At the End of the Tunnel

It was raining. Of course it was raining, it fit my mood perfectly. Those so-called experts on TV said that there would be scattered showers all over the Bay Area over the course of the week. Instead, it seemed as if the entire Pacific Ocean had decided to fall on San Francisco all at once, and all on me. Not that I minded much, I actually like rainy days. At least it was cool, not like those weeks at a time when the sun beamed down relentlessly like it was out to get you. No, this was pretty nice.

I was much more focused on where I was headed, anyway. My path led me along the wharf, down toward the Golden Gate Bridge. No, I wasn't going to Oakland or anything. I didn't intend on making it across the bridge in the first place. Thoughts like that one had been racking my brain nonstop for weeks, and no amount of medication, or alcohol, or women, or willpower could shake them from my mind.

It's not as if I wanted to die, quite the contrary, death scared the hell out of me. It was just that I didn't see any good reason to continue trudging along this endless path, a path that was leading me nowhere, a path that was never going to get me anywhere. At least, that's how I had explained it to my therapist last week. And since I was too afraid to pull the trigger, or slash my wrists, I figured I would let the ocean do my dirty work.

I passed a man on the side of the street, under an awning of some apartment building. He was playing a guitar and humming a bit. A hat sat beside him, flipped upside-down, an obvious sign. I stood there, drenched from head-to-toe, listening to him for a minute. He actually wasn't half bad, I'd certainly heard worse before. When he finally did notice me listening, he nodded at me, I nodded back. I stepped over toward him, not three steps, reaching into the back pocket of my blue jeans for my wallet. I took out every bill I had in there, I think it amounted to about fifty bucks, and dropped it in the hat. He stopped playing, but only for a second, nodded at me again, and went on playing. I went on my way as well, making sure he didn't see me as I dropped my wallet, and whatever was still inside it, into a trashcan at the corner.

Eventually, I reached my final destination, and began crossing the bridge, of course walking on the pedestrian sidewalk that is there. I chuckled to myself when I thought of the hundreds, no probably thousands at this point, of other people who also took their final steps along this same path. When I reached the middle, not a short distance, mind, I stopped and looked out over the ocean, the rain still beating down on me heavily. Traffic on the bridge was very light, which I took as a good thing, the fewer people who witnessed it, the better. I chuckled again as I tried to estimate how many days it would take them to figure out who I was after my body washes ashore. I took one last deep breath, whispered goodbye, and in one fluid motion, pulled myself up to the handrail of the walkway, and jumped off. The feeling of falling through the empty air was really quite invigorating, a bit of an adrenaline rush, if you know what I mean. Now all I had to do was wait to hit the water.

*THUD*

"What the hell," I thought to myself as I laid in a prone position on my stomach. I knew that hitting the waves from that height would hurt, and I did hurt, but that definately wasn't the noise I was expecting. And, can I feel soil underneath my hands? That can't be. I must be dead, because I'm hallucinating. I pushed off the ground that shouldn't be there, and stood up, like I shouldn't have been able to do. I opened my eyes and saw a field, full of grass, and beyond that, a town, but one I most definately had never seen before. Then I did something I never supposed I would do again, I spoke aloud.

"Where am I?"

I repeated the phrase over and over again as I stumbled toward the town, eventually reaching it. When I did, I shook my head violently, double checking to make sure I still wasn't just having visions from a post-dive concussion. Everywhere I looked, there were seemed to be little horses, almost all of them had very brightly-colored coats, with equally-bright manes and tails. Some seemed like just normal horses, but there were unicorns, and pegasi too, creatures that, up to this point, I had considered completely imaginary. They all seemed to be bustling about, doing various tasks, and, now my ears were playing tricks with me, conversing with one another? In plain spoken English?

Seeing no other plan of attack, I simply continued to trudge further into the little town. If these had been people, they would have certainly thought that I was drunk, the way I was stumbling about, barely able to walk in a straight line. I was honestly surprised that it took the little horses so long to notice me, but eventually one of them did.

"Look, a monster," came the terrified shriek of a yellow horse with an orange mane and tail and a picture of a carrot on her flank, "Everypony run!"

And run, they did. All of them dashed off in different directions, but all avoiding me at all costs. I put my hands up above my head, an attempt to show that I meant them no harm, but that just made me taller, and thus, scared them more.

"Somepony go get Twilight," a horse with three blue horseshoes on his flank yelled, "She'll know what to do."

"Please," I finally said, trying my best to be heard, "I'm not going to hurt you. You don't have to be afraid." None of them paid my words any heed, if they had heard them at all.

Eventually, I saw not one, but two horses begin to actually fly toward me. One was a cyan pegasus with a very striking rainbow mane, the other was purple with a two-tone mane that had features of both a unicorn and a pegasus, I didn't know if there was a name for that sort of creature. They touched down a good fifteen feet in front of me, glaring at me.

"OK," the rainbow-maned one yelled, "you're going down, whatever you are." She began to rev-up her wings, but the other one threw up a hoof.

"Wait a moment, Rainbow," she said, I say 'she' since the voice was obviously feminine, unlike the other one, "this monster doesn't look all that threatening."

Usually, I would take that as an insult, but if saying that my tall, gangling frame wasn't intimidating saved me from getting attacked by a flying horse, than I was willing to go along with it.

"I'm not going to hurt any of you," I said to them, dropping to my knees, my hands still up, "I promise I won't. I don't even know where I am." I bowed my head, tears beginning to well-up in my eyes as I silently hoped that they wouldn't harm me first.

"C'mon Twi," I heard the voice of the pegasus again, "I don't trust this thing. Let's just get rid of it already."

"No," the other one retorted, "whatever it is, it isn't going to hurt us. And since it can communicate, I'm very interested in seeing what I can learn about this, uh, being."

"Oh all right. You never let me have any fun." I heard a very fast whooshing noise. When I looked up, the pegasus was gone, leaving only the purple horse standing in front of me. She cleared her throat before speaking.

"Hello, my name is Princess Twilight Sparkle. Can you possibly tell me who you are, what you are, and where you come from?" She smiled at me and waited patiently for me to answer as I slowly made my way back up to my feet.

"I'm a human. I come from another world."