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// 17 
// Story: Choice 
// by AnOrdinaryWriter 
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You attempt to walk a little to the right to realign yourself, and then proceed forward from there. Strangely enough, you’ve been walking for quite some time and you haven’t reached the poster yet. In fact, the voices of everypony at the party and the music seem to be diminishing in volume. You pay it no heed and keep going, but you do find it particularly strange.

Then, as you bring your left foreleg down, it doesn’t come in contact with the ground. You suddenly find yourself falling forward, and you collapse to the hard ground before rolling down some sort of hill. Your body goes airborne momentarily every once in a while and hits the ground, sending pain through every part of your body.

You tumble down this hill for what seems like hours before you finally reach level ground and roll to a stop. Your whole body aches, and you likely have a broken bone or two. Also, you lost the tail at some point along the way.

You sit up on your haunches, your world still black, and reach with your hooves up to the blindfold to remove it. When the darkness of your vision is replaced by the real world, you find yourself in the midst of some sort of desert, hot sand below you and extending miles into the beyond along with cacti, some taller than others. The sun is blistering hot, and sends unbearable heat down onto you to the point where you already start to sweat, the distant, blurred scenery warped and wavy due to the temperature.

Turning your head back, you see that you had just fallen down a long and steep hill with rocks jutting out of the side, and you can’t see anything beyond the top of the hill.

You might have gone a little too far to the right…

With no option at your disposal, you get up, and start walking in a random direction. There are no signs or anything of the sort indicating where to go to get back to any sort of civilization, so you just walk in hopes that you’ll end up somewhere helpful. The last thing you want is to die of dehydration out here, so you opt to keep moving before something like that happens.

You walk, and after a minute, the heat is already more intense. Sweat drips from your body like a faucet, and you wish you had water on you.

After ten minutes, you find yourself still walking toward nowhere. The hill that you fell down is now part of the blurred scenery, far enough behind you that you can barely see it. Your body has been able to somewhat accustom itself to the heat, but you still sweat like a pig. While it does offer some relief when mild gusts of wind drift across your skin, it’s still terribly hot, and you’re desperate to find some sort of refuge to get out of the sun.

After another ten minutes, you start feeling weak. It almost seems impossible that you’ll find anything out here. You can’t have gone this far away from any nearby town. There had to be something out here that was at least a small excuse for some sort of safe haven.

It’s another few minutes before you notice a shape in the distance that looks like a pony, though you’re not sure if it’s just a mirage or if a pony is actually there.

To your left is a gravel road that stretches off into the horizon two ways. There’s no directional indication of which way would take you to civilization, or which way would be quicker, or whether the road leads to civilization in the first place. If that is a pony in the distance, maybe they can give you directions.

What will you do?

Examine the Shape______________________________________________________________________________________Move On