Prologue
The day began and ended just like every other day: Boring, disappointing, and monotonous.
That, and cold; Much colder than yesterday in fact, but even that was par for the course of the daily monotony of life in this east coast swamp of a state.
The seasons seemed to not be able to decide whether it wanted to be summer, fall, or winter that October. Today the weather decided to be winter, tomorrow it would probably be summer, and then fall the next day.
Zach didn’t mind the cold, but it was the inconsistency that always bugged him this time of year. The weather had been going back and forth like this on a regular basis in the general region of his hometown. It was as if the weather was actively juggling between the seasons on a whim within the span of a week.
Was it a bit of an exaggeration? Sure, but the temperature difference was still quite considerable. It was all over the local news, from the few times he actually watched that crap; the weather teams could never explain it and everyone just had to adapt. It sucked, that’s all he really knew.
He leaned his bike against the door frame and unlocked his front door, talking to himself as he did so, “Temperature went from ninety to fifty like it saw a state trooper. I’m about a hundred and ten percent done with this crazy weather; I need to get out of this state.”
Zach stepped inside, wiped his shoes on the welcome mat and hoisted his bike over the carpeting. He carried it to his room just down the hall and set it aside near his desk. Zach then unceremoniously tossed his coat and kicked his shoes off into his open closet. With that done, he plopped down at his desk in his flimsy office chair and tapped the power button to his laptop.
Zach adjusted his glasses and took up the cleaning cloth in his free hand, clearing them of the debris the lenses had accumulated over the course of the day. It wasn't a clear shine, but it was free of the worst of it, that would do well enough.
“Another boring day, another batch of dollars towards keeping a roof over my head and food on the table. Welp, time to be a vegetable for a few hours in front of my PC, then I'll go to sleep and do it all over again tomorrow.” He spoke in a detached tone of voice, as if speaking a rehearsed line that he’d grown tired of saying. "Yay for being an adult."
Zach watched the PC finish its boot cycle and proceeded to do just that, letting his mind wander and idly float off as he filled his gaze with a number of internet videos that seemed interesting. Maybe he’d play a game too, if he could find the desire to do so. These days he rarely had the desire to do much of anything anymore, life in this overhyped state tended to suck that out of its workers.
He did what he could to fill his attention with the random nonsense on-screen, but the old, gloomy thoughts started finding their way into the forefront of his mind as they always inevitably did. Upcoming rent, the thought of what he was going to do once his seasonal part time job at the Halloween store ended, what he was going to do with the rest of his life, etc.
High cost of living, too few high paying jobs, too many minimum wage dead-end gigs. The usual pessimistic and anxious contemplations that he didn’t particularly care for reared their ugly heads one by one.
Zach sighed and dismissed the thoughts, managing to force them out of his mind with significant effort. They would be back though, and he needed something better to distract himself with than entertaining videos.
“Fine, games it is.” He opened his games follder and started up one of the many rarely touched videogames that lay within. Nothing too fancy, just an old adventure game with a good nostalgia factor to it that he'd modded into obllivion and forgotten about. He’d played it dozens of times already, but it never seemed to get old no matter how many times he played it. There was always something new to do, especially with how often he added modifications to it.
Off he went, vicariously roaming that fantasy world through his little avatar.
Real world issues didn't matter in here: Rent? What rent? You're an adventure hobo, you go wherever the quests take you. Food? Just go hunt a deer or a rabbit, easy pickings. Crappy weather? Never. Money issues? Ha! Adventurers are rich; go do a quest and become wealthy after one dungeon is picked clean.
He’d give anything to live a life like that for a day, to just, set aside the stress and monotony of life for an adventure, something meaningful and exciting. Well…maybe not, when he really thought about it. Sure, his life was boring, but he was just fine without magical mythological creatures trying to kill him. Sometimes though, he imagined that wouldn’t be so bad…
“No, that’s enough of that.” He chastised himself and steered his thoughts away from that avenue. Zach refocused himself on his character's adventure through whatever the name of this fantasy world was that he could never seem to remember. He always confused the nation with the continent and the country, and the way the NPCs talked about it just made it harder to tell them apart.
After a couple hours of dungeon crawling and NPC rescuing, he saved the game and shut it off. “So long for now, Käfer. We’ll adventure again tomorrow buddy.”
