//------------------------------// // New Dimensions // Story: FiO: Very Optimal // by FeverishPegasus //------------------------------// Wasn’t the ship supposed to be gold…and shiny? Zany was ecstatic. “It’s perfect!” “What?” “Don’t you see? It worked!” I scoffed. “No. It didn’t.” “Of course it did!” I looked at her, concerned. “You’re telling me you haven’t read the bible?” Her excitement faded into confusion. “What does the bible have to do with it?” “Okay, not The Bible, but a bible.” “Okay…” “Does the name Zaphod mean anything to you?” “No.” Then how?! I considered this for a moment. Somehow, Zany had come up with the idea to make an infinite improbability machine, without actually having read the bible. I’d never, in all the time I’d spent living, encountered a coincidence this staggeringly unlikely. The author did come up with the idea himself, but the fact that the one true love of my life had managed to come up with an identical idea to his in an isolated setting scared me. Was this an act of CelestAi? How many times had she changed Zany to suit me better? “Hey,” she said, waving her hoof in my face. “You’re doing it again.” I relaxed. “Sorry. Once we finish our adventure, I have a few books for you to read.” ********************************** We found ourselves in the Heart of Pink. Once Zany flipped the switch to turn on the engine, I hadn’t expected the ship to act like it was working, but it in fact, grumbled to life. I felt a moment of worry that perhaps the SchrodingerFriar had lived on in our newly-made contraption, grumbling in preparation for his next best hymn, but once the engine reached a smooth purr, I became satisfied that there was only a fifty percent chance that a cat was living in our engine. Heck, knowing the way I’d treated cats in the past, that chance leaned a little over the fifty percent mark. Either way, I was confident that we’d done something wrong. “Are you sure you pressed the right button?” “It’s the only button, and it says ignition.” “I know, it’s just…it wasn’t supposed to work.” “What? Of course it was. Our engineering is the best in the world!” “You say that, but I don’t remember installing module fifty-two.” Her face dropped. “Ohhhhh, snap.” After looking around, she asked, “What did we make then?” “I don’t know. What was module fifty-two supposed to do again?” “Something about dimensional stabilization.” I breathed a sigh of relief. “We don’t need that.” For the first time in a while, Zany looked concerned. “Are you sure? Who knows what could happen?” “CelestAi’s got our backs.” ********************************** As soon as Zany gave the word to our ship’s artificial intelligence, a terrible banging sound assaulted our ship. It seemed as though we were colliding with a mountain over and over again, minus the actual effects of the g-forces. My voice, barely loud enough to be heard, screamed out to Zany. “What’s going on?” “You say that as if I have any more experience riding unstable infinite improbability machines than you do!” I waved my hoof towards the ceiling. “Ship’s navigator! Is there some way to cut the clatter?!” A hillbilly, backwater type voice came from nowhere in particular. “Shore thing. Diseengaging compliamentiary adveenture sound syntheesizer.” The sound stopped, and I found it possible to think again. Zany took advantage of the silence. “So we aren’t actually in trouble.” I shrugged. “Who knows? There’s a chance the ship hasn’t even moved.” “Ha! Maybe flipping the switch didn’t work.” “I’d say there’s a fifty percent chance.” The ship disappeared from beneath us, and we found ourselves in a Harry Potter fan-fiction. ********************************** Hagrid stood in the midst of a maelstrom, his wand outstretched, straining against the encroaching forces of water. It wouldn’t be long until his strength gave out to the powers that be, but before that happened, he had to come clean with his feelings for Harry. However, he was hesitant. His relationship with him had been strictly as a mentor. Would it be right, even while facing death, to trouble Harry with his feelings? Harry stood on the precipice of a cliff, drenched in the pouring rain, watching as his beloved struggled under the weight of the water. To help Hagrid would spell doom for both of them, but he had to do something! He hadn’t had the chance to tell Hagrid that he loved him! Zany and I stood behind Harry Potter, not sure why the thoughts of both characters were narrated in our heads. The first few seconds of this encounter were all we needed to know what was going to happen to the two. Dread made my vision swim. I had thousands of years to live, and I didn’t want to have Hagrid’s hairy body dominating my vision every few minutes. Hell, if worst came to worst, I’d probably just ask CelestAi for help with that, whom I’m sure would be pleased. She’d probably take my words to mean a bunch of other things too. I watched in horror as Harry climbed his way down the cliff towards the worsening maelstrom. Soon we would reach the critical turning point, and then worst of all, the impossible plot device. At most, Zany and I had five hundred more words before we would be scarred for life. Both of us glanced at each other for a moment, understood what we needed to do, and then jumped off the cliff into the maelstrom. We heard Harry scream, “What?!” before whizzing past him at incredible speeds. Just as we were about to hit the frothing water, we saw the cat we’d used for our Equestria destroying device swimming in the whirlpool. Both of our faces registered shock, and I regret to say that we forgot completely about ice cold water we were about to plummet into. The disbelief we felt teleported us onto the cliff again, which seemed to be this universe’s alternate version of flying. Hagrid looked at our forms that winked out of existence and dropped his wand in surprise. The maelstrom consumed him, but just as we’d thought the worst of it was over, Hagrid materialized onto the cliff next to us. We had been the impossible plot device! By winking out of existence out of surprise, we’d surprised Hagrid and inadvertently caused him to teleport to safety. Luckily, Harry still clung to the cliff side, now very confused as to what