It was a cold and not warm at all night in Equestria. The trees were singing really badly because they couldn’t sing because they were trees, and the birds were asleep because it was night, as previously established. So it was pretty average for 3:00am in spring. At 3:01am, however, things because suddenly unordinary. High in the sky, a flash of fiery orange lit up the land for a brief moment. A meteor phased into existence at the origin of the flash, hurtling downwards at a terrifying speed. At least, it would be terrifying if there was someone being terrified in some way by the velocity of this meteor. There wasn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was going fairly fast.
This event was completely unnoticed by a bear down below in the Everfree Forest. He was sitting in a clearing with a pencil in his mouth, torch by his side, scribbling furiously on some paper. In front of him, a complicated set of lab equipment was carefully laid out on a table. This was his latest experiment. You see, this particular bear was a biological anomaly. He had been born a genius, the only one of his kind known to all bear-kind, and it had been his life’s work to work out the cause of his intelligence, in hopes of sharing it with his species and ushering in a new age of super intelligent bears.
He paused his scribbling, looking at a certain vial with wide eyes. With shaking paws he carefully lifted it with a pair of tongs, pouring the contents into another beaker filled with a softly glowing green liquid. It shifted into a turquoise hue, and the bear ripped out a few of his hairs, reaching over and dropping them into the mixture. The glow intensified. It became a bright cyan, and a tear rolled down the bear’s furry face. After all these years of painstaking research, experiments, being ostracized by all the other bears; he had finally done it. He had created the tonic that would allow his people to move beyond the boundaries of time, skip millions of years of evolution, and choose the path of enlightenment. And all would know the name of the one who gave the bears intelligence. All would know-
He had bear-ly enough time to glance up before the meteor crashed into the clearing with a tremendous boom, destroying everything and sending out a massive shockwave.
In the nearby town of Ponyville, a purple unicorn had been gazing through her telescope at the stars. Twilight Sparkle sure did love geeky stuff like astronomy. Her view had suddenly lit up bright orange for a moment, causing her to jump away from her telescope in surprise, before she noticed a fireball falling from the sky. She swivelled the telescope around to it, adjusting knobs and stuff until it was in clear focus.
“Ooh…” Yep, it was a big piece of rock that was glowing as though it was really hot, falling from the sky. Twilight hadn’t ever seen one this big before, and was getting excited (snicker). She tracked its descent, and lost it as it crashed into the ground in the direction of the Everfree Forest because some inconsiderate dumb-dumb had built their house in the way of her telescope. Her horn lit up as she looked in rage at the offending house, before remembering that arson was a crime in Equestria. Instead, she started hyperventilating in an attempt to calm down, but this just had the effect of causing her to become lightheaded and pass out.
-
“Twilight? Are you okay?”
“Spiiike, I’m trying to sleep here…” Twilight kept her eyes closed and rolled away from her assistant’s annoying voice. Of course, everything seems annoying when you’re trying to sleep. What was considerably more than annoying was that there was no ground where Twilight rolled to. Her eyes shot open as she plummeted from her balcony in her giant library treehouse, which she lived in because she is such a nerd she lives in a library. Fortunately, one of the benefits of living in a tree is that there are leaves on it that sometimes break your fall, which is what happened shortly after Twilight opened her mouth to start screaming. This gave her a mouthful of leaves and slowed her down enough to get off a teleport spell, placing her back on her balcony, with a bunch of leaves in her mouth.
The baby dragon smirked at Twilight. “You know, I was gonna make breakfast in a sec, you didn’t have to LEAVE so quickly just to get some food.” At the look from Twilight’s eyes Spike’s grin dropped. “You know what, I’ll go do that right now.”
Twilight spat out the leaves and made a grumpy face at Spike’s fleeing purple ass. Her sudden awakening had not given her much time to get any thoughts in order, and it was a moment before she remembered what she had been doing last night. “The meteor! I’ve got to go see the meteor!” She glanced back at the gap in the railing she had rolled off and made a mental note to get a repair pony to fix that. For someone who claimed to be the best flier in Equestria, her friend Rainbow Dash sure did crash into a lot of things. Things which were surprisingly often her house.
