Quantum Schlep

by AugieDog

Rating: everyone
Tags: Science Fiction, Big Macintosh, Slice of Life, Crossover, Alternate Universe, Applejack, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Other
Length: 5361

Theorizing that one could travel to parallel tooniverses where one's own species was sapient, Dr. Horace Horsecollar stepped into the Quantum Schlep accelerator...and vanished.

Theorizing that one could travel to parallel tooniverses where one's own species was sapient, Dr. Horace Horsecollar stepped into the Quantum Schlep accelerator...and vanished.

He woke to find himself trapped in one cartoon realm after another, facing equine mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change the overall cosmos for the better. His only guide on this journey is Mickey, an observer from his own tooniverse, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Horace can see and hear.

And so Dr. Horsecollar finds himself schleping from life to life, striving to put right what could go wrong, and hoping each time that his next schlep will be the schlep home.

This one isn't, though. This one has him schlepping into Big Mac's body just before "Applebuck Season."

And while this is definitely an entry in Estee's "Who Crossed Over My Little Pony?" contest in which it gained an Honorable Mention, it also might have something to do with this little TV series from the early 1990s called Quantum Leap...

Published 2022-03-29 01:00:02 UTC
Last updated 2022-03-29 01:00:02 UTC

The Harder They Fall

The bluish-white sparkles swept from Horace's eyes, but he didn't brace himself for what he might see. He'd tried that the first dozen times or so, and it just never worked.

"Consarn it!" a mare's voice with a countrified twang shouted beside him, but Horace found that he was blinking up at the side of a barn, a sight he'd known all too well several decades ago. Here, though, the hayloft door stood open near the top of the peaked roof, and so many bales of hay bulged out, he couldn't understand how they weren't bursting through the walls. "What in tarnation was Apple Bloom thinking?" this voice continued. "She trying to get a cutie mark in hay cramming?"

Horace glanced over to see a beat-up Stetson hat; he had to tip his head downward to see the cider-orange mare wearing it. So either she was really short, or the body he'd schlepped into was really tall.

A creaking groan pulled his attention back up to the loft. The bales were quivering, the bulge larger than when he'd first seen it a few seconds ago, and the quick calculations popping through his head based on the rate of change between the initial conditions and what he was seeing now told him—

He caught his breath. He'd discovered early on that schlepping from dimension to dimension did things to his mind and memory. "Swiss cheesing," Mickey called it with a characteristic grin. "Minnie named it during lunch."

Mice...

But while Horace couldn't be sure with holes in his memory and all, he thought this might be the first time he'd come into another tooniverse with his mathematical skills intact.

His ears perking, he ran the calculations again just because he could, then let his ears fall when he realized what the results were saying. "Watch out!" he shouted, spinning and shoving the mare hard enough, he figured, to get her out of range.

Because that's when the side of the barn exploded, and what he estimated to be three dozen hay bales blasted out directly toward him.

"Oh, nerts," Horace muttered.

"You just rest," Applejack said, Horace gritting his teeth as he collapsed onto the bed.

He'd learned her name during her conversation with Redheart, the white mare in a nurse's hat who'd come galloping onto the scene just as Applejack was tying off the last of Horace's bandages. "We heard the blast all the way over at the hospital," Redheart had called, slowing to a halt beside them. "I figured I'd better come out and check."

Grimacing, Horace had nodded in agreement with the diagnosis of badly bruised ribs, had kept on grimacing as the two had wedged themselves on either side of him and helped him limp into the nearby house. He'd also caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror of the room they'd led him into: a big red stallion with a straw-yellow mane and a yoke around his neck.

Even through the pain, Horace had stared. It was almost exactly the same sort of collar as the one he always wore over his lab coat back home to remind everyone that he'd literally worked his way up from the mud to head the Quantum Schlep program.

"McIntosh," Nurse Redheart had called him, while Applejack—his sister, apparently—called him "Big Mac." She also called him a dang galoot and asked if he wanted to give her a heart attack.

