Article 2

When an alien craft crash lands in Equestria, the Princesses struggle to keep the one surviving crew member from death. After it wakes from a coma, they find this creature, a human, is much more volatile than they expected.

It can be found at Equestria Daily, fanfiction.net and FIMFiction.

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Tropes used in Article 2 include:

• Anti-Magic: Humans, or at least Shane, are highly resistant to most spells, and seem to be able to dispel magic by skin contact alone.
• Deadpan Snarker: Shane, oh so very much, and in a very frequently hostile manner.
• Determinator: When completely surrounded, wounded, and telekinetically pinned to the ground by Luna, Shane still struggles. It takes a knockout spell to subdue him.
• He Knows Too Much: Invoked. Major Doran says that his own government would not hesitate to kill him if it ever got word that he's being held captive by another sovereign country, due to the amount of classified information he has.

Shane: Every minute I'm alive is a liability. I know things, lady, scary things. Things that should not be made public, and as far as they're concerned, I'm better off dead than risk being slowly tortured until I crack and start hemorrhaging information.

• Hidden Depths: Shane manages to surprise Celestia by not only recognizing that she has experienced a great deal of loss, but also expressing his heartfelt sympathies.
• Hostage Situation: Shane holds Twilight at knifepoint when he's being chased by the palace's guards. He lets her go in favor of escaping, though.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: One of the very few aversions in the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic ficdom.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: The story is told from the perspective of the Equestrians, with the human never being the focus of the narration.
• Inhumanable Alien Rights: Inverted: Equestrian law was not written with humans in mind, and therefore it does not apply to them. Luna makes a joke that, legally, Shane would be considered more of a pet than a prisoner. He doesn't like it one bit.
• Interrupted Suicide: Shane tries to put a bullet in his brain when he's surrounded. Luna doesn't let him.
• Jerkass: Shane comes off as this to the ponies. In fact, the only person he goes beyond simply tolerating is Twilight, as Luna notices.
• Mind Control: How the Stare works on Shane. It's noted that it works even more effectively on him than on the animals Fluttershy uses it on.
• Morality Pet: Twilight seems to have shades of this to Shane. This is presumably as a result of him recognizing her voice as the one that talked to him in his sleep.
• Nightmare Fuel: Pretty much everything about Fluttershy to Shane, ever since she Stared him down^[1]. He always stays as far away from her as possible, and any sudden action of hers, like flying straight at him, are enough to freak him out.
• Noodle Incident: Shane attributes one of his scars to "a fistfight with a dumpster", and that's the only information he felt like revealing to the Equestrians. When questioned about another one, the only answer he gives is "steak knife".
• Not Afraid to Die: Again, Shane. He seems fascinated with his own death, to the point of mimicking a corpse when he sees an empty gurney, and hints at one point that he might attempt suicide again. It leads to Luna privately questioning Celestia if they can really force him to live.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Pinkie Pie appears straight out of nowhere in Shane's cell to offer him a batch of cupcakes. He and Luna hang a lampshade on it, as does Rainbow Dash later on.
• Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap: Shane says that real sugar is very expensive back on earth, as much as fifty times the price of synthetic substitutes.
• Scars Are Forever: Shane holds a surprising amount of those. Not all of them are related to his time in the military, though - see noodleIncident above.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: What Shane turns out to be. Even the characters themselves recognize it.

The entire time the alien eyed him from his sitting place on the cot. It was not a threatened or hostile gaze, which surprised Aegis. He simply looked tired, tired and defeated. Aegis set the plate down and looked at the creature. It looked back. Aegis knew this look. It was the look of a broken soul.

• Super Window Jump: Subverted and deconstructed at the same time. Shane shoots the glass panel first to only then dive through it, and even then suffers cuts that turn out to be minor plot points.
• Survivor Guilt: Shane feels strongly that he shouldn't have been saved, and makes it quite obvious to everyone within earshot, multiple times.

1. ↑ see Mind Control above