There once was a man in Equestria.
This man was not just any man, he was a particular man. He was the most uninteresting man that Equestria had ever seen. This was not, admittedly, an award that had any competitors, for he was also the first man that the Equestrians had ever seen, but after spending any length of time with him, most ponies would agree that he was particularly uninteresting, whatever he was.
It wasn’t so much that he tried to be uninteresting. It’s just that he wasn’t all that talkative. He generally gave one or two word answers, and hardly ever elaborated. You see, this man in turn found Equestria to be uninteresting, so you can imagine how hard it was to carry on any kind of conversation, when neither party was truly interested in discussing the same subjects.
For the first few weeks, this man spent most of his time in the local library, where a certain unicorn hosted him at the behest of the crown. She provided him with room and board, and he provided her with what amounted to an extra fixture in her reading room that took up a chair and sometimes responded if spoken to.
What was he reading? If the unicorn’s friends had cared to guess, they might have suspected that he read the riveting Daring Doo series, or that he indulged in romantic novels. The more reasonable among them might suspect that he was reading up on the history of Equestria, or perhaps some textbooks that covered its inhabitants, in order to better understand his new environment.
If they had cared to ask the unicorn, she would have drily informed them that he spent his time reading a mix of psychology and magic-theory textbooks. The unicorn had yet to discern his motive for this, in spite of some intermittent questioning. The man had deflected nearly all her questions, showing no real interest in elaborating on his nature or his people.
The truth, if the man had cared to divulge it, would have still been uninteresting, if a little concerning. The man was of the opinion that he was experiencing a particularly vivid coma-dream, and was trying to figure out what he needed to do in order to wake up. He had, of course, identified other hypotheses, but between trying to figure out if he could harness this thing called ‘magic’ to bridge the gap between dimensions or planets, and trying to see if he could hack his brain into waking back up through raw willpower, or thinking really hard about bunnies, he found himself contentedly occupied, and didn’t really leave the library.
The unicorn sometimes exhibited similar behavior, in doing little else with her time but research and study. Whenever she went too long without venturing outside, her friends and assistant would need to stop by and remind her to eat, leverage her out her door, and give her something more relaxing to do. The uninteresting man, on the other hoof, took life at a snails pace in comparison. He always took the time to eat, to bathe, to sleep, and whenever he was done he went right back to reading. To all appearances, he neither needed nor wanted company, and so he was left alone. Mostly.
In his first week, one of the unicorn’s friends threw this man a surprise party. The man was certainly surprised, though not particularly amused. He became mildly social during the party, responding to questions with more words than most would ever hear from him again, though afterwards one would realize that his answers never really amounted to much either. Over the course of the party, all the ponies were left with the impression that he was a decent sort, but nopony felt all that inclined to visit him again. His conversation was polite, but singularly uninteresting. He was taller than a pony, but not stronger than one. He was not particularly quick or flexible, he had no talent for animals or fashion, and he preferred to spend his time indoors studying rather than hard at work or out having fun. He gave no one the impression that he disliked them, but neither did he seem interested in hearing them talk about themselves.
The party ended and he went to bed without making a single friend.
There was one time when one pony, the unicorn, almost found the man interesting, and that was when he got into an argument with her over the sun. She claimed that the princess raised it every morning, whereas he claimed it operated according to some innate physical mechanism of the universe. The argument ended when he requested a look at one of her physics textbooks, spent twenty minutes with a growing look of disgust upon his face, and then never discussed the subject again.
Eventually there came the day when the unicorn noticed, while shelving some books, that the man, while tightly concentrating, was levitating one of her quills in the air with his magic.
She turned back to her task unperturbed. After all, all creatures in Equestria could use magic in some form or another. This man just seemed to take after unicorns, nothing odd about that, really.
A few months afterwards, the unicorn passed by her reading room one afternoon to discover that the man was gone. In fact, all of the books he had out to read had been shelved again, in the right places too. A check of his room revealed that he had cleaned it until it was spotless and that he even had left a note.
The note simply thanked her for her hospitality, even if her mentor hadn't really given her a choice, and informed her that he had found a way home and had taken it. The only other sign of his stay at her house was a black scorch mark in the center of the room, and that too could be fixed with a little work.
She felt a bit odd, when she realized he wasn’t coming back. His presence in her reading room was something that she had gotten used to over time. Now it felt a little emptier than it should be, as if something of value had been stolen from the room, but she couldn’t remember what it was, or how much it was worth.
Two weeks later, self-acclaimed “public enemy number fishsticks” broke free from his stony prison, and the unicorn didn’t seriously dwell on the man again for the rest of her life.
As for the man, he stepped out of a shadowy alleyway and onto a street he didn’t recognize, in a country whose name he couldn’t pronounce. He spent two days locating the nearest embassy for his home country, and eventually got put on a plane to go home. Having been a missing person for a long time, there was some media attention which he got around by claiming he had no memories of his time away, and that he woke up where he did without knowing how he got there.
A few days after returning to his old home, and sleeping in his own bed, the man attempted to use magic again, and discovered that he no longer could.
He focused on returning to a normal life, but for the rest of his days, he couldn’t decide whether it was all a hallucination, or if he really had been the first human to cross worlds.
But he didn’t give it too much thought. Magic was cool, but Equestria hadn’t been all that interesting anyway.
Author's Note
Writers block is a strange, strange thing.
After reading one too many fics where this doesn't happen, I decided there needed to be at least one fic out there where it does. Hope you got a kick out of it.
