I woke up to the feeling of moist dirt on the side of my face, which came as perhaps less of a surprise than it should have. I had been at a frat party until the wee hours of the night, and it wasn’t the first time I had decided I could make it home on my own, and it wasn’t the first time I hadn’t.
Head pounding, I slowly sat up. It felt that a quick move would make my head fall off, and I just didn’t feel like risking it. I was thankful that it was still dark, because I think that the bright sun on my face would have been just too much to face.
I must be in Memorial Park, I decided. It was about halfway between the frat and my apartment. Thank heavens it wasn’t the cemetery; the time I’d woken up there had been a little…surreal.
It seemed odd that I couldn’t hear traffic, but maybe it was too early for traffic. Still, the silence seemed a little unnatural. Plus, I didn’t remember that Memorial Park was quite so…wooded. Maybe it was just the fact that I was still half-drunk. This was probably just a little copse of trees in the daytime.
I heard crackling in the brush off to my side, and looked over that way. It took a second for my eyes to adjust, but what was looking back at me seemed to be a lion.
Now, I’d never heard of lions in Ohio. Maybe mountain lions, but not the big-maned African looking lions, and it was undoubtedly a side effect of too much tequila. Nevertheless, I did what thousands and thousands of years of primitive instinct suggested that I should do, and ran as fast as I could in the opposite direction. A loud roar—which sounded very leonine—just added a little more speed. If there’s an Olympic sprinting-from-a-predator-through-a-dark-unfamiliar-woods event, I think I might have had a lock on the gold.
A rational part of my brain informed me that lions hunt on the open savanna, not in forests, to which the primitive part asked if the rational part wanted to stop and tell the lion that, which pretty much shut up rationality for the rest of my record-breaking sprint.
I cleared the bulk of the trees and found myself in a clearing of some sort. Some distance ahead, I saw houses with lights, and that seemed to be a good thing to run towards. Lions don’t like houses with people in them, I hoped.
I turned around to see how far ahead I was, which wasn’t far enough, especially since the lion was cheating by flying. I don’t remember Animal Planet ever mentioning they could do that, which seemed like quite an omission on their part. I looked forward to see how close I was to the houses, instead seeing the trunk of a tree about a millisecond before I crashed into it. Dumb tree. Then I blacked out.
~~~
I woke to bright sunlight shining on my face. I felt wonderful, in the best shape of my life. I took a deep breath of the air, and it was the purest, most wonderful air I had ever breathed. It was like those air fresheners that call themselves ‘summer wind’ or somesuch, but this was the real deal. If this could be bottled, it would be worth a fortune, I was sure of that.
The grass was really comfortable, too. It was almost unrealistically green. There were no imperfections in any of the blades of grass, and each one was exactly the same size. It didn’t look like it was mowed, either. I’d spent enough time on lawns to have a good feel for grass. Grass was my bro.
The ground wasn’t lumpy, either. It was kind of springy, loamy, and it smelled like—well, it smelled like dirt, but the nice kind of dirt you’d put in a flowerpot, not the kind that ground is usually made of.
I might have stayed there forever—well, not literally forever, but for a while, anyway—but a shadow came across my face. I was just thinking about how wonderful it was that I was on this marvelous lawn, which, I had decided, was probably at some fancy golf club—no one else took lawns that seriously—and remarking on the fact that I didn’t feel hungry or hung-over.
I assumed that it was Officer Friendly, to come and tell me to get off the lawn before he ran me in, but I took my time turning my head. Imagine my shock when it was a cartoony horse face that looked at me. Brilliant white fur, sky-blue eyes, and a glossy blue and aqua mane.
For a moment, I decided that I had lost my sanity, possibly the first thing that my rational and subconscious had agreed on in a while. Then I suddenly remembered being chased by a flying lion through a woods and a park, and it all clicked.
“I’m in Equestria,” I said, looking her in the eye. “Ha, it’s just like all those bad fanfictions I read.”
“If they were bad fanfictions, why did you read them?” she responded evenly.
On a scale of one to ten of things that ponies say when they first meet a human, with one being “what the heck are you” and ten being “oh no, it’s another human, hide your foals,” this was at least a fifteen. Maybe more.
“Um, I was bored.”
She nodded as if this made perfect sense. I wondered how she knew what fanfictions were, or if she had just guessed from context. It was an avenue I felt deserved exploration, but maybe not quite yet.
I sat up, in preparation for standing up, but stopped when I noticed that my white t-shirt was—well, it was white again. I had a vague recollection of someone puking on it at the frat house (it might have been me), but it was so clean right now that Billy Mays would have happily held it up to show everyone how well Oxy-Clean really works. I was less surprised to see that my pants and shoes were clean, too. For a moment, I thought about checking my boxers, but decided that perhaps I should wait on that until I was alone.
