06-22-2015, 10:15 PM
Her jump is successful, and for one thrilling moment Ephrelle feels entirely weightless as she soars through the air.
Her tiny plastic body prepares instinctively for the perfect landing after such a perfectly executed jump. But...there is nowhere to land. She has cleared the edge of the toy box and reached the empty air, but the world outside the dark box is huge, and the ground is miles (or three feet) below her minuscule purple body.
In the time it takes for her eyes to adjust to the brightness of the room she has already fallen most of the way to the ground. Ephrelle has time only to see and endless sea of white rushing up from below before she hits the ground.
I'm dead, she thinks, this is what death is. Death is like landing on an enormous white cloud and flying back upwards. Death is painless, and only tickles softly on her plastic sides as she bounces upward and lands on the cloud again, and again, smaller bounces each time. Death is a high pitched squeal and a blur of pink and gold. Death is hands...wait.
She isn't dead.
She might not be breathing anymore, but Ephrelle is not certain she's breathed at all since she woke up. She's not entirely sure she even has lungs: she certainly can't feel her heartbeat anymore despite her knowledge that it must be racing. What she can feel is the warm sensation of a child's hand around her mid-section. The hand is the same size as the one that punched a hole through the dollhouse roof, and Ephrelle is awash in the realization that this must be the 'She' that Doc McStuffins had warned her about.
"A Pony!" screams the girl, her voice shrill enough to make Ephrelle wince and shake her head. "My own pony!!! All mine!!! Ahhh!!!"
For several long seconds, Ephrelle's world is a shaking blur as Nerissa runs in circles around the room, shrieking and holding her new purple pony up in the air. Perhaps this won't be so bad, the filly thinks; Nerissa seems excited to have her, and maybe they can be friends. Ephrelle has always been good at making friends.
"Hello?" she says tentatively. Nothing happens, and the world is still spinning as Nerissa runs around the room. "Hello!" She shouts, much louder this time. She needs to make sure Nerissa hears her, "Hello! please stop shaking me! Please, could you be quiet?" Ephrelle pleads loudly, "My ears hurt and I'm dizzy."
"NEIGH! NEIGH! NEIGH!" shouts Nerissa, and Ephelle is gripped even tighter, both by Nerissa's sweaty little hands and by a feeling of panic. The child doesn't understand her. Nothing she says is making any sense to the gigantic monster that has control of her. Breathe, Ephrelle tells herself, Breathe.
'I have no lungs', her inner voice shouts back in a panic.
The world rushes by in a blaze of pink as Nerissa suddenly darts across the room, but at least she isn't spinning in circles anymore. For a moment, Ephrelle thinks she is about to be put back in the toybox (is it wrong to feel relieved?) but Nerissa stops before she reaches it. The girl tucks Ephrelle beneath her arm, but she can see with one eye that Nerissa is kneeling down and pulling something away from the wall.
Ephrelle is placed down in front of a large doll house. No, not a dollhouse. It's pink, like the dollhouse in the toybox, but this is a stable. Actually, it's a very nice stable, and when Nerissa shouts that "This is your home!" Ephrelle is trusting enough to think that perhaps she is not doomed after all. But then Nerissa says something about "Meet your neighbors!" and Ephrelle is shoved into three stalls and smacked into three things that she has no time to identify save their colors - red, green, and black.
She's shoved through the open door of a final stall and while her head and legs bump painfully against the walls, at least Nerissa has let go of her. The ground beneath her is hard plastic and she's unable to move, lying prone on the molded yellow straw. She cannot see anything, but the sounds of Nerissa rustling through something is loud and clear. Her hand appears through the stall door and Ephrelle prepares to be grabbed again, but instead a handful of real grass is shoved through the door.
"Eat this! I got some in case I got a pony and my wish came true!" She pushes the grass farther in, which pins Ephrelle to the far wall of the stall. "I have to go to the bathroom now, but I'll be back soon! Eat up!" Nerissa's hand fiddles with the stable and then the stall door swings shut. The girl pulls away from the stable, and Ephrelle can feel the sound of her footsteps growing quieter, and then the slam of the bedroom door closing.
For nearly five minutes, Ephrelle remains perfectly still.
She is in shock, though she doesn't quite have the vocabulary to put the feeling to words. The filly desperately wants this to be a dream, but every time she squeezes her eyes shut, she reopens them to see the pink and white walls of the stable around her.
After a while she stands up, wincing as the dried ends of the grass presses against her purple sides.
She walks to the stall door and sticks her head out, trying to determine exactly how bad her predicament is. There is another stall to her left and two across a wide aisle from her. To the left of the stall beside her is simply a solid wall - it is a four stall stable.
