Impossibilities & Roses by Flotsam

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Wrote some garbage, thought you guys might like it, probably gunna at least continue it to a state of blissful mind fuzz. Who knows right?

 

Damien clawed at his faced as he watched helplessly as another hand of poker circled the drain on his scuffed and faded computer monitor. From a deeply imbedded muscle memory he immediately queued up for another game, his mind resetting as best it could after such a fucking blunder. As he often did he murmured his thoughts to himself to try and deal with the torrent of self-hatred and masturbatory sadness that accompanied every lost game.

"Just stay calm, stick by the principles, and don’t let your ego get involved"

His ego meanwhile screamed at him, begging him not to chuck more money into this demon of a game. But Damien was too deep. He had already sold his car and his collection of records to finance what surely would be his meteoric rise to prominence on the online poker circuit. So far though, these sacrifices had bore little fruit. All he had left was his laptop, a dingy mattress in the corner of his room, and a maxed out credit card. As he loaded into his next game, the poker table onscreen blinked into existence, a bountiful and vibrant green. Around it a series of avatars appeared and took their places. He watched as his own, some random jpg of his favorite character in the world, took her spot amongst the others. Behind the table a faceless dealer appeared, and a small animation approximating shuffling followed by dealing two cards to each of the avatars. A small and big blind were automatically deducted from two of the players, and the round began. Damien looked around at his competition, sizing them up. One could tell a lot about a person from their avatar.

At least he thought so. A default or completely blank avatar usually meant a player who took themselves too seriously, or wished to achieve the appearance of a smurf. Two such avatars were seated at this particular table. Next to one of the defaults, was a cropped image of porn. Damien even recognized where it was cropped from.

"I see you are a man of culture" He bemusingly chuckled to himself.

And finally to round out the table, there were two images of functionally identical anime girls. One of which was from some normie trash that had caught on a couple months ago in the west, and the other was Kasumi from a supremely ancient yet equally supremely quality OVA. Damien noted to himself to keep an eye out for the Kasumi player. Good taste in anime usually meant they had no social life, and therefore were probably rain man levels of skilled when it came to online gambling. Finally Damien's gaze rested on his own avatar. Her smile was so precious, the gorgeous flow of her mane. That perfectly warm and inviting off white of her coat. He had picked his online name for her almost six years ago, and not once had his devotion to his waifu faltered. As the screen alerted him it was his turn, he watched, entranced by her beauty, as Rose luck checked and tossed in two chips from his pile for him.

In the realm of online gaming, and gambling to a certain extent, a pony avatar was often the target of endless mockery. But it was worth it. Rose luck was worth everything. When he finally caught a winning streak and climbed his way out of complete poverty, He vowed he would get the best quality Rose luck plush he could, and fall asleep in her hooves every night.

The poker game pulled Damien out of his day dreams for Rose, and he focused in as the dealer unveiled the first three cards. Ace of hearts, ten of diamonds, and king of hearts. Damien's heart leapt as he doubled checked his own cards. A queen and nine of spades. He clasped his hands together in prayer and begged to whoever would listen for a jack to be unveiled.

"Buddha, Jesus... Celestia somebody please let me win this hand"

With a click of his mouse, he doubled down on his hand, and continued praying for a jack to be unveiled. The normie anime trash and one of the default avatars had already folded, but there was still enough in the pot to make up for the last three losses all on it's own. With a deep inhale, Damien held his breath as the final two cards were revealed. The first one was a 5 of spades. Damien's body tensed up in a painful rictus as he intently stared at the screen, willing a jack to appear.

"C'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon baby please don't fuck me just hand me a jack hand me a jack hand me a... "

Damien leapt off his chair and screeched a victorious cheer into the empty room.

"FUCK YES BLESS YOU GOD THANK YOU"

A jack of clubs sat so beautifully in the center of the table that Damien felt tears start to well in his eyes. A massive stack of chips were shoved to his wonderful little Rose Luck. With this momentum he could easily bide his time and bully the other players out of the game with just a little patience.

He sat back, almost cackling in victory when another voice rang through the walls.

"SHUT THE FUCK UP DAMIEN I'M TRYING TO SLEEP"

Damien almost fell out of his chair, all of the victorious energy he felt was instantly sapped. Composing himself as best he could he called out to his poor roommate a meek little sorry. There was no response, but he could swear he heard the exhausted groan of his roommate across the hall. Poor guy was going to university, getting an education, a future. Damien envied him a little, school had always felt impossible to him. He suspected he was just not cut out for the modern world. Save for his cozy little chair and computer.

