Important! This story takes place in Totallynotabrony's "Dreams" universe. Reading these stories is highly recommended.

Chapter One:

Hey there, my name is Allen, and I am what you call a human. That is, for those uninformed, I walk on two legs, and stand about 5 foot 8 inches tall when upright. The only real hair I have is on my head, which happens to be brown, and cut very short. I prefer to wear T-shirts and denim pants, like any other guy my age. From what I've been told, my face always looks cross. Perhaps its the thick eyebrows... Anyways, i'm on the thinner side, with 160 pounds' weight. My skin is very tan, even for a white Kansas kid, because of all the outdoor stuff I enjoy, but that's hardly relevant. This is all how I remember myself looking when that day occurred.

I was reading a comic book. It was an old one of my dads, called “Crock”, which had a running gag on a lost foreign legion squad, called The Lost Patrol. They sent upside-down smoke signals, held committee meetings as to why they were lost every Wednesday, and dragged cannons through the sand without wheels so as not to leave wheel tracks. I always got a chuckle out of how stupid they were, especially considering that I had just been added to the Wichita Ground Team Patrol. You see, even though I’m only 14, I have the honor of being part of a United States Air Force cadet auxiliary, known as the Civil Air Patrol. All us Veterans it just call it CAP. One of the missions of CAP is to provide emergency services; Ground Teams are units of cadets that go about searching for lost/missing persons, and provide aid in times of civil or natural disaster.

“Allen! Telephone!” My step-mom called up the stairs.

I honestly couldn't stand my family. One of the reasons I joined CAP was so I could get away from my step-mom (who mainly ignores me) and my “Dad” (who has never not lived paycheck-to-paycheck, and is on his fourth wife).

“Coming, mom.”

It’s probably just an idiot classmate who forgot the history homework. I grabbed the handset from the hallway, switching the over to the call as I put the phone to my ear.

“Cadet Hamilton?”, asked a voice. “This is Chief Baler. We’ve been called out to find a missing hiker to the north. Get your 48 hour pack ready, I think we may be out a few days.”

I was so excited! My first real emergency, not just a SAREX or a training exercise.

“I’ll be at HQ in 20 minutes.”

22 Minutes later, I entered the CAP Wichita Command. Thankfully, the building was within walking distance; neither parent could ever be bothered to drive me there. Tony Baler looked up from the safety forms he was reviewing, and glanced at his watch.

“Two minutes late. We better not have a dishonest cadet as our newest member,” He chided me. His voice had the chilling effect of a metal bar against bare skin.

“Sorry, sir-er, Chief.”

Tony was a Cadet Chief Master Sergeant, calling a chief “sir” was akin to asking to have your head bitten off.

Tony, realizing my nervousness, said in a softer voice,”Hey, don’t worry. This is a pretty routine mission, the perfect one to cut your teeth on.”

“Yeah, about that...” I mused, “This is Kansas. Why don’t we just send out aircraft?”

“Well, two reasons. First, we like our younger cadets to get experience, and you know that only members 18 and older can be on a flight team. Second, we DID have a flight crew search in a fifty mile radius of the last known location, but nothing turned up. It is entirely possible that they didn’t see the hiker right under their nose, so we need to go in and do a thorough search. Now, its time to meet your new best friends.”

Counting the Chief and I, we had a total of eight cadets on the team, with one Senior CAP Advisor and safety officer, who would mainly be running the com-links and picking up fresh supplies for us every night. We estimated a maximum of five days of searching. At that point, the Feds take over, since after that long they are probably going to find a corpse, not a hiker. We hopped in the van with the familiar Triangle Propeller logo on the side, and headed out towards the open space to the North. The thing many never realize about Wichita is that it has a little over 4,800 acres of park and open space, not counting the undeveloped land surrounding some of those parks. A hiker, being on a virtually flat terrain, could get lost without maps, GPS, or compass, because points of reference were nil in some areas.

This open space park looked like the same prairie grassland, horizon to horizon. Jumping out of the van, I stretched my legs and put on my sunglasses.

“OK, base camp is going to be by the visitor center, over there. That way we have facilities and a building to look for if we get disoriented. I want to cover ten square miles per day, so we can really comb the areas that the air team checked out. No time to lose, lets go!”

Finishing his directions, Tony set off down the path at a brisk walking pace. We’d cover the closest sections, then head outwards from there.

