Author's Notes:

sorry for such a short chapter.

Last time on Zaanne: "'up up and away!' 'Nope!'"

This time on Zaanne...

I made it home just before the snow picked up. Still, I felt like stalagmite on my scooter as I parked it. I quickly went inside. I had apparently left the door unlocked, not that I lived in a bad neighborhood or anything.

With the sun set, the house was dark, quiet, and cold, as usual. Dust had collected on the living room furniture; we never got a chance to sit around in here. My trophie case sat old dusty cups and plaques. The goblet that said "Xtreme pony 1st place" had cobwebs spread across to a metal plate with a ribbon engraved on the side that said "Wing cancer awareness marathon winner"

The house could warm itself due to some pegasi magic-stuff, but I had no clue how to do that, so I trudged on to my room upstairs. The crystal gave enough light to see myself to my bed, and I plopped down onto it like a sack of potatoes.

"Where's your parents?" Zaanne asked. He seemed genuinely concerned.

"My mom works out of town. She's not always here."

"And your father?"

I looked out the window, watching the snow fall mutely against the homes around us. "Never really met my dad, he ditched us around the time I was born."

"They were married, right?" He asked.

"Of course, why wouldn't they be?"

"Well, you got one thing better than Gabriel there."

I sat up, looking at the crystal. "His parents weren't married? I thought you had to be married before you had kids."

The wind whistled against the house. "I'll let him explain. Just know that the human world is messed up."

"For now," Ship said, "get some sleep. I sence a long day tomorow." Not the best comment for sleeping, but the crystal streamed soft music through my head, a song about some girl named Delilah, and I quickly drifted off to Dream Land. Unfortunantly, my dream land was a little broken.

In my dream, I was galloping through ponyville, with Gabriel next to me. We were going as fast as possible, my scooter gone. Gabriel (or Zaanne, I couldn't see his eyes) looked beat up, but I saw myself pointing to a mountain in the distance, yelling something at him. My voice was drowned out by a loud roar not too far behind us.

The whole town had taken a beating. Random houses were on fire, and a few homes in complete ruin. The sky was dark and ashen, the snow in the sky turning black for some reason. It reminded me of a snow storm of ashes.

"We need to get to that mountain!" I heard myself yell at Gabriel. The roar picked up again, louder and much closer. The floor rumbled, like the earth was breaking under us.

"Well then, let's get going!" He shouted, sprinting down ponyville. He shot his head to the side and yelled, "The machine is there? Why did they even make another one?!"

I figured he was asking Zaanne, so I focused on galloping. The scooter appeared in front of me so I sped forward on that. Gabriel kept our speed by doing some hop/glide with his wings.

The thing behind us roared, and the dream buzzed out. When my vision came back on, I was back in the dark room with a new machine next to me. I wasn't focused on that though, I was more worried about Applebloom, who was in some animal cage. She didn't look harmed, but she was obviously scared. She was also mad about something, grumbling to herself and looking in the dark.

"Calm down, AB." I said. "We can't get you out without Zaanne though, and he's, ah, busy with something."

"Ok" she grumbled. The room shook violently, tossing me into the machine. When I looked up to it, I got a nice picture of something I didn't want to see.

It looked like a giant fish bowl flipped over. Inside was pure black, with little lights flashing on and off inside the bowl. Every few seconds, a light would glow blue, and it would stay there. There weren't many, maybe three, but more were popping up. As if on cue of weird events, the walls shook and light poured into my eyes.

When the light faded, I was back in the white place with Ship and Zaanne. The place was boring, nothing but white with a slight green tint in any way you look. The floor was like marble, but it didn't reflect my image, so more like a tile floor without lines.

Ship was a human that I didn't recognize. He looked more like a Supersized bowling ball covered in a tropical shirt and tan shorts. His head was popped out though, a chubby mound of meat with eyes and a huge smile on his face.

"Why are you so fat?" I asked. Not the nicest thing to say, but he was seriously big.

"I'm not fat, I'm fluffy." He hobbled from Zaanne and waved to me.

