Of Heroes and Magic

Chapters

Chapter I: Multidimensional
Chapter II: The Bakugo Wilderness Survival Guide
Chapter III: Dreams
Chapter IV: Awakening in a New World
Chapter V: A Ruined Castle
Chapter VI: First Contact

Chapter I: Multidimensional

"In geometry, a hypersurface is a generalization of the concepts of hyperplane, plane curve, and surface. A hypersurface is a manifold or an algebraic variety of dimension n − 1, which is embedded in an ambient space of dimension n, generally a Euclidean space..."
-Wikipedia, "Hypersurface"

Ida Tenya was having a bad day. He was unsure whether he would later look back on this as the worst day, but it was certainly in his top five. Today, after all, marked the second time his class had been attacked by villains, and the third time he, personally, had encountered them. Those three incidents, along with the day of this year’s Sports Festival when he learned of his brother’s injury, made up four of his top five worst days of all time.

The fifth was the day that Tensei broke the news to him that Santa wasn’t real. It was a formative memory and Tenya was still of the opinion that maintaining the lie in the first place was detrimental!

Regardless, much like the USJ and Hosu incidents, this attack on their summer camp sprang from nowhere. The random lottery had placed him and Hagakure on a team for the test of courage, and while he would freely admit to having been startled by several of Class 1-B’s antics, the invisible girl behind him had seemed to screech at every passing noise.

Her heightened awareness from fright saved them, however, as when a pink gas began spreading through the forest, Hagakure noticed it first and proceeded to inform him with another shriek. He had paid close attention to his sister class’s quirks during the second round of the Sports Festival to avoid surprise, so Tenya was certain that this wasn’t the work of another student. None of the pros with them had a quirk like this (and they weren’t supposed to be involved in this event, anyway), and Tenya doubted that Kota would freely participate in anything involving his class. Thus, only one possibility remained:

His class was being attacked by villains.

Again.

So Tenya did the sensible thing. He deduced that the gas was likely dangerous quickly enough to pick Hagakure up, activate [Engine], and flee. Unfortunately, their positioning in the path forced Tenya to run further into the woods, skirting around the low-hanging cloud as he dodged around trees and rocks. He had to stay mindful of Hagakure’s positioning in his arms as well—her invisibility made it difficult to judge whether or not any given obstacle might bump into her.

Thankfully, he had already explored quite a bit of the Beast’s Forest during training over the past couple of days, and was by this point well-experienced in using his quirk in the woods. Still, the gas cloud was large enough and mobile enough to delay his attempts to return to the camp by a few minutes.

When he arrived at the starting area of the test of courage, the fighting seemed to already be over. Pixie-Bob was unconscious from a head wound, though Mandalay was tending to her while Tiger used [Pilabody] to keep the two unconscious villains restrained.

After a moment, Hagakure coughed. “Uh, Ida? You can probably put me down, now.”

There was another beat of silence before Tenya flushed in embarrassment that his first instinct to extract her was to pick her up bridal style. Still, he made sure to avoid dropping her, at least, as he hurriedly allowed her to stand up herself. Almost immediately, he adjusted his glasses and bowed. “I must apologize for any impropriety, Hagakure!”

The invisible girl scoffed amusedly. “It’s cool, don’t worry.”

Before Tenya could go any further with his apologies, Mandalay cut in. “You two kittens should get back to the lodge.”

Hagakure seemed to nod along with that, if Tenya was reading her body language properly, but he himself frowned. “How many are still in the woods?” he asked. “If needed, I can extract-”

“Regardless of how fast you are, I am not authorizing a student to actively put themselves at risk running into a villain attack!” Mandalay cut in.

That…was fair, Tenya considered. As much as he desired to help his classmates, he would do no good if he took himself out in the process. Hagakure almost immediately ran off on the path to the lodge, and he was about to follow before Tiger spoke.

“Not that that stopped Midoriya,” He grumbled under his breath. “What the hell was he thinking running in with two broken arms?” Clearly Tenya hadn’t been meant to hear that, but it was still loud enough for him to just barely make out. Mandalay shot him a look as Tenya stopped, his emotions suddenly—and strongly—conflicting with his logic.

Midoriya had run back into the woods. Midoriya, who had proven himself far more heroic than Tenya during the entrance exam when he broke himself to save Uraraka. Midoriya, who had positively mangled his hand during the Sports Festival just to break through to Todoroki. Midoriya, who had risked life and limb to save Tenya from himself in Hosu. And now, presumably after facing down some other villain and down two limbs, he still ran back into the fray to save more people.

Midoriya’s motivations, Tenya knew, were far different from what his own were in Hosu. But his attempt to deliver vigilante justice unto Stain and Midoriya running into a villain attack with both his arms broken would have the same result: both were effectively suicidal charges. And when Tenya broke the rules and got himself in over his head, Midoriya had put himself at risk to save him.

So how could Tenya call himself Midoriya’s friend if he didn’t return the favor?

Mandalay had apparently caught onto his thought process and wasted no time making her displeasure known. “Ida, don’t-”

“I’m sorry, Mandalay,” Tenya apologized, “but Midoriya is my closest friend. I cannot allow him to face this alone.”

Any of Mandalay’s further orders were lost on the wind as Tenya fired up [Engine] and sped off into the trees.

Uraraka Ochako started running as soon as Aoyama’s laser hit the magician villain, but she could tell that she and Tsu were going to be too late. Shoji had managed to grab one of the marbles but the fire villain was too fast and got the other before Todoroki could. And now Kurogiri was preparing to warp and the villains were going to get away all because they weren’t fast enough.

She heard an engine behind her, and quickly glanced over her shoulder before she allowed herself to regain some hope. Ida was there and quickly approaching! Maybe they still had a chance!

Looking back ahead, Ochako tried to put together a plan as quickly as she could. Back at the USJ, when she had hit Kurogiri with [Zero Gravity], it seemed to interrupt his warp. At the very least, he had been distracted enough to not stop Ida from retreating. It wasn’t much to go on, but it had to be enough; the fire villain had his hand around Bakugo’s neck and Kurogiri’s mist was starting to spread.

This probably wouldn’t be any better than Deku’s earlier plan, but it was something! She wrapped her right hand around her left arm, negating her gravity and doing her best to ignore the sudden bout of nausea that came with it—Ochako blamed the blood loss and desperation for momentarily forgetting about that side effect of her quirk. Still, she pushed through it and hoped beyond hope that Ida was close enough to hear her as she shouted. “Ida, throw me at Kurogiri!”

She felt her friend grab her and, thankfully not questioning it, hurl her forward. The throw added to Ida’s already considerable speed, and within a second Ochako had broken out of the trees and into the clearing. But Ida’s aim had been off, and for half a moment she despaired that, despite everything, they were still going to lose.

Then Tsu’s tongue slammed into her side, and Ochako’s trajectory was redirected.

Her entry had been swift enough that none of the villains had time to properly react, and Ochako reached out, her left hand splayed to activate her quirk as Ida and Tsu were entering the clearing. Her fingers brushed against Kurogiri’s metal brace just as he dissolved into mist.

[Zero Gravity] and [Warp Gate] activated simultaneously.

Under most people’s ideas of physics, gravity is a fundamental force of the universe, alongside electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. While this is sufficient for most cases—Newtonian gravity was good enough to get humanity to the Moon, after all—the idea of gravity being a force at all is fundamentally flawed. In 1915, Albert Einstein published “The Field Equations of Gravitation,” in which he detailed his theory of general relativity, turning humanity’s understanding of gravity on its head. It introduced the idea of spacetime, a four-dimensional manifold that makes up the fabric of reality itself, containing all of three-dimensional space along with one dimension of time.

The global curvature of this manifold was a hotly debated topic among physicists for decades, but later calculations confirmed that, as far as humanity could tell, the universe is flat. One could approximate it with a four-dimensional hyperplane.

Locally, however, reality is curved. Gravity is the effect of energy, which warps and curves the hypersurface of the universe, on spacetime. This is barely noticeable at planetary scales—the entire Earth only curves local spacetime by about one part per million—though around extremely dense objects like neutron stars and especially black holes, the curvature is noticeable even to the naked eye.

[Warp Gate], however, abuses this fact of reality to an extreme degree. In a range of around four hundred kilometers, Kurogiri can temporarily link two points in four-dimensional space such that they occupy the same three-dimensional coordinates. For a lower dimensional analogue, one can imagine folding a piece of paper to force two points together, an analogy that many before have heard to describe a wormhole. Creating wormholes is, after all, effectively what [Warp Gate] does.

[Zero Gravity], on the other hand, is far more subtle in its manipulations of spacetime. In order to conserve energy and both angular and linear momentum while maintaining the observable effects, [Zero Gravity] constantly shifts the spacetime around an object under its effect to keep it tethered to the Sun and to Earth’s rotation. Otherwise, any object Uraraka Ochako affected would become decoupled from Earth’s orbit and spin.

Unfortunately for everyone in the clearing that fateful Tuesday night, [Zero Gravity]’s subtle effects on spacetime were still enough to disrupt [Warp Gate]’s more overt effects. Spacetime almost snapped back to its natural configuration just as Kurogiri was beginning to open a wormhole, sending a small gravitational wave through the Earth and greatly confusing the few scientists still keeping an eye on LIGO. [Warp Gate], however, was still active and searching for valid coordinates to warp to. Ordinarily, this would not be a problem, but Uraraka Ochako had interrupted Kurogiri in the small amount of time it took to actually open a gate, leaving his quirk searching for coordinates off of the manifold of the universe.

And none involved had yet considered that there may be more than three spatial dimensions.

On another manifold, in another world, infinitely far away in three dimensions but only twenty-three kilometers away in an orthogonal fourth, the Tree of Harmony pulsed as its Elements were returned to it. A blast of harmony magic destroyed the many plundervines that had begun snaking their way across Equestria, releasing the Princesses and allowing Luna’s starry night to take hold. Unbeknownst to everypony, however, said blast of harmony magic was not limited to three-dimensional space and, in a cosmic coincidence, coincided with Uraraka Ochako activating her quirk on Kurogiri.

And [Warp Gate], ever eager to serve its master and attracted to this energy blast, took the first chance it had to find a valid set of coordinates and pulled.

Discord, lounging in his home in Chaosville, sat bolt upright as he felt something yank on the fabric of reality. Snapping his paw, he slowed time to get a proper look-see at whoever was trying to break into Equestria’s reality. He was rather fond of it, nowadays, or at the very least a pony living in it, and as much as he loved a good bit of chaos damaging reality itself for it wouldn’t be worth it. After all, he couldn’t mess with ponies if there weren’t any ponies to mess with!

The draconequus hummed in thought as he flashed into the landing site and inspected the newly-formed wormhole. It was effectively the same effect as any other teleporter, even if it was coming from outside of the universe. But oh what was on the other end was fascinating indeed. Humans! He hadn’t messed with that species in millennia! Oh, if only Jean-Luc was still around.

Still, these new humans seemed a bit at odds with each other, what with one of them having his hand around another’s neck and by the stars those were a lot of burns. There were other injuries as well, but Discord could at least clearly tell who was attacking who with a tiny bit of mind reading. It would be a trivial matter to separate the two groups, at least, but by now he couldn’t stop them from coming through unless he put a lot of effort into it. Even for a creature as magnificent as him, transdimensional travel still took a lot out of him.

Meh, he couldn’t really be bothered. As long as Fluttershy was safe he didn’t really care. He waved his talon and wrenched the wormhole into having two openings and, after making sure that all of the humans were alive and made it through, teleported himself back to Chaosville.

He, of course, already had a bucket of popcorn prepared. Humans! In Equestria! Oh, this was going to be glorious.

In the Beast’s Forest, Aoyama Yuga, Frenchman, hero student, and unwilling spy for All For One, stared blankly at the space the villains and his classmates had been in only moments before. Trembling, he forced himself out of the bush he was hiding in and stumbled as he forced back the bile rising in his throat.

Eight. Eight of his classmates had just been kidnapped, two of whom had had serious injuries! Shoji was missing an arm and Midoriya’s were both broken, and now they were at the mercy of villains. And it was entirely his fault. He had given the League their location, after all.

The faces of his classmates flashed through his mind. The shock on Tokoyami’s after he had been unmarbled. Midoriya’s despair at failing to save Bakugo. Everyone's relief when Uraraka came flying in. The sheer determination in her expression. And everyone’s surprised faces when Kurogiri just took them all.

Yuga stumbled again, fighting back the urge to vomit from the stress. He…he couldn’t do this anymore. He couldn’t keep giving information to All For One. Not after this. He would have to turn himself in.

This time, Yuga actually did vomit into a nearby bush as the thought crossed his mind. If he did this, if he went to the heroes and gave himself up…

All For One would almost certainly kill his parents.

Whimpering, an indecisive Yuga found a tree to sit against.

“Merde.”

In a bar in Yokohama, Shigaraki Tomura scratched at his neck in annoyance. Kurogiri had come back with Magne and Spinner—who both had been knocked the fuck out, disappointingly—and apparently had already delivered the chainsaw Nomu to Sensei. So why the hell was he taking so long to grab the objective and get back?

The clock on the wall continued to tick annoyingly and Tomura’s scratching increased. “Where the fuck is the rest of my party?”

The television in the back remained silent.

In a warehouse in Kamino Ward, All For One frowned. He almost constantly used a mental quirk to keep his Nomu in line, and it was particularly useful for keeping an eye on Kurogiri. He may have still been a Nomu, but he was sapient enough to be potentially worrying, and All For One did not want to risk his best warper to the possibility of Shirakumo Oboro’s consciousness resurfacing, as low of a risk as that was.

Shirakumo had already been dead for hours when the Doctor operated on him, after all.

But still, something had happened to the mental connection he shared with Kurogiri. Either the warper was unconscious, which would be a minor setback to his plans, or dead—well, more dead than he was already—which would be a major setback to his plans. Regardless, it would be a good idea to get a read on his location.

Truly, he couldn’t wait until Tomura’s little league got back to him with [Search].

Shifting, All For One looked towards Doctor Garaki, all the while mentally cursing the buffoon for taking his eyes six years prior. [Thermal Vision] was simply not comparable to normal eyesight, but he made do. “Doctor,” All For One spoke, and Garaki immediately turned around to face him. [Thermal Vision] couldn’t make out much detail, but [Empathy] let All For One know that his doctor was showing, somewhat surprisingly, trace amounts of fear.

Now, someone fearing All For One was not a novel occurrence. He was a one hundred forty-three-year-old supervillain who made a name for himself stealing quirks and had ruled the Japanese underworld for over a century. But Doctor Kyudai Garaki was one of the few people who never feared him. In fact, the only time All For One ever recalled Garaki showing fear was when confronted with something he truly couldn’t understand.

“Yes, Master?” Garaki asked.

“Do we have Kurogiri’s location?”

Garaki gulped, actually gulped, and All For One knew he had immediately hit the nail on the head. “No.”

All For One hummed. “Is the signal being blocked, perhaps?”

“That’s…doubtful,” Garaki said. “That tracker had dozens of failsafes that would have at least triggered first before the signal cut.” He looked back at one of his screens. This setup was rather different from his usual lab, but the pair were preparing for what All For One knew would be the end of All Might, so they had to compromise with the warehouse. “The signal was just…gone.”

And in a clearing in the Everfree Forest, not far from the Castle of the Two Sisters, eight high schoolers fell out of a purple, misty portal that promptly vanished. Immediately, one let out an involuntary wail of pain as his already severely battered and broken right arm wound up wedged underneath him.

Uraraka Ochako was the first to move in response to Deku’s cry, quickly negating his gravity and floating the weight off of his arm. All he could do was let out a pained whimper in response, and Ochako felt her heart shatter at the noise.

It wasn’t long before the adrenaline started to wear off and, the danger seeming to have passed, Deku passed out from the pain.

The others were quick to push themselves to their feet as well, and Todoroki lit his left hand to offer some light when the darkness around Tokoyami began writhing too much. It took a few seconds, but Shoji was the one to eventually ask the question everyone was thinking.

“Where are we?”

It was still nighttime, but the forest they were in wasn’t anything like the Beast’s Forest. The very air around them felt oppressive, like they were constantly being watched. The trees were different too, but Ochako wasn’t well-versed enough in botany to be able to tell the species.

What she was well-versed in, however, was astronomy. And looking up, her heart fell. There weren’t any constellations she immediately recognized. No Sagittarius, no Ursa Major, no Cygnus.

Alright, fine, maybe that just meant they were in the southern hemisphere? Except…she couldn’t see the Southern Cross either…or the Milky Way, for that matter.

Finally, dread beginning to pool in her heart, Ochako looked to the Moon and almost physically recoiled. The crater patterns were wrong, and the Oceanus Procellarum just straight-up didn’t exist. And on top of everything else, it was far, far too big in the sky.

Fuck.

“Guys,” she said, snapping everyone’s attention to her, “the stars are wrong.”

“The fuck does that one mean, Round Face?”

