Applejack Is An Interdimensional Alien

“Oh, my head…” Applejack moaned after being out for a few seconds. “Why- what… where am Ah?” she asked to nopony in particular.

“Oh good! You’re okay!” the colt told her happily, the relief evident in his voice. “I thought you were hurt.”

“Not so loud, please,” AJ responded quietly. She looked around for a second, trying to piece together what had happened, and then remembered about the colt’s mother and the car and hitting her head after slamming the back of the vehicle into the silo. She could hear the engine of the thing still running, and turned around to see the hole in the back window, glass from it coating the backseats.

“How do we get this thing goin’ forward?” she asked slowly, not really comprehending the fact that she just hit her head, only knowing that it was better to be moving than it was to be staying still. Answers were supposedly ahead with the colt’s mother, rather than in that empty house with the open window.

“Doesn’t really make a lick of sense to keep a window wide open in the winter,” the mare found herself thinking. “Not one single bit of sense at all.”

“We have to put it in D for drive,” the foal answered. “But… um, are you okay?”

“Ah’m fine,” she answered a bit groggily, her speech slightly slurred, waving a hoof at him. “Ah’m fine. Just a little hit on the noggin. Ain’t nothin’ ta be worried about. Ah’ve been through worse.”

“Okay, if you say so,” he answered, accepting her response. “Be careful though. I’m gonna change it now.”

She heard the gear shift twice, and, not having her hoof on the break, watched the car slowly start to crawl forward, turning the wheel in the direction she wanted to go as it inched along.

“Is this as fast as it goes?” she asked, looking down at the pedals before remembering what he said earlier. “Oh yeah, ya gotta press these things.”

Gingerly, she touched the gas, and felt the car lurch forward a bit as it sped up. She had enough sense to make sure it didn’t get too fast this time, and only touched the pedal every few seconds, making sure it didn’t go all the way to the floor like before. It didn’t take long before they were slowly turning onto the road.

“You need to get to that road over there,” the colt told her, pointing his hoof over to the interstate a few hundred yards away. “That’s where my mom always goes when we drive.”

“Will do, kiddo,” she confirmed, guiding the car where she wanted it to go. “Using this thing is much easier ta do than Ah expected,” she commented, her driving becoming slowly less jerky, the mare becoming more sure of herself by the second as they moved. “The other pedal is ta stop?”

“Yeah, but if we stop too fast, it’ll make us hit the window.”

“Noted,” she replied, noting the headache she had. “I’ll be just as gentle with it as the driving pedal.”

She didn’t drive too fast as the two of them turned onto the interstate, although she saw a sign that told her she could go seventy-five miles per hour. While she was sure of herself operating the car after so little time, she wasn’t quite that sure of herself just yet.

She looked at the gauges on the dashboard again, trying to decipher what they meant as she concentrated on the road. One of them was obviously the speed, hence the mp/h sign under it, the needle pointing at around the twenty miles per hour marker, but the other two she had more trouble with. The first one had r/min and a needle that inched up past the three on it every so often before dropping back down to one, seemingly at random times. The other one, from what she could tell, was a fuel gauge that told her the car was completely filled up, however she wasn’t certain that’s what it meant.

“Hey, uhhhhh…” she trailed off, looking over to the colt, uncomfortable about the fact that she had nothing to call him. “Is it okay if Ah called ya Blue? Or Green? Or somethin’?”

“You can call me Blue,” the colt, Blue, answered. “I don’t care.”

“Say, Blue,” Applejack asked as she drove, “do ya know what these gauges mean? Ah know the first one is our speed, but what are the other two?”

“Ummmmmmm… the one on the right is how much gas we have left… and… and I don’t know what the other one is. I don’t think my mom really looks at that one.”

“Fair enough, Ah guess. Do ya know how far we can go with it sayin’ we have a lot of gas?”

“I don’t know, but the store shouldn’t be that far. We can usually get there in, like, an hour or something.”

Applejack didn’t question him, deciding simply to stare ahead at the road, realizing after a little while she should be keeping the thing in between the dashed lines on the road and trying her best to do so. She saw a few signs as they drove, namely one that advertised a place called McDonald’s as being fifteen miles ahead, and somewhere called Hays as one hundred fifty-five miles away. That seemed like an awfully long ways away, and while the speed limit sign did tell her she should be able to get there in two hours, at the pace she was driving, it would take her almost three to four times as long.

“We ain’t goin’ all the way to Hays are we, Blue?”

“No, there’s a bunch of stores and stuff in the town ahead. I’m pretty sure that’s where she would be…”

She found herself trusting what he said. He didn’t seem like one to tell a lie, and couldn’t help but listen to him. Not that she would really have any other choice if he were lying, or even just mistaken, but as she thought to herself before, going someplace was better than staying still.

It was a tiring task Applejack found out, driving. The endless road and fields ahead of her, unchanging, with hardly any twists or turns in the road, made it hard for her to keep her focus held on driving. She almost thought she felt her eyes starting to get heavy when after about forty minutes of silent, unchanging highway in front of her, she thought she could see a couple of building far off in the distance, and much closer, a mare walking along the road, heading in their direction.

“Is that her?” AJ asked Blue as she carefully pressed on the break, planning on pulling up to her. It was a pink mare she saw walking towards them, one that looked like it had a bit of a limp in its step, carrying a bag of something on her back, what she couldn’t tell.

The colt shook his head, answering, “My mom’s brown.”

“That ain’t the mare from last night, ya think?” she asked aloud, mostly to herself, her head still a bit foggy from the hit it took. “Why Ah oughta give her a piece of my mind. That’s her, ain’t it?”

“I think so, but we-”

He was interrupted by the car jerking to a stop, AJ opening the door as the mare approached a bit more quickly and Blue switched the vehicle to park.

“What do ya think yer doin’ out here?” Applejack called, the pegasus’s eyes widening in recognition at her voice, the fear still clear in her eyes when she looked at her cutie mark. “Y’all just went and abandoned-”

It was AJ's turn to be interrupted as she suddenly heard a bang coming from the mare’s direction and she found herself staggering back and falling to the ground, seeing just a tint of red in the snow as she did.