I hate colds.
I mean, who doesn’t? When you have a cold, it’s as if a fifty pound weight jumped onto your shoulders and you have to carry it around with you for the rest of the day! Your throat swells, your sinuses get clogged and your chest feels like its inhaling dirty air or something. The day becomes much more exhausting when you’re trying to function with a cold. The worst part is that you can’t even do anything about it! There’s no instant solution to the problem! All you can do it sit there, wait for it to pass over and take multiple colours of tablets several times a day. And they last for a long time too! There hasn’t been one cold I’ve experience that hasn’t lasted less than two weeks!
It’s garbage.
And yet here I stand, looking out of the large front window of my house, waiting for my uncle to pick me up for school. I’ve got my red sweater on already, all I have to do now is put on my sneakers and run out the door as soon as his green minivan rolls up to the sidewalk. I was a bit unsatisfied that he was ten minutes late. I mean, I shouldn’t complain, because without him I would have a thirty minute walk to take in late winter weather with a cold. However, if we both agree that I would be ready by a specific time and he would pick me up by that specific time, then gosh darn it, he should stick to that time!
I had right hand jammed in my pants pocket and the other surfing Reddit on my phone. Jammin’ tunes sang into my ears through the headphones that I was wearing on my head. I was leaning my shoulder against the window, the chilling air of the outside world bleeding through the glass and cooling off my arm. I shifted in my position, flicking my thumb across the smooth surface of a touch screen. I didn’t know how much longer my uncle would be, but all I knew was that I wanted to get this day done and over with.
My nose was burning. You know that feeling that you get when you’re about to sneeze but it never comes and then there’s a backlash of energy that itches within your nostrils? Yeah. That’s what I felt. It’s like I tasted something spicy but instead of the sensation sticking to the top of my mouth it got lost and found its way into my olfactory senses. It was driving me nuts, and this is when I was actually on daytime medicine! Without the pills, I couldn’t breathe through my nose at all.
I looked out the window and narrowed my eyes, the morning light shining across the flat surface of snow that sat on my front lawn. Yeah, it’s supposed to be spring already, but there’s still snow on the ground. Thanks mother nature! You’re a real swell person.
Just then, I felt a familiar twitch in my nose. Oh boy, here we go, sore nose time. I started taking deep, gasping breaths of air as I backed up to behind my living room coffee table and grab a tissue off of a tissue box. Two more gasps and I feel the pressure building in between my eyes reaching a breaking point. One more inhale later and a shotgun blast come out of my face, snot particles shooting out at 120 kilometers per hour. I wasn’t sure how much the tissue I’d been holding in front of my face had blocked, but by the way how my hand was slightly wet I guessed it didn’t do much.
A suction sound abruptly breaks the silence of the room. Then a low hum with lots of bass rocked the room as I was thrown off my feet and onto my butt. Why the hell is there an earthquake all of the sudden in the middle of small prairie town? Suddenly, a large black sphere popped out of nowhere and consumed the center of my house window. The ball looked as if it emerged from within the glass and had a purple glow lingering around the edges of it. Coal coloured particles floated down to the floor from below it, burning holes in the wooden floor panels.
Aaaaaand it’s sucking me in. You know, I had a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that that might happen, but I was praying that it actually wouldn’t happen. I scramble away from the hole on all fours while my socks cause my feet to slide around and forcing me to dump off a lot of my forward momentum. The humming got louder, and the pull began to outrace me. Thinking quickly, I try to turn around and grab the nearby coffee table for purchase. Unfortunately, as I turned around to grab it I watched in horror as it got pulled into the black hold and turn into a bunch of swirling splinters within a matter of milliseconds.
My stomach dropped and I started redoubling my efforts to get away safely. But despite my will, I wasn’t even close. I got dragged closer and closer until the humming behind me got really loud and I couldn’t feel the tip of my toes anymore.
Boy, my parents were going to be really pissed that the coffee table was destroyed.
And then darkness overtook me.
I fell fast, and my ears sure knew it. The wind screamed, blasting out my eardrums and killing whatever sense of hearing I had at the moment. I’m pretty sure my headphones flew off somewhere, because as I was falling I couldn’t feel them on my head anymore. Before I could open my eyes, I had a heavy landing on something. I think I’m on the ground now, because rocks and dirt were pelting me in the face. I also think my back is broken, because I can’t feel my limbs. What I can do is inhale (although barely) through my nose and get a fistful of dust stuffed down my lungs.
I started coughing violently, and lifted up my arm to shield my head from incoming damage. Opening my eyes now would be a bad decision, as dirt plus eyes equals stinging. I roll to get off my back and take a peek at the world around me, trying to see where exactly I had ended up and why the black hold didn’t kill me. This couldn’t be heaven, could it?
The soil was clearing from the air now. From what I could see, I landed on top of a small hill with bright green grass stretching along it. The sky was a pure blue, not a cloud in sight. There was a tiny tree to my right, and to my left seemed to be a bunch of apple trees sprouting bright coloured ones all over the place. There was a certain lack of detail in my surroundings, and it was if the world lost its texture. It felt all kinds of wrong, any my pupils felt violated at the pure, unfiltered colours that my retinas were reading.
Then my heart stopped. The colours. That’s what’s wrong here, the colours are all wrong! They look like they’d been taken out of a Flash cartoon or something! Everything was cel-shaded and too bright, it was awful! It even followed a certain art motif too! I took a quick glace down at myself to see that I had also been cartoon-ified. Did that stupid black hole seriously slap me down in the middle of a fucking cartoon? I think I would have rather died!
Now that I think about it, this place looks kinda familiar. The colours, the graphical style and the lighting all spoke to me somehow. I felt as if I’d seen this place before.
Oh, wait.
No.
No no no no no!
Could it be?
Aw, fuck no!
That’s impossible! That only happens in poorly written fan fictions! I can’t possibly be placed in that kind of situation! I don’t even like the show that much! Seriously fate? Why me?
“Stop where you are and don’t move!” Tara Strong said behind me.
I turn my head to see six vibrant ponies staring me down with various pieces of jewelry equipped.
Aw shit.