Today's pre-stream writing: Friendship is Deceptive (Patreon)

ACCOUNTABILITY:

WORD GOAL MONTH TO DATE: 33,000

ACTUAL WORDS WRITTEN (INCLUDING THIS): 10,965

--------------------------------------

Soundwave squinted as the rain clouds began to float away, revealing the bright early afternoon sun above them. The brighter light brought an unfortunate trade-off to his new body's defective, nearsighted eyes: brighter light made it easier to make sense of the blurred shapes and colors around him, but it also brought intense pain. 

Despite the pain, the change in weather overall made it easier for him to navigate the now-muddy streets of Ponyville. The loud hissing of the rainfall rendered his new echolocation sense useless, and the odd twinges and tingles he registered through his horn didn't help with avoiding fruit carts, rain puddles, and juvenile ponies.

The smell of flowers caught his attention and guided his steps. He'd worked his way slowly through the town in search of a source of electronic hardware, and between his search and the hour lost to the rain he'd skipped lunch. Now the smell of fresh greenery and sweet pollen made his new, strange organic body react, associating these smells with food and reminding Soundwave of the need to maintain energy levels. 

The source of the smell became apparent before long: a blurry storefront surrounded with even more bright colors than average, with three especially bright-colored ponies moving around the other blurs. Soundwave made his way carefully over, listening closely as the three ponies, all apparently female, chattered to one another.

"Roseluck, this tray's a little waterlogged. Should we swap out for a fresh one from the greenhouse?"

"That's the last of our zinthias, Daisy. If we pull them back we won't have any where shoppers can find them."

"Maybe we could bring out the bougainvillea starters."

"I don't think so, Lily. Those are always a hard sell. Nobody in town has enough yard for a proper bougainvillea display. And they don't like being potted."

"Well, we certainly won't sell them if they spend- ooooh, my..."

Soundwave had quietly and carefully walked up as close as he dared to the pots and planters. He could tell there was barely a ponywidth between the rows of displays, but he couldn't quite tell where those gaps were... and, based on his blurred observations, his new body was an unusually large pony, second only to Megatron in his limited experience. And compared to the normal-sized female ponies before him... well, he didn't exactly tower over them, but the size difference could still intimidate- and obviously did.

"C-c-can I help you?" the pony addressed as Daisy asked. Soundwave saw her as a pink blur topped by a light green blur. 

"Assistance requested," he replied in his strangely resonant monotone. "Information sought: location of electronic equipment. Where-"

"Its voice!!" Daisy shrieked, flinching away from him. "That's not natural! It's a robot! A robot of some kind!"

"A robot in disguise!" Roseluck agreed- a pale blur topped with mutiple shades of red. "Look at its eyes! That's not natural!"

"The horror! The HORROR!" Lily screamed.  The pink and yellow blur jumped and bounded towards the shop, colliding with the two other blurs, who fell into a heap among the multicolored blurs of the floral displays. 

Soundwave didn't flinch. This wasn't the first reaction of this kind he'd encountered that day, but it was certainly the most dramatic. Obviously he wasn't going to find help here. 

As he began to step away, he felt something brush against a forehoof. Using the magic he'd been practicing in the privacy of the guardhouse, he lifted up the thing close enough for his eyes to focus- which meant practically on top of his muzzle. It was a ceramic pot full of dirt, a small one, holding a single flowering plant. The stalk of its lone flower was broken, causing the flower to droop. 

Soundwave focused more closely on the flower itself. He couldn't see clearly beyond a few centimeters in front of him, but up close his new eyes saw spectacularly well. He traced the veins, noticed the microscopic stomata under the sepals. He noted the swirling, mathematically beautiful but organically imprecise rows of petals, detected the tiny flaws of color which a normal pony eye would have registered as a solid, unbroken shade. It smelled acceptably, though the scent did not seem to Soundwave to match what his body regarded as edible.

All in all, it was no different from the thousands upon thousands of plants, flowering or otherwise, he'd trod underfoot without a thought on Earth. To him it wasn't beautiful- Soundwave had no use for beauty, at least of the visual kind. But it felt good to have a datapoint that added to the parallels between this newfound pony society and that of the fleshling humans of Earth. 

