//------------------------------// // Sam-pai The Brazilian Horse (MGR:R Spoilers) // Story: The Cool Brazilian Wind // by Lazy_ //------------------------------// Sam woke again, this time with a little more mental strength than the last. Instead of opening to a dull and monotone world of muffled sounds, he now awoke being able to hear clearly and slowly but surely, his brain got in gear and he began to become more aware of his surroundings. He could now hear people talking instead of mumbling and make out what they were saying, as well as the regular beeping of a heart monitor. A light shone through his closed eyelids and created a glowing orange/red collage of colour for his brain to work with. He felt something lodged inside his throat and the soft surface he was lying on, a bed? But that would mean... "-No.-" He rotated a foreleg to test the joints and the way his muscles moved, they certainly felt like they did in his dream. Then he started to test other parts of his body; his hind legs, his neck and his back. His movements were more like twitches than anything, but through them he could tell his body was nothing other than that of one of these 'Ponies', just like Luna said. Bullets fired in his brain and panic started to set in, he opened his eyes and sure enough he found his head was resting on a clean white pillow and straight ahead of him there was a metal frame bed with another pony sitting on the side of it. Looking elsewhere he saw more ponies. Ponies that were naked, ponies in white lab coats, ponies in doctors uniforms and ponies in hospital gowns. For a moment he just lay there and stared at them all walking by, going about their own business and doing what ponies do. He didn't know what to do, there had never been a time where he was a full on hospital patient. He kept thinking and the only thing that came to his mind at the time was to run or to fight, after all, it was what he had been doing for... god knows how long now. And he had to admit to himself, it was really all he knew. First thing was to remove the feeding tube in his mouth and throat without hurting himself or attracting any attention. He raised his shaky hooves and gently tugged at the tube as well as using his tongue to push it out of his throat. It came out slowly, rubbing against his dry throat and causing a small amount of irritation as it slid away. And with a quiet *pop*, the tube came free of his throat. After that unpleasant experience, his body shifted and he felt his new and tired muscles trying to object against his will. He did't have many cyborg parts, and he didn't have all those stupid strength enhancing implants that other World Marshal agents had, he never felt that he needed any of them. And he found himself wishing he did have them as his body experience a strange latency from his brain to his muscles. They just hated the idea of moving at that point. He felt the pull of wires and tubes attached to various places along his body and as he pulled himself out of the covers, one of them broke free and a beep was emitted from the monitor. Then he pushed himself off' the side of the bed, landing hard on his stomach and detaching practically all of the things attached to him. The heart monitor immediately began to flat line and emit a constant beep, and he groaned in some pain at the stress in his body that was now discovered to be feeling very tight, stiff and achy. Every pony in the room looked his way and went silent as he started to slowly push his reluctant form up onto it's unbelievably shaky hooves. He barely managed to properly stand his body, if slightly awkwardly, before he came face to face with his first real pony. What was probably a nurse placed a hoof under his chin and lifted it so that he could see her. She gave him a quick but skeptical expression before speaking, "Hello, can you hear me?" She said to Sam who huffed and nodded. "You need to get back to bed, you still need a couple of days to fully recover." Sam could barely believe what he was experiencing. Talking ponies with technology and in their own civilisation. "Recover?" He said to her as he gave a small laugh. "I don't need time to recover, I'm fine." He insisted. "Sir, you've been in comatose for a week and your body is still affected by the prolonged sleep. You do feel exhausted, do you not?" She said to him like it was fact. Sam glanced up at the nurses cap on her head and for some reason he thought of it as a weird BDSM prop. He quickly dismissed the random thought and returned to looking at her white coated face. "I'm fine." He said with a weak smile. "I'll walk it off." At that point she gave out a small sigh and looked to be suppressing a small grin. "Sir, I'm afraid you can't just 'walk off' the effects of a coma. I need you to sit down, you don't look very stable on your hooves." She placed her hoof at his side as if trying to prevent him falling over sideways. Sam tried to shuffle backwards but found his legs un-cooperative, as they were only just managing to stay stood up, never mind walking. "Here..." She said as she pushed him back and rested him at the bedside, leaving