Intro: A new world. Gosh!

I was sure that the joy of being a medical professional would've died down by now. But no, instead the bubbly feeling of accomplishment just sort of congealed into a sort of solid state. I had been a specialist in Magnetic Resonance scanning for a little over two years now, so many years of schooling and it was finally paying off, monetarily and otherwise. I was sitting in the basement where our little department was located, and by "department" I mean myself and Frank. Yeah, it wasn't a grand hustle and bustle-hospital like where I had been in my prior position, but it was a nice place to work at.

This department had just recently opened and the small hospital where I worked needed a specialist to get the project up and running. And so as it's always done one of the big hospitals a few counties over were contacted, the veterans there were inquired about if there were any young professionals who knew their stuff and had the patience and temperament to run a small, new department by themselves and see if anyone was interested.

I feel that I can't help but brag but I was the first choice. I am good enough to show doctors and nurses the ropes with one of the latest models of scanners. Also getting a position in a hospital like this means I didn't get in the way in emergencies. I mean, sometimes you see youtube-videos of people like me but who're athletic adventurers and skaters and stuff, I'm not quite like that but I'm pretty well adjusted. Still, not being at your fullest capacity isn't good when solving emergency issues where people's health are at stake.

Not your fullest capacity you ask? What does that mean? Well like I said, I consider myself well-adjusted. But despite what some manufactured "inspirational videos" I've seen says, disabled still means disabled. And missing one arm, one leg and one eye makes you disabled.

So anyway, I was swiveling slightly in my chair while double checking the reading from our latest scan, and putting on the finishing touches on my report when Sam poked her head in through the door.

"You ready for the next patient?" Sam asked in the usual chipper way.

"Just about, gimme a few minutes, I'm just finishing up here," I answered wihout looking up.

"Alright, it's a hip scan, and it's an elderly man but he doesn't use crutches or anything so you shouldn't have any problem since there are no heavy lifting and-"

"Sam!" I interrupted before the verbal trickle became a flood "Yes you can leave early today."

"Thanks, Gabe! Though I was sort expecting you'd let me since you pretty much run this place," Sam said with a smile and vanished like hygiene in a public toilet.

-

And now it was time to go over protocol with the patient. With me it's almost always two protocols, my own personal one followed by the official one. The first one still makes me feel a strange mix of amusement and slight exasperation. I liked imagining the patients' reaction like a data output-log. Display subject's thought process:  I'm glad no one's here to see me in this gown-thing- Oh, here comes the doctor (/* misnomer; I don't actually have that title*/) that's gonna scan me- It's a she!- [if compatible]: She's pretty- [anomaly detected]: Does she have a limp?- Anomaly confirmed- execute standard pleasantry procedures- Extend right arm, smile appropriately and scan features of newly arrived doctor- [Anomaly detected]- Target's upper right extremity not found- Incompatible with gesture of greeting- Abort pleasantry procedures- Pleasantry procedures aborted- Pleasantry procedures required- Scan for pleasantry procedures... processing, processing, processing- Pleasantry procedure has encountered an unexpected run-time error- emergency restart initiated- Revert to basic social protocols- scanning for reference.

Aaand here we go.

"Uh..." (Called it) the man said as he awkwardly pulled back his right hand. Now, I just extend my left hand before he starts scratching the back of his head with his. Wait. Oh, too late.

"Oh!" He exclaimed as he realized that he just sabotaged my attempt at salvaging the social situation by busying himself with the hand he could have used to shake mine instead of his right. "I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about it," I said with a slight smile as he finally caught on and after a little impromptu brain-gymnastics we finally got to the point of getting a professional greeting. "I see you're wearing the standard lovely sky-blue gown." He looked a bit awkward at this but I think he understood that I was making light of the situation to get some laid-back vibes in the room after what seemed to be for him a social fiasco just second earlier. "So, Mr Berg, do you know what this scan entails?"

"Well, I lie down in a tube for a while and you scan me?"