Käfer, that’s what he’d named his character; He originally intended for it to be something cool, fearsome, something using a different language. Zach had chosen German, the language that always seemed to have cool sounding names for most things, a part of his heritage too. He stumbled across the name by chance and decided to go with it on a whim.
As it turned out, Käfer meant “beetle”, of all things. Unfortunately, he’d already been a few dozen hours into the campaign and was too attached to the character to start over with another one, so the name stuck.
Casting a glance to his alarm clock, Zach saw that the hour was already getting late. “Oh come on, I wasn’t gaming for that long, was I!?” He indignantly commented.
He was almost certain he’d only been on for two or three hours, tops, but the alarm clock said otherwise. Knowing his track record, it was entirely possible he’d lost track of time, again. “Every time…” Zach muttered under his breath.
Zach had always been terrible with keeping track of time. This wasn't the first time he'd let the hours slip through his fingers and it wouldn't be the last; not that he had anything better to do. besides, time one enjoyed wasting wasn’t wasted time, after all! Although he did find himself wishing he’d ‘wasted’ that time doing something else, as he always did.
Zach drew in a tired deep breath and exhaled, “Whatever, bed time, I guess. Too many things I want to do, not nearly enough time.” He went through his bedtime routine: brushing teeth, powering down electronics, the works.
Zach gently placed his glasses on his nightstand, then he slipped under the covers without much other thought. Just as he was beginning to get comfortable, his mind decided it wasn’t ready for sleep.
All manner of fantastic imaginary scenarios and deeper thought ran through his mind with reckless abandon. Zach could do little to stem the tide of random ideas and theories about trivial things. He grumbled to himself and reached over to grab his phone, figuring that he may as well read something to pass the time if his brain wasn’t going to let him sleep.
Eventually, sleep came for him. Just as it did every night: Unexpected and without warning.
...
Zach woke the next morning with a start, having slept on his phone at an awkward angle. It was a good thing he’d employed the use of multiple alarms to wake himself up in the morning, or else he’d have slept right through the muffled and garbled noise of the alarm currently emitting from his phone.
With a groggy yawn and a stretch, he roused himself from bed, placed his glasses upon his face, and began his standard morning routine. Zach threw on the same kinds of casual business pants and button shirt, same as he did every other day.
For his breakfast: a hot cup of mocha coffee, followed with idle thoughts and imaginative ideas. The only part of his routine that he was perfectly fine with staying just the same every time. That’s what mornings were for: coffee and contemplation; Anyone who said otherwise was wrong, in his humble opinion.
Zach went about finishing the rest of his routine, brushing teeth, getting his watch, making sure his phone was charged, etc. When the hour came for him to leave, he threw on his keys and winter coat and was out the door with his bike.
He made it to work precisely on time, on the dot in fact; its what he always did and prided himself on doing it. It wasn’t much, but this was his little accomplishment and he was mildly proud of himself for it.
Zach rather liked his job; it kept him busy and helped occupy his mind in a more concrete and difinitive manner. He enjoyed talking with people, and talking to people was his job essentially. Well, technically it was "customer service" like the corpos always called it, but the point still stood. He made people laugh and smile to the best of his abilities, and that offered him a sense of happiness knowing he was making someone else's day just a little bit righter.
He really did enjoy this job working at the Halloween store; It was a significant aspect of brightness added into his life. Ironic, really, that going to work was what made him happy when for the entirety of his school-years all he wanted to do was get as far away from work as humanly possible.
Unfortunately, as much as he loved working here, this was just a seasonal job. Come November, he’d have to go and find something else to occupy his time with… and make money of course, the money was important too.
“Can’t worry about that now, no point worrying about it when I can’t stop it. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.” Zach said to himself. He took a deep breath, clocked in, and went about his day.
The hours passed with long waiting periods of nothing to do, broken up whenever a customer walked in. Zach would greet them, talk with them, and answer questions they had about what lay on the shelves or his honest opinion on things. The same as it was every other day, but it was at least a good kind of sameness. A constant of happiness he could count on to keep him from going insane from how drab and tedious every other aspect of life was.
Zach knew that it’d get busier the closer it got to Halloween, due to people waiting until the last minute like they did every year for every holiday. It never failed, no matter what holiday it was.
