Tales from the Cosmos Eccentric

by RB_

The Present is Strange 2

The school’s bell let out its last ring just as Winter Bell slipped through the classroom door, out of breath and sweating.

Cheerilee, standing by the blackboard, cast her a weary look. Winter Bell grinned sheepishly and shrugged.

Rolling her eyes, Cheerilee motioned towards the desks, and Bell scampered to her seat. Hers was near the back of the classroom, on the right side. She heard a few muffled snickers as she sat down.

That was way too close, she thought.

You could have avoided all of this if you’d just let Noteworthy—

Not now, Momma.

She pulled open her desk and retrieved her notebook, flipping to a clean page as Cheerilee began her lessons. They were starting with maths, today, basic algebra, picking up where they’d left off yesterday. Numbers and letters appeared on the board in what seemed to Bell like completely random orders to the squeal of chalk.

It looks like you weren’t the only late pony today, sweetheart.

Bell glanced up, scanning the rows of desks. Sure enough, one was empty, towards the front.

Who sat there, again?

That colt you saw running away earlier, if I’m not mistaken.

Bell raised an eyebrow. Coil Feint?

That’s the one.

Movement, in her peripheral vision. She glanced to the side.

It seemed she wasn’t the only one to notice the colt’s absence. Dinky Doo, Miss Ditzy’s daughter who sat in the very back of the classroom, was also staring at the colt’s desk. Bell watched as her eyes flicked furtively to the door, then the blackboard, then the clock, and back to his empty desk again. Her bottom lip rolled between her teeth.

And then, as if she had felt her staring, she turned and locked eyes with Winter Bell.

Bell’s attention snapped back to the blackboard.

Something’s going on.

Definitely.

---

Ditzy ran her hoof across the checkered wall of the impossible tunnel. It was solid, and smooth, like a block of marble. Unlike a tunnel made out of blocks of marble, however, the walls here were continuous, with no obvious seams or breaks. The entire thing was carved from one solid piece of… whatever this was.

Well, the important point was that tunnel was solid, and thus stable. That was a good sign.

Probably.

Ditzy took a step back and blew a breath out the side of her muzzle, catching a few stray hairs from her mane.

“Okay,” she said to herself. “Pro: tunnel is way too physical to be a temporal anomaly, which means it’s probably not my fault.”

She nodded.

“Con: This isn’t my field, and if I’m not responsible for this thing appearing in my daughter’s closet, I have no idea who is.”

She swallowed.

“I am so glad Dinky’s at school.”

---

“Where in Equestria is he?”

It was lunchtime-slash-recess at Cheerilee’s schoolhouse, which normally entailed a lot of trading of lunch items, joyful squealing, kickball, and drastic misuse of playground equipment. And there was plenty of that going on, still, but with the exception of one particular group of four children, gathered in the shade of an old oak tree and far away from the attention of their classmates.

Aside from Winter Bell, who was eavesdropping on them, of course.

“Who, Coil?” Rumble asked. He was sitting against the tree, nestled between its roots.

“Yes, Coil!” Dinky Doo hissed. “Who else would I be talking about!?”

“He’s probably just got the flu or something.”

“He was fine yesterday,” Coconut Cream interjected, though her attention was currently occupied by the blue and purple tail hair she was braiding in her hooves.

“Yeah,” Toola Roola said, her own attention diverted by the fact that she was the one having her tail braided. “He didn’t seem sick at all.”

“So? You can get sick really quick overnight.” Rumble put his hooves behind his head and leaned his head back, letting his eyes fall closed. “Sometimes colds creep up on you.”

Dinky frowned and began to pace, the light filtering through the tree dancing across her coat.

“Well, I don’t like it,” she declared.

“You don’t think he moved back to Fillydelphia, do you?” Toola asked.

Coconut Cream shook her head. “There’s no way. He would have told us!”

“Well, maybe his parents sprung it on him at the last minute,” Toola shot back.

“What, after only a month? As if.”

“It could happen!”

Dinky sighed. “Girls, please. He didn’t move away. His parents would have had to have told Cheerilee, and if they had then Cheerilee wouldn’t have read his name out during attendance.”

