Not Like This

Chapter 1: But Thou Must

This is wrong; this is all wrong.

You stumble around in a daze, bewildered by the slightly-too-colorful landscape and the static yet impossibly flexible blades of rubbery grass beneath your bare feet.

Panting, you look up to see skies of far-too-perfect blue and clouds of fluffy, two-dimensional white. Together, they trap you below what looks suspiciously like the firmament of ancient times.

You feel light-headed. In fact, you feel light-everythinged—as if gravity itself had gone wonky, and one false move might have you lifting off from terra firma, like a flesh-balloon whose string has slipped from a toddler’s grip, falling and falling forever into the vast blue abyss above.

After slamming into a tree you cling to it for support, but then quickly let go again, shuddering with involuntarily revulsion when you realize it didn’t feel like a proper tree at all: the texture of its surface is disgustingly slightly-too-smooth, feeling vaguely un-barklike. It feels... dead, lacking even the small spark of vitality that lends trees their slow, ponderous form of life.

It’s as though unseen, monstrous creatures simply strode up and planted a forest full of terrifyingly lifelike, but ultimately still plastic trees.

Looking up, your feverish mind notes, in perverse detail, the way indefinable gestalts of individual leaves seem move together, as if invisibly glued together to form simplified green blobs. There’s also the unnatural repetitiveness with which the branches are swaying in the faint breeze. And the resulting rustling may as well be an audio-track of ‘Forest Noises’ being played on loop.

Unheimlich.

You’re familiar with the word, with the underlying concept, but never before have you been confronted with such an uncannily effective demonstration of it. It’s as if the entire world is wearing a mask—a mask of normalcy, but one with tiny little tears which, whenever you pay close attention, reveal telling but maddeningly subtle glimpses of some underlying, cognitive nightmare.

It’s all ever-so-close to being familiar, even pleasant, but instead of offering any kind of solace it keeps finding all these little primal triggers built into your brain—labeled ‘creepy’ or ‘diseased’ or ‘dead’—and mashing on them mercilessly.

Having run out of breath, you inhale deeply, reluctantly sucking in the stale air around you. You’re inordinately aware of it entering your lungs; it seems strangely heavy, viscous almost. It makes your skin crawl.

More disturbingly—despite inhaling through your nose—you can detect no trace of the familiar ‘green’ smell your brain associates with forests; no hints of pollen, or fresh grass, or dirt... In fact, there are no scents at all that your (admittedly crude) olfactory senses can pick up. Not a single detectable molecule seems to be wafting around.

This startling absence of smell only adds to the surreality, the unreality, of this place.

Straining your ears and filtering out the whispering leaves, you try to pick up birds singing, mosquitoes buzzing, trees falling in these abandoned woods, anything, only to be met with the deafening roar of silence.

“Where am I?” you demand of your bizarre surroundings, defiantly shattering the daunting stillness only to be shocked by the raspy, unfamiliar voice that repeated those words back to you. You spin around frantically, and it takes a while for you to realize that it hadn't been some hoarse-sounding stranger plucking the very thoughts from your brain, but that you had merely heard yourself speaking.

“What happened to me?” you add desperately, if only to try and grow accustomed to the croaking travesty that was now, apparently, your voice, eroded as it was by disuse.

Taking a moment to catch your breath, elusive bastard though it is, you suddenly recall wading blindly through a shallow stream mere moments before. Doubling back, you have no difficulty finding it again; the soft, but most of all entirely appropriate tinkling of the rushing water proving mildly comforting somehow.

Cupping your hands together, you scoop up a few mouthfuls of the clear liquid. It isn’t as frigid as you think it should be—certainly nowhere near as cold as the icy tendrils of dread still gripping at your heart—but pleasantly cool nonetheless. You pause, staring at the sloshing pool of alleged water in your hands, not caring that you were spilling most of it but wishing, wishing fervently, that when you bring it to your lips it will be wet and refreshing and alive, somehow, proving that whatever plane of existence you’ve stumbled into isn’t entirely dead—that you aren’t dead.

You take a sip. And another. And another. And then you splash the remainder against your relieved face, hoping it would help clear your head.

You had no idea you were even thirsty, but, judging by how many happy little doses of dopamine your brain is putting out, you must’ve been absolutely parched. “Aaah,” you gutturally gasp, helpless to resist the obligatory post-slaking sigh.

Well, that’s the most pressing of your basic needs down, at least.

A mutinous rumble in your stomach duly reminds you of the next one that needs taking care of, but you steadfastly ignore it. You’re far more eager to get some answers first; then you could decide whether it was worth struggling for survival here.