In between hands, he quickly clicked over to his other tab. It was open to a pony image board. He had been scrolling through a couple of his favorite threads last time he looked, and he continued from where he had left off. The Rose luck thread had been resurrected recently, and he eagerly devoured what little content there was. A couple new greens, some sketches by a drawfag. Nothing major, but better than nothing. He made a post himself, reposting one of his favorite pieces. Rose luck curled up in a pet basket, comfy and napping. With a slight pain of melancholy, he posted it along with the text,

"If only she was real"

As the post loaded he clicked back over to his poker game and quickly made a small raise before returning to the image board. He refreshed the thread due to little more than habit, and found there was already another post. It was some dumb gif of a pony screeching. For a moment Damien was a bit puzzled, until he fucking checked his post. >> 77777777. If there was one tonic which penetrated and soothed his pathetic miasma of existence, it was meme magic. Maybe it was just latent mental illness, or the years of fostering detachment from reality, but as he looked at the biggest get he had ever got, Damien's mind ran wild with fantasies. Autistic reminiscing about fanfictions and wish fulfillment blotted out all thought. Already he could hear his doorbell, see his beautiful little rose luck in a cardboard box, waiting for him to rescue and take care of her.

"My little rosie" he sighed.

He stared at the thread in afterglow as reply after reply piled in, screaming their shock and awe at his post. This was the kind of power that won elections, tore down companies, and made anime real. And from the jaws of reality he would plunge his post, and retrieve the waifu. Without a hint of self restraint or sanity, Damien let his mind run wild, only pulling himself down to reality to continue smoking the shit out of the other players in his poker game.

From under his computer desk he retrieved a bottle of Pinot Noir. He may be a jobless dropout runaway gambling addict reject brony loser, but he certainly did get a lot of the same number on a post. And that excuse was as good as any to start drinking and lapsing into fantasy.

He pulled the cork out and brought the bottle to his lips, chugging down the cheap wine by the mouthful. It was late anyways and he found it easiest to sleep when stone cold drunk. He finished the poker game on autopilot, and shambled over to his mattress before collapsing into an unsightly mess of dirty clothes and cum soaked blankets. He passed out almost immediately.

 

“W-wha, where am I?”

Damien shook himself awake and found his shaking translated into a rocking motion on the ground beneath him. His confusion was cleared up as he squinted his eyes open and saw he was on a little dingy in the middle of a dark red ocean. He leaned over the side of his humble ship, and reached a hand into the red ocean. He cupped his hand and brought the red liquid up to his lips.

“Red wine, obviously” he thought to himself.

Pretty good wine too if his tongue was to be believed. He sat back his ass back down on the floor of the dingy, and cast his gaze around the ocean of wine. Pink clouds dotted a beautifully yellow sky as a sun hidden from clouds provided the air with a pleasant warmth.

Suddenly, something sliced into Damien’s cheek, drawing blood that was just as translucent and rich as the wine in the ocean around him. He winced from the pain and looked down at his feet. A single rose laid on the floor, a barb from it’s stem coated in his own blood. He picked it up carefully and gave a good inspection of it. It seemed like a flawless rose, barbed and painful yet, delicate and beautiful. It was at this point another rose fell from the sky and struck Damien flat on the head, getting tangled in his messy nest of a scalp.

“Ow fuck,”

And in the following moments, the still pleasantly warm air was filled to the brim with falling roses. Filling up the dingy and striking their barbs into Damien over and over again. All around him petals and stems began to collect on the surface of the water. He was bleeding now from all over, a stinging pain as roses struck and sometimes stuck themselves into him like a pincushion. In desperation Damien threw himself into the water, submerging his entire body in the wine. And yet as he tried to paddle himself under, away from the hail of roses, the wine around him turned to poker chips at the touch of his hand. A great funnel seemed to open up around him, roses and poker chips and spouts of wine swirling in a terrible maelstrom. And Damien fell down, sinking deep into the ocean. He managed to open his eyes as his descent grew faster and faster, only to find himself staring at Rose luck.

He reached out for her, and she mirrored his movement with one of her hooves. As he was just within reach of her, his fingers passed through some kind of film, and disappeared. He was slowly pulled into a mirror like pool, screaming no as he watched Rose luck in the reflection be dragged towards the surface.

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”

Damien bolted upright, almost throwing himself off his mattress and onto the floor next to him. He clasped his hand to his head, feeling his brain roll around like it was made of mush. He squinted away the sleep in his eyes and tried to remember the dream he just had, but it slipped through his fingers and floated away into nothing. He let go of his attempts to remember, comforting himself in knowing that if it had been important, he would have just remembered it no problem. He slid back to his computer desk and awoke it from its slumber. The last page he had been on was still open. It was the Rose luck thread…

It looked like it had been taken over by some obnoxious spamming, someone must have gotten a pretty fat get. He clicked over to the online poker site, but for some reason or another, he felt exhausted even looking at the login screen. He made a groan of boredom and walked out of his room to his apartment’s kitchen. It looked like his roommate had already left for classes. Damien plucked a couple eggs from the fridge and cracked them into a pan. He also stole half an onion from his roommate’s cupboard and threw it in with the eggs after he had diced it. Once he had finished cooking and eating breakfast, he walked over to the bathroom for a shower. As he passed by the mirror, his reflection caught his eye. He darted back and took a look at himself.

“Jaundice looking motherfucker” he laughed to himself. The bathroom lights were always making his skin look weirdly yellow. Almost like he belonged on the Simpsons. He dismissed it with a yawn and turned the shower’s handle all the way left to try and eek out as much heat as he could.

