A Wayfinders Guide to Equestria

by ChrysalisM

Rating: everyone
Tags: Human, Main 6, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dungeons and Dragons, Comedy, Adventure, Crossover
Length: 4078

An adventurer shares his tales of hundreds of years of traveling the multiverse starting with Equestria...

A romp through the multiverse with an adventurer armed with rudimentary knowledge of shapeshifting magic, mixed with random observations, (D&D's trolls are a good model of Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphic Resonance for instance) some pop culture references and cameos, and anyone he drags along for the ride. human tag as that is what our hero starts as... I own nothing in these storys other than OCs. all owners are famous enough to be recognized easily.

Published 2020-10-30 02:20:00 UTC
Last updated 2021-06-14 22:21:04 UTC

A beginning

Author's Note

KNOW, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of,Stop that! This is not Robert E. Howard, and this is about 2000 years after the hyborian age. This is a story about an adventurer of a different sort than a sword wielding lusty lunatic (though he really was a lot more than that as a character ), I just needed something to catch your attention. Arvax is a character that has been bouncing around in my head for a while and I'm taking the chance to write down his story, from his point of view...
Any resemblance in my characters to real people (or publication names) is coincidental or is used fictitiously. all magic spells are made up too. (this is my first fanfic so don't judge me too much.)

A beginning

My name is Arvax Magus, which does sound a bit dramatic, but my family tree apparently stretches back to Merlin (according to family legend, not historical fact, but still!) My family other than the dramatic last name is quite ordinary (I unofficially changed my name to more suit me). Sadly, trying to revive the family business (i.e wizardry) has resulted in not having too many friends, people who know me from reputation only making warding signs when I walk by, being fleeced by people selling fake magical artifacts and resulted in the chain of events I am about to relate.

It began with a garage sale, and a guy who seemed a bit touched in the head.

"I assure ya, this is a sword that can cut holes into other worlds ." Of course, considering the claim, you can see why I say touched in the head. But he oddly seemed to be able to say that while looking at me straight in the eyes, unlike many of the other people who tried to peddle me rubbish under the guise of it being enchanted (the result of putting out a personal ad looking for real magic items, that made my parents evaluate my mental health).

"How do I know this is genuine? " I said as I looked over it, it seemed to have words in what seemed like an archaic form of Latin (now that is hard to understand) inscribed into it, along with symbols like, pentagrams, the eight fold path symbol (Warhammer 40k corrupted the meaning of the symbol by the way it is actually 8 paths to enlightenment.), but that could be faked (something you only learn from being fleeced a few dozen times).

"How about this kid, you take it for a test run, if it doesnt work, you get the sword for free." Even if it didn't work, it was cool looking, and it had a horse decorative motif overall.

"It's a deal."

"Oh, and before you go, don't worry about freaking out the locals on the other world, the sword will take care of that."

"I'm telling you, I'm pretty sure that this isn't a fake Ellory ! If this really works, we could pop into My Great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfathers prison in that oak tree, free him, and maybe he would teach us magic !"

I'd explain about the oak tree but that is a long story in itself. Long story short, Merlins one girlfriend took dumping him and never seeing him again to a whole new level. I was on my bed near my only friend (other than my dnd group who at least liked my dm'ing style) who was willing to socialize with me.

"Thats what you said about the black powder recipe, 'Look! I found a recipe for a philosophers stone!' I still see the scorch marks even after you repainted the walls."

Fast forward after i've gathered supplies,(2 changes of clothes, 3 days rations for myself, copies of the 5e D&D rulebooks to keep my dnd campaign going with my friends, and a copy of Mark Booth's A Secret History Of The World ) roped a friend into coming along, (Ellory Quinn because she was my constant partner in my attempts at magic, and of course not seen as polite company due to that sadly ), and reciting the magic words inscribed on the blade while in a corner of the public library (the occult section naturally).

"ferrum cantata"
"ferrum et vetera"
"ex parte ante illam velum"
"inter mundos!"

