Heck.

Grocery stores, to many, are quite benign. You visit once or maybe twice a week, exchange bland smalltalk with the cashier, and live the rest of your life without paying it a second thought.
However, to some, they are like hell on Equu. The bright and sterile environments are hardly welcome to those few timid ponies, only made worse by the often bored and uncharismatic employees working the counters.
One such pony will soon find herself victim to the unusual mischief and malice of an unsavoury worker...



“Is that all?”

A brown earth pony leers across the counter at her unicorn customer, considering the barebones groceries placed upon it and shoving them into a plastic bag without consideration for their fragility. After she’s done, the bag doesn’t seem to have changed much in size; the contents look barely enough to feed a foal, let alone a fully grown mare. The unicorn, who’s quite a lot smaller than the average mare, has to look up at her to talk - the sterile lighting above forces her to squint, silhouetting that same earth pony and making her dull form seem far more imposing than it should.
Quick shakily levitates a few bits out of her saddlebags. “Uhm.. yeah, that’s it.” She places them one by one next to the bag of groceries, which the other mare snatches with a somewhat satisfied sneer. It seems like that was enough bits.. which is lucky, since that’s all she had left in her wallet.

“Receipt?”
Quick shifts nervously, tapping her hooves against the floor and rubbing them together - not as a result of the question, but just as a simple nervous tic while interacting in general. “No thanks, miss.”
“Enjoy..”

Quick stuffs the bag into her saddlebags, and before she walks away, she says: “You too.”

Oh, sweet goddess Luna.
I did it again.
Please kill me.
How does this always happen…?
She can almost feel the confused glare on her back as she makes her escape outside. It’s cool, late into the autumn, and soon it’ll be winter. Bad news for Quick; her lodgings are poorly insulated and have zero heating, so she’ll have to rely on piling on the blankets to get through it.
Quick’s house - if you can call it that - is somewhat out of town, located down a small dirt path, and is easy to miss if you’re not looking for dilapidated shacks on the edge of Ponyville. The path fades out in multiple places and is almost impossible to navigate in the dark. As such, Quick can never really go out at nighttime, or stay out late either. The area around her is heavily forested, and quite pretty. She can always swivel one ear to catch a distant avian call, the snapping of a branch, or the shrill tapping of a woodpecker. Despite all this, the mare hates it, in truth; every walk home cakes her hooves in dust and dirt, scratches her hide and dirties her fur, getting leaves and sticks in her mane.

If it wasn’t already obvious, she’s quite a sensitive little pony.
An awkward feeling tugs at her chest as she walks home, and after a while, one particularly strong surge of what can only be described as pain is matched with the sound of her heart tearing in half.
…actually, that’s just her right saddlebag coming apart in a burst of bad luck. Quick turns to find her groceries coating the gravel path below her. Part of that mess is even broken glass and spilled liquid, which is odd, because none of her groceries included bottles or bowls. Even if she could afford alcohol or even cola, she mostly prefers water. Much cheaper and healthier.

That’s not important, though. What is is that the equivalent of the unicorn’s weekly budget for food has been reduced to broken sludge on the ground, save for a few eggs and a soaked cup of instant noodles. If similar heartbreaking incidents hadn’t happened before, it’s safe to say she’d probably have broken down into a pathetic sobbing fit right there and then.
But her fur needs to stay clean, and the forest doesn’t need to hear her breakdowns, and so Quick salvages what she can.. which, apart from the aforementioned goods, is just a tiny chocolate bar for desert.

