Stretching after a long game of Kirby: Return to Dreamland (eighth play-through today, they needed to get the next one out, soon), Anton yawned and turned off his Wii. It was well into the night, and he needed to get to school the next day.

Buuut... there was a new episode of MLP on, so perhaps sleep could wait. Yeah, it could wait, ponies were more important.

Stepping over to the computer in the corner of the room, Anton flicked on the aging monitor, thankful that the computer at least was fairly new. It made YouTube searches and the like so much faster.

And, he had to admit to himself, that was one of the biggest draws: with a part-time job under his belt, he could even afford NetFlix and get the episodes only a day or two late, without the copyright infringement-related problems. Reaching for the keyboard, he stopped as a faint ‘whoosh’ noise caught his attention. It was rather like the sound the gas stove made when it was on, but nobody else was up...

“Shit, I really hope someone made ramen earlier and forgot to turn the stove off. Again.”

Standing up to check on it, Anton began to move towards the kitchen. His movement, however, was interrupted by a loud CRASH and the sound of wood and plaster being sent everywhere. It also came from behind him, still in the living room.

“Mom is totally gonna freak when she sees that. I hope it’s just another family of rats.”

Turning around to see the damage, he gaped at what he saw. A full wall of the basement had been damaged by the whatever-it-was, and chunks of the insulation and wooden beams scattered around a large hole, about a yard or so across.

What made Anton the saddest, and most likely to pull a Darth Emo and cry an elongated ‘nooo!’ to the heavens, was that the hole was right behind where his computer had been. The past tense is stressed here, because all that remained of the computer was fragments of metal and silicon, along with a couple of pieces of the ponies he’d gotten for his birthday last year scattered about.

The handmade sandstone figurines were more or less obliterated, including the one of his OC, Copy.Data. He fought back the urge to cry as he surveyed the mess.

“I... I didn’t even think the words ‘what could possibly go wrong’ this time! What the hell!? My... My collection... shit. Well, I guess... I could get some super glue... aw, who’m I kidding, I guess I’ll just figure out what did this before mom or dad does.”

Searching around the mess, Anton poked about. He found, and tried not to weep over, the broken remains of Twilight Sparkle’s front half, the back half in dozens of pieces. He also tried not to weep over the disembodied head of Pinkie Pie. He couldn’t find any other portions, and the little pony was still grinning.

It was more than a little macabre.

Finally, he found something that he hadn’t seen before. A spherical orb of some type of glass or something. Quartz, maybe. As Anton reached for the basketball-sized globe, it began to glow.

‘A big, glowing, crystal-ball-thing... maybe I can sell this to pay for the damages... and replacements... I hope I can get replacements.’ Anton’s thoughts idled on the idea for a moment, and he went to get a bag. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find any large enough. All he had available at the moment was a bunch of the bagel bags and a single half-ripped grocery bag left. Stopping to ponder who could’ve used up the piles of grocery bags, he came up blank.

“Okay, now I wanna know where everyone is, dad would have at least yelled from upstairs to say ‘Keep it down!’ and mom is not a heavy sleeper, I put my money on the glowing crystal ball thingamajig. Or aliens. Nah, probably the ball, even though aliens make more sense.”

A sudden thought struck him, and he went to check on the ball again. It just sat under the bed, glowing only slightly. It didn’t seem to have anything in it that could do anything to make people sleep, and he could pretty easily see through it. Well, minus the distortion from having a solid ball of glass between him and what he was seeing.

“Alright, I guess I can pick it up, weirdest it could do is start sparking like those electricity orb things and make my hair look like I jumped out of an anime, minus the neon dye-job.”

Reaching under, he gripped the ball firmly and tugged, earning a squeal of metal-on-stone as it slid under a support for the bed. The first thing he noted was that it felt perfectly smooth, and the second thing was that is was heavy.

“O- Okay, not glass or crystal then, waaay too heavy for those. Leaded glass? Quartz? Unobtanium? A weird meteorite that’ll cover everything with plants?”

Lifting the ball in both hands, he sat on the bed with the glassy orb in his lap. It wasn’t quite cool enough to have been sitting outside. And if it had gone through the wall like that, it should’ve left a crater.