Than, to my utmost surprise, I swung the blade in an arc and an opening to a white void appeared in the shape of an arch appeared. As we stepped through, I felt our material bodys fading to pure energy, which is what matter is at the core, and thought.

I remember hearing a voice that thought (yes the voice thought,) "A thousand years since one of the living came here," than nothing. Eventually after what felt like no time at all, and all of eternity in the same moment, I felt myself reform in a body that felt familiar, yet alien. I heard sounds along the lines of "Spike, get me the first aid kit," than I fully passed out.

If they had looked behind , they might have noticed the motes of black energy seeping out of the occult book section behind them. Might have seen what looked like a trio of shadows consolidate near a figure, 3 feet tall, in a cloak, fiddling with a dagger, skull-shaped handle and obsidian blade, in reptilian hands, concealed in the shelves. Could have heard it's words "Bring me the sword." might have seen the shadows follow through the arch. and the figure follow them into the void. His 3,000 years of searching were about to pay off.

I awoke in a hospital bed with an iv hooked up to me, and my vital signs being monitored (I memorized that beep after someone sold me a recipe for a philosophers stone consisting of charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur. why I didn't see a hospital trip coming from that is still a mystery to me.)

I heard a voice, say "She's awake! " Despite my gender seemingly being mixed up (I'd get used to it as I used transformation magic more but that is later), I simply replied, quite groggily "Ellory?"

The voice replied "Your friend woke up a few hours before you did. she told me a good deal of information but I felt I should hear it from you, as it seemed you were a key part in what happened. My name is Twilight Sparkle by the way."

"I'm a boy for starters, and I don't think this is Merlin's prison in an oak tree." My voice sounded at a uncomfortably higher pitch.

"That's odd, you look like a mare."The voice, which came from an odd purple creature which looked like an anthropomorphic cross between a pony, a pegasus , and a unicorn. An alicorn I believe the term is. I was either having hallucinations from watching too many fantasy tv shows, or The sword had worked. I was hoping for the latter.

"Well, it's a long story, and I am going to kill the guy who sold me that enchanted blade (Ellory told you about that right? ). Blend into the populace yes, but not a bit of feedback from myself on the new form. but I should explain. My name is Arvax Magus, which does sound a bit dramatic, but my family tree apparently stretches back to Merlin. Just to clarify, you do know what a wizard is do you? "

To Be Continued...

On our antagonist

Author's Note

My writing schedule will be a bit irregular, but will have new chapters not too far apart, though length will vary in writing and time between.

In addition, I would like to inform you we're having troubles with our chapter, someone is trying to hijack our story. we apologize for broadcast difficultys.

On our antagonist

Later after I had sufficiently explained my-

Pardon the intrusion but I felt It would be a worthy use of my magic to intrude upon the narrative to explain myself more than just a "Cloaked figure with a skull hilted dagger with an obsidian blade and reptilian hands" maybe I should start at the beginning, my beginning. (Arvax, you aren't getting the story back until the next chapter.)

If you insist...

I'll just drop the bold text.

My name is Meerak. Kobold Wizard, Lych , and leader of the last fantastical monsters on the planet earth. There are not many of us left. Ettercaps, extinct. elves, (drow I mean) endangered (oil drilling has an effect on the underdark you know!) Dragons, only one left (Saint George actually didn't slay the dragon, he made a deal to let it go in exchange for a fortune) . Vampires, werewolves, and ghosts are thriving (Vlad the Impaler has held that over my head for decades.). There are about 3,000 of us left compared to billions of humans. and dont get me into history, we didn't expect the Spanish inquisition.

Eventually we sought out some gods to help us, a an ascended lych that was killed by his top lieutenant with a sword he had made for him. A.K.A. Old one eye, one hand, god of forbidden secrets, guy who acererak kissed the *** of for several centuries, Vecna himself. He told us that our chance for salvation would come if we were patient. Same thing with the ruinous powers, so we waited...

