The Hitchhiker's Guide to Equestria

by hotelmario510

First published 16th of December, 2011

A Hitchhiker's Guide/MLP:FiM crossover. Don't Panic!

OFFICIALLY DEAD AS OF SEPTEMBER 2018. SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH

Why are ponies born? Why do ponies die? And why do they spend so much of the intervening time being friendly to one another?

When catastrophe strikes Equestria one day for no apparent reason, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, and Spike are thrust into a long and bizarre chain of events, that might just take them not only between universes, but to the Ultimate Question itself.

Rated Teen for a bit of swearing. I’m so naughty.

Prologue

Perhaps the most controversial, certainly the most argued-about and oftentimes most money-making for philosophers such as Oolon Colluphid, who, up until the collapse of the Altarian dollar, had been rich enough not to care much about it anymore, is a very simple, four-word question: “Is there a God?” And depending on who you talk to, the answer will be “Yes”, “No”, “I dunno”, or, “Spunch spunch spunch ckkk ckkk spunch click-click”, which, in Old Andromedan, means, “Zark off, I couldn't give a dingo's kidney.”

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy tends to stay away from these things, for two important reasons: One, to avoid upsetting any religious members of the Guide staff, as few of them as there are, as the publishing corporations of Ursa Minor simply cannot afford to be sued by any of them, and secondly, because the Guide staff that are non-religious tend to prefer writing lengthy articles about the best brothels and bars in the Galaxy rather than debate silly philosophical issues that aren't worth worrying about because, “Hey, we're all going to die anyway, right?”

Many, if not most, gods and goddesses have a general consensus of keeping themselves to themselves to avoid the inevitable publicity scandals that would immediately follow, such as in the case of “Messiahgate” in or around the Earth year 0BCE in which an unidentified god made the unwise decision to, to put it in polite hitch-hiking terms, sass a young woman, which led to almost 2000 years of bickering after the child born subsequently was nailed to a tree about thirty or so years later for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, though this whole mess was all cleared up when the Earth was demolished. This is, therefore, not that story.

There are a select few gods and goddesses who, through special control and organisation actually make things work to their, and, in very rare cases, everyone else's benefit, with little to no ill effects. Such is the case with Princess Celestia, a goddess who happens to live somewhere in an explored, though significantly-less-explored-than-say-the-more-interesting-bits portion of the Galaxy, on a very Earth-like (before it was reduced to a whiff of hydrogen, ozone and carbon monoxide) planet that, while having a very unclear name, is usually just referred to as a whole as “Equestria”, as that is the name of the ruling country there, which is incidentally where the goddess takes up her seat of power. For the sake of convenience, the Guide's staff have decided to treat this as a fact, largely because they'd rather spend a night out seeing who can chug the most Ol' Janx Spirit than worry about minor technicalities.

Princess Celestia leads a world which, to most hitch-hikers' eyes, is like the visual equivalent of someone vomiting pure sugar on to your eyes, and then dusting them with love, harmony and peace for good measure. It's so sickeningly sweet that the Guide recommends packing insulin, regardless of whether or not your species can get diabetes, as you are guaranteed to get diabetes either way. It is inhabited largely by sentient quadruped creatures that are comparable to Earth equines such as ponies, horses, donkeys, and zebras, as well as more fanciful or just plain silly creatures such as unicorns and pegasi. The local dialect has adopted these terms; thankfully, as the Guide's staff were getting worried they'd have more technicalities not to worry about.

Princess Celestia, who is an alicorn, that is, an extremely rare mix of both unicorn and pegasus, whose only known relatives at the time of publication are her younger sister “Princess Luna” and a snobby chauvinist known as “Prince Blueblood” (who is not an alicorn, but a unicorn, thus making him the shame of the Equestrian Royal Family), is gifted with the utterly ridiculous power to move a star to make the sun rise every morning. Most people visiting Equestria have often wondered in the past as to why she doesn't just set the planet, which has remained stationary in space for over 4.5 billion years, in orbit around the star. Of course, said visitors have often been warned to shut up, lest they be sent away to Equestria's natural satellite, which, by a staggering coincidence, is referred to as “The Moon”, in the same way Earth's was. Similarly, her sister has the power to make this natural satellite move. It makes absolutely no sense, and the ruling class show no signs of caring.

Celestia's residence is within a physically-impossible city known as “Canterlot”, which, when she was once asked to explain how it existed, explained it by saying, “It's all magic, I don't have to explain anything.” The problem with Celestia's godliness is this: She unfortunately deitied herself into a corner, and as a result has very little in the way of actual defense against the forces of evil, as few and far between as they may be. As a result, she has had to find a loop hole to god herself out of this hole.

And so it is that six very ordinary equine-descendants who just so happen to be socially interlinked are Celestia's “get out of not-exactly-being-a-god-but-I-sort-of-am-so-yeah” card. And, due to the universe's odd sense of humour, their lives are about to get a hell of a lot more complicated, as is often the way with these things. But, like another, suspiciously similar saga, it begins very simply.

It begins with a hen house.

Google Docs link

Chapter I

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of fanfiction disclaimers: Useless. If you don't want to be sued, then whoever hosts your work will cover you. Admitting the fact that you've stolen copyrighted characters and plot elements tends to take away from your case. Trying to use a fanfiction disclaimer to get out of being sued or having one's timelessly classic Mary Sue self-insert work utterly destroyed by a corporation is roughly equivalent to walking up behind an elderly woman, warning her you're going to steal her handbag, then proceeding to knock her over and steal her handbag, just before running away yelling "I told you so!"

A/N: Yes, I have read "So Long, and Thanks For All the Ponies" by Sir Ginger. I have stolen, er, borrowed one or two elements from him because I couldn't think of anything else, so I credit him 100% for those. Please don't be angry at me for taking, that is to say, borrowing them, Sir Ginger, or your fans for that matter. Consider my theft...borrowing of them a tribute. Please, enjoy the fic, don't forget your towel, and as always – Don't Panic.

The cottage stood in a hilly area just on the edge of the Everfree Forest, not far from the rural village of Ponyville. It stood alone and was surrounded by a broad spread of Equestrian wildlife. Most of the time, it was very peaceful and quiet, just as the tenant of the cottage liked it. And most of the time, the only sound that could be heard was the innocent chitter of a squirrel, or the chirp of a bird.

The cottage sat upon a small raised patch of ground, with a fully organic roof. There were birdhouses set inside it and hung from it. Outside, there were many untrimmed bushes, grass, reeds, flowers and trees, all because the tenant of the cottage didn't like to disturb her animal friends. Little rabbits would usually chew at the unmown grass and the birds would nestle in the birdhouses hung from the house or the sapling in the front garden. There was a bridge under which there lived a family of otters, among others.

Overall, it more or less succeeded in pleasing the eye. It was the kind of house someone would look at while poring through a catalogue at the estate agents', nodding and thinking, yes, I'd like to live there, before accepting the depressing fact they'd never be able to afford such a thing and buying instead a squattish, squarish, sixty-year-old house, made of brick, with four windows in the front of a size and proportion that more or less exactly fail to please the eye.

Around the back, there was yet more plant life and garden. There was also a chicken coop, or hen house, in which the tenant of the cottage got fresh eggs from her dearly-beloved, if mischievous, chickens. Wire fencing stopped the chickens escaping and going in to the Everfree Forest, where all kinds of poisonous creatures lived. Usually the garden would be filled with the sounds of animals all making their various noises in cacophonous harmony. The tenant of the cottage was an animal-lover, needless to say.

And, at present, the tenant of the cottage was cowering underneath the hen-house, trying desperately to protect the structure from being demolished. She was a light, pastel-yellow pegasus, and would at first glance seem to be a mutation of the common, recognisable breed of equine-descendant recognisable to a human being. She had a light pink mane, and stood about 120 centimetres tall on all fours. Her personality, that of extreme timidity and kindness, reflected her name: Fluttershy.

"Fluttershy, come on. You're going to have to accept it,"came a voice from somewhere outside the fence. Fluttershy didn't dare jerk her head up. She'd already bashed it several times today and the area of her cranium she kept hitting was beginning to pound and ache. "This road has got to be built, and is going to be built. There's nothing we can do."

Fluttershy fearfully turned around, her hooves making soft clopping noises against the hardened mud. She could see an arrangement of other hooves outside the fence. Orange, white, and purple, with purple standing at the front. There was an absence of blue hooves, and Fluttershy knew exactly why.

"Fluttershy, don't make me come down there," a boyish voice threatened.
"Rainbow!" scolded another, more regal-sounding voice, belonging to the white hooves. "Fluttershy, dear. We're just going to take down your hen-house here and move it to the front-garden so we can build a little extension to the main road going into Ponyville. Really, it won't even take a day. Right, Applejack?"

"Yup," assured a voice with an accent comparable to a Southern US accent, if the Southern US hadn't been blasted into atoms. "Ah got Apple Bloom and Big Macintosh all ready, they're gonna come over and fix 'er up, from top-to-bottom. We'll git 'er done!"
"You see? Nothing to worry about."

"Why are you so hung up over this?" came the boyish voice once again. It was flying overhead, as it was possessed by another pegasus. "We're just moving it a little bit."
Fluttershy poked her head out from under the hen-house. "But, Rainbow Dash, you don't understand...Elizabeth...she might get...homesick..."
"Homesick?!" the purple-hooved pony said. "Now you're just being illogical."
"But...if she got homesick...I'd never forgive myself..."

"Fluttershy, you've known for months this day was coming."
"Nobody told me until the mailmare brought round the mail last week – I didn't even know."
"They had the plans up on display in the town hall!"
"You know I don't like the town hall...there's too many...eep...ponies..."

The purple-hooved pony, known as Twilight Sparkle, rubbed the edge of her nose with her front hoof. She had a large object, made of some kind of chalky bone, protruding from her forehead. She was a unicorn, and had abilities beyond the grasp of most people, not that she used them to her advantage (preferring to walk rather than just teleport to places).
"Fluttershy, you know you're going to have to come out of there eventually. I won't pull you out. I'm not that kind of pony."
"But I am!" the pony with the boyish voice, known as Rainbow Dash, said, proudly. After being shot a glance hard enough to rip a diamond to shreds from Applejack, she quietened down, folding her front legs indignantly.

"Where's Pinkie Pie, anyway?" asked Twilight Sparkle, the fact only four of her friends were present suddenly clicking. If there was one thing Rainbow Dash didn't like to be stopped from doing, it was a chance to show off her "radicalness", as she said, and Twilight Sparkle's questions weren't helping. She turned back around for a moment.
"No idea," she snapped.

In fact, No idea was exactly how many ideas the five equine-descendant friends had that their other friend, Pinkie Pie, was in fact not descended from a four-legged ungulate creature at all, but was in fact not of this world in the slightest, and was not raised on a "rock farm", as she usually claimed in her tall tales of how she got her "cutie mark", a biological imprint on the flank that showed off natural talents.

This said, most of her friends had, jokingly, suspected this, often quietly thinking to themselves, "She must be from another planet".
Unbeknownst to them, they weren't right, but they weren't wrong, either. Pinkie Pie was quite possibly one of the oddest things in the Universe, and, by extension, the Whole Sort of General Mish-Mash of multi-verses and dimensions.

When Equestria came under threat from monstrous villains and villainous monsters, Pinkie Pie was the "Element of Laughter", part of the group known as the "Elements of Harmony", a group of closely-interlinked friends who, essentially, stood in for Princess Celestia due to the fact she had godded herself into a hole, by sending her sister to the moon, thereby breaking the powerful platonic link she had with her sister. Or something like that.

In the daytime, however, Pinkie Pie was merely the local eccentric, known for her seemingly boundless supplies of energy (not as illogical as one may think, for reasons that will be explained later), and her obsession with everything to do with having fun and laughing. At any one time, Pinkie Pie could be throwing a party, eating cakes, dancing, singing (she showed an amazing ability to write songs off the top of her head), hopping around, building flying contraptions that would make Leonardo Da Vinci's eyes water, or even doing completely outlandish things, like making films on no budget. In fact, one of Pinkie Pie's films, a horror film in which she and her friend Rainbow Dash starred, was so graphic, that hundreds were sent to hospital for various ailments including feeling faint, vomiting, and temporary insanity. The film was so horrifying because nobody had ever seen anything like it before and their brains were physically unready for the imagery – and this led to the Equestrian Board of Film Classification being set up, and all the copies being burned, to Pinkie Pie's chagrin.

Nobody really knew where Pinkie Pie had come from. She had seemingly rolled in to town one day and, after causing havoc after starting a party right the hell out of nowhere, had asked for a job at the local bakery, Sugarcube Corner, where she indulged in her passion, baking cakes. When asked, she often explained she had been raised on a "rock farm". It was only after she had seen her future friend Rainbow Dash shatter the light and sound barriers simultaneously in a phenomenon known as the "Sonic Rainboom" that she had discovered her special talent for creative insanity, she explained.

This, however, was all a lie.
Pinkie Pie had a peculiar habit – she would call parties for her five friends, but only ones that took place on star-lit nights, and she would then climb on to the roof and sit there all night, for no reason. Her friends often just ascribed this strange behaviour to Pinkie Pie's quirky personality. Little did they know that this was not the case at all. Once, when her friend Rarity asked her what she was doing on the roof, Pinkie Pie responded, "Looking for aliens," to which Rarity had simply blinked for a couple of seconds, laughed nervously, and then gone back inside.

But really, Pinkie Pie was looking up at the sky all the time because she knew how to flag alien spacecraft down and get lifts from them. She knew how to see the Marvels of the Universe for less than 1 ningi a day, (thankfully, as she didn't own any wallets that were 6,800 miles across). But she wanted her friends to be with her, too, when she could get a lift.

In fact, Pinkie Pie was a roving researcher for that wholly remarkable book, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Fluttershy still wouldn't crawl out from under the hen-house, even after all kinds of encouragement from her friends. It was all rather silly, really. Fluttershy really did like things to stay as they were. Right now, things refused to stay as they were, no matter how hard she tried, but by Celestia she was going to milk it until there were no more options, i.e. not being able to sit under the hen-house any more. Still, she'd prepared for such an eventuality, and could eat the chicken-feed she had stored if she needed to.

"Fluttershy, are you...eating chicken feed?" asked Twilight Sparkle.
"Um...yes...what else does one do when trying to prevent having a chicken-coop knocked down...?"
Twilight Sparkle sat back on to her rump, and rubbed her temples with her hooves.
"Fluttershy, you're more rational than this, usually," Twilight remarked.

Fluttershy remained silent, as if trying to think up some kind of response. At that same moment, a pink pony with a darker-pink mane that would make a hairdresser wake up at 3AM screaming hurdled the wire fence with a casual disregard for the fact the others were staring at her, and then bent down underneath the hen-house. She had a saddle-bag on her back, which looked rather lumpy.

"Um, Pinkie, what are you doing?" Rainbow Dash asked, curiously. Pinkie Pie turned.
"Oh, you! I didn't see you there. I was just coming to get Fluttershy and then you guys! Guess I don't have to now!"
"For what? Not a party, surely, we're in the middle of something," the white-hooved pony, Rarity, also a unicorn, said. "We simply cannot be having a party at this hour."
"A party? No, silly. It's really exciting! But serious. But really exciting!"
"Can it wait?"
"No, not really."

Pinkie punctuated her succinct answer with a grin. It was a rather unnerving grin.
"Well, are ya gonna tell us, or what?" Applejack asked.
"What? Oh, right, the thing! Of course, yeah. Um, but can we get Fluttershy out from under this hen-house first?"
Fluttershy squeaked and withdrew further under.

"Can't it wait?" the yellow-coloured pegasus groaned.
"No, not really," Pinkie Pie repeated.
"But my chickens – "
"Oh, you silly filly, you're not gonna be needing those much longer," Pinkie Pie said, tactlessly, although being as tact was a totally alien thing to her, this was to be expected. "Come on, get out from under there. We need to see Celestia, as quickly as possible." She started to trot away, preparing to hurdle the wire fence.

"The Princess?!" Twilight Sparkle exclaimed, "What in Equestria do you need to see her for?"
Pinkie Pie hurdled the fence, as Fluttershy tried to decide whether or not to crawl out from under the hen-house.

Pinkie Pie stopped. She sat down on her rump, something she wasn't seen doing often.
"All right. What would you say if I told you I wasn't really raised on a rock farm?" The others sort of stared, as if they wanted to say something, but couldn't. Rainbow Dash was the first to voice what was on everyone's minds. She started by guffawing loudly.
"Oh, Pinkie Pie, I don't think anyone sane could believe that story even if they tried!"

"Right, right. But you all sorta agree with my story, right?"
"Where's this goin'?" Applejack asked, with a bit of concern in her voice.
"What would you say if I told you I wasn't really raised on a rock farm but I am in fact made of this stuff called submarine particular wave stuff and strictly speaking I shouldn't even exist?"

"What does that even mean?" Rarity asked, trying to keep the curl in her elegantly-styled purple mane. "Is that something you're likely to say?"
Pinkie Pie sighed.
"Look, just take this," she said, handing Rarity an oblong object. "I'll explain on the way. Oh, we're gonna need Spike," she added, to Twilight.

Four of the six started to trot away, except Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash.
"Come on, you guys!" Pinkie Pie said. "No time!"
"But – but – " Fluttershy tried to argue.
"No buts! Come on!"
Fluttershy followed quickly behind, as she looked back.
"Rainbow, don't you dare do what I know you're about to do," Twilight said, as the eagerness in Rainbow Dash's eyes faded and she folded her front legs over each other.

"The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy", Rarity said, aloud. As she turned it over in her hooves, she noticed it said on the back, in large, friendly letters, the words, "Don't Panic".
"How do I use this thing?" she asked Pinkie Pie.
"Oh, that? It's voice-controlled. Just say, 'Sub particular wave thingy'. It'll find it."

This is what The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has to say on the subject of sub-particulate wave-matter.

Sub-particulate wave-matter is quite possibly one of the oddest things in the universe, just behind the Babel fish. It goes above hyperspace, reality, probability and indeed, logic itself. Of course, for these reasons, it shouldn't, strictly speaking, exist. Essentially, sub-particulate wave-matter exists in all possible realities at any given time. Sub-particulate wave-matter can adapt to any laws of physics and reject them as it pleases, and exists across every single part of the Whole Sort of General Mish-Mash. This also means that any object made of sub-particulate wave-matter can absorb energy from the surrounding air at will, leading anything that is made of the substance to have a nearly boundless supply of energy.

Most leading physicists theorise that there is in fact only one photon of sub-particulate wave-matter in existence, it's just that it exists over so many time streams that it can come together to form material objects, the photons all being the same photon, all from different periods in its lifespan. Most leading philosophers, however, theorise that it is the leftovers of God after He vanished in a puff of logic. Most leading physicists, of course, denounce this airy-fairy notion as a load of dingo's kidneys, though this didn't stop Oolon Colluphid writing a book about it on the back of a napkin after the collapse of the Altairian dollar, entitled, "Bugger It, I'm Hungry, Read My Book, Will You."

One can easily tell that any living being is constituted of sub-particulate wave-matter by the fact that it shows abilities somewhat resembling the physics within Earth animation programmes, including, but not limited to, the ability to defy gravity until it is noticed, survival of extremely life-threatening injuries, completely mathematically-random brainwave patterns, and the ability to break the so-called "fourth wall", among others. There is, of course, a fourth wall between each reality and the next, but nobody ever notices it because that's just silly.

"So, you're...well, that?" Rarity said, putting the object back into its cover, in a tone that sounded very bizarrely unsurprised, as if it didn't matter at all to her that her good friend was from outside of reality entirely. She seemed to be taking it rather well, and so did the others. Then again, this was a world where one of her best friends could breach the sound and light barriers simultaneously, and her other friend could quite easily perform magic. The fact Pinkie Pie was not all that she seemed felt more like a mild inconvenience than an actual life-changing event.

"Oh yeah, totally," Pinkie Pie replied, stopping for a moment to point into space. "I mean, don't you see them?"
"See who?"
"The readers, of course!" Pinkie Pie smiled, waving into the space, mouthing, "Hi, readers!"

Twilight eyed Pinkie. "Pinkie, are you pranking us?"
"What? No!" Pinkie said, indignance in her eyes. "If I was going to prank you, I'd do this!" she opened up a can of fake peanuts she produced from nowhere, sending a snake flying into the air.
"Right..." said Twilight. "Okay, but if this does turn out to be a prank, then – "
Pinkie Pie's tail twitched.
"Snake incoming," she said, as it came back down and hit Twilight on the head.

The five stopped outside the Ponyville Library.
"Wait here," Twilight said, going inside to fetch her assistant, a young reptilian creature known as Spike, a fire-breathing dragon, with the ability to send letters directly to the Princess by both setting them on fire and by regurgitating them. In this fashion, he was essentially a living postbox. He was also a postbox with a bad habit of sleeping. Being as his skin was about an inch thick, it took more than a hard prod to wake him up.

Twilight found him sleeping peacefully in his bed. She gave him a gentle nudge. He was purple, with green spikes lining his back, owing to his name, green ears, and a soft green underbelly. Unfortunately, he was sleeping on his front, so Twilight couldn't wake him up by giving him a sharp prod in said underbelly.
"Right," she mumbled. She couldn't believe she was doing this. As much as Pinkie Pie was her friend, she was also not very reliable. The rock-farm story was an example of this, though the whole sub-particulate wave-matter thing seemed even more outlandish.

