Friendship With A Side Of Toast

        The moon had just risen, the night darkened to the point where the stars were just enough to see by. The chorus of the night was in full swing, loud enough to catch and hold the ear, but quiet enough to dream by. To Rylie, it was the muffled chorus of crickets that sang outside his window; for Jack it was the rain, a summer night’s shower falling steadily in a pleasant, soothing rhythm. The relative normalcy of the night belied the heavy hand fate was about to deal to the two of them, one that would lead to a whole new world of possibility.

        For Jack, it had been an absolute stroke of luck that he even managed to watch the show. His family, while being kind and loving, tended to overdo the teasing in his opinion. As a result, he had made sure that his hobby of watching My Little Pony and writing fanfiction for it was hidden from them, lest he would be forever tormented by his family. Heaven forbid it if they tried to do something like make him a T-shirt of the show.

So when his family had left the house for the night on a rare outing, he rejoiced at the idea of watching the show on his TV for once, instead of having to cower in a corner somewhere with his laptop as he listened to it with his easily broken headphones. As he sat down on the ratty couch his family owned, he took out the TV remote and hurriedly began flipped through the channels, hoping he’d be able to watch some before something ridiculous happened, like having his TV fried by a lightning strike from the storm. His luck was terrible and since he only had the Hub network for this month, due to complicated reasons, he would bet that this may have been his only chance to watch it.

Rylie, on the other hand, had a family that didn’t really care about his enjoyment of the cartoon. However, he was always a bit uncomfortable watching any sort of cartoon when his parents were around. It was a silly feeling with no real basis, but still, he never watched any cartoon unless they were out of the house. That night he was alone for the first time in a while, so he fired up the new plasma screen, intent on watching ponies in High Definition.

Some might call it coincidence. Some might call it luck or figure out the exact possibility percent … some might even call it the hand of God. Regardless of what caused the occurrence, something happened that evening that was unexplainable: the two bronies hands were in synch on their respective remotes.

Click.

Click.

Click click …

And then, as they reached their desired target and clicked, still perfectly in synch, a bright flash filled their vision, a white noise almost deafening them! And then … blackness, their worlds disappeared …

It was a nice day, birds chirping, the sun shining, the clouds a smattering of huge, fluffy pillows, the wind through your hair …  All in all it was a nice day, but the sudden feeling of vertigo and a rush of wind from beneath would cause anyone to glance down, an action that turned the nice day into an absolute disaster.

Nice days are never nice days when you’re falling towards the roof of a building.

In one of the most impendingly painful ways possible, Jack and Rylie had appeared in the sky without so much as a popping noise or a flash of light on this end. Before they could even register it, the change in position and gravity swiftly seized them and dragged them downwards. They tumbled through the air, their limbs whipping about wildly in a fruitless effort to find something to halt their unexpected and, quite frankly, rather terrifying descent.  When then they landed, they did so ungracefully by smashing right through the roof, splintering it all over the room underneath and the room’s occupants.

        As the dust settled and the fits of coughing subsided, the room became eerily quiet.  To the occupants in the room, most of the roof had suddenly and inexplicably caved in, the timber and shingles suddenly relocating to the center of what appeared to be a lounge area.  One such occupant sat stock still on one of the couches around the room, another crouched, hiding behind said couch, but most were standing in shock.

        As for the unfortunate pair of travelers, they lay underneath the broken wood, hidden from sight … sadly conscious.  With a cough, Rylie shook himself ever so slightly. That small shake, however, sent a jolt of electric fire up his arm and into his heart; the last time he had felt something like this he had been too young to remember. The resulting cry of pain and fright drove a few of the room’s occupants back a step, then rushing forward to help.

        Jack groaned and hissed through his teeth, tensing as his body screamed at him for its suffering.  For a moment, all he could think about was the pain that wracked his body as he squeezed his eyes shut as forcefully as he could. Then, slowly, it subsided a small bit at a time. As the agony faded from his mind, his thoughts came into focus.

What happened? He thought, quickly trying to piece together what had happened.

        As it became easier to think, Jack ransacked his head, searching for memories that could explain the state he was in. Eventually, he remembered what he had been doing during the few minutes prior to the fall. He furrowed his brow in confusion, even as his eyes remained shut from the pain. He had turned on the TV, flipped through the channels, then fell through a roof. He tried again to remember anything else, but his mind had nothing to offer, not even a period where he might have passed out.

        As he tried to puzzle it out, the sound of hushed and worried voices came to his ears and if he bothered he would have heard the sounds of the footsteps of the figures approaching him. Recoiling from instinctual fear, he was tempted to try to lay there as still as possible in hopes of going away. However, when he remembered that he had crashed through some sort of roof, he grudgingly opened his eyes so he could face the consequences of whatever had happened.