"Nope," Horace got out through still-gritted teeth. Stretched across the bed, he really hoped she wasn't expecting him to say more than that.

Applejack nodded. "Ain't like this is the first time either of us've gotten busted up 'round here." She sighed and started for the door. "Holler if you need me." Stepping through, she turned and pulled the door closed with her teeth.

Horace stayed flat on his back for a moment, then stifling a groan, he rolled over so he could maybe begin taking stock of whatever situation the cosmos had dropped him into this time.

A mechanical click and whoosh pulled his attention to the other side of the room, and a flat, bluish-white rectangle slid into being in the empty air. "Whoa, now, Horace," a familiar high-pitched voice said, and Mickey stepped through the shimmer, just the sight of his bright red trousers and jacket over that black t-shirt making Horace relax a bit. "From what this Big Mac fella told Daisy in the waiting room," Mickey was going on, the Imaging Chamber door sliding shut and vanishing behind him, "I was expecting to see you buried under a ton or two of hay."

"Felt like it." Horace did some more grimacing and pushed himself into a sitting position. "They gave me some willow bark to chew on, but I don't suppose you've got any holographic ibuprofen you can slip me?"

"Sorry, pal." Something gave a couple out-of-tune beeps, and Mickey started. Reaching a gloved hand into his jacket, he rummaged around before pulling out a little slab of multi-colored cubes, lights flashing through it. "Looks like Minnie's already getting some info on where you are, though." The lights on the handlink suddenly fizzled out; Mickey frowned, smacked it along the side, and with a few more beeps, the lights flickered back on. "There we go!" He tapped one of the cubes. "Welcome to the magical land of Equestria!"

"Magical?" Horace blinked at the plain wallpaper, the worn floorboards, the slightly shabby window curtains. "And they're giving me willow bark for pain relief?" He rubbed his forehead with a hoof. "Don't tell me: I've schlepped into another tooniverse where someone's hoarding all the magic and I've got to get them to share, right?"

Mickey kept poking the handlink. "Magic's tricky, Horace. With your memory swiss-cheesed, maybe you don't remember that broom I keep in the corner of my office, but—" A whole series of sour notes came from the handlink, and Mickey's eyes went wide. "Actually, Minnie's saying you're likely here to get someone to accept the magic that's being offered to them."

"Huh." Back home, Horace had never been able to take magic seriously, and his schleps so far into tooniverses where it was a bigger thing hadn't changed his opinions much. It always seemed to cut out at exactly the wrong moment, its rules changing from day to day or even from hour to hour. Besides, math, physics, and good old engineering had gotten him to where he was today—or at least to where he had been before the budget cutters had forced him to activate the Quantum Schlep program early and all this nuttiness had swept him away...

Still, he could remember Mickey telling a story about an adventure he'd had with magical brooms while Horace was at university getting his second doctorate, but he somehow couldn't remember the actual content of the story. It did remind him of a much happier topic, though. "Oh, and my math skills're back. And Daisy can tell this Mac guy I got his sister clear of the blast zone before the hayloft exploded."

"Barn wrecking." Mickey gave that loopy little laugh of his. "Just like the good old days." He looked up from the handlink. "But Minnie figures the sister's the reason you're here: Applejack's her name."

"We've met." Horace gingerly touched his bandages, wrapped exactly as tight as they needed to be. "She seems pretty capable, I've got to say."

"Maybe too capable." Mickey was focused on the handlink again. "With Big Mac out of the picture and Apple Bloom, the other sister, still in school, Minnie calculates that Applejack's going to try harvesting the entire orchard herself."

Horace wrinkled his forehead. "I only caught a glimpse of the place, but it looks like a pretty big spread. You guys're sure it's just the three of them working it?"

"There's a grandmother, too, but, well, Minnie says that harvesting around here is called 'applebucking.'" Now it was Mickey's turn to grimace. "Kicking trees doesn't seem like the best thing for a senior citizen to be doing..."

