Taken

I awaken to voices around me. They’re voices that I don’t recognize, so I’m automatically wary of them. My common sense portion of my brain is active enough, though, to tell me that just maybe I should listen to what they have to say. So, without moving a muscle (and thus, alerting them to my awakened state), I listen.

“You’re not getting what I’m saying, are you, Princess Luna?” the first voice said. “We got the wrong one. We were supposed to get Twilight Sparkle, but instead we got… him. A human.”

“It matters not,” another voice replied. Without being able to see, much less know who the hell any of those voices belong to, I can only assume that this new voice belongs to the aforementioned Princess Luna-

Wait. Princess? So if what my mind is telling me is correct- that these are other ponies that I’m listening to- that must mean… I’m in the presence of pony royalty? Holy shit, that’s deep. Now I really don’t want to piss them off. I focus back to hear Luna still talking.

“-must have gotten him for some reason. Maybe he has Twilight’s scent on her, which is what we locked onto. We weren’t very thorough with the scent distinction in the scan; we thought that it would be able to distinguish between human and pony scents with ease.”

Okay, all of this is getting a bit too weird. So now, I’m hearing that they have some kind of advanced technology that can search for ponies just based off of scent? That’s a hell of a lot more advanced tech than what we have on Earth…

“I don’t want to be rude,” the first pony replied, “but this isn’t something that we need to take lightly. This human can provide us with valuable information. Let’s question him and see what he has to say.”

I chance a glance now. There are four ponies in the room, all standing near to each other. One of them is taller than all the others; she has a dark coat, with the symbol of the moon both on her chest and on her side. I’m guessing that one’s Princess Luna. The one who is speaking is sea-green with an image of a harp on her side; one of the other two is white with a musical note on her side, and the other is blue with rainbow-colored hair and a lightning bolt/rainbow combination on her side.

“I agree,” the blue pony said, grinning a bit too maniacally for my tastes. “Anything to help us find Twilight-“

Princess Luna holds out a hoof, and the blue pony falls immediately silent. “I understand your wanting to do anything you possibly can to find your friend, Rainbow Dash, but we must not jeopardize our chances. If we scare him too badly, he may shut down, and whatever information he has will be lost to us. Do you want that?

The one that she called Rainbow Dash shakes her head slowly. Princess Luna turns to the white pony. “Vinyl. How close are you to getting the trans-dimensional echo-locator online?”

She thinks for a second, then responds: “Well, with all of the technical difficulties we sustained after that last Changeling attack… I’d say it’s at least another two weeks out.”

Princess Luna lets a very un-princess-like word past her mouth. “That may be too late… We must find her another way.” She turns to the first pony, the one that she was speaking to originally. “Lyra, go wake him.”

I don’t want anyone waking me up, so I sit up on my own. “There’s no need for that,” I say. “I’m already awake.” I cross my legs into the Indian-style position, but that’s about the extent of the movement I take.

Princess Luna swings her head in my direction. “Aah, good, you have awoken. Please, allow me to introduce myself. My name is-“

I hold up a hand to stop her. “I already know who you are, Luna. What I want to know, is where am I and what am I doing here?”

Luna looks at me sort of affronted, like I just slapped her in the face. “You dare speak so insolently to me? The ruler of the night over all of Equestria?” Man, she can be a bitch.

“I’m sorry,” I say, holding my hand out in a conciliatory fashion. “I didn’t mean any offense at all. I guess I’m just not used to dealing with royalty…”

Some of the anger in her eyes fades out, but I can tell that she’s still pretty pissed off. I’m glad when she takes that anger and directs it someplace actually useful: “So. Tell me everything that you know about your situation. Where have you been, what has happened, tell me everything!”

I figure this is going to take a while, so I get out my pack of cigarettes and go to light one up. Before I can do so, the one called Rainbow Dash flies over to me. “What’s that?” she asks.

“A cigarette,” I reply, firing up the lighter and setting the tip of the cigarette ablaze. “You might not want to be near me; I don’t know what kind of effect cigarette smoke has on pony lungs.” As much as I can tell she wants to stay near me out of curiosity, she nods her head and flies back over to where Luna is stationed.

Now that I’m getting that all-important nicotine into my system, I’m much more willing to cooperate with her demands. I start from the beginning and run through everything that I think is important. She lets me go on, until I get to the point where I mention Discord. That’s where she flips out and cuts me off.

“No! That can’t be!” She starts pacing; it reminds me of what I did back at the house. “You’re not seriously trying to tell me that Discord is back, are you?”

