Chapter 1: The Door
The door lands closed.
She instantly flattens herself against it, hyperventilating as she searches the room. The well-lit room, with nothing in it.
Finally, she lets herself slide down the door, seating herself on the floor, and forcibly calms her breathing. “Alright, Jake- er, Golden Locks- you got this. You’ve been awake for a whopping four hours, but have you seen anything pink?” She searches the room. “No. Not that pink at least. But that doesn’t mean anything: Has she seen you?”
She scrambles to her hooves and navigates quickly through her new home, double-checking all the doors and windows- and every little nook and cranny. She doesn’t find anything, and finally sneaks back into the entryway. “Nothing. Hopefully, she hasn’t.” She shudders. “... Kinda surprised, actually. I don’t think I saw a single one of them today… And I walked right through the middle of town.” She lets out a sigh, walking over to her bag. “With a strange bag hanging around my neck. Yet I made it all the way to the town hall and back, all without encountering a single one of them.” She shakes her head. “That’s… Unnatural.” She flips her bag’s strap up with one hoof, slinging it quickly over her neck, before glancing down at it. “Though, I suppose this is also unnatural. Now then, the kitchen. This…
“Oh. Um, good thing I thought to stop for food before I left town. I still think it’s suspicious to not see any of them after a good two hours in town.” She scowls at the dirt-encrusted sink she’d somehow not analyzed in her earlier pass through this room. “And the way the bank teller said I ‘looked creditworthy’ at a glance… There’s something I’m missing.” She shakes her head, leaning her odd bag against the wall before undoing the clasp on her saddlebags and slipping them off. She shuffles the contents around for a couple seconds before looking up sharply.
“I bet it’s a spell,” she states. “That teller was a unicorn. I didn’t see any glow, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t a spell involved.” She raises one hoof to touch her forehead… Or, the spear-like object sticking out of it. “I wonder if I can learn that spell…? Maybe someday, but not right now. Um… Oh, how am I going to earn money? Getting a loan is all well and good, but how am I going to pay it off? That spell will probably tell the tale if I default on it and hunt up another bank, no matter how well I disguise myself! Ugh…”
She hangs her head briefly, removing her hoof from her horn, and returns to her work in her saddlebags. “Anyways, I need to eat. I’ve got… Ah, I think I’ll have one of these. I’ve got a couple dozen of ‘em anyways…”
She lets out a sigh, using her teeth to open the preprepared meal and consuming it efficiently. “Ahh… Much better. I’ve got enough of these to last… What, a week? Then I’ll have to make another foray into town.” She shudders. “Unless… No, unless nothing. Anyways…” Leaving her saddlebags on the kitchen floor, she returns to her bag, once again slinging it over her neck. “Let’s see, the study was over there…”
She walks her way into the other room, stumbling only once, before she reaches the little desk in the corner. A quick glance into the bedroom as she passes tells her all she wants to know about the state of her bed. “Ugh, I’m going to be sleeping on the floor for the first little bit, I guess… Honestly, given how little this place cost, I’m lucky there even is a bed, I suppose.” She chuckles lightly. “At least it’s structurally sound… I think. I’ll have to get someone… er, somepony… in to look at it sometime.” She sighs, placing her bag on her new desk and pulling out a small, plastic rectangle. And a length of black plastic cord. She places the rectangle carefully on her desk and runs a hoof gently across it. “Honestly, I’m glad this place has electricity. Not very good electricity, mind, but at least it’s some… and you can handle the variations they have here.”
She smiles, slotting the cord into place with one hoof before using her mouth to pull the other end down to the enormous wall outlet… and dropping it. “Well, I don’t suppose I’ll be going that anytime soon- can’t plug it in… Oh well.” She returns to her chair, carefully prying the plastic rectangle open. The top half of it swings back on the other, right at the very edge of the rectangle, revealing a screen- very suddenly lit, with various startup procedures- and a keyboard.
Five minutes later, despite the thirty-second startup time on the device, she’s managed to log in.
“Ugh… I’m going to hate typing. At least walking was okay- I had only to think of it like walking on my hands and knees and boom- but if I have to use the tip of my horn to select each key every time…” She shudders.
Then facehooves.
And yelps.