"True, but we scan you with magnetic fields. Really strong ones," I said as I checked out his ring-finger where the outlines of marriage were clearly visible. "And I see you've removed your wedding band, that's good. Some people, especially older men, come in here and don't realize that they've been unable to remove their rings for decades. Which is unfortunate, because if you wear metal, you don't get a scan."

He seemed to be a bit interested in this "Dr. Mercer told me to do that. Is that really that strict?" He asked.

"Yup, I remember the last place I worked, someone wheeled an office chair too close the machine and..." I gave an abridged version of what happened, three fractured fingers, shutting down the whole machine, venting the cooling gas, ordering new gas and calling for specialists from the manufacturer it to come by to inspect it, then start it up again. He paled a bit when I laid down the cost of restarting the machine alone. "In short, no metal near this machine," I concluded.

He seemed to think a bit about this "Uh. You aaah..."

Oh, one of those questions. "Ask away," I said.

It didn't seem to be quite enough and instead he just gestured slightly with his head towards my right leg.

"Mmhm, a prosthesis, but it's all carbon-fiber and titanium, not magnetic at all," I said.

"Oh," He seemed a bit taken aback by how frank I was when talking about my disabilities. If he was sticking around I would've been worried that he was never gonna relax, but he wasn't sticking around, so no matter.

"So, Mr Berg. Tell me a bit about yourself while I press buttons," I said as I sat down and started calibrating the machine for a hip-scan of a sixty-something male with average build.

"Like what?" He asked, a bit confused.

"Like where you've worked, how long your hip has been aching, when you've noticed, what you've been doing at work when you noticed and so on."

"Well I..." He had apparently been working in a small metal workshop for most of his adult life, I inwardly rolled my eye, you didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that that meant that he worked on a daily basis with archaic tools with not nearly enough safety-features on them and if a work-safety committee set foot in that place they'd probably pull the fire-alarm in order to get people out of there as fast as possible, assuming there was a fire-alarm.

He kept talking disjointedly about his job while we walked into the chamber with the scanner, at my encouragement because his aching hip were almost certainly related to his job. But a few red flags popped up in my head as he went on. And just as he was about to step over the threshold into the magnetic field I grabbed his shoulder with my left hand, and he was lucky I could since my right one stayed behind at the crash-site all those years ago to keep my arm and leg company, a metaphor naturally. I think. "Hold on a second, Mr Berg, you've done a lot of spot-welding, right?"

He gave this some thought "Well, not really more or less than the other boys down at work."

"But compared to the average person on the street you likely have, yes?" I asked and he nodded.

Now I was getting relieved I caught that "And used those high-speed metal saws, right?"

"Yeeees?" He asked with a raised eyebrow

"Have you used proper safety gear, especially safety goggles every single time you've done so? Be honest now for your own sake." I knew the answer before I asked.

"Well, no." He seemed to pick up that this was somehow serious.

"I'm sorry, Mr Berg but I'm afraid I'm gonna have to cancel this scan."

"Wh- why!?" He asked, sounding alarmed.

After I laid down the possible consequences of him getting close to that machine he seemed to accept not getting a scan today. The risk of having forty years of accumulated dust sized steel flakes being forcefully ripped out of your eye-sockets just didn't seem worth it.

"And you should be careful with your eyes, take it from me," I said, a bit mischievously, and lightly tapped my glass eye with my fingernail. He paled a bit again, I really should stop doing that.

"Alright, head up and knock on Frank's- uh, Dr Mercer's door and tell him what I told you. He'll probably schedule another examination and determine the next step after that. But I'm guessing you're either gonna get a Computer Tomography scan or a scan in lighter model."

-

Elsewhere:

Princess Twilight Sparkle had a lot on her plate, and it made her almost giddy. Studying the experiments of one of Equestria's greatest magical minds did that for her.

"Apparently this orb is for scrying for information from other worlds, somewhat like that mirror that he and Pri-*ahem* Celestia used for going on adventures together a thousand years ago," She said

"Careful now, Twilight, if I recall that mirror led to almost destroying not one but two Equestrias," Warned Spike. That a juvenile dragon sometimes functioned as the voice of reason for an incredibly powerful unicorn (alicorn, these days, she still forgot that sometimes) was sometimes a bit worrying for those familiar with the de facto leader of the Elements of Harmony.

