Wallflower Blush twiddled her thumbs.
She glanced back over at her phone, the same way she had five other times in the last minute. Shockingly, it still hadn’t lit up. She picked it up and gave it a tap. No new notification.
What was Sunset doing?
She’d known Sunset and her friends were going to be “out of town” for part of the day – the clever little euphemism she used to avoid the eternal weirdness that surrounded the fact that she was actually a horse alien from another dimension full of magic horse aliens and that she was ever-more-frequently going back to that special dimension of horses. You don’t have to dwell on all those things when you just say “out of town” instead.
Wallflower certainly wasn’t jealous that Sunset hadn’t taken her out of town. Not at all. Even though they were supposed to be dating and yet it seemed like Sunset constantly treated her old friends as more special than her…
She realized she was still holding her phone and gave it another tap. Still nothing.
Sunset had said she’d be back this evening. And sure, there was an argument to be had over exactly what hours constitute evening, but as the last light through the window began to fade, Wallflower felt pretty sure Sunset would be stretching the definition by the time she showed up.
If she showed up.
If she even remembered…
Wallflower gave herself a slap on the cheek. Stop it. Stop thinking like that. Stop thinking of her like that. Don’t be who you were.
Sometimes Wallflower forgot how lucky she was that Sunset was still willing to even look her in the eye, never mind have a relationship with her. And then she remembered, and that brought back all the pain anew.
Still, this was a little weird for Sunset. Especially if Twilight had gone with her. Twilight was about as punctual a person as you could get, and more than once Sunset had admitted she’d had Twilight to thank for reminding her of an outing that might otherwise have slipped her mind. So it didn’t seem likely that both of them would forget when they’d intended to be back. She supposed maybe Magic Ponyland might have had a confusing time zone difference, but then again, Twilight at least would almost certainly account for that.
That raised another, much more alarming possibility – something had happened.
Considering all the wild things that had happened in all the years since that one Fall Formal, it wasn’t out of the question that Sunset and her friends had gotten into some kind of trouble. And while Sunset didn’t talk too much about Magic Ponyland – presumably out of fear of making Wallflower uncomfortable about her relationship technically being interspecies – she’d heard and seen enough to know it wasn’t all sunshine and castles and friendship over there.
(She had a small bud of a carnivorous plant she’d collected amid the chaos of the Tri-Cross Relay to prove it.)
The anxiety was quickly mounting, eating away at Wallflower’s mind, and before she knew a plan had been hatched. If Sunset wasn’t coming back, then she’d have to go find her. She had to at least try. Sunset would do it for her, right? She didn’t know if anyone else would even think to peek through the portal. But she’d do it, because she was Wallflower Blush, and she wasn’t scared anymore. She wasn’t frightened, or bitter, or angry, or hiding. No, she could be brave and strong and daring just like Sunset and her friends, right?
Right?
She could ponder that question later. She had to get over to campus.
Standing before the statueless pedestal that hosted a portal to Magic Ponyland, Wallflower steeled herself.
She’d never heard Sunset and her friends complain about any pain from traveling between dimensions. Her classmates who’d been on that one cruise talked a lot about how surreal and brain-breaking the experience of tromping through another world in horse bodies was, but not anything suggesting pain. So hopefully it’d be an easy trip.
Recalling her classmates brought up another thing her adrenaline had kept her from considering up until then – changing bodies. She knew everyone who went through turned into a pony on the other side. Except the pony world’s Twilight’s version of her dog, who apparently became – a dragon, or something? But Wallflower wasn’t a dog, so pony it was. She couldn’t remember the precise types of ponies offhand – Sunset she knew was a unicorn, so she figured that might be nice to be.
Thinking about dragons sent her mind wandering off to Ray, Sunset’s pet gecko. Should she check to make sure he’s okay?
No, stay focused, Wallflower thought. I’ve got to at least look for Sunset and her friends. If I can’t get some kind of lead quickly, I’ll go back so I don’t get lost there. But I can at least do the bare minimum.
Wallflower took a deep breath, then plunged her head in, the rest of her body quickly being sucked through.
She was in a deep, twisting spiral, swirling around and around as though she were in a whirlpool, but yet there was no water beneath her, and she was falling, falling, into an endless eternity of–
And then there was a surface, and she was staring, dazed, up at a high ceiling.
Blinking, she tilted her head side to side. She was sprawled on the ground, but at the moment, her surroundings had taken priority over her body in commanding her attention. Where was she? She hadn’t really thought much about what exactly would be at her exit point, but… a library?
It certainly seemed that way. The large, circular room was made up almost entirely of bookshelves, stretching all the way up to the tall ceiling. Certainly not a typical place for a transportation hub, though she supposed one anchored to a partially demolished school monument was equally odd. Speaking of which, her eyes gradually lowered to a large contraption in the middle of the room; that must have been what she’d tumbled out of.
In the center of it was what looked like a mirror. Convenient, she thought. At least I won’t have to wonder what I look like.
Wallflower rolled over, immediately noticing the oddness of her form, but holding off on inspecting herself until she could reach the mirror. She stood – on two legs – and stepped awkwardly towards it, feeling something dragging behind her, and noticing after a moment that she was about the height of the mirror. Craning herself forward, she looked, and was astonished.
Her body was long and serpentine, with three distinct shades to it; a black, scaly tail, a sleek tan-furred midsection, and a fluffy green face. Her limbs were nonsensical; the two she was standing on bore a hoof and claws respectively, her left forelimb had fingers bearing talons, and her right forelimb had a paw. She also seemed to have wings, though they were also mismatched. Her face looked positively draconic, and yet her horns – wait, was one of them an antler? – looked mammalian.
“Huh.” She briefly scratched her chin with the left forelimb, then lowered her arm, only to then notice her chin was still being scratched by an appendage that had detached itself from the rest of the limb without her even feeling the separation.
After a moment, she rolled her eyes.
“Of course I get to be a really fucked-up pony. Great.”
Meanwhile, in a dimension that lay outside all laws of pony and nature alike, another draconequus spat out his tea, far more than he had sipped. His eyebrows furrowed.
“So it was a sign,” he muttered. “It’s happened. It’s finally happened.”