But all it had done was destroy his computer and his ponies.

Sighing, he looked down at the ruined remains of his carefully tended Glaze figurine, now in more than a dozen pieces. Surveying the extents of the pony-figure carnage, he could identify bits of the Cadence and Shining Armor salt and pepper shaker set he had once considered the centerpieces of his collection. Portions of his Woona figurine’s wings were visible, but nothing else was.

A tear came to his eye as he thought of all the great friends who had gotten him these as presents and gifts. Even if a couple of them had disappeared lately...

“Fucking ball-thing, what are you?”

Anton tried to shake the thing, but its hefty mass prevented that from being an easy goal.

“I wonder if you can break too... Let’s find out, shall we?”

Anton went over to the home-improvement tool drawer in the kitchen and came back with a hammer and safety goggles. Several cathartic swings of the hammer later, he came to the conclusion (thanks to a broken hammer handle) that no, the ball-thing would not, in fact, break.

“Okay, we’ve tested weight, and durability, next step of scientific inquiry, does it go ‘boink’? And, how the hell do I get rid of it, I doubt I could sell it on eBay... mainly because it’d be a bitch to mail. And it broke my computer.”

Looking back at his ponies, he sighed, not getting as much happiness out of trying to demolish the sphere as he’d hoped. Lifting it higher, he huffed in sadness and effort.

“Man, I wish I could have more ponies...”

The orb in his hands lit up like a sun in a rainbow spray. The light was blinding, and he felt like his hands were being stripped apart, skin from flesh and flesh from bone.

The agony overrode every part of his conscious mind, and he felt every portion of his body come apart like a poorly-knitted sweater. As his mind faded to black, only one, barely coherent thought held through:

‘Oh, shit! It’s Disco’s Revenge!’

Anton groaned in pain, a bright light hitting his closed eyelids. Which was weird, because his room was in the basement, and the one window he had looked out at the underside of the deck’s stairs. And his room’s light was nowhere near this bright.

The light was wonderfully warm, however, which was definitely a plus.

“Okay, that’s not the sun, the sun almost doesn’t exist in Washington, I must be in Dryington. Or something.”

He stayed lying down, half of him hoping it was a dream, half hoping it wasn’t.

Something above him made a cawing noise, like an exceptionally loud crow.

“Great, nature’s alarm clock. Shut the hell up, I’m awake already!”

Yawning heavily, he slowly opened his eyes, his vision still taking time to adjust.

The first thing he saw was a brilliant, robin’s-egg blue expanse, with a disc of shining white that made his eyes want to shrivel up and crawl back into his head. Cue headache.

The second thing, or rather ‘things’ he saw, was several circling shapes far above, looking like birds.

One of them gave another of the raucous caws.

“Great, buzzards, where the hell did I wake up? Usually I’m asleep when I find a place that looks nice and is covered in predators. Or chocolate fudge, either or. Alright, might-be-dreaming brain, what do I look like tonight?”

Looking down, he first saw what he was laying on, and that being a patch of grass on the edge of a desert, or other largely sand-covered place. Maybe a really long beach with an ocean on the other side.

Then, he got a good look at himself. His front legs ended in pad-like paws, each of which had a short nail, or claw sticking from one of the four toes. There were banded sections of black and orange, pebbly scales. Interspersed at the ‘elbows’ and the ‘wrists’ were tufts of soft-looking orange fur.

Anton blinked for a moment, taking this in.

Looking further down his body, he saw that his underbelly was bright orange and scaled as well, but a twist of his head let him see that his back was, apparently, covered in black-and-orange fur.

‘This is new. I’m Gecko-Tiger Man. What else do I have?’

Finally, his gaze arrived at his legs and hindquarters. His legs were still orange and black, but this time ended in large, round hooves. He also had a tail, consisting of a long length of mostly black whip-like structure. The whole thing was at least as long as he was, and had a fuzzy tip at the end, a bit like Discord’s.

And the structure of those hooves looked almost precisely like the ones on ponies from MLP...