"It wouldn't have been destroyed per se, but alright I see your point. Still, some careful studying won't harm anypony, Starswirl the Bearded wouldn't have made it otherwise."

Spike was a bit skeptical about this, but he knew what scrying meant. If Twilight instead found the tugging orb or the prodding orb he would start worrying for real, banish the thought about the bunsen burner orb.

"And it magically logs your discoveries! This is amazing!" Gushed the lavender incarnation of regality.

"Alright I'm gonna give it a spin," Twilight contnued. "I don't even know where to start I'm just gonna pick one that Starswirl has already studied. Hmm, how about this one? Bipedal population, clearly intelligent but with unstable feudal and/or tribal societies. Harsh lives. Sea-based trade and farming in unfavourable conditions. Seemingly no magical power. Fraught with disease and conflict. Do not visit unprepared, preferably do not visit at all," Twilight mumbled to herself as she read the scrying orb's log about what it had found about the world and its dominant inhabitants. "Oh, what poor creatures! I wonder if they've improved their situation in the time it's been since last the orb scried their world?"

It seemed that they had, but far beyond the point that Twilight was expecting. Compared to the lacking wooden houses, crude stone castles and muddy roads that Twilight had seen in the logs of the previous scrying this world was magnificent. That a world with no magic could build such cities (and keep them clean) was nothing short of amazing. Thousands of the indigenous population thundered down vast stretches of paved roads in self-propelled chariots and by the coast she could see majestic ships that were apparently an everyday sight for no one seemed to pay them any mind. "Fraught with disease" came to Twilight's mind and she tried steering the orb's magic to locate a healer of some sort. What she saw astounded her even further. Like ponies, the inhabitants of this world had developed entire facilities to treat their sick. It made her a little envious, seeing how far these creatures had come in just a single millennia.

"Astonishing!" The royal pony said in reverence.

"Yeah," Her assistant said quietly across the small table, he too seeing and experiencing what Twilight did.

Suddenly they felt a disruption of a sort, not like a harsh wave, but rather an undercurrent that they had not been aware of before then.

"Twilight?" Spike asked, a bit worried.

"I feel it too, don't worry Spike, this device can't harm us, I've septiple-checked that." This calmed down the dragon considerably. "Still, that felt a lot like magical power, and according to both mine and Starswirl's observation, this world doesn't have any magic in it."

Spike had trouble wrapping his head around that. Magic just was, a world without magic was like a world without gravity, or warmth.

"I'm gonna take a closer look, you can look away any time you want Spike," Twilight said as the scried closer to the strange disturbance. She saw a images of a large device, a clean white device with some sort of pony-hole on the side, sitting in a bare room, it was humming.

Suddenly she felt a great tug at her magical power, and a wave of energy shot out from her horn through the invisible walls separating the worlds. Twilight was fairly certain that if it wasn't for the orb's safety measures, she would have involuntarily teleported somewhere, possibly between worlds this time. As she recovered from the slight shock a moment later, she could feel the wave surfing towards the source of the disturbance, the great device, where one of the indigenous was apparently situated at that moment. Many years of magical studying and experimentation made her jump to a conclusion that she prayed to Faust would be wrong.

It wasn't. Twilight's ears dropped.

"Uh oh!"

-

Another day, another handful of patients, I thought as I was preparing to close down shop at the MR-section. Shut down computers, turn of lights, have a look at the machine that was the heart and soul of my little section to make sure that no one left stains that might stick, there aren't any. Good

The humming from the machine suddenly intensified, like someone turned all the knobs of an amplifier to the highest settings. I looked up. "Wha-" was the only sound I could make before I heard a sucking sound and I had the strange sensation of being pulled into the opening of the machine before everything went black, all within the span of about half a second.

...