"Spike, wake up," she said. "Spike. Spike. Spike, wake up!"
Still no answer, apart from snoring, and the occasional nonsensical grumble along the lines of, "Jusfimominuteplease..."
Twilight shook her head. "Right," she said, again, using the telekinesis her horn granted her to pick up a bucket and fill it in the bathroom. She looked away, and then dumped it on him.

"Gah!" Spike shouted. "What was that for?"
"We need you to send a letter to Princess Celestia."
"Already...? It's, like, ten o' clock."
"Yeah, well, blame Pinkie."

Spike yawned. "Fine, let's get this over with."
He stalked down the stairs and out the front door, grabbing a quill on his way.
"Yes, Pinkie, what is it?"
"Spike!" she said, gleefully. "Can you take a letter?"

"Fire...away..." Spike said, yawning a small bit of green fire.
"Dear Princess Celestia, I need to see you because it's really important and I really need to talk to you so can you just please send over two large carriages that fit three ponies each to take us to you in Canterlot as fast as possible because it's really important and I need to talk to you right away!" Pinkie Pie paused. Spike was astonished by the total lack of commas in the entire letter. "Love, Pinkie Pie," the pink pony added, as a polite afterthought.

"Do you think you can trust Celestia to believe this wacky story?" Rainbow Dash asked.
"Me, I'd trust her to the end of the world," said Pinkie Pie.
"Oh, yes," said Twilight, exiting the library. "And how far's that?"
"About two hours away," Pinkie said.

Google Docs link

Chapter II

WARNING: The following chapter is not very funny. In fact, this chapter is the equivalent of Mostly Harmless in terms of darkness. Well, what did you expect from a chapter describing the destruction of Equestria? This isn't your run-of-the-mill End-Of-The-Earth we're talking about here. No, we're talking about the destruction of Equestria, the most sweet and innocent place in the Galaxy. This is going to be quite dark, as you would expect. If you don't like that sort of thing, skip the next few hundred words. There's an amusing little bit at the end there to keep you happy.

Between the rural village of Ponyville and the city of Canterlot, there lay a couple of hundred miles of hilly valley. Here, wild animals hopped and skipped and ate and drank and excreted and died to their hearts' content, while the glorious sun shone, spreading its warm yellow light over the valley. At the end of the valley stood a great mountain.

The mountain was huge, a sheer, fat, steep drop, climbing massive distances, overseeing massive areas of countryside. Great clouds surrounded the mountain's peak, and ice formed and dribbled down from the top as a meandering river, which flowed for miles. It was, by any practical definition of the term, breathtakingly beautiful.

Slap bang on the side of the mountain, of course, was a great city, its very foundations carved out of the very rock of the great mountain, with great towers stretching towards the sun in a similar fashion to a sunflower. Golden roofs glittered in the sunlight, especially that of the observatory, and the marble that had been built on top of the dull rock of the mountain shone, like a beacon. The city's water supply, waterfalls that came off the river, could be seen, falling hundreds of feet to a misty explosion of vapour. This was the city of Canterlot.

The wide expanse between the two settlements seemed mostly quiet, save for a few birds that occasionally flew past, but suddenly, something golden, moving incredibly fast, shot through the clouds that overhung the valley, like a bullet. It was followed by another. They were travelling at over two-hundred miles an hour, roaring through the air as if they were thunder made flesh.

This was the personal escort service of the Royal Palace in Canterlot, the hub of Equestria's central government, forged thousands of years ago. The reason for the speed was that one of the passengers on board one of the chariots of the escort service addressed a matter of urgency. The service took matters of urgency seriously, even if that meant having to crush the bones of every one of their passengers into fine powder to get them to the Palace at once.

Wa-zhoom!
The chariots suddenly stopped, and hung in air, in exactly the same way that a bullet doesn't. They then lightly touched down in a quiet square. The six passengers disembarked the chariots.
"Thank you kindly, sirs," said one of them to the escort guards.
"No problem, ma'am," replied one of them, in a thick Cockney accent, complete with the mispronunciation of "ma'am" as "marm".

"Oh no, call me Twilight," replied the passenger. "Twilight Sparkle."
"Names ain't in the job description." replied the other, in an offensively stereotypical New York accent. "But you're welcome." With that, the two guards looked over at the other two, nodded to them, and flew away.
"Well, I say, that was rather rude," Rarity remarked, with an air of disgust in her voice.

Pinkie Pie, meanwhile, was doing a headcount. Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, Fluttershy, Rarity, Spike, herself, and – where was Rainbow Dash?
"Look out below!"
Ah. There.

Rainbow Dash hit the ground with a loud thump, leaving a small dent in the road.
"Sorry I'm late, guys."
"How in Equestria could you have possibly have been late?"Twilight asked. "You're faster than the escort service! If anything, we should have been the ones who were late!"
"Well, you know, that's the clearest sky in Equestria. You can't blame me for wanting to do a few little tricks."

"Dash!" Pinkie Pie said, indignantly, and uncharacteristically. "Now is not the time for playing! We have to see the Princess immediately!"
"Well, the palace is right over there," Twilight said. She knew the geography here well. After all, she had spent over a decade living here.
"Well, c'mon, let's go, let's go! There'll be plenty of time for playing afterwards!"

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the magic of Equestria: It is one of the oldest and most mysterious forms of practically-applied physics-altering energy in the Galaxy. Thought to have come about billions of years ago, historians and scientists alike still baffle at the nature of the so-called "magic of friendship" and where it came from.

The "magic" is said to exist as a kind of field all over Equestria, which can be utilised by unicorns, pegasi, and alicorns on a physical level, and earth-ponies at a level comparable to background radiation particular to planets such as the late planet Earth. Apparently, it is strengthened by social connections such as friendship and platonic love. As yet, there is no word on the effect erotic love has, and nobody particularly wants to find out.

The "magic" is used in various different ways by the different races. Pegasi use the "magic" to aid their small wings in helping them to fly and walk on clouds. Unicorns use the "magic" to perform various activities that cannot be performed with fingerless hooves. Expert unicorns, such as Twilight Sparkle, are able to perform reality-bending tricks such as teleportation. Earth ponies use the "magic" for increased strength, mental agility, charisma, et cetera.

Alicorns, however, are perhaps the most important users of Equestrian "magic". While only two are generally known to exist, their magic leaves them capable of transporting enormous masses with as little energy wasted as possible, the practical upshot of which is that entire stars can be manipulated to their bidding, depending on the amount of power they possess. The most powerful alicorns, such as Princess Celestia, can even construct entire cities.

Little is known about the nature of Equestrian "magic", even by the inhabitants, who accept it as a kind of energy field or force blanketing the planet, like a magnetosphere. The "magic" does have similar qualities to energy in that it can only change, never be destroyed. However, like a force, it can also be overpowered by stronger forces. This brings a worrying question to the minds of many Equestrian scientists, a question that has not been voiced, and never will be. It will never be answered, due to a terribly stupid catastrophe, caused, in part, by the question.

"What do you mean, you can't let us in?!" Pinkie Pie shouted at the guard in front of the palace entrance. "This is serious business!"
"It's Princess Celestia's lunch hour," replied the guard, stoically. "She doesn't like to be disturbed during her lunch hour."
"Don't you understand?! This isn't about us, it's about Equestria!"
"Yes, yes, I'm sure your wacky political beliefs like 'democracy' are all fine and good. I'll be sure to tell her after her lunch break. Run along now."

Pinkie Pie growled, with a noise that sounded worryingly accurately like a lion.
"I'm going to give you six seconds to get out of the way. If you don't, I'll just have to force you out of the way."
"With what?"
Pinkie Pie suddenly realised she had no answer to that question. She grabbed Spike, holding him under her front leg, like a gun.

The guard appeared to stoically stifle a chuckle. "Yeah, right."
"Six..."
"I'd like to see you try and get through me."
"Five..."
"Come on, then."
"Four..."
The guard stood firmly on the spot.
"Three, two, one!" There was a pause.

The guard looked intently at Spike, who blew no fire at him, and looked just as disdainful as he did.
"Uh," was the only noise that managed to escape the guard's mouth before he was suddenly blindsided by a wet towel to the face.

"I knew you'd come in handy some day," Pinkie Pie giggled, rolling the towel back up and putting it back in her saddlebag.
"Um, did you just assault a member of the Equestrian Royal Guard?" Twilight asked. The other four ponies, and Spike, looked on in shock.
"Sure did!" Pinkie Pie said, cheerfully, before proceeding to casually pull a lever and open the gate.

"Um, Pinkie, I hate to interrupt, but..." Spike stammered. "Um, isn't that illegal? Won't you get in trouble?"
"Look, we only have to worry about the laws in this place for another fifteen minutes," Pinkie Pie replied. "So, are we gonna visit this princess or aren't we?"
The others looked at each other, then back to Pinkie. "Good. Then let's go."

Princess Celestia sat alone at the table. Sometimes, her sister ate lunch with her in here, but she had been tired recently, and so she was currently sleeping in her own bedroom, waiting for the night, when she would get up again, to raise the moon. The silence in the room was quite unbearable. It was all too quiet nowadays.

She didn't actually need to eat, being a goddess, but she felt that if the cooks were polite enough to actually make her a plate of alfalfa, or a salad, or whatever, it was only right she ate it. She didn't often eat for luxury; after millennia of eating dish after dish after dish, she was quite sure she'd eaten every discernibly tasty thing in Equestria that she possibly could.

She sighed. Her constantly-flowing, multi-coloured mane floated strangely across the table, ever-waving. The silence was not broken. Not even by the drop of pin. There was silence, all except for the memories chattering away in Celestia's ancient mind, going over the centuries as if they were all nothing.

This was the curse of immortality – eternal boredom. Not until the end of recorded time itself would she be allowed to sleep. An old acquaintance of hers, whose name escaped her at that minute, by the name of Zakwon, or something of the like, had told her that immortality was best if you tried hiding away, like him. Perhaps she should have listened to him.

With that, the door suddenly slammed open.
"Princess?!" shouted a loud, high-pitched voice. Celestia turned. The Elements of Harmony, and Spike, stood there at the end of the room. Pinkie Pie stood at the front, a saddlebag draped over her back.
"Ah, my little ponies. How may I assist you? I trust the guards didn't give you much trouble?"
Twilight and Applejack shot nervous glances.

"No, your Majesty!" Pinkie Pie lied. "Now, I need to see you for something really really important, but first I'm gonna need you to get up, you don't mind skipping lunch, do you? I'll give you cake, not that you'll need it much longer – " she pulled an alarm clock out of her saddlebag. " – darn it!"

"What's the matter, Pinkamena?" Celestia interrupted.
"I'm looking for something...that should be on the wall...oh, this way!" Pinkie Pie cried, excitedly, running off round a corner, shooting down a corridor.
"Pinkie?" Rainbow Dash asked, flying after her.
"Please, Dash, no flying in the palace!" Twilight scolded.
"It's quite all right, dear," corrected Celestia. "This seems important."

Dash was off like a shot, round the corners. "Pinkie!" she called. "Pinkie, where are you?"
The silent marble columns were illuminated only by the warm glow of the sun. "Pinkie!"
Rainbow Dash shot past an archway, and then suddenly drew back. Pinkie Pie was inside the room.
Quietly, she followed.

The room was very large, with a fireplace, and various ornaments placed on the mantelpiece, largely consisting of porcelain ponies.
"Pinkie?" she asked.
Pinkie Pie had sat herself down on a rug in the middle of the room. She was staring up intently at something on the wall, just above the mantelpiece.

"What are you looking – " Rainbow Dash looked up. And there it was, to her horror, the terrible, awful, screaming eternity of –
"A clock?!" she shouted. "You brought us all the way here for a clock?!"
Pinkie said nothing. She stared up at it. She glanced down at her alarm clock, then back up. It read five minutes to twelve.

The others arrived, Celestia leading.
"I don't like the feel I'm getting from this room," Spike mumbled, hiding behind Twilight.
"Pinkie, explain yourself," Celestia said, quietly. "What are you doing in my old bedroom?"
Pinkie looked over at Celestia, then back at the clock.
"That old thing?" Celestia asked. "Why, that clock hasn't ticked for...years, years and years. Not since before Discord's time..."

"Discord's time?" Pinkie Pie asked. "Princess, clocks have only been around for the last five hundred years. You imprisoned Discord over a thousand years ago. How have you had a clock for that long?"
Celestia was speechless. "Well, I...I...I don't know. I just have. I've had it for years."
"Exactly. It's been frozen, you say?" Pinkie Pie sounded serious.
"Yes, frozen at exactly one minute to twelve, eleven fifty-nine, for hundreds of years."

"Now that's a funny thing..." Pinkie Pie mumbled, clambering up on to the mantelpiece, listening to the clock, knocking off a few porcelain figures in the process.
"Pinkie!" cried Twilight. "Those were antiques!"
Celestia said nothing. "What do you mean, Pinkie Pie?"

Pinkie Pie looked at her alarm clock. Ten seconds to eleven-fifty-nine.
"Wait for it," Pinkie Pie mumbled, as her alarm clock ticked off the last few seconds of the penultimate minute of the hour.

The alarm clock finally ticked over on to eleven-fifty-nine. And as it did so, a low groan sounded from within the old clock. It groaned as ancient gears squealed in to life. And then, there was a quiet noise, barely a whisper. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
The ancient second hand, cobwebbed, but alive, began to count off the sixty seconds to twelve.

The room fell silent.
"That's it?" Rainbow Dash said. "That's really all we came down here for?"
"No," Pinkie said. "No, this is bad." The others had never heard the fun-loving pony sound more serious in their entire lives.

The clock ticked on to thirty seconds.
"What're you talking about?" Applejack asked. "Why have we come all the way down here for an old clock?"
"Well..." she said. "I think that clock has been waiting..."

"Waiting?" Fluttershy asked. "For what?"
Pinkie Pie's face looked grim.
"Doomsday," she replied, simply. The room fell silent.

She looked down at her alarm clock. Ten seconds.
"Doomsday, my dear?" Celestia asked. "But the End of the World isn't supposed to come for years...there are prophecies...everything! Are you sure?"
Five seconds.
"Pinkie?" Twilight asked.

"Run, now," Pinkie Pie said, abruptly, dashing from the room. Her alarm clock shrilly rang out.
In response, the old clock returned the favour. Ancient bells droned a familiar tune. Bing-bong bing-bong, bing-bong, bing-bong...
Outside, the Palace's clocktower joined in, as if in chorus with the others.

The bells sounded out the number of the hour.
Bong...
Pinkie Pie galloped back through the corridors, followed by the others.
Bong...
Her hoofbeats and the bells were all that broke the silence.
Bong...
She was sweating, all over. She had to get out. She had to get outside.
Bong...
Nearly there, Pinkie, nearly there.
Bong...
She ran through the large dining room in which she had interrupted Celestia.
Bong...
As she ran, she reached into her saddlebag.
Bong...
"Come on, where are you..." she muttered, looking frantically for her way out.
Bong...
She was approaching the palace entrance now.
Bong...
"There you are!" she said, happily.
Bong...
She ran through the doors, out into the court yard. She looked up, gripping the object between her teeth.
Bong...
The others followed quickly. "Pinkie?" Spike asked, fear in his voice, as the others looked over at the clocktower.
Bong...

And then there was nothing.

Somewhere in the palace gardens, something stirred. Quietly, at first. With a dull roar, it suddenly exploded into life. It had a donkey's head, two mismatched horns, mismatched legs, and a mismatched body. It was nonsensical. It was ridiculous. It was a draconequus. Stretching its arms, and with a deafening roar, it opened its mouth and...yawned.
"Oh, goodie, who freed me from the statue this time?" the creature that had moments ago been sealed in stone asked rhetorically, with a devilishly gleeful voice.

It looked up, with its mis-shapen eyes and pupils, glaring up at the sky. There was a great black schism crossing it, like a massive crack, like an opening in all of time and space.
"No, it can't be," it uttered. "Not yet, surely?" It produced a watch from nowhere, which ran backwards. "The most chaotic event of all time...but why now?"

It chuckled lowly. "So, I suppose this is time up, then?" it asked the great black crack in the sky. "That's it? It's over? Like that? I expected more, Equestria!" The arc did not respond. "Alas, it is not I that will be destroying you. Why would I want to destroy you? I love living here! I would save you, if I could. But alas, it seems that is not to be."

It folded its arms. "But the chaos of destruction is a simply wonderful thing. Unpleasant, but wonderful. So what'll it be? Nuclear warfare? Disease? Or something a little...worse?" The schism did not reply.
"And to think, I, Discord, the ultimate in chaos, outwitted by...chaos itself! That's brilliant!" He applauded. "The End of Days, Armageddon, Doomsday...whatever you want to call it...it's happening. But the old prophecies said that it wasn't to end for years, not until..."

Suddenly, a thought crossed the old draconequus' mind. "Oh, that's clever. That is clever. And I only figured it out now. It's a shame, really. Celestia, Luna...those six, all the others...they will never know how, or why. And you only chose to tell me now. For all there is in this world is chaos. Well I must say, I'm honoured. It's been a pleasure working with you, chaos. A real pleasure."
With that, he simply vanished. A dead silence fell over the world, for just a few moments.

Then, with a not a whimper, but a bang, the world ended. The ground cracked in Ponyville and fire brimmed from the ground. Buildings shot into flame, and the schism finally shattered. It was as if the sky itself was falling. Trees, houses, crops, all exploded violently into splinters and kindling. A firestorm began to rage.

The sky tore itself asunder, like a great blue sheet, revealing nothing, showing only blackness. Ashes and smoke blew through the air, blotting out the Sun, everything, leaving nothing in their wake but the smell of burning. Sirens sounded, but it was no use. The rumbling was too much, they could hear nothing.

The great mountain, atop which Canterlot and the Royal Palace had once sat, began to crumble. Great cracks opened, and pieces of it began falling to the ground in huge landslides. The cracks finally reached Canterlot. The towers shattered like glass almost instantly. The golden domes, which had one been objects of beauty, were now becoming little more than crumbling dust.

The palace, which had stuck fast for so long, found its resistance wavering. Bricks fell out of place, but it stood fast. The stained glass in the Great Hall vibrated and shattered. Then, with a final, deafening scream of defiance, the clock tower was the first to fall, right through the palace. It took mere moments for the front of the building to fall back on to itself.

Deep in a vault in the Great Hall, the magic jewellery representing the Elements of Harmony, kindness, honesty, loyalty, laughter, generosity, and magic, tried desperately to stop it, but without their bearers, proved useless. They fell silent, as the Palace was finally ripped apart by the collapsing mountain, crushed into dust by the rubble.

The great cracks that had appeared in the ground finally gave way. There was a yell of fire from each one, and the whole planet fell to pieces, sparing nothing in its wake. The atmosphere disintegrated. Space fell quiet as the pieces broke up into black soot. For the first time, the Sun hung motionless, and the Moon slowly drifted into the cloud of dead dust.

Equestria was dead.

Pinkie Pie rubbed her head. She grunted in pain. "Ow," she muttered. Then a smile crossed her face. "Ow!" she said. "I can feel pain! I'm not dead! Woo!" She quietened down. "Wait, where am I? Where are the others. Right, I need to get my bearings!" She looked at her saddlebag. "Okay, that's fine." She jumped up and down. "Yep, The Guide is safe and sound. Good."

She looked around. She was in some kind of corridor. Strange objects lined the walls, like lights, but hexagonal.
"Guys?" she called out. "You there?"
There was no reply. "Guys?"
She rounded a corner. Nothing.
She rounded the other. Nothing.

"Guys? Hello?"
She heard whimpering from around the first corner. She ran around it.
"Fluttershy? That you?"
Pinkie Pie looked. Fluttershy sat, propped fearfully up against a wall. "Fluttershy! Hey, girl! How's it going?"

Fluttershy did not reply.
"I'll take that as bad."
"Wh-where are the oth-others?"
"Oh, they could be anywhere," Pinkie Pie remarked, nonchalantly. "Sub-Etha is only meant to be used for one, really, it's bad enough with two. But seven, or maybe even eight? Who knows? I just hope they have peanuts or some kind of tofu at the other end."

Fluttershy was not comforted by this.
"Speaking of which..." Pinkie Pie handed Fluttershy a packet of peanuts. "Here, eat these."
"What happened to Equestria?"
"Oh, that?" Pinkie Pie said. "Yeah, blown up. Gone. Poof."
"Blown up?" Fluttershy asked. "Like, it exploded?"

"Yes. The whole planet. Gone."
"Okay," Fluttershy said, quietly. "Um, Pinkie Pie, that makes me feel really rather sad."
"Well, you're taking it better than most people – " Pinkie Pie said, before noticing Fluttershy had broken down hysterically into tears. "Ah, right, okay. Um. What was that old song? Always look on the bright side of life, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, no?"

"Angel and Hummingway and Elizabeth and every single one of my animals has been blown to smithereens, how can I look on the bright side? And all my friends are gone!"
"Well, I am the mare who wrote, composed, and sang Giggle at the Ghostie, so, you know."
"But everyone's – "
"Don't say it, this is a fanfiction of a TV-Y rated show."

"You mean I can't say 'dead'?"
"Oh, you said it! You're not supposed to use the D-word!"
There was an uncomfortable silence.
"Besides, not everyone's dead. I'm sure we'll find the others soon enough. Of course, they could be on the other side of the Universe, but we'll get there in the end, I'm sure."

