Chapter 1
I believe in an afterlife despite being a rather loud and obnoxious atheist. To me God is an impossible concept. I can’t think of way for any one individual could have that much power and not end up destroying themselves and probably everything in existence as well. I just can’t think of a way for it to work. It might be nice for a short amount of time but life would just feel so … empty. Knowing everything and being capable of doing anything would make actually doing things pointless. What would be the point of doing anything if you knew exactly what would happen if you did it? The action and its consequences would be meaningless because you knew they were going to happen so you could make your own life perfect. I can’t think of a worse kind of hell.
Of course it is possible that I just can’t comprehend this great and all powerful being because I only have a lowly human brain but if I can’t understand God it becomes rather difficult to believe in him and even more difficult to worship him.
However the idea of an afterlife is a far more appealing concept. If anything I find it nearly impossible to not believe in an afterlife. It’s almost as if there’s a voice in my head that screams at me whenever I question the idea. This is probably a survival mechanism designed to keep me sane since the idea that one day I and everyone I have ever met will cease to exist and everything we’ve ever done will be rendered meaningless would undoubtedly leave me a drooling wreck on the floor. It might be the most logical answer I can come up with but it’s one I hate with every fibre of my being.
It reminds me of one time when I was twelve and I smashed a bunch of fancy scientific cylinder thingies when my teacher had sent me to a storage room to get one of said thingies. Instead of facing my problem I returned to my teacher cylinder in hand and asked to go to the toilet complaining of stomach cramps. I hid from my problems in the bathroom hoping they would go away. They didn’t of course. I got yelled at and made to pay for the surprisingly expensive cylinder thingies but I hid anyway. Still do every chance I get. Suspension of disbelief has a very powerful hold over me which is probably the reason I love books so much. I can’t help but want these fantastical adventures and creatures to be real and so, when I read, I can’t help but believe that they are for a little while. The difference between these situations and my belief in an afterlife is that I want there to be an afterlife so badly that I end up forcing myself to believe. I know I’m probably just lying to myself and then convincing myself that these lies are the truth but I can’t help it. I would usually say that this is very unhealthy but, for the sake of my own sanity, in this instance I’ll allow it.
I often keep myself up late into the night with these strange thoughts about life the universe and everything. This was roughly what was going through my head as I was drifting off to sleep on earth for the last time.
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I was woken up by something small and kind of sharp prodding me in the side.
“Is he dead?” A small hesitant voice asked.
I let out a fairly audible groan to let the voice know that they shouldn’t bury me yet.
“I think that’s a no. Unless he’s a zombie! They groan all the time and they’re dead.” A slightly higher voice said.
“ ’mmmnot a zom-b” I muttered. I felt very strange. I didn’t feel like me which didn’t seem like a good sign.
“Well he’s definitely not a zombie then, they can’t talk.” A third and seemingly more confident voice chimed in.
I attempted to open my eyes but immediately regretted as the light nearly blinded me. After a few more half assed attempts I finally managed to keep my eyes open and soon realised I was looking at the sky. This meant one of two possible situations. 1- My house no longer had a roof or 2- I wasn’t in my house. Neither of these options appealed to me too much.
“Did I get drunk last night?” I asked myself. I couldn’t remember drinking anything last night but that didn’t necessarily mean I hadn’t. My past was littered with nights I couldn’t remember. I doubted it however since usually waking up after getting drunk resulted in my head hurting. In this case everything except from my head was hurting.
“Well then mistuh now that we’ve established you aren’t going to try and eat our flesh I would be happy to lend a helping hoof.” The first voice stated.
“Hoof?” I asked turning to the source of the voice. Standing next to me were three strange looking horses. The middle horse was holding a stick but other than that looked fairly normal except for having really big eyes. The other two where another matter entirely. The one on the right had a horn that looked fairly well attached to its fore head and the one on the right had wings. On top of this the trio were an assortment of bright colours.
I did the only rational thing there was to do in this situation. I let out a short high pitched yelp and ran away.
Luckily enough the trio were to startled by the yelp to immediately make chase so, since I was in what appeared to be an apple orchard, I lost them relatively quickly. I continued to run for a few minutes before realising something. I wasn’t running so much as I was galloping. This stopped me in my tracks and I decided to take a second to examine myself.
I didn’t like what I found.
For starters I know had four legs. I was pretty confident I had never had four legs before so I was somewhat freaked out by this fact. I also realised I had pitch black fur. This was another feature that I was fairly confident I did not have the day before.
I collapsed in a heap on the ground in shock.
I remained like this for what could have been hours trying to process this information but my brain kept rejecting it. This made zero sense. People don’t just wake up in the morning and have four legs.
“You alright partner?” A voice with a strong southern accent asked from behind me.
“I haven’t … I’m …” I let out a short high pitched laugh. “I don’t even know how to begin to answer that question.”
“That don’t sound to promising.” The southern voice replied as I felt something soft, warm and furry rest on my shoulder.