I heard birds singing, which was nice but also puzzling. Head resting against something soft and uneven, along with the rest of my body, I'm lying down it seems. I couldn't see anything however, most likely cause my eye was closed. I took steps to rectify that and immediately aborted my plan when my eye was blasted with painfully bright light. I noticed something strange about that last action however; it worked really well. Having the color and complexion that I do means that I have to scrunch up my entire face if I want block out bright light, but this time simply bringing down my eyelids did the trick. And I know that the light hadn't disappeared because I could still feel it on my face.

Speaking of which, it felt a lot like sunlight. That, coupled with the birdsong make me realize that I was most likely outdoors.

Let's see, I was preparing to go home for the day, and then... Uuh, then nothing. I'm up to speed as far as I can tell. Preparing to go home for the day, then lying outdoors with the sun in my face. I am now confused to the extreme but let's slow down and check a few important things first. I sort of wriggled my entire body and realized that I felt really numb. That's not very reassuring but it's better than lances of pain I guess. Now time for detailed inspections, eye-socket first. Feel around the general right eye-area to make sure that I've either got my glass eye inserted, or that my eyelid is at least closed.

My arm didn't feel like lead, because that would be stupid, but it did feel heavy and I realized that I am alarmingly exhausted. That's not very reassuring either but hopefully that's the reason for the numbness. The first attempt at lifting my arm was a fruitless endeavor but I'm not giving up that easily, the only thing that can defeat me right now is a nap. So, a few deep breaths, and heave!

*bop!*

OW! Is my hand in a cast? No wonder it felt so heavy. I just clubbed myself in the forehead. I did manage to land it sort of right though so time to start feeling around with the back of my wrist. Results: Eyelid = closed, arm = strangely shaped and textured. Is it swollen?

What conclusions can I reach if I combine all my current knowledge about my situation? Ambient sound, brightness, position, exhaustion, numbness, disorientation and state of hand could all suggest that maybe I am not outdoors but in a hospital room with open windows, maybe partially covered in bandages. Please don't tell me I've been in another accident. Or at the very least let me keep all my limbs this time. I sighed and started opening my eye. Time to face the music, whatever that's supposed to mean.

Blinding light, eyes slowly adjusting, vision returning... green meadows? A muzzle? Blue fur!? A *hoof!? Staying awake just doesn't seem worth it at this point. Hey, something's coming. Huh, look at that. A big ugly dog that's throwing a calico bag over me.* *sigh* I don't even care anymore. Hark! My old friend/arch-nemesis is here. Nap-time! You have me at a disadvantage this time, oh worthy adversary, I submit myself to you with my head held high.

-

"Ok, girls, I'm having some success at locating our target. It seems to have landed almost directly to the east of Ponyville. Hopefully along the borders of the Everfree and not directly inside it." Princess Twilight was pacing back and forth through the Golden Oaks library with a dozen knick-knacks floating around her.

"As I said before, the locator-matrixes cannot pin-point the target reliably so close to the Everfree woods, not to mention that since the target originates from another world it-"

"WHOA WHOA! Hold on just a minute!" Rainbow Dash interrupted "You said you accidentally teleported somepony to the edge of the Everfree Forest-"

"I said I HOPE I teleported it to the edge of the forest, as opposed to into the forest."

"Whatever, you never said anything about somepony from another world!"

"Also," Pinkie Pie chimed in "why are you calling this pony an 'it'?"

"Because I don't think it even is a pony!" Twilight frustratedly exclaimed. "I'm not even sure if it's a he or a she! And yes, something was teleported here from another world. The world I was talking about me studying, remember? I told you like ten minutes ago!"

The other five ponies looked at each other before the alabaster unicorn took a step forward.

"Twilight dear, we've barely been able to keep up with what you've been saying. And we haven't even been here for two minutes, I think you might want to calm down a bit before we try and solve this problem."

Twilight stopped mid-step and looked around at what she was doing. She was trying to mount a rescue-operation of an unknown target in an unknown location, and in her haste she apparently readied such useful things as a feather duster and a doorstop. Her friends had indeed not been here for ten minutes, she had only managed to squeeze ten minutes worth of explanation into one and a half minute. She let out a deep sigh and hung her head. "I'm sorry everypony, it's just... I'm really worried. I might have done something terrible."