        He almost immediately wished he had tried to feign unconsciousness some more.

        Staring straight into the face of his savior, he saw a unicorn.

        The ponies in the room had instantly come to help when they heard Rylie’s cry. Lifting planks and beams aside with hoof, wing and horn they reached Jack first, pulling him out roughly despite the high-pitched whine of protest, body mottled with fresh bruises. A hoof stuck out from the pile of debris below him, leg turned at an odd angle, the cry from before having turned into soft whimpering.

        “Ditzy! Call Nurse Redheart, now!” The commanding tone coming from the alabaster unicorn left no wonder as to who was in charge. With the swift reply of yessir, Candfloss sir, a grey blur swept out of the building. Taking extreme care, he lifted pieces of the roofing away until Rylie was completely uncovered.

        Rylie had been holding his eyes shut, sucking in breath through clenched teeth and expelling it again with a quiet, shuddering whimper, trying the best he could to simply ignore the pain. However, as he felt the pressure on top of him disappearing, he cracked an eye to see what was happening. At that moment, the reality of his situation came crashing down upon him like a sucker-punch to the gut, pushing all the air out of him and then holding him in shocked silence.

        There was a unicorn. Right there. Looking down at him … and he was unnervingly familiar. If it wasn’t for the pain of his broken arm, he would have been sure this was a dream.  Even now he wasn’t completely convinced. However, something else niggled at the edges of his mind, but he failed to make any further neural connections, his mind so numb as it was. And then he looked at his broken arm, only to see a hairy leg and hoof.

        The aforementioned Candyfloss was not entirely surprised when the adolescent colt fainted, but he was caught off guard when he noticed Jack was still hanging in there.

        “Gah! I just wanted to watch a cartoon,” Jack moaned, reacting harshly as the other ponies continued to drag him out of the pile. “Not be in one. Ow! Ok, that was a lie, but I swear, I wanted to get here a lot less painfully!”

        “Mental note, have Nurse Redheart check the other for a concussion,” Candyfloss muttered under his breath, half concerned, half coming to the realization that these two ponies were somehow responsible for caving his roof in, though neither were pegasi.  Probably that one’s fault, he mused with a quick, sidelong glance at Jack. The earth pony’s current state of writhing over some minor bruising was not helping his case.

        After carefully levitating Rylie’s limp body out of the wreckage and resting him on one of the unoccupied couches, Candyfloss turned back to the two pegasus ponies trying to calm Jack.  “Cloudcover,” he called, catching the attention of the one closest to him; “is the pony alright?” The green beret covered the pegasus pony’s eyes for a moment as he glanced down at the squirming, intelligible earth pony.

        “Well, he’s not making much sense,” he began, Trottingham accent clear; “but it’s still Equestrian and complete sentences …”  He trailed off, looking over Jack with a critical eye.

        “Uhh, did I say cartoon?” Jack said, finally realizing his folly. “I mean I … the concussion is messing with my head?” Cloudcover looked at him, a singular eyebrow raised. “Umm, so, any idea how I ended up crashing through your roof for some reason, or are you just as clueless as I am?” With a self-satisfactory hmmph the pegasus turned back to his boss.

        “I’d say he’s fine. He’s an earth pony, sturdy stuff.”

        “You might say he’s fine,” the other pegasus pony said, a smirk clear across his red snout. “However, I’m tempted to find him a psychiatrist.”

        “Mister Autumn Breeze!” A new voice spoke up from behind the red pegasus as a grey hoof bopped him on the head. “That’s not a nice thing to say about anypony!”

        “Hehe, sorry Miss Doo,” Autumn replied with a humorous chuckle, rubbing at his head with a hoof as he turned to let the smiling mare past, eyes following her as we walked up to Candyfloss.

        “Nurse Red Heart is on her way, I flew ahead to see if I could help with anything.”

        “Umm, are you sure you want Nurse Redheart to treat me?” Jack paused for half a beat as he filed away the fact that there was someone else with him before hurriedly continuing. “I mean, I am not exactly a pony you know.”

        “Oh really?” An electrified yellow Stallion said, appearing out of nowhere and zipping up to him with alarming speed. “Because you look, talk, and smell like pony!  Wait …”  The yellow pony sniffed Jack in a seemingly exaggerated manner. “Yep, you smell like a pony.  Wait … Does that mean you are a changeling?”

        “Wait what are you …”  Jack stopped halfway through his sentence. He closed his eyes and slowly brought what he thought was his arm right in front of his face, wincing from the bruising.  His eyes slowly opened as he forced himself to stare at the undeniable truth. With a groan, he brought his snow white hoof in for a facehoof. “Never mind,” Jack said with a deep sigh. “I am a little fuzzy from that concussion. Do I have any wings or a horn?”

        “Nope!” The pony probably known as Watt chirped. “You are a regular okie dokie poky Earth Pony!”

