I almost wish I could tell you much about just exactly how it felt to get zapped by a live powerline, but the problem is, I... kind of didn't. You see, the very instant I was about to become crispy-fried photo geek, something blinked. Don't get me wrong, I'm not short on vocabulary here, I can epitomize with the best of them, but all of a sudden it felt like the whole world simply...
Look. Have you ever felt that strange sensation of silence when the power grid shuts off? When the calming, soothing hum of all of those electrical or thaumaturgical devices you've got going on simply stops? Imagine that, but imagine it as a full-body sensation. Like all of a sudden, every spark of nerve suddenly disappears. Can't see, can't hear, can't think. It was something like that. I don't know if that's what it's like to be dead, because I've frankly never been, but it must've been something like that.
You're alive, so you breathe, your heart beats - well, if you have a heart, and you're not some crystal abiotic creature reading my notes for some reason, and if so, Hello! - but when all of that shuts off, and somehow you're still alive, that leaves what's left of you in a little bit of a panic. And then, when a moment later, it starts up again...
Well. To describe my traverse through what I'm now going to call the Void would be kind of difficult, because frankly, text doesn't do it justice, and I am very definitely not going to go all House of Leaves here-- er, for the most part.
Maybe for effect.
Possibly.
But I felt like I somehow heard the sound of water hitting a wraith, a wind crackling, I think I felt the Earth singing a tune of something or other, and I know for a fact that I heard the baying of a dozen or more wolves, howling at the sky. The sensations... we don't have words for those. And please, bear in mind, that's what I can remember. I'm not a good narrator here.
The sensation of falling, though, now that was unmistakable. And so was the thud when reality returned and my head shattered like a dropped plate.
That is not, of course, what it was. It was, however, what it felt like. Allow me, please, to wax artistic for a moment. Imagine, if you were, that a crazed lunatic were running a jackhammer over your skull while Yoko Ono played, turned up to eleven, into your ears, while your tongue was being pierced by red-hot needles, your limbs casually removed an inch at a time, your spine was being played by a xylophone artist extraordinaire who had somehow decided to use golf clubs, and your hair somehow felt like it had been detached and used as a makeshift harpsichord. Sounds pleasant, right?
Knowing what I now know, that's more or less how a transfer through a morphogenic field array without the proper safeties goes. And ladies and gentlemen, that's on a good day.
This was not a good day.
By the time I returned to proper consciousness, I think that my unearthly screams must have probably scattered away whatever wildlife was scattered throughout, if they were even there in the first place. Which, again knowing what I know now, was probably what saved my life in the end. You see, waking up in the Everfree Forest, land of chaos, dark magic, and generally... er, well, Terran weather, is kind of like waking up in Ravenloft, Silent Hill, or Chernobyl. The very moment you realize this is where you are is the very moment you realize this is where you do not want to be.
I, being a young, hapless twenty-something, did not quite realize this fact. However, I did recognize that I was no longer in Toronto. For one thing, things were much, much too quiet. When you are in a city, there are certain sounds you grow used to, even subconsciously. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those nutcases who think that wind turbines are going to cause depression or that wifi signals will control your brain. But it's a low-level background noise which eventually, folks get accustomed to, like the hum of a fan.
Biologically, the fact that I could no longer hear the sound of cars was enough to propel me to full alertness, followed swiftly by full unconsciousness as my body reacted poorly to the sudden movement.
The second time, I opened my eyes in a much more sober way. And here were my thought processes, in part:
To the front of me, grass. Maybe it's someone's rooftop garden? Not a lot of birdsong, that's fine, it's kinda fall and maybe they're just in migration patterns. What are those brown things? Kind of interesting, those. Kinda brown... bark, that's it! Bark!
Wait, why are there trees here? Did
And that's more or less all I remember from that segment.
To leave it at that would be silly, though. The third time I opened my eyes, I immediately stopped. I took a deep breath. A moment or two to center myself.
And then I lied to the audience, because I immediately awoke in a panic.
