Domain of Friendship

by Cold Bolt

Episode 1-1

The first thing Scarlet Lombardia noticed as she awoke was the fog filling her brain, as though she had taken a blow to the head.

"Unh..." she groaned, bringing a hand to her head as the world slowly swam into focus. Soft moonlight bathed the land around her, revealing the gently rolling hills on which she now lay. This immediately struck her as strange, but her mind was still too sluggish to devote any resources to recalling why that was... and before long, this matter had already given way for a rather more pressing one.

The second thing she noticed was that the hand she'd raised wasn't a hand at all.

"W-What sorcery is this...?"

A hoof. For whatever reason, she now found herself staring at a hoof, of which a cursory glance at her body revealed her to have four. As the glance gradually became a stare, she soon found four legs accompanying the hooves, a long body covered in red fur, a tail the exact same shade of sky blue as her hair... and, perhaps most curious of all, a strange mark on her hindquarters in the shape of a shooting star. All together, it gave her the impression of having been turned into some sort of horse-like creature.

With a moment's concentration, she conjured up a small cloud of bubbles and watched as they drifted away on the breeze. At least her magic still worked.

The longer she spent attempting to process all this, the less sense it made. A dream, perhaps? The dull ache in her head seemed to suggest otherwise. Her next guess might have been magic, but this was far too elaborate to be a simple illusion... and anyone outside of ten years old knew that transfiguration spells only worked on non-living things. As she climbed awkwardly up on all fours, she quickly deduced she wouldn't be puzzling this out by herself.

The third thing she noticed was that she wasn't alone.

Two figures lay sprawled out on the hill beside her, their strangely equine features somehow both familiar and alien. Was this part of the trick? Of this, at the very least, she knew one way to be certain.

"Tank? I think you may want to get up."

Sure enough, one of the figures stirred, emitting a groan as he turned over on the ground. "Mmf... It's still dark, though. Can't it wait till morning...?"

"I really must insist." Scarlet stepped forward, now standing over the figure that had spoken. "I promise you will find out why in fairly short order."

"Alright, alright... I'm up," the figure insisted, managing at least to prop himself up using his forelegs as he turned toward Scarlet. "Right, so what's got you all WHAT IN THE - "

Alexander Abrams - better known by the nickname 'Tank' - scrambled to a standing position in alarm as he caught sight of the strange creature towering over him. Several seconds passed as he gave her a quizzical stare. "...Waaait a sec. Blue hair and a big red ribbon... Scarlet, is that supposed to be you?"

Scarlet rubbed her neck. "I believe so, at least. I should confess I am not entirely certain..."

Tank chuckled. "What happened to you? You look like a baby horse that lost a fight with a box of crayons."

"Judging by these proportions, I think pony would be a more accurate term," Scarlet suggested, glancing backward once again at her peculiar new body.

Tank quirked an eyebrow. "Right, because that's what needed clarification."

As she turned back toward him, Scarlet gave Tank a knowing smirk. "In any case, I would not be so quick to joke. You may want to have a look at yourself."

"Huh? What do you - oh." It was only at this point that Tank noticed he'd been standing on all fours the entire time, which prompted him to spend the next few moments looking himself over. "Well then. I'm naked, covered in green fur, and someone drew a weird tattoo of a shield on my butt. It's everything I always wanted," he concluded, rolling his eyes.

Having already gone through the same process herself, Scarlet could only giggle.

"Hey, don't laugh," Tank warned. "You'll be poking someone's eye out with that horn before long, mark my words."

"Horn?" Scarlet blinked, raising a hoof to her forehead. Sure enough, it had apparently sprouted a horn that felt surprisingly sharp. "How curious... I wonder what distinction was drawn that gave one of us a horn, but not the other?"

"Uh, hang on a sec." Tank pointed a hoof at the third figure on the hill. "If you're you, and I'm me... then is that who I think it is?"

The two exchanged glances before approaching slowly.

Tank gave the nearly motionless figure a gentle nudge. "Uh... hey, Miri? You might wanna wake up. Something weird is going on."

Mirielle Marcus slowly extended all four limbs in an exaggerated stretch and gave a silent yawn that seemed to last almost an entire minute. Vision still hazy from her interrupted nap, she could barely make out the strange pair of figures standing over her in the dim light; it almost looked like one of them was red and the other green... but that would be silly, wouldn't it?

One moment of rubbing the sleep from her eyes later, Miri found herself staring at a pair of brightly-colored ponies.

"Good morning, Mirielle. Please do not be - "

Before Scarlet could even finish her sentence, Miri's eyes went wide as dinner plates, and she leaped several feet into the air in surprise.

Tank sighed and briefly closed his eyes. "Well, so much for 'try not to freak out.' At least we... wait, what?"

