Sitting at the dorm after a long day in college, Cole Winters sighs.

Now that summer was in the air again, it was getting hard to pay attention in class again. Which wasn’t helped at all by the teachers getting steadily more and more demanding as the year dragged on, and the workload was getting more intense.

Looking over at the computer that sat in the corner, Cole has to suppress the urge to try watching his favorite show, which he’s been denied for most of the last four months. The allure of ponies is strong, but he can’t watch now.

After Trixie’s backstory episode in season 5, he’d had to taper off watching the episodes, and he hadn’t seen anything of season 7 yet.

Drawing a sheaf of papers, he had a microbiology paper due the following week, a stack of court cases to look over, and a lab hand-out to fill out that he was too lazy to fill out when he first did the lab last week.

Looking out the window at the evening sky, Cole sighs.

Then, he shouts, as a brilliant line of fire streaks from the sky towards him.

Scrambling for cover, and expecting an explosion from the impact, Cole can only wait. A sound of smashing glass reaches his ears, and a thump, but no explosion. Peeking out from the chair he’d hid behind, and ignoring the shouts to shut up from the hallway, he takes a look at the ruin of his window.

“How am I going to fix this?!”

He panics at the fact that he will now be paying for the damages.

As if to counter his argument, a soft, rainbow glow lit up the room. Looking down at the mess of broken glass, Cole saw a large, glowing orb. It was almost perfectly smooth, a pearl of glass.

“The hell is that?”

He walks over to the sphere carefully, avoiding the shards of glass, he had to pay for the damages, he didn’t need medical bills on top of that. Cole carefully picked it up and sets it on his desk, the light fading as he touches it. A bit confused by this he headed over to get the broom and dustpan so he can start cleaning up the pieces of glass scattered about the room, knowing his roommate would sue if he stepped on one.

Several minutes of cleaning up the mess and preparing the cardboard to cover the window he stops and re-examines the sphere. Its surface was smooth, with what felt like millions of tiny indents, like craters on the moon, or divots on a golf ball, but larger. All in all, it was a magnificent piece of art, and likely worth a lot of money, but knowing his luck it was fake.

“Who launches a cubic zirconia golf ball at people’s windows?”

The globe simply sits in his hands, rather heavy and very pretty. Just for its visible appearance, it was likely saleable, regardless of the material. Turning it around, he couldn’t find a made-in stamp anywhere.

“Damn ball, I wish I didn’t have to pay for your mess.”

Suddenly, the sphere lights up again, and Cole’s arms lock up as an electric shock with rainbow hues arced up his arms, pain lancing across his nerves as brilliant colors exploded across his vision, before fading away entirely.

“The hell just happened?”

He sighed, holding his head, wondering if the dorm druggie spiked his drink earlier. As he reached for his head, something hard smacked him on the side of his skull, painfully.

“The fuck is on my. . .hand?”

He stopped where he lays, staring at his arm, something was different.

“What the hell?!”

The arm was, for one thing, more tube-like than before, and ended abruptly where the wrist ought to be. Smooth, darkly-colored hair covered the stricken appendage, and he turned it around to see the puff of soft fur on the back of it, a silvery-white in the dim lighting.

“The hell?”

He panics slightly, but more confused than anything. One thought was going through his head, yup, my drink must’ve been laced with something. He tries to stand up only to collapse on all fours in a pile on the floor.

“What the hell is going on here?!”

He stopped speaking, as a knock echoes across the room.

“Hello? Are you awake in there?”

“I don’t know!?”

Silence reigned for several minutes as this processed.

“Then, uhm, how are you talking to me? Do... Do your kind speak in their sleep a lot?”

“Well I did manage to talk to my cousin about games in our sleep once, but no, I am just REALLY confused right now.”

Silence falls again.

“Uhm, can I- can I come in?”

“I would appreciate that seeing as I’ve fallen and can’t get up.”

The door opens rapidly, a rectangle of blinding light against the soothing dark of before. A four-legged shape is silhouetted for a moment, before moving into the room.

“I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to leave you here alone, I just needed to get my notes, and then I realized you’d be hungry, but I couldn’t find anything on what Nightwings eat, so I thought I’d do some research, and-”

The shape resolves itself much more clearly to the confused Cole as a length of spiraling bone on the equine’s forehead lights up, a soft golden aura wrapped around his limbs and helping him back onto the bed.

All the while, she kept talking, her voice kind but rather panicked-sounding.

“Calm down and explain something to me, did you just pick me up using magic?”

“W-well of course. Oh! I forgot to introduce myself, I’m Summer Solace, daughter of the head of the Imperium Sol bureau of Information. A-and you are, sir?”

“Cole, Cole Winters, and what is Imperium Sol?”

“Oh, you must be from the outlands, I’m sorry, I thought that all of the nightwings lived under Lady Rubeum’s rule these days.”

“Who?”

