An Oblivious Balancerby ExtantdreadChaptersOBLIVIOUSCOMING HOMEBYE, WORLDHELLO, EQUESTRIAOBLIVIOUSMay 26th, 2020 What is the definition of loneliness? What about distinctiveness? Are those two feelings so easily distinguishable from one another as I once thought, or are they more similar than anyone realizes? Because now, now that what I’ve been through has had a chance to be considered thoroughly by everyone - well, I’m afraid I can’t tell them apart as easily as I once could. What I’ve been through has been, and words don’t suffice my meaning, extraordinary. Please though, you don’t know what it was like. Don’t go assuming it was good or bad, you weren’t there. None of us can go back anyways now, so we might as well look back on it with a little pride. That’s not gonna happen, of course, but someone can dream. Here I sit, locked away as far as I can possibly be from every person on Earth. There, I wished I had a chance to say goodbye to my family and friends. Of course, I don’t have to anymore. Here, my face is plastered on every news broadcast, digital screen, and billboard around the world. Mind you, it still would have been if I had stayed, but I wouldn’t have had to confront it the way I do now. There, I thought I felt lonely as could be, not ever realizing how I would be treated if I ever came back here. To my point, there are several hundred undeviating reporters from every news agency in existence (as far as I can tell, at least) outside the front windows, every one of them wanting a chance to capture me walking by the glass panes. My basement is, unfortunately, not a far retreat from their madness. I can’t be more than a couple dozen feet from the soles of their shoes down here. Their desperateness to get a glimpse of me makes me feel lonelier than I would have ever thought possible, before this all happened. Here, everyone is distant. My friends, as much as I’d like to say hello in person, can’t even come to the house, either because there’s a smaller sea of reporters around their own home or they can’t get through the one around mine. My family doesn’t know how to treat me, they all just sit in nervousness in their rooms next to each other upstairs. There, sure, I missed home constantly, sometimes wishing it would all just go back to how it was before. But at least I was cared for, and I’m afraid I didn’t make it known how much I appreciated that. It’s a regret of mine. One of many I had. There, in Equestria. Ridiculous, ain’t it? Ya know, I’m not sure how this is gonna work, this piece of writing. Of course I have to write it down, before my memory of it all fades. I don’t know if that was an introduction I’d actually use, or if it was a bunch of nonsense. Whatever it was, it was from the heart. Anyways, I’ll have a lot of free time on my hands, or well, hooves, unable to sleep. I figure it should be a good time to start jotting everything down. This dusty old journal’s been sitting on my desk for a while now. I actually had wanted to write this all down while I was there, but there was always so much going on, I barely ever got the chance. I cannot say that I know if these past two months have, overall, been the most positive of my life, I can assure you that they were far from the worst, despite my condition over that time. My experiences varied greatly, and even if they were sometimes on that low end, it was worth going through, just to have the best of those two months. I still feel as if it's all been a dream, especially when it's now rapidly falling into my past. I certainly don’t want to forget it like that, that’s for sure. Maybe I’ll say at some point in the near future that I'm happy to be home, reunited with family and friends, in some scripted speech, just to get the media off my back. My point in telling you this is... well, I'm not. It’s only been a couple days now, and I’ve gotten over the shock that they’re gone. I don’t think I ever got over the fact that I was actually there. That’s likely for the best though. Ramblings aside, I must say at least that it was a humbling experience. I don’t think I should’ve been the one to go there, and there were probably millions of people who would’ve handled the whole thing better than me. Heck, maybe they wouldn't have gotten nearly killed as many times as I did. To my own defense though, I never meant to be there. I just got sorta selected by random chance, I suppose. Doesn’t excuse half the crap I did though. Frankly, I don’t have the slightest clue what I should do when I’m done, or how polished I should make this, or how I would even publish it. I never thought I would write a book, or journal, or whatever this thing will be called when it turns out. For now though, I’m mostly worried about getting everything accurately described and detailed. That said… I’ve always had a little interest in writing a novel. A novel, mind you. Not an autobiography. I like reading, but it can’t be something as tediously boring as a regular ‘ole autobiography. It’s got to have a bit of sustenance to it. I’m afraid to relive the past two months, though. How the hell could I have been so stupid, so often? It’s going to be painful to have to go through with this… Maybe it’d be easier to do it all out of order, so I don’t break down every time I end a paragraph. Or maybe I should just go through with it. Maybe it’ll get it out of my head, make it easier to accept what’s gone is gone. That’s what I’ll do, I think. I’ll be forced to talk about this for the rest of the my life, so I might as well get the worst of it overwith, and just tell it in the most painful way possible, so the pain is never this bad ever again. One last point of this intro I’d like to make before I start is that I just don’t get why you’ve all been so very bickery about the whole situation. We, as a species, came out unscathed. Alright, so there was no such luck for me, but I certainly don’t regret that out of everything that happened. I know we don’t have contact with them anymore, but that should just be all the reason to look for more like them in our own universe. Well, I do know why some of you are angry and upset, but you literally know nothing about what’s happened over the past couple months of my life. The least you could do is allow me the chance to explain what I’ve done before you throw your pitchforks at me. First of all, I don’t fully understand how it all worked myself, but I will do my best to tell all that I know in this journal. I wanted to tell this in the form of a story, because I don’t think I could sit here and do it any other way without killing myself. It’s just the easiest, and frankly, most exciting way to tell it. So here goes. COMING HOME“ – and now, for the daily news. Believe me folks, we’ve got an odd one for you today. An entire pack of Gray Wolves in Yellowstone Park has gone missing, according to park rangers. The GPS tags fitted onto their legs have stopped working, and while that is apparently not entirely unusual to happen occasionally, the entire pack’s tags have all gone out at once,” the radio newsman said outspokenly. I glanced my eyes at my buddy’s, paying attention to his expression instead of the darkened fields flying by at highway speed just behind the window. He easily noticed my curiosity. “You can turn it up if ya want.” So I did. I listened keenly to the broadcast. “This has lead officials to believe that someone has managed to capture them and destroyed the tags. But not only that, the den that the females were building was also completely destroyed.” We both simultaneously raised our eyebrows. “I’ll just read the description they gave us, ‘The den was completely buried in a foreign soil that is not native to this area. When dug out, there was no sign that any wolf was in the area when the destruction of the den took place.’ The wolves are one part of the population building process in Yellowstone, and police are already actively searching for suspects. They added that this would’ve been a much bigger loss if it happened a decade or two ago. However, - “ and so the newsman went on. We both took a moment to ponder the odd story. “Who goes to Yellowstone, goes out into the wilderness, destroys a wolf den and breaks the tags off an entire pack of the things? How the hell are you supposed to even do that without getting yourself killed?” I finally said, fascinated by the whole thing. “I didn’t know you were such a concerned environmentalist, Pierce,” Mason said mockingly. “I’m not. For the record, I hate wolves. When I lived in that house in the woods as a kid you could hear them howl at night. Every single night. Creeped me out, ya know?” “I don’t recall any wolves living anywhere in America, ‘cept for Yellowstone, Pierce,” he said to spite me. He was also probably right. “Well, I guess they were coyotes then, Mason,” I bitterly spoke, “But even so, I remember hearing them when my parents took us to Yellowstone a few years ago, and they sounded pretty similar from what I could remember. So I still hate ‘em.” I crossed my arms in conclusion. “But seriously though, who does that?” “I dunno man, do I look like I would know?” he said, clearly starting to get annoyed at me taking his focus away from the road that was filled to the brim with the dull shades of grey, red, black and white of the multitude of cars in the morning rush hour. I waved my arm at him as if to say, “Well fine.” My ear’s attention turned back to the radio, and to my disappointment they had gone back to playing the country music that was playing before. Still don’t know why Mason liked that sorta music. Guess it’s just cause we grew up in the midwest. I just never caught on to the stuff. We had been driving for a few hours without an intermission, and were getting pretty restless. My parent’s house would’ve been about an hour away had we not stopped. The fast food place wasn’t anything special, we only stopped just because we had gone the entire night trading off driving and frankly we needed a break. The news was on the TV there, where they were talking about the wolves again. Nothing really new, just a few pictures. I thought whoever took them must of been a pretty bad photographer, because the lighting was very noticeably off on the dirt that they said the den was covered with. Or maybe it was just someone doing a bad photoshop job of trying to highlight the differences. I didn’t know then. Eventually Mason finished his excruciatingly slow manner of eating and we got back on the road. It was pretty eventless except for the morning traffic. We finally made it to our exit, and trudged off the freeway through the town, then through the neighborhoods. Mason pulled up to my parent’s house. “See ya in a bit. Got the list of stuff?” “Uh…” I said, pulling several items out of my pockets. Finally, I found the list, a list of supplies we thought we’d be needing for our trip. “Yep.” “Alright, say hi to your mom for me.” “I will if I catch her.” He drove away, off to his own parent’s house. We’d been friends since we were in elementary school. We actually both moved in at about the same time, about a dozen or so years ago. I remember driving by his house seeing a moving truck outside after we had just finished unpacking. Our assigned seats on the first day of 3rd grade were right next to each other, so we sorta stuck together since then. Maybe I didn’t convey that we are indeed best friends usually, long drives through the night just make us both sour. I don’t even remember why we decided to go camping in the first place, by that point it was obvious it was gonna be a lot of trouble. Maybe I would’ve been better off if we had just ditched the idea long ago... I walked up the stairs to the deck and knocked on the door. My sister opened it. “Hey sis!” I said excitedly. “Hey!” she replied, motioning me inside from the still somewhat chilly spring morning. “You’re here early. Ya just missed Mom and Dad, they left for work already, and I have to leave for school pretty soon,” she said, hugging me in a quick embrace. “Ah, that sucks. But it’s good to see you, it was too bad I missed you during my last visit!” I