"And the town?" Horace waved a hoof toward the window. "A nurse showed up after the barn blew and said she'd heard the explosion over at the hospital. To me, a hospital implies a town, and a town implies townsfolk."

"That's the problem." Mickey ran a gloved finger across the handlink. "Applejack's friends in Ponyville—"

"Ponyville?" Horace blinked. "Really?"

Mickey shrugged. "The locals refer to themselves as ponies, not horses. There's three types: earth ponies like you, pegasus ponies with wings, and unicorn ponies—"

"With magic." Horace nodded. "So her pegasus and unicorn friends offer to help, and this Applejack, she won't accept. Half the harvest rots in the trees, and if this farm's anything like the one I grew up on, they're skating pretty close to foreclosure at the best of times."

"Got it in one." Mickey was frowning at the handlink's continuing series of beeps. "It gets worse, though."

Horace tried to think of something appropriate for the level of technology he'd seen in this tooniverse so far. "They've got debtors' prisons?"

"They've got monsters." Mickey's frown had turned to a scowl. "Applejack and her friends met when they were saving Equestria from an ensorcelled princess, and it was their unity that broke the spell to bring the princess back. When the Apple family loses the farm, Minnie's calculating that they'll end up in a place halfway across the continent called Appleloosa. So when the next monster shows up—and another monster always shows up in tooniverses like this..." Mickey raised his scowl. "Applejack and her friends won't be together, and Minnie's prediction models aren't finding any scenarios where Equestria survives that."

Memories prodding him, Horace carefully shook his head. "Pride. Yeah, I've been there, trying to show those snobs at the university that I was more than just some mud-hoofed plow horse..." Sucking in a breath, he pushed himself off the bed and onto all fours. "So I just need to convince Applejack that it's in her best interests to let her friends help out around the place while I'm incapacitated." The stabbing pain when he shrugged snapped his teeth together. "Simple, right?"

"Don't you use your fancy mathematics to muddy the issue!" Applejack shouted, her voice rising and hardening. "I said I could handle this harvest, and I'm gonna prove it to you!"

The words ringing in his ears, Horace walked back to the house under the almost-too-blue skies and ground his teeth. "Plan B, I guess," he muttered once he figured he was far enough away to keep Applejack from overhearing.

Being a holographic projection, Mickey could've just floated alongside him, Horace knew, but he always made the effort to look like he was walking. "Plan B?" he asked. "You mean talk to her friends in Ponyville? Get them to offer their help earlier and more often?"

Horace shook his head. "Like I said, I've been in her horseshoes. The more they offer, the louder she'll shoot them down."

"Yeah." The sigh in Mickey's voice made Horace glance over, but he was just looking at the handlink. He seemed to notice Horace's gaze, though, and turned a perkier expression toward him. "So what's Plan B?"

"Wear her out." He flipped Mac's mane, longer than he ever wore his, back toward Applejack still looking out over the hills, covered with apple trees as far as the eye could see. "You heard her, right? Calling herself the loyalest of friends and most dependable of ponies? Anything that goes wrong around here or around Ponyville, she'll feel obliged to try fixing it. So we need to create a few situations that'll get her away from the orchard and absolutely exhaust her." He blew out a breath. "Some of us don't see sense till it gets slammed into both ears and stomped up our noses, so that's exactly what we need to do here."

"Uhhh..." Mickey raised one finger. "Just to be clear, we're not talking actual slamming and stomping, are we?"

Grinning, Horace nodded to the handlink. "What've they got for cows and snakes in this tooniverse?"

And for all that crouching in the bushes and peering out at the herd of cows peacefully grazing flashed an instant image through Horace's head of a bovine face with mascaraed eyes and sweet, smiling lips, the picture was gone down one of his memory holes before he could do more than blink. So he did blink, then he let loose the snake he'd bottled up on his way through the woods.