Wasting no more time, Twilight galloped down the stairs. “Spike-I’m-going-to-go-look-at-a-meteor-be-back-when-I’m-done-bye.” She kicked open the door with magic, because it would have taken too long to actually kick it open with her hoofs, and galloped off towards the forest. Spike walked out of the kitchen wearing a super girly pink apron which he looked fabulous in, took a look at the destroyed front door, sighed, and went back into the kitchen to continue making pancakes. “I don’t get paid enough for this.” It did not occur to him that he did not get paid at all.
On the border of the Everfree Forest, Twilight began to slow down, panting for breath. She wasn’t terribly fit, even though ponies are naturally good at running, as she usually just teleported everywhere like a lazy unicorn if she was in a hurry. Plus, she didn’t really get out much anyway.
The forest was dark, ominous, scary, and highly dangerous, especially to go in by yourself. To do so was a very bad idea unless you were suicidal. Twilight trotted straight in, before realizing she had no idea where the meteor was. She thought for a moment, mentally accessing her database of memorized spells that could help her. All the ones she usually used weren’t very useful for finding meteors. Teleportation would work if she knew where it was, but that was sort of the problem.
“Hmm… Ahah!” Meteor triangulation detection. That would work nicely. She was forced to learn this spell as a punishment in magic kindergarten when she accidentally turned Spike into a bowl of noodles while trying out a crazy irresponsible spell. Her horn glowed and a golden arrow appeared on the ground, facing the direction of the meteor, which appeared to be roughly north-west. While Twilight could have just walked that direction, she was a scientist and as such had no time for such trivial means of travel like walking through a dangerous forest. She trotted north-east for a few minutes and cast the spell again. Perfect. She teleported to near the location her spell had triangulated, and immediately shrieked and scrambled backwards away from the edge of the crater she had appeared on the edge of. Once she had sure footing (or hoofing more like it lel), she walked over to the edge of the crater and looked down. Her jaw dropped and her eye twitched at what she saw.
It looked like the meteor had not survived the impact with the ground. Twilight would have been disappointed at this, as she was hoping for an intact meteorite instead of a meteorong, but this was more interesting than that. Down in the smouldering crater rested the form of a pony. This was quite unlike any pony Twilight had ever seen, however. His coat was black like coal, and his mane appeared to be literally made of fire.
Twilight hopped down into the crater to get a better look at the mysterious pony. As she trotted over to him, she couldn’t help but noticing just how large he was – his stature was fairly considerable too; he must have been almost twice as tall as Twilight. She reached him, and touched a hoof to his side. He was definitely alive, and her mind raced through all the possibilities of what he was doing in the meteor’s crater. None of the theories she came up with made any sense, so she figured it probably had something to do with magic, or it was an elaborate prank.
She took a closer look at him. He had wings, making him a pegasus. This close, it was apparent that his coat wasn’t actually black, it was an extremely dark purple. And his mane wasn’t actually made of fire; it was just orange and really frizzy. Twilight giggled as she poked at it. It was just like her friend Pinkie Pie’s, except not pink, and it was styled to look like fire, as far as she could tell.
“Do you mind-“ the strange pegasus began, before his voice cracked and he started coughing. Twilight leapt back, startled, and the pegasus covered his mouth with his hoof, before slowly getting to his hooves. “…not doing that?” he finished. His voice struck Twilight as being incredibly… unique. In the way that it sounded like he had a really bad cold, spoke too loudly, and wasn’t quite sure about where stresses go in words. She managed to work that out just from six words; it was pretty bad.
She stared at him. He stared at the ground without saying anything. She blinked, and said, “So, uhh… what are you doing in this crater?”
He looked around, noticing his surroundings. “…Err, I dunno.”
Twilight waited for him to continue, but he just alternated between looking at the ground and rubbing his eye. “…Do you have a name?”
The pegasus stared at the ground. “Yeah, umm, it’s, uhh-“
He was cut off by a loud gasp from Twilight. Her gaze was locked into his forehead. More specifically, at the horn she just noticed poking out through his frizzy mane. “Y-you’re an alicorn!”
His stare moved from the ground to Twilight’s face. It was at this point that he actually noticed who he was talking to, as his attention had been focused on trying to be cool while talking to a girl. His eyes widened as he took in her appearance. “You’re a… a alien!” He fell back onto his haunches, and looked down in shock. “I’m an alien too!” He let out a nasal scream as he frantically looked over his own body.
