Alien amongst Men

---- Day 7 ----

I woke up and heard the sound of people talking. I glanced at the clock and noticed that it was a quarter past midnight. My mind connected the dots between the conversation I heard before, the time, and the conversation in the hallway. One of the voices asked "Has the creature left the room?" another voice stated that the creature was on a sleeping agent and that it had not left the room. Unfortunately for them, I removed the IV from my foreleg and was very much aware of the conversation in the hallway.

I knew that staying in that room would be a bad idea, so I quickly made my way to the window, opened it, and jumped through. Hovering next to the open window, I closed it swiftly but quietly. I flew away from the hospital and tried to figure out where I was.

I had never been in this city, so I was at a complete loss. Usually I would solve a problem with trial and error, but I figured that was probably not the best idea.

I flew over to the tallest building I could and I landed on it. I needed some time to think and flying around was distracting me. I figured that if I wanted to get back to my village I'd need a map. I figured finding an actual paper map was going to be the easiest to find.

I launched myself off of the tower and began my quest for the lost city map.

I arrived at the closest gas station I saw and landed on the roof. I laid down and poked my head out from over the edge of the roof. I scanned the environment and spotted a rack with a couple maps on it. However, this gas station was connected to a McDonald's, so you can expect there was a lot of people. I got up, spread my wings, and flew to the next gas station.

The journey to the next gas station took about ten minutes at a casual speed. I wondered, for a moment, how long it would take at full speed.

Again, I landed on the roof of the gas station, poked my head out, and started observing my surroundings. I quickly spotted the maps, but I noticed a problem. For whatever reason, there was three cameras pointing towards the maps. Appearing on camera as a pegasus is like putting a cat in a blender, you don't fucking do it.

After I searched seven gas stations, I finally found unprotected maps. I landed on the pavement and trotted up to the maps, but as soon as I grabbed the map I heard a car door shut from behind me. I was about to fly away, but a tug on my tail and the voice of a child stopped me.

I simply froze and tried to act like a statue. The child said "Look, mom. A pegasus!" The mother of the child replied with "Yes it is, honey. Want to get a picture with it?" The child answered with "Yes please. I don't know this pony's name though. I wonder why they didn't put Rainbow Dash in front of the gas station though."

The mother raised the camera and pointed it at me. I knew I couldn't let this woman to take a picture of me, so I did the only polite thing I could. I turned my head and said, "No pictures please." I grabbed the map and blasted off into the night sky.

After a while, I slowed my pace and simply enjoyed the scenery. A small smile crept across my face as I felt the wind travel through my coat. It was nice being able to see the world from a new perspective.

I began to breath a little heavy and my heart rate increased. That confused me quite a bit because I was flying at a casual rate. I started going through a list of things that could cause my body to react in this way. Unfortunately, my brain started thinking about how when people are about to flat line, their heart rate tends to increase.

My heart rate was beating through my chest, and each breath made me wheeze. I needed to land now. Instead of going for the tall building, I settled with a flat roofed building with a greenhouse on top. I landed clumsily and ran inside the greenhouse to rest there for a bit. The entire time I was constantly thinking that I was just going to drop dead and be dissected after they found my body.

I threw myself onto the floor and curled up into a ball. I was absolutely terrified at the thought of being cut apart. Every little sound that I heard while inside the greenhouse caused me to jump. I was shaking violently and my eyes were pouring tears.

I thought that the Doctor put something inside of me that could track me and cause this to happen. I felt like the monsters that were in the hallway at the hospital were only seconds away from catching me. However, after several minutes had passed no such monsters showed up.

The shaking subsided, my breathing slowed, and my heart rate returned to normal. After several minutes of laying there, I got up with wobbly legs and sat on my haunches to take a few deep breaths.

I pulled myself off of the floor and walked out of the greenhouse. I opened the map, found the city I was in, and then located the village that I lived in. It would've been incredibly easy to do this if I had a compass, but I didn't have a compass. I ended up looking for landmarks to the north and tried to figure out my direction from that.

It was actually pretty hard to figure which direction was north from roads alone, but I got it. I pointed northwards with my hoof to make sure I didn't lose track of which direction was north while I checked the map. After I figured out which direction was north, I was able to find which direction I had to travel to get to my house.

I spread my wings, launched myself off the roof, and flew towards my house. Other than a couple of gusts of wind, the journey back to home wasn't really all that eventful.

I arrived at my house a staggering five minutes later and landed on the balcony. I forgot to lock the door when I left last time because I wasn't expecting to be gone for that long. I pushed the door open, walked inside, and locked the door behind me.

A small grin crept across my face as I realized I was safe at home. I let myself plop onto the floor to let myself relax a bit. I knew I was doing something before I left to go flying, but I had forgotten what I was doing. An idea made its presence known in my head and I thanked my past self for documenting everything. I flipped through the pages in my notebook and found out I was making a saddle back for my notebook and other things that might need carrying.

I walked over to my office and looked at my last design. My brain pointed out several flaws in the last design that I needed to fix. I flipped to the next page in my Engineer's notebook and began drawing several different views to get every little detail. I noted down the materials that I was going to be using and how I was going to secure certain bits together.

After an hour or two of drawing, I remembered what that child had said at the gas station. "Rainbow Dash?" I muttered to myself. I trotted over to the room that contained my computer, powered it up, and opened the browser. I slowly typed in the words into the search engine with a pen in my mouth.

A sky blue pegasus with a rainbow mane and tail appeared on screen. The pegasus named Rainbow Dash had an uncomfortable amount of similarities with my own body. After some further research, I discovered it was from a children's cartoon called My Little Pony : Friendship is Magic.

This search has me more confused about my current situation than I was before searching this up. One thing I had a hard time wrapping my head around is how my body could be from a children's cartoon.