Ochako lowered her gaze, but couldn’t bring herself to meet anyone’s eyes as her voice wavered. “The stars are wrong,” she repeated. “We’re not on Earth.”

Author's Note

Hello, everyone! I am here with more crossover shenanigans! This time between MLP and MHA! Which I...still haven't seen past Season 3 but I've read enough fanfiction for it and scoured the wiki enough to know pretty much the entire story past that.

Also, don't worry too much about aPPPPoPP; I will get back to that, but this idea has been bouncing around in my brain for a while and I had to get it down, lest it become all I think about.

Oh, and for a full list of the eight students that were brought to Equestria, because this chapter doesn't focus too much on exploring exactly who was in every scene:
Midoriya Izuku, Uraraka Ochako, Ida Tenya, Asui Tsuyu, Todoroki Shoto, Bakugo Katsuki, Shoji Mezo, and Tokoyami Fumikage (and Dark Shadow with him).

In any case, I hope to see y'all again soon!

Chapter II: The Bakugo Wilderness Survival Guide

"A forest is an ecosystem characterized by a dense community of trees. Hundreds of definitions of forest are used throughout the world..."
-Wikipedia, "Forest"

There were a few seconds of blessed silence before the screaming inevitably started.

“WHAT THE FUCK?”

“We’re not on Earth?”

“But the idea of any interstellar-capable warp quirk is preposterous!”

“I make gravity my bitch and Todoroki completely ignores thermodynamics but you’re drawing the line at FTL travel?”

Everyone’s gazes snapped to Uraraka, taken aback by the swear.

She blinked in confusion before realization dawned on her face and she blushed. “I grew up around construction workers and I’m under a lot of stress right now, cut me some slack for forgetting to mind my language.”

Before anyone could recover enough to comment on that, Todoroki apparently decided that he wanted people’s bewildered attention instead.

“What if the night sky is an illusion maintained by world governments so they can make money off of people who believe in star signs?”

No one seemed to have a coherent response to that for a solid ten seconds as everyone just stared at him. “I…what?” Uraraka asked, completely befuddled.

Todoroki frowned, confused. “When I asked Fuyumi for advice on building and maintaining friendships she told me that cracking a joke can relieve tension.” His voice was as deadpan as usual, even as his eyebrows furrowed in thought. “And Natsuo once told me that stating something obviously false like that is considered funny.”

“Oh, so are all your conspiracy theories jokes, kero?” Tsu asked. “Like thinking that All Might and Midoriya are rela-”

“I fully stand by my theory that All Might is Midoriya’s father and nothing short of meeting this ‘Midoriya Hisashi’ in person will convince me otherwise.”

Once again conversation stalled, giving way to the ambient noises of the forest. Or it would have if not for Bakugo’s steadily rising volume of growling drowning out those ambient noises, that last comment from Todoroki seeming to gain his ire.

Before he could speak, however, Tokoyami Fumikage was the one to break the silence. “What a mad banquet of darkness.”

For once, Dark Shadow didn’t pipe up in his mind to call him an edgelord, for she was apparently just as perplexed as he was.

Fumikage’s statement seemed to cut through the rising tension, at least, and Bakugo just let off an annoyed sigh. “Alright, we’ll get to Icy-hot apparently not believing in Uncle Hisashi later.” Whirling around, he accusingly pointed a finger at Uraraka. “What the fuck do you mean about not being on Earth?”

Uraraka cringed and looked back up at the sky. “Exactly that,” she said. “There aren’t any constellations I recognize—northern or southern hemisphere—and the Moon is too big. And also doesn’t have the right crater patterns.”

Bakugo growled. “Well how the hell are we gonna get back?”

All at once, the reality of the situation sank in for the group. They were stuck quite possibly light-years from Earth and Kurogiri was nowhere around. Uraraka in particular paled, still desperately looking up at the sky. “I…I don’t know. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Shit.”

Tsu consolingly patted her shoulder. “You couldn’t have known, kero.”

“Yeah, but now we're trapped,” Uraraka emphasized. Her gaze returned to ground level, darting around everyone in the clearing. “We’re trapped on another planet and can’t get back and-” Her eyes landed on the unconscious Midoriya, still floating in the air from her quirk. Particularly, they landed on his arms. “And Deku’s hurt.”

She took a step forward, probably to reach out to him, and immediately her leg gave out. Tsu caught her before she hit the ground. “You are too, kero. You got stabbed, remember?”

Adrenaline’s a helluva drug, ain’t it? Dark Shadow said in Fumikage’s mind. She’s only just feeling the pain from getting stabbed. That blonde bitch better hope we don’t find her, else she’s gonna regret daring to hurt our friend.

Calm yourself, Dark Shadow, Fumikage commanded, wincing as he struggled to keep his quirk in line. Even though they weren’t particularly close to Uraraka, Dark Shadow had been feeling extra protective of the class since Shoji was injured.

At that thought, Fumikage had to focus once more on keeping Dark Shadow contained as he turned to look at Shoji. Todorki had given him his jacket earlier to act as an emergency tourniquet, but they would want to find something better soon. For both his injuries and the others’. “Perhaps we should take stock of our injuries before we continue with anything else,” Fumikage said.

Ida nodded in approval. “I agree! First aid is incredibly important in the field!”

“After that, we find shelter, a source of fresh water, and then we can worry about food,” Bakugo added, before grumbling at the others’ surprised looks. “What, have you extras never been camping before?”

Ida cleared his throat. “Ah, yes, Bakugo is correct. In any case, I am uninjured.”

Dark Shadow forced herself out of Fumikage without warning, but there was only a brief moment of panic before Todoroki lit his left side and she shrank to a manageable level. “Fumi and I are a-okay too!”

“Tch, Icy-hot and I made it out fine, too,” Bakugo said, his expression morphing into a feral grin. “Tooth fucker couldn’t land a single hit on us.” His gaze turned to the other four. “Obviously Deku and Shoji got hurt, but what about you two? You were fighting the knife bitch before we showed up, right?”

“I have a small cut that isn’t bleeding too bad. I can bandage it pretty easily,” Uraraka offered, an arm around Tsu to help her stand. She yawned. “But my main issue is blood loss from the syringe.”

Tsu nodded and opened her mouth, allowing her tongue to spill out of it a bit, revealing a nasty gash on it. “My tongue got cut pretty bad, kero. Not much we can do without gauze, though.”

With that, Shoji finally spoke up. “My own injury isn’t terribly severe,” he said, drawing incredulous stares from everyone as they gazed upon his missing arm. Gesturing with the other five, he removed the bloodied tourniquet to reveal new skin already covering the wound. “This was one of my extra arms; [Dupli-Arms] will have it regenerated within a day. Honestly, I’m most concerned about Midoriya.”

The teen in question was still floating, the remains of his shirt hastily wrapped around his arms in an effort to keep the breaks from getting worse. Based on the state of his right arm, though, that effort was futile. What skin they could see beyond the wrappings was purpled, looking eerily like what had happened to his hand in the Sports Festival, just applied to the entire arm.

Fumikage nodded gravely. “In combating the darkness, he seems to have given up much of his light.”

Edgelord, Dark Shadow commented.

Fumikage ignored her.

“We need something to splint his arms before we move him,” Ida commented.

Without a word, Todoroki stamped his right foot on the ground, generating an appreciable amount of ice. He carefully melted the base of two of the spikes before walking over to where Midoriya was floating, under a meter from Uraraka and Tsu. “Uraraka, float these.”

Uraraka, understanding what Todoroki was getting at, reached out at both of the ice spikes in turn, negating their gravity. Todoroki positioned the spikes next to Midoriya before taking his own shirt off, at which Uraraka blushed and looked away and Tsu let out a surprised croak.

Without any preamble, Todoroki began ripping his shirt apart. “We need something to secure the splint and I can thermoregulate the best of us here,” he explained.

“Ah, good thinking, Todoroki!” Ida praised. “That should last long enough for us to find splints that won’t melt.”

“I can get started looking for a cave or some shit while you take care of that,” Bakugo volunteered.

Uraraka yawned again. “Right, guess we’re following the Bakugo Wilderness Survival Guide,” she said.

“What was that, Round Face?”

Apparently deciding to push their luck, Tsu spoke up next. “You know, kero, I would’ve expected you to have blown something up by now, Bakugo. You’re being oddly calm, kero.”

Bakugo crossed his arms, clearly annoyed. “Oh I’m pissed at you extras for landing us here, but I can prioritize survival for now.” Under his breath, but unintentionally loud enough for Fumikage to hear, he added, “Besides, Auntie Inko would kill me if I let Deku or his shitty friends die on me.”

Dark Shadow broke down laughing in Fumikage’s mind.

“In any case,” Ida said, getting back on track, “Uraraka, could you float someone else? We may be able to search for shelter better at a higher vantage point!”

“Yeah, I’ve-” she was interrupted by another yawn—clearly the events of the evening had left Uraraka exhausted. “I’ve got a bit left in me. I’m just a bit queasy right now.”

Ida frowned. “If you’re unsure-”

“It’s fine,” Uraraka insisted. “Blasty, get over here.”

“Blasty?” Bakugo asked, sounding legitimately offended as he stalked over.

It seemed that the irony was lost on him.

“Too tired to care,” Uraraka retorted. “You can move midair with your explosions, right?”

Bakugo’s offended expression morphed into a grin as Uraraka reached out and removed his gravity. Immediately, even as Uraraka doubled over and tried not to lose her dinner, explosions sprung from his palms and he rocketed into the air.

Twenty seconds later, more explosions rang out as he descended back onto the ground. “Good news: I found shelter. Bad news: we might be dealing with shitty alien extras.” He pointed into the trees. “There’s a castle a few kilometers that way.”

Uraraka’s eyes seemed to sparkle, even as she fought back her nausea. “First contact,” she whispered in an almost reverent voice.

Dark Shadow’s mental laughter seemed to grow louder. There might be intelligent aliens involved and his first thought is to call them shitty extras?

Truly, Bakugo revels in the dark more than many of us, Fumikage thought back.

I’ve lived in your mind for fifteen years and I still have no idea what you mean by that.

Ida cleared his throat to once again bring everyone’s attention to him. He had helped Todoroki get the ice splints onto Midoriya’s arms and was now cradling their classmate. “Uraraka, if you could cancel your quirk-”

Before Ida could finish, Uraraka had already jammed her hands together. “Release!”

Ida grunted as he was suddenly carrying Midoriya’s full weight and Bakugo stumbled a bit as his weight returned. Midoriya let out an involuntary whimper in his sleep. “As I was saying,” Ida said, “I can carry Midoriya. Tsu, can you keep Uraraka standing?”

Tsu nodded with a ribbit, and Uraraka frowned at needing the assistance. She didn’t complain aloud, though.

“Shoji, stay close to the four of us,” Ida added. “I know your injury isn’t particularly bothersome, but keeping close would still be ideal.”

Shoji nodded.

“Four Eyes has got the right idea,” Bakugo said, and most of the others blinked in surprise at him agreeing with someone else. “I’ll take point and Icy-hot and Birdbrain can watch our flank. We don’t know what lives in these woods.”

“I must protest, Bakugo,” Ida retorted. “Tokoyami and Dark Shadow are effectively two sets of eyes, so it would be most beneficial to have Todoroki in the front with you.”

Bakugo crossed his arms. “Tch, I don’t really care. Just figure it out so we can get moving already.”

In the end, Ida’s suggestion won out. The walk, though, had been relatively peaceful so far, even if Asui Tsuyu’s instincts were constantly screaming at her that something dangerous was watching them. [Frog] didn’t give her any particularly heightened senses, but a frog’s natural position in the food web carried some instincts with it into her quirk. Including the generally good spatial awareness of prey animals.

Still, well over a kilometer into their trek through the forest, and those instincts hadn’t bore fruit yet. It was at the point that Tsu was finally allowing herself to relax a bit, considering that the general chill might be putting her on edge as well. It wasn’t enough to get her to start brumating, but it was still uncomfortable for her. Shivering a bit, she focused on her half-asleep friend.

Ochako was leaning hard on her right shoulder. The brunette’s left arm was wrapped around Tsu’s shoulders, and every step she took was lethargic. Now that the adrenaline had fully worn off, Tsu was honestly a bit amazed that she was still awake; she would’ve expected Ochako to crash hard after losing as much blood as she had. Still, Ochako soldiered on, fueled by sheer will to stay awake.

Every so often, though, her eyes would flutter shut before she jolted awake. After one such jolt, she yawned and spoke. “Hey, Bakugo, how much further’ve we gotta go?”

“Another kilometer or so, probably,” he said with a shrug. “What, you weaklings can’t keep up?”

Ochako grumbled in response and let loose a line of creative cusses under her breath that, frankly, left Tsu with quite a few questions on how she came up with them.

Before she could do much internal debating on whether or not to ask, though, a low growl rumbled out around the group. Immediately, progress stalled and everyone whipped their heads around looking for the source.

Tsu caught sight of it and paled. There, hidden in the trees, was a pair of glowing green eyes. As it got closer, Tsu saw what it was first, her excellent night vision paying off.

It was wolf-shaped, complete with a snarling snout and sharp claws. It stalked forwards, its mouth dripping as it prepared to pounce on its new prey. Taking a very quick glance around, Tsu saw Bakugo, Todoroki, and Tokoyami preparing to fight as three more of the creatures closed in on them. Ochako was wide awake by now, and Ida and Shoji had huddled closer together, looking out into the woods with narrowed eyes. Clearly, just like wolves, these creatures were pack hunters.

Tsu looked back at the creature, this time noting what made it quite unique compared to Earth’s wolves. The most obvious difference was that it was made entirely of wood, seeming to be a cobbled together amalgamation of sticks, branches, and leaves. In place of saliva, sap dripped from its wooden teeth, and rattling noises rang out with every step it took.

For a tense moment, everything was silent.

And then all hell broke loose as the wolves pounced.

Immediately, Tsu shoved Ochako into Shoji’s arms as she jumped, the wolf’s jaws clamping shut where she had been mere moments before. While she was in the air, she heard an explosion from Bakugo and the crackling of Todoroki’s fire, along with what she hoped was Dark Shadow slamming the fourth wolf into the ground.

But Tsu didn’t have time to look as she fell back down to the ground, one leg extended to kick the wolf directly in the back. She heard snapping as the strike connected and her leg went cleanly through the wolf, throwing off her predictions as she found herself suddenly riding the creature with her left leg while her right was embedded in its back. Reacting quickly, though, Tsu shot her tongue out at the creature’s head, wincing as it aggravated the knife wound. It proved to be worth it however, more snapping sounds signifying the creature’s decapitation—her tongue packed enough force behind it for the blunt trauma to the back of the wolf’s head to separate it from the body.

Tsu braced her left leg against the ground as the wolf’s legs collapsed, looking around as she wrenched her right leg from the creature’s body. True to her thoughts, Dark Shadow had completely pulverized the wolf that had been behind them, while Bakugo’s had been reduced to sticks and spread everywhere and a pile of ash was all that was left of Todoroki’s wolf. With her leg freed, Tsu made her way back to her injured classmates, once again helping Ochako stay upright.

Bakugo laughed, and in Tsu’s opinion it sounded rather deranged. “Hell yeah! No shitty wolf is standing up to the future number one!”

“I will admit,” Tokoyami said as Dark Shadow retreated inside of him, “that was rather anticlimactic.”

Shoji shot him a glare. “Well, now you’ve jinxed it.”

“I doubt that superstition will come into play,” Ida mentioned. “After all, it seems unlikely that-”

Ochako cut him off. “Hey, is it the exhaustion talking, or are the sticks floating for you guys too?”

True enough, many of the sticks that had been strewn around them from Bakugo’s explosions were floating with a green glow. Collectively, they shot off into the woods behind them, before beginning to coalesce into another, larger wolf. Panicked, Tsu quickly looked back to where she’d dealt with her own wolf, and her eyes widened as she saw that it had reformed as well. Still snarling, still dripping sap, and importantly, still ready to pounce.

And she didn’t have time to dodge this time.

All Tsu could do was shove Ochako to the ground to get her out of the way, but her positioning dragged Tsu down with her. Panicking, Tsu thrust her left arm out to try and do something, and screamed in pain when the wolf bit down on it.

Thankfully, whatever this was wasn’t strong enough to break bone and the bite missed her arteries, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. Reflexively lashing out, she scored a kick to one of the wolf’s legs and punched it directly in the snout with her other arm, but both failed to get it to let go.

What did get it to relinquish its hold on her arm was the veritable swarm of arms that came from Shoji. He grunted as two of his extended hands found purchase on the wolf’s snout, wrenching it open and freeing Tsu. Simultaneously, a third hand punched straight into the wolf’s neck, decapitating it once again.

He didn’t stop there, though. His duplicated arms continued across the wolf’s torso, ripping it stick from stick. Unfortunately, that just gave the giant wolf behind them more material, but Tsu had stopped paying attention to that as she clamped down on the wound with her right hand to try and stem the bleeding.

