One year, seven months, sixteen days, two hours, and thirty minutes. One year, seven months, sixteen days, two hours and thirty-one minutes. Thirty-two. Thirty-three. Thirty-four...
That has be approximately how long I've lived completely alone. Everyone around me left for the East, and never bothered to come back. My family, my neighbours, my friends. I had to be one of the last sane humans left in Manitoba.
Sure, there are a couple mad domestic terrorists moving up from across the borders to claim farmland around the city, but I'd rather be dead than join a group of people that represented the polar opposite of what I believed in.
These people would come to my home in pairs, trying to recruit me for their mission, and each time, I would answer the door in ways only I would find truly funny nowadays.
One day, I answered the door in nothing but my bathing robe, open, and nothing else. Another day, I would reverse their usual speech and try to convert them to get off my front step. And just yesterday, get this, I answered the door with a costume knife going through my skull and fake blood just soaking through my shirt. Buggers bought the whole act too, thinking I was some magical zombie or something. Idiots.
They'll be back today, though. That's the pattern, three days in a row, then a week of peace and quiet, then another three days of door knocking. This has been going on for about five months straight now.
They called themselves the "Human Liberation Front", or HLF, for short, and with a name like that, you could only expect a troubling amount of mentally challenged inbreeds believing that mankind was the superior species created by God, and always should be.
Alright, this may have been a viable claim in two cases.
1. If I actually believed in God in the first place.
And 2. If the magical land of Equestria hadn't popped up out of the Atlantic and had their inhabitants, a bunch of talking ponies, start immigrating into the human world.
Oh, didn't I mention that these "Equestrians" before? Well, to put it simply, they are small, horse-like creatures coloured like any crayon in a Crayola box, that can talk, fly, perform true magic, and just radiate peace and happiness to those around them, among other things.
Apparently, they were facing a little overcrowding problem back home, and needed to expand, so they opened up their gates and came by to say hello. What nobody ever knew in the first place, though, was that their homeland was having a ripple effect on the rest of the planet, making the Earth more like their own world, as well as poisoning any other higher lifeform, being apes, chimps, and man.
Naturally, people are afraid of dying, and the ponies felt so bad about killing so many people, that they offered the service of turning humans into ponies and surviving.
That's exactly what almost everyone around me did. No one wanted to die, and they wanted a second chance at life with a simple future, and I can't blame them for that.
Why didn't I go? Simple answer to that. In all truth, I just wanted to squeeze out was fun was left in having digits at the end of my arms. If you take that in a dirty context, you'd be right, but I use them for other things too. I taught myself the useless skill of juggling, made high score on all the games at the arcade before power died out, I am even a half-decent artist too.
Okay, so there's a little more to it than that. So there's a little paranoia involved as well. When everyone left, I lost contact with everyone I cared about. I haven't seen my friends or family in one year, seven months, sixteen days, two hours, and thirty-eight minutes. There is no news broadcasting or media around where I am, nor anyone to actually make the stuff. I am completely in the dark, left to make up stories to scare myself to prove I still have a heartbeat.
It's running about seventy two beats a minute now, just saying, because I still have fingers to check my pulse.
When the "Conversion Bureaus", the places they change humans into ponies, started popping up along the eastern parts of the continent, they ran advertisements for them, showing how utterly harmless they were in the end. But when I saw how that woman would come out of those doors different, something just irked me inside. She wasn't exactly herself anymore, in physical and mental terms. To be so happy to be so radically different compared to the rest of your kin was just a little uncanny.
I didn't want that. I liked how I was. Sure, I may be a little bitter, a little mean-spirited when it comes to humour, and maybe I'm just afraid of losing whom I believed I was.
I walk into those doors, but I won't be walking out in body or spirit. That's my fear.
Excuse me, I forgot to introduce myself!
My name is Kennedy Baxter, just your average human guy, and I'm one of the last few normal humans in Manitoba. Now if you excuse me, I hear my door knocking and I'm going for the "crotchety, old man" act.
"Get off my lawn, you blasted... hold up... What's this? Just a letter? Strange."
Okay, I'm back. So it was just a classic "knock on the door and bolt off" sort of thing. Don't really get those too often unless I let them see me in the window with a fire-picker. They left a note though, so it wasn't like I got pulled away for no reason, right?
Give me a second for me to open this bad boy up with my fingers, shall we. I guess you can't see too well, given there's no camera, but it's an old fashion wax seal with a sunburst sort of symbol on it. Just gotta crack it open like so, and viola!
Let's see what this has got to say... duh duh duh, "We at the Ottawa Conversion Bureau hereby recognize-" blah blah blah, "honored guest", just skip a little here... Huh. So it says here I've gotten myself a little invite to get turned into a pony. Should I accept and travel a good, bloody two days in a car, stealing, I mean, salvaging gas from stations because I have no money, then go through the process I give myself nightmares over?
Yes?
No?
Oh, there's the knocking again. You know what, screw those HLF guys. They're late, and I wasted my act already. I'm out today, they can come back next week and try again.
Actually, now that I think about it, I hear Ottawa's very nice this time of year. It's awfully lonely around here anyways, company at the door obviously regardless. Maybe I should just go, see what they have to say, then just come back home when they don't convince me.
Oh no they're not. They are NOT breaking down my door. Hold on a moment, I got something to sort out.
-=-=-
I'm back. Turns out the zombie thing wasn't taken too lightly. Or maybe it was the fire-poker thing, or otherwise refusing to join them, I don't know. What I do know, is that I'm packing my bags right now.
Some underwear, a couple shirts, what's left of my candy hoard, a couple boxes of CDs, and I'm set. Alright, that's that.
I'll be seeing you folks when I get out of the city. Roads may be empty, but I'm just bad with directions.
Later!