How (Not) To Make a Hippogriff

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The magic faded with a flash and a crackle that hung in the air like static electricity, Twilight’s spell fizzing to completion. She looked up from the arcane spell instructions in her book to the sound of struggling grunts from Dash and Gilda, her two willing subjects to test the spell. The alicorn mare blinked in shock, blushing lightly at the unearthly sight of her friends… this was NOT how the spell was supposed to work!

“A-ah… Rainbow! Gilda! That’s… oh dear.” She murmured.

“Twilight! W-what happened!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed in pure confusion, finding her body not responding properly to her commands, hind hooves out of her control, as if being moved by someone else. Her forehooves were altered, brown and furry, they didn’t bend right at all, her eyes wandering up and down, finding trouble in moving her head about to take in what had happened, eyesight hemmed in by long brown fur and thick haunches on either side. Her forelegs seemed to be hindlegs, gryphon-esque in appearance; she lifted one up and tentatively flexed the toes, the orientation seeming all wrong. Her eyes slowly moved upward to a long swishing tail that jutted out over her head… Gilda’s tail! After she set that paw down, she felt that other presence, taking over control of those limbs and flexing them, as if whichever mind was trying the hardest to move any of their suddenly shared body would be the one to do so.

“RAINBOW!?” Gilda shouts, a mix of shock and incertitude upon her voice. “Get off of me!” She demands, clearly not understanding the full breadth of what had just happened with the spell.

“Ooohhhh gosh… oh dear… this wasn’t supposed to happen!” Twilight flips through her spell book frantically. “It was supposed to make you two into hippogriffs, just like you wanted! I don’t know where this could have gone wrong…” She groans.

“A-ah…” Rainbow blushes, realizing now she’d been merged with her friend, feeling her presence awkwardly fused behind her. “I um… we n-need you to fix this, quick.” She says, urgency prevalent in her tone.

“YES!” Gilda roared. “Fix it now!”

“Oh… ah…” Twilight frownsed, quivering a little as she reread the spell. “It seems I mistook the wording… this spell wasn’t for hippogriffs plural it’s for hippogriff. Singular. I thought the tense was wrong, a product of bad translation, I didn’t think it would matter in the spe-”

“Twilight! You CAN fix this…? Please tell me you can fix this!” Rainbow interjected, cutting Twilight off.

“A-ah… well, yes. I can. At least I think. But it may take me a couple of… days. Er, a week maybe.” She gulped. “To work out the counter-spell, this magic is so deeply entangled, it’s a real mess.”

Rainbow and Gilda both twisted their fused body to get Twilight into their gaze, unable to glance at each-other… this was going to be a long week. And they were unsure how they’d manage it. But they technically were a hippogriff now, just not like they… or nature, had intended.