What the F**k?
Another arrow goes whizzing past my skull. I can hear its fwish as it sails past my ear and its twang as it sinks its head into a tree beside me.
“Hey, Bon Bon!” I shout, galloping and out of breath. “I thought you said this temple was supposed to be abandoned!”
Bon Bon gallops alongside me, ducking under another arrow which barely grazes the brim of her hat. “That’s what the oracle said! You were there when she said it! And I don’t remember you looking any solutions, either!”
The jungle heat is oppressive, and the unfamiliarity of the land actively works against us. Trees tower all around us like a green and brown maze; roots and bushes twist and gnarl like tentacles beneath our legs. Vines hang from the branches like snakes. Giant leaves drape across the canopy. We lost our compass and map when the tribals got the jump on us, and we’ve been avoiding them by the skin of our teeth ever since.
Another arrow flies by, dangerously close to my face. “They’re gaining on us!” I shout. “I can’t keep this up for much longer, either!”
“Just a bit longer!” Bon Bon noses forwards. “Up ahead, look! It’s the river!”
And so it is. Ahead of us is the river, and the boat we rode in on. It’s a yellow dinky dinghy, bought from Rich’s Barnyard Bargains for fifteen bits. It’s a miracle that it lasted for so long--being made of rubber, it’d get popped by anything close to a sharp object.
POW!
And an arrow sinks right into its side, bursting it and sending shreds of bright yellow rubber flying everywhere.
“Bon Bon?!” I shriek. But she doesn’t respond. She looks more shocked than I am, and properly so, since we’re both probably going to die here.
We get to the riverside, water swiftly coursing downstream. I turn around, and I can see the tribal ponies in the far distance--face paint, bows at the ready, and an insatiable bloodlust in their frenzied eyes.
“We’re going to die!” shrieked Bon Bon. “I can’t believe it! We came all this way, and we’re both going to die here and it’s all your fault!”
I put aside her accusations for a moment to clear my mind. The tribals advance from behind, and I can hear their chants echoing louder and louder.
“Maybe not yet, Bon Bon. Bear with me for a second, but I think I might have a way out of this…”
“A way out? Our boat’s gone! How are we supposed to get away without a--”
I grab her by the hoof and plunge both of us into the river.
The river is much harder to get around in without the boat, but we make do. I surface, then does she too. “Jason,” she says, “I hate you so much right now.”
I try to paddle against the currents, but it’s too strong. “This would be a lot easier if I had hands, you know. Or legs.”
Bon Bon shoots me a glare. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if you did!”
We turn around a bend.
“Well, at least we’re alive, right?” I say, trying to sound chipper.
But she doesn’t respond. I turn around.
There’s a massive waterfall right ahead, easily five stories high. The mists fade into the horizon, with sunlight forming rainbows between its miniscule droplets. The roaring becomes deafening as we get closer. The currents are moving way too fast to paddle to safely, and years of erosion have widened the waterfall’s mouth, making it too far to reach a side.
Bon Bon stares ahead, gaping. “Use your magic,” she says.
“What?”
“USE YOUR MAGIC! YOU HAVE A HORN! USE IT!”
I strain, but nothing happens. “I can’t! I still don’t know how to use this thing!”
“TRY HARDER!” she says, futilely trying to swim to a side. But she isn’t fast enough.
I strain and I strain, but my horn continues to be little more than eye candy.
“Well, Bon Bon,” I say, “I rescind my previous comment. You were right: we’re both going to die here. Still not my fault, though.”
As we slip off the side, the crashing water drowns out our screams and we plunge to our inevitable deaths below--
Well, hold on. Let’s freeze for a moment.
Before I talk about all that, you should probably know how we got here.
My first name’s Jason. My last name’s not important. I am, as you have probably surmised, not a pony. Not originally, anyways.
Before I turned into a pony, before I met Bon Bon in Equestria and went on a quest to find a magical artifact only heard of in legends, I was a human from Earth.
I’m from a small town. Wayside, it’s called, which is a really apt name for it. Smack-dab in the middle of Colorado. Population: 5,000. All of the buildings here are two stories tall at the most. Not a terribly exciting place to live, and once I get my degree, I am out of here.
I live with my parents and little sister in a two-bedroom apartment. Puts a real damper on my social life, but that’s the way thing work out, I suppose. Wake up, get a ride from friends to community college, take some classes, work a part time job at the gas station, and come home where my mom’s making dinner, my dad’s talking about some crap that’s happening on the other side of the world because he read it in the papers, and my little sister watching cartoons. She watched a lot of that pony cartoon.
That’s pretty much my human life in a nutshell. Pretty typical, I’d think. Now let me tell you about how I came to be a minty unicorn pony.
So the night went pretty much about as normal as any other night would go. I was walking home from the gas station about quarter after seven at night. The street was more or less void of traffic, so I walked down the middle of it. The night sky was full of stars, and I liked naming constellations to myself. There was Taurus. And over there was Draco. To the other side of the sky was Virgo. And if I let my eyes drink in the light for long enough, I could see Venus.
