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// The Offer 
// Story: Child of the Moon 
// by _Moonbeam 
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At some point, we've all wondered what it would be like if we could meet our favorite fictional character. (Yes, you. Don't worry, you can admit it. I'm a paragraph on a website, I don't judge.) Maybe it was Harry Potter, or or whoever your favorite member of the Mane 6 was. Maybe you've thought about what you would actually do if you actually got to meet them. No matter how you'd think it would go, I can personally attest that if the magical alicorn princess of the night suddenly decides to show up inside your home without warning, you will probably react something like this: 

First, you will go through your memories of the past few hours, just to make sure you didn't accept candy from a questionable stranger at some point that day.

If the answer is "no," you will probably stare at said no-longer fictional character, waiting for them to do something. To her credit, Luna really didn't react to me while I was ogling her, other than following my gaze when I walked around her. In hindsight, I probably should have at least introduced myself. Or done something other than have a staring contest.

At some point, I'm still not sure exactly how long it took me, you will work up the courage to reach out and touch them. The area my hand happened to find was Luna's mane, which still seemed like it was an animated oil painting up close. It didn't feel like hair, I couldn't even feel any individual hairs. I'm not entirely sure how to describe it, it felt… viscous, sort of oily, but without the wetness, and it didn't stick to my hand. It definitely felt real enough.

So, to recap, a My Little Pony character was in my house, sitting on the floor while I stuck my fingers into her mane. I'm not exactly a diplomat, but I'm pretty sure that this was not the best way to introduce humanity to an alien diarch who has the power to control the moon in her home world. I stepped away from Luna and pulled out my phone. I needed somebody else here, to make sure I wasn't going completely and utterly insane. I wasn't sure who I was planning to call. Maybe Sara, maybe my parents, maybe the police. Well, no. I never did consider calling  the police. I doubt they really would have helped. Regardless, I never got the chance. Nothing I had done before grabbing my phone had caused any real reaction from her, but that did. A spark of - was that fear? - shone in her eyes. Ponies’s faces are far more expressive than a normal horse’s, or even a person. It must have been fear. "Wait!" she whispered forcefully, taking a half step towards me. She was cautious, as if she was afraid of scaring me away, but was also worried about the the device in my hand. To her, I was a bunny holding a shotgun. Apparently, there was something about my phone that scared the Princes of Night enough that a second after she saw it, I felt a tugging from it and the phone went sailing across the room, coming to a stop next to the wall opposite me, seemingly uncracked. When Luna spoke again, she was visibly tensed up, as if she expected a monster to pop out of my phone. Actually, given what Equestria is like and how little she knows about Earth, that's not a bad guess. 

"You… you probably shouldn't use that," she stated in what sounded like a subdued version of the Royal Canterlot Voice that was still loud enough to make the closest window vibrate. Hopefully, none of the neighbors noticed. “O-okay..." I managed to stammer out. The last thing I needed was to inadvertently doom the entire planet to annihilation because I scared an extraterrestrial world leader. "...Do you want..?" Think! Something I could grab in a few minutes that an alicorn would like! "...Coffee?" was the first thing that came to mind. Luna went wide-eyed. "You have coffee?" she asked, grinning like a five-year-old in a toy store.

And that was how, five minutes later, Princess Luna was sitting on my couch, still staring at me. I was utterly mesmerized as Luna grabbed a cup of coffee I made with her telekinesis. I didn't feel anything unusual when she grabbed the cup out of my hand, which made my second observation even stranger: there was no visible sign of what she was doing. She didn't have a glow-y field around the mug, not even her horn lit up. The entire time I was getting the drink, I don't think she ever stopped staring at me. She hadn't spoken since asking for coffee. It was honestly starting to get unsettling. Luna started drinking from the mug in small sips, as if wanting to savor it, then giving up and chugged the rest of the drink in one long gulp. Once she put it down, she went straight back to looking at me. At this point, I was struggling to think of something to say to her, and it looked like she was doing the same thing. Apparently, Luna decided on what to say first. 

“You should probably sit down.” She pulled herself off the couch, and I took her place. As soon as she sat down on the floor, she continued. "My name is Princess Luna. I have no doubt you already know this, but I am not from your world. Six years ago, I Returned to ruling my nation, Equestria, after a long exile. Shortly after I regained power, I began looking at Earth." I must have looked more scared than I felt, because Luna seemed to soften her tone. "N-not for conquest, if that is what you are afraid of. I don't want anything from your species - hoo-mans? Is that what you call yourselves?" I coughed. "Humans." I responded. "Humans? Yes?" I nodded. "All right. In any case, I don’t want anything to do with Earth. I only came here tonight for one reason." She took a few steps closer to me. "And we're looking right at it."

Maybe if this was all just hypothetical, I could have come up with some collected, informative response on behalf of the human race. It wasn't, though. This was real, and so I said the only thing I could think of: "Why me?"