said, closing the door behind me. “Yeah, sorry about that, I wouldn’t have gone on that sleepover if you would’ve freaking told us earlier that you were coming over!” “Heheh... sorry. It was kind of unplanned. But I’m here now! How’s your year been so far?” “It’s been OK, the team did a lot better this year, we won the region but didn’t quite make it to the state finals. Did Dad not tell you about that?” she said, in reference to her school soccer team. “He mentioned it a little bit, I just wanted to hear it from you. How’d you do, contribute anything in that little sport of yours this year?” I said. I didn’t have much of an appreciation for any sports at all, much less soccer. “Just a couple goals, yeah. But I’m not supposed to score goals often! I’m a defender, how many times do I have to tell you?” she said, remembering when I teased her the last year about playing soccer and not ever scoring anything. I smiled light-heartedly at that last comment, and mentioned, “Anyways, I would’ve offered to take you to school if we had driven my car here instead of Mason’s. When do you have to leave?” “In like,” she took a second to look at a clock, “five minutes.” “Ah. How do you get there nowadays anyway?” “One of my older friends usually picks me up, at least she will until I get my license.” “Mm. Well, I’m glad my car won’t be in the driveway when you get it.” “Hey…” “Just teasing. Mom’s told me you’re better than I was. That really means nothing though.” “Yeah, I was gonna say with the amount of times you nearly rear-ended other people when I had to ride with you…” “Aw, come on, I’m not nearly as bad as I used to be.” “Oh I’m sure,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Well, I’ve got to go make sure I’ve got all my stuff ready.” “Alright, I’m gonna text Mom and tell her I made it home.” She walked up the stairs, leaving me to myself in the house I grew up in for the first time in a few months. I leaned against the stair railing and did what I said I would do, and told Mom I made it safely and got to say hi to Lorena before she left. My eyes scanned the living room after finishing with that, seeing if they moved anything. I planned to take a nap in my favorite couch, which was happily sitting there, looking undisturbed since I had been here the last time. After a couple minutes Lorena came back downstairs with a backpack. “That thing looks heavy,” I commented. “Ya wanna see for yourself?” she said, taking the bag off with noticeable difficulty. She swung it at me from a few steps up, making sure I was ready to catch it. Then she threw it, and it caught me as much as I caught it, forcing me to take a step back. “Sheesh, what’s in this thing? Wait, lemme guess…” I said, thinking of what I had to carry in my sophomore year of high school. She motioned for me to figure it out. “Algebra 2 and World History textbooks?” She looked at me disappointedly, “Pre-Calculus, I passed Algebra 2 last year. But close enough, those and -” “Wait, wait, do you have Mr. Forney for English?” She nodded. “Well that explains it. Does he still make you freaking carry that three inch binder and give you like, five papers to read every day?” She nodded again, her face said my exact thoughts from those many years ago. “Ha, well, don’t look at me for advice. Just… don’t fail. That’ll ruin your grades pretty quick,” I sarcastically confided as we heard the horn of a car outside. “I’ll try,” she said before she came up to me to give me another hug. I hugged her back lightly, then said, “Ya know, I’m not leaving again until this afternoon, so we’ll probably see each other one more time,” to reassure her that I would be here all day. That was the plan. “I guess this is just in case I somehow miss you again.” And that was the last time I hugged my sister for a good couple of months. BYE, WORLDLorena stepped outside, waving goodbye to me as I closed the door behind her. I watched from the window for a second as she hopped into her friend’s car, then turned myself back into the house. It immediately came to my attention that Lorena’s cat, Jasper, was sitting on the stairs. He was just staring at me, flicking his tail up and down. We never bothered each other much in the few months that I lived with him before I moved out, and I didn’t have allergies or anything, but he just never seemed too pleased to be around me. He scratched me pretty badly when I tried to pet him the day she got him, and we avoided each other ever since. I swear I never did anything though, he just didn’t like me for... some reason. I walked past the stairs, somewhat creeped out by him slowly turning his head to keep his eyes glued to me. After a moment, I noticed the new dining table that my parents got. Dang, I remember thinking. They got rid of the old one? Man… There were a ton of childhood memories inscribed in that table, from constantly scrubbed - but never disappearing crayon stains, a countless amount of scratches, and more than a couple dents. My phone buzzed, my mom finally getting back to me. “Oh, that’s nice. Ask me if you can’t find anything for your trip!” the text read. I replied, “I will!” and sent it. To my surprise, it struggled to do so, and it came up with an error message after a few seconds. Finally, I looked at the service bar. There was none. It was extremely confusing, especially considering it had just sent a text just fine, and then received one just a few feet away from where I was currently standing. I turned around to go back to the front door, taking a glance at Jasper as I walked by. Now he seemed furious, whapping his tail against the carpet of the step. That, and… his hair was standing up. Not like he had just scratched himself against the stairs, but it was his entire coat, it was all standing up, like someone had just rubbed a balloon all over him. Which I totally had never done. It was at that moment I felt the static in the air. I reached up to my head, and felt my own hair oddly standing on end. I hurried to the window, opening it to look outside for any clues. After opening it, Jasper jumped down four steps, up the chair next to the window and against against window’s screen in panic. Thankfully the screen wasn’t made of the cheap stuff, otherwise Jasper would’ve torn right through it. “Whoa, hang on a second there, buddy,” I said, grabbing him around the torso, trying to calm him down. He hissed at me, tore himself from my grasp, and jumped down the leg of the chair, at my own limb. I managed to move it far enough away to keep his teeth from my poor jeans, but he was extremely pissed, and managed to give me a two inch cut with one of his claws on my lower left leg. He then ran away from my screams. “OW! YOU LITTLE BASTARD!” I yelled, semi-hopping back a few strides. The odd events were all just starting to add to my confusion. He ran back up the stairs the fastest I had ever seen the fat cat go, probably back to Lorena’s room. “Damn it…” I winced, just fully realizing the pain. But I had to go on, this was far too weird at this point to just stop. Hobbling back to the door, I reached for its handle. “AOOOWWWWW!” I screamed as my hand came close to it. It shocked me bad, and I will swear to this day that the arch between me and that door was three inches long. Of course, it was pretty stupid to reach for a metal handle when my hair was sticking up. I looked at my hand, a dazed look of fear on my face. I breathed a little heavily, still recovering from it, and said “I mean… Good God… what the hell’s gonna happen now? Is the house gonna be struck by lightning?” I looked up and out through the window, with a hint of apprehension on my face. Thankfully, a nearly perfect clear blue sky is all that I saw. Well, there was a slight yellow tint, but it was still somewhat early, so I assumed it was just the angle of the sun’s light. “I don’t understand…” I said, befuddled by everything that had happened. I grabbed for my phone again, and pointed it towards the sky. Nothing. No service. It made absolutely no sense. At first, I thought the cell network must have gone down at the weirdest time possible. I took a glance outside again, and saw the car Lorena got in coming back down the road. “She isn’t gonna believe this…” I said to myself, while wondering why she was coming back. After having watched for another second or two, my eyes definitely noticed a certain... glow, was added to my vision, and it certainly wasn’t coming from the sun, even if it was a yellow glow. I decided that at this point it might be best to go outside for a second to just take a breather. Maybe my phone will work out there, I said to convince myself of my decision. I took a step onto the front deck, probably looking ridiculous with a pained look on my face, my hair standing up and a bleeding leg to go nicely alongside the torn up left leg of my jeans. It would’ve fair to say I looked like a zombie extra for a TV show. The car was getting close, and I also started to notice that it felt pretty hot out there, in the shaded porch. “Sheesh, how hot can it get in ten minutes?” I muttered to myself. It was quite cool when I had arrived. The car slowed, and Lorena opened the door before it stopped, obviously in a hurry. The glow was getting more and more thick with yellow. It was getting hotter too. She hopped out, and immediately looked stunned. At first, I thought it must’ve been a combination of how terrible I must’ve looked just five minutes after she last saw me, alongside the heat, and the yellow glow that she obviously saw as well. “Lorena! Do you know what the hell is going on?” I belted out to her, distressed. Then it happened so quickly. Before she could respond, my feet were nearly taken out from under me. It felt like an earthquake, or at least that’s all I can think of to compare it to. I’ve never even been in an earthquake, having lived in the midwest my entire life, so maybe that isn’t the best of comparisons. It was sudden and intense, and the glow got increasingly and alarmingly thick, while the heat was becoming more humid, like a sauna. A noise, a very high resonation, felt like it was playing all around me, and it was getting louder. It reached a point where I couldn’t see Lorena through the glow, and I scrambled back inside, threw myself on the ground and covered my head with my hands, like we were always taught in school tornado drills. The shaking got more and more intense, and glass started breaking all around me. My mother would have spilled blood if she were there. Finally, I remember feeling like I was floating for a moment, and then like I was dropped. My head must’ve hit the floor, or something, because that was all I remembered until I woke up. Vision slowly came into view, and I was looking at the slanted ceiling of my childhood home, only the picture it provided felt like it was missing something... I never knew how long I was out, it could’ve been just seconds, or hours. However long it was, my body felt terribly sore, like I’d just gone through a full day of physical work. I rolled myself over, quite regrettably after the fact. There was glass littering the floor, and I felt a particularly sharp piece puncture slightly into my side through my torn up shirt. “Ahhhh…. shoot...” my voice rasped in pain. As my sight became less blurred, the light fixture, lying in pieces, came into view only a couple feet beside me. I audibly gasped at seeing the object that was so beloved by my mother lying broken in so many pieces beside me. “She’s gonna kill someone when she finds out about this…” I grimaced, dreading the moment. The pain in my side, combined with the general shock of what I thought had happened, led me to realize that my sister could be outside and somehow endangered still. Instantly, I sprang up and opened the not-fully closed door. There was a long moment of silence from me. “Oh my God,” I finally said to no one. What I was looking at was inexplainable in the rules and laws of physics in our then-current human knowledge. Unless it was a painting, or a prank of some sort, of course. That’s what I initially thought it, just a joke. My eyes darted across the front