First Contact

After a portal opens life changes as we know it.

Dennis Tennison had seen a lot of weird things in his thirty seven years, most of them involving expired gas station sushi and questionable life choices. But this? A swirling portal downtown spewing light and actual unicorns? That was a new one.

He leaned forward in his recliner, eyes glued to the flickering news broadcast. His bag of off brand cheese puffs hung limply in his hand. “Is this real?” he muttered, half expecting an alien from Star Trek to pop out and say, “Just kidding, humans. You’ve been pranked!”

But no. The portal was real. So were the unicorns. Though the news anchors were already arguing about whether they were truly unicorns or "unicorn adjacent quadrupeds with anomalous cranial protrusions." Dennis didn’t care. He just wanted a job. Preferably one that didn’t involve portals or mythical beasts.

Still, the footage was mesmerizing. Towering in the middle of downtown like a glowing wound in the fabric of space, the portal shimmered with otherworldly energy. People had been camping out for days, selling "I Went to the Portal and All I Got Was This Lousy Shirt" T-shirts and rainbow horn headbands. Capitalism, Dennis thought, always finds a way.

The government, naturally, had no idea what to do. They sent in drones at first. One returned immediately, fried and steaming. The second sent back a blurry image of what appeared to be a floating castle, and what might’ve been a tree smoking a pipe. No one could say for sure.

Then, five days in, everything changed.

Dennis was sipping stale coffee from a cracked mug when it happened. The portal pulsed...visibly. The air turned electric. From the swirling glow stepped a unicorn. An actual unicorn. White as snow, with eyes like galaxies and a mane that rippled like silk in the wind. It approached the portal slowly, its hooves not quite touching the ground. People screamed. Phones recorded. Security scrambled.

And then the unicorn... poked the portal with its horn.

The result? Pure chaos.

The portal let out a loud Bzzzt noise, like a kazoo being strangled, and suddenly the unicorn's mane lit up like a neon sign at a karaoke bar. It sneezed; loudly and a shower of sparkles blasted a government drone out of the sky. It blinked, staggered, and then, to everyone's astonishment, turned around and talked.

"Apologies," it said in perfect English, "I seem to have destabilized the continuum. Happens more often than you'd think."

Dennis choked on his coffee.