness, but it’s certainly a priority to get anything-but-grass back on the menu. And it’s like night and day, trying to do this in the outskirts of a town. There are seeds here. There are crops already growing, planted last spring, and so they’re a bit weedy, but we can eat the weeds!

Ponies can eat... practically anything, I suppose.

So I start waking up every day in a new barn, feeling much better about myself, and about things in general. The principal difference between this barn and our old one is that we have blankets now, and close proximity to a real town. Not much else is different, so soon after arrival, but with what I’ve been seeing wandering through town, taking in all the strange sights of people whose lives have gone pony, I can imagine that our lives are gonna change a lot, and so much for the better. I’m really glad we finally chose to move out here.

On that note, the pony who taught me butchery practically begs for my help, because well... we’re pretty much obsolete, and she’s scared of being treated as useless.

“I can’t do this alone,” Tess pleads, in an anxious tone, “There are actual real butchers here who really know their stuff, and just... I’m just a pony! ”

Specifically, Tess is a slim green unicorn mare, who once used to be a man, whose mane and tail have colors that seem to shift between pink and orange depending on the angle you look. Her eyes are warmly brown: so normal, they’re a stark contrast to the ruby red irises that I’ve been given. She worked in some sort of butchery, though only as an assistant. Still, she’s the only one of us who had, so up until now, she’s been the lynchpin of our meat preparations, even though everyone thinks it’s me, since I’ve been helping her out so much.

“It’ll be fine,” I assure her, while I stick the poles for the drying racks in the earth. Sort of like a clothesline for meat. “Just teach them what you know, and they’ll teach you what they know. You know a lot of things they don’t, about how to do things as a pony, so tell them that, and let them teach you about meat and stuff.”

“Yeah, it’s just... I never had to teach a class before,” she says glumly, lighting up her horn to levitate ropes across the line of poles.

I have to giggle at that, rearing up on the poles to check at how firmly I’ve gotten them in place. They um... may as well be cemented into the ground. Okay that’s kind of weird.

“Don’t think of it like teaching a class,” I chide her lightly, pushing off the poles to stand on all fours, “Think of it like having a discussion. You’re there to answer each other’s questions, not stand up and lecture about what hooves are.”

She giggles weakly in return.

Eyeing the ropes she’s stretching across between the poles, I think Tess must have gotten them from town already since we got here a day ago, because they look a lot more thin and wirey than the bloody clothesline that we kind of... extremely had to urgently change as soon as possible. Because bloody. Clothesline.

Thankfully, I don’t have a problem stepping on the new material to pull it taut, while she uses her magic to tie it off at tension. I can’t imagine how I’d get rope burn on hooves, but I still consider myself pretty lucky for not having it.

“You know, we probably won’t be doing much with meat at all after this,” Tess says thoughtfully, “Once the professionals get the hang of it and all.”

“It’s for the best, I think,” I muse to her seriously, “I don’t even want to imagine having to butcher one of those cows.”

Gulping, Tess says, “Y-yeah those things are frikking ginormous. If other people can do that, well... it’ll be nice not to have to get all... um...”

“Covered in blood?” I suggest curiously.

Rolling her eyes, Tess says, “Yeah a little bloody. But thanks so much for your help. I just hope my uh, meat drying attempts don’t make them roll their eyes too much.”

“With the size of our eyes, that’d probably cause an earthquake!” I retort in obvious shock.

She really likes that.

With all the cows around, you’d think our days of meat crisis are over. But how the heck would anyone possibly slaughter one of those cows? We have a whole town to feed now, though, so how could we not slaughter them? My little group could get by with wild stuff caught in the underbrush, but the whole town?

To make matters worse, of all the hundreds and hundreds of privately owned cattle, there’s only one ranch owner who actually lives in town. The rest are... caretakers I guess, or renters, and... well, the feedlot cows that make a vast majority of their population are all owned by ranch companies that nobody in town has even heard of. Even if we could slaughter a cow, they are all earmarked for stores in Omaha and other places that are way too far away to travel on hoof. Can we really just... take them to feed ourselves?

I guess life and death have to take precedence over private property rights, but somehow I don’t think the police would agree.