“Ha!” Coconut said with a smirk. “Told you!”

Toola stuck her tongue out at her.

“And I don’t think he’s sick, either,” Dinky said.

Rumble opened one eye. “Then what’s your big idea, genius?”

“I don’t know,” Dinky said. She bit her lip. “But… do you think he might have…”

“Gone to the Carolish?” Toola said.

The others all immediately turned on her. She shrank back.

“What?” she said. “I thought that was where you were going with that!”

“Not so loud, dummy!” Coconut hissed. “We don’t want anyone else finding out about that!”

Winter Bell, pressed up against the opposite side of the tree from them, raised an eyebrow.

What’s a ‘Carolish’?

I do not know. I’ve never heard of it before.

That’s never a good sign.

“Anyway…” Dinky rubbed her forehead. “Yeah. I think he might have gone to the… you -know-what.”

“Alone?” Rumble said, eyebrow raised. “Do you really think he has the guts for that? It’s Coil we’re talking about, here.”

“I know that!” Dinky said. “But where else would he be?”

“At home! Sick! Or maybe he’s just skipping school, I dunno! Point is, it’s definitely not worth getting worried about, Dinks.”

Dinky scowled. She was about to say something else, but then—

“Heads up!”

The shout came from the main area of the yard, and Winter Bell turned to look just as the kickball was about to hit her in the face.

She yelped and flung her hooves up, the large rubber ball bouncing harmlessly off of them with a sharp phunt, but that did little to stop her cover from being blown. When she lowered her limbs, she found four foals peeking at her from around the side of the tree.

“Winter Bell?”

She flinched. Busted.

Rumble was the first to round the corner, advancing on her with his wings unfurled and a glare in his eyes. “What are you doing here? Were you spying on us? What did you hear!?”

“I-I was just passing by—”

“No you weren’t,” Dinky said, advancing herself. Bell's back pressed up against the bark of the tree. “We would have seen you. Why were you eavesdropping on us?”

“Uh…!”

Tell them about their friend.

“C-Coil Feint!” Bell blurted out.

Dinky froze. Her eyes narrowed.

“What about him?”

“I, uh… I saw him, earlier,” she said. “On main street, running away from the school. You guys were wondering where he was, right? I saw you looking worried when he wasn’t there for attendance this morning.”

“See?” Rumble said, relaxing again. “He got sick and ran home.”

Dinky‘s eyes narrowed. “Where on main street?”

“Around Cotton Street.”

“That’s past his house,” Coconut murmured.

Toola’s eyes widened. “But it is on the way to…”

The four shared a glance.

“Still think he’s just sick?”

“Oh, can it,” Rumble grumbled. “What are we gonna do?”

“We need to go after him,” Dinky said.

“What?” Toola exclaimed. “But it’s the middle of the schoolday!”

“Recess is going to end in like ten minutes!” Coconut added. “Miss Cheerilee will tell our parents!”

“Well, we can’t just leave him in there alone!” Dinky said, stamping her tiny hoof. “Something must have happened to make him run off like that, right? What kind of friends would we be if we just left him to fend for himself?”

Toola rubbed her hooves together. “Well, when you put it like that…

“I’m in,” Rumble said. “We’ve got history next, and I didn’t finish the homework.”

“This is exactly why you got held back, you know.”

“I said can it.”

They all turned towards the remaining member of their group

“Alright,” Coconut said, sighing. “But if we get caught, it was your idea.”

“Deal.”

“So, where are we headed?” Toola asked.

“Well, Dinky’s closet is the closest,” Rumble said.

Dinky shook her head. “We can’t go to my house, my mom’s taking the day off today. She’d freak if she saw me skipping school.”

“Alright, then we’ll use the bucket.”

Coconut groaned. “Do we have to use the bucket? I hate using the bucket.”

“Do you want to go after Coil or not?”

“Fiiiiine.”

The matter settled, the four straightened up. It was only then that they seemed to remember that Winter Bell was still there, standing awkwardly off to the side.

None of them looked really sure what to say, but Dinky was the one who spoke up.

“Thanks, Winter Bell. You were really helpful.”

“Uh… you’re welcome,” Bell replied. “What are you guys gonna do now?”