'See, if people were smart, they’d do their shopping early. They didn’t, and then they’d arrive and be upset when they found out that there wasn’t anymore stock available of that thing they wanted.' That being said, at least it’d give him more opportunity to keep himself busy and talk to people. Definite silver lining in all the chaos that would surely happen come the last week of October.
The hours passed and eventually the time came for him to clock out and leave. Zach cleaned his workspace, hung up his name-badge and grabbed his bike. He waved his supervisor Jeff goodbye and hopped onto his bike to head home.
The trip home was as uneventful as he was used to. So much were things unchanged that when he spied a deer on the side of the bike path, he didn't even stop to admire it. Zach only stopped to grab a bite to eat at one of the local fast food places, he continued on and headed straight home.
Zach pulled up to his driveway and hopped off his bike once he’d reached the front door. He removed his gloves, his hat, and looked up to the mostly sunny sky as if expecting anything to be different about it. Nope, the sky was still blue and the sun still burned your eyes if you looked at it directly.
Zach glanced down at the weather app on his phone and sighed. “Looks like tomorrow’s gonna go back to being T-shirt weather. Aaaand its probably going to rain, what fun.” He hated rain, hated being wet in general... unless it was at the beach or a pool.
Same as he did yesterday, he hoisted his bike up and brought it to his room. Zach laid it against his desk, and proceeded to toss aside his shoes and coat, right back into the closet where they always went.
“Another uneventful day, another batch of dollars.” He sighed and plopped down into his office chair again, cleaning off his glasses and booting up his PC. “Time for some real Vegetable hours. I wonder where the term 'being a vegetable' actually comes from? I'll look it up.”
He spent an hour or so browsing the web, one thing leading into a rabbit hole to another. Eventually he got bored of that and the collection of useless information he filled his head with and elected to bake it out with a videogame.
Zach opened his game browser and picked one of the titles at random, not caring too much about what game he played, just that he was playing something. Occupying his mind with the process of the game, holding his focus, that’s all he really needed at that moment.
Freezing Seas... a submarine simulator. "Well this one is really going to hold my focus, what with all the buttons and data I have to keep track of... and identifying sonar contacts." he yawned and smacked his lips as he adjusted his glasses. "Lets do this, time to kick some soviet butt."
After a couple of hours were expended prowling the virtual Norwegian Sea in his nuclear powered submarine and sinking soviet fleets in deadly games of cat and mouse, he switched off the game and swapped back to browsing the internet.
He wasn’t doing anything particularly interesting or meaningful, it was just wasting time until it was time to sleep at this point. Zach casually browsed through a few of the less biased and propagandized media websites and spent some time on social media; he looked up a few internet videos and the like too, whatever random thing grabbed his attention.
It was a lazy cop-out, but it was all he could find the willpower to do most days. Better than being idle and letting his mind stew about with negativity or any of that gloomy crap that made him feel miserable. No, he wouldn't let himself do that, that'd eat him alive for sure.
Just as he was about to write this off and switch back into games, Zach came upon something that caught his eye after one particular video ended. It was a random chance, one of those odd video suggestions that rarely have anything to do with the video that had just been watched; yet it had him hooked.
The video itself wasn’t all that interesting, but the subject matter of the video was what really caught his attention and piqued his curiosity: “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, is airing its final episode this week.”
Zach wasn’t sure what to think about that news; “Huh..” was all he could think to say.
Thinking about it further, he’d never really been a huge fan of the show itself. No, what he'd really gotten into was the artwork and the music (especially the music), and even a lot of the fanfiction that fans of the show had made. He loved the sheer creativity in the fanworks, he thoroughly enjoyed that content the last time he'd looked through it; maybe he still did, but he hadn't had the drive to look any of it up in a long time.
Zach had stopped watching the show after the end of… whichever season, he couldn't remember exactly. It was just after the Canterlot Wedding incident involving the changelings if he remembered correctly. Season two, maybe? No, he’d watched a few episodes here and there after that season had ended, nothing consistent, but it had been years since he’d last seen the show.
Somewhere in the middle of season three; that's where he'd stopped watching the show. It just wasn't to his liking really, it was obviously not made for his age demographic; not that he had anything against that idea. Zach ran a hand through his hair as he remembered what he could about the show. The iconic children's cartoon about colorful ponies, magic, and friendship.