happened to Hagrid. He’d initially been horrified to see the water converge on him, but no matter how hard he looked, the body couldn’t be found anywhere. His heart surged with the insane hope that someone, somewhere, had conjured Hagrid to safety. Full of adrenaline, he climbed his way to the top again, driven by his insatiable lust for that hairy beast. I calculated that we had about two hundred and fifty words left before the critical point of cringe. Zany and I had to find some way to leave, pronto. Only issue is that the Heart of Pink couldn’t be found anywhere. One moment we’d been in the safety of the ship, and the next, well, we found ourselves in hell. At last, at the end of his wits, Harry crested the top of the cliff side he had been so eager to climb just a second ago. Wild hope made his heart beat at incredible speeds as his head whipped around for some indication that Hagrid had made it to safety. A wild roar shook the trees around us as Hagrid’s voice boomed in greeting. “Harry! I’ve been meaning to tell you something!” Zany and I groaned in horror. Harry’s heart skipped a beat. Not only was Hagrid safe, but from the tone of his voice, he could sense news of the best kind. “What is it Hagrid?” I interrupted him. “No! Stop! Can’t you take it somewhere else? Does it even bother you that we’re here, watching?” Hagrid put his hand on my withers. “I actually quite like it this way.” Harry, on the other side of me, grinned. “Is that what you’ve been meaning to tell me?” Hagrid smiled wide enough to part his beard like Noah did with the Red Sea. “I suppose it slipped out…but yes.” Zany and I ran, we ran as fast as we could, but we couldn’t escape the inevitable words of Harry Potter faintly making its way through the underbrush of the forest. “That’s not the only thing that’s going to slip out tonight.” ********************************** While a few minutes of running yielded us with the reward of escaping the grunts, groans, and screams of the wizards, we found it impossible to avoid the narrator’s voice. Every now and then we’d hear things like. Hagrid likened this enjoyment to the first time he’d eaten a banana. At first, he wasn’t sure what to do with it, but the experience he’d gotten now did well to help him relish… Or. Occasionally, Harry felt periods of bliss, but the experience made him feel strained more than anything. He likened it to the time he first wielded a wand, trying to squeeze every last ounce of magical power out of his being. Yeah. Just when Zany and I figured we wouldn’t be able to handle the narrator’s voice any longer, the Heart of Pink, miniature sized, bonked me on the nose. It was so small in fact, that I hadn’t seen it, and assumed it was a fly. But when I traced the trajectory of the object after it collided with my snout, it came to a rest in the grass, and revealed itself as the pink savior that we’d been looking for. I desperately searched the tiny figurine for some kind of button that would make it possible for us to ride it. From the look Zany gave me, it seemed she didn’t realize that it was the Heart of Pink I was messing around with in my hooves. Frustrated and a little embarrassed, I threw it at the nearest tree, and for whatever reason, the impact made the ship expand. In the place of the tree I’d thrown the figurine at, stood our Heart of Pink, eternal savior from the evil narrator and its two cohorts. We were going to get out of here. ********************************** After a few moments of screaming at our hillbilly navigation computer, the ship departed for a place called ‘Oh god, just get us anywhere but here.’ In hindsight, we should’ve changed directions sometime along the way, but we were pre-occupied trying to keep specific mental images buried in our subconscious. ********************************** The next planet looked relatively normal, minus the fact that the ground felt like one giant waterbed. The trees stood straight up, even pulled at the ground, as if they were filled with helium. Given the adventure I’d had today; I’d be willing to consider it. However, the most shocking thing about this world, was that the animals themselves were made entirely of plushy material. They moved around and ate things like normal animals, but seams could clearly be seen on the sides of their faces, along their legs, and down their backs. Upon closer inspection, the texture of their skin looked like a mixture of cotton and polyester. For a place called ‘Oh god, just get us anywhere but here,’ the scenery and wildlife was quite nice. I was also pretty confident that our Heart of Pink was working, but there’s a chance that CelestAi is just a cruel mistress. Either way, there was an acceptable lack of fanfiction, in that there was none at all. At least our previous experience hadn’t been about My Little Pony. Something kept bumping me, and I looked down to see a cute plushy dog. It was humping my leg, but the speckled brown dots covering its body invoked more of an ‘aww, what a cute dog’ reaction, rather than a ‘get away from me you freak’ reaction. However, I did push it away, because it was weirding me out. All this time, Zany had been squinting at the ground. Most likely focused on a plushy ant colony. But when I looked at what she was looking at, tiny plushy hedgehogs came into view. Amazingly, they could talk, and talk they did. The whole conversation was some sort of argument about which one could run the quickest. One hedgehog argued that with the Force Emeralds, they could harness its power and become the fastest in the world, while the other argued that it could beat anyone in a race, Force Emeralds or not. The brownish-yellow hedgehog continued the discussion. “Who needs to run fast when you can fly?” A hedgehog with a light blue tint replied. “When you’re the fastest in the world, you feel like you’re flying.” I grabbed Zany’s foreleg, and she looked at me with fright. “We need to get out of here.” “Why?” “Just trust me. The planet we’re on, it’s much worse than the last one.” “Why?” I pushed her in the direction of our ship. “There’s no time, we have to go now.” Zany resisted at first, but eventually caught on to my urgency. We first walked, then ran, to the safety of our ship.