In the stall directly opposite hers she can see another horse. "Hello?" she says cautiously. The horse, a Breyer Secretariat, shakes its head and sinks behind the stall door, presumably laying down so she can no longer see it. Something green in the stall next to Secretariat catches her eye, and Ephrelle turns her head to see a brontosaurus sticking its very long neck out of the stall. It reaches across the aisle to the stall opposite it without making a single noise, and pulls open the door with its teeth. As the door slides open, something emerges.
At first she does not recognize it as a horse, not with everything he is wearing. But he is black and horse-shaped, and the metal armor he is wearing scrapes again the sides of the stall as he squeezes out. "Thanks Bro," says the armored horse, walking across the aisle to butt his head gently against the brontosaurus' neck. "Get yourself out and let's do this." The dinosaur nods mutely and mouths at the latch on its own door until it opens (Ephrelle watches in wonder, unsure how it is so efficient with its teeth).
"Let's go," says the armored horse. "It's now or..." His voices fades out as he spots Ephrelle through the stall door. He seems confused (though it's hard to tell with his face armor), and Ephrelle takes a step back, stumbling as she catches her huge legs in the straw. "How'd you get caught, cutie?" he asks, and Ephrelle blushes despite herself. She is about to answer when the bedroom door slams open, and the black horse and the dinosaur behind him suddenly freeze.
Footsteps thunder toward them and Ephrelle is pulled through the still closed stall door. She does not fit, of course, but the snap of the door breaks before she does, though a third of her mane is caught in the latch and ripped out as Nerissa pulls her out of the stable. The pain is still strangely dull, like the impact of the car into her side earlier. She knows she is in pain, but with no nervous system, she cannot quite feel it.
"It's time for a race!" Nerissa crows, and Ephrelle could have sworn she saw panic flash across the faces of her three stable mates. "Let's race new Pony against...hmm...Black Knight. Yeah. That's good."
Nerissa moves Ephrelle so that she's holding her in her left hand and picks up the armored horse in her other. That must be Black Knight, Ephrelle realizes. She's not sure how they are going to race when neither of them can move, but it quickly becomes clear that they don't need to. Nerissa crawls on her hands and knees around the room, cheering them on. She puts her entirely weight on each plastic horse when she crawls forward, and every time she does so, Ephrelle can feel her plastic legs bend in a new direction. Black Night seems far sturdier, and Ephrelle's envy of his ease in the situation turns sour quickly. Did he know this was going to happen? Had he meant to put her off balance by flirting earlier? Of course he had; he wanted her to suffer so he could win.
Ephrelle cannot say she is surprised when her leg breaks. The body weight of a ten-year-old is no small thing. What does surprise her is that it's not just one leg that breaks, but two of them. Both of her forelegs cave at the knee, buckling into the hollow cavity of her purple body and leaving her with two stubs. Nerissa stumbles in her crawling, and Ephrelle can hear her gasping even as she struggles to process her own pain.
Her legs are broken. In the real world, she'd be dead. There is no use for an Amazon with broken legs, and there is no way she'd make it to the healing waters of the Falls without being able to walk. She would be panther food, a weak link in the food chain.
It seems that she is the weak link in the chain for Nerissa as well. "No!!!!" shouts the girl, "No!! I just got you! You can't break yet! Stupid pony!"
The world suddenly goes flying by as Ephrelle is somersaulted through the air, tossed by Nerissa. She hits a bright pink wall and falls to the ground, only to be picked up and thrown into the opposite wall. Her right ear breaks off with the second wall hit. Nerissa picks her up and she is ready to be tossed again, but instead her mane is grabbed with one hand and her tail with the other. Nerissa pulls them both as hand as she can, screaming as she repeatedly slams Ephrelle into the carpet.
"Stupid pony. Stupid stupid pony. You're weak and slow and broken and you make. Me. So. Mad." Each of the final words is accentuated with an especially hard slam, and then with one final swing, Ephrelle is flung into the wall. Nerissa then runs from the room, screaming something about defective toys.
A long time passes.
Ephrelle does not move.
She doesn't even try.
Both of her ears have now broken off, and her right hind leg has also caved into her side from the repeated slamming. Most of her silver and green mane and tail are on the floor when she'd been slammed. Her head has twisted all the way around on her body so that she's looking at her own rump, but she remains entirely prone. She does not want to move, and even if she wanted to, she doubts she could. When the bedroom door creaks open she does not bother to open her eyes, and so the teeth of Nerissa's puppy are an unwelcome surprise as they pierce her purple body. She is chomped on only once before Nerissa returns to the room, presumably having been following the puppy closely.
"Gross!" she says, shoving the puppy away and picking up Ephrelle by one of her few remaining tail hairs. "now you're all slimy. Ew. Double Ew. There's like germs and stuff and I have to wash my hands."
Still holding Ephrelle by the tail, Nerissa walks out of the bedroom. She drops the battered and broken plastic pony into the glittery pink wastebasket on the way out. Ephrelle lands on a dirty Kleenex, face-to-chest with a headless Ken doll, and wishes for death.
