Chapters You blink. That was odd. Must have spaced out or something. Returning to the task at hand, you decide to go over the machine again to make sure you had everything right. The fuel line for the gas tank is loose, and you mutter to yourself about how they just don't make hardware like they used to. It's too bad neither Ebay nor Amazon sells experimental and dangerous radioactive minerals. Those would probably be a much better energy source. Still, it feels like for some reason this is sufficient.
You decide to wait for the gas tank to fill up. Pulling out your phone, you check your Twitter, Facebook, and other websites. The time flows by, and speaking of time, it's time to read a few fanfictions! Your reading is interrupted, however, by something that falls out of the sky. It's not a pony. It's not your space dad. It's not a UFO, because it's perfectly identifiable. It's a large meteorite in the exact shape of Abraham Lincoln's head. Needless to say, your house is demolished. And again the gas tank explodes, but it's barely noticeable in the impact crater.
==Summary==
Attempt Number: 2
Time Lasted: 22 minutes, 38 seconds -- New Record!
Distance Reached: Home
At least you didn't kill anyone this time.
Even if the meteorite did kill quite a few people, at least it wasn't your fault.
What's up with the Abraham Lincoln head, anyways?
Something about presidents? Not seeing where this vague train of thought is going, you return to reality and look out the window. It's a pretty normal day. What was that thought about, anyways? You can't remember. You shrug and tighten the fuel lines. For a moment, you swear you've done that before ; then, the moment fades. You are about to push the on button, then take a second look at the chair. It's a wooden stool from the kitchen. Clearly, a monumental scientific discovery like this deserves a better chair. You go to the office room and borrow a spinny chair, which you spin around on for a few seconds. After this, you power up the machine and turn it on. The whole thing powers up, and LEDs on various circuit boards flicker.
You press the ‘start’ button. Instinctively, you flinch, despite the fact that clearly nothing is happening. You spin over to the terminal for the machine. The power is set to 0%, and a few safeties are on. You enter a few commands and push the button again. Everything is fine and dandy until, unknown to you, it turns out that in your code for the power levels, the most you were supposed to set it to was 11. You set it to 100 thinking it was measured in percentages. And the code didn't check that input for boundary errors. The burner goes on far too high, overwhelms the reaction capsule and shoots fire everywhere.
You are on fire. Your chair is on fire. Your machine is pretty much on fire. The room is on fire. Soon your whole house will be on fire. You scream and try to run, but trip over some cables. The burning pain overwhelms you and you black out to die shortly after. However, the machine is able to detect the fire and shuts everything off. It’s too late to save you, and your house mostly burns down. The firemen who arrive later are able to save part of it. There were no other casualties. A short while later, specifically 20 minutes and 21 seconds after you die, the meteorite hits. This time, while the meteorite does kill fewer people, it takes out the firemen who were saving the scraps of your house.
==Summary==
Attempt Number: 3
Time Lasted: 2 minutes, 17 seconds
Distance Reached: Home
Okay. You're getting better at this. I think.
I still feel like it's somehow your fault.
View Online
The Plot expands dramatically (and not because of over-eating)
You turn away from your CRT. Yes, you actually use a CRT : they tend to glow a bit brighter. You feel like you were about to do something on it, so you turn back to it. Something about an error in your math. Looking at your code, you can see that you did alter your code. You remember that you had something wrong, and changed it. It feels odd, and yet comforting, like you've progressed in life, never to go back.
While looking over the code, you notice another issue: you forgot to specify the destination. It can calculate the destination that most likely is the target, but right now it's just teleporting you to wherever and whenever and whatever. Rolling your eyes, you add in some controls in the terminal GUI to specify that, and hop on the stool. You frown at the stool, and slink off to the office to get a better chair. A spinny chair. A chair which, for some reason, makes you think of fire. You sit down in the chair and turn the machine on. Wheeling over to the terminal, you check the status of everything. Again, the fuel line is loose. You grumble, saying, "I swear, it feels like this thing is always loose."