Ochako was at her side in an instant, frantically trying to rip off a piece of her T-shirt to wrap around Tsu’s arm. “Shit,” she swore as her fingers slipped and she failed to get the right purchase to actually rip the fabric.

Thankfully, she wouldn’t need to, as once Shoji was done with the wolf he reached over to put pressure on the wound. “Uraraka,” he said, “if you float her and yourself I can carry both of you and keep pressure on the bite.”

A determined look came over Ochako’s face as she nodded. She went green as she negated both her and Tsu’s gravity, but managed to keep it in—apparently the nausea training at camp had paid off.

As soon as they were secure, with Shoji keeping pressure on the wound with two of his arms and carrying Tsu with the third on that side of his body, Ochako shouted. “Tsu’s injured! We need to move now!”

Bakugo, predictably, instead charged directly at the newly formed giant wolf, and Tsu could clearly see him fly towards it as she looked over Shoji’s shoulder. “I’m not backing down from a fight!”

He got up near the wolf’s head and unleashed a massive explosion, sending sticks everywhere. Said sticks just as quickly launched themselves back into the wolf, and the only thing that saved Bakugo from literally having his head bitten off was Dark Shadow springing out to grab him and pull him back.

“You owe me and Fumi one,” she said.

“Todoroki!” Tokoyami called out as he ran back to the group, Bakugo still in Dark Shadow’s grasp.

Todoroki stepped forward and unleashed a giant column of flame from his left side, almost completely enveloping the wolf. For a moment, they waited with bated breath, hoping that this would be enough to kill the creature for good.

Panting slightly, Todoroki let up on the flame, only to reveal that the wolf had coated itself in sap, which, while it was smoking slightly, had prevented it from burning to a crisp. Even those parts of it which had burnt away were quickly reforming, dragging random sticks from around the forest and even ripping a live branch off of a tree.

“Its sap must be fire retardant,” Todoroki noted. Switching strategies, he planted his right foot securely on the ground and recreated his Sports Festival fight against Sero.

In an instant, a massive glacier had sprung into existence, trapping the wolf inside. Tsu shivered, even with Shoji’s body warmth there to help, and there was a flicker of flame from Todoroki’s left side as he warmed himself up after that attack.

“I don’t know if that’ll hold it,” he said. “Like Uraraka said, we need to move now.”

The ice cracked, and everyone agreed. Except for Bakugo, but he was outvoted and even he wasn’t so blinded by his ego to throw his life away over this.

They’d gotten a bit over a hundred meters away when they heard the glacier shatter, and the wolf let out a bone-chilling howl. Bakugo growled as he whirled around. “Four Eyes, Arms, you’ve got our wounded. Make a run for it while the rest of us hold it off. We’ll catch up later.”

“I cannot justify simply leaving you all agai-”

“Ida, I love you like a brother, but if you don’t get to that damn castle before Deku’s splints melt I will throw you into the sun!”

Ida seemed to have a mental debate with himself at Ochako’s declaration, but he quickly relented. He and Shoji gave Bakugo, Todoroki, and Tokoyami a parting nod before turning around and revving [Engine].

The next five minutes were a blur for Tsu as she barely fought off unconsciousness, both from exhaustion and the fact that her left arm was still in a lot of pain. Occasionally, they would hear an explosion rock the forest, or hear Dark Shadow’s bestial roar, or see the tips of Todoroki’s ice attacks.

Before long, though, they broke out of the trees and into a giant clearing, and Tsu grinned as she looked in front of them and saw the castle they were gunning for. Granted, it didn’t look inhabited. Many of the towers were collapsed and several walls had caved in, but the stone structure was still shelter.

Unfortunately, it was on the other side of a chasm.

“Damn,” Shoji said. “Uraraka, you awake?”

Ochako shot him a death glare. “I’m barely holding it together as is, I can’t float all of us across.”

“Todoroki should be able to make us a bridge!” Ida mentioned.

“Great, kero, we need one of the ones we left behind,” Tsu deadpanned.

Ida frowned, looking down at Midoriya in his arms. “Shoji, could you-”

“I can’t carry him, too,” Shoji said. “All five of my working arms are occupied.”

Ida grumbled. “I suppose we have to wait, then.”

As if fate was toying with them (and with the day they’d had, Tsu couldn’t really rule that out), a haggard-looking Todoroki, Bakugo, and Tokoyami stumbled out of the trees. Bakugo immediately fixed the group with a glare. “The fuck are you extras standing around for?”

“Todoroki! Bridge!” Ochako shouted, at this point seemingly giving up on using enough energy to form complete sentences.

At least Todoroki seemed like he got what he needed to do, as he ran up to the chasm’s edge and stomped down his right foot, connecting the two cliffs with an ice bridge. Ida, Shoji, and their passengers were the first to cross, followed by Tokoyami, then Bakugo, and finally Todoroki. Just as he made it to the opposite cliff, the wolf charged out of the trees towards them.

At this point, the thing was massive and barely even looked like a wolf anymore. It seemed to have an entire tree—albeit a small one—for one of its legs, even. Its howl rattled everyone there down to their very bones, and it charged forward, right for the bridge that Todoroki had made.

Acting quickly, Todoroki slammed his left hand down onto their side of the bridge, rapidly melting through it and weakening the ice. The wolf only made it a quarter of the way across before the bridge shattered underneath it, and it made one last yelp before it plunged into the foggy depths below.

Ten seconds later, they heard a massive crashing and shattering sound as thousands of sticks, branches, and even a few entire trunks hit the ground and the wolf creature was claimed by the forest’s night.

After a tense moment to see if the thing would reform again and somehow climb the side to kill them, everyone finally relaxed. It wasn’t getting back up.

“Well,” Tsu noted, “that was terrifying, kero.”

“Heh, wolf shit couldn’t hold a candle to me!” Bakugo said, his bravado instantly returning now that they weren’t in a life-or-death situation.

Choosing to ignore him, the rest of them turned to the castle. “Well, I suppose for now we should set up camp for the night in there,” Ida said. “We’ll need a makeshift infirmary for Midoriya, Uraraka, and Tsu.”

“‘M fine,” Ochako sleepily complained, having her second adrenaline crash in the same night. “Just tired.”

Shoji nodded at him regardless. “Tomorrow, we should try and find a river. Todoroki can boil any water we collect to get rid of bacteria.”

Ochako suddenly found a bit more wakefulness. “Shit. We’re on another planet. We don’t have any immunity to their diseases and I don’t wanna go out like the Martians did in War of the Worlds.”

Todoroki carefully considered that. “I will be extra sure to boil any water we find before it’s drunk.”

“When the light arrives to chase away the darkness, we shall further our quest,” Tokoyami said. “For now, we rest.”

Dark Shadow rolled her eyes as well as a shadow demon could at his theatrics.

Carefully, the group stepped into the castle through one of the broken walls. Had Tsu been more awake, she would have taken the time to admire the stonework and the iconography adorning many of the walls, but right now she was just about ready to collapse and sleep for a week.

Thirty minutes later, with her wound bandaged and laying on what was left of some sort of tapestry, however, her thoughts turned in a direction that sent Tsu sitting bolt upright.

“We weren’t the only ones in that portal, kero.”

Tokoyami, who had agreed to take the first watch—who knew what creatures might be lurking around in the castle—looked back at her with wide eyes. A grimace formed around his beak as Dark Shadow popped out to vocalize the question they all had.

“Where the hell is the League?”

“Where the hell are we, Kurogiri?”

“I am unaware of our current location, Dabi.”

“Yeah, well, your coordinates for the bar opened to the middle of the fucking ocean, so we better figure it out quick.”

“Gentlemen, please, I am certain we can resolve this civilly.”

“Shut the fuck up, Compress.”

“Oh, what if we’re in the Sahara! We’re in another universe, moron.”

Toga Himiko giggled to herself as her companions shouted at each other. Sure, it was weird that whatever Ochako-chan had done had sent Kurogiri to this desert, but today was still great! She got to meet Tsu-chan and Ochako-chan and Izuku-kun and all of them had such pretty blood. She shivered at the thought of finally breaking open the syringe she had of Ochako-chan’s blood and getting to taste it.

Currently, they had just come upon a city. Despite it being nighttime, there was still a bunch of hustle and bustle in the local marketplace, but based on the number of stalls it was probably much busier during the day. Himiko bounced on the balls of her feet as she got a good look at the inhabitants.

Huh, that was a lot of heteromorphs. And a lot of them were similar to each other, maybe there was a family reunion going on? Idly, Himiko was wondering how they’d look covered in blood when a thought crossed her mind. Most heteromorph families still had distinct members, and there were only three or so different species involved!

Hmm, maybe Twice’s alternate universe idea was spot-on.

Suddenly, Himiko gasped as she caught sight of an anthropomorphic cat. He had mostly brown fur with some white accents, along with a shock of purple fur between his ears, but what caught Himiko’s attention was his coat. Particularly the color. It was a beautiful blood red, and she wondered how his blood would taste.

He was wandering between stalls, chatting up the people running them, when his green eyes centered on the group of humans. “Hey, everyone!” Himiko gleefully shouted, snapping the rest of their attention to her and interrupting the latest argument between Dabi and Compress. “The cat’s coming to talk to us!”

Dabi rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but wherever here is, I don't think they speak Japanese.”

A deep chuckle from the approaching figure cut off any retort. “Well, I’d hope that harmony magic keeps the translations running!” The cat grinned. “I can’t say I’ve ever seen any of your species before, though. The name’s Capper.” He bowed extravagantly, and Himiko swore she could feel Compress judging a fellow showman. “Welcome to Klugetown. What can I do you for?”

Author's Note

The League of Villains (at least those trapped on Equus) won't fully come into play for a while yet, but oh I have plans for them. Conveniently, so does Capper. Conveniently for whom? That's for me to plan and for you all to find out.

Also, since this being on FimFiction might mean quite a few readers aren't exactly familiar with MHA, here's a quick rundown of the students and villains in Equestria and what their quirks do:

-Midoriya Izuku: [One For All] is a transferable stockpiler quirk created during the Dawn of Quirks that accumulates strength over time. Midoriya is the ninth wielder and the quirk has been accumulating energy for one hundred forty-nine years.
-Uraraka Ochako: [Zero Gravity] is a gravikinetic quirk that allows the user to negate the Earth's gravitational pull on an object. The object maintains its angular momentum; it is still in orbit around the Sun and continues to follow the Earth's rotation. In Equestria this is simplified due to the celestial mechanics of the MLP universe.
-Ida Tenya: [Engine] gives the user engines in their calves, granting them massively increased speed. It also carries a subtle eye and brain mutation to allow the user to perceive and react to things properly at highway speeds.
-Asui Tsuyu: [Frog] is a heteromorphic mutation quirk that gives the user several frog-like attributes, including a long tongue, powerful legs, and a weakness to extreme temperatures.
-Todoroki Shoto: [Half-Cold Half-Hot] allows the user to generate ice from the right side of their body and fire from their left. It does not, however, include cryokinesis or pyrokinesis; once the ice or fire is generated the user cannot further control them.
-Bakugo Katsuki: [Explosion] allows the user to sweat nitroglycerin and ignite it from their palms. It also includes a minor mutation in the forearms and shoulders to allow the body to take the stress of its explosions.
-Tokoyami Fumikage: [Dark Shadow] is a sentient quirk manifesting as a shadow monster that the user has limited control over. Dark Shadow gains strength in darker environments, at the cost of control. When enraged and a dark enough environment, Dark Shadow may go on a rampage.
-Shoji Mezo: [Dupli-Arms] gives the user six arms, the ends of which can be morphed into various enhanced organs, including eyes, ears, mouths, or even more arms.

-Kurogiri: [Warp Gate] allows the user to open a gate between any two positions that they know the coordinates of.
-Dabi: [Blueflame] is an extremely powerful pyrogenic quirk, allowing the user to produce flames above 1,400 degrees Celsius. However, the user's skin is resistant to cold temperatures, meaning that they are not immune to their own quirk.
-Mr. Compress: [Compress] allows the user to compress any amount of matter into blue marbles, and later decompress them back into their original shape. This includes living beings, and anything alive in a marble is effectively in stasis while inside.
-Twice: [Double] allows the user to create up to two clones of any object they have the exact measurements of, including people. Clones of people are able to use their quirk. Clones disintegrate after taking enough damage. As the user can clone themselves twice, and then those clones can clone themselves, and so on, in theory an arbitrary number of clones can exist. However, each generation of clones of the user can take half as much damage as the rest, and only about ten doublings can exist before ambient air pressure destroys further clones.
-Toga Himiko: [Transform] allows the user to shapeshift into another person after consuming their blood. The maximum length of the transformation is dependent on the amount of blood drank. It only works on humans, however; the user cannot shapeshift into a nonhuman animal.

See y'all next time!

Chapter III: Dreams

"Rapid eye movement sleep (REM sleep or REMS) is a unique phase of sleep in mammals (including humans) and birds, characterized by random rapid movement of the eyes, accompanied by low muscle tone throughout the body, and the propensity of the sleeper to dream vividly."
-Wikipedia, "Rapid eye movement sleep"

Princess Luna of Equestria was a mare of many talents. As one of the princess regnants of Equestria she was well-versed in politics, though she was still adjusting to modern customs. She was a skilled combatant, having led Equestria’s armies along with her sister during the War of the North, and to this day she remained a feared figure in Griffonstone for when she single-hoofedly repelled an attempted invasion a millennium prior. And according to her cutie mark, her main talent was moving the Moon, a talent she had discovered during her and her older sister’s simultaneous Ascension.

If one asked Luna, however, she would say that her truest passion was the study of magic, particularly oneiroturgy, a field that she had spearheaded herself. In her youth, before she Ascended and had the responsibilities of a princess regnant thrust upon her, she had spent long hours studying under Star Swirl the Bearded himself. Where her sister was most interested in direct, tangible magical effects, Luna was always far more fascinated by how magic could affect the subconscious. The subtle nudges in a pony’s psychology, for good or for ill, was a magic frowned upon even then, but as fourth in line for the throne little Luna had been afforded certain privileges.

Especially after she began focusing on how to affect dreams.

Later on, after she had settled into her new alicorn form and the War of the North had come and gone, Luna had thrown herself into protecting her little ponies from threats both physical and mental. She took what she had learned about dreams in her youth and pioneered an entirely new field of magic out of it: oneiroturgy. In the modern day she still took to her nightly duty with gusto, delving into her subjects’ psyches to alleviate their fears.

Tonight was no different, and Luna, her horn lit and her eyes closed, was exploring the land of dreams. Her physical body was still in her chambers, of course, with several proximity spells in place to ensure that her mind would be returned there if she was interrupted, but in her mind’s eye, she was in a space she referred to as the Collective Subconscious. It was, in a sense, a dreamscape created from the minds of every dreaming soul on the planet, though Luna could only access those within a certain range. It was an impressive range, for sure—nearly two thousand kilometers was nothing to sneeze at—but it did leave much of the world out of her purview. Regardless, it meant she could at least access the minds of any dreamer in Equestria.

The exact visual would appear different for any pony accessing the Collective Subconscious, but for Luna it manifested itself as a nearly endless hallway of doors with no discernable floor. There was a carpet of stars beneath her hooves, twinkling with every step she took, but she knew that it was just a manifestation of her own thought process. The distinct dreamlike nature of the place also meant that, really, any door could lead to any dreamer’s subconscious.

She, of course, prioritized those suffering from nightmares. She could search for a specific pony and contact them (and had done so to speak to her sister on occasion, especially soon after her return from the Moon), but her most important duty every night was to help reduce fear and suffering.

Most nightmares were easy enough to dispel and Luna could get away with simply swapping the dream for a more pleasant one. She didn’t even have to enter the pony’s mind to do so. Other nightmares, however, were strongly rooted in a pony’s fears and anxieties. Those took more doing to help the dreamer through, and meant that Luna would have to get directly involved. She could, at least, tell how bad a nightmare was before even entering the dream, with a sense almost akin to smell.

The door before her, then, positively reeked. Whatever nightmare the dreamer beyond was having would be horrid, and ordinarily Luna would have wasted no time jumping through to help.

The only thing that stopped her was the uniqueness of the door itself.

Uniqueness, in and of itself, wasn’t entirely unusual. Every dreamer’s door was different. But this was by far the strangest door Luna had ever seen, or least its design was as such. In the center of the door was an image of a hand—similar to but not quite the same as a minotaur’s—grasping a lit torch. Surrounding the image were eight other hands reaching for (or handing off?) the torch, all discernibly different from each other due to different scar patterns or gloves.

Another oddity was the lock; almost all dreamers had a single lock on their door, which remained unlocked to Luna unless the dreamer was also skilled in oneiroturgy and focused on keeping her out. This door had nine locks, though all of them were unlocked.

Shaking her head, Luna shrugged off the oddities and yanked the door open, intent on ending whatever nightmare this dreamer was having. Immediately on entry, she slowed time in the dream to a standstill to take stock of the situation. The dream was taking place at night, on a cliff’s edge above a burning forest. The acrid smell of smoke filled the air, and blue flames danced on the trees below. But what Luna most focused on were the creatures on the cliff.

