It is said that in times of danger, heroes will come together to face the rising tide of evil, and fight back to preserve the light. These heroes can come from the strangest of places.
This is the story of one such hero. Although she appears to be Zipp Storm, you may be surprised to learn her true origins...
Alright, time to stop talking in the third person. The person, or pony, should I say, is me. I'm Zipp Storm. It's a pleasure to meet you, though I have to ask how we're having the conversation.
I guess that's another magical mystery for me to work out. As you can probably guess from the blurb I left above, I wasn't originally a pegasus. No, I wasn't originally a unicorn, as that infamous typo in a YouTube video suggests (seriously, what were Netflix thinking?).
No. To truly understand both my story and the story of the chaos that nearly destroyed Equestria, we must first go back in time to a place far from here. A town in a place called England.
This town was called Nottingham, and it was a pretty nice place to live. Not a very big place, but not that small either. It was the sort of place where you could easily walk a few minutes from heavily built up places and find yourself in fields and nature without too much difficulty. It was a nice place to live.
As you've probably picked up, this was where I lived. This small house on Gregory Street was where I lived all that time ago.
Tom was my name back in those days. I was a graduate of the University of Nottingham, and at that stage of my life was preparing for a sudden shift in my life. I was going away from Britain for a long time, to study in the United States (something I had planned to do before the dreaded disease hit).
That morning had begun like most others. Get up, shower, eat, brush teeth, and then prepare to head out for my business. I had some shopping to do, but I got the heavy stuff into my home via internet ordering. I didn't have space for a proper car in a garage, and instead used a motorbike to get about town. I decided I would collect the few supplies I needed to purchase after going to another place which is close to my heart.
So, I got my gear on, hopped onto the bike, and wheeled it off the drive before stopping on the road. The engine roared into life. "Imagine doing this on a Black Shadow," I said to myself. I would have liked to own one, but they were quite rare, and also pretty expensive. I was also a complete shortarse, so would have struggled to start it without jumping on the levers.
So it's was my faithful Kawasaki it was. I kicked the engine into forward movement, and flew down the road at great speed. So far, my life seemed normal as I blazed down the roads.
I had no way of knowing that many parallel versions of myself had experienced strange things on this street, and it had become a weirdness magnet of sorts for much of the country. And it was about to become the same for me. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Just north of the A52 lies the familiar land of Wollaton Park. It was once a country estate owned by some rich gentleman- I think the person who built it was mates with Queen Elizabeth I- and it had since become a public park which housed a natural history museum and a large industrial collection.
I arrived at the scene to go and park at the bottom of the hill, and then shut the engine off to go and get a ticket. I soon secured it, as parking tickets were mercifully still cheap (the Council, thankfully, hadn't taken the recent economic instability as an excuse to jack prices up). I plopped the ticket on my bike, which I had parked to ensure other motorists had seen it, and set off into the park, leaving my helmet and jacket behind at the bike.
I wasn't heading for the house today. Off to the side of the site is a large lake, and near that lake are several small areas of trees. I'm not sure what you call them- it's been a very long time since I used all those sorts of words.
I'm rambling again, aren't I?
Up ahead along the pathway was one such area. This place was known for strange and unnatural phenomena, such as one story where children were chased out of the forest by gnomes driving little cars. This story sounded both hilarious and horrifying, and I felt merited further investigation. I advanced into the tree line, noticing the barrier that used to exist there had curiously been broken. Who had done this? A gnome, possibly? That's ridiculous, as gnomes don't exist.
I made my way, noticing the tree branches closing overhead as I walked in. It made the place feel spooky and empty. No wonder so many horror stories in European folklore take place in forests. They must have seemed quite scary, empty places full of danger to people before the Industrial Revolution.
I stopped when I was partway under the line of tree branches, and spotted something odd. It looked as though a massacre had happened here. There was a gigantic cloud of feathers on the floor, with them being scattered haphazardly all across the ground. Clearly a bird had been killed here.
Or so I thought. The plumage resembled no bird I had ever seen. The feathers were a confusing mix of blue and purple, with some being mixed blue and purple shades. Had I discovered a new species of bird?
I picked one of the feathers up as a curiosity to show to friends or ornithologists. This was a mistake.
An electrical shock flowed through my very body, and I toppled over backwards into the grass below the trees. I tried to get back up, but my limbs wouldn't cooperate.
"Arise, brave hero!" said a voice. "Take her place!"
As this was set, bluish whirling energies flew about, and something weird began to happen. My entire body shrank in size, before my legs snapped backwards with a series of bangs. I also lost all sensation in my feet as my boots fell off and landed on the floor. Below where they had once been were... hooves?
This couldn't be happening. I tried to bash my head against something in a futile attempt to stop the pain as my chest began to expand. A rather personal area started to tingle, and before I could even curse it was sucked into me. Not only did it seem I was a centaur, I was a female centaur.
Something else was added in that region, as most of my clothing was torn apart by the combination of my shifting frame and uncontrolled movements. My neck snapped backwards, sounding like it was broken. Moments later, my arms snapped into a different shape, and my hands were distorted into hooves.
Two bony structures erupted out of the sides of my back before being covered in flesh, skin, and a layer of fur. Feathers popped out of the back, in shades of dark blue, purple, several sets of ones inbetween, and a small set of light blue feathers.
My mouth and nose merged together as I was still unable to process what was happening. My mouth and nose were crushed together into a muzzle, which then moved forward a few inches in a sequence that would have made John Landis wonder how on Earth it was pulled off.
My eyes turned blue and grew in size as a layer of white fur covered my body. My hair was pulled upwards, and shifted to a mixture of blue and pink. A tail in the same colours popped out of my ass.
At last, the pain faded away, and I tried to drag myself up the bank. I say 'tried'. My limbs wouldn't cooperate. They moved randomly in different directions with no sense of cohesion. I reached the top of the bank, before a voice shouted.
"Mummy, look! It's Zipp Storm!"
I then saw a child pointing at me. No, this couldn't be happening! Zipp is a made up character! What the Hell was going on?
I tried to move forward, but one of my legs slipped and I began to roll down the hill. I gathered speed as a rolling block of flesh and limbs randomly flailing as I approached the water of the nearby lake.
I slammed into it, the water flying high into the air as I drifted over. I continued to flail in a desperate attempt to stay on the surface, but you try swimming with six unfamiliar limbs.
I drifted under, and it seemed as though the sweet release of death would free me from this nightmare.
Life, however, had different plans for me.