And more to the immediate point, the broken flower provided an opportunity for a second chance with these ponies. Megatron, after all, had ordered the Decepticons to stay out of trouble for now. If word got out that Soundwave had panicked three ponies unnecessarily, trouble would certainly follow. But if he could end the encounter on a positive note, trouble would be averted... or, at least, reduced in amplitude.

He levitated the potted plant away from his face, in the vague direction of the blurry ponies. "I have damaged this," he said. "Restitution necessary: how much?"

"T-t-take it," Lilly quavered. "J-just don't hurt us."

Soundwave was almost tempted. As a Decepticon taking whatever he wanted had been standard procedure and habit. But his personal desires had always been for data and experience, not for physical things. The plant was only useful as a means of defusing the situation. "Negative," he droned. "Stealing is wrong; vandalism like-"

"Hey, girls!!" A new blur, this one pink with more pink and a bit extra pink besides, appeared suddenly between Soundwave and the three florists. Soundwave almost dropped the flower pot from his magic; he had not detected any hint of this pony before she appeared. Nor had there been the sensation of teleportation like he felt when Skywarp teleported, or during the confrontation between Nightmare Moon and the student pony... Twilight Sparkle, that was the name. 

"Sorry to drop this on you at the last minute, but I'm pitching a surprise party for Twilight in about twenty minutes! Can you three make it over to the library tree by then?"

But now that the new pink blur was here, Soundwave did pick up some magical traces from his horn... and even though all such sensations were most peculiar to him, these felt like a higher quantum state of peculiar. And he'd felt them once before... during the fall of Nightmare Moon. This was one of Twilight Sparkle's followers. Now what was the name...?

"Pinkie! Run away! It's a robot pony!"

"A pony robot!"

"A robot disguised as a pony!"

"A pony disguised as a robot? Where?" The new blur- Pinkie, apparently- went into a complicated movement that Soundwave's weak eyes couldn't even begin to make out. "I don't see any! Just this pony who I've never met before standing right-"

There followed a loud intake of air that Soundwave would have sworn on the Allspark surpassed the lung capacity of any terrestrial organic life form of that size. 

And then Pinkie resumed talking at what Soundwave estimated at 1.7 times her prior rate of data transfer. "You're one of the new ponies Princess Celestia had moved into the old guardhouse! Which is really a good thing because somepony needed to fix the place up, I mean nopony's lived there since I came to Ponyville and that was YEARS ago, but I still need to throw you all a Welcome to Ponyville Party! Or should that be a Welcome Ponies Disguised as Robots Disguised as Ponies to Ponyville Please Don't Invade Us Party?"

There came a brief pause, which Soundwave spent pondering if he should even attempt to answer that question. He couldn't decide if this Pinkie was either somewhat dim or extraordinarily perceptive.

Then the moment passed, and Pinkie resumed. "Now I don't want you and your friends to think I've forgotten you, but I'm just an eensy bit busy right now, working on something I want to do purely because Twilight Sparkle is my friend and for no ulterior motives whatever!"

Soundwave noted that, changed body or not, his ability to recognize when someone else was lying hadn't been in the least impaired.

"But I am in kind of a hurry, so I'll get back to you about the party, okay? And there'll be cake and games and everything! But I need to borrow the girls here for a while, if that's okay?"

Words failed Soundwave. This, he felt, was probably just as well, considering the effect his unique voice seemed to have on others. He silently waved the broken flower in the air with his magic. 

"Oh! You want to buy that? Well, why didn't you say so?"

"We said he could have it! But he won't leave! He said something about not being a thief, but-"

"Oh! Well, that's honest of him! I wonder if he's met Applejack? Honest ponies should get along really well! There's nothing the world needs more than honest ponies, except maybe chocolate and vanilla and strawberries and..."

