The midday sun shone across the sky, illuminating the active Raising Cane’s where Anon, a man with short brown hair, light mustache and beard, and a black t-shirt and camo cargo pants sat at one of the bar stools across from the cash register, eating his 4-piece tendie combo (complete with Cane’s sauce, no slaw/extra fries, a piece of buttered toast, and a Hi C fruit punch with no ice). With little else going on today, his plan was naught more than “go out, grab some lunch, go back home, browse the chan until it’s time to work my graveyard shift security job, where I get paid to sit down at a desk and browse the chan for 8 hours”. Taking one bite out of his toast, half the slice is gone, and he closes his eyes in bliss enjoying his meal.

“Hey,” he hears a strong female voice behind him, no doubt calling to him, causing him to open his eyes quickly in shock. Confused, startled, and certainly not used to being approached, he turns around to see his greeter, and is met by a 4’6” (on all fours) beautiful unicorn with an off-white coat and horn, black saddlebags, an aquamarine mane and tail, a cutie mark he couldn’t see well (of course it’s bad manners to ogle flanks for too long), and what he would later describe as “resting mare face”.

“Umm… hello?” he responds, looking her over and giving a pathetic wave, encouraging her to go on (which she doesn’t). A couple moments later he responds, “do you need something?”

“Is this seat taken?” she raises a hoof as if to point to the stool next to his: Not surprising, as it’s just shortly after lunch rush and all the seats are full unless you want to sit outside.

“Go right ahead,” he responds to the mare, who nods wordlessly and hops on her haunches to sit down next to him human-style, while he finishes up his piece of toast awkwardly.

“Is that Hi C?” she asks, signaling to the cup near his right hand, causing him to nod his head, pick up his cup, and show her through the see-through lid.

“Yeah, with no ice,” he continues to the mare, who nods as well. A thick, palpable silence penetrates their conversation for a few more moments, as Anon focuses his attention back to his combo, tackling the fries.

“Fresh hot chicken for Stella!” a busy female chicken wagie calls out. Anon lifts his head and notices his acquaintance nod hers, as her horn sparkles and levitates the tray to her side of the counter. His eyes widen: not only has he never seen a unicorn before today, he’s certainly never seen one use magic like that.

“Stella,” Anon quickly chews and swallows the portion of fries in his mouth, thinking out loud and focusing his attention on her, “is that your name?”

“Yes,” she responds coldly, looking not-exactly at him, but in his general area. Her magic then levitates her cup of iced lemonade, taking a long sip.

“Anon,” he raises an open palm to her to offer a hand/hoofshake, causing her to do likewise as he tries to find the right part of her hoof to grab, hoping he did a good job on short notice. After all, “faux pas when dealing with mare species” is not a topic he’s particularly versed in.

“What’s that shirt?” she points another hoof at him, causing him to look down at his top apparel: A black t-shirt with the McDonald’s golden arches logo, with the text underneath it reading “MkUltra”.

“Oh, haha…” he lets out an uncertain laugh, having never thought about explaining the joke to a girl before. “Well, it’s just like the McDonald’s logo, but the text says MkUltra.”

“I know what both of those are,” she emotionlessly adds, before they share the unspoken consensus to return to their meals. The two Oblivion NPCs share the silence for a few minutes until Anon musters the courage to speak again to the first non-family woman who approached him all year, thinking extra carefully about his choice of words.

“So…” he begins, as the mare moves her eyes in his direction without turning her head. “Do you come here often?”

“Yes,” another concise response. “I was at the grand opening,” she adds, referring to a month ago.

“Really? I’ve been coming pretty often as well, hadn’t seen you before,” he takes a deep breath in, deciding better than to allude to the fact that she’s a unicorn. Surely he would have remembered seeing a unicorn before? “I was there too. You know how they had the raffle where twenty randomly drawn names win free Cane’s for a year?”

“You won.”

“You remember me?” he responds in shock.

“Yeah, they called your name, you started screaming, and you ran down the line with your arms flailing.” His eyes widen unconsciously, startled by her recollection of events. Of course, every ounce of what she’s saying is true. He just didn’t expect her (or anyone, really) to remember either his face, name, or put those together with obviously the most excited raffle winner. It’s a couple more moments before he responds.

“You’ve got a great memory,” he chuckles and smiles nervously, her face remaining as stone as ever.

“Thanks.”

“I mean, of course I was excited. I think that was the first raffle I ever won.”

Another awkward, minute-long silence between them ensues. A new customer comes in, the wagies call out names, people at nearby tables talk and laugh, and Stella finally speaks up:

“Your hair is pretty bad.”

“Huh?” Yet again he turns to her, his mouth half-full of chicken tendie, trying to chew before she finishes her train of thought.

