Tim sighed as he glanced around his lab tiredly, absently rubbing at his newfound stubble while giving his newest runic circle a quick once over for mistakes. Teleportation arrays were known for being… ‘fickle’ if not downright capricious if you weren’t careful… well, moreso than regular runic arrays.
Still, this one checked out, all the usual errors and horrors were properly accounted for. He should arrive with all his parts, in the correct orientations, and he shouldn’t turn into crystallized Humanus at any stage of the process.
Tim attuned the runes, and they lit up, connecting to someplace elsewhere. The scrying orb showed that the receiving array was also lit up, so that was good. Carefully, he released a chicken onto the array as he moved to a solid steel bunker to ensure he got everything right, before activating the sigils.
The runes glowed and the chicken disappeared in a flash of pale white light. The scrying orb showed that indeed, the chicken had arrived safe and sound, and it hadn’t suffered anything too obvious or explosive.
Tim happily walked over to his latest project and hopped on, activating the sigil and feeling the now familiar effects of the teleportation.
Unfortunately, he forgot one thing: the chicken on the end. The chicken who, after it had calmed down, had begun to scratch and peck at its surroundings, looking for bugs and seeds to eat.
Naturally, it pecked at the wooden sigil beneath it, and managed to break one of the delicate runic arrays whilst Tim was mid-teleport. Funnily enough, the chicken managed to save itself from a telefragging. Not so funnily, it meant that the teleportation array was destabilised with a now-incorrectly-dialled receiver.
Tim had all of 2 seconds to realize what what had happened and managed to get out “Oh, son of a bi-“ before the spell activated, wrenching his gut and rattling his brain as the wild spell flung him between dimensions with no mercy or restraint, his world going black.
Teleportation can be envisioned as skipping a stone off water. You want to ‘hit’ the dimensional barriers with sufficient velocity that you deflect off, and then use a magical conduit established along a fixed path to ensure that you ‘land’ where you want, like abseiling along a zipline or being squeezed through a long rubber hose.
The conduit had just had one of its ‘anchors’ break, and the far end had naturally flung out wildly. This sent Tim on a wild trajectory where he didn’t so much ‘skip’ off dimensional barriers as he splashed down and ‘sank’.
Coincidentally, this shattered the dimensional barriers, dooming Tim’s original world to endless entropy and destruction until it ceased to be entirely.
But that’s a story for another time.
Olive Branch smiled to herself as she watered her garden, carefully holding her water can in her teeth and watching to make sure she didn’t drown her newest flowers.
Olive was a simple earth pony working as a nurse to treat wounded, who were always steadily trickling in when the Pegasi or Unicorns picked a fight with the Earth Ponies, and vice versa.
She still held out hope that her husband would return, but he hadn’t shown up in any of the hospitals for two weeks already. While she was trying her hardest to hold out hope, it was getting harder by the day. Olive gazed out across the lake by her cottage, looking for any sign of her husband, but like every other day, she didn’t find him.
A bright flash over the tall mountain near her did, however, catch her attention. A bright light that was growing larger and larger and brighter and brighter, and a dull roar made itself known. Then, with a colossal impact, the light struck the mountain close to the peak, causing avalanches and shattering the singular peak of the mountain into two.
Olive watched as the light grew much dimmer, deflecting off the mountain before arcing over and landing right in the middle of her lake, causing a big wave which washed up the shores and drowned her carefully managed garden before she could do anything.
Olive had just gotten to mourning her poor flowers when she noticed a figure floating face-down on the shores of the lake. It was almost certainly not a pony, and was wearing a dark purple robe with a large hood. Small bubbles still appeared around the hood, which gave Olive some hope the figure was alive.
Pony or no, she was a Nurse pony, and it was her duty to heal the sick and injured, a duty she’d taken up because she was tired of seeing people getting hurt in the endless bickering between the pony tribes.
Olive Branch charged out into the water, grabbing the figure by the hood and dragged them to the shore. The figure was unresponsive, so Olive rolled them over onto their back and positioned their head to the side before pushing hard on his chest, hopefully helping drive the water out of their lungs.
Whatever this creature was, there was a lot of water in their massive chest, but Olive Branch continued on, working his chest like a bellows trying to get air in there. Her efforts paid off as the creature began to cough and threw her off of itself as it rolled onto its legs to cough up what was left.
It wasn’t pretty, but Olive Branch congratulated herself for another life saved.
“Are you okay?”
“I-” the creature began, but stopped to have a coughing fit and cough up more water. After several seconds of panting and gasping, it continued “I’m… not okay.”
“What happened?”
“In order? My tele- teleportation- circle just fizzled- halfway through…”
The creature clutched a… thing at the end of its front legs against his chest, hunched over in apparent pain.