him to sit there as she took a look at him. "...You do look cramped and you're obviously tired out. I mean look at your hooves, they're pretty shaky. Although you don't look too badly affected as you said; you can stand at least, which is more than most coma patients can do when they wake up." She continued to look over his anatomy for a few more moments until she was interrupted by a loud voice suddenly overpowering everyone else's in the room. A blue unicorn wearing a business shirt and tie rounded the corner and turned into the ward with massive excited looking blue eyes. He immediately saw that Sam was awake and his pupils widened, before starting to rush over like the world depended on it. He dodged skillfully around the beds and maneuvered his way to where Sam was sat and stood next to the nurse looking him over. "Oh Celestia, I've been waiting for this for ages!" He said excitedly. "You've been waiting for 7 days. That's hardly 'ages'." Sam replied. "Yes, but with what we've learned from you and what we could further learn now you're awake could mean so much for Equestria!" He stated loudly. "Okay, that's a... bit creepy." Sam retreated away from the unicorn by recoiling his head. The unicorn only leaned forward though so he could get closer and interrupting the nurses inspection. "I'm Doctor Steady Hoof, Research and Development of this establishment and it's a pleasure to finally meet you!" He took up Sam's hoof and shook it vigorously in what should have been a friendly gesture, except turned weird. Sam tried to pull his hoof away but the doctor had him gripped too tightly. He wasn't sure how hooves could 'grip' but apparently it was possible. Sam tried to make his lack of comfort known. "Um, doctor?" He said as he tried desperately to pull himself away from the mad scientist. The doctor stopped shaking his hoof but still didn't let go. "Please?" He asked him but then he started to talk again while using Sam's own hoof as a tool of gesture. "We've learned so much from you; your shoulder and where you come from... well, that one was more confusing if anything, but hey-ho!" "Doctor, I think you may want to let him go, he's only just woken up." The nurse reasoned with him as Sam looked at him hopefully. Steady Hoof then retracted his hoof and apologised over and over again after that. Sam wasn't sure if he was ready to take on life in a hospital with personalities like that and he could already tell, it was going to be a long first day awake in the kingdom. Sam just stared at the image in the mirror, un-able to pry his eyes away from the un-familiar images staring back at him. In the mirror, a grey pegasus looked back at him with an identical expression to him. His confused and tired blue eyes looked almost as alien as the world around him, everything was solid colour and nothing shined very much unless it was really really shiny. He flicked one of his ears as a pony walked alongside his bed and drew a draft onto the sensitive hairs. However he was so transfixed by the pony in the mirror to care about any other distractions, so he just lay there, in his hospital bed, staring at the mirror and the pony who stared back. "You still staring at that mirror?" The female voice asked from his side. Sam didn't answer, he didn't know how he should, what would he say? 'I can't stop looking at myself because I can't get over the fact I'm a totally different species than I was before and I have been moved to an entirely different universe than the one I was born in.' He's already explained it to them and they said it made sense with everything they already knew about him, so why say it again anyway? He simply kept on looking blankly at the mirror as the nurse sighed next to him sighed and leaned over his bed, placing her note-pad down and draping her foreleg around his shoulder. She looked into the mirror with him and gave him a warming smile. "You know, when I look into that mirror I can see a handsome and strong stallion." She said with a light blush upon her cheeks. Sam grew a small smile and looked at her reflections through the mirror. It was the mare who first helped him after he tried to get out of bed. "Thanks." He said and the nurse giggled a little. "I never got your name." "Red Heart, I used to work at Ponyville General Hospital but I got moved here because I'm simply that good, my superiors couldn't handle me being better than they were." Red Heart and Sam laughed quietly to each other before Sam finally came out of his trance, looking to the IRL Red Heart with a smile. "Is that really the reason why?" He said with a manor of intrigue. "Not officially." She said playfully. "But I could bet you my annual salary it was." They both laughed again. "That's a big bet to place on such a small thing." Sam told her with a questioning tone. "Yeah, well I like to bet big. No point being small fry all the time, sometimes you gotta' play with the big colts. Anyway, got other patients to check up on." She nudged him gently and took her leg away from his shoulders. Then she slung her note-pad around her body again and stood back on all fours. She winked at