Lost Soul

I have decided to upkeep a journal, as I was recently thrust into a coma and I’m worried about potential memory loss. In order to prevent such a thing, I’ll record my- shall I call them adventures?- in this journal and keep it as up-to-date as possible. Leaving out whatever I deem inappropriate, of course.

Brief introductions for my future self would be appropriate, though. My name is Franco Herman, although recent circumstances would likely have me changing that fairly soon. Not for any legal reason, mind you; more so due to the effects of magical persuasion. I digress, I’ll get to that when I come to it. For now, let’s start with my arrival in this strange new world.

February 23rd 2052
Much of my memory of said arrival and slightly before it is foggy, hence one of the reasons for the journal, but from what I can remember, I awoke in a dark forest to the distinct sound of monstrous roaring. If there’s one thing my time in the military taught me, it’s that if I hear any loud noises, no matter what they are, and don’t start moving immediately, I’m dead. So, I sprung up from where I was lying and made a conscious effort to move as quickly as possible, while making sure that I was leaving as little a trail as I could to prevent interested parties from tailgating me.

My stealthy efforts were eventually rewarded with finding a straight dirt path, one that could hopefully lead me to some sort of civilization. Realizing that I should have a relative amount of safety now that I was travelling down what I thought was a man-made path, my mind began flooding with questions akin to where I was, how I got here, where the road I was taking would lead me, and so on. Not to mention that admittedly terrifying roaring that I would occasionally hear get further and further away from me. I noted that it was a really good thing that monster managed to not knock over any trees on its path while it was still near me. I tend to be rather skittish around loud crashing noises nowadays.

After what felt like hours walking down this dirt path, I finally managed to encounter someone from the town that the dirt road was taking me towards. I very distinctly remember being completely fucking dumbstruck at the fact that she flew down to greet me. Still have a hard time getting over that, by the way. Well, I say “greet” but it’s more like “assaulted,” I guess? Once she flew down to about eye-level for me, she hovered there for a minute, scanning me very carefully from a distance before actually talking.

“What are you?” Of all things, it had to be a blue, talking, miniature pegasus asking me what I was. What a ridiculous situation to be in for my first encounter with a technically alien species.

I stood there for a minute just staring at her wings, flapping to keep herself in the position she was in.

She gave me a skeptical look before continuing, “Can you talk?”

Before I even got the chance to respond she immediately asked, “Do. You. Un-der-sta-”

“Stop that!” I cut her off. “I’m very capable of understanding your language. I was just… surprised.”

“Well, you don’t have to be rude…” she muttered under her breath. I still wonder if she knew I could hear her say that. I should probably ask her one of these days.

“What are you, and where am I?”

She gave me a blank stare, “My name’s Rainbow Dash, by the way. Thanks for asking.”

“You probably shouldn’t share information like that on a whim,” I retorted. “Neither of us have any idea whether the other is friend or foe.”

She blinked a couple times before giving a quizzical stare. “Well, if you were a bad guy, you would have attacked me by now.”

Okay, scratch foe. I guess she’s just an idiot.

“So you got a name or what?” She stopped flapping her wings and stood normally on the ground. I knew she had to be short, but she was practically half my height. Around 2’11” if I’m being generous.

“I…” I racked my brain for an answer, but for the life of me it just wouldn’t come. The side effect of travelling dimensions at play, clearly. Well, either that or I hit my head on something during my transfer over here. I’ll never know. “I should.”

“Are you gonna tell me or not?” She was clearly getting annoyed, and I didn’t want the only source of information I’ve come into contact with brush me off.

“I would, if I remembered it at the moment.”

“So…” She gave me a deadpan stare. “You don’t remember it.”

Given the circumstances, I could see how she thought I was lying to her. Unfortunately, I was telling the truth. “I probably bumped my head on something. I’m sure it’ll come to me soon enough.”

“Hmm…” She started flapping her wings again, lifting her body up to examine my face. “I guess it can’t hurt to bring you to Twilight. Maybe she’ll know something about this.”

I nodded. I wasn’t about to turn down a chance at some more information, not only about where I was, but what I was dealing with to boot. Clearly I would need it, given this first encounter.

We started to walk down the path with her slightly in the lead, before she stopped dead in her tracks and tilted her head around to look at me. “But if you do anything to hurt my friends, I guarantee you’ll regret it.”

With how unbelievably naive she was being, a statement like that was a refreshing change of pace. At least she didn’t let her nature screw over everyone else around her.