lawn, parts of edges of it were smoldered and charred, but thankfully not burning. However, there was no immediate sign of my sister. After scampering outside and looking around frantically for a moment, I couldn’t take the huge amount of immediate stress anymore. The chances that it was a joke depressingly decreased, considering there were huge trees surrounding my house that were not there before. Sulking, I walked back inside, the long moments I had to consider what happened incited hysteria in my mind. The panic hit me like a brick. My breathing increased dramatically, I started crying uncontrollably, and I had literally no idea what happened, where I was, or what I should’ve done. Unfortunately, my body felt like collapsing from the panic. So gently as I could, which wasn’t very, I laid down on the floor. Thankfully, none of the glass had made it quite that close to the door. Vision had started to leave me again, so I did what you were supposed to do while passing out. I raised my knees and just laid there, trying to ignore everything and not think too hard about anything. After taking a few minutes trying to recoup myself, sight fully returned to me once again. I attempted to get up, and held onto the stair’s railing for support. Remembering what had caused me to collapse, I felt weak again. “Oh God, I’m not dreaming,” I said to myself, feeling nauseous after taking another confirming glance outside. Holding myself up by the railings, I shuffled towards the kitchen, looking out the windows on the way. A million thoughts were going through my head in that short walk, yet I still didn’t have the faintest idea of where I was. Frankly, the fact that the outside world looked so… cartoonish, hadn’t registered with me, just yet. I simply thought I was in a forest of some sort, somewhere far away from where my house should’ve been. Jasper was there in the kitchen, hiding under the dining table. He was whapping his tail angrily, and I didn’t have any desire to disturb whatever was keeping him under there. My hands opened the refrigerator, I grabbed a bottle of water, feeling fairly thirsty. I shuffled back to the front door. The door’s handle turned. My eyes began to adjust to the outside light. Down the porch steps. Again, I frantically looked around for my sister. I had no such luck in finding her. Treading across the lawn, I then took a step onto where the asphalt road should’ve been. A dirt one took its place. My shoes touched the dirt of another planet. Those marks may not exist now, like Armstrong’s, but they quickly became one of the big symbols of my “achievement” anyways, after I took a picture of them later on that day. Finally, after being so blind for so long, I started to notice the oddities of the world I had stepped into. My eyes shot from tree to eerie tree, realizing the gloominess of the forest. It was so dark on the ground level, leading me to initially believe it was early morning like it was back on Earth. Then I looked at the sky. It wasn’t pink, or purple, or dark whatsoever. It was bright blue, and I saw the glare of the sun through a tree, almost directly overhead. The height of the tree surprised me, but still I could only see a glimpse of the sun through the leaves. My eyes looked all around me, taking in everything else. Belatedly, I noticed the flatness of the colors, the screeching darkness of the forest, and the general... familiarity of it all. One side of the path went deeper into the woodlands, a place that at that moment I had no desire to go to. On the other side, I breathed a quick sigh of relief as I saw a wide opening to lighter pastures and skies, and no more creepy trees. Slowly I walked out from the property, farther and farther, ‘til I was in the middle of the path, where I went on my knees. My palms came to my face, shielding them from the world that was starting to become too much for me. There on my knees, an idea of where I was popped into my mind, and my eyes widened. The voice in my head tried to convince me that it was a trick, all of it. “No. No, it is NOT what you think it is. It’s a trick. Just a trick.” That’s what I told myself, at least. The rest of my body came down with me, and the tears started dripping once again, coming from my hatred for whoever or whatever had ripped me away from home, my friends and family. I had a life that I found to be worth living. A future to look forward to. To be just driven away from it like that with absolutely no real reason or even hope to believe I’d ever make it back had its impacts on me, that’s for sure. A sound had gradually come to my ears as I contemplated this seemingly gloomy turn, and it was getting more powerful. Soon, I managed to see a different blue among the pure sky. It was blurry, I’m not sure whether from my tears or its speed. And boy, was it moving fast. Desiring anything but to be seen and noticed by something alien to me, especially so soon, I ran for the cover of the porch, and hoped against hope that what I thought the sound was wouldn’t see the house. A few minutes passed, and the noise went away. The trees had, by some lone form of grace, obscured my residence. Still sniffling a bit, I went back in the house, and checked the downstairs. There were a few picture frames down there, so there was yet more broken glass where some of them were knocked off. After inspecting the damage, I grabbed a few things, feeling more like doing a bit of exploration. Most notably, from a box in the storage room I grabbed a pair of binoculars, then headed back up. To the outside world I went once again, this time going completely across the road. The trees, dirt, heck the entire world was... simplistic, for lack of a better term. It wasn’t exactly like the show, there was much more detail, but to say it was anything near realistic by human-Earth standards would be dishonest. The entire thing was nutty, it actually could’ve been a painting for all I knew, until I went up to the trees. The dark, hundred-foot tall log really did just look like a tree from a cartoon, and a fairly menacing one at that. The Everfree had a certain sense of creepiness, though that disappeared if you were to retreat inside of the house. Curiosity by far beat my fear, so of course I went to go see what it felt like. The bark of the tree certainly felt real, just like any tree from Earth. It was sharp, not the kind that would be nice to your hands if you climbed it. Disbelief still stayed with me to an extent, and I started walking down the path, touching all of the trees to be sure as possible. Soon I had reached the path’s entrance. The house was, in fact, barely in the Everfree, perhaps only a hundred feet. When I reached this point, I took in the new surroundings, the path now going along the sides of the forest to my left and right. Everywhere else was clear of trees, and my heart felt lifted just from exiting that blasted place. Across the walkway was a hill. I had no idea which way to go, so I walked across the road and hiked shortly up it just to get a better view of my new environment. There I found the sight that would make me feel the most enraptured I’ve ever felt. In the distance, there were lots of buildings with quaint slanted roofs, red windowsills and framing, and of course the chimneys and odd little wooden perches that seemed to be a standard feature on many of the structures. This came with a faint but almost enchanting noise of a small-town market. A poor little smile came to me, and finally I thought, Maybe this won’t be so bad. HELLO, EQUESTRIAI sat down on the top of the hill, and thought. I started by calming myself down once again, by trying to think of nothing. It didn’t work. So instead, my thoughts turned to my family, mostly wondering when or if I would ever see them again. Then, I thought about Mason, and the rest of my friends, just acknowledging and coming to terms with the fact that it would likely be at least a very long time before I saw any of them again. At that point there was no longer any doubt in my mind that I was in Equestria, and it was an overwhelming thought, but I stupidly kept thinking, continuing to overload myself. I tried to think of what I was gonna do, who I was gonna meet, and what I would say. Talking to myself while subconsciously questioning my sanity, I pondered, “Let’s see… there’s Pinkie, Twilight, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, and Fluttershy. Who do I go to? Who will help me, and not freak out too much at the sight of me? Pinkie and Fluttershy are out of the question, too crazy and too easily surprised. And it probably shouldn’t be Rainbow, don’t wanna get myself knocked out. The other three probably... well, hopefully will be pretty reasonable. I don’t exactly know where any of them live though…” I snapped out of thought and looked over towards the town once again. I took the pair of binoculars taken from downstairs out from its casing and scanned the town’s buildings, eventually spotting a few things I recognized, the huge treehouse and the boutique the most notable... about as far away from me as possible. I could only see the tops of the two buildings. “Dang, both of them are right on the edge of town. Well, guess I’m gonna have to go find Applejack.” There was no sign of Sweet Apple Acres that I could see, lamentably. To go with that, there was every possibility that it was also on the other side of town, because I had no friggin’ clue how the area was laid out. Neither could I see any of the residences of the other three ponies I knew, even though I didn’t want to go to any of those, it would’ve been nice to have known where they were. Eventually, I realized that I was probably pushing myself into shock from thinking about all of this. Seriously, Ponyville was just sitting a mile away from the hill for me to just… look at. So, I actually had some sense to stay seated for a little while and try to calm myself down once again, this time by just thinking about my house, since I wasn’t gonna be missing that. There was broken glass literally everywhere, which was going to be a pain to clean up. To go along with that, I had no idea if there was any structural damage, having no clue what the trans-universal twisting could’ve done to my poor house. My pulse was too fast for my liking, so I kept resting for a moment and listened to the quiet noises of the village in the distance. Minutes passed by, and I had laid down by this point, staring up at the clear sky, keeping track of my heart rate. What I assume was the Ponyville School’s bell, went off at one point, though I didn’t know for what. It could’ve been for lunch, or for the end of school, or for something else. I didn’t have the time, and foolishly it never occurred to me to check any of the clocks in my house. Unfortunately, the sound of an airplane came to my ears once again, although at that point I was pretty sure it wasn’t just any plane. “Crud.” I dived down the hill as quick as I could without breaking my neck and hid in the somewhat tall grass to conceal myself. Cringing and hoping that the sound wouldn’t come any closer to me, another noise came to my ears that shocked me. “Uhh… sir, what are you doing?” the familiar voice questioned from the pathway on the bottom of the hill. My eyes flashed open, adrenaline flowed, and breathing stopped. Slowly, my head turned to this new sound. As my surprised face turned to hers, she started to look frightened. “Are-are you OK?” Finally remembering to breathe, I gave an infirm huff in response, which in retrospect did not help, though I couldn’t really control it, acting by instinct. I must’ve looked like a savage. My hair was still messed up and stiff from standing on end from the static, there was dried blood all over me, a two inch cut in my leg, and my shirt and pants were torn up and stained from all the little cuts I had from the glass and Jasper’s painful claws. And I had just dove down a hill for no good reason. “Can-can you talk?” she asked, obviously wanting to help if she could, probably legitimately questioning my ability to communicate. “I… I… Yes,” I said, squirming