Eventually my mind and body held a conference, decided that it would probably be better to be alert and capable in an unknown situation, and woke me without the sheer rush of Adrenaline and Terror which had encompassed my prior attempts. Maybe Self-Preservation decided to make an executive decision; I'm not entirely sure. Still, when I finally regained what there was of my sanity, I awoke to find myself in a small grove, with a small brook beside me and a bag at my feet.
Immediately, to stifle the pounding in my head, especially with my hands feeling like they were utterly numb, I stuck my head into the stream and drank deep. The cool water... well, it's difficult to describe. It really was like the breath of life. If you've ever been dehydrated, and felt utterly willing to do anything to obtain a glass of water, that's more or less how I felt, only that I must have drank a full liter before I was satiated.
With that water coursing through my veins - shut up, I know, that's how it felt, not how it was - I finally took a moment to perform a quick self-diagnosis. After all, I'd awoken, utterly parched, in the middle of a forest. Who knew what sort of person led me here? Diagnosis, let's see, left ear, right ear, perfectly fine, face, full feeling, hooves were perfectly intact, forelegs w
...Wait.
This time was the charm, this time was the charm. I knew it. Okay, perhaps I was hyperventilating. Who wouldn't hyperventilate? Hyperventilation was perfectly fine and reasonable and I knew that there was going to STOP, self, before this becomes a running gag. You're in a strange forest. You can't afford to pass out any longer. Well, that's what I told myself, anyway.
What I was doing, of course, was looking at a pair of blueish and... rather... holey legs. Legs which would otherwise belong to a horse. Legs with a certain number of gaps within. Legs surrounded by chitin.
... let's just skip past the running gag at this point.
Once I had finally washed my face enough, I decided to come to grips with reality. Pain? That much I got, and stubbing my leg on a rock didn't make it any less realistic. I guess maybe it's possible that a coma dream could result in realistic pain, but... eh, the nerves just felt good enough. By which I mean, ow. Don't do that unless you really are trying to wake up, it's not fun for the next two hours.
Mental, on the other hand...
For a few moments I toyed with solipsism. In case you philistines don't know, that's when you imagine that the whole world's in your imagination. It's popular amongst galactic presidents and other such narcissists. Problem is, even if you don't know if this is one gigantic dream or some fake reality or the real reality, it's entirely possible that the sword through your throat doesn't care. So there was that. Totally not worth a try.
Coma dream, waking dream, fever dream... let's not. Let's say it's real.
Some kind of afterlife? That is possible, but I didn't think I'd be good enough to wake up here. Again, discarded, if only due to my own self-loathing. Plus, Hell wouldn't let me take my bag along, unless someone really wants to spread around some good shots of ... no, let's move on.
So... discarding those, let's just say that this is all real. So, somehow, someway, something had resulted in me winding up, in Wilderness Forest #3, Gigantic Spooky Haunted Place, in a grove which might be the only safe point for some reason, in the form of an overly emotional bug-pony, with this weird bracelet around my foreleg.
And those, ladies and gentlemen, were my thought processes. Don't worry, we'll get to the bracelet in a moment.
Let's take a few moments here to separate, briefly, from our brave and not-at-all-freaking-out heroine, and look in on three members of the Wild Guard, Equestria's answer to places like the Everfree Forest, the Ghastly Gorge, Froggy Bottom Bog, and Princess Celestia's bath so on. They were the fearless, the best of the best, and the ponies who had somehow pissed off their superiors hard enough that this was the place they were sent. Not that they were incompetent -- far from it! -- but 'fearless' does not equate to 'common sense' on any metric, and so...
Well, to make a short story long, when a round of profanity strong enough to turn the air blue erupted from the forest they were patrolling around, all three guards on duty nearly engaged in a case of 'friendly stab', to borrow a phrase from the late great Pterry.
Please bear in mind that this incident has been buried and 'forgotten', ahem. I'm simply going by what I know of these three, who eventually became well-acquainted with me. ...Okay. Stop looking at me like that, I know better than to start trouble, but this is Equestria, and a day without some level of panic, desperation, and possibly rampaging lagomorphs is what we call a 'good day'. Plus, you've got the rampant xenophobia, which... eh, I'm getting ahead of myself again.