A part of him was sad, there was no denying that; especially considering what the show had meant to him.
He originally fell in love with the show because, at the time, he was in a bad spot. It wasn’t a very happy point in his life, to put it mildly. The show stood out as this little beacon of brightness against what he now remembered as that dark splotch in his life that he didn’t like thinking or talking about. In a big way, that show had saved him from doing something he wouldn't have lived to regret; and he held it in a special place in his heart, a notion of gratitude towards it, even if he didn't care for the show anymore.
Now, here it was, the show that helped him through that dark spot was ending.
Zach gave it some more thought, and finally came to the decision that, maybe he’d give the show another watch. Sure, he wasn’t a huge fan of the show anymore, but why not watch it for nostalgia sake? Well, maybe “nostalgia” wasn’t the right word for it, given why he’d originally watched the show.
He digressed, Friendship is Magic would give him a much-needed mood boost, heck, it might give him a sense of inspiration to do something other than vegetate after work. At the very least it’d give him something else to do besides playing videogames and watching random internet videos.
Zach might even start writing again, or drawing; It would be nice to get back into his old hobbies, especially the creative ones.
It didn’t take much for him to convince himself to commit to rewatching the show. “Why not? Could be fun, I’ll give it another go.” Zach checked the clock, and emitted a low, agitated huff. “…Starting tomorrow.”
He shut down his PC and readied himself for bed.
...
The next day was par for the course, save for the exception of it being T-shirt weather. Same morning routine, same ride to work, typically average work day. Same fast food place after work even. The one significant change he had going was his desire for the work day to end, as he now had something different waiting for him.
He got back home after all was said and done, carried his bike inside, sat it next to his desk and kicked his shoes off. “Another day, another batch of dollars. Vegetable time once again with feeling, I'll be a tomato today.”
Zach unceremoniously plopped into his chair. His mind was on full “crappy feelings” mode for whatever reason, nothing out of the ordinary for him. Unpleasant as it was, he had a remedy for it, the perfect remedy even.
“Wait…a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable. Ok, whatever, Lettuce then.”
Zach decided he'd play some games first before he started up anything pony related. Once he dipped a toe into pony he'd probably be sucked in and not do anything else for the rest of the night. He booted up the adventure game from the night before and selected his save file, “Hello again Käfer, time to go exploring for a bit before I visit some colorful old friends. You ready?” The avatar played its idle animation, the pixels onscreen indifferent to anything other than the direct input of his keyboard. Zach shrugged, he said it more for himself anyway.
A good hour or so was spent dungeon crawling, exploiting the climbing skills of the game’s horses, and exploring regions not yet marked on his in-game map, while avoiding some of the more annoying NPCs and their repetitive dialogue like the plague.
He hadn't gotten anything done with the main quest of the game, but he seldom ever did. For him, the main quest wasn't why he played this game anyway; it was all about immersing himself in the world and taking in the sights and sounds, appreciating the world-building. Was he a colossal nerd? Maybe, but who was asking?
Zach stretched and took a breath; he checked the clock and decided that now was as good a time as any to begin his journey back to Equestria. He shut down the game after saving it, bidding Käfer farewell. "Don't worry, we'll do some more questing tomorow buddy."
He rooted around online and found a solid source for the episodes to the pony show, grabbing a playlist of the first season and loading it up. “Welp, here goes, for old time’s sake. I'm not ready to be dragged back into pony, but I guess I owe it to myself to get some frilly cutesy sugary stuff to make the world a little less gloomy.” Without further hesitation, he started up the pilot episode for Friendship is magic. This wasn't the first episode he'd ever watched, but he couldn't remember where he'd started the show originally back in the day. He may as well get himself back into the show from its actual beginning this time around.
Once the intro began, the “nostalgia” hit him like a wave, washing over him and instilling a familiar sense of excitement and…the less happy emotions he’d had at the time he originally saw these first episodes. He took it all in, not that he had much of a choice in the matter.
Zach remembered the scenes almost perfectly, funnily enough. It had been roughly five years now, and he still remembered that pilot episode as if he’d just seen it yesterday. He felt a refreshing sense of ease and then something close to joy gradually filled the spaces in his mind. Zach sat and he watched Twilight meet her future friends, followed along as they journeyed into the everfree forest after Nightmare moon…
He hadn't even gotten through the pilot episodes yet and he couldn’t help but smile. This was nice, he was glad he decided to do this.