To make our meat matters even worse, it’s been a few months since Twilight’s atmospheric spell thingy, and well... you can’t keep refrigeration up without electricity. Not many in town knew about how to make the meat last that wasn’t alive and walking around. Some started salting and drying some of the meat in the freezers, but... the vast majority of it’s past rotten by now. Ponies in town are really hurting for some protein in their diet by the time we get there. So our choice now is either hunt small game to sustain a whole town, or people have to go without their treasured animal flesh.

I suppose it’s not as bad as it could be, because I may have mentioned ponies are very little, compared to humans. We don’t need a lot of meat in our diet, and we were going meatless for quite a while back there, before we all started going nuts for a hamburger. So the townspeople aren’t desperate for meat when we get there, just kind of foul tempered. There are some cooler cellars that a few people have graciously donated to store some of the perishable stuff, getting the first cut of it of course, prolonging the meat decay.

So nopony’s suffering especially from a lack of meat. I’m kind of jealous actually, because these townspeople never even heard of Friendship is Magic. They just sort of continued on eating meat, rather than that little vegan crisis that my group ended up having.

Speaking of meat in a more abstract sense, it’s surprisingly hard to find places to have sex around here. There’s a few... discreet locations in the barn where we’re staying, but there are a lot of people passing through it, and a lot of chances that we’ll get caught. I manage to put it off for a day, then two days, but after a week, I’m practically crossing my legs wanting to be touched down there. The scrublike wilderness we frolicked in earlier, which technically was private land I suppose, isn’t an option here. Everything is most explicitly private property, with barbed wire fences, and locked doors, and buildings with public access deliberately designed so that there’s no place out of sight, where anybody could have sex discretely.

Seriously have you ever tried to find a hiding place in a public park? It’s diabolically difficult!

Mike figures it out, thankfully, or unthankfully considering the consequences. “Meadows!” the red and green bat pony calls out in tense excitement, descending from the sky and landing before me, then blushing. Just... blushing.

“So we’ve been doing... good, so far,” she says in a little voice.

At my curious look, she adds, “A-at not making... baby ponies, you know.”

“Oh, y-yeah we’ve been... pretty good,” I reply unhappily, uncomfortably aware of the urge rising in me to just fuck it all and lift my tail in public. I... kind of do sometimes, not towards anyone, but just when... no one’s looking my way. It just... it makes me feel like I’m going to get... laid, even though I’m not.

“But if we were,” Mike says, swaying indecisively as she takes a few steps on her bright green hooves, “I mean i-if we wanted to, we um...”

“T-there’s not exactly any place to just...” I say, trying to ignore the impulse to bob up my tail.

“But there is!” she declares excitedly, then shrinks back, mumbling, “Um... I mean we shouldn’t... we should stay away from the c-corn fields. Because if we were... if we were there...”

“Then no one could see us!” I say, staring at her, wide-eyed.

Mike smiles anxiously at that and laughs out, “S-so do you wanna... I mean, j-just us girls, just... go there some time and...” Her hind legs shiver, and her lush, red tail clutches close to her butt. “...help?” she squeaks.

“...you really need it, huh,” I tell her looking at Mike with sympathy, and empathy, I suppose. I need it bad, too. It’s just so much easier to say she needs it, than have to admit how much I need it. But I think Mike knows we’re both hungry for it.

“Yeah, I...” she sniffles, wiping at her eyes, “Sorry I just... it’s been over a week and... and I’m just really f-feeling it. You know...”

If she’s feeling what I’m feeling, then boy do I know. I’m getting wet just thinking about being with her. She could... we could freaking orgasm.

“No, no it’s no problem,” I say, sidling comfortingly up alongside her, managing to admit, “I’m... feeling it too.”

Mike leans her soft body against me, a wing shifting between us as she says, “S-so if you want, I could show you, unless it’s a bad time to do that sort of thing, but I really can’t think of a-anything else anymore. Like ever. It’s just... I need it.”

“Yeah it’s...” I was gonna explore the town, and try to meet with Tess about... “N-no I’m not doing anything,” I say, thoughts of everything but Mike just fading away, “Let’s just...” a blush grows on my face, as I say, “Let’s just go.”

