The young man walked down the road, dirt crunching beneath his feet and chilled gusts of wind pressing against him. He had to pull his gi top closed with his hands to keep the wind from stealing his body heat. As cold as his hands felt against the biting winds, it was more important to keep his core warm.
The young man trudged onward with heavy footsteps and bare feet. He was constantly stepping on rocks and pebbles that made him retract his foot instantly from the sharp pain. If this was what the journey home would be like, then there would be some long hard times to come.
The young man tried not to think about the past few days. The ponies had been good to him, sure. Gibbs pulled him out of the water and gave him a place to rest and heal up. They gave him food, protected him from the bad guys who wanted to take him away.
In return, the young man gave them some good things back. He put an end to that mercenary group that showed up, killing three and crippling the last one. Of course, they only showed up because of him. But the young man didn’t choose this life, so he was really doing them a favor, and not just giving them something owed. So the net giving was neutral, and all parties were even.
And then there was this Tong group. Terrorist thugs, holding villages in perpetual positions of extortion and fear. The young man tried to get them to fight back; he even would have helped if they had decided to try. But they were too scared. What did they have to be afraid of? They already had no freedom, that couldn’t be stripped from them. They had their lives, but when life is so terrible, why value it so much?
The young man started thinking about life. Why did it hold value? The question made him stop. He assigned value to life based on the liberty you have to do what you want. For these ponies, that simply wasn’t true; it couldn’t be.
The ponies had their “special talents” that they didn’t get to choose, and that defined most of their life. Sure, they could be autonomous within a field, but they didn’t have the all-encompassing freedom of any human being. Clearly, they didn’t value life for freedom.
What did they value life for? Their families, for one. Every life can find value on that principle. Friends, too. Maybe the only thing that gave the ponies value in life was having friends? Whatever you are forced to do in life, you do still get to choose your friends. You still have personality traits that aren’t dependent on your talent.
But then, with the threat of friends being taken from you, should you not fight that threat? If it is always lording over you, you have to retake control for the safety of your friends, right? And if you stand by your friends, you have the ultimate power that anyone could have.
It was an interesting thought, friends over freedom. To the young man, it still didn’t make sense not to fight for freedom, when all you had to do was fight by your friends’ sides for it. It was just… inconceivable. He shook his head and kept on walking.
The ponies were clearly very narrow-minded, unlike people, who could press on through almost any struggle. Why were they so different? What was it that made the ponies so weak?
The young man sighed. “I don’t understand…” he said.
He paused in his tracks and stared at the ground before him. Something felt off. The winds that were pushing against him had disappeared suddenly, and not a sound echoed from anywhere around him. The trees had ceased to rustle, the dirt no longer crunched under his feet, the sounds of the wilderness were gone. An uncanny silence ruled over the land.
Just as he was about to say something to himself, the world started to rumble. It started off as a small rumble, hardly noticeable, unless you saw the rocks shaking on the roadside. Then, it gradually became larger, until it became a full-on earthquake. The earth growled beneath him as if it was growing angrier and angrier at the world above, trying to knock it off its feet.
The young man looked up and toward the sky. Off in the distance, something was coming toward him, high in the sky. He couldn’t quite make it out, as it was too far away, but as it came closer, he recognized some sort of arc shape that was getting larger, expanding as the rim of a circle.
Just as he was about to forget it and move on, the arc accelerated and picked up massive speed, and it exploded outward as an enormous rainbow shockwave, somehow blasting a sonic boom ahead of itself. The young man stared in awe, mouth agape and eyes wide, as gale force winds rushed against him from the same direction and slammed into him, knocking him down and landing him facing the opposite direction.
The young man stared in disbelief as the shockwave continued on its journey, casting itself over the world for just a moment before disappearing off over the horizon. It was the most extraordinary thing the young man had ever seen, the most stunning display he had ever laid his eyes upon. Was it natural? Something like that could not exist back home, it could only exist in a world of magic and wonder.
The young man looked backward in the direction of the village, a spark showing in his eyes for just a moment. Those ponies were in trouble. With new determination unlike any he had ever had before, he got back up and started walking.
Those ponies needed help. And he was the only one who could provide it.