Fluttershy was not comforted by this.
Suddenly, there was a low buzzing sound from around the corner.
"Wait, what was that?"
Pinkie Pie put her back against the wall. The buzzing sounded again.

It was getting closer.
"I certainly hope this isn't a Vogon ship," Pinkie Pie mumbled. "Vogons are mean, nasty creatures. They didn't destroy Equestria, thankfully, but you don't want to be with one on a bad day. Or a good day. Or even a particularly boring day."

The buzzing came round the corner. It got louder and louder. Pinkie looked over. A silhouette held it between its teeth, a bluish glow emanating from its jaws. It drew closer and closer, until finally, Pinkie Pie could make out its features. And then a massive grin crossed her face. Out of the shadows stepped a cross-eyed mare, gripping an electronic device between her teeth.

"Hello!" she said. "Welcome to the TARDIS!"

Google Docs link

Chapter III

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy contains an entry on the subject of the origins of the Universe. It says this: In the beginning, there was nothing. Then, for no apparent reason, the nothing exploded. It became something, and expanded rapidly, and so the Universe was created. Deal with it.

There have been many attempts to find where the Universe came from throughout history. A viable theory was first suggested by scientists from a small planet orbiting a blue star billions of years ago, which was so boring and desolate the only real thing to do was stare up at the sky at night and say, "Well, I wonder where all this stuff came from?" In fact, they had formulated ideas for the beginnings of the Universe even before they had invented fire, and problems such as Cogito ergo sum and P=NP had already been solved even before the wheel.

Sadly, the planet's inhabitants died from a total lack of agriculture, government, or economy before they could tell anyone about their amazing discoveries, and so the idea was lost forever. This, of course, led to what we know to day as "religion" to fill in the gaps of exactly how the hell we got here.

Many theories have been purported, often concerning a great heavenly Father or Mother appearing and conjuring up the Universe to be exactly perfect for His or Her creations. Of course, on most planets once astronomers start to figure out the beings of that planet aren't all that special, and really, they're living in a cold, lonely universe devoid of any love, affection or care for them, those astronomers get burned. Or shot. Or stabbed. Or mutilated, or some combination of those things, until after a while people get bored of burning, shooting, stabbing, and mutilating them, and actually start listening to them.

Equestrian mythology, however, is anomalous in that it never really had an opinion on where the Universe actually came from. While such great philosophers as Star-Swirl the Bearded and his student, Clover the Clever, have dabbled in theories as to where it all came from, the general agreement was that the Sun came up every day because of Princess Celestia, and the Moon came up every night because of Luna, and the stars were just there because they felt like it. In fact, it was not for thousands of years that someone even considered that the Sun might also be a star. This idea was eventually accepted by the Royal Equestrian Society of Science and Exploration, after much peer-review, but still nobody thought to question as to where the stars actually came from.

Equestria already knew what it wanted to know, which was, where did the place they live come from? And that was answered by the Princesses Celestia and Luna, who had, allegedly, used their powerful "magic" to build, from scratch, plentiful land that could be shared by all. And they would be correct, the immense powers they had did allow them to rid the world of disharmony and enjoy a wonderfully utopian, laissez-faire society, loosely united under the royal flag. For the most part, the nation of Equestria was in charge of weather and other environmental needs around the planet Equestria, but other races and species were given enough land on which to live. In fact, Equestria was, politically speaking, one of the most stable planets ever.

But it was not to last. Unbeknownst to everyone on the planet except the Princesses, the magic-sphere covering the entire planet, which gave them their extraordinary abilities, was also the thing that held the planet together. Ancient legends and myths foretold that, inevitably, the magic would "run out", and the entire planet would, inevitably, lose stability, and shatter away into atoms.

Much to our heroes' displeasure, this has happened rather early, and now Equestria has been destroyed, along with every race that lived upon it. This is rather inconvenient to their interests at present, as one can imagine, and two of them are currently drifting through space in an ancient and remarkable time-travel machine known as a TARDIS. They are currently being escorted to the main control room.

"Derpy Hooves!" Pinkie Pie said, as she walked with her down the long, dim corridors, along with her friend, Fluttershy. "Fancy meeting you all the way out here!"
"I'm just as surprised as you," the grey, yellow-maned, cross-eyed pegasus replied. "And I thought I was the only pony that had ever been off the planet Equestria."
"You were, until recently," Pinkie Pie said, vaguely, so as not to alert her acquaintance to the fact her home was now atoms.

"Why, did you meet a Time Lord as well?"
"No, certainly not. We kinda...hitched a ride."
"I didn't even know you could do that," Derpy pondered.
"Yeah, neither did I."

"What's a Time Lord?" Fluttershy asked, quietly.
"Well then how'd you get here?" Derpy asked, ignoring Fluttershy's question.
Pinkie Pie responded by pulling a small black rod out of her saddlebag. "With this thing," she said. "It's an electronic thumb. Of course, I don't have any thumbs, so it's all metaphorical and stuff."

"Excuse me, what's a Time Lord?" Fluttershy asked again, softly.
"What are thumbs?" Derpy asked.
"Um, it's hard to explain," Pinkie said, succinctly. "But, basically, the device transfers matter via the Sub-Etha waveband and allows anything into ships."
"Does it work like a sonic screwdriver?" Derpy asked, pushing the metallic cigar-shaped object that had been tucked behind her ear into her mouth, and pressing a button on it with her teeth. A wall panel exploded. "Oopsie."

"No, not really," Pinkie Pie said. "It's just used for matter transfer, not for screwing screws in."
"This does way more than that!" Derpy chortled. "You should see The Doctor using it, oh, he's amazing."
"The Doctor?" Pinkie Pie said. "Doctor who?"

"I don't know, he just calls himself 'The Doctor'. He says he's a 'Time Lord', like, an alien."
"Can somepony tell me what a Time Lord is?" Fluttershy asked, quietly.
"An alien? What, like a big, green monster, with tentacles? Or an evil killing machine bent on exterminating everypony?"

"No, no, he looks just like a stallion, except he has two hearts."
"What's a Time Lord?"
"He sounds interesting."
"What is a Time Lord?!" Fluttershy said, not so much in a shout, but more in an assertive whisper.

"Now that you mention it, I think the Guide mentions Time Lords," Pinkie Pie said. She took The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy out of her saddlebag, and passed it over to Fluttershy. Fluttershy turned it over in her hooves.
"Don't Panic," Fluttershy read. "That's the best thing anypony has said to me all day."
"Yeah, poor Fluttershy isn't having a good day. Her hen house has been demolished and now her planet's – " Pinkie Pie was shut up by her own hoof. Derpy Hooves looked at her, and then carried on.

"How do I use this thing?" Fluttershy asked.
"Oh, just say 'Time Lords', it'll come up," Pinkie Pie replied. "Say, does this thing, what do you call it, 'TARDIS' have a fridge?"
"Sure does," Derpy said. "But I emptied it."

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about Time Lords: They were one of the most important races in the history of the Universe. They were also total and utter bastards. They were important because they invented the first time-travel engines, and used them to keep all of time flowing correctly. They had direct access to the barrier between cause and effect, time itself, a swirling mass of happenings and history known as the "Time Vortex".

The Time Vortex formed very integral parts of Time Lord society, in fact, people often invited it around to dinner to hear its fascinating tales of "RUM-TUM-TUM-TUM, RUM-TUM-TUM-TUM, RUM-TUM-TUM-TUM, RUM-TUM-TUM-TUM," and so on. A form of initiation for young Time Lords involved staring into the unending eternity of the "Untempered Schism", rather uncannily similar to the Total Perspective Vortex, without all the insanity-causing horror. Except, of course, the insanity-causing horror of it drove many insane. "In retrospect," one Time Lord official said, "That whole 'Untempered Schism' thing was rather stupid."

The Time Lords have also gone down as the biggest bastards in history, tieing for first place with their arch-enemies, The Daleks. The reason for this being that the two factions had a massive war throughout all of time and space that killed decatillions of people. But that's not the thing that makes them bastards. No, due to the fact that it was a Time War, it took place all over time and space. This includes inside The Guide's offices, which were utterly trashed by blasts resulting from badly-placed explosive devices and death rays. Several aspiring hitchhikers were exterminated in the crossfire during a particularly fierce battle. And to make it worse, the insurance didn't cover Time War-related damage, so the building had to be repaired by docking pay. In short, the Time Lords are total and utter bastards.

Eventually, the War was finally ended by the near-total extermination of both the Daleks and the Time Lords, with few survivors. The Daleks are still considered "bastards" by The Guide staff's standards, but the surviving Time Lords – or rather, Time Lord, is quite a nice bloke. If you happen to meet him, try to befriend him, and he'll drop you wherever you need to go, and if you're especially nice to him, he'll leave you with a packet of jelly babies as well.

Fluttershy put The Guide back into its cover, looking at the cover again, at those large, friendly letters. Don't Panic. Being as panic was all she had done for most of her life, those words offered a bit of comfort somewhat, especially as she was now aware of the worrying idea almost every one of her friends was dead aside from Pinkie Pie, who wasn't even Equestrian.

"Right this way," Derpy called out, the sonic screwdriver now tucked behind her ear again.
Nobody really knew why Derpy Hooves was named that. She stated on numerous occasions that her birth certificate gave her name as "Ditzy Doo", though she didn't mind being called "Derpy", seeing it as an affectionate nickname. Most people back home thought she was stupid, due to her expression and high-pitched voice. As a matter of fact, Ditzy Doo was actually reasonably intelligent, although she was very clumsy. Pinkie Pie sympathised with her. Being totally alien to the Universe itself, she had felt like somewhat of an outcast sometimes, as well.

Derpy reached a door, which appeared to be sealed shut. She pressed a few buttons on the panel next to it, and the door proceeded to jam.
"This happens a lot," Derpy assured the other two. "Just a second."
She took the sonic screwdriver from behind her ear and placed it back in her mouth, and then pushed the button on the side a few times with her teeth. The panel exploded into sparks.
"Why does that always happen?" she asked. She bit down on it again, and the door came open with a whoosh.

"I'm glad I found you," said Derpy. "This ship is really big. It's easy to get lost down there."
"So, where's this 'Doctor' guy, anyway?" Pinkie Pie asked.
"Right this way," said Derpy, leading on.
She turned a corner and up some stairs.

What Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy saw next was amazing. A massive, dome-shaped room covered in lights just like the ones down in the corridors, with organic-looking coral reaching up towards the ceiling. A quiet, ethereal humming could be heard from deep under the center of the room, almost like breathing. Above the discernible source from which the sound was coming was a great organic-looking control panel, with a massive column in the centre, glowing mint-green, moving up and down slowly.

Resting on a seat attached to a railing was a young-looking stallion wearing a spotted tie and a collar. He was gripping a copy of a newspaper known as The Equestria Weekly in his front ankles. The headline read, "RAINBOW FACTORY CLOSED DOWN AFTER FOAL ABUSE INVESTIGATION". He appeared to be doing a crossword puzzle.

"Let's see," he mumbled. "Very sad unfinished story about rising smoke, eight letters." he pondered for half a second. "'Tragical'", he said, as he wrote it in with his mouth.
"Doctor?" asked Derpy.
"Oh, Derpy, so you've found the two stowaways, then?"
"Sure have!"

The Doctor stood up. He had a brown coat, with blue eyes and a dark, spiked mane. He had an hourglass on his flank. Then he stood back in shock.
"Pinkie Pie?!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"
Pinkie Pie was taken aback.

"What do you mean?" she asked. "This is the first time we've met, isn't it?"
"No, well, yes, in your timeline, but not in – look, I can't tell you too much, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to meet you. Or rather, I have already. But you haven't."
"Right..." Pinkie Pie said. "Um, that's good to know."

"Yes, sorry about that," he stammered. "I'm the Doctor." he held out a hoof, and Pinkie lightly took it in her own 'wrist' and shook it. The Doctor did the same to Fluttershy, who fearfully reached out and shook it as well. He spoke in an accent that would be comparable to Estuary English, if the Thames Estuary hadn't been evaporated.

"So, how did you get on board the TARDIS?" the Doctor asked, twiddling a few knobs and pushing a few buttons on the control panel.
"Basic Sub-Etha transfer, right, Fluttershy?"
Fluttershy was biting nervously at her hooves. "He's...an alien?"

"Oi!" the Doctor said. "I take offence to that, I prefer the phrase 'Non-Equestrian Being'."
"Sorry," Fluttershy said, quietly. "It's just that I'm really confused right now, and – "
"What's wrong with her?" Derpy asked.
"Oh, you know, just getting her space legs," replied Pinkie, as she noticed Fluttershy's knees about to wobble. "I think she's about to faint."
There was a soft thump as Fluttershy fell over. "Yes, yes she is."

The Doctor ran over to help her, taking the sonic screwdriver from behind Derpy's ear. He buzzed it over Fluttershy's body.
"Pulse normal. She'll be fine," he said, following up with, "Right, so let me get this straight, we were flying through space and time and you just happened to land here in the TARDIS"?

"That's what I'm saying," affirmed Pinkie Pie.
"But a Sub-Etha waveband shouldn't be able to reach into a hole in time and space, unless – " The Doctor mumbled, pressing a few more buttons on the TARDIS control panel and looking at the screen. " – unless you somehow opened a wormhole in the fabric of space and time. But the likelihood of that happening is – well, almost impossible."
"Almost," Pinkie Pie affirmed.

Rainbow Dash woke up feeling groggy. Her head was spinning. She remembered vaguely, she had the worst nightmare. The world ended, and everypony she knew was killed. Still, only a dream, right? She tried to stand up, and found herself suddenly standing on her hind legs. That's odd, she thought, as she ran a hoof through her mane.

And then she looked down at where her hoof was supposed to be. In place of it was a pale, fleshy thing with five appendages sticking out of it. She did what anyone else would do in this kind of situation – she screamed.
"What the hay is that?!" she cried, waving it about in disgust.

She suddenly became aware that her hind legs and what had been her flank were now covered in some kind of heavy, bluish fabric, and that she was wearing some kind of covering on what had once been her barrel and withers. She also became frighteningly aware she had two swellings on what had once been her barrel, just below her withers. As she studied the pale fleshy thing now attached to her front leg, she noticed that the ends of the appendages had miniature hooves, which were all a pale blue colour, much like her coat.

"What?! What?! What?! What?! WHAT?!" was all she could repeat. She looked at her back. To her absolute horror, her wings were gone. "No, no, no, this can't be good," she said. She collapsed back down onto what had once been her rump and noticed that, on what had once been her back hooves, and were now some other horrible fleshy appendage, she was wearing a pair of strange, hardened coverings, with rubber bottoms, and wings on the back.

She was relieved for a moment, until she became nauseatingly aware she could move the appendages inside the covering as well.
"Guys?!" she shouted. "Guys?! Help!"
There was no reply.

"Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh," she repeated, breathing deeply. "Okay. Right. Okay. So, this isn't normal. First, study my environment."
She looked at where she was, and was rather confused to find she was standing in a back-alleyway in Manehattan. She stood up, finding it surprisingly easy to walk on these strange new hind-legs, and exited the alleyway.

It was there that she saw it. It was horrible.
There were strange-looking creatures sitting all around, walking on their hind-legs, manipulating things with their strange front-leg-appendages. They had no coats, only manes on their heads. Their skin was fully visible. They were picking up things without the aid of magic, simply using their weird hoof-tentacles to wrap around things and pick things up. On the roads, rather than pulling carriages and wagons, their carriages and wagons were pulling them! And they made a low grumbling noise, like strange animals.

She looked at the sky. The clouds! They were moving! All by themselves! She tried to fly to correct the problem, but found that she couldn't. One of the strange wagons suddenly howled out, and one of the strange-looking creatures leaned out of it and yelled at another, then got back into his wagon and ran off.

"What is this place?" Rainbow Dash mumbled.
"Ah was just thinkin' the same thing," a familiar voice said. Rainbow Dash turned. Standing in a large hat, with a covering – Rarity would have called it plaid – over her barrel and a covering on her hind legs similar to her own, but much shorter, was Applejack. Applejack appeared to stand slightly taller than her, and her skin was a darker colour to hers.
"Oh boy, am I glad to see you!" Rainbow Dash said. "I don't like the feeling I'm getting from this place."

"Me neither," Applejack said. "It's all upside-down here. Ah tried walkin' on these legs," she said, nodding to what had been her front legs. "But mah hind legs were too long. They kept goin' all over the place. And then one of those...things, I think he was a guy, in a blue uniform came over and told me ah had to do 'expressive dance' in the park. Why, I coulda..." She rolled up her sleeve.

"So, we're stuck here?" Rainbow Dash said.
"Looks like it," replied Applejack. "Ah tell ya, ah had the weirdest dream, though – the whole world was endin'."
"No way, I had the same dream," Rainbow Dash exclaimed.
"Huh. Great minds think alike an' all that."
"So, what do we do now?" Rainbow Dash asked.
"Well, ah may be a weird brown thing now, but ah'm pretty sure ah still have a stomach," Applejack said. "Let's eat."

The Doctor was frantically trying to figure out where Pinkie Pie had come from.
"All right," he said. "So you're saying you, against all odds or logic, managed to tear a hole in the fabric of time and space itself for one second, and somehow ended up here?"
"Well, our other friends must have gone through, too, but ended up elsewhere," Pinkie Pie said.

"But, that's impossible, you can't have..." The Doctor said, before suddenly leaping up. He hit himself on the forehead with his hoof. "Of course!" he shouted. "Why didn't I think of that?!" He ran back over to the TARDIS screen and pressed a few buttons, causing symbols on it to rotate and change.

"Oh, how could I have been so stupid?" he said.
"What? What is it?" Pinkie Pie said, looking over at Fluttershy, who Derpy was tending to.
"That Sub-Etha, it's basic matter transference, right?"
"Right."
"Then, it seems that you've accidentally used the TARDIS as a kind of transmitter," he said. "You ended up here, and your friends have been broadcast throughout time and space. They could literally be anywhere, in any time period!"

"Oh my..." Fluttershy said, as Derpy handed her some water and a packet of jelly-babies to stop her fainting again.
"Then again, I have a time machine that can go anywhere, in any time period," The Doctor mused.
"I could try back-tracing the negative energetic residue they left as they were thrown out of the TARDIS."

"Do that," Pinkie Pie said.
"On it," the Doctor replied, pressing buttons.
Suddenly, the TARDIS began to jolt.
"Whoa!" he shouted. "That's not supposed to happen."

This was the last thing Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy heard before a massive explosion rocked the cabin.

Once again, there was nothing.

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Chapter IV

There was a clap of thunder, and a roar of bitter wind. The water hit the ground like bullets fired by a crazed gunman with one eye. The water collected up into massive puddles that bounced and rippled to the point they were bubbling and foaming with the filth of the ground they had picked up. The ground squelched and glollumped as if it were somehow alive.

The filth from the puddle ran down a grassy ascent to meet with all the other filth at the bottom. "Grassy", of course, is a loose term – it was more like a scrubby, weedy sort of an ascent. The rain trickled audibly and became an even more audible miniature river, which ran nowhere in particular. In fact, it was more of a lake than a river.

In all, it was thoroughly miserable.
Standing atop the scrubby hill stood Fluttershy, who had suddenly found herself flung from the TARDIS in which she had been laying, and she was now hoof-deep in a puddle of mud.
"P-Pinkie?" she called. "Are- are you there?"

There was no reply.
Fluttershy pulled her hoof from the mud and started to walk. Bipeds may not have understood, but for a quadruped, this was extremely difficult. Fluttershy found her joints aching after just a few steps.

"Pinkie?!" she called. "Where are you?"
Still no reply.
The rain came down in torrents, the ground hissing as if to assure Fluttershy she was not welcome. Fluttershy once again began walking.

"Pinkie Pie?!"
The ground continued to bubble and churn away, and there was still no response. Fluttershy became frustrated. She didn't tend to get angry, not unless someone did something really bad to her friends, but she could get a mite upset.

This was not one of those times. She tried one more time.
"Pinkie Pie?" she said, feebly.
"What?" a mopey, yet high-pitched voice said. Fluttershy peered down the hill. Standing, or rather, sitting, in the ditch at the bottom of the hill, was Pinkie Pie.

"Oh, Pinkie Pie! Thank goodness you're all right!"
"All right?" she said, with a voice so miserable even Sylvia Plath would have felt cheerier after having met her, "What's the point? I'm so pathetic. I hate everything. I just want to sit in this ditch and die."

Fluttershy was rather concerned. She noticed that Pinkie Pie's coat seemed to lack its usual vibrant colours, and her mane was flat, a mane that would calm a hairdresser down after he woke up at 3AM screaming. It, too, lacked colour. Fluttershy also noticed that the saddlebag on Pinkie Pie's back was gone.
"Where's your saddlebag?"
"I don't know," Pinkie Pie droned. "Somewhere, I guess. What do I care? Oh Celestia I'm so depressed."
"But what about the Guide?"

"Guide? Who cares about the Guide? Everything in the Galaxy is horrible. Why should I want a guide to show me around all the really horrible parts, just to make me miserable?"
"Well, shouldn't we get out of this rain?" Fluttershy asked, noticing the rain was still coming down in torrents.

"No, I'm hoping to get trench-hoof and die of septicaemia," Pinkie Pie said, succinctly, and sat quietly in the mud.
Fluttershy realised there was nothing for it but to begin pushing her friend out of the mud so they could actually get somewhere.
"Hey, stop that," Pinkie Pie groaned. "I said stop it. Hey!" Fluttershy found herself strangely empowered by this exercise and kept at it.

