Author's Note

Warning: Sad much

Scary thoughts

It was a pleasant sunny day. Me and Shy were walking across the town. Ponies of all kinds and colors were greeting us every now and then, and we greeted them back. Everything was perfect.

“I need to do something. I’ll be back!” said Shy at some point, and promptly flew off.

“Ok!” said I, and continued my pleasant stroll.

Soon I realized that I wasn’t sure where exactly I was, or where I was supposed to go. I decided to wait for Shy and sat right where I was.

Time passed, ponies walked by, Shy still was somewhere else. I started feeling hungry.

I looked around and noticed a cafe to my left. As I came closer, my mouth started to water at all the food on display. When I approached the salespony, I realized that I had no money at all. I was feeling very hungry at that point, I was ready to do a lot for something to chew on.

“Hey, take this! It’s on the house.” I raised my head and saw a cupcake that said salespony was pushing towards me over the counter.

“Thank you. Thank you!” I took the cupcake with both hooves and pulled it closer, only for it to slip out of my grip and smash against the dirt. The salespony started laughing. I tried to salvage what remained, but I could not grab anything with my hooves. I only managed to smudge the cupcake all over the ground and my hooves. Laughing intensified.

I looked up. The salespony was hysteric, and some onlookers joined him now. “The next one will cost ya,” said he, barely stifling his laughter to do that.

One of the onlookers threw a coin my way, and it bounced off my head. I found it in the dirt, but I could not pick it up with my hooves. I had to take the dirty coin in my mouth. It was terrible, but I was extremely hungry. I put the coin on the counter and tried to spit the dirt out.

The salespony pushed a burger towards me. I greedily grabbed it, and it dropped out of my hooves too, covering the bread with in mud and spreading hay and flowers to the wind.

I sat there, now starving. Everyone around was laughing. Laughing at my misery.

“Catch this!” said some pony, and threw a piece of bread. I ran after it, not even looking where I was going. It flew through an open door and landed on wooden floor. The planks were moderately clean, so I finally started eating, right off the floor.

I heard a click behind me. I turned and saw that the door was now closed. I rushed to it and tried to push and pull, but it did not open. I looked outside through the iron bars of the door’s window.

“Hey, open the door!”

“It’s not locked. Just turn the handle!” They were still laughing.

I turned away and noticed a bear that was sleeping in the far corner of the empty room. Is started to growl and stand up.

“Please! Open the door! There’s a bear here!”

“Just use your hoof! Or your horn even, are you not a unicorn?” The laughter intensified.

I tried to turn the handle with my mouth. It was made of smooth glass, and my teeth just slipped off it. All I could hear was laughter, growing louder and louder.

Then there was a deafening roar from behind.

I turned in panic and saw the giant bear’s maw open right before me.

I screamed, and the jaws closed around me.

When my thoughts became somewhat coherent and my panic subsided, I found myself lying on my back next to the sofa. I was panting heavily. Some birds were watching me from their birdhouses near the ceiling.

Then I heard a quiet growl that sounded like a bear. Panic gripped me again for a moment, I turned towards the sound and almost screamed.

The bear was watching me through a window. Shy was hiding behind a slightly opened door, and was watching me too. Somehow, both she and the bear managed to look extremely worried.

“Are you all right?” asked Shy rather quietly and without leaving her cover.

“I’m good,” said I. “Bad sleep.” I was still panting. “Thanks heavens, that was just a dream! A very bad, scary nightmare.” I kept laying there on the floor. Shy finally entered the room and slowly approached me.

“I’m good,” said I and stood up. I probably wasn’t very convincing. Shy nodded, still worried, and reluctantly left me be. I flopped onto the sofa and soon was deep in thought.

“That was just a dream, but what happened in it really concerns me. What if I never get my magic back? What can I even do to earn myself a living if I cannot even win against a door? Ponies use magic for everything. I have trouble even holding things. I probably won’t be able to properly wield most tools. Sure, Shy is taking care of me now, but I cannot make her care for me forever. And even if I can, what kind of life would that be?” I was not feeling very good.