I stood the rest of the way and looked around. Off in the distance, I could see more ponies standing around on the grass, and pegasi flying through the air. Aside from the lack of buildings, it looked pretty much like Equestria should, I thought.
I looked back at the pony, who was looking at me curiously. She shifted her weight on her feet, just like horses on earth do, and I caught a glimpse of her cutie-mark. I was remembering that the fanfiction said it wasn’t polite to stare at cutie marks, so I didn’t, but I did get enough of a glimpse to know it wasn’t one I recognized easily.
I extended my hand. Pretty sure Applejack shook hands—hooves—with Twilight Sparkle in the first episode, so I was probably safe there.
“My name’s Edward Parker,” I said, “Ed to my friends.”
“Denim Blue,” she replied, holding her hoof out so we could shake.
“Are you curious what I am?” I asked, figuring that if I was the one to break the question she’d feel less awkward.
“You’re a human, or a person, I can’t remember which is the right term to use. I haven’t seen one in a while.”
Well, this was interesting new information, something that hadn’t come up in any of the episodes of the show I’d seen. Still, there was that unicorn that one of my buddies said wanted to be human. Lyra.
“How long a while, Denim?”
She shrugged, which is a singularly odd thing for a pony to do, even a talking pony. “I don’t know, a while.” She bent her head down and began to graze at the grass contentedly. I worried a little bit that she didn’t seem very interested in me. The expected reactions, I was pretty sure, were terror, curiosity, and probably something else I couldn’t remember. I was pretty sure disinterest wasn’t one of them, though.
It seemed like she wasn’t going to tell me anything else, so I figured I might as well move on, sort of get a feel for the area. Maybe she was the pony equivalent of a retard.
I walked across the grass for a while, but definitely less time than it had been since Denim Blue had last seen a human (well, technically, it was for the exact same amount of time since Denim Blue had seen a human, but I meant the time before that), until I came to another group of ponies who were grazing together. They looked up at me as I approached, and then went back to their meal, also unconcerned, or so it seemed, at my approach.
When I got closer, though, a bright pink earth pony looked up at me. She had a pink and white mane, and also had blue eyes. Her cutie mark was a snow-covered evergreen with snowflakes or daisies around it. I was betting on snowflakes.
“Hi,” she said brightly. “I’m Mittens.” She didn’t offer her hoof, so I didn’t offer my hand.
“Ed,” I replied. We seemed to be on a first-name basis already, or else she only had one name, and I didn’t want to show off by having two.
She kept looking at me like she was expecting me to say something else, so I finally obliged.
“So, what is it you all do around here?”
“We hang out together and do fun things.” She paused, and narrowed her eyes. “Are you new here, or something?”
Another one, a blue Pegasus moved forward and stood close beside Mittens, touching a wing lightly to Mittens’ back. “Ooh, are you new?” The unicorn looked at me closely. “How did you get here?”
Mittens turned at her. “Silver Glow, you know that’s rude to ask.” She looked back at me, expectantly, as if I would answer anyway, even though it was apparently a rude question.
“I don’t know how I got here,” I said.
“Did you see Him?” I could hear the capital letter in the way Silver Glow pronounced it. The other ponies looked at me expectantly; apparently they could listen while eating.
“Um, no, I don’t think I have.”
“Oh.” Mittens looked at me thoughtfully. “Well, I expect you will soon enough. He never lets anypony or anyperson go unmet.” She took a step back and started nibbling at the grass again.
“Why does everyone—I mean everypony—keep grazing instead of talking to me?”
Mittens looked back up, thoughtfully chewing a mouthful of grass. “Maybe because it’s lunchtime, and we’re hungry?”
Well, that seemed like a perfectly reasonable answer.
~~~
I ambled around for the rest of the day, but didn’t get much further. I was clearly marked as an outsider. They weren’t shying away from me, but they weren’t really talking to me, either. Any questions I asked were answered vaguely, if at all. I had not realized before today how many ways there were to tell someone very politely to go away, but they had it down to an art form.
I decided to keep my sanity to just walk around, but it seemed like the plains went on forever. I asked ponies which way to Ponyville, but none of them knew. They couldn’t tell me where Canterlot was either, which seemed kind of odd. They recognized the names—they never acted as if they didn’t—but they either didn’t know where they were, or didn’t want to tell me.
I finally decided to sit down and watch the sunset. All the ponies seemed to have vanished from the plain, although I couldn’t see where they could have gone to—and I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
It was interesting to be able to watch the sunset without it hurting my eyes. I could stare right at the sun. They say Chuck Norris won a staring contest with the sun; I decided I might as well try to be runner-up.
I didn’t hear the alicorn approach me; one moment the sun slipped below the horizon, and I thought, ‘I’ve beat you, sun, take that,’ and I turned my head, and there he was, standing right next to me.
