Anton woke to the feeling of a warm form on top of his back and the sensation of cold water on his belly. It was very sobering.

“Well, this is uncomfortable. Uh, Creepette? Are you awake? I kinda need to be warm everywhere.”

A sleepy, half-muttered ‘uhn-gee...’ and a nuzzle was his only response.

“Okay, plan B.”

He tried to move his tail a bit, to use the poofy end to try tickling her or at least getting her attention. Unfortunately, his tail lacked the flexibility to do more than swish side to side a bunch, and almost reach his shoulder. It was just too fat and stiff, like a chubby guy on the morning after an exercise marathon. He stuck out his tongue for a moment in frustration, reeling it back in when he tasted dirt.

“Thank you brain, for that totally relevant comparison.”

He tried shifting back and forth to shake the mare a bit, in an effort to jostle her awake. All this resulted in was her changing position to one far less comfortable for him, with two of her hooves directly on the base of his neck for balance.

Wincing, he tried to roll over completely, and finally dislodged her. She tipped over with a hiss of confusion and a quiet ‘slap’ and ‘plop’ of her landing in the muddy patch of dirt next to the ‘pond’ Anton had excavated. She looked around in confusion before her gaze settled back onto the lizard-pony with a frown.

“Uhn-gee?”

“Yeah, sorry, I was just really uncomfortable. How about we get out of this hole?”

He started to climb before realizing he had yet to figure out how to go about climbing with four legs, in spite of doing so earlier in his panicked state. Having to actually command his limbs into position led to a much trickier ascent, his wide-splayed toes on his front legs making it easier, but still challenging.

He finally made it to the top with a headbutt to his rear from Creepette, which launched him over the last foot of steep edge and face-first into the grass all around.

‘Stronger than she looks, okay, what was I doing? Oh, yeah, English Class with a Creeper pony.’

He waited for her to clamber out, embarrassed that she did so relatively easier than he did. That is to say, without needing help.

He tried cutting some grass down to get to a patch of dirt, starting with gnawing at it, trying to slash with his claws, but nothing seemed to work.

“Uhn-gee? Abbat?”

“That is exactly what I’m trying to fix.”

“Tact-lee!”

He cringed at the horrible pronunciation, his inner English teacher really starting to go nuts.

“Fine, uh, guess I’ll try digging for more dirt, and hope I don’t look stupid.”

Scraping up another section of the grass took a lot of time, and once Creepette figured out what he was doing, she began trying to help. Surprisingly, she seemed to have a good eye for figuring out the distance needed to make it almost perfectly circular.

Several hours of back-breaking work later, the two of them had finally taken care of the clearing, and Creepette nuzzled him happily. She was so snuggly all of a sudden, even though they were both absolutely filthy.

“Okay, now that that’s done, let’s uh, get to teaching.”

He used one of his claws to draw some pictures in the dirt, his art skills looking about the same as when he was human: craptastic, but decent enough.

Attempting to start with a rabbit, he managed a vaguely lapine shape, with long, floppy ears and a circular body. She stared at it with partial interest. Pointing at it, he started his lesson.

“Rabbit.”

She looked around, before looking back at him quizzically.

“Abbat?”

He decided to explain ‘pictures’ later. He then made a spider... okay, a disfigured egg with eight squiggly things, but screw it.

“Spider.”

“Dy-der!”

She smiled broadly, and Anton prepared to congratulate her when she dug at the ground with a hoof and proclaimed it loudly again.

“Dy-der!”

‘Goddamnit.’ His thoughts echoed loudly in his head as he suppressed a face-claw.

“No, that’s dirt, the thing I drew is a spider.”

Upon hearing the new word, she dug again, making a sizable hole in the ground. Anton took a second, as his inner knowledge of the English language had an aneurysm. This was going to be difficult. Maybe he had to try something else. But what?

He tried grabbing a chunk of dirt, the crumbly material falling apart in his tentative grasp.

Holding objects up wouldn’t work, he’d have to try having the object visible, and not as a picture. He pointed at some of the long stalks of grass nearby.

“Grass.”

“Rass?”

“Yeah, grass.”