For the first time since I saw her, Luna broke her gaze. Staring off into some random point in the distance, she started to speak. I'm not even sure she was talking to me, just letting out a painful memory. "We... we had a child. When they were just a yearling, we lost them. For years, we never saw them, were never able to find them. It was like our child just vanished off the face of the world." She turned back to face me. Her muzzle was streaked with tears. "Until-" her voice cracked - "until now."

Perhaps, given Luna’s emotional state, I was too demanding with my response, but let's be honest, would you have reacted any differently? I sat down on the couch. "Wait. You're telling me that you had a long-lost son, and it's somehow me, despite me having two biological human parents who both have no idea who or even what you are?" I buried my head in my hands. In hindsight, maybe I was being too critical - I mean, I was hearing this from what I thought until about twenty minutes ago was a fictional character from a television show intended for six-year-old girls. I was asking quite a bit for something. - anything, really, at this point - to make sense.

I felt an appendage wrap around me from the side. It was warm and sort of prickly, almost... feathery? I turned my gaze back to Luna. During my small outburst over the sheer insanity she had wreaked upon me since appearing in my house, she had apparently gotten back onto the couch and scooted over to me, then wrapped her left wing around me like a child's safety blanket. "Well, no. That... isn't quite right." Her tone was calm, like I was a little animal Fluttershy was trying to calm down, even though we were both about the same size. She took a deep breath, then continued. "I didn't have a son." Her voice started breaking again. "I... I had a daughter."

I shut my eyes, trying to process everything that she was saying. Let's see: a princess of Equestria, from a cartoon show I watch, suddenly appeared in my house. She then told me that I was somehow her long-lost daughter, despite me being an 18 year old man with two very present parents, not to mention that Luna had been on the moon for the past thousand years, assuming the show was recent history from her perspective. What's next, am I an alicorn or something? How are you even supposed to respond to the kind of information she gave me?

"I have an... offer for you," said Luna, derailing my train of thought before I could find an answer. She said it in a flat voice, like she’d rehearsed it.

Luna paused, as if waiting for a reaction from me. When none came, she continued. She tried to hide it, but she was clearly upset. I'm still not sure if it was with me, with Celestia, or with herself. Or maybe all three. "You can come home. To Equestria. As a mare. You will have the privileges of a noble, have quarters in the castle with a private teacher to bring you up to speed with Equestrian life, and live as my daughter.”

I didn't respond at first. I had to judge what was going on. "And...if I don't?" I asked, trying to figure out how to answer her.

Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say. A single tear trickled down her cheek. "If..." her voice caught, and she made a noise that sounded like a horse had choked while trying to gargle. I couldn't tell if it was a whinny or a sob. "If you turn down our offer, we will erase your memory of tonight. Our paths will never again cross, and we... we will leave you to carry out your human life - here."

That was clearly too much for her to take, and she buried her head in my chest, sobbing softly. If she really thought I was her child whom she hadn't seen in years, it must have been a pretty emotional night for her, especially if I couldn't remember anything from Equestria. It almost felt like a large dog was pushing itself against my chest, so I did the first thing that came to mind. Luna was considerably lighter than me, as I found when I pulled her into my lap, and started rubbing her belly. That seemed to calm her down quite a bit. Well, at least, the sobbing stopped. That's a step.

Now what? Luna was asking a lot from me. Emigrating to a magical world inhabited by magical ponies was going to have consequences, and those consequences could be terrible. Even Especially  if I was the daughter of one of their rulers. 
Daughter. Odd that that stuck out so specifically. An alien princess from a children's cartoon who claimed I was somehow her child was currently sitting in my lap while I petted her like a dog.  In that context, anything else is kind of a minor detail. Even besides the loss of species, I had a pretty good future ahead here on Earth. Guaranteed acceptance to an Ivy League college, a moderately attractive girlfriend, a 3.9 GPA, the works. The idea of throwing all that away after a fifteen minute conversation under ordinary circumstances was... troubling, to say the least. But Luna appearing in my home was definitely not what I would call “ordinary circumstances.” Maybe, looking back, if I wasn't put on the spot like this, I would have had a different reaction. Then again, if I'm really being honest with myself, I made up my mind the second she said I could come with her.

When I looked back at her, Luna was a little bit more collected. Or, more accurately, she was no longer crying. I cleared my throat. "Luna?" I called for her gently. She didn't move most of her body, just rotated her head to face me with a range of neck motion no horse on Earth possessed. Her eyes were still wet, but not bloodshot. That was odd. I brushed a few tears off of her face. She wasn't saying anything. Sometimes, I wonder if I should have done what I did. Literally every problem I've since had in my life, I was dragged into by those three words. In the end, though, I never would have said anything else.

"I'll do it."