What is it with little girls and ponies? She could be the daughter of a certified world class genius brought up in the strictest tenets of the Scientific Method, but one look at a member of the genus Equus ferus caballus, and she’ll emit a squee with weaponizeable frequency and amplitude. I have a prototype ready, and once I get my hands on a set of earplugs hermetic enough to prevent it from affecting the user, They will all see! The world shall tremble under my treble!

Ehm. But I digress.

The point here is that the Horsepocalypse, which is a stupid name. I mean, what were those press jockeys thinking? I get the while ‘end of the world’ naming convention thing. And I mean, Urspocalypse is a pretty good name for when the Polar Proletariat released those laser bears. And Ragnaroc was a stroke of genius as a name for an invasion of giant bird riding aliens. And even Götterdämmerangutan was decent, even if mostly for the hilarity of watching those news anchors try to pronounce it. But Horsepocalypse? Everyone can realize that you’re just copying the bears here. Besides, it wasn’t even close to a planetary extinction level event. They barely even leveled the one city. If it was up to me, I’d have named it Pondemonium.

Where was I?

Oh, yes. The point here is that Pondemonium was not my fault. Which should have been obvious. I mean, they can’t possibly be mine. I don’t do biology. Far too messy. And yeah, they came out of my lair home. But I’m not the one who made them!

I guess I’d better start at the beginning.

This was right after Ragnaroc, and since it was an ‘all hands’ event, I’d gotten a full pardon after we managed to close the portal and get rid of the last of the armored avian antagonists. I had a key role in devising the gas that weakened their carapaces enough for the more front line hero and villain types to punch them out, and I’d taken a grant to study the quasi biological alloys they used to see if they can be adapted for our use.

I’d rented a house in the suburbs, and actually managed to get my kid into a decent kindergarden, so she could learn about how the inferior of intellect and prospects live socialize. I mean, I’d more or less given up on destroying the world by that point. After all, if she lives in it, it can’t be all that bad, right? Kids have a way of getting you to change your world view. But I was still set on taking over at some point, since humanity was still dead set on doing it wrong so I figured she’d have to get to know how the other side lived.

So there I was, settling in for the suburban-university life. The neighbors weren’t completely intolerable, and some of the faculty members were event smart enough to talk shop with. The dean was a reformed mad scientist I’d done some work with in the past, and reminiscing about the good old days was actually kind of fun.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

And then the kid gets back from kindergarden and tells me she wants a pony. Apparently, all of her friends have them, and she can’t play with them properly without at least one. Now admittedly, this struck me as somewhat odd, since I’d been given a set of rules by the neighborhood association when I moved in, and I couldn’t remember any exception made for ponies. But what do I know? I’ve spend the majority of my adult life in Invisible Concrete™ reinforced bunkers several hundred meters below ground. So I determined that if my daughter needed a pony in order to fit in, a pony she shall have. It wasn’t even hard to get one. Apparently there are farms dedicated to raising the little pests, which made perfect sense to me, since if every little girl needed at least one pony, there would definitely be a market for them.

So I bought what I thought was a perfectly good pony, and was rewarded for my effort by an ear splitting sonic attack. Once my girl calmed down though, I was informed very firmly that what I bought, while being an adorable little horsy, was most definitely not a pony.

A pony, apparently, is supposed to be pastel colored. And preferable have a horn, wings or both. Now I was getting somewhat out of my depth. I knew she wouldn’t accept a robot, and I’d signed an agreement that I would refrain from making any Frankenstein related monster when I’d gone legit. Which really left me with either transformation magic, which tends to be fay-originated and thus unpredictable and woefully unreliable, or genetic engineering, which meant biology, which is only slightly less unreliable than fay magic.

Between ‘woefully unreliable’ and ‘slightly less unreliable’, I decided to go with biology. But as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t do biology. So I turned to one of my more frequent associates, Dr. Chimera. A world famous mad biologist. Which is kind of redundant, when you think about it. All biologists are mad. If they were sane they’d be chemists.

But Dr. Chimera was an ally, and tended to be more stable than most biologists. Officially mad or otherwise. And she gave me a discount on ordering a full herd of ponies in a variety of pastel colors, and with various extra appendages as specified by my daughter.

Even with Dr. Chimera’s turbo growth tanks, it took a little over a week for my herd of ponies to be ready. But let me tell you, the squeal of pure delight my daughter gave rise to upon seeing them was definitely worth the wait. And loud enough to break the neighbor’s windows.

There was, of course, no help for it at that point. She just had to invite every single girl in her kindergarden over for a pony party. Which was all well and good, but the entire horde of squealing young females managed to descent upon my home at just the right moment for the sedative Dr. Chimera used to safely transport the ponies wore off.

At which point I realized that the good Dr. had taken genes out of goats in order to make the horns, and out of swans for the wings. And you’d be hard pressed to find a more ornery animal than a goat, or a more aggressive bird than a swan.

It turned out that miniature horses with genes from aggressive and ornery animals spliced into them do not like the kind of noise excited five year old girls can make. And they are definitely not shy about letting the girls, myself and the rest of the city know just how unhappy they were.

That, right there, is why I don’t do biology. Give me grey goo over DNA any day of the week.

It’s only my habit of planning in advance and my years of paranoia that made me prepare an escape elevator and a secret bunker in advance.

My daughter, of course, was sulking. She’d just started to make some new friends, after all. But really. How was I supposed to know she just wanted a doll?