This was, in fact, the first time Fluttershy had experienced schadenfreude. As the Element of Kindness, and the representative of all things despicably nice, it was refreshing to her to get off on this. She managed to unstick Pinkie from the mud, and kept pushing her up the hill, all the way Pinkie Pie digging her hooves in to the sodden soil, attempting to resist.

Fluttershy continued like this along the side of the hill for several miles, and found her back hamstrings were starting to ache. However, after stopping for one moment, Pinkie Pie leapt back up and attempted to drown herself in the ditch, which led Fluttershy to have to hold her tail in her teeth as she pushed her along.

It was, of course, of much relief to her, then, when she saw the sea, and a little old shack sitting on a patch of scrubby land. She pushed on with her suicidal accomplice, and proceeded to knock politely at the door.
The door opened slightly.

"Hello?" a voice said. An eye appeared in the crack of the door, and looked down at Fluttershy. "Oh, er...hello." It sounded kindly and innocent, like a lovely old man, with fond memories of when you could buy ten liquorice torpedoes for a penny at the newsagents'.
"Um, hey there," Fluttershy said, shyly. "Um...I don't want to be, um, much of an, er, bother, but, could we, um, stay in your shack to dry off for a while? It's just my friend, she needs a bit of a lay down, and – "
"How can I be certain you're not just a figment of my imagination?" the voice cut in.
"Well, um – "
"I don't know. Let me think about it." the door closed.

A grand total of ninety minutes and forty-seven seconds later, the door opened up a little bit again.
"All right, then. But only because The Lord said so. Or did he? Do cats talk? I'm not sure. Do horses? You're a horse, right? What's a horse? I don't think I've ever seen one..."

The man, a tall, lovely old man with straw-coloured hair, continued rambling to himself as Fluttershy trotted inside,with Pinkie Pie, who was now merely festering in her own self-hatred, her tail still half-in Fluttershy's mouth. She struggled to drag Pinkie on to a conveniently-placed sofa. He was quite a strange-looking creature to Fluttershy, tall, with a kind of pink colour, and strange appendages at the ends of his front legs, which he didn't walk on. Nevertheless, he seemed nice enough.

"I'm Fluttershy," Fluttershy said, attempting to make polite conversation as she tried to find some way of securing Pinkie down.
"Fluttershy?" the old man said, in a grandfatherly tone. "That's a lovely name. Do you want to know my name? I think I have one...no, wait...I don't. But I have a title, do you want to hear that?"

"That would be really nice," Fluttershy replied, cheerfully, in sharp contrast to Pinkie Pie's loathing of everything, and her mumbling of "Shut up" every time a nice, happy thought crossed her mind.
"Well," said the old man, with a glint in his eye, "They say I'm..." he stifled a giggle, the giggle of a schoolboy. "...the Ruler of the Universe."

Fluttershy dropped the strap in her mouth.
Some say there was an audible thump as her jaw hit the floor.

Applejack and Rainbow Dash were growing accustomed to these weird, wonderful things, which a passerby had informed them were called "hands", while giving them a rather funny look, before walking off mumbling something about "freaking cosplayers". Nevertheless, they had made a point of testing all the things these things could do, like touch, grip, and adapt.

They had a field day with a can of some kind of sticky, coloured substance on a wall, until someone in a blue uniform came up and told them that they weren't allowed to do that, "no matter what freaky show they were into". Before they could ask him what he was talking about, he had written them out a warning. They had then stolen his pen and found it fascinating how it, a) wasn't a feather, and b) dispensed ink and c) could be manipulated by "hand", after which he, too, had walked away mumbling things about "freaking cosplayers".

After that, they had decided to go for a stroll. There was a minor incident in which Applejack spotted a big, black pony being made to draw a carriage, and had promptly proceeded to punch the carriage driver in the face with her new-found hand, before "freeing" the stricken pony, who had then lazily proceeded to defecate on the ground and nibble on some grass. By some miracle, the blue-uniformed guys had let them off a second time.

Right now, they were sitting in a café, yet again getting some very odd looks. But then again, Rainbow Dash had decided to "experiment" with the new-found appendages she had discovered at the ends of her back legs, which she was informed were called "feet". After prising the covering off of them, with some difficulty (after the hard, rubbery covering, there was a thin one, which came off with a quick pull, she had taken to first studying them in immaculate detail, noting that they resembled hands very much, except the appendages at the end of them were shorter. She duly noted that the so-called "feet" also possessed miniature "hooves" at the end of each appendage, also coloured a bright sky-blue. After spending the best part of twenty minutes staring at them in fascination, she had then taken to attempting to eat her lunch with them, and was eventually told to stop that by a woman who had covered her young colt's eyes the second she used her "foot" to pick up the cutlery.

The food they had here was very curious, and looked deeply unpleasant. They had these brown things called "burgers", and these other brown things called "sausages". Both Applejack and Rainbow Dash, though Applejack especially, had immediately regretted asking what both of them were made out of. The same went for lamb doner kebab, although the last straw was "chicken nuggets", which sounded utterly repulsive. In the end, they had both settled for some vegetables on a plate, which was apparently called a "salad" here.

Rainbow Dash, still barefoot, though now cross-legged on her seat, and using her front legs to manipulate the cutlery, was finally eating her lettuce in a polite and respectable manner, although she was smearing her face with a rather large amount of salad dressing, something she had taken a liking to. Applejack, in the meantime, was attempting to avoid looking like she was with her. Even now as a weird, brownish, two-legged thing, she still seemed to have an intrinsic understanding that she and Rainbow Dash were very weird. Perhaps it was the glares she seemed to keep getting, or the people who kept moving away from them, but it seemed to her, and them, that there was something just a little bit off about her being there. Aside from being a weird, brownish, two-legged thing.

Applejack quietly mulled over her "salad", as Rainbow Dash greedily tucked into it.
It was at this moment that something very unlikely and deeply improbable decided to happen, in the café, for whatever reason. It took everyone rather by surprise, and a few moments to understand exactly what in the name of a brain that isn't screaming about how people who eat Wensleydale cheese worship Satan was going on.

The something was this:
An empty space sat undisturbed for the duration of Rainbow Dash and Applejack's meal. There were no tables or chairs occupying it, and it was a few metres, maybe three or four, away. There was no litter or anything in the area. Just a grim, sickly red-orange lino, the kind of colour associated with the vomit of a baby that has just been introduced to mushy carrots.

And then, from within the space, there came a bizarre noise, somewhat like someone scraping a piano wire up and down, up and down, over and over. Everyone in the cafés' head turned towards the sound, and a small draft picked up, scattering one or two menus and those little colouring things children are given to keep them quiet. In the spot, there appeared a large box, about two feet by two feet on the bottom and about eight feet tall. It was blue, and resembled a wardrobe of some description.

Everyone stared at it in awe. Nobody was quite certain what the hell it was supposed to be. It had a sign under its pyramid-shaped roof and also one on what appeared to be the front door. Their eyes googled and goggled and bulged and did various other things that would satisfy an etymologist's need for words if he couldn't afford to go to Squornshellous Zeta. Incidentally, there was one sitting at the back of the café, furiously scribbling various words for surprised eye movements in a notebook.

The wardrobe sat silent for a moment.
Faint sounds were audible from inside. There was a click at the door. Everyone froze up instantly, in eager, terrified anticipation. Applejack and Rainbow Dash, who, curiously enough, was still devouring all the red onion she could find, eyed the box, unsure of what was about to happen next.

What happened next was, the door opened.
Smoke came billowing out, filling the room with very noxious-smelling fumes, somewhat like a mix between car exhaust, geraniums, and death. There came a sound of loud coughing from inside – everyone else was too petrified to cough – and a man with brown hair and brown eyes, dressed in a long brown coat, his hair in a strange, messy quiff, staggered out, still wheezing. He looked up, and around the café.

"Oh, hello – " he said, before pulling a nauseated expression. "New teeth, that's weird..."
He looked down at his hands. "Ah, right. Okay. This isn't right."
A young lady with light blonde hair, wearing a uniform resembling that of the U.S. Postal Service, except with a grey shirt, and a black skirt, stumbled through the door, wheezing as if her lungs had decided this was really not the kind of place to be right now and they'd rather be oxygenating something that wasn't inhaling poisonous fumes.

The man turned to her, and suddenly grabbed her by the shoulders.
"Right, I know I look very strange. Ignore that for the moment. On the count of three, I want you to look at your front legs. On no account should you scream or begin panicking. Understand?"
The girl nodded, confused.

"One...two...three."
She looked down at her front hooves, made a noise somewhere between snoring and coughing, nodded, and proceeded to sit down on a chair and go very pale.
The man glanced at her for a minute, and then looked around the café.

"Ah, hello!" he said. "This is a lovely little restaurant you've got here, isn't it? Everyone enjoying their meals? Eh?"
There was no reply.
The man grinned awkwardly. "Um, I suppose you're all wondering why a big blue box just suddenly appeared out of nowhere in here, right?"

Again, everyone sat completely still.
"Right, well...it's a long, boring story. Not worth going into now. No, definitely not."
The girl continued staring at her arms in a way uncannily like a Beedlebraxian Mega Hippie, whose favourite pastimes usually consist on the philosophy of hands and how they can, "like, touch anything, man."

Eventually, Applejack stood up and confronted the man.
"Who the hay are you?" she asked.
"I'm a doctor," the man replied. He paused. "Don't I recognise you from somewhere?"
"I dunno, what's it to you?" Applejack replied.

"What's your name?" the Doctor asked. "Might jog my memory, I have over 900 years of memories, so I might have forgotten, you see..."
"Name's Applejack," Applejack said, thrusting out her arm to give a manly handshake.
"Applejack?" the Doctor said. "I'm sure I've heard that name before..."

Rainbow Dash, who until this point had been quietly listening in on the conversation while gingerly chewing on some lettuce, stood up as well. The so-called 'doctor' noticed for the first time that her hair resembled a rainbow.
"Um...is that your natural hair colour?" he asked.

Rainbow Dash ignored the comment. "What are you doing here?" she asked.
"Well, there was an explosion," answered the girl. "And then we were here and...my hooves turned into..."
"Well, this sure is a pickle," Applejack mumbled. "What do we do now?"

At which point Rainbow Dash noticed for the first time that she recognised the girl in the seat.
"Derpy?!" she said. "What are you – how are you – but I..."
The girl shrugged. "I'm just as confused as you are, Rainbow Dash."

"Perhaps it would be better to hold this conversation inside the TARDIS," the 'doctor' mumbled, realising that the whole café was going to need to stop being petrified and actually breathe at some point. The others agreed that this was a wise decision and went back into the large blue box.

An unrelated but interesting side note is that the café had the highest number of visitors fall unconscious immediately afterwards than it had in recent history. It eventually renamed itself from the rather redundant name "The Café" to "The Fainting Café" and made a killing selling to people with low blood pressure, until it eventually went bust two years later after a freak accident involving a pickled onion and a pencil sharpener, having renamed itself afterwards as "The Deadly Café". As readers of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy would know, this sort of thing is actually going on all the time.

One of the most curious and fascinating things about the Universe is its wild propensity for mockery towards those that inhabit it. This is roughly the same as if you were to make life hell for one of your liver cells, but then again the Universe must of course get very bored, being infinitely huge.

However, when it is not making life a misery for unfortunates who inhabit it, it is instead zipping people to places, whether they want to or not. Usually, this is because it "accidentally" opens a wormhole in itself and transports people far away from home for about two days, before dumping them back where they came from after the allotted time, just to see the confused reaction this generates.

Occasionally, though, the Universe is a good sport and rewards people because it is in a good mood. It was for this exact reason that it had ejected the equine-descendant Rarity and her close friend Spike into the Crystal Caves of Polaris V. Here is an extract from The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy describing them:
The Crystal Caves of Polaris V are one of the most spectacular and breath-taking views in the entire Galaxy. They are, in fact, referred to as one of the Seven Wonders of the Galaxy, alongside Bethselamin, Barnard's Star, whatever the hell a Hrung was before it collapsed and killed everyone on Betelgeuse Seven, Dentrassi cookery, and the last three actually being one object: headphones capable of blocking out the poetry of both Vogons and the Azgoths of Kria, alongside Disaster Area's music if you happen to be an unhoopy oldie who doesn't dig that kind of thing, know what I'm saying?

In any case, Polaris V itself isn't really that special at all. It is more like a grey, lifeless rock than anything else, and the surface is in fact very depressing, even more so after a long-term stay in the Caves. The Caves, on the other hand, are absolutely, stunningly, legitimately, beautiful. Even the most cynical, misanthropic, world-weary, angst-filled hitchhiker will collapse to his knees and cry at the majesty and beauty of the caves.

The walls are made of purest blue diamond and sapphire that twinkles from every angle, sending rainbows decorating all the other crystals, turning the air into a flurry of sparkling rainbows and beauty. Embedded in the walls and the floors are the purest and most beautiful jewels known to life-kind – rubies, sapphires, emeralds, amethysts, topaz, and, if one is lucky, pure Pxyxzywyx (Pook-zik-zee-wikz), which is a colour that is unimaginable until you see it. It is gorgeous.

The Caves are beautiful, but they have a dark side, which is this: Most people that visit them are so struck by their immense beauty that when they leave and see Polaris V's grey surface, they develop what the Galactic Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders calls "Sudden-onset gem-attachment major depressive disorder", a rather nasty mental disorder that results usually in either extreme depression to the point of insanity until the person is returned to the Caves, at which point they remain permanently insane, usually crawling off into a corner somewhere in a foetal position, usually gibbering about what their favourite kind of gem is; extreme depression to the point of instantaneous suicide, usually by means of the heart or brain saying, "Ah, screw it, I can't do this shit any more" and suffering either instantaneous cardiac arrest or stroke respectively; or the person will leave saying, "Hm, that was nice", and have a few boring pictures to show their friends when they get home. More often than not, however, it's the second option.

Rarity and Spike the Dragon had found themselves deep within one of these gorgeous caverns. At first, they'd had trouble getting to grips with where they were. Now, knowingly or not, the Universe had actually chosen to dump them in the one place where they were most at home. We join them now, in the full insane grip of what they have discovered.

Rarity broke down in tears when she saw the walls.
"No words!" she sobbed, joyfully. "No words to describe it! Poetry! They should have sent a poet! So beautiful! I had no idea!"
Spike, on the other hand, had taken to releasing what may have been the biggest amount of saliva since the Glorbaxian Slobberers of Embractus. He had then taken to gnawing on a nearby stalagmite, precious stones being his absolute favourite food.

In fact, for the past two days, they had been having a field day, collecting as many gems as they could carry and eating them all the while. Even chipped-off bits of the walls were nice enough to keep. They didn't even particularly care about getting lost down here, and Rarity certainly didn't mind the fact that she hadn't eaten since just before...

Then it hit her.
"Um, Spike," she said, as Spike chewed effortlessly on a 24-carat diamond as if it were a bit of tender meat, "Don't you wonder what happened to the others?"
"Whuzzat?" Spike said, his mouth too full with the succulent, extremely hard carbon allotrope to notice.

"Well, it's just, you know. Twilight and the others. Don't you wonder where they went? First we were standing in the palace courtyard, and then, poof, we were here. Don't you think they might be lost somewhere?"
"I dunno, maybe," Spike shrugged. "I'm sure they're all fine." He looked at the emerald in his hand, and offered some to Rarity, out of politeness. "Want some?"

"Um, no thanks...you don't think any sort of alfalfa grows down here, do you?"
"If there was, we could easily just sit here and live offa the fatta the land," Spike mumbled.
"Yes, Spike, we could. But do you see any alfalfa? Because I don't."
There was an uncomfortable pause.

"Spike?"
"Yes?"
"I think I'm going to die down here."
"Oh."
There was another pause.

"I'm glad we had this conversation," Rarity uttered.
"Me too," Spike replied. The naïve young dragon didn't exactly show it, but he was most certainly in puppy love with Rarity, something that often went unrequited, and, for the sake of this story, will continue to do so.
"So, uh, where should I bury you?" Spike said. "You know, when you go?"

"Oh, I don't know, somewhere nice," Rarity mumbled. "Over there, somewhere," she said, pointing to a patch of ground that really wasn't all that different from the others.
"Okay, then," Spike said. "I will."
They sat back next to each other.

There was yet another pause.
"You know I love you, right, Rarity?"
"Yes, Spike."
"Like, love, love you."
"Yes, Spike."

"All right."
This time, there was a final pause. The pauses seemed to be getting rather annoyed by their overuse by the two characters in the tunnel, and decided to conspire with the writer of the story to make something exciting happen to stop it. So he obliged.

At that very moment, a gleeful little song was audible, echoing somewhere in the cave. It was a rather joyful little tune, though repetitive, and it went something like, "One thousand, four-hundred and sixty-two pieces of emerald in the wall, one thousand, four hundred and sixty two pieces of emerald, If I were to find one, and I were to mine one, then there'd only be one thousand, four-hundred and sixty-one pieces of emerald in the wall, one thousand, four-hundred and sixty one..." and so on in that fashion.

The two tilted their heads to where the sound was coming from. The Caves' acoustic qualities meant they could hear it from all directions, but narrowed it down to coming from their right. They watched an opening in the wall to see who the singer was. Perhaps they might be able to help.

She skipped into the room happily and plopped down on the floor. She had a saddlebag on her back.
"Oh, hi, guys!" Pinkie Pie said.
Some say there was an audible thump as their jaws hit the floor.

Google Docs link

Chapter V

With a loud splutter, the TARDIS materialised first upside down, then on its side, then curved four-dimensionally through eight-dimensional non-Euclidean space, then finally came into appropriate being on the ground. Its usual whirring vworp vworp sounded rather more like a rather like a constipated donkey that had just been speared through the larynx.

It had started off so well. Or reasonably well, anyway. They'd been through the whole, "It's bigger on the inside" routine, then the whole "witty banter while pressing buttons" routine, and then the whole "oh let's see where we'll go next" routine, except it then came to Applejack, the Doctor, Rainbow Dash and Derpy Hooves' attention that they had to sit down and discuss exactly why they were each now a form of mammal common to a planet that existed light years away from the former planet Equestria.

After sitting down and talking about it for five, maybe six minutes, they then decided it was rather not worth talking about, not least because Rainbow Dash insisted she was really rather beginning to enjoy ankles that didn't end halfway up her back legs. Even if she couldn't fly, she had come to the reasoning that running was better than nothing. She had, therefore, requested to be taken to a big field where she could do a lot of running.

The TARDIS had decided not to oblige. Either it was still hiccupy from having had to take in and burp back up two hitchhikers, or it was suddenly running a no-shirt-no-shoes-no-service policy (and Rainbow Dash was distinctly shoeless), but for some reason it had decided a nice big field wasn't the place it had wanted to go and had instead taken a detour that, incidentally, landed it just ten minutes' walk away from the old café.

The four emerged from the box, rather confused and slightly disturbed about having been phased four-dimensionally through space that they were rather unaccustomed to inhabiting, and glanced around in a daze.

They were in a big hall.
Right, that was the first detail.
It was a big hall and there were lots of little stalls everywhere.
That was the second detail.
It was a big hall, there were lots of little stalls everywhere, and there seemed to be a lot of people in strange clothing around.
And that was the third detail.

A man in a shirt reading, "THIS SHIRT JUST GOT 20 PER CENT COOLER" in rainbow-coloured lettering asked the four for a photograph, and the four awkwardly and confusedly bundled in for a picture. Then he thanked them and walked away. The four watched him walk away, eyebrows slightly furrowed or raised, depending. There was a long pause.

"Where the hay are we?" asked Applejack, finally.
"I have no...idea..." the Doctor uttered, taking out his screwdriver and changing a few settings on it. When this didn't work, he decided to go with the old-fashioned discipline of just talking to people, and walked up to a man in a tweed jacket and a bow-tie.

"Um, hello," he said.
"Oh, hey, nice costume," the man replied. "You look just like the real thing!"
The Doctor was rather taken aback, but shook off the remark. "Um, thank you. Could you be so kind as to tell us where we are?"

"Oh, this? This is the - " was all the man got out before a rather large woman jumped on him and gave him a heavy embrace. The man stood up. "Sorry, got to go. You know glompers, right?"
The Doctor shook his head, the man shrugged, dusted himself off, helped the woman up and then continued on his merry way.

"What the heck just happened?" Derpy finally said, after a long period of silence. She said this not only because something surreal had just taken place, but also because her golden lazy eyes had been having trouble focusing on the ordeal. There was a lot of chatter in the air, from people talking to other people, some in costumes, some not. It was all very surreal.

Then Rainbow Dash suddenly turned, and began to walk very, very slowly across the room towards something she had seen.
Nobody quite understood what she was looking at at first. But then they saw it. It was very, very bizarre. A stall, of course. She was looking at it with a mix of utter horror and confusion.

The stall was lined with boxes. A young girl of maybe twenty or so years sat there with a smile on her face, the kind of cheerful smile associated with that one, jolly, constantly-happy person who wouldn't cry unless something truly terrible happened. You know the one. The one that cynics tend to mock for being so cheerful all the time despite the fact two in three people will die of a genetically-inherited disease. That kind of person.

But that wasn't what Rainbow Dash was staring so intently at.

