Til You Believe In Friendship

5| Every Blessing Comes With a Price

—Iris! Iris, where are you? Iris!

Beat Link couldn't see her anywhere; the crowd had just doubled since he left. He was freaked out, his white coat and tricolored mane getting stained with drinks and appetizers while bumping with everypony in the salon. His eyes were still watering, and his voice cracked as he yelled her name over and over.

—IRIS!

It was pointless, the place was too crowded: all the noise in the room made him see awfully weird shapes. He couldn't bear his head. Beat ran into one of the bathrooms and shut the door. He sat on the toilet and broke to tears again. He was now really on his own, with nopony to come and save him. While watching the dim echoes of the party, he tried to forget what had happened in the last hour, but his memory just seemed to loop the experience in high-def, forcing him to revive it all over again.

After the initial shock of figuring out his condition, an incredible cocktail of incomprehensible feelings arouse inside him: he had finally found out his destiny! Although it wasn't really clear for him at the time, cutie marks don't just appear from nothing. And the fact that his was the exact same shapes he could see sealed up the issue. Yet he wasn't an expert in the subject, his lifetime studies may had taught him a thing or two about synesthesia.

It is known (since somewhat recently, though) that someponies possess an intriguing sort of abilities. While some scientists still think it is a newly-formed way to control magic, the majority state that these talents may be something more complex. Research has found that in these subjects, their brain activity differed a lot from that in manipulating magic. They have found that the perceptive capacities of these ponies are far more developed than in the others. It is still known very little about the topic, but most experts can conclude that the brain connections that these ponies have in their senses are jumbled, or mixed up, inside their head.

Let's say somepony takes an ordinary pony and a synesthetic pony, and experiments with their senses. While both subjects will perceive a stimulus with a sense, like music with the hearing, the synesthetic pony may interpret it with more than one sense. For this kind of ponies, it is possible to see the sound, or to taste the textures, or even to smell names, depending on the type of their condition. Some types of synesthetic ponies can perceive and link together things like colors and glyphs, or time and space. It is not that they just think it happens, but they really feel stimuli differently, they associate one thing with the other. Their mind can make connections beyond the senses and actually interpret things in different ways.

Yet Beat made his own diagnosis and should have go seen a specialist before assuming things, he was too excited about it to even think. He rushed out of the party, fascinated by the entire world that had just opened for him. The chats, the traffic, the signs; every ordinary noise in the Big Apple had now a visual form. It was amazing! With his newly-tattooed flanks, he hurried home to show all of this to his family. He didn't care about how he had disobeyed his parents, or about how all of her mother's dreams may have been crushed, not even about the hour; he just wanted to show off his luck to his parents.

Forgetting completely about Iris or the party, he arrived to his apartment building and got inside. His parents must have already arrived. He got upstairs a bit nervous, but tried to calm down when getting to his door. He opened it slowly; his dad was sitting in a chair right in front of the door, reading a book with a neutral expression. He talked with a creepy, too-peaceful tone.

—Where were you?

Beat felt every bit of worry give rise for anger in his dad's voice when he answered. His dad looked at him right into his eyes, which were the exact same tone of his. He started to feel frightened.