Chapter 1: Arrival

“Is it just me, or are we falling?”

Sunny Days looked across the strange metal room to the brown archaeologist pony Hieroglyph glancing out the window. Now that he brought her attention to it, she did feel that odd squirming sensation in her stomach that she got when riding the big drop towers at an amusement park. A mild sensation of panic settled in as she ran past peculiar white alien consoles to the massive window that encircled three-fourths of the giant circular room. Indeed, the clouds were moving past them as the rust-colored bits of fluff sped up through Sunny’s view.

“Storm Drive,” she called to an white colt with a cartoon rocket on his flank sitting in front of one of the consoles. “Can you fly this thing?”

Storm Drive looked at her as if he had just been asked to jump out an airlock. “This is a 5000 year old city-sized ship built by an ancient long-dead civilization, with technology so advanced it may as well have been magic, that conquered the stars while our ancestors were banging rocks together. Do YOU think I can pilot this?”

Sunny Days’s bright yellow face flushed pink upon realizing how stupid a question that had been. Trying to change the subject, she looked back out the window. “That mountain is getting awfully close...”

As if in response to her statement, another explosion rocked the ship. The floor was now noticeably slanted as they plummeted through the atmosphere towards the big gray mountain, billowing smoke behind them. Lines of worry creased Sunny’s face as she looked closely at their impending doom, then smoothed into an expression of surprise.

“It’s that black pony!” she cried, pointing a hoof at the small dot on the face of the mountain.

Well, black wasn’t really the right word; it was more of a very dark red. Hieroglyph rushed over to see what she was pointing at. “What pony?” he asked, squinting.

“There!” Sunny adamantly pointed at the same dark dot, just barely discernible as a pony. “It’s that thing that ate- that ate-”

For a moment, Sunny swore she could see the blood-red eyes of the dark pony stare right at her. The distant screams of Dig-Dug’s last moments echoed in the back of her mind, and she shook her head, pushing them down.

“What the hay? How did he get there so fast?” Hieroglyph’s weaselly voice asked.

“Guys, I don’t think now is the best time,” Storm commented as he started hitting the colored shapes on the console in front of him randomly in hopes something might happen. Sunny and Hieroglyph glanced back at the white pony, nervousness now turning into full-blown panic. The entire ship was shaking violently now, and wisps of cloud were racing past the window at breakneck pace. The feeling of acceleration was visceral.

“Ah, who am I kidding?” Storm threw his hooves up in the air, shaking his head. He gazed upon his two compatriots, eyes filled with trepidation. “Sunny Days. Hieroglyph. It was a pleasure working with you.”

Hieroglyph sounded like he was about to hyperventilate. Sunny heard a small whimper escape from her throat. I really, really don’t want to die, she thought. My friends, my family, what are they going to do? What’s going to happen to them? What’s going to happen to me? Oh gosh, is there an afterlife? She felt her eyes begin to water and clamped them shut. I really really hope there’s a pony heaven...

“Hey- hey, he’s gone!” Hieroglyph shouted, then appeared to realize he was supposed to be hyperventilating and quickly resumed breathing loudly in rapid gasps. Sunny’s eyes snapped back open. Hieroglyph was looking out at the mountain again. Sunny followed his gaze. Sure enough, the dark red blotch on the mountaintop was gone. At the same time, she noticed the mountain itself was getting awfully close...

At that moment a calm, cool, feminine voice piped up out of nowhere. “Secondary control bridge active. Transferring control from primary bridge to secondary bridge.”

Sunny looked around in alarm. That voice! It was coming from everywhere. The other two ponies in the room were looking around with similar expressions. “Who was that?” she asked.

“Transfer complete,” the bodiless voice replied, stubbornly refusing to answer her question. There was a slight pause. “Order accepted. Engaging Infinite Probability Engine.”

Sunny Days had just enough time to exchange faces of bewilderment with the other two ponies before the voice spoke again. “Infinite Probability Engine engaging in three... two... one.”

Everything broke. A tremendous force picked up Sunny Days and tore her into trillions of tiny shattered fragments that were scattered across the universe, each piece aware of its own existence, screaming in a high-pitched chorus that echoed inside the confines of the mind of Sunny Days, now having stretched to encompass all of creation. Existence had been broken. Sunny neither saw, nor heard, nor felt; she was only aware, aware of her own awareness, aware of her own existence, aware of the existence of everything, twisted into shapes that were so mind-numbingly wrong that they should have lacerated the fabric of reality simply by the possibility of their own existence. Straight lines twisted together as colors incomprehensible flashed ahead and a burning wheel rolled backwards through time towards the origin of it all.

