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."

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