‘Brain, we are going to have a chat about this later, we agreed no dreams like this unless I ate expired pepperoni two hours before bed.’

Looking around again, he saw that there was desert in one direction, and a low plain in the other, terminating in lots of trees. Likely a forest, if he was to guess.

In the direction of the desert, there were some rocks, larger rocks, and more rocks. A few dry, dead plants still stood near the edge of the plain, but none farther into the desert from where he could see. He began to stand up, in anticipation of walking in one direction or another.

“Soo... where t-”

He tripped. It was more of a ‘twist’ than an actual fall, because he tried moving his ‘arms’ like arms and his ‘legs’ like legs, and mostly just spun around as his muscles refused to respond right.

“I haven’t felt like this since I last played Twister. Okay, let’s try this again.”

Carefully planting one ‘foot’ at a time in the sandy turf, Anton rose to his full height. And immediately got a puff of incredibly fine hair in his face as a breeze rolled in.

“Pthh. Last I checked, air wasn’t fuzzy. Unless it’s April and dandelion spores are fucking everywhere. Where am I... brain... yeah, I love-slash-hate you too.”

The hair in his face was midnight black, and just as shiny as his scales.

“First step of scientific determination: poke it.”

Reaching up a clawed forelimb, he gave the offending hair a tentative jab. It billowed slightly, but was otherwise unresponsive. Straining his eyes led to him actually seeing where it was coming from: His scalp.

Then, he started at the realization that he was looking at the front of his own head.

Blinking rapidly, he thought back. If he was anything like the ponies from the show (no guarantee, he’d never seen scaled lizard-tiger-gecko ponies before on MLP) then all he’d just done was cross his eyes and looked up. They’d done the same thing a few times to see their own foreheads in the show, so maybe that was all.

Or this was the weirdest dream he’d had in almost a week. Whichever.

“Okay, so I need a haircut, and to know where to go. I’d ask the natives if there were any. Now which direction, sand or plains... let’s go with plains, if I can walk, crawl, slither or whatever the hell I do now.”

Attempting a stiff-legged, slow walk towards the grassy area, stepping through increasingly tall grass. Eventually, he figured out how to walk with his knees bending, which made the walk a lot less painful and tiring. Still looked unnatural, probably.

“Come on, there’s gotta be something around here, or some kind of-”

Something rustled in the long grass behind him. Whatever it had been wasn’t in view when he turned around fast enough to trip, however. Still working on walking with four legs.

Just dark green and light green stalks of grass. Which seemed awfully darkly shadowed for the mid-day.

Anton let out an involuntary whimper.

“Hello? Don’t eat me? Or whatever?”

Nothing moved but the grass, swaying in the wind. Said grass was long enough in most places to be just shorter than his nose, and in several places it had grown much taller.

“Well, I guess I’ll just walk through this tall green grass, even though it’s too dangerous without my own Pokémon.”

He rolled his eyes and did just that.

Several minutes of walking in silence later, he heard the shuffling noise in the grass, this time from his right. He was starting to get a ‘The Lost World Velociraptor Field’ vibe from the whole thing. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell which direction he’d come from initially, and he couldn’t see the desert with how tall the grass was.

“I know you’re here somewhere, if you’re gonna hit me or something, just get on with it already, you’re not making either of us look any smarter.”

As if in response, something moved to his left. He hadn’t even heard any movement to connect the two points, so he was likely surrounded. On instinct, he held perfectly still. For the first time that day, he went to lick his lips nervously. On the way, he found that his teeth were oddly sharp, and seemed to have some bitter tasting fluid on them.

“Okay, fine, you want me to move, fine, whatever, I’ll just leave then. Don’t forget that three of my six ends have pointy bits.”

As he began moving, he glanced left and right along the way.

Then, with razor-edged abruptness, he found himself out of the grass. The tall grass was mowed almost to nothing for a good forty feet until the forest.

“Well, if those things were predatorial, I think I’d stand a better chance here where they can’t hide... well, or they’re invisible, that would suck.”