It was a terrific stampede, and just as Horace had calculated, their path led them straight toward the little town he'd skirted earlier. Not that he could stand around watching: as soon as he heard a "Yee-haw!" and saw Applejack leap into the middle of the fray, he headed back the way he'd come and almost pulled more rib muscles dragging hammers, saws, and lumber out into the farmyard in front of the barn.

He barely got it all set up before Applejack came trotting in from the direction of town, her breath a little short. "What in tarnation?" she asked.

"Well?" he said, wincing more than he needed to and putting more strain in his voice. "I can't harvest, but the barn needs fixing. So—"

"So nothing." She marched up and put a hoof down on the hammer. "You're strictly off duty the next couple days, mister."

"But Applejack," he started, then spent the rest of the afternoon watching from his window as she replaced the broken boards.

She didn't say a word when he had supper waiting for her—he hadn't cooked in a long while, but apparently what he'd picked up hanging around the farm's kitchen as a foal had come back with his math skills—and he didn't say a word when she turned around after eating and headed through the darkening evening toward the orchard.

The next day, she was gone by the time he got up to make her breakfast, but she did come in for lunch. "Just a sandwich," she said, her eyelids drooping. "I gotta get back out there."

Horace scowled gently at her with her brother's face. "I'll have a proper supper ready tonight."

She nodded, but when she came in from the orchards that evening, her tail dragging, he had the farmyard all set up so the first thing she would see was the mess of red paint he'd made along the side of the barn. "Consarn it, Mac!" he heard her shout downstairs as he moved away from the window and settled himself across the bed. Her hoof beats shook the house, but the agonizing expression he was carefully displaying, he was sure, made her lower her voice when she stomped in. Of course, she still called him a dang galoot again and asked him what he was playing at.

"I can't just lay here," he said, putting as much strain as he could into the words. "Not while you're—"

"I'm fine!" she told him...though the circles under her eyes and the thick, salty stink from her hide and hair said otherwise. "But I sure won't be if my idiot brother don't get it through his thick skull in one quick hurry that he's too hurt right now to do anything but rest!"

He nodded, his eyes clenched and his gritted teeth showing; he only let himself relax when he heard her clomping away down the stairs.

Standing beside the bed, Mickey was nothing but a projection reaching across the tooniverses, of course, but his sigh was big enough that Horace could've sworn he felt it gust against him. "I don't know about this, Horace..."

"Trust me." Horace rolled to his hooves and crept to the door. "We need to wear her out quickly and completely, or she'll never give in and let anyone help her." Taking a breath, he pressed his ear to the thinnest part of the wood paneling. "That's why it's vital to calculate her current stubbornness-to-exhaustion ratio."

"Her what?"

"If she's more stubborn than exhausted, she'll settle for another quick sandwich and get back out to work, maybe even finish painting the barn before she heads for the orchards." Unable to pick up any meaningful data through the door, he turned and crossed the room to the window. "If exhaustion's winning out, though, she'll be logical about it and settle in for a more substantial meal. That's what we want, but I don't expect to see it this early in the—"

The rattle-creak of the kitchen door opening made him bite off his words, Applejack marching from the house toward the barn. "Yeah, so much for logic," he muttered.

"And you're sure this is the best way to go?" Mickey asked behind him.

Not looking away from her, Horace nodded. "Like I said, I've been there myself."

For the rest of the week, then, he kept it up: put moth grubs in the flour so she'd have to head into town to restock; set a pipe to dripping above where they stored the baskets so the bottoms would turn to mush and she'd have to reweave them with fresh straw; clogged the kitchen sink with a mixture of dog and horse hair so she'd have to wrench off the pipes and flush them out. Farms had a thousand things that could go wrong, after all, and Horace was sure he'd seen most of them before he'd left for school.

