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It was very dark. Applejack collected her sense of balance with her eyes closed, afraid to open them and find herself looking like a horrifying orange bundle of blobs. After a quick feel along her left foreleg, which she was content felt like proper fur and bone, Applejack opened her eyes. She could see fine. A glance down was followed by a sigh of relief. Normal pony body. Normal Applejack.
The ‘where am I’ popped into her head immediately, but she held her tongue for the sake of the cliché, and also on the grounds that she couldn’t see anyone nearby to answer. Despite her eyes being wide open, it was dark.
“Hello?” she said into the darkness. It seemed a more appropriate generalization.
There was no response.
Amidst the silence of her fading question, Applejack thought she heard a ticking, like the hands on clock through a veil of water.
“Hello?” she tried again. No answer.
Then, light.
Applejack shielded her eyes, covering them with her foreleg as the darkness suddenly burst into almost blinding brightness. She turned her head away as the light intensified, peaked, and then diminished, fading to a level that Applejack surmised she could look into without burning out her retinas. The light said nothing, and Applejack abandoned her hopes for questioning.
A giant standing sculpture of letters stood in front of her where there had been nothing. They looked carved from giant trunks of wood, but they flashed from red to black in colours far too unnatural for any wood. Applejack squinted to keep her eyesight as she read the giant array of letters in front of her.
“P-R-E-S-S… S-T-A-R-T?”
The last syllable had just escaped from Applejack’s lips when the ground vanished again. Gravity returned its familiar hello, speaking in the only language it was capable and dragging Applejack down into nothingness. This time, her eyes were wide in the darkness. Again, she attempted to scream.
It came, but there was no one there to hear.
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When Applejack landed this time, she could feel the ground. It welcomed her with an ‘oof’ and a sudden screaming for air in her lungs, which she gasped for.
A sound like a carousel spinning round greeted her. For a change of pace, everything seemed to be pink.
She wasn’t sure if she wanted to ask any more questions. Saying things had been unwelcome thus far.
“Applejack? What are you doing here?!”
The voice was unmistakable. Applejack collected a semblance of breath and tilted her head upward. The ceiling waved hello, in a jumble of brown and orange blocks meant to construct its colouration. A smiling pink face eclipsed the scenery, beaming down at Applejack as her eyes did their best to keep from spinning around in her head.
“Pinkie Pie?”
“That’s me!” Pinkie Pie nodded and grinned wide, nodding in time to the all too cheery music in the background.
At least she could ask now.
“Where am I? What’s going on?”
“Hmmm… You’re in Party Palooza Five! Unless it’s Party Palooza four… so many flavours of cupcakes makes me think five though.”
Applejack didn’t understand, and wasn’t sure she wanted to.
“Beg ‘pardon?”
Applejack felt one of her forelegs grasped between two hooves, and was pulled upwards for the first time since landing, the world orienting itself rapidly around her still badly jarred body. There was a simple brown table to her right, laden with all manner of deserts and garishly decorated cupcakes. After a moment of her eyes adjustment, Applejack lost what little appetite she had developed at first sight – the cupcakes were the same as the scenery, pieced together with tiny blocks in a crude semblance of what an actual cupcake might look like.
Applejack turned her gaze around the room. Balloons and streamers made of squares jumped at her from every angle – the only remotely normal looking thing was Pinkie Pie, and saying anything about Pinkie was normal was a stretch of the imagination at best.
“Party Palooza Five! It’s fantastic… there’s cupcakes and party planning and streamers and music that goes bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce-“
“Please explain in English, Pinkie… the last thing I remember was a bunch o’ dark, and some words, and then I fell here… and before that, falling somewhere else.”
“Ooh, sounds like fun! How many points did you get?”
Applejack did not have the patience for even the slightest bother at this point – she imagined for a moment that she had gone to pony hell, and Pinkie was her tormentor until of time. The thought left when she assured herself that no Equestrian deity of karmic justice could be that cruel.
“Look, Pinkie… I have no idea what’s going on. Where am I really, and how do I wake up or get back home or do whatever it is to not be here?”
“[pplaugh.midi]!” Pinkie tilted her head back with her eyes closed, and a noise like a marble filled with water falling down a set of xylophone stairs played in Applejack’s ears.
Applejack blinked.
“What.”
“Oh, sorry, it does that every time I giggle. I already told you where you are, silly… Party Pal-“
“Pinkie! That don’t make any sense to me. It’s not any place I’ve ever heard of.”
“Yes you have! It’s in the box with Coltra, and eQuestria Quest II…”
No, maybe there was a deity that cruel after all.
“Pinkie, that ain’t funny. How could I be in one of those stupid box thingies-“
“They’re called video games! Is strange vord from foreign land, comrade Applejack.” A fur hat appeared mysteriously from thin air as Pinkie’s accent shifted. The fur hat was the same as everything else, a mishmash of blocks in the shape of what AJ imagined a Stalliongrad cap might look like.
