Chapter 6: Waking Up
The remaining members of the Big Sister Little Sister Camping Trip were packing up the campsite as fast as they could in the crisp light of the early morning. This was unfortunately slowed down by the fact that Rainbow Dash had flown off to bring back Fluttershy as a translator for Harry, and the fillies weren’t too experienced in taking down tents by themselves. Harry himself was sitting off to the side of the campsite, looking a little antsy.
The mood was a bit anxious and somber. Unless Applejack were to return, or Rainbow happened to stop at the hospital on her way back, they wouldn't know the fate of the fatigued filly until they made it back to town. Conversation had been sparse, and nearly entirely focused on Terra.
“I’m really worried about her,” Sweetie Belle admitted while lugging a box to the cart.
“Ah think we all are,” Apple Bloom replied, pulling a tent stake out of the ground. “She really came outta nowhere, and she was all alone too…”
Scootaloo sighed, struggling under a pile of tent fabric. She emerged and said, “I just wish we knew anything about her, y’know? She was hurt really bad, and then she just collapsed! I don’t even wanna think about how long she was stuck out here…”
Rarity remained silent. She had all of these concerns and more; where the filly’s parents were, why she had been so injured, and how Harry was involved were among her chief ones. But she chose to keep these concerns unspoken, and gave a small smile as she forced herself to be strong for the fillies.
“Now now, I’m sure she’ll be quite alright. The hospital staff are perfectly capable of taking care of her, and once she’s awake she’ll be able to explain everything. None of you fillies need to worry your little heads about it! We can all go see her once we’re back in Ponyville.”
The fillies’ faces brightened, and Scootaloo shouted, “Yeah! And I didn’t see a cutie mark on her either, we should invite her to be a crusader!”
The other two gave enthusiastic shouts of agreement as Rarity’s smile grew to be genuine. She knew the Cutie Mark Crusaders to be steadfast in their determination. Even if Terra’s parents never showed, she had hope that the fillies before her would do everything in their power to brighten Terra’s future with their companionship.
It took another fifteen minutes, but Rainbow Dash finally returned, flying down to the campsite with Fluttershy in tow. The group stopped what they were doing and trotted over to them, before they all moved together towards where Harry was sitting.
“Harry?” Fluttershy started, “Rainbow told me about a situation with a filly? What happened?”
Harry began giving various grunts and growls as Fluttershy listened intently, nodding every so often, before she began to recount Harry’s tale. Unfortunately, it was a rather short one.
Harry had been foraging for food in the woods when he heard something stumble and fall nearby. When he investigated, he found a filly passed out on the forest floor, a bit scraped up but otherwise unharmed. Concerned, he approached the filly and shook her awake, but when she noticed Harry, she looked terrified and bolted off, leaving Harry confused. He began to follow after her at a solid pace, but when he heard a scream up ahead, he sped up, worried something terrible had happened to her. Once he realized that there was a camp up ahead, he slowed down, knowing that the filly was likely now in capable hands.
“Now Harry,” Fluttershy lectured. “You must be careful of your effect on other ponies. Not everypony knows you’re a nice bear, right?”
Harry nodded, looking downcast.
“Now hold on,” Rarity interrupted, “the filly—”
“Terra!” all three fillies chimed in unison.
“Ahem, Terra wasn’t injured when you found her, correct?”
Harry nodded.
“Then something must’ve happened right before she stumbled into camp. Nothing much we can do besides wait for her to awaken, I suppose…” Rarity affirmed, sounding disappointed. “Thank you for your help anyway, Fluttershy.”
The yellow pegasus gave a polite goodbye as she began her flight back to Ponyville, Harry returned to the woods, and the rest of them dejectedly resumed their packing.
…
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve woken up sore and in pain in an unfamiliar place, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice.
As I groggily opened my eyes, I first noted that I was no longer outside, and was instead in a brightly lit and colorful looking room. The wooden walls were decorated with illustrations of vines and leaves, twisting and curling around the edges of the space. There was a large window on the wall to my left, letting in a decent amount of light, and a door on my right with a small viewing window placed in it.