“The Living God of the Earth? Maybe you know her under a different name. Anyways, the Imperium Sol is the official name of King Eosos’ domain, and is from an old language and means ‘Empire of the Sun’ because King Eosos raises the sun each morning!”

“Well, I am really angry right now...“

“I-I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to offend you-”

“Not at you, at the universe itself for once again screwing me over completely.”

The mare just looked at him.

“I-I don’t understand... What do you mean?”

“Judging by all of this and your colorful nature I assume we aren’t on a planet called Earth correct?”

“P-planet? But planets are travelling stars that recur in the night sky regularly. You can’t live on a star.”

“Well as of yesterday I didn’t live here, I didn’t have hooves, I was able to walk without collapsing in a pathetic pile on the ground, and now I just realized the three years I spent at university are now worthless here. Fantastic!”

“Y-you went to a university? Ooh, what did you study?”

The mare seemed to almost literally brighten at his words.

“Biology for three years, and I doubt it’ll be of any use here.”

“What sort of biology? I finished most of the available material when I was fourteen, but any outside knowledge would be really helpful!”

“I did organic chemistry, microbiology, some ichthyology, a-”

“Ichthyology?! I love fish!”

“As do I, but right now I would prefer to figure a few things out. Firstly, where am I, secondly, how I got here, thirdly, why I am a pastel colored pony when I was a bipedal ape only yesterday.

“Alright, in order. This place is my home, or rather my parent’s home. It’s a villa a few dozen miles from the capital of the Imperium Sol, and my parents are letting me use it while they stay at the family estate there and teach.

“As for the second question, I brought you here after I found you outside. I was planning an electricity-based experiment, to see if I could convert the lightning to a base charge in a capacitive spell matrix. But I had to stop, because you were laying there, after this huge bolt of rainbow-colored lightning! I’ve never seen anything like it before, and there’s nothing in my notes about rainbow-lightning. Either way, when I went to check it out, I saw you, wearing a really fancy suit, in the bottom of a blast crater, reminiscent of a shockwave spell or collapsed-trail wormhole.

“And the third thing, I have no idea, but some residual energy from the bolt could be causing some sort of magical feedback, altering your memories. That crater was swamped with high-energy thaums.”

The mare blushed slightly, turning her head away from his gaze.

“Y-you’re not actually pastel, you’re more of a really fine carbon, especially with your eyes.”

“Well my memory is fine I can remember my life before this, the day this happened however is a little hazy, and are you oka- wait, what about my eyes?”

The sunset-colored mare shuffles shyly, and the fall of her hair reminds him momentarily of Fluttershy or Trixie, and she blushes harder, her cheeks going from rosey orange-red to a startling crimson.

“They’re a really nice orange... Uhm, sorry, I d-didn’t mean to get off-topic.”

“Why are my eyes orange now? They used to be brown, same with my hair, and it was long and curly. This is still very strange in so many ways.”

Cole took almost a ‘Thinker’ like pose.

Summer began circling around him, her horn alight again as she contemplates him.

“W-well, you’re mostly a really shiny gray, with bright orange eyes, and your mane and tail coloration is more pony-like than Nightwing-like, from what I’ve read of them, featuring a three-color motif them. I can see...”

She carefully leaned in towards his head, her breath making his ear twitch.

“I think that’s purple or indigo, hard to tell in this light, then cobalt blue, metallic even, and the third color is... steel gray.”

“Huh, I always liked green better, oh well, too late to change anything, not that I could. Oh well, did my clothes have anything in the pockets?”

“Oh, yes, there was some sort of money pouch, and a few artifacts that seemed to have some sort of residual enchantments on them, but I didn’t have time to figure them out.”

“Can you bring me the brick shaped one?

“There were two of them, both had some sort of lightning spell in them. What do they do?”

Cole grinned wickedly.

“I’ll show you my dear.”

Summer blushed at his comment, then hurried out of the room. Cole waited for a minute, wondering why she was suddenly so bashful. Moments later, she skidded back into the room, a bag in her telekinetic grasp, smiling as she burst back into the room.

The bag levitates over to Cole, and she set it down carefully onto the bed in front of him. He spends several minutes of fumbling in the bag, sorting past clothes and such until he finds his prize: an iPod.

“Thank you, now to... Damn it, how do I work this with hooves?”

Cole fumbled with it until he facehoofed, accidentally hitting the iPod’s screen with his nose, and turning it on.

“Ah there we go, now to find my song.”

Cole used his nose on the touch screen leaving smudges all over it, but eventually manages to play the song he wanted. Within Temptation, Our Solemn Hour.

For the four and a quarter minutes of the song, Summer simply watched the device with utter fascination. Cole sat there, happily bobbing his head to the beat of the music, lost for a moment in the recent past.

Slowly, the music fades, and Cole presses the button to stop it with his nose. Looking up, he spotted Summer, sitting in awe, the light from the doorway highlighting her features, from her fiery red-orange coat to the smooth, shimmering violet of her mane, like a sunset in equine form.

“That is one of the songs of my people, do you like it?”