The corn field isn’t the best place to have sex, but it is discreet. There aren’t a lot of insects in there, and even this early in the season, the corn is higher than both of our heads. There’s a barbed wire fence blocking off that farm’s property, which I leap over without even touching it. And Mike, well... wings.

“I can’t believe how much I want it!” I whisper to her with a guilty smile as we duck among the fronds, pushing through the tall stalks.

“Me too!” Mike whispers excitedly back, “Let’s... let’s get in and I wanna. Want you to put your tongue in there.”

“Y-you too,” I tell her, tail twitching, “Want to o-orgasm so hard that I just squeeze down on it and... bam!”

“We can’t even hold out a week, ” she says sorrowfully, yet indulgently. There’s something powerful about being so... taken with desire like this. All I can think about is how I’m winking and... and it’s finally gonna happen to me. And her!

“I... I want... I want it,” Mike whimpers, staggering to a halt. I hope we’re deep enough in, because she lifts her red tail to reveal her glistening marehood, “I wanna be a girl,” she says in a voice aching with need. I don’t even have to hesitate, before my tongue is feeling Mike’s soft, round, accepting pelvis, and tasting the tang of her sweat and arousal as I lick up her nether lips and slide my tongue inside.

Mike doesn’t say much more, beyond gasping my name, or how much she wants this, or how much she loves having me inside her. But mostly just stands there, and the only way she communicates with me most of the time, is how she quivers and flexes her inner passage as I curl my tongue around in there. She outright shoves her pelvis into my mouth, when the soft of my forehoof comes to press against one of her nipples. I know how that feels.

I don’t say much either, having my tongue curled inside another mare’s vagina, but I do tease open her... her inside inside place, and squeeze through just a little bit. She clamps down on me, then releases, then squeals loud in the silence as my tongue abruptly slides into her womb, then she clamps down again and.... yeah, I’m not getting out of this for a while.

It’s so wonderful, feeling Mike’s rhythmic pulses as she goes into orgasm, hearing those grateful and stuttering moans, I can almost ignore my own need, just experiencing her feeling like this. Mike’s voice is high, so it sounds more like doves than ponies. At last the rippling muscular vagina within my friend stops trying to crush my tongue, and only the very deepest part of her is slowly flexing around it... what I assume has to be Mike’s womb.

Her deepest flesh shifts around me so serenely, as I imagine that movement in there becoming the powerful contractions of childbirth. Relaxing totally, Mike sinks to her chest, her forelegs going limp. Her hindquarters sink to the ground, making my tongue naturally slide out of her, as the bat pony relaxes before me, cooing, chin sinking to the earth, and quivering still in her hindquarters.

I pull my tongue the rest of the way out, patting my friend’s entrance comfortingly before taking it back to myself. She lifts her head at that, shifting to sit more normally on her belly. A blissful smile spreads across her blunt snout, as she says to me, “That was perfect, Meadowsweet. Thank you so much.”

“It’s no problem, really, Mike,” I tell her embarassedly, and a little disappointedly, as I wanna be the pony lying there feeling that good.

“No, I’m not...” she shakes her head, struggling up to her hooves. Her catlike pupils are dilating as she says passionately, “I’m not Mike. I can’t be Mike, Not around you. I need a... a pony name. A girl name, like yours.”

“L-like mine, right...” I reply, trying not to wince in front of her joy. She’s right. I do have a pony name, and Twilight must have forced me to have it, because there’s no way any parents would ever name a boy Meadowsweet. So it doesn’t feel like a pony name, but it still is one. And now Mike actually wants one.

I think I’d want one too, if I didn’t already have one. I didn’t have to change my name at all, as far as I know. But if I was born with the name Albert, I can’t imagine I wouldn’t change it to Meadowsweet, because seriously. Meadowsweet just fits me so perfectly, it might as well have been the name I was born with.

We stand there together for a while, gazing at each other amid the softly swaying corn stalks, until Mike sighs, and looks down, saying, “I got nothing.”

“Hm?” I reply, looking with worry at the red and green bat pony.

“Names, I never thought about it,” she says, “Like... a girl name, or maybe a pony name, but... I can’t imagine calling myself Green... Bat... something.”