As his eyes reopened, Tank realized Miri wasn't in front of him... because she hadn't yet returned to the ground.

As the other two looked on in a mixture of confusion and awe, the steady beat of Mirielle's wings kept her hovering a little ways above their heads. It took several seconds for this realization to strike Miri herself, at which point she began flailing her forelegs in an attempt to reach for her friends below.

"Careful, careful!" Scarlet advised. "We will catch you if you fall! Try deep breaths; perhaps calming your nerves will slow them down a little."

In, out. In, out. Though Miri could still feel her heart racing, it seemed to be working - her wingbeats began to slow a little and, before long, lower her gently to the ground.

Tank scratched his head. "Well, that sure is different."

Sitting back on her haunches, Mirielle wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead and began waving her forelegs in a very particular pattern.

Scarlet winced as she realized what was wrong. "...Oh dear. Mirielle, would you mind trying that once more?"

About halfway through her second attempt, Mirielle too caught onto the problem.

"...She can't sign." Tank, however, was the one to give it voice. "In these weird bodies, we don't have hands. She can't sign to us without them."

Mirielle spent the next several seconds staring at her hooves before looking up at her companions, tears welling in her eyes.

Scarlet stepped forward and pulled Mirielle into a brief hug. "There, there, dear... do not fret. We will improvise until such time as we find a way to return to normal, I promise."

"Totally," Tank agreed. "Besides, look - you've got wings now! That's... kind of like a trade-off, right?"

Mirielle blinked as she turned her head to examine the wings folded neatly on her back. Standing up on all fours once more, she took a step back, hesitating for a moment as though unsure of how to proceed. Before long, however, her wings flared to life... and with no further ado, she took off into the night sky, soaring over the hills as though it was what she'd been born to do.

Tank sat back and gave an exhausted sigh. "Geez, is this for real...?"

"It would seem so," Scarlet admitted. "We ought to get our bearings, at the very least; I recognize none of this terrain. Would you bring me the map and compass?"

Tank scratched his head again. "I would, yeah, but there's a problem. Our stuff is kind of, um, gone."

"Gone?" Scarlet's heart skipped a beat. "All of it? The rations, the flares, the emergency radio?"

Tank crossed his forelegs. "All of it. Including my sword, Miri's medkit... and our clothes, for no adequately explored reason. Whoever or whatever did this to us made absolutely sure we'd be as stranded as possible when we woke up." He paused briefly for another sigh. "Come to think of it, I don't even remember what we were doing..."

Her earlier disorientation out of the way, Scarlet's mind began the task of tracing through her memory for any possible clues. "I seem to recall that we took a request from the notice board to investigate the old temple outside of town."

Tank's face lit up. "Oh yeah! Something about hearing weird noises, I think? I remember we picked it 'cause it sounded like something we could knock out in an afternoon, and my folks invited us to stop by for dinner while we were in town." His enthusiasm soon faded. "But... what happened? I swear I remember the drive over to the temple, but nothing after we got there."

Scarlet stared at the grass as though expecting it to yield the answers she sought. "My recollection is no better than yours..."

Mirielle chose that moment to land gracefully on the hill beside them, an excited smile beaming across her face.

At this, Scarlet perked up. "Mirielle, do you remember anything after we arrived at the temple before?"

Mirielle blinked, her gaze wandering this way and that as she racked her brain for answers. After several seconds, all she could do was shake her head sadly.

Tank took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Okay... okay, let me make sure I've got all this straight. One, we're completely lost. Two, literally all of our stuff is gone. Three, we're missing a huge chunk of time somewhere between leaving town and waking up here. And four..." He paused briefly to give an impatient huff and stare incredulously at his hoof. "...for however much sense it makes, we have apparently been turned into ponies."

Scarlet nodded matter-of-factly. "An excellent summary."

"Ugh." Tank kicked a nearby rock in frustration and watched it roll over the grass. "That settles it then: this whole thing is patently absurd."

Mirielle looked up from staring at the strange heart-shaped emblem on her flank and nodded.

Scarlet placed a gentle hoof on Tank's shoulder. "Inclined as I am to agree as well - quite wholeheartedly, in fact - sitting here stewing over it will do us little good."

Tank slowly stood up. "Well... you're not wrong, but where do we start? We have no way of knowing where to go."

With a quick hop, Mirielle hovered a few feet in the air and pointed a hoof over the crest of the hill on which they had awoken. Following her cue, Scarlet and Tank trotted to its peak for a better look.

"Oh, there's a town way over there!" Tank's expression brightened once again. "Right, you probably saw it while you were flying around earlier! Maybe some locals can help us figure out what's going on."

"Then that will be our first objective," Scarlet declared.

With that, the trio set off down the hill in the direction of the distant town.

Comments

[blue skys]

love it so far. guess their from are world just it has magic in theirs?