Psychedelica – Pastel Ponies
A pony story by Joseph Raszagal
As inspired by stuff best kept away from children
Chapter Three – Kicking and Screaming in the Throes of Withdrawal

Vomiting and blacking out. I've been doing a lot of that recently.

I awoke blearily in a strange bed and immediately lurched over the side to evacuate the contents of my stomach out and onto the floor. Running on empty, all I had to offer was watery bile. As I went to wipe my chin, I stopped myself halfway, remembering the shoddy job that I had done last time.

“Bathroom sink then,” I muttered around the bitter taste in my mouth.

It was an assumption, but one that I felt was fair. If there was a four poster bed with freshly laundered linens and pillows, there was probably a modern bathroom as well.

“Sink,” I repeated, mantra-style, as I sat up.

Getting up out of the bed was a mistake. As soon as I put my full weight onto my new... hooves, a searing pain shot through my limbs and pulled me down to the ground. A brief battle with gravity ensued, but I knew straight away that I was in no condition to win it. Overcome by aches and a sudden wave of nausea, I fell into my own puke puddle and, as the rancid smell filled my nostrils, I involuntarily went double-or-nothing and threw up again. My chest burned as though I'd swallowed a ball of pure fire, the dry heaving painful enough to bring tears to my eyes. With my nose running like a leaky faucet and my new fur coat a ruined, disgusting mess, I gritted my teeth and slowly forced myself into a standing position.

Suffice to say, it hurt.

It hurt a lot.

Several excruciating minutes later, having made it across the room, I found myself leaning against the bedroom's door and putting forth my best effort to hold back what little liquid remained in me. I had apparently decided at some point that it was wisest to keep my eyes closed, but having forgotten that amidst my pre-vomit concentration, I opened them again.

The room immediately began to spin like a top. Clockwise at first, then as if in mockery, counter-clockwise twice as fast.

Like an idiot, I attempted to follow it with my eyes for the full seven seconds necessary to make me fall forward, slam my nose against the doorknob, and toss my cookies again.

Me and these “agains”, goddamn.

“Fuck!” I garbled, a mouth full of blood and bile somewhat difficult to yell through.

The staccato clatter of hooves against wood told me that someone was on their way up a flight of stairs somewhere inside my head. After the stars stopped spinning and I stopped seeing dots, I realized that the door had been forced open and that someone was standing over me, inspecting me.

Flopping my battered noggin to the side, I was rewarded with a picturesque scene of the night sky through an open window, the sun having just sunk below the horizon.

Hey, wait... That reminded me of something.

Someone.

“Twilight?” I quietly called out.

“Yes?” she replied.

Squinting my eyes, I looked up and saw the purple pony standing there looking tense and utterly serious, as though she'd go to war with a foreign power if I asked her to.

It would have been adorable had I not felt like a pile of sewage at the time.

“Bathroom,” I croaked. “Bath.”

With an affirmative nod, Twilight stood up and set to work. Either she was stronger than she looked or she could levitate me just as Celestia had, but regardless, the little thing still managed to lift me all the same. Whisking me down what looked like a topsy-turvy hallway from a fun house, she quickly deposited me in a large porcelain tub and turned the hot water faucet with a metallic squeak. I was vaguely aware of the fact that there must have been a flood because there was water up to my knees, when suddenly, a great deal of shampoo was squirted onto my head without warning and roughly worked into a lather. The next hour or two were spent unceremoniously scrubbing my coat clean of the vile, self-produced gunk that I had worked into it. A nearby wastebasket was filled over the course of the bath, Twilight expertly predicting my puke and guiding me to the receptacle before I could ever get any of it into the water. Periodically, a warm washcloth floated over to my nose and dabbed away a spot or two of blood as it appeared.

Eventually, I blinked and found myself standing by the side of the tub, dripping all over the floor as Twilight applied towel after towel to me. The large mirror affixed to the wall adjacent to me displayed a pathetic sight. A damp pony with a brown coat and sandy blonde mane stood shivering from more than just the cold, his blue eyes sunken-in, unfocused, and baggy. I lifted a lethargic hoof and pressed it to the glass, hoping that the sad reflection somehow wasn't mine and wouldn't mimic my movements. With a pained groan, I watched as the sickly creature did exactly as I did.