“Just think about it a while,” I tell her, briefly snugging her tail in my own, “I’ll let you know if I think of anything with my weird... pony name memories. Maybe I can come up with something.”

“I’m sure you’d pick the perfect name,” she says with a warm nuzzle to my cheek.

A moment to think and I say teasingly, “Pineapple Sausage. Still think I’d pick the perfect name, Pineapple?”

It doesn’t take long for Mike to swat my rump sharply with her tail and go bounding out of the corn field, with me soon following after. She’s lightheartedly laughing though, her voice like sweet birdsong, and between the both of us, I think we’ll be able to figure something out together.

“Hey! I didn’t get a turn!”

“Oh... sorry.”

We spend a lot of time in that corn field. ♥

“Soo... Lucy?” I ask one day, inching up to somepony who I am fairly sure is named Lucy. Our new barn in our new town is going well, and I finally have an opportunity to approach the orangey pink furred, purple haired unicorn mare. She’s kind of tall and slender, in the way that I’m short and curvy. She doesn’t have Fleur de Lis proportions, but she’s just a little more... swanlike, and I’m a little more... ducklike. Lucy does look really pretty. I can definitely see Sue fucking her, if she can hold up his weight at least.

I only hope she’s as nice a person as he says she is. Sharing your vagina with a male has a way of... endearing you to them, so maybe Sue’s just talking about Lucy through rose colored glasses. But outside of how good it feels to fuck her, Sue’s description of Lucy was appealing enough for me to at least try to get to know her. Because I feel like he still cares about her, and... misses the mare who taught him how to be a man.

Lucy looks up from weaving straws in her magic as I approach, continuing to weave what looks like a pot as she smiles and says, “Hey, you’re Meadowsweet, right? The one who beat up Twilight Sparkle herself?”

I kind of forgot we did that! Blinking in surprise for a moment, I blurt out, “Y-yeah that’s me and Nick, and Mira. But it’s no big deal really, considering we... failed.”

“Aw, well you’re not the only one,” she says with a sympathetic grimace, “So what can I do for you?”

“Oh, nothing...” I say, swaying casually on my hooves, “Just trying to get to ...know people more.”

“Well okay then,” she says giving me a look. “Pleased to meet you!”

“P-pleased to meet you too,” I venture shyly, “You know, I did think you’d know me but not because of Twilight. I thought you’d know me from when I was doing the meat preparation and stuff.”

“Oh right, that was you,” she says, eyeing me more selectively, still weaving the pot behind herself. “You look a lot less um... red than I remember.”

“Y-yeah that stuff does kind of stain,” I admit sheepishly, looking back at my pale yellow furry rump, and lush green tail, “But it was mostly just on my legs and... snout. And I guess my tail got kind of...”

“Well, it was just the tip,” she says demurely.

“A-anyway, so um... weaving a pot, huh?” I ask, looking at her hovering crafts project there.

Levitating it over between us causes her to pause the weaving, but it starts up again as she looks at it. “Yeah,” she says, sliding straws within straws, “There was a book in the library on basket weaving. You don’t even have to use long straws, just slide them together like this and stuff.”

“Must be nice to have a horn,” I say glumly, watching her enviable dexterity.

“Oh sorr—” she says, looking up from her work. “Sorry, I...” then she glances back down at her work, and her weaving stops. Glancing up again, she smiles guiltily and says, “Guess you can’t really do that fine manipulation stuff.”

“I could probably make a pot out of clay, or just get a bucket,” I say with a shrug, “It’s not so bad, I’m just... kind of envious.”

“Well, sorry for showing off in front of you,” she says, wincing and starting to set the basket down, so I lift a forehoof, going,

“No, no! Go ahead and make it. I don’t mind. I want you to do it, actually.”

“Why’s that?” Lucy replies skeptically.

“Because it sucks that I can’t, but that doesn’t make it suck that you can,” I explain, pointing at the half completed basket, “So it’s actually kind of fascinating how you can do that. I’m just... complaining about myself. But that doesn’t make me like you doing it any less!”

“Well... okay then,” she says with an uncertain smile, looking down at her floating partial pot, and her magic once again lights on the pot and several strands of hay, slotting them together into the growing weave.

