Trans-dimensional LADs Night Out.

This was going to be legendary.

That was all that was going through my mind as the minibus pulled away from the Scout hall. I was eighteen years old and this was going to be my last ever camp. And it was in Switzerland! I’d heard only good things about this northern European country. Most of the Scouts were going the next day on an aeroplane. However, my two best mates were here on the minibus with me. We’d left it too late to book a place on the plane, but our absolute legend of a leader, Max, had let us hitch a ride on the bus with the kit, and for a discounted price too!

“Hey, you know there’s gonna be like, twelve hundred people at this camp right?” asked Ed.

Ed was tall, with blue eyes and straight blond hair that just reached the bottom of his ears. He wasn’t a muscled lad, but could hold his own in a fight. Most people underestimated him because of his thin, scrawny appearance. But boy was he fast.

“Yeah, that means it’s gonna be the greatest crusade we’ve ever been on!” said Sam, loudly.

Sam was the complete opposite of Ed. He had dark hair, skin and eyes, and was a tank. His dad had played rugby for Wales in his day, and Sam dreamed of following in his footsteps. Or bootsteps. He was already the top player in his school and the national under eighteens, even though he was only sixteen. The muscles in him looked like they were practically fighting to get out of his upper torso, and his thighs were like concrete slabs.

“Nah bro, it means there’s bound to be some fit girls there.” retorted Ed.

I couldn’t help laughing. “Shut up Ed, we all know you’d shag anything with two legs and tits!”

My name is Jack and I was known for my hair. It was dark ginger and the envy of many. It grew big, wild and curly, and came halfway down my back. Even girls grew jealous of its thick smooth curls. I’m not proud of it or anything... hehe... anyway, I was the geek. Anything electrical or mechanical had my immediate and undivided interest. I’d spend hours disassembling and reassembling old laptops, game consoles, and once, the engine from our old car. As a result, I wasn’t exactly fat, but I could do with losing a few inches off the waistband. Exercise just didn’t seem to fit in around all the tech I messed with. Hell, I even still played with Legos.

I’d thankfully put in a good few sessions in the gym before the camp, so I was thinner and more muscled than usual for the activities.

Ed scowled at me in good humour, and then joined the unanimous laughter.

“Yeah, this one time when we went to Jersey, I managed to overhear some muffled screams coming from your tent.” chimed in Max. The guy was in his late fifties, had awesome grey and brown facial hair, and a faded bushman’s hat to hide his balding head. He was not what you’d expect of a leader; he was officially one of our drinking buddies and was as laddish as they come. If Max was at a camp, the camp was good.

“Oh my God, I thought the pillow she put her head in would help.” said Ed, embarrassed.

“Yeah, I saw that bird come out, you needed the pillow for more than one thing eh? That face looked like a truck hit it!” cut in Sam.

“Hey, that’s why pony style was invented!” replied Ed.

“Good point.” I said, as the bus erupted into more laughter, Max’s beer belly jiggling slightly.

Also, as well as being the ultimate mates, we were all bronys. Even Max. Therefore, we had affectionately renamed ‘doggy style’ as ‘pony style’. See what we did there?

The banter continued down the motorway with music blasting out, mostly Alestorm, Muse and Kasabian. The talk mostly ranged from past scout camps and what we expected from this one, to school, life in general and other trivial stuff. Before going under the English Channel in the Eurostar, we arrived at the Travelodge we’d be spending the night in.

“Booking under ‘Phoenix Explorers’ please.” Max said to the receptionist.

“Certainly sir. That’s one triple room and one single room, correct?”

“Yes, that’s us.”

Max gave us our key.

“Why not just a family room?” asked Ed, not the brightest bulb in the box.

“I’m your Scout leader.” He explained whilst we walked down the corridor. “I’d be carted off to prison faster than you can say ‘Foal fiddler’.”

“...Oh yeah...”

“Well done Ed.” I said. “Way to ask the obvious. Whadda ya want from the bar, I brought my driving licence.”

“You legend!” said Sam and Ed together, as they handed me a tenner each. (Ten of my British pounds. Spiffing.) I was the only one of the three who was above the age limit.

Sam wanted as much cider as I could buy with his money, and Ed demanded Jack Daniels.

“Lashings of ginger beer for everyone!” I cried as I jogged off in the direction of the bar and the sweet delicious alcohol.

“Not too much!” shouted Max. “You need to be conscious and healthy at seven in the morning!”