"He's transformed into a comedian again. His name is Gabriel Iglesias, not our Gabe though, so don't confuse the two chubbies." Zaanne was in his pony form, looking at the same clipboard from the afternoon.

"What are you looking at?" I asked, pointing a hoof to Zaanne.

"Oh this?" He held up the clipboard like it was an unimportant peice of wood. "It's plans for stuff, like the things we summon or new uses for the magic." He slid the board to me and i took a look at it.

The stuff he put made no sence with too much clarity. It had a picture of a fire with random words around it like "blow up" and "fire punch". Next to it was a lightning bolt with a few less words spiraling around that. "Water" and "storm" were circled in blue. Under that had a funny picture of a stick human holding a sword. There were plenty of things there, most of which were circled. "Dragon voice", "Keyblade", "Food", and "Ubercharger-thingy" was circled twice.

"What's an 'Ubercharger-thingy'" I asked.

"It's a backpack thing with a canon thing that shoots good thingies!" Zaanne was by far the greatest person to explain stuff.

"Well that's nice," I said. Until humans made more sense, I was going to wear a cowboy hat upside down everywhere. "Ship, what happened to the aliens?"

The Hawaiian bowling ball tapped the side of his pudgy head. "They're doing something in the Everfree Forest, that is all i can see. I do sense that Gabriel knows more of their whereabouts."

"You 'sense' him? How does that work?"

For the guy that knew everything, he seemed puzzled by the question. "I'm not entirely sure how, I figure it's some internal energy source in me." Ship sat down on the floor and crossed his arms, or tried to. "Zaanne, what happened to the time machine you were making? Did you just stop working on it?"

"I finish what I start, unlike most people." The green stallion rolled onto his hooves. "I merely took a quick break after something in it broke."

"If you mess with time, you might not like the outcome."

"Yeah yeah, anyway-" Zaanne waved a hoof to the air and a video appeared. "-This is what happened."

The video showed him, as a human, working on something that looked like a big blue box. It could probably fit three people at the maximum. It was about 8 feet tall, with windows lining the top of the doorway. The top of the wooden box said "Police Box", but it looked like it could fit under the description of "Cookie Box".

Zaanne kept banging the sides of it with a hammer, muttering to himself before taking the crystal necklace off. That seemed like a really risky move considering the rock was keeping Gabriel alive. Zaanne tossed the ship/rock/crystal to the top of the machine, where an open light was set.

The crystal fell into the light, and the machine hummed smoothly before going completely silent.

Zaanne didn't seem satisfied, so he ran into the box. I couldn't see in it, but the entire construction started making a loud whooshing noise and slowly dissappeared. It reappeared, but it looked abit different. First off, the color changed to green, which didn't suprise me at all. Second, the light had turned on and glowed brightly.

I wasn't sure what I was looking at. "Okay, so you made a teleporting box. Why did you make everything green though?"

"Keep watching." Zaanne ordered.

The human hopped out of the box and grinned like a madmare. Immediately, things went downhill. The box itself glowed brighter than the light, making Zaanne cover his eyes. The whole image went into a series of random colors, swirling through space with the sound of explosions and a thousand people talking at once rolling out like a extremely broken tape.

When the colors and voices died, Zaanne was on the floor, next to a circle of ash and the crystal.

"That's what happened." He cut off the show and dissipated the screen. "I'm not entirely sure what all that stuff was though."

"If I may guess," Ship said, "you broke the time vortex while trying to make the heart of the time machine."

"I'm not sure what that is." I said.

"Wibbly-wobbly stuff. It's all timey-wimey." The pegasus frowned. "If it is, then we need to be careful of what happens around us. Scootaloo, what did you dream of before you came here?"

"Why?" I asked.

"I just wanna know. If the vortex thingy hit the crystal, it might have effected you."

It seemed logical enough, for something with no logic at all. I told him my dream, about the roar and the mountain and the new machine. I left out the part of Applebloom, partially because is didn't seen important. Partially because it felt like it should be my responsibility to save her.

"So, the aliens are doing something again eh?" Zaanne laughed, bringing up his cheery side. "They'll be sorry they tried to mess with ponyville!"

"Or 'will try'." Ship pointed out. "It could have been a dream of the future."

