A Journey Unthought Of

by Hustlin Tom

Chapter 1 REVISED

The sensation of falling was intense. I was hurtling thousands of feet every second, but I also felt as if I wasn’t even moving at all. My bones and muscles were burning within my body. They felt like they were on fire; like every atom of my being was bundled up with immense energy. I experienced vertigo, unsure of whether I was falling, standing, or even flying through a cauldron of what looked like something I could only describe as a white blackness, and which sounded like a roaring silence. My environmental protection suit was straining at its every joint, and it was holding me together in the nothingness.

Then I saw it: right before my eyes, a small pinpoint of light.

It grew larger at an agonizing pace. I realized that if I wanted to survive this journey, and not be lost to all of reality, I had to will myself towards the point. As I reached out with my right hand to try and grasp at the seemingly distant hole in the mad world around me, I felt a numb sensation overcome my legs. Looking down I cried out to see that my feet were slowly disintegrating, eaten away by the energies of the Void. Panicking, I flailed my outstretched hand towards my destination. As I concentrated on being alive and free from the hellish world around me, the point of light grew a little larger. Seeing that my determination was giving me results, I did everything I could to ignore the nothingness I felt slowly climbing up my torso, and I reached. I screamed in anger, fright, and the intensity of my desire to be real again. I could finally see colors in the light; blue, green, and brown. I remember feeling like I was staring through a camera's out of focus lens, and as I felt my torso enter oblivion and the numbness claw up towards my arms and neck, my fingers touched the light.

I felt the wind cutting across my face and whistle past my ears. Now realizing that my senses felt something familiar and not hostile to my sanity, I screamed out in excitement: I was alive! I was back in real life! As my eyes opened to greet the world around me, the scream of exhilaration turned into one of terror as I saw I was free-falling towards a quickly approaching forest skyline. I hit the upper branches of a pine tree, and fell through them as they bent beneath me. My suit, made of nothing more than hard plastics, synthetic polymers, and bits of aluminum, was definitely not designed with a parachute, and it became a form-fitting, shock absorbing prison around me. More branches hit my body. Suddenly I saw a large and very thick branch loom directly in front of me, and before I could scream again I slammed down into it with a crack. I felt my chest cave in. All the breath was knocked from my lungs. I lost my balance, and my body fell to the side of that branch. My fall was cushioned, and I heard a splashing sound. Cold crystal clear water lapped up over me and swallowed me whole. I could feel it filling my lungs, but there was nothing my body could do to expel it from them. As the sunlight creeping beneath the surface grew dimmer, I remember feeling a delirious desire to laugh overcome me: I had exchanged one cold and dark death for another, but now I was at least experiencing one I was comfortable with.

---

Lyra Heartstrings strummed her instrument absentmindedly, trying to attune herself with the natural world surrounding her. Inspiration was a very nebulous and flighty thing to try and catch, but the musician was hoping that for her next piece the sounds of the Everfree could help her to write a mysterious and powerful melody. After what seemed like hours of waiting, she found a contentment in the sound of the chirping birds and a rustling of the wind in the branches of the trees, and she began her meditation in earnest, trying to internalize the spirit of the forest and find the beat she was looking to start with. She felt like it had to be something from the higher strings of her lyre, something primal and shrill, like that scream she was hearing.

As the yelling continued, she stirred from her trance to look up in the direction she heard the blood curdling call coming from. Some sort of creature was falling through the trees, but as it fell out of sight, obscured by more low hanging branches, its screaming abruptly stopped. Fearing the worst, Lyra ran towards the area where the creature should have landed, scrambling over the rugged broken forest floor, jumping over an eroded old river bed. There was a large splashing sound as she jumped up to the top of the ridge ahead of her. As she cleared the top, she saw the obviously unconscious form of the animal drifting down the river in front of her.

"Horseapples," she hissed to herself as she rushed to the riverbank and waded in after the poor thing. She started to paddle when the water became too deep to walk in. Horrified, she saw it was starting to sink to the bottom of the riverbed.

"Oh no you don't," she exclaimed, and she redoubled her efforts to paddle after it. When she felt she was close enough, she reached out with her magic, lifting it up with all her mental might. It rose up near the surface again, and then it rose up out of the water, suspended in a golden aura. Straining under the drain of her magical reserve and her need for concentration, Lyra levitated it towards the shore. Her hooves found purchase on the riverbed once again as she made it, and she slowly turned the creature over to lie chest down on the gravel strewn about.