to sit up and look somewhat civilized. “Well, are you OK then?” “Uh… Yes. Well, I... don’t really know.” I didn’t know what to say, I felt paralyzed. She was clearly waiting for me to elaborate. After an awkward moment of silence, she questioned, “S-so are you hurt, are you-“ “No, I just- I’m sorry, what else did you want to say?” I said in nervousness, accidentally interrupting her. “No, no, you go ahead.” She said, seemingly at a loss for words herself. “Well, I- I just,” I paused, still not knowing what to say. Nothing was registering in my head. Sure, my mind could take the change in the look of the terrain without freaking out too much, but this? Talking to an alien? Eventually, I nearly yelled, “Oh-OH my God. Are you real?” She looked around, and looked back at me, more than likely thinking I was completely insane. “Yes, I’m pretty sure I’m real. Are you sure you’re alright, sir?” I gave a nervous laugh. “At this point, to be honest, I have no idea. I’m confused, and I wanna go home.” “Oh, well, I’m sure that my friends and I could help you find a way home. Uh… where exactly do you live?” she replied, seeming more relieved now that I had given at least given some tidbit of information to her. “Uh, you see, it’s kinda complicated. My house is just down that road. You can see it from here,” I replied, getting more used to talking now that I just had to answer straightforward questions. “Huh? You live in the... Everfree?” she said, turning around to look where I had pointed. “Whoa, I definitely do not remember that being there. Did you just... move there?” she asked, her face showing great concern over what I told her. “Not, uh, willingly.” “What do you mean?” “OK, OK, I - I’m just gonna give you a brief rundown, and you’re gonna think I’m more crazy than you already do. I was just there, in my house, that house. It was a perfectly normal day, then poof, there was a big yellow light, a lot of shaking and all of the sudden I’m here.” She blinked. “... Wow. That had to take a lot of magical energy to teleport you and your entire house there. Actually, that had to take an impossible amount of energy, at least for one pony to conjure." “I don’t know if it was magic.” She chuckled a little bit, “What else could it have been?” I paused for a moment, considering what she had said. I truly had not half a clue as to what brought me to Equestria at that point. The idea of magic being real hadn’t hit me. “I - I don’t know Twilight… maybe you’re right....” Twilight blinked in alarm. “How do you know my name?” she asked, in an accusing manner. My mouth was stuck open. I spoke without thinking. I, of course, knew an answer to that question, but it wasn’t one that I wanted to give at that very moment. Now glaring at me in suspicion, she pestered, “Well?” “It’s… it’s really a very long story, uh, ma’am.” I didn’t know what to call her. There were too many alternative options, and they all seemed too awkward to use. “Well, would you mind telling it? The way you’ve been acting and talking, it’s just made me a bit nervous,” she chided, speaking with more confidence and seriousness than before. That made me extraordinarily nervous, and I felt like breaking down right then and there. I don’t know what kept me going. “Oh… ah. Yes, I’m sorry. I don’t want to spook you, trust me. It’s uh… really an honor to meet you.” “It... is?” she remarked, raising an eyebrow. Quickly, I decided the honest route was best way to go. Mind you, I wasn’t planning on saying every detail right there and then, but I did not want to lie to her and lose more trust than I had already lost. “Yes, it is. If you could… excuse me to think for a moment. I don’t know how to te-” It was at that moment that I realized what I was looking at. Yes, it was indeed Twilight Sparkle. She was wearing a saddle-pack with some bottles sticking out of the top of the bags. At first, I thought they were covering up something of her’s. That moment, however, I noticed she was instead missing the something I thought was there. Her wings. They weren’t there. Carelessly, I blurted out, “How come... you don’t have wi-” My hands instantly covered my mouth in panic. “Of course,” I thought. When I looked at her treehouse, I did not realize that I was looking at her treehouse, which should’ve been smashed to smithereens. “Oh shiiii-,” I quietly breathed into my hands. Had I just nearly accidentally revealed her future? My plan to tell her the truth went out the window, and I had no idea what to do. I didn’t know if it was alright to even tell her that I might’ve known her future, what with all the science fiction movies I had seen where the main characters ‘break the space-time continuum’ by playing around with time travel. Unfortunately, my facial expressions seemingly told her that I was taken aback. Her face had an ill-tempered look from my sudden aversion from saying that I would explain my freak-out. It seemed hopeless for me. Then, my phone went off, jingling its little jingle to let me know I just got a text, while simultaneously scaring the heck outta both of us. “Wha-what in Equestria was that?” My eyes widened and jaw dropped. “That… that was my phone!” Scrambling to tear the little device out of my pocket, I pushed the screen to read the new message. “What IS that?” Twilight asked from the dirt pathway. “It’s… it’s my phone. It’s just a thing a lot of humans have,” I quickly explained, walking down the hill towards her. “A - a lot of what have?” “Humans, a lot of humans. I’m a human, that’s what we call ourselves, humans,” I clarified, now reading the text. It was from Mason. The text read: “dude, just heard about your parents house burning down. U ok?” “What? My house burning down?” I sneered under my breath. “What’s he talking about?” Twilight was listening intently. “Your house is burning? But isn’t your house right there?” she interjected, motioning her head towards my childhood’s humble abode. We both looked towards the house. “Uh, it’s not burning,” she stated. “Nope,” I replied. “Why did you say your house was burning then?” “I didn’t, he did.” Twilight squinted in bewilderment. “What?” she retorted. I looked up at her. She was weirded out by this to no end, there was no question about that. “It’s - it’s my friend, Mason, alright?” “Huh? Wha- Where... where is he then?” She quietly perplexed in an increasing state of frustration. “Oh my goodness,” I said in irritation,“It’s right here.” I proceeded to point the phone’s screen at her. “I don’t get it, mister human, I didn’t even hear this mason friend of yours-” she said, not looking at the screen right away. “Oh,” she paused, reading the small text, “I see, it says it right there… why does he have such poor grammar?” “Oh for the love of… just forget it.” “But-but why did he say your house was burning if it’s right there?” She declared, motioning to my house again. “I don’t know,” I said, exasperated. At this point it was clear we were getting on each other’s nerves. Thankfully, I suppose, I finally realized yet another anomaly in the situation. “WAIT!” I yelled. “What!” She replied, joining in. “HOW THE HELL DO I HAVE SERVICE?” Her eye twitched, as she screamed in annoyance, “I. DON’T. KNOW. WHAT. YOU’RE. TALKING. ABOUT.” I gave a nervous laugh, then stupidly said, “Twilight, I have service!” “I still don’t know what that is,” she hissed. “What kinda provider has interdimensional service?” I mumbled, baffled at the fact that I had the ability to still communicate with Earth. “Ugh.” She stated in acceptance of my vagueness. “I have to.. I have to… if they think the house burned down... oh no. They might think I’m dead!” As much as I realized I was ticking off Twilight by not explaining to her what was going on, that text brought what I thought was a more pressing matter. So I sat there for a moment, typing out, “Everyone, I’m fine. The house hasn’t burned down, Jasper’s fine, but what happened will take some explaining.’ As I was doing this, Twilight just stared at me, hopelessly confounded as I - to her - pushed on a little bright light a bunch. “And… there. Sent a message to my family and friends,” I confirmed, as the message successfully delivered itself to my joy. She stared at me, expecting me to just keep blurting out things she didn’t understand. Now, I had time to explain everything to her. I felt pretty bad for not being able to earlier in the conversation, at that point it seemed like she was already fed up with me. I sighed, then got to fixing my mistakes. “OK Twilight, this is a telephone. A mobile telephone,” I said, figuring that was a good enough spot as any to start at. She blinked, suddenly looking interested. “Alright, what exactly does that do?” “It’s a communications device. A lot of humans have one, especially where I live. Each one has a number, and all you have to do is enter another person’s number in the device and it’ll call it. Basically, that means you can talk to the person with the other telephone.” “Call? How does a telephone call another telephone?” she questioned, having no context to fully understand what I was saying. “Ah, well you see, when a person ‘calls’, it makes the other person’s telephone ‘ring’, or just make a sound to let that person know they’re being called, which is what we heard earlier from my phone. When the other person picks up the phone, they can answer the call and talk.” “... So you talk, like what you showed me with your friend, with those written messages?” “No, no, talking with voices.” “Whoa, how does that work? And why did you have written if you could actually talk to him?” “Ah… one question at a time. I couldn’t explain it to you fully, even though I want to. Service! That’s what I mean by that actually. When I say service, I’m saying that I’m getting service from a telephone tower. Which is really weird, because there are no telephone towers anywhere near here.” “Huh? Service from a tower? What does that even mean?” “The answer to that is very scientific, and that’s why I said I couldn’t explain it to you fully. I guess I can try. Basically what happens is your voice gets electronically turned into a signal, which is sent to a big metal tower, that receives it, sends it to a satellite, which sends the signal-” “Whoa, whoa. Satellite? As in a moon?” “No, no no. An artificial satellite with a bunch of electronics on it. We send up satellites for a lot of-” Her jaw dropped. She interrupted,“Ar-artificial? You mean you send things into orbit?” I nodded. “Oh my goodness,” she paused. “How! How do you do that?” Twilight said, unable to contain her newfound excitement. “Okay, okay Twilight, please don’t freak out. I’m going to overwhelm you if I give you all the details here. So… can we talk it maybe a little later? I’m sure you’ll love human technology, but right now I’m really scared, and I want to find out what the heck is going on,” I confessed. “Oh…. right. Well, I don’t know for sure, teleportation is kind of tricky. It gets exponentially more difficult the farther you go, and mass is a factor as well.” I nearly interrupted her, raising a finger, but decided to let her continue. “Personally, I couldn’t dream of teleporting myself more than a dozen or so miles at most, let alone the distance between where ever you came from and Equestria, not to mention that humongous house you brought with you. I don’t think Celestia’s magic could even come close to that kind of power.” “Okay… so how else could I have gotten here?” I maintained. She mulled over the thought for a moment. “I… don’t know,” she eventually answered. My hopes dropped significantly. Sighing, I muttered, “I’m not gonna be going home for a while, am I?” Twilight frowned. Author's Note Hello reader! Thank you for reading my first foray into this story. Feedback is welcomed below! Also, I'm looking for a pre-reader! I feel like I spent way too much time scouring over these first few chapters, I need someone more experienced with spotting errors, and maybe giving me general advice about the story and writing techniques and whatnot. Message me or comment below if you're willing. Updates for this story might be infrequent, I don't have guaranteed free time too often.