He stepped into the shower with one foot before quickly retreating it and once more laughing at himself.

“Almost forgot to turn on the fan.”

He reached over to the other side of the room, and turned on the fan. As it began to rumble away, the bathroom light also blinked to life. It took a moment of blissfully drowsy thinking, before another moment of cognitive dissonance for Damien to realize something had just been fucky.

He sprang out of the shower and back in front of the mirror. His skin was looking a strange yellowish colour, just like it always did with the bathroom light. He reached over and clicked the switch to the fan and light. As the fan rumbled down, and the light faded out, the yellow skin remained.

Not completely saturated and cartoonish as the Simpsons, but still a few shades closer to lemon than normal. Damien traced his fingers along his cheek.

“Am I going to die?”

Google was consulted, and the general opinion seemed to be yes, although what the numerous online doctors and FAQs didn't find a consensus on was the cause. Why is my skin yellow seemed a fairly inoquious queery in his head before he had actually written it out, but as Damien scrolled through the results, he couldn't help but get a little hysterical. Lupus, Jaundice, rapid onset teriaki syndrome, cancer of the heart, cancer of the lungs, cancer of the blood cancer cancer- Damien decided that he would just scroll past all the cancer stuff. As he passed over condition after condition after desease, one caught his eye. Liver Failure.

Suddenly some of the details of his dream came back to him, something about an ocean of wine? He cast his gaze over to his mattress, around which lay three empty wine bottles.

"Oh god I fucking drank myself to death. Just like my old gypsy aunt said I would."

He gabbed at his slightly bloated tum, and pleadingly begged,

"Please don't kill me mr.liver, I believe in you! You can break down all those mean ol alcohols. If you get me through this, I promise I won't ever drink again."

The giddy drunk in the back of his head committed suicide upon hearing himself utter those words.

He quickly followed up with another google search. How to survive liver failure. Or at least that is what he meant to type out. What actually ended up in the search bar was, Hjowwt o surrevivvce jkilberfalurw. Damien pulled his hands away from the keyboard and focused on them for a second. They were shaking like a Chihuahua on a cold day. He tried his best to will them to his control, but a strange numbness had permeated his fingertips and he found himself completely unable to move them independently. They all just followed the same sort of muscle group. Like he was wearing a mitten.

His hands were fucking dying. They were dying and rotting right in front of his eyes. In a blur of panic and hangover ennui he mumbled something about a hospital, before reaching for his old phone at the edge of the computer desk. But his stupid fucking numb ass mitten hands just knocked it to the ground. He fell to his hands and knees and crawled over to the phone on the ground. He pressed his hand into the power button and awoke the device of his salvation. It made a small jingle in response to being turned on before being patted about with his numb as butcher meat fingers until he opened the phone application on his phone. For a moment he thought how much easier this would be with an old type phone that had actual buttons.

He dialed nine one one with his nose before pressing his head to the phone as it still sat on the ground.

“Hello nine one one what’s your emergency.”

“I turned yellow this morning and now I’m super messed up and my hands are bucking dying I need an ambulance.”

“Ok ma’am tell me your address so I may route them to your location.”

Damien felt a wave of nausea pass over him, buckling his entire body in two, forcing him to the floor. He meekly groaned out,

“Thirty Sixty Pomerium Avenue, apartment four. Get here fast I feel like I’m going to die.”

“Ok they are on their way right now, if you can tell me in mor-“

Damien felt himself shudder, like some fish had wormed its way into his stomach, before he fell limply on his phone and passed into unconsciousness.

The spray from the ocean caught Damien in the face. He woke to find himself back in the dingy from the night before, but this time he had made landfall. Before him was a small outcropping of rock and sand, utterly tiny compared to the vast unending ocean around it. The waves were still crashing into the back of his dingy even as it was pulled onto the beach. He jumped from the tiny boat onto the shore of the island, strangely sure in his footing considering his state in meat space. But it seemed the dream had imbibed him with a vigour unlike he had ever felt before. He pulled the dingy further onto the beach so as to prevent a high tide from washing it away, and set about exploring the island.

He went off at a little jog, climbing the gentle slope up to the center of the island. He deftly place each stride away from the painful little crags of the pebbles and smaller rocks around him, until he came closer to the center of the island where larger swathes of limestone had been pushed up and laid bare before the sun.

Once he made it to the highest summit of the island, which was still little more than a humble pile of rocks, he sat down and took inventory of his realm. Not much but sandy beaches and sun bleached rocks. And yet somehow Damien knew he would be ok here. That he could prosper on this tiny spec of land. He looked down at the rock underneath him. The rockface had almost melted away, tilled by invisibly small strokes into a happy little gravel, and then a pleasantly functional clay. Until finally he reached down a picked up a handful of dirt from where just a minute ago there had been nothing but bare stone. He looked behind him at the path he had taken to get to the summit. Winding in between the rocks and the dunes, a thin stretch of tilled earth had appeared. Around the dingy it looked like flowers were already blooming. Damien looked to his side, and saw a tiny little rose, rising out of the ground.