The first two days were uneventful. We found and searched a few areas that, while appearing to be flat ground from the aerial photographs, actually turned out to be rock overhangs. This heartened us to the idea that the hiker had eventually just camped beneath one of those, obscured them to aerial view. We also quickly learned the climate. While blistering hot and humid in the day, the open prairie became shockingly cold at night. I noticed that when Tony got uncomfortable or tired, he’d pull out some sort of keychain thing, and would grip it tightly, almost as if it were a talisman of strength and courage.

Whatever is was, we decided it worked, as Chief Baler quickly earned the name “Chief Badass”. On the first day, a cadet had stopped to hydrate and adjust their boots, but neglected to tell anyone. When it was noticed that she was missing, Tony immediately turned the group over to Technical Sergeant James, and ran back in the other direction, breaking several safety conventions. However, being the fastest runner and a master orienteer, he wanted to get the cadet back to the group and on schedule as quickly as possible, something he could do best without one of us slowing him down. When they came back ten minutes later, the cadet looked a little pale.

“Rattlesnake” commented the chief, not even out of breath. “I had to crush its head with a rock.”

The cadet hadn’t meant to get behind, but the rock she sat on had a sleeping rattlesnake beneath it. She had sat motionless for nearly twenty minutes. With a stern reminder to just ask next time, the cadet moved to the center of the pack, and we spread out into search formation.

I flopped out of my cot on day three, now quite adjusted to the routine. The chief called us together and announced that we would now switch to a scouting tactic, where a group of two or three would go around and find any geographic features that could obscure a person from the view of a plane. He’d need the fastest cadets to go with him. As I ran cross-country, I volunteered. Another cadet, called Riker, stepped forward, saying that his experience in track made him a good runner. Chief Badass, cadet Riker, and I set out on day three towards the search area at a brisk jog.

“No need to overdo it” Baler reminded us.

However, by mile three, it was apparent that our “Track Star” Riker was out of gas. Chief Baler had us take a seat as he radioed back for someone to come and get Riker. The Chief sat a few meters away from us, and pulled out his keychain.

After a few minutes, I approached the Chief, wanting to ask about where we would head once Riker was taken back.

“Hey, Chief, I-”

I stopped as I saw what the keychain he was hastily putting into his pocket was.

“Um, what do you need?” He asked, flushing bright red.

“Was...was that a...” I returned slowly, searching for the right word. “...pony?”

Baler sighed. “Two things. One, don’t let this get in the way of the mission. Second, its a Unicorn, named Rarity. I’m what you call a brony. Just roll with it, Please?”

This was a paradigm shift in manliness. However, a leader is a leader and this guy was still the long-distance running, snake-killing, chief bad-ass. In a way, it was almost a relief to know he wasn't perfect.

The rest of the time was spent in silence, until, thankfully, the two cadets sent to pick up Riker arrived. The Chief and I set off at a brisker pace than before, both of us pushing ourselves as we did not want to have enough breath to converse. After another 4 miles, we came across the largest rock outcropping we had yet seen. We came to a stop, and Baler pulled out the park map.

“Odd. this isn’t on the map.”

Venturing further, I noticed a granola bar wrapper tangled into a dead shrub. “Chief!”

Going under the rock outcropping, we came across another granola wrapper, and an empty water bottle. Baler ran his finger along the bottle's rim.

“Still wet. I think we got here in time. He MUST be close by...”

Then we saw the crevice. A large, round hole led into a cavern beneath the rock. We could see a faint glow coming from the hole, and figured that it must be a small cave with several openings.

“Hello? This is Civil Air Patrol Cadet Chief Master Sergeant Tony Baler, we are here to assist you.”

No response.

He looked at me, and said in a low, even voice, “Frankly, what I want to do is not what we are supposed to do. You see, I have 150 feet of climbing rope...”

“Say no more, I’m in.” I was excited, thinking about my name in the papers.

Tying on to a large boulder, Tony pulled out a couple of carabiners and two shorter lengths of rope, which he made into harnesses. As it turns out, the drop was only two and a half feet, so the rope and harnesses weren’t needed. Entering the small cavern, we saw a glow was emanating from a foot-long tapered spike, and four, round metal shoes. They were the oddest shoes, I could swear that they were made for a horse, but they were much too small. Baler went over and picked up the spike. He then pulled out his pony keychain.

Looking from one to the other, we both said “...No. way.”  

Tony turned around, and, for the first time, noticed a deep handprint in the smooth rock face. He absentmindedly ran his hand down the rock, letting it come to rest in the print. It fit his hand perfectly. Suddenly, the glow from the metal shoes and the “unicorn" horn turned to a bright, L.E.D. blue. Then, darkness.