Jumping back into the chair, you spin around a few (dozen) times for good luck and press the ’start’ button. Nothing happens. You feel like you've made this mistake before. You turn the power up to 11 (not sure why it isn't there by default), and sit back. The reactor core charges up, and glows brightly. Lightning shoots out and hits you. At first it doesn’t bother you much, but before long it begins to really hurt. Some tiny voice in your head quietly screams, "Not again".
The terrible white rip in the universe forms in front of you, and you fall into it. You wouldn't remember the last time, not properly anyways, but if you did, you would say it hurts substantially less this time than last time. The white fades out into black, and you feel like you're flying at incredible speeds. You look around and see white glowing lights. You can see the one from which you came behind you. You fly towards one, but veer off just to the side of it.
You pass through what feels somewhat like a fog, with the other lights being far overwhelmed by the one you're next to. As you get closer and closer to the light, you can see that the light is not one light, but many individual lights. Stars. They’re organized in galaxies, into super-clusters, into the soap bubble foam of the light of a universe. Sure, scaled down, but still pretty dang amazing. You reach out to it, but before you can touch it you fly out of reach.
Zooming back out into the black, you wonder when it's going to stop hurting. The pain has been constant this whole time. You stop wondering that because straight ahead is another one of those lights. A universe. And you're heading straight for it. You mentally steel yourself for what happens next.
You fly closer and closer and closer. The light gets larger and larger, and starts to hurt more. Then another rip opens in front of you and you fall into it. As you fall in, however, you swear you see a certain lime-green unicorn. And then nothing.
Lyra Heartstrings was contemplating the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Then there was a glowing white light, a ripping sound, and she was covered in dust. Wet dust. Multi-colored wet dust. She had no idea what it was. It was mostly brown, green and black with streaks of other random colors, including an oddly glowing pink.
==Summary==
Attempt Number: 5
Time Lasted: 19 minutes, 2 seconds
Distance Reached: Equestria -- New Record!
Sorry, Lyra. You're covered in scrambled human. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Because then we do stuff like get deatomized at roughly average human body temperature.
At least you started your looping later in the story. Which indicates PROGRESS.
You stop staring at the controller. Your finger hovers over the button. For a moment, you almost push it. Then, you decide you should take a break and think things over before hurling yourself off the face of existence. You put the controller down and - just in case - shut the machine off. Wouldn't do to have it randomly go off by itself. You go grab your wallet and car keys, and drive down to the Dairy Queen, because ICE CREAM DRINKS.
You order something cold and delicious and large to consume and contemplate. Sitting down in a window seat, you idly gaze over in the general direction of your house. At 22 minutes and 30 seconds after a certain key point in time, you begin to feel nervous. Before long, you’re downright scared. You almost scream. And then, oddly, nothing. Nothing happens. It's almost as if something has changed. There was a problem but the problem was fixed, like someone cleaned up a mess and put it in the right box instead of all over on the ground.
Your train of bizarrely correct thought is interrupted by the dreaded scrape of your spoon against the bottom of the cup. You sigh, stand up, chuck your trash in the appropriate receptacle, thank the workers, walk out to your car and drive home. You see that your roommate still isn't home, which is good. They probably wouldn't approve of all the weird trans-dimensional science stuff you're doing. They're already somewhat skeptical about all the Derpy posters in your room.
Walking downstairs to the basement, you walk past the computer you've been writing all the code for this thing on. Then you walk back to it. You got an idea. An important idea. An idea that could save your life. When you ate earlier, you ate ice cream out of a cup. They didn't just sell the ice cream to you. You got a cup with it. The cup held it together. The cup was the reason why that sort of thing was even possible.
You write some calculations and ideas on the whiteboard (tends to be easier to work with than a computer sometimes), do some thinking, write some more ideas, crunch a few numbers, and crack your knuckles to write some serious code. A few minutes later, with some quick debugging to make sure you don't have any infinite loops or dead code or misplaced periods, you hit the compile button and squee with success.
Powering on the machine, you go to the terminal and enter the launch information. Slightly quivering with excitement, you jab the ’start’ button. Again, the lightning from the reactor reaches out to you. Again, it hurts. But then it changes. The lightning splits apart into finer and finer threads. The pain fades out to an odd tickling feeling. Instead of an ugly rip in space, something much more circular-looking opens up, and you fall into it.