Let us place the tableau for a moment. The day had been good for the three ponies: an Earth Pony mare named Shamrock Quartet, whose tones were as green as her name might sound; a Pegasus stallion named Cobalt Pinion, a deep azure in shade; and a Unicorn mare who went by Scarlet Dawn. No points, dear audience, for guessing her particular palette. The use of the triad of tribes had developed in the early days of the Wild Guard, where it was decided that a group capable of dealing with any threat and fulfilling a combination of facets was well worth the option.
It is perhaps in the nature of any group of friends, compatriots, and even coworkers, that a certain dynamic inevitably occurs. In a set of three, for example, most often you have the gregarious, the flightly, and the calm. Okay, so in reality that's not what happens all the time, but in the case of these three, somehow it came together naturally. They'd come together in Manehattan Primary, seemingly at random, when - and I'm not making this up, this part they actually told me - they all sat together at the same table, disregarding the local - and racial - cliques. I'm not going to say that it was friendship at first sight or anything, but they ate their food, shrugged, and from then on, they just sort of... drifted towards one another. Sooner or later, they figured they might as well do something interesting together, and, couple of years later, the closely-knit group eventually joined the Guard.
Weird how it happens, huh?
So judging by what I know from these three, Shamrock drew her spear fast as lightning, Cobalt zipped over to a cloud for cover and potential overwatch, and Scarlet charged to a secondary corona, before they even had a chance to communicate to one another exactly what they were doing. Which... probably wouldn't have turned out well no matter how well they knew each other, but when no obvious threat erupted, they holstered, depowered, and... well, stayed on the cloud at that point. And then they began talking.
The reason this team was in place along the Everfree was simple. Earlier in the day, a gigantic ring of rainbows had erupted from the vicinity of Cloudsdale. With the resultant thaumic dispersal, an accompanying upswing in chaotic energy was expected, even if nothing had immediately occurred. This was furthermore confirmed by a series of oddly prominent events, such as the Princess deciding upon a new pupil after - and this part was specifically difficult to believe for anyone who hadn't been there - she somehow pushed enough thaums into a dragon egg to cause it to hatch, something which ordinarily requires the presence of an active volcano or an equally impressive source of power. There are, for example, air dragons hatched in the eye of a hurricane... but let's leave the Kirin out for now.
Have I mentioned that Spike terrifies me? Because he does. Moving on...
As such, every member of the Wild Guard was on high alert, though for these three, 'alert' usually means 'keeping an eye out when they feel inclined, and goofing off.'
... and though she might not be here: Shut up, Shamrock. I'm the one telling the story.
Let's go back to the forest here. As you might have probably guessed, that little ring-about-the-Rainbow which was propagated by a certain prism-painted Pegasus pony was indeed the catalyst for a series of events, but of course, the most important one was the wave of energy which brought me here. Having screamed my vocal chords half to death and possibly scared away a manticore or two, then, I decided to perform a more proper inventory of my assets. No time, as they say, like the present.
Hair, check. White -- well, perhaps, silver. Patchy in spots, perhaps to fit the motif of a changeling. Gods, what does that do to split ends? Either way. Check. Ears, two ea., I had to doublecheck, and ensured that they were both there, if somewhat more long and pointed than I - for some reason - thought they should be. Eyes... well, I closed each of them and verified that I could see equally well out of each, that is to say, I could make out fine details at a range of 10 feet. So there's for that. I'll spare you the rest of the details.
In case you were wondering why I was doing a full body inspection, there are two reasons. The first and foremost is that because, when you find your brain transplanted into an entirely new framework, you ensure that each and every part is mobile, flexible, and reactive. The second is because you don't want any surprises. Well, any more, I guess.