Everything would be ok.

Damien was pulled into consciousness by a severely painful roar in his legs and hands. It felt like they were on fire, in a blizzard. He rolled his head to one side, and from behind some kind of breathing apparatus, he saw someone in a bright yellow jacket with a red cross over the breast.

“H-help me” He choked out.

The face of the emergency worker flickered in surprise and shock.

“HOLY SHIT IT’S STILL ALIVE”

Damien assumed that was a bad sign. Or maybe a good sign. At least he wasn’t dead. He began to fade out into unconsciousness again but the emergency worker snapped right around his face and have him a little slap. Somewhere all around him a siren turned on, and he felt the force of acceleration push him a little in the table? Gurney? Whatever they had strapped him to. He felt a spike be driven into his chest, and managed to raise his head enough to see a syringe as thick as a pencil jammed into his chest. He felt compelled to quote a piece of high art he was quite familiar with.

“-s-some-thing-“

He couldn’t tell if the emergency worker got the reference so he just imagined they did. He then receded into his own head a bit and played through the scene with Vincent and Mia, the one with the ketchup joke. He was pretty sure he knew it by heart and when it came to the punch line, he incomprehensibly mumbled,

“H-hegooeesssandsteppssssson th’ lil tommatoooo and saayyysss ketchup”

He giggled a bit but that hurt the crap out of his chest so he tried his best to cut that shit out. He could have sworn that he heard the emergency worker say something about royals with cheese but that was probably a pain and delirium fueled hallucination. Just like the roses that were sprouting up around his gurney. Suddenly the emergency worker jumped and yelled out,

“Where the fuck did all these flowers come from?”

Oh… guess that wasn’t a hallucination. For some reason Damien felt the need to apologize for the inconvenient growth of flowers in the ambulance. He tried his best but he choked again basically as soon as he opened his voice. A ripping pain shot through his throat, like it was being cut up and rearranged. He tried to banish that mental image and focus on the roof of the ambulance. All white and aluminum looking and stuff. As white as the clouds they have back home.

He zoned out for a moment and pulled his hand up to his face to wipe off some sweat, but the thing which touched his face was most definitely not a hand. It was all messy and some bits of it were as hard as stone. There weren’t fingers there anymore. Just a sort of loaf of flesh. Damien just let his not-a-hand fall back to his side. He could deal with this once he wasn’t moments from death.

Another blur of sirens and a sensation of motion stirred Damien into as much alertness as he could handle. Which evidently wasn't that much. All around him he could see people coming and going, every time they looked down at him they clasped their hand around their mouths or just shrieked in terror. He watched as the roof of the ambulance became a starless night sky, before an automatic door and endless corridors of those foam board ceilings they have in high schools. When finally he sensed motion had stopped, he felt about twice as exhausted as he had when he was in the ambulance. From around him he heard a male voice authoritatively call for some implement of some kind.

A thick face cloaked in a surgical mask bent over top of Damien. He snapped his fingers and pulled Damien’s left eye open. Damien did his best to move it around to prove he was in fact still alive.

The old doctor disappeared from his vision and he heard some muted voices from around him.

“-lose up this wing we are entering into quarantin-“

“-cuate everyone you need to leave now-“

“-the shit is that?”

Damien felt another wave of exhaustion pour over his body, rotting what little strength he had left. His eyes rolled back and he fell into a dreamless sleep.

 

A blinding white light shot though his head. Instinctively his eyes clenched shut, which did little to brace against the piercing brightness. He tried to bring a hand up to shield his eyes, but was caught off guard by the complete exhaustion which gripped him as he channeled will power and effort fruitlessly. He continued to try and bring a hand to his face until he took another breath, and felt his body collapse further into the blankets below him. With a fluttering of a thousand blinks, he eventually managed to force his eyes open against the torrent of painful light. As he did, he was greeted by a white ceiling, and a frosted slate of glass housing which might as well have been concealing a miniature sun. Summoning up another bout of willpower, Damien turned his head to the left, letting it fall against what felt like a linen pillow. Next to him was a wall roughly two meters away with a window set within. It took a moment for him to parse the sight before him, and as he did a feeling of nausea grew. In the pale reflection of the glass was a strange chimera, limbs draped over the sides of the table and cloaked in a macabre pelt of skin and sloughed tissue.

As Damien’s eyes widened in horror, so too did the misshapen holes punched deep in the bloated head of the beast. He stared into the image, a gross parody of life, for long enough to begin mapping his proprioception to the festering mass in front of him. He began an inventory in his mind of the form he was now trapped in.

“There are the legs, that gaping cavity used to be the chest, that tiny spindle of flesh was my right arm, and that potato looking mass is the head...”

A searing headache had begun to drill into the back of Damien’s head, but he found himself too captured by the sight of his own body to acknowledge it.