him with a sly smile and Sam winked back before they both giggled. "Your a fun guy, a little depressed and shocked maybe, but that'll wear off. I'm sure you'll get back to your normal self soon." "Yeah... normal." He said as he drifted back to his mirror. After a few seconds he lifted his eyes to see her walking away from him and across the ward. "Hey!" He called out to her. She stopped and turned around to face him with only one eye visible due to the angle that her face was pointing. "Come back at some point, eh? Your the only pers-pony who isn't creepy or miserable around here, and I'll need someone to talk to." The nurse tilted her cap with a hoof and said; "Certainly, Sam." Then she got up and walked away, going off to tend to some of her other patients. Sam settled back down into his bed and raised the mirror up to see himself once more. He turned his head sideways to see his black mane falling down the back of his neck and his big blue eyes staring at him interestingly. He smirked to himself and laughed light heartedly. "Handsome, eh?" He placed the mirror back down and crossed his forelegs behind his head, lying back onto the comfy pillow and closing his eyes. Later that day, Sam was napping and had his head rested in the same position he had been for the last hour. With his forelegs crossed behind his head and his head laid on top. He rested against the pillow for as long as he saw fit. He had even drifted off not long after he had started, but of course that had to be ruined by that stallion Steady Hoof who had come to apologise, yet again, for his actions early on. And promptly begin to question him. He kindly told the doctor to go away and then he had been resting there ever since, unable to fall back to sleep again. So for 10 minutes he had been listening in on the people around him, gathering information and generally just eavesdropping on conversations for entertainment. Besides, it's not as if he had anything else to do at the time, hospitals were pretty boring. So when he heard a new voice enter the mix, his attention was stolen. He opened his eyes and looked in the direction of the new voice; walking into the ward was a young looking purple winged unicorn alongside the nurse Red Heart who he had talked with earlier. When he saw the nurse point him out he smiled as he thought he would get to talk to someone normal among what seemed like an entire building of weirdos. But then he saw the eyes of the purple winged unicorn who looked at him excitedly. He didn't like that look, it was the look Steady Hoof had given him when he first saw him. She took a notebook from a saddlebag and made her way towards him in a steady trot with the nurse following behind. His smile dropped and he sighed as he thought; "-Not this again.-" The mare got to his bedside and sat herself down on a stool before pulling out a quill and inkwell from her saddlebag and placed them on the bedside table. Nurse Red Heart sat on the floor next to her and looked at him sympathetically. "She's here to ask you a few questions." Red Heart told him and he rolled his eyes. "Just bear with her, she's been looking into how you got here so the least you can do is answer a few questions, okay?" She said kindly. Again, proving that she was the only one he had met thus far who was not creepy or obsessed... or both. But if the mare was there to ask him questions that would help him go home, then he guessed he could cooperate. "Okay. As long as they help me get home then I guess I can go along with it." When he mentioned going home the nurse appeared to have a mood drop and she stopped smiling. "Great!" The winged unicorn exclaimed as she opened her book to a blank page. "My name's Princess Twilight Sparkle, but you can just call me Twilight. All my friends do. Now first things first, whats your name?" "-Jeez, did she say princess? Damn, this is worse than I thought...-" "I have a few names. My full name is Samuel Rodriguez but most people call me Jet-Stream Sam, or Minuano. However I just like to be referred to as Sam. It's shorter." The purple mare scribbled all of this down before asking her next question. "Alright. What's your occupation?" Should he tell her? "-Ugh, why not. They probably know already from what Steady Hoof tells me.-" "Mercenary. I am- was a swordsman and agent of the organisation Desperado Enforcement, connected to World Marshal. Before that I used to go free-lance and do what I want." "What changed?" She asked him and he looked up to see her excited grin. This one unnerved him. "I saw the bigger picture." He answered simply and she wrote it down while murmuring something under her breath. "However after the... incident with Raiden, I am still left wondering; Was the bigger picture the right picture?" Twilight looked at him with a questioning expression for a few seconds before looking back down at her book for a few seconds and then back at him. "Okay... Next up: did you have any family or relationships?" "I don't have any relationships. My father was killed by one of his own pupils at a sword arts class back in my home country, Brazil. Other than that I didn't