I grinned to myself. That definitely wasn’t going to happen.

I kicked the door to room 307 and Sam opened it. His eyes went wide as dinner plates. I wasn’t able to knock as my arms were filled with bottles of booze. I stomped into the room and grandly dumped the JD, cider and ginger beer on the bed. We each grabbed one of our chosen beverages and opened them. Ed ripped the top off with his teeth; I knocked the cap off mine against the table, making a scratch. Sam however, picked up a spoon from the coffee tray and wiggled it around under the cap of his cider. To the surprise of me and Ed, the cap popped off. Sam looked at our amazement, gave a cheeky grin, and pocketed the spoon.

We each raised our bottles high and said ‘grace’ as we always did before drinking:

“For wenches!” shouted Ed

“For alcohol!” yelled Sam

“For the strength of thy brothers!” I added.

We all gave the final line: “In the presence of these three, may our mothers never see.” And glugged our drinks until we’d each finished one.

The morning was not kind to us. At least one of us had had the sense to close the curtains so the sunlight wouldn’t torture our eyes. What woke me was a loud knock at the door.

“Oi! Get up you dolts! We need to leave in an hour!”

Great. Max was outside.

“Urrrgharble.” I replied.

Wow. I really need to work on my hangover talk. I dragged myself up off the floor and leant on the bed, in which Sam was sleeping like a baby. A baby surrounded by copious amounts of empty bottles of alcohol. Staggering to the door and using the walls and furniture for support, I managed to say in a croaky voice: “I’m coming...!”

“You guys had better be ready or I’ll...”

I opened the door.

“Kick... your... faces... in?” He mumbled as our leader gazed past his extremely hung over Scout into the chaos that was our room. With heavy footfalls, Max strode past me, grabbed a half finished bottle of cider from the table, and wordlessly emptied the contents onto the face of Sam, who was suddenly very wide awake.

The noise he made was utterly outstanding.

“AAARGH! WHAT THE F-GLUBGLUB-BLAAA! YOU DICKWEE-BUBUBU- *PPPFFFFFFSSSHHHHH!!!*”

I paused, somehow not laughing at what was easily the most comical scene I had ever witnessed, just to embrace the moment. To treasure and cherish the sheer amazingness of what had played out before me. Eventually, I managed to manoeuvre myself so that I was next to a spluttering Sam, and I grasped his hand in a firm shake.

“I must hereby give you the heartiest congratulations, my good sir. If I were not in the same state of post-drinking pain as you, I believe I would have wet myself.” I said, in the most posh British accent I could muster whilst some unseen God of Hangovers was cleaving my head open with a battleaxe. I turned back to Max to ask if he’d seen Ed, when I noticed his iphone pointing at us.

“Oh fuck no!” said Sam. “You fucking recorded that didn’t you?!”

The horror on his face, combined with embarrassment and drips of golden cider was a true wonder to behold.

Max decided to grace us with a pearl of wisdom after he’d finally stopped howling with laughter.

“In all my years of Scouting, I have never seen something so damn hilarious. I’ve got an easy two hundred and fifty quid if I sent this off to ‘You’ve been framed’ and have it shown to the world on TV.”

“You fucking dare!” challenged Sam.

“Oh but I do.” said Max. “Now where’s that other tit.”

“Dunno.” I shrugged. “Haven’t seen Ed this morning.”

“Right.” relied Max and wrenched open the bathroom door. He then stared in for a few seconds before bursting into newfound laughter. “Come take a look at this!”

I helped Sam out of bed and over to Max, only to behold Ed sleeping curled up on the floor next to a pile of brownish puke and snoring slightly.

“Hold this.” Max handed me his iphone after setting it up to record video. I pointed it at Ed. Max crept over to him, leaned in next to him, and bellowed into his ear:

“WAKEY WAKEY LAD!”

Caught on tape was Ed screaming awake, jolting up, whacking his forehead on the toilet bowl, and falling back down in groaning agony. A few moments later, a decently sized chunk of white porcelain fell off the bowl and knocked him unconscious.

“That was the second funniest thing I have ever seen. Of all time.” I stated.

“Not my fault!” said Max quickly. “Someone put a toilet in his way.”