Twilight backed away slightly. “No… I’m a pony. And, uhh, you are also a pony.”
The dark alicorn looked at her incredulously. “What?”
She wasn’t sure whether he meant for her to repeat herself or he was just confused. “I said, I’m a pony, and you’re a pony.”
“Oh.” He appeared to be satisfied with that answer for a moment. He then lay down on the ground and stared at Twilight some more. “Ponies can’t talk. You’re purple. Why am I a pony. I’m not a pony. Who are you.”
He didn’t say anything like a question, but Twilight picked the easiest one to answer anyway. “My name is Twilight Sparkle. What’s yours?”
The alicorn was about to answer on reflex, but stopped himself. His real name was Gareth Stewart, but this purple pony didn’t know that. He smiled, showing off his somewhat yellowish crooked teeth, and said, “Why, my name is… Black… fire. Yeah. Blackfire.” He suddenly thought of a name that seemed slightly cooler. “No wait, I mean Nightfire. Yeah that’s my name.”
Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Night… fire? Well, that’s certainly an interesting name, I suppose.” It sounded awkward to her, didn’t quite have the same ring as Twilight Sparkle did, but if he said that was his name, she wasn’t going to argue with him. “Well, pleased to meet you,” she said in a friendly tone. “So… you don’t remember why you’re in this crater?”
“Err, no. I went to sleep last night and I woke up here. And I’m a… pony.” He stood up slowly, and started shaking as he looked down at himself. “Everything looks funny…” He went cross-eyed. “…where am I?
“You’re in the Everfree Forest.” After a pause, she added, “That’s near Ponyville.” She waited a moment. “…In Equestria.”
Nightfire looked at her blankly. She stared back. “You’re not from Equestria?”
“…No.”
Another awkward pause.
Twilight sighed. “Where are you from then?”
“I don’t remember.” That was a lie. The last thing he remembered was going to sleep, as a human, on Earth. He figured it would be easier to just pretend he didn’t remember that; he wasn’t very good at talking to girls and it made him feel uncomfortable and nervous, and if she didn’t have any questions to ask maybe they wouldn’t have to talk anymore.
“Ugh. Well, there’s no point sitting in this crater all day. I better take you back to Ponyville and contact Princess Celestia, as soon as possible!” Twilight climbed up onto the rim of the crater. “Come on then.”
Nightfire looked down at his new body, and started unsteadily walking forwards. He immediately tripped over and landed on his face. “Ow…”
Twilight grimaced. “That looked painful.” She hopped back down and trotted over to him, helping him up. “I don’t know what an alicorn is doing in a meteor crater, but I guess you’re kind of disoriented. Maybe when we get to Ponyville you’ll have remembered something.” This close, she noticed he smelled faintly of burnt toast, but chose not to comment on that as she unsteadily aided him in climbing out of the crater.
Things were not going well so far, Nightfire finally decided as they walked through the forest. He’d just met one of the first girls who had talked to him in a long time, even though she was a pony, and despite being as charming as possible she wasn’t blushing and giggling at his every word like the girls in the anime he always used to watch. They probably didn’t have anime here, he suddenly realized, stumbling at this realization.
“You alright?” Twilight asked as they stopped.
“Y-yeah,” he lied. “Uhh… have you heard of anime by any chance?”
She looked at him quizzically. Oh fug. A single tear rolled down his cheek.
“What’s anime?” If Nightfire’s face was a shoddily constructed dam, that question was a professional demolition team. His jaw quivered as his face scrunched up, forgetting any plan of being charming. He was apparently in a strange new world where colourful ponies could talk, and there was no anime. Tears streamed down his face and snot started dribbling out his nose as he sniffled and hyperventilated. He grew lightheaded and lay down on the ground, curling up as the world around him grew dark. The last thing he saw was Twilight looking at him with an expression that was somewhere between pity, confusion and disgust.
Author's Note
I would greatly appreciate any feedback. Stuff like awkward sentence structure, phrasing, pacing, flow, spelling, wrong meteor terminology, anything that would make my writing or this story better, would be awesome.