Suddenly, movement from behind the glass obscured the reflection, and his attention was instead directed to the small crowd of people behind the glass. Most of them were covering their mouths in what Damien assumed to be disgust. One of them, with a lab coat and a set of thick rimmed glasses was almost pressing her face to the glass, soaking up every detail of the scene before her hungrily. As Damien’s gaze passed over her she excitedly waved. The warm drone of an intercom system then filled the room.

“This is head researcher and toxicologist Matthew Fletcher, I will be the overseer of your treatment and the study of your ailment. Please do not exert yourself at this time, your body has grown increasingly frail in the days since your admittance. Me and my team will do everything to try and save you, but please keep In mind the nature of your condition is currently under debate and we will not risk contamination, even if that means resigning you to death. If this is clear, please nod.”

Damien tried his best and managed a pretty respectable nod considering his current state. A few of the faces in the glass cast looks at each other. A sigh of melancholy rattled around the room through the intercoms.

“Due to your ailment and the lack of any next of kin, I am afraid we must press you for consent to treatment before we continue further. We are first going to take biopsies of the tissue which has not yet experienced necrosis, as well as samples of the necrotic tissues, and a full suite of MRI scans. If you understand and consent to these actions then please nod”

Damien nodded.

A second voice then came over the intercoms, this one sounding like a middle aged woman rather than the scritchy baritone which had just been speaking.

“We have been unable to ascertain the environmental factors which could have led to you developing this condition. I am going to ask you a series of yes or no questions. Please give a nod for yes and remain still for no.

Have you visited a Nuclear reactor within the last three years?”

Damien stayed still, no.

“Have you lived near an industrial waste site in last three years?”

No.

“To your knowledge have you consumed a large amount arsenic within the immediate past?”

No.

“Have you traveled outside of the country in the last three years?”

No.

“Have you had sexual relations with any persons who have been outside of the country in the last three years?”

No.

“Have you had any sexual relations within the last three years?”

No.

“Have you been employed in a waste treatment facility in the last three years?”

No.

The questioned continued for nearly half an hour, and aside from the questions asking if he actually could still hear them or asking for confirmation on his answers, he never had to answer yes. The voice on the intercom grew tired and by the end almost seemed frustrated at the lack of useful information being extracted from her questions.

Once the questionnaire had been finished, there was a click and a rush of air behind Damien, like the sound that doors make in science fiction films. Two figures covered in what looked like radiation suits walked into his field of view, one of which was holding a tray filled with some of the biggest needles he had ever seen. As the other picked up a syringe through thick plastic looking gloves brought it to Damien’s half rotted flesh, He retreated back into his mind.

“Go to my happy place go to a happy place” He thought to himself.

Right as the sting of the needle shot across what was left of his body, Damien could hear the theme song to my little pony playing in his head. He focused on each note and word of the song, meticulously recreating the music in his imagination. The pain became a distant worry easily brushed aside as he pictured the smiling faces of the little ponies. He pushed himself to then map out and paint the inviting streets of Ponyville. The chirping birds, the welcoming little cottage stores, the inhabitants all waving and greeting Damien as he walked down the cobblestone roads.

“Hey there Rosie!” Lemon Hearts called out.

“Hey Lemon! Hows the studying been going?” Damien automatically replied

She blushed with embarrassment and cringed with a little giggle.

“Oh it has been a wee bit of a struggle, but hay what isn’t?” She spoke, already regaining her bubbly composure.

“We can have a party when you ace those entrance exams to the Canterlot Academy.” Damien cheerily cooed before continuing down the street.

Even as another needle pierced into him, with a little bounce of his hooves he once again lost the pain in a fuzz of warm feelings. So many ponies to see, so many old friends to chat with. It was like he has spent his entire life in Ponyville. He began to hum along to an old tune his mother had taught him. His voice was well suited to it, so tender and flowery.

“-Morning in Ponyville shimmers! Morning in Ponyville shiiiiiiines and I know for absolute certain, that everything is perfectly f-“

“FUCK”

Damien was pulled from his imagination by what felt like a branding on the inside of his legs. Pain like fire spread through his body, and he couldn’t help but uselessly writhe in pain. He tried to scream but found his throat had caught somehow, and all that came from him was an airy hissing. The two medical personnel jumped backwards, the one with the tray of needles dropping them out of surprise. The pain coalesced at what felt like the tip of Damien’s toes, spreading through them, almost burning away the dead flesh which had been shed off of the main part of his leg. He kicked out in pain, and surprisingly, a strange pale yellow limb followed his command, sloughing off the necrotic flesh around it like a phoenix from ash. He felt his body shift to accommodate the action, and was overwhelmed by the sensation of being trapped in a massive coat. Or a cocoon.

The limb which had struck out with his will, was strange. He flexed the different portions of it, and was amazed at the dexterity of it. The knee had been pushed up, and his thigh had rounded out a lot and it jutted out from his hip in an unfamiliar way. His ankle was now much higher on his leg, and the entire bottom portion of the limb consisted of his foot, with the very tip of his toe, or the musculature which used to be a toe, forming the bottom of the limb.

Damien was about to pull the new leg up a bit to get a better look at it, when the intercom rang out again.

