Do You Ever Get The Feeling?
Let me tell you a story.
That sounds suitably eerie, don’t you think?
Let me tell you a story… that could go so far… or it might not. It could be as simple as a tale of how I walked to Ponyville this morning to pick up some milk and bread. Else it could be an epic; something that I couldn’t describe in five words, nor in five-hundred.
No… this is neither of those. This is a story in my mind; something that never happened… not yet anyway.
It starts with me; Twilight Sparkle, alicorn, bearer of the element of magic, student of Princess Celestia, lavender, five-foot-seven, purple eyes.
It starts with me, Twilight Sparkle, in Equestria. It’s a big country, stretching from sea to sea and then some. It is home to unhospitable mountains where the dragons dwell. It is home to lonely deserts where the zebra nomads make their living. It is home to deep caverns where the diamond dogs hoard their treasures.
So this is a story of me, Twilight Sparkle, in Equestria. It’s late June, the seventh year since I came to Ponyville; making it the year 1007. I am twenty-four years old as of two months ago.
None of this is particularly vital to know, but you never know…
Which is sort of what this story is about.
Do you ever get the feeling that the world is out to get you and you specifically?
I have.
Do you know how many times I’ve ‘saved the world’ as of this day?
Eighteen-and-three-eighths times.
Eighteen-and-three-eighths times I’ve been thrust into danger against some foe hell-bent on destruction. At this point, I’ve seen all the plots, all the plans.
Eternal night.
Chaos forevermore.
Enslavement of a whole race.
Crystallisation of the world.
Chaos forevermore… again.
I could go on, but I guess you get the point. Every single time though, it’s always me and my friends that are at the heart of it.
We’re the ones risking out lives for the sake of everyone else, for better or for worse, and each time, we look at one another and agree that we were lucky to escape a worse fate than we did. Each time, we vow to one another: never again; saving the world is going to get us killed at some point or another.
But it never sticks.
There are few guarantees in life: birth, death, and taxes are but three of them, but I’d like to add another to that list. That Twilight Sparkle and her friends will save the world every other month.
I’d like to blame it on Celestia… that it’s her, pulling the strings, putting me into danger; testing me to my limits, that, instead of calling on her council of guards, magicians, and advisors, she would send her student instead.
I’d like to… but any world in which I can fathom her doing that of her own free will seems impossible.
So I don’t place the blame on her. I like to believe that she would never do these things… maybe it’s the wrong assumption to make, and maybe the blame lies solely on her shoulders… but I don’t think so.
If it’s not her though, then is it us? Is it the fault of myself and my friends that we always tumble ourselves into these situations without a second thought?
I can’t say that this isn’t an idyllic theory either… I know one pegasus in particular who would be considered rather patriotic on some days.
But none of us go seeking trouble that we don’t own… We didn’t wake up one morning and all decide that we would rove across the lands as vigilantes. We woke up to find them on our doorsteps and with ourselves as the few sane ponies still able to form a thought and a plan against the attackers.
We don’t go looking for trouble. Trouble finds us. Wherever we go, whatever we’re doing, whoever we’re with… trouble always manages to find a way to cough politely before crashing the party.
Coincidence is something that I stopped believing in after the twelfth time we attracted one of these situations.
It becomes hard to believe that you just have the most rotten luck on the planet when it seems like Tartarus has a to-do note on their desk saying ‘priority one: deal with Twilight Sparkle and her friends,’ a filing cabinet with a thousand fantasies of how you might be disposed of, and a picture of you on a dartboard.
I’m probably not the only one of us that’s started to get weary of doing this over and over again. Applejack wearies of having to put aside her normal life on the farm to come and save the world with us over and over again.
On the positive side though, Fluttershy seems to have battled through her fears due to pure perseverance, so some positives have come from this too I suppose.
We’re all wondering if we even want to keep doing this though… none of us particularly like a life-or-ruin-of-Equestria situation every other month.
It’s not like we’ve got a choice though… if we don’t do it, who will? If there’s one thing that all eighteen-and-three-eighths times I’ve saved the world has taught me, it’s that we’re perhaps the only ones who ever stand up against those intent on destruction.
Sometimes it feels like we’re the main characters in the story of Equestria… as conceited as it may sound, trouble seems to follow us around like a narrative with a vendetta.
We have quiet times too, yes. We have times where we sit in the sunshine and have small problems; the problems of everyday life. We have times where we forget that we apparently have a bounty upon our heads.
And then we don’t.
I prefer the days when I have small problems. The days when a chemical I mixed has been spirited away by one of the Cutie Mark Crusaders. The days when I can curl up with a good book.
The days that let us imagine that we will never have to fight another battle, that let us believe we’re done… we’ve finished the story, this is our happily ever after.
They never last long though…
There was always another big problem. There was always another villain waiting in the shadows for the opportune moment.
And there was always the moment when the six of us set our jaws and vowed: ‘Never Again.’
And the moment when the page was turned in the story of our lives and it wasn’t the end of the book.