Zach devoured the colorful art and visuals, the sound design and the overall sillyness of the show. He couldn't get enough of it, the ponies were sucking him right back into wholly enjoying the cartoon again. Maybe this was exactly what he needed to help shake things up a bit in his life?
He sat and enjoyed himself, queuing up episode after episode, up until he glanced at the alarm clock and it showed that the hour was once again getting late. “Really?” Zach said with an air of indignation. “Oh come on! I wanna watch more horse cartoon!" No, he couldn't do that. If he binged the entire first season he'd be up until the hours of the morning and he'd have to call in to work due to exhaustion.
He had at least that much self control, at least he liked to think so.
There was no use arguing about the lack of time anyway, time was final; regardless of how much he wanted to force the clock to go back and return him those hours so he could keep watching the colorful friendship ponies do their thing, he had to get some sleep.
“Whatever, I’ll pick up where I left off tomorrow then.” He begrudgingly conceded to his sleep schedule and readied himself for bed.
Once his teeth were cared for and everything else was done, he slid into bed and blew a raspberry at nothing in particular, decompressing for the night. As Zach lay there in his bed, he mused aloud, “People say time flies when you’re having fun, but I’m starting to think that’s a croc of poop. Time just flies, and we all end up older; sometimes I hate time.”
He sighed and rolled onto his side, glancing over at his phone.
An idea popped into his head, and Zach reached for his phone with a grin. “You know what? I’m not getting to sleep just yet anyway…why not watch more ponies?” It wasn’t the best idea, since he’d most likely end up sleeping on his phone again. Things like that had never stopped him before and it wasn’t stopping him now.
Given the nature of the show, it’d offer a safe and gentle backdrop for falling asleep. That, and he could catch up to the point he’d last watched the show quicker this way. Zach had originally said he was going to re-watch the whole series, and this was technically cheating, but, hey, they were his rules. He could break his rules without any reprieve, that was the best part of self imposed rules.
If it really bothered him at any point, he can just as easily go back and re-watch any missed episodes, so it was a moot point anyways.
Zach was just getting comfortable when, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed something ‘off’ about his ceiling. Well, not his whole ceiling, rather, a splotch on his ceiling, directly above him. At first, he thought it may have been a bug, they were getting to be an invasive nuisance this time of year before the winter came and forced them into hiding or death.
“Sorry buddy, unless you’re a spider, you’re not welcome in my house.” He said aloud and rose from bed. Zach reached to get a wad of paper towel with which to crush the little invader, keeping an eye on it as he did so.
He climbed onto his bed and stood up, getting a closer look at that odd little splotch on his ceiling, which hadn’t moved so much as an inch since he’d gotten out of bed to deal with it.
As it turned out, the splotch was revealed to not be any kind of bug upon closer inspection.
It was a little orb of blue, a dot of color on the surface of his cieling. It wasn't a true blue either, was it a navy blue perhaps? No, he was sure that was a little too dark to be “navy blue” but it was most definitely “blue” of some form. It was a blue circular splotch on his ceiling, and he had no idea how it got there or what could have possibly left it there.
Zach poked at the little splotch with the wad of paper towel, nothing came off on the towel and the dot remained exactly where it started; Well, that wasn’t entirely true. The moment the towel made contact with his ceiling, the blue dot showed up through the towel, on the towel. It was as if the splotch were made from a light source coming from within his room.
Zach moved the paper towel away and held a finger up to the blue splotch with a growing curiosity. He poked at it and, sure enough, the blue went over his finger as if the blue were coming from a light source. He couldn’t figure out for the life of him where this light source could have been originating from. No shadows were being cast when he moved his finger around his ceiling.
Zach held his hand out and moved it around, trying to get an idea of where the light was coming from. Nothing, there wasn't a single position he could hold his hand that blocked the little light. "Ok, that's weird, really weird."
He eyed the blue splotch with a scrutinous expression, “You were not here yesterday…” Stating the obvious; Zach’s gaze trailed across the room, searching high and low for anything at all that could be casting this little light onto his ceiling.
No luck; he had no earthly idea how this light got here, or where it was coming from. If he didn't know any better, he'd argue that it was a dot of paint, maybe. That wouldn't work though, it was very clearly some kind of light.