One detail which did draw my eye, and which will probably become a bit important, was that I was wearing, well... some kind of bracelet. It wasn't really much of one, just an armband - well, forelegband, which held twelve stones, each of which was a different shade and shape. The fabric of that bracelet seemed to be silk, or gossamer, or possibly some sort of nylon - either way, it nearly blended into the oceanic blue of the chitin around it.
The armband seemed... pointless to worry about. The stones, though. Those twelve stones seemed... Important. Capital-I Important.
And the very instant I realized, that's when I cursed, heavily and in detail. Loudly. With fine precision and the weight of a hundred-kilogram sailor. Frankly, I did not have time for that right now, I was in the middle of Spooky Haunted Forest and I had more important things to do. At that point, I put it right out of my mind, ignoring what might well have helped me ignore a lot of issues.
After a self-diagnosis which would probably have deeply annoyed a medical professional, I decided to take stock of my surroundings. Here is where I found myself, and my resultant thought processes:
> Examine here.
You are in a forest filled with large trees of various natures, including pine, oak, maple, ash and cedar. Other types appear herein which are unfamiliar. Deciduous and evergreen varieties populate the area. A pathway leads to your left, with no signs to mark the way. It appears to lead North and South. A babbling brook runs through this area, bereft of fish or other life; moss grows on the bottom, but appears slightly grey. The time appears to be late afternoon, the skies are clear, and the weather is currently about 30 degrees Celsius.
You see here: A bag, leaves, a large rock, and a gold coin.
> Count leaves.
There are 69,105 leaves here.
> Examine bag.
Okay, so it didn't go quite like that, but I really couldn't resist, now could I?
The bag itself was... strange, at least to my eye. Well, perhaps I should say, 'bags'. The pair of them seemed to be equivalent to a set of saddlebags, meant to be thrown across one's back so that the contents, in their shifting, didn't move around too much with that, er, motion. That having been said, they were stylized in such a way that they could more readily be called 'packs'. I painstakingly viewed the contents of each pouch, and found nearly what I expected: Granola bars, a small bottle of water, odds and sorts, and, most critically, my hardware.
You might be a little bit confused here. First, for a geek, especially one like myself, one's technology is one's life. A granola bar is filling, and manages to get one's stomach full, or at least full enough to continue functioning. A camera? Now that helps to fill one's mind. And so I was invariably pleased when my trustworthy camera was found sitting, neatly, in a good little pouch which seemed almost designed for it.
Then the implications hit me.
I was admittedly rather more concerned about the tablet and laptop which were sitting on my left side. I had, first of all, no way to charge them - if such a thing could even be considered possible. (Yes, my camera needed to be charged too, eventually, but it had a much longer battery life than either.) What exactly does one use to define 120V, 60AC? Would time be different here? What exactly would one do to define voltage and amperage? Alessandro Volta surely never found his way here, right?
Barring the very basics of electricity as we generally know it, let's also consider temperature. Is Celsius the same? That is to say, is 0 the freezing point of water at sea level, and 100 the boiling point of the same? What's an inch, or a centimeter? What's gravity look like around these parts: obviously I haven't evaporated yet, so there must be something, but what's the measurement scale?
Worse yet! What's a meter? Is it still the amount of time it takes for an object to accelerate? And what's an inch, a centimeter, a second, a gram...
As my imagination ran away with me, you can probably tell that I was hyperventilating like mad. Heh, I was probably a second away from a rolling ball of quivering chitin.
It's a damn good thing that those guards found me at that point.
Said guards were, a few minutes prior, a few hundred meters off, playing Scooby-Doo.
Scarlet and Shamrock stalked forward along the cracked ground, leaning slightly against one another from time to time as they convinced one another that yes, they were still there. Cobalt was up top, ostensibly providing overwatch - but, more precisely, hiding inside his cloud, the very tips of his wings poking out to provide ample proof of its occupant -- as though the sound of wind through his nose weren't more than enough for that.
This sounds like poor positioning, but the Wild Guard actually tends towards rational team layouts in every case. Cobalt's magic suffused the cloud, allowing him to throw off some lightning when he needed to or to bug out if things went south. Scarlet could pull back to provide artillery, fire support and the like, while Shamrock could dive into the furor and manage to survive through sheer good luck and bullheadedness. Or, at least, that's how it usually turned out in the WG.
