When my consciousness comes back to me, it feels as though someone’s been smashing my head with a sledgehammer for hours. I summon all my strength to open my eyelids, and can see that it’s now the middle of the day. Is this the same day as when I came to…wherever this is?

When I sit up, splotches of light jump all around my vision and my head feels like it grows 20 pounds lighter. I back up to a tree and use it to prop myself up, then survey where I am.

I’m sitting in a giant field with long, light green grass moving gently in the cool breeze. There are a few trees dotted here and there, but for the most part it’s just a grassland. On my right are some mountains, and one of them looks like it has a city built onto one of them. It’s not quite built onto the mountain, but more…off of it. A lot is built on a platform that juts out a bit. I swear that I’m hallucinating, because I’ve never seen or heard of any city like it. It looks like some majestic city out of a fantasy story. If this is real and whatever lives there doesn’t want to kill me, I’d love to go there sometime.

I bury my face in my hands. Interdimensional travel hurts a lot, and it’s giving me one awful headache. I can even hear my heartbeat in my head, and it’s really fast and getting louder. Wait, that’s not my heartbeat. It sounds like a ton of hooves running straight at me.

Taking my face out of my hands, I expect to see a bunch of heavily armed alien creatures on some weird horse-like things. Instead, I see fairly normal horses with no riders. They’re the armed ones. Great, seems like a side affect of travel is weird hallucinations. A white one in purple armor steps ahead steps foreword uneasily and looks at me. It’s got a horn on its head, does that mean it’s a unicorn? Man, these hallucinations are really strange.

“Hello, creature!” it says in a proud voice. Judging by its voice sounds, I can only guess that it’s a male. “We have never seen anything like you before. Where are you from?”

I laugh at the idea of a talking unicorn in armor asking me where I’m from. I’ve probably actually just landed in the middle of nowhere, still on Earth. “So,” I try to ask through my giggling, “You’re a talking unicorn? I’ll admit, I never expected to be seeing things like this while sober.”

He looks at me again, confused. “I’m sorry, what?” he asks. I can see that figments of my imagination clearly don’t have any sense of humor.

“Come on,” I laugh, “Talking unicorns? This can’t be real.”

“Well, I can assure you that we are. You’re…not from around here, are you?”

“So, you think you’re real?” I ask. He nods. I just groan and bury my face in my hands. I'm suffering through excruciating pain, in the middle of God knows where, and to top it off, I've got some unicorn insisting that he's real. I mean, supposedly being on an alien planet and all, I'd accept that he's a native, but he seems too...real. He speaks English perfectly, wears armor that looks pretty recognizable, and looks exactly like normal horses. Ironically, he's so real that I don't believe that he is.

"Is everything all right?" he asks.

"No," I moan, sliding my hands off my head.

"Well, maybe I can help?" he asks benevolently. The horn on his head lights up purple, and he walks toward me.

"No."

"Come on, now," he says in the manner you'd use when talking to a stubborn kid. "This won't hurt at all and it'll make you feel a lot better."

"No!" I say more powerfully. I have no idea what he's trying to do and frankly, I'm scared at the thought of an alien doing some unknown thing to me.

"Come on," he pleads again, "I'm just trying to help you."

"I said no!"

"Please?" he asks, getting even closer.

"No! I don't need any help!" I scream. Without thinking, I do the first thing that comes to mind; I make a fist and punch him square in the jaw.

As soon as I pull my fist back, all the other soldiers raise their spears at me and advance. I think I just punched one of their generals in the face.

“What was that for?” the unicorn yells at me.

“Hey, this isn't all my fault!” I yell back. "If you weren't advancing on me, I wouldn't have done that!"

He shakes his head in disbelief. I can tell that I’m certainly not making a good first impression on these things. “Well, since it appears that we can’t discuss this like civilized beings, we’ll have to stoop to your level.” His horn sparkles again, and this time he fires something at me. The bolt of light hits me square in the head and gives me an even worse headache than the one I had before. I scream and fall to the ground, clenching my forehead. I feel excruciating pain coming on as I pass out again.

***

It’s a lot colder and darker when I wake up again. I go to rub my head in pain, but something snags my arm and stops it from fully getting there. I move my stiff neck slowly to see what’s on my wrist. There’s a shackle on it, with a chain going to the stone wall behind me. Seems like a bit of overkill, but I did sort of nail one of their soldiers in the face, so I guess I can't blame them.

I drop my hand down in defeat, and when it lands on my leg, something doesn’t feel…right. To check, I move my hand up my body to my ribs, and the feel doesn’t change at all. I move my head down to survey myself, and I realize now why it’s so cold. The horses have taken the jumpsuit off me sometime between when they knocked me out and chained me to the wall.

I look around at where they’re keeping me. A small stone chamber with a small little window that lets some light in. The door out looks like it’s some heavy iron designed to keep me in. If I didn’t know better (and I probably don’t), I’d say this is some sort of medieval torture room. If it is, I sure hope these horses don’t get as creative with a bike seat as the UN torturers got.