She simply looked at Cole with her mouth agape and her eyes wide, lost in the moment.

“Would you like to hear more?”

Summer snapped out of her trance at the offer, a broad grin stretching across her face. The way her eyes light up just makes Cole want to give her a hug as she nods her head enthusiastically.

“Then hop up here, the bed’s big enough for the both of us, now what kind of music would you like to hear?”

Cole patted a spot on the bed next to him. she crawled up onto the spot, curling up like a large cat next to him as she looked closer.

“I- uhm... I- I have no idea. What kind of music was that? And how did you store an entire song into a single artifact, with a lightning enchantment involved? Most of those simply fade away in minutes, let alone hours or days.”

“Well, where I’m from we have harnessed the power of electricity to power certain objects like this, it isn’t enchanted, it just has a battery inside it. We can store thousands of songs in these and play them back whenever we want. We had no magic or immense physical strength so my people focused on intellect and being a creative and inventive sort.”

“W-wow... that’s just so... wow... And- and your people create music like this? I never knew the outlands could produce such things, all the schools say that away from the six domains, there’s nothing but wilderness and savages.”

“I’m not from the outlands, or here. I wasn’t a pony either, and what’s a nightwing? I never heard of that type.”

“Oh, well, uhm, I guess the outlands might be called other things by those who live there, but, uhm... as for what a nightwing is, well... it’d be easier to show you if there was any light in here.”

“That’s not what I me- never mind, and what do you mean light, I can see perfectly fine, even without my glasses.”

“Well, that’s one thing... it’s almost completely dark right now, the only light is from a few candles in the hall.”

“Huh, I guess Nightwings have good vision in the dark, I can see you perfectly.”

Cole emphasized this by booping her on the nose.

“Well, of course, you’re nocturnal. And, uhm, what was that for?”

“I don’t know, you just look soft.”

She just blushed, and squeaked softly.

“R-really?”

Cole booped her nose again.

“Eeyup. Now what kind of music do you want me to play?”

“Uhm... do you have anything with a cello?”

“I don’t think so, how about this?”

Cole hit play, playing a song with a long name, the music playing over the speaker. The bass, heavy rhythm and simple lyrics dragging Summer into the song as they listened.

Leaning on Cole as she listened, Solace found her eyes fixated on the tiny device, just small enough, and the right shape, to fit in the hollow underside of his hoof. The two sat as the music continued, and the full five and a half minutes of the song pass.

“So how was that?”

“W-wow... it sounded so... primal, I suppose. I-I don’t really know how to describe it.”

“Glad you liked it, I think it would be classified as industrial metal, not really sure. Wanna hear some of the heavier stuff?”

Cole playfully jabbed her.

“I- I think I would like that... But, do you have anything with more strings in it?”

“I think I have something in mind.”

Cole gave her a smile as he selected A Little Piece Of Heaven by Avenged Sevenfold.

As the lyrics pour out, and the opening notes drift out. Summer settled in closer to Cole in the dark, smiling at the soft music.

When the grimmer parts of the song, though, began to play, she cringed, then winced, then huddled against Cole, forcing him to stop it most of the way through to figure out why his side had turned wet. He looked down at the unicorn, and saw through the gloom that her face was buried in his side, and that she was crying softly.

“Y-You okay?”

“S-s-sorry... I- I just... that was awful! why would anypony write music a-about k-killing a-a-and eating other p-p-ponies and w-w-why?”

Summer sobbed into Cole’s side, barely able to speak around the choking, stifled crying.

“I’m sorry, I guess where I’m from things like that aren’t as frowned upon in music. Want me to play something else?”

“Y-yeah...”

Cole then spent a full minute fiddling with the device, finding a better song through much diligence and effort. Finally, he puts on a song that should be a little more... uplifting.

Cole smiles as the song ends, and looked down to ask Summer what to go for next, only to see that she’d fallen asleep on him, snoring softly, her breaths making the lone bundle of hair sticking off the front of her mane drift up and down.

Cole just sat there and began to stroke her mane, he kind of felt bad for letting her listen to a song of that nature, ponies and cannibalism aren’t good pairings. Sitting and contemplating the events of the morning/evening/night/whatever, Cole wondered how he arrived.

Summer had said something about a rainbow-colored lightning bolt, and something about that set him to thinking. The words kept ringing in his head, and he had a momentary flashback to something about rainbow-colored electricity and some kind of orb. Whatever the memory was, though, he couldn’t focus on it, like a bad dream.

Before she woke up he had an idea. He laid her in bed, laid down next to her, messed up her mane a little bit, and simply waited. And waited. And waited.

He was patient, though, and waited until his eyes grew heavy, fighting off sleep every moment until he, too finally drifted into rest.

Author's Note

Well, this is the much-anticipated (by that one guy in the back row. Yeah, you, the one throwing popcorn at the screen) third of six.
Yeah, that's right, six. I need to get either a life or an assistant.

Anyone got a 1-Up I can borrow?