Consider, if you would, that these three had earned the collective nickname of 'The Bucking Nuts'. And thus are they arraigned to Ponyville.
I'm given to understand the Princesses have a running tally on when they'll lose their heads. Shining has a side bet, as does Mile Stone.
Sooner or later, I inevitably decided to get ahold of myself. "Okay," I told myself, "we can do this. We can handle being... a changeling, in a forest, in a FUCK ME RUNNING there is no way there no way I can handle this on my own and what the fuck am I supposed to do in this sort of circumstance and... and..." Then I paused. I sniffed. I started looking about.
My saddlebags, which I hadn't taken a longer look at, were neatly placed about my ... let's call them sides, I honestly had no clue what they were defined as. They remained with their bulging innards, a happy appearance to any thief who might view me here, and a slightly sad sight to any woodsman. The smell of whatever was going on... no, the aroma, was plenty strong enough to keep me from noticing anything else.
The stream had nothing to do with it: I quickly determined, though I did have another small lap from the fresh water before moving onto my further consideration, that the increasingly aromatic scent was coming from the east. Well, east-ish. Southeast, anyway.
And I was just about to delve out of this seemingly innocuous grove when a pile of three ponies decided that was a good time to tumble in. I barely had the time to even see any of them, before, um... let's just say that they declared their presence in a most spectacular way.
Quoth the profundo, "You have precisely three seconds to remove yourselves from me before I get you thrown into Tartarus." The two - stallion and mare - found themselves quickly excavating themselves from my presence, leaving only the mare responsible for nearly shattering my eardrums.
For a brief moment I considered glorious retribution, but a glimpse at the very obviously military mare, as well as careful and cautious consideration caused me surcease -- or, at least, a few moments to plan my revenge. Instead, I felt it proper to take in the situation, and found the end result to be edifying.
Very rarely have I ever considered my deadpan, almost unimpressionable face to be a blessing, but in this instance, I thanked whatever dark deity granted me that gift. Were I to simply take in the triptych before me, I would surely have broken like a windowpane. That is not to say that any one of these three is comical in their own right -- but that as a set, they dance upon the sublime. Celestia herself must have put them together, there could be no other way.
I could not otherwise have possibly stumbled upon Larry, Curly, and Moe.
Of course, these three aren't those, in any way, but that certainly was the first impression my stunned mind could gather, and their colour schema certainly didn't help. For a full minute, I believe that I had my head tilted to the side, a thin line of drool slipping down the side of my lips as I had my mind blown for the second time in short order. I think that quite briefly, I imagined pink fluffy unicorns.
That was when Shamrock slammed her hoof into the side of my head.
As you might imagine, this lead to a slight infraction. It went something like this:
"What the FUCK is wrong with you?!"
"We're in the middle of a haunted forest, daze out on your own time!"
"...first, ow. Second, fair enough, lead on."
Yeah, retribution was going to come, and it would be vast and sublime, but right now priorities took hoof, such as it were. First and foremost: get the hell out of the damned forest and into something approaching civilization. With a deep breath, I gathered up my materials and materiel - what little I had - and carefully slung my backpack across my withers.
Cobalt, being Cobalt, decided to try a bit of conversation. "Um, what's with the weird saddlepack?" A fair question, but... a difficult one to answer. A human backpack does not look like a pair of saddlebags, nor does it fit over one's withers in the same way.
I wasn't - couldn't have been - the only one of the group who noticed my lengthy pause there. "It's a matter of taste," I finally replied, leading to a pair of snorts and a long huff. The lattermost could only have come from one particular mare, and frankly speaking, I knew that she was already on the verge of throwing me to the wolves, proverbially put. Shamrock was about to give me an Irish kiss, so to speak, and I full well deserved it.
