‘Little’? My foot ‘Little’...
Derrick cackled gleefully. He really couldn’t call it anything else, it was too high-pitched and called instantly to mind evil witches and mad scientists all at once.
The massive, spindly metal frame, little bits and pieces taken from a multitude of different sources, sagged slightly to the left as it leaned pitifully against the wall.
“It’s finished!” he cried, happily prepared for this day for the last seven months of back-breaking work (at RadioShack. It’s where most of the stuff came from) and a few hours on weekends tinkering with it.
He cackled again, the noise becoming shrill as he ran of air this time. Coughing slightly, he made a mental note to stop laughing like that.
“Now,” he cooed to the machine, “to switch you on and make sure you work! This is the most awesome thing I’ve ever made, especially since I joined the Evil Genius At Home society!”
The letter had arrived in the mail, and he’d sent in the requisite $22.50 and seven Smart-O’s cereal-box tops. Then, he’d gotten a letter back, saying he’d become a part of the society, and to have a free schematic for an interdimensional portal.
It was a good waste of weekends.
Derrick stopped his contemplations of what to do next as his thoughts were interrupted by a call from the floor above.
“Derrick Jones! It’s dinner time! You’d better not be noodling around with that damned machine, young man!”
Derrick sighed and huffed. “Alright, mom, I’m coming. And I was just, uh, playing with my figurines!”
His mother called out again, “Then stop playing with your dolls and get washed up! It’s time to eat already!”
Derrick began walking up the stairs of his mother’s basement, flicking off the light switch at the top of the stairs, and went to sit down for some spaghetti.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Derrick woke up early the next morning, a Saturday, to test out his new toy. Eating his bowl of Smart-O’s (Now with 20% less sugar! That’s 2 calories per box, kids!) in record time (43.07 seconds) he rushed down the stairs into the basement, barely remembering to flick the light switch on the way.
Tapping buttons and flipping switches and levers, he successfully got a humming to start from the flimsy ring of parts. He’d taken to leaving it leaning against the wall with his posters on it, as the basement was his playroom, although he preferred to call it his lair.
A shimmery, if sickly, glowing sheen formed in the air inside the portal-maker’s ring of bits. It crackled weakly, and the humming intensified.
Derrick grinned widely, and he began rubbing his hands together maniacally, and almost cackled, but remembered not to this time.
“Now,” He said, “To see where it goes! Oh, wait, the camera-on-a-stick got broken last week... Uh, I guess I’m moving to human experimentation?”
He glanced back at the little desk behind him, crowded with the vinyl figures of bright, pastel-colored ponies. He bit his lip, and gave the Twilight toy a quick pat on the head, and whispered, “I’ll be back soon, I promise!”
Derrick quickly threw together a sack lunch, taking an apple, a small carton of milk (his mom worked at a school and got them for free) a PB&J sandwich, and piece of fruit leather. Then, he tromped down the stairs again.
Derrick Jones stepped into the portal, not sure of what to expect on the other side, bringing nothing but his clothes and a sack lunch.
With a falling sensation, he landed on a hill, which the portal stood perpendicular to. Meaning it appeared at a 60 degree angle, and as such left him pitching forward, rolling down the incline, which was covered in waist-high grass.
Derrick rolled to a stop, the grass slowing him significantly, back to the ground and eyes on the sky. Where he saw a gliding blue form against the clouds. His heart caught in his throat, hammering suddenly. He knew that silhouette! Especially since it was blue! The rainbow training behind also gave it away.
He sat up, shoulders barely above the grass. He looked around, hoping to see where the pegasus (his inner voice squealed out “Rainbow Dash! This is so awesome!”) was going. Looking around, he realized that he couldn’t see ponyville, or indeed were the blue pony had gone, as he was sitting at the wrong side of the base of an immense hill. He stood up, face determined, and gathered his lunch. Then, he began walking.
Less than five minutes later, he was panting and gasping for breath, his out-of-shape body barely able to gather enough strength to pull him any higher up the immense incline. He stopped to take a break, two-thirds of the way up, and drank his milk.
feeling refreshed, he trudged up the hill and looked out...
He ought to be able to see everything from here, he had thought, because this hill was Massive! Immense! Huge! wasn’t even half as tall as it standing up, and he was pretty normal, at 5’8”. Instead, he say what had to be the longest road in history leading into Ponyville, other hills nearby crowding out his vision to the surrounding world.
It had to be a long road, because it wrapped gently around the base of the hill, and the hill was big. But the houses of Ponyville appeared to be normal sized from here, so maybe it was just an optical illusion.
Looking around, he saw a light orange filly, probably around the age of the Crusaders, trotting towards Ponyville with a grin on her face.
Derrick thought this was the perfect chance. After all, young children are always nice, wonderful little things (Except Bob. He was never nice, and still wasn’t) and Derrick always got along well with them.
Jogging towards the little filly, he smiled, and almost began whistling, until he remembered that he can’t whistle.
So, instead, he just kept jogging. After nearly three minutes, he realized he had gotten off the hill, and the road had seemed right next to the hill, but it looked to be several yards away still. Derrick was supremely confused. Was it all just a bunch of optical illusions? He continued jogging, doing much better now that he wasn’t running up a hill. Finally, he got to the road, which appeared to be packed dirt. Stepping out of the tall grass, looked around, trying to find the filly.
She had already wandered off. Derrick was sad about this, he had wanted to try to get a hug.
Rising softly, a series of tremors sent shudders up his legs. He turned as the tremors got more noticeable, and he could hear loud thuds getting closer, like the footfalls of some giant beast. He turned, in time to see a huge shadow glide over him, massive orange pillars, coated in long, sweeping lengths of some type of vine or frond, also in orange, flew past him, landing with a resounding crash behind him.
Looking up in terror, wondering what type of monstrous beast or horrifying abomination it could be, he saw...
The underside of a pony. Only, the belly of the pony was easily twenty or thirty feet or so above the ground, making the pony somewhere in the range of forty feet in height.
Derrick was really good at math.
If 5’8” in human terms was about a... do the math, carry the one, shift it over a little aaand... about a seventh of the height of a 3’6” pony (Hearth’s Warming Eve episode. Colgate is standing next to a candy cane declared to be 8 feet tall, and Colgate is about 3.5 stripes tall, with 8 stripes going up the candy cane, making each stripe approximately 1 foot tall)...
Then he was six inches tall in Equestria.
Looking back towards the hill, he realized that he had no idea where the portal was. He was trapped, the size of a mouse, in a land of super-ponies.
“Well, looks like I’m going to Fluttershy’s, then. I was kinda hoping to live with Twilight, but oh well...”
And with that, he started walking down the dirt road towards Fluttershy’s house.
Next Story:
“Micro-Pony Party Extravaganza!”