Soundwave, perpetrator of millions of lies great and small in his service to Megatron and for his own advantage over his long mechanical life, found himself agreeing with Pinkie. More honest people made his job easier. The human saying that you couldn't cheat an honest man had, in his opinion, no basis in fact. And yet he did feel a little bit guilty about considering such a completely defenseless target...

"Oh, right! I'm short on time! If he wants to pay you, why not let him?"

"All- all right. It's two bits."

"Nuh-uh! It clearly says seven bits on the underside of the pot! See?"

Soundwave drew the pot closer. He hadn't thought to look there. Verifying the price, he levitated up the pouch of bits Starscream had doled out and counted seven of the twenty gold coins out, dropping them in front of the tangled blur of fallen ponies. Bringing out each word slowly and with the greatest of care, he said, "Thank you; I am sorry I damaged your wares; unable to see where I was going."

"Huh?" Suddenly Pinkie's face came into sharp resolution, mostly because its owner was leaning on Soundwave's muzzle. Her blue eyes bored into Soundwave's milky whites. "Hmmm... something wrong with your eyes?" As suddenly as she'd lunged at him, she pulled away, becoming a vague pink blob again. "Quick! How many fingers am I holding up?" One bit of the blob stretched up above the rest.

"Pinkie..." Roseluck didn't sound terrified anymore. If anything, Soundwave thought she sounded like this was something that happened every day. "Pinkie, you haven't got fingers."

"Oh, yeah!" Pinkie said. "Guess we better get you to an expert!" Soundwave felt something scoot underneath him and lift him off his legs. "See you in fifteen minutes at the Golden Oak, girls!" Then Pinkie dashed off, and Soundwave on top of her, barely clinging on to the newly purchased plant with his magic. 

The streets of Ponyville blurred past the two of them, an indistinguishable riot of color and movement in Soundwave's vision. He had just enough time to learn that his new body was capable of something he'd never experienced before in nine million years- motion sickness- when a jingling bell and a sharp decrease in the ambient light heralded the end of their trip. Soundwave's hooves hit the floor, and Pinkie-blur reached over a counter and rang a bell. 

"Just a moment." A door opened, and another pony, a unicorn levitating something that smelled like a clipboard to Soundwave, came into the antechamber. "Oh, hello, Pinkie. Are those eyedrops working out for you?"

"Super-swell, Doc Clearly!" Pinkie said. "But I've got an optical emergency for ya! This pony needs some really strong glasses, like, stat! Oh, and don't worry about him! He seems a little scary, but he's really a total cuddle-bear, you know?"

Never, absolutely never, not in an infinite number of situations, had Soundwave ever heard himself referred to as in any way cuddly. Creepy, yes. Threatening, absolutely. Terrifying, on numerous occasions. Cuddle-bear? Well... cuddle-bear could be useful, if he had any idea how to maintain it in the absence of the blurry pink chatterbox. 

"Yes, I can see he would be," the unicorn said doubtfully. "So, is this a special favor, Pinkie? Or am I getting paid for this one?"

"Oh, he's one of the new guard ponies," Pinkie said matter-of-factly. "Send your bill there. I'm sure Celestia will cover it! After all, health coverage is part of the guard package!"

Soundwave hadn't known that, and he filed that datum for the all-too-foreseeable moment when he'd need to silence Starscream's whining on the subject. 

"Anyway, running late, gotta go. Thanks! Bye!" A ringing of bell, a clattering of wooden door, and Pinkie was gone. 

"That girl," the unicorn doctor said, chuckling softly. "Anyway, nice to meet you. I'm Iris Cornea Clearly. My friends call me I. C." The doctor leaned a bit closer to Soundwave's face, and her face came into focus enough to make out a pair of maroon eyes. "Tell me, have you at least got some sight? Can you focus at all?"

"Affirmative," Soundwave said. "At close proximity: vision excellent. Other ranges: focus impossible."

"Well, that's good news," Doctor Clearly said. "And tell me, do bright lights cause pain?"

"Affirmative."

"I'll just bet," the doctor said. "Well, let's get you examined, and we'll see what we can do about that."

(out of time- need to prep for tonight's XCOM stream)