---- * ----

There was a man in his late fifties sitting at a desk surrounded by paperwork. He had bags under his eyes, gray hairs showing from the little hair he had left, and a gray suit with a blue tie. Last night, he sent twelve soldiers to extract a strange creature from a hospital, but failed. Somehow, the creature had escaped the room while under the influence of a sleeping agent.

Thankfully, the raid wasn't a complete loss. They received valuable information about the anatomy of the creature and the physical description. The doctors had finished profiling the creature's DNA with the blood they extracted from it. The Chief was hoping for some good news today and getting the results from the blood test was going to be incredibly helpful.

He pushed away his thoughts with a heavy sigh. He really needed to get caught up on the wall of paper.

---- Day 8 ----

The construction of the saddlebag is going well. I'll list of the things I did in order. I made the water reservoir first, followed by the under belly straps, and then the bags. I haven't secured the bags to the main vest yet, I still have to figure out a way of connecting it without weakening the seal for the reservoir.

I'm taking a break from making it right now. I'm actually eating those half pops I bought a little while ago. I should have the saddlebag done by tonight if everything goes well. Today's been a pretty relaxing day, all things considered.

Also, here's a thought that should've passed my mind several days ago but hasn't. Why am I documenting everything that happens and why am I putting so much effort into keeping that documentation with me? To be honest, I don't know. I think it's because I've always liked the idea of a notebook full of information. There's something oddly satisfying about looking at a notebook and seeing an entire page filled with fine print. Perhaps the reason why I document this is because I want people to know my story after I die, and having the book with me at all times helps me with that.

I wanted to burn some time, so I trotted over to my workbench. I opened the middle drawer and grabbed the soldering iron. I was about to grab the solder from the drawer, but then I realized it's probably not such a good idea to have lead anywhere near my mouth.

Although I didn't think it was possible, I figured it'd be a good idea to at least try and improve the dexterity of my hooves. I grabbed the solder with two hooves and placed it on the table top. I tried to grab a pencil with my hoof, but failed miserably. I tried again, this time using fetlock to squeeze the pencil. Using the fetlock had some success, but friction was the main problem. I'll have to design something out of rubber to fix the friction problem, but I was happy I was able to even pick up the pencil. I had greater success holding the soldering iron because it was larger.

I ended up spending a good part of the afternoon fiddling with wires, soldering, and improving the dexterity of my hooves. It's actually pretty surprising what you can do without hands. After all this practice with soldering and wiring, I figured it was time to start gathering the materials I'd need for this little project of mine. I'll need heat shrink tube, a good pair of black ear buds, dielectric grease, and a microphone with some sort of wind shield.

I walked back to my office and started making the saddlebag again. I attached the bags to the side of the vest with a strap. I also wanted a way to secure my phone to the vest, so I had the strap extend to the underbelly of the vest and I sewed it down every five centimeters. I used the clip on the back of my phone pouch to slip it onto the strap. After I finished the underbelly straps and finalized the water reservoir, the saddlebag was done.

I'm going to draw out the wiring schematics for the battery pack and the headset until night time falls. I'll be heading out tonight with the saddlebag so I can gather the materials I need. The first thing I did was draw the batteries in parallel so I could get a larger storage capacity. I included a way to allow the batteries to be charged in the schematic, and I included a switch to shut off the circuit when it isn't in use. I really should've done something more time consuming because this process took about fifteen minutes to complete. I still had six hours until nightfall, and I barely had anything to do.

I took the time I had to eat some more food because I was peckish. It probably wasn't necessary, but I had an entire six hours to burn. I got them a year ago during their halfpocalypse advertising campaign. They gave out free halfpops to a bunch of programmers.

I'll skip over everything I did during the six hours because it wasn't really worth writing home about. Nighttime came, and I flew out the back door. The first thing I wanted to get was a bunch of lithium ion batteries, or a few of those phone charging batteries. I figured I could get those from BestBuy, so I began flying towards that city I was at before. It was a Sunday, so they've been closed for a while.

I knew that they had security cameras, so I needed to shut them off before I got in there. I landed on the roof of the BestBuy without incident. The architects must've not expected someone to be able to get up here, because the security was absolutely atrocious. I walked up to the surveillance room and just opened the door. I was surprised that they didn't have a security guard in there, but I wasn't going to complain. I shut off the computers and walked down the staircase that lead to the room that held all the electronics. On my way, however, I spotted their storage room. I ended up going in there to look through the boxes. After about ten minutes of going through the boxes, I found what I was looking for. I grabbed six of the batteries and went for the door.

I looked up briefly, and had to do a double take. I saw a little red dot that blinked every few seconds. "Oh... fuck."

---- * ----

The Chief was in the middle of finishing some paper work when his phone started ringing. Sighing, he answered the phone. "You better have a good reason to call me at-" he was cut off by the person on the phone. "The creature has been spotted on camera at the local BestBuy." The Chief quickly got up from his chair and threw on his jacket, "I'll be right there." he said before throwing the door open.

There was over twenty police cars and a helicopter at the BestBuy when the Chief arrived. He wanted to see the creature himself, and he really wanted to speak to it. The Chief's mind was trying to figure out why the creature was at a BestBuy when an officer rushed up to him and handed him a sheet of paper. The sheet of paper showed a pegasus searching through some boxes in the storage room. "Why is it in Infrared?" the Chief asked the officer. "The room is completely pitch black, Chief. None of the lights are on." the officer replied. "Has the creature left the building yet?" the Chief asked eagerly. "No, we have a helicopter viewing the roof, and an entry team positioned at all exits. They're all in position, and they'll be entering in thirty seconds." the officer said. "There's no escape this time, horse. We'll catch you, and then there will be no escape." the Chief said aloud.