"Lieutenant Johnson!" A faint voice said on the edge of his hearing.

"Lieutenant Johnson!" The voice repeated again, insistently.

Robert Johnson opened his eyes, to see one of the men from below crouching over him.

"W-What?" Lieutenant Robert Johnson said, slowly gaining awareness.

"LT, we're entering the town in two Mikes." The soldier said, ducking down through the top hatch and entering back into the interior of the Stryker ICV.

The events of the past few days quickly entered back into the Lieutenant's mind, from finding themselves in a desert, to contact with the Russian and American ships, and finally to the 'Net' briefing of the town.

Johnson turned his head to confirm that, yes, they were about to enter the town. A sign slowly passed by as the Stryker rumbled along at ten miles an hour. Johnson was able to catch a brief glimpse at the sign, which read 'Welcome to Hollow Shades'.

"Jesus." Johnson muttered. "Couldn't be a better name if we were in a horror movie instead of a land of unicorns and... Whatever else is here."

The Lieutenant kept a tighter grip on his Colt RO635, but so far, it did not look like he would need it. Various ponies dotted the sides of the streets, watching blankly as first his Striker, and then another, followed by two M2 Bradleys and a M1A1 Abrams rolled down the street. Forty feet behind that, the rest of the hundreds of armored vehicles rolled onward convoy-style, right through the edges of town.

"What are those things?!" He heard one of the ponies yell over the sound of the engines.

"Just passing through!" Johnson yelled out towards the crowds now gathering.

Sixty kilometers away, in the UAV control center of the USS Lake Erie, a technician looked through the feed of a MQ-4C Triton UAV flying high above the landscape. He could see the beginnings of the massive column of armor going through the center of town, the 'local yokels' gathered around to watch it. In this case, the locals being sapient 'ponies', and with the First Contact situation being a nightmare (or so he had been told), tensions would be high.

"Man, I would hate to have that guy's job." The technician muttered as he watched a man in a US Army uniform on the lead vehicles appear to say something to one of the crowds as the man's vehicle passed.

"Tell me about it." His friend at the next UAV rig said. "Radar mapping the huge forest with a UAV is boring, but at least you get to make it home after you're done."

"We're not going to make it home again." The technician tersely said, highlighting the tensions being on a entirely new world was raising among the crew, many of whom had family who would believe them dead. It had almost caused a number of suicides when the news broke out - and an increase in visits to the Fleet doctors.

In any case, the technician prepared himself for another two hours of watching the UAV feeds. He sighed, wondering what he had done to be stuck doing this.

Lieutenant Vasilyev lifted another pair of sandbags, before walking them over to a new emplacement location, outlined in white chalk powder on the grass, and placing them neatly on top of said line. He began his walk back towards the crate that housed them, twenty feet away, thinking on the setup of the camp.

Over the past four hours, the temporary Forward Operating Base had taken shape. Prefabricated tents and basic sandbag fortifications had gone up, and construction on a series of elaborate wood-and-sandbag trenches had taken place. Eventually, Captain Volkov (temporarily placed in command of Russian forces by the Admiral aboard the New Russian Federation aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetson) and Captain Henderson had both worked together on putting ashore enough supplies to make their camp a fortress ready to house up to 10,000 men.

With the combined Russian and American units only a few hours away (having been delayed by their passage through the town), the camp had to be ready to house all of their assorted men, vehicles, and numerous supplies. Half a dozen motor pools had gone up, and several major stockpiles of supplies had begun already, beefed up by helicopters flying from the Sevastopol amphibious assault ship, which had anchored itself one hundred meters offshore.

Vasilyev lifted up another pair of sandbags, slowly walking with them over to the emplacements. He had due to be replaced in fifteen minutes, and he couldn't be happier about it. Lifting nearly thousands of sandbags over the course of three hours, a mere half hour after securing the beach in a helicopter assault that met no resistance of any kind, had tired him out. He may have been conditioned to endure plenty of physical activity as part of his MVD Spetsnaz training, but the sixteen years of relative peace after his graduation had not prepared him well for running around Russia, fighting the NRF... Or running around a forest in a new world, all the while being chased by mythical creatures, for that matter.

With a grunt, Vasilyev set the bags down in their positions: An emplacement, surrounded by sandbags on three sides, set half a foot into the ground, with the back connecting to the trench networking now being build and reinforced with timber walls and floors.

"It sure seems like we're about to host the First World War all over again." One of the US helicopter crewmen beside him complained.

"Look on the bright side, Delany." Another joked. " They won't be throwing poison gas at us like they did at my great-great-grandfather."

"You mean the stuff that blinded him for fifty years?" Another commented. "By my count, they still have that that tele-whatever that can lift stuff and who knows what else. Hey, next time I want the magical cannon of pixie dust fired at my MH-6, I'll drive over to Disney and put it in a fucking movie."

"What happened?" Vasilyev asked the pilot, mentally switching to English.

The pilot shrugged. "Oh, you know, the usual: Get transported to an alien world full of talking horses, have to fly a recon flight over the forest, and proceed to get shot at by a group of the winged ones-"

"Pegasi." Vasilyev interrupted.

The pilot waved him off. "Yeah, Pegasi, whatever. A couple of them in gold armor feinted us towards another group of fucking unicorns on the ground. THAT group of grade-A assholes proceeded to fire fucking plasma bolts or some shit at us. I don't know: I'm not flying a goddamn UAV. If my Little Bird is in danger, I get the hell out of there."

With that, the pilot walked off, carrying one sandbag. Vasilyev shrugged, silent running it over in his head before going back to work. He still had ten minutes until he would be replaced, and he wanted to get it over with as quickly as he possibly could.

NOTE: The Author's notes will often have unrelated, irrelevant information that neither I nor you care about. Nonetheless, it would be awesome if you could read them.

Author's Note

Well, here's the next chapter for you. Please comment below on what you thought. I tried to introduce a little humor here: God knows if I succeeded. If I did, awesome. If I didn't, I vow never to use my horrible humor again.

There are three references in here: One to a random CoD game (an early one, not one of the MW series) and two to RvB.