There was a sign attached to the stall.
It said, in bright pink, friendly letters, the words, "My Little Pony", the word "My" inhabiting a small love-heart, the words "Little Pony" adorned by a pink-and-purple rainbow. Underneath this was a shape somewhat like a halved, deformed apple. Inside was some white, perhaps less friendly, though still amicable text, that spelled the words, "Friendship is Magic".

But that wasn't what Rainbow Dash was staring so intently at, either.
What Rainbow Dash was staring so intently at was an object, just in front of the girl. It was small. It was blue. It had a multi-coloured mane. Its lips appeared puckered, its eyes cartoonish and pronounced. The back portion of the object had a lightning-bolt adorning it.

It was a model of herself.
She finally arrived at the stall. The young woman smiled. "Oh wow, I love your costume!" she muttered. "The wig looks so real – no, wait...is that a dye job?"
Rainbow Dash blinked. She picked up the small figurine. "Uh, what is this?" she asked.

"Well, it's a My Little Pony toy," the girl said, her smile unfaltering. "I was pretty sure that you'd know that."
"What the hay is My Little Pony?"
"Well, surely you've heard of it? You're dressed as Rainbow Dash, for Pete's sake."
"Dressed as – " Rainbow Dash gurgled. She studied a few cut-outs around the edge of the stall. Sure enough, there were several two-dimensional, colourful images of her friends in a variety of poses.

"Okay, this is weird."
"You sound just like Ashleigh Bell, do you know that?" the girl asked, cheerfully.
There was no answer, however. By this point, Rainbow Dash had fallen to the floor, gibbering to herself.

As we learned about three chapters, or thirteen-thousand seven-hundred and seventeen words ago, Equestria has now been completely and thoroughly destroyed by a terrible and stupid triumph by the laws of physics over those silly enough to try and control the slippery things. Reduced to mere molecules, the planet, and every unfortunate soul still left standing on it when it suddenly collapsed, is now completely and thoroughly dead, because the chronicler is a completely heartless bastard.

The planet's remains had split off into various vapours. The iron-rich core ripped itself to shreds and sent spears of searing, semi-solid iron through the surface. It is best left to the imagination as to what happened to people in cities when this happened. The crust simply tore itself up like old lino, with the atmosphere dissipating away into deep space and the crust itself turning to dust.

The water on Equestria's surface was mostly vaporised by the intense heat generated in the planet's final moments. Nobody was actually able to see it, but for a brief moment Equestria resembled a star before its light was instantly silenced. A few million light years away and a few million years into the future, a young astronomer on a distant planet would in fact see this anomaly and write a very good thesis on it that earned him the most prestigious science award on his planet, on the same night he got run over by a piece of heavy, lumbering transport, dying in excruciating agony. But that's not relevant, so let's move on.

The difficult part to talk about is, of course, what happened to life on the planet. Well, to put it lightly, those who were not burned alive or crushed to death were vaporised into their component atoms. They instantly became shapeless whiffs of various compounds, water, carbon dioxide, and the like, with some self-regenerating organic molecules thrown in for good measure. They collected into large, dark-looking clouds, a kind of morbid space-graveyard.

Floating in the midst of this was something rather strange. It was the only material object for several million miles. It glinted in the light of Equestria's star, now finally beginning to move and have things orbiting it of its own power. It span in an almost ballet-like manner, floating in the empty silence of space.

It was a pair of sunglasses.
They had a sort of bluish-purple tint, though they were cracked and scratched from what they had been through, debris they'd crashed into. The legs of the glasses opened and closed silently in space. The plastic around the rims was worn and tired-looking, and the glasses seemed to look rather forlorn without their owner. Quietly, they made their sad, silent journey through space.

"...and that's pretty much why I'm here!" Pinkie Pie explained, trotting gleefully down a cave without a sense of direction or purpose, a starving Rarity and a rather disjointed Spike in tow. Pinkie Pie's explanation was a long and rambling one that contained more tangents than a Dane Cook joke performed on cocaine, but really, the explanation was this:

She had no idea how she was there, but seemed to think that was a sufficient reason in itself for her being there. She explained how she had suddenly appeared on the ceiling and it had taken her two hours to realise gravity still existed. Then she started telling some stories about frogs, which was a bit weird, before returning to the topic of why exactly she had chosen to appear right there on the spot. And again, she had no idea.

Rarity lost interest at some point during some anecdote about frog mating rituals and their relation to toast and how burnt it comes out of the toaster, and started looking at Pinkie Pie's saddlebag as if it were a large cut of beef, like in the old cartoons. Except here this should be terrifying, because as we all know, equine creatures are by nature vegetarian. Rarity was famished.

"So, uh, Pinkie Pie...where are we going?" Spike managed to force out during a long story about this one time she saw someone lick some icing off a cake in the bakery and she let them keep the cupcake but not without paying twice the amount for it and then went on to explain why this was a good business venture in excruciatingly lengthy detail.

"Oh, well, you see, there should be an extra-large cavern somewhere around here where I think they have food."
"Food?" Rarity's head snapped up. "Did somepony say food?"
"Ooh, ooh, and water, too!"

"Wait, what do you mean by 'they'?" Spike asked, recalling a book he read about an alien invasion of Equestria he read in the library once late at night even though Twilight told him not to.

Twilight...

He shook his head of the thought as the three turned various corners. These caverns were starting to feel weird now. Not nice like they had been. Not delicious. Almost menacing. Sparkling light kept disappearing from corners as they went deeper, translucent crystals dimming and obscuring each other. It was then he realised that these caverns did not have to be beautiful for him. The Universe did not have to conform to what he wanted.

Pinkie Pie still gleefully hopped along, the joints in her legs making a quaint dwee sound only someone from every single dimension at once could pull off. She seemed blissfully unaware that anything could possibly be wrong. Suddenly, something crossed Rarity's mind.

"Um, Pinkie Pie, dear, what exactly happened to get us here? I seem to recall you running out into the courtyard and everything suddenly going black."
"Oh yeah, Equestria blew up!" Pinkie Pie said, without losing a hint of cheer or happiness.
Rarity and Spike stopped and looked at each other, then said, in unison, "What."
"Yep, everything burst into flames and the whole planet shattered into a million teeny-weeny little pieces."

Pinkie Pie had an unnervingly cheerful tone to her voice. Her smile never left her face.
"You mean...Equestria...just...blew up...?" Spike asked, trying desperately to force out his astonishment. "The...whole planet? Boom? Gone?"
"Yep! So we're now several million miles away from home on Polaris V. But don't worry, Fluttershy is okay. Oh, and Derpy!"
"But what about Sweetie Belle, and Opalescence?" Rarity asked.

"Don't be silly, they blew up too," Pinkie Pie said, with the kind of heartless recklessness that would make someone in their right mind punch her across the nose. Rarity was not in the right state of mind, and resolved to whimpering. "Yep," Pinkie Pie continued, cheerfully. "Everyone is dead. Everyone. Apart from Fluttershy and Derpy."

Spike felt a mix of anger and concern. Anger because he couldn't fathom why Pinkie Pie would be so cruel to Rarity and show absolutely no signs of grief to the fact all her friends and family were dead. And concern for not only Rarity's mental health now that she'd learned this, but also Pinkie Pie. Pinkie Pie was random and silly, sure, but she knew when there was a right time to be happy. This was not it. She seemed...different. Almost...uncanny.

"This way!" Pinkie Pie said, happily, uncaringly.
Spike was left speechless. He was disgusted. How anyone could be so vile and completely apathetic to the deaths of millions of people was simply infuriating. Even as a dragon, he knew morals when he saw them, and by Celestia was she being disrespectful. He stalked after her, with a claw placed lightly on Rarity's neck as she sobbed quietly.

Finally, Pinkie Pie leapt down a hole. It was strange, actually, as no other place in the cave suddenly dropped like that. In the left-hand side of one of the caverns was a hole carved in between the floor and the left wall, and seemed to drop with a sudden slope. Spike and Rarity followed. Now this was bizarre. It was actually dark down here. There was light in the caves, but here, it was actually dark. Had they gone deep enough that even light could not penetrate? The answer was, no, they'd reached the base rock from which the crystal caves rose out.

Still, Rarity and Spike felt apprehension as the cheery pink pony faded into the black of the cave. Spike feared that he was going mad. He could hear...voices.
So I hear that Equestria's gone.
Bummer, man, you think she's heard yet?
No, but nobody wants to say because...

Then, suddenly, he felt the ground shake and his body flying. He twisted through the air as a loud sound suddenly erupted throughout the room. The sound was this:
"HELLOOOOO POLARIS V! ARE YOU READY?!"

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of Hyper-Spatial Dubstep: Wear protection. Dubstep, a musical genre originating in the B!!!!!!!! (where '!' is a loud, guttural 'WUBWUBWUB' sound repeated over and over again) race of Paxaflonaxis, originates in a form of communication and singing utilised by B!!!!!!!!ans for many centuries. Thought to be by many the absolute pinnacle of their culture, when the scientists of Paxaflonaxis invented the time-probe, they decided to beam some of their music across all of space and time.

The effect of this was of course that the distinctive sound of dubstep was implanted into the racial memories of literally billions of species throughout space and time. As such, the genre, which usually utilises head-bobbing beats and ear-shatteringly loud electronic bass instruments, is now thought to be a universal form of communication between all sentient races. It's no coincidence that the phrase "drop the bass", usually said in a deep voice, for whatever reason, is recognisable to over 1000 civilisations in the Milky Way Galaxy alone.

Hyper-Spatial Dubstep, however, takes this a bit further. While regular dubstep permeates all three dimensions with its heavy sound, Hyper-Spatial Dubstep, invented by a young fellow named Xell from a distant planet known affectionately as Irks, actually breaks the barrier between the third and fourth dimensions, permeating that dimension as well. This, of course, renders the musical both inaudible and audible at the same time, with the effect that to protect itself, the brain, in most carbon-based life, releases ridiculous amounts of endorphins and dopamine, in order to stop itself going completely bonkers (though it usually does anyway, for giggles). As such, listening to such music is an extremely enjoyable experience, especially when played at high volumes.

It's thought that once the scientists of Paxaflonaxis learn of this, they will demand compensation for trillions of years of copyright infringement, and at the time of writing, ships are currently in talks to be mobilised back in time so as to destroy everyone on Paxaflonaxis just moments after they send their message out in the first place.

When Spike regained consciousness, all he could hear was what only be described as a piece of heavy machinery experiencing a bowel movement while simultaneously experiencing childbirth. Loud, metallic screeches were underlaid with grunting, guttural, vibrating noises. Yet, for some reason, he felt quite happy. Care-free, in fact. As if the fact his home was now gone and the fact Twilight was probably dead didn't even matter.

He could hear Rarity giggling to herself, and he couldn't help but join in. This is fun, he thought, as he stared up at the ceiling, then rolled over to the stage to see DJ Pon-3 on stage. Yes, this was lovely, just laying here and WHAT.

His eyes suddenly snapped onto the stage again. A pony, a white pony, with a quaver note on her flank, stood surrounded with electronic devices and speakers, furiously spinning records and pushing buttons and changing dials, all while smiling manically. This was not of the ordinary for her. What was, of course, out of the ordinary for her was the fact she was several million miles from home – or where home had once been.

His eyes fell to Pinkie Pie. She was standing with a tape recorder, obviously bootlegging the performance.
"Pinkie Pie," Spike managed to force out. "Why is DJ Pon-3 several million miles away from home with us?"
"Beats me," Pinkie Pie shrugged, then shushing him as she continued to record the performance.
Spike collapsed into a heap. He didn't even care why DJ Pon-3 was there. Probably some convoluted plot device in the book of his life that made no sense because whoever was chronicling it ran out of ideas.

How right he was.

Google Docs link

Chapter VI

Rainbow Dash, after a while, had stopped gibbering and had decided it was best to curl up into a foetal position and pass out. She wasn't quite sure how long she'd been out, but she could hear things.
"Smfshnlrfmnsl so yer sayin' smghysfurltchri..."

Her mind decided to claw out of the prison that her own body had placed upon her for the time being as the sounds continued to echo through her body's ear sockets into her mind.
"Smrhfhflal Faust aajabfbshsbsbhsys Wootton shrmrlrhsfssjgbwbshsxuwh..."
Her mind tried to get a better listen in. It was like being in a swimming pool, underwater. Everything was echoey and muffled in her head. She wasn't sure whether that was implying she was big-headed or empty-headed, but either way she found that her body was being quite insulting.

"Bafsrsmgspmemly buy one of these goosnargh amsnrsnsygb schshennntfjcb..."
"Mfwdmsjchsnshcunwb five dollars fmsjshnxhxunw..."
"Pleasure doin' business with ya. Guess not all freaky-deaky aliens like you wanna do experiments on farmers like me like my Pa always used to say."
"Um...thanks?"

Rainbow Dash sat up. The Doctor dabbed her forehead lightly with a cold, wet cloth.
"How are you?" he asked. The girl leant over the desk.
"She okay?"
"She okay," the Doctor responded, playfully, as Dash got up. Then she stood straight up.

"You!" she pointed to the girl. "What's going on here?"
"Calm it, Dash, she explained everythin' to me," Applejack interrupted, the still agitated Dash shaking.
"We'd best be getting back to the TARDIS," the Doctor suggested. Dash looked over to Derpy. She nodded.

"So you're saying that, on this planet, Equestria is like some kind of...book, or something? About ponies? And that there are stallions that like to watch this show?"
"Well, the girl was very nice," Applejack replied, in her southern drawl. "She said that here they have this thing called a 'teller-fisher', or somethin' like that, that can send pictures over miles and miles – further and faster than you can travel in a day."

"Whoa," Dash said, rubbing her head. She'd bashed it on the way down. It hurt.
"Basically, for some reason, on this planet, and on this tellerfisher thing, there's this...show, like a play, kinda, that has ponies, like us, as the characters, and, well, it's actually made for little fillies, but, fer some reason, stallions like to watch it as well."

"A show for little fillies, and stallions watch it?" Dash replied, holding back laughter. "This planet sure is weird."
"Not planet," the Doctor cut in, finally, looking at the TARDIS screen. He had a grave look on his face. "No, not planet. I'm not even sure if this planet exists. To us, anyway. Maybe. I don't know."

"What are you talking about, Doctor?" Derpy asked, eating a blueberry muffin she had chanced upon at a stand in the big hall. If only it were chocolate chip, although blueberry was just fine. Though the blueberries tasted different here. Sweeter...no, sourer. Both?
"It's not that we're not on the right planet," the Doctor said, looking at some readings that only made sense to him, "We're not even in the right Universe."

"What?" asked Derpy. "But that's crazy! There's only one Universe! Everypony knows that!"
"Don't they teach you anything in schools these days?" the Doctor asked, indignantly. "Just minor differences, tiny ones, can have catastrophic effect. Maybe an electron hits something it isn't supposed to, maybe a blade of grass gets cut just a nanosecond early, maybe a butterfly dies at the wrong time...chaos theory," the Doctor said, the word 'chaos' sending shivers down the spines of the other three. "But in any case, time is not linear. It's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey...stuff, you see? They call it the Whole Sort of General Mish-Mash in some parts. And in any case, we're in the wrong sliver of it."

"Is that why we're..." Dash looked at her hands. "...like this?"
"Yes. Must be some kind of temporal bleed-over. Perhaps when you were broadcast through the TARDIS it saw fit to apply its own chameleon circuit to your genetic code..."
"So you're saying this thing turned me into this weird-looking...thing, because a talking pony is just too weird for these people?"

"Yes," the Doctor said, flatly. "But none of this explains why the TARDIS hasn't gone dead. In these situations the TARDIS is supposed to die. It can't function in other universes, very minute changes in the physical laws render it useless."
The Doctor bit his thumb for a moment.

"Unless..."
He stopped for a moment. "...unless, it's still got some sort of connection with Pinkie Pie..."
He did a few calculations in his head. He got a manic smile. "Of course," he muttered, pressing buttons and pulling levers. "I hope to the stars that this works..."

"Doctor, are you sure this is a good idea?" Derpy asked.
"No," the Doctor said, succinctly. "But we'll find out if it is when we get there."
Before anyone could stop him, the Doctor pulled the TARDIS dematerialisation lever, and the column moved up and down with an unholy grinding noise.

People watched with amazement as the TARDIS disappeared. Thankfully, a few minutes later the establishment apologised for the lousy special effect of the disappearing TARDIS and redirected people to see some producers give interviews. The incident was never spoken of again, which really says a lot about human nature, don't you think?

The concert within the caves of Polaris V had got a lot crazier. For starters, about halfway through, DJ Pon-3 had suddenly backed down from the stage for no good reason and been replaced by a band nobody had ever heard of, then she'd come back on stage and played half a song before backing down again, and then the stage had exploded into flames, been put out, and rebuilt, by which time another band had come on for no good reason, before fighting the previous band in perhaps the most musically-complex version of "Dueling Banjos" the Galaxy would ever know.

Not that Rarity particularly cared. She'd happened upon a table of refreshments and had spent a long time stuffing her face with food. She'd tried lifting things telekinetically with her horn, and found she couldn't, deciding it was probably just malnourishment that was causing her magic to fail.

She didn't even care that she was getting her hooves dirty. She was starved. She wasn't even certain whether or not what she was eating was digestible by her stomach, but decided to try it anyway. She continued eating and eating. Curiously enough, she found that she couldn't get full off of this food. It seemed to turn her stomach into a bottomless pit.

DJ Pon-3 came up one final time.
"Oh boy, this is the big one!" Pinkie Pie shouted, holding her tape recorder out even higher. Spike groaned and put his fingers in his flap-like ears. This was going to sting, but feel so good at the same time.

The song started out quite mellowly, with charming lyrics about romantic topics such as orphanages burning down and the inevitability of death, with a light, metronome-like beat. Spike even found himself nodding his head to it. It wasn't bad. But then the beat started to speed up. Oh boy, he thought, here it comes.

Spike flinched. Nothing came. He sighed in relief for a moment.
But no, the bass had other plans and quickly saw to pasting his body to the wall. Some hard, sharp gems dug into his back. He had never been more thankful for inch-thick skin in all his life. The groaning, booming bass rose and dived over and over, and within the space of about twenty seconds everyone had collapsed in a ball of ecstasy.

This was where things got a bit weird. You see, Spike couldn't figure out whether his fragile reptilian brain had gone, "You know what, forget you, forget all this," and spammed every other part of his brain with a massive dose of DMT, or DJ Pon-3 really had just turned into a rubber duck and exploded into a pile of confetti while the entire audience turned into rainbow-coloured serpents that quickly dissolved into what looked like an array of marching hammers and prisms showing the spectra. Yes, his brain was definitely on DMT overload. Joy.

He rubbed his eyes in confusion and looked at his claws. Yes, as he suspected, they had both turned into sparrows. No, wait, they were parrots, now.
"Who's a pretty boy, then?" his right claw squawked. "Pretty Polly, pretty Polly."
"Who names a boy parrot Polly?" Spike asked the parrot.

"I dunno," the parrot responded, proceeding to expire alarmingly quickly. Well that was interesting, Spike thought. He turned to his left claw. "So, er, your friend's just died."
"No he hasn't," his left claw said. "He's just pining for the fjords."
Spike would have put his face in his palm, but one of them was rapidly decomposing and the other threatened to peck his eyes out if he did.

He wondered how silly he must look to the others. He glanced over to Rarity, who had for some reason become a stopwatch from which ants were currently bursting and crawling up the walls.
"You okay, Rarity?" he asked.
".-.-.- -.-- .-. .-. --- ... / .-.-.- - .----. -. ... .. / - .. / .-.. .-.. . .-- / .-.-.- . --. .- ... ... . -- / - . .-. -.-. . ... / .- / ... .- .-- / ... .. .... - / - .... --. ..- --- .... - / ..- --- -.-- / - . -... / .-.. .-.. .----. .." she replied.
"Good to know," Spike said, ironically.

Spike then had an unpleasant sensation, like he was fading away from the caves. The caves seemed to disappear before him and be replaced by a massive room in their place. He wondered if this was what the afterlife looked like. He blearily looked around him, vaguely making out a few familiar shapes, finding himself dribbling on his belly catatonically. One of the shapes turned to look at him.
"What in the hay?" it said.

Fluttershy had been living with the Ruler of the Universe for a couple of weeks now, and she was really getting used to it. He was a nice man. He spent most of his time pondering the meanings of things and, having found somebody who would actually sit down and listen to his nonsensical ramblings, seemed quite cheerful.

Pinkie Pie, on the other hand, was not. She'd got bored of complaining about how bad life was and complaining about complaining about how bad life was, and had resorted to complaining about everything else she could possibly find to complain about. She'd engaged in quite a spectacularly well-spoken, politically-charged rant about employing an old man to rule the entire Universe that went on for two hours a few days ago, and all the while Fluttershy and the Ruler of the Universe had listened politely and carefully, decided it was best she got some sleep, and when she refused, they strapped her back down to the bed again, where she was currently staring at the ceiling, mumbling miserable little songs to herself. Well, at least she hadn't lost her creative panache.

But Fluttershy was growing bored, and ever more anxious. It had occurred to her in recent days that, even though the Ruler of the Universe was a lovely man, Pinkie Pie no longer had her saddlebag with her. There was no way she could possibly get out of here. She was slowly beginning to come to terms with the fact that she was inevitably going to die out here.

