Dead Rising: Lens of West

America! Land of the free! Woo hoo!

Boy, it surely did have one heck of a history. Boy, it surely did solve every problem it faced! Oh, golly! There were too many solutions America could come up with for every single problem! Ohhhhhhhhhh boy! Ohhhhhhhhhhh man!

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…If that really was the case, then for the first time, the stereotypical image of America being able to solve any problem would have been ruthless torn apart when Frank met a talking horse.

Talking horses… Now where did he hear that from?

Oh right- Animal Farm. What’s next? Napolean shows up in my camera and tells me that he’s always right? What’s going on? What is that thing? Holy crap, why is this scaring me more than a zombie outbreak?

Paralysis never felt so tormenting. Having taken a few steps away from the pale-blonde pony, the photojournalist shakily raised a hand, pointing at the creature accusingly as if it committed some grave crime.

“You… talked,” he muttered after a fairly long period of silence.

“I… did.”

“Yup.”

Unable to stand the situation, Frank raised an arm as if to protest about something before lowering it without saying a word. He paced around, checked his camera, and even cleaned his sunglasses for once in an attempt to wake himself out of what seemed to be a frightening nightmare.

This really could be one of my craziest nightmares ever, the two legged photojournalist thought grimly, though he felt a bit relieved to know that his puns were as fresh as ever.

There were zombies. Then there were Convicts, Looters, and Psychopaths, and then there was the military. Then there were gas-zombies, annoying game show hosts, and a flat-chested undercover agent that killed a good man, Sullivan.

Frank was fairly certain that talking horses did not come after undercover agents.

He could already tell that something was extremely wrong in different ways. Sure, the talking creature was already a big deal, but there was also the concern of where he actually was. With the way things were at the moment, even the most ridiculous of answers actually seemed plausible to his questions on where he was.

Wait.

“You there,” Frank said, his eyes settling on the pale-blonde thing. “Are there more of your kind around here?”

“…Yes.”

Yup. The world had gone nuts if it contained talking horses.

Of all things, there were more talking horses than the number of solar eclipses that occurred every few years.

And now that he looked at the creature in front of him a bit closer, he noticed that there were strange feathers sticking out of its sides. He did not even want to think about the strange mark imprinted on the pony's body.

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This, he thought as he slowly got a gist of what really could be his situation, is nuts. It’s so nutty, I can literally hear the squirrels shouting "Hey, fuck you" by the corners of these trees.

All of a sudden, everything felt unreal.

“Where am I?” The photojournalist asked the thing known as Fluttershy.

As if a bit happy to clarify where he was, the strange mammal (which he assumed to be a Pegasus) quickly, yet softly whispered to him,

“You are… on Equestria.”

“And what is this… eQuest thing?”

“It is the world we live on?”

Frank let his knees collide against grassy ground, clutching his head as he swung his torso forward. Holding a rather fetal position, the sunglasses-wearing photojournalist shook his head.

He was right, as much as he wanted to deny it.

He was no longer on Earth.

But wait! There was a chance that the horse was just shitting with him. Attempting to be as optimistic as possible, the photojournalist decided not to overthink the situation.

…He found it impossible not to overthink his current location, however.

“God dammit,” Frank mumbled as he shook his head. “This is totally nuts.”

Turning to the pale-blonde Pegasus, who seemed to cower under his gaze, the man walked up to the creature. Each step he took caused the pony to shrink before him, which he eventually took note of and stopped moving towards her.

Oh yes, and he was smart enough to detect that the Pegasus was a female judging by the delicacy of the creature.

“Tell you what,” the photojournalist said, instinctively raising his hands at waist level. “If you can open up portals or some crap like that, can you just… send me back to my home or something?”

Fluttershy tilted her head.

“Where would your home be-“

“Earth,” Frank abruptly answered, his patience starting to get at him. “Planet Earth. You know, home of all sorts of good and bad things? Milky Way?”