When Shy entered the room the next time, I really wanted to ask her something.

“Shy?”

“What is it?” said she and came closer.

I left the sofa and approached the table. I sat on my haunches, tapped my horn a few times, then done a few abstract gestures, and finally picked up the pencil with both hooves and moved it randomly in the air for a bit. Then I put it in my mouth and wrote ‘magic’ on one of the sheets of paper.

“You mean magic?” asked Shy. She picked up the pencil when I dropped it, and wrote the word down.

“I have no magic?” asked I.

“You have no magic,” answered Shy as she looked at her own hooves.

“When I have magic?”

“I don’t know. You don’t have it ?at all?. All ?creatures? have magic. Ponies get ??? when they have ?little?, and ??? when none left. Somehow, you are not ???.” I could see it was hard for her to say that. The last two words I didn’t recognize were the same, and I had a suspicion on what they meant.

“What word ‘???’ mean?” asked I after writing down that word.

Shy looked like she was on the verge of tears, but took the pencil anyway. She drew a frowning face with crossed out eyes.

“Yep. I thought so. And it raises about as many questions as it answers.”

“I’m sorry. Was all my fault. Should have ??? you ??? ?faster?. You were ???. I was ???. I thought... too ???... Though you die... I...” I had to hug her at that point, and she started crying her eyes out onto my back.

“Not your fault. I’m not dead. Thank you for that.” My vocabulary did not let me say much more, so I just kept stroking her back with my hoof and waited. “All will be good.”

We stood like that for a few minutes. Animals gathered around us and were watching. As soon as we parted, a white rabbit jumped onto and tried to hug her the best it could with its paws. She hugged it back.

“Thank you,” she said to me. Then she started walking away and talking to the bunny. “And thank you too, ???. ... No, ??? he’s not bad. ... Why do you think so? Ponies don’t eat ???.” If there was more, I didn’t hear it.

“Ponies don’t eat what? Wait... Wasn’t it the same bunny from yesterday? And it seems Shy was actually talking to it. Interesting... It’s hard to believe how different his attitude was right now compared to yesterday. Maybe I should not have scared him like that.” I returned to the sofa and switched my thoughts from the bunny and to what I learned.

“So. Apparently, Shy saved my life. Something happened to me, which left me with the scars and without magic, and then Shy found me and brought me to the hospital. Moreover, she’s somehow blaming herself for not doing it fast enough, and thinks that I may have lost my magic due to that. With what I’ve seen of her, I can now understand why she would fuss about me so much.

“Now to the matter of my magic. She said that I don’t have it, and that she does not know when, and if, I’ll get it back. Apparently, I’m an anomaly. Ponies die if they loose all their magic, and she probably meant they get sick when little is left. I don’t have any magic at all, yet I am alive and kinda well, somehow. Most likely that's what freaked the nurse out when the unicorn doctor checked me for the first time on my memory. How is that even possible, anyway? Maybe it’s because I wasn’t a pony before? The idea starts to feel a little absurd, though... And even if I wasn’t a pony, she said that all the creatures have magic here. That would mean that if I had no magic in the first place, I’d probably have to be from another world... Which is consistent with me being surprised by this world from time to time, hmm...

“Anyway, right now it’s not really important if I am from this world or not. Or if I was a pony before the incident. The important things right now are, first, that I have no magic at all, second, that I may well not be getting any, and third, that I need to make a living here regardless. Shy won’t take it well if I’ll be just moping around, worse if I... do something stupid... Brr! Honestly, I’m better than that! I WILL make a good living here. If not by magic or muscle, then by my brains! I’ve managed to learn to understand and produce some pony speech in just half a day of studying, after all! Those brains have to be worth something.”

And on that cheerful note, I stood up, approached the table, and started shuffling through the stack of paper, refreshing my memory of the stuff I already learned.