I shifted a bit, noticing that I was quite sore, in a bit of pain, lying in a rather comfortable bed, and… currently a horse. “Hold on, what happened again?”
All at once, it came back to me. The void, the forest, the bear, the campsite… and passing out. I groaned, realizing just how much of a mess I had made for myself. I looked down, noting that most of my body was obscured by a blanket, but still noticing a bandage wrapped around the end of my… foreleg. “Ugh, I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to that.”
I looked back at the window. It was hard to tell, but it seemed like the day was nearly over, with the sun’s light leaving long shadows across the ground outside. Whether or not it was the same day as the one I passed out in would be impossible to tell without— oh, yeah, I just realized something else.
“There have to be other ponies around, or… other benevolent creatures of some kind. I didn’t get a good look at those camp goers, but whatever they did after I passed out led to me ending up in this… rather friendly looking room… in a… hospital, maybe?” It seemed almost too nice to be a hospital room, but the window in the door and the sterile smell of the place seemed to suggest so.
Just then, I noticed a bedside dresser to my right, with a lamp and a glass of water sitting on it. I leaned over and grabbed the glass, taking a few long gulps and relishing the refreshing taste. I had been out in that forest for far too long, any longer and I would’ve—
Wait.
I looked down at the glass I was holding.
With a hoof.
My brain stopped functioning again at the realization and the glass fell out of my grip, shattering on the floor below. “Wh-wha— how— I—”
Before I knew it, I could hear sounds coming from outside the door, right before it flung open.
All at once, I became aware of several more pieces of information before my brain even had the chance to process the initial discovery.
One, there were in fact other ponies around (which I could already reasonably assume, but whatever).
Two, there was a pony running directly into the room with me. They had a white coat and pink hair— a pink mane?— tied in a bun, along with a lengthy pink tail. They wore a white nurse’s cap on their head, and seemed to have some kind of tattoo on their side, depicting a red cross with four pink hearts surrounding it. Their face held icy blue eyes with eyelashes that looked distinctly feminine.
Three, although it was hard to tell from a distance, they appeared to be about twice my height.
Not that I could do much with all of this information, as my brain was still buffering from what I had already learned before. I sat up, stunned, as my wide eyes blinked back and forth between the shattered glass and the pony now standing before me. The pony in question had just finished crossing the room to the end of the bed and was looking at me, concerned.
“Oh no! Are you ok, little one?”
…
“Did you get hurt?”
…
“Can you… speak Equish?”
Almost on autopilot, my head nodded. I didn’t even fully understand the question.
“Oh, good. I’m glad you’re finally awake, but what happened?”
The hamster wheel in my brain finally began turning again as I got out, “I uh… I didn’t… mean to drop that.” Hearing the high pitched voice that came out when I said that kickstarted my brain back into some semblance of functionality.
There was a short pause before the pony replied, “Oh, well, that’s quite alright, dear. I’m not mad at you. Did the glass hurt you at all?”
I shook my head.
“Ok, good. I’ll just clean this up for a moment. Stay in your bed, please,” she instructed firmly.
By now I could tell that this pony was almost surely a woman, as her voice and body type seemed to suggest. “Or… whatever the horse term for it is. Hell if I know.”
She left for a moment and returned with a broom and dustpan held in her mouth. With almost unnatural dexterity, she held the broom with her hooves, swept the shards of glass into a pile, and picked them up using the dustpan.
While this was happening, I had a moment to think again. In that time, I realized something that I had already realized prior, backed up by the wording of the conversation we just had.
“Oh god, I’m definitely a child here, huh?”
I was not happy about this information. Being a child meant others making decisions for me. It meant not having control over where I was or what I’d be doing. It was all… rather uncomfortable to think about. For the time being, I chose not to think about it.
I took the opportunity to think about other things, such as the whole ‘language still being the same’ thing. “Equish? What was that all about?” The fact that I had been tossed through the multiverse and had somehow landed somewhere that spoke the same language as the place I had left was somewhat baffling, even if they called it something different.