How unfortunate. Though, after such a terrible experience, her luck can only get better from here… right?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It seems that life will allow her at least one small blessing, for now.
Right after the mare got home, and it was getting dark out, the heavens themselves seemed to open and dumped a giant rainstorm over the town and its surrounds - and though her home is tiny and rundown, it is very waterproof. Quick made sure of that after her first year in the house.
The sight of her cramped living room, though possibly somewhat depressing to other ponies if they ever visited, is familiar and comfortable to her after all that walking. Not like she can relax.. while there’s still light, this unicorn has to get started on cooking. No money for lantern oil or candles.
Dinner is very limited, tonight, but edible. She can use one of the eggs in her noodles - which are partially soggy from the mystery liquid from her groceries, but assuming she accidentally picked up some alcohol from the store Quick pays it no mind. Explains why she had to empty out her wallet for the groceries, though.
A few minutes pass, the smells and sounds of frying egg fill her tiny kitchen, though that’s all overtaken by the shrill whistling of the kettle. The unicorn is a pretty good cook. Magic, combined with a foalhood filled to the brim with reading books, makes for a well-read and coordinated pony. It’s a simple process; hot water and flavouring mixed in noodle cup, drained noodles go in bowl, egg goes on noodles. Even though this meal will hardly put a dent in her hunger, each and every successful ‘dish’ cooked by Quick feels like an achievement to be proud of. She takes one satisfied whiff of her creation…
But, as delicious as it does smell, she’s more focused on her muzzle. Specifically, how the end is covered with scales and covering the rest of her snout with the same.
It’s so surprising to her, all Quick can do is blink in amazement for some time. When she’s finally come to her senses, that snoot of hers is in critical condition; she tries scratching at it, groaning in pain, her fur rapidly disappearing in place of scales - the pain intensifies as bones and cartilage shift, breaking into different, foreign shapes, elongating and molding her into something she’s not.
Pretty soon her whole face is changing too, skin hardens into scales, her ears feel funny and can’t turn properly anymore. That’s hardly the greatest change, though…
It spreads across her face and down her body. First, after her ears lose their fluff and maneuverability, one tiny horn splits into two small ones and shifts across her skull. Quick’s magenta eyes gain a menacing look; those large pony sockets shrink painfully to allow for smaller, slitted reptilian ones. The shifting continues down her body, and all she can do is scream and flail, helpless to stop herself from becoming totally alien.
Sometime during the commotion, she spills the entire boiling hot bowl onto her fur, which at first is agonising.. but after a few seconds she feels no pain at all. Scales there, too, the growth only accelerated by the poisoned noodles.

Her forelegs thin out and break into different shapes. She sees the end of her hooves splitting apart.. forming entirely new appendages for her to use on both sides, along with dangerous claws on the end of each. She’s too enamoured by these, temporarily, to notice it spreading down towards her crotch..

See, there are certain details about this unicorn that are.. misleading. Not on purpose, of course, but Quick doesn’t exactly do a great job of conveying them either.
The scales spread down and around her sheath.

His sheath.
This colt takes on such a feminine appearance that many mistake him for a mare. Even the leering earth pony from earlier may not have noticed his sex with her calculating glare.

Those parts, male as they may be, won’t be left unaffected. His unusually large balls and sheath stay untouched, which is unusual for the male reptile he’s becoming, and may make interactions even more awkward in the future - his ‘parts’ have no slit to retreat into.
However, just to give him that little extra bit of embarrassment, a decent knot forms at the base of his sheathed member and *just* enough stimulation is applied to force it to slide out.
Lastly, his hind legs reform and crack into… strange shapes. Kinda like a minotaur, only with similar formations and claws to what remains of his forelegs.
His mane, in the background, is replaced with hard plates of the same colour, and his scales retain the same shade as his fur - though his belly is faded compared to the green covering the rest of his body.
Eventually, it’s over. His noodles are ruined, his body and mind are in shambles, and it takes a great deal of will to even keep himself awake with the amount of stress running through him.
A great deal that he doesn’t have. Quick passes out.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
When Quick finally wakes up on the floor, a dim light is shining through his windows. He slept heavily and well - it appears to be early morning. Though… as his awareness grows, it takes a few moments for him to register exactly how wrong everything feels. The memories return to him - a nightmare, perhaps? - but it soon dawns on him that perhaps this is something he won’t be waking up from. L
Scaly belly, check. Scaly ‘forelegs’, check. Weird hind legs, check.
Confused and scared out of his mind, and still checking each and every limb, he reaches out with one of those new legs and presses it between his legs. It’s warm… hard… a little leaky… but as far as he can tell, without inspecting further, Quick’s bits are the same as ever, if… a little frustrated.
His house is the same - minus a shattered bowl on his left - but he certainly is not. Maybe he can get help…?

The first challenge is standing. He first tries to get up bipedally… no dice. It’s very uncomfortable, and he’s clearly not designed to walk on four ‘legs’.
So, the next logical step is to use his hind legs to walk only. But… how is he to do that? “D-Damn it,” he whispers shakily, “why d-did this have to happen to me? N-No phone, no roommate, I’m n-not even in town..”
He could wait for weeks before someone comes to check on him after the bills don’t get paid. Maybe longer. So.. Quick has to get up. Laying and wallowing here isn’t going to help anyone, least of all himself.