As you fly over and around the lights, you can't help but feel like you've done this before. You almost feel certain that this has happened before. So many of them whiz past you, you almost get mentally lost in them. But then you head straight for one of them. The light resolves itself into millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions, nobody-has-any-clue-how-many-illions of stars. The universe grows and grows until another hole opens up in front of you, and you fall into it.
Lyra Heartstrings was contemplating the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. She was guessing all sorts of things, including apricots and the number 42, when there was a bright light. Then she was covered in human. One solid, living human this time, instead of a disorganized radioactive blob of nothing meaningful. She collapsed from the surprise and the weight. Both of you gave out a rather loud oof.
You took one look around you - she took one look at you - and you both did the exact same thing at the exact same time.
Youtube Video
==Summary==
Attempt Number: 6 (still going)
Time Lasted: 32 minutes, 14 seconds (still going) -- New Record!
Distance Reached: Equestria (in one piece) -- New Record!
Huzzah. The fun has been quintupled.
"I'm so excited! It's finally my turn!"
You shake your head and give Lyra a questioning look. "Your turn for what?"
"Oh. Well, usually you humans either turn up in the Everfree or Twilight's Library but now I finally get one!"
"What?"
There is a burst of light and an electrical sound, and then suddenly you are standing in front of you. That is, there are now two of you. One you is standing and the other still awkwardly in a dog pile with Lyra.
The standing you says "Hey! Now listen, me, you need to- oh. Whoops. Wrong me."
They push a bunch of buttons on a device on his wrist and disappear again.
"What?"
Then they reappear and say "Oh. By the way..."
They shove you and Lyra and disappear again. A moment later, a bass wave just barely misses the two of you.
"WHAT?"
Far off in the distance you hear a voice yell "Whoops! Sorry!"
"... what..."
This is it. You've been building up to this moment. It's been an hour since you got the last part and put it all together. You push the power button on your console. You wired up your Xbox 360 to this fire hazard of a mess you optimistically call "My Ticket to Equestria". You check the fuel gauge on the gas tank, and it's now at 89%. While you wait for it to finish filling up, you pull out your phone and post to Twitter, "Here goes nothing".
You push the ‘start’ button on your contraption, and squee when it makes powering up sounds. Before you can make that awful high-pitched noise again, it happens. The thing that every gamer on Xbox fears. The RRoD. With such a major part out of commission, quite a few things go out of control. Sparks fly everywhere. Cables short and burst into flames. Something breaks and slams into your head. You see stars and are knocked down.
Unfortunately, you land on the loose fuel line for your machine. Now it's no longer attached, and leaking gas. A few seconds later, there is a massive explosion. That DOES kill you. Shrapnel from the explosion takes the lives of two innocent people walking outside your house and severely injures another. The story is the headline for the newspaper the next day, and the forensics people are still trying to figure out what you were doing.
==Summary==
Attempt Number: 1
Time Lasted: 48 seconds
Distance Reached: Home
Hopefully this won't turn out like Kerbal Space Program usually does for most people...
You stop staring at the window. You feel like you were staring at it forever, trapped in time until that moment. It's a weird feeling, and you move on to better things. You look at your maths again. You see a few issues, namely the fact that you incorrectly used the chain rule and got the derivative wrong in one equation which propagated itself through a lot of your work. Also, you incorrectly calculated the difference between TREE(3) and A(g64,g64).
Going over to the computer, you rework the code to eliminate the bugs created. You also double check your GUI code and notice that you forgot to put boundary checks on a few inputs. You add those, and give the layout a good cleanup. While you’re on the computer, you decide to put on some epic music to suit the mood. You go to Youtube and bring up ______.