I hadn’t even begun to process how I was able to hold that glass earlier, but I figured it wouldn’t be a smart idea to experiment with it while there was another person in the room with me. If this was something that everyone could do normally, I’d look like a weirdo if I messed around with it like it was the most amazing thing ever.
Even still, I was immensely relieved that I still had the ability to grab things. I don’t know if I’d be able to function if I was stuck with unusable hooves for the rest of my life. Which… right, yeah. I’m stuck here. As a horse. I almost wanted to forget about it again so I could focus on more pressing matters, but without the immediate danger of the forest I previously woke up in, I didn’t have much to distract myself with.
The helplessness I felt before started to creep back into my headspace, just before the nurse finished disposing of the glass and interrupted my thoughts, saying, “There, all done. Now, my name is Nurse Redheart. What’s yours?”
All of a sudden, I was feeling quite shy. With all that I had lost, my identity and my memory were among the few things that I still had left. I knew it was silly, but I felt like if I were to reveal very much about myself, I’d be giving away my last items of value and gain nothing in return for it. So, instead of answering, I stubbornly remained silent.
The silence stretched on to the point of discomfort, before Redheart sighed and said, “Well, the pony that brought you here had called you Terra, is it alright if I call you that as well?”
“Terra?” I inspected the fur on my uninjured foreleg, before slowly nodding and replying, “That works, sure.” It was short and simple, and should be pretty easy to remember. Although, given names like ‘Redheart’ and ‘Terra’, it might’ve been smart to hide my human name. It’d probably sound very strange to the ponies here if all of their names were like this. That line of inquiry got me thinking about something else though, something far more important.
“The way that I got here… I can’t tell anyone what happened. There’s no way they’d believe me.” The voice in the void had told me that there wasn’t another incident like mine for… centuries, was it? This obviously wasn’t a common occurrence. I had a hard time believing what was happening and I was the one actively living it. “Well, if I don’t tell them that, then what do I tell them?”
Before I had the chance to come up with ideas, Redheart interrupted my thoughts again by gently saying, “Alright, Terra. How are you feeling?”
I took a quick mental inventory of my senses before replying, “Uhh… bad. I’m sore, I’m tired, my… foreleg… still hurts, and I haven’t eaten or drank very much in a while.” I subconsciously noted that that had been my longest sentence so far since I’d first woken up as a pony, and it was for the sake of complaining that I felt bad. That realization… was not great for my mental state. “Um…” I added shyly, “sorry.”
“Oh, it’s nothing to be sorry about,” Redheart consoled. “Applejack said she found you in the woods this morning after you passed out in their campsite. With how long you slept, you must’ve been exhausted, and that injury on your leg must’ve hurt a lot. You’re very strong for getting through it all,” she praised.
I blushed a little bit and looked down, feeling embarrassed about being treated like a lost little kid. “Which is exactly how you appear to her right now. Stop complaining.”
“Now, Terra,” she began softly, her tone gentle and comforting, “do you know where your parents are, sweetheart?”
Oh.
In all the chaos I had been through so far, I had somehow forgotten all about my parents.
God, I stormed off to the forest on my father’s birthday and now— I’m never gonna see them again, aren’t I? I’m never gonna be able to apologize, or make up for lost time, or give them the chance to do the same. I wouldn’t be able to give my sister a call like I planned, or spend time with any of my friends, or— do literally anything with any person I have ever known.
I was completely…
and utterly…
alone.
…
My eyes grew blurry.
“I shouldn’t cry— I won’t cry.” I fought against the rising tide of emotion as if it were the only battle left to fight.
I could feel tears forming as a tightness gripped my chest and my heart pounded against it.
“No, I refuse to cry.” Not now, not in front of someone else. I had to maintain composure.
A solitary tear rolled down my cheek.
“No! Stop. Crying. You can’t break down now. You need to be strong.”