Back? Was he dead or something? I describe him to Luna and say, “Is this the same Discord we’re talking about, here?” She nods silently. Well damn.

“What’s going on with Discord?” I ask now, taking another drag off the cigarette. “You just said that he’s ‘back,’ as in he was gone before. What happened to him, and why is he back?”

“I can answer the first question easily,” Luna replies. “It was only through the combined influence of the Elements of Harmony- and him being weakened from a well-timed blast from Vinyl’s bass cannon- that we were able to defeat Discord and seal him back away.” She turns to Lyra. “Check on something for me. Is the Discord statue in the cemetery still intact?”

Lyra bounds off to check, and Luna turns back to me. “As for your second question… it will be more difficult to answer. I do not know why he has returned, or how. All I know is what you have told me, about this ‘test’ that he is putting you and Twilight through.” She looks me straight in the eye, and it creeps me out big time; it’s like she’s staring straight into my inner-most being. “Tell me, human one: do you know what test he is trying to put you two through?”

I shake my head as I take another puff. “I specifically asked him to tell me what the test was, and he said he wasn’t going to do that yet. All he’s revealed to me, is that he’s trying to make me more cynical, and that he’s happy that supposedly I’m slipping further towards the Dark Side of the Force.”

Luna looks at me a bit perplexed. “The Force? What is this Force of which you speak?”

I almost slap myself. I used that reference entirely too casually; I didn’t even stop to think that maybe they didn’t have Star Wars in this universe. “It’s something from my home world… Regardless, what I said still holds true. He does think I’m headed towards the side of evil, or whatever side he’s on.”

Luna breaks her gaze and walks backwards a few steps. “Discord is most definitely evil… We thought we had gotten rid of him for good. I guess we were wrong…”

Lyra comes back in then, and she has a very odd look on her face. “Princess, this doesn’t make any sense at all… The statue isn’t broken. It’s still just as whole as it has been since he was sealed away.”

The color seems to drain from Luna’s face. “Then… what on earth is going on?”

Something occurs to me, and though it’s an incredibly  far-fetched idea, so is the notion that I’d be sitting in a room that I have no idea where it is, having a conversation with four multi-colored ponies from a different dimension. So, I bring it up: “Do any of your kind have some kind of ability that allows you to project yourself into a different place, without your physical body ever leaving?”

Vinyl looks at me. “What, like a forced out-of-body experience?” For some reason, she gets looks of shock from the others. She quickly adds, “What? I saw a book about it in Twilight’s library and it looked interesting!”

I held up my hands, trying to show her she wasn’t going to be getting any shit from me. “But does any pony have that power?”

Luna is silent a moment before answering: “No, but we also have to consider that Discord has powers that no other pony can even dream of possessing. He is a master illusionist, but also a fine wielder of the magic arts. He can summon clouds that rain chocolate milk and cause tumbleweeds of cotton candy to roll everywhere; he can-“

“Okay hold up,” I say, standing up and dropping my cigarette to the floor. I stamp it out under-foot. “Chocolate milk clouds? Cotton candy tumbleweeds? All of that sounds absolutely harmless. How does Discord go from that to putting myself and Twilight through a game that by the way has damn near gotten her killed-“

Luna jerks her head in my direction, a look of shock on her face. “Twilight Sparkle nearly died? Tell me how!” I recoil a bit at the force of her demand, but nonetheless I tell her about the encounter with the machete-wielding madman, and how I helped her along her path to recovery.

Rainbow Dash flies over and lands beside me. “So you saved her life, basically, right? You helped her get all better?” I nod. I hadn’t told Luna about the Flame, and I don’t plan to, either. Not unless she finds out from another source and confronts me about it. I want that little secret to stay between me, Twilight, and Discord- at least, until I can explore my Flame more and figure out everything that it can do.

At this point, Rainbow Dash does something that pretty much surprises me: she rears back onto her hind legs, standing up on them- and she gives me a hug. It only lasts for a few seconds before she drops back down onto all fours, but I could feel the warmth that she was radiating.

“Thank you,” she says. “I feel so bad not being able to be there for her, so I’m glad that she has somebody as strong and loyal as you by her side.” Something tells me that she normally doesn’t say things like this, so I smile and pat her on the head affectionately. She closes her eyes, like she’s enjoying it, so I leave my hand on her head for the moment.

I turn my attention now to the one that they keep calling Vinyl. “Someone had mentioned earlier about an echolocation device?”

Vinyl’s ears perked up. “Yeah, are you interested in hearing about it?” I nod.

