Saphrim goes to Equestria

The pink being on top of you had you pinned to the ground. You briefly consider feeding it to the wolves you saw earlier and continuing on your way but decide against it. Killing a local wouldn't be very wise given your current situation.

She, you assumed it was a she, was talking at an extremely fast rate, almost too fast for you to comprehend. It didn't matter whether you comprehended its words or not as you stopped paying attention to it after it said ‘Pinkie Pie’. Still, you were able gleam a few bits of knowledge from the fountain of speech on top of you. Things like, ‘I haven't seen you before’ and, ‘must have a party!’.

Deciding to just wait until this thing ran out of breath and paused for air, you lay there on the the ground waiting. And waiting. And waiting. By this point you wonder if this thing realises it even needs oxygen to function properly, at least, you think it needed oxygen to function properly. Maybe it just breaths through its eyes and ears. You consider just knocking the thing out and leaving it- and it's passed out.

You lift the pink fuzzy cartoon creature off of you with very little trouble seeing as the creature weighed very little with their extremely reduced density. Placing the pink creature down besides the path you were walking on before being knocked over as you stand up, you turn and look at the creature sleeping silently on the grass.

You wondered why it didn't stop to breath. You guessed she usually had something or someone else stop her before she hurt herself. Oh well. She'll be fine. You briefly glance up at the forest nearby, seeing some ominous glowing eyes. Yeah, she'll be fine. Maybe.

Turning around and beginning your journey towards the town which you had noticed on your way out the door of the cottage from earlier, hopefully your journey will be uninterrupted this time.

Mulling over the past few hours in your head you start to piece together bits of information that could prove useful for later.

Apparently you landed somewhere where humans are treated as pets, despite being intelligent. That, or humans just liked wearing collars here. After recalling the ‘event’ on the day of your arrival you couldn't exactly rule that option out. If it proved to be the former then that could spell disaster for you in the future.

Wherever you are also had very strange anomalies present, which you promised yourself you would solve before you left this funny little planet. That's another thing you realised, how were you supposed to get back home? Assuming you could get home at all. You still hadn't narrowed down your location very much besides the town name of ‘Ponyville’, which you managed to learn from the pink horse-creature earlier, and the city that you swore you would never set foot in again.

Snapping out of your musings, you realise that you are almost upon the town. You notice several strange oddities about the town before even setting foot in it. The first being that whoever was the architect for these buildings needed to be sacked immediately. The buildings look like they would topple over if you so much as looked at them hard enough.

The next thing of note was the building material. While the last city had a primitive brick and mortar for the buildings, these houses had...less than primitive building materials. The houses were literally made of wood and thatch that just screamed fire hazard at you. The last thing you took note of was all the bloody colours! The colours were so bright you physically had to shield your eyes from them. It also didn't help that the colours were amplified by the cartoonish look of things.

You were getting a headache already and it wasn't even midday yet.

Walking into town you see various horse-creatures going about their daily lives, which mostly consisted of eating flowers and doing various chores around town. You also noticed that none of the humans here were wearing collars. Maybe you were right about the whole kinky sex slave idea, an idea that still sent shivers down your spine. Also as a side note, you noticed how few humans there were compared to the natives, or what you assumed to be the natives.

On your voyage you begin collecting many stares from the miniature equines. Lots and lots of stares. The locals were looking at you as if you were a lost puppy. Or sex minion. You couldn't decide whether or not they were staring at you because you were without your ‘owner’, by both meanings of the word,or because of your size. You hadn't noticed it before but all these humans were ridiculously small, by your standards anyway. The tallest of the humans that were inhabiting the quaint little town with the brightly coloured creatures only came up to just below your shoulder.

You were gathering even more attention now; the homunculi and what you assumed to be their owners actually stopping what they were doing to stare at you. You tried to block out as much of the eyeballs as you could but all the attention was starting to get to you. You increased your pace slightly, hoping to find a sanctuary from all the attention, while also keeping a look out for a source of information.

Looking upon the signs as you power walked around held little results as you would have to pause, translate, and then move on. Eventually though you were able to garner some useful information; a sign directing you towards a public library. Feeling a little bit excited at the prospect of actual some-what reliable data you begin to speed up your power walk, nearly entering a jogging speed.

After a few more minutes of walking you came into sight of the library.

It's a tree, is your first thought. It's a bloody tree. The other buildings in town had fire safety issues, what with their thatched roofs and all, but this building took the cake in that department and swallowed it whole. Not even crumbs were spared.

It's not that the building looked like it was going to burst into flames at any second, no that wasn't what made you hesitant to enter. You could see lanterns hanging in and around it. Lanterns! Besides that obvious flaw in the design of the building the rest looked completely fine. You must admit, it would be pretty cool living in a giant tree, minus the dangerous lanterns of course.

