Chapter 1 REWRITE - Panic is Magic
The name’s Bennett. Mark Bennett. I’ve heard it told that in some cultures, to live in an interesting time is a curse, and the reasoning has the logic to back it up. For most of history, ‘interesting’ usually involves a lot of faceless young men and women going away and never coming home. The good news is, I am not, nor have I been, nor do I have plans to be, a soldier, and avoiding that career path generally cuts down on the people wanting you dead. The bad news is that where things were heading for me were going to be interesting by any definition.
That day was about average for a Monday. Wake up, go to school, save the world. At least, that’s what I would’ve preferred. Instead, I got ‘wake up, go to a university I can’t really afford, sit through an engineering lecture I couldn’t care less about, and go to work to deal with some of the most annoying people you’ve ever met.’ I can not begin to describe just how incredibly hard it is to not break some noses when you’re trying to do your job and someone starts getting on you about it. Seriously, I’m just the guy that pumps your gas. I do not control the prices, I can’t fill your tank until you put your cigarette out, and I’m not going to cut you a break if you forgot you already spent ten bucks and can’t pay your bill. People these days. Still, gotta keep it going if I plan on doing things like buying food. I’m just glad I got my tuition waived and don’t eat much anyway.
By the time I got home it was already after seven and I still had homework to do. That whole thing about gaining fifteen pounds every year in college? I’m pretty sure I was losing that much or more just out of stress and sleep deprivation. At least I had a room to myself; as you might have noticed, I’m not really a people person. Had a roommate once, but he got homesick within the first month and left, leaving me with the whole dorm to myself. Hooray for small mercies. Before I had left for work I had already unpacked my bags, but where I had left a disorganized stack of papers and books on my coffee table there were several perfectly squared-off pillars of documents, seemingly arranged by subject and date and completely impossible to use for me compared to my normal ‘important stuff at the top’ method of organization. Just to drive the point home, whoever had done it even left a little note next to everything with her name on it and a little smiley. Seriously, who names their kid Twilight? Wasn’t the first time someone had broken into my dorm, but usually they left it in a worse state than normal. Either way, if there was someone in my place they would be very unhappy very soon.
“Oh, this is just wonderful.” I said to no one in particular. “Really, whoever did this. Thanks a ton. Now I get to spend the next TWENTY MINUTES figuring out where ANYTHING is and then I can get started on my ACTUAL homework!” I continued ranting as I pulled a drink out of the fridge next to the couch and only stopped when I heard something right next to me. I looked up with what I felt was completely justified contempt on my face and found myself staring right into the huge eyes of a purple unicorn, already sad and moist at what I realized was a profound rejection of something she had probably spent several minutes on. Of course, that all occurred to me quite a bit later.
“HOLY-! Who- What- HOW?” I scrambled back and promptly smacked the back of my head against the bookshelf behind me, which brought me down from whatever panicked/terrified reaches of my brain I was in and replaced it with pain and a lot of swearing. The whole time the pony I assumed was Twilight was freaking out just as much as I had been, but where mine was out of instinctive fear she was more worried about me giving myself brain damage. At least, that’s where she was at in her rambling when my brain started properly processing what my ears were giving it.
“-trauma like that can lead to all sorts of things! If it’s not examined immediately you could be hemorrhaging inside your skull and give yourself a stroke! It could happen any second! We need to get you to a hospital so that you can...“ Rather than deal with her dragging me off to the emergency room for what was basically a bad headache I put two fingers up to my lips in the universal ‘shut up, please’ gesture. It took her a few seconds to notice, but once she did she quieted down pretty well.
“I’m okay, I’m okay. We’re all okay. Just relax, okay?” I rubbed the rest of the pain out of my eyes and got my first proper look at her. I don’t know a whole lot about horses, but she was smaller than I thought would be really normal, even for a pony. I mean, she could sit sideways on my couch without a problem, and it’s not a big couch. Basically big enough for you and your significant other to sit on and give you an excuse to be real close, or give a bachelor room for himself, his laptop, and whatever textbooks he needed that night. If a horse-sized horse tried to sit on it the thing would probably shatter at the joints, but Twilight was really about the size of a particularly large dog more than a proper equine. Of course, her exact height and weight weren’t really the parts that I was having trouble with. Those went out the window in favor of things like her bright purple coat, eyes that seemed significantly too large to fit into her skull with any useful brain space left, and lest we forget, IT TALKS.
