Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons - "New Horizons": Zero Dawn

Blackjack stumbles into a sexed-up horse casino and gets a deluxe spa treatment. Mature.

This has to be a mirage, I thought. You didn't just run into spotless, beaming alicorns in the middle of the Equestrian Wasteland. Especially not hot ones with sandy fur and long, black manes and curves like she'd never seen before stuffed into skin-tight bikinis and...

I shook my head. Don't get distracted. Don't look at her chest. (Seriously, how did she have a chest like that? It was so round and soft.) Okay, don't look at her chest, starting now.

"Who are you?" I asked.

With a flick of her bangs and a flutter of her eyes, she said, "I'm Oasis Shimmer, and I'm here to welcome you to The Horse Luxor." As she swept her hoof out in front of her, out of the rippling air behind her appeared a pyramid faced with polished white glass, gleaming and pristine, and surrounded by a spattering of shady palm trees strung up with pink and purple neon lights.

Which is to say that it was some extremely mirage nonsense. All I could think to say was "What?"

"It's a casino, dummy," Oasis said with a roll of her eyes. "And since we haven't been getting many customers, you've been selected to get the deluxe package, on the house."

Damn it, now I was staring at her lips. Thick and plump, painted with glossy purple lipstick, squeezed into a coy pout... Hey, give me some credit, at least it wasn't her chest this time. I tried to come up with some excuse not to go along with this, just on the off chance that it might be real, but everyone else was busy, and Oasis was perplexingly hot.

"Oh, uh...well, why not?" I said.

Going Up

For two office workers, an elevator ride becomes a growing, swelling, sloshing experience as they're turned into a big goofy toon wolf and gator. Mature.

On one side of the elevator stood Andrew. On his way back from a late lunch, he hadn't expected to run into anyone he knew. Okay, 'knew' was a bit of a stretch, since he didn't even know her name, but he knew she worked in Legal up on the fifty-second floor, that he was intimidated by how good she looked in a pantsuit, and that he wouldn't be able to say a word to her without stumbling over his own tongue.

On the other side of the elevator was Breana. She'd just gotten out of a meeting with one of their clients. She couldn't help feeling a little jealous of Andrew, who didn't have to haul out a stuffy suit jacket or wear heels every time he had to meet someone new. She didn't know his name either, but she recognized him from the couple of times she'd been down to Finance on the forty-third floor. They'd never had the chance to talk before.

"So," she said, breaking the silence as they waited for the doors to close. "You like Dopey Ditties?"

Andrew was caught completely off guard. "Um, what?"

"You have a, uh, B.B. Wolf mug on your desk." Great idea, she thought, kicking off a conversation with old cartoons. Not weird at all. "I always liked Al A. Gator."

"Oh. He's pretty cool," Andrew said, for lack of anything better to say.

The doors swung shut on the lobby and, mercifully giving Breana an excuse to go quiet again, the elevator chimed, "Going up."

The two of them were about to get know each other real well.

Birthday Blaze

A certain someone gets sucked into one of those dragon platformer games. No, not that one. Mature.

As the black of the screen stretches into a swirling void and you're pulled flailing through the frame of the TV, you can't help but wonder whether the note that said, "Here's that dragon game I thought you'd really get into," was supposed to be a pun.

At first it feels like being hurled forward, then like falling into the formless dark. With no more force than if you rolled off the edge of a couch, you land on a polished stone floor. A spotlight falls across you, lighting up an area a little wider than the span of your arms. You look up, but the light's not coming from anywhere. It's just there.

Ugh. Always this sort of thing on your birthday. You sit up, then get to your feet. Maybe the screen's still somewhere in the dark up above you. If you can get up to it, maybe you can climb back out.

But before you take two steps, a broad black pane blurts open in front of you, blocking your way. Letters appear inside of it, in time with a warbling sound that's not quite like a voice.

Uh, yeah, no thanks. You're not bothering with this; you need to find a way out. As you turn to the side, you're confronted by a text box with a blinking cursor. You turn around, but it whirls about to keep itself in front of you. You reach out to push it away, but it's solid, like a floating wall. When you touch it, the first blank spot switches to an A.

You sigh. Maybe it'll let you go if you play along. By tapping on the text box you start spelling out, letter-by-letter, B-L-A...but before you can follow that with C, the cursor leaps two spaces forward, spelling out 'BLAZE' instead.

Hello My Name Is...

A customer at Katie's diner is messing with words, and Katie—or whatever her name is now—has got to stop it. Mature.