“Please relax your limbs subject, or we will be forced to restrain you.”

Damien froze and did as the intercom said. The two people in the radiation suits quickly exited and Damien was left to start through the window. Through all of it, the one doctor who had waved to him had retained her happy attitude, and in fact stared at him even more intently. Something about her made him feel a lot more comfortable.

A few minutes later another team of people in thick plastic suits entered his room. This time they carried with them a collection of scalpels and surgical tools. Out of his field of view they cut and snipped away at the dead flesh surrounding his form. There was a third person this time, holding in their gloved hands a bucket with a biological hazard sign on it. Slowly Damien listened as they cut and slopped what used to be his body into the bucket. He was thankful that for whatever reason, his sense of smell had been stolen away. He could imagine the stench was probably at least twice as bad as the rank body odour filled room he had come from.

When the doctors finally stopped, Damien sat up as best he could to get a look at the damage.

Around his leg it looked like a plastic toy’s leg had been lowered into a clumsily dissected pig carcass. The view reminded him of Eraser Head or The Fly. He rolled his shoulders around some, and tried again to speak, but once more the only sound which escaped his throat was pained hissing. He then turned over and found that apparently a series of tubes and wires had been planted into his side. They led to a bank of tanks of liquid and flashing diodes. He supposed that was how they had managed to keep him alive for apparently days. He shuddered at bit taking in his situation.

Even before his body had spontaneously begun to die, it seemed like most of his time had been spent either gambling or falling into dreams and pony themed fantasies. He supposed that was what he deserved after spending the better part of a decade masturbating, adoring and losing himself in a show for little girls.

He let his head fall back down into the fluffy pillow of his bed. He’d rather be dreaming of some cute pony nonsense than continue wallowing in the wreckage of his body.

~Meta: I can already see some fucking typos so ill fix all that shit before i continue writing, sorry for such a sloppy post~

“If it’s immune deficiency then how did it move so fast? The thing we brought in on Thursday at least looked human. I can’t even point out to you the basic anatomy of the pile you have slopped on the table. And worse than that, it’s still fucking conscious. It has got to be some horrible chimera of flesh-eating viruses, syphilis too. That is the only thing which can account for this much necrosis while allowing the subject to remain lucid.”

She sat back in her chair and grabbed at her coffee mug. Her hands were shaking even just picturing the scene she had witnessed in the quarantine. She looked down at her body and couldn’t help placing herself on that table, in that state. It was enough to send shivers down her spine. She caught the eye of her other colleague, Doctor Campbell, as she took a sip from her mug. Leigny rolled her eyes and invited Campbell’s speech. She had heard it once before on the first day the patient arrived and dismissed it as nonsense. But in the absence of logical conclusions, sometimes solace could be found in nonsense.

“Go ahead and give me a refresher, Campbell.”

She excitedly almost floated through the air to Leigny’s desk.

“You are all ignoring the biggest thing about this. The biopsies we took of their internal organs show that they are entirely unharmed. The digestive system even seems to be reinforcing itself. And I know that you know that I know that the thing sticking out of what's left of its hip is some sort of leg. The body is rebuilding itself underneath all that dead tissue. For some reason or another the entire body has just decided to change into something else. Maybe our attempts to stabilize what the body saw as just biological waste are what lead to the current situation. What if all the skin and muscle and fat that it is shaving off is supposed to be abandoned? What if this is-”

“You are talking about science fiction, science fiction in a fucking hospital-”

“I don’t know what you are looking at but the science fiction is already here, lying in the quarantine. Despite losing most of their body mass, they are still conscious. In just three days their leg reformed from a pile of gore into an unguligrade pillar unlike any living creature. What we are witnessing is scienc-”

Leigny groaned in exhaustion.

“So what do you think we should do? Let the condition accelerate? Let it evolve into some pokemon looking angel? This is a fucking hospital not bad fanfiction. I don’t want to hear about your idiotic delusions again.”

Campbell smiled and just turned around. As she left Leigny’s office, the key chain dangling from her pocket caught Leigny’s eye. It was some pink creature, reared liked a horse. It reminded Leigny of the patient’s leg in a disconcerting way. She remembered inviting Campbell to a few drinks a year ago and having the bitch whinge about some cartoon show the entire time. How such a lunatic got her medical license she didn’t know.

The next time the medical personnel came into Damien’s room, he did his best to not even acknowledge them. They just went straight to pulling and removing more of the dead flesh. They pulled and ripped it off of him like torn pork. He didn’t feel a thing. Until a spray of cold water shot against his body. One of them had brought a hose with them and was unleashing the ice cold torrent right his reformed leg, washing away the last of what used to be his old leg. He began to shiver as chills took hold of him. As he did he felt himself squirm out of his skin, or rather his cocoon of dead flesh, and nearly kick it off entirely. The movement freaked out the medical people. Damien tried to jokingly say Boo, but the raspy, strangely beautiful singsong mewling which escaped his mouth only served to further freak out the radiation suited men. Something in the back of Damien’s mind compelled him to at least reach out to them. As he did, the two heaps of flesh at his side buckled and burst open, revealing two more limbs just like his leg. He felt oddly nostalgic as he found himself staring down at his new limbs, as though he had been reunited with an old friend.