I turned to look at the being that was attempting to comfort me. It was a larger version of the horse like beings that woke me up. It had blonde hair and bright orange fur. It was also wearing a Stetson hat. My first thought was to pull the old ‘high pitched scream then leg it’ since it had worked so well the first time but I decided against it. While this was a perfectly valid response to seeing a monster it wouldn’t provide me the answers that I needed to make sense of my current predicament.
“Do yer have a name?” The inquisitive being asked
“Yes.”
“Do you want to tell me it?”
“No.”
“Well I’m Applejack” the being looked at me expectantly.
I stared blankly back at it trying to come up with a sentence that was longer than on word or, at the very least, contained more than one syllable. ”Hi.” I said disappointing myself greatly.
“Well I need to call yer something. I guess I’ll call you silver after yer mane.” It said becoming more agitated after each pathetic reply and pointing (well closer to gesturing really since it didn’t have fingers to point with) at my head.
Wondering what she meant by this I glanced upwards and saw a strand of silver. I reached up with my new ‘hoof’ and (somehow) pulled the front of my hair (or mane as the being had called it) down. It was indeed silver. This confirmed my worst suspicions. I seemed to now look like one of these horse thingies. ”Huh” I said before violently throwing up and fainting.
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I woke up in a bed.
‘That was one hell of a weird dream’ I thought, eyes still shut dreading the moment when my retinas would be assaulted by the monstrosity that is light. I finally found the strength to open my eyes and get out of bed but I stopped midway through getting up. That wasn’t my ceiling I was looking at it. Why do I never wake up to my own ceiling above me?
“You’re awake!” An over excited voice nearly screamed. “I’m so glad. I was worried I hadn’t cast the correction spell right, the book said that could happen. It also said that if the correction spell wasn’t cast within 24 hours of the original spell it wouldn’t work so I was worried I’d missed the window.”
I let out an elongated groan when I realised the voices owner was another of the strange horse like beings and that this meant my dream wasn’t in fact a dream. This particular being was light purple with a dark purple and pink mane. She not only had a horn but also wings.
“Are you alright?”
“No.”
“Applejack said you’d do that.”
“What?”
“The one word sentence thing.”
“Oh.”
“She was right, it is annoying.”
“Sorry.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on but at this point I had decided to just go with the flow. I was fairly confident I’d just gone insane and this was all a product of my own overactive imagination so there seemed to be very little point in fighting it.
“So why did you try and change your physical appearance? Did you really want to be a Pegasus that badly?” The winged being asked a piece of paper and quill encased in a pink aura hovering in front of her.
“I didn’t and I’m a Pegasus?” I replied reaching behind my back and confirming that I did in fact have wings before closing my eyes and rubbing my temples.
“yes you are a Pegasus in prime condition. Your wings are fully grown and seem to have all the required bones and muscles for you to fly. Are you sure you didn’t purposefully try and alter your appearance? You had transmogrification sickness which can only be caused by going through some sort of transmogrification and there are only 3 ways that I know of which could cause this. The first is a potion the second is a spell and the third is that you went through a portal between dimensions.”
My eyes shot open at the third option “What do you mean by between dimensions?”
“Well there are hundreds of different dimensions in existence but not all of them contain ponies that look like you and me. As a result if we were to pass into a dimension that didn’t contain our race the universe would sort of compensate for that impossibility by transforming you into the closest thing to your race that existed in the dimension you are entering.”
That sounded like far too convenient an explanation to me. It still seemed far more likely that my brain had invented this place as a result of some sort of mental breakdown. However I decided to stick with the go with it option. If this was in fact what happened then I wasn’t crazy and if I was crazy then I’m already crazy so what could be the harm in humouring myself? “I pick option number 3 then Doctor.”
“My name is twilight sparkle and I’m not a Doctor. I’m a princess and a librarian.” The being stated matter of factly.
“Of course you are” I replied thinking that the crazy theory had suddenly gained a lot more credibility.
“Well if you are from a different dimension all we have to do is find out which one and send you back through the portal. The universe should take care of the rest. So what type of creature were you before you were a pony silver?”
I thought about correcting her on my name but thought better of it. This conversation was convoluted enough as it was and the naming conventions of these beings seemed to be different to that of humans and I didn’t fancy explaining them right now. “I was a human. It’s a sort of bipedal ape type creature.”
The princess/librarians facial expression seemed to change at this. Was that pity I could see in her face? “I know of the beings and I know of a portal to that dimension.”
“Well that’s great right? Problem solved?”
“Not exactly. There should only be one portal to and from that dimension and it only opens once every 30 moons.”
Yep that was definitely pity etched on her face which meant I pretty much knew what was coming. I asked the question anyway. “When does it next open.”
“Not for another 29 moons.”
“Oh…” I felt like I’d just been punched in the gut. Repeatedly.
It didn’t feel nice.