know any other family." Both mares looked at each other, shocked, and then back to him. "Oh my..." Red Heart started. "...I'm so sorry." "Don't be. He was connected with the local mafia and he got what was coming to him in the end." Sam grew a sinister smile. "H-how?" Twilight stammered a little. "I killed him." Silence fell upon the three as the two mares looked at him, shocked once again. "I got my revenge and left Brazil forever, never to go back. After that I started up on my own, made my own life by building on what my father taught me. I became a master swordsman and I worked for myself, hunting down mafia members and corrupt people in high places who would have civilians killed for their own gains. Ridding the world of evil." "And then you saw 'The bigger picture'?" Asked Red Heart. "And what is it? If you son't mind telling us, that is. It seems like you had it rough." "The bigger picture is that no matter how much evil you rid the world of, there is always an endless sea of it somewhere else. Things like war, slavery and torture aren't just things performed by the wicked. They live inside us, and we have to perform evil ourselves just to destroy the evil others perform." "That is not always true, Sam. When me and my friends fended of the changeling invasion we didn't kill any of them. We just had them all booted out of Equestria, never to return, as you would say." Twilight defended. "And that was my mistake when I joined Desperado." Sam said. "I left behind what I knew, forgot what I truly fought for. I began fighting for a cause I didn't really believe in and I ended up fighting without knowing why. Did you know why these 'changelings' were invading, Twilight." "Their queen wanted to feed from the ponies of Equestria. And before you say anything more, these changelings feed from positive emotions with love being the primary source. They're parasites and we did right by kicking them out and saving our kingdom." She said with a slightly smug expression. "So the consequences of them losing is now they may be starving, dying and living in fear of death everyday because they couldn't feed themselves." Twilight opened her mouth to give a comeback but found herself not saying anything as her jaw hung open for a moment. Then she closed it and shrank back a bit. "You destroyed the evil actions of the changelings, but by doing so performed your own evil by causing them to starve. You fought without knowing fully what you were doing, and because of it others suffered. This is what I had hoped to stop before I joined with Desperado, by killing those who would fight so blindly and cause even greater evil in the process I would have helped the world solve it's wars and settle it's problems. But... that all changed. I lost my way and ended up becoming one of those blood-thirsty bastards myself. And then I met Raiden." Twilight and Red Heart picked their heads up in some interest. "Raiden fought for those causes I once believed in, fighting the world of evil such as corporations like Desperado and World Marshal. People who would make war just for profit." The two mares looked disgusted by the idea. "I fought with Raiden and was defeated by him. He defeated me because he fought for himself, not for a concept he didn't believe in." "Make war for profit? What pony in the right mind would do such a thing!?" Twilight burst out. "That's horrible!" "I can see why you fought for the causes you did." The nurse said and Twilight nodded in agreement. "But, how did you lose your way?" "It's simple. I gave in to the temptations of evil. I started to think that I would never succeed and I gave up." He sighed and stretched his limbs out, getting some satisfying pops from all over his body. Twilight winced but Red Heart just posted a smile on her face as she thought about everything Sam had just said. He could tell she was trying hard to keep the smile there, though. And that she just wanted to frown away. "Anyway, I'm still a bit tired and I'll need some more rest." "Yeah." Twilight said as she stood up. "You've given me some food for though *Laugh*, and uh, I need to go get a friend of mine. He'll help us out for something. Thanks for telling your story, Sam." The purple princess stood up and began to walk away. "Bye!" She said as she hurried out of the room. "In a rush, much." Sam commented as she left. However Red Heart was still present and took her place on Twilight's stool. There was a while where the two sat silently, not saying anything to each other. "Was it all true?" She said to him in a hushed concerned voice. "Hm?" Sam picked up his head at the sound of her talking to him. "Was what true?" "Your story. Everything." She said solemnly. Sam nodded and the nurse bowed her head. "It's just so horrible... corporations that thrive on wars and live for the profit of fighting, your father, the time you spent on your own, Raiden... It's just a lot to take in." "Yeah... and so is ending up here, leaving behind everything I ever knew. Not that I knew much." "You said you came from another world, yes?" Sam nodded in affirmation. "Then what if you tried to make things right