“Okay, stop. Stopstopstop. Who are you, what are you, and what are you doing in my dorm?” Twilight blinked and made some weird calming gesture with her hoof that I’m pretty sure she shouldn’t have the joints for before starting to talk again.
“My name is Twilight Sparkle. I’m a unicorn,” She gestured to the horn sticking out of her hair to illustrate the point, “And I don’t know. Your turn. Who and what are you?”
“Mark Bennett, human. What do you mean, ‘you don’t know’? You had to have come here yourself or you wouldn’t be here.” She looked a little puzzled at what I can only hope was close to the right jumble of tenses, but answered quick enough.
“I... I just woke up here.” At this point she scrunched her face up, apparently trying to remember something. “I was... I might’ve been... Huh. I don’t know where I was before this. I just woke up on this couch and started organizing things, I didn’t realize it wasn’t my home.” She started looking herself over and when she couldn’t see anything she actually started spinning like a dog chasing its tail before catching herself acting like an idiot.
“Could you check the back of my head for any bruises or punctures? I need to figure out what happened to my memories.” She perked up, ears popping to attention as she jumped off the couch and pulled a blank sheet of paper out of one of the piles on my desk and started writing at a truly impressive pace using just her mouth.
“I need to write down my reactions before I forget! This could be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to study this phenomenon firsthand!” Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t how amnesiacs generally act. Come to think of it, I don’t think this is how anyone acts. She paused and let go of the pen, which began to glow with a light purple aura that held it in place. Her horn started glowing with the same color, and the connection wasn’t hard to make. She glanced over at me and I must’ve looked like I had seen the gates of Heaven itself open up based on how quickly she started looking around, flipping her head fast enough to embed her painfully expensive fountain pen into the wall.
“No! Calm! How are you doing that with your horn?” She paused with a quizzical look on her face, and when she looked over at the pen still stuck to the drywall she could only respond with an amazed look.
“Wait, did I do that? When did that happen?!” She cantered over and pulled it out with her mouth again, this time putting it back in the cup she had taken it from. “Now, what were you saying about my horn?”
“You did a thing just now where your horn started glowing and the pen was moving without you touching it. Explain.”
“I... What? I have no idea what you’re talking about. I mean, I don’t know anything like that.” She focused on the pen again, seemingly trying to replicate the action. When that failed, she thunked down in my desk chair, pulling her legs up and awkwardly straddling it as it spun slowly.“See? Nothing. What, you think I can do magic?”
“Given that you’re a talking purple horse that spontaneously appeared in my dorm, that wouldn’t be that surprising.”
“Fair enough. Okay, let’s say I do have the capacity for magic and I just used it. I have no idea how I did and I can’t replicate it, so where does that leave us?” I thought about it for a few seconds. If she could use magic that would be an amazing shot at modern understanding of pretty much everything, but if she couldn’t use it consciously then we weren’t really anywhere useful. Further down that line, if she couldn’t remember something that looked like an integral part of her biology she probably wouldn’t be able to do much of anything without a lot of research. All in all, not really my problem and I had nothing to gain.
“Honestly, there isn’t really an ‘us’ at this point. You woke up here and we had a conversation. Look, do you know if you have anywhere to stay? A home with your friends or somewhere that isn’t my couch that you can go to?” She shook her head, her huge eyes flashing with understanding and then with fear. However, she understood what I was getting at, and padded toward the door. Honestly, that was one of the most freaking pitiful sights ever. She hung her head and I could see her eyes shrinking down to pinpricks, but never raised a complaint about anything. I couldn’t just throw her out and let her fend for herself, not when she was that scared and liable to do something stupid. When she glanced at me for help working the doorknob I just smiled ruefully and shook my head.
“I’m not saying you have to go. Not yet, anyway. I’ve got some extra room here, so you can stay with me until you get your brain sorted back out. There’s no way I can afford to make this a permanent thing, understand, but I can make things work for a couple weeks.” She smiled like she had just seen the sunlight for the first time and ran over to me, throwing me into a hug that nearly put my head into the bookcase. Again.
“THANK YOU! Thankyouthankyouthankyou!” She continued hugging me as hard as she could, and I didn’t expect to feel that good about helping her out. It was only a second or two before I hugged her back with a smile.
Gotta say. Ponies are cool.