So, by the start of the next week, when Ponyville held their ceremony honoring Applejack for saving the town from the stampede, he watched her sleepwalk through it from the edge of the crowd and felt that things were heading in the right direction. Not much later, though, hidden behind one of the larger apple trees, he heard her shoot down that purple unicorn's offer to help.

Stifling the urge to rush out there and tell Applejack she was being an idiot—when he'd insisted that he was going to pay his way through the university himself, he recalled, getting called an idiot had only strengthened his resolve—Horace instead turned away, his sides barely twinging at all by now. Of course he'd kept up the act, pretending to reinjure himself every few days so Applejack wouldn't have a moment's rest, but he could see now that she was going to need more than that.

A silver rectangle slid open in the air ahead, and Mickey stepped through, his wrinkled brow pointed at the handlink. "Minnie's calculations aren't good, Horace," he said.

He'd come a few dozen steps deeper into the orchard by then, but he still kept his voice down. "Applejack just turned down the first of her friends," he muttered.

Mickey blew out a breath. "The probability clouds ahead keep getting darker." He looked up. "But you're her brother, right? Maybe you could go around to her friends, get them to start working in the parts of the fields where Applejack isn't. That way, the harvest'll get done and we'll save the farm without her having to—"

"No." About this, Horace was certain. "This isn't just about apples, Mick. If Applejack doesn't see that she needs her friends, what sort of monster fighting team are they likely to be? And besides, going behind her back?" He shook his head. "She'll resent it. Not out loud or to their faces or anything, but it'll fester inside her, this idea that her friends didn't trust her to get the job done."

Those big, round ears drooping, Mickey blinked at him. "Resent it? Really?"

"Yeah." Horace briefly wondered why he was so certain of this, but with all the apples around him needing to come out of the trees now, there wasn't time for any deep thinking. "The only solution here is for her to accept that she can't get the job done. We need to lead her to a place where she can consciously make the decision to ask for help, or this'll taint her relationship with her friends for years to come."

His mouth sideways, Mickey held up the handlink. "Well, she doesn't seem to be heading to that place yet."

Horace gave Mickey a grin he didn't quite feel. "Looks like it's Plan C, then."

Mickey raised one eyebrow.

"Sabotage," Horace said.

From the edge of town, Mickey's continued fretting came clearly to Horace at the base of the contraption's tower: "This is a really, really, really bad idea, Horace."

Looking up at the platform four stories above, Horace nodded. "It's a problem with the design." He stepped over to the fulcrum of the giant seesaw, and using Big Mac's prodigious strength, he shoved it another two centimeters to the side. "Any slight misalignment, and the whole thing doesn't work."

A sour note from the handlink, and Mickey popped up frowning right beside Horace. "That's not what I meant, and you know it."

Horace glanced around to make sure the place was still deserted before asking, "Are they coming?"

Mickey shook his head. "That pegasus—" The handlink gave another blorch; Mickey looked at it, and his mouth went sideways. "Whose name, of course, is Rainbow Dash, thank you, Minnie." He waved a gloved hand back toward the buildings. "She's still perched on a fence post over there tapping her hoof and waiting."

"Good." Horace started away from the device.

"Good because Applejack might not show up?" Mickey asked, moving to walk alongside, the sound of his shoes shuffling on the floor of the Imaging Chamber multiple tooniverses away making Horace swallow. So close, but so far...

Grinding his teeth, Horace forced his thoughts back on point. "She'll show up. And yes, she'll kiss a little dirt when she jumps off that tower and misses the other end of the seesaw. But the way I only got a couple bruised ribs from all those hay bales last week shows that this is a squash-and-stretch tooniverse rather than one of the deadlier sorts. She'll only get more disoriented, and that's exactly what we want."

"I suppose..." Mickey sighed. "She'll definitely be asking for help with the harvest afterwards anyway."

They were coming back into town by then, ponies smiling and waving and calling out to Big Mac as Horace passed them. Fortunately, he'd discovered that this Mac guy was well-known as the strong, silent type, so he didn't feel bad when he smiled in return, nodded, and kept on going.