That seemed like the limit of the weird shit that the medical personnel could take, as they hurried to the door and slammed it shut behind them. Damien expected to hear some voice come over the intercom and protest his actions, but the little speaker above the door frame was still silent. He took this as invitation enough to continue pushing his way out of all this gross shit he was trapped in. He was filled with an intense vigour for the first time since his liver had stopped working, or whatever it was that fucked him up back in his apartment. He took another look at his limbs before he tried to free himself from the rest of his body. They were a pale yellow, and strangely smooth and elegant. The colour reminded him of springtime. Their posture was quite different from his last pair of arms. They stuck out in front of him like a dog or a pony’s. His mind went blank for a moment, and when it returned he had lost whatever the last thought he had was. Probably wasn’t important anyways.

Damien used his free limbs to try and roll himself over the side of the table. He swung them around and with a gooey sounding rip, tore himself from the flesh still caked to the table. The tubes which had been jammed into the side of him stayed stuck in the cocoon of flesh. He landed on all four limbs, his back left leg still looking like an overcooked shawarma spike. He gave his entire body a shake, and more dead material flew off him. He lifted one of his front limbs to try and scrape off the mound of flesh around his head, but he couldn’t find purchase. He gave a cursory look around the room and his eyes landed on the handle of the door the suited men had disappeared into. He approached it and began to rub his head against it. It was only an inch or two higher than his natural posture, and after a few unsuccessful attempts, the tip of it caught on an open wound of Damien’s head. He felt the tug of it and pulled away as hard and fast as he could.

He landed on the floor just next to the door. It felt like someone had just turned his vision from a CRT monitor into a widescreen. He blinked quickly and found his facial muscles as responsive as ever. He looked up at the door, where a swath of necrotic flesh was still hanging from the handle. After a moment it struck him that his face might have changed along with his limbs. He was filled with a strange balance of dread and wonder.

It had slipped his mind when he trotted over to the door, but he had naturally slid into a comfortable gate. It didn’t feel at all like shuffling around on his hands and knees. Did he even have hands and knees any more?

Putting that thought at the back of his mind, he cantered over to the window. He was just too short to get a good look at himself, so he reared up on his back legs. He pressed his limbs to the glass to steady himself and stared at his reflection.

The most striking change was his eyes. What used to be small beady little things had changed to big sparkling eyes. They were like little pools set into his skull. Their massive retinas bounced around as he took in the rest of his facial details. The top half of his head had no skin on it, most of it was showing bone and errant muscle tendons. The bottom half was covered in the same light yellow coat that covered his limbs. His mouth and nose had fused together, and now poked out in front of soft looking cheekbones. There were still little polyps of dead flesh stuck to his face, but most of it was bare now.

Something about the reflection was very familiar. Damien squinted and tried his best to to recall where he had seen this type of face before. He could swear he had seen these big eyes, and this little muzzle before.

…

Oh right, obviously he recognized this face. It was His face. He had probably seen it a million times over the course of his life. In his reflection and in pictures ponies had taken of himself. He rolled his eyes and giggled a bit at his own foolishness. It was so funny, being weirded out by thinking your reflection was familiar. He dropped back down on all fours, and gave a little hop. He suddenly felt so excited and full of energy. It was like a song was playing in his head. He chirped along happily and let himself flow to the music.

Doctor Leigny thought she had misheard the terrified babbling of the quarantine workers. They had burst into her office in complete hysterics, screaming about yellow arms and zombies. She hadn’t been about to parse any specifics, but it seemed that their mystery patient was acting strangely, which for someone in their state probably meant just continuing to remain conscious. She felt a sigh float up from her gut as she realized she would be late getting home, again, if there was any notable changes to the patient.

The aura in the hallways of the quarantine held a strange energy. When she met the gaze of a nurse going about her duties, it looked like the poor thing was about to vomit. As she rounded the door into the observation room, the first thing she saw was one of the medical students she had assigned to monitor the the patient. He was staring into space, catatonic. She placed a hand on his shoulder and warmly spoke his name.

“Joseph? Is everything all right?”

He didn't make a sound, he just pointed to the observation window.

Leigny looked into the room, and immediately did a double take. The table the patient had been on only an hour ago, was now home to nothing more than scraps of dead flesh. Behind the table on the door handle was a swath of even more flesh, slowly rotting and sloughing to the floor. Her mind went wild as she struggled to imagine the patient achieving any sort of locomotion, but the instant she saw it, all thoughts vanished from her mind. Bouncing around on the ground in front of her was a quadrupedal thing covered liberally with remnants of the patient’s body. She immediately placed the reconstructed limb from before as the one on the back end of the thing in front of her. The top of its head looked half formed, the light yellow coloured flesh continuing only up to where the brow would be on a human. The skin of it looked like… a cartoon.

She snapped out of her awe and grabbed the intercom in front of her.