As she sat and thought about this, the Ruler of the Universe, who had been having a staring contest with a rolling-pin up until that point, suddenly piped up.
"You know," he said, with a slight chuckle in his voice. "They'd say it's very odd that you're here, Ms. Fluttershy."

Fluttershy turned. "Why would that be?" she asked.
"Well, you see, every time they come 'round and give me these things to look at, they're always going on about 'improbability fields' and such. From that I can gather that you shouldn't be here. I hear the only people who can be here have this device that can take them here. You don't have one of those, do you?"

Fluttershy shook her head.
"Do you exist?" the man asked.
Fluttershy nodded her head.
"But can I be sure of that?" he said in an anxious tone. Fluttershy put a hoof to her mouth. That was a very good question. She was beginning to wonder if she was a figment of his imagination as well.

"I...don't know..." she responded.
The two sat in silence for a long time.
Eventually, the man spoke again.
"How's your friend?" he asked. "You have a friend, right? I didn't imagine her?"

Fluttershy stood up and left the room. She decided to check on Pinkie Pie. Of course, this being a shack, there were only about two rooms, divided by bits of cardboard and medium-density fibreboard. Still, it didn't hurt to check. She peeked into the room, gently. The chronically-depressed Pinkie Pie lay in bed. To Fluttershy's surprise, it looked as though she was sleeping.

But sure enough, Pinkie Pie sat up bolt-upright in a way that equine creatures should not be able too as soon as Fluttershy took another step.
"What do you want?" she said.
"Um, I just wanted to see how you were doing."
"Terrible," Pinkie Pie snorted. "I wish you'd left me in that ditch to get trench-hoof."

Fluttershy felt saddened by this. "But surely there's something you have to live for?"
"No. My home's gone, the majority of my friends are probably dead, I'm living in a godless, uncaring universe, and my back legs hurt."
"Well, ponies aren't supposed to sit up like that."

"Maybe not, but I don't really care, anyway, because death's inevitable and every minute brings me closer to it."
Fluttershy felt the best thing to do was leave her alone. She spent a few moments tying the depressed pan-dimensional pony back down, then nodded pleasantly and left her alone.

Fluttershy sat back down next to the Ruler of the Universe. She mumbled, "I miss my friends," and then fell into a dreamless sleep.

"What in the hay?" Applejack cried. She said this for two reasons. One of the reasons was that she was rather surprised to find her orange fur back as it was and her four legs back on the ground again, but also because a rather delirious-looking Spike the Dragon had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, along with a Rarity and a Pinkie Pie who looked to be in quite the same condition.

Rarity looked to be halfway between consciousness and unconsciousness, and her head kept lolling about. She was in no way to talk to anyone. Derpy put a hoof to her back in an effort to try and help her out.
"Leave her," the Doctor said. "There's always one. She'll be back to normal soon."

Rainbow Dash was quite relieved to find her wings back as they were. "I missed you," she said to the wings on her back, which seemed to respond by springing out momentarily before folding back in.
"Spike? Spike, can ya hear me?" Applejack asked, shaking the small purple dragon lightly.

"Bluhhhh," Spike responded, burping out a little bit of green flame. "Five more minutes, mommy."
"Well, look who the Sub-Etha dragged in," the Doctor said, cheerfully, not least because he was a pony again. He glanced back at his hourglass-shaped cutie mark. He gagged a bit. "I never can get used to the feel of new teeth."

Pinkie Pie looked around, "Oh, hi, guys, glad you're not dead!" she said to Applejack and Rainbow Dash, cheerfully.
"Dead? Why would we be dead, sugarcube?" Applejack asked.
"Well – " Pinkie began, just as Spike broke out of his delirium and ran over.
"Pinkie, don't!" he cried.

"What's wrong, Spike?" Rainbow Dash asked. Spike shifted on to his toes, and then back on to his heels a few times, fiddling with his claws.
"Uh...uh..." he said.
"Do you think he's a little time-sick?" Derpy asked the Doctor, who, naturally, noticed something was wrong.

"Um..." he said. "...Spike, is it? The dragon?"
"Yes," Spike managed to force out.
"Something's happened, hasn't it?"
"Yes," he pushed out, slowly.

"Well what is it?" Rainbow Dash asked, impatiently.
"Come on, sugarcube, what is it?" Applejack lilted. "You can tell us anything."
"Um, well, I don't know how to put this, but – "
The sound of sobbing suddenly emanated from where Rarity was sitting.

"Rarity?" Rainbow Dash asked. "Rarity? You there? What's wrong?"
Rarity was trying to speak over crying hiccups. She pointed lazily to Pinkie Pie, who, still grinning wildly, was now paying no attention to the situation at hand, instead finding compartments to leap into and hang from.

"Pinkie Pie?" Applejack asked. "What's she done?"
Pinkie Pie turned at the sound of her name. "Whee!" she shouted, with an unsettling amount of happiness in her voice.
"Uh, Pinkie Pie, you feelin' okay?"

"Sure am, AJ! How are you?"
"You seem different, hun."
"Nope, same as always!"
Dash cut in. "But, Pinkie, you seemed so serious back in Equestria, when the clock went off."
"Well yeah, Dashie, the world was ending."

The drop. Rarity sobbed slightly louder. Spike backed up, and the Doctor, Derpy, Applejack and Rainbow Dash's mouths fell agape.
"What..." the Doctor said. "What do you mean by...ending?"
"As in, the world ended! It just blew up! Everything! Like, boom!"

Applejack and Rainbow Dash turned to each other.
"You mean..." Applejack said. "The whole world just, exploded? Like that? And everypony..." She struggled over the word. "...died?"
"That's what I'm saying, AJ!"

It took all of Applejack's strength to stop Rainbow Dash hitting Pinkie.
"There's something very wrong here," the Doctor pointed out, obviously.. Derpy stood in a state of shock. "Doctor," she said. "Doctor, how can...how can an entire planet..."
"Are you telling the truth, Pinkie?" the Doctor asked, calmly.

"Yup!"
"Yes, you're telling the truth about that, but...here's my question, Pinkie Pie...are you really Pinkie Pie?"
"Uh, yeah, I think so."

"Doctor, this is no time for word games, our homes...our families..." Applejack stifled her grief, "...they're gone!"
"I'm not playing word games," The Doctor said. "You're not from Equestria, are you, Pinkie Pie?"
"No!" she said. "I'm made of sub-sandwich wavy-mat stuff."
"Well, yeah, we gathered that, sorta," Rainbow Dash said, with surprising confidence, considering she knew that her home was now destroyed.

"Ah, yes," the Doctor said. "I know that. Sub-particulate wave-matter, is that correct?"
"Um, yeah," Pinkie Pie responded.
"And, tell me, Pinkie Pie, isn't a Sub-Etha transmitter used to transmit matter?"
"Yeppity-do!"

"Then, Pinkie Pie, I have reason to believe that you aren't all yourself...literally."
"No no, no, silly, I'm Pinkie Pie!"
"Yes, you are," the Doctor said. "But where's your other half, Pinkie Pie?"
"Other...half?" the smile wavered momentarily.

"Yes. The half that comes out when everything goes wrong, when things are bad, when life gets too rough. Where's she? What's her name, Pinkie? What's her name?"
"Doctor, stop," Derpy urged, but it was no use.
"P...Pinkamina," the Pinkie Pie before them stammered. "I...can't find her...and I'm just so happy about that!"
"Of course you are," the Doctor said.

"What the heck's goin' on, Doc?" Applejack interrupted.
"Well, you see, life formed from sub-particulate wave matter can take on any physical properties it wishes, to the point of distorting reality itself, because, strictly speaking of course, it doesn't exist. But sub-particulate wave matter-based life ignores the rules associated with DNA, with aging, with death. If she so wished, Pinkie Pie could live forever."

Pinkie Pie nodded cheerfully, hanging from the coral-like rafters of the TARDIS.
"But you see, Pinkie Pie – or the thing that was to become Pinkie Pie – based its form on Equestrian life. But it was also completely alien to it. Don't you see? She's a facsimile, and by doing that, she's totally misinterpreted how Equestrian psychology works."

"Cut the fancy talk," Rainbow Dash said. "What's really going on here?"
"Well, unlike most ponies, who have one intricate and complex personality which develops naturally over time, Pinkie Pie has two simpler and less intricate personalities which she developed at the moment she created herself."

"So you're saying..." Spike said.
"Yes, we've only got one half of the Pinkie Pie you know. The cheerful, playful, happy-go-lucky half. The half of her that you see every day, taken to its furthest logical extreme. She literally does not understand seriousness, or sadness, or anger, at all."

"Well, we gotta find her other half, then!" Applejack said.
"What if her other half is a psycho killer?" Spike asked, once again remembering a book he read that Twilight told him not to. Oh, Twilight...

"Spike!" scolded Applejack. "Don't talk like that. We gotta find this...Pinkamina, who knows where she is, otherwise we'll only have five and a half Elements of Harmony!"
Which is when it hit everyone.
There was a long pause.

"Where's Fluttershy?" Rarity asked, finally.
"Where's Twilight?" Spike followed.
The Doctor saw this as a call to action. He pushed buttons on the TARDIS controls. He had to forget this whole Equestria situation for the moment. He hoped the others would too. If what Pinkie Pie was saying was true, if Equestria, his favourite planet in the whole Galaxy, truly was dead, then he had to save those who were left.

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Chapter VII

The silence of space, they say, is one of the most mind-bogglingly terrifying things about the universe to any creature that can sense audio. Even to creatures that can't sense audio and can only see, the vast, black emptiness of space is utterly horrifying. In space, you feel nothing except two things: Fear, and the cold, the unending cold (physicists may correct me on that one but I honestly don't care).

And yet, it's an incredibly amazing thing for most to fathom that, completely by accident, life has arisen in this blisteringly awful, chaotic place. The fact is taken for granted far too often that life has even got as far as civilisation. Of course, some races are more primitive than others. The especially primitive ones consider themselves to be incredibly formidable and technologically-advanced, going so far as to think that the mobile telephone is still a pretty neat idea.

But once civilisation reaches its pinnacle on most planets, be it its absolute zenith or the point at which everyone says, "Meh, yeah, whatever," there is a point where civilisations go whizzing about to find new places to colonise, only to find when they get there that some galactic federation has got there first, and it's their turn to sign up.

One thing essential to all these races is this: the ability to cross enormous distances in very short spaces of time. Which was why, now, in an enormous cloud of dust, rock, and organic molecules, a massive ship appeared. Enormous, sleek as a brick wall being dragged by a rhino, like a morbidly-obese thief in the night, it came into existence and slowly drifted.

The massive machine eventually came to a complete stand-still, several million miles from the star, same as it had for the last few billion years. Space was silent, but a soundtrack taken from Vangelis's Albedo 0.39 or perhaps an excerpt from Pink Floyd's composition "Echoes" on the album Meddle would have worked if this were a film, which it isn't.

Everything was quiet. Absolutely nothing happened for a few moments. Even the dust and asteroids in the cloud seemed to stop moving, and then, suddenly, four large probes shot out of its surface and went spinning through the black void, and then four more followed, flying a good few thousand miles' distance before once again coming to a halt.

The gulf of space stood before the peculiar arrangement, unobserved, quietly hidden within the cloud, slowly orbiting the small sun. It did not seem alive. It seemed abandoned, in a way. However, deep within the belly of the craft, something was stirring, plotting, scanning. Humming within, the still, silent ship prepared to act on its purpose.

The rain pattered down on the roof. Even after weeks, the rain had been unceasing. One had to wonder how the grass and weeds outside the shack thrived in such a muddy, torrential environment. Water from a burst gutter trickled down the single window the shack possessed. Lightning flashed, thunder crashed, and the world outside just looked grey. Fluttershy wasn't sure if she'd ever seen something so devoid of colour. Even the darkest places in Equestria were rich in colour. Her pale yellow coat and pink mane seemed almost obscene in a world like this.

Pinkie Pie grunted and rolled around in bed. She'd finally decided there was no point in attempting to end it all any more, and instead decided to wait it out in a shallow puddle of self-loathing. As such, Fluttershy had taken away the straps. Pinkie Pie mumbled something about how much she hated life, and then appeared to fall back to sleep. Either way, it didn't matter.

The Ruler of the Universe had got into a staring contest with a magazine, and hadn't spoken in six days. Fluttershy couldn't get a response out of him. She was, effectively, alone. So here she was staring out of the one window the shack possessed, waiting for tiredness to set in so she could go to sleep, ignore this place, and imagine she was back in Equestria with Elizabeth, Hummingway, Angel, and all her other animal friends, the only ones, she felt sometimes, that had truly understood her. She wanted to back to way things were, to the way everything was in her past. Her parents loved her, Rainbow Dash had been a great friend in her youth, going so far as to win a race to prove a point about her, and yet none of them had ever understood her, why she feared things. Come to think of it, neither did she. Perhaps she was just born that way. She just didn't know. She was the kindest pony in all Equestria, and yet, it seemed that even being the epitome of niceness, the Element of Kindness herself, people still never understood her ways with animals. She was merely a pet-sitter to them. Nothing more. And now she was all alone. It occurred to Fluttershy that she hadn't cried in a long time, unusually for her. Perhaps that was about to change. She felt the tears welling and anticipated them running down her cheeks once more.

As she tried to sniff back the tears beginning to brim at her eyelids, she heard a sound. Faint at first, but definitely there. It heaved in a clear, thrusting noise. Up and down, up and down. She couldn't see where it was coming from outside the window. She looked around. The sound seemed to be coming from...

There was a creaking sound from the roof. There was a great groan, as if the roof were in some kind of pain, and then the roof came crashing down. Pinkie Pie sat bolt upright, and Fluttershy stared across the room at the hole in the roof through which the rain was pouring in, and the object that had caused it.

It was a large blue box, sort of like a small stable. It had fallen on to its side. Fluttershy studied the sign attached to it. It read "ROYAL GUARD CALL BOX" in large, sans-serif letters.
"What the hay is that?" Pinkie Pie asked. "Can't they see I'm trying to be depressed here?"
Water trickled down and on to the box.

All of a sudden, there was a clunk sound, and the front of the box fell inwards.
"Watch out!" a voice shouted, as a grappling hook suddenly came launching through the hole. "Ready?" the voice said. "One, two, three, heave!"
There was a sound of grunting from within.
"Okay...okay...we're...we're about...a tenth of the way there. One, two, three, heave!"
More grunting came out, louder and more painful than before.
"And we're about...two tenths the way there. Ready to go agai-"
"Oh for the love of Celestia, really? Really?"
"Well, you come up with a better plan."

There was a pause.
"Doctor."
"Yes?"
"I'M A FREAKING PEGASUS."
There was another pause.
"Oh."

Then there was a bang, and a cyan pony with a rainbow mane came flying out of the hole. She looked around. "Fluttershy!" she said. "Thank Celestia you're still alive!"
"I'm glad to see you, too, Rainbow Dash," Fluttershy replied, hugging her affectionately.
"Um, this is very touching and all," a regal voice said, from within the box, "But would you be so kind as to consider GETTING US OUT OF HERE?"

"Sure thing," Rainbow Dash replied, pulling at the rope. She glanced over at Pinkie Pie.
"We got Pinkie 2 up here, too, guys."
"Pinkie 2?" a happy voice asked. "Can you say 'Hi' to me, for me? No, wait, I'll do it myself. Hi, me!" Pinkie Pie was taken aback. "Who is that?"

"That's you," Dash grunted, pulling on the rope. "Darn it...why couldn't I have spent time exercising my limbs...instead...of...flying..."
There was a loud crash.
"My topiary garden!"
"This is no time fer worryin' about yer silly trees, Doctor!"

"They're shrubs, I'll have you know, and very nice ones, at that."
"How much further?" Dash called down.
"Just a little bit further," a voice said. "Come on, guys."
"Says the baby dragon at the back."
"Hey, shut up, muffin-eater."
There was a pause.
"I just appreciate you didn't call me 'google-eyes'."
"Well, I'm not that mean."

"How many ponies are in that box?" the depressed Pinkie Pie interrupted.
Dash gave a last enormous heave, to the point the veins in her legs and head popped out.
"Princess Luna!" she shouted, taking the princess's name in vain. "Pardon my Fancy."
"Okay, one last pull, and we should be out," a voice shouted.

"All right," Rainbow Dash said, inhaling and exhaling. She inhaled again and then gave another enormous pull, and a brown pony with an hour-glass cutie mark hopped out of the box, followed by a grey pony with bubbles on her flank, an orange pony wearing a Stetson, a white pony with a curled purple mane, a pink pony with a frizzy pink mane, and finally, a small purple dragon.

Rainbow Dash fell over backwards, then stood up and cracked her back. "Ah, that's a relief."
The shack was now brimming with ponies.
In the other room, the Ruler of the Universe finally lost focus and looked away from the magazine.
"Bah! You win!" he exclaimed, throwing the magazine away and standing up.

He came in to the other room, and was rather startled by the other ponies.
"I don't seem to remember all these ponies being here," he said. "Do you all exist?"
"As far as we're aware," The Doctor said.
"Right," the Ruler of the Universe said, noticing the hole in the roof.

"Oh, sorry about that, there, partner," Applejack said. "Have any tools around? Ah'm not that good with tools, but ah'm sure ah could fix that roof up in a jiff."
"Well, let's get the TARDIS back up, first, shall we?" the Doctor cut in, as the seven that had just come out of the blue box got behind it and heaved it up. It was surprisingly light for something with a pocket Universe inside it.

"Well, I'm afraid they never brought any tools," the Ruler of the Universe replied.
"I've got a set of tools in the TARDIS," the Doctor offered. "If you'd like, I'll – "
"Doctor, are you forgetting exactly why we're here?" Derpy Hooves interrupted.
"Oh...right."

Pinkie Pie and Pinkie Pie met face-to-face for the first time.
It was a curious sight. They both appeared to have simultaneously never met each other while also feeling extremely familiar with each other.
"Hi, I'm Pinkie Pie!" said the happy Pinkie, or as she was now known, Pinkie 1/2.
"So am I," responded the depressed Pinkie, or as she was now known, Pinkie 2/2.

"Well, hi, me, how am I doing?"
"Terribly. Worse since I met you."
"Oh, don't be like that. Let's turn that frown upside down!"
"Let's not."

"So this one time, I was making cupcakes at Sugarcube Corner - "
"Me, I know this one, I am you, I've been there."
"But it's so much funnier telling it to myself in pony! Anyway, there I was – "
Pinkie 2/2 tried to find a distraction and couldn't find one.

It was really quite a fascinating sight. Pinkie 1/2 was so annoying, she had managed to irritate herself.
"And then I said, 'Oatmeal, are you crazy?!' Anyway, what was that you said, I am you, as you are me, as we are she, and we are all together? That sounds like it'd be a great song! Don't you love singing? I love singing! Here's a good song! When I was a little filly and – "

"Doctor, make her stop!" Derpy shouted, plugging her ears.
"I...can't!" The Doctor said. "How are we supposed to merge these two together if she won't just sit down and be quiet?!"
"...I'd hide under my pillow, from what I thought I saw..."

"Celestia!" Spike cried. "I mean, at least the regular Pinkie Pie's songs sort of make sense to the situation!"
The Ruler of the Universe stared, dumbfounded. He literally had no idea whether or not he was hallucinating all this by this point.

Applejack dashed out of the room as the others tried desperately to drown out the singing. She returned moments later with pages of a magazine stuffed in her ears, then quickly ran into the TARDIS.
She vanished for a few moments.

"What's she up to?" Rainbow Dash asked.
Then, suddenly, she returned with a plastic box gripped in her teeth. She approached the two Pinkies and spat it out in front of them. Pinkie 1/2 fell silent instantly.
There before them was a small box with the words "Pinkie Pie" adorning it, alongside a logo reading "My Little Pony Friendship is Magic".

"What's this?" Pinkie 2/2 asked.
"Why, it's a model of you two as you are when you're together," Applejack said. "Where ah got it from, they say it's a toy of some kind."
"A...toy?" Pinkie 1/2 said. "I love toys! Don't you love - "
"NO!" shouted the others.

"But, you see," Applejack cut in. "Isn't it nice how there aren't two toys in there? A happy one and a sad one? Notice how there's one." She read out the description on the back for them, all about how Pinkie Pie loved to make her friends laugh, and throw parties. She chuckled. "That's the Pinkie Pie ah know. But instead, look what ah got. One of ya has no idea how to be happy or silly at all, and the other is just so happy it's annoyin'. You two ain't the Pinkie Pie ah know."

The two Pinkies looked at Applejack, and then back to each other.
"You're both just copies of somepony I used to know." she turned her back to them and trotted away, sadly.
The two Pinkies continued to look at each other.

Pinkie 2/2 sighed. "Hmph. Well, if it'll make you all happy."
Pinkie 1/2 sighed, as well. "I love making my friends happy! Right, me!"
Pinkie 2/2 shook her head. "I wouldn't know. That's your job."
And Pinkie 1/2 grinned. "Well, then why don't we help you figure it out?"
"What? No – "

Pinkie 1/2 did something that, to her more serious, cold side, would have in other times been an extremely annoying gesture. She gave her a big, warm hug. But Pinkie 2/2 felt something strange come over her. Her front legs were moving. She tried to resist, but she couldn't...and suddenly, she found herself hugging herself back.

The two hugged for a few moments.
"Get down," the Doctor mumbled.
"What was that, Doc – " Dash began.
"GET DOWN!"