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

We walked a bit of distance on this dirt road before the trees above us finally all cleared up. I had to blink and squint a couple of times to readjust to the light. All the while, I couldn’t help but feel I was still being followed by something lurking just out of our sight. Despite the path we were treading being fairly well-lit, the excessive amount of trees provided excellent cover for any who would try some form of espionage. Perhaps it was old habits kicking back in, inflicting more paranoia than I usually feel, but it made the walk incredibly unnerving.

“Hey, so…” she piped up again, interrupting my focus. “What are you, anyway?”

Oh right, I never did answer this question. Then again, she didn’t answer mine either. “I could ask the same of you. As for an actual answer to that question, human.”

“Who- hoo- hyuman? Can’t say I’ve heard of it. Are there a lot of you?”

“We should be the dominant species on the planet, but since you’ve clearly never heard of us, that isn’t the case.”

“So what, are you, like, an alien or something?”

“That depends. What planet are we on?”

She came to a halt in the middle of the road. “No. Way.” She turned around and looked back up at me, “You’re actually an alien!”

Clearly she’s just going to ignore every question that comes at her. It’s likely I’ll have to save all my questions for this “Twilight” person. I can only hope they’ll be of more use than this one.

She nudged my leg with her appendage, “Seriously, this is so exciting! An actual, real alien encounter! Twilight’s gonna flip when she sees you!”

Her enthusiasm, while appropriate at the time, was most certainly not something I was in the mood for. I rolled my eyes as I continued to walk. “Congratulations. You have the honor of making first contact.”

As I walked in front of her, I could hear her wings begin to flap once more. With each step I walked, the flapping drew closer until it was practically on top of me. Every single primal and trained instinct I had was screaming at me to take some sort of evasive action, so I immediately side stepped and pivoted on my foot to whirl around so that I could see exactly what she was trying to do. My efforts apparently weren’t in vain, as I now gazed upon one of her front hooves, now cocked back in what I could only interpret as a punch.

She stared at me in utter disbelief before whistling. “Those are some crazy reaction times, hyooman!”

I hopped back a bit as I braced myself for combat. “It isn’t wise to pick a fight with someone double your size.”

“Woah, chill, dude!” She flapped her wings forward a couple times, sending her back a couple feet. “You said I could have first contact.”

“Wha-?” My guard lapsed momentarily as I struggled to process her train of thought. “So… you were going to hit me because…?”

“Well, duh. That’s what ‘first contact’ means, right?”

I felt like a statue, standing so completely still as I stared at her. The thought hadn’t occurred to me that a concept such as “first contact” hadn’t been considered in their culture, let alone that she’d misinterpret it in such a manner. Either that or she was more of an idiot than I gave her credit for. Quite simply, I was completely dumbstruck.

“That’s... not…” I trailed off, struggling to find the words to continue this stupid conversation.

Her face flashed with annoyance as she looked on at me expectantly. Over the flapping of her wings, and right before she was about to speak up, I could hear something rustle slightly in the bushes behind her. Whatever I thought was tailgating me must have snuck up on us during my struggle with apparent culture shock and proceeded to wait for this opportunity to strike.

Green eyes slowly starting lighting up the bushes surrounding us, increasing in number as they got closer. There seemed to be 5 sets of eyes that I could count from all the rustling bushes. Looks like I was right about being trailed. These things were waiting for me to get in a position to be ambushed. It’s likely they tracked me by scent, the one thing I hadn’t counted on getting tracked by. Typical.

One of the pair of eyes lunged forward from the darkness, aiming right for the blue pegasus in its path. “Get back!” Using my left arm, I pulled her by one of her hooves behind me and swung my other arm forward, getting a clean, solid hit on our aggressor.

I was now able to get a good look at the source of the pair of eyes that stared intently at us, since my punch made it crash into a nearby tree: a wolf-like creature. It seemed to have some sort of wood armor and leaves all over it. I only wish my initial deduction was correct.

“Timberwolves?!” She yelped behind me. “These things are bad news! Run!” I heard her wings begin to flap furiously and very quickly grow distant.

I can’t believe that a bumbling idiot like that is smart enough to recognize when there’s too much danger to deal with and implement the Joestar family’s secret technique. Speaking of which...

I ran after her along the path, trailing behind her with the distance she created between us. I could hear that these “timberwolves” were still chasing after us, hot on my trail from the sound of it. I figured it was likely that I wouldn’t be able to outrun them, given my bipedal nature, so I decided to look for the nearest blunt object I could find along my path and use it.