He was almost ready to give up, he decided to just label things as they saw them, just so she’d stop making holes every time he said ‘spider’. Maybe if they found a town he might be able to get the objects easier. Or find a person willing to tutor her, he didn’t know how much more example-misunderstandings he could take. If he kept this up, she might end up mistaking a tree for a rock.

“Rass! Rass-rass-rass!”

‘Okay, her going around and poking the grass with her nose and shouting ‘rass!’ is somewhere between adorable and annoying. It’s likely to tip from one to the other rather quickly.’

“So, do you know where a town is?”

He cringed, hoping against hope that she knew what he was talking about.

“Rass!”

She held up a clump of grass held in her mouth to him. He could almost swear he saw her eyes literally sparkle in delight.

“Yes, that is grass. Man, I don’t know how mom did this for so long. Anyway, a town, like with buildings?”

He tried gesturing, in an attempt to mime a large object.

She just dropped the grass in front of him and took his outstretched limbs as a cue to give him another hug. By this point, the sun was high in the sky, so he wasn’t as tired, but it was still a very sudden change from speaking to being hugged. Not that the hug was bad. Misinterpretation wasn’t all bad, he decided.

“Town Uhn-gee!”

“Okay, no. I’m not going to try anymore. Let’s just get moving and hope we find somewhere.”

She nuzzled him again, and he sighed. She was nice and warm, but she was seriously starting to smell, and he doubted he smelled much better.

“And hope they have clean water.”

He pulled away from her and started walking away from the desert, even though the back of his mind was telling him rolling in the sand would be awesome. He wasn’t going to risk Creepette like that again... even though rolling in the sand sounded nice.

After a while, he’d stopped for a break, Creepette having followed him the whole way. He knew his path hadn’t been entirely straight, having to go around the spontaneous path-blocking thorny bushes hiding in the grass every now and then. He’d walked into the first one, and had sat through Creepette pulling several thorns from his face with her teeth. she’d been really careful, and flinched any time he hissed in pain.

‘She’s not stupid, just... horribly uneducated. Unfortunately, I can’t offer much help. If only explaining things was easier. Oh well. I hope we find civilization soon. And that they speak English.’

During his rest, Anton looked around, hoping he’d see something, even with his poor vision.

‘Nnope. Grass, grass, grass, Creepette, grass, grass... wait, is that the forest I saw earlier?’

Perking his ears up subconsciously, Anton stood a little straighter and looked towards the barely-visible dark green line hanging just above the grass. The blobs were approximately the right shape for trees with fuzzy vision and only the very tops of their canopies visible.

“As cold as it is, I’m willing to bet going through the forest will get us to town... hopefully. Now I need some way to stay warm...”

He looked over to Creepette, who had perked her ears up at the word ‘town’. He grinned widely as an idea fermented in his brain, like a fine wine on fast forward. It mature considerably faster than he had, and ran to the forefront of his mind.

“I can’t get through the forest, I’m cold-blooded. But if I had someone warm-blooded nearby to offer body heat... and she is rather... rug-like I guess. Okay! New plan. We go through the forest together.”

He was suddenly struck by an interesting thought; ‘In all my life, the phrase “Hugs make everything better” has yet to be proven wrong... whodathunkit?’

Spreading his clawed arms out, he called to his friend.

“Creepette, town!”

The mare happily threw herself into his embrace, chasing away the chill of the breeze and shaded grass. ‘Now to figure out how to get her onto my back... Then, I’ll have a real coat!’ he thought to himself, chuckling slightly at the absurdity of it.

“Hey Creepette, carry?”

“Keeree?”

‘Damn, now that was close. ‘hole’ was still dead-on, though.’

He tried remembering how he got her onto his back when he tried getting her out of the desert, managing to somewhat emulate it. Lifting the squirming Creepette, he held her aloft on his back, until she got the idea and rearranged herself more comfortably.

“Keeree?”

“Yes, carry.”

She hugged him, pressing her muzzle to the back of his neck as he began stalking into the tall grass, headed towards the forest. She was kinda heavy, heavier-seeming, in fact, than before, but he could carry her.

“Fuud?”

“Where? Oh, uh, right, don’t know that one.”

Her voice was a little plaintive as she asked again, but he still had no idea where to get her more food from. He heard her belly rumble about the same time he stepped out of the grass once more into the clear area before the forest.