Yet, despite my best efforts, I was unable to withstand the overwhelming grief I felt. I sobbed, my shoddily made emotional dam quickly crumbling.
I should’ve been better than this. I was better than this. “God, what the fuck happened to me…”
I curled up into a ball on the bed and covered my face with my arms as my emotions poured out of me. I felt despair on a level I’d never felt before, a hopelessness beyond comparison.
In that moment, the few things that were familiar about this place were nothing compared to the sheer level of unfamiliarity I was now contending with. All the feelings that I had pushed to the side for the sake of my safety were now coming out all at once. Without anything to distract me, I was truly at a loss for what to do.
My— hooves trembled as I clutched the bedsheets below me, grasping for something, anything to anchor myself against the waves of anguish. Having been stripped of nearly everything familiar, I felt lost, adrift in a foreign world.
Suddenly, I felt something soft running along my back, brushing against the fur there. It was… comforting. In a way I didn’t know how to explain. I heard Redheart’s voice, in the same gentle and comforting tone as before, make shushing sounds and say, “you’re alright, it’s going to be okay.”
“B-but… I’m n-never gonna see them again!” I got out between sobs. “W-what am I supposed to do now?”
“Terra, listen to me,” she instructed, her soothing tone taking on a hint of firmness as she continued to stroke my back. “You’re not alone, Terra. I’m here for you, and I will do everything in my power to make sure you live a happy and comfortable life, no matter where the future takes you. You have my word.”
And yet again, right when I thought it was all over, a voice gave me a glimmer of hope in the midst of absolute uncertainty. It was one thing when it came from a disembodied entity speaking inside of my own head, but hearing it from the voice of someone standing directly in front of me was another thing entirely. Redheart’s kindness was a beacon of strength when I was unable to provide it for myself.
I then did something completely unlike me; I reached out and grabbed a hold on Redheart, wrapping my trembling arms around her and burying my face in the fluff covering her chest.
As I continued to sob, Redheart, to her credit, continued to offer soothing gestures and make comforting sounds. We stayed like that for a while.
As embarrassing as it was, it did help to calm me down, and eventually my sobs turned to sniffles, before I retracted my face from her now tear-soaked fur.
I took a deep breath. “Well, that was embarrassing,” I mumbled, finally realizing what had just happened.
“But don’t you feel better now?” Redheart countered.
I reluctantly nodded. As disconcerting as it was in retrospect, it did bring me comfort. “And… um… thanks, I guess,” I shamefully spoke while wiping my face with a… whatever this joint was on my foreleg. I should pick up an anatomy book at some point, this was getting ridiculous.
Redheart gave an amused smile as she said, “Now, I know you’re upset, understandably so, but just remember what I said, alright?”
I nodded passively. It felt strange to take advice from a— pony I had just met, but I didn’t exactly have any other options at that moment. Besides, it really did help.
Redheart’s smile grew. “Alright, I bet you’re probably very hungry.”
My body responded for me as my stomach growled loudly. I blushed a little bit in embarrassment.
Redheart gave a short chuckle. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said with a hint of mirth in her tone. “I’ll go get you something to eat. How about you go wash up in the bathroom?” She asked, gesturing towards a door that I hadn’t noticed yet, situated on the same wall as the bed.
I agreed with a nod. After being thoroughly humiliated, it’d be nice to take a break from being around another person. Er… pony. Although when I looked down off the edge of the bed, I noticed something else.
“Um…” I started unsurely, “…how do I get down?” The bed I was on was about the same height as I was. I saw no way off of it that didn't involve injuring myself. “Ugh, being a kid sucks.”
“Oh! Let me help you down,” Redheart said, before she suddenly reached out with her head, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck (which I apparently had now) with her mouth, and gently lifted me down to the floor.
I was stunned, my face now thoroughly red. Add that to the list of Things I Do Not Know How To Process Yet.
“Now, be careful on that leg of yours,” she sternly cautioned, “I don’t want you hurting any more, alright?”
