I’m Dale Burke, and I’m here to tell you about the time I was stuck in Technicolour. Now, all you guys know what I'm talking about. Otherwise you’re trolling and in that case get the hell out. I’m being serious here, for once. I am going to tell you how NOT to go about meeting an ancient all-powerful magical race of equines, and just how, exactly, I screwed it up for the rest of you.
I’m pretty sure you get the basic idea of what’s gonna go down here…
But I should start at the beginning, shouldn’t I? Uhh, I guess I’ll start with me. A saying that’s been passed down through my family for generations; A Burke by name, a burke by nature, which unfortunately applies very well to my gin-soaked father and even more so to short-tempered introvert me. I’m a five foot ten bundle of raw nerves ready to bring all of my Irish blood right up in your face if you so much as give me the smallest invitation. I’m not biased towards anyone, they’re all idiots, and neither am I racist, I just hate everyone. An ambassador I am not. Now, I’ll tell you how it all started.
I hate Birthdays.
Hate them, I tell you. They are idiotic little ego boosts to weak-minded little sycophants who want to be congratulated for getting one year closer to the grave and parasitically suck money off of their families for one more day of their miserable lives. I also hate all forms of ‘friends’, who don’t turn up after I’ve spent three weeks planning a barbecue on this pathetically special day in my life with all their favourite food and drink under a rented tent that cost me and arm and a leg and a bottle of Guinness to the amusement park security guard. I would have thought all those bastards would have been happy to see me eating into my second decade of uselessness, but noooo, they all had to cancel this morning. Well, not like I really care.
I never needed them anyway.
So it was that I found myself sitting outside the local golf club in the rain that day, sipping on a beer and smiling like a loon as all my birthday decorations melted to nothing around me. Gotta love them Irish summers. A big cardboard number twenty-one washed past me into the gutter, dragging itself miserably down the lane and past and old scruffy pub on the corner.
Now there’s an idea.
On a related note, another tradition passed down through the generations; when angry, upset or sad, drown all these emotions, and preferably the whole spectrum, in a massive flood of booze at the local watering hole until you can neither remember nor care why you were upset in the first place. Pubs. Wonderful things.
My village had all of forty families who lived there permanently, but six of those families ran pubs. I also lived on the eastern side of town, so it would normally be unimaginable that I’d walk into a western-side pub that Saturday evening. All eyes turned to me in my scrawny glory as I shouted, “Oi, barman! Pint o’ a good stuff, quick as ya like!”
I was surprised to see, upon scanning the staring crowd of middle-aged men and football hooligans, the familiar back of someone’s head. I swaggered over as if I owned the place, nodding familiar-sounding and vain greetings to whoever looked like they might be more violently inclined, before sitting next to the tight-huddled form of one of my ‘friends’.
“Good ta see ya Bobby.”
“Aye, you too, Dale. Bin a while.”
“Aye. So how’s Tammy doin’, then?”
“Fare ‘nough, with child an’ all.”
A silence stretched between us, him leaning away slightly while he fiddled with his lager, me taking gusty swigs of my pint as I watched him carefully. Just as the noise within the pub picked back up to normal levels, I started again.
“So how’s Darrel and the lads, then?”
“Good as ever, can’t say I’ve talked with ‘em much lately.”
“Oh aye ya have.”
He gave me that scared look of a man caught with his pants down on a cold night. “What d’ya mean, Dale?”
“Why’d non o’ ya turn up fer my party, eh?”
His eyes went wide, and he stopped twisting his glass in his hands. “I’m sorry Dale, it just came at a b-bad time an-“
“Oh fer Christ’s sake, Bobby!” I cried, shoving myself to standing. I waved my mug broadly behind me, nearly beaning the guy behind me in the process, “It’s not even a block away! I could see this pub from the yard ya’know!”
“Well,” He struggled to answer as he stood as well, “It’s not really like ya wanted us ta come anyway, ennit? You hate your stinkin’ birthday, and ya make all of us hate it too!”
“That don’t give ya an excuse,” I growled low, “I always turn up at your’ns birthdays, don’t I?”
“Aye, and ya make ‘em about as fun as funerals, don’t ya?” He snarled back, “Listen, Dale, I get it. Ya don't like people. Ya hate us, ya hate yer family and ya especially hate yerself. But you don’t have to bring all of us down with ya, okay?”
He really did just call me out in front of the whole pub. He’d insulted me, called me a hateful bastard, and worst, he’d make it so I could never go back to that pub again. I reacted with yet another Irish stalwart reaction.
I decked him.
It took about thirty seconds for me to end up outside in the gutter, next to the mashed and crumpled twenty-first sign that had lead me here in the first place. I glared at the disintegrating cardboard and spat some blood from my mouth. “You led me astray, ya paper git.”
The cardboard dissolved completely in shame.
I struggled up to my feet, noting that the sky was a slightly greyer grey, more like asphalt than slate. It was getting to evening. Great, now I could go back to the golf club lawn with my stolen tent and wasted time…or maybe I should just walk home, it’s barely twenty minutes’ walk anyway.
Stumbling down the street erratically, I grumbled to myself. The day had been a disaster. I comforted myself with the knowledge that I hadn’t really expected any better. I wiped my mouth once more, pulling a face. Taking on a guy a good stone heavier than me might not have been wise.
As I was walking down the middle of the street, I noticed a hole in the middle of the road. Did the rain pop a man hole cover again? I didn’t think that was it, sewers and the like don’t glow with an un-earthly light anywhere but Russia. I turned to my left to skirt the weird hole, too lost in my angst to really care about it. I should have cared a little more, though, because If I’d been looking at it straight I might have been able to keep my feet on the road. As it was, I found myself falling through it faster than I dropped out of college.
*****
I must have hit my head on the way through that hole, because I woke up with a headache so massive that I… I couldn’t actually measure it. It felt like eight hours after mixing everything in the bar with a gallon of gasoline and chugging it in thirty seconds. And then being hit by a bus. And getting my shoes stolen.
Where the hell were my shoes? I decided to open my eyes in an attempt to solve my cobbler's conundrum.
THE PAIN!
It was now measurable in gigawatts focused directly into my retinas, it was so damn bright. So in other words, a normal sunny summer day to the rest of the world. I rolled over to hide my head in the dirt and twigs under me. I pulled my old ratty jacket closer and tried to ignore the fact that I was clearly not in a sewer, nor on the cold wet concrete of my hometown’s pavement.
Eventually, the pain subsided, and I decided that it was time to take life by the balls and figure out where I was. I rolled over and looked up again, straight into a bright oversized pair of magenta eyes.
“Heya dude. Got your shoes here.”
No. Fucking. Way.
Yeah, you know what I saw. At the time I had no bloody clue, but it was in fact a smallish equine hovering on illogically stunted wings. She sported a glaring prismatic mane and an annoying incorrigible smile, and on each of her forelegs hung one of my shoes.
“Hey look!” The hovering apparition joked, “I’m one of you guys!”
Logic dictated I scream in her face.
“Aaaaaaaargh!”
I looked at her closely once my lungs were empty. Nope, she was stil a powder-blue floating pegasus-thing. I snorted, grabbed my shoes from her hooves and ran away through the apple orchard I found myself in, screaming at the top of my lungs.
“Aaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuiiiiioooorgh!”
Behind me, Rainbow Dash blinked.
“Huh…Nice chat?”