My continued running led me to come across a wooden sign. I didn’t have the chance to read what it said, but I imagined it was some sort of welcoming sign to the town the pegasus was leading me towards. I swiftly made my way over to it and kicked it as hard as I could, breaking it away from the ground so I could use it to defend myself. Picking up the now broken sign, I whirled it around 180 degrees and happened to make it collide with one of the wolves. The wolf practically exploded on contact with my force, leaving nothing but a pile of sticks and leaves. Well, that was bizarre. At the very least, two down, three more to go.

Wielding the sign in its current state is what I imagined a dual sided battle ax to feel like, a weapon that hasn’t seen use who knows how long. The only melee weapon training that I had was some knife training from CQC and kendo, so using a blunt weapon of this size and nature put me on edge. Unbelievably uncomfortable. Despite said discomfort, I decided to ready a stance I learned from kendo and centered myself against the last three wolves. Two of them rushed me this time, to which I stepped forward and hammered my makeshift weapon down onto the one on the right, causing it to explode similar to the last one. This left me just enough time to parry the left one, shoving the length of the sign into its mouth. At this point the last wolf realized it needed to attack me here, so it charged forward, forcing me to swing my weapon along with the wolf attached to it horizontally towards my right. The action ripped some of the wolf’s wooden teeth straight out of its mouth as the last two wolves smashed into each other, stunning them long enough to not only ready another overhead strike, but to use it to smash them as well. There were piles of wood fucking everywhere now, but I managed to take care of them just fine.

I took a moment to catch my breath a little, trying to maintain what little remained of my composure. Fighting was something I went out of my way to abstain from after the war. I suppose it would be a bit more accurate to say that I couldn’t fight after the war. Not for long, anyway. It’s what kendo was supposed to help me with in the first place, and I suppose it paid off considering I was still in one piece both physically and mentally after killing or incapacitating five of those things. All this after interacting with a technicolor pegasus that tried to assault me. What a strange day. It probably could have been the fact that I still thought this was a dream- or maybe, more accurately, a nightmare- that allowed me to keep it together for so long. Denial apparently works wonders on the human psyche, who knew?

My stupid jokes aside, it was at this point that I noticed that the blue pegasus from earlier brought over five others- with equally ridiculous colors- back over to where I had been fighting these so-called timberwolves.

“Jesus Christ, how many hallucinogens did I take yesterday?” I muttered.

“Rainbow, dear, is this the one you said needed help?” The white one spoke up, giving a concerned look at me.

“Well, eh… yeah…?” She flew over next to me and looked around at the piles of wood that now littered the area. “But I guess this hyooman took care of it all on their own!”

She had attempted, yet again, to use her hoof to strike me. This time was on the back, so I sidestepped away from her to prevent it from connecting. “Don’t touch me,” I glared at her.

“Yeesh, what a barrel of laughs you are.” She rolled her eyes at me.

I continued glaring at her. Don’t give me that, you abomination of nature. You were the one who left me here to handle these things on my own.

“...Anywho, Rainbow, what is this- er…” The orange one trailed off as she looked at me. I knew what she was going to say.

The purple one with the horn took it upon herself to invade my personal space and studied me intently. “Fascinating. I’ve never seen your species before,” She continued looking up and down my body, occasionally stopping at certain parts, before finally continuing, “Are you ape descended?”

Well, color me impressed. I guess it’s just the blue and orange ones that are idiots. “Correct. Latin classification is homo sapiens sapiens. Commonly referred to as humans where I come from.”

“I assumed she was exaggerating, but Rainbow said you were an alien before. Are you really from another planet?” Her eyes seemed like they could be searchlights with how much she was beaming right about now.

“Not sure. I’d have to get a good look at your constellations at night to confirm or deny that possibility. It may only be a technicality that I’m an alien.”

“P-p-parallel universes?” Her eyes widened even further than I thought possible as a big, dopey grin formed on her face. It was pretty rare to come across another so interested and well-versed in scientific study, even back home, so this was most definitely a welcome change of pace in comparison to dealing with the abusive pegasus.

“Er, Twilight? I think y’all might wanna have this conversation later.” The orange one pointed her front hoof over at something behind me, causing me to whirl my head around to see what she was referring to.

The piles of sticks from the fallen wolves had slowly started to come together, clumping into one massive pile seemingly all on their own. The pile began to take shape, shifting and swirling to form legs, a torso, and a wolf head, with leaves and some sticks flowing together into a tail. Its green eyes glowed as it let out a massive howl. The thing was massive, easily matching the nearby trees’ height. This was going to be a problem.