There was a flash of pink light, and the room's temperature went up by one degree. The bed in which the two ponies sat caught fire for a second. A pink pony leapt from the flames.
"Arghhh!" she screamed. "My tail! My tail is on fire! Yaaarghhhh!"
The Ruler of the Universe politely opened the door for her to go out in the rain, despite his inability to tell if the outside really existed or not.

There was a sound of hissing, then a sigh of relief. When she came back in, the pony was met with an embrace from Fluttershy. "I'm so glad you're back," she said.
"I never left!" she replied. "Well, my mean side did, but she's only there to stop me becoming annoying. I bet I was annoying, wasn't I? Wait, why am I asking you? I - " The Doctor clapped a hoof to her mouth. "Enough of that," he said. "Please."

"Well, that oughta hold," Applejack said, spitting out the TARDIS' trusty mallet as she nailed the last part of the roof shut.
"Thank you again!" the Ruler of the Universe said. "I tell you, I've had more fun with you all than I've had with anyone in the last million years!"

"Well, you know us ponies," Pinkie Pie said. "We're a barrelful of laughs."
"Ain't that the truth," Applejack chortled. "These past few days have been the weirdest I've ever known."
"Yeah," Rainbow Dash said. "I wonder what happened to those hoof-cover things I left behind in that café? Think someone stole 'em?"

"I wouldn't worry yourself with that," the Doctor said, seriously.
An uncomfortable silence fell on the room.
"So...where do we go now?" Rarity asked, with melancholy in her voice. "Our planet is gone...my boutique is gone...Sweetie Belle and Opalescence are gone..."
Spike, Rarity, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, the Doctor and Derpy Hooves all looked at the ground.

"No," Spike said. "Wait. This isn't right. We can't grieve now. Not yet. Twilight still needs saving."
The Doctor shook his head, gravely. "She could be anywhere in the Universe by now, Spike."
"Really?" Spike wondered. "Then how exactly is it that nopony in this group travelled far enough that they were impossible to find?"

The Doctor's eyebrows lowered. "What are you saying, Spike?"
"I'm saying that we're all connected. That TARDIS knows what it's doing. It took itself to me, Rarity and Pinkie, and I think it'll do the same for Twilight."
The Doctor sighed. "A TARDIS doesn't work like that, Spike."

"Don't say that!" Spike replied, indignantly, with growing anger in his voice. "We have to try. Surely a smart guy like you knows that science isn't sticking to what we know – it's experimenting on what we already know and what we don't know, to find out more. Come on, Doctor. We have to try."

The Doctor put his hoof to his forehead. "Fine," he said. "We'll try a random timeflight transfer. But if it doesn't work, I'm sorry. Twilight Sparkle is lost for good."
"Let's go, then!" Rainbow Dash exclaimed, eagerly.
"Yes, let's!" Rarity affirmed.

They group of eight made their way for the TARDIS

"Goodbye, then," the Ruler of the Universe said, sadly. "I'll see you again sometime?"
"Maybe," Fluttershy said.
"No," the Doctor replied, coldly. "This place is closed in a fixed unprobability field. Nasty thing. Only someone with a key can get in. It's a wonder we got in, it's only because of Pinkie Pie's random molecular structure we got this far."

"So I suppose this is goodbye forever?" the Ruler of the Universe asked. His eyes looked a bit wet and red. One forgot for a moment he was hundreds of years old. He was like a grandfather who had lost an old friend, or a spouse, to the ravages of age.
Fluttershy ran across the room to where the burned bed was. She grabbed something in her mouth and took it to the man. It was a plastic box, blackened, but still visible.

A small Pinkie Pie toy.
The Ruler of the Universe managed a smile, and then rubbed Fluttershy's mane.
"Thank you," he said. "And good luck."
The last two ponies returned to the TARDIS, and after a few moments, it dematerialised. As the Ruler of the Universe sat down, The Lord came in to the room. It meowed and preened its fur. "Ah, hello!" the Ruler of the Universe mewed. "Look what I've got!" He opened the box with some difficulty and got out the small model.

For the first time in a long time, the cat purred and curled up on the Ruler of the Universe's lap. He smiled. "I'm not even sure if I care whether this exists or not," he said to himself, and proceeded to engage in a very long conversation about tables with the model, and lived more or less happily ever after, except for the time the delivery boy came again and stole his sudoku puzzles.

"Slight imbalance in Sector B7, firing retro-rockets...confirmed stable."
"Probe alignment confirmed, system stable."
"Roger that."
"Very well. Commence the first test of the MSF immediately. Let's see what this machine can do..."

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Chapter VIII

As you may already be aware, the introductory paragraphs of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy have many things to say about the Galaxy in which anyone who happens to own a copy inhabits, but only serves any real purpose if they inhabit a galaxy known commonly as "The Milky Way", or "The Great Nipple-Squirted Stripe", as the Azgoths of Kria embarassingly referred to it, owing largely to their very poor poetic skills (but bless them, they tried).

The very, very opening paragraphs, however, contain a set of words that have become more or less a bog-standard cliché go-to when trying to explain to another the immense size of the Universe. "Space", they say, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen..." and so on like that. Those who have followed the adventures of a certain ape-descendant and his Betelgeuse-hailing friend would be aware of this.

Anyone coming to this realisation would know that picking any dot they happened to see in the vast, black, cold emptiness of space demonstrates really how small they are. Some species tend to go mad from this revelation, while others, tend to just buck up and get on with it while suffering some mild angst. In fact, if you picked out the small, yellow dwarf star that Equestria used to orbit, you would instantly shrug and think it was just a very small, not-very-bright prick of light somewhere in the middle of space that you could care less about. That is to say, you care a little, but hell, you could care less. It's not a matter of not being able to care less – look, this grammatical debate is all rather tedious, let's move on.

Suspended in the midst of a large, dark dust cloud that had once been Equestria was a very large, nasty-looking object, at least one hundred feet by a hundred feet at its end, and possibly five-hundred feet by one hundred on its side. It was a grimy shade of sickly yellow, not least because it was in the haze of the cloud and being dirtied by ashes and various other things.

It sat almost perfectly still, as did the eight smaller objects, floating a few hundred thousand miles from it. They were sharp-looking, bullet-like objects, about ten feet in diameter, the kind of objects one would run away from really quickly. They glinted silver, clearly having never been used before or brand new, unlike the large object whence they had come. They also seemed to stay perfectly still, though every so often a retro-rocket or two would fire on them to keep them stable. They had large rings attached to their ends, about fifteen feet across, all pointing back at the object in the middle.

The inhabitants of the large craft were carefully making sure the smaller objects did not move at all. They pressed buttons, did calculations, pressed more buttons, put out fires started by computers under heavy load with a total lack of cooling systems, pressed a few more buttons, came down with migraine, recovered in a dark room for an hour or two, woke up, had snacks, went back to their computers, and repeated this process until shift change.

They were so busy, they did not notice as a very, very small object moving through space approached one of the corridors near to the cloakroom. It, too, glinted in the sun, as murky as its image was through the brown dust, but it was coming quite quickly. Someone watching might be scared, but there was nothing to fear – the small object simply collided with a window. The window was unaffected, but the smaller object, in what looked like quite an ironic turnout, shattered. Bits of purple-blue glass went flying off into the depths of space, the remainder of what had once been a pair of stylish sunglasses simply dissipating into the black unknown.

This was undetected on the ship's main bridge, and wasn't even a particularly important occurrence. The bridge was far busier making sure everything wasn't on fire and preparing a test of their new machine. The Captain of the ship sat and watched the hustle and bustle of the procedure go by as the soft hum of generators permeated the room, to power the experiment.

The Captain was not a particularly nice fellow. They say a friend is someone that you can meet in an airport at 3AM and have no trouble having a drink and a conversation with while waiting for your next flight, possibly even missing it and waking up on a luggage conveyor naked except for a small ribbon tied around your ear, thinking, "Oh shit, I'm going be be fired if my boss finds out", and then proceeding to roll over and sleep more until security toss you out. Or at least, that first part, I made up the other bits for giggles.

The Captain, however, was the kind of person – if you could call him that – that you'd meet in an airport at 3AM and proceed to forego drinking entirely, grab a book or a magazine from a bookshop of some kind, and run to your departure gate, boarding pass in hand, all the while checking over your shoulder in the hopes he wasn't going to tell you another riveting tale about his sex life. His horrible, disgusting, though thankfully rather meagre, sex life.

He was a man – if you could call him that – who was very purposeful about his duty. He had one aim, and that was to do exactly as his superiors told him, which was to do as they told him, which was to do as they told him, and so on in a recursive partially-fractal loop. At the moment, he was apparently in charge of this snazzy thing called an "MSF". He had no idea what it stood for or how it worked, but he felt obligated to act like he knew what he was doing, saying things like, "Yeah! I can't wait to see what this thing can do!" even though it could really have been some kind of new oven, or fridge, or whatever. It sure was taking a long time to make things hot or cold if it was one of those things, which it wasn't, little did he know.

"When I said, 'Commence the first test of the MSF immediately, let's see what this machine can do', Ensign, I expected this...thing, whatever it is, to start making lots of noise and exploding things."
"Sir, the MSF is a very delicate arrangement of probes. It needs to recalibrate to the exact measurements it has been given before the experiment can begin."

"What exactly is the experiment, anyway?"
"We don't know, nobody bothered to tell us."
"So what are we doing here?"
"Beats me, waiting for this thing to charge up, I suppose."
"Right, right."

The Captain wrinkled his nose. At least, he wrinkled it more than he already had done. Today was going to be a long day. He looked at a few lighted panels and pretended to know what he was doing, and then let his mind wander to what kind of soup he wanted to have that day. He was so busy doing this he didn't notice a little red light blip up noiselessly, a rather stupid design fault that would have made the events play out rather differently otherwise.

Along a silent, musty corridor deep within the bowels of the large ship, there had but a few moments ago been silence. But now that silence was being rather unpleasantly and forcefully murdered by a calamity of noise that thundered down its green, dripping walls. A Tannoy speaker, covered in algae, sat on one side of the corridor, with a window sitting directly opposite. But now a rather out-of-place blue box had seemingly materialised out of nowhere while groaning asthmatically.

The truth was, it hadn't actually materialised out of nowhere. In fact, it had materialised out of an entirely different axis of reality that we commonly call "time", and the people inside it had in fact done some very complex calculations to get it exactly where it was now. And by "complex calculations", I of course mean they'd hit the control panel with a hammer a few times and pressed a few buttons. The door came open.

"Oh my," Rarity said. "Well, I must say, I don't care for these people's taste in décor."
"Are you sure Twilight is here, Doctor?" Spike asked.
"Well, if she is, she is, and if she isn't, she isn't," the Doctor said, unhelpfully. The arrangement had been made that four of the eight passengers of the box would stay behind, and four would go out and search for their elusive friend. As such, the Doctor, Derpy Hooves, Applejack and Rainbow Dash had offered to stay behind (well, the first three, anyway, Rainbow Dash was forcibly roped into it by Applejack's volunteering, much to her chagrin) while Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Rarity and Spike would go out in search for her.

"Thanks, Doctor," Spike said, sarcastically, shutting the door behind him.
"Ooh! Ooh!" Pinkie Pie said. "Now that we're on an alien spaceship, I can give you all these!" she exclaimed, excitedly, pulling out several small jars with small, yellow, leech-like things in them.
"Darling, what are these?" Rarity asked, politely.

"They look...strange..." Fluttershy mumbled.
"Oh, you sillies, you stick them in your ear, so you can hear what people are saying to you!"
The others stared, dumbfounded and disgusted.
"You want me to put this..." Rarity retched. "In my ear?"

"Yup!" Pinkie Pie said, pulling open her ear canal a tiny bit so the others could see the creature wriggling in her ear.
"I think I'm gonna hurl," Spike responded.
"It's just a Babel fish," Pinkie Pie said. "Just stick it in your ear!"

The others spent the next five minutes doing so with some difficulty. Rarity spent most of the time saying, "Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew," over and over again, while Fluttershy shuddered and shook, and Spike swallowed vomit repeatedly. He hadn't even been aware until that point that his stomach could vomit.
Suddenly, the door on the TARDIS came open again.

"Oh, by the way," the Doctor said. "Don't worry about any aliens you might meet. The TARDIS does all the translating for you, telepathically."
The others all glared at Pinkie Pie.
"Oops. Sorry."

They set off on hoof and claw to find Twilight Sparkle. Lost to the streams of time and space, it had seemed, until they had arrived there. They had spent days, perhaps even weeks, just inserting random, slightly-relevant calculations into the machine. Of course, within the TARDIS, time was pretty much irrelevant, like some demented form of the wardrobe from The Chronicles of Narnia without all the Christian symbolism.

The entire ship had a dank smell, like someone had just casually hosed off all the walls with filthy water and let the bacteria and algae particles work their magic. And it showed. They never thought they'd see the day seaweed would grow on a wall in space. That gave off the terrible stink associated with the seaside, as well, the sulphuric smell that Victorians thought was good for you but was actually just awful.

The small windows at the top of the walls opposite the ones with speakers showed very little light, and as such there were a lot of fluorescent bulbs dangling out of the wall in the same fashion as a school that can't be bothered to repair things that the students break. There had obviously been some kind of shade covering them, but now they were just ugly protrusions in the wall, remarkably like Earth energy-saver lightbulbs, intended to naïvely save the already-doomed planet from its sealed fate. Well, actually, it was to save them from global warming, but hell, if thermonuclear death ray destructor ships didn't warm the globe up, then you can put a wig on me and call me Pamela. Seriously. Call me at [REDACTED] and ask for [REDACTED].

The dim corridors were largely silent. So were the equine-descendants and reptile-creature walking down it. It was strange. Where there would usually be quote marks there was only an urge to find Twilight and get off the darkened, grim ship as soon as possible. Suddenly, Spike stopped.
"Shh," he said, putting a claw to his lips.

"What are you – " Pinkie asked.
"Shh!" Spike said again, listening. There was a very slight humming noise coming from somewhere down the corridor, almost electronically. Spike put his ear up against a wall. "This way," he gestured, walking down the hallway slowly. "I can hear..."

He noticed a corner going in the exact direction the noise was coming from.
"This way," he said again, and the four went slowly down the long hallway. It was getting darker now. Peeled stickers and posters, unreadably aged, lined the walls. Numbers that had once had some meaning perhaps to storage workers were sprayed in white paint. They were in the bowels of the ship, all right. The duodenum, perhaps. Or the small intestine.

Signs began to appear. "UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL NOT ALLOWED" read one. "AUTHORISED PERSONNEL NOT ALLOWED" read another, which begged the question of who exactly was allowed to be there. The four continued on, nonetheless. Well, they weren't authorised personnel, so they filled both sign criteria for "not actually supposed to be there".

They finally turned a corner and arrived to find a dead end.
"Well, shoot." Fluttershy said, in some surprisingly strong language for someone of her disposition. She quickly apologised for her foul-mouthedness.
"No, wait..." Spike said. The hum was much louder now, far more defined. It was coming from behind the dead end. There was an unmistakable stink of sulphur and damp now. Spike walked over to the dead end and touched it. There was an unpleasant squelch and his claws went through it.

"It's metal!" he said. "Quick, we need to clean this off!"
Pinkie Pie grinned. "Got you covered the-ere!" she crooned, and opened her satchel. She pulled out a crisp white bath towel with the words DON'T PANIC stitched in small, not particularly amicable, though not really unfriendly red letters on the corner.

"A hoopy frood always knows where her towel is," Pinkie Pie remarked, emptying a fish-less Babel fish jar – which for some strange reason still had water in it – on to her towel, and then proceeded to clean off all the grime from the dead end. The water made the smell worse, but at least they could tell what the dead end was now, even in the dim light they used to illuminate the area.

It was a very large, very heavy steel door. It had a sort of electronic control panel on the front as well as lots of bolts, including several that looked like they'd been put there haphazardly, perhaps by the same gunman with one eye from the simile with the rain in Chapter IV. Clearly whoever put the door there didn't want anyone who found it getting behind it. But the hum grew louder still.

There was a plaque attached to the door, as well. They squinted to read it.
"M...S...F...Ce...n...tral...Me...ch...an...is...m," Rarity made out. "MSF Central Mechanism? What in Equestria does that mean?"
They probably could have easily found out, but suddenly a large hand grabbed her by the tail, and a large, unfriendly-looking gun was pointed at her head. It let go of the tail and allowed her to turn, as the others looked up to see the great hulking brute.

It looked vaguely porcine, in the same way that a sausage looks vaguely porcine. It was like some horrible Gillray political cartoon brought to life, its head hunched over, its skin a very nasty shade of green. Its nose was not under its eyes, but rather between them. Two goggles over its beady eyes stared at them from behind a mask that revealed nothing more than yellowish, stained teeth, like someone who had smoked since birth.

"Resistance is useless!" the figure cried, pointing its gun at the four, who thought it best to just follow the guy rather than get shot in the head with a very nasty-looking gun with lots of nasty-looking bits attached to it to warn you that you'd have a nasty-looking death if your face happened to get in the way of it.

The figure beckoned them to follow it and stalked off down the corridor. Pinkie Pie would have created a distraction with the towel but it smelled like the arse of a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal at the moment, not particularly nice, and while it would be a formidable weapon against the guard, whose species she knew well, it would probably end up making her spew everywhere, which would give the guard ample time to shoot her fifty times in the neck. Which she planned to avoid, being as she had about thirty litres of blood in her body, and she planned to keep all of them.

Those who own a copy of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy will know that the book quite often makes very derogatory references to the Vogon race in terms of borderline – no wait, scratch that – flat-out racism and speciesism. Terms like "utterly conniving bastards", "evolutionary rejects" and "obese, green, bureaucratic, bad-tempered, officious, callous, outright poo-poo-heads" are frequently thrown around, and for good reason. No, actually, a set of very good reasons.

One of these reasons would be that Vogons have a strange manner of getting points across to people, and by "strange", I of course mean "utterly sociopathic". They don't particularly care if, for instance, someone is dying of a terminal illness, if they can't fill in the forms to get vital life-saving treatments, they are going to die. In fact, Vogon homes for the elderly are largely just large factories that just have the elderly killed and then turned into charcoal for use as firelighters. Vogons do love their firelighters.

The ship's captain, Prostetnic Vogon Reth, was one of those Vogons that laid somewhere between being oafish and horrible. He wanted so badly to be as truly revolting as Vogons like Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, but he was just too nice. He even tried to write some poetry and it came out as a lovely little number about a field of poppies. Disgusting. Not even one use of the word "flooberfukkles". His poetry was publishable! Publishable! The shame was unbearable. He kept it a secret and frequently plagiarised other works to fuel his own, to no avail.

Yet, he made himself look as menacing and horrible as possible for the hitchhikers being brought to him. He was lucky to have noticed that light when he did. If they'd somehow got in to the MSF Central Mechanism, then he could have been out of a job. And if there's one thing Vogons detest, it's being out of a job.

They appeared. He shuddered. They were all so bright, and colourful. This array of pastel colours made his eyes hurt. Greens, purples, whites, pinks, yellows. He wasn't even sure he'd seen the particular shades that these hitchhikers were before. They were – no, surely not...

They were.
It was improbable enough that even ONE inhabitant of the former planet Equestria would have survived, but four? The planet had been smashed to atoms! How the hell could they have even – that didn't make any –

One important thing to note about Vogons is that they absolutely hate it when something blows up and not everyone dies because of it. That leads to mountains of paperwork describing survival statistics and reasons for not being dead, which only leads to ranges of paperwork mountains explaining that one mountain. Another thing to note about Vogons is their despicably complex organisation system.

Still, he felt a wave of nausea looking at how revoltingly cute and cuddly they were, all while holding up his tough image. But they were looking at him with the same face his mind was pulling, so it seemed to be a no-win situation. The guard thumped up to him, like them. He fell into the "oafish" area of Vogonity. And by "oafish", I of course mean "completely thick".

"The hitchhikers, Captain," the Guard grunted. "I did the shouting and everything."
"Good," replied Reth. "You may go."
The Guard haphazardly saluted, breaking one of his goggle lenses. He gave one last, "Resistance is useless!" to the prisoners, and then stalked off to do more shouting and firing off his Kill-O-Zap at things to pretend he actually had a career.

Reth eyed the four with beady eyes. Three of them were nasty, four-legged creatures, ugly things, with great big eyes and sweet, perfectly-sculpted faces. The other was a small, scaly creature, purple and green. It was slightly nicer-looking, but not by much, as it still looked rather infuriatingly cute.

One of the Equestrians, a yellow one with pink hair, was shaking.
"You!" bellowed Reth at her. "What are you doing stowing away on my ship? This is not a taxi service! We have business to attend to! Why don't you all get jobs?" Yeah, that ought to do it. That was mean. He was tough. Phwoaaarr.

Except then the pink one emitted a few squealing noises and dripped water from those big saucers it had for eyes. Reth gave a loud tut. He decided to direct his attention to the uglier one, the reptile.
"You!" he shouted again. "Explain!"

"We're sorry, sir," the small reptile said. "We're here to find our friend, see. She's disappeared. She's somewhere on your ship, and – "
"Somewhere on our ship?" laughed Reth. "We're merely carrying out an experiment for someone or other. You're interrupting. You might even ruin the results!"

