Even though you thought it was ridiculously paranoid, you and Starlight are both wearing 'protective containment suits,' making you both look like astronauts or space aliens, or maybe characters in a disaster movie.
Twilight Sparkle insisted, and Rarity designed them so well they're almost comfortable.
On a stage, a brass band plays. Pinkie Pie wields only three of the seven instruments.
"What's the next step on the list?" Starlight Glimmer asks.
You look at a checklist. which Twilight Sparkle forced you to accept. "You know what? I hate making speeches. Let's just go through the magic portal, let my old friends know I'm still alive, and then we can hop back and let everypony know the experiment worked."
Starlight Glimmer purses her lips. "You know...remembering the LAST time I became an evil cult leader who took over a town?" She shivered. "I don't want to step onto a stage and make a speech either. Just thinking about it makes me feel like I could...backslide."
"Want to just go?"
She nods. "Let's just go." She runs across the lawn, towards the metal archway she and Twilight collaborated to build last week. "Last one to Earth is a rotten egg."
"Hey! You didn't give me a fair start!"
She looks back at you just long enough to stick out her tongue, and strikes the archway with a secret spell's activating jolt of magic. She trots directly into a shimmering, blurry hole in space.
You run after her.
***
When you step out through the other end of the portal, you have no idea where on Earth you are.
Starlight whispers, "Is the human world always this dark?"
"Must be night right now."
The unicorn snaps a few glowsticks she borrowed from Pinkie's party supplies, and tosses them in different directions.
Your mobile phone starts playing several different songs and chimes and beeps, all at the same time.
You pull your phone out of your pocket. "Huh. Five hundred and ninety-eight new messages." You start scrolling through them. "This might take a few minutes."
"Anon," Starlight pokes you with one forehoof. "Does your world always look like this?"
"You aren't used to the night being dark?"
Starlight pokes you again. "What I mean is...you humans have electricity, right? And electric lights?"
"Sure. But we've obviously arrived in some out of the way place where no one lives, so no one has any lights on. Now don't bother me right now, I'm catching up on what's happened while I was away. And I'm hoping I can text someone to come pick us up. Or maybe call an OoberCar."
Starlight walks slowly around you in a circle, her hooves shuffling though crisply dried, fallen autumn leaves, and whatever trash people have dumped in this middle of nowhere place.
A lot of people missed you while you were away! Well, several people. Your roommate Anon2 seems to have missed you the most. He was really worried about you.
You should text him before anyone else, to let him know you're alive at least.
You skip forward in your unread messages.
"Huh," you say.
"What?" Starlight asks.
"/pol/ has been busy. They launched a joke campaign to get thousands of people to vote for the worst possible candidate for president, trying to make it viral. For the lulz."
"I don't know what some of those words even mean."
"I thought I told you what lulz are. And /pol/ is...too complicated to explain right now."
"But what's a president?"
"The president is kind of like Princess Celestia. Except he can't raise and lower the sun. But he can do a lot of other things."
"Things like what?" Starlight asks, one of her hooves shuffling through scorched debris on the ground. She accidentally kicks a rounded object.
You hear a hollow thump. "What are you doing? What is that?"
Starlight rolls the object over. "Looks like a skull. I don't know what kind of animal it's from, though."
"What?" You bend down to inspect Starlight's find. "That's weird."
"What's weird?"
"You usually don't find human skulls just lying around, you know."
"Maybe we're...in an old human graveyard?"
Your phone makes a raucous noise. It says, "This is a test of the emergency alert system. If this were a real nuclear war, this would be an excellent time to seek shelter, in a location relatively well protected from direct radiation, blast waves, and fallout."
Starlight asks, "What does all that mean? Do we need to hide?"
"Maybe it's just a prank. You know, like the election thing."
Starlight shakes her head. "This is a strange world. I don't understand it. I don't really get what's going on here. But you know what I think we should do?"
"No idea. What?"
"I'd like to fly a kite."
You laugh. "You brought a kite?"
"Do you think that's silly?"
You shrug. "Whatever makes you happy, I guess."
Starlight unpacks her saddlebag. She unfolds a large, flat object, which pops up into a box shape. "A box kite!" she says proudly. She levitates it, letting a spool of string unwind as the kite rises.
"Huh. I'm used to people running to get a kite started."
"I...don't want to wait any longer than I have to." The kite rises higher and higher.
Starlight levitates a small mirror towards you. "Hold this, will you?"
"Sure." You gaze into the mirror. In your isolation suit, you really do look like a character in a movie. You laugh. If you can keep the suit, you'll have a good costume for next Halloween.
It'll be fun to do things with your buddy Anon2. You hadn't ever realized quite how much you missed him.
SO much.
"Starlight?"
"What?"
"I think I need to wipe some dust out of my eyes."
"Don't you DARE open that suit, not yet. If you so much as crack the containment, Twilight will kill you. No, she'll make BOTH of us wish we were dead. I'm serious."
"Ok." You blink, again and again. Having a bit of water running down your face isn't so bad. At least you're finally back on Earth!
If you have to be extra careful for a few more minutes, to keep Starlight and Twilight from getting upset, that's ok. After all, they DID go to a lot of work to help you get back home.
A few more minutes of waiting isn't much.