Staggering back to your bare feet, hydrated and strengthened by good old H2O, you make your way to the nearest hill and climb it, thinking it might offer you a good vantage point.

When you finally reach the top, you make a mental note to really just stop wishing for things, lest they end up all coming true in such a prompt and disconcerting fashion.

Because yeah, you found a great vantage point all right...

“No fucking way,” you whisper. An apt response, given the fact that, along the banks of the little river meandering through the lands below, a quaint little town has been erected. A town which you have never seen rendered in the glorious triune of length, width and depth before; an amazing technicolor town which, by rights, should not, could not, exist...

Yet, there it is. Go figure.

Sometimes, apparently, the blatantly impossible has the audacity to happen anyway.

Worst of all, when you look closer you can clearly see that the modest little settlement is bustling—part of your mind suggests ‘teeming’—with life; little quadrupedal dots of vibrant color wandering hither and thither, sometimes even zooming heedlessly through the skies, all quite oblivious to the fact that they really have no business existing, let alone taking flight.

Ponies. My Little Ponies. Trademark.

“So, it has come to this,” you tell yourself in utter disbelief. A valid albeit pointless observation. But then again, your mind is simply too busy boggling to make much sense; the shock of something so utterly implausible interfered with your ability to react appropriately.

At least you know your voice is a little better now.

Almost as surprising as the mere existence of these colorful, toy-inspired equines is the fact that you can remember them to begin with. You are suddenly painfully made aware of the fact that you can remember very little else.

The intricate tapestry of interwoven memories that had once been your past has been reduced to a collection of frayed patches and loose, pitiful threads, as if parties unknown had cheerfully cracked open your skull and torn out all the choice bits of gray matter, unraveling the fragile synapses until all that was left were the bare-bones skills you relied upon to survive—that, and these confounded ponies!

The end result? You could effortlessly identify the pony with the moniker ‘Lyra’ in the town below, for example, purely by means of pelt-color and mode of sitting. With eagle-eyed precision, you can spot the googly-eyed little grey pegasus hiding out somewhere in the distant background. And from this lofty perspective, looking down on the vista below, you feel a nigh-irresistible urge to hum a certain theme song, one that feels like it’s been stuck like a splinter in your brain since time immemorial.

All of this, naturally, in lieu of remembering such trivial details as, say, your own friggin’ name.

You feel a mad, hysterical laugh coming on, but manage to quell it. Barely.

Right; decision time. Still haunted by your, quite frankly, disturbing experiences thus far, you carefully consider whether it would be wise to descend into the very bowels of this cutesy hell, into a literal Uncanny Valley, so as to interact with the no-doubt bug-eyed little ponies who dwell there.

You hesitate for a moment or two-and-a-half, but then you do what any self-respecting young man would do when faced a town full of sentient, uber-girly cartoon-ponies-made-flesh:

“Nope.”

You turn around and march right on back into the forest.

————————————

Currently, your eyes are fixed on the large stump of a long-ago-felled tree. It’s the next in a long procession of landmarks, and you’re ducking and weaving through the undergrowth, circumnavigating branches and bushes and brambles alike, just to keep it squarely in your sights. You’re moving from noticeable feature to another, you see, to ensure that you keep moving in a straight line; after all, the last thing you want to do is go in circles.

Yeah, that sure would suck, you think, dooming yourself.

Moments later, you find yourself cresting a sizable hill to get a better view of the lay of the land, only to freeze dead in your tracks upon reaching the top.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me...” you mutter, despite knowing full well that, generally speaking, your senses have little in the way of a sense of humor. Something else apparently did, though; or thought it did, at least; something inordinately fond of playing cruel jokes on hapless interdimensional castaways.

“This can’t be happening,” you sputter feebly, despite all evidence to the contrary. And then, just as pathetically: “I don’t want to! I don’t want to go!”

But thou must.

You’re back at the town, of course. Hell, to add insult to injury, you’re even occupying the selfsame hill you’d been standing on before.

There’s simply no avoiding it, you realize with surprising clarity: The town is the crux, the nexus, the be-all and end-all of this reality, where everything of significance is supposed to happen. As such, it appears to suck(er) in all visitors, be they willing or no, like a naked plot-singularity. Like being caught in some vast, imperceptible M.C. Escher painting, wherein all (im)possible paths lead inexorably to Ponyville.

“Fine!” you cry out angrily at the heavens, only barely refraining from shaking your fist. “I’ll go and do the whole Human in Equestria thing. Not like I have any choice.”

No. No, you don’t.

So off you go.