Strange Happenings
Midnight. They always came at midnight. The chimes from the old grandfather clock in the den jolted Daniel out of his restless dreams. It wasn't the chimes that woke him so much as the knowledge that They were coming. It was the same horrifying ritual, every single night.
The room was illuminated by an eerie pale green glow. Three figures in haz-mat suits stood around his bed. One of them held a large briefcase, another held a gun, and the third--the apparent leader, from the way he acted--was making entries into a large handheld computer. Daniel tried to escape, to run, to even move, but some unseen force held him in place, as immobile as the bed itself. The leader looked up from his computer and signaled to the one holding the briefcase, who set the case down and began to open it. Daniel strained to see its contents, but couldn't from his position. If only he could move...
The leader reached forward, grabbed the bedcovers and--
The shrill blast of Daniel's alarm clock filled the room. He'd had that dream again, the same one he'd been having every night for nearly a month. Except that it didn't feel like a normal dream. It felt more like a memory, but one that had been partially forgotten. Anyway, Dan had more important things to worry about, so he pushed whatever it was aside for the moment. Today was the last day of school, finally. All he had to do was survive his last few final exams, and he'd be home free. He wasn't about to let a creepy dream get him down.
***
Dr. DiCaoz glanced over his biology classroom. "Is anybody still working on the final?" he asked tiredly. He paused for a moment, then said, "If everybody is finished, you may talk quietly amongst yourselves for the remainder of the period." As the class erupted in chatter, he went back to nursing his hangover.
Daniel loved his biology class. It wasn't just that he was good at it, or that it was the last class of the day. By some bit of luck or fate, he happened to be in the same class as his four closest friends, Gassan, David, Pammy, and Jake. Gassan, David, and Pammy had become absurdly popular since coming to high school. Gassan was Lebanese and therefore "exotic," David was a star swimmer, and Pammy was a cheerleader. In retrospect, popularity was an inevitability. To the other popular kids, Jake an avid follower of the Furry subculture (he called it a craze, but nobody else did) and Daniel, the introspective writer, were social liabilities. Still, Gassan, David, and Pam never let their newfound "friends" keep them away from Jake and Dan. Privately, Daniel was grateful that he had managed to befriend the four people who appeared to be immune to high school drama.
"So, what'd you guys think?" Pammy whispered.
"I'm pretty sure Dr. Di is a nutcase," Gassan answered quickly. He was met with a chorus of approval from his companions.
"Anyway," Pam continued, "are we having our annual Thank-God-The-Schoolyear's-Over party tonight?"
"I can't go," Jake said, "I've got a convention."
"I can't go either," said David, "My dad's taking me camping. He's on a back-to-nature kick."
"I'm visiting my grandma," Gassan said. Pammy rolled her eyes.
"Alright," she sighed, "when do you guys get back?"
"Sunday"
"Sunday evening"
"Sunday, but it'll be late."
"So," Pammy continued, "is Monday night alright with everyone?"
***
The days passed quickly. By the time Monday arrived, he had gone an entire weekend without his mysterious dreams. He was mostly relieved, but part of him wished the visitors would come back so he could find out what they were up to.
The streets were charged with an eerie calm. A summer storm was coming. As Daniel reached Pam's door, he couldn't help but feel a strange foreboding. Something was decidedly wrong. He rang the bell.
"Come in," called Pammy. Dan opened the door and found friend sitting on the floor in a tidy circle. They were all staring at him, an unsettling hunger in their eyes. "We are playing Truth or Dare," Pammy intoned mechanically. "Please, join us. Truth or Dare?"
"Please choose Dare," Gassan said, in the same unearthly voice.
"The Truth is never any fun," agreed David, still in the same tone. Throughout the exchange, none of the four took their eyes off of Daniel.
"Is everything alright?" he asked. "You all seem...different."
Pammy answered in the same monotone as before: "We are collectively unnerved at a series of recurring dreams we have been having. Perhaps you too are experiencing these visions?"
