//------------------------------// // 1.4 - Assessing the Situation // Story: Ponies, Portals, and Physics: A Practical Study on Unscheduled Interplanetary Excursion // by superpurple //------------------------------// This was some damn good oatmeal. Once again, I was sitting on the universe’s most uncomfortable bed, but now I had breakfast, courtesy of what’s-her-face. The tray that had been brought earlier held a small bowl of oatmeal, some apple slices, and a cup of juice. Nothing fancy, but I wasn’t complaining in the slightest. Food was food. And fever-dream or not, I was hungry. So here I sat, eating the damn-good oatmeal, and trying to wrap my mind around this whole situation. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t starting to doubt this whole dream deal. All of this was getting really weird. That’s not to say talking unicorns in dreams was so unbelievable, or even new for me, but the fact that I was aware that it was weird while it was happening was what made it weird. In my experience, dreams made sense when I was in them. When they stopped making sense is usually when they fell apart and I woke up. Not a single thing that was going on made any sense, and it’d been like that for hours now. The fact that it was weird was weird and was making me think. “So…” I said to myself. “If we put aside dream-slash-hallucination for now, then what are we dealing with?” I stuffed another spoonful of oatmeal into my beak. Starting from the top of the list-of-things-to-explain-weird-shit: Aliens. I’d been abducted and brought to the planet of alien unicorn things. Kind of makes sense, right? ...Except that this didn’t really look like the home of an advanced space-faring race. Pretty much the opposite in fact. Unless it’s all some kind of trick. Holograms, or mind-manipulation. It would explain how they could speak the same language. But for what purpose? To keep me calm? If so, they kind of fucked that up with the whole griffon thing. Trying to fuck with my head? Some kind of interrogation? But why— Hey. Hey Garrett. Stop overthinking things. You know why. Just say it. You know you’re thinking it. No. I know what I’m thinking and its stupid. Say it. No. Say it. “Fine!” I slammed the spoon down on the tray. “It could also be that I crashed into some wormhole in the middle of campus and got magically turned into a griffon! But that’s fucking stupid, which is why I dismissed it! And now I’m arguing with myself!” I threw my arms up and flopped back onto the bed. “Fan-fucking-tastic!” But was the alien-hologram-brain-fuckery-thing really that much more likely than finding a magical portal? “Yes. No. Maybe. It’s a lot less stupid.” … “Ok fair enough,” I huffed, then rolled over and went back to my oatmeal. Besides, when you get right down to it, holographic interrogation wasn’t much different from dreaming. Throw out the unnecessarily complicated details and it boils down to just two things: This was real, or it wasn’t. It was time to get scientific about this. “Starting with Case A—the less headache-inducing of the two. This isn’t real. I am dreaming, hallucinating, in a coma, or anything else of the sort. Evidence for? Well, I’m a griffon, there are talking unicorns. Don’t think I really need to say more than that. “What to do in that case? Well…” I tapped the spoon against the tip of my beak as I thought. “…I could sit around until it ends on its own. But we’ve been there already and it's boring as hell. And who knows how many dream hours, days, years, that could be if I’m in a coma in a hospital. I’m no neuroscientist, I don’t know how this shit works!” Maybe try another way to wake myself up? I pinched my arm. The talons made it hurt a hell of a lot more than normal. “Yeah. Didn’t really expect that to work.” I stared at the talons protruding from my fingers. They were impressive natural weapons, that was a fact. I had no doubt they could be deadly if used the right way. I could always try something a bit more… aggressive… to wake myself up. Slowly, I reached up to my neck... …and promptly let the hand fall back down to my lap. No. I didn’t really feel like testing that theory, especially on the off chance I was dealing with Case B. “Case B. That this is…” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly through my nostrils. “...that this shit is real. Or real enough. Okay. Evidence for? What do we got?” Well, as much as I loathed to admit it, if you tabled the aforementioned bits about mythological creatures, it all seemed pretty damn real. “It’s also the simpler explanation, really. Yeah, Occam’s razor and all that jazz. Pick the one with the fewest assumptions or whatever. Though… does ‘everything you thought you knew about the universe is wrong’ count as a single assumption? Maybe assumptions should be weighted by magnitude—” Nope, we’re getting sidetracked here. It looked real and felt real. And really that should be enough. Nothing good could come from ignoring your own senses just because you don’t believe what they’re telling you. That way lay madness. If I wasn’t losing it already. “So, what to do in Case B?” Step one: Start with not panicking. Step two: Don’t think too hard about the details. Step three was probably something along the lines of ‘find a way back’, but I could get to that once I was sure I’d managed the first two. So, case A, I could sit here and do nothing until I died of boredom or lost my shit entirely—a prospect which was becoming more likely by the minute. Or go with case B, in which the thing to do was play along with the whole bizarre situation and work on finding a way out of here. Actually, even if things weren’t real, doing that would at least be entertaining. At the end of the day, there was really only one course of action here. “That it? We’re really doing this? Aaaalrighty then. For sake of sanity, we are proceeding—cautiously—under the assumption that all this shit, is somehow real, and that I need to find my own way back. Okay, what do we know? I am in an unknown location—hereby designated as Planet Unicorn. I got here after what is quite possibly the most unfortunate bicycle accident in human history. What else? “There was the crash, the blackout, and after that, the room with the junk and the bubble-mirror that might also be a magical portal to home. There was the freaking out—which is not important—which got interrupted by someone yelling at me before I blacked out.” And now that I was thinking about it, I was pretty sure that the yelling someone and Mr. Angry Dude were one and the same. And if that was the case, that means there’s a pretty good chance that the room with the portal is nearby—maybe even in the same building. But to get to that room I first needed to get out of this room. Now I had a mission—which was mostly the same mission as before, but now with purpose. And it was a mission that I would approach with every resource and bit of knowledge I had at my disposal.