Eventually I was doing a bit of light reading on monster summoning in a public library when I get a whiff of magic, the good stuff, old magic, and I see this immature boy, with a excited look on his face, along with some girl who seemed to be looking at him with a mix of trust and concern (probably about his sanity now that i think about our later encounters.)

He was holding a sword with a strong aura of portal magic, so I decide to bring along my shadow bodyguards as I went to ~~steal~~ borrow the sword to bring my friends of this stupid rock of a planet, than he went through the portal, so I moseyed on through with him, though I did make sure to make myself invisible upon arrival and discreetly gated in my spellbook in an unoccupied corner of the crystal castle we had just been dumped in. But I'll let my friend take back the narrative now.

To be continued...

Sheesh I hate that kobold.

In which we remove the part on the authors motives being inscrutable to mortals, and our heroes make an inventory check

Author's Note

A note on Canon in this story
It will be loosely followed, but faithful through the 4th or 5th season, expanded as I slowly watch more with my sister, one of the few opportunity's I get to watch mlp, I usually go for other stuff at other times. Charlie Chaplin is quite good too. You can find a link to see a clip of his stuff here. here*

On a different note, it is time for a new addition to the real men, real role players, loonies, and munchkins list.

in case you aren't sure what i'm talking about it is a joke list classifying different types of rpg player. they are...

The Real Man The tough macho type who walks up to the attacking dragon and orders it to leave before he gets hurt.

The Real Roleplayer The intelligent cunning guy who tricks the constable into letting you all out of prison.

The Loonie The guy who will do anything for a cheap laugh, including casting a fireball at ground zero.

The Munchkin Need we say more?
Favorite mlp character

Real Men: won't admit they watch the show, but Shining Armor if pressed.

Real role players: Cadance or Rarity

Loonies: Screwball, Discord or Derpy usually.

Munchkins: Lauren Faust

In which we remove the part on the authors motives being inscrutable to mortals, and our heroes make an inventory check

The author sighed as he typed up the next chapter in his manuscript. He was working on a tight deadline, and considering his employers, it was more literal than you would think. But torturing fictional characters, and bunting people into interacting with them was fun work. Especially when you had a magic typewriter, and a sadistic imagination.
He set the type writer to typing out what was happening from his unwilling protagonists point of view.

After we had figured out who was who we commenced to debating why my friends had turned into fantastical creatures.

That's easy. As you had no inherent magic, you were transformed into things that did. It's a side effect of the way you got there, and something that would cause me a lot of head aches.

Stop interrupting or I will personally find you and pour a vial of holy water down your dead, rotting, throat.

We did eventually get to that conclusion, after a long boring lecture from Twilight. It turns out Will turned into a half-elf because he had his character sheet in his backpack. He quickly rummaged through his pack and pulled out a bunch of items that I remember being written on his character sheet. Oddly similiar phenomena happened to everyone else and when we had pooled it all together we had the following list

A spellbook ("What kind of sadist makes a spell to smite someone dead?"Twilight exclaimed. "Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax" I replied in a slightly snarky tone. )

500 caltrops (we spilled them, now that was a nightmare)

A signed copy of Acereraks autobiography The life of a god killing, dungeon building, badass (courtesy of our jaunt into the tomb of horrors)

A holy symbol of Pelor

5 iron spikes (the weapons of the first guys to go into castle greyhawk)

a sprig of mistletoe

A +3 Ak-47.5 (outperforms those old ak-47's )

A +1 dagger

A + 5 defender longsword

A Battleaxe of dismembering (Homebrew!)

3 potions of greater healing

A cursed scroll of John Cena (When you utter the words on this seemingly normal spell scroll it yells out "And his name's John Cena" With the effect of a blast of sonic energy instead of the expected spell. We set it off by accident, and that was a nightmare.)

etc...

Eventually we headed out of the castle to a town where every window was broken.