"Yeah," Dan said, "but I'm not acting that weird about it."
"Perhaps," Pammy said, "All will be made more clear if you answer this simple question: Truth...or Dare?"
Written by Zodiac on 31 May 2008
Forgotten Memories
Daniel was taken aback by their behavior, more because they appeared almost zombified and not very attentive to things that were going on around them. If there was a fly buzzing around in the room somewhere, he doubted any of them would notice it over their uncanny focus on him. Answer the question, that seemed to be the unwary contract held between him and these puppets that were his friends. Maybe they were tired and exhausted after their respective weekend activities, but Danny had a hard time trying to justify those darting glances between each other like a conspiratorial borg hive mind.
"You guys okay?" Dan asked, hoping that this might be one last spark to yank them back onto the road of sense, but no dice.
"Truth or dare, Danny boy?" Jake intoned almost without any inflection, his hair still smelling of lingering traces of a bit of grime and sweat. At least that part of him was normal, as well as the mild scent of latex or rubber on his skin from the inner liner of a high end fursuit.
He quickly saw by their behavior that he wasn't going to get anywhere until he played their little game, whether these were actually his friends or not remained to be seen. It wasn't an easy choice to make either, as he knew what they were waiting for, expectantly ready for a hinge to snap like a spring on a mouse trap. "Dare." There, he said it. He let the genie loose.
"Was that so hard?" Pammy made a flourish of her arm like a cheer and chuckled, drinking from a pink sports bottle and looking around at her friends in on the secret. "So, who has a dare?" It seemed a rhetorical question, only one thing was on the mind of these pleasant imps.
It was hard, but only because Daniel had that voice in the back of his head that told him this was all wrong, but he couldn't put a proper face to those nagging feelings. They were obviously up to something, but his birthday wouldn't be around for several months. "We dare you to-" Jake paused, licking his thin lips as he savored the following moment like a morsel set before a snake.
Daniel was waiting on edge for them to continue. As much as he dreaded what was going to follow, a part of him wanted to get it over and have things back to normal. When Pammy finished his previous sentence, an odd bluish twinkle in her eyes that appeared and vanished so quickly that he wasn't even sure it was there in the first place. "Remember (indistinct unrecognizeable phrase)". Those words were like a trigger, well the latter one was because he'd never heard it before and yet something came rushing into his head. Memories. Lots and lots of disjointed memories that weren't his and couldn't make any sense. It was if he were remembering the past life not of another person, but an animal with a completely different set of senses.
Before he knew what was happening, his mind was rushing through a strange vocabulary he had never used: people, places, and things that never existed before. Except, they did, more real than he could possibly exist as though he shared a body with two souls. "What did you do?" He gagged out, collapsing and trembling on the floor like a seizure as they gathered around him and bundled his pathetic body in a big comfy blanket. They knew this would happen, and they were prepared. "You do not remember, Dan, but you will soon." Gassan said soothingly, rubbing his back like he were comforting an addict out of a hellish bout of withdrawal. Maybe it was, as his hangovers never felt this terrible and he hadn't taken anything more illegal than a few stim pills for studying late overnight.
Written by FluffyPony on 01 June 2015
Not human
Gassan, he was remembering, was not the Lebanese kid's real name, nor was he really Lebanese. He came from a far-flung place called The Star Realm, and that was why he was so strange compared to the rest of them. The Star Realm: no such place existed on Earth. Then again, none of them were from Earth, were they? He was remembering bit by bit of where he was from just as he felt something seize up in his body. His muscles were cramping at odd angles and his skin was burning up with a maddening itch all over like a sunburn trying to peel away. "And with the memory will come the mission." Gassan added, now a bit more familiar as someone who had come from a completely different squad to lend assistance.