“We have passed through the probability singularity,” the voice announced. “Beginning descent through probability space... one in a trillion... one in a billion...” The voice continued to rattle off the odds. “One in ten... one in five... one in three... one to one.”

And then it was over. Reality fixed itself. Sunny Days collapsed like a heap of sticks, her head bouncing off the cold metal floor, eyes staring at the foot of the console in front of her face, wide open in terror.

“Ugh.” Storm Driver was the first to recover from the experience. Picking himself off the floor, he noticed first that the floor was still slanted downwards. He then observed that they clouds were still racing past the windows, and from those two bits of information deduced that they were still falling out of the sky.

Except now there was no mountain in their way. The ground was no longer a barren landscape of rocks, but rolling hills of green. The sky was not the color of old rust, but a bright, vivid blue, with a dazzling yellow sun in the sky.

The ground was racing up towards them. The disembodied voice spoke again, impossibly calm and polite in a situation that prescribed panic. “Please prepare for impact.”

It was almost noon in Ponyville, the sun blazing hot overhead, the sky sparsely filled with wispy clouds that occasionally provided cover from the heat. Twilight Sparkle’s eyebrows furrowed in concentration as she shifted her gaze from the book lying in the grass to the small purple dragon smiling in front of her. “Alright Spike, let’s do this.” She closed her eyes and began to channel magic into her horn.

And then it happened. Twilight felt it resonating within her magic before she heard Spike’s gasp. A fragment of the reality of the skies above Equestria had broken. It was as if someone had taken the normal, flat plane of existence, crumpled it up into a tight wad, opened it back up, then tore it to pieces. Beyond the hole this left, Twilight felt a vast emptiness, devoid of thought or feeling or life, an all-consuming void all of Equestria could fall into and not fill.

Then it was gone. There was a tremendous rumbling in the heavens. Twilight opened her eyes and craned her neck around. Those glassy spheres almost popped out of their sockets at what they saw: a gargantuan... thing falling out of the sky, leaving trails of smoke behind it.

It was huge, filling the sky past Canterlot, dwarfing the distant mountains that held the Equestrian capital, vaguely rectangular in shape, the end pointed towards the ground ending in a smooth cylinderical curve that tapered off into a single point on the bottom side of the object--that curved surface glowing a brilliant white as the light of Celestia’s sun danced off of it, emblazoned with giant symbolized golden sun. The rest of the... thing was light purplish in color and expanded outwards into two small wings towards the rear--small only compared to the rest of the entity, for one could have fit Applejack’s entire farm inside them. The side facing Twilight was covered in all manner of golden rectangles and small black dots, the entire surface looking like a view of Manehattan from as high as a pegasus pony had ever flown. And on the top of the object were steps that led up to a series of blocks and towers ending in tapering cones that looked not unlike the spires and turrets of the Equestrian capital. But there were vast, irregular holes in what Twilight now decided was some sort of ship, belching flames that must have been several stories high, smoke billowing into the atmosphere forming vast contrails of gray clouds that scarred the sky.

The ship continued to fall, seemingly so very slow because of its titanic scale, until the tip finally touched the ground. But that wasn’t near enough to stop such enormous momentum, and the ship plowed through the earth, bulldozing entire hills as it tore through everything in its way, leaving behind a gigantic brown wound in Equestria.

Then the tremors began, the ground beneath Twilight’s feet shaking with enormous force. She heard screams from the direction of Ponyville as the sudden earthquake achieved its full force, pieces of buildings falling from the structures as they shook themselves apart. It was a terrifying feeling, to have the ground beneath one’s feet give away like that, the sudden failure of something that Twilight had taken for granted as an eternal constant for her entire life. But that fear barely registered on the pure, unadulterated awe from what Twilight had just seen.

“Spike...?” Twilight said when the shaking finally stopped, her voice a weak groan, smaller than even Fluttershy’s.

It took a while for the purple dragon to realize he was being spoken to. “Yeah?” he responded, unable to take his eyes off the massive structure that had planted itself in the distant hills past Canterlot.

“Am I dreaming?”