“Pinkie, please. Can you just tell me what is going on?”
“I’d love to!” Pinkie said, whipping her pixilated fur hat away and plopping herself down in a nearby chair. Applejack breathed a sigh of relief, and pulled up her own chair. She adjusted her hat, and her eyes bulged with panic for a moment before she pulled it off her head and stared directly at it. A sigh of relief joined the carousel background as the still normal shaped brim of her hat greeted her eyes.
“Whenever you’re ready then,” she said, settling into her chair. Pinkie smiled brightly at her from across the table.
“Like I said, I’d love to… But, I don’t really know what’s going on either.”
Applejack let her face fall forward into the table. The impact made a boop that filled Applejack’s ears rather than emerging from the point of contact. She sighed loudly.
“I mean, yeah, I know we’re in a game, and it’s my favorite one… but I don’t know how we got here! I just woke up and I was surrounded by cupcakes and streamers and goodies, and I’ve been having fun ever since!”
“Unfortunately, this ain’t my idea of ‘fun’, Pinkie.”
“Rweary?” Pinkie took a huge bite out of one of the pixilated cupcakes, and when she spoke, tiny pink squares flew into the air around her. Applejack shielded herself absentmindedly from the torrent of eight bit icing.
“Uh-huh. If you have any inkling on how to not be here right now, or if you want to pinch me real hard so I wake up, I’d apprecia-ow!”
Applejack drew her leg back as Pinkie smiled and dug into another cupcake, withdrawing her hooves from their sudden fierce pinch. Applejack rubbed the appearing red mark as Pinkie gobbled down her desert.
“Well, you’re not dreaming,” Pinkie declared. She was denied that easy escape, at least.
“So how does this stop?” A sudden thought flashed across Applejack’s mind. When she had fallen at first… pieces of grey and a hiss like an escaping breath through the mouth of an ancient cave. “Um.”
Pinkie tilted her head quizzically, munching on a mouthful of pink blocky icing.
“I, uh… well, I think I might know all of sudden what’s got me here in the first place.”
Pinkie narrowed her eyebrows and replaced the furry cap on her head.
[lenkirpbrjj.midi]
The music that had been ambling in the background shifted suddenly, twisting into what Applejack imagined might be a Stalliongrad campfire song, twisting and weaving over strange chords in place of the slightly unnerving but still relatively simple carnival music.
“Da?”
“I… we… it might have happened that, the uh… that Rarity’s magic box she leant us… it might have broken. On accident. Accidentally.”
“Bozhe moĭ! How did that happen?”
“It was an accident, I said! But, uh… do you think it could have anything to do with… this?”
“Vozmozhno, most definitely.”
“Could you cut it out with that accent?!”
“[ppsnort.midi]… Heh, sorry. But, you do know how that video game box worked, don’t you?”
Applejack looked as though Pinkie had asked her to explain the concept of magic at large. Pinkie’s eyes softened, and she leaned across the table.
“Well, it’s magic, first off. But it’s a very special kind of magic, in a tiny crystal inside the little grey box! If you broke it… well, here we are, I guess.”
“Land’s sake! This is not what I needed right now.”
Pinkie leaned back in her chair again and tossed a cupcake into the air, catching it in her mouth with a giant chomp.
“What do you mean? Everypony could use a vacation sometimes… and it’s not every day you get to spend it in a video game.”
“There are places I’d rather be, and work that needs to be done besides. Please tell me you have some idea on how to get out of this awful place.”
Pinkie Pie looked as though she resented the use of the world ‘awful’, but she mustered a response behind her sudden onset glare.
“Well, most video games end when you reach the end. Party Palooza doesn’t really have an end… you just play until you can’t serve any more guests or eat any more cupcakes.”
Applejack looked down at the table – new cupcakes had appeared for every one Pinkie Pie had eaten. Applejack hammered her head onto the table again. Boop.
“Don’t be sad, Applejack! Just try to enjoy yourself.”
“No thank you!” Applejack stood up with a huff, adjusting her hat with fire in her eyes. “I aim to get things back to normal as soon as possible, so I can forget about all these dumb games and get back to the work that needs to be done.”
“You’re a real party pooper sometimes, Applejack.”
“Don’t you start too. I just want to get out of here. Ain’t my idea of fun time, being somewhere everything’s made of squares and beeping.”
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“Did you say something, Pinkie?”
Pinkie’s open mouth froze in place. As Applejack watched, the party pony in front of her faded away like falling cliffs in the wind, her body disassembling into pink squares and dissolving into nothing. Applejack felt a familiar tug, and the ground vanished, along with the scenery and vaguely ethnic music. As she fell, Applejack closed her eyes, and kept her mouth shut.