Daniel remembered the squads, but didn't remember what they were for or why they were needed. Was he a brainwashed terrorist or assassin or something? He hoped not, as he liked his life in America a great deal and wanted nothing to do with any enemy entities. His mission. What was his mission? The burning on his skin turned into a fervent fever intensity as he lost all control and had to throw back the blankets just to scratch, well, everywhere. His fingernails were working frantically to scrape away this unbearable crawling sensation all over his flesh as he felt an odd pain in his back. On occassional touches back there, he could feel two nubs growing out of his skin almost like horns. It was pointed bone trying to escape as he ignored it over trying to get the mosquito-like bites to stop harassing him.
Little by little, the itch did stop, but each place where it ceased there were tufts of cushy pure black fur a few inches long. He noticed a similar much smaller nub growing out of the top of his buttocks like a horned tramp stamp, but ignored it as he tried to make sense of the shiny coat of hairs instead. He was turning into some kind of animal and didn't understand why, yet to all of his friends, this seemed quite normal and par for the course. In fact, as his memory of the previous life came back, he realized Gassan wasn't even supposed to be here except for emergencies as the recon coordinator. Recon. Who were they spying on? Earth.
That last bit of information floored him and he tried to make sense of it just as more changes spread over his body like accelerated wildfire in a dry wheat field. The fur was all over him and the itch was gone. Just as he calmed down, the blanket was thrown back over him and they all pressed in close with firm massages through the fabric against his body. The fur was just the beginning as he felt something pop out of his shoulders and elongate into poles of bone-shrouded flesh, growing in strength and bulk with a whispery lightness and lack of weight. Whatever was on his back was almost intangible and didn't feel like it was there, at all.
His hair, normally so neat and formal, was now growing to meet his collarbone and beyond. The words of wisdom, "It will grow back," couldn't possibly be anymore true. It was longer, but it didn't feel like his old hair anymore, instead a little more wiry and thick with a nice polish to it like it had been shampoo'd to oblivion. The thing growing out of his rear was the same story, as he could feel whatever it was lengthen through the backs of his thighs where there was a similar texture of shiny silky hairs.
Was that it? Were the changes over? No, he was still in the middle of them as his face seemed to elongate a bit, creating a strange accordian effect with his eyes that he wasn't sure he was seeing. He couldn't take it in fully, anyway, as the semi-dark state under the blankets was like a cave or burrow just allowing the tiniest peeks of light within. Still, he could feel just fine. It was a very long nose and his mouth was further away than normal. Would he come out of the covers looking like some kind of sheepdog?
After that was the last touch, as something funny happened to his hands and feet. They came together as his skin seemed to induce a hostile takeover of his fingers and toes like a creeping mold or tangle of vines. His fingernails themselves grew much longer and connected with each other, feeling very much like large teeth attached to his limbs, but the ones on his wrists, for as hard and bony as they seemed, were still unusually dextrous to leave any doubts of holding objects without grounds. Whatever these things on his arms were, they seemed made for walking on and holding most objects. After all of that, it was over as he didn't feel any other changes overtake him, although all those muscles and bones rearranging did leave him sore and stiff. Daniel wouldn't doubt that when he came out from under the covers that he would be looking at himself as a werewolf.
As much as he wanted to see what had happened to his body, his friends wouldn't let him. Instead, they encouraged him to sleep. As antsy and curious as Dan was to see the new look, they were right: after an ordeal like that, he needed the rest so his overextended body could recover from what had been done to it. Even so, It was still a very difficult rest as all kinds of sore spots would jar him awake at random moments with protest.
Written by FluffyPony on 02 June 2015
The Reveal
When he awoke, it was like someone played hell on his muscles. Everything hurt in some unexpected way, and he felt a bit more bare beneath the blanket as his clothes had evidently been taken away. This probably made more sense, since he had too lush a coat of fur to wear anything over it too easily, but the idea of being nude like an animal unsettled him. With his stirrings, each of his friends took their notice of him a few at a time, but it was Pammy that went to him first. "Are you ready to see the truth?"