One was what she could only describe as a monster, wrapped in—Luna performed a double take—was that skinless muscle fiber? It was bipedal, with a shock of blond hair on its head and what looked like a mechanical eye. Whatever it was, it wasn’t any species she recognized. Had a new sapient species emerged over her millennium on the Moon that Celestia hadn’t introduced her to yet?

She assumed that they were sapient, at least. The sheer aggression and, disturbingly, glee in the monster’s biological eye seemed to indicate it. It was attacking a smaller figure, clad in garments befitting their size and wearing a large red hat. They were cowering and attempting to move backwards, but Luna could tell that the monster would reach them long before they could hope to do anything.

For a moment, she assumed that this smaller being was the dreamer, but a quick check dismissed the idea; this was another creation of the dream. Looking around, she found who she was looking for: a third creature of the same species wrapped in green lightning, shooting through the trees towards them. Even with time at a standstill, Luna could tell where the nightmare was going from the dreamer’s mind, and cringed. She dearly hoped that this was not a scene the dreamer had witnessed in reality, and that it was a construction of some fear of failure.

Because within the nightmare, the dreamer would not reach them in time and the small figure—a child, Luna realized—would die a gruesome death. Not wanting to witness that either, Luna lit her horn and prepared to smite the monster as soon as she resumed time, but before she could the nightmare abruptly ended.

For the briefest of moments, Luna thought she saw an image of eight thrones—seven of which were occupied by the same species as the creatures on the cliff—but she had not the time to properly analyze that, nor the time to determine why the dream had suddenly changed. Before she knew it, seven voices echoed through her mind as one.

GET THE HELL OUT OF NINTH’S HEAD!

She was forcibly ejected from the dreamscape, landing back in the Collective Subconscious as the door slammed behind her and seven locks clicked into place.

Luna picked herself up off the carpet of stars and brushed off some nonexistent dust. Glowering, she narrowed her eyes at the door. That had never happened before.

What in the world was going on?

Princess Twilight Sparkle dreamed often. This was nothing out of the ordinary—most ponies dreamed every night. She did not, however, often dream lucidly, so when Twilight found herself abruptly realizing that she was dreaming she knew something was off.

Equestria’s newest princess extricated herself from the pile of books she was laying in (unfortunately, due to the nature of dreams, they were all illegible), and looked around for the source of her sudden lucidity. Her dream had been taking place in a mental recreation of the Royal Archives in Canterlot, though parts of it were slightly off from how Twilight knew the Archives were actually laid out.

The Archives also didn’t usually have Princess Luna frowning at the central hourglass, either, and Twilight guessed that her presence was why she was currently lucid.

“The fact that your mind can recreate this room so faithfully is impressive,” Princess Luna stated as Twilight approached. “Though the exact designs on the hourglass are wrong.”

“Well, I did spend multiple hours a day down here when I attended CSGU,” Twilight said, dropping into a bow as Princess Luna turned her way. “Good evening, Your Majesty.”

“You have no need to prostrate yourself before me, Twilight Sparkle,” Princess Luna said with what sounded like a hint of exasperation. “My sister and I may be Princess Regnants, but you are nominally of equal rank to us.”

Twilight glanced at her wings as she rose. “Sorry,” she apologized, “force of habit.”

“‘Tis no issue,” Princess Luna said. “Regardless, I did not come to your mind tonight for a simple social call. I would like to ask you a question and a favor.”

Twilight blinked, a bit confused, but her eyes widened as she came to a conclusion as to what the favor might be. “Is something still wrong with the Tree of Harmony?” she asked. “I thought returning the Elements to it would fix the issue! Or is this about the box it gave us? Because I was already planning on looking into that so-”

“Insofar as I can tell, the Tree is still quite hale,” Princess Luna cut her off before she could ramble too much. “My question regards a nightmare I attempted to dispel earlier this evening.”

“Oh, okay.” Twilight performed a double take. “Wait, attempted?”

Princess Luna nodded. “A few minutes ago, I encountered a dreamer of a species I had never seen before. Before I could dispel their nightmare and speak to them directly, however, I was removed from their mind by some sort of mental defense.”

Twilight’s eyes lit up. A new creature, sapient enough to dream and potentially with some inborn psychoturgy? This would be positively fascinating! After a moment of thought, though, she frowned. “Wouldn’t it be best to consult Princess Celestia on this? She’d know more about the world’s creatures than I would.”

“I do not wish to bother my sister over a potentially trivial matter,” Princess Luna explained, “especially not with how busy our schedules are with the Summer Sun Celebration only a day away.”

“That makes sense,” Twilight agreed. “What did these creatures look like?”

“They were bipedal,” Princess Luna said, and Twilight’s eyebrows rose. The only bipedal sapient creatures on Equus she could think of off the top of her head were minotaurs, yetis, and abyssinians. Well, she supposed that Discord was technically bipedal as well, but Twilight was fairly certain that Luna knew what draconequi looked like. Discord was rather…noticeable.

“They were also furless, aside from a mane atop their heads,” Princess Luna continued, “and they were structured rather similarly to apes—perhaps they’re related?”

Twilight would have choked on her own spit if this wasn’t a dream. “That…that sounds like you encountered a human,” she said, shocked. “But that shouldn’t be possible! The mirror portal closed weeks ago, and won’t be open again for another twenty-nine moons! At least!”

Princess Luna blinked. “You believe these to be the creatures you encountered beyond Star Swirl’s Mirror?”

Twilight nodded. “They match the description, at least. But that means that there’s either a natural portal between Equestria and Earth—without the transformation enchantment, at that—or…” Her expression became more concerned. “Something managed to open a portal, and we don’t know when, where, or from which side.”

Princess Luna frowned as well. “Hmm, that is rather concerning.”

“And you said you got kicked out of the dream, right?” Twilight asked. “The humans on the other side of the mirror didn’t have access to magic except for what Sunset, the Element of Magic, and I brought over. They shouldn’t be able to do psychoturgy at all, let alone at the level that would be needed to keep you of all ponies out.”

“Oneiroturgy,” Princess Luna idly corrected, her own face screwed up in thought. “Perhaps it would be best for you to keep an eye out for any sightings of these humans, and look into what parts of oneiroturgy they could be tapping into.” After another moment of consideration, she continued. “A great deal of my own writings on the field should still be under preservation charms at the old castle in the Everfree; I do not recall the Nightmare having gone out of its way to destroy them.”

Twilight grinned, almost salivating at the idea of going through supremely old books. “Oh, maybe I can find information on the chest that the Tree gave us while I’m there!” she realized. “I’ll see if Spike and I can check out the castle’s library as soon as we’re back in Ponyville after the Celebration.”

Princess Luna nodded. “Thank you, Twilight Sparkle. I suppose I shall see you in Canterlot later for the Celebration?”

Twilight nodded. “Yep! Spike and I were planning on leaving tomorrow morning. Or later today. I’m not sure what time it is outside.”

Princess Luna chuckled. “It is actually nearing daybreak, so I will leave you to prepare for the trip. Fare thee well, Twilight Sparkle.”

In life, Shimura Nana had seen a lot of strange quirks over her thirty-two years, most of which were during the fourteen she spent as a pro hero. Strange quirks came with the job. Plus, she’d spent eight of those years wielding [One For All] and being actively engaged in a shadow war with a century-old supervillain, with another three years spent continuing the war after she passed the quirk on to Toshinori. Honestly, she was just glad that he was able to graduate from UA before All For One killed her.

Even after her death, reduced to a vestige within [One For All], she had continued to see a myriad of strange quirks. Spending thirty-seven years in Toshi’s mind, with him being the Number One Hero for the past thirty-two, contributed to it, yes, but most recently Izuku’s obsession with odd and fascinating quirks had done most of the legwork for the Weird Quirk Count.

But never before had she seen something quite like what had just happened.

She opened her mouth to speak on it, but Daigoro beat her to the punch. “The hell kind of mental quirk shoves a blue horse in someone’s mind?”

The rest of the vestiges’ incredulous attention snapped to him.

“What?” the fifth wielder of [One For All] asked. “It’s way too similar to whatever the brainwashing kid did at the Sports Festival for it to not be a mental quirk.”

Hikage frowned and hummed in thought. “We have to assume that Ninth has been captured by the League. All For One knows that he cannot steal [One For All] easily, so I can only imagine that this is some kind of intrusion designed to make him let his guard down.”

“That might not be true,” Nana said. “Izuku passed out too quickly after the portal for us to see all that much, but I didn’t see the League there.”

En shook his head. “We should still assume the worst case scenario here, just in case.” His mood turned even more somber, somehow. “Unfortunately, that means that All For One may have hostages he can use against Midoriya to force him to give up [One For All]. Especially since those hostages would include Bakugo, Ida, and Uraraka.”

Nana paled. “Shit, this exact sort of thing is why I gave Kotaro away.”

“In all honesty, Seventh, I still think that that decision was unwise,” Yoichi spoke up. “If my brother wanted to find your son, he would do so regardless of whether or not you were still actively looking after him or if Eighth had reconnected with him.” He shook his head, striding forward within the formless void they called home to join the other four conversing holders (Kudo and Bruce were still brooding in the corner). “Regardless, I do not think that this was my brother’s doing.”

Hikage looked at him in surprise. “You don’t?”

Yoichi chuckled, a small smile growing in his face. “No, Fourth, I don’t. I think we’ve been isekai’d.”

The others looked at him blankly. “Excuse me, what?” Daigoro asked.

Yoichi waved a hand in a so-so motion. “Eh, it’s not exactly your classic ‘die and God shoves you into another universe’ isekai; we didn’t get Truck-kun’d.”

“Yoichi, what the hell are you talking about?” Nana asked.

“I think we’ve been transported into a fictional universe,” Yoichi explained. “The show was before my time, but there was a resurgence of memes about it and its fandom in the early 2040s, so I do recognize the blue pony that popped in.”

En raised an eyebrow. “Enlighten us, then.”

“I do believe that that was Princess Luna from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic,” Yoichi said, ignoring Daigoro breaking down in laughter. “I never saw the show myself and it was canceled after its fourth season amid all the chaos of the Dawn of Quirks, but like I said, there were a lot of memes about it.”

Nana sighed, conjured a chair behind her, and sat down. “Great, so we’re stuck in what, Ponyland?”

“Equestria,” Yoichi corrected. “At least, I think that’s what the name was.”

“Fine, we’re stuck in Equestria,” Nana accepted. “Can we, I don’t know, at least somehow get information to Izuku about what’s going on?”

Yoichi shook his head. “Even if we had a reliable way to contact Ninth, like I said, the show was before my time. I remember some names, but I don’t know anything about the plot.”

En, apparently deciding to be cautiously optimistic, spoke up. “Perhaps one of Midoriya’s friends might have seen it?”

“The show is ancient,” Yoichi emphasized. “I highly doubt that a modern teen has seen it, especially since it was always much more popular in the West than in Japan.”

“It’s lost media, anyway.”

Everyone’s attention snapped to Bruce, surprised that the man had actually spoken.

“Finally done staring at a wall?” Daigoro asked sarcastically.

“I’m still not a fan of Ninth,” Bruce said. “But I’m willing to discuss what Second and I know in this situation. We can’t defeat All For One from another universe.”

“Alright, then, speak up,” Nana said, some tiredness leaking into her voice.

Bruce shrugged. “There’s not too much to say. Hasbro shut down in the late 2020s, so there weren’t many physical or downloaded copies of the show when the June Twelfth Cyberattack hit, so most of the show is lost media nowadays. There’s just about a zero percent chance that any of the kids stuck here have seen it.”

“June Twelfth Cyberattack?” Daigoro asked.

Bruce sighed. “Why am I not surprised that you of all people haven’t heard of the biggest cybercrime in human history?” Daigoro made an indignant noise, but Bruce started explaining before he could make a retort. “On June twelfth, two thousand forty-eight, some nutjob with a technopath quirk escaped from a lab in the US hopped up on an experimental early form of trigger. The lab he escaped from eventually tracked him down and killed him, but in the time it took them to do that he scrubbed about half of the internet clean.”

“Holy shit,” Daigoro breathed.

En raised an eyebrow at him. “This is taught as part of most middle schools’ history curricula. How have you not heard about it?”

Daigoro shrugged. “Eh, I’m pretty sure I slept through most of my middle school history classes.”

“Regardless of this…fascinating history lesson,” Hikage cut in, “I’m still not entirely convinced that we’re in another universe entirely. This could still be some ploy of All For One’s to make us let our guard down.”

Yoichi scoffed. “Please, my brother would never debase himself by watching what he perceived as beneath him. He was a theater kid obsessed with Star Wars, Captain Hero, Dumas’ works, and practically nothing else. Besides…” Yoichi gestured towards Toshi’s vestige, which hadn’t moved since Kurogiri had teleported them. It was still a half-formed, vaguely human-shaped ball of golden fire, but it had gone stock still and seemed to be flickering in and out of existence. “I think whatever is going on with Eighth is indicative of the alternate universe hypothesis.”

There was a shaking sensation, and Nana quickly stood and dismissed her chair. “Izuku’s waking up,” she said, turning towards the area of the vestige space that they’d been using to see through Izuku’s eyes.

“Good,” Hikage said, “maybe we’ll get some definitive answers.”

Wakefulness returned to Uraraka Ochako slowly, the dream she’d been having slipping away from her memory as she opened her eyes. Said eyes immediately narrowed as she realized that the sun was up. Surely, Mister Aizawa would have woken them up early for training, so why was-

Ochako’s eyes shot open and she sat bolt upright as the memories of the night before returned to her. She regretted it instantly, a dizzy spell shooting through her along with a stabbing headache. Still, she looked around, confirming that their time spent off of Earth wasn’t some crazy dream that her space-obsessed mind had conjured up. They really were really far from home.

Shit.

“Good morning.”

Ochako’s gaze snapped another occupant of the room. Todoroki, who had wrapped himself in some sort of fabric that they must have found elsewhere in the castle, was leaning against the wall next to the door. They had cordoned off what was probably once a bedroom as a makeshift infirmary, though any furniture the room once held had likely long since decayed. Instead, they had slept on stone slabs (which was hell on Ochako’s back, but it’s not like they’d had any better options) with rolled up fabric that Ochako guessed was once a tapestry of some sort acting as pillows.

Looking down, she noted that the same fabric had been ripped up a bit and tied to her pinkies to prevent her from activating [Zero Gravity] in her sleep. Clearly this castle had a lot of well-preserved tapestries for them to be using them for practically everything—Todoroki was even wearing one like a toga!

It looked like Tsu was awake as well, since she was sitting up on her own slab and keeping an eye on all of them. Her left arm was still wrapped (in yet another piece of a tapestry; Ochako felt a bit bad about the history they were probably destroying but survival was survival) but she didn’t seem all too distraught about it. Still, Ochako hoped it was healing okay. Her memories of the previous night were mostly a blur after Kurogiri warped them, but she did remember that Tsu was hurt pretty badly. It wasn’t as bad as Deku’s wounds, but-

Ochako’s thought process aborted itself and she whipped her head around to look at the fourth of the infirmary’s occupants. Deku was still asleep, with both of his arms tied to thick pieces of wood that the others must have found outside. Immediately, Ochako tried to scramble upright and call out to him, but her throat was so dry that her cry of “Deku!” sounded more like a strangled gasp, and she barely made it off the stone slab before she tripped.

Todoroki caught her left arm before she could actually fall, and he sat her back down with a sigh.

“I feel like you should’ve expected that to happen as soon as she saw him, kero.” Tsu spoke up.

Todoroki ignored her, instead forming a cylinder of ice from his right hand and then carefully melting a hole in it with his left. A few moments later, he was left with a cup made of ice full of chilly water. He handed it off to Ochako. “Drink.”

Ochako vaguely remembered that drinking a lot of water in quick succession while dehydrated wasn’t a good idea, and she wasn’t so thirsty as to chug the whole thing down instinctively, so she took sips. After a few, she gave Todoroki a concerned look. “Won’t this just dehydrate you, too?”

He nodded. “Yes, but I can last until Bakugo and Ida find a proper source of fresh water. Asui-”

Tsu let out a somewhat threatening croak.

“Apologies. Tsu asked the same thing.”

Ochako looked around again, her gaze settling on Deku’s sleeping form. “Where are the others, then, and…” her voice dropped, “how’s Deku doing?”

“Shoji and Tokoyami are looking around the castle, kero,” Tsu provided. “But Midoriya…”

Todoroki sighed. “At some point in the night Midoriya transitioned from unconsciousness to actual sleep,” he started.

“That’s…that’s good, right?” Ochako said, but Tsu and Todoroki’s tones had seemed somewhat somber, which was massively concerning. She couldn’t help but worry.

“I’m worried about him, kero,” Tsu said from her slab. “He got the most hurt of any of us, and it was before we were even teleported.”

“Deku…Deku will make it through this,” Ochako said, though her voice did crack a bit. “I…I have to believe he will.”