Her tiny plastic body prepares instinctively for the perfect landing after such a perfectly executed jump. But...there is nowhere to land. She has cleared the edge of the toy box and reached the empty air, but the world outside the dark box is huge, and the ground is miles (or three feet) below her minuscule purple body.
In the time it takes for her eyes to adjust to the brightness of the room she has already fallen most of the way to the ground. Ephrelle has time only to see and endless sea of white rushing up from below before she hits the ground.
I'm dead, she thinks, this is what death is. Death is like landing on an enormous white cloud and flying back upwards. Death is painless, and only tickles softly on her plastic sides as she bounces upward and lands on the cloud again, and again, smaller bounces each time. Death is a high pitched squeal and a blur of pink and gold. Death is hands...wait.
She isn't dead.
She might not be breathing anymore, but Ephrelle is not certain she's breathed at all since she woke up. She's not entirely sure she even has lungs: she certainly can't feel her heartbeat anymore despite her knowledge that it must be racing. What she can feel is the warm sensation of a child's hand around her mid-section. The hand is the same size as the one that punched a hole through the dollhouse roof, and Ephrelle is awash in the realization that this must be the 'She' that Doc McStuffins had warned her about.
"A Pony!" screams the girl, her voice shrill enough to make Ephrelle wince and shake her head. "My own pony!!! All mine!!! Ahhh!!!"
For several long seconds, Ephrelle's world is a shaking blur as Nerissa runs in circles around the room, shrieking and holding her new purple pony up in the air. Perhaps this won't be so bad, the filly thinks; Nerissa seems excited to have her, and maybe they can be friends. Ephrelle has always been good at making friends.
"Hello?" she says tentatively. Nothing happens, and the world is still spinning as Nerissa runs around the room. "Hello!" She shouts, much louder this time. She needs to make sure Nerissa hears her, "Hello! please stop shaking me! Please, could you be quiet?" Ephrelle pleads loudly, "My ears hurt and I'm dizzy."
"NEIGH! NEIGH! NEIGH!" shouts Nerissa, and Ephelle is gripped even tighter, both by Nerissa's sweaty little hands and by a feeling of panic. The child doesn't understand her. Nothing she says is making any sense to the gigantic monster that has control of her. Breathe, Ephrelle tells herself, Breathe.
'I have no lungs', her inner voice shouts back in a panic.
The world rushes by in a blaze of pink as Nerissa suddenly darts across the room, but at least she isn't spinning in circles anymore. For a moment, Ephrelle thinks she is about to be put back in the toybox (is it wrong to feel relieved?) but Nerissa stops before she reaches it. The girl tucks Ephrelle beneath her arm, but she can see with one eye that Nerissa is kneeling down and pulling something away from the wall.
Ephrelle is placed down in front of a large doll house. No, not a dollhouse. It's pink, like the dollhouse in the toybox, but this is a stable. Actually, it's a very nice stable, and when Nerissa shouts that "This is your home!" Ephrelle is trusting enough to think that perhaps she is not doomed after all. But then Nerissa says something about "Meet your neighbors!" and Ephrelle is shoved into three stalls and smacked into three things that she has no time to identify save their colors - red, green, and black.
She's shoved through the open door of a final stall and while her head and legs bump painfully against the walls, at least Nerissa has let go of her. The ground beneath her is hard plastic and she's unable to move, lying prone on the molded yellow straw. She cannot see anything, but the sounds of Nerissa rustling through something is loud and clear. Her hand appears through the stall door and Ephrelle prepares to be grabbed again, but instead a handful of real grass is shoved through the door.
"Eat this! I got some in case I got a pony and my wish came true!" She pushes the grass farther in, which pins Ephrelle to the far wall of the stall. "I have to go to the bathroom now, but I'll be back soon! Eat up!" Nerissa's hand fiddles with the stable and then the stall door swings shut. The girl pulls away from the stable, and Ephrelle can feel the sound of her footsteps growing quieter, and then the slam of the bedroom door closing.
For nearly five minutes, Ephrelle remains perfectly still.
She is in shock, though she doesn't quite have the vocabulary to put the feeling to words. The filly desperately wants this to be a dream, but every time she squeezes her eyes shut, she reopens them to see the pink and white walls of the stable around her.
After a while she stands up, wincing as the dried ends of the grass presses against her purple sides.
She walks to the stall door and sticks her head out, trying to determine exactly how bad her predicament is. There is another stall to her left and two across a wide aisle from her. To the left of the stall beside her is simply a solid wall - it is a four stall stable.
In the stall directly opposite hers she can see another horse. "Hello?" she says cautiously. The horse, a Breyer Secretariat, shakes its head and sinks behind the stall door, presumably laying down so she can no longer see it. Something green in the stall next to Secretariat catches her eye, and Ephrelle turns her head to see a brontosaurus sticking its very long neck out of the stall. It reaches across the aisle to the stall opposite it without making a single noise, and pulls open the door with its teeth. As the door slides open, something emerges.
