//------------------------------//
// I.1 - Throne Room Awakening 
// Story: Night 
// by Revenant Wings 
//------------------------------//

	In the beginning, all I knew was darkness.  I heard voices swimming around in my head, but I had no knowledge of what they were, no idea who they belonged to.  I don’t even remember if any of them were my own.  Nothing stood out, and nothing made sense, like everything was being shaken around like a can of dice in a game of Yahtzee, waiting for the right moment to throw me down and see where I landed.  I really hoped it would stop soon; I was getting dizzy from whatever had just happened and realized that I was feeling sicker than I ever remembered before, besides the time when I had gotten drunk on the night of my twenty-first birthday.
I began to piece some of my only remaining memories together, of my last moments before everything had gone dark.  I saw some being against the sun with a pure white complexion whose shadow had covered me from the light.  Suddenly, there was a blinding flash of yellow and the feeling of being shrunk and pulled through a hole the size of a penny before collapsing on a cold floor; the cold came back to me as I lay there in the darkness.  I could hear voices near me as the scene replayed in my head again and again, as though torturing me with the fact that that was the farthest back I could remember, the only thing I could remember, but it wasn’t much to go off of.
“Wake up…  Wake up…”
The voice came again and I slowly began to bring myself to my senses again.  First came the feeling of being sprawled out on the floor, then came the floor itself, cold and hard like polished tile.  Sound came next, as I found myself listening to the calls of birds and the chattering of woodland animals and hearing an odd sound as though two people were walking towards me.  Light came next, a very taunting bright white that felt similar to the flash of light I had seen before being pushed through the coin slot.  It took a long time for my vision to regain itself, becoming blurry as I looked towards where I remembered the sound of walking to be coming from.
“Oh, good.  You’re finally awake.  I was afraid the journey might have accidentally left you comatose.”
Before me was a white blur with occasional specks of gold, pink, and turquoise.  I rubbed my eyes to clear my vision, but even then the sight made me unsure if what I saw before me was real.  In front of me was a large horse, a head taller than I was if I was standing up instead of sitting rubbing the back of my head on the floor, though it boasted a large white horn coming out of its forehead and a large pair of white wings with feathers that reminded me of a dove or an eagle; I leaned over to one side, half expecting to see the back of a lion, but such was not the case though there was a tattoo of a golden sun on the thing’s flank.  The gold I had seen earlier had become a tiara with a pinkish diamond on the horse’s head, a sort of necklace with a similar diamond around the base of the neck, and four gold horseshoes, and the pink and turquoise melted into a long mane that appeared to be constantly flowing despite the presence of a slight breeze that didn’t even shake the mess of hair on my head.
“Who… who are you?” I asked.  “Where am I?”
The horse-thing spoke with a calm elegance and a voice that made me feel calm despite current insecurities about standing in front of something I was quite sure for a long time was unable to speak, let alone wear jewelry.  “My name is Princess Celestia, and I am one of three alicorn rulers of the province of Equestria.  Currently, you are in Equestria’s capital of Canterlot, in the throne room of the royal palace of the alicorn sisters.  Now, tell me one thing: how much do you remember of your past life?”
I opened my mouth to speak (horse or not, royalty deserves respect), but I could not find the words.  There were so many questions that I had to ask them while my brain still tried to figure out where I was.  “Where… where is Equestria?”
The princess gave me a small smile and spoke with the same voice as before.  “To be quite honest with you, the only thing I moved was what dimension you were standing in.  You originally came from a place called the United States in a city called Denver, and it just so happened that the factory where you worked was the same place where Canterlot and Canterlot Castle in particular now stands in Equestria.”
I stood up with some hesitation and went over to a nearby window to see a skyline quite different from what I was used to seeing.  Despite my faded memories, it was quite clear to me that I wasn’t home, from the towering buildings to the cobblestone streets filled with more of the horse-things, this time only having either the wings or the horn – some even had neither - and pulling and riding in carriages pulled by more of the horses.  The horses themselves were in all colors and shapes and hairstyles, and each had a little tattoo-like mark on both sides of their flank.  Furthermore, everything seemed bright, green, and natural, a welcome change from the dirtier and more crowded streets that I remembered, but it still didn’t feel right.
I looked at myself.  I was quite definitely a human, with pale colored flesh that was red as though sunburnt in places (though I assumed it was from the flash of light the alicorn behind me had created).  A closer look in the window revealed a head of messy brown hair and blue-ish eyes on what may have been an average-sized body if there were other humans around, though from the looks of things I was the only one there, and I had a feeling that I was the only other human in the entire of this Equestria place.  I had never really thought myself ugly, but everything I had seen so far while I was here had made me quite uncomfortable, not the least the constant smile that was on the face of the alicorn behind me.
I turned around to face her.  “Why am I here?”