Truth or dare. He should've known. Now, he was going to get both because this was their way of easing him into an uncomfortable awareness that he had a past life and had gotten too immersed in a lie. That he had forgotten the whole reason why he had been sent to Earth, but had been converted to something he wasn't. Daniel was remembering now, bit by bit. If he had a gold for every time that happened, he'd be living in a Sky Castle. That last thought stopped him in his ruminations, causing him to wonder where he'd heard it before. Was it something Garran or Jake said?
"The truth, yes. Let's start with that." Dan finally spoke gustily, a strange higher-pitched voice came out that he didn't recognise as his own, or even male. It startled him. Still, there was nothing for his bewilderment as they helped him rise to unsteady feet in front of a tall plate glass mirror on a closet. As the blanket fell away, it was hard to figure out who or what was staring back at him. Her. The body was that of a horse with wings, with black fur as dark as a moonless night, and a pair of eyes full of sharp but questioning curiosity and intellect. There were no doubts toward gender, the way she accomodated those nice curves and luscious bumps of her pegasi body.
She was remembering, but not very quickly, so they had to fill in the gaps as she stood there curiously staring at the other bipedal naked female pagasus in the mirror like a stranger quickly becoming a tangible old friend, and then after that, her rightful self as familiarity dawned. "Night Rider, The Old King sent us on a mission into other realms to colonize with friendship and wings after he was rejected from the Greater Realm for his forward unconventional ways. He is under cover at their United Nations scoping out the political scheme while we awaited as sleeper agents to acclimate to the culture and prepare for the arrival of further like-minded allies to bring our winged glory to this world." It all seemed so strange, so unconventionally weird that Night had to stop and think it through for herself as her friends looked on expectently in their human forms hoping she would remember soon and get back on the friendship-spreading conquest bandwagon like the rest of them so they could go on observing and slowly perfecting a ponification formula for the humans.
Night Rider remembered, but that didn't mean she accepted what was going on. Even so, she knew that refusing outright would just earn her a couple months or more in the solitary confinement of the reconditioning chamber back at home base in Greece. Instead, she had to take hold of this insanity and accept it on the outside like some exposed conspirators did a few years back before The Old King's first failure at forced colonization of the Greater Realm. "Yes, let's get to it every peg. May the wings be freedom." And that was all Night had to say to trick them into thinking she still believed in the old regime while reviling it every second with vile about to come up the back of her throat.
Written by FluffyPony on 03 June 2015
Next day
Night Rider stirred restlessly in her sleep on the carpet. Her body was very cushy and padded so it wasn't as uncomfortable as one might think. It was the dreams of a previous life as a human which she gradually knew to be false. This life as Danial couldn't be true, as it already felt as if it had been a hundred years ago. True, she did have memories of the town she currently lived in, but not growing up as a human boy, but instead as a pegasi who took on a different magicked form to be with the humans and not arouse their suspicions as she went about investigating the town.
Not even the Biology class on the last day of school three weeks ago seemed particularly tangible or real to her. It seemed as though she woke up out of a coma and just wanted to get on with her life. The others never questioned the fragments of personality woven into her mind, reassuring Night that it was just a side-effect of doing recon in another form for a long time. So, she was never really human? It was just something that she had tricked herself into believing for the year that she was fitting in to learn the strange customs of this other sentient species that the pegasi just happened to discover and colonize.
Besides the memories reasserting themselves fully into her conscious mind like a warm waterfall of comforting realization, the aches and pains of her body were also fading into nothingness. The bruises barely visible under the lush grey fur were nearly gone, allowing her to stretch and move muscles that previously ached in protest like cranky hinges not properly oiled. When those pains were finally gone, Night wanted more badly than anything to go out after sunset and fly again as she was accustomed to doing in her land, but knew this would be a mistake that could bring about suspicions before the pegasi empire was ready to bring about their plans of colonization.