OBLIVIOUSMay 26th, 2020 What is the definition of loneliness? What about distinctiveness? Are those two feelings so easily distinguishable from one another as I once thought, or are they more similar than anyone realizes? Because now, now that what I’ve been through has had a chance to be considered thoroughly by everyone - well, I’m afraid I can’t tell them apart as easily as I once could. What I’ve been through has been, and words don’t suffice my meaning, extraordinary. Please though, you don’t know what it was like. Don’t go assuming it was good or bad, you weren’t there. None of us can go back anyways now, so we might as well look back on it with a little pride. That’s not gonna happen, of course, but someone can dream. Here I sit, locked away as far as I can possibly be from every person on Earth. There, I wished I had a chance to say goodbye to my family and friends. Of course, I don’t have to anymore. Here, my face is plastered on every news broadcast, digital screen, and billboard around the world. Mind you, it still would have been if I had stayed, but I wouldn’t have had to confront it the way I do now. There, I thought I felt lonely as could be, not ever realizing how I would be treated if I ever came back here. To my point, there are several hundred undeviating reporters from every news agency in existence (as far as I can tell, at least) outside the front windows, every one of them wanting a chance to capture me walking by the glass panes. My basement is, unfortunately, not a far retreat from their madness. I can’t be more than a couple dozen feet from the soles of their shoes down here. Their desperateness to get a glimpse of me makes me feel lonelier than I would have ever thought possible, before this all happened. Here, everyone is distant. My friends, as much as I’d like to say hello in person, can’t even come to the house, either because there’s a smaller sea of reporters around their own home or they can’t get through the one around mine. My family doesn’t know how to treat me, they all just sit in nervousness in their rooms next to each other upstairs. There, sure, I missed home constantly, sometimes wishing it would all just go back to how it was before. But at least I was cared for, and I’m afraid I didn’t make it known how much I appreciated that. It’s a regret of mine. One of many I had. There, in Equestria. Ridiculous, ain’t it? Ya know, I’m not sure how this is gonna work, this piece of writing. Of course I have to write it down, before my memory of it all fades. I don’t know if that was an introduction I’d actually use, or if it was a bunch of nonsense. Whatever it was, it was from the heart. Anyways, I’ll have a lot of free time on my hands, or well, hooves, unable to sleep. I figure it should be a good time to start jotting everything down. This dusty old journal’s been sitting on my desk for a while now. I actually had wanted to write this all down while I was there, but there was always so much going on, I barely ever got the chance. I cannot say that I know if these past two months have, overall, been the most positive of my life, I can assure you that they were far from the worst, despite my condition over that time. My experiences varied greatly, and even if they were sometimes on that low end, it was worth going through, just to have the best of those two months. I still feel as if it's all been a dream, especially when it's now rapidly falling into my past. I certainly don’t want to forget it like that, that’s for sure. Maybe I’ll say at some point in the near future that I'm happy to be home, reunited with family and friends, in some scripted speech, just to get the media off my back. My point in telling you this is... well, I'm not. It’s only been a couple days now, and I’ve gotten over the shock that they’re gone. I don’t think I ever got over the fact that I was actually there. That’s likely for the best though. Ramblings aside, I must say at least that it was a humbling experience. I don’t think I should’ve been the one to go there, and there were probably millions of people who would’ve handled the whole thing better than me. Heck, maybe they wouldn't have gotten nearly killed as many times as I did. To my own defense though, I never meant to be there. I just got sorta selected by random chance, I suppose. Doesn’t excuse half the crap I did though. Frankly, I don’t have the slightest clue what I should do when I’m done, or how polished I should make this, or how I would even publish it. I never thought I would write a book, or journal, or whatever this thing will be called when it turns out. For now though, I’m mostly worried about getting everything accurately described and detailed. That said… I’ve always had a little interest in writing a novel. A novel, mind you. Not an autobiography. I like reading, but it can’t be something as tediously boring as a regular ‘ole autobiography. It’s got to have a bit of sustenance to it. I’m afraid to relive the past two months, though. How the hell could I have been so stupid, so often? It’s going to be painful to have to go through with this… Maybe it’d be easier to do it all out of order, so I don’t break down every time I end a paragraph. Or maybe I should just go through with it. Maybe it’ll get it out of my head, make it easier to accept what’s gone is gone. That’s what I’ll do, I think. I’ll be forced to talk about this for the rest of the my life, so I might as well get the worst of it overwith, and just tell it in the most painful way possible, so the pain is never this bad ever again. One last point of this intro I’d like to make before I start is that I just don’t get why you’ve all been so very bickery about the whole situation. We, as a species, came out unscathed. Alright, so there was no such luck for me, but I certainly don’t regret that out of everything that happened. I know we don’t have contact with them anymore, but that should just be all the reason to look for more like them in our own universe. Well, I do know why some of you are angry and upset, but you literally know nothing about what’s happened over the past couple months of my life. The least you could do is allow me the chance to explain what I’ve done before you throw your pitchforks at me. First of all, I don’t fully understand how it all worked myself, but I will do my best to tell all that I know in this journal. I wanted to tell this in the form of a story, because I don’t think I could sit here and do it any other way without killing myself. It’s just the easiest, and frankly, most exciting way to tell it. So here goes.
COMING HOME“ – and now, for the daily news. Believe me folks, we’ve got an odd one for you today. An entire pack of Gray Wolves in Yellowstone Park has gone missing, according to park rangers. The GPS tags fitted onto their legs have stopped working, and while that is apparently not entirely unusual to happen occasionally, the entire pack’s tags have all gone out at once,” the radio newsman said outspokenly. I glanced my eyes at my buddy’s, paying attention to his expression instead of the darkened fields flying by at highway speed just behind the window. He easily noticed my curiosity. “You can turn it up if ya want.” So I did. I listened keenly to the broadcast. “This has lead officials to believe that someone has managed to capture them and destroyed the tags. But not only that, the den that the females were building was also completely destroyed.” We both simultaneously raised our eyebrows. “I’ll just read the description they gave us, ‘The den was completely buried in a foreign soil that is not native to this area. When dug out, there was no sign that any wolf was in the area when the destruction of the den took place.’ The wolves are one part of the population building process in Yellowstone, and police are already actively searching for suspects. They added that this would’ve been a much bigger loss if it happened a decade or two ago. However, - “ and so the newsman went on. We both took a moment to ponder the odd story. “Who goes to Yellowstone, goes out into the wilderness, destroys a wolf den and breaks the tags off an entire pack of the things? How the hell are you supposed to even do that without getting yourself killed?” I finally said, fascinated by the whole thing. “I didn’t know you were such a concerned environmentalist, Pierce,” Mason said mockingly. “I’m not. For the record, I hate wolves. When I lived in that house in the woods as a kid you could hear them howl at night. Every single night. Creeped me out, ya know?” “I don’t recall any wolves living anywhere in America, ‘cept for Yellowstone, Pierce,” he said to spite me. He was also probably right. “Well, I guess they were coyotes then, Mason,” I bitterly spoke, “But even so, I remember hearing them when my parents took us to Yellowstone a few years ago, and they sounded pretty similar from what I could remember. So I still hate ‘em.” I crossed my arms in conclusion. “But seriously though, who does that?” “I dunno man, do I look like I would know?” he said, clearly starting to get annoyed at me taking his focus away from the road that was filled to the brim with the dull shades of grey, red, black and white of the multitude of cars in the morning rush hour. I waved my arm at him as if to say, “Well fine.” My ear’s attention turned back to the radio, and to my disappointment they had gone back to playing the country music that was playing before. Still don’t know why Mason liked that sorta music. Guess it’s just cause we grew up in the midwest. I just never caught on to the stuff. We had been driving for a few hours without an intermission, and were getting pretty restless. My parent’s house would’ve been about an hour away had we not stopped. The fast food place wasn’t anything special, we only stopped just because we had gone the entire night trading off driving and frankly we needed a break. The news was on the TV there, where they were talking about the wolves again. Nothing really new, just a few pictures. I thought whoever took them must of been a pretty bad photographer, because the lighting was very noticeably off on the dirt that they said the den was covered with. Or maybe it was just someone doing a bad photoshop job of trying to highlight the differences. I didn’t know then. Eventually Mason finished his excruciatingly slow manner of eating and we got back on the road. It was pretty eventless except for the morning traffic. We finally made it to our exit, and trudged off the freeway through the town, then through the neighborhoods. Mason pulled up to my parent’s house. “See ya in a bit. Got the list of stuff?” “Uh…” I said, pulling several items out of my pockets. Finally, I found the list, a list of supplies we thought we’d be needing for our trip. “Yep.” “Alright, say hi to your mom for me.” “I will if I catch her.” He drove away, off to his own parent’s house. We’d been friends since we were in elementary school. We actually both moved in at about the same time, about a dozen or so years ago. I remember driving by his house seeing a moving truck outside after we had just finished unpacking. Our assigned seats on the first day of 3rd grade were right next to each other, so we sorta stuck together since then. Maybe I didn’t convey that we are indeed best friends usually, long drives through the night just make us both sour. I don’t even remember why we decided to go camping in the first place, by that point it was obvious it was gonna be a lot of trouble. Maybe I would’ve been better off if we had just ditched the idea long ago... I walked up the stairs to the deck and knocked on the door. My sister opened it. “Hey sis!” I said excitedly. “Hey!” she replied, motioning me inside from the still somewhat chilly spring morning. “You’re here early. Ya just missed Mom and Dad, they left for work already, and I have to leave for school pretty soon,” she said, hugging me in a quick embrace. “Ah, that sucks. But it’s good to see you, it was too bad I missed you during my last visit!” I said, closing the door behind me. “Yeah, sorry