Fate hates me, Jack thought as Nurse Redheart entered the room and immediately began checking over Rylie. It doesn’t hate me enough to kill me. It is even considerate enough to fulfill my wish of going to another world. But it seems to want to make me as miserable as possible while doing so. Ok, fate, if I ever find your house, I am going to skip the lemons and just go straight to punching you in the face.

        “Oh, I punched fate in the face once!”  Watt bounced up in front of Jack before helping one of Nurse Redheart’s assistants load him onto a stretcher. “He didn’t seem to like it very much, but then again I got to meet Glow, even though she was a bit cranky.”

        Jack blinked and turned to question Watt when a look of realization came across his face. Slowly, he took a deep breath and placed his hoof gently to his face.

        “Candyfloss, Autumn Breeze, Doo, Glow,” He murmured under his breath. “Your name wouldn’t happen to be Watt, would it?”

        “Yepperooni!” Watt, then scratched his head. “Why, is it important?”

        “No, but things make a lot more sense now,” Jack sighed wearily.

        “Oh good,”  Watt chirped.  After a few moments of silence,  Watt coughed.  “So, is Pinkie Pie you’re favorite pony?”

        “No, but only because I can’t choose between them..”

        “Oh really?”

        Deciding to throw all pretenses of ignorance out the window, Jack and Watt continued to discuss things that neither party should honestly know about. Ignoring this instinctively, Candyfloss walked calmly over to Nurse Redheart, trying to maintain some sense of composure.  As she finished up a standard medical scanning spell on Rylie, her expression set in practiced neutrality and concentration, Candyfloss coughed to get her attention.

        “Nurse,”  Candyfloss glanced sidelong at Redheart as he faced Rylie.  “How is he doing?”

        “Well, it looks like he should be fine,”  She said, examining the unconscious patient.  “However, his right foreleg is broken.  I‘ll need to reset it and take him to the hospital to check for any internal injuries as we check the other one out for concussive damage.  I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but I hope that that one has a concussion.”

        “What makes you say that?”  Candyfloss asked, raising an eyebrow as he tried to conceal his curiosity and concern.

        “He is holding a conversation with the only pony who can understand Pinkie Pie chatter without getting confused.”

“...Oh.” A few moments later, Candyfloss’ expression became that of barely contained horror as the implications set in. “That’s alarming.”

“Indeed,” The nurse gave the leg another examination. “Well, nothing shows that there will be any serious repercussions from it, so I’ll reset the colt’s leg now.”

        At this most inopportune moment, the aforementioned pony woke up, brain back in working order.

        “Ugh …” he groaned, stirring as he returned to consciousness. Opening his eyes and taking in the multiple equine faces brought back all that he had learned just a few moments beforehand, his breath catching in his throat and eyelids flying wide open. Slowly, he turned his head and looked around the room before getting disoriented by the new placement of his eyes on his head. Sadly, in his mental haste for rest, he had forgotten one aspect from before: his arm was broken.

        Moving said arm brought intense pain back to the forefront of his thoughts. A high-pitched keening-turned-whine suddenly punctuated the room, telling all in hearing distance his exact condition. Rolling around didn’t seem to help, but he did so anyway.

To Nurse Redheart’s credit, the only reason she wasn’t the one to restrain Rylie was that Candyfloss’ magic was faster and more effective. After thanking him for the help and requesting that he keep the earth pony still, she stepped around the stretcher to Rylie’s opposite side, the side with the broken foreleg.

“Now, this is going to hurt, but only for a moment and it’s necessary,” she said to no one in particular, as her patient was obviously not listening and on the verge of hyperventilation. A moment later, after a swift movement punctuated with a blood-curdling cry that left Candyfloss’ white coat seem paler, the situation was resolved, Rylie’s brain deciding unconsciousness was still a better option.

“I hope I never break anything …” the pale unicorn managed, trailing off.

        “It isn’t as bad as it seems if you are in good health,”  She said simply.  “... but it still hurts though.  At any rate, I should take him and the loon over there to the hospital just to see if there was anything wrong that I missed, but I think they’ll be fine aside from being sore for the next few days.”

        As the hectic atmosphere began to finally wind down, each pony began to notice how exhausted they were.  They had a moment trying to get Jack to go with them.  While he wasn’t particularly aggressive about it, he seemed rather reluctant and scared of leaving the room.  Eventually, they managed to calm him down enough to get him to accompany them and the medical crew was on their way.

        “Good day to you, Doctor Candyfloss,” Nurse Redheart said with a nod.

        “Same to you, Nurse,” the unicorn replied wearily. After she exited, he was left in the quiet with his employees. Turning and taking in all the damage, he simply sighed, ears laid back against his head. “What a day,” he grumbled.

“What a day indeed …”