Unlike me and Max, Sam could not hold his laughter well. He was struggling to breathe as he rolled around on the floor in hysterics. I grabbed a couple of seconds of that on the video and shut off Max’s iphone. I shifted the piece of toilet away from Ed and flushed it. Because of the missing piece, a good amount of water flowed onto Ed’s face, rudely rousing him again. Unlike Sam, Ed simply got up and stepped fully clothed into the shower and started to wash.

“Well, didn’t expect that.” said Max in surprise. “Right. Jack go after Ed in here, Sam come with me. I’ll wait outside my room while you shower. We’ve still got forty five minutes until we need to go, so let’s move. We can leave the empty bottles and stuff here, just take the full ones.”

“Spoken like a true Lad.” I commented. “Let’s do this!”

As Ed and Sam washed any and all evidence of our forgotten night of drunken debauchery form themselves, I rounded up the empty bottles and put them under the duvet, then piled the unexpectedly large amount of remaining alcohol on top after covering the empties. I whizzed around like a hurricane finding all our stuff and throwing it in the general direction of our suitcases. I was about half done when Ed strode gallantly out of the bathroom in a fresh pair of undies. I leapt into the shower and began to wash. (I’ll let you fill the gap here dear reader. As much fun as describing myself taking a shower is, you can just imagine it yourself.)

When I returned to the room and got dressed, Sam was back, and he and Ed were packing their bags. I joined the frenzy and we were all ready with ten minutes to spare.

“Well done Lads.” I congratulated them with a high five each before we exited the room and met Max in the lobby. After a hasty retreat from the Travelodge with our bags, we were on the move again. Well, not so much ‘on the move’. We could have been beaten to the Channel Tunnel by an asthmatic ant carrying heavy shopping. We waited for the abysmally slow queues to shorten. Sam and Ed fell asleep. I waited more. It wasn’t long before I joined the other two Scouts and fell into the clutches of a hangover nap.

Three and a half hours later, Max had had enough of the silence. One good blast from the radio later, and our protests joined his laughter as we were startled awake.

“We’re getting close to a services, anyone need anything?” asked our leader.

“I need to play fireman.” I replied. Sam and Ed agreed.

After we’d emptied our bladders and Max got a huge ass bag of sweets, we hit the road again and munched on the snacks.

After five more hours of conversation, this time mostly featuring that goddamn addicting show and fanbase that we all loved called ‘My Little Pony’, the campsite was in sight! We learnt a lot. Max had never read a fanfiction on the show before, and his favourite was Pinkie Pie. So it was with great pleasure that we recommended a sweet innocent story known simply as ‘Cupcakes’. Damn we’re mean. Sam’s favourite turned out to be Applejack because as he said: “She’s a friggin’ tank. She took out most of Sweet Apple Acres with her two back legs! If she wouldn’t win at rugby I’ll eat my kettle.” We guessed Ed’s favourite as Rainbow Dash, and whadda ya know, we were right. He used to be as much of an obnoxious show off as the cyan mare, and with twice the self-righteousness. But Sam and I had hammered it out of him (quite literally) not long after we met him. Now he was a bit more humble and thought about the feelings of others. ‘My Little Pony’ had taught him that.

We pulled up next to the minibuses from other Scout groups around Europe in the large field dotted with trees that hopefully would not be our home for the next week. The place would be absolutely brilliant for a Scout camp, but that’s not the main reason we were here, in Switzerland, home of the Large Hadron Collider. This mammoth machine, bigger than our home city of Cardiff, was built to accelerate atoms and molecules to near light speed and smash them into each other. In my mind, it was brilliant. In most other people’s minds, it was just some big sciency thing. This field was perfect, both because it was so big and because it was only eighteen hours hike to the bunker that lead to this machine.

After exiting the minibus, we were greeted by the rest of our troop and some friends they’d already made from Denmark and Spain. Us three didn’t bother with long introductions. If all went well, we’d be out of this universe tomorrow.

We set about setting up our tent. Max had offered a small three man, but Sam had brought instead a large six man tent, which was perfect for our belongings. We’d packed all necessary equipment and some un-necessary equipment, so we each had a hold-all and a monster of a 65-litre Duke of Edinburgh Challenge rucksack. With the tent up in ten seconds flat, we set out our beds for the night even though it was still mid-afternoon. If you can call a thin roll-out mat each a bed.