“Ow! Owowowow… That hurt. Note to self, don’t facepalm… facehoof, I guess. Of course I won’t be horn-pecking the keyboard every time- at some point, I’ll learn to use the thing like every other unicorn does- and simply levitate the keys downwards or something! Ugh… I can’t wait. Anyways… Ooh, I’m glad this thing has a touchscreen. I’d be so screwed without it.” She chuckles; she’d touched her desired icon on the screen with the tip of her hoof and, unlike the physical keyboard, the touchscreen had been more than willing to localize the touch data to the exact point she’d actually intended. Much better than how the keyboard had eagerly generalized the press of her hoof on a single key to mean that key… and at least six others around it, resulting in her horn-pecking to type.
Then she raises an eyebrow, glancing across to the right side of the taskbar. “Wait a second… Why is that…?” She touches the symbol. “Connected… Internet access? Huh. I didn’t know ponies with basic electricity had both wifi and internet.” She pauses for a second. “And that my laptop knew how to connect to their network off the bat, as well… Interesting. Whelp, maybe next time, I guess. Um… Well then.” She reaches up to touch the URL bar on her favorite Web browser and, after spending a couple seconds activating her computer’s ‘tablet mode’ and pulling up the on-screen keyboard, punches in her desired URL in far less time than it had taken to punch in her Windows password.
It rather helped that her browser remembers the page from her history- so she had only to push the ‘s’ key… and the ‘enter’ key.
She watches as the page loads up. The images… are definitely human, not pony, and she’s already verified that ‘human’ doesn’t seem to be a word in the locals’ vocabulary.
She chuckles, touches the search bar, and punches in her query. A little test; if she can reach her favorite e-commerce site from Equestria, can they still reach her? She glances down at the wall next to the desk, and the truly enormous electrical socket no human device would ever plug into. Seriously, even a 220-volt plug for a dryer- or electric range- would be smaller than THAT! … And while she’s on the topic, she’s pretty sure she’s seen entire electrical breaker boxes smaller than that single-socket fixture.
So she adds the result to her cart, picks out another item, and finally checks out.
She smiles to herself, after punching in her Equestrian address to the delivery section. Funny, it accepted it… Huh, whatever. Then she touches the ‘place order’ button. “Right then! In two days, I guess I’ll find out how they plan on getting two outlets and two outlet boxes to my doorstep… and if it’ll even work.” She rubs her hooves together. “Oooh, I hope I don’t get the UPS guy stuck in Equestria as well… What-? Low battery? Shoot!”
She closes out of the browser and goes through the motions of turning the laptop off. “I think I’m going to need those parts sooner than I thought,” she states. Then tilts her head. “I wonder who I can get to install them for me…?”
She snorts. “Like they’re even going to get here. I know Derpy is supposed to be a mailmare, but last I checked, mail is usually sent by dragonfire or something of the like! I…” She looks at the closed laptop. “I wish I could watch the tracking details as it comes… but I’m not going to get very far on a dead battery. Um…” She glances out the window, then hops off her stool. “I wonder what kind of trouble I can get into- without running into… Her?”
She trots to her front door, stepping out, and makes sure to lock it behind her before looking up and down the deserted road. Pretty typical; the dilapidated home she’s acquired isn’t even in Ponyville, even though its address labels it as in town.
She looks steadily down the road towards town… and the inevitable ‘welcome to Ponyville party’ she’s been working her hardest to prevent. Then she looks in the other direction. After a shrug, she sets off. Perhaps…
“Cutie Mark Crusaders Sled Racers!”
“There ain’t no way that’s gonna end well,” she states outright. Then she tilts her head. “Though, I wonder if they’ll take a fourth contender…?”
As it would turn out, they wouldn’t- if only because they didn’t have a fourth sled for her to use. But they did appreciate her help in coordinating their start; Scootaloo won outright, shortly before slamming into the huge pile of snow she’d insisted they have at the bottom of the track, in front of the trees. It had taken only one mention of how much it would hurt if they happened to overshoot the end of the track without such a hill before they set about building it.
Applebloom is a close second, but Sweetie Belle fell off her sled shortly after takeoff; her unattended sled slips off the track halfway down and, shortly after the other two hit the hill, passes next to the hill… to fragment apart against a tree.
She looks down at Sweetie Belle, standing next to her; she just helped pull the filly out of the snowbank she’d managed to bury herself in. “Good thing you weren’t on it, eh?”
Sweetie Belle nods slowly. “... and a good thing you had us build that mound.”