Walking as quickly as he was able on his still-shaky limbs, he started into the forest. Almost immediately, he felt cold. As if the whole forest should be covered in frost and snow and ice and everything else associated with freezing to death. The deep shadows of the forest seemed to drag the warmth from him, and he jerked back hastily into the warm, glorious heat of the sun’s light.

“Okay then, status check. Fact, I seem to be cold-blooded. Fact, I’m furry and I have scales. Fact, I have no fucking clue what I am or where I am. Yup, that’s life for ya, what a bitch. Guess I’ll go back to the grass of possible dangers for now.”

He looked down at his hooves and claws for a second.

“On second thought, how about I learn to walk better first. Yay, I can think straight-ish!”

Smiling to himself, he walked back and forth in front of the forest until he grew bored of doing that (about four minutes) and tried to run instead.

After that disaster, he went back to walking until he had that down properly.

He decided to make a game of it, such as ‘try to reach my front feet up to my chest mid-step for a minute straight’ or ‘move my back legs together when walking for a minute or so’ and other such distracting things.

Then, his stomach rumbled.

“Okay, now for dietary decisions. I am mammalian, and I have fangs, predator, obviously. But I’m sort of lizard like, do I eat giant bugs? No, let’s try that last... uhm, fruit? Yeah, none available around.”

He stood there, thinking, on the edge of the forest a little longer.

”I guess the only current option is raw meat from whatever was in the grass... Or I eat grass. Why not? It’s got fiber at least.”

He took a bite out of some stalks of grass, immediately spitting out the bitter-tasting plants. Definitely not trying that again, except as a last resort.

A small burst of movement caught his eye, and he saw a small, white-and-gray rabbit hop up nearby, looking in the wrong direction to see him. Which was kinda funny, seeing as how he was a bright, orange-and-black lizard-pony thing on a green background.

‘Hmmm... I could take a page from the book of tigers and crawl through the grass and pounce on it... rabbit sounds good, yeah, lunchtime, Peter Cottonbutt.’

He began somewhat stealthily sneaking up on the rabbit, until it turned towards him for a brief second. The fear, the utter, abject terror in its eyes stopped him for a moment, just long enough for the furry little creature to hop away and duck into a small burrow.

“Damn, it always looked so easy on the Discovery Channel... Oh well.”

He heaved a sigh, and cast his gaze about once more.

“Now what? I guess I’ll go with hunting those things from earlier. God I hope they don’t unfold or some crap and end up fifty feet tall.”

Looking back at the grass, he thought he caught a glimpse of a tiny, red dot of light before the shifting of the grass obscured it. something shuffled around in the grass, and Anton suddenly got the feeling he was still being watched, that the surveillance on him had never ended. It rather ruined his confidence.

He continued slowly into the grass, staying low and trying to be as quiet as possible. Hoping he could find a snack. If he saw that red light again, he’d probably leave and just eat grass, tasting like shit doesn’t matter if you’re dying of starvation in his opinion.

Slowly parting the grass, he heard right away another short flurry of movement off to one side.

There’s lunch. I hope... He moved toward the movement cautiously.

The movement ceased as he drew near. He still hadn’t figured out how to move silently, other than to try moving when the wind was blowing. It covered at least some of the grass’s crinkles as he stepped past.

Peeking slowly through a patch of grass into a small clearing on the other side, he saw a tree, the top broken from some long-ago lightning strike. The bark, blackened and weathered by countless rains, was just about all that remained beyond the stump. A thick carpet of decomposed bark mulch, reminding Anton strongly of home, kept the grass mostly at bay. Something moved on the other side of the tree, a slight movement of dull red.

He walked as fast as he could, running might end up in another faceplant, to the other end of the tree to see what it was, preparing to pounce it.

The shape, not one he immediately recognized, began to shuffle at the base of the tree, and he stalked forward, ready to leap as best he could. It was green, with a poof of red fur on the back.

‘Here’s hoping it’s not spiky under that.’

Lunging forward with all the grace of a two-legged stool on a sea of eggs, Anton tackled the thing, knocking the green creature to the side. It squeaked in fright, and Anton reared back to try biting it. He paused, however, jaws still wide, when he saw that it was a pony. Green fur, with variegations of lighter and darker green, perfect for hiding in the tall grass, and soft-looking red mane and tail. Also, incidentally, a mare, judging from the facial structure.