Tired, but knowing she still wasn't done, she brought her forehooves up onto the creature's back and slowly pressed their weight down, then ground them up towards its head. Lyra repeated this motion several times until she heard it sputtering and coughing beneath her. When it had finished clearing its airway, the creature seemed to settle, and she realized that it had fallen back into its unconscious state as it raggedly breathed into the rocks beneath it.

Looking down at the creature she had just rescued, she realized that it could still be injured in some way. Now that she wasn't panicking over its life, she also realized she had never seen anything like it before. Its upper torso almost looked like a minotaur without its horns, but its lower half had straight legs instead of those of an ox. It wasn't awake and it had no obvious means of defending itself: by nightfall it could very well become some other animal's dinner. She glanced back in the direction she had come from: the forest edge wasn't all that far away. She could drag it to the cottage if she took a quick breather before she did. From there she could get Fluttershy. "Maybe she can help me with this poor thing," she thought to herself as she got ready to cast another levitation spell.

---

I slowly came to in a small cottage. Very small, I had to note as I blurrily looked at my immediate surroundings. The pain and ebbing burning I felt in my lungs either told me I was alive or that I was being very convincing at it despite being dead. Wherever I was, it appeared to be some sort of small living room. A bookcase sat next to me. A doorway and an adjoining hall were near my feet and to my left. To my right was a low sitting couch, and in front of it were two pillows, probably for some pets of the owner. There was a window on the opposite wall, through which I could see the magnificent clear sky. Next to it was a door that most likely opened to the outside world. Obviously someone lived here in comfort for so small of a room.

I heard the sounds of two people talking in a room next to mine, their conversation echoing out of a doorway in the far right corner. They were talking quite loudly. It was more than that I realized; they were having an argument.

“No! We are not keeping it! We don’t even know what it is, and we have no idea how to care for it!”

This I was quick to note: They don’t know what I was?

The voice continued, “You should have left it out there in the forest! It would have woken up and been gone to..wherever it belongs!”

“Bon Bon, I couldn’t just leave it out there! It had no means of protecting itself. Besides, I'm not asking that we keep it here forever; just until I can get to Fluttershy's!”

My mind sank into a further state of confusion: what kind of a name was 'Bon Bon', or for that matter 'Fluttershy'?

"And how do I know this won't turn into you begging for us to keep it? You have a gold heart for saving the poor creature Lyra Heartstrings, but I will be making sure it doesn't stay one second longer than it has to."

I sniffed the air and realized that the smell of grass was lying heavily in the room. So I’m on a farm of some kind, obviously. The smell agitated my already burning lungs, and I sneezed.

Absentmindedly, the voice of the one named 'Lyra Heartstrings' mechanically exclaimed, “Bless you!”

“Thank you,” I replied back in a similarly predetermined manner.

Afterwards, there was a long pause of silence. After a while, the cream colored head of a young pony emerged from around the corner, looking all around curiously. Another pony came around the corner fully, which gave me a start, because I saw that it had a horn on its head, and all of its body was painted some shade of mint. After that discovery, I noticed their manes were stylized, almost like human hair. The cream colored one had a string of pink hair through its navy blue mane.

“You didn’t tell me you had somepony over, Lyra,” the cream colored pony said.

Wait, the cream colored pony spoke.

I shook my head softly, while simultaneously wondering if I had somehow hit my head during my fall.

The mint colored unicorn replied back, “I don’t have anypony over”.

My eyes slowly grew wider. This wasn't a delusion: these two ponies could talk!

Words slowly and with a slight trembling came to my mouth, “What in the world...”

Both of the ponies looked at me.

The mint colored unicorn stared at me in awe. The cream colored one fainted.

And that’s how it all began.

Comments

[paladinwolf]

Alright, since no one has said anything... If I read this correctly, he is in an 'environmental protection suit'. How could he drown, if he is in an EV suit? By definition, an EV suit would protect him from hostile environments such as water. When Lyra pumped his back to get the water out, what happened to his helmet? Did it disintegrate? Was his EV suit annihilated on impact with a tree? Not sure how this is headed. onward to the next chapter...

Oh, fyi, this is what I expect when someone mentions an EV suit of some sort but does not detail it much.
database.obsidianfleet.net/wiki/images/EVAA.png
or
static4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120417224119/memoryalpha/en/images/c/c3/EV_suit,_22nd_century.jpg

After a lil thought, how did Lyra even compress his lungs? The EV suit was armored?

[StarChaser01]

6861012 Yeah, that bugged me too... wouldn't the thing have a helmet if it managed to protect him from the Void?

[JazzyWaffles]

I was gonna point out the plot holes in the first chapter, but the two fine gents before me did that already. Oh well!