She nods solemnly. “Though they might need help getting out of it… Hmm, and with that speed, Scootaloo might have her Mark, even.”
She then has to canter- thank Celestia that’s not much harder than walking- to keep up with the unicorn filly. When they reach the bottom, true to her word, the other two- Scootaloo in particular- need help getting out of the hill. By the time the two finish extricating Scootaloo, Applebloom needs only a little tug to finish her extrication, her earth pony strength having contributed enormously to her self-extrication ability.
Neither of the two have their cutie marks. After the quick round of disappointment, and a good few minutes extracting the surviving sleds from the mound, the question comes up: What does her cutie mark mean?
She blinks; back when she’d first gotten here, it hadn’t even registered she had a cutie mark. Or that she might have one. As a matter of fact, she’d come up with her pony name based on the color of the hair that had fallen down in front of her eyes when she had been busy convincing her hands-and-knees gait to look natural. All of which, of course, was after she’d discovered the other problem.
After all, in her previous life, she’s pretty sure she wasn’t a she.
But now, the cutie mark problem has arisen. “Uh,” she begins, and turns to look at it. Then she blinks, and smiles- how perfect a representation of her past life’s passion! “It means I’m good with computers,” she states simply, turning back towards the fillies.
“Computers?” Scootaloo asks. “What’s that?”
She shrugs. “It’s… a device that does all the hard thinking for you, I suppose.”
“Really?” Sweetie Belle asks, tilting her head inquisitively.
“How’d ya get it?” Applebloom asks.
She tilts her head, glancing back at it. “Honestly, I didn’t notice when it appeared.” She smiles at them. “The thing is, sometimes, you have to be smarter than the computer. Sounds like an easy thing to do- until you realize it can compute the exact distance it is from something by making a noise and listening to the echo. That it can find the square root of every number from zero to a billion in about a second- you try doing that.
“In many ways, the computer can think far faster than we can- yet many times, I still have to outsmart it. I think my Mark appeared the first time I successfully outsmarted it.” She shrugs, then chuckles at the three fillies dumbstruck expressions. She finds herself wondering if she hasn’t just caused a future cry of ‘Cutie Mark Crusaders Square Root Calculators’. Oh, and it would even rhyme- possibly triggering ‘Cutie Mark Crusaders Poetry Rhymers!’... which would rhyme, but wouldn’t match quite as well.
The door lands closed.
She instantly flattens herself against it, hyperventilating as she searches the room. The well-lit room, with nothing in it.
Then she lets out a breath, calming herself quickly, and sweeps a forehoof across her forehead. “Whe-Aaah! Note to self, be wary of horn. Those Crusaders really can be a hoof-full… But hey, it sure ate up time. It’s time for dinner and bed, I believe.”
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*Pegasister
9211811
Shaddap.
Anyway, good story. I already want M̬̱̥͔̮̜̝͊̿O̙͖̐̈̉͑̈͟R̟̯̊̍͗ͨ̒ͦͯÉ.
9211811
Actually, it's accurate as 'brony'. It's revealed in a side comment later that she was also gender-swapped during the transformation.
9211928
Good to hear, thank you!
Hmm.... If two-day shipping can reach Equestria, perhaps it can reach me in middle-of-the-nowhere Alaska!
Dreadnought
9212213
I don’t know. I do know Amazon advertized, at some point, there’s an island somewhere with a couple living on it... only a prop plane could reach them. Yet, when they ordered a washer and dryer, two days later, they were on their doorstep!
So, if you’ve got an address up there, I’d wager to guess they can get it there.
I'm guessing they use drone delivery for that?
I wouldn't be surprised, though, if they have issues with Derpy hitting/collecting them.
Or perhaps Derpy manages to accidentally cross dimensions and pick it up?
Or Prime has a new teleportation service in Beta and the protagonist qualified?
I am interested to see how that package arrives.
How good is she with electricity? A comical zapping scene seems in the works...
I'm assuming her charger is fine with both main AC frequencies to have enough operational range to work with whatever Equestria uses, or this is going to be a short story.
I'm now wondering what sort of funny things could be done to a power transmission frequency with magic. Perhaps it's like Phlogiston, where its absence is what provides power, so the ground and hot leads are swapped, or maybe instead of time-domain oscillating, it oscillates physically, or in another dimension...
I doubt any of that will come up in the story, but it could be interesting.