The door creaks open, and the unicorn I punched in the face walks in. It’s weird, because he doesn’t even look mad. The purple armor he was wearing is also gone, making him wearing just as much as me, which certainly doesn't make me feel any safer.

“Haven’t you ever heard of knocking?” I yell at him. Almost instantly, he stops out of shock.

“I’m sorry,” he says pretty apologetically. “Did I startle you?”

I scoot back and pull my knees up. “Well, you took my clothes off of me and chained me to a wall, so let’s start with those things.”

“Is being exposed considered indecent where you come from?” he asks. “Forgive me if we have done or are doing anything offensive to you.”

“Well, it kind of is. Both taking my jumpsuit and throwing me in a dungeon would be considered bad hospitality, but I guess I sort of deserve the latter after the whole," I point at his face. "You know." He smiles.

“All right,” he says, moving to the door. “I’ll go get your clothes.” He opens the door and walks out. After a few minutes, he cracks the door and levitates it to me. Surprisingly, he even unshackles my arm, which is even more than I trust myself; I wouldn’t be too surprised if I go on some sort of rampage and try to kill half this world.

My whole body aches when I try to stand up. I’m so stiff that I can barely even get my feet into it. When I do, I fall back down and put the rest of it on. I sit on the ground for a couple more minutes, moaning in pain.

The unicorn walks back in after a bit. He’s still not wearing anything, which I can assume is the social norm here. “Better?” he asks, using his magic to reattach the shackle to me.

I pull a little on the chain that he just reattached to me. “I guess it’s okay.”

“Again, sorry for everything that must be happening. I guess we over reacted to you acting out of confusion.”

“It wasn’t confusion,” I admit. “I was…sort of stupid and I wasn't thinking. I should be the one apologizing to you. It’s not normal to punch people in the face when you meet them, so sorry if I gave you the wrong first impression of us.”

“Would you mind if I bring somepony else in so we can clear the air?”

I swear that he just said “somepony” instead of “somebody”. Still, that’s not even the wackiest thing that’s happened in the past month. “Sure,” I say fairly indifferently.

The door opens again, and a larger, pure white horse walks in. Its mane is long and constantly flowing, even though there’s no wind in here. The rainbow of pastel colors sparkles with the little light and generates a soft glow, brightening the mood. Interestingly, it has both a horn and wings. “Hello,” it says in a feminine and regal voice, “My name is Princess Celestia, the ruler of Equestria and all ponies that live within its borders. And who might you be, visitor?”

Man, that was quite an entrance. “I’m Keerthana Griffis. I was sent by the United Nations to this planet to see what's here.” I look around a bit. “Where are the rest of the people I came with?”

“’People?’” the princess asks. “Is that what you are?”

“Well, sort of. I’m a human. ‘People’ is a general term referring to more than one of us. Have you seen any else?”

She shakes her head. “No, I’m sorry, we haven’t. Did you come here with others?”

“Yeah, four more. You sure? You saw none of them?”

She shakes her head again. “Do you have any idea where they might be?”

I think about it for a second. “No, I…I don't. I don’t even know where I am, really.”

“You are in the city of Canterlot, the magnificent capitol city of Equestria,” she smiles. “Jewel of the planet of Equis. And where would you be from?”

“The United States, on the planet Earth. What galaxy is Equis in?”

“Galaxy?” she asks.

I sigh as I realize how much of a chore this might end up being. “A big cluster of stars and planets, but that's not important right now.”

Her horn lights up, and the shackle around my wrist falls off. “Would you come with me?”

Shakily, I get up to my feet and realize how much taller I am than all these horses. I’m not that tall to begin with and I’m hunched over, but the unicorn still only goes to my chest. The princess, who looks so tall in comparison, is only slightly taller than I am. She leads me out of the room and into a long hallway. “Where are we going?” I ask.

“I will be sending you to my best student, in Ponyville. She will accommodate you, and I hope that we will be able to learn much more about ‘people’.”

Ponyville? Nice to know I'm in the Land of Creative Place Names. Celestia walks us out of the dungeons to a small deck where a golden carriage is sitting in the evening sun. Two armored horses with wings are hitched to it. She gestures her hoof toward it, so I climb in and sit down.

“Wait,” I say, looking around the carriage, “I had a bag. Did anyone find a backpack near me?”

“There was a bag near you when we found you,” the unicorn says. “Is that what a ‘backpack’ is?”

“Yeah. Do you have it?”

“It’s already been sent to Ponyville,” he explains. Something pops into his head, because now he’s smiling broadly. “Twilight will love to meet you. Tell her I say hey.”

“Uhh, sure?” The horses open their wings and start flapping them. Surprisingly, they manage to take off, the carriage in tow. I look over the side to the picturesque country all around me. Mountains, forests, grasslands, and all the beauty of the world surrounds the carriage as far as the eye can see. This world might not be so bad after all.

Author's Note

Sorry I'm late. I actually had this written for over a month, but I kept sitting on it and becoming more and more busy.