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.

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