The rest of the day passed almost wordlessly between us as we prepared for our secret trek. We’d snuck into the nearby forest and were using our Scouting abilities to the max. To explain our absence, Ed was gathering branches while Sam used a hand-axe to fell a few small trees. I however, had found an ancient yew tree and was using some branches cut by Sam and some thick climbing string to craft three large bows in order for us to catch game/deter wild predators. Four hours later gave us an excuse, a bow each, and about sixty arrows between us. Sam had started fletching while I found a shale outcrop and was knapping the rock into arrowheads and fixing them to the shafts, and Ed hunted for feathers.

Just before nightfall, we stowed the weapons in the tent along with Sam’s axe and my rock hammer, and joined the dwindling queue for dinner. We sat together on our own.

“So Jack, have you got the... thingamajig...” asked Ed.

“Yep, the little bitch needs temperatures of below a hundred Kelvin so it’s being stored in a canister with liquid nitrogen.” Their blank looks said enough. “...I need to keep it very cold so it’s in a container to keep it that way. It’s also very heavy which is why you guys are lugging the tent between you.”

“Fair enough” commented Sam. “We’ve done longer hikes before but these packs will be our heaviest yet.”

“I’ve taken that into account.” I said. “It’ll take us eighteen hours to get there if we don’t stop, but we’ll need to so I’d say about a nice even twenty-four hours walk with stops for food and rest and stuff. We’ll have some sleep time as well.”

“We can do that.” agreed Sam, and Ed soon followed. “What is it you’ve made again?”

“I couldn’t give you its proper name, but I’ve taken a benzene ring and shoved some appropriate elements on it. Benzene is made of six carbon atoms arranged in a regular hexagon with one spare bond and the remaining valence shell electron delocalising into a pi-bond system above and below the ring...”

“English please.”

“Thank you Ed, anyway, I picked calcium for kindness because of the strong bonds it makes with other atoms and the fact that it is present in bones, shells and stuff that help protect and support organisms. For generosity, caesium. It’s the most reactive non-radioactive element and will always give its spare electron to any atom or molecule that needs it. Aluminium is for honesty. It’s very hard to wear down this metal, but if it does, it changes some of its properties drastically, like a warning that it’s changed. Loyalty is obviously argon, the most common of the noble gasses. I had to shove this gas through an electron gun to get it to even consider joining onto the benzene ring, but now it’s on; it’ll take a lot of heat and pressure to remove it. For laughter, I picked oxygen. Not only do we need it in order to breathe and therefore laugh, but I also bonded it with hydrogen to make an alcohol group. Lastly, magic. I chose nitrogen because of its ability to have either three or four bonds and still be stable. As far as I know, this is a unique ability.”

“Tidy.” said Sam, he seemed to have followed. “Just don’t think about the egghead nonsense and I guess it makes sense. I find your conclusions to be sound, Doctor.”

“I’m not a Doctor yet, I need to pass my A-levels first.”

“Wait!” said Ed. “Wait wait wait! Are you sure this will work?”

“Nope.”

“...okay.”

I roused my two friends at three in the morning after an early night and the tent went down by our hands, again in ten seconds flat. Thanks to years of practice, we were off by quarter past three. Our hold-alls were strapped to the top of our bags, each now weighing in excess of eighty kilos. We walked in silence, checking the map and compass on the go. I’d helpfully marked our route with a red felt tip, so there was no way we’d get lost. Two hours later at five in the morning, we stopped for a twenty minute rest. We set off after a snack and drink from our bags. We’d gotten Max to ignore our absence; he’d understood when we said we wanted some wild camping experience...

It was midday and we were completely drenched in sweat. The ruthless sun had decided to unleash its heat straight on us, boiling us in our own skin. At half past twelve on the dot, we collapsed for lunch. None of us had said a word so far since the trek began, and we weren’t in any sort of mood to now. I gratefully shed my rucksack next to a tree and lay a while sprawled out on the grass in the shade with my eyes closed. Ten minutes later I found the strength to lift my head. Sam and Ed were tucking in to a full-on sandwich feast they’d brought with them. Wordlessly, I grabbed my cheese and pickle from my hold-all and began to chow down. After scoffing three, I finally noticed the scenery. In our haste, we’d even forgotten to watch the sun rise! Our interpretation of the wonderful view was simply landmarks to be interpreted by map. I gazed out off the green hill we were on and onto a row of snow-topped forested mountains that pointed high into the sky, so that you’d think you could touch the clouds. The few clouds that did roll overhead were large, fluffy and bright grey, showing no chance of rain. A large farm shared our hill and the fields were so big, their animals grazed almost completely freely. Back home in Wales we had majestic hills and mountains, albeit covered in sheep, but they were there and provided great hiking practice and stunning scenery. But it had nothing on these green and white behemoths of natural beauty rising above us.