‘Hmm, we were in a cleared area in the barricade, maybe she can get some here? I hope so. And I hope I won’t have to smell it.’

He tried his best to put her down gently, resulting in her rolling to the side, grabbing him desperately and dragging them both down. But, a moment later, they were standing again, so no biggie.

“Can you get food here?”

“Fuud?”

“The fungus stuff, can you find it? Where do we make the hole?”

“Hole? Abbat hole?”

“Er, no. The stuff you ate. The fungus.”

He tried making eating motions, since she had got some of the nasty slime last time he tried.

“Fuud? Dy-der fuud. Dy-der fuud!”

She promptly began snuffling near the ground, looking for all the world like a big, green rag-mop pretending to be a bloodhound.

‘Good enough, I guess. Although, the smell might not take too long to find... eww.’

He watched as the mare got close to a hollow-looking log, just about the same circumference as her head. She started to sniff inside right as he got a bad feeling about such an action.

He decided that wasn’t the best idea, lest she find a nest of some animal, perhaps a skunk or whatever this strange place’s equivalent was. ‘Maybe it sprays acid... oh shit.’

“Wait! Stop!”

His warning came too late, however, as the mare stuck her head into the log a moment before he shouted, and his shout startled her into trying to back up. The ‘trying’ is empathized because she couldn’t back up, and she began frantically pulling to try getting herself out of the log.

‘Well, it could have been worse, uh, gotta break the log or something...’

He looked around for something he could use as a tool, like a stone or something. A short ways away, he could see a chunk of rock, broken from a larger boulder with tree roots wrapped about it. The result was an impressively sharp-looking fragment of rock on one side, with a thicker portion perfect for grabbing on the other, even with his vastly reduced manual dexterity.

“Alright, perfect. Maybe my luck is changing.”

As if to spite his words, he heard Creepette cry his ‘name’ with an edge of fear or desperation to it. Looking back, he saw something crawling into the other side of the log. He didn’t get a good enough view of it to guess whether it was dangerous or not, but considering her response to seeing it...

“Hold on!”

He snatched up the stone and began hacking at the log desperately, hoping it was rotted enough to make the task easy. Unfortunately, it was just rotted enough to make the task more difficult, having turned spongy and slick with threads of mold and the tracks of wood-boring beetles.

“Come on, break, break!”

He tried to hit it with the rock harder, while looking for a seam that he could focus on.

Luck seemed to have flip-flopped for him again, and he slammed home a blow on a spot that had cracked some thirty years prior from a bear landing on it. Not that Anton knew that, but the bear had been in the midst of fighting a pegasus viking, so the story’s kinda interesting.

This action caused the top of the log to split lengthwise, allowing the terrified, crying Creepette to fall from the log, backing away in utter horror, her face an almost perfect rendition of the MineCraft creeper’s face, albeit more rounded.

She scrambled back and away, utterly silent as she huddled against the grass some twenty or so feet away, holding her hooves over her eyes.

‘Don’t worry, it’s fine. Obviously if it fits in the log, I’m bigger, and a predator, I should be fine. Right?’

His brain, deciding to be totally up-front with him this time, decided to regale him with a series of facts: Anything that small and running towards something larger either thinks it’s got a good chance of taking them on, is incredibly unintelligent, or has offspring at stake.

Also, Jackie Chan is around two-to-four inches shorter than you were and he could still kick your ass. Oh, and anything running towards predators probably hunts them.

‘Shut the fuck up, brain! Okay, hope for the best...’

Peering into the end of the log, now that the top had cracked open to let the light in, he could see Creepette’s terror.

It hissed at him, as it crouched over the adorable little kittens that ‘mewed’ at him adorably. He could understand at least two things; one, that it was entirely okay to be scared of an angry momma cat if you can’t fight back or get away. Second, Creepette was afraid of cats, just like a creeper. Definitely a connection somewhere in there.

“Okay, I’m not gonna eat your kids, we just wanna find food for Creepette, we’ll just leave you alone...”

He backed away quickly as the momma cat hissed and swung a paw at him, claws at full extension. It was a close thing, but he managed to avoid any scratches.

He went over to Creepette, trying to calm her down.

“Come on, let’s find somewhere else. I really don’t think fighting a cat over a slime mold is worth it.”