Todoroki sighed again, and he looked Ochako in the eye. Somehow, the eye contact just made things worse, and she just knew that whatever came next would be bad news. “Uraraka…”

“He has a fever.”

Author's Note

This fic does starts off kinda angsty, but it'll just make the fluff hit harder when we get to it later on. The beginning of this fic is tough for our heroes, though.

Also who'd have thought that first contact between MHA's humans and the ponies would be between the mental projection of Princess Luna and a bunch of dead people? There'll be an actual proper meeting between the humans and ponies soon enough, though—Castle Mane-ia is only a few days away.

Rarity might be a bit...unhappy about how they handled the Castle of the Two Sisters' tapestries, though.

Oh, and as a side note, I changed the date in the description from 2157 to 2163. Both have February 26 (the canon date of Izuku's entrance exam) on a Saturday, but I recently realized that because of Tiger (whose birthday is February 29th and whose canon age during the training camp arc is 31), 2157 doesn't work. 2163, however, is 31 years after a leap year and thus works as a potential year that MHA takes place. The mention of AFO's age in chapter 1 has been updated accordingly.

Chapter IV: Awakening in a New World

"Wakefulness is a daily recurring brain state and state of consciousness in which an individual is conscious and engages in coherent cognitive and behavioral responses to the external world...The longer the brain has been awake, the greater the synchronous firing rates of cerebral cortex neurons. After sustained periods of sleep, both the speed and synchronicity of the neurons firing are shown to decrease."
-Wikipedia, "Wakefulness"

“...alternate universe hypothesis.”

“Izuku’s waking up.”

“Good, maybe…answers.”

As Midoriya Izuku awoke and the strange dream he’d been having faded away, sensation returned to him rather quickly. Coherency, however, did not, and he had to spend quite a bit of time getting his thoughts in order.

The first thing that he felt was the familiar pain of broken limbs. The fact that such a pain was familiar was probably an issue, but he could deal with the ramifications of [One For All]’s adverse effects on his health later. Right now, with his mind sleep-addled, his arms in pain, and a severe lack of adrenaline running through his veins, he couldn’t even pull together a coherent enough thought to wonder why he hadn’t been put on painkillers. Instead, he was focused on cataloging each sensation he felt as he came to. The second thing he noticed was that whatever he was lying on was cold and hard, followed by the dryness of his throat.

Somewhat sluggishly, he tried to recall the sequence of events that had brought him here. The last thing he clearly remembered was defeating Muscular. Everything after rescuing Kota was a blur of loud sounds and bright lights piercing the darkness. He could vaguely remember seeing the fire villain grab Kacchan by the throat, but then Uraraka had flown in and…messed with Kurogiri, somehow? Izuku wasn’t quite sure what had happened after that, just that the villains weren’t wherever they were.

That was probably when he passed out, now that he was thinking about it.

As more of his awareness slowly returned to him (had he sustained a head injury? Or was he just that tired?), he became aware of conversation happening in the room around him. It was low enough that he couldn’t tell what was being said, but at some point someone spoke up louder.

“Uraraka…”

That was Todoroki’s voice! Izuku definitely wasn’t in a hospital, but at least he wasn’t alone. And it sounded like Uraraka was here too!

“He has a fever.”

Were they talking about him? He didn’t feel particularly feverish, but given how easily Todoroki could control his own body temperature, Izuku didn’t have any reason to distrust him on his assessment. Him being ill in this situation was far from ideal, though, so Izuku hoped that Todoroki was mistaken.

Slowly, Izuku forced his eyes open, wincing as sunbeams hit them. He tried to speak—more to announce his presence than to actually say anything—but got nothing out of his mouth other than a dry cough.

That was enough to alert the others to his wakefulness, though. There was a blur of motion to his left and a cry of “Deku!” to his left, but before he could turn his head to look he felt something cold and a bit wet press against his lips. He reflexively took a few sips of the offered water, but the cup was taken away from him moments later. That gave him time to collect his thoughts, though, and he shifted his head (and that definitely wasn’t a pillow, but Izuku could figure out what was going on after he made sure everyone was okay) to look at his best friend.

There was a lot he wanted to ask—where were the others, where were the villains, where were they—but as he looked into his friend’s worried brown eyes the only thing he could stutter out was a confused “Uraraka?”

She opened her mouth to say something, but her eyes flicked down to his arms and whatever her response was died in her throat. Izuku frowned and tried to push himself up to get a better view of the room, but before he could even shift all that much Uraraka lightly placed a hand on his shoulder to stop him.

His movement at least seemed to let Uraraka find her voice again. “Try not to move too much, Deku,” she said. “Hold on, I can help you up.”

Izuku suddenly found himself weightless, but at this point he’d worked with Uraraka enough in team exercises that the shift in gravity didn’t faze him as much as it used to. In a few seconds, he had been repositioned so that he was sitting upright and his gravity was returned, finally letting Izuku properly look around the room.

It was rather dull, frankly. Everything seemed to be made of stone (barring the balled up fabric that his pillow was made of and that tied his arms to the splints he had just noticed) and it looked like whatever structure they were in was long abandoned. The sunbeams that had greeted him upon waking up weren’t coming through a window, they were coming through holes in the ceiling.

Uraraka and Todoroki were there too, obviously, and Asui—Tsu, Izuku mentally corrected—was sitting on her own approximation of a bed, with some of the same fabric wrapped around her left arm. With him that made four, but they were still missing the people that Izuku was most concerned about at the moment.

“Where is everyone?” he asked.

“Bakugo and Ida are searching for a source of fresh water,” Todoroki provided, and Izuku sagged in relief hearing that the League hadn’t managed to get Kacchan. “Tokoyami and Shoji have been looking for anything that we can use in the castle itself.”

Izuku blinked, surprised. They were in a castle? Before he could vocalize that query, though, another thought shot across his mind that took priority. “Wait, Shoji’s arm-”

“Is fine, kero,” Tsu interrupted. “He’s already grown back most of it.”

That was a relief. Shoji had already told him that it’d regrow, but it was nice to know that he was recovering well.

Izuku seemed to be the only one that had relaxed a bit, however. Uraraka was still focused on his arms, and Todoroki was looking at him with a hard gaze that promised bad news. “Speaking of injuries,” he said, meeting Izuku’s eyes, “your own are extensive.”

“I heard that I have a fever,” Izuku provided, “and I know that my arms are broken.”

“‘Broken’ doesn’t even begin to cover it, kero,” Tsu muttered, barely audible.

“Your left arm was a clean break, at least,” Todoroki continued. “You tying it back at the camp probably kept it from getting worse. I did what I could for the burn, but you’ll have scars on that arm.”

Izuku nodded. That made sense, given the situation. It didn’t look like they’d been captured by the League (everyone was far too calm for that), but clearly they didn’t have access to modern medicine at the moment. “And the right?”

“Your right arm was mangled, kero,” Tsu bluntly cut in. “You’ll probably need corrective surgery when we find whatever civilization is around here. And, kero, if it takes too long, we might have to amputate it.”

Izuku choked on his own spit, and he could see Uraraka tense beside him.

“Amputation?” she asked.

“Only as a last resort,” Todoroki clarified. “Dark Shadow can make her claws sharp enough to cut through in under a second, I could cauterize it, and we have enough fabric to fashion a tourniquet. However, it would only be an option if not amputating would outright kill you.” He gave them a second to chew on that information before he continued. “You have already gotten an infection, though, so we want to minimize the chances that it could get worse.”

Izuku nodded, seeing the logic in that. He didn’t like the prospect, but he’d prefer losing a limb to losing his life. To take his mind off the possibility, though, he changed the subject. “So, where are we, then? You said that we’re in a castle?”

“Yes…” Todoroki said before trailing off, like he was unsure of how to continue.

Tsu, ever blunt, simply said what he was unwilling to. “We’re not on Earth, kero.”

Izuku’s mind stopped working for a second. “What?”

Uraraka made a sound that was somewhere between a sob and a laugh. “It’s my fault,” she said in a tone that made it seem like she was talking to herself more than anyone else. “I thought touching Kurogiri would stop his warp but now we’re stuck on some alien planet and Deku has some alien disease and it’s all my fault.”

“You didn’t know what would happen, kero,” Tsu reassured her, though it didn’t do much to stop Uraraka from spiraling.

“[Zero Gravity] brought us to another planet?” Izuku asked before he could stop himself and force more tact into the question.

At least it snapped Urarka’s attention to his question specifically. She nodded.

“That’s amazing!” Izuku said, despite the many reservations he had about actually being on a different planet. He’d had enough of his own panic attacks to know that she didn’t need more negativity at the moment. “If we could figure out how to replicate the effect, it might even be a way to bypass the Kessler Syndrome!”

“You’re…not mad?” Uraraka asked.

Izuku cocked his head. “Tsu already said that you didn’t know, and I don’t think anyone could have predicted this.” He attempted to shrug before a spike of pain stopped him from moving his shoulders. Ignoring that, he continued. “Besides, if [Zero Gravity] brought us here, [Zero Gravity] can bring us back.”

Uraraka calmed down from that, though she still had a worried look in her eyes. Izuku didn’t blame her; he was self-aware enough to admit that had he been in her situation, he’d probably still be blaming himself.

After a moment, though, the look in her eyes went from worry to determination. Uraraka clenched her fists and nodded. “Right. Whatever that was can’t have been one-way.”

Todoroki cleared his throat. “Regardless, for the time being, our priority is survival.”

Izuku nodded once again. “How can I help?”

Uraraka sighed beside him, Tsu gave him a flat look, and Todoroki made sure to maintain direct eye contact. “You can help by recovering, Midoriya.”

Izuku furrowed his brow and opened his mouth to retort, but Uraraka beat him to the punch. “Deku, if you say something like that you still have your legs I am going to tie you down until you agree to stop breaking your bones.”

Izuku closed his mouth and turned to look at his best friend, who glared back with the same intensity she had when Mister Aizawa had announced the Sports Festival. She was dead serious about making sure he didn’t exert himself too much. It only took a few seconds for him to relent. “Alright, fine, I’ll stay in the infirmary.”

Uraraka relaxed at his admission, and the other two nodded. “We’ll hold you to that, kero,” Tsu said. “Ochako, Todoroki, you two should be on Midoriya-watch.”

Izuku sputtered at the insinuation. “I don’t need to be monitored.”

The other three looked at each other for a moment before turning to him. “Deku, you ran towards a giant robot to save me during the entrance exam,” Uraraka said.

“There’s also yesterday, kero, when you ran after the villains with two broken arms to save Bakugo,” Tsu piped up. “And you tried to help save Mister Aizawa at the USJ instead of running away like we were supposed to.”

Everyone turned to Todoroki, expecting him to add something.

“The Sports Festival and Hosu.”

He did not elaborate further, but Izuku did not need him to. His point was made.

Izuku sighed. “Okay so maybe I have a problem.”

“You don’t have to put the whole world on your back, Deku,” Uraraka said softly. “There’s eight of us here. You can afford to rest.”

The other two nodded affirmatively, and Izuku nodded back a bit hesitantly.

There were a few seconds of awkward silence before Izuku broke it. “So, you said that Kacchan and Ida are looking for water?”

“Well, Bakugo is, kero,” Tsu responded. “Ida ran after him shouting that no one should be alone in a dangerous forest.” She tapped a finger to her chin in thought. “I wonder how that’s going.”

Bakugo Katsuki was angry. That, however, was his natural state of being, so perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was livid. Or vehement. Perhaps even pissed off. And woe be upon whomever pisses off a member of the Bakugo family.

This whole situation was fucked, really. Katsuki might’ve even preferred being kidnapped by the League of Dumbasses over being stuck on another planet with a bunch of extras. At least then he’d have a chance to blow the assholes up, instead of being stuck wandering this shitty forest with Four Eyes, looking for a river.

They knew one had to exist; something had to have carved out that chasm near the castle, even if it had since changed course. All they had done so far was choose a direction and start walking, hoping they stumbled across it or got close enough to hear the water. Honestly, Katsuki was most ticked off about Four Eyes’ insistence that he not go alone.

Sure, the forest definitely had some dangerous shit in it, but nothing they’d encountered so far was anywhere near as powerful as the wolf from last night. The only thing that came close was the lion-bat-scorpion thing they’d encountered a few minutes ago, but whatever it was, it was still a wild animal. One well-placed explosion had it scampering back into the underbrush.

Worst of all, though, was Four Eyes’ attempts at, ugh, making conversation.

“I must insist, Bakugo, that we be more methodical in our search, lest we lose ourselves in these woods!”

Katsuki turned to glower at him before wordlessly gesturing to the series of trees that he had marked earlier with his explosions for that exact purpose. Of course he had already thought of that. Plus, the explosions were useful for keeping the wildlife away. Katsuki was resourceful like that.

“We aren’t getting lost, Four Eyes. If you still manage it I think you deserve to get eaten by whatever shitty animal finds you first.”

Katsuki relished in viewing the scandalized look Four Eyes had after that. Pissing other people off was like drugs to him. Given how his Old Hag acted, he suspected that it was genetic.

Without another word, Katsuki whirled around again to continue his search, tuning out Four Eyes’ next lecture about “propriety” and “working together” or some shit like that. He was Bakugo fucking Katsuki, future number one hero. He didn’t need any extras riding his coattails.

Hell, none of the extras he was trapped with could even give him a decent spar. It was a bit of a shame that Shitty Hair wasn’t there, because the only other extras that could stand up to him were Birdbrain in the right environment and Deku. And Katsuki would sooner chop a finger off than spar with Deku with his late-blooming-ass shitty “borrowed power” quirk.

Katsuki still needed to beat some answers out of him for that line, though. He still had no idea what the fuck Deku was on that afternoon.

Before Katsuki could descend into another rant about Deku and his posse’s inherent shittiness, the sound of running water hit his ears. Grinning, he turned towards where he thought he heard it coming from and started sprinting, ignoring Four Eyes’ indignant shout of “Bakugo!” as he chased after him.

Neither of them noticed the blue eyes that tracked them from the trees, or the patch of blue flowers that they ran through.

As Zecora returned to her cottage, having been out gathering materials for some antiviral potions—with summer came illness, and the plundervines had destroyed her prepared stock—she pondered the two creatures she saw. She hadn’t approached, of course; approaching an unknown creature in the Everfree Forest was often a death sentence. Still, they were unlike any creature she had seen or read about, which for somepony as well-traveled as Zecora was saying a lot.

Perhaps Twilight Sparkle would know more? She was in Canterlot at the moment for the Summer Sun Celebration, but Zecora was due for a resupply trip into Ponyville anyway. She could track her down and ask her then. Perhaps they could even make an expedition out of it, since with Princess Twilight’s magical might there was very little that would be able to stand up to them.

Zecora hummed in thought as she approached her home. “I have seen much of the world, this is true,” she said to herself, still pondering the creatures, “but I have to wonder, what in the world are you?”

Author's Note

A bit of a shorter chapter this time, but given that this is both the first Izuku POV and first Katsuki POV in the fic, adding more would've felt a bit bloating, plus I just felt like this was a good spot to end the chapter.

But with another character's interest, Castle Mane-ia is just getting more and more complex, and the explosion will be ever-bigger when it all comes to a head. Only a couple of days until a potential first contact situation is reached.

Chapter V: A Ruined Castle

"Ruins (from Latin ruina 'a collapse') are the remains of a civilization's architecture. The term refers to formerly intact structures that have fallen into a state of partial or total disrepair over time..."
-Wikipedia, "Ruins"

Shoji Mezo was unhappy.

This was to be expected, given his situation. He had been wrenched from his homeworld by pure happenstance, several of his classmates were injured, and this castle was almost entirely bereft of useful material. Bakugo and Ida, at least, had returned earlier with the location of a river, so they had a source of water. It would still take a while for them to build up a proper store of water, however. At the moment, Tokoyami and Dark Shadow were fashioning buckets out of stone, passing them to Todoroki for sterilization, and finally Bakugo and Ida would bring water to the castle one bucketful at a time.

Mezo, in the meantime, was continuing where he and Tokoyami had left off in exploring the castle they’d found themselves in. As far as he could tell, the building was old and hadn’t been maintained in a long time. Everything was made of stone or metal, aside from the tapestries, which were in surprisingly good condition. Clearly not in great condition, of course, given how easier they were to tear apart for material, but they hadn’t succumbed to the passage of time like whatever furniture the castle once held had.

Regardless of how unideal the situation was, though, Mezo did find the mystery of the castle—and of whoever once inhabited it—intriguing. Most of the tapestries depicted stylized horses (including quite a few mythical ones, particularly unicorns and pegasi), and he’d recently stumbled upon a hallway full of horse-like suits of armor. Beyond indicating that the intelligent beings that inhabited this planet were likely equine, it was also a boon for materials. They’d have to fashion molds out of stone, but depending on what metal the armor was made of, Mezo reasoned that Todoroki might be able to melt it down into proper buckets.

