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A Corpse in Equestria

by LucidTech

Chapter 1: Chapter One

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It all began with a qoq. That is to say... a pop in reverse. An anti-pop as it’s known in some corners of Equestria. A bunch of air rushing to get out of a space. This was because something that didn’t belong in this plane of reality had come into being about 40,000 feet in the air above Ponyville. This layer of the atmosphere, higher even than most blimps flew, was reserved for well-trained weather pegasi. The kind who didn’t have the time to deal with things like low-hanging clouds or turbulence. Or breathing.

The being, named Jack, having no knowledge as to why he had suddenly gone from reclining on a couch and then to several tens of thousand feet in the air in the span of an instant, assumed it was a dream. This, of course, meant he was screaming at the top of his lungs as he began to freefall. A normal practice among all races. Bar, of course, those that have wings, or are simply too small to have to worry about any kind of damage from a fall like this. Two things that Jack, unfortunately, did not have working for him.

As the wind rushing past his head distorted his own scream into a muffled shout, he began to understand why they had chosen the word ‘terminal’ for terminal velocity instead of some other word like ‘maximum’. It was because when you saw something falling at that kind of speed towards unforgiving stone it seemed like it was, indeed, terminal.

Jack, not much one for carefully examining situations even in the best times, continued to scream in a constant, nonlinguistic spray of pure terror that funneled easily from out between his lips. It was a sound that you would either have to be deaf to miss, or tens of thousands of feet away. Surprisingly, however, there was one inhabitant of Equestria who didn’t fall into either category.

Her name was Rainbow Dash. She was a self-assured, loyal, prideful, exceedingly fast flier who seemed the sort to save falling creatures. Unfortunately, she was also the kind of pony who was easily confused by things she wasn’t familiar with, and she also preferred not to exert herself unless absolutely necessary. Because of this, she was going to be late. Though it is difficult to pin down a start to things, it is arguable that the death of Jack was defined by the fact that when Rainbow Dash saw a falling biped that she didn’t recognize 40,000 feet above her home town of Ponyville, she waited for a couple seconds as she reflected on how strange that was. Jack, for his part, screamed bloody murder. Both responses are fully reasonable, if a bit unfortunate given the circumstances.

As Jack freefell through the whistling air, his mind ripping his thoughts to pieces in favor of it’s current plan of attack, he caught a glimpse of an electric blue equine shape with rainbow colored hair flying towards him at breakneck speed with a look of determined strain on its face. He began to scream louder. Rainbow Dash, ignoring the crazy monkey creature, was straining to go as fast as she could, even as she felt the barrier of the sonic rainboom begin to collapse around her like a vice, which was to her equal parts familiarity and thrill.

She made to push through the barrier, as she had so many times before, when she realized that Ponyville had gotten very close very quick. Very, very quick. She knew from… past experiences that if she broke the barrier this close to town, there would be worse things to worry about than a falling simian. Namely, destruction of about half the town which would be shortly followed by Rainbow Dash and the strange biped colliding with the cobbles at impossible speeds, unable to correct herself with the added weight of the very thing she was trying to save. She knew, as all pegasi do somewhere in the back of their mind, that it is very easy to stop. Indeed flying directly into a thick enough wall was all you needed to stop. It was living through it that was the hard part.

Her gaze moved and focused on Jack, she was gaining on him, very quickly, but he was still a hundred feet away. There was about as much distance between Rainbow Dash and Jack as there was between Jack and the ground. Or that’s what Rainbow told herself anyway, knowing full well that the ground was significantly closer than she was letting herself believe. Her eyes shifted between Jack and the cobbles below and the few ponies who had begun to look around for the source of the screaming. And why, she thought to herself, was it that she felt like she’d seen something like him before? He just looked… off color and… wrong, but the shape of him, she could’ve swore it put her in mind of something.

She increased her speed slightly more, the air wrapping itself around her like tar, her eyes watering with effort as she sidled as close to the edge as she dared. She could see his face clearly now, insanity danced across it the way an untrained elephant might. That is to say, wildly and with no direction. He was only feet away, inches, even. She saw the cobbles and she knew, in the exact same moment that she tore away, that she couldn’t save whatever it was. Her wings bit into the air, trying to almost swim through the thick soup of air that had tied itself around her like lengths of cable.

She felt her descent cut away, as fast as lightning, her wings trembling from the incredible forces that such a maneuver imparted on them. It was, she reflected later, the fastest recovery she’d ever made from a complete dive. However it was spoiled as, at the bottom-most arc of the display, she heard a sound like a lobster shell being cracked underneath a heavy mattress. It had a certain sickening wetness to it that drove itself into her mind, telling her exactly what the source had been.

There was a moment, just a moment, where it froze her to the core, and in that moment she felt her wings buckle under the stress. She’d managed to get herself horizontal before then and, with some luck, caught herself with her hooves as she landed onto the cobbles. Her hooves slid across them like ice as her wings fought for balance. She’d managed to disperse most of the force when one of her hooves caught a cobble at a bad angle and sent her skidding uncontrollably a couple feet along the pathway, her chest and cheek getting scratched raw by the rock.