I yawned, slowly coming to. My eyes closed, I felt grass beneath me, and I heard noises to my left. Guess that wherever we were, Tony was here, too. I opened my eyes, and immediately felt very sick and dizzy. I was looking through a fisheye lens! No... wait. My eyes, they’re on the sides of my head. I’m no longer a predator, huh. I then looked down, and my legs gave out. All. Four. Of .Them. Four legs, ending in.. hooves? And wow, was I green! I looked like some kid had taken a sea foam crayon to me. I looked over at Tony, and was greeted by the sight of a muscular, off-white winged horse. What were they called? Tony spoke.

“Holy shit. I’m a Pegasus. You... you’re a Unicorn.”

“Are we dreaming?” asked Tony as we walked, or should I say, trotted, over an impossibly green hill.

Still getting the hang of those eyes. Man, I could see so much! Unfortunately, to focus on something, I basically had to go cross-eyed. Ah, well.

Tony was glassy-eyed. He unconsciously sat on his haunches. "...Wow. Wooow. He-he-heee... my tongue feels weird."

Great. Looks like this experience had broken the Chief.

I was automatically slipping into "Am I in the Matrix?" mindset. Believe it or not, at a younger age, I had made an made a generalization that would result in some expensive couch-sitting with shrinks, and an overall subjective view on life. Basically, its a condition referred to as Solipsism. Years of internal argument had resulted in a mental checklist on deciding if reality was...well... real.

First, Feel. I could smell the scent of grass, wood, lavender, and... pony, I guess. The light breeze in the area tickled my hide. My mouth was much longer, the molars remarkably flatter. I felt as if I was walking on wooden blocks, and a foreign sensation... ah, that would be my tail, doing whatever tails do. I dropped, hitting the ground with a soft swoosh, and feel the unpleasant sensation of air being knocked from the lungs. Pain was evident. I absent-mindedly raised my hand-er, hoof, to my forehead and felt the spike. How about that, I have a horn. Overall, incredibly detailed and alive feeling.

Second, logic. Well, generally, dreams are not an active experiences. Your brain is on auto-pilot, filing away the days memories. Yes, this could be what is called a lucid dream, but I know from experiences I can actually force myself to wake up from those. Here, I cannot.

I subscribe to Sherlockian logic. "After eliminating all other erroneous possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth."  Yeah, its rather crazy, but I felt that logically, I could say I was actually a small, anthropomorphic pony. I'm really a simple guy when it comes to internal battles.

And then there was Chief "Badass"...

Tony seemed to be attempting five different emotional displays at once. I approached him, and he gazed up at me.

"I'm dreaming, right?"

I sighed. "You already asked me that, and I doubt it. For one thing, we are BOTH here, in this thing. What kind of a dream does that?”

“True... but now what should we do? I mean, to get back?”

I grimaced at this. "Lets focus on one thing at time. Do you even think there is life here?"

“Yeah..." Tony glanced around, and what I assumed the pony equivalent of a knowing expansion flashed on his features. "Yeah, I do. I actually think I know where we are. Now, I’m still your superior, and until further evidence is presented, we are going to act the the men we are!”

“Heh, men...”

“Shut up.”

I could tell that something as off. Tony had been pretty laid back and quiet when he wasn't ordering us to do something. Now, he was irrational, emotional. As he turned away from me, I could swear I saw him grinning. Captain, Mr. Spock isn't firing all thrusters right now...

We headed off in one direction until we met a stark line of trees. You know the forbidden forest in Harry Potter? It looked like a city park compared to this.

“Well, I don’t think we’ll find much life in there, at least, anything that won’t eat us...”

I silently remembered that we were now technically prey, albeit very well trained prey. We decided to turn to the right, and follow the treeline. Now we began to notice the benefits of being four-legged. I was easily running an six minute mile without a second thought.

After what seemed like three hours, we saw something in the distance. Houses. And around and in the houses... more of us! Or, more of our species, so to speak. They were all colors and sizes, and each had this tattoo thing on their hindquarters.

“Jeez, I hope there isn't some sort of initiation ritual...”

Tony gave me a sideways glance, then rolled his eyes. Somehow, he knew quite a lot about this place, and was much more at ease than I. What did he say he was? A... broski? Something like that.

One of the creatures, a bright pink monstrosity, noticed the two of us at the top of the hill.

Thanks to The Only Brony in the Army for editing.