The blissful darkness granted by one’s own closed eyelids. That spot between being asleep and awake, where all is right with the world, and the enveloping warmth of the bed that keeps your muscles soft and relaxed. I needed to wake up like that after that wild dream. Getting turned into Yang Xiao Long and dropped in a world of pastel ponies was certainly a new one though.

I was very relaxed when all of a sudden, the very thinkable and very highly unwanted happened: a beam of sunlight peeked through a crack in the curtains and landed right on my closed eyes. I turned to face away from it, but wound up putting my eyes right in the beam. I quickly turned the other way, but the beam had already done its vile work and there was no way I was not waking up. Something about my chest also felt strange. Come to think of it, my whole body felt a little strange. I opened my eyes and saw a nightstand, upon which a bag of cookies sat.

“Huh?” Since when did I have a nightstand? And my voice sounded odd too. Firmly in the female range. Familiar on top of that, along with the bag.

I sat up and looked around. I was in the room I kind of remembered falling asleep in. I remembered the intense boredom, just lying on the bed. I held up an arm and saw a loose robe sleeve. It was white with purple trim. Just like the one from the dream. Looking at everything in the room, the dream felt more like a yesterday.

Looking back at the nightstand, I saw the Ember Celica and the fingerless gloves attached to them. I remembered Ruby, Miranda, Ally, and Sandra cosplaying as team RWBY. I remembered getting the Ember Celica, activating them, and getting sucked through some kind of rift or portal. The castle crash, breakfast with ponies, a boutique, a fountain to pierce the heavens, getting scared by a pink pony, waking up screaming, some new clothes, a good veggie casserole, and a comfortable robe. It all came back in a flash, and I became breathless. I was breathing like someone who just had a close encounter with death.

I was brought out of my stupor when the door to the room opened, Rarity walking in. “Oh, Yang, you’re awake already. Sun in the eyes, I presume?”

Such a mundane question actually calmed me down a bit. Somehow. “Yeah. How did you know?”

“It’s what everypony who stays in here complains about. No matter what I do, I can never get the curtains to stay fully closed. Sleep well?”

“Yeah. I actually like how this robe feels. What would I have to do to earn it?” I may have liked free stuff, and really needed it due to lack of money, but I would just feel bad getting everything for free.

“You already have, dear. Your simple black and white outfit that I made yesterday has inspired me to make a whole new line of dresses. Black, white, and simple. Why, I came up with no fewer than fifteen designs last night. In fact, I’ve been up all night working on those designs. And that’s also part of why I’m here now.”

“I’m not the best judge of-”

“Not that, darling” Rarity interrupted. “I was planning on walking with you to Twilight’s castle so she could teach you how to read our writing, but I am in no condition to do that. Just look at my mane!”

I looked at it. It was in a state of mild disarray. “Is that it?”

“Well, no. I’m also really tired. Sweetie’s downstairs. She will take you to Twilight’s castle. There’s also a bit pouch with ten bits in it if you want to buy something small for yourself. After everything that you went through yesterday, I’d say you earned it.”

“Alright. Just let me change and I’ll be down there.” I collected the clothes Rarity made yesterday, and once she was out of the room, I quickly changed out of the robe and into them. I still found it amazing how well these basic clothes fit me, and just how comfortable they were.

Once I was done admiring the quality of the clothes (and maybe myself, just a bit), I went downstairs. I saw Sweetie Belle at the table, eating a bowl of oatmeal. There was another bowl of oatmeal on the table, untouched. In the middle of the table was a plethora of things that could be put in oatmeal, including my favorite: brown sugar.

I didn’t even need a single second to figure out that the bowl of untouched oatmeal was mine. I quickly took my spot at the table and loaded up on the brown sugar. I had only just finished mixing the brown sugar in the oatmeal and was about to eat a good spoonful when Sweetie Belle stopped me with her words. “Let’s go to Twilight’s castle.”

“Now?” I asked.

“Now” Sweetie confirmed, putting her saddlebags on.

“But I haven’t even started on my oatmeal yet.”

“You can eat it on the way.”

“Huh?”

“Yes. Just bring the dishes back from Twilight’s when you’re done there.”

Now this was just bizarre. I understood breakfast on the go, but a bowl, an actual non-paper bowl of oatmeal was just something that simply wasn’t done. In fact, breakfast on the go with actual, breakable dishes and metal utensils was just downright weird.

After just managing to hold the strangeness of the notion aside, I picked up the bowl, the oatmeal and spoon in it, and followed Sweetie Belle out.

Finally, I asked the question that had been on my mind since less than five minutes ago. “Why are we leaving so early?”

“Because Rarity needs to get her sleep, you need to get to the castle, and I have to go to school, which is in the opposite direction you need to go” Sweetie said in one breath.

“Oh.” That made a lot of sense.

The rest of the walk to the castle was quiet, as I didn’t feel like talking while walking with a bowl of oatmeal in my hand on the way to a castle I had crashed through. It just felt awkward. Sweetie probably didn’t want to talk since she was tasked with leading me to the castle. With what I knew of what was going on (which wasn’t much), I figured she didn’t really want to do this. At least I know I wouldn’t want to.

Finally, we showed up at the castle. Or at least got fairly close. “There’s the entrance” Sweetie pointed out. “You can make it there on your own, right?”

“I can navigate some tricky roads back home. I’m sure I can manage a straight line” I assured her.

“Alright. Have fun with Twilight. I guess I’ll see you back at home later.” Sweetie turned around and walked away towards her school. I turned my gaze to the castle and walked up to the main entrance. Oatmeal in one hand, I knocked with the other. A moment later, the door opened up, revealing not Twilight, but a green and purple bipedal lizard thing that did not look happy to be awake at this time of day.