Rarity put a hoof on her friend's wither. "Then let's try and solve it properly. You were saying something about studying another world when the device you used did something."

Twilight took a moment to collect herself. "Yes, I was using an old scrying device of Starswirl the Bearded to study another world when I came across a strange phenomenon. It seemed to react to the magic that I was pouring into the device and by some freak coincidence it manifested as a teleportation spell. But the device seemed to have been designed with safety for the user in mind so when the teleporting spell went off it was reversed. So instead of me being teleported to the other world the other world was teleported here, or it would have if the power the scrying orb was letting through had allowed it, instead it was a small chunk that came here, and I'm pretty sure it was one of the inhabitants."

"So you accidentally dumped some mystery creature from another world into the middle of the wilderness?" Said Rainbow Dash. Applejack and Rarity glowered at the blue pegasus, Fluttershy uttered an almost silent "Oh my!" while Twilight hung her head again and Pinkie Pie looked excited.

"There ain't no need to rub it in, Dash!" Snapped Applejack.

"No, she's right" Twilight said dejectedly. "I just hope we can solve this."

"Alright! What needs doing?" Rainbow Dash, always the creature of action, said.

"Well, we need to conduct a thorough search of this area here," Twilight said while pointing at a spot on a map of Ponyville and it's surrounding areas.

"Oh! Oh! Like hide and seek?" Pinkie Pie exclaimed excitedly.

Her friend's antics was making Twilight feel a bit better, Pinkie had a knack for knowing how to solve strange problems, no matter how air-headed she seemed.

"Yes, only we don't exactly know what we're looking for and hopefully nopony is actually hiding. Alright, first let's go see Zecora, she might've seen something and we can ask her to keep a lookout for Equestria's new visitor." Twilight said.

"Oh! Good idea!" Pinkie Pie said as the group headed out of the library. "She's super duper good at hide and seek! Once, when I pretended I was mosquito, I couldn't find her even when she was standing right in front of me and trying to get my attention!"

-

I was lying in a rucksack of some sort. The strangest thing in my mind about that is not the situation in itself, believe it or not, it was how fast I made peace with the thought of it all. Actually no, when I think about it was probably just that my that brain had figured that the middleman between itself and the senses it used to perceive the world around me had taken sick-leave for an extended period of time and no replacement had been found.

So I had a strangely calm demeanor, or perhaps a general lack of demeanor, when I was lifted out of the bag and held aloft by my cheeks by two enormous filthy paws. Interestingly this didn't hurt. Maybe the numbness is my friend?

"Look! We found pony!" I heard a voice immediately behind me say. Should I open my eye? Let's wait.

"Pony with horn can find gems!" The voice said again and I realized that it sounded like Andy Serkis! Alright eye, take a look around and tell me what you see.

"That is small and broken pony," A deep and gruff voice said as I opened my eye and saw that the most recent speaker had the ugliest face I have ever seen. Or it could just be a trick of the absence of light, because it seemed like I was in a dark cave.

"Small and broken pony cannot escape," Andy Serkis said excitedly. "Must help us find precious gems." Precious! Oh Mr Serkis you know how to please your fans! What's all this about a pony though?

The ugly face got closer and I realized that it belonged to a dog. Oh, that's right, I saw a big dog earlier I think, and I'm being held by paws. There seems to be some sort of canine-motif going on around here. Andy Serkis obviously isn't within my line of sight and I can't move my head right now. Alright eyeball you can take a break.

There was a thud behind me and I had the alarming sensation of falling, predictably followed by the unpleasant sensation of landing. Ouch. A bit at least.

"We do not want ponies here!" The gruff voice shouted. "Cause trouble! Big ponies come look!"

I opened my eye again and took another look. I was in large cave surrounded by dogs of alarming size towering over me, most of them wearing armor and holding spears. There was a few other things decorating the cave as well, some torches, a throne of some sort and what looked like a minecart. I felt my brain catching up with what I was seeing and some part of me predicted that it wouldn't be pretty if it did. Nap-time, my love. Hold me in your warm embrace and take me far, far away.