Creepette just grabbed onto him for dear life, and he had to choke off a strangled cry for help as he felt her vice-like grip settle entirely accidentally on his neck. She cried into his shoulder. ‘She’s far more emotional than the creepers I know of, that’s for sure.’

“We still need to get you fed. What was the phrase? Spider-food?”

He rolled his eyes at the phrase, noting the total absurdity of the imagined meaning and the actual one.

“D- dy-der fuud...”

She sniffled into his shoulder and eased up on her grip, keeping a wary eye on the log with the kittens as the two demi-ponies walked quickly away from it.

After about half an hour of searching, including her tummy growling loudly every few minutes, they finally located a patch of the mold, and she eagerly slurped it up. That response just so happened to be from relatively near Anton, and he gagged at the stench.

“I will never touch mushrooms for as long as I live...”

Afterwards, Creepette happily pranced over to him, and nuzzled his neck, her breath shockingly stench-free. The motion also sent a slight tingle of some sort through his body, sort of like a static shock, but without being at all painful.

“Alright, now we get through the forest. Carry.”

After some jostling and some maneuvering, he finally got her onto his back once more, the sun beginning to move to the other side of the sky, slowly. The two ponies stepped into the forest, Anton immediately grateful for the pony on his back. The forest wasn’t as cold as he had first thought, but was rather chilly.

As the dark and shadows fell over the two over them, Creepette slowly looked up and around, her muzzle occasionally brushing past his ear in the process. Each time that happened, his ear twitched, and he got a weird sensation in his chest. He had no idea what it meant, just that he didn’t mind the feeling.

‘I’m not terribly well-versed in the nature of reptiles, specifically desert lizards, but I don’t think that’s... lizard-like. Whatever, man how big is this forest?’

Stepping over a large root, he found his eyes rapidly adapting to the low light, resulting in an oddly monochrome, but more crisp view of the forest. Thick roots and very little undergrowth gave the feeling of a forest of great age. Each of the yards-thick trunks were gnarled with age, forming leering faces and sharp, tooth-like growths. Faint, glowing patches of fungus or something filled the pits and holes of the trunks, making the ‘eyes’ and ‘mouths’ of the trees seem to glow menacingly.

He was starting to see how something like what happened in S1E2 would work, but it was still creepy as heck. The slight shifting of the branches and the whispering wind gave what he hoped was the illusion of movement.

“Okay, just gotta keep moving. The less time we spend here, the less likely we are to be attacked by God-knows-what.”

“At-ack?”

Creepette’s nervous voice was a comfort in the gloomy twilit forest, and he shook off the discomfort as best he could. Eventually, the two ponies stopped once more. The forest had only gotten darker in the intervening three-ish hours, and Creepette kept circling him nervously once she was on the ground once more.

“Don’t worry, we should be fine, we just have to keep moving while staying as quiet as possible. Hopefully we’ll hear if something comes up behind us...”

After cringing for a few seconds, expecting to be jumped, he relaxed.

Creepette snuggled close to him, keeping a scared face pointed outwards in the dark forest. She was obviously keeping close for comfort, but it helped him keep thinking clearly. The deep shadows of the forest seemed to shift and move if he wasn’t looking, and it was really disconcerting.

‘Weird, for once, I feel fine walking through a dark forest at night with a creeper following me, weird feeling... not bad though. At least I can kinda see in the dark.’

Looking around, he saw that one of the tree’s ‘faces’ seemed to be staring directly at him and Creepette, and the apparent attention was giving him a really bad feeling, likely linked to it looking vaguely like it was smiling maliciously. The rest had just looked like they were snarling...

Shuddering, he hoped his brain’s first guess was very wrong. It was scary, and just messed up. Who ever heard of an Ent with rabies anyway?

He looked away, checking to see how Creepette was doing. Her slight shaking was easily attributed to the frightening atmosphere, combined with the chill pre-night air. He began to re-think his willingness to walk through this dark forest, creeper in tow or not. He almost jumped straight up as he looked back, and thought to himself, ‘Holy shit, I thought that tree was farther away than that.’

The grinning tree indeed looked significantly closer, and he subconsciously pressed closer to Creepette.