“Must be kind of weird, honestly,” I say as she glances up my way. “Remember when you were... I mean unicorns were passing out, and stuff?”

Her weaving actually stutters at that, but keeps going as she winces.

“Y-yeah I remember,” she says demurely, “It just... comes naturally to think like this now. Like uh...”

A blue magic limned straw lifts up in the air, and as she says, “I could announce to you straw! aim! poke! swivel! tighten! squeeze!” the straw weaves into her basket by her command.

“Or I could just do that and talk to you,” she concludes, once the straw is woven, as another straw swiftly follows it, “And not call out every little thing I’m doing like some kinda anime.”

Lifting four straws then, Lucy gets a strangely confused look on her face, and everything pauses. Then she levitates all the individual straws in front of her face, looking at them cross-eyed as she adds, “Though now that I think on it, I don’t know how I’d call it out, if I was doing more than one straw at a time.”

“Maybe if you had four mouths?” I suggest.

She laughs, looking up at me again, saying, “Yeah, exactly! I got like four brains or something.” Her pot weaving resumes. “I suppose five if you count the one I’m using to talk to you,” she offers uncertainly.

“How many can you do at once?” I ask curiously, “Sorry, my unicorn um... friend isn’t really big on talking about this stuff.”

“Eh, I think... five is about my limit,” she says dismissively, “It just feels like um... like juggling but more complex. This’s my sweet spot, and if I get more, I start to run out of um... brain, I guess.”

Leaning forward, while still weaving, Lucy says excitedly, “But man, Robin? He can levitate like a dozen things at once! He’s got some fancy binary subdivision thing too, that he says helps. I probably could do more if I didn’t just grab ‘em.”

“Huh, I didn’t know that,” I muse thoughtfully, “So he just... divides his straws into two big tasks, then divides those in half, and those in half, until he’s down to one straw per... thing?”

She stares at me.

“S-sorry, I really don’t mean to—” I start to say, lifting an embarassed hoof, but she cuts me off, saying

“No, wait wait!”

Her pot just drops out of the air then, hitting the straw she’s squatting next to with a thump. She then takes a bunch of straw, floats it in front of her and stares at it intensely. Then she separates the clump into two, and sort of waves them around a little. Then her blue eyes widen in shock, and she says, “Holy crap, Meadowsweet! So I just...?” Her clumps split, and then those split, and then those split again, then again.

Soon she has sixteen... clumps of hay floating around her. Her eyes dart around as one of them spins in midair like a pinwheel, then another next to it spins, then half the clumps on her left side. Then she focuses on me, saying, “I think I finally get it! He meant like sub division!” A smile breaks on her face as she moves the clumps around her evenly spaced, then sets them slowly orbiting her. “Check it out, Meadowsweet! This’s freaking amazing!” she declares.

“You’re lifting sixteen!” I exclaim staring in excitement, “You just figured that out now?”

She nods eagerly, then says, “Hold on!” Closing her eyes, Lucy’s clumps split one more time, until a storm of thirty-two strands are whirling around her. She opens her eyes, staring forward dully as she says, “See, it—uh... just—...” She blinks then, and half of them fall out of the air.

“I guess five is my limit,” she says sheepishly, focusing on my face again, “Still, I can work twice as fast like this. Thanks!”

“Sure, I guess...” I reply cautiously, “I have no idea what it’s like to even... divide your head like that, but I’m glad it helped.”

“Yeah it’s...” her smile grows strained, “Weird...”

Another silent moment staring at each other, then Lucy just drops everything, the cool blue light of her horn shrinking to nothingness, as straw falls around her. “You know what?” she declares assertively, climbing to her hooves. “How about let’s go do something less weird.”

“Oh, um... you wanna take a walk?” I ask, flicking my tail in the direction of the door outside.

Her smile’s genuine at that and she says, “Sure, I’d love that.”

Lucy turns out to be... really nice, actually. She was a girl at Bronycon, working on the convention staff, like people who check your tickets and keep an eye on any activities to make sure nobody’s getting too rowdy. She loves the show, and though her unicorn nature really creeps her out sometimes, she’s open and inquisitive about it, in ways that Twilight Sparkle never was.