Pressing onwards towards the entrance you knock on the wooden door a few times to, thinking of what your tree-house would look like if you owned one.

After getting no response you knock again. Waiting. And waiting. Getting tired of standing there in front of the library you decide to go in. Giving the doorknob an experimental twist brings a smile to your face as it turns without resistance. Pulling the door open releases a blast of dust that shoots straight into your face. Coughing a bit to clear your lungs of the offending substance, you push through the cloud of dust particles and take a look at the library.

It was a mess. It looked liked no one had even set foot in the building for years as there was dust on everything and cobwebs covering the many books that lined the walls. Sighing silently to yourself you close your eyes and began controlling your Nanites, hoping to cleanse the room. You didn't want to read in this filthy room after all.

You use your Nanites to breakdown the dust into individual atoms and store them in one of your hives that had the space. You're about to breakdown the spiderwebs but decide against it; the fibroin protein found in spider silk could be used to make fibres stronger than steel.

Opening your eyes and taking a look at your work, you nod in satisfaction as the room looked spotless, besides a few scattered books. Walking over towards the nearest book, you pick it up and look at the cover. Frowning in slight irritation as it was written in a different language to the ‘horse code’ from earlier. It was completely illegible to you, and you would have to rectify that.

Looking for a Nanite with translation capabilities in the endless list of Nanites within the hives’ data banks, you eventually find one that would suite your needs perfectly. Translating Nanite. Nanite that embeds itself in the optic nerve between the eye and the brain. This Nanite recognises what the user is seeing and will translate anything that is foreign to the user, before sending the correct signal to the brain.

Looking over it again you realise that you only need a few hundred for each optic nerve, so you begin constructing them. A few seconds later you had them ready, so you begin installing them into your left and right optic nerves. A brief explosion of pure agony erupts from behind your eyes as the Nanites dig into sensory neurons located behind your eyes. Unlike before, this pain doesn't last that long, a short burst of it that feels kind of like having ice picks stabbed into your eyes.

Once you reopen your eyes, having closed them during the infusion process, you realise you are on your back looking at the ceiling of the library, the book you had picked up before having disappeared onto the floor somewhere.

As you begin searching the floor for the book you just had in hands you can't help but notice a blur of pink in the corner of your vision. A very bright blur of pink at that. Shrugging off the anomalous pink blur you continue your search for the lost book, with very little results. Sighing in defeat you turn around to the bookshelf to find a new piece of literature for your eyes to ingest. As you turn, however, you see a bright smiling pink creature with your book in her mouth sitting on the library floor very cheerfully.

You stare at the pink creature, Pinkie Pie if you remember correctly, for a few minutes. She stares back at you with a ridiculously huge smile, so ridiculous in fact it was almost comical. It could have just been the sheer amounts of ridiculous you had been receiving since you first landed, what with the colours and the creatures and the absurdity of it all, but that face you were staring at managed to make you crack a smile on your own face.

This only makes the smile on Pinkie Pie’s face increase in size and ridiculousness, which in turn causes you to let loose a small laugh at the pink creatures antics.

“May I please have that book miss,”

The little equine in front of you drops her head and drops the book on the floor, in front of your feet. You immediately bend over and pick up the capsule of knowledge, sitting down in the process. In this position the little creature just barely came up to your nose, leaving you to stare into her massive smile. You smile at her once more before turning to your book, briefly noting a small frown appearing on Pinkies face for a split second.

“Hey! Aren't you going to tell me your name at least?”

“Saphrim.”

You replied in the most bored tone you could muster as you turned to the book in your hands, flipping it open. She didn't stop though, instead opting to hop around you in circles, firing words from her at an insane rate. How she did not destroy her vocal cords you would probably never know.

Turning to the first page in the book hoping to learn where you are whilst trying to ignore the constant verbal assault from the being beside you. Looking at the first few lines you take note of the weird hieroglyphs on the page before the Nanites take affect. Your vision almost seems to blur before a wave of static like images flash before your eyes, their meaning lost to you as they disappear just as fast as they arrived. Looking back to the book you see English text appear as an almost-hologram, flickering slightly whenever you moved.

You take one look at the newly translated title and nearly all your hope of getting help from the natives plummet through the floor.

“Why are you reading a book about magic? Humans can't use magic silly.”

You look up to see Pinkie Pie looking down at the book in your hands.

“Magic.”

Pinkie nods.

“Magic.”

She nods again.

“...Magic.”

You say once again not really comprehending the stupidity of it at all. Eventually though the concept sinks in and you immediately feel like breaking your skull on something hard. You would have to find something though, everything here would probably break due to your skulls higher density.

“Magic, really?...just...wow.”

“What's so shocking about magic?”