To be continued when I next have enough time to do anything of any length. (Sorry for the briefness.)

* Just kidding, here's the real link if you did get rickrolled. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=389cemZpkb4

Meanwhile somewhere in russia...

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Kappas part one

I had an idea for getting support for my next idea to acquire the sword. He does not know items with dweomer like that usually need a month to recharge, plenty of time for me to plan. All I needed to do was make a trip to japan and bring a number of cucumbers.

When I arrived at the Town of Tono, known for it's kappas, I simply had to wait for nightfall to be able to drop my human disguise. I made my way to the nearest body of water. After that I simply tossed a few cucumbers in to get their attention. It didn't take long for them to come snatch a few up. I watched as the turtle like, humanoid creatures crawled out.

"Konbanwa gentlemen," I said, bowing deeply. The leader, which I could tell from the fact he was a few inches taller than the other kappa, returned the gesture, dumping the water out of it's sara, hence rendering him powerless until he quickly refilled it from the lake. One of his buddies chuckled at that, but was easily silenced by a hairy eyeball from the leader.

"Welcome Mahōtsukai. What brings you to the home of the kappa?"

"There is a problem I need help with. How good are you water demons at picking off large groups indiscreetly? "

"We have been the reason for precisely 666 peoples' disappearance."

The number of the devil. To humans it means bad luck, but to us, it is good fortune.

"Excellent. How many of your friends do you think you can muster?"

The Kappa grinned, "You haven't seen the half of it."

Behind him many more figure crawled their way out of the depths.

"Meet me here this coming Friday the 13th. I have a portal to open."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Back to the main story

Author's Note

Now that I have taken care of our pirate broadcaster back to the story.

Back to the main story

Now that I have hopefully cleared up the signal hijacking , back to the story.

I beg to differ, but I'm only waiting in the background

Anyway...

As I was saying before I was interrupted, after sufficiently explaining myself and having the history of this realm explained (and finding I had become a unicorn), Twilight seemed interested in my world. "Your world doesn't sound like the human world I went to."

I simply replied, "You've been to my world ? If so, you must've not seen much."

I was hiding nearby, had my shadows (which now seemed to be shaped like equines) blocking off any escape routes, and I jumped to try and grab the sword which was on the bed stand nearby.

Am I going to have to get used to you interrupting?

Yes.

Anyways, I had just gotten up to find my friend when suddenly, a cloaked figure came out of nowhere and grabbed my sword off the bed stand of the hospital cot. I tried to tackle him but he raised a hand and a glimmering shield of purple energy popped out of nowhere and repelled me, sending me slumping against the bed. I quickly galloped after him while the figure ran off cackling and yelling, "The Lych is in the zone, baby!"

The Lych did not say that.

Who's telling this you or me?

This initiated a chase through the castle where occasionally something tripped me when i least expected it (My shadows do their work so well!), Twilight sending off magical bolts from her horn (Childs play to block, but it burns through spell slots ), and a random encounter with 1d8 bugbears (this ain't a dnd crossover without wandering monsters, no matter how improbable).

I had nearly slipped away while they dealt with the bugbears when a portal opened up above my head and I was crushed beneath 4 figures, a gryphon, a dragon, a pegasi, and a half-elf. I came to in reformed in front of my phylactery, minus the sword, and my shadows pulled along with me. Curse the god of deus ex machina! Though I did have a book I swiped from the library which I could use as a focus to crack open a portal.

I recognized the groaning of the figures from my dnd campaign whenever one of my players rolled a one. "Guys? How the heck did you get here?" I heard one voice pop up and explain the following.

Hi this is Jordan, I play the cleric in Arvax's D&D campaign. When he disappeared, we were the first to start looking for him. When we heard about the guy he was last seen buying a sword from we went to his house to interrogate him. The other players in the campaign accompanied me. Brynn our wizard, Will, the thief (perhaps not just in-game, rumor is he's the head of a small time hacking team, though we can't prove it), and Philip, our fighter. Ellory was our druid, but she'd disappeared along with our DM so she was not present.