“We’re going to go find him,” Dinky said. “Please don’t tell Cheerilee on us. This is really important.”

Bell nodded.

“And don’t follow us,” Rumble added, as the rest walked away. “You got that?”

“Sure,” Bell said. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

She watched as they made their way to the edge of the schoolyard, and then, while no one was looking, quietly slipped around the side of the building.

You are going to follow them, yes?

“Duh,” Bell said, starting after them.

For the record, it's not polite to lie to your friends.

“Yes, mother.”

---

“Where did you come from?” she muttered, fixing the thing with a glare from her walleyes. She was sat on the floor, now, facing the closet; an array of instruments sat in a semicircle in front of her.

She highly doubted the tunnel was Dinky’s doing, or if it was, then her little muffin had been hiding quite a bit more than she’d been lead to believe. Either way, they’d need to have a talk later about telling mommy when impossible spaces appeared in one’s bedroom.

Ditzy couldn’t blame her, really; she’d certainly kept bigger secrets from her parents when she was younger, and a mysterious tunnel suddenly appearing in the back of one’s closet certainly counted as ‘things normal parents would never believe’.

Of course, she wasn’t quite a normal parent, but then again, Dinky didn’t know that.

Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to let that little secret out of the bag…

One of the devices arrayed on the floor in front of her pinged, shaking her from her thoughts. She noted the readings on her instruments, then ‘squinted’ her future sight, shifting her view forward by a minute or so, and checked them again. She did this for each minute of the twenty-two minutes and seventeen seconds of the future that she was allowed to see.

“No significant changes,” she muttered to herself. “Not going to disappear any time soon, then… at least, that I can detect...”

She turned to a weighing scale, to her side, upon which rested a small chunk of material that she’d chipped off of the interior wall of the tunnel. She slid the weights back and forth, but…

Her mouth fell open as she slid the weight all the way to the left and the arm finally settled.

“No discernible mass?”

She looked back up at the thing.

“What are you?”

---

Pinkie slid into the empty seat at the toad’s table. He had finished eating some time ago, and had picked up a newspaper, which he now peered at her over the top of. He’d also ordered tea.

“Hi!” Pinkie said.

“Hello,” the toad replied, glancing up from his paper. “Can I help you with something?”

“Well, my shift just ended, and usually when my shift ends I go hang out with my friends,” Pinkie said.

“Right…”

“But then I saw you sitting alone, and I thought, hey, this toad is my friend, and I’ve never met a talking toad before!” She smiled at him. “We are friends, right?”

The toad’s bulbous eyes blinked. “Erm…”

“So then I thought, well, why don’t I get to know my new friend Mr. Toad better? So I walked over here and said hi, and then you asked me if you could help me, and then I said—”

“Yes, I do believe I was there for that part.”

“Great!” Pinkie said, beaming. “So what’s the mode, toad?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What’s the news from your side of the frog pond?”

“I don’t follow.”

“What’s hoppening?”

“Is this meant to be some sort of joke?”

“Yes!” Pinkie said, exasperated. “You’re not very good at this, Mr. Toad. I want to know more about you!”

“Ah,” the toad said. “Well, you should have just said that in the first place. What would you like to know?”

“Well, let’s start with an easy one,” Pinkie said. “Where are you from?”

“Why, I’m from the Carolish, of course!” He harrumphed. “I would have thought that would have been obvious.”

He took a sip of his tea.

“Well that’s funny, I’ve never heard of any place called ‘the Carolish’ before,” Pinkie said. “Is it far away?”

“On the contrary; you can get to it in less than a minute from this very establishment, if you know the right way to go. I’ll be headed back there once I finish my tea.”

“Ooh, really?” Pinkie said, bouncing up and down a little in her seat. “Can I come? Pretty please?”

---

Shouldn’t you be, I dunno, trying to discourage me from skipping school?

Winter Bell slipped through the lesser-used side streets of Ponyville soundlessly, following on the tails of her classmates. She wasn’t sure where they were headed, but they sure seemed to; from the way they navigated, it looked like this wasn’t their first time out.