about that, I wouldn’t have gone on that sleepover if you would’ve freaking told us earlier that you were coming over!” “Heheh... sorry. It was kind of unplanned. But I’m here now! How’s your year been so far?” “It’s been OK, the team did a lot better this year, we won the region but didn’t quite make it to the state finals. Did Dad not tell you about that?” she said, in reference to her school soccer team. “He mentioned it a little bit, I just wanted to hear it from you. How’d you do, contribute anything in that little sport of yours this year?” I said. I didn’t have much of an appreciation for any sports at all, much less soccer. “Just a couple goals, yeah. But I’m not supposed to score goals often! I’m a defender, how many times do I have to tell you?” she said, remembering when I teased her the last year about playing soccer and not ever scoring anything. I smiled light-heartedly at that last comment, and mentioned, “Anyways, I would’ve offered to take you to school if we had driven my car here instead of Mason’s. When do you have to leave?” “In like,” she took a second to look at a clock, “five minutes.” “Ah. How do you get there nowadays anyway?” “One of my older friends usually picks me up, at least she will until I get my license.” “Mm. Well, I’m glad my car won’t be in the driveway when you get it.” “Hey…” “Just teasing. Mom’s told me you’re better than I was. That really means nothing though.” “Yeah, I was gonna say with the amount of times you nearly rear-ended other people when I had to ride with you…” “Aw, come on, I’m not nearly as bad as I used to be.” “Oh I’m sure,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Well, I’ve got to go make sure I’ve got all my stuff ready.” “Alright, I’m gonna text Mom and tell her I made it home.” She walked up the stairs, leaving me to myself in the house I grew up in for the first time in a few months. I leaned against the stair railing and did what I said I would do, and told Mom I made it safely and got to say hi to Lorena before she left. My eyes scanned the living room after finishing with that, seeing if they moved anything. I planned to take a nap in my favorite couch, which was happily sitting there, looking undisturbed since I had been here the last time. After a couple minutes Lorena came back downstairs with a backpack. “That thing looks heavy,” I commented. “Ya wanna see for yourself?” she said, taking the bag off with noticeable difficulty. She swung it at me from a few steps up, making sure I was ready to catch it. Then she threw it, and it caught me as much as I caught it, forcing me to take a step back. “Sheesh, what’s in this thing? Wait, lemme guess…” I said, thinking of what I had to carry in my sophomore year of high school. She motioned for me to figure it out. “Algebra 2 and World History textbooks?” She looked at me disappointedly, “Pre-Calculus, I passed Algebra 2 last year. But close enough, those and -” “Wait, wait, do you have Mr. Forney for English?” She nodded. “Well that explains it. Does he still make you freaking carry that three inch binder and give you like, five papers to read every day?” She nodded again, her face said my exact thoughts from those many years ago. “Ha, well, don’t look at me for advice. Just… don’t fail. That’ll ruin your grades pretty quick,” I sarcastically confided as we heard the horn of a car outside. “I’ll try,” she said before she came up to me to give me another hug. I hugged her back lightly, then said, “Ya know, I’m not leaving again until this afternoon, so we’ll probably see each other one more time,” to reassure her that I would be here all day. That was the plan. “I guess this is just in case I somehow miss you again.” And that was the last time I hugged my sister for a good couple of months.
BYE, WORLDLorena stepped outside, waving goodbye to me as I closed the door behind her. I watched from the window for a second as she hopped into her friend’s car, then turned myself back into the house. It immediately came to my attention that Lorena’s cat, Jasper, was sitting on the stairs. He was just staring at me, flicking his tail up and down. We never bothered each other much in the few months that I lived with him before I moved out, and I didn’t have allergies or anything, but he just never seemed too pleased to be around me. He scratched me pretty badly when I tried to pet him the day she got him, and we avoided each other ever since. I swear I never did anything though, he just didn’t like me for... some reason. I walked past the stairs, somewhat creeped out by him slowly turning his head to keep his eyes glued to me. After a moment, I noticed the new dining table that my parents got. Dang, I remember thinking. They got rid of the old one? Man… There were a ton of childhood memories inscribed in that table, from constantly scrubbed - but never disappearing crayon stains, a countless amount of scratches, and more than a couple dents. My phone buzzed, my mom finally getting back to me. “Oh, that’s nice. Ask me if you can’t find anything for your trip!” the text read. I replied, “I will!” and sent it. To my surprise, it struggled to do so, and it came up with an error message after a few seconds. Finally, I looked at the service bar. There was none. It was extremely confusing, especially considering it had just sent a text just fine, and then received one just a few feet away from where I was currently standing. I turned around to go back to the front door, taking a glance at Jasper as I walked by. Now he seemed furious, whapping his tail against the carpet of the step. That, and… his hair was standing up. Not like he had just scratched himself against the stairs, but it was his entire coat, it was all standing up, like someone had just rubbed a balloon all over him. Which I totally had never done. It was at that moment I felt the static in the air. I reached up to my head, and felt my own hair oddly standing on end. I hurried to the window, opening it to look outside for any clues. After opening it, Jasper jumped down four steps, up the chair next to the window and against against window’s screen in panic. Thankfully the screen wasn’t made of the cheap stuff, otherwise Jasper would’ve torn right through it. “Whoa, hang on a second there, buddy,” I said, grabbing him around the torso, trying to calm him down. He hissed at me, tore himself from my grasp, and jumped down the leg of the chair, at my own limb. I managed to move it far enough away to keep his teeth from my poor jeans, but he was extremely pissed, and managed to give me a two inch cut with one of his claws on my lower left leg. He then ran away from my screams. “OW! YOU LITTLE BASTARD!” I yelled, semi-hopping back a few strides. The odd events were all just starting to add to my confusion. He ran back up the stairs the fastest I had ever seen the fat cat go, probably back to Lorena’s room. “Damn it…” I winced, just fully realizing the pain. But I had to go on, this was far too weird at this point to just stop. Hobbling back to the door, I reached for its handle. “AOOOWWWWW!” I screamed as my hand came close to it. It shocked me bad, and I will swear to this day that the arch between me and that door was three inches long. Of course, it was pretty stupid to reach for a metal handle when my hair was sticking up. I looked at my hand, a dazed look of fear on my face. I breathed a little heavily, still recovering from it, and said “I mean… Good God… what the hell’s gonna happen now? Is the house gonna be struck by lightning?” I looked up and out through the window, with a hint of apprehension on my face. Thankfully, a nearly perfect clear blue sky is all that I saw. Well, there was a slight yellow tint, but it was still somewhat early, so I assumed it was just the angle of the sun’s light. “I don’t understand…” I said, befuddled by everything that had happened. I grabbed for my phone again, and pointed it towards the sky. Nothing. No service. It made absolutely no sense. At first, I thought the cell network must have gone down at the weirdest time possible. I took a glance outside again, and saw the car Lorena got in coming back down the road. “She isn’t gonna believe this…” I said to myself, while wondering why she was coming back. After having watched for another second or two, my eyes definitely noticed a certain... glow, was added to my vision, and it certainly wasn’t coming from the sun, even if it was a yellow glow. I decided that at this point it might be best to go outside for a second to just take a breather. Maybe my phone will work out there, I said to convince myself of my decision. I took a step onto the front deck, probably looking ridiculous with a pained look on my face, my hair standing up and a bleeding leg to go nicely alongside the torn up left leg of my jeans. It would’ve fair to say I looked like a zombie extra for a TV show. The car was getting close, and I also started to notice that it felt pretty hot out there, in the shaded porch. “Sheesh, how hot can it get in ten minutes?” I muttered to myself. It was quite cool when I had arrived. The car slowed, and Lorena opened the door before it stopped, obviously in a hurry. The glow was getting more and more thick with yellow. It was getting hotter too. She hopped out, and immediately looked stunned. At first, I thought it must’ve been a combination of how terrible I must’ve looked just five minutes after she last saw me, alongside the heat, and the yellow glow that she obviously saw as well. “Lorena! Do you know what the hell is going on?” I belted out to her, distressed. Then it happened so quickly. Before she could respond, my feet were nearly taken out from under me. It felt like an earthquake, or at least that’s all I can think of to compare it to. I’ve never even been in an earthquake, having lived in the midwest my entire life, so maybe that isn’t the best of comparisons. It was sudden and intense, and the glow got increasingly and alarmingly thick, while the heat was becoming more humid, like a sauna. A noise, a very high resonation, felt like it was playing all around me, and it was getting louder. It reached a point where I couldn’t see Lorena through the glow, and I scrambled back inside, threw myself on the ground and covered my head with my hands, like we were always taught in school tornado drills. The shaking got more and more intense, and glass started breaking all around me. My mother would have spilled blood if she were there. Finally, I remember feeling like I was floating for a moment, and then like I was dropped. My head must’ve hit the floor, or something, because that was all I remembered until I woke up. Vision slowly came into view, and I was looking at the slanted ceiling of my childhood home, only the picture it provided felt like it was missing something... I never knew how long I was out, it could’ve been just seconds, or hours. However long it was, my body felt terribly sore, like I’d just gone through a full day of physical work. I rolled myself over, quite regrettably after the fact. There was glass littering the floor, and I felt a particularly sharp piece puncture slightly into my side through my torn up shirt. “Ahhhh…. shoot...” my voice rasped in pain. As my sight became less blurred, the light fixture, lying in pieces, came into view only a couple feet beside me. I audibly gasped at seeing the object that was so beloved by my mother lying broken in so many pieces beside me. “She’s gonna kill someone when she finds out about this…” I grimaced, dreading the moment. The pain in my side, combined with the general shock of what I thought had happened, led me to realize that my sister could be outside and somehow endangered still. Instantly, I sprang up and opened the not-fully closed door. There was a long moment of silence from me. “Oh my God,” I finally said to no one. What I was looking at was inexplainable in the rules and laws of physics in our then-current human knowledge. Unless it was a painting, or a prank of some sort, of course. That’s what I initially thought it, just a joke. My eyes darted across the front lawn, parts of edges of it were smoldered