I said, "Well, since i haven't seen the new machine yet, I'm going for future on my dream."

"Come to think of it, that explosion happened before we blew up the last machine." Zaanne looked to the sky. "So that might explain my dream as well."

"You can dream?" I asked.

"Well it's more like a vision, like the one you had. Me and some blue pony yelled at eachother for a few seconds, then it ended."

"Blue pony..." I thought about the writing on my scooter, and how Zaanne had preached it word for word, as if he said that every Sunday. "Zaanne, do you remember what you said, right before the sword fighting?"

"Yes, 'I'd rather die of passion and love than to boredom and solitude'. Why, is it important?"

I didn't know if it would work in a dream, but I rose my hoof. With a quick flash of light, the scooter appeared. I rolled it to the pony. "Read what's under it."

Zaanne flipped the board and read the words aloud. After he did, he re-read it, and reviewed it again. "It's a convinent message, the things most people want yet never get, but it can also be used in reverse. A lot get passion and love but must first live with boredom and solitude. But a lot of people just want to be alone, and have to fake compassion to obtain it." He looked at the initials. "B.F.? Is it from your best friend?"

"No, it's from my dad, his name was Blur Flare, or something like that."

The name made Ship shuffle nervously, which again was odd for a computer. Ship had started to gain more and more emotion, considering the first time I met him, all he did was speak completely monotone. "When we were in the machine, some of the firewall bricks said 'Flare Blue'. Maybe he what they meant."

The information made my head buzz. What did the aliens know about my dad? They apparently knew him and Zaanne more than Gabriel, but Zaanne had never left Gabe since... well, I'm not sure when. I realized I was probably overthinking it, so I forced it out of my mind. Even then, the room seemed to get ten degrees colder over the conversation.

"We'll talk about it later," Ship decided, "for now, it seems that Scootaloo has had a dream from the future, with the information presented." He transformed into a tall man in something that was either a black karate gi, or a dark bathrobe. He had curly dark brown hair and a scar down the side of his face.

His voice changed to have the same accent as Rayden. "I suspect that, if she had a dream of the future, and Zaanne had that vision of his apparent past, Gabriel should be currently dreaming of the present tense."

"So, I have a past I apparently don't know, aliens are still trying to kill us, and Scootaloo's daddy issues might have something to do with it?" Zaanne laughed at the sky, as if he wasn't psychotic enough. "This story just keeps getting better and better!"

Before I could respond to that, there was a weird fold of light next to me, and Gabriel appeared, sprawled out on the floor. He was human, but slightly fatter, though not as chubby as the other Gabriel, and with curly blond hair instead of Zaanne's flame spikes.

"Nice of you to join us." Zaanne chided as Gabe sat up quickly. "Care for a blankie as you lie about?"

He ignored Zaanne. "Guys, we have a problem!" He stopped when he saw Ship. "Anakin Skywalker? Why are you him?"

"That's not important, share your information please."

"Well the problem is that the aliens are up to something!"

I fiddled with the handles of my scooter. "We got that already, they're making another machine, and we don't know what it does."

"How do we know all this?"

Ship grunted. "Zaanne tried to make the Tardis."

Gabriel stared at the pony stunned. "What made that seem like a good idea? We already have teleporting transportation!"

"Yes but the crystal cannot travel time." He summoned a ball and rolled it in his fingers. "The crystal can copy the powers that change stuff, like explosions and fire, but time is constant. You can't stop it, so you can't copy it, which is the crystal's specialty. Therefore I was going to make a Tardis to help us out, but it backfired."

How Zaanne could come with such a conclusion, then call something an "ubercharger-thingy", I had no idea. Zaanne had been able to tap into the crystal's power and summon a storm of fire without even trying. Granted, it took his life force out for a moment, he still was able to use it, and considering we had about twelve hours of improper training, it seemed improbable.

I shot the ball with fire as he tossed it in the air. "And now we all get dreams of the past, present, and future. So, what was your dream?"

"Well if that's true, then we're more screwed than I previously thought." Gabriel eyed the sky like it was about to roar at him and announced, "We have dragons coming to town."