Instead, she was doubtless stuck to roam the house that Jake owned under guise of his parents leaving on some ambiguous never ending vacation that he refused to openly elaborate on. It was a nice two story house with an attic and basement, and Night could have free range of it so long as the curtains were drawn so as to keep everything hidden inside. The strangest aspect, though, was that while she was in her natural form again, the rest of her friends elected to stay human and she had very few reasons why. Was it because transformation took a great deal of energy and time to perform with a long rest period, or were they in the middle of their own tasks outside the house that would require subtlety? And of course, it could be a combination of the two, as pegasi were always considered a whimsical but practical people.
The dreams that came, she had a lot of time to think about those, what parts she remembered. The strange doctors that injected her with the chemicals had an aura of familiarity, despite being so alien and peculiar. Aside from the ambiguous way they were dressed and moved, they didn't seem like doctors or scientists at all. Now, Night Rider didn't have many good experiences of actual doctors on this planet to base her observations on, but the way they held themselves was all wrong. In fact, instead of the practiced but casual air that doctors exhibited when they performed a test or procedure that was very commonplace and easy ( such as an injection for instance ), these cloaked creatures huddled around the bed in her nightmare had a much different presence to them. If she had to guess, it felt more like some kind of sanctified or religious ritual that they had performed by doing the injection in her sleep.
The next day after that revelation, Night slowly stopped paying attention to the old memories or the scary dreams of priestly doctors, putting them out of mind as irrelevent distractions that kept her from focusing on the goals of the pegasi collective. Even her earlier ideas of standing against the colonization effort in secret were left aside as silly and not truly her own idea. What the pegasi were getting ready to do to the humans was a good thing, and even in her more skeptical frame of mind she could see that. The only real problem Night Rider had was this inescapable boredom that slowly swallowed her up inside the house as she felt a creeping restless insanity resting over her thoughts. She had to get something done, but didn't know what. Maybe that was the most troubling thing, the helplessness and the waiting for something to happen. When she'd been healing from the transformation it wasn't so bad, as she slept most of that off in exhaustion. Now, she seemed rejuvenated and awake with lots of energy but no meaningful way to spend it that wouldn't jeapordize the operation.
Since she had no better ideas, Night went downstairs to make breakfast for her friends before they woke up. Pammy was the one who went to get the groceries, and she was efficient and thorough in getting all the basic things they would need weekly. Pegasi, even in human form, were still unapologetically Vegan and therefore did not eat anything that came from another animal, not even milk or cheese. Although this limited her cooking options, the things she didn't have weren't of interest to her anyway, so it wasn't as if Night could say she missed having any such things as scrambled eggs. Instead, a meal for equine tastes would focus more on things that were grown in soil with a few luxuries such as bread or sugar. Oh, and molasses. Can't forget toast with molasses spread on it.
As she made pancakes with molasses, apple extract, and a meatless substitute for the eggs in the mixture to help pancakes hold their shape, her allies came down the stairs a few at a time to sit at the small humble table nearby. It must be a strange thing to see a female horse up on her hind legs making food like a person. Well, she wasn't actually a horse, but it was plain they shared the same appetite and the four of them came hungry. They were all starved, but Night Rider was the only one who wanted answers instead of a meal. The better question was if they shared any of her dreams of being a human or if they knew how to interpret her nightmare about the strange doctors she kept having and why they were relevent to the mission they all shared.
Written by FluffyPony on 02 July 2015
Memories
The meal was nearly finished except for the drinks, which would be the easy part. All she had to do was make up some tea from instant powder and mix in some apple juice to give it an almost cider-like tang. There were other options when it came to refreshment, but it seemed a faux pas to a horse not to have apples at every meal. Lack of molasses could be forgiven, but not apples: equine crack cocaine. While she stirred the powder into chilled water and measured a proper mix of green apple extract into the hallowed beverage, the conversation amongst her friends had already started without her.