and charred, but thankfully not burning. However, there was no immediate sign of my sister. After scampering outside and looking around frantically for a moment, I couldn’t take the huge amount of immediate stress anymore. The chances that it was a joke depressingly decreased, considering there were huge trees surrounding my house that were not there before. Sulking, I walked back inside, the long moments I had to consider what happened incited hysteria in my mind. The panic hit me like a brick. My breathing increased dramatically, I started crying uncontrollably, and I had literally no idea what happened, where I was, or what I should’ve done. Unfortunately, my body felt like collapsing from the panic. So gently as I could, which wasn’t very, I laid down on the floor. Thankfully, none of the glass had made it quite that close to the door. Vision had started to leave me again, so I did what you were supposed to do while passing out. I raised my knees and just laid there, trying to ignore everything and not think too hard about anything. After taking a few minutes trying to recoup myself, sight fully returned to me once again. I attempted to get up, and held onto the stair’s railing for support. Remembering what had caused me to collapse, I felt weak again. “Oh God, I’m not dreaming,” I said to myself, feeling nauseous after taking another confirming glance outside. Holding myself up by the railings, I shuffled towards the kitchen, looking out the windows on the way. A million thoughts were going through my head in that short walk, yet I still didn’t have the faintest idea of where I was. Frankly, the fact that the outside world looked so… cartoonish, hadn’t registered with me, just yet. I simply thought I was in a forest of some sort, somewhere far away from where my house should’ve been. Jasper was there in the kitchen, hiding under the dining table. He was whapping his tail angrily, and I didn’t have any desire to disturb whatever was keeping him under there. My hands opened the refrigerator, I grabbed a bottle of water, feeling fairly thirsty. I shuffled back to the front door. The door’s handle turned. My eyes began to adjust to the outside light. Down the porch steps. Again, I frantically looked around for my sister. I had no such luck in finding her. Treading across the lawn, I then took a step onto where the asphalt road should’ve been. A dirt one took its place. My shoes touched the dirt of another planet. Those marks may not exist now, like Armstrong’s, but they quickly became one of the big symbols of my “achievement” anyways, after I took a picture of them later on that day. Finally, after being so blind for so long, I started to notice the oddities of the world I had stepped into. My eyes shot from tree to eerie tree, realizing the gloominess of the forest. It was so dark on the ground level, leading me to initially believe it was early morning like it was back on Earth. Then I looked at the sky. It wasn’t pink, or purple, or dark whatsoever. It was bright blue, and I saw the glare of the sun through a tree, almost directly overhead. The height of the tree surprised me, but still I could only see a glimpse of the sun through the leaves. My eyes looked all around me, taking in everything else. Belatedly, I noticed the flatness of the colors, the screeching darkness of the forest, and the general... familiarity of it all. One side of the path went deeper into the woodlands, a place that at that moment I had no desire to go to. On the other side, I breathed a quick sigh of relief as I saw a wide opening to lighter pastures and skies, and no more creepy trees. Slowly I walked out from the property, farther and farther, ‘til I was in the middle of the path, where I went on my knees. My palms came to my face, shielding them from the world that was starting to become too much for me. There on my knees, an idea of where I was popped into my mind, and my eyes widened. The voice in my head tried to convince me that it was a trick, all of it. “No. No, it is NOT what you think it is. It’s a trick. Just a trick.” That’s what I told myself, at least. The rest of my body came down with me, and the tears started dripping once again, coming from my hatred for whoever or whatever had ripped me away from home, my friends and family. I had a life that I found to be worth living. A future to look forward to. To be just driven away from it like that with absolutely no real reason or even hope to believe I’d ever make it back had its impacts on me, that’s for sure. A sound had gradually come to my ears as I contemplated this seemingly gloomy turn, and it was getting more powerful. Soon, I managed to see a different blue among the pure sky. It was blurry, I’m not sure whether from my tears or its speed. And boy, was it moving fast. Desiring anything but to be seen and noticed by something alien to me, especially so soon, I ran for the cover of the porch, and hoped against hope that what I thought the sound was wouldn’t see the house. A few minutes passed, and the noise went away. The trees had, by some lone form of grace, obscured my residence. Still sniffling a bit, I went back in the house, and checked the downstairs. There were a few picture frames down there, so there was yet more broken glass where some of them were knocked off. After inspecting the damage, I grabbed a few things, feeling more like doing a bit of exploration. Most notably, from a box in the storage room I grabbed a pair of binoculars, then headed back up. To the outside world I went once again, this time going completely across the road. The trees, dirt, heck the entire world was... simplistic, for lack of a better term. It wasn’t exactly like the show, there was much more detail, but to say it was anything near realistic by human-Earth standards would be dishonest. The entire thing was nutty, it actually could’ve been a painting for all I knew, until I went up to the trees. The dark, hundred-foot tall log really did just look like a tree from a cartoon, and a fairly menacing one at that. The Everfree had a certain sense of creepiness, though that disappeared if you were to retreat inside of the house. Curiosity by far beat my fear, so of course I went to go see what it felt like. The bark of the tree certainly felt real, just like any tree from Earth. It was sharp, not the kind that would be nice to your hands if you climbed it. Disbelief still stayed with me to an extent, and I started walking down the path, touching all of the trees to be sure as possible. Soon I had reached the path’s entrance. The house was, in fact, barely in the Everfree, perhaps only a hundred feet. When I reached this point, I took in the new surroundings, the path now going along the sides of the forest to my left and right. Everywhere else was clear of trees, and my heart felt lifted just from exiting that blasted place. Across the walkway was a hill. I had no idea which way to go, so I walked across the road and hiked shortly up it just to get a better view of my new environment. There I found the sight that would make me feel the most enraptured I’ve ever felt. In the distance, there were lots of buildings with quaint slanted roofs, red windowsills and framing, and of course the chimneys and odd little wooden perches that seemed to be a standard feature on many of the structures. This came with a faint but almost enchanting noise of a small-town market. A poor little smile came to me, and finally I thought, Maybe this won’t be so bad.
HELLO, EQUESTRIAI sat down on the top of the hill, and thought. I started by calming myself down once again, by trying to think of nothing. It didn’t work. So instead, my thoughts turned to my family, mostly wondering when or if I would ever see them again. Then, I thought about Mason, and the rest of my friends, just acknowledging and coming to terms with the fact that it would likely be at least a very long time before I saw any of them again. At that point there was no longer any doubt in my mind that I was in Equestria, and it was an overwhelming thought, but I stupidly kept thinking, continuing to overload myself. I tried to think of what I was gonna do, who I was gonna meet, and what I would say. Talking to myself while subconsciously questioning my sanity, I pondered, “Let’s see… there’s Pinkie, Twilight, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, and Fluttershy. Who do I go to? Who will help me, and not freak out too much at the sight of me? Pinkie and Fluttershy are out of the question, too crazy and too easily surprised. And it probably shouldn’t be Rainbow, don’t wanna get myself knocked out. The other three probably... well, hopefully will be pretty reasonable. I don’t exactly know where any of them live though…” I snapped out of thought and looked over towards the town once again. I took the pair of binoculars taken from downstairs out from its casing and scanned the town’s buildings, eventually spotting a few things I recognized, the huge treehouse and the boutique the most notable... about as far away from me as possible. I could only see the tops of the two buildings. “Dang, both of them are right on the edge of town. Well, guess I’m gonna have to go find Applejack.” There was no sign of Sweet Apple Acres that I could see, lamentably. To go with that, there was every possibility that it was also on the other side of town, because I had no friggin’ clue how the area was laid out. Neither could I see any of the residences of the other three ponies I knew, even though I didn’t want to go to any of those, it would’ve been nice to have known where they were. Eventually, I realized that I was probably pushing myself into shock from thinking about all of this. Seriously, Ponyville was just sitting a mile away from the hill for me to just… look at. So, I actually had some sense to stay seated for a little while and try to calm myself down once again, this time by just thinking about my house, since I wasn’t gonna be missing that. There was broken glass literally everywhere, which was going to be a pain to clean up. To go along with that, I had no idea if there was any structural damage, having no clue what the trans-universal twisting could’ve done to my poor house. My pulse was too fast for my liking, so I kept resting for a moment and listened to the quiet noises of the village in the distance. Minutes passed by, and I had laid down by this point, staring up at the clear sky, keeping track of my heart rate. What I assume was the Ponyville School’s bell, went off at one point, though I didn’t know for what. It could’ve been for lunch, or for the end of school, or for something else. I didn’t have the time, and foolishly it never occurred to me to check any of the clocks in my house. Unfortunately, the sound of an airplane came to my ears once again, although at that point I was pretty sure it wasn’t just any plane. “Crud.” I dived down the hill as quick as I could without breaking my neck and hid in the somewhat tall grass to conceal myself. Cringing and hoping that the sound wouldn’t come any closer to me, another noise came to my ears that shocked me. “Uhh… sir, what are you doing?” the familiar voice questioned from the pathway on the bottom of the hill. My eyes flashed open, adrenaline flowed, and breathing stopped. Slowly, my head turned to this new sound. As my surprised face turned to hers, she started to look frightened. “Are-are you OK?” Finally remembering to breathe, I gave an infirm huff in response, which in retrospect did not help, though I couldn’t really control it, acting by instinct. I must’ve looked like a savage. My hair was still messed up and stiff from standing on end from the static, there was dried blood all over me, a two inch cut in my leg, and my shirt and pants were torn up and stained from all the little cuts I had from the glass and Jasper’s painful claws. And I had just dove down a hill for no good reason. “Can-can you talk?” she asked, obviously wanting to help if she could, probably legitimately questioning my ability to communicate. “I… I… Yes,” I said, squirming to sit up and look somewhat civilized. “Well, are