The smile broke.  “Your conditions back at home were not the best.  I pulled you out of unfavorable conditions; things I presume you would not want to remember very well.  I watched you for a month and decided the best thing to do would be to give you a chance here, a chance at a better life.  We could find things for you to do, and should you take an interest in any one of them, transform you into one of us and give you a steady job and good living conditions and you may live out the rest of your days in peace.”
There was a loud sound as though the doors to the throne room were banged open, and I turned around quickly to see another one of the alicorns.  This one was almost entirely dark blue from her mane to her fur to her horn and wings, though her flank was black with a tattoo of a white crescent moon and her face wore a scowl.
“I thought I heard you talking to someone in here, dear sister,” the alicorn said, her voice and expression much colder than the oth– Princess Celestia’s.  “I thought you had stopped that silly business of teleporting humans here from the other dimension.  There was a period of a year where you didn’t do a single thing for a while and I thought you were done with that business and finished with that foolish lot.”
“Princess Luna,” Princess Celestia said, trying to make herself sound sympathetic.  “This one has come from poor conditions.  I only wish to give him a new life and a chance to live in harmony with us.”
“The last one you tried that with ended up in the dungeons,” Princess Luna chastised.  “I shall not be surprised if this one ends up the same way.  But he is not to be my problem.”
“Actually…”
“Dear sister, do not tell me that…”
“I already have business with Twilight Sparkle and her friends that I must attend to over this coming month, in addition to other business elsewhere and trying to discuss treaties with the Griffin kingdom.  I haven’t the time at the moment and need your help.  You have always said you wanted to help me out in royal duties.”
“But I did not want part of these royal duties to be babysitting.  Why don’t you give that job to Princess Cadance, since she did so well with Twilight?”
There was a certain venom dripping from the darker alicorn’s voice that I did not like one bit.  She talked as though I wasn’t in the room or as though I was merely an item.  I wasn’t comfortable with the situation anyways, so I decided to speak up.
“Princess Cadance has other duties to attend to involving the Crystal Empire.  I do not wish to impose another job on her.”
“…excuse me, Princess Celestia.”
The lighter alicorn turned towards me.  “Yes?”
“I… don’t particularly want to stay here.  I… I think I’d prefer to go home.  I don’t want to be a burden to any of you, and would rather like if I could get back to my family.”
The darker alicorn, Princess Luna, scoffed.  “At least this one has had enough sense to go back immediately.”
“Very well.  However, the spell required for me to do that takes much more time to prepare than the one it took to bring you here.  I will need to have three months to sort things out.  In the meantime, Princess Luna” – Princess Celestia turned towards the darker alicorn with a stern glare before returning her softer gaze back to me – “shall be taking you under her wing and teaching you about Equestria.  If, by the end of three months, you are sure you want to be taken back home, the spell will be ready.  But first, how much do you remember of your former life?  Are you absolutely sure you want to go back?”
The haze hadn’t left.
“I… I don’t remember anything.  Not my name, not my profession, not my family, nor anyone else I knew there.  I didn’t even know where I lived until you brought me here.  As much as I try, it’s like everything before this has been blotted out.  I know I’m twenty-two years old, but that’s as far as I can remember.”
Princess Luna laughed and pointed a hoof at Celestia.  “You really think I should be babysitting a foal?  That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”  And she turned around and walked out of the room, still laughing.
Not another sound was made until the laughing was long gone.  Princess Celestia’s horn glowed yellow, the same yellow as the flash, and closed the door before heaving a large sigh.
“Are you sure you don’t remember… anything?”
I thought as hard as I could, but only one memory remained.  “The last thing I remember was you magically transporting me from… wherever I was originally.  There’s also a few senseless details that go around in my head; hardly anything you could benefit from, though.”
Princess Celestia nodded and closed her eyes for a minute.  Gone was the warm smile, and in its place was an almost melancholy expression.  When she did open her eyes, she looked at me with pity.  “In three months, there is the summer solstice and the Summer Sun Celebration that marks the beginning of summer, at which point my powers will be at their peak.  Give me three months, and by the end of those three months – which you will spend under a combination of Luna’s and my care – if you still want to go back… we will let you.”
I nodded.  “Fair enough.”
The smile returned, though the pity remained.  “Very well.  Though you cannot remember your name, is there anything else we can call you by until you remember?”
“There is an old story in which someone introduced himself to some giants with a name that meant 'no one' so that whenever he caused the damage, he would blame no one and the others believed he was delusional.  Due to my feeling like no one and a stranger in a foreign land, I would like to be known as ‘Nemo’*, if this pleases you.”
“For now, it is not about pleasing me, but making sure you are comfortable here.  I shall inform the guards and castle staff that we shall have one more roaming about our halls.  I shall make a room ready for you.”
With that, Princess Celestia led me to a padded bench outside the throne room and sat me there to wait until a suitable room was ready and until my ultimate fate was decided.