You turn your stare away from blank space and instead direct it towards the source of the most ridiculous sentence you had ever heard in your life. That's quite a feat, you having both lived a very long time and having had plenty of stupid conversations with other people. Usually over wireless communications of course.

You enter a staring contest with Pinkie, you just staring blankly into her confused expression. Well at least she's not talking anymore, you thought, trying to make the most of the bleak situation. You doubt you would get any help getting back home from the locals, especially if they believed in magic. That brought you back to another question. Where exactly were you? You had a very basic, flimsy understanding of the way things worked here, but you had absolutely no idea where you could be.

Perhaps your only hope was the locals, but just the thought was enough to fill you with dread. The thought of being stuck here forever in this candy coloured land was not very pleasant. Turning your attention back towards the cheery pink mass you force yourself to sound normal and think up a few questions. Might as well milk whatever information you could out of her, while you had the opportunity at least.

“Oh? Nothing, nothing at all...just...um...what can you tell me about ‘magic’?”

“Ooh, lots of things, like how only certain species can use it, like unicorns, they can do aaaaall kinds of stuff, like make things levitate, and use it to teleport, which is really, super, awesome. I mean, they just go pop! And then disappear, and pop and reappear, and pop and disappear, and pop and rea-”

“Ok! Ok! I get it, they can teleport. I understood you the first time you said it!”

You brought your hands up to your face and groaned quite audibly. If the creatures here possessed abilities like the one in front of you mentioned, you wouldn't be all that surprised if they called it magic. Them being primitive, by your standards anyway, the rest of humanity probably viewing the technology you used as being primitive and being a different case entirely.

Yes, that was probably why they thought of it as being magic, alongside the fact that having such incredible natural abilities would have rendered actual scientific advancement moot. You were beginning to formulate an idea as to where the rest of that energy was going. You just needed to know how much they knew, or at least how much Pinkie Pie knew.

“I get that part, but can you tell me how they actually do magic?”

She seemed a little confused of your request at first but responded regardless, still in her happy chipper tone.

“Weeell, unicorns use their horns to weave magic into spells that do really, really cool things, like-”

“Hang on, hang on. You are telling me how they use magic, not how they actually do it. Can you please explain how they do it.”

Pinkie Pie appeared to drop her cheeriness suddenly and seemed to lose most emotion from her voice, leaving behind a bit of sadness.

“Um...well...you see...um...the thing is...you see...I don't really know how they do that, I'm just an Earth Pony you see, and am unable to cast magic, but I'm sure if you asked a unic-oh my gosh!”

Her sudden change in emotion startled you, making you jump a little, not going very far from your seated posting though. She went from sad and a little downtrodden to being shocked and surprised, albeit with some of her previous cheeriness back.

“What? What is it?”

You were a little bit worried over what could have her so quickly change the tone of her voice from cheery and annoying, to borderline rambling and still annoying.

“You don't have a cutie-mark! Oh dear this is terrible, I've never seen anypony without a cutie-mark before. OH! What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? What do I-”

“Please just calm down and explain what is so important!”

She was really beginning to grate on your nerves, the way she just exploded or went on to a different topic suddenly. It was both really annoying and really distracting, probably not helped by the fact she punctuated every few words with a jump, or more of a hop. You couldn't decide which it was.

“What's important? What's important! How can you not know how important a cutie-mark is!”

She was nearly shouting by the time she finished talking.

“I don't even know what a cutie-mark is! Ok!”

She suddenly stops hopping in circles around you and stares directly into your eyes. Oh shit. You feel like you just made the biggest mistake of your life, again, quite a feat considering what you had done in your life time.

When she answers you all emotion is gone from her voice and you could swear you saw her hair deflate a little bit. Her smile was gone and she was SCARY.

“...How could you not know what a cutie-mark is? ”

You had to come up with something fast, fearing the consequences of not doing so would be far worse than the wolves from earlier.

“Uh...heh heh...um, you see...I'm not...from around here.”

“Oh! Ok.”

She instantly regained all her previous emotion and responds in the same cheery voice that you could tell was going to get real infuriating, real quick. But at least she wasn't acting like a cereal killer anymore. You didn't like the idea of that on your tombstone. Death by bright, colourful pony.

“Do you think you could tell me what one is though?”

You had to admit, you were a little curious as to what they could be.

“Weeeeell...a cutie-mark is a marking that magically appears on everypony once they-”

“Wait for a second. Everypony?”

“Yes, everypony, that's right, why is something wrong?”

You filed that information away for later while looking at Pinkie Pie who was staring at you with her head craned sideways in a curious puppy style way.

“Oh no, nothing. Nothing at all. Please continue with your answer.”

“Okie doki. Well, once somepony finds their special talent, a marking appears on them that represents that talent”

She lifts her rump into the air I front of your face and wiggles it, showing you a marking of three balloons. How had you missed that before? No, seriously how had you missed that, it wasn't exactly subtle.