Eventually, Mezo stumbled upon a wide, open room with a large statue of a winged unicorn in the center. The walls were lined with shelves upon shelves of books, reaching from the floor all the way to the room’s high ceiling. There were platforms accessible only by flight or ladder, and in the center of it was a large table with surrounding chairs, strangely made of wood. It and the books must have been treated with whatever miracle substance kept the tapestries from decaying.

Curiously, Mezo reached over to one of the shelves and plucked a book off of it. Whatever language the aliens wrote in would, obviously, be unreadable to him, but he was still curious as to what their written language looked like. Upon glancing at the book’s title, however, he nearly dropped it in surprise.

Why was this written in Japanese?

Shoji’s discovery of the castle’s library, while fascinating, did get pushed to the side for a few hours in favor of the armor that he had found. As interested as everyone was in legible Japanese text existing on a foreign planet, an easier way to collect and boil water took priority. Thankfully, even though Todoroki Shoto couldn’t get his flames hot enough to actually melt the armor (as far as anyone could tell, they were made of either iron or steel, which had melting points too high for him) he could still get the armor pieces hot enough that Dark Shadow could reshape them. Tokoyami just had to retreat to a dark corner for a few minutes beforehand to let her get strong enough for it.

Of course, they couldn’t do that in the infirmary, so Shoto left Midoriya under Uraraka’s supervision while he heated armor pieces in what was probably once a throne room. Shoto didn’t exactly expect his friend to try and leave the infirmary, but given his track record he felt that it was better safe than sorry. Besides, he and Asu—Tsu, he reminded himself—both felt that he wouldn’t try anything with Uraraka watching him regardless, so she had also pitched in, helping Shoji with moving armor pieces to the throne room for them to reshape, since her arm had recovered enough for it.

That was all they did for a few hours, during which Shoto and Tokoyami held a long and winding conversation, albeit one with multiple-minute long breaks as they focused on work and the occasional interjection by Dark Shadow. Neither of the pair were particularly sociable, however, so other than one particular comment from Tokoyami that the layout of this castle was rather odd and shockingly indefensible, said conversation never really led anywhere.

Eventually, Bakugo and Ida returned with the first, more inefficient water-gathering method, and Shoto got to work boiling it as the two took the two new buckets and set out to gather more water (there was quite a bit of swearing on Bakugo’s part during the process, but Shoto had learned to tune him out sometime after the Sports Festival). They lost quite a bit of water during the boiling process since the stone lids they had fashioned earlier weren’t the best, but within a few hours they finally had proper drinking water.

Well, enough for everyone to have a few cups, at least. Upon their second return, Ida and Bakugo wound up drinking the most, which surprised no one given the physical exertion they had been through. With their water situation mostly sorted, the group finally acknowledged their grumbling stomachs. By that point, the Sun was beginning to set, though, so they agreed to hold off on figuring out what around them might be edible until the following day.

By now, most of the octet were asleep. Uraraka had opted to keep her vigil over Midoriya, who had been drifting in and out of consciousness for most of the day. At some point A-Tsu and Shoji had ventured outside to grab enough kindling and larger logs for a contained fire to keep warm through the night. Well, warmer than they had the night before—it seemed to be a similar temperature to early summer on Earth, so temperatures at night still dipped rather low.

Those two and Ida were asleep in a room adjacent to the infirmary, with Tokoyami choosing to slumber in the hall while using a collection of tapestries as a mattress. Bakugo was taking the first watch, and Shoto could hear an explosion pop every few minutes from a few halls over. He wasn’t quite sure if it was Bakugo actually seeing something or if it was just a way to keep himself focused, but he never called for backup or tried to wake anyone, so Shoto let it be.

Shoto himself, finding himself unable to sleep, had decided to sate some of his curiosity and ventured to the library that Shoji had reportedly found. Whatever had preserved the books and table had done more than that, it seemed; on the table was a set of wax candles, perfectly preserved for however long this castle had been abandoned for. Picking a random book off of a shelf, Shoto lit the candles, sat down, and cracked it open.

Shoji had mentioned that the books had Japanese text on them, so Shoto was prepared for that, at least. What really surprised him, however, was the content of the book. It seemed absurd, even compared to the more outlandish conspiracy theories he liked to think up from time to time (though he had nearly managed to actually convince himself that Best Jeanist and Edgeshot were secretly dating despite approaching the topic in jest, so perhaps that had some merit regardless).

Despite seeming impossible, the book held his attention all the way to its final passages.

And so, our Princesses vanquished the tyrant King Sombra, banishing his spirit beneath the ice of the Frozen Wastes for eternity. His final ploy, however, was to place a curse upon the Crystal Empire, vanishing it and all of the Crystal Ponies living there. Four hundred thousand souls were lost to time, leaving nothing behind but the freezing winds of the north.

The tome purported itself to be a historical retelling of something called “The War of the North,” but some of the claims made in it appeared straight out of a fantasy novel. A once peaceful kingdom overthrown by a tyrant wielding dark magic? Two new-to-the-throne rulers venturing north to stop his invasion? An entire city wiped from the map as if it had never existed in the first place? For a moment, Shoto suspected this to actually be a work of fiction written in the style of a history book.

Before he could ponder it much, however, a flash of blue caught his attention. Crawling across the table and illuminated by the candlelight was something like a large spider—the largest that Shoto had ever seen, actually—but the creature was clearly not of Earth. It only had six blue eyes that seemed to almost glow, with one large one in the center of its head and five others forming half of a ring around it. On its abdomen was a perfect five-pointed star, which was the sort of geometric perfection that nature simply did not achieve on Earth. Though, Shoto considered, there were some cases of perfect symmetry on Earth. His quirk was an example, after all.

Watching the creature scuttle along, Shoto’s thought process turned to quirks in general when he came to a somewhat startling realization. His own quirk violated the law of conservation of energy, as did Yaoyorozu’s. He was fairly certain that Kaminari’s violated conservation of charge. Ida had metal growing out of his legs—nature just didn’t do that. Uraraka, in her own words, “made gravity [her] bitch,” and however [Zero Gravity] brought them to another planet, it certainly violated multiple physical laws in the process.

No one really knew how quirks worked, and sitting there in a library well after sunset while staring at an unnaturally perfect star on a spider, Shoto came to the conclusion that maybe magic really wasn’t so far fetched.

Princess Twilight Sparkle yawned as she trudged into the room that she had stayed in the previous night. Visiting Canterlot was always nice, especially since she had gotten to catch up with her parents the day prior, but after spending a year living in Ponyville, the sheer grandeur of Canterlot Palace felt like a bit much. Quietly, as to not wake Spike up, she chuckled to herself at how quickly times had changed. She had lived in Canterlot for two decades and spent many of her formative years learning in this very palace, but spending a year in a small town had changed her perspective enough for the halls to feel somewhat foreign.

Smiling, Twilight glanced at the sleeping form of her little brother as she started packing up. Spike always tried to stay up until dawn the morning of the Summer Sun Celebration, but so far the ten-year-old dragon had yet to succeed. This year he had stubbornly stayed up until three in the morning, but tiredness had eventually managed to take him. She herself had gone to bed quite early in anticipation for her role in the ceremony, but she’d still only gotten five hours of sleep. Twilight was planning on napping on the train back to Ponyville to make up for it.

Levitating her sleeping brother onto her back, she smiled as she wrapped the rest of their luggage in her telekinesis and trotted out of the door. Yes, even with the chaos that came with living in Ponyville, this year had been great, and Twilight was looking forward to the next. And she’d be starting it off tomorrow with a trek into the Everfree to look for old books at Princess Luna’s behest.

Dreams were something that Bakugo Katsuki rarely remembered. He had maintained a strict sleep schedule for years now, going to bed at eight in the evening and waking at four in the morning, and that sleep had been, as far as his waking mind was concerned, mostly dreamless. The last time he really remembered a dream was the night after he had been attacked by the sludge villain, the nightmarish feeling of suffocation plaguing him even into his sleep.

The fact that the incident had given him nightmares was a secret he would take to his grave.

So when he awoke for his second morning on another planet, the fact that he had more than fleeting memories of a dream set his mind on a low level of alert. It was possible that it was because of how crappy the situation was, especially with him having not eaten since before their training camp got attacked, but he still felt like something was wrong.

Pushing himself into a sitting position, he glared at his surroundings. It was still the same gray stone room that he’d fallen asleep in after Icy-hot had relieved him from guard duty. It was grating on the eyes and did nothing but increase his annoyance at the entire situation, but he stood and pushed open the door anyway, eager to find something edible in this forest.

He silently nodded at Birdbrain, who had the last lookout shift of the night, in greeting on his way to the door. Before Katsuki could reach the exterior door, though, a loud shout of surprise rang out. His and Birdbrain’s attentions snapped to where it came from instantly, and Katsuki thought he recognized Four Eyes’ voice.

Immediately, the two of them took off in the direction of the room Four Eyes had decided to sleep in, despite Katsuki’s glare at Birdbrain following him. As they moved, the sounds of the others waking up resonated through the halls. There was the clatter of something hitting the ground from the direction of the infirmary, accompanied by Round Face’s voice trailing down the hall. “Deku, stay in the bed!”

Katsuki scoffed. The nerd must’ve tried to force himself to get up after hearing Four Eyes. Even like this, Deku was still looking down on him, thinking that Katsuki couldn’t handle this himself. He didn’t need any of these extras’ help, least of all the nerd’s.

Katsuki and Birdbrain reached Four Eyes’ room at the same time as Arms and Frog Legs opened the door, some amount of panic in their eyes. Pushing past them, Katsuki glared into the room to see what the predicament was, his hands sparking in anticipation, but his eyes widened in surprise. He expected that some sort of alien monster had snuck in, or that Four Eyes had managed to somehow injure himself. Instead of anything sensical, though, Four Eyes was sitting there, staring at his legs in horror. His exhaust pipes weren’t sticking out of his calves anymore.

They were sticking out of his shins.

Katsuki said the first thing that came to mind.

“Four Eyes, what the heck?”

What followed was silence for multiple seconds, as it sank in for everyone, including Katsuki, that he had said something significantly…softer than expected. And all at once, it finally hit him why he had felt that something was wrong, why he had instinctually known that this darn day was going to be crappy.

“WHY THE HECK CAN’T I FREAKING SWEAR?”

“Ah, Twilight Sparkle, may I have a moment of your time? I have made a discovery, and not speaking to you about it may as well be a crime.”

Twilight Sparkle, who had just reached the doorstep of her home in the Golden Oaks LIbrary, painted a smile on her face and turned around to face Zecora. She wasn’t unhappy to see the zebra, of course—Zecora was a friend, after all—but at the moment Twilight wanted nothing more than to take a nap. She refused to let that show, however, and simply replied, “Ah, Zecora! It’s wonderful to see you.” After that token response, what Zecora had actually said finally processed, and Twilight refocused. “What discovery?”

“Yesterday, I came across two creatures in the depths of the Everfree,” Zecora said. “I am not aware of their origins, though I dared not venture close enough to properly see.”

Well, if Twilight was lucky, perhaps Zecora had stumbled upon the humans she would be looking for. “Could you describe them?”

“They stood on two legs,” Zecora began, and Twilight’s focus sharpened, “and appeared almost like hairless apes, aside from some hair atop their heads that stopped short of their napes.”

Twilight took a deep breath before coming to a decision. Gesturing for Zecora to follow her, she telekinetically opened the door and began moving, Spike still soundly asleep on her back. “I’ll need a nap after this, but I think we can sort out a trip into the Everfree for tomorrow before I go to bed.”

Deku was getting worse.

Her best friend was getting sicker and sicker and there was nothing Uraraka Ochako could do about it.

The day had already started off terribly enough, what with Deku aggravating his injuries further trying to help when they’d heard Ida scream. She’d managed to get him to calm down only by running over to see what was wrong and then assuring him that Ida was alright (which wasn’t exactly the term she’d want to use for his and Bakugo’s states, but they claimed that they were physically fine aside from the…modifications to Ida’s quirk). But with whatever had happened to the two of them, Ida had decided to quarantine himself, which left the eight of them unsure of how to proceed.

Tsu, Tokoyami, and Bakugo had left the castle in search of food, the latter having ignored Ida’s advice that he isolate himself as well, claiming that food took precedence. Todoroki had said something about a theory before spiriting himself away to the library, and Shoji was staying by the water they had collected yesterday just to make sure nothing messed with it.

Ochako herself fought against her growling stomach to keep focused on Deku, who seemed to be getting worse by the hour. At the moment, he was asleep, but it was a fitful thing. He was tossing and turning as he slept, his face a bit flushed from his fever and a sheen of sweat visible on his forehead. He’d agreed earlier for her to tie his arms down (securing the fabric with some heavy rocks that she’d moved into place with her quirk) to stop him from moving his arms too much in his sleep. Still, she had to hope that he wouldn’t unconsciously use his quirk; it seemed that nothing would be capable of really stopping [Superpower], up to and including Deku’s own bones.

Her stomach rumbled again, and Ochako sighed. She was extremely grateful for the water that Ida and Bakugo had collected, but she was really starting to feel the lack of food. How long had it been since she’d last eaten? Thirty, forty hours, maybe? She honestly wasn’t even sure how long she’d sat there, watching Deku’s state continue to deteriorate.

And no matter how much Deku had assured her that no one could have predicted it, there was still a voice whispering in her head that this was all her fault. That her mistake is what landed them here, that her mistake got Deku sick, that her mistake might eventually get him ki-

Ochako shook her head, trying to dispel the thought. Deku would get through this. He had to.

She wasn’t sure what she’d do if he didn’t.

Thankfully, something external did break her out of her thoughts. “Good afternoon, kero.”

Ochako jumped a bit as she turned, but smiled nonetheless. “Hi, Tsu,” she said, her voice betraying just how tired she was with the whole situation.

She perked up a bit upon the scent of fresh fruit hitting her nose, and Ochako could feel herself salivating as Tsu presented a plate (really a slab of stone but hey that was all the material they really had) of what looked like wild raspberries. “It took a bit for us to figure out if they were edible, kero, but Dark Shadow said they tasted identical to raspberries from Earth.”

Ochako tilted her head. “You had Dark Shadow check if they were poisonous?”

Tsu nodded. “According to Tokoyami, she can get sick from things that are poisonous to humans but it doesn’t actually hurt her, kero.”

With that said and her stomach growling loudly again, Ochako was quick to swipe the fruit and gobble it down. It didn’t do much to quell the gnawing hunger that had set in over the past day, but it helped a bit in the short term.

As Ochako swallowed, Tsu looked over towards Deku. “How’s he doing, kero?”

Ochako frowned. “Not good. His fever’s just gotten higher and the last time he was awake he said it felt like his right hand was starting to go numb.”

Quietly, Tsu walked over to Deku’s bedside. Carefully, she took a look at his right hand, which was still disfigured from his actions, both at the camp and when he mangled his hand earlier in the year. After a moment, while she still seemed concerned, she relaxed a bit. “I hope the numbness is just because of the break, kero.”

That statement ratcheted up Ochako’s concern in turn. “Tsu…?”

“Ochako,” Tsu said, looking up to her friend with a rather grim face, “I couldn’t find any dead tissue, but if the numbness doesn’t go away then we might really need to amputate his hand—it could be gangrenous.”

A twitch of her right hind hoof, a pinch in her left front ankle, a swivel of her right ear, and a swish of her tail. There was somepony new in town.

Then the sequence happened again.

And again.

For there to be a total of eight new ponies for her to greet, why this called for one heck of a party. Assuming the new ponies wanted it, of course. She didn’t want another Cranky situation on her hooves.

Still, it was getting rather late, and she hadn’t heard about any group of new ponies walking into town earlier today. She’d just have to set aside her plans for tomorrow—Dashie and Applejack would understand and find somepony else to referee their little bravery contest, hopefully—and track them down then. And then ask if they’d like a welcome party, of course.

But oh, she’d track them down.
Nopony escaped the notice of Pinkamena Diane Pie.

Author's Note

Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of how this chapter turned out, which probably contributed to the massive amount of writer's block I had while writing it. Eventually I realized that I just kinda had to get the chapter out if I ever wanted to actually move on and write the chapters that I actually was looking forward to writing when I started the fic, but since this is the last chapter before stuff actually starts to happen hopefully I find more inspiration to write going forward.

After all, up next, we finally have a first contact situation. It took longer to get there than I initially though it would, but we're almost there.

Chapter VI: First Contact

"First contact is a common theme in science fiction about the first meeting between humans and extraterrestrial life, or of any sentient species' first encounter with another one"
-Wikipedia, "First contact (science fiction)"

Buzzing was all she could hear.

A narrowed pair of green eyes was all she could see.

And the cotton suit over her fur was all she could feel.

“Give it up, Dash,” came Applejack’s drawl, “ya can’t hope ta beat me when farm animals are involved.”

Rainbow Dash scoffed. “‘Give up?’ Have you met me?” After a moment, she added, “And calling bees ‘farm animals’ is a bit weird.”

“Well they farm honey, don’t they?”