“Isn’t that what humans call their manes?”

“Yeah, but you said my hair is bad?”

“It’s thinning.”

He turns away from her and looks at the soda dispenser, checking his reflection. She was correct; his hair is disheveled and quite obviously thinning at parts.

“Oh geez, you’re right,” the dumbstruck Anon says after running his hand through his hair in an on-the-spot attempt to look ever so slightly more presentable. “I’m sorry, I don’t really take good care of it.” A couple more seconds of no response transpire, leaving him to add “Your hair-I mean mane looks great though.”

“Thanks.”

It’s after another silent period that Anon has his meal finished, with Stella slowly behind him. Taking his meal basket in one hand and his empty cup of corn syrup in the other, he empties his trash by the nearby soda machine- only stopping when he feels a wadded-up napkin hit his shoulder.

“Please get me a lemonade,” he turns around to find that Stella is hovering her cup full of ice to him, who stands still for another moment, slowly raising his hand to grab the cup from her magic pull. It didn’t really seem like much, they barely even touched, but some tangible emotion was present as the soda cup passed from her magic grasp to his human hand. “Sometime today would be nice.”

Yeah, he zoned out again, didn’t he?

With all the elegance of a balding ape with Parkinsons, he pivots, removes the lids from both drinks, and fills his iceless cup with the artificially red-dyed ambrosia of the money gods, and hers with the clearer yellowish liquid (as much as he could without the ice spilling over) of colts and fillies looking to make a few quarters, and seconds later joins her at the stool, holding her lemonade out to her- and there that feeling is again. Her magic brushes against his hand as she levitates the drink to her mouth.

“Umm… Well, it was good to meet you, but I was just about to go home.” He can barely get the words out of his mouth. So many unexpected things have happened in the span of less than ten minutes.

“Same.” She responds, thinking nothing of the world-shattering she’s just caused this unsuspecting human. “Thanks for keeping me company.”

“Y-yeah, likewise. Nice to meet you, Stella.” Technically true. Up to this point, he was planning on just going back to regular life, maybe tell his friends what happened. Like they’d believe him. Go back home, vidya, text all two of his friends “lol guess what happened at Raising Cane’s today-”

“Do you want to come here again?”

His heart stopped. If he thought he was thunderstruck before, this dropped the whole storm on him.

“What, you mean, with you?”

“Yes.”

“Uh, yeah, I should be free at 1PM this time next week.”

“Can I put your number in my phone?”

When Anon first saw the unicorn, his meter hit 3. When she spoke curtly to him repeatedly, it was at 7. When she asked him out at a specific time, she turned it up to 11. Now? Now it was at least 20. Reflecting on this moment Anon could only hope he didn’t drop too much spaghetti on the pristinely mopped Cane’s floor as he concluded his first conversation with the mare, who took the first step and asked him out- the MARE asked HIM out. He only hoped his next few spaghetti-laced sentences were coherent enough (and not utterly reeking of “never in my life been 5 feet from a girl”) to make a good first impression on the mare who obviously expressed interest in him.

His memory was a blank slate for who knows how long, really, checking back into reality as he hears a “see you then” from the mare and waves goodbye to her as she nods and trots out.

“That was no doubt the strangest experience in my entire life,” Anon thinks to himself, positively melting with emotion, but (ever so slightly) more sane and in his right mind. “I could count on one hand the amount of times a girl approached me, and just like that a unicorn mare out of nowhere greeted me. Obviously she had her eye on me for a while, she knew I was at the grand opening, she knew I won the prize, and she made comments about my hair? I can’t put my finger on what it is about her, but… there’s something about her that just makes me want to know her better. Not just the fact that she’s a unicorn. I can’t mess this up. I need to play my cards right. At least it’s somewhat of a relief that she seems into me, but-”
And so his thoughts went for several uninterrupted minutes, before exhausting himself and snapping back into reality. An opportunity has been handed to him, like the head of a prophet on a silver platter, and he would be a fool not to hammer the iron while it glows red hot.

Author's Note

If you've gotten this far down my autism-fueled story, thank you so much for reading this far! As stated in descriptions, yes, this is inspired by a dream I had. Now granted, plenty of the information written here came from myself "filling in the gaps" as it were, but the overall framework (of the first chapter at least) is quite literally ripped from the dream world. Thank you Princess Luna for bestowing this knowledge (and responsibility) upon me.

Also, this particular anon is literally just me. I understand this is literally just me writing about my life, with some fanciful details, but what the heck? By the particular we can know the universal.

Finally, this is indeed my attempt to return to the foray of writing after years of inactivity. I hope this can become a regular thing and I expect to have some updates... I won't promise when, but sometime eventually!