Our rest came and went. We had to trudge on. In silence we continued toward our goal. At eight in the evening we stopped in a relatively flat, unoccupied and inconspicuous field for the night. It took us an hour to set the tent up, get a fire going, and cook our meal. We’d camped like this so many times before, we practically ran like clockwork. Everyone knew their jobs: Sam would gather firewood with the help of his axe whilst Ed and I pitched the tent. When the tent was up, we’d help Sam until we had a large pile of wood. I’d then stay at the campsite and start the fire as Sam and Ed took a bow each and searched for some wild game. We knew it was illegal but we were hungry, and quick cook noodles can get a bit boring and insubstantial after a while.

The noodles were done; cooked in a pot over an open fire. Sam and Ed returned empty handed, as the norm, so we filled our bowls and ate. I was just about to ask what everyone thought the guys were doing back at the official camp, when Sam hissed “SSSHHHH!” Ed and I looked at him, puzzled, before he slowly picked up his bow, knocked an arrow, and waited; the readied arrow pointed at the shrubbery. Almost a whole minute passed. ~Twang~ *Thunk* ‘YELP!’

Sam jumped to his feet, dropped the bow, and bounded off into the darkening wood with a “whoop!” after an orange and white flash from the undergrowth. Ed and I just sat there looking stunned for a couple of minutes before we heard a rustling to the left.

Ed jumped over his bow and quiver, rolled, and sprang up with an arrow ready to fire. I snatched up my geological hammer in my right hand and flipped open a switchblade (illegal again, yes, but they’re too cool not to have!) to hold upside down in my left. Ed stood over me as I dropped into a low fighting stance I learnt from the internet. Yeah, I am so a ninja...

Thankfully, it wasn’t a bear. It was Sam with a dead fox slung in a fireman’s lift on his shoulders.

“Sharp as ever, lads.” complimented Sam, as he strode towards us, heroically.

“Oh thank Celestia; I thought it was a bear.” I sighed as I clipped my hammer back onto my hip, and snapped the switchblade shut and returned it to its pouch on my belt. I loved my belt. I felt like Batman when I wore it. I had on it my switchblade, a Leatherman penknife, a compass, a holster for my hammer, a long length of climbing rope and a quiver I’d made myself that sat sideways across the back of the belt and allowed me to pull out arrows from the right side of my hip instead of my shoulder. I’d also managed to make it so the arrows didn’t fall out by accident.

“You’re the best at this stuff.” Sam said, and unceremoniously dumped the carcass at my feet. He proceeded to start finding more wood fire while Ed constructed a spit for roasting. I won’t go into detail about the process of skinning and removing the internal organs of a fox, I was queasy enough when I got covered in the innards of a rabbit in more familiar woods back in Wales during a week of living off the land with the survival lads Sam and Ed, whom I love.

Twenty minutes later we had a fine net around a skinned fox while it bled out. It would be ready to cook by morning. I buried the head and some of the organs, but kept the stomach, lungs and intestines because ‘they can be useful’ says the internet. I thoroughly washed the skin and organs I decided to keep in a river nearby with some anti-bacterial washing-up liquid until they stopped smelling of fox and/or excrement. I returned to the tent to find Ed and Sam getting ready for bed. I couldn’t blame them, as it was nearly half ten at night and we’d been shattered almost all day from the moment we rose that morning. I wearily stowed the now clean fox parts in my bag and joined them for a well deserved sleep after sharing one of the leftover alcoholic ginger beers between us.

“So you really think you can get us to Equestria?” asked Sam through the darkness.

“...I honestly don’t know.” I replied. “But you know me; theoretical physics is a hobby of mine. And if the multiverse is as real as I’d like to believe it to be, what better way to prove it than zapping us off to Equestria?”

“Remind me, what’s the multiverse again?” asked Ed, severely behind on the whole idea, apart from the fact that we were trying to get to Equestria.

I replied enthusiastically: “The theory that states there are an infinite number of universes so therefore infinite possibilities of what these universes contain. So there has to be at least one Equestria that’s exactly like the show. You follow?”

“Uuuh... Yeah sure.”

“Good, so I hope my theory with the Large Hadron Collider works, otherwise it’ll just make a pretty picture on the screen and we’ll have to sneak out again.”