You sit down on the stool, which feels odd because you swear you grabbed a different chair, and power up the machine. The noise of it excites you, and as you look at the status screen, you see that while you were programming, the fuel tank filled itself up. There's also a warning that it might be loose. You tighten it and sit on the stool again. Everything looks good. You turn it up to ‘11’ and press ’start’. The reaction chamber glows, and there's bolts of lightning. As expected, the lightning shoots out at you. It doesn't hurt, though. Everything goes kind of blurry. Then a quiet sound starts. A ripping sound. It gets louder and louder. And then it starts to hurt.
A ghastly void appears in front of you, jagged at the edges and constantly twisting and rippling. It's white. All you can see is white. The white consumes you. The pain won't stop. Then the pain spikes and you know nothing more. Your atoms themselves are split apart and scattered throughout space-time, and even probability. A few particles end up in the beginning of the creation of the Milky Way. The extra gravity there attracts some particles, which slowly build up into a strange rock. A rather large rock. A rock which looks exactly like a certain president of the United States of America.
==Summary==
Attempt Number: 4
Time Lasted: 14 minutes, 56 seconds
Distance Reached: Void -- New Record!
I KNEW IT! It was your fault that the meteorite crashed into the earth! Ha!
You did a bit better this time, at least.
Now you just have to figure out a way to stop the meteorite at some point and all will be well.
Except, of course, for the fact that you'll keep dying.
You are about to start a conversation with Lyra when the two of you are flattened by a meteorite. Not, however, one in the shape of Abraham Lincoln's head. This time, it's Celestia's head. Ouch. Oh. Right. Did I mention it was filled with bananas? Emphasis on was. They were rather cooked by entry into the atmosphere.
==Summary==
Attempt Number: 6
Time Lasted: 32 minutes, 17 seconds -- New Record!
Distance Reached: Equestria
Apparently there was one last asteroid. In a different dimension.
Hopefully that's the last one.
...
...
"Could you get off me now? You're squishing me. What are you just staring off into space for?"
You return to reality and scramble off Lyra.
"Oh. Sorry, I was just... uhh..."
Awkward silence abounds as you just kind of look at each other.
"I don't know what I was doing. Nothing, I guess."
More silence.
Lyra asks, "What's your name?"
You are about to answer when you notice that you've been hearing a tune off in the distance this whole time. Looking for the source, you see a white pony with a jagged lightning blue mane with a box. A box that is opening up. A box that happens to be aimed right at you.
"OH *BUY SOME AP- "
The apple censor would finish, but that's as far as you got before BASS CANNON. Both you and Lyra were hit. The bass wave stunned both of you quite badly, and had quite a bit of knockback. The clincher came when you slammed into a tree. No, not the yellow kind. The wooden and very, very sturdy kind. Several bones, especially the ones in your neck, broke on impact. And so you died yet again.
==Summary==
Attempt Number: 7
Time Lasted: 33 minutes, 8 seconds -- New Record!
Distance Reached: A tree in Equestria -- New Record!
You should be glad to know that Lyra crashed into you instead of the tree, saving her life. Nice.
Lyra is a good exposition method
"Well, I suppose it's time to give you a proper introduction. I knew it was a good idea to always bring this along."
Lyra reaches into her... something... you'll have to ask her about how that works... and withdraws a scroll.
"Attention, Human. Do not be alarmed. You are one of dozens of humans that have arrived somehow in Equestria in the past two years. A full guide to Equestria may be acquired at any library free of charge. Follow the laws of Equestria and everything will be fine. Welcome to your new home."
Silence.
More silence with Lyra grinning somewhat creepily at you.
"So there are a bunch of humans just popping up in Equestria."
"Yep."
"Anyone- err, pony know why?"
"No."
"Are you sure it's not Discord?"
"Two things. FIrst, we've learned to not ask how you know things you probably shouldn't. Second, Discord's dead. Sortof."
Utter shock fills your mind and soul.
"WHAT?"
"Yeah. All these humans coming in freed him, and he started trying to turn the humans into his minions. One human did not appreciate that and somehow killed him. The human recieved a medal for dealing with him and got thrown into jail for killing somepony. And Discord didn't stay dead and after that he stopped trying to take over. ... Everything's just been weird and crazy. But fun."
This all seems to be a little much. What to do, what to do?