The pony frowned as she shakily shook her head. “I don’t think Ursas are planets,” she whispered.

At this, Frank raised a hand by his mouth as he whispered back, “I don’t think I said ‘Ursa,’ you clever little thing. I said ‘Earth’.”

Much to his dismay, the Pegasus did not seem to know what the heck Earth was, as she unknowingly shook her head.

“There are people like me around, right?” Frank asked, starting to get desperate to get at least a single ‘Yes’ from the talking pony, but again, Fluttershy shook her head. “Is there anyone who resembles me at the very least?”

Fluttershy softly shook her head once more. “There are some who resemble the way you move, but they look very different from you… mister…”

The photojournalist moaned as he threw his arms up in the air. Clutching his face, he turned away from the pony and remained standing still. There were punishments he deserved every now and then, but he- from all that is either holy or damned- did not deserve some sort of divine punishment that delivered him to a world with no people.

Why?! Frank thought with frustration, his clenched teeth about to leave grinding marks against each other. God, this is confusing and troubling to think about!

At last, he was unable to contain his frustration to himself. The dark-haired man kicked the grassy ground as an impolite word mumbled its way out of him.

It turned out that the world he stood on did not want to leave him alone, for he soon heard the soft voice of the pink-and-yellow mammal nervously whispering to him,

“Do you have a place to stay at? You do not seem like you’re from here, mister.”

By impulse, Frank would have flipped his crap and stormed away from the creature, but her words rang true. He did not have a place to stay at, and he was clearly not a horse. With that said, he had no idea as to where he was, and ignoring the advice of what could be a native to the world that he ended up in might end badly for him.

There were plenty of people at both the Willamette Mall and Fortune City who cared little about the miracle shelters known as safehouses. While he did manage to persuade plenty of survivors into getting into the safehouses, some of them simply persisted in indulging themselves to selfish desires and never lived to see the light of the day again. From then on, he knew one thing for sure; no matter how mentally and physically strong certain people were, if they rejected shelter, things never went smoothly for them. It was common zombie outbreak knowledge to actively look out for safe shelters.

The photojournalist took a quick breath, calming himself down. He needed to think about making less conversations and more action- actions that could establish a safe place he could temporarily borrow to ponder over things.

“I don’t know any place I could stay at,” Frank West admitted. “Hell, I don’t know if there is a place to stay at out in this stupid forest. Mind telling me some quiet places I could stay at for the time being?”

Much to his own surprise, it did not take long for him to accept the reality of him talking to a horse capable of speech. Maybe the insanity of zombie outbreaks really did get into his head too much.

“U-Umm,” Fluttershy fidgeted as she glanced around the trees before looking back at Frank. “You could stay at my house for a while. But there are some friends of mine that are very small and sweet…”

The man readjusted his sunglasses as he assured her with newfound determination in getting a place to stay at for the time being, “I don’t really enjoy touching small animals, and I’m a bit of a semi-vegetarian-“

…It sounded like the typical bullshit indecisive dietarians would make up, but it did make sense that he started enjoying vegetables much more than usual after seeing zombies eat his own kind.

The “animal peacekeeper” description, on the other hand, had a slightly more prominent sauce of bullshit on it because he never really allowed himself to go near a small animal in the first place. If anything, all he did was tame a tiger by throwing chunks of steak at it, and that alone made him feel like he deserved a medal.

“-so you don’t have to worry about me even thinking about hurting anything.”

Much to his relief, the pony seemed to accept his words carefully. With a shy nod, the pony softly responded, “I understand. We could talk more about how you got lost here, if you’d like.”

Finally, the conversation went to somewhere he was actually interested in. He wanted to get out of the damn world and get back to where he belonged in. If anything, he just wanted to believe that everything he experienced on the ground he stood on was just an extremely unique nightmare.

With a firm nod, the freelance photojournalist, lost in a world he never trekked through before, told the Pegasus,

“I’d definitely appreciate that.”