Your morning starts off pretty normally. Just another day in the technicolor horseland you’ve been trapped in for the past twelve months.

Wake up. Get off of the couch.

Yes, you sleep on a couch. A lounger in the library, to be exact. The bedrooms in Twilight’s castle start at the fifth floor, and you don’t do stairs. Besides, it’s a nice couch. You’d prefer something leather, but hey. Sapient cows.

Drag your tired ass to the kitchen. Pour yourself a bowl of Twilight Charms™.

She stocks her cupboards with her own goddamn cereal. Sometimes, you put extra vigor into eating the marshmallows in the shape of her head. Narcissist.

Finish your egotistic cereal. Rinse your bowl out in the sink. Stare at the timer on the coffee machine.

Think about how maybe today is the day you’ll finally get the first cup of coffee.

Then again, given your complete lack of both telekinesis and, essentially, godhood, you’ll probably come to the conclusion that today is not the day, and that day will probably never come.

Look on as Twilight comes into the kitchen. Exchange pleasantries like the gentleperson you are.

“Hm,” you’ll grumble in a way that says: ‘I’m acknowledging your presence, but I’m not talking until I have my coffee.’

“Mm,” she’ll groan in a way that says: ‘I’m acknowledging your presence, but I’m not talking until I have my coffee.’

Kindred spirits, you two.

Take your place by the coffee machine, looking as nonchalant as possible, like you’re not about to fight a stunted horse to the death over something as objectively simple as coffee.

Two minutes later, the digital clock on the coffee machine will switch from 6:59 to 7:00, and the buzzer will go off like a horn of battle.

But at that exact moment, at exactly seven o’clock, on a day exactly one year after you mysteriously appeared in the basement of Twilight’s castle, something changed. The day, nay, your life, was changed forever, at that precise moment in time.

Twilight Sparkle charges up her horn, no doubt preparing to grab the coffeepot with her telekinesis before you can even hope to take hold of it…

...you reel back, balled your hand into a fist...

...and without a second thought, without any threat of repercussions even crossing your mind, you haul off and punch the Princess of Friendship in her coffee-hogging mug.

You savor the last sip of your coffee, the coffee that you fuckin’ earned.

The taste is accentuated by a loud crack followed by a scream of pain. Nothing sweetens coffee like the sound of an equine forcibly relocating their own jaw.

“Ah, you hear that, Spike?” The dragon looks up at you with nervous eyes. You gesture to Twilight with your mug. “That’s the sound of victory.”

“Um...victory sounds painful.” He flinches as you give him a rough pat on the back.

“There is no victory without sacrifice. In this particular case, the sacrifice was the momentary pain of your adoptive mother. You know what I’d call that, little dude?”

“W-What?”

“Worth it!” You throw your hands in the air, releasing your mug, the conduit of caffeine soaring into the kitchen sink, and don a wide grin.

“That, agh...that was completely uncalled for,” Twilight protests from her seat across from you, massaging her jaw with an ice pack. You just roll your eyes and point to the large indentation in the wall. The one that’s remarkably you-shaped.

“I was having a bad morning...” Twilight begins to defend herself for telekinetically throwing you into a solid wall earlier that week before she trails off, staring at something.

“Yeah, whatever. Look, we’ve shed enough blood in this room for the sake of coffee. Let’s just buy another coffee maker and be done with it and why are you staring at my hand and what the fucking fuck.”

What the fucking fuck indeed, for when you look at your hand to see what all the fuss was about (the fuss being the dumbstruck look on a purple pony’s face), you notice a ring of lavender light faintly emitting from the base of your pointer finger.

No sooner do you notice this what-the-fuckery before a purple pony was standing next to you, poking your finger with an invasive hoof.

An invasive iron-shod hoof.

“Hey, hey!” You pull your hand away, and idly rub at your glow-stick finger with the opposite hand. “If you’re gonna do that, take your stupid horseshoes off! Shit’s cold!”

Twilight rolls her eyes and takes off her metal horseshoes, the whole recently-relocated-jaw thing completely out of her mind. With them out of the way, you look on curiously as she pokes first at your index finger itself, and then the bottom knuckle of the same finger, which lies directly under the ring of light.

Not a big surprise, but something weird happens. When she pokes at the index finger, nothing happens at all, but when she touches anything below the ring, the surface of your skin ripples like a river in the rain.