“And that’s how I got my cutie mark!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed cheerfully.

Sweetie Belle tilted her head in confusion. Rarity raised an eyebrow. She already wasn’t sure how a trip to Sugarcube Corner to buy some pastries had turned into a story about how Equestria was made, but Pinkie Pie’s random ending only served to confuse her more.

“Well, anyways...” Rarity began, levitating the bag of muffins she had just bought into her saddlebag. “We’d better get going, I have to finish six more dresses by the end of the day or I won’t be able to go to the spa tomorrow!”

“Have fun!” Pinkie waved cheerfully from behind the counter.

“Rarity, can I have a muffin now?” Sweetie Belle asked as Rarity opened the front door of Sugarcube Corner.

“Wait till we’re back at the boutique, dear,” Rarity huffed. “You might trip and fall if you try to eat and trot at the same time. Besides, you’ll get your hooves all sticky without a napkin, and that would be un-ladylike~!” She practically sang this last word, and Sweetie Belle’s ears flattened against her head at the reminder.

“Ooo, I have a napkin!” Pinkie interjected, quickly diving under the counter to retrieve several small paper doilies. She hopped out from behind the table and pranced over to the two unicorns, napkins in mouth.

“That’s ok, darling,” Rarity said. “I have plenty of napkins back at the boutique. And Sweetie Belle,” she looked intently at the filly upon saying her name, “is not going to be eating while walking anyways.”

“Oh, alright!” Pinkie Pie bounced back over to the counter and placed the napkins where she found them.

“Now then, see you la-” Rarity began, but was rudely interrupted when Pinkie’s tail started thrashing violently back and forth. “Pinkie Pie, what in Celestia’s name are you doing?”

“Ooo, ooo!” Pinkie cried, her head turned around to watch her tail as though it were some strange animal. “Twitchy tail, twitchy tail! Ooo, and it’s a doozy!” She looked around the room, the corners of her eyes and mouth bent downwards in a worried expression as she scanned for anything that might fall. “Where did I put my umbrella hat?” she asked as she started tossing things around the room into the air, searching for her go-to defense when her tail started twitching.

“Twitchy? Tail?” Rarity’s pupils shrank into points. “Quick, Sweetie Belle! Get under that table!”

The little white filly immediately did as told; everypony in Ponyville knew about the dreaded Pinkie Sense, after all. Tossing her muffins aside, Rarity grabbed a pillow from a couch and hunkered down next to her sister, holding the fluffy shield against the top of her head with her front hooves as she cowered underneath the table.

Nothing happened. Rarity waited, her eyes scanning the room for anything that could possibly detach from the ceiling. Still, nothing happened. She waited some more. Still nothing. Finally, feeling slightly ridiculous, she crawled out from under the tablet and tossed the pillow aside. “Well,” she said tentatively, for she knew the Pinkie Sense was never wrong and had a tendency to strike just when one thought it was safe, “perhaps if we get going, we can avoid-”

Sugarcube Corner started vibrating intensely. Rarity gasped; was it a stampede? As baked confectioneries started falling off the shelves, she quickly dived under the table again, although this time without a pillow.

“M-m-m-my v-v-v-oi-oi-oi-ce-ce s-s-o-ou-ou-ds s-so s-s-i-i-l-l-l-y,” Pinkie chirped happily, bouncing rapidly on the floor as her high-pitched voice oscillated, having completely forgotten about her search for the umbrella hat.

Applebuck Season had just started, so Applejack had been up bright and early to start kicking the apples off trees. This year’s harvest wasn’t as good as last year’s--Applejack doubted that any harvest would ever top that one--but there was still a lot of work ahead. Big Macintosh hadn’t gone and hurt his back this time around, so they were back to the standard of them two harvesting apples together as family.

And this year there might be a new addition to the team. “Apple Bloom,” Applejack called to the cute little yellow filly kicking pathetically at one of the biggest trees on Sweet Apple Acres. “Stop buckin’ there Bloomberg the Second and get over here!”

“But Aaaaapplejack!” Apple Bloom whined. “You promised ah could help ya’ll buck apples this year!”

“Ah did promise you could help us buck apples, and ah never go back on mah word.” Applejack lifted her head proudly. “But that there Bloomberg the Second is just too darn big for ya to buck, so git’ over here and buck these here lil’ trees.”