I am of the opinion that getting to the bottom of what the other foals are up to is more important than today’s history lesson, her mother replied. Though I do expect you to apologize to Ms. Cheerilee when this is over. And to get caught up on what we missed.

Fair enough.

She pressed herself up against the corner of a house, peeking out just enough to watch Dinky and the others take another corner and vanish from her sight. She grimaced and scampered after them as quietly as she could.

Your father, however, will not be happy.

“Dad’s never happy about anything I do, anyway,” Bell muttered, “so what’s one more for the pile?”

Sweetheart…

Bell sighted them again as she rounded the corner, ducking behind a trash can for cover.

“Alright,” Dinky was saying, as she and the others came to a stop at the end of the alley. A bunch of junk lay piled up behind them, tools and bits of metal and things, some of it covered by a tarp. Bell had never noticed it before. Actually, come to think of it, she’d never seen this alley before, either.

“So we’re guessing Coil used the lamp post, right?”

“That’s the only entrance in the direction he was heading,” Coconut said.

Toola frowned. “So why aren’t we going in the way he went?”

“Because,” Dinky said, turning towards the trash pile. She grabbed the corners of the tarp and pulled it off, the sheet fluttering before it was tossed unceremoniously aside. “There’s no way we could get that far without someone spotting us. It’s almost on the complete opposite side of town.”

She reached into the depths of the pile.

“Besides,” she said, “the lake’s not that far from the forest, and we can ask something if it knows anything.”

With a grunt, she pulled her hoof from the pile, bringing with it an old, rusty pail. This she placed in the middle of the group. Despite clearly being made of metal, it made no sound when it was dropped onto the ground.

“Alright,” she said. “Who’s first?”

“I’ll go,” Rumble said.

The others stepped back to give him space to work, while he approached the bucket. Rearing up, he put both forelegs into it, followed by dunking his head in. After a moment, he tipped forward.

Bell watched his hindlegs wriggle in the air for a moment, then disappear under the rim of the thing. Which was impressive, considering the size difference between the two involved parties. She couldn’t see anything of the inside of the bucket.

“Alright, me next,” said Toola. She too, approached the bucket and preformed much the same maneuver, sliding into the bucket’s depths. As unlikely as it would have been for Rumble to fit himself entirely into the thing, the addition of Toola as well made such a feat downright impossible.

The other two followed suit after her, first Coconut, and then Dinky, who cast a cautious glance around before she, too, slipped into the pail.

And then it was just Bell.

She hesitated for a few moments, to see if anything else was going to happen, but when nothing did, she slipped from her hiding spot and scampered over to the bucket. There was something unnerving about it, sitting there alone in the middle of an empty alley (even ignoring what she’d just witnessed), and Bell slowed down to a cautious trot as she grew close to it.

Arching her neck up, she peered inside.

The bucket was full of water, which she hadn’t expected; she hadn’t seen any come sloshing out earlier. It was murky, as well; she couldn’t see the bottom of the bucket through it.

“What do you think?” she said aloud.

I don’t like it.

“Me neither.”

On instinct, Bell expanded her senses, reached out to the bucket with the song in her soul. Every object had a note in the symphony that was reality; perhaps this one’s could tell her something about it.

She got no response. The bucket was entirely silent.

That shouldn’t be possible, her mother said. There was a tone of deep confusion in her voice. This is unnatural This… thing… should not exist.

The statement was followed by a pulse of colour, sound, and feeling, expressing everything in an instant that words could not.

Making up her mind, Bell reared up and stuck her hoof into the water. It sank beneath the surface cleanly, barely eliciting a ripple from the liquid’s surface. She got up to her elbow before she realized that the water wasn’t murky, as she’d originally thought. Rather, she couldn’t see the bottom because the pail didn’t have one.

She swallowed. When she removed her hoof, it was bone dry.

Sweetheart, are you absolutely certain you want to do this? It’s not too late to go and get Pinkie Pie, or Ditzy Doo.

“Sorry, momma,” Bell said. “I have to. By the time we found them, the others might be long gone. It’s now or never.”

Then please, please be careful. I don’t know what we’ll find in there, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to protect you from it if it means you harm. Promise me you’ll run at the first sign of real danger.