“Mine represents my talent at organising parties and other social events. All ponies get them, like Zebras, Earth Ponies, Unicorns, Pegasi, Griffons, Dragons, and even Humans like yourself! Although not all ponies get their cutie-marks on their flank. Like Dragons get theirs underneath their tails and are considered extremely private, and won't usually show anypony else, like, at all! And Humans like you, who get them on the back of their hands once they discover their special talent, which I'm going to have to help you find later. Ooh, I almost forgot, you also have the Griffons, whose cutie-marks appears on their- what are these?”

You stop absorbing the information and look back to see what Pinkie Pie was pointing at. She was pointing a limb at your belt, which had the nine fusion cores and your antique weapon. How were you going to explain the advanced tech to the creature before you? You didn't really want to explain what your tool of death did so you decided to just explain what the cores were. Albeit very dumbed down.

“They are sources of energy, energy which is stored in there for me to use when I need or want to.”

“So its like a magic crystal?”

You very much doubted that these ‘magic crystals’ had anywhere near as much energy within as the fusion reactors on your belt. But in a sense you guess Pinkie was right. Of course you didn't know what they did, but you had a fair idea based off of Pinkies description.

“What do you use that energy for?”

That's a good questions actually. What were you going to use the energy for. All you knew for now was that they are to valuable to lose, you didn't currently have a use for them but you were sure you would in the future.

“Stuff.”

That was the only reply you could think of.

“What kinds of stuff?”

“Stuffy, stuff.”

“What kind of stuff is that?”

“Stuff that I don't know what kind of stuff yet.”

“Oh, that makes sense.”

“How so?”

“Unknown stuff is always better than normal stuff, which is why you said stuffy stuff, because stuff with stuffy is better than normal stuff without stuffy. Get it?”

“Yep.”

You couldn't argue with that logic.

“Sooo...can you teach me where I am and the creatures that inhabit this land. I don't really get out all that much.”

That was an understatement if you ever heard one. You didn't get out at all. Like, ever.

“Of course I will silly! You're in Equestria, and it is mostly populated by humans, Unicorns, Pegasi and Earth Ponies like myself!”

“Mostly?”

“Well...there are other species, but they mostly stay in their homelands.”

“What kind of species?”

“Oh, you have dragons that live in the badlands, and gri- hey! That rhymed!”

“Please stay focused!”

“Oh, Sorry! Besides dragons you have griffons, who live in the second largest nation, Griffexia. You also have Zebras, who live in the nation of Zebrica, that has two major biomes, grassland and jungle. Then you have Minotaurs that live in a cluster of medium to large islands with goats and donkeys.”

“Is there really that many sapient species?!”

You couldn't understand how there could be that many intelligent creatures on the planet at one time. Surely evolution and natural selection should have prevented so many sapients from springing up. Also why do most of the creatures here have the same names as the creatures of ancient Earth? Pinkie Pie bore a semblance of a pony but was fundamentally different. Did all creatures here bare a resemblance to their counterparts?

“Oh, no not at all. There are more.”

“More!?!”

“Yeah, of course there are more. I forgot to mention cows, pigs and sheep, who all live in Equestria with ponies. There are so many that it would take like forever to list them all!”

Wow. What kind of world did you happen to stumble across? A fucked up world, a world where physics seems to just stop working properly, and was inhabited by many, many different creatures of varying degrees of absurdity. And also colours. You couldn't forget all the colours this place possessed.

“Hey, what is this thing?”

You look down at your belt and realise your antique was missing. Looking up in haste you look around for Pinkie, hoping she doesn't fire it. It wasn't powered but you didn't want to take any chances at all.

You spot the pony over by the bookshelf holding the weapon up close to her face, eyeing the barrel of the gun with intense scrutiny. You quickly fix the potential suicide by grabbing the handle and yanking the antique from Pinkies grip. How the fuck does she hold things with her hooves?

“Hey!”

“Don't touch that, it's very old and very dangerous!”

“Why is it dangerous? It just looks like a metal stick.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

Metal stick, really? It doesn't look anything like a stick. You were about to lecture to the pink mare about why you don't just take other people's stuff without their permission, but stop when she abruptly lets out an adorable yawn. Adorable? Where did that come from? And why was she yawning?

“Well it's getting late, I should get going. Bye!”

And she disappeared in a literal blur of pink. What did she mean by late, it's not that late is it? Walking over to a window you look out to see the moon already a small distance into the sky. You could have sworn that it was midday just a second ago. Oh well. You might as well take a few of the books and head back to the forest.

Selecting several books that look like they could be promising and another one that was hidden behind some roots, you turn and head towards the exit and back towards the forest you had come from, the overall gloominess of the forest having no affect on you at all.

You venture into the dark...