Psychedelica – Pastel Ponies
A pony story by Joseph Raszagal
As inspired by stuff best kept away from children
Chapter Five – Breakfast for Three

Pancakes.

Why does every innocent breakfast always start with pancakes?

Do you have any idea how self-consciousness a person I am, how much I would hate to ruin the purity of such a breakfast?

And yet...

“T-twilight?” I asked, more than a little nervous.

Patiently, my hostess responded, “Yes?”

“I'm sorry. You know, about what I said yesterday.”

“You mean when I was trying to explain to you what a Cutie Mark is and what yours might symbolize?”

“Y-yeah...”

“As I recall, you told me you'd rip yours off and shove it down my throat. Correct?”

“Yeah...”

Letting out a huge sigh, Twilight smiled and said, “You were recovering. You're still recovering. I know you didn't mean it.”

“I don't know how to begin explaining it,” I began, mulling over my thoughts with my coffee.

Catching the scent of a possible friendship report, Twilight quickly put her hair up in a bun and kept a notepad and quill floating nearby for good measure.

“Sometimes I just feel like the whole world's depending on what I say or do next. I've got all of this pressure coming down on me from everywhere and I really, desperately don't want to blow it and make a tremendous, spectacular, outstanding, unbelievably enormous chump out of myself. When it hits me, it's like I think I'm the butt of some enormous joke that only I don't seem to understand. There's a punchline in there somewhere, I'm just too frustrated and flustered to see it, you know?”

Empathetically, Twilight nodded and asked, “You know that that doesn't need to be the case, right?”

Shaking my head, I replied, “Yeah, I know, I don't need to make a huge deal out of everything. Of course I don't. It's just that sometimes things get too out of hand, there's serial escalation, and all of a sudden everyone's staring at me with expectant faces wondering what I think about it all.”

Stares. Man, they get at me the most. Wanna watch me crumble? Just stare at me for a few minutes.

“I don't know. I'll just... I'll have a spaz attack like that and everything will just get more and more difficult to express or relate to others. By the end of it all I'm left a sputtering, confused wreck.”

“Wow, um, what did I just walk in on?”

Twilight and I both nearly fell out of our chairs in surprise as Spike strolled into the room. Admittedly, it was still pretty darn early and, admittedly (again), this was indeed a very strange conversation.

“Sounds like a great way to built a ton of stress,” the little dragon remarked as he pulled up a chair. “How do you deal with it?”

Throwing my hooves into the air, I spat, “Dude, I have no clue.”

“He's just venting, give him a few minutes, Spike,” said Twilight as she placed a comforting hoof on my shoulder.

Nodding, I added, “Yeah... just... just give me a second here.”

“Look, I know that I don't need to worry so hard about what others think of me, it's just really, really, really hard sometimes,” I smirked halfheartedly. “I've been a colossal idiot before and, if given the chance, I'll likely be one again. That's just the thing though. I love the idiot that I am, I really do... I'm just always so afraid that everyone else won't, so I never really give them the chance and instead fly off the handle and spiral down into one of my patented panic attacks.”

Kind of like watching a house of cards collapse in on itself.

“But hey, what are you gonna do?” I smirked more genuinely, grinning. “I've done it before and I'll do it again, just try to cut me some slack when I do this next time, alright? I mean well, I'm just a dunce.”

“For what it's worth, I don't think you're a dunce,” stated Spike.

It caught me off guard.

Even my therapist was at a loss for words. Her unnecessary glasses slid down her nose.

Earnesty. That's all a man could ever ask for.

“Thanks, dude,” I replied, outstretching my hoof for him to bump.

Which he did.

Yeah, we're bros.

“Not a problem,” he said, smiling. “So, any other conversation landmines I need to be warned about before I go stepping into the kitchen? You two have pancakes and I don't, which must be a crime somewhere. I'm going to go and make myself a stack, maybe with some rubies and raspberry jam. Does anypony need anything while I'm in there?”

Twilight and I shared a smile.

“Nope, I'm fine,” I answered. “Get greedy and go ballistic in there. I mean it. I want to see a stack of starch a million miles high when you get back out here!”

“You got it!” cheered the baby dragon as he went charging from his seat into the next room.

“You're pretty good with kids,” commented Twilight as I sipped on my coffee.

“He's a good kid.”

We shared another smile.

“He most certainly is.”

Taking another sip of my java, my eyes crossed somewhere along my nose and gravitated up towards the other thing I had really wanted to talk to Twilight about.

“So, while we're getting all informative and whatnot~

“It's Twilight, her only existing setting is informative!” shouted Spike from amidst his breakfast-making.

“Anyway,” I snickered, rolling my eyes at my therapist. “What the heck is this thing jutting out of my forehead?”

Put simply, it was a horn.

The thing is, I didn't have it a couple of days ago...

Last night had been a bit of a shock. Now most of the way through the worst of the withdrawals, I hadn't been expecting the severe amount of pain that ended up dragging me out of dreamland and into the realm of the waking.

Neither had Twilight or Spike.

I remember screaming in ways I had never screamed before as a headache the size of South America hit me with all it had, then watching with wide eyes as a shiny new horn burst from my forehead like a tree sapling out of the dirt.

Now imagine that in fast-forward... and occurring in the center of your head.

Ow.

Predictably, Twilight responded with, “Your horn.”

My expression must have relayed that a vague answer like that wasn't exactly what I was looking for, because the unicorn waved a hoof and continued, “Unicorns have the ability to perform feats of magic using the concentrated power stored within their horns~

“You're like an encyclopedia, it's pretty hilarious.”

“I'm also the one responsible for dinner around here,” she affirmed, giving me a challenging look.

“Point taken,” I laughed.

Suppressing a chuckle of her own, Twilight smiled and said, “The ball's in your court.”

“Right. Uh, so, my horn. I'm a unicorn now, ergo, now I have a horn and can perform my own feats of magic. Right?”

Looking more or less just as confused as me, the lavender unicorn answered, “Right.”

“This hasn't happened before, has it? A pony randomly sprouting a horn in the middle of the night.”

Scrunching up her face in thought, Twilight shook her head and replied, “I've sent several letters to the Princess on the subject already, but no. Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

“Any ideas why?”

“Well, I have a theory,” she explained, her face scrunched-up again, “and it's only a theory so don't quote me on it, but I think your body is compensating for the general metamorphosis it went through by working out all the excess mass and energy in whatever ways it can. You still had potential energy and mass locked up inside of you and, well, it came out. Some ponies have horns. Now you have a horn. I'm... trying really hard not to think about it too much right now. Several books could be written about this, I don't even know where to begin.”

“Wow, really? It's really that big a deal?”

Nodding, an exhausted-looking Twilight confirmed, “Yep.”

“Well, geez, don't let me catch wind of that,” I busted up laughing. “Knowing the giant chowderhead that I am, I'll make a gigantic scene about it.”

“If that's the case, we'll calm you down,” asserted Spike as he reentered the room, a hefty plate of pancakes in his claw. “Now then, who's got the syrup?”

To be continued in Chapter Six - The Trickster's Brigade...