As three of us climbed up the cliff - well, minor steppe - from which my wayward companions had fallen, making our way through the rampant abuse of the world's physics engine (also known as having hooves), we continued to shoot the proverbial tofu. Cobalt lay upon his cloud, being as much of a lazy son-of-a-Discord as he always is (shut up, Cobalt, you know it's true) while we sweated, grunted, and made our way up in turn.
"So," asked Scarlet, "what's the weather like where you're from?"
Here, I had to break out in a grin. "You ready for this one? Gonna come as a shock." To my surprise, all three nodded their heads. "Alrighty. Hooves secured?" Here I gave Cobalt a glare, and he gave me an ordure-munching grin. "We don't handle it. Weather just happens."
That nearly resulted in us going back and resetting all our progress, but thankfully, both of my compatriots managed to recover themselves in time. They did, however, nearly cause a rockslide when they shouted, in unison, "WHAT?!" I swear, it was virtually in sync.
I don't think I had to even bother with the smile, because their jaws nearly rolled off down the forest path when I appended, "Nope, great big Everfree. Which is why I want to get the hay out of here," I extemporized. "I can deal with wild zones, no problem. Wild zones filled with," and here I provided a theatrical shudder, "dark magic and monsters, not so much. Let us be away."
None of them raised any objection to that for the strangest of reasons.
"So, whaddya normally eat?," asked Shamrock, as we finally pulled ourselves over the final ledge and hit the path leading back to town. My back cheered - my legs tried to cannibalize the rest of me for fuel.
"Probably what you get around these parts," I panted, taking a moment to let myself recover from the circumstances - and let my brain parse the fact that I was dealing with someone more clever than the average bear. "Honey and nectar is a major ingredient in a lot of our recipes - it provides a caloric boon, and bolsters many of the carbohydrate-heavy recipes." I took a moment to pause from bullshitting, and rested my forehead against the cool dirt, taking the time to provide myself a heatsink for my horn. Immediately I felt some surcease, and I began to wonder - could I drill into the ground?
A gentle cough broke my concentration, and I brought my head up to look at the three guards. "Something wrong?" I asked, blinking. That was odd. I shouldn't have had a film over my eyes...
"You'd been resting your head against the ground for a quarter hour," Cobalt informed me with a tiny nod and a more sizeable wince.
For a moment I blanked. 15 minutes? That can't possibly have ... actually, it could have been viable. Microsleep is not something I've dealt with very often, but it's a well-known phenomenon, and... for a moment I shook my head. "Okay. If I'm zoning out, then we absolutely need to get to a save point and fast."
"Save point?" queried Scarlet, looking a little more concerned than she otherwise would. Hard to blame her. I must have been... stumbling around and worse.
"Out. of the damned. forest." With a willful gesture, I bit the side of my right foreleg, hard -- and the resultant pain drove a spike of alertness through me, just as intended. Said spike lasted about two seconds before it began to fade, but I took the opportunity to point down the path. "Onwards, marching soldiers," I halfway sang, and the others followed me forth through the horrific forest of despair.
"Please tell me this is it, and we're not just hallucinating."
"I think this is it...?"
With a cry of 'hallelujah' and a dive towards the mossy ground on the roadside, I began to kiss the dirt which was, finally, completely outside the Everfree. The three members of the Wild Guard regarded me in differing ways: amusement, curiosity, and distaste. Shamrock, of all folks, found my ministrations to be particularly concerning.
"I think you were there for... less than twelve hours," she began, considering the second half of my praise: a kowtow to the Sun itself, something which Scarlet and Cobalt regarded with significant amusement. With a sigh, Shamrock simply disregarded the concern, and provided me a poke to the side of the head, which finally brought me from my reverie.
"Come ON. We have things to do and more foliage to watch." Wait. Was that a joke? Surely not. Nonetheless, I decided to follow Shamrock in the hopes, however slim, that I might glimpse such a rare occurrence once again.
And as I did so, I took a surreptitious glance or two at my bangle. Now and then I saw a dark sparkle within the mother-of-pearl, and a light within the opal... and I swear that the ruby and sapphire were likewise lit, and that's to say nothing of the diamond and tiger's eye...