So.. he pulls a chair over with his magic.
...nothing happens.
He tries again.
Nothing.

Maybe, if he reaches out with his new leg..
As if beckoning for the chair to come closer, he reaches out with that limb, and when he pulls back… so does it.
Perhaps his magic is in a different form, but it’s still there. That reassures him, if nothing else.
Next, standing. His leg clumsily finds its way onto the flimsy wood- “Ah!” Quick’s new digits clamp along the edge of the chair. Experimentally, he flexes them. Interesting. Very interesting. He’ll have to experiment with this later, once he’s done learning the basics of living… oh, and screaming.

The other clawed limb finds itself grabbing onto the other side of the chair - he’s getting better at this - and with some effort, the colt(?) drags his torso onto it.
That’s a start.
Next, shuddering at the *wrongness* of the movement, his hind legs scrape into place underneath him, planting on the floor. And now all he has to do is… stand.
“A-Ah.. shhhooot!” He wobbles all over the place and knocks once of his hips on the edge of his table. Quick winces and stumbles, trying not to curse (he hates saying bad words), but eventually he manages to find his footing.

His house looks so different from ‘up here’... everything’s so small, so… puny. Like him, but just a little smaller. Though, further inspection can wait. He needs to get a look at himself. Understand what exactly his body has morphed into.
So, still stumbling awkwardly, he makes his way into the bathroom.

Quick is… well, horrified wouldn’t be the right word to use. When he looks in the mirror, he feels a deep, dark feeling of dread rising in his gut. He’s staring at a dragon.
Not a normal dragon, though. It bears his colours, feminine looks (and hips), and… his sheath remains untouched. Save for, to his dismay, an impressive knot at the pink base of it.
How is he going to go outside looking like this? He remembers how Ponyville treated a zebra. But a dragon? Especially with such… obvious genitalia? It makes him shiver to even consider the idea that he might go out looking for help.

Luckily, or perhaps unluckily for him, he doesn’t have to decide. His train of thought is interrupted by a knock knock knock at the front door.
The pony-turned-dragon is sent into a panicked frenzy, rushing about his little cottage, trying to find something to cover his body - especially the still hard and throbbing member jutting out from between his thick, scaly thighs.
Eventually, he ends up just uprooting the sheets from his bed as a second round of knocking begins. Quick wraps himself in it (as best he can with his lack of coordination) and stumbles over, nearly tripping over the coffee table.

He opens it just a sliver and peeks through - only his scaled snoot is visible on the other side.

“E-Excuse me, I-”

But he can’t say much more before the door is shoved open fully and he’s sent flying, twisting through the air and landing on his side with a painful thump.
Cowardly instincts soon kick in, with his body curling up and his ‘forelegs’ tucking over his head.

“I’m s-s-sorry! I-I.. please d-don’t do anything d-drastic, w..we c-can talk about this..”

He certainly doesn’t seem to be in a position to negotiate, though. This is further reinforced by the shaking in his body as someone steps through his door. Slow, steady, graceful hoofsteps make their way over to him, likely staring at the pathetic shivering dragon at their hooves.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk. You really are a coward, aren’t you?”

That voice. That tone. Those words, dripping with malice, sarcasm, poison…
It’s the earth pony.
“Wh.. What?” Quick peeks through his digits, looking up - it’s her, no doubt about it. “Why.. why a-are you…
“Be quiet.”

She’s just as cold as ever, and reaches down to yank the sheet away. Not that Quick had much of a grip on it to begin with, of course.
“You are going to be quiet. You’re going to do what I say. And no one is going to know you exist apart from me. Is that clear?”

The mare pulls roughly on his side, forcing him onto his back - though, owing to his hard problem, Quick keeps his legs crossed.

“I-I.. um… y-yess, miss-”

“Mistress.”

“...y-yes, misstress... “

She grins maliciously, placing her hooves on the ends of his two legs. “Goood. Now, let’s see that… ....”
The brown mare forces his legs apart, expecting to find some wet, plump draconic lower lips - only to find a pair of heavy balls and an unsheathed, knotted cock to match.

“...what the fuck?”