There was a sharp whistle, and suddenly the bees vanished from both Applejack’s and Rainbow’s forms, retreating back into the elderly beekeeper’s hives. “Time’s up, you two,” he called before turning to properly tend to his insects.

Rainbow groaned. “Dang it! We’ve tied!”

“Ah wish Pinkie were here,” Applejack said with a sigh. “Maybe she’da been able ta call it.”

Rainbow narrowed her eyes. “We just need another competition! The bees didn’t work out to end the best of five so…” Her eyes drifted towards the border of the Everfree, which was relatively close to the beekeeper’s property. “I know! Let’s go explore the Castle of the Two Sisters!”

Applejack raised an eyebrow. “Ya know the Forest gets mighty dangerous, even during the day, right Dash?”

Rainbow grinned at her. “Well, if you’re too chicken to explore some ancient ruins, that makes me the winner of our bravery contest!”

Applejack snorted. “Ah didn’t say Ah wasn’t game. Ah was just makin’ sure you were.”

The pair grinned at each other for a moment before they took off towards the forest with no hesitation.

“A-are you sure this is a good idea?”

“Please, darling, we’ve been through the Everfree multiple times before! I dare say that the chances of us running into anything untoward are vanishingly unlikely!”

Fluttershy glanced behind them before continuing walking, just to make sure that Rarity hadn't jinxed them with that comment. “But, um, before it was all six of us when we’d go into the Everfree.”

Rarity glanced back. “What of that time you entered alone to save my sister and her friends?”

Fluttershy shivered at the memory. Yes, she may have gotten that cockatrice to back down, but it was still one of the scariest things she had ever done. “That was st-still really dangerous.”

Rarity slowed down to give Fluttershy a reassuring pat. Or at least, Fluttershy thought her friend was trying to be reassuring. It didn’t accomplish much—it was no more reassuring than the knowledge that Angel was in her mane—but Rarity continued on afterward regardless. “Well then, we shall simply have to reach the castle posthaste! I have wanted to give those tapestries a proper look for a year, now!”

The Everfree’s canopy rustled in a light breeze as Twilight Sparkle trekked through the forest. Looking up, she squinted at the sky that she could see through the leaves, noting that there would likely be a storm in the afternoon. Hopefully, she and Zecora could find the humans (or at the very least any information about them that may or may not be at the Castle) before the rain set in.

Returning her focus to the proximity charm she had up, Twilight glanced at their surroundings. It was standard for the Everfree, really. Most of the truly dangerous predators of the forest were nocturnal, though timber wolves were known to show up during the day occasionally. She felt that it was better safe than sorry, hence the charm set up to alert her the moment something else stepped into range.

Spike was on her back, keeping a second set of eyes out behind them as the three of them moved between the trees. Or at least, he was supposed to. From the conversation he was having with Zecora, Twilight could tell that he was more interested in the reason for them being out here than keeping watch.

“So what’s with the potions you’re bringing, then?” he asked.

“The humans I saw ran through a patch of poison joke,” Zecora said, shaking a vial that Twilight assumed held the antidote for that particularly annoying plant. Personally, Twilight thought that, much like the plundervines, poison joke was an invention of Discord that he simply forgot to mention. “I hope to prevent them from panicking, if they are as susceptible to it as us pony folk.”

Twilight winced a bit, remembering that whole debacle. The wince, really, was both from her remembering the poison joke’s effect on her and the lingering shame from how she and her friends had treated Zecora. But before she could open her mouth to apologize for that (probably unnecessarily, given that the transgression was nearly a year ago and Zecora had forgiven them even then, but Twilight was a princess now; she had to set a good example), Spike spoke.

“Oh hey, we’re almost there!”

Following where her brother was pointing, Twilight could see the top of the Castle of the Two Sisters’ tallest spires peeking over the trees. Soon enough, they had exerted the woods and were in the large clearing containing the castle and the chasm surrounding it. The bridge, thankfully, was still up, and stable enough that they could cross without issue and Twilight didn’t have to try (and likely fail) to fly them across.

Twilight took a deep breath before entering the Castle. She wasn’t sure she’d find the humans that they were looking for here, but she figured that it was likely. The Everfree didn’t have much in the way of shelter other than it and some scattered caves, so an intelligent creature would probably seek it out to set up camp.

As Twilight lit her horn to push the large stone doors open, none of the three noticed a pair of black eyes narrow at them from above.

Stepping inside, Twilight didn’t see anything amiss. At least, not until they reached the Castle’s throne room, which they had decided to look at before going to the library. That room did have some differences from how Twilight remembered it.

The first thing she noticed was that one of the tapestries above the twin thrones was gone. Specifically, the tapestry with an artistic display of the Moon, hanging above Luna’s ancient throne (which was the only one of the two still intact; Celestia’s had been destroyed when Nightmare Moon refused to make way for the day), had vanished.

“I wonder if they moved it,” Twilight muttered, mostly to herself. It seemed like the most likely explanation for the tapestry disappearing, though admittedly Twilight wasn’t sure why the humans would have messed with the Castle’s art.

“It would seem that the humans did,” Zecora chipped in, her voice alerting Twilight to where the zebra had moved. “This is not particularly well-hid.”

She was standing a bit of a ways away, in one of the throne room’s corners, standing over a pile of scrap. Upon closer inspection, Twilight’s eyes widened when she realized just what the scrap was: the remains of the missing tapestry. A bit put out that the humans would ruin such an ancient piece of art, she stalked towards it.

As she did, Spike sniffed. “Wow, that’s a bit of a strong smell.”

Confused, Twilight craned her neck to look at him. “What smell?”

Spike blinked. “You can’t smell it? It’s the same as how most metal smells to me. I mean, it’s not as strong as the metal jugs over there,” he gestured over his shoulder at a series of metal pots that, properly looking at them, Twilight could tell were made out of the decorative armor around the castle, “but it’s still pretty strong.”

“Dragons are known to have enhanced smell, for more than just what is dragged out of the mud,” Zecora spoke up. “Aside from gems and the rocks on which they dwell, dragons can also better smell metals, and thus,” she held up a ripped piece of the tapestry, which even in the dim indoor lighting of the castle, was clearly stained a rust red, “blood.”

Twilight gasped, her ears pressing back against her head. Quickling taking a piece of fabric in her telekinetic grip to more closely inspect it. Some of the pieces were knotted, and it was clear that they had been cut free from whatever they’d been wrapped around. There were wooden splinters in a few of them, and with how many of them were stained red…

“They were using it to dress their wounds,” Twilight concluded. Eyes wide, she looked at Zecora and Spike. “We need to find them. They’re lucky a manticore hasn’t wandered in here with this much blood around; trying to dress your wounds in the Everfree is just asking to get eaten.”

“Infection is also possible in such an environment,” Zecora added. “Even likely, and sicknesses from the Everfree can be particularly violent.”

Spike gulped audibly, and Twilight steeled her expression. “Alright, let’s head to the library, then.”

Spike made a confused sound as they left the throne room. “If we’re looking for them, why there?”

“It’s one of the biggest rooms in the castle,” Twilight said, “which might make it convenient. And I know if I found myself on another world, I’d be very curious as to why their books were appearing in my native language.”

“You believe these humans to be extraterrestrial?” Zecora asked. “I would think, before making such a claim, that proper proof would be essential.”

Twilight shook her head. “I mentioned the Mirror portal to you yesterday, right?” At Zecora’s nod, she continued, even as they pushed the door open to the library. She was too engrossed in the conversation to notice the other two freeze in shock. “The world across the Mirror had different laws of physics from Equestria. I don’t think humans are just extraterrestrial; I think they’re extrauniversal. They couldn’t even use magic, not even passively like how most species on Equus do.”

“Well then,” a new voice spoke up, and no Twilight froze in shock as well, “that would certainly explain a few things.”

Slowly, Twilight turned around, facing the creature she had been looking for. His voice and build indicated that he was male, at least going by what Twilight had seen across the Mirror. He was wearing the remains of a tapestry, with the fabric wrapped around him to hide the fact that he must have lost his shirt at some point. He had two-tone hair—white on his right and red on his left—and seemed to be around the same height as the humans Twilight had encountered before (at least assuming the Spike’s dog form was around the same height as dogs in Equestria), indicating that he was likely young. His eyes matched his hair, heterochromia splitting the colors between them. His right eye was a stone gray, while his left was turquoise. Most of Twilight’s attention, though, settled around his left eye, on the absolutely massive burn scar covering most of the left side of his face.

The three natives to Equus stared at the human and he stared back for a few moments as no one spoke. Eventually, the human spoke up with a small frown. “I suppose I should introduce myself, given that whatever lets us read these books also lets us communicate. My name is Todoroki Shoto,” he said, “and if we’ve truly stumbled into another universe, that makes things much more complicated.”

Ida Tenya looked up in surprise as Asui quickly entered the room and shut the door behind her. Putting down the book he had grabbed from the castle’s library (and wasn’t that just fascinating how this world had books in Japanese; at this point they all suspected something supernatural was going on), he spoke. “Asui-”

Asui croaked threateningly.

“Tsu,” Tenya quickly corrected, “what is wrong?”

“We have company, kero,” she said. “I already told Ochako, but Bakugo’s outside and I don’t know where Todoroki, Shoji, or Tokoyami got off to.”

Tenya frowned. “I do know that Todoroki has been spending more time in the library as of late, and I hope that he is able to handle himself if the natives are hostile.”

In truth, Tenya wished he could help with a first contact situation, but whatever was going on with [Engine] kept him from doing so.

“I don’t think they are, kero,” Tsu offered. “I caught some of their conversation and they seemed more curious than anything, but, kero, I don’t want to take any chances.”

Tenya nodded. “A sensible position. As for the others, I do know that Shoji has taken to exploring the castle, but I have no idea where Tokoyami is.”

Fumi! Hey, hey Fumi! Look at this!

Tokoyami Fumikage sighed before deciding to just indulge his quirk. Dark Shadow would just keep bugging him about it otherwise. “What is it, Dark Shadow?”

Dark Shadow rushed through an open door, pulling Fumikage along with her. “A pipe organ!” she squealed, opting to speak aloud rather than in his thoughts for now. “We’ve always wanted to play one of these!”

Fumikage’s fingers twitched, but he resolutely turned around. True as it was that the room held a massive pipe organ and that Fumikage had had a few fantasies of being able to play such a magnificent instrument, the pipe organ that was available was probably ancient. “It is unlikely to work in the first place, Dark Shadow.”

“Aw, come on, Fumi!” Dark Shadow complained. Before he could reign her in, she shot forward and moved to press her claws to the keys. “You never know until you try!”

The talon pressed down, and a surprisingly clear chord rang out.

In Ponyville, Pinkie Pie paused her search for the new ponies for a moment as a strange feeling passed through her, drawing some strange looks from the Crusaders as she inexplicably hung upside down from their clubhouse’s ceiling. Her eyes narrowed. “Somepony’s stealing my bit,” she said.

Without any explanation, she dropped down from the ceiling and jumped out of the window, an event that the three fillies soon shrugged off as just Pinkie being Pinkie.

Outside of the Castle of the Two Sisters, Rainbow Dash and Applejack were near one of the walls to set the ground rules for their contest. “Alright,” Rainbow began, “we’ll each spend two hours inside the Castle, and we’ll keep track of how many times something startles us.”

Applejack raised an eyebrow and leaned against the wall. “An’ how do ya think we’ll do that?”

Rainbow grinned. “Points!”

“Points?” Applejack clarified.

Rainbow nodded. “Jumping is one point, running is two, screaming is three, and running and screaming is five!”

“An’ Ah take it this is golf rules?” Applejack asked. “Whoever ends with the least points wins? Ah can work with that, but,” she narrowed her eyes, “how do Ah know ya’ll be honest?”

Rainbow snorted. “And how do I know you’ll be honest.”

Applejack snorted right back. “Please, Ah can’t tell a lie ta save my life.”

Before Rainbow could properly retort to that, the wall Applejack was leaning against suddenly shifted. Rainbow herself jumped (and hated that fact) as Applejack let out a shriek as the entire wall spun around and she outright vanished.

“AJ?” Rainbow called. She knocked on the wall a few times before deciding that that was a fruitless endeavor and she resolved to look around inside for her friend. Nary a moment later, she’d shot off into the air and towards the front of the Castle with a rainbow contrail behind her.

Fluttershy winced at every stray sound that emanated from the Castle, and when that organ chord sounded out she outright yelped. At this point, Angel had grabbed one of her forelegs with a paw and was practically dragging her behind Rarity, who seemed too engrossed in the Castle’s décor to pay much attention to Fluttershy nearly having three heart attacks in succession.

For a moment, Fluttershy’s thoughts paused. When had her inner monologue gotten so sarcastic? Huh, maybe she was spending a bit too much time around Discord.

Ah, never mind that, though, it seemed that Rarity did, in fact, notice Fluttershy’s extreme distress. She glanced back at her in the hallway before the throne room. “Fluttershy, darling, an old castle like this is going to have some odd sounds from time to time!” she rationalized. It had to be rationalization. That was the only explanation Fluttershy could think of for Rarity’s behavior that didn’t involve her friend suddenly becoming even more unaware of others’ feelings. “There’s no need to be so dramatic-AIEEEEEEEEE!”

Fluttershy glanced inside the throne room to see whatever had Rarity in such a conniption. Her unicorn friend had dashed towards the two thrones (or really one throne and the crumbled remains of a second) and was peering up at a blank wall. “One of the tapestries is GONE!” Rarity dramatically (Fluttershy let herself feel some vindication, though she didn’t express it outwardly) declared.

“Um,” Fluttershy piped up, “weren’t you planning on taking it and seeing if it could be renovated? Maybe somepony had the same idea?”

Rarity let out a sniffle. “I…suppose that may be possible. But I shudder to think our trek will have been useless. Perhaps I should examine the other as well and-”

She cut herself off, her eyes having landed on a corner. Her face quickly warped from a distressed frown to a confused frown to an angry frown. She stalked towards the fabric in the corner, almost inequinely snarling. “How dare somepony desecrate such beauty!”

Fluttershy nervously followed after her, but she looked down in confusion when Angel refused to get more than a few meters from it. He shook his head, chittering a bit, and Fluttershy’s eyes widened in realization. “Uh, Rarity?”

“Not only did they tear it, but look at this!” she shouted, not even acknowledging Fluttershy’s voice. Light blue magic wrapped around a piece of fabric as Rarity shoved it towards her friend’s face. “RUST RED! They stained it and had the GALL to do so in such a garish color!”

“Rarity, that’s-”

“I simply must find the pony that defiled this fabric and…” Rarity huffed, stomping a hoof as she contemplated whatever punishment she’d give the poor soul who did this, “give them a very stern talking to!”

Fluttershy shuddered. She’d been on the receiving end of Rarity’s rants about fashion before, back when she’d gone to apologize for how she acted during the debacle with their Grand Galloping Gala dresses. It had been quite informative, sure, and Fluttershy had learned that her previous understanding of fashion from when she’d tried to nitpick her dress was rather surface-level, but it wasn’t something she’d wish upon anypony.

Except maybe Sombra. He’d probably deserve it.

Well, there was another example of Fluttershy’s inner monologue being influenced by her time spent around Discord. She didn’t think she’d ever been so vindictive before meeting him, though she still wouldn’t trade their friendship for the world.

Wait, where was she?

Ah, right, Rarity was running off into the hallways, following a trail of bloody fabric, chasing after somepony to give them a piece of her mind. Somepony that, if Fluttershy was reading the state of the fabric properly, was probably wounded.

Her eyes shot wide open and she frantically looked towards where Rarity had run off to. Quickly grabbing Angel from where he was examining a bunch of beaten-up looking pots filled with water, Fluttershy ran as fast as she could after her. “Rarity!” she called. “Those are bloodstains!”

She wasn’t sure if she had been heard. Between Rarity’s state of mind and Fluttershy’s naturally quiet voice, she doubted even the loudest she could make herself shout would get through to the unicorn. Panting, she turned a corner just in time to see Rarity jump into a room, and Fluttershy tried desperately to push herself even harder.

She pivoted to run into the room, seeing the commotion that Rarity’s hasty decision had caused. She seemed to be mid-step towards a figure lying down on a stone slab (with another, larger piece of tapestry cushioning the creature) but was swiftly stopped by a second creature that pretty much lunged for Rarity. Before Fluttershy could even react, they had made contact with her, and that’s when things got a bit strange.

Rarity started floating.

In an instant, Rarity had been thrown, and she let out a bit of a pained yelp when she hit the far wall. With the unicorn still trying to figure out which way was up, the creature’s attention turned to Fluttershy, brown eyes boring into blue.

The pegasus had dealt with dangerous creatures before, though, and this was displaying all the signs of an animal backed into a corner. She tried to make herself as nonthreatening as possible, even reaching up to prevent Angel from popping out of her mane to defend her. After a few terrifying moments, the creature seemed to relax a bit.