All in all, I looked just about ready for the glue factory.

“How are you feeling?” questioned my caregiver as she scrutinized her cleaning work from a few paces away.

“Like I got in a fight with God and lost.”

“Oh, well, that's a bit worse than what I was expec~

Cutting her off with a wave of my hoof, I prepared the lie that every addicted junkie has stashed in reserve for when they're put in the care of someone with the potential to be an unintentional enabler.

Medicine.

“Before you say anything else, do you remember all of the things that should have come with me? I was... sucked into a portal or something in my closet, it's a long story.”

“I was there, remember?”

“I'm the one asking the questions here. Anyway, did my stuff come with me? At the time, it felt kind of like a giant vacuum cleaner was just sucking everything out of there and I'm pretty sure I saw a couple of things go through before me. Did any of it?”

“Yes, actually,” she answered, narrowing her eyes. “I took the liberty of gathering all of your belongings that we could find and had them shipped here.”

“Where is... here?”

“My home, the Ponyville Public Library.”

Ponyville? Really?

Creative name, guys.

“I haven't had the time to sort through it to see if any of it was broken while in transit, either during the trip from your world or during the cargo-carriage ride from the palace,” Twilight stated as she turned and exited the room, motioning for me to follow her. “Besides, it's rude to rifle through another pony's things.”

The police do it all the time.

“Right,” I muttered to nobody in particular. “Rude.”

“Princess Celestia and I felt that it would be in your best interest if you were removed from all the stimuli and noisy bustle of the palace,” she continued as she navigated the considerably more normal hallway and then down a staircase. “You seemed quite ill and, looking at you now, still do.”

Ill?

Well, damn, I couldn't have guided the conversation along any better than that even if I tried.

“You could say that, yes,” I said, putting on a mask of neutrality that I felt was already rapidly cracking. “I'm coming down off of some medication that I've been on for some time and still need, that's actually why I asked you about my things.”

Heading straight for a small kitchen, Twilight ducked into a pantry and came back out with a backpack that looked as though it had gone through two wars... plus one.

Holding the bag aloft for me to see, my host deadpanned.

Damn, the jig was up before it even began.

Thinking quickly, which wasn't very quick at all, I spat, “Didn't you tell me you hadn't gone rooting around through my junk?”

“I lied.”

“Oh. Well, you were right, that's rude.”

“Apparently, just as you were ejected from the portal, several of the palace's contraband sniffing Diamond Dogs had to flee the premises due to spontaneous, uncontrollable nosebleeds,” Twilight commented, giving the bag a hard, appraising look. “Now, I know I can be a bit excitable sometimes, maybe even gullible, but I know narcotics when I see them. There's enough in here to kill you ten times over!”

There wasn't much I could say in response to that.

My stash really was that considerable.

“So, you're a substance abuser and these are the substances that you abuse, right?” Twilight interrogated, still levitating the loaded bag.

“Yes, Captain Obvious, I am and they are. Now, if you'd be so kind, Cokie the Clown needs his bag of tricks, so please, would you be a dear and GIVE ME THAT BAG?!”

Lunging forward with all of my exhausted, nauseous might, I tried to snatch the backpack full of drugs out of the air, but came up short and landed in a heap on the floor as it floated higher, just barely out of my reach.

I glared daggers at the purple pony, locking eyes with her in search of a chink in her armor. Maybe she could only maintain this level of determination for so long?

No such luck.

The fiery intensity in her eyes gave absolutely no quarter. If she didn't want me to get that bag, I wouldn't be getting it.

The realization that I'd be spending the next week and a half hating and despising this pony girl I had only hours earlier been introduced to was a tad shocking and hit me like an atomic bomb.

She was just trying to help me...

She really didn't deserve to be called the whole slew of things that I would most definitely end up calling her or the holy Hell that I was most certainly going to raise.

Dammit.

To be continued in Chapter Four – ''Nurse, I need 30ccs of friendship, stat!''...