Scratch that. He wasn’t standing next to me, he was looming. He was towering over me. It wasn’t that he was much taller than me, because he wasn’t. If he’d stretched out his neck and tilted his muzzle to the sky, he might have been seven feet tall, and I’m all of six-five. It wasn’t about height, though, it was about presence, and this guy had it. Oh boy, did this guy have it.
I remembered from the show that Celestia and Luna had wavy flowing manes made out of solar winds and night sky, or something like that. Well, this guy’s whole body was made out of solar stuff. He wasn’t transparent, like the Ursas in Boast Busters, but he seemed to be made of space. His body was a black nothingness, spotted with glowing stars and galaxies. His mane and tail were made of the same thing, but they were, unsurprisingly, flowing in the nonexistent wind. I think Princess Cadence got gypped; her mane and tail just hang there.
He didn’t say a word as the sky darkened, and I figured the polite thing to do would be to wait until he spoke. The moon came up, and the sky filled with stars, and it might have been no coincidence that I could have used him as a pony Google Sky. I thought about suggesting it, but figured that if Celestia could banish her sister to the moon for a thousand years, this guy could make that look as benovelent as a five-minute time-out. As it happens, I was right.
He was wearing a grey peytral and tiara inset with oval gems that were a deep purple. I was wracking my brain to think of what gem that could be, before I remembered that this was the wonderful magical land of Equestria, and it could be anything. Probably dug out of the ground as a matched set..
Finally, he looked over at me. “Lulu always loved the night sky,” he said, then fell silent for a few minutes which seemed to pass in a heartbeat.
“I suppose you’re wondering how you got here?”
I waited. As usual, an explanation was not forthcoming, although I strongly suspected that if he wasn’t the pony who got me here—wherever here was—he would know who did. Perhaps it was the serenity of his expression. I’d wondered sometimes why Celestia had such a lack of emotion no matter what, and decided that a few millennia of ruling and raising the bloody sun would take the surprise out of everyday life, but this guy had her beat. If I could master his blank look, I think I could make a fortune in Vegas.
“Well, the last thing I remember was leaving a frat party, and then, boom, here I was.”
“That isn’t the last thing you remember, Edward Parker,” he stated flatly. How did he know my name?
“Well, ok, I was running for my life from a lion—“
“Manticore,” he corrected.
“—and I was running towards a town HOLY CRAP THAT WAS PONYVILLE and then I ran into a tree, and then I was here.”
He nodded. “Where do you suppose here is?”
I shrugged. “How the heck should I know? It isn’t Akron, I’ll tell you that much.”
“An endless plain, with perfect weather all the time.”
I shrugged. “Is it the fantastically magical prairie? You’ve gotta help me out here, I’ve never seen a map of Equestria.”
He chuckled, which alarmed me. “Nowdays, it usually goes by the Summer Lands.”
I looked at him blankly.
“How thick are you humans, anyways?” He sighed. “Very well, I’ll give you a bit of information you clearly haven’t figured out yet. Edward Parker, you are dead.”
“So, this is…” I was wondering, even as I spoke, if this was how a contestant felt on final Jeopardy when he’d wagered every cent he had, “heaven?”
“For ponies.” He looked at me thoughtfully, and I was pretty sure he could read minds. “Were you expecting the pegasi to have little harps? Or maybe I could give wings to the earth ponies and the unicorns and the zebras?”
“But why am I here?”
He gave me the look a parent gives a child after the fiftieth explanation of the same thing.
“Oh, right. I died.” I looked around, and then looked at him. “So…in a nutshell...I somehow got transported to Equestria, got killed by a lion—“
“Manticore.”
“—and now I’m in pony heaven.”
His lack of an answer was all the answer I needed.
A while later
I looked over at the familiar purple unicorn. She looked the same as I remembered on the show. I wished I could get a handle on how long I’d been here, but the days were all the same. I had discovered on my second day that I had been accepted into the herd, and there was no lack of things to take up my time. Occasionally, I’d seen a pony I recognized, but there were few new arrivals.
She had come yesterday. I had learned how to know if there was a new arrival, and had found myself unable to answer any significant questions that new arrivals had asked, at least not before they had seen Him. I don’t know how I knew, but I just did. I assumed it was the ambient magic of the place, or something. I guess it was to give the new arrivals time to get accustomed, or something.
“I’m Edward Parker,” I said in a friendly tone.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said. “Twilight Sparkle.”
“Actually, Twilight, I think we have, once. Sort of.”
She looked at me with that adorable questioning look she had. I was so glad that she hadn’t lost that in…well, however many years it had been.
“Yeah. Do you remember one morning, Fluttershy discovered a strange creature at the edge of the Everfree Forest? One that had been mauled almost beyond recognition—well, if you had known what it was before the mauling—by a manticore? That was me!”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, I always was curious about that! Princess Celestia never gave me a satisfactory answer.”
I put an arm on her back. “Well, come on. I’ll tell you all about it while we walk over and meet the other girls. You’ll be happy to see them again.”