She grins. “Alright! So this is basically how it works. If I input the basic wavelength of someone’s vocal patterns, my machine can look through a whole bunch of different wavelengths to identify the exact place that someone is at.” She trots over to me. “And the best part? It can cross dimensions!”

Wow. So apparently pony technology is way more beyond ours, than I’d first expected. “So what’s stopping you from using it?” It’s only then that I remember what she said. “Oh, yeah, the Changeling attack. Ugly motherfuckers.”

I suddenly have Luna’s one-hundred percent undivided attention again. “You know about the Changelings?” she asks. “Where have you seen them before? I don’t think you’ve ever been to Equestria before; I would remember seeing you…”

“Never been to Equestria,” I reply, “though like I was telling Twilight, I’d love to go sometime. But anyways, Twilight drew me a picture of them and told me all about them. Plus, there’s this book that I found, that I guess is written in the Changelings’ language. Twilight didn’t want to read it, but she said the title had something to do with eradicating ponies from existence.”

Luna nodded. “They are our sworn enemies, the minions of Queen Chrysalis. They attacked Equestria again not too long ago. They hit our weak point for massive damage, including just about trashing Vinyl’s echolocation machine. Luckily, they didn’t find our interdimensional matter transporter, which is how we brought you here to us.”

Inter…dimensional? “Wait so I’m not in that dimension anymore?”

Lyra is looking at me funny now. “No, silly. You’re in Equestria.”

I… am in… Equestria?! Holy fuck.

“Why did you bring me here? Why didn’t you get Twilight too? You could have brought her back, too, so why d-“

Luna holds her hoof up to silence me, and though I’m starting to rage pretty hard right now, I bite back my words and fall silent. She nods in approval, then speaks: “We track with this machine based off of scent. We thought we had a lock on Twilight’s scent and so we captured the source of the scent and brought it back here. Unfortunately, that turned out to be you, and not Twilight.”

I sniff my shirt. It doesn’t smell any different from usual. “Twilight slept on my chest a few nights. That’s probably why you caught her scent on me.” I suddenly get a whiff of an angry aura in the room; I don’t have to search, really, because Rainbow Dash is giving me the evil eye. What’s going on with her? I didn’t say anything-

Oh. So her and Twilight are lovers, or something? Okay, that’s good to know…

Luna is walking up to me, now. “What do you suggest we do, human one?”

I’d figure the answer to that would be simple. “Easy. Get Twilight and bring her back here.”

Luna is shaking her head before my sentence is even finished. “That’s not going to be possible at this time. The machine is powered by a very specific form of magical energy, that is incredibly hard to come by… It would take us at least another month to be able to find enough energy to be able to re-charge it enough, at least to the point where we could get her back here. With what energy is left, we only have enough to send you back-“

“Then do it.”

She looks at me like I’m crazy. “From what you have told me, human one, that world you and Twilight are stuck in, is not very hospitable. You can stay here, and be with us until we can get Twilight back, and then we can decide what-“

I don’t care at this point if she is the Princess of the night or not; she’s talking some serious shit. I get where she’s coming from, but I disagree completely. “No deal. Twilight is out there in that world alone, and I don’t feel like sitting around here while she could possibly be getting killed.” I ignore the slight whimper that escapes Rainbow Dash’s lips.

“Send me back there, and then you all can get back to finding out a way to get enough magic to bring Twilight back. Besides, I’ll be of absolutely no help to you here; this is pony technology, and I can’t work it. I’ll probably end up fucking things up even more. So do us all a favor, and send me back there.”

Luna shakes her head. “If that is what you wish, then it shall be done. Before you go, though, keep this with you. Give it to Twilight when you see her next.” She hands me a necklace that has the symbols for the sun and the moon on it. “This will give her a link to us; that way, she can contact myself and my counterpart anytime she wants to.”

The sun symbol looks familiar to me, for some reason. It takes me a minute to place it. “The sun symbol… Is it in any way associated with some pony named Celestia?”

Luna nods. “Celestia is the ruler of Equestria, as well as being the ruler of the sun and of the day, as I am the ruler of the night… She is also my sister. The sun is her symbol, as well as being her cutie mark.”

Her what? What the hell is a cutie mark? I’ll have to remember to ask Twilight about that later, when I see her next.

Luna looks at me. “Are you ready?” I nod, and she walks over to a giant machine that for some reason I didn’t notice at all up until that point. She flips a switch, and I see the shadows come up out of the ground. I breathe in one last time, and the shadows engulf me, causing me to see and feel nothing again.

“Hold on, Twilight,” I mutter. “Here I come!”