Chapter 1
The room
Dan Wilson was your typical school student, good grades, good friends, good times. But what made him different from his fellow students was a secret only his best friends knew about. He was a brony, a guy who watches my little pony for a living. He didn’t care about whether that made people feel less about him, the pros outweighed the cons. For Dan, there were so many pros it was unjustifiable. The only thing he didn’t like about the show was the earlier seasons unrelated to this particular version, as they gave the show a bad name, just because they were incredibly girly. Not to say this version didn’t have its girly moments, but that’s beside the point.
After a rather long day of boring lessons “Double math and Triple Science, who organised this crap!” and little to no activity on the Internet, he went to bed early. But not before he brushed his teeth and shaved of course, he did have some standards after all. Yet something seemed off, it was if he was being monitored, which he knew couldn’t have been the case. There wasn’t a window in his bathroom, so no one was watching him outside, and the door was locked, so no one could get in without him noticing. Yet still the feeling persisted, never changing, never leaving. Until he left the bathroom, then it went as soon as it came.
“Must just be the breeze or something” he figured. Which very well could’ve been the case, his house wasn’t in the best of conditions. It was old and shabby; with many of the once bleach white tiles aged into a dull grey. It was common for him to notice a small gust of wind or a small hole in the wall. However, this was not the case. In fact, it was the complete opposite. But Dan didn’t know that, and put the thought behind him.
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Dan didn’t normally have dreams, but when he did, they weren’t like what he was seeing now; a pitch-black room with nothing interesting about it. The only reason why he could tell that it resembled some kind of room was the slight light difference noticeable in specific aspects of his vision, allowing him to just make out a chair and some form of table. But after all, this was just a dream, and he just decided to deal with it, who knows what it could be leading too. Shame he didn’t have any sunglasses. They would have been so appropriate for this moment, but it wasn’t like the place could get any darker anyway even without them.
What Dan didn’t expect to happen though was a voice unlike his own to be talking to him. It couldn’t have been his; he knew what the voice in his head sounded like from all the fanfictions he reads to himself. This voice did have a sense of familiarity to it, but he couldn’t quite put a finger on it. Must have been the sleepiness. He didn’t think straight when he was sleepy, he didn’t really think straight when he was awake either, but he put it behind him.
The voice didn’t seem to have a source though. He certainly couldn’t see one; then again, he couldn’t really see anything right now. Wherever the voice was coming from, it certainly seemed near him wherever it was.
“Hello Dan. Pleasure invading your dreams” It said rather comically, yet with a darker tone to it.
“Pleasures all mine” Dan retorted. He was quite a sarcastic person at heart, always having an answer to everything, but never the right one. He did this on purpose though; he found it fun to annoy his friends any way possible. This was probably why they often called him the ‘life troll’, which in all honesty, was a pretty accurate title for him to have burdened to him.
“No, the pleasure will be all mine when you see what I have in store” the voice replied quite menacingly. Dan had a rather brave nature at heart (+ Attack –Speed), but the way this… entity spoke, he couldn’t help but be just a little scared. “We’re going to play a game I like to call ‘alternate reality’” the voice continued, “I’m sure you’ll love it” the voice, now becoming scarier by the second, then laughed like there was no tomorrow.
Dan didn’t like where this was going, but since it was just a dream, he wasn’t scared, he wasn’t bothered, because when he woke up, it would all be gone; a mere memory of his brain doing whatever the fuck it wants. He summed up the rest of his courage, and continued to talk to whoever the voice was emanating from. “What do you have in store?”
“Oh, you’ll find out when you wake up, but for now we wait, or rather, you wait. I’m going, it’s terribly boring around here…” and without warning, the presence of the voice was gone with an “arrivederci”.
“Finally, I can think in peace” Dan sighed. He had begun to get rather annoyed by the voice by that point, and was more than glad to see him rid of. Well, he couldn’t exactly see anything, but that’s beside the point. Wait a second…Wake up? Dan hated waking up, because when you wake up you have to get out of bed and when you get out of bed you have to do stuff, and Dan didn’t like doing stuff. In fact, he’d much rather just stay in bed all day and do nothing, great role model right? Besides, he had only just gone to bed after all, or at least that’s what it felt like. He couldn’t say he was at all fazed by what the voice said. When he woke up, anything could happen, he could be anything or anyone, that’s what ‘alternate reality’ meant right? So for once in his life, maybe he actually wanted to wake up. Maybe he wouldn’t take on a different form, but instead, his surroundings would. Surely when he woke up he’d be in his bedroom where he went to sleep in the first place right? Well his answers would all be answered soon enough, as no sooner had he wondered when the hell he would wake up…
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“Wait… Mario? God damn it…” He was in his room, just as he had left it, no stone untouched, everything as it was, being awoken from his sleep by his Mario Bros. alarm clock. He checked himself for any differences in appearance, hair in a mess; check, outy bellybutton; check, hands; check. Nothing out of the ordinary. He still felt the same, just a bit hungrier. “Well that’s disappointing”
Being unsure of what the dream was implying, he stepped up to his curtains to take a look outside, just to prove a point to himself that nothing had indeed changed, he opened the curtains of this bedroom window. Dan was quite sarcastic, yes, but was also rather stubborn, always carrying out an argument until his ‘unlucky’ opponent gave up. But he didn’t get what he was expecting; instead of his back garden and neighbourly houses, what he got was very different. “What… the fuck” was all he could muster, his jaw dropping to the floor.