"But we're sure she's here!" one of the pink four-legged things pointed out, hastily. "Just put out a call for her, if she doesn't turn up, you can..." she gulped. "...read us some of your poetry."
Shit, Reth thought. I'd better find her.
"Fine," Reth huffed, picking up a Tannoy microphone and speaking into it. "If I may have your attention? We are currently searching for a – "

"Twilight Sparkle," the white one chimed in. "T-W-I-L-I-G-H-T-S-P-A-R-K-L-E".
"Twilight...Sparkle..." Reth gagged. "If anyone finds her, please let us know. Thank you."
There was a long pause.
Nobody reacted.

Now Reth was looking as worried as the pink one. She was terrified of hearing his poetry. He was terrified of her hearing his poetry. No Vogon worth his salt could pass up reading some truly appalling poetry as torture. When she heard his lovely poems about summer days and love and kindness and gentleness and sharing and rainbows, she'd laugh herself silly.

Suddenly, one of the ensigns turned around.
"Sir! The experiment is ready to begin."
Reth puffed out a sigh of relief. "Very well," he said. "Begin."
The four before him raised an eyebrow as they turned and suddenly noticed the odd configuration of the bridge. The Captain sat on a raised seat in front of a large square-shaped arrangement of seats, in which the junior officers sat.

Around the square, however, was a large railing, that seemed pointless until you realised that the area beyond the railing's ground was now sliding away, revealing a black, empty hole that seemed to give way to nothing. There was largely silence, aside from the noise of operators desperately trying to stop the machine igniting into flames now, and ensigns checking readings on dials.

Then, a hum, distant, but growing closer, and louder. The clinking of some kind of geared mechanism pulling whatever object it carried up through the square. Lights flashed, sirens sounded to warn anyone who hadn't by this point fallen down the hole to stand well back, and coolant bubbled out, partially to keep systems cool and stable, but mostly to produce a nice dramatic fog effect.

Then an enormous metal box zoomed out of the hole. Even the operators stared dumbfounded now. The metal panelling on the box slid away into the edges of the cube, and then the cube's edges receded also, leaving only the object in the center visible. It was not clear at first what it was, but then...

"Twilight!" Spike cried.
Twilight Sparkle stood before them in a rather bizarre position. She was attached to a metallic frame in a regular standing position, to restrain her legs. She appeared to be weak, bleary, almost as if in a coma. Her head lolled. Presumably the frame was to keep her kicking and screaming if she woke up. The four could only look on in horror.

Another piece of frame suddenly shot out and rose high above the librarian's head. It bent over in a sad way, like a lamp-post. Except, in place of a lamp was a hole, from which there now drooped down a set of tools. They promptly affixed themselves to Twilight's horn, and made a hideous squeal. The squeal of a drill. Twilight, even semi-conscious, cringed in pain as the bone was cut into, like a hot knife through a piece of cheddar cheese. The tools retracted and were replaced by another, which put a bunch of cables of various colours into the holes it had just drilled.

"Stop this!" Pinkie Pie shouted to Reth.
Even Reth looked horrified. "I can't!" he shouted. "This is just my job! I have no idea what we are trying to do here – "

Suddenly, Twilight's eyes shot open. They were blank and emotionless. Her face was totally expressionless. She stood and stared frighteningly out at Reth and her rescuers. Reth whimpered.
Then, in a loud, echoing, booming voice, like the voice of the legion, she announced,
"Mary Sue Field now fully operational."

Google Docs link

Chapter IX

Twilight Sparkle yawned and sat up. She rubbed her eyes, and then put her hoof to her head. It felt like her brain had been replaced with a great big chunk of stone. She rubbed her temples slowly and moved her well-kept, sensible fringe out of her eyes. She looked around at her environment. Well, first things first, it was very pink, though there were shifting veins consisting of pastel colours permeating the pink. It was like being within a cloud of some description.

She felt for what she was sitting on. It was a red leather sofa, and smelled brand-new. It was rather comfortable, and had two cushions with quaint little patterns on them. It was rather nice and homely, bizarrely, because it wasn't actually in itself sitting on anything. It just appeared to be suspended in the middle of nowhere.

How had she got here? She decided to retrace her steps. Let's see...she had been at the castle...and the clock had struck noon...then what? She remembered Pinkie Pie running...a flash of orange light...intense heat...and then...nothing. She felt as if she had woken from some strange, horrible dream, and that this strange world she now occupied was her home, which she had somehow forgotten in her dream.

The air smelled sweet, like sugar. It seemed silent in here, but Twilight could hear her own breathing. Huff, puff, huff, puff. She experienced that annoying thing where you remember that you're breathing and can't stop thinking about it, so now all she could hear was the sound of her own breathing. Huff, puff, huff, puff, Twilight... puff, huff, puff.

Wait, what was that...? Twilight held her breath and waited for the sound. It was like wind, faint, but there. Twilight...
"Wh...who's there?" she stammered, as the voice grew louder.
"Twilight..."
"Show yourself!"

"All right, bossy-boots," the voice responded, and took form immediately.
Floating before her was a large, snake-like beast, with a furry body, a reptilian tail, two mismatched horns, a displaced fang, two red, unmatched pupils, a goatee, four legs from four different creatures, and a devilish grin on its face.

"Discord!" Twilight exclaimed.
"How wonderful it is to see you again, my little pony!" the creature responded, its voice filled with childish pleasure at tormenting Twilight.
"What are you doing here? Where are we?"

"Well, strictly speaking, I don't actually exist any more," Discord smirked. He had been, before the destruction of Equestria, the spirit of chaos and disharmony, the total polar opposite to sense, rules, and order. It was in his nature to disrupt things. In fact, one could argue Discord was not actually evil, it was just the fact that harmony was necessary to keep the structure of Equestria in balance. He continued. "But, I do believe we're inside your little noggin. Well, the cotton candy clouds and general psychedelia is my doing, mood lighting, you see, but the rest of it is all in your head."

"Well, get out of my head!" Twilight said. "This is my head, not yours!"
Discord looked at her with contempt. "Oh, p'shaw. Honestly, Twilight, you don't think I have any kind of power any more? I've barely managed to reconstruct myself from the memories you had of me. Like I say, outside your head, I'm as good as dead."
"Well, what do you want?" Twilight asked.

"Twilight, do you know why I existed?" Discord asked. "Why I, the spirit of chaos and disharmony, existed in the most perfect, harmonious world anypony has ever known?" he briefly pointed a finger down his throat.
"Because everything has an opposite," Twilight reasoned. "Harmony is no exception. But opposites do not have to be equal."

"Oh, don't they?" Discord asked. "Opposites don't have to be equal? Is that your shoddy excuse for why I was imprisoned in stone for more than a millennium? Because, ooh, chaos always loses out in the end! You know, for a smart little pony, you're really rather stupid."
"How dare you?!" Twilight shouted in outrage. "If you're going to stay in my head, then you treat me with a little respect."

Discord disdainfully frowned. "Ugh, fine. You're not all that clever. Better?"
Twilight did not react.
"I'll take that as a yes. Twilight, the reason I was ever born was because, simply, I am the antithesis to anything that has order or balance. It's in my nature to break things up and harm things. But I in myself have not always existed, you see?"

"What are you getting at, Discord?"
"Twilight, think about this logically for one second, will you? I may be the spirit OF chaos and disharmony, and have the means by which to cause those things, and I may be those things personified, but I am not those things as a general whole. And why? Because, little Twilight, chaos and disharmony has existed since the beginning of time and space."

"You mean to say that you are older than you look?"
"No, I am a fact of physical laws – or rather the lack thereof – made flesh. Think about it. Ever since the Big Bang, anti-matter has collided with matter and annihilated, and atoms have been split. Stars could not exist without chaos, Twilight. Without random intervention. Nothing could. Harmony, the laws of physics and nature, are merely the chaos taming itself. But chaos will always exist, Twilight. Randomness is a key factor in everything. Heck, even in YOU. Evolution could not happen without random chance. You're a product of my doing. Weird, huh."

Twilight struggled to digest this information. "Why are you telling me this?"
"You...ponies, you were so proud, so proud of your accomplishments. You built cities, gained successful government infrastructure, built schools, hospitals..." he smiled villainously at Twilight. "...libraries. You wrote books, you questioned theories, just as any scientific civilisation would. Your race even developed an ability to harness the natural, what was it you called it, 'magical' energy in the air. Poppycock, of course, what you really gained was an ability to warp energy and matter, but 'magic' works as a name. Your pegasus friends evolved an ability to walk on clouds, your earth pony friends gained an ability to 'speak to nature', which is earth pony talk for 'pretend they were at all special'. And then one day, you all took it too far."

"How so?" Twilight asked.
"Your pride swallowed you up. Your royal family, pureblood alicorns, born of a rare genetic malformation – again, caused by chaos – were so arrogant, so cock-sure of their abilities, they decided they would freeze the entire planet in orbit, and force the sun to orbit them instead, so they could feel important in their tiny little patch of universe. They learned to move the Moon. They even convinced their subjects that they could control the stars."

"But what does this have to do with anything?" Twilight impatiently interrupted.
"In due time, my dear. You see, I had control of the entire planet at one point. I am by birth a freak of nature. I simply appeared out of nowhere one day – my father, the chaos and disharmony that controlled – and controls – all, my mother, the so called 'magic' in the air. But then the Royals just had to arrive and spoil it. They imprisoned me in stone, and then arrogantly took the Sun and Moon for themselves."

"But I've seen you make the sun rise and set in the middle of the day!" Twilight interrupted. "You're guilty of it, too!"
"That was an illusion," Discord argued. "Stop interrupting." He gave her a glare with his mismatched red pupils, a glare that said, "Shut up, the grown-ups are talking."

"When I escaped again, you set about imprisoning me once and for all. And for the most part you succeeded, and harmony was restored, and chaos was vanquished. Aww." he paused, sardonically. "But it was not to last. Chaos may not be able to prevail over harmony, but at the same time, neither can harmony over chaos. You broke a fundamental rule of nature, that day, when you put me back in stone, and that is what led to your downfall."

"Which is?" Twilight asked.
"You mean you don't know?" Discord asked. Then he laughed, loudly. "Oh, that's just priceless!" he pounded the air as if it were solid. "Good one."
Twilight stared, dumbfounded.

"You mean you really don't know?" he asked. "Oh dear." He grinned. "Well, I'll leave you to fill in the gaps in the story. Right now, it's my time to go."
He conjured up a hat and donned it.
"Discord, wait!" Twilight shouted.

"No, Ms. Sparkle, this is a road you must walk alone."
"So, is this it, you're just going to...die?"
"Not die, no. Well, this old body is going to disappear for good, yes, but it was ugly anyway. My essence, however, will remain alive until the end of time. Chaos is everywhere, Twilight Sparkle. You cannot escape disharmony. It will follow you. And while harmony may help tame the beast within me, it will, inevitably, always win. Well, I say that...there's no winning in this game," he chuckled. "Just a matter of losing the least. Oh, would you look at the time? I'm afraid my essence has some life to cause and life to ruin. I bid you, adieu." He paused momentarily. "Oh, but Twilight," he added. Twilight Sparkle looked up. "You owe me one."

With that, the old spirit straightened his hat, gave one last laugh, and then vanished without a trace.
Twilight sat still for a few moments and waited. Sure enough, the sofa disappeared, the candy-floss walls of her mind fell apart, and slowly, she fell back into her body again.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say when it comes to the subject of the Mary Sue Field. It was invented by the young Lt. Mary Sue by complete accident during her service with the short-lived Galactic Federation, which lasted about two weeks. It involved lots of silly costumes and many of the most silly-looking aliens from the Galaxy took part in it. It was so silly that it has now embedded itself into the racial memory of many worlds, and one can expect to find a weekly fictionalised version of the fabled Galactic Federation on most primitive worlds' television sets.

Lt. Mary Sue was by far the laziest, most flawed, ugliest girl one could ever see. Her face was so riddled with acne vulgaris, rosacea, and sapiens (an aggressive and sentient form of acne that screamed swear words if you tried to pop the spots), that creatures lacking stomachs were known to vomit upon seeing it. Not an inch of the skin of her face did not come at least two millimetres away from the muscle. She was, by all accounts of the word, hideous. She barely did any sort of military paperwork, and she smelled a good deal, so men tended to run away screaming when given blind dates with her, proceeding to bleach their skin off and usually dying in agony from chemical burns. Lt. Mary Sue was not a very hygenic lady.

One day, Lt. Mary Sue woke from a nap in a daze, and sleepwalked all the way on to the main bridge, where, by staggering coincidence, everyone had gone off to dinner without her. In her dream-state, Lt. Mary was apparently an expert technician and began to fiddle with the ship's Main Warp Drive. She accidentally shocked herself awake, however, and when she awoke, she found that the air had taken on a bluish tinge and smelled curiously of geraniums.

The crew returned from dinner, and rather than having her instantly court-martialled, they thanked her for her amazing repair abilities, admiring her "perfect skin" and her "amazing scent". They absolutely adored her. She was promoted to Admiral instantly and controlled the ship for about ten minutes, at which point they crashed into an enormous asteroid and died in the dark emptiness of space. The Galactic Federation Planning Committee said the incident was "a bit of a shame" and "made them feel a bit bad". They disbanded two days later over insurance agreements (the personal and life insurance money for the incident still hasn't materialised, cheeky bastards).

Thankfully, Lt. Mary Sue managed to beam the blueprints for what she called the "Mary Sue Field Generator" all across the Galaxy, and at the time, the fledgling Vogon race, who had just invented communication technology, thought it was a terribly smashing idea – the Mary Sue Field bent reality and psychological perceptions to benefit whoever was using it to irritatingly over-perfect levels, which could reduce planetary protests against demolition by 99.9%: If people were begging to be destroyed by the Vogons, they could increase efficiency massively (the remaining 0.1% would be the Belcerebons, who would spend more time talking about how crap the weather was to worry about Vogon attacks to possibly come in the future anyway). There was a minor setback, however: When scientists tested the Mary Sue generator on a Vogon, he instantly became hated and feared by everyone and everything around him. Vogons were just that disgusting that even the Mary Sue Field wouldn't work on them.

Upon abducting and testing humans with the device (misbelieving that the human brain was located in the posterior area of the body, as in many creatures found around the Galaxy), and finding humans were just too stupid to run the machine, the Vogons filed the blueprints away until they could find a suitable organism to run the device. That is, until now.

Twilight Sparkle's blank expression faltered slightly. The others continued to stare in horror.
"What in Luna's Moon have you done to Twilight Sparkle?" Rarity demanded out of the hulking mass of flab sitting in the Prostetnic's seat.
"I have no idea," Reth replied, slowly. Almost remorsefully. "I really don't know what's going on here."

"Stop this!" Pinkie Pie shouted. "Stop this now! This is a low form of torture, even for Vogons."
"I'm telling you, I'm not the one behind this," Reth insisted. "Vogons don't do this kind of thing. Even callous bureaucracy has standards. We just read our poetry to people, we'd never..."
"Then who's behind this?" Pinkie Pie asked, rhetorically.

"Can't you do anything?" Spike asked, desperately. "There's got to be a way – "
"No," one of the technicians replied. "The experiment has begun. There's no override. We can't stop it."
The four stared up at Twilight's floppy body. She looked as if she was dead.

"So it's not torture," Pinkie Pie said. "It's an experiment. Is that how it is, is it? A planet gets destroyed, and you use the survivors as guinea pigs, is that it?"
"No!" Reth insisted. "I mean...the Vogons...we...I don't even know...I heard what happened to Equestria, but...I had no idea..."
"So tell me," Pinkie Pie interrogated. "Who are you working for?"

"I'm telling you, I don't know!" Reth shouted, standing up from his seat, clutching his fat, slug-like head with a pair of beastly hands. "A Vogon's duty is to do his job. Which is to do his job. Do you honestly think a race such as ours has time for petty villainous scheming? No! We're just here to run an experiment. It's one of the many services Vogsphere offers, you see. It's not all destroying planets, you know."

These words caught Rarity's attention. "Was it you?!" she shouted. "Was it you that destroyed our planet...killed everyone..."
Reth sighed and took out some rather dingy-looking grey tablets from under his seat. He dusted them off, dropped them into a glass of water, and drank it.

"That was far too clean a destruction for us to be involved," Reth said. "We use thermonuclear warheads and death rays. Your planet and everything on it was turned into a dust cloud," he said. "Which we're floating in right now."
The four suddenly noticed the dim haze out of a rare window in the control room. Vague yellow light from the star they knew entered through it.

Fluttershy retched at the thoughts this conjured. She wasn't much for science, but as a lover of all living things she was fully aware that somewhere in that mix were organic molecules that had once made up the blood and bodies of friends and relatives, enemies and rivals. All reduced to dust in the end. She tried not to weep.

"So what now?" Pinkie Pie roared. "You just fry our friend, too. Let her work this Mary Sue Field? What are you planning?"
"I think I can answer that," a voice behind Reth answered, in a tone so deeply unpleasant that even other Vogons found the sound positively repulsive. In fact, several bacteria in the area released a large amount of gas as the bacterial equivalent of crapping themselves, so for a few moments the air smelled faintly of rotten eggs, giving the new Vogon an even more unpleasant entrance.

"Prostetnic Vogon Kath!" Reth exclaimed, saluting politely. "Awake from suspended animation so soon?"
"Yes," Kath replied, his voice a low, gruff groan, like a building slowly collapsing in on itself combined with a whale with wind and a sore throat. "You know the drill. You initiate the experiment, I oversee it, and then Prostetnic Vogon Shightz takes over as we leave."

"Well, with all due respect, Kath," Reth replied, "I'm in the middle of dealing with some..." he glanced at them, almost apologetically. "...hitchhikers."
"Hitchhikers?!" bellowed Kath. "Hitchhikers! Bah!"
He stared down at them with beady eyes.

"You bunch of freeloading, jobless, stupid, saccharine little quadruped merrychippi!"
"Hey!" Pinkie Pie retorted. "That was uncalled for. At least call us 'pliohippi'."
"Shut up, you pink furball," spat Kath. He surveyed the experiment. "Ah, yes. The classic Mary Sue Field treatment." he gazed at Twilight Sparkle. "What on earth is that?" he asked.

"That's a unicorn, sir," a technician answered. receiving a smack on the head.
"I know that, you dolt. I've just never seen an M.S.F. set-up like this before."
"I have the papers right here," Reth answered, as if speaking to a superior rather than an equal.
"Let's have them," Kath said.

He glanced over them, looking at the diagrams. The words were printed in large print, BLOCK CAPITALS, and used lots of short words.
"Incredible," Kath murmured. "It's perfect."
"Perfect for what?" Reth asked.

"Nothing," Kath replied.
Reth gave him a look that was banned in several galactic sectors and zones for "being bloody irritating". Thankfully, he currently had diplomatic immunity, so the look was allowed through, and Kath shot him back a look that was banned on a dwarf planet somewhere in the vicinity of Sirius for "looking extremely stupid".

"Excuse me," Rarity enunciated in an even more regal tone than was typical of her, "But I do believe you're forgetting that you've captured our friend and strapped her to this abomination hanging from the ceiling."
Kath looked at her and growled.

"That 'abomination', pony," he spat, making sure the 'p' in 'pony' released as much saliva as was vogonly possible, "is cutting-edge technology."
"That doesn't change the fact you've shoved a bunch of cables into her face!" Pinkie Pie shouted. "What's wrong with you?!"

"We're just following orders," Kath replied, smiling a smile that could probably cause terminal illness in some species.
"From whom?"
"We can't say!"
"Why?"
"Because we're under contract."

"So you signed a contract with someone to say you could kidnap a pony and fly your ship into the remnants of her home planet for some plan you don't even know the details of?"
"That seems legitimate," Rarity sarcastically proclaimed.
"Enough!" shouted Kath, bringing his enormous, flabby green hands down on the control panel. "Reth, let me take control of this situation."

Reth felt that twinge in his heart again.
"Prostetnic Kath, I'm fine as it is – "
"Really? Then why haven't you thrown these freeloaders off the ship yet, hmm?"
No answer.

"Damn shame," Kath said. "I didn't bring any poetry. Looks like I'll just have to make do with having them thrown out of the airlock."
Fluttershy cowered behind Pinkie Pie.
"But, Kath, we appear to have accidentally kidnapped their friend."
"And? Why does that concern you?"

"Well, this doesn't seem ethical."
"Ethical?!" Kath bellowed. "Ethical?! You dare call yourself a Vogon with that attitude?"
"Perhaps we could tell our employers – "
"Tell them what? That a bunch of stowaways demanded we ditch their plans entirely so they could get their friend back? You're an idiot, Reth. Now, go back to suspended animation!"

"No!" Reth shouted, without even realising.
"Did you just say 'No' to a fellow Prostetnic's order, Reth?"
Reth fell silent once again.
"Did you or did you not just say 'No', Reth?"
"Yes, Kath, I said 'No'. Because I don't think what we're doing here is right, and I want to resolve it in a peaceful manner."
Kath stared at him with a cold, hard look.
"Very well," he said.

"Did you hear that? They're going to free Twilight!" Spike whispered, excitedly.
Reth stepped forward. "I will fill out the paperwork allowing your friend to be freed," he said. "We apologise gravely for the inconvenience. I'm sure this has been very distressing and you are entitled to a free pen as you leave the sh-"

There was a loud, electrical crash that bounced around the ship. A green flash of light appeared and disappeared instantly. Reth looked down at his chest to see his own green blood pouring out of a large wound.
"No!" Pinkie Pie cried.
He didn't have a chance to look back at his assailant before he was shot several more times.

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