I forcefully kickstarted my brain, before sputtering out, “O-okay. I’ll be careful.”
Redheart gained a new smile as she walked back through the door she came out of, closing it behind her. I almost felt myself wanting to ask her not to leave, but I held back because… c’mon, I just met her!
I stood there for a moment, taking note of my body’s soreness and my foreleg’s injury, before stumbling off to the bathroom door, my brain swirling with thoughts.
Nurse Redheart was conflicted. She had just finished talking to Terra, the mysterious filly that had appeared that morning without any reason as to why. The search through the missing foals database had proved fruitless, as there was no match for a unicorn of Terra’s description. Letters had been sent out to nearby cities in the search, but none of these had returned yet.
As she walked through the hospital corridors on her way to the cafeteria, Redheart couldn’t help but wonder about what really happened to the filly. She had taken care of plenty of injured and distressed foals before, but there was something eerily different about Terra. The way she just appeared at Applejack’s campsite, barely awake and fairly injured, painted a vividly distressing picture.
Redheart knew she couldn’t pry too deeply though. Terra seemed fragile, both emotionally and physically, and Redheart would hate to put her through any more distress. There was one thing at least that she knew for sure without the filly needing to audibly confirm it.
Her parents were… out of the picture. For good. The look of pure despair, one that should have never appeared on the face of a foal, said it all.
Even still, Redheart stayed determined. She knew Terra needed somepony strong to support her in the wake of losing the most important ponies in her life. Underneath that shell, there was a kind young filly who had only been dealt a bad hoof. Whatever Terra’s story turned out to be, Redheart would be there to give her comfort, if needed.
With a determined nod, Nurse Redheart continued on her way to find food for the forlorn filly.
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I wonder if it's another Redheart adoption story. Those are few and far between. Good work so far, I'll be keeping an eye on this one.
11858025
Wait there are redheart adoption stories!?! I could never find one.
I wonder what they will do now. I mean, as long as math is still base 10 in this world, all they need to learn is history, and that can be done with a few books. So, other than for social and magical reasons, school will be both boring and slightly humiliating.
11858033
Only one I've seen so far, and it's a foster situation currently, not full on adoption. It's also a fairly extreme, though well reasoned eample of RGRE, so it might not be to your taste. Have a link, if you're interested.
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/535177/gynophobia
11858044
Ill check it out, you rock!
A very cute chapter, I can't wait to see more of this story!
Nurse Redheart is one of my favourite characters, I love how you had written her in this chapter
Aww, thanks for this.
11859268
Heh I don’t actually remember how I came up with it
11859271
>:3
Thank you for the chapters!
This must be good, because I don't usually read too many other people's fics on here... yet I whizzed through the first six chapters of this in an hour! Great worldbuilding, very realistic reaction to the unprecedented situation this guy finds himself in... and I have the algorithm of my own HiE fic I'm writing at the moment to thank for finding it!
You seem like a very humble writer as well who's unaware of their own talent, which makes it even better. Keep up the great work, and looking forward to more updates immeasurably.
11862405
Eeee thank you sm! :3
Love what I'm reading already. I have hopes that it will continue that way in the future.
Too early to say much here tho, other than I hope Terra learns to do magic soon as that's one of my favorite things in these kinds of stories.
I have to say that I am disappointed tho in how quickly I got through what was here, and can't wait for more.
There's is never enough nurse red heart lol. Love it. I eagerly Await to read more
This is very cute so far, and I'm eager to see where it goes. Thanks for sharing!
So far so good, well written with some interesting ideas. Poor Harry got his feelings hurt, lol. Not so sure about the weirdly contrived naming situation, but that's a minor issue at worst.
Canonically it's mid-season three, before Twilight's upgrade and even Discord's reformation. I also spot the Alt. Universe tag, but so far it doesn't look like the world itself is hugely different, only that episode's events due to MC's interference. (Not that I've anything against more advanced AUs, if the author decides to go there; this is just an idle observation.)
The cover art for the is fanfic is amazing! Terra looks sooooo cute
