It was a beautiful day in Ponyville, which doesn’t really matter since our hero, Gregor McAwesome, was on Earth.

For now.

Across a perfect green field on a large estate in Vermont a teenager dressed in a casual pair of jeans and a t-shirt walked manfully. Most people would have been cold, it was only forty degrees outside, but he felt fine. Gregor was six foot four, covered in athletic muscle, had bright blue eyes and golden blond hair which he kept cut short, but not too short. All in all he was so good looking that Adonis, that Greek guy who stared at himself in the pond, would have been jealous.

“Man, it sure is great to be home after three consecutive tours of duty with the Navy Seals,” Gregor said to nobody as he strode manfully through the woods behind his family’s five-story, twenty-bedroom mansion. He stopped suddenly, brooding. “I sure hope the rest of the team is all right without me, but since I’m just sixteen I really wanted to come home for a while.”

He shrugged manfully, dismissing the worry and started walking once more. He’d be starting school again in a few weeks. He was sure the basketball team would try recruiting him, after all he’d scored the winning basket that earned the USA gold in the last Olympics, but he just wanted to relax this year at school.

The expectations he had to live up to were hard, especially after he got perfect scores on both the SAT and ACT. He sighed manfully. Still, for today he could just enjoy his walk in the woods. Sometime around lunchtime Gregor stopped, stunned by the sight before his eyes. It was a giant Mayan temple stretching above the treetops, lined with age and covered in bits of moss.

“Huh,” Gregor stated manfully, “I’ve walked down this path literally hundreds of times. I wonder why I never noticed this place before.” He thought for a second. “Or why nobody has ever noticed this from the house, I mean it’s taller than all the trees, you’d think it would stick out.” So intent was his mighty mind on this quandary that he never even asked why there was a Mayan temple in New England.

“I might as well explore it,” Gregor thought aloud. “I’ll just have to do it quickly so I can get back in time for tea with the President.” Moving like the ninjas he had studied with for several years, Gregor snuck into the temple. Traps that should have rotted or rusted away hundreds of years ago somehow still activated as our hero journeyed through the temple’s mysterious corridors. Dodging manfully, Gregor passed all the traps with ease and soon stood at the exact center of the pyramid. Temple. Whatever.

There stood an altar surrounded by intricate carvings. Huh, Gregor thought manfully, those carvings remind me of my favorite television show: My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic.  On the altar rested a glowing azure orb, levitating several inches above the stone platform. Next to it was a carved inscription which was conveniently in English.

Beware! Beware!

Take heed and care!

For those who touch this blue stone,

Can never more return home.

Changed will be your flesh and bone,

And a strange new world you must roam.

“What superstitious nonsense,” Gregor declared, trying to deduce the scientific principle that allowed the stone to float and glow without an apparent power source. His Rolex beeped, reminding him of his impending teatime, and he came to a manful decision very quickly.

“I’ll just take it with me and donate it to a museum or something to study,” he said, momentarily forgetting the rules of aracheology he had learned during the semester he spent at Harvard. The first rule being this: if at any point during a dig, an object glows, speaks or moves under its own power, run. Just run and never look back.

The moment his hand manfully touched the stone it flashed with intense bright light, blinding him. Suddenly, he had the sensation of falling, as though the floor had suddenly disappeared. His head hit something, during the fall and everything faded to black.

………

Six hours later, Gregor awoke with a headache, and perfect recall of what had just happened to him.

“I appear to have been manfully teleported to another world,” he said, instantly recognizing a hundred subtle differences between the forest around him and those of any biome on Earth. Only after he had ascertained his new location did he notice that he himself had changed. He was now a black-coated alicorn with crimson fetlocks and a pure white mane. A quick glance in a nearby pool revealed that he had golden eyes with dragon slit pupils. He also had three horns, a pair of curving demonic ones similar to Tirek's in his final form in addition to a needle sharp unicorn horn. His wings were vast bat wings and with them he gained the instinctive knowledge of flight. His cutie mark was an infinity symbol made of tiny silver stars, indicating his special talent of unlimited magical power. He sat and pondered his new form for a while. He specifically considered what the consequences could be of introducing another alicorn, one more powerful than all the previous four combined, into Equestria's geopolitical climate. Not to mention how it might alter foreign affairs. Nah, Gregor thought, shrugging manfully. Then with a single spell returned himself irrevocably to his normal human form.

He let out a quiet sigh, relieved to be restored to his proper state. But, wait, he thought, contemplating manfully. There was something wrong with his hearing, but he couldn't tell what. It was almost like something was missing. He listened carefully trying to solve this weighty conundrum. The wind whispered through the trees like a soothing melody from his acoustic guitar. The calf-high grass tickled him like the trailing fingers of the Baron Vanderbam's daughter whom he'd met while studying abroad in Germany. In both senses of the phrase, he thought, and his clever joke was so good that he began to laugh aloud.

"That's it!" he realized with a shout. "The sound of my own voice. that's what was missing!" The problem was manfully solved, and Gregor felt very pleased with himself. He brushed a few blades of grass off of the fine suit he had created as part of his transformation. Eyeing his surroundings, he noted a low hill close to the pond and climbed to the top of it, finding that it conveniently overlooked Ponyville.

A short distance to the south, which he identified with his unerring sense of orientation, Gregor spied Fluttershy's cottage. He could even see the yellow pegasus hard at work refilling the many bird feeders in her trees if he strained his hawk-like eyes. In the meadows between the hill he stood on and Ponyville several ponies played or relaxed, including Bonbon and Lyra who were sharing a picnic lunch. Rainbow Dash flew overhead in distance, leaving a chromatic trail that could belong to nopony else. "Well, it looks like my keen senses didn't fail me. I am definitely in the world of Equestria," he said staring at the town with a smile that had literally won awards. "I wonder where I should go first? Next Chapter: The Most Radical Second Chapter Ever Estimated time remaining: 10 Minutes