As I was looking upwards, from where the moon was, I saw a brilliant flash. “Augh!” I screamed, gripping my eyes. It was like staring right into the sun. When I regained my vision, everything looked normal again. There was Taurus and Draco, and Virgo and Venus, and the moon…
Did the moon always have those dark craters? I rubbed my eyes. Those craters looked new. I wasn’t paying much attention to it before, so I couldn’t say for sure, but something about them just seemed off.
I got home a few hours later, and as always, my mom was in the kitchen trying some new recipe she’d found online. “Mafaldine casareccie!” she called it. I have absolutely no idea what it meant, but it looked like some kind of pasta. At the least, it smelled appetizing.
My sister was sitting a foot in front of the TV watching her pony cartoon. One purple unicorn was talking to a orange otherwise-normal pony and a blue pegasus, and everything was covered in snow.
“Aren’t you a little old for this, Sarah?” I asked. Sarah, being the brat she is, completely ignored me.
“Come on,” I said, grabbing her by the sides. “You’re sitting way too close to the TV. You’ll burn your eyes out doing that.”
That was when she elbowed me in the ribs without so much as turning around. For a nine year old, she can really hurt a guy. I doubled over in pain, clutching my side.
“...Winter needs to be wrapped up, and I'm determined to do my part.” That was the voice of the purple pony that was on screen earlier.
I looked up, my eyes inches away from the television screen, and found myself face to face with a minty green unicorn with neon-gold eyes. It bounced up and down behind a bunch of other colorful ponies, standing out from--or behind--the crowd.
Gingerly picking myself up off the ground, I muttered a “whatever” and went to the room I shared with my sister. Dinner came and went, I spent a few hours reading random blogs and watching videos on YouTube, and we went to sleep.
The dream I had that night was peculiar in that it was so incredibly vivid. At least, what I remember of it. The mint pony from Sarah’s cartoon popped up all over it, and I saw flashes of her--or rather, of her life. It was weird, like I was living as her throughout the dream. I ate cereal made out of hay, I acted normally and friendly to other colorful ponies (that I clearly had never seen before), and the way I went about doing anything was always lively and chipper, whereas I myself… Well, I’m not the most enthusiastic of people, let’s put it that way.
Like in one of these scenes, I was a judge for a synchronized swimming contest. Pony-me was pretty harsh on everyone, except for the old lady who almost killed herself. That was funny, in a morbid kind of way. In another, I was trying to eat some pie until this giant fly-thing shows up out of nowhere and swallows it in one gulp. All these flashes, going at a million per second, flooding into my vision.
And then at the end of these dreams, I tripped and there was something shiny and then something happened and… I don’t really remember. It was a dream, after all. It was weird.
So that woke me up. I fell out of bed, entangled in my sheets, and made a mental note never to look at that pony show again. It wouldn’t have been the first time I fell off, but since I share a room with Sarah, that usually wakes her up and she yells at me. That didn’t happen this time. Maybe I was off to a good start for the morning?
Nope.
I threw the blanket off. This wasn’t my room. This wasn’t even my apartment. It was a lot bigger, though.
When I tried to walk around, I fell flat on my face, nose first. That didn’t feel right at all. Sleeping in a funny position was one thing, but it’s not like it should make me lose basic motor controls.
So I looked down at my legs.
They weren’t legs anymore.
They were hooves.
Needless to say, I freaked out. I screamed at the top of my lungs, staring down at my new hooves--mint-colored, no fingers. Just elongated cylinders with some cleft at the end for what I can only guess is grip. A giant, fluffy tail. A squishy green belly. A big honking nose. I didn’t even notice myself screaming this entire time until another pony burst through the bedroom door.
“Lyra!” the pony screamed.
I responded with my own screaming.
“Lyra, would you be QUIET?!” she shouted. She was a milky white, and she had three bow ties on her butt. She continued, “It’s six in the morning! Normal ponies are trying to sleep, you know!”
I continued to scream, alternating my pitch in an attempt to convey both understanding and confusion.
The other pony looked frustrated, and she jammed a pillow in my mouth.
She sighed wearily. “Great. Now would you tell me what’s going on?”
I ignored that, of course. “Where’s the bathroom?” I asked, but listening to my own voice scared me to death--it was high pitched, like a teenaged girl’s.
The other pony raised an eyebrow and pointed towards a door, which I sprinted to and nearly broke open. A large mirror splayed across one of its walls.
And what it showed me broke my mind as I could only stare in abject horror: I found myself face to face with that minty green unicorn from Sarah’s TV show, and from my dreams. Fluffy ears, big golden eyes, and a golden lyre tattoo on my butt.
Oh, fuck me.
Author's Note
First chapter. Hope you enjoyed it!
