Everyone, what time is it?
Faaaaaaaaan Fiction Time!
Okay, Jake, you do the honours!
Aw, come on, Princess Bubblegum, why should I be the one to start it off? A beginning is a delicate thing!
Hey, I could do it!
Cause you’re the greatest dreamer of us all! Jake, you’re Mr. Imagination! Just don’t let your imagination run away from you like last time...
Finn is right! You can do it, Jake!
No, really, I could take care of it. I’ve got lots of experience writing fanfics.
I agree with Finn and BMO, Jake. You’ll be fine.
You too, Marceline? Isn’t anyone going to save me? What about you, Flame Princess, do you have anything to say for my defence?
…
Me, me, what about me?
Aaah, fine, so I have no choice. I guess I’m the one who’s supposed to tell the first part of this story, huh? Okay, here I go. Let me get the boring, normal stuff out of the way first.
So Princess T. Rex was taking us on a ride on her F14. Girl flies like crazy, lots of fun, and we looked like flies with those looong oxygen masks on our mugs. Then there was this huge, super-black cloud all over the ocean, all foreboding and gorged with promises of awesome. So of course we went straight for it. And our guts were right! That was no cloud after all; it was a Stormer. You know, one of those cloud-brained beings of meteorogical fastitude; they’re always miles-huge, and look all aerodynamic and tencaculastic and squid-like.
He sort of gave us the skeptical look. "Er, nope. You can't get in. Forget it. Just... turn around, and everything will be okay."
The way he phrased it, he totally sounded like he was bluffing, badly. So I said to Finn and Princess T. Rex, all despondent-like, "C’m on, folks. Let’s jet..." and we had this pause, where we all looked so sad and silent, and then we all grinned and shouted together, “IIIIIIIIIN!” and we did exactly that.
But then his face shifted into smug, like that's what he wanted us to do all along.
"IT'S A TRAP! JUMP!" I said, putting on my best squid face: Rexie deployed her parachute, and l jumped off the plane and I tried to shapeshift into some gizmo that could glide. Just in time, too; a second later, the fighter jet fell in pieces.
The cloudgod smiled all shark-like but with a circular mouth and wagged his tentacles at us, all ten of them.
"So you want to go into my paradise lands?”
“We don’t know what you’re gurgling about!” I shook my fist at him. He probably wanted to send us somewhere horrible!
Maybe he didn’t hear me. “Be my guest. Welcome to Equestria." Then he sort of thundered at my backside and gusted us out and pre-empted the air in front of us and, just like that, he made a tunnel funnel and sucked and blew us straight through the black cloud-ness.
And Princess T. Tex shouted "Finn, Jake! The clouds are gone!" and I looked back and the the Squidder Stormer and his massive black-abs cloudmass wasn't there anymore; the sky was bleach-blue and crystal-clear, save for some cotton-eyed tiny cloudies that were closer to the ground than we were. I got distracted looking at the landscape.
Speaking of the ground, it was getting closer real fast. But before I could make out anything beyond 'there's little houses and prairies and forests and stuff' and 'we're still stuck in this funnel tunnel and by glob we're going to get a nasty crash', something else caught me, my attention, and my bro in one fell sweep. It had come from the side, and it left a rainbow streak... and what was Lady doing here anyway? I couldn't see her, but I understood what she was up to. We couldn't get out, so she got us out! I flexized myself to make it as easy for her as possible. As she jolted us from our trajectory, I felt a brutal shift in the pressure of the air; we'd made it out of the ftunnel and were in normal, everyday air again.
"Looks like I saved you from a crash course." Hey, that squeaky voice wasn't Lady's! I finished turning my head to the side. That wasn't Lady at all! It wasn't even a rainicorn! It was a horse with wings! It was all... short and cyan and un-Lady-like. I felt kind of disappointed... and also seriously weirded out. She dropped me, and I took a flyful shape again.
Aw, crap! “Our friend is still stuck there!” I told her. I was wrong. T. Rex, who was still strapped to her ejection seat, had cut off the parachute, which would only have kept her stuck in the ftunnel, and she had just about managed to to bust herself out awesomely using the propellers on her seat!
Then they ran out of fuel. She looked at us with her sad, crystal-blue eyes, shook her tiny two-fingered hand at us, and then she dropped like a dinosaur. The winged horse was already on it, and damn she was fast. She’d get there way before me, but I figured she wouldn’t be strong enough to keep the princess airborne, so I fastened Finn and flew after her as fast as I could.
Turns out I was wrong. She could lift T. Rex all by herself! I still grabbed the princess as soon as I got there, because, well... aw, I hope she never reads this.
And then we went flying on, like, in the general direction of the ground, but this time we took the scenic route. Time for introductions.
"Hey what's your name girl, what's your sign?" Finn, are you out of your flippin mind?
"Name's Rainbow Dash!", she said, with one of the cockiest grins I'd ever seen. Which was appropriate, because her hair was kind of like a rooster's tail, all rainbow-like --but not at all like Lady's. Yeah, I still felt sort of cheated. And “cheat” is not a semantic or morphological field I want in my brain right now! So I uprooted that stem and linguistically tore it to pieces and threw every piece into a fire. Phew. Anwyay, this place looked great, it was so grassy and stuff--
"Hi! I'm Finn! And this is Jake!"
"Hi there, la--I mean girl!" I greeted. What? She was obviously a kid. "What flies?"
"Nothing much, just a buncha guys in the sky passing me by from on high. I saw they were crashing, so I saved their lives."
Princess T giggled. Finn and I exchanged a grin; Yeah, she's pretty fly.
"Thanks a bunch!"
"Yeah, we really couldn't have gotten out of that ftunnel without you!"
(Yeah, I don't remember which one of us said each line, but does it even matter?)
Her chest inflated like postwar money. "Never fear, your f--" She caught herself, and blushed furiously, in what I thought was a great Flame Princess impression, then coughed. "-- I mean," she redressed "you're welcome!" What was that all about?
Then she inquisited at us with squinty eyes. "Anyway, what are you guys? I feel like you're just people, but I've never seen your kind of people around." [Note to pre-war terran readers; "people" means "sapient beings", as in, people who you can't just eat, no matter how delicious they taste, ‘cause they have aspirations and stuff]. "Though your face," she said to me, "kind of looks like a dog's."
"I am a dog."
"Noway, dogs don't talk!"
"What?" Finn interjected. "Did they, like, make a vow of silence or something?"
"No, they just sort of can't. They bark, that's all.”
"They eat tree-skins to get high?" I asked her, perplexed.
"That's--what?" She looked at me all weird, like I had said a complete non-sequitur. Which is silly, ‘cause I did my fair share of barking in college; people called me the Bark Lord. Don't