At first she does not recognize it as a horse, not with everything he is wearing. But he is black and horse-shaped, and the metal armor he is wearing scrapes again the sides of the stall as he squeezes out. "Thanks Bro," says the armored horse, walking across the aisle to butt his head gently against the brontosaurus' neck. "Get yourself out and let's do this." The dinosaur nods mutely and mouths at the latch on its own door until it opens (Ephrelle watches in wonder, unsure how it is so efficient with its teeth).
"Let's go," says the armored horse. "It's now or..." His voices fades out as he spots Ephrelle through the stall door. He seems confused (though it's hard to tell with his face armor), and Ephrelle takes a step back, stumbling as she catches her huge legs in the straw. "How'd you get caught, cutie?" he asks, and Ephrelle blushes despite herself. She is about to answer when the bedroom door slams open, and the black horse and the dinosaur behind him suddenly freeze.
Footsteps thunder toward them and Ephrelle is pulled through the still closed stall door. She does not fit, of course, but the snap of the door breaks before she does, though a third of her mane is caught in the latch and ripped out as Nerissa pulls her out of the stable. The pain is still strangely dull, like the impact of the car into her side earlier. She knows she is in pain, but with no nervous system, she cannot quite feel it.
"It's time for a race!" Nerissa crows, and Ephrelle could have sworn she saw panic flash across the faces of her three stable mates. "Let's race new Pony against...hmm...Black Knight. Yeah. That's good."
Nerissa moves Ephrelle so that she's holding her in her left hand and picks up the armored horse in her other. That must be Black Knight, Ephrelle realizes. She's not sure how they are going to race when neither of them can move, but it quickly becomes clear that they don't need to. Nerissa crawls on her hands and knees around the room, cheering them on. She puts her entirely weight on each plastic horse when she crawls forward, and every time she does so, Ephrelle can feel her plastic legs bend in a new direction. Black Night seems far sturdier, and Ephrelle's envy of his ease in the situation turns sour quickly. Did he know this was going to happen? Had he meant to put her off balance by flirting earlier? Of course he had; he wanted her to suffer so he could win.
Ephrelle cannot say she is surprised when her leg breaks. The body weight of a ten-year-old is no small thing. What does surprise her is that it's not just one leg that breaks, but two of them. Both of her forelegs cave at the knee, buckling into the hollow cavity of her purple body and leaving her with two stubs. Nerissa stumbles in her crawling, and Ephrelle can hear her gasping even as she struggles to process her own pain.
Her legs are broken. In the real world, she'd be dead. There is no use for an Amazon with broken legs, and there is no way she'd make it to the healing waters of the Falls without being able to walk. She would be panther food, a weak link in the food chain.
It seems that she is the weak link in the chain for Nerissa as well. "No!!!!" shouts the girl, "No!! I just got you! You can't break yet! Stupid pony!"
The world suddenly goes flying by as Ephrelle is somersaulted through the air, tossed by Nerissa. She hits a bright pink wall and falls to the ground, only to be picked up and thrown into the opposite wall. Her right ear breaks off with the second wall hit. Nerissa picks her up and she is ready to be tossed again, but instead her mane is grabbed with one hand and her tail with the other. Nerissa pulls them both as hand as she can, screaming as she repeatedly slams Ephrelle into the carpet.
"Stupid pony. Stupid stupid pony. You're weak and slow and broken and you make. Me. So. Mad." Each of the final words is accentuated with an especially hard slam, and then with one final swing, Ephrelle is flung into the wall. Nerissa then runs from the room, screaming something about defective toys.
A long time passes.
Ephrelle does not move.
She doesn't even try.
Both of her ears have now broken off, and her right hind leg has also caved into her side from the repeated slamming. Most of her silver and green mane and tail are on the floor when she'd been slammed. Her head has twisted all the way around on her body so that she's looking at her own rump, but she remains entirely prone. She does not want to move, and even if she wanted to, she doubts she could. When the bedroom door creaks open she does not bother to open her eyes, and so the teeth of Nerissa's puppy are an unwelcome surprise as they pierce her purple body. She is chomped on only once before Nerissa returns to the room, presumably having been following the puppy closely.
"Gross!" she says, shoving the puppy away and picking up Ephrelle by one of her few remaining tail hairs. "now you're all slimy. Ew. Double Ew. There's like germs and stuff and I have to wash my hands."
Still holding Ephrelle by the tail, Nerissa walks out of the bedroom. She drops the battered and broken plastic pony into the glittery pink wastebasket on the way out. Ephrelle lands on a dirty Kleenex, face-to-chest with a headless Ken doll, and wishes for death.