“And… I just… just… the water… was there a mountain? It’s all a blur...”
“Well, sounds like a unicorn problem… I don’t know much about magic, I’m just an Earth Pony… sounds serious though. Way I heard it, Teleportin’s risky business.”
“Yeah… have to… rebound off dimensional barriers… easy to do, but easy to mess up… and accuracy is awful if your apparatus isn’t up to scratch,” the creature said, sounding like he’d done it many times before.
“So you destroy mountains regularly?”
“I what?!”
Olive Branch pointed at the destroyed peak. “You made quite the impression during your little crash landing.”
As if to emphasize her point, a large, red hot meteor landed in Olive Branch’s garden and obliterated what was left of it after the miniature flood.
“My garden!” Olive whimpered, staring in horror at the boulder, her ears holding back and tears welling up in her eyes..
She tensed as she felt the strange claw-less forelimb that so resembled a gryphon or dragon’s clawed foreleg touch her shoulders, before slowly moving in an attempt- Olive realised- to comfort her.
All three tribes of ponies were terrified of the meteor that had just destroyed half a mountain. The Earth ponies thought it was an attack from the Unicorns and Pegasi working together; The Pegasi thought the sky was falling; and the Unicorns had no idea what happened
All three sent parties to investigate. The Earth ponies were the first to arrive, mostly due to sheer proximity to the incident. Locals pointed them towards the mountain, and after several days of dangerous climbing, made more or less so as the ponies employed their various talents, all three found themselves staring through the great hole the meteor had made, one after the other.
One after the other, they found themselves heading for the lake, having heard from the locals that the meteor had kept going, and seeing it as a likely landing spot. Circling the bank led them, one by one, to a small, unassuming little cottage with a destroyed garden.
They found a strange, unidentified creature of massive proportions wearing a purple robe carrying a large staff with a glowing green orb on the end doing something that was clearly magical in nature to the earth pony’s garden.
Figuring him for a Unicorn spy or worse, the earth ponies charged up to arrest the magical creature.
“Halt, Criminal scum!”
The Figure tilted its head, but simply kept washing its magic over the slowly recovering garden. “In just a moment. Olive Branch has asked me to help with her garden after the recent disaster.”
“You will cease your magic at once and come with us- this ‘Olive Branch’ too.”
“Couldn’t if I wanted to… the flowers are only just spreading their roots, to just cut them off would kill them.” the creature replied.
The lead pony stormed forward to buck at him, and make the creature comply. The creature responded by raising the other end of its staff to reveal a blue orb that created a shimmering forcefield.
“I can however, hear your clunky footfalls, and cast a little magic shield to keep you from doing what you were about to do.” The figure said, his robes hood hiding his features in unnatural looking shadows.
The creature stood up, the Ponies backing up slightly when they saw what they were dealing with.
It was tall, incredibly so, but perhaps not as much as a minotaur. It was also far less muscular than a minotaur, and minotaurs had no talent for magic anyways. It was dressed in an intimidating dark purple robe that was modified to be easier to move in, if the ‘skirts’ open front and purple pants were any indication. For defense, the cloth robes were covered in patches of layered plates made of a similar dark purple metal on both the shoulders and thighs, and no doubt hidden elsewhere within the robe.
The hood, which was up, seemed to gather shadows such that the ponies couldn’t see more than an inch or so into the hood, shrouding the rest of the figure in mystery beyond the fact they walked on only two legs and supposedly used their front limbs for grasping.
“What are you?” one of the ponies asked, his voice wavering slightly.
The creature tiled its head, almost looking amused. “I am a Human.”
“Human?”
“Yes.”
“What’s a human?”
The figure tilted its head again, murmuring to itself. “Small talking horses and no humans… fascinating…”
Several pops drew the attention of everyone as a small squad of unicorns teleported in, offensive and defensive spells already charging in their horns. “Stop!”
The human almost dropped his staff at the sight.
The original ponies eyes flared in anger as they faced off with the new arrivals.
“What do you think You’re doing here?!”
“Trying to keep you from destroying whatever it is that fell from the sky, what else?”
“This is Earth Pony Territory, affects only Earth Ponies, and you lot can butt out.”
The horned pony’s reply was cut off by winged ponies suddenly landing nearby.
“We have no idea what going on but we want in!”
All sides rapidly descended into bickering as Tim knelt in the dirt next to Olive Branch, trying to comfort her.
“It’s always like this” Olive whispered sadly. “All the bickering and anger… it never stops, and ponies get hurt every day because of it… my husband never came back one day… I heard there was a big fight...”
Tim hugged the pony close as she sobbed gently.