“P-patient, stop moving and, and uh-”

She wracked her brain to try and find words, but found herself unable to process the sight in front of her. It seemed like the intercom had grabbed the attention of the patient, was it still the patient? The Thing stopped its jubilant action and look through the window right at Leigny. Its big ungodly large eyes stared at her expectantly. It slowly began to walk towards her.

“STOP! STOP MOVING THIS INSTANT!” She screamed

The thing halted in its tracks and sat on its bottom, like a dog. Leigny found herself laughing at the mundane obedience of this otherworldly thing. It slipped her mind to turn off the intercom, and so her terrified laughing was spewed out of the speakers. When she realized she could hear the faint echo of her panicked laughter through the glass, she physically shot her hand to her mouth, smothering the sound. She turned to the medical student still staring at the alien creature and couldn’t help but exclaim,

“What the fuck is this? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?”

Neither of them had an answer. She continued, mumbling to herself.

“What the fuck what the ever loving fuck. Am I crazy? Did I have my coffee spiked with hallucinogenic drugs? T-that must be it. I am tripping balls or I am fucking crazy. I am fucking crazy.”

She flicked on the intercom again.

“Stand up, you…”

The creature stood back up on all fours. It seemed quite used to its own form. This couldn’t be the human they had carted into the emergency room four days ago. That thing was bent and broken, but it was human. It was human.

“Patient, I need you to speak if you can to confirm your identity.”

Was this a joke? Was this some horrific publicity stunt for a movie or something? The thing before her looked like it belonged on a television rather than a hospital. They hadn’t been able to confirm its identity. They hadn’t even been able to confirm its gender for shit sake. But it was undeniably human just 90 hours ago. She repeated her question.

“Speak and confirm your identity.”

The little alien tilted its head to the side like a fucking dog, before opening its cartoonish maw and producing the strangest sound she had ever heard. It was from what Leigny could tell, a mix of a demonspeach, singsong and baby babble. It sounded like it was trying to mewl out a song in some long lost polynesian language.

“P-please repeat what you just said.”

Another serenade of horrifying demonspeak was unleashed from its mouth.

Leigny was reduced to just a half vacant stare. The vision before her was like it was plucked from a cartoon. She must have gone crazy, or died and gone to some limbo of unreality. She grabbed a hold of the back of one of the seats, attempting to anchor herself to something, anything that she could trust was real. Her breath caught in her throat, hyperventilating a moment later in a tiny panic.

“OHMYGODAPONYPONYPONYAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.”

Leigny flinched in horror away from the screaming behind her. She spun around and was greeted by the glowing face of Campbell. She rushed past her and instantly pressed her face against the glass, staring at the thing with eyes almost as big as its. A high pitched whine emanated from her throat and she began waving to the being like it was a mopey panda in a zoo. For some reason or another Doctor Leigny thought her associate might have an idea as to what the fuck they were looking at. She cleared her cacophonous thoughts and managed to squeak out a question.

“D-doctor Campbell, d-do you know what it is I am looking at?”

Campbell didn’t move an inch from her spot, but emotionlessly intoned,

“I have a few theories, but I would like to ask permission for further observation, and closer observation of the subject before I make a judgement. I think both you and I can tell this condition whatever it is, is unprecedented in medical history.”

Leigny nodded. She felt a sense of whiplash strike her right in the front of her brain, like she was a computer trying to process a paradox. She meekly said;

“Ok.”

Campbell turned around, the childlike exuberance she had been possessed with a moment ago banished away in favour of a cold, scientific stare. It was enough to send a shiver down Leigny’s spine. Although maybe her rattled state predisposed her to such fear.

“I am going to suit up and enter the quarantine to engage with the subject. I am the most proficient behavioural staff member in the hospital this late into the night, and I don’t think we should bide our time. There is obviously no telling how the condition could progress at this point, and extracting as much information as we can from it would be a great boon to our treatment of the patient.”

Leigny almost laughed.

“Is that thing still our patient? It's closer to a fucking xenomorph than it is to us.”

Campbell coldly retaliated.

“It is our duty as doctors to help as much as we can. It is obviously alive, no? It is obviously the same thing, or at least the heavily altered version of the person we pulled into the quarantine to begin with. I will not stand for such dehumanizing speech-”

Campbell continued her little speech in her head.

“-Not yet anyway.”

She disappeared through the door frame, leaving Leigny to contemplate and contend with this strange reality boring its way into her hospital. She sat down in one of the cheap office chairs they had pulled into the observation room back when it seemed the entire staff had wanted to voyeuristically enjoy the sight. The room now did nothing but inspire dread in the heart of the Doctor.

She found herself wondering if there was anything left of the poor soul she had helped drag in four days ago. Maybe whatever constituted her Patient was currently decomposing on the table. The scraps left over from a horrific usurpation of body. Maybe that reality was better than imagining the human mind was currently trapped in that cartoonishly alien body. It was almost funny, Leigny suddenly made sense of Campbell’s outburst. Superficially, the being before her did look like some sort of toy pony.