Katie kept her name tag pinned above the left breast of her pink button-down blouse. It was part of the outfit she had to wear: the blouse, the matching skirt, and the apron she kept her pen and order pad stuffed into. At the start of every shift, she dug her name tag out of the bowl in the back next to the shift schedule, and pinned it to her chest. It was the one part of the dumb, outdated outfit that she had no problem with.

At least, not until today.

Two other name tags were missing from the bowl when Katie clocked in. The first belonged to Liz, who was making herself busy in the late-afternoon lull by tidying up around the register. Her shift would be over in an hour and change, and Katie knew she was just counting down the minutes, because that's what she did herself when she had the eleven o'clock shift.

The other was Benny's. He was just the busboy, but he was six-foot-something and had once tackled someone who'd tried to leave without paying. Katie had never talked to him much, but she gathered he'd played football while he was in school. She was jealous of him, because he didn't have to wear pink.

As far as Katie could tell, it was a normal, slow day at the diner. She'd gone around to each booth and pulled down the blinds, so the sun wouldn't be glaring in through the windows, and had checked to make sure the table of college-aged guys didn't need anything. They were no one she knew, thankfully.

Friday

A latex outfit grows out of some guy's body as his apartment changes around him. Mature.

One Friday, entirely by accident, George found he had kicked up the corner of the rug of reality.

Before then, it had been the sort of day that left him desperate for the weekend. A late shift at work bled into the bus ride home into the rain washing down as he walked to his apartment building. Cold and damp, George started climbing the stairs to his floor. As soon as he got in, he was going to peel off his clothes, dunk himself in the shower, and then crawl into bed until tomorrow afternoon.

When he stepped onto his floor, he spotted a woman leaned back against the wall opposite his front door. What caught his eye wasn't her posture or the way she was casually checking her phone or her unfamiliar face, but the fact that from her diamond- studded collar down to the tips of her toes, every inch of her was wrapped up in a pink latex catsuit. Her lips and her hair were so brightly pink they could have been made of candy. Next to all that, her plain black jacket looked out of place.

She didn't look up as George walked to his front door. Still, he knew she'd noticed him and was politely pretending to ignore him. He pulled his keys from his pocket. He could feel her attention boring into his back, but if he looked and she wasn't staring at him, he'd be the weird one. Something about him was interesting, but he didn't want to be interesting. He wanted to be warm, and dry, and asleep.

With the door swung shut behind him, standing in his kitchen-slash-living room, he felt comfortable again. What was someone dressed like that doing hanging around here? A neighbor he hadn't seen before, maybe, or someone's girlfriend. It was enough of an answer to put his mind to rest.

Squash and Stretch

Kotep doesn't let getting turned into a big dumb cartoon jackal get in the way of turning their friend into a big dumb cartoon wolf. Mature.

Surprise is an important part of being a jackal trickster god. Why just visit a friend when you can pop down to his apartment unannounced, fill it with magical traps ready to be sprung, and wait for him to stumble in and kick off the fun? The only problem was he didn't have the courtesy to show up on schedule. I'd been waiting for him for twenty minutes now, tipped back in his chair with my feet up on his table. I was bored of debating what to turn him into (maybe a cow, hadn't done that in a while) and had resorted to fiddling with my armbands by the time I decided to get up and get a drink. All this sitting around in the mortal realm was making me thirsty.

I slipped into the kitchen with my ears perked and swiveled toward the door, just in case he barged in while I wasn't looking. I didn't even have to hunt for a glass; a water bottle sat invitingly out on the counter. Nice of him to leave a drink out for me, especially since he had no clue I was coming. I tipped my snout up and downed the whole thing, then left it by the sink and headed back to my post at the table.

Something lingered in my mouth, like that syrupy feeling after drinking cheap soda. I ran my tongue along the roof of my palate and gulped. The feeling didn't go away; it was thick and gooey and clung to my teeth. I lapped along the backs of my fangs and swallowed again. I didn't want to be sloshing over my words whenever that friend of mine decided to show up.

No sooner had I gulped all that slick, viscous fluid down than my mouth began to fill up again. It clung to my tongue, making it feel blunt and slippery and too large for my mouth. My tongue squashed up against my own incisors, struggling to stay squeezed inside my jaw, curling and twisting and folding up against itself. At first I clenched my teeth and furrowed my brow, but soon the growing pressure was too much and I relented. My tongue flopped free and hung from the side of my muzzle, fat and round and inflated, pinkish-red with a glossy shine. A heavy bead of drool rolled from the tip like sticky sugar glaze.