again, you could help ponies here. Do you have any other skills, other than... killing?" Sam harrumphed and turned his eyes up in thought. "No." "Oh... then maybe you could become a Royal Guard. Protect ponies on the streets?" The nurse suggested. Sam just laughed and sighed. "No, law enforcement isn't really my thing. I'd much prefer the military approach, or going solo again." Sam didn't like the idea of being a guard. Taking orders from some wuss and actually not being able to take out an opponent sounded like a rather dull alternative to being a mercenary, or a freelance one-man-army. "Then... well..." The nurse began to scrunch up her nose in thought. Her moment of thought was interrupted when the purple pony walked back into the room with a happy look on her face. This time she was accompanied by... a big lizard. The thing had big green eyes and purple scales. It stood about as tall as the princess' chest and walked on it's hind legs like a human would. He noticed the claws it had and eyed them for a while, part in envy part in annoyance. Was it some sort of pet? So as they approached, Twilight noticed him staring at her 'pet' lizard and frowned. Wait, she said earlier that she she was going to get her friend... was that it? "What's that?" He asked her. Twilight smirked and gave out a little giggle. "That is Spike, my dragon assistant." She said replied. "That'd be me." The lizard said with a mock bow and a smile. The lizards voice sounded somewhat young, but a little aged. Not to dis-similar from a human in their mid teens. "-This place seems to get weirder by the minute. Magical talking ponies, dragons and princesses, what's next? Fire that sends messages?-" "Ok that's great, but how does this advance our conversation?" Sam asked with a slightly impatient intrigue. "His body contains an experimental and complex set of contact runes." Twilight explained. 'Contact Runes'? "You'll have to keep it simple, Twilight. I'm not exactly knowledgeable on your world, what do these 'Contact Runes' do?" "Oh, basically it means he can send messages by burning them in dragon-fire. How nifty is that!?" She beamed proudly. Sam's eye just twitched in response. "What's wrong?" Nurse Red Heart asked, confused at his reaction to the break-down. "Nothing." Sam quickly snapped like nothing had ever happened. The two mares paused for a second and exchanged a glance before Twilight carried on. "Okay then. I want to send a letter to Princess Celestia about everything you told me." Twilight said. "Your sister?" Sam questioned. Was there a large royal family in the country? "Ha! I wish." She said before levitating a roll of parchment from one of her saddlebags and placed it withing reach of her assistant, who snatched it from the air with no problem encountering the magic field. She did the same with a quill and left Sam in some thoughts. "Then how are you a princess if you're not related to the royal family?" He asked with a hoof scratching his chin. "Oh, I ascended." Sam stared at her blankly, it took a second before Twilight realised he had no clue what she meant by that. "Long story short, I saved the world with my friends a few times and accomplished some pretty amazing stuff to earn a spot in royalty." She explained with a light blush. Sam didn't know he could ever consider a blushing alien pony as cute, but he did now. There was a brief moment of silence and Sam glanced over at the heart monitor at his bedside. "-If they have the technology for things like heart monitors, then how haven't they invented the pen yet?-" He thought. "-But then again, I guess their weird magic stuff must make up for some lack of technology in places. Still though, I may need to get used to this 'magic'. It just doesn't look natural to be floating stuff around like that.-" "Alright! Let's get started!" Twilight exclaimed after the awkward silence before looking at him with a strangely happy but nervous grin. "Oh, and um, Sam?" "Yeah?" He waited for the question. "Please avoid anything graphic." She gestured to the little dragon who looked up with a confused expression. "-Oh, the youngster. Of course.-" He noted mentally. "Huh?" The dragon questioned out to them both. Ignoring his apparent confusion, Sam began retelling everything he told them previously. Except he put everything into a timeline and thoroughly detailed the points that the lavender princess asked him to extrapolate on. She seemed like the sort of person who wanted to know everything, like she had some sort of addiction to learning knew things. He wasn't disrespectful to this trait, however it became mildly aggravating the more she pressed. Anyway, he managed to compress everything he knew (Minus the gory bits) into a story which made sense. Then the little dragon simply held out the scroll at arms length and blew a burst of green flames from his mouth, completely destroying the scroll. He cocked his head and was about to question the act when he remembered. "-Oh yeah... magic.-" "Now we just wait for her to reply!" The princess exclaimed cheerily. Sam suddenly got a gut feeling that he wasn't going to like his new world.