The silence was still tense, though, and Fluttershy used it to take in everything that was going on. The creature that had attacked (though in their mind, it was probably retaliation) Rarity was bipedal, and similar in structure to an ape. Despite the lack of fur, they were still clearly mammalian, with a mop of brown hair atop their head. The hair looked ragged, as did the creature’s clothes; it was clear that they had been camped out here in the Castle for at least a couple of days. Given the creature’s chest area, Fluttershy presumed that they were likely female (was she lactating or did her species simply have permanent breasts, Fluttershy idly wondered), though she certainly wasn’t going to be so crass as to say that aloud, especially given that the creatures were clearly intelligent enough to both create clothing and dress wounds.

Speaking of those wounds, Fluttershy’s attention then turned to the creature that was lying down. She couldn’t see much, given the angle, but she could tell that their arms were wrapped in the same fabric that made up the tapestries—that was what had probably gotten Rarity so worked up. There was a pile of clean tapestry pieces at their bedside, and Fluttershy figured that they probably brought the used ones out to the pile in the throne room to properly dispose of them later. What she could see of the creature’s arms, though, looked bad. Their left arm had a nasty burn scar and the sleeve of their shirt was even a bit charred, on top of the arm seeming broken. Their right arm, or at least what little of it Fluttershy could properly see, was also broken, ugly purple bruising blemishing the visible skin. They were asleep, at least, their eyes shut under the bush of green hair, but the sweat on their forehead and their freckled face being flushed seemed to indicate a fever.

Eventually, the female creature sighed. “Alright, I’m gonna assume that whatever magic translation thing is going on lets us understand each other, so uh,” she paused, looking back at Rarity but making sure to keep an eye on Fluttershy, “what the hell was that?”

The unicorn in question was now slowly rotating in place, a bit away from the wall that she had bounced off of. She winced. “I…may have overreacted a tad to the Castle’s tapestries being trifled with.”

The creature raised an eyebrow. “A tad,” she repeated.

Rarity sighed. “Yes, and I do apologize. Could you release whatever magic you used on me now? I promise not to attack you or your friend and I’m not really skilled enough at autolevitation to properly move right now.”

The creature crossed her arms, splaying the digits at the ends of them in such a way that only four were in contact with her at a time. Mentally, Fluttershy tried to recall what the creatures on Equus that had them called them—those were called fingers, right? The creature’s fingers had visible pads at the tips of them; perhaps they were how she activated whatever magic she used on Rarity?

“Yeah, I’m not gonna trust you with that right now,” the creature said, and Rarity sputtered a bit.

Meekly, Fluttershy did eventually speak up. “Um, maybe we’ve all gotten off on the wrong hoof?” She shivered a bit as the creature’s attention turned to her, but forced herself through it. For Rarity’s sake, if nothing else. “M-my name is Fluttershy, and,” she poked at her mane to let Angel know that it was okay to show himself, though she guessed that he was likely glaring at the creature, “this is Angel Bunny.”

The creature did seem to relax further, but she was definitely still on guard. “Uraraka Ochako,” she offered.

Pointedly, Fluttershy looked at her floating friend.

The unicorn sighed. “Rarity, darling. May I ask what your friend’s name is as well?” Her face softening, she added, “And, if it isn’t too much, what happened?”

Uraraka sighed and sat down on a slab of her own. Fluttershy wasn’t sure why this room had so many stone slabs but that probably wasn’t the most important thing to focus on at the moment. “That’s Midoriya Izuku. He…both of his arms were broken when we got trapped here, and we think that he got an infection here.”

“Trapped?” Rarity asked.

Uraraka stiffened, looking at her hands (they were called hands, right? Fluttershy thought she’d heard of minotaurs calling that appendage a hand) as if they had blood on them. “We…still aren’t sure how it happened, exactly,” Uraraka said, guardedly, “but this isn’t our home planet.”

Fluttershy’s eyes widened, and she locked surprised eyes with Rarity. Even with all the things that they’d dealt with since gaining the Elements of Harmony, aliens were not on the list of things she expected.

Then Rarity continued rotating away and the eye contact broke, but the thought still got across.

Still, Fluttershy shook her head to clear it. Regardless of them being aliens, one of them was still in danger. “Could we…” she started softly, trying to figure out how best to phrase this. She didn’t want to scare them off, but Uraraka was still very much on guard and definitely adverse to any of them getting closer. Of course, Fluttershy didn’t exactly blame her; if one of her friends had multiple broken bones and an infection, she’d be wary of some unknown creature too (especially if another of that creature had previously attacked them). “Maybe we could help? Ponyville has a hospital and we could show you the way out of the Everfree Forest.”

Uraraka looked to be warring with herself between continuing to be cautious and wanting to accept the help. When she looked towards Midoriya, though, her gaze softened and she seemed to settle on one option. “That…that’s probably a good idea.”

She didn’t say it, but Fluttershy had dealt with very sick animals enough to pick up on the fact that it was likely their only option. Midoriya already looked half dead and if he didn’t get medical attention soon he probably would die. “Would you mind if I took a look at him before we moved him?” she asked as Angel hopped out of her mane to snicker at Rarity a bit more. “And, um, could you undo the magic you used on Rarity?”

Uraraka seemed confused for a moment before she realized something. “Oh, right, my quirk. I guess it might look like magic in this world…” She muttered that last part, before quickly bringing her hands together, matching each digit with its counterpart on the opposite hand. “Release!”

Rarity’s gravity returned immediately and she fell to the ground in a bit of a heap with the second pained yelp of the day.

Angel just snickered louder.

Ignoring that for the time being, Fluttershy trotted up to Midoriya, with Uraraka’s burning gaze still centered on her, and carefully undid the wrappings on his right hand. Up close it was even worse than how she had first assumed; not only was there recent purple bruising all up and down his arm, but his hand in particular looked like it had been put through the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy Six Thousand. And on top of that, Fluttershy could see some old scarring as well, likely signs of earlier surgeries.

The worst of it, though, was staring her right in the face. And right in the nose, as well.

“When was the last time you redid the wrappings?” Fluttershy asked.

Uraraka shuddered. “A few hours ago, I think? It’s…hard to keep track of time right now.”

Fluttershy gulped. “So this is recent, then.”

Uraraka must have seen the concern written on her face, because her own face took on a fearful expression. “How bad is it?”

Fluttershy met her eyes and immediately regretted it, but it was better for news like this to be shared rather than hidden. “Gangrene.”

Uraraka seemed to go through a lot of expressions rather quickly, but she settled on some combination of desperation and determination. Without warning, she got up and made for the door. “Alright, I need to grab two of the others here for an emergency amputation, then.”

She made it about three steps into the hallway before something very fast and very orange slammed into her legs, sending both her and the newcomer tumbling to the ground. When a familiar Stetson landed a bit before Fluttershy, though, she knew who had run into Uraraka.

“Applejack?”

The farmpony seemed confused for only a moment before she locked onto the fact that two of her friends were here. “Flutters, Rares, ya gotta help me! Ah can’t find Dash and there’s some six-armed monster in the halls!”

Uraraka let out a pained groan a bit away before speaking as well. “Oh, you found Shoji.”

Rarity looked at her as Angel hopped back onto Fluttershy’s head. “How many of you are there?”

“There’s eight of us,” Uraraka answered, getting up and dusting herself off. “We’ve gotta find Todoroki and Tokoyami to save Deku, so let’s go.”

Mentally, Fluttershy filed away the nickname Deku as a way that Midoriya was referred to before following along as Uraraka began to run through the hall. She could hear a bit of Applejack and Rarity’s conversation as the latter filled the former in on what was going on (“Aliens, really?” “Yes, darling, aliens.”) but most of her attention was on helping to make sure that one of their extraterrestrial visitors didn’t die of sepsis.

It turned out that they wouldn’t need to do much searching, at least, because by the time they reached the Castle’s foyer, it was in complete pandemonium.

The biggest, most eye-catching thing was the giant shadow monster writhing around in the center, causing enough of a ruckus that it was a wonder they hadn’t heard it earlier. Fluttershy, of course, froze on the spot as soon as she saw it, backing up to be behind Applejack as she rushed into the room too.

Darting around the shadow monster was a familiar rainbow contrail, though, so at least that meant that Applejack had found Rainbow again.

There were two more creatures of Uraraka’s species as well, one significantly taller than her with broad shoulders who was waving a flaming stick around and another likely female member of her species, who was using an exceptionally long tongue to pull the tall one away from the shadow monster’s strikes every so often.

Uraraka swore under her breath (and that certainly wasn’t something that Fluttershy could fault her for; growing up around Zephyr had somewhat desensitized her to swearing and the situation certainly called for it) before looking at the three ponies. “Dark Shadow’s out of control!”

Applejack looked at her somewhat incredulously. “Ya know this thing?”

Uraraka nodded. “That’s Tokoyami! Or, well, Tokoyami’s quirk. It’s complicated and he or Deku would explain it best but right now I need to ask if any of you can produce light.”

Rarity looked a bit confused but lit her horn anyway, a simple light spell at the ready.

She needn’t have bothered, though, because as soon as she did a massive column of flame, directed towards but not directly at Dark Shadow, spilled out of one of the side hallways. Immediately, the shadow retreated, revealing another creature. Fluttershy wasn’t quite sure if this was another member of Uraraka’s species or something else, given that he had the head of a crow but the rest of his body seemed to match their species (and she really needed to ask what they called themselves at some point).

Following the flame, though, were four figures. Another of the aliens, who looked to be the source of the fire, Zecora, Spike, and, blessedly, Twilight. Before she could run up to her friend and ask her to save an alien’s life, though, they were interrupted again by the doors outright exploding.

“Alright, what the heck is going on in here?”

Fluttershy’s gaze snapped to the destroyed doors, which had been blown to smithereens by another, irate alien. This one had spiky, blond hair and red eyes that made Fluttershy shiver in fear just from them glancing over her. In only a moment, the angry alien apparently decided that Twilight was the biggest threat, because their hands exploded and they launched through the air towards her.

Her horn flared and the alien was wrapped up in purple magic and suspended midair before he made it even halfway across the room.

Uraraka let out some kind of surprised choking noise at that, but Fluttershy was, at this point, mostly focused on Twilight. She and Rarity both ran towards the alicorn, with Uraraka close behind. “Twilight!” Rarity shouted. “One of them is injured!”

“Badly,” Fluttershy added quietly. “His wounds are gangrenous.”

The alien that was with Twilight seemed surprised by that last part, and Twilight’s own eyes widened, too. The alien glanced around. “Do we need to amputate?”

Twilight shook her head. “I can teleport him directly to Ponyville General, so there’s no need for a field amputation.” She looked at Rarity before releasing the alien she had suspended, who let out a flurry of creative insults upon being dropped. “Take me to him.”

Rarity nodded resolutely, and the two of them sped off back towards Midoriya.

As soon as they did, Uraraka seemed to finally let the tension she was holding in break, and she fell to her knees in what Fluttershy assumed was relief with tears in her eyes.

The rest of them seemed to slump back as well, a whole load of tension that they were carrying relieved all at once. Rainbow landed next to the rest of the ponies with a bit of a confused expression. “What’s going on?”

The blond alien crossed their arms and growled. “Yeah, I’d like to know that too.”

The alien with heterochromia and two-tone hair let out a breathy, humorless chuckle. “It’s worse than we thought, Bakugo,” they said. “We’re not just on another planet. We’re in another universe.”

Uraraka, who at this point had collapsed entirely to the ground, let out a groan that Fluttershy couldn’t help but compare to her brother’s “done with this shit” groans. His words, not hers.

“Hold the hay up!” Rainbow shouted. “You’re aliens?”

“Before we continue this line of conversation, perhaps there is something else we should take into consideration,” Zecora cut in, directing everpony’s (everyone’s?) attention to her. “Midoriya has broken bones, so to heal him Ponyville General will need an example. Could someone get there fast enough to provide a sample?”

Rainbow immediately started hovering, but looked unsure as she scanned the aliens. She was still full of bluster, but did seem to lose some as she actually thought about it. “I…don’t think I could carry one of you all the way there.”

The alien that had been with Twilight (oh how Fluttershy wished that they had all exchanged names, but introductions could wait for now) sat up straight. “I have an idea. Could you still lead us out of the forest?”

Rainbow preened. “Absolutely! You’re looking at the finest Wonderbolts reserve that Ponyville has!”

“Uraraka,” said the alien, “could you use your quirk on Ida?”

She pushed herself to her feet. “Yeah, sure thing, Todoroki. I take it you’ll carry him and he’ll push you?”

Todoroki nodded, and the alien that must have been Ida approached them as well. “I am…unsure of how this will work, given the state of my engines.”

“You’ll just be facing backwards,” Todoroki said. “I can still hold onto you like that. And perhaps this hospital can help you as well.”

Zecora seemed to suddenly remember something on that note. “Ah, you and your angry compatriot have walked through a patch of poison joke,” she said, grabbing a vial from her saddlebags. “The cure to that is to add this to some water and take a long soak.”

Bakugo seemed particularly pleased that there was a cure, but no one wanted to bring up why that may be, so Fluttershy wasn’t about to assume things.

A few minutes later, everyone had properly introduced themselves, Rarity had rejoined the group as Twilight had teleported away with Midoriya, Ida was securely on Todoroki’s back, with the latter’s arms splayed outward a bit to loop through the former’s. The pair were just outside of the destroyed doors, with Rainbow doing a few warm up loops in front of them. “So, you think you can keep up?”

Todoroki grinned and stomped his right foot on the ground, and Fluttershy could see Applejack’s jaw drop as a thin sheen of ice spread across the ground, with a thicker ice bridge across the chasm separating the Castle of the Two Sisters from the rest of the Everfree. At the same time, the strange protrusions in Ida’s legs began to glow from heat, and Rainbow grinned at them.

The three were off like a rocket moments later.

“Alright, then,” Applejack spoke up after everyone was silent for a few seconds. “Are we gonna head back ta Ponyville an’ have the aliens meet everypony?”

Rarity frowned a bit. “You know, I cannot help but be surprised that Pinkie hasn’t shown up here, given that the rest of us did.”

“She did cancel on me and Dash’s competition,” Applejack said. “Maybe somethin’s keepin’ her in town?”

Either these new ponies were supremely clever at hiding from her, or her Pinkie Sense was wrong. And Pinkie Pie’s Pinkie Sense was never wrong! But she had already searched all of Ponyville! The new ponies weren’t in any buildings, or under the bridges, or even hiding in any of the trees!

She did find a neat new hiding spot for eye patches in case of eye patch-related emergencies, so there was at least one positive to her search.

Still, Pinkie tapped her chin in thought as she considered where the new ponies may be. Perhaps she had been thinking too small! Ponyville’s borders technically encompassed the entire Everfree, even if nopony ever exercised their jurisdiction there. Maybe the new ponies were in there, hanging out with Zecora!

Before she could set out, though, an all-new wave of shudders passed through her.

Pinkie didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but she could tell that there was a doozy coming.

Applejack shrugged. “Whatever it is, she ain’t here.”

Uraraka sighed from where she’d once again sat down, leaning back against a wall. She seemed half asleep, but she was still awake enough to respond. “We’ll go when everyone gets here.”

Fluttershy looked around. There were three ponies, one zebra, one dragon, and four humans (Uraraka, Bakugo, Tokoyami, and Asui, or Tsu as she preferred to be called, if Fluttershy was remembering their names right) around, so they were just waiting on one.

Like the thought of him had summoned him, the final, six-armed human, Shoji, entered the Castle foyer from one of the many hallways. He looked around, noting the many exhausted beings around, and gained a confused expression. Fluttershy thought it was confused, at least; it was hard to tell from only the eyes.

“What the hell did I miss?”

Author's Note

It's off-screen, but the reason that Rainbow Dash was fighting with Dark Shadow was that she stumbled across Tokoyami while searching for Applejack, and her first instinct was the punch the shadow monster in the face. This is the mare who decided that kicking a full-sized, adult dragon in the snout was a good idea; she knows no fear.

Dark Shadow reacted negatively to that, to say the least.

Also, when I was initially writing this, I didn't expect the Fluttershy section to get nearly as long as it was, but as I was writing I realized that yeah, Fluttershy absolutely would analyze the heck out of some new creatures. She lives for that sort of thing, and I like to think that, if she hadn't been tied down to Ponyville by her animals and the Element of Kindness, she probably would have gone to school for an actual degree in biology or ecology. Plus, I just enjoy writing her; she seems like the kind of character that would let her thoughts wander a bit, especially since her social anxiety keeps her from interacting with most other ponies and especially especially since she hangs around Discord quite a bit.

It worked out, though; Applejack's and Rainbow's experiences in the Castle weren't terribly different from in Castle Mane-ia itself, so I left their actual encounters with Shoji and Tokoyami respectively off screen.

And now, finally, the introductory arc of this story is out of the way! We won't be jumping straight into how our heroes handle Equestrian culture, though; first, we'll be spending two chapters in an interlude of sorts, because up next is Chapter Seven: The World They Left Behind. And as a sneak peak, here's the first line:

To say that Midoriya Inko was distraught would be the understatement of the century.