The only other light source in his room at that moment was the soft orange glow of the salt lamp on his desk, "Seriously, where in the world did you come from? Is it some butthead with a laser? No, the light doesn't move, even when I try to block it from the direction of my windows. This is gonna bug me to no end."
Zach scratched his head and gave up bothering to look for where the light source originated from. “It’s blue, dark blue, really not all that bothersome…whatever, I’ll look for the source tomorrow…I’m tired and not in the mood to deal with this right now.”
He conceded that the light would just have to stay there for now, but he couldn't shake the weird feeling he had about it. Zach knew needed to get some sleep and be ready for another day of work tomorrow after all! He was not about to jeopardize his “on-time” streak over some little light shining on his ceiling.
Zach slipped back under the covers and grabbed his phone again, though he cast one last look up at the mysterious little light splotch on his ceiling. “You better not be some paranormal thing… I’ve got salt, lots of salt, and I’m not afraid to use it!”
He returned his gaze to his phone, and the colorful ponies that showed on-screen.
...
When Zach next found himself conscious, or what he thought to be consciousness, he was bathed in dark blue light. A sense of warmth seeped itself into his body, it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, but it was very odd. He could see just above himself that the little splotch of light had grown exponentially. It was now a fairly large and rather ominous mass of deep blue glowing luminescence.
In addition, it was surrounded by what appeared to be whisps of similarly colored clouds or mist dancing around the outer edges. As bland and unimaginative a description as that was, it was the best way he could describe it in his half-asleep state.
In all honesty, he was fairly certain he was still asleep at this point. Either he was sleeping, or he was experiencing a paranormal event. To think, he’d been joking when he made that threat about the salt earlier… now he might have to actually go and get his salt.
'No, no, Ghosts aren't real; I am 100% sure I must be dreaming.' The paranormal was almost always able to be explained away with logic and reasoning. This glowing mass of light and corporeal material defied all logic and reasoning, therefor it must be some kind of dream; That was Zach's reasoning at least.
Looking closer, the mass of light wasn’t actually a solid formation; if he wasn't mistaken, the mass looked as if it went inward. It dipped inward and upwards through his ceiling almost, like a tunnel. The construct was difficult to really make out any details of given that he was still groggy and fatigued, that and he didn’t have his glasses on.
He sighed and looked away to nowhere in particular, “Subconscious, can you not do these crazy surreal dreams? Just once I'd ike a dream that doesn't make me question the fabric of reality.”
Zach had dabbled in the idea of lucid dreaming a few months back. He’d never really done a lucid dream, but he found that he could communicate indirectly with his subconscious and guide his dreams to an extent. Even when he couldn’t guide his dreams, he could still speak to his subconscious, and more often than not, his subconscious would listen.
This time, however, nothing changed. There was no avenue of steering, the ominous tunnel of glowing blue stayed exactly where it was. If anything, the tunnel got bigger.
When he listened closely, he could swear he was starting to hear the sounds of laughter. It was soft, cheerful laughter. There were birds chirping, some folks were singing… it was nice. He looked over to his right and realized that the sounds were actually coming from his phone. The pony show was still running, and that gave him a significant feeling of unease. Never in his life did a dream ever have an electronic consistently showing any kind of media like that. Not without obvious "this is a dream" signs like the screen warping or the phone bending or...
He shook his head away from that line of thought: No, this was clearly a dream. It was just an oddly realistic dream, save for the glowing hole in his ceiling leading to god knows where. He could work with a dream, but was it a nightmare readying itself? He doubted that; If this ominous blue light was some nightmare thing, it would have been blatantly obvious. This didn’t seem like any kind of nightmarish occurrence, it actually seemed rather peaceful and…not horrible.
A dream about... sleeping under a blue portal? This was a new one for him.
“Ok, I’ll bite. Have at it, subconscious.” Zach said aloud. He laid back down in his bed and closed his eyes to try and either move onto the next scene of this dream, or wake up in the morning. He started to feel himself drift, except he wasn't drifting to sleep or any new scenery in his dreamscape. Zach felt himself lifting up from his bed, floating almost.
He felt as if something was guiding his mind upwards and out of his bed. He opened his eyes, but he couldn’t see anything to confirm or deny the sensation he felt. Furthermore, the portal was still there, albeit even bigger now. The pony show still rang out its cheerful tunes and dialogue from his phone next to him.