At first the discussion seemed very much benign and almost commonplace. Gassan was making polite overtures to excuse himself from their secret club so he could go back to other pegasi cells that needed his expertise and subterfuge more than the four fake high school students that had taken up most of his time for the sake of mere friendship. He was itchy to go to Ireland, where that group of soft-spoken shamrocks were having their fair tail shake of difficulty trying to blend into the common populace. Where David, Pammy, Jake, and "Danny" had succeeded, the Irish pegasi's efforts had been more marginal. This was most likely due to that country's current climate of suspicion for domestic terrorism from the Irish Republican Army.
David was in agreement with him in spirit, but still didn't want to see Gassan go. After all, pegasi were very sociable friendly creatures and having such a small group of nice faces to interact with must surely shunt their interactions in some way or other. Jake thought it would be wiser to blend into the furry community at large and create an effective counter-culture that would eventually lend itself to humans being more amendable and willing to be transformed. This concept wasn't so strange, when they took note of most furs' fetish for transformation, so perhaps they might eventually seek out the pegasi colonizers instead of waiting unsuspectingly for operation Sandman.
Sandman. A chill worked up Night Rider's spine when she heard that word for the first time in this context. It was a strange usage of the word, and almost seemed interchangeable with a preplanned assassination attempt. No, it was their code word for the forceful transformation of the unwilling, it seemed. The pegasi would carefully case someone out and hang around with them as a kind of probation period while deciding their amenability and overall usefulness to the cause before proceeding. Night Rider was nearly done stirring ice and apple flavor into the pitcher of tea, but decided to linger in the kitchen to throw off their attention of her, at least, that was the impression she was going for.
Having never heard of this euphemism before, Night didn't know exactly why, but she had an instinct deep down that her friends might not want her to hear them discussing that word so wantonly and with such casualness as they were. Despite being a pegasi like them, it seemed like forbidden knowledge that she wasn't privy to. Maybe if she were actually in the dining room they might actually remember that she was there to hear, but since she was in the kitchen separated by a wall, it seemed to mask her presence from them. She kept stirring the pitcher of tea to keep up an illusion of being busy while eavesdropping on their chat. Normally this was something completely out of Night's character, but there was no doubt that this seemed very important to her for some uncanny reason.
Pammy was against it completely, as although things were stable in this region and Night had healed from her transformation trauma well, their colonizer cell was still relatively small due to the inability to find easy targets to assimilate in a timely manner. Unlike in third world nations where people went missing all the time without anyone around to care, America and other countries in the more developed sphere would immediately become suspicious and make a Sandman almost impossible as the first transformation after the sleeper drug injection was always so complex and a long time in recovery. By the time the target of their assimilation was strong enough to become human again to assuage the authorities, the police would most likely already find their place of refuge and get them in great trouble.
At the mention of "sleeper", she remembered the definition of that word, though not in this context. Dr. DiCaoz had taught them about sleeper viruses in Biology class several months ago, mainly in the concept of retroviruses that had the ability to change someone's DNA or RNA whenever anything randomly set them off. He defined them as a switch waiting for the right factors to flick it on. This sleeper drug that was being briefly discussed seemed to have similar properties, and by that logic, the pegasi could inject the whole of the world without their knowledge and would just need to await a perfect opportunity to turn it on. She was remembering now, though Night didn't want to. Danny did.
The green glow of the apple extract was hauntingly familiar as the sunrise shone through the kitchen window onto the bottle via slits in the closed blinds. Bright neon green and almost seemingly alive the way her hoof jostled it around in her paw. Almost immediately, he managed to clamp down on his panic as he remembered where he was and what had been done to him. For the moment, his alter ego of Night Rider was banished to the subconscious and his nightmares until he could think through the mess that he'd gotten into. If he walked into the dining area, would they notice that he wasn't like them anymore, or could he bluster his way through the quagmire of their social graces? In either case, they were expecting their drinks soon and to hesitate any longer would garner their unwanted attention almost immediately!
Written by FluffyPony on 11 July 2015