“You’re Yang?” he asked, clearly tired.

“That’s what I ask people to call me now” I replied. “I was told that Twilight wanted to see me.”

“Follow me” he said, letting me in. I walked past and looked down at him. His crest came close to the middle of my thighs, so I was still the tall one here. Once I was in, he closed the door and started walking down the big hallway. I followed him into what looked like a conference room.

“Thank you, umm. . .” I started.

“Spike. I’m a dragon” he said.

“Thanks, Spike” I sat down in an actual chair by the table and set down my bowl of oatmeal before what he said caught up with me. “Wait, you’re a dragon!? An actual dragon?”

“Um, yeah. Don’t they have dragons where you’re from?"

I let my shoulders slump and turned to eat my oatmeal. “I give up.” In this new world of crystal castles (one of which I crashed through), unicorns (two of which I was now living with), and now dragons, having something as familiar and simple as a bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar was kind of comforting. I also found it kind of sad that I even could find such comfort in a bowl of oatmeal.

I think Twilight caught on to the mood when she joined me. “Hello, Yang. Is there something on your mind?”

“Not much. Just taking in the world and all its oddities.” I sighed and took a bite of the oatmeal. It was fairly plain, most of the flavor coming from the brown sugar.

“I can understand what you mean. Anyways!” Twilight’s tone became both serious and excited. “It’s time for you to learn our way of writing so you can read.”

I raised a hand and pointed to my oatmeal. “Can I at least finish my breakfast before we start?”

“Nope. You can eat during class.” I swear she was starting to get into a teacher mindset. “Before we start, tell me about your alphabet.”

I got another bite of oatmeal in my mouth and started talking before I swallowed. “26 letters, five being vowels, and one not quite a vowel. Numbers are base 10.”

While Twilight was quiet, I ate some more of the oatmeal. Finally, she spoke up. “That’s both a remarkable coincidence and kind of a letdown.”

“What, did I accidentally describe your letters and numbers?”

“Yes. I hope there’s at least something different somewhere.” Twilight’s horn lit up and a chalkboard flew into the room from somewhere up above. Once she set it down, six pieces of chalk were floated up, and each one made six unique, blockish shapes. The shapes were grouped into one of 10 and one of 26.

A pencil, quill, ink, and a few pieces of paper were soon floated over to me and arranged neatly around me. “I’m not getting out of this, am I?”

“Reading is a vital skill, so no” Twilight said. “We’ll start with numbers as a warmup for the alphabet. The single digits are zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine. After that-” Twilight’s speech was interrupted by a the sound of a mostly empty bowl being moved onto a different spot on the table, followed by the sound of my face hitting the spot where the bowl used to be. “Yang? Are you okay?”

“Peachy. Just fine. It’s just that we have the same numbers. Zero to nine, I’m guessing after that comes ten, eleven, twelve, the teens, twenties, and so on?”

“Yes. Well, that was another disappointment. I wanted to learn a new way to count, too.”

“Good for me that I don’t have to.” I sat back up straight. “What’s in store for the alphabet?”

Twilight began reciting off the alphabet, and somewhere around E, I had started to recite it in sync with her, each of us growing quieter as we realized the letters were the same. A few seconds after Z, I brought my face upon the table’s surface again with great prejudice. I think I heard the table crack a bit too.

I did not lift my head back up, even as Twilight rattled off various letter combinations and their sounds, with me confirming each with a muffled “yes”.

Once she had gone through every combination, her head hit the table too. “Let’s just make, as much as I hate the name for it, a cheat sheet for you” Twilight said. “Based on my experiences, letting you go with that should get you reading our writing fairly quickly. You already know the finer points of the language, so it’s just a matter of recognition now.” I heard the scratching of a writing instrument on paper and turned my head up, seeing exactly that, happening a foot over the table.

Once it was finished, it came over to me. The Equestrian characters were spaced apart enough to make each distinguishable, and under each letter, I wrote both the upper and lower case equivalent from English. Under the numbers, I made sure to put both versions of 4. Once I was done, Twilight brought it back to her and went over all I had written with ink. While she was doing that, she asked me a question.

“Yang, I doubt I’m reading this wrong, but I have to ask why it looks like you put two versions of each of your letters below mine.”

“We have uppercase and lowercase versions of each letter” I answered. “The uppercase ones are mostly used on the first letter of each sentence or a name, but there are other times to use them too. And I don’t know why there’s two versions of 4.”

“Interesting. Equestrian writing has something similar with writing, but it’s just a size increase. And we only have one version of 4.”

“That simplifies thing for me.”

“Yes, it does. Just let me make a copy of this and you can have one of them.” Twilight’s horn glowed just a little bit brighter and the paper started to split like a cell. After a few seconds, there were two copies of the document, one of which was floated over to me. I plucked it out of the air and looked over it. The Equestrian characters were still weird to me, but at least I had a reference sheet. I also still had some oatmeal, which I set the reference sheet aside so I could finish it. At least food had no need to be translated for it to be eaten.

“So, I guess we’re done ahead of schedule?” I asked Twilight.

“Yes, we are. But this also means that I can teach you more things about this world.” Twilight had this glint in her eyes that told me I was in for an infodump. Joy.

Author's Notes:

So it seems something's up with FiMFiction, as when I uploaded the Gdoc, there was a bleep-ton of bold and italic marks again. I guess this is another chapter brought to you by the backspace key.