Chapter One: Fall

   My first thought was about the rather unpleasant headache. I opened my eyes to see a clear, all-too-perfectly blue sky. I sat up uncomfortably and immediately noticed a number of things. The first one being that I was incredibly dizzy, and the second one being that everything looked... almost cartoony, and in a very familiar fashion. As my dizziness dissipated, I scanned my surroundings.

   There were what looked to be apple trees all about me, and as I turned my head I saw something that confirmed one of my very first thoughts. I was looking at a barn, a familiar barn. Far too familiar. Was that the barn, the one of Sweet Apple Acres? Wait, what? I live in reality, not in a television show, this wasn't right. The last thing I remembered was that I was walking home from school, and suddenly I was... falling? Yeah, that was it. I hit the ground. Must have been hard, too. Hard enough to knock me out. I felt the back of my head. There was a terrible bruise forming, and a small gash that had apparently stopped bleeding some time ago. I looked to where my head had laid, and there was a little stain of blood on a small rock. That was what had knocked me out? I'd somehow fallen out of the real world and hit my head on a rock in... what was this, Equestria? A fictional world? While I wasn't dizzy anymore, I was very sleepy, probably because I had a concussion or something. I concluded that this was a weird dream, and that I had fallen asleep on my feet. After all, I had been pretty tired. I laid my head down on the grass and drifted off.

*****

"Hey!" said a familiar voice.

"Are you alright!?"

I opened my eyes. I was laying face to face with a pony, an orange pony. Well, that was another thing that didn't make sense that was confirmed today. Fictional place, check. Fictional character, check, not waking up from a weird dream, check.

"You can't be sleepin' here, this is private property," the orange pony said promptly.

"...Urgh. Hello, uhh... Applejack. Applejack!?" I mumbled, dazed. My eyes snapped open as I realized what, exactly, I had just done. Did I just speak to a pony?

"I don't reckon to have seen anything like you around here, nor anypony. How would you know my name?"

I was silent for a moment. I was talking to a fictional character. A pony. How could I explain myself to Applejack?

"Well? Who are you? How do you know me?"

"Uh, I'm Zach. I don't know you-"

"But you know my name. I'm not that famous."

"-But I know a great deal about you," I continued.

"How? I'm only a farm pony," she said modestly. I expected such a response. Not everypony in the world knew Applejack's name, or even that she existed.

"Actually, that's an interesting story,"  I replied. She narrowed her cartoonishly large eyes at me and frowned.

"Start talkin'."

"You probably aren't going to believe a word of this, but..."