He tried to make himself smaller, but also was trying to get a better look at the tree, his damned curiosity prioritizing the dumber idea of the two.

The tree didn’t move, and the roots were securely set into the soil, the thick sections of gnarled wood forming a cage-like embrace for a chunk of stone. The gentle, blue glow in the ‘eyes’ and ‘mouth’ left its expression clearly outlined as it smirked at him.

‘It’s just a tree, a really weird tree, just take a few moments to rest, and we keep moving... or sleep. No, bad brain, not the place, jeez this is scary, just calm the heck down.’

He shook his head hard to clear the irrational fear from his mind. Looking back up at the tree, he prepared to laugh at it, dispelling the terror of the encounter, just as Pinkie Pie would want.

The laugh caught in his throat as a choke when he saw that the tree was actually closer. There was no mistaking it this time. Several of the other trees with face had also turned towards him and Creepette, and an involuntary whimper rose to replace his laugh. Realizing he hadn’t blinked in more than a minute, he blinked just from ingrained instinct, in spite of not feeling the need for it.

The trees were closer.

‘Shitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitohshitoh!’

He’d seen Doctor Who. Even if they didn’t teleport him and Creepette into the past, they might simply be carnivores, and he didn’t want them near him. Especially after he saw that they had begun to brandish hand-like branches tipped with mossy claws.

His heart hammering in his chest suddenly, he planned to run as fast as he could, but he didn’t know if Creepette could keep up in the dark. He tried to think of something, cursing his brain once more, in an attempt to get it to work with him. A good idea had to come to him soon, or he’d be fertilizer.

A thought occurred to him and he felt his muscles seize up in fear. He’d just realized he and Creepette were snuggled up in the roots of a large tree. Glancing away from the hoard of evil trees, he peered at the tree they’d taken refuge under.

It had a face, too, and it looked like it was sleeping.

“Carry. Creepette, carry.”

His only solid plan that made sense, was to get Crepette on his back, and she get away as fast as possible. Feeling her latch onto his back with totally unbridled fear confirmed that the reason she’d been surveying the forest behind them was that she’d seen more.

Staggering to his feet/hooves, he looked up to see that the evil trees weren’t too far away now. Keeping an eye on them as best he could, he began to run. Gallop, more like, hurdling low branches and tall roots, ducking a couple of outstretched limbs in his way.

Seeing a patch of light ahead, he accelerated, feeling Creepette jostle on his back as he ran. He slid into the patch of silver moonlight, skidding to a stop as he realized he was in a U-shaped depression in the ground. He turned to escape it, but saw the leering faces of the trees and backed up. He could hear his heartbeat in his ears, a thundering sound that was only matched by the panic in his mind, racing along and pushing back the sensations of pain from the harsh run and excessive heart rate.

He felt the mare on his grab him harder and bury her muzzle into the back of his neck, tears of fright soaking into his coat.

He had to do something, his brain giving the ever-present obvious hints like ‘use the environment to your advantage’ but still being a dick and not offering any ideas how to do so. He had to make his brain work, but he didn’t know how. Frantically, he looked around for anything.

His eyes snapped back up to the encroaching tree-monsters as he remembered they moved if he wasn’t watching them. Unfortunately, the leader of the group, the blue-eyed one, was right in front of him, looming menacingly at the entrance of the hollow. He could feel Creepette look up, and heard her sniffling gasp of horror. As she pressed her face to the back of his head, he could hear her whimper, followed by a soft hiss.

Wait, a hiss?!

A pulsing white light built up behind him and he felt the world tear apart around him. A sensation like being slugged in the stomach by a freight train went through him, and he caught a glimpse of a whirling, seizure-inducing tunnel of lights and rainbows, the colors muddied and mixed as they swirled past in a nauseating display.

Then, the barest instant later, they were standing on a stone floor, rough and unfinished, like the inside of a cavern. And considering there wasn’t any light beyond Creepette’s softly glowing eyes.

Then, those winked out as well, and a dull thud marked where she fell.

Author's Note

Alright, I'd just like to say that any commentary of a constructive nature is useful, and I'd love to hear what you have to say.

Unless it's useless and mean, then I don't want to hear it.
And by useless, I mean tells me nothing.

You can be mean if it's part of telling me where you think I'm going wrong in my story, that's alright.