She was surrounded almost instantly by ponies, many of them fans or friends of hers. Rarity, a member of the latter group, was the first by her side. She was shouting something but Rainbow Dash wasn't sure what it was. When she arrived she lifted Rainbow's face, and gasped at the multitude of shallow cuts that let loose small rivulets of blood from where it was being pumped just under the surface. However as Rarity did this, unbeknownst to her, she turned Rainbow’s gaze directly to the corpse of the creature she had failed to save. Or rather, at the grotesque pile on the cobbles that had been the creature.

The best you could say was that the skin had done its job, even in death, and kept all the important bits inside. Yet, while none of the ponies present were familiar with the anatomy of the creature, they were all pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to bend there, or like that, or in that direction. Rainbow fainted, equal parts strain and overwhelming nausea. Rarity followed a moment later when, unwisely, she looked to see what had got everypony’s attention.


Jack woke up with a jolt, though noticeably without the familiar feeling of cold sweat that normally greeted him after waking up from one of his frequent nightmares. He stared into the bright blue sky above him and felt a sudden wash of relief that tore the lingering horror from his bones and brain. It’d been a dream after all, thank the stars for that.

Yet, despite the welcome weightlessness that had settled on him, he couldn’t seem to ditch the feeling that it had been real. More worryingly though was that he didn’t remember falling asleep outside. Nor, on second thought, could he remember any time that he had so much as thought about doing so. In fact, the longer he looked at the sky, the less it looked like anything he’d been familiar with. Desperate to get his view off of the strange blue void above him he began to move. Carefully, and with some hesitancy to find out the truth, he sat up and looked around.

It was… an odd tableau, to say the least. Strange candy colored horses surrounded him on all sides and, if that wasn’t enough, they all seemed to be displaying one of three emotions; First were those that were staring with wide-eyed intensity at him with a mixture of disbelief and horror, then were the ones running away with a look nausea clear on their faces, and lastly were those laying passed out on the cobblestones who were the only ones that seemed to be okay with the whole situation.

“Hello?” Jack asked cautiously, seeing the looks of absolute fear and disbelief gathering around him. One of the equines suddenly shifted from one of those in the first group to one of those in second. Shortly after that one turned a corner Jack could hear the sound of something losing both its appetite and the thing it had eaten to quell it in the first place.

Then he realized they were staring at his legs, which was strange, but Jack continued his attempt to communicate. “Hello?” he offered again, looking at each of the creatures eye to eye. Well, almost all of them, some of the larger ones had covered the eyes of the littler ones, but he did his best all things considered. None of them seemed to want to answer him or even recognize that he had spoken.

Then he realized they weren’t staring at his legs, they were staring through them. Carefully, Jack stood from the ground and turned slowly around to the thing that held all their attention so much. Jack made to vomit at the sight, but found that though he was familiar enough with it, his stomach didn’t seem to have anything to throw up. Which was a shame, because if there was one sight that deserved to be vomited over, it was Jack looking at the contorted corpse that had been his body only moments before.


“Well?” Said a strange man in a strange place with a painfully plain lab coat from inside the kind of bunker that could make a nuke insecure about its destructive force “Did it work?” The voice was hopeful even as it looked at the overloaded machinery around it, most of it would need replacing, just like it always did after an actual test.

“Uh…” Responded the man who wouldn’t have been able to respond if things had gone properly.

There was a drawn out sigh. “Oh damn.” Came the reply. “I was sure we had it that time. We’re getting so close. They want this done by the end of the year you know? There’s a lot of money riding on this. Transportation to another realm, it seemed so basic in class. Where did I go wrong?”

“You plugged all the cords in?” Began the checklist from the test subject.

“Oh yes.”

“Turned on the harmonization engine?”

“Naturally.”

“Attuned the trans-dimensional drifting mechanism?”

“Oh please Larry, I know what I’m doing! I built most of this machine on my own you know! From the most basic stuff I could find with a dirt cheap budget from an organization that barely exists! I’m not some forgetful assistant, or uncaring unpaid intern who would skip over something, like someone else I know huh? There’s a reason one of us is on the unstable transporter pad as the first human experiment and the other is inside the unbreakable glass room with enough food to last two years, Larry. No I’m sure there’s just an error somewhere in the theorem, I’ll iron it out.”

“Oh okay, so you properly calibrated the departure and arrival destinations then? I mean that one's pretty basic but it’s always the simple stuff you know Doctor?” There was silence as an uncomfortable silence as a reply, the kind that says more than words tend to. “Doctor?”

“Leave the room Larry.”

“Wha-?”

The next words were an unholy combination of screech and shout that would’ve cut lesser glass into neat little shapes. “LEAVE. THE. ROOM.”

Next Chapter: Chapter Two Estimated time remaining: 2 Hours, 24 Minutes
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