Her eyes, glowing red with black sclera, looked up at him in terror.

“Okay, I’d feel bad about it if I killed you, but I-”

Suddenly, she made a noise, a loud, evil hisss that had haunted his dreams and games of minecraft for years, and he felt the world invert with a blast of light.

Groaning as he came to, he blinked his eyes a few times. His everything hurt, and he wondered why he was waking up to a soft light, and not to his mom waking him up for his morning medication.

“Great, it wasn’t a dream, but what parts were? Ah screw it, guess I’ll make the best of... still hungry. Damnit.”

His stomach growled to confirm that, and he looked up. The shadows around him were longer, and he still looked like a lizard-tiger-pony. Looking around, he saw that he was in a different clearing, this one with sections of what looked like wood or something woven into the grass around the perimeter, with what looked to be sharpened sticks pointing outwards.

Laying on the ground not too far away, was the green pony from before. She was laying on her side in a sunbeam, her tail occasionally flopping around, like a cat’s. She seemed to be looking away from him.

He decided to try getting away before anything bad happened again. Trying to be quiet, operative word being try. Which he did poorly.

The green mare’s tail stopped moving. In fact, she seemed to have frozen still in place, like a rabbit that had been spotted. As he stared back, scared of what she might do, he got a good look at her.

She seemed to be covered in sections of something like strips of cloth, rather than actual fur for her coat, and her mane was rather dirty, the red much duller than it probably could’ve been. Each rectangular piece of her coat’s... ‘hairs’ was the closest he could come to an appropriate appellation, was a slightly different color, forming sections of darker green, lighter green, and a few spots of green so pale it was almost white.

From this distance, he could probably jump over and bite her neck open before she could blow up again...

He forcibly shook his head at the thought, wondering where it had come from.

“Listen, don’t explode, I’m just hungry. All I need is food and I’ll leave you alone, just don’t blow me to kingdom come, please?”

The mare didn’t move, barely breathing. He could see she was thin, and could see her ribs through her coat. For a moment, he thought about how that would make her easier to run down, but forced away the thought.

“Okay, definitely a predator, jeez. Anyway, uh, miss? I’m not going to hurt you as long as you don’t hurt me... deal? Wait, can you talk?”

He waited for a moment, before the mare slowly turned her head. It was almost creepy, how her head simply seemed to fluidly change positions. Her expression, though, was still one of fear. Her wide eyes, glowing pupils tiny, locked on him, and her mouth was open in a slight ‘D’ shape of terror.

“Okay, I think I kinda know what you are, I’ll just give you some space, sound good?”

He nervously stepped back, stopping suddenly when he realized he had nowhere to back up to, as his butt was against the fence around the clearing.

“Alright then, I have the feeling you don’t want me to leave. So what do you want? I guess if you wanted to kill me, you’d have done it already, so what’s up?”

The mare slowly got into her standing position, and began to back away, only to find she, too, was stuck in by the fence.

“Okay, obviously you don’t like me, so what’s the deal? Why not just leave me where I was when you blew me up?”

The poor, terrified-looking mare didn’t respond, only planted her rear in the dirt and covered her head with her hooves. It was strangely adorable. The undersides of her hooves, he saw, were a bright, glossy red. she shivered slightly in fright. He sighed.

“Okay, I get it, you don’t like me, you don’t want me around, so why’d you bring me here? I’d leave if I could. Also, I’m still hungry, if you’re going to keep me here, at least help me.”

He groaned when she failed to do anything but peek shyly out from between her hooves. Much of the adorable was lost to the menacing glow of her eye in the dark shade of her hooves.

“Great, Fluttercreep. Now what? You’re mute, and for some reason really don’t like me, and I’m hungry. As much as I-”

“Uhn-gee?”

He stopped as the timid mare spoke up, horribly mutilating the word. Luckily, his time working with his mom as a tutor allowed him to speak ‘toddler’ rather fluently.