Starlight levitates the spool of string towards you. "Hold this in your other hand," she says.
You grab the spool, and feel the kite's steady pull, a proper upwards slant. "Feels like good kite flying weather," you say.
"Mmm-hmm," Starlight agrees absently. "Hoof me that mirror, will you?" She looks into it. Her horn glows for a moment, and she looks into the mirror again.
She pulls a cylinder out of her supplies. "Now, Anon, this next part is going to be a bit loud. Just stand back, and stay out of the way."
"What?"
She points the cylinder upward, tugs a trigger on the side.
A moment later, a column of fire shoots out of the cylinder's end, with a boom.
"Holy shit!" you say. "What was that?"
Starlight smiles. "One of Trixie's largest fireworks. Just wait a minute..."
An explosion of fiery orange light appears in the sky above you, with thousands of smaller starlike points spreading out from it.
"Now!" Starlight says. "While the firework gives us enough light to see by. Stand next to me. Look over my shoulder, into the mirror."
"I can't see much. It just looks dark."
Starlight's horn glows for a moment, then glows again, as she peers into the mirror.
After about twenty seconds, she levitates the mirror towards you. "Take a closer look," she says.
"I can't see myself at all."
"The mirror is a viewing portal, connected to the kite. It gives us a kite's eye view of the landscape around us."
Finally, your eyes focus properly on the view inside the mirror.
"What's that?" you ask. "It just looks like...someone spilled a bunch of matches on a filthy floor."
The view shifts. Now it shows what looks like the worst possible urban blight. No, even worse than that. All the buildings have fallen over, the remnants burned out, like an angry mob was determined to destroy everything they possibly could.
Maybe with high explosives.
"Where are we?" you say. "What IS this place?"
The view shifts, pointing in other directions, zooming out and in and back out again.
"This...is your home world, as seen from the kite. Those 'matches' are trees that suffered an enormous disaster, something that knocked them all down in the same direction. And those buildings...something did a lot of damage, I think in a very short time."
"A hurricane?" you wonder.
"Where are all the humans?" Starlight asks. "I don't see any. Shouldn't there be someone? Or one of those 'cars' you told me about, driving on one of the streets? Where did everyhuman go?"
She gestures upward with a forehoof. "And why aren't there any stars? My magic doesn't even detect proper clouds. Instead, it's like the upper atmosphere is full of dust and dirt that's blotted out the sky."
"No. No one would be stupid enough to really do it."
"To do what?" she asked.
Your phone blares the raucous tones again. "This has been a test of the emergency alert system." The sound cuts out.
"It's funny," you say.
"What's funny?"
"I wouldn't have thought the phone system would be the last thing to go."
You scroll to the very last text message anyone ever sent you. It's from Anon3. A simple cartoon face, mouth open in a goofy grin, eyes rolled upwards.
"too much lulz đâī¸đđĒĻđĒĻ" says the caption.
This...THIS is your last contact with humanity. The human race's last communication with you.
And somehow, it seems only fitting.
"Well," you say. "I guess we're fucked." A moment later you say, "And like you said, DON'T take off your isolation suit, not here at least." You sigh. "I'm not sure Rarity knows how to make anti-radiation shielding. Even with the suits, we might be seriously radioactive already."
"What's radioactive?" Starlight asks.
"It's a deadly, invisible poison, like dust you can't see. Smaller than dust. It can burn you like a chemical, or give you cancer. If you get enough of it into your body, there's no saving you." You think for a moment. "Just how well do you think you can clean us off, before we go all the way back into Equestria?"
Diffuse, magical light swirls around the two of you, enveloping you both.
"I'll try my very best," Starlight says, as she leads the way back into the portal.
***
Weeks ago, when you arrived back in Equestria, ponies set up a shed outside Ponyville General Hospital for you and Starlight.
The hospital staff didn't want your radioactivity to contaminate the hospital's rooms and hallways, and maybe get on or into other patients.
On a bed next to yours, Starlight Glimmer mumbles in her sleep.
You no longer have your mobile phone, or anything you and Starlight brought along while visiting your home world. When an experimental physicist arrived in Ponyville from a research institute in Canterlot, carrying a Geyser-Mewler radiation detector, they confirmed what you'd already suspected.
Everything you'd carried on your short trip to Earth had become too radioactive to keep.
The closest thing you have to a souvenir isn't from Earth at all. It's a new hand mirror.
Starlight cast a spell to make the new mirror show the same view as the old one. It shows the view from Starlight's kite, which, aided by a bit of residual magic, still flies above an alien world...YOUR alien world.
You've searched the mirror again and again, but you still haven't spotted any human survivors.
You don't know if you ever will.
You struggle out of bed, your body aching. You shuffle to a curtained off area in the corner, where you pee in a bucket.
When you wash your hands, you see yourself in the bathroom mirror.
Radiation sickness didn't kill you, not quite. But between the sickness and the improvised, experimental magical treatments to bring you back from the edge of death, your complexion has turned a sickly green. Your facial features have drooped and half-melted.
You don't look quite so human as you used to, but more like a twisted parody.
But with all other humans (so far as you know) dead of nuclear war?
You are humanity's one surviving representative.
You are everyman.
Now and forever, you truly are Anon.