you OK then?” “Uh… Yes. Well, I... don’t really know.” I didn’t know what to say, I felt paralyzed. She was clearly waiting for me to elaborate. After an awkward moment of silence, she questioned, “S-so are you hurt, are you-“ “No, I just- I’m sorry, what else did you want to say?” I said in nervousness, accidentally interrupting her. “No, no, you go ahead.” She said, seemingly at a loss for words herself. “Well, I- I just,” I paused, still not knowing what to say. Nothing was registering in my head. Sure, my mind could take the change in the look of the terrain without freaking out too much, but this? Talking to an alien? Eventually, I nearly yelled, “Oh-OH my God. Are you real?” She looked around, and looked back at me, more than likely thinking I was completely insane. “Yes, I’m pretty sure I’m real. Are you sure you’re alright, sir?” I gave a nervous laugh. “At this point, to be honest, I have no idea. I’m confused, and I wanna go home.” “Oh, well, I’m sure that my friends and I could help you find a way home. Uh… where exactly do you live?” she replied, seeming more relieved now that I had given at least given some tidbit of information to her. “Uh, you see, it’s kinda complicated. My house is just down that road. You can see it from here,” I replied, getting more used to talking now that I just had to answer straightforward questions. “Huh? You live in the... Everfree?” she said, turning around to look where I had pointed. “Whoa, I definitely do not remember that being there. Did you just... move there?” she asked, her face showing great concern over what I told her. “Not, uh, willingly.” “What do you mean?” “OK, OK, I - I’m just gonna give you a brief rundown, and you’re gonna think I’m more crazy than you already do. I was just there, in my house, that house. It was a perfectly normal day, then poof, there was a big yellow light, a lot of shaking and all of the sudden I’m here.” She blinked. “... Wow. That had to take a lot of magical energy to teleport you and your entire house there. Actually, that had to take an impossible amount of energy, at least for one pony to conjure." “I don’t know if it was magic.” She chuckled a little bit, “What else could it have been?” I paused for a moment, considering what she had said. I truly had not half a clue as to what brought me to Equestria at that point. The idea of magic being real hadn’t hit me. “I - I don’t know Twilight… maybe you’re right....” Twilight blinked in alarm. “How do you know my name?” she asked, in an accusing manner. My mouth was stuck open. I spoke without thinking. I, of course, knew an answer to that question, but it wasn’t one that I wanted to give at that very moment. Now glaring at me in suspicion, she pestered, “Well?” “It’s… it’s really a very long story, uh, ma’am.” I didn’t know what to call her. There were too many alternative options, and they all seemed too awkward to use. “Well, would you mind telling it? The way you’ve been acting and talking, it’s just made me a bit nervous,” she chided, speaking with more confidence and seriousness than before. That made me extraordinarily nervous, and I felt like breaking down right then and there. I don’t know what kept me going. “Oh… ah. Yes, I’m sorry. I don’t want to spook you, trust me. It’s uh… really an honor to meet you.” “It... is?” she remarked, raising an eyebrow. Quickly, I decided the honest route was best way to go. Mind you, I wasn’t planning on saying every detail right there and then, but I did not want to lie to her and lose more trust than I had already lost. “Yes, it is. If you could… excuse me to think for a moment. I don’t know how to te-” It was at that moment that I realized what I was looking at. Yes, it was indeed Twilight Sparkle. She was wearing a saddle-pack with some bottles sticking out of the top of the bags. At first, I thought they were covering up something of her’s. That moment, however, I noticed she was instead missing the something I thought was there. Her wings. They weren’t there. Carelessly, I blurted out, “How come... you don’t have wi-” My hands instantly covered my mouth in panic. “Of course,” I thought. When I looked at her treehouse, I did not realize that I was looking at her treehouse, which should’ve been smashed to smithereens. “Oh shiiii-,” I quietly breathed into my hands. Had I just nearly accidentally revealed her future? My plan to tell her the truth went out the window, and I had no idea what to do. I didn’t know if it was alright to even tell her that I might’ve known her future, what with all the science fiction movies I had seen where the main characters ‘break the space-time continuum’ by playing around with time travel. Unfortunately, my facial expressions seemingly told her that I was taken aback. Her face had an ill-tempered look from my sudden aversion from saying that I would explain my freak-out. It seemed hopeless for me. Then, my phone went off, jingling its little jingle to let me know I just got a text, while simultaneously scaring the heck outta both of us. “Wha-what in Equestria was that?” My eyes widened and jaw dropped. “That… that was my phone!” Scrambling to tear the little device out of my pocket, I pushed the screen to read the new message. “What IS that?” Twilight asked from the dirt pathway. “It’s… it’s my phone. It’s just a thing a lot of humans have,” I quickly explained, walking down the hill towards her. “A - a lot of what have?” “Humans, a lot of humans. I’m a human, that’s what we call ourselves, humans,” I clarified, now reading the text. It was from Mason. The text read: “dude, just heard about your parents house burning down. U ok?” “What? My house burning down?” I sneered under my breath. “What’s he talking about?” Twilight was listening intently. “Your house is burning? But isn’t your house right there?” she interjected, motioning her head towards my childhood’s humble abode. We both looked towards the house. “Uh, it’s not burning,” she stated. “Nope,” I replied. “Why did you say your house was burning then?” “I didn’t, he did.” Twilight squinted in bewilderment. “What?” she retorted. I looked up at her. She was weirded out by this to no end, there was no question about that. “It’s - it’s my friend, Mason, alright?” “Huh? Wha- Where... where is he then?” She quietly perplexed in an increasing state of frustration. “Oh my goodness,” I said in irritation,“It’s right here.” I proceeded to point the phone’s screen at her. “I don’t get it, mister human, I didn’t even hear this mason friend of yours-” she said, not looking at the screen right away. “Oh,” she paused, reading the small text, “I see, it says it right there… why does he have such poor grammar?” “Oh for the love of… just forget it.” “But-but why did he say your house was burning if it’s right there?” She declared, motioning to my house again. “I don’t know,” I said, exasperated. At this point it was clear we were getting on each other’s nerves. Thankfully, I suppose, I finally realized yet another anomaly in the situation. “WAIT!” I yelled. “What!” She replied, joining in. “HOW THE HELL DO I HAVE SERVICE?” Her eye twitched, as she screamed in annoyance, “I. DON’T. KNOW. WHAT. YOU’RE. TALKING. ABOUT.” I gave a nervous laugh, then stupidly said, “Twilight, I have service!” “I still don’t know what that is,” she hissed. “What kinda provider has interdimensional service?” I mumbled, baffled at the fact that I had the ability to still communicate with Earth. “Ugh.” She stated in acceptance of my vagueness. “I have to.. I have to… if they think the house burned down... oh no. They might think I’m dead!” As much as I realized I was ticking off Twilight by not explaining to her what was going on, that text brought what I thought was a more pressing matter. So I sat there for a moment, typing out, “Everyone, I’m fine. The house hasn’t burned down, Jasper’s fine, but what happened will take some explaining.’ As I was doing this, Twilight just stared at me, hopelessly confounded as I - to her - pushed on a little bright light a bunch. “And… there. Sent a message to my family and friends,” I confirmed, as the message successfully delivered itself to my joy. She stared at me, expecting me to just keep blurting out things she didn’t understand. Now, I had time to explain everything to her. I felt pretty bad for not being able to earlier in the conversation, at that point it seemed like she was already fed up with me. I sighed, then got to fixing my mistakes. “OK Twilight, this is a telephone. A mobile telephone,” I said, figuring that was a good enough spot as any to start at. She blinked, suddenly looking interested. “Alright, what exactly does that do?” “It’s a communications device. A lot of humans have one, especially where I live. Each one has a number, and all you have to do is enter another person’s number in the device and it’ll call it. Basically, that means you can talk to the person with the other telephone.” “Call? How does a telephone call another telephone?” she questioned, having no context to fully understand what I was saying. “Ah, well you see, when a person ‘calls’, it makes the other person’s telephone ‘ring’, or just make a sound to let that person know they’re being called, which is what we heard earlier from my phone. When the other person picks up the phone, they can answer the call and talk.” “... So you talk, like what you showed me with your friend, with those written messages?” “No, no, talking with voices.” “Whoa, how does that work? And why did you have written if you could actually talk to him?” “Ah… one question at a time. I couldn’t explain it to you fully, even though I want to. Service! That’s what I mean by that actually. When I say service, I’m saying that I’m getting service from a telephone tower. Which is really weird, because there are no telephone towers anywhere near here.” “Huh? Service from a tower? What does that even mean?” “The answer to that is very scientific, and that’s why I said I couldn’t explain it to you fully. I guess I can try. Basically what happens is your voice gets electronically turned into a signal, which is sent to a big metal tower, that receives it, sends it to a satellite, which sends the signal-” “Whoa, whoa. Satellite? As in a moon?” “No, no no. An artificial satellite with a bunch of electronics on it. We send up satellites for a lot of-” Her jaw dropped. She interrupted,“Ar-artificial? You mean you send things into orbit?” I nodded. “Oh my goodness,” she paused. “How! How do you do that?” Twilight said, unable to contain her newfound excitement. “Okay, okay Twilight, please don’t freak out. I’m going to overwhelm you if I give you all the details here. So… can we talk it maybe a little later? I’m sure you’ll love human technology, but right now I’m really scared, and I want to find out what the heck is going on,” I confessed. “Oh…. right. Well, I don’t know for sure, teleportation is kind of tricky. It gets exponentially more difficult the farther you go, and mass is a factor as well.” I nearly interrupted her, raising a finger, but decided to let her continue. “Personally, I couldn’t dream of teleporting myself more than a dozen or so miles at most, let alone the distance between where ever you came from and Equestria, not to mention that humongous house you brought with you. I don’t think Celestia’s magic could even come close to that kind of power.” “Okay… so how else could I have gotten here?” I maintained. She mulled over the thought for a moment. “I… don’t know,” she eventually answered. My hopes dropped significantly. Sighing, I muttered, “I’m not gonna be going home for a while, am I?” Twilight frowned. Author's Note Hello reader! Thank you for reading my first foray into this story. Feedback is welcomed below! Also, I'm looking for a pre-reader! I feel like I spent way too much time scouring over these first few chapters, I need someone more experienced with spotting errors, and maybe giving me general advice about the story and writing techniques and whatnot. Message me or comment below if you're willing. Updates for this story might be infrequent, I don't have guaranteed free time too often.