Of course, he couldn't talk to Mickey with all these folks around, but, well, as far as Horace could tell with his faulty memory, the two of them had always kind of communicated like this, Mickey talking while Horace didn't. "So," Mickey was saying, "I'll guess that we're heading somewhere for more sabotage in case a couple belly flops into the ground from four stories up isn't enough to convince her, huh?"

Horace gave as nonchalant a jerk of his head as he could manage, Sugarcube Corner coming into sight ahead. He'd used the past week to get the lay of the land in and around Ponyville, and after Applejack's friends at the award ceremony had talked about where and how she was going to be helping them, he'd come up with some quick ways to make things go wrong. Realigning that catapult, switching the sugar and salt at the bakery, getting another snake to stir up the bunny census: they were nice and simple and straightforward and ought to be enough to get Applejack and the townsfolk all seeing that she needed help.

But instead, Horace was astonished that, after sending her pegasus friend hurtling straight into one of the biggest trees he'd ever seen, Applejack proved herself capable of fouling things up even more completely on her own. Watching from the bushes outside the bakery as she accidentally turned the muffin batter into a mulch pile, he changed his plans and made his way over to the urgent care center just in time to lend a hoof when the sick ponies started streaming in.

He gave Mickey a significant look, and Mickey nodded. "Stand by!" he squeaked, the blue-white rectangle appearing behind him. "I'm shutting down the Imaging Chamber so Minnie can use every watt of power calculating the odds! But I'll be back as soon as we know if this is the tipping point or not!" He practically sprinted through the door, and it slid shut, taking him from Horace's sight.

As always, it sent a shiver through him when Mickey left, but he knew he'd be back. He was Mickey, after all. And besides, with more groaning, green-faced ponies showing up every moment, Horace didn't have time to dwell on it.

He was still carefully administering ipecac, in fact, when the ground started shaking and the bunny stampede he hadn't had a chance to set up yet came crashing past, heading for the center of town.

And if that didn't make this the tipping point, then Horace had never seen one. "Sorry, Redheart," he said after setting down the bottle he'd had clenched in his teeth and recorking it. "I've got to check on Applejack."

"Please do," the nurse said, her mouth a thin black line, "or next she'll somehow unleash a blizzard."

Turning and racing for the farm, he only managed a couple dozen steps before the Imaging Room door slid open and Mickey hopped out, hitting the ground running. "Minnie says we've got one chance! Either Applejack tips now, or she doesn't tip at all!"

Horace nodded and panted out, "Plan D, then!"

Mickey looked over. "Do I want to ask?"

"You don't!" Picking up his pace, Horace thought frantically the whole way out to Sweet Apple Acres, but no Plan D had come to him by the time he charged through the farmyard's front gate.

"Huh!" Mickey gestured. "Would you look at that!"

It took Horace a second of blinking, but then he realized that nearly half the orchard had actually been harvested. Of course, the smell of ripening fruit in the air told him that the rest of those apples needed picking in the next twenty-four hours, so he slowed to a trot, headed for the row of hills that separated the green trees from those still spotted with red, and there, he could pick out two quadrupedal figures: Applejack's cider orange and the purple of her unicorn friend, the one who'd already offered to help out around here at least twice—Twilight Sparkle, he thought was the name he'd heard during the week he'd been lumbering around town with his midsection all bandaged up.

He managed to catch his breath by the time he got close enough to hear the two arguing, Twilight listing all the disasters Applejack had been a part of recently—in a remarkably alliterative fashion, too—and insisting that Applejack needed help.

"Ha!" Applejack replied. "No, I don't! Look! I did it!" She gestured to the empty half of the orchard. "I harvested the entire Sweet Apple Acres without your help!" With a gasping sort of a laugh, she narrowed her eyes. "How d'you like them apples?"

"Um," Horace offered, waiting till Applejack had swung an astonished look toward him before he turned his head to direct her attention to the trees, still heavy with fruit, that filled the hills behind them. "How do you like them apples?"