“Yes, I am hun-gry. Do you have food?”

He asked the question slowly, trying to communicate.

“Fuuud?”

“Yes, food, to eat.”

He tried making eating motions with his front... limbs.

She held still for a moment, then pulled her head timidly out of her hooves. She nosed at the rich, black soil, uncovering a slimy mass of some sort of composting fungus. She pressed her face to it and... slurped. The grayish-green semi-solid goo made an abominable ‘splooorch’ noise as she sucked it up. She then nosed over a wide piece of bark, with more of the jelly-like mold growing underneath it.

“Okay, right, um, I’ll try and not lose my non-existent lunch? Er, how do I put this? I eat meat, not discolored pudding-vomit.”

“Fuuud. Uhn-gee. Fuud!”

She made similar motions as Anton had, looking a bit less scared.

“I thought the phrase was ‘bite the bullet’ not ‘bite the slime mold’ but, whatever, eww.”

He closed his eyes tightly as he tried to eat the goop, the vile, rancid smell of mold and rot filling his nostrils strongly enough to make him gag. It was like that smell you discover upon opening that plastic tub at the back of the fridge. You know, the one that your grandparents had when they were young, and nobody’s thrown it out yet.

His eyes cracked open reflexively before he put his face to the slime, and saw it jiggle at his presence. The glassy-smooth surface bubbled once, and the bubble popped leaving a smell ten times worse than the smell that was already there.

Eight minutes later, he finally stopped dry heaving into the grass on the other side of the clearing.

“I... have just made... the ultimate... scientific...”

He gagged and retched again, breathing deeply to clear his nostrils of the horrific smell.

“D- discovery. The one thing... more repulsive... than microwaved spinach.”

He then had a brief coughing fit.

The green mare had returned to huddling on the opposite side of the clearing from him, but he was pretty sure it was the smell from his upchuck. In spite of having nothing in his stomach, he had still poured out a lot of a yellowy-white viscous fluid that had eaten through the first inch of the dirt. It also smelled awful, even if not as bad as the sludge he’d nearly imbibed.

“Okay, I- I’m sorry, but, as I, urgh, said before, I eat m-meat. Apparently, it’s all I can eat. I can’t believe I asking this, but do you have any small, dead stuff lying around? Oh right, you can’t really understand me, can you?”

She pointed at the pile of not-quite-vomit with her muzzle.

“Fuuud?”

“No! No, I wouldn’t eat that, really.”

She flinched away as he yelled, hunching back. Her ears had gone flat against her head, and tears had begun to form in her eyes. She no longer looked scared sure, but ‘about-to-cry’ wasn’t much better in his book.

“Damnit... um, wow, er, do you... need a hug?”

He cringed, both at what he’d done and at what he said. Hug a Creeper, yeah, real smart.

“Hug?”

She seemed honestly confused with the word.

“Okay, you don’t know what a hug is, and given I’m a predator, you’d probably think I was attacking... so, dang, now what?”

The mare shifted uncomfortably in her spot on the other side of the enclosure. The day was coming to a close, and while he was hungry, he wasn't that hungry, in spite of throwing up. He looked back at his tail, so thick at first and tapering to a thinner tail at the last quarter or so. Maybe he was like a camel, but with food?

Nah, that made no sense, even for a lizard-pony-tiger-thing.

Sighing, he settled in on his side of the enclosure, looking up at the sky as it began to shift to a soft golden-orange. He was tired now, and getting slightly cold. No clouds meant a really cold night, too.

“All in all, today’s been quite a bummer, hasn't it?”

“Uhn-gee?”

“I’ll try and get food tomorrow, if I can manage it.”

A traitorous, nasty little piece of his brain insisted that she was food, and might not even put up much of a fight, if he could kill her fast enough...

Shaking away the thought, he combated it with more logic ‘If I can see her ribs, how much meat could there be? Definitely not sustainable.’ The logic didn’t help much, so he just closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

It took a long time, and he could feel the night falling. It didn’t help that she smelled tasty...

Author's Note

Nom nom!

But seriously, thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope you like this start to Anton's journey