“Well, here’s not safe any more. We’ll need to find somewhere else.”
Tim grabbed his staff and replaced the foci, before waving it at the house. A faint glimmer formed several lines that formed a barely visible box. In moments, the house had shrunk down, and was subsequently picked up and placed in a jar at Tim’s hip.
“It’ll be safe in there.” Tim said, lightly patting the small jar.
“What? What are you doing?”
“Well, I rather prefer to not be here when they decide to throw more than insults… you?” Tim said, holding the jar up for Olive to see.
Olive could see her house was indeed in the jar. The crooked window her husband had nearly broken his hoof trying to build, the old patio with her favourite chair on it, even that old painting she had made that hung in her living room.
“How?”
Tim put the jar back on his belt absentmindedly, his other hand gripping his staff tightly. “Every so often I’d need to pick up my cabin and relocate, and packing up a cauldron full of raw vis is… difficult… at least, not without disaster following, so I like to keep everything where it is and move the location it’s in around instead of dismantling everything… on the upside, I can move locations at the drop of a hat.”
Tim offered Olive a hand. “Shall we?”
Olive glanced at the now heated argument, he ears folding back sadly.
“O-okay.”
Tim took Olive’s hoof, before grabbing her and tucking her under his arm. Tim seeming kicked off the ground, causing them the take off before flying away into the sky. Olive barely suppressed her scream as she felt the ground lift away from under their feet.
Olive looked up, and saw that large ghostly wings made of magic were working to propel them through the air at breakneck pace, the wind was pushing back Tim’s hood slightly. Olive was able to barely make out the outline of his curiously flat face, and could even see the tip of what she guessed was a prominent nose for the pair of nostrils, and a rounded chin.
His small, barely visible smile when he noticed her looking did wonders to calm her nerves.
The wind was too much for them to hear each other as they flew south, far away from the bickering ponies. They flew farther than Olive was aware any pony had ever explored, until the ocean came into view. They landed after several minutes of flying with Tim panting and exhausted at the edge of a small copse of trees.
Tim set Olive down as his wings disappeared.
“What was that?” Olive asked, her voice shaky as she calmed down from her fright.
“It’s a useful trinket I found a long time ago,” Tim said, holding up his hand for Olive to see the golden band with two delicate-looking and detailed little wings on it. “It lets you fly, but it taxes the body and makes you-”
Tim’s stomach decided to make itself known by gurgling loudly.
“-hungry” Tim finished, chuckling to himself.
From within his robes, Tim fished out an axe made of a strange purple metal and got to work finding a tree. Tim swung the axe several times and Olive watched as the axe didn’t seem to make a dent in the tree, before suddenly a large chunk just disappeared from the bottom. Against all logic, the tee remained suspended despite the fact that there was nothing to support it.
Tim didn’t seem fazed by this development, and just kept chopping at the next section until that disappeared, and then the next, until Tim had completely removed the trunk from the tree. Even worse for Olive’s rapidly fraying nerves, leaving the leaves and smaller branches stayed suspended in the air, completely ignoring gravity.
He noticed Olives expression as she stared at the sight.
“Oh, don’t worry. The leaves will decay in a minute. I know some people hate it when you leave the tops of trees floating around.”
Tim dug a pit in the small open area and produced a section of tree, bark and all, seemingly from nowhere, and then lining up several logs on their side, using another tool to shave off a layer to give them a flat surface to sit on.
As Tim produced a large rock and a length of metal, Olive carefully approached the log and poked it with ehr hoof. It stayed put like it was supposed to until she began to lean into it, which shifted it slightly, but shifted the entire log, like it was all one piece, despite the fact that Olive had just seen Tim place it down in pieces.
Tim had- in defiance of all known laws of firestarting, managed to set an entire 1 meter cubed log on fire without using tinder or kindling- walked to the other side of the bench, looking up at the leaves which were beginning to disappear.
Looking at Olive, he saw her sanity slipping, and decided to try and lighten the mood.
“You look unwell…” Tim said, holding out a hand with the palm upwards under the floating leaves.
The leaves finally decayed, and despite the fact he’d just cut down a tall birch tree, an apple fell into it. Tim offered it to Olive with a upbeat tone. “Could you use an apple?”
Olive shakily reached out and took the apple from Tim, frightened of the being before her that could casually defy logic and reason and everything Olive thought she knew about the world.
Olive bit into the apple and found it was the single most delicious apple she’d ever had, which terrified her nearly as much as everything else she’d just witnessed.
And so, Olive used the most ancient and sacred survival technique Mares had in their arsenals: she passed out.
Tim blinked in confusion before shrugging and laying a blanket over her.
“Eh, she’ll be fine.”