Applejack stared, her jaw dropping and her eyes literally rolling around in her head. Then with a few unintelligible words, she dropped to the grass like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

"Applejack?" Twilight called, stepping forward to peer at the other pony's slack features, and Horace held his breath. Not that he was worried about her physical well-being, but if this didn't convince her...

She stirred and blinked and interrupted Twilight's speech about respecting Apple family ways by saying, "OK, Twilight." She then literally pressed her front hooves together asking Twilight please to help, and Horace could feel the atmospheric pressure let up as suddenly as a warm front rolling through.

"Got it," Mickey said quietly, poking a few almost-musical notes from the handlink. "Minnie says all her calculations are clearing right up. I mean, they've still likely got monsters on the way, but it looks like they'll all be right here to face 'em together."

Twilight was helping Applejack to her hooves, and the two started down the hill side by side, Applejack hanging her head and Twilight telling her not to worry. "Plan D," Horace muttered when he figured they were far enough away not to overhear. "The sudden realization. That's what it took when I kept saying I was going to pay my own way to the university." He turned to grin at Mickey—

And it was like a jigsaw puzzle snapping together in his head, pieces popping out of nowhere and lining up to form memories that collapsed his grin. "You," he said after finding his tongue. "On the farm. When I was a plow horse, you...you were my driver. Minnie did mending and kept the books, Daisy worked in the kitchen, and..." There'd been another duck, a drake who always wore a sailor suit, and a cow whose smiling lips flashed before him and vanished again.

Another shake of his head got his thoughts back in order. "I was so wrapped up in pride, I insisted that I could take care of my tuition and everything myself. But then it turned out that I couldn't, and I...I dragged myself into the bunkhouse, practically had to pry my own mouth open to ask you guys for help. And you...you gave me a bank book, said you'd pooled your money and it was...was all mine now..."

Mickey gave a grin of his own. "I was the one saying we should give it to you right away, but the others said we should wait till you asked, that you'd resent it if we did it before you were ready. Clarabelle really put her hoof down about it."

"Clarabelle!" And if his previous memories had been a jigsaw puzzle, these were fireworks, bursting through his mind with images of her, the sound of her voice, the sweet touch of her lips on his. "Mickey! Is...is she all right? Do you know if she's—?"

"She's staying at Minnie's place." Mickey's grin got a little wavery, and Horace gasped to see little blue and white glowing specks popping up around him. "We're all working together," Mickey was going on, his voice rising above the whoosh of the specks turning to streaks. "Wherever you end up, buddy, we'll find you! And whatever it takes, we'll figure out how to get you home!"

"Tell Clarabelle I love her!" Horace called, everything dissolving into blues and whites. "All you guys! You're the best!"

The bluish-white sparkles swept from Horace's eyes, and he wondered why his cheeks were wet. Had he been crying?

No, it was probably just a reaction to the smoke. Blinking against it, he found that he was looking at a large bonfire, a number of quadrupedal animals—pigs, dogs, cows—sort of dancing around it. There were sheep, too, he saw now, and they were chanting, "Four legs good, two legs bad! Four legs good, two legs bad!"

"Oh, nerts," Horace muttered.

Author's Note

The problem with:

Writing a story that displays Horace Horsecollar's original personality is that he didn't really have one. From his first cartoons in the late 1920s, he was kind of short tempered, but in 1934, Donald Duck came along and turned "short-tempered" into an artform. Horace also had a slight tendency to think he could handle situations better than he maybe could, but again, a few years later, Goofy appeared and really made that particular shtick work.

"A cheerful know-it-all," Horace's Wikipedia page calls him, but he really only started being that just as he began disappearing from the cartoons in the early 1940s. Still, I've tried to incorporate as many of his incarnations as I could and made him into Dr. Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap, too. Because, I mean, why wouldn't I? :eeyup:

Mike