“Aw, alright.” Apple Bloom walked over to her big sister, head hung low in dejection.

Applejack chuckled. “Dun’ worry about it too much now, ya hear? Why, when ah started buckin’, ah had to start with the small trees too. Even Big Macintosh didn’t start off bein’ able to buck big ol’ trees like Bloomberg the Second.”

Feeling somewhat more cheerful at the knowledge, Apple Bloom ran up to the smallest apple-bearing tree she could find and thrust her hind legs against the trunk as hard as she could. The trunk vibrated, the branches shook, and one large, shiny red apple landed on the ground. Apple Bloom stared at the fallen fruit, disappointed, while Applejack chortled merrily nearby.

“Keep at it, sis, ya just need some practice is all,” the orange cowpony encouraged.

After watching Apple Bloom for a little more, Applejack decided it was time to start doing her share of the work. Getting into position by another tree trunk, Applejack compressed her hind legs, getting ready for a powerful buck that would send all the apples falling into the buckets at the base of the tree. But she hadn’t yet unleashed the mighty kick when an apple fell and hit her on the head.

“Brblrr.” Applejack shook her head, clearing her consciousness of the hazy soup that the falling apple had caused. Another apple struck her back. “What in tar-” she began, when she realized that all of Sweet Apple Acres was shaking.

The apples were falling from the trees like rain, bouncing and rolling on the grass. Applejack was reminded of that time in the Princess’s hedge maze, when Discord had used apples to trick her into lying, but these apples weren’t being propelled by an unseen force to gather up into so-called ‘Keepers of the Grove’.

“Is it ‘nother stampede?” Apple Bloom yelled, hanging onto the tree she had just been bucking for dear life.

“Big Mac!” Applejack called out to her brother, who had been working the trees up a hill. “What the hay is goin’ on?”

Despite her best efforts, Fluttershy had been unable to get Angel to take his medicine. The poor little bunny was sick with a cold, but his stubborn nature meant he refused to take orders from the kind yellow pegasus, even though they were for his own good. Fluttershy had tried everything; asking politely, begging, pleading, even beseeching, but all to no avail. The only thing left in her arsenal was the Stare.

Unfortunately, the Stare wasn’t something that Fluttershy could call up whenever she wanted, so she pushed the bowl of soup towards Angel again. “Come on now,” she said soothingly, “Here comes the choo-choo train!”

The little white rabbit crossed his front paws and turned his back to Fluttershy, nose stuck up high in the air. He then gave a wheezing cough. Fluttershy sighed and gave her best reprimanding-mother voice. “I’m going to go out to tend to the other animals. I expect to see all this soup gone by the time I get back. It’s for your own good, you know.”

She left her cottage and flew out towards the meadow. Here was her usual spot where she met and played with all the animals from the wild--the pretty birds, the adorable porcupines, and the cute little bunnies. This had also been where Fluttershy had first laid eyes on a parasprite, but she wasn’t thinking about that at the moment.

She had only been making her rounds for about fifteen minutes or so when she sensed a disturbance in the behavior of the animals. There were some birds flying away from something high in the sky. Curious, Fluttershy flapped her wings harder, ascending into the air to get past the treetops.

What she saw left her in a daze. Fluttershy watched in horror as the metal mountain descended towards the horizon. I- I must be seeing things, she thought to herself.

But no. The reaction of all the animals she had been playing with out in the meadow told her that what she was seeing was indeed real. They too, were gazing off in the distance at the unearthly sight. The fires spurting out from the mountain’s sides were enormous, the black smoke scorching the sky terrifying. Oh... what if it lands on somepony?

Then the earthquake began. Fluttershy was surrounded by squawks and squeals as all the animals dashed away into hiding. Birds took to the air, fish dove deep into the waters, the little bunnies and porcupines and snakes crawled into their burrows. “Eeep!” Fluttershy cried, and dropped back to the ground, sinking down on her knees, head low as leaves rained down from the trees in droves.

It was a while after the earthquake was over before Fluttershy gathered the courage to stand up again. Gingerly she looked around at the deserted meadow. Not a single critter in sight. Although she was still a little scared from the incident, she summoned strength into her throat and called out, her voice resonating sweetly in the air. “Come out little animals... it’s alright. It’s over... there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore...”

Next Chapter: Chapter 2: Contact Estimated time remaining: 45 Minutes