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Now, I was expecting this to be the start of a grand adventure through time and space, but as it turned out I had actually been watching too much Doctor Who. Instead, it was the start of me learning how to make salad in ways I had never imagined before. Yeah. Fun. I had always been a seared meat guy through-and-through, but I had to admit I was learning to like being an herbivore. Balsamic vinegar does good things, and when I was getting tired of greens Twilight was always perfectly happy with pasta. As I was starting to learn, Twilight was happy with just about anything I did. Hell, I could probably lock her in the closet and she would thank me for it the next morning. Not that I was going to do something like that, of course. If I actually tried she would probably freak out and either start crying or smash the door down in a rage. Either way, not interested in doing that, not if I was going to keep living with her afterward. I’m not an idiot, regardless of what some of my friends say. One of the weirdest things for me to process was that she was actually reading everything she could get her hooves on whenever she got bored, which was just about any time I wasn’t in the same room and actively conversing with her. If she limited herself to books, that would make sense. However, I’m one of those people that prints out every paper I write because I know my computer is going to crap out ten minutes before every deadline, and she read just about every essay I had written since my sophomore year in high school. She even found my ill-fated attempt at Star Wars fanfiction. Ugh.
However it happened, within about two weeks of her turning up at my door Twilight had learned just about everything about Earth she could get. The scale of our sense of war was apparently enough to seriously mess with her for a few hours, but she shook it off eventually as simply a casualty of research. I don’t remember exactly how she put it, but she had effectively realized that her own perception could cloud her judgement over our society and pushed it to the back of her mind until she realized that, for the most part, we at least had clear-cut good guys and bad guys in our history books and the good guys did eventually win out. Not sure what that says about our historical recollection as a society, but as long as she wasn’t thinking I was a Neo-Nazi I could roll with it.
Of course, given that I dodged that bullet, the next one hit me square between the eyes.
After she had exhausted the whole three-part biography of Winston Churchill and was still clamoring for new material, I finally caved and gave her a copy of my room key and told her to go down to the library to see what she could find. By the time I figured out that I had just unleashed a talking miniature horse on the city of Salem, she was already long-gone and I figured I might as well just turn on the news and wait for her to be picked up by the NSA or something. Of course, that didn’t happen and she came back a few hours later with a few books floating next to her with the magic she was still insistent she didn’t have.
“Could you explain My Little Pony to me?”
Yes, Area 51? I’ve made first contact with a non-human species and I’d like you to come pick it up quick as you can.
“When I was at the library I saw a human child carrying a bag that had a picture of myself and the words My Little Pony on it in a big pink heart. How does she know about me?”
This was going to be tough for me to handle. First off, I don’t know jack about My Little Pony. Secondly, if that is who she is, how exactly am I supposed to convince her that she’s a cartoon come to life? Seriously, horsie. Don’t expect me to have all the answers and come out looking like Einstein.
“Okay, this is going to sound stupid. My Little Pony is a fictional television program made for little girls. I have no idea why you were on her bag. However, we do have a wonderful little box of information right here.” I gestured to my laptop, which she obligingly flipped open and pulled up Google. Two searches later, we had way more questions than answers.
“So. You are a talking horse from inside a cartoon world with freaky otherworldly powers. This is seriously the stupidest storyline I have ever heard of.” Where I was pessimistic, though, Twilight seemed to be a lot more glass-half-full.
“This can’t be a coincidence. If I really am the same pony from the show, where did I come from? Are the writers at Hasbro looking into another universe and writing their stories about real ponies, or did I come out of their creation? Who am I?! ” She continued browsing and deeper and deeper into an existential meltdown, meaning it didn’t take much for me to totally lose the will to live and go lie on the couch for a while. Eventually, even that wasn’t enough to quell the building headache at the top of my spinal cord.
“Look, Twilight. You’re not going to get any answers.” She swiveled around in my chair, looking disgustedly at me. I, for my part, continued to lie there and stare at the ceiling, prompting her to glare harder. Looks like that’s not something you’re supposed to say to a mare of science. “Hear me out. You’re not going to get any answers because this sort of thing never happens. To anyone. There is no evidence, nothing. If you have one ridiculous outlier in a set of data, what are you supposed to do with it?”
“Well, you discard it, but-“
“Exactly. Right now, you are the outlier. Tough, but that’s how it is.”
“But I’m not- “
“And as it is, you’re not a data point, you’re an anomaly. You are here for no reason we can figure out, and until we discover interdimensional travel-“
“Mark!” I glared over at her, tired of the interruptions every time I took a breath.
“WHAT?! What is so all-fired important that it just can’t wait for me to finish?!” She reeled back from that one a little and for a second I thought I might’ve gone a little too far. I mean, she was being annoying, but I don’t want to hurt the little chica. I mean, seriously.
“I found another one. Another pony, I mean.”
...Yeah, I got nothing.