I blinked my eyes, groaning and stretching as I tried to struggle to my feet; I only wound up making it as far as my hands and knees before I was stopped by what felt like a hoof resting on my back.
"Now, settle down, Miss Mare," came a male voice, "you've just been through quite an ordeal. It's good to see you awake, but you still need to rest."
I looked around – momentarily surprised at how far I could turn my head, though I filed that information away for later – and came face to face with… "A Rapidash?" It wasn't quite a Rapidash, though, as its mane and tail were made of brown hair rather than flames, and it was wearing glasses and a lab coat over a shirt and tie and a stethoscope around its shoulders.
"There'll be no rapid dashing for you for some time, Miss Mare; this is a hospital and you are injured." It was the same voice as before, and it was coming out of the Rapidash's mouth!
"No, but… you're… you're…" I tried to protest, but he cut me off, his hoof pressing more insistently on my back as though urging me to lie back down. "Oof!" I grunted as he succeeded in pushing me down on my stomach… on a bed. How'd I wind up on a bed? Well, he said I was in a hospital… But that still didn't answer the question of his appearance.
"Now, according to your chart, your last name is 'Mare', but we didn't get a first name from the pony who brought you here." The Rapidash-who-wasn't was saying. "Care to enlighten us?"
I blinked. Why would someone say that my last name was Mare? And what did he mean, the pony who brought me here? I started to correct him, "Actually, my name is Su–" but then I looked down at my hands and said, "Ee!" as what I saw were a pair of chocolate brown hooves. I pulled my arms in close and sat up, staring in disbelief.
"Suy Mare it is, then. Pleasure to meet you, Suy; I'm Doctor Stable," he said, holding out a hoof as though offering a handshake.
I shakily lifted one of my own front legs and draped it over the end of his. "Um, it's Su–ee!" Once again my name was distorted by a shriek of surprise, this time as Doctor Stable somehow managed to pull me down onto my stomach again simply by jerking his foreleg away; mine was yanked along with it and, thrown off-balance, I collapsed on the bed.
"Yes, you said that already," he said patiently and a clipboard drifted into my line of sight, displaying a medical file topped with the name 'Suy Mare', "I heard you the first time."
I sighed resignedly and batted the clipboard away, only realizing that the thing had been surrounded by a pale blue glow when it suddenly stopped glowing and fell to the floor with a clatter.
"Now, really, there's no call for that!" Doctor Stable said sternly, and when I looked at him in surprise I saw his horn light up with the same glow that the clipboard had; moments later the clipboard was floating again, surrounded by the pale blue glow once more.
"S-sorry," I said, sheepish. What else could I say? Apparently I had knocked the clipboard out of the hold of his Psychic attack or something. I didn't think Rapidash could learn Psychic, but then I didn't think people could become Pokémon either, and that was the only explanation I could think of for how I suddenly had hooves instead of hands: I've become a Rapidash… or a Ponyta… or something. Well, if it's one of those two, I'll be able to tell the difference by feeling the top of my head – if it's smooth, I'm a Ponyta; if there's a horn, I'm a Rapidash.
Just as I started to reach up and figure out exactly what I was, I found my front legs being held down by a Ponyta with two-toned light blue hair instead of flames and a smaller one with a whitish body and plum-colored curly hair for a mane and tail, both wearing white hats with red and white cross-shaped logos on them. "Wha–"
"That's quite enough." The Rapidash was speaking again. I turned my head – realizing now that the reason I could turn so far was because I had the elongated neck of some kind of equine – and met the doctor's no-nonsense glare. "I've already told you you need to rest; if you won't be still and listen to me then you'll have to be restrained." His gaze softened then as he continued, "Now, I'm going to ask Nurse Coldheart and Nursery Rhyme to step away in a moment, but this will be your last chance, alright?"
"Y-yes sir… Doctor Stable," I mumbled.
"Very good." He nodded to the two Ponyta, and they stepped away.
My forelegs were now in a somewhat uncomfortable position, but I didn't want to risk the doctor's anger by moving them again so I simply laid my head down on the pillow between my hooves. I felt a tickle in my nose and sniffed, only realizing at that moment that I was starting to cry. I turned my head to bury my face in the pillow in shame, sniffling miserably as tears started to run down my face when I squeezed my eyes shut.
Doctor Stable spoke again then, cajolingly, "Come along, Suy, there's no need to cry… Nursery Rhyme, could you get our patient a tissue, please? Thank you."
I looked up when I felt a nudge against one of my forelegs; the smaller Ponyta had bumped me with her nose, holding a tissue in her mouth. That couldn't be particularly hygienic, but if it was how Pokémon ran their hospitals then I guess it was alright. I looked uncertainly from the Ponyta with the tissue (the doctor had called her Nursery Rhyme?) to Doctor Stable, who gave me a short nod.
"Thanks… Nursery Rhyme?" I said stuffily before reaching to take the tissue between my hooves. I knew it should be physically impossible to handle a tissue with hooves in the same way I would with hands, but I told myself it would work somehow… and, somehow, it did.
"You can just call me Rhyme if you want," she replied once her mouth was free; I nodded to show I understood.
Holding the tissue between my hooves, I blew my nose – my very horse-shaped nose, I learned – before depositing it in the wastebasket that floated up to me with a blue glow around it. I looked again at Doctor Stable, whose horn glowed blue until the wastebasket landed on the floor beside my bed with a gentle clunk, then I wiped my eyes with the backs of my hooves before crossing them on top of my pillow and looking down at them miserably.
"Now," Doctor Stable said as he took a deep breath, sounding much more business-like all of a sudden, "you were brought in here with major burns on your left flank and bruises on your right; do you remember how you got those?"
"Mm…" I closed my eyes and tried to think, but all I could recall was a painful searing along my left side followed by a hard impact on my right. Was I caught in some sort of explosion?
"I wouldn't know; that's why I was asking you." Doctor Stable's voice broke through my reverie, making me realize that I must have spoken the question aloud. "It seems you have amnesia."
"Oh." I didn't know what else to say to that.
Doctor Stable sighed. "Do you have somewhere to go, Suy? Any friends or relatives in Ponyville? Your treatment is just about finished so if all goes well you'll be discharged tomorrow, but somepony's going to have to take care of you while you continue to recover."
'Ponyville'? 'Somepony'? Apparently this place was only inhabited by Ponyta and Rapidash, if their language was any indication. Still, all I could say was, "I don't know."
A/N: Okay, timelines! This takes place just before Read It and Weep (Season 2 Episode 16 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic). You might recognize the doctor and nurses here as the ones in that episode; that's what I was going for. As for Sue, well… it's further than I have written for Twin Trainer Team (the sequel to Pokémon Trainer Twins) – lucky for you she's got amnesia, so there's no spoilers for what happened to her! After this chapter she'll stop thinking of them as either Ponyta or Rapidash and just call them all ponies; this fic really doesn't have anything to do with Pokémon – it just features a character from my Pokémon book series that's somehow turned into a pony.