“Umm...” interrupted Sam. “About the ‘sneaking in’ part... How are we doing that again?”

“Well... I know my way around inside. I’ve used the virtual tours on their website and spoken over the internet with an employee of the facility. It’s just getting in that’s a bit of a problem.”

“...Well... Let’s go get shot.”

Thursday the twenty-second of August 2013. The day of our reckoning. The day that we’d truly know if we could fulfil our dream of travelling to Equestria. The odds stacked against us were too high to measure and we knew it. But we were gonna fuckin’ do it anyway!

14:32

We saw the facility in all its glory. We stood in a sparse village on the Franco-Swiss Border and marvelled at the simplicity of the outside of the building. No high-tech security, no armed guards, just a front door that helpfully stood ajar. I shrugged and began to walk towards it. My belt of awesome was safely stashed in my bag, and we’d burnt the bows at lunchtime, so we just looked like your regular backpacking trio of tourists. I guess our unwashed state helped appearances also. I confidently stepped through the door to find some sort of... reception area?

“Guten Tag, wie kann ich Ihnen helfen?” Too bad the lady behind the counter was speaking a language we couldn’t understand.

“Umm, English please?” Sam requested.

“English...? Good afternoon, how may I help you?”

I walked up to the desk like I wasn’t trying to hijack one of the most expensive pieces of scientific equipment in the world.

“Hello, do you run tours of the facility?”

“Sadly not, but feel free to chat with one of our free scientists in the room over there.” She pointed to the third door on the left. “Here is a leaflet. It has the rules of the conversation. No violence or rudeness, that sort of thing.”

“Thank you very much.” I concluded, and lead Ed and Sam to some chairs on the far side of the room. We skimmed over the leaflet and I whispered a plan.

“Right, we actually need the middle door so we need to move when the reception lady’s not looking. Then, we just hope that no-one tries to stop us before we reach the control room and I put our magic molecule into the machine.”

“How long are we gonna need to walk before we get to the thingy?” asked Ed.

“Not five minutes. Provided I remember the way...”

“Darnit Jack!” butted in Sam. “Do you know the way?!”

“...Yes.”

“Then let’s hear no more about it. Miss Reception has already gone for coffee or some shit, so let’s do this!”

After hiding my embarrassment that I’d missed that vitally important detail, I scooped the metallic container from my bag and crept silently through the room and across the threshold. Right into a white, featureless corridor that, apart from the doors, would make the early Doctor Who prop directors jealous. I took the lead, walking past doors a little more brisk than normal. I’d heard that if you act like you belong somewhere, you’re less likely to get caught out. Unless you open the wrong door. I’m a bloody genius.

“Who are you?” asked a confused looking elderly gentleman in a lab coat.

Think, Jack! Thinkthinkthink...

“...Delivery for Dr. Halsey.” I answered, holding out the wine-bottle sized cylinder.

...Shit.

“She’s in room eighty-three. Go out, turn right, and it’s third on your left.”

“Umm... thanks.”

I backed sheepishly out of the room wearing my best poker face and carried right on walking. Sam sidled up to me and whispered:

“You utter prat.”

“Thank you, thank you, I’m here all week.” I replied, sarcastically.

From then on, I triple checked every door and corridor with my memory. Until eventually...

“This one.”

“It’s locked.”

“I know.”

“We’re screwed.”

“I know.”

Sam picked the perfect moment to cut mine and Ed’s conversation in half with his hatchet. Right into the locking mechanism of the wooden door.

*BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP*

Wonderful.

I charged the door and it swung inwards, red lights flashing inside. I whacked the container against a desk so the lid would fly off, the liquid nitrogen rapidly becoming a gas. After the smoke cleared, I grabbed the test tube containing my precious molecules and ran to the control booth while Sam and Ed held the door closed against the angry scientists. I looked hurriedly around the controls. Nothing seemed to want to work. I spotted a hole labelled ‘sample bottle’. “Yeah that might work.” I said to myself as I transferred my liquid into one of their special bottles. I jammed the flask into the opening as the head of a fire axe burst through the door, narrowly missing Ed. Sam took the moment to wrench the axe through the door to our side. I pulled a giant handle down and pressed some promising looking buttons. A computerised voice said:

“Sample accepted.”And I burst through the door.