He closed his eyes, the sensation of being pulled returned.
Zach was no stranger to weird dreams, so he tried not to take it too seriously. He was a bit reserved towards this turn of events, but…it was all just a dream, right? What could possibly go wrong? He was at least a little curious too, to see where his subconscious would take this.
Zach took a breath and tried to force himself to relax; he held his eyes shut in an effort to try and move on to whatever his subconscious mind had in store for him next. Hopefully it would something a little less surreal and more the normal kind of weird he was used to in his dreams.
The warmth filled his body completely, the sounds of the pony cartoon next to him seemed to grow distant, like his phone was sliding away from his bed. His mind drifted and it became difficult for him to think.
A muffled thunderclap rang, there was a rushing of wind, then there was silence.
...
Zach opened his eyes and was warmly greeted, not by his array of alarms, but by the sounds of crickets chirping and leaves rustling in the wind above him. He was no longer in his bed, bits of twigs and grass brushing against him established that fact quite quickly.
Once his eyes adjusted to the modest light, he could see trees of various shapes and sizes around him. There were countless colors and hues he wasn’t used to seeing, plants that were definitely not from his local geographical region. The sky was overcast with clouds, but sunlight still managed to sneak its way through, just enough to illuminate his surroundings.
‘OK! It’s pretty obvious I’m still dreaming. Where has my subconscious elected to dump me this time I wonder? Lemme guess…’ Zach said in his mind. The area looked faintly familiar to him, well, more familiar the longer he looked and took in the finer details.
He admired the saturated colors, observed the unusual trees and bushes, the vines. He noted the gently shrouding darkness in the furthest reaches of treeline in the distance. The trickling of a stream nearby, little croppings of hill mounds and burrows…
He was in a vibrant and colorful deep forest area, one that was uncomfortably familiar.
'I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't this.'
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Tbh, it feels like a self insert for me lol.
Most people dont write a prologue of sorts and just opt to just throw you into the story headfirst saying it's a self insert and it is very well done setting the stage already you say its fast paced and honestly its probably the best size it could be. You introduced us and now your going into the actual story afterwards.
10066979
why thank you!
Considering what the story was going to entail, I felt it was crucial that I give a prologue and setup for who this person was, and how they suddenly found themselves in the land of colorful friendship equines, rather than just do the cliche "wake up in equestria and scene!"
Very odd start... O Well... Here we go...
Routine seems to be important to this one.
This person’s relationship with the show is almost identical to mine. Weird.
I dont remember this storyline. Time to re-read it
Okay, I'll bite. This seems pretty interesting.
And totally not because of your russian bias-hinting username
Giving this a reread.
I wouldn't think much of the weather situation, but this paragraph makes it stick in my mind.
The thing that always get me out of wanting to read this story is how long it expends in things that don't matter overall.
Golden rule of story telling "less is more", we don't need to know how the mc was as a human just superficial information like the first day was enough and his personality should be highlighted during the story and not defined in the first chapter.
Still not my place to tell you how to tell your story just telling you how I reacted to it and what I think apply as reason for such.
11141964
this is something a fellow writer friend of mine brought up, and is a large reason of why I heavily edited the initial chapters to gut out a lot of the more pointless "nothing is actually happening" portions.
the initial chapters had a very bad "wheels spinning" problem that I've hopefully addressed and I don't end up running into again in future chapters.
funnily enough, I thought the original prologue was too short.
No matter what I do with this prologue, it always comes out looking awful and I'm never satisfied with it.
>write it short and sweet?
"Bleh, I hate how short this looks, I'm rewriting it."
>Write more detail?
"dammit now its too long!"
its a lesson in futility for me at this point, I'm never going to get this dumb prologue right so I've stopped trying.
there's a lot of things I don't like about my first few chapters for this story, but if I keep going back to them and tweaking them, I'm going to drive myself insane.
if I knew then what I know now, well: should have, could have, would have and all that
I threw in ideas that looked great in my head, but then looked like poo in application
Funny that I have to re-reading itvto remember the story. But since I consum Fimfiction Storys like others do Candy I am not so surprised.
Nice chapter.
Nice start.
11369403
Black soul you are bloody everywhere on this sight aren't you?