Oh, and she’s between relationships right now.

I don’t spend all my time thinking about sex. Sometimes I’m thinking about Lucy, or I’m thinking about telling Sue about the cornfield, so he can start rutting me and Mike again. But there’s so much else to do around here, it’s overwhelming! I sort of find out why nobody’s out in the farmland fields for instance, when wandering through town, I take a look at what people have been growing inside the city limits.

Wandering through the town, I can see that a lot of people are tending to gardens. Once the supermarkets stopped getting restocked, many people turned their front lawns into vegetable gardens. Not sure who had the idea first, but it spread quickly. There are already some healthy looking vines, which people inform me are beans and squash, with some small summer squash on the latter. Tomato plants laden with budding green fruits. Then I see someone’s lawn entirely covered with rows of corn stalks.

But unlike the corn Mike and I have been fucking in, this stuff can’t be more than 2 months old! I know corn grows really fast, and I know I’m pretty small, but it’s already taller than I am! Alone in that empty front yard, staring up at this serene, unattended patch of corn, I remark to myself, “That’s some really tall corn...”

“I know, right?” a squat earth pony says, scaring me half to death, poking her pink furred head out from between the green rows to smile brightly at me. Her curly yellow hair’s pushed back by a white kerchief, that I think might be an actual handkerchief. “It’s my first time growing it, too!” she says excitedly, “It just keeps growing bigger! I can’t wait to have some actual corn to eat!”

My surprise turning to confusion, I ask her, “What about the corn in the fields out of town?”

“Well, that’s private property first off,” she says flatly.

“O-oh right, so this is your lawn, so the corn’s okay to grow here,” I say in realization.

“Eah, until the bank comes down on me,” she says with a shrug, stepping out from between the rows of corn entirely, standing with me in the summer sun, with her ears sagging against the kerchief, “Can’t exactly pay my mortgage like this.”

“I think these are slightly extenuating circumstances,” I say with a wince.

She just shakes her head at that. “Extenuating whatevers aren’t going to make money appear out of thin air. Takes work to make money.”

To emphasize this, she starts digging at the soil with her forehoof to try to uproot a dandelion it looks like.

“Well, you seem to be working pretty hard to get that corn growing,” I say, looking above her at the growing ears on the bright green plants.

“Takes work that makes actual money,” she says, grumpily, scuffing at the soil again, “Anyway, all that corn outta town is completely inedible.”

Giving her a look, I say, “...seriously?”

“It was a shock to me, too!” she replies earnestly, “Some actual farmers around here said it’s only good for stuff like corn syrup, and only after heavy chemical processing. After I uh... found out that it basically tastes like sand. N-not that I stole any, or anything.”

“Well there’s gotta be more than one kind of corn growing out there,” I tell her insistently, “Those fields go on for miles!”

Looking my way uncertainly, the pink mare says, “I think they only grow one kinda corn. Believe me, I looked. I had to get this sweet corn from the supermarket!”

“Well that’s... strange,” I reply, looking at her corn stalks in a new light. “So these will grow sweet corn?”

“Heck if I know,” she replies with a sloppy grin, “But they sure are growing like gangbusters! And they got ears growing on them all over. They’re just kind of small still.”

“Hopefully they’ll be tasty,” I say, finding her smile infectious. “Anything that can grow higher than me in two months earns my respect,” I add jovially.

She laughs at that, a very musical laugh, and then says, “It’s a lot easier than I thought. Long as I can get water, right? Then those pegasus...es came from outta town, and now they can make it rain just on my front yard in the morning!”

“Oh, I was wondering about that,” I reply curiously, “How did you get water until the pegasi started pulling clouds together... however that works?”

She gives me a puzzled look. “You get a bucket, and go to the creek,” she says, “Thought that was obvious?”

“I... oh, so that’s... oh,” I say, reduced to mumbles for a moment there.

She starts idly digging at another unwanted plant, cursing under her breath as the weed flattens down, the tough fibers of the stalk just sliding under her hoof, stubbornly clinging to the roots in the earth.

“Hey uh, why don’t you just loosen the soil a bit?” I ask, my tail dipping down shyly as I add, “Uh, n-not to criticize your gardening or anything.”