“Spike, get me my notes on magical containment fields,” Twilight orders. Spike quickly jumps out of his chair, leaving a perfectly good bowl of Twilight Charms™ sitting on the kitchen table. You think about how weird it is that he’s eating the miniaturized heads of his adoptive mother.

That particular thought doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s just sort of weird.

Then again, this morning you punched out a princess and got a fashionable mark on your skin out of it, so really, the thought of a dragon eating marshmallow cereal in the shape of horse heads was on the bottom of your mind’s ‘analyze this fuckery’ list.  

It’s a list you refer to often. Horseland is full of fuckery.

Twilight mumbles under her breath as she continually probes at your hand. You just sort of sit there and resign yourself to being inspected for the next few minutes. Given your new digs, you’re used to this kind of treatment. At least she isn’t busting out the measuring tape and rubber gloves. Now that was a day you’d be more than happy to repress.

Eventually, Spike returns with a stack of scrolls that nearly reaches the ceiling. And yes, of course he drops it, because how could he not? The kid’s got the dexterity of an undercooked potato.

“S-Sorry!” He quickly gathers up the scrolls and places them in a neat pile on the table. Twilight grunts distractedly, levitating the scrolls in her magic and revolving them around her head, running her eyes over the pages frantically.

“Slavedriversayswhatwasthat?” you rail off. Twilight gives you a cursory glance.

“What was that?”

“A small victory.” You pull your hand away from her and wipe it on your pajama pants, because hooves. “You figured out what’s up with my finger yet?”

Twilight pulls away and sits on her haunches by your chair, and looks over her notes once more before regarding you with her full attention. That is to say, with her giant, freaky, mother-nature-never-intended-this-shit eyes.

“Well, I have nothing conclusive,” Twilight began carefully, “But….look, this isn’t going to make much sense to you, but I’ll try to put it in layman's terms the best that I can.”

This isn’t the first time this particular purple horse underestimated your capacity for understanding a complex subject, and while it irks you, you find that you’re just better off letting her dumb things down for you. Your attention span is low enough as it is, so you don’t need her to drag things out longer than they have to be.

“You’re...locked into this universe.” Twilight’s ears flick in irritation. To her, dumbing down her precious science, even for the sake of another, is just wrong on multiple levels. “I could try to send you home, but it wouldn’t work. You have to be from this place in order to leave it.”

“So, what, the whole ‘interdimensional-travel’ thing is one-way only?” you ask incredulously.

“Well, by default, anyway. Ponies have made it back from different dimensions by acclimating to the dimension and altering their magical signatu… ” Twilight stops herself, sighs, and begins to reiterate. “They can only come back if they trick the dimension into thinking they’re not foreigners, which...unlocks them.”

“So you’re saying that, to go back home, I have to...unlock myself?” Whatever that means.

“Basically,” Twilight groaned. “Though, it looks like you already started.” She gestured to the glowing ring of fuckery on your pointer finger. You stare at your hand for a moment, considering what she had said, and slowly ball it into a fist and lift your head to lock eyes with Twilight.

“...The way to get home is to punch you in the face?”

Twilight’s ears clamp down to the side of her head, and her horrifyingly large eyes grow wider. Never breaking eye contact with you, she lowers herself from her stool, picks herself up in her telekinesis, and floats herself to the other side of the room before lowering herself to the ground.

“No,” she says, pointing at your hand from quite a distance. Big kitchen. Totally impractical. “That part of your body holds my magical signature...which...you somehow got from being unnecessarily violent.”

Take note that a little pony princess implied that violence can be necessary. For example, when your hostess continually steals your morning coffee.

“If you want to get home, you’ll have to cover yourself with...native...signatures.” Her eyes widen to the size of volleyballs, and her pupils dilate to the size of tagnuts. “...Oh no.”

With slow, deliberate movements, you get out of your chair and walk backwards to the entrance of the kitchen, never looking away from Twilight. You stand there quietly for a few moments until you point your thumb over your shoulder, and break the silence.

“...Welp, I’m gonna go take a walk.”

“No.”

“Just need some fresh air.”

“Don’t you dare!”

Okay, she’s chasing you. The goddess of magic is chasing you. That’s cool. Everything’s cool.

You hear her horn magic startup. You ball your fists and book it.

You’ve got some work to do.

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