“…Yeah. Okay. But it can’t be that bad, right? Dinky and the others were fine with whatever it is.”

And yet, they seem very worried about leaving their friend alone in it.

“Hm.”

Taking a deep breath and holding it, her cheeks puffing out slightly, Winter Bell dunked her head into the bucket.

---

“Well, only one thing left to do,” Ditzy said to herself. Various bits of arcane scientific apparatus littered the floor at her hooves, brass doohickeys and copper-whatsits.

She’d confirmed that the tunnel was (probably) stable. She’d confirmed that it (most likely) wasn’t going to close any time soon. And she’d confirmed that it (almost certainly) actually lead somewhere.

Now she just had to find out where that somewhere was.

“Just need to make sure you’re back in time to get Dinky from school,” she reminded herself. “Four hours. You’re a time traveler. Four hours shouldn’t be a problem.”

And, just in case, she’d left a note on the kitchen table telling Dinky to go to Pinkie Pie if she didn’t come back right away. It wasn’t the first time she’d done this, but so far it had proved unnecessary, and she wasn’t looking to change that now.

Taking a deep breath, she took her first step into the checkerboard.

An electric tingle ran down her spine.

Alright, here we go…

---

“It’s not much farther,” the toad said.

“Okay!” Pinkie chirped, pronking along behind him. She’d already followed him through a veritable labyrinth of streets and back alleys, several of which they’d had to double back through, but that was okay. Pinkie knew the reason for the bizarre route… not that she’d told the toad that, yet.

After several more twists and turns (Since when did Ponyville have so many alleys? she wondered to herself), they turned a corner and found themselves in a small flower garden, in between two buildings. The grass was a bright, almost surrealy verdant green, and concentric rings of roses and violets and several other brightly shaded flowers surrounded the garden’s center.

“Here we are,” the toad said, as he stepped over the low fence that walled off the patch. “Now, all you have to do is stand in the middle of the flowers, close your eyes, and turn around three times. Afterwards, you’ll see an archway, and that’ll take you right to the Carolish.”

“You know, it’s kinda silly, but I’ve never seen this garden before,” Pinkie said, hanging back but still smiling. “And I’ve lived here most of my life!”

“Really?” the toad said. “Well, I didn’t plant it. Perhaps you’ve just never found it before.”

He moved towards the circle.

“Well, it is hard to find,” Pinkie mused. “I don’t think most ponies would ever have even thought about tracing the manifold of a six-hypercube in three-dimensional space as mapped onto Ponyville’s street layout. Still, I’m sure someone would have ended up here eventually, and boy wouldn’t they be in for a surprise!”

The toad blinked. Pinkie continued.

“Hey, have you noticed how quiet it is?” she said, stepping forwards. “No birds chirping, no bees buzzing, no ponies ponying… it’s kinda creepy, huh?”

“I-I don’t follow, Miss Pie,” the toad said.

“It’s almost like,” she said, grinning even harder, “this place isn’t really supposed to exist!”

“Well, that’s quite a silly thing to say,” the toad said. “Really, what makes anything ‘supposed’ to exist?”

Pinkie shook her head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Toad, but I don’t feel like playing that game right now. I’d much rather take a look at what you’re trying to hide behind all these pretty decorations.”

She took a step forwards. The toad took a step back. She peered into the circle of grass at the center of the flowers. She held her gaze there for almost a minute.

Then…

“Mr. Toad.”

For the first time in a long time, Pinkie let her glamour drop, revealing her true self in its entirety to the being that stood before her. Her tendrils writhed. As the toad shuffled away from her, his flattened irises contracting, Pinkie’s mouths opened and spoke as one.

“I think it’s time for you to tell me exactly why you’re here,” she said, her many eyes narrowing all at once. “Now.”

Comments

[TheStratovarian]

Oh boy, pinkies gone serious... I feel almost bad, but realize theres a reason no one out pinkies pinkie.

The adult voice is not a good thing to get.

[FanOfMostEverything]

Curiouser and curiouser. Definitely looking forward to seeing what the story is with this wabe, and why even eldritch and extraplanar entities find it concerning.

9760973
Given that the realm is called the Carolish, that's probably intentional.