We found the guy out back, doing a game of solitaire. while supervising the garage sale. He was wearing a shirt which said 'Its called splash damage you crybabys, suck it up or go whine to the cleric.'

Brynn marched right up to him, looked him right in the eye, and said through gritted teeth, "What. Did. You. Do. To. Our. Dungeon. Master!"

The guy looked unfazed and simply said "Oh, that kid. you want to try and go to where he is?"

Brynn said/ growled "Of course we do! "

The guy, had us come into his basement where he made a chalk pentagram on the floor. "I'll need you to stand on your heads in the middle of the pentagram " I replied with a confused look on my face, "Why?"

"Magic follows it's own logic. As i'm sending you to a world which will turn your conceptions of reality upside down, you need to stand on your head so we can fool the spirits which oversee the dimensional boundary's so we can send you through, though even then you may change to match the native creatures. "

"But that doesn't make sense!"

"It's wonderland logic, it makes sense in an abstract way, like the stuff in alice in wonderland."

Than he put on a pointy hat, started turning widdershins around the circle while chanting these words

"mazakala
sucop sucoh
Cthulhu
ballyhoo
alakazam
hocus pocus"

And then a wormhole opened up beneath us we fell in, felt our physical bodies dissipate and reform differently, and we all fell from the ceiling crushing a cloaked figure.

The Author looked down the portal and smiled, everything was falling into place.

It was amazing to see my friends again and after a group hug, some introductions, and an explanation, we realized something we overlooked. "What the hay happened to that cloaked guy?" I simply replied, I think he said something about being a lych, which might explain it."

But before I could, Twilight seemed to pull a big tome out of nowhere and start searching through, "Lych, Lych, where is it, i remember seeing it in here. Oh yes 'A lych is a type of undead creature. Often such a creature is the result of a transformation, as a powerful magician striving for eternal life uses spells or rituals to bind his intellect and soul to his phylactery and thereby achieve a form of immortality' which means it probably reformed near his phylactery" I was speechless for a few moments.

"What she said. I have a weird feeling we'll see that creep again."

Omniscient words as you will see...

To be continued...

The Author

Author's Note

Our cast so far (only people encountered already, if you're wondering based on the tags)...
The Author: no data confirmed
The Transformed and displaced
Arvax: a unicorn mare
Ellory: An earth pony (they finally got around to visiting her)
Brynn: a dragon wizard
Jordan: A pegasi
Philip: a gryphon
Will: The half-elf
The Antagonists
Meerak: A lich
Minions: Various monsters including the shadows
The people already here
Twilight sparkle: An Alicorn
Spike: A Dragon/ Twilight's #1 assistant

Dnd statistics for our heroes shall be cooked up and linked to later.
We now return to our story.

The Author

That embarrassing scene last chapter was a very good exercise In watching where you are going. I was about to call it quits when the moment I was about to give up I heard a clacking reminiscent of a typewriter and a figure appeared in front of me, incorporeal with a malicious grin on his face. "Giving up so soon o great one?"

"Who are you and what is your business here" I shouted out to the figure. He simply grinned even wider and said to me, "I am a teller of tales, a sculptor of world's. You Meerak have a role to play. You will get the sword and bring it to me."

I looked at him and said, "Why should I believe you are more than a phantasm, a figment of my mind, an illusion."

Suddenly Meerak felt pain, greater than what he had felt for century's.

"I'll do anything! Just make it stop!" I pleaded, helpless for the first time in centuries. "Bring me the sword, or I will edit you out of the story."

Nevertheless I agreed. and in the blink of an eye, the figure vanished, and the pain stopped. Only a malevolent chuckle on the wind, almost inaudible, showed any sign he was there. I do not know what he meant by editing me out, but I was not taking any chances.

To be continued (with a longer chapter next time.)...