“Come on lads, we’ve only got to hold the fort for ten minutes while the machine does its work!” I joined Sam and Ed, fitting the axe across the door frame like a sort of bar. I saw a heavy-looking metal filing cabinet on the adjacent wall. “Sam! Move that thing in front of the door!” I shouted, gesturing to the cabinet as I took his place against the tide of researchers on the other side of the door.

Sam quickly unscrewed the cabinet with his penknife and cast it aside as he shifted the metal weight towards the door, inch by painful inch. After about half a minute, he shouted:

“FUCK THIS!” He then did something to make every brony truly proud. He spun around, put his hands on the ground, and gave the cabinet a two-footed buck to the middle. “MOVE!” Ed and I dove either side of the door and the cabinet slammed down on the floor, blocking the bottom half of the door perfectly. We jumped on the fallen metal instantly to stop them breaking the top half of the door in. With Me, Sam and Ed holding the door and no fire axe, the boffins were helpless. Well, until the police arrived.

“Dudes... it’s ready. Let’s run!” I shouted. The machine had warmed up and ionised my molecules. As we fell with style down the metal stairs to the viewing room, I had my own little private sciencegasm thinking about this unique compound that I’d created, being accelerated to near-light-speeds and smashed together. Twilight would be proud.

Twilight.

I couldn’t wait.

Of course there was every possibility we’d get shot, arrested or something, but I am both stupid enough to believe in unproven theories and clever enough to know how to use them.

The computer’s voice sounded as we stopped in the viewing room.

“Collision in five, four, three, two, one...”

Blackness. Or maybe whiteness, I couldn’t tell. No vision, no hearing, no feeling... wait. There was something. Oh yeah, my ridiculously oversized bag crushing my torso as I lay face-down. I checked a few things. Breathing: good. Heartbeat: slow but there. Movement: none yet.

Great. I’d probably been thrown into the back of a police van and knocked out.

“Umm, hello?”

...

“Twi, that’s not working.”

...

*WHACK!*

“Dash! Don’t do that!”

“Uurgh... geddoffme.”

Sam. It was Sam. Sam! Ed! Switzerland! Finding... Equestria!

Boom. It all came back. I turned over and sat bolt upright. There we were, in the middle of a small crater, right in front of Ponyville library. An angry looking cyan pegasus zipped in front of my face.

“What are you and what are you doing here?”

“Umm, we come in peace...?”

“Not buyin’ it.”

I grabbed her by the shoulders.

“Look missy, we’ve been through quite a bit to get here. Just... Just let me lie down for a minute okay?”

I picked her up and put her on the ground. Then I took off my bag and used it as a pillow, while she just glared at me with a mixture of ‘startled’ and ‘annoyed’. It was then that I noticed the whole town was surrounding the four of us in the crater; us three humans and Rainbow Dash. I couldn’t blame them. It wasn’t every day three aliens popped into existence and then demanded to lie down. I spent a minute recovering my strength and looking around. I spied most of the Ponyville background ponies including Bon-bon, Vinyl, Colgate and Derpy. Five of the mane six were present, Fluttershy probably scared off, and the local Apples were there too.

There he was. The only pony who I thought could help.

“You there! Brown Stallion!” I pointed.

“M...me?” Yes, he was the one. Sounded exactly like Matt Smith.

“Could you come down here a sec, please?” He stood his ground.

“Why are you here?” He asked, confidently.

“I shall answer you in time. You are Doctor Whooves, yes?” The crowd murmured and whispered to each other:

“He knows them?”

“Does this mean they’re safe?”

“I still have doubts...”

Doctor Whooves walked towards me slowly, taking his time to get a good look at me and my semi-conscious companions. When he got sufficiently close, he asked:

“How do you know my name?”

“There’ll be time for that later; I understand that you are familiar with inter-dimensional travel?”

“...Yes, what of it?”

“Well, my friends and I just managed it and I was wondering if you know of any side effects we should be aware of.”

“Hmm... Let’s try this.” He pulled out the sonic screwdriver with his hoof and pointed it at me, varying its pitch and frequency. He pulled it up to his eye and the top opened up. He looked into the green crystal at its tip. “Well well... look at you!” He said with glee in his voice. “This won’t hurt a bit.” His smile was un-nerving to say the least. Once again, he pointed the screwdriver at me and buzzed it.

Man, I was tired.

In ten seconds flat, I was unconscious on the floor again, but not before Rainbow Dash came back out of her stunned state and exclaimed:

“What the hay?!”

Couldn’t have put it better myself.