“It’s no problem, like I said I’m new at this,” she says looking down at the scraped weed with a sigh. “At everything...”

Positioning myself over the stubborn weed which appears to be another stalky looking dandelion, I tell the other mare, “Well, I’m new at this too, but one thing some people in my um... group were doing is... you just sort of...” a hard stomp of my forehoof breaks up the dry soil around the dandelion with a little puff of dust. Then I crane my neck down and bite the stem, pulling the plant out of the crumbling soil.

With the dirty thing held delicately in my teeth I give a hopeful smile, as she exclaims, wide-eyed, “You can do that?”

Dropping the dandelion nervously, I stammer, “Y-yeah, it’s because hooves are harder than feet so you can really... stomp with them.”

“I was just sort of digging them out,” she says, gazing at the fallen weed I pulled, with its two foot long taproot sticking forlornly in the air.

“Digging, you pull at the soil,” I explain, “With loosening it, you have to really push into the soil.”

She gives it a try, but her hoof just compacts the soil further when it strikes dirt, so I come up beside her and say, “No, not push down the soil, push into the soil, like this.”

While I stomp to loosen up another area of soil, she watches with fascination, saying, “Oh, so it’s sort of like a vibration.”

“Yeah, like...” when stomping again to demonstrate, my hoof actually ends up sinking into the loose soil I produce under it, making me stumble a bit. “Like— that.”

She tries again, and it takes her a few tries, but soon she’s gleefully stomping around her corn rows, kicking off thistles and briars and all that sort of stuff that grows if you don’t have a lawn anymore to choke out the weeds. We’re kind of attracting a crowd actually. A bunch of people from nearby houses in this frankly suburban neighborhood.

“Can you show me how to do that?”

“Does it work on blackberries?”

“Are you pulling out dandelions with your mouth?”

The rest of my afternoon is spent on that block, just helping people out with their um... stomping technique? It never occurred to me how useful a trick this was. We never had much of a weed problem in our garden back at the old farm because there were like ten ponies working on it, so someone was gonna figure out how to get the weeds. I thought it was just kind of convenient, but people here really do have a problem with weeds, and with compacted soil.

I find myself troubled, when asking around back at farm 2.0 about the soil loosening trick. I find my answer from an earth pony stallion named Rachel. He was doing most of the gardening back at our old place, and he and I got to chatting about it on occasion. He was the one who taught me this soil trick, so I figured he’d be the pony to ask.

Rachel’s doing well, when I meet him. He’s a blue haired, dusty orange earth pony stallion, very tall and... strong, but in less of a forceful way than Sue. Still spends most of his time in our new garden, using those skills he taught me. And the reason he taught them to me was just because I was curious about how he did it. He’s just a really nice guy that way.

“Oh, loosening the soil?” Rachel replies among the sprouting plants in our new garden, casually leaning on a hoof, letting the other cross over his chest, “I learned that from Twilight Sparkle!”

Blinking, I say, “Really? But you’re an earth pony!”

“You don’t need a horn to stomp on dirt,” he says with a jolly laugh.

“Well... she could do it too, then?” I ask, ear tilting in confusion.

He shakes his head, but pauses uncertainly, saying, “No, she could, but... well, she said that I’d be better at it. I think it’s an earth pony thing?”

“I don’t think it counts as an earth pony thing if a unicorn could do it,” I say sadly, drooping my tail, “Even if she was bad at it. I’m not just bad at magic. I can’t cast it at all! And I’m certainly not even slightly capable of flying.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says with an encouraging smile, “We got plenty of ponies who can fly and use magic. All we have to do is stomp some dirt, and grow some veggies.”

“Yeah I... I guess...” I say shyly, blushing at his kind words. I guess I could argue with him, that I want to do something other ponies can’t do, to really help out instead of just being an optional accessory. It sounds dumb when I say it out loud though, and honestly he’s right. I should get used to being... what I am, even if I’m not more powerful than ponies with wings or a horn.

I’m also starting to want to fuck him.

Author's Notes:

And there they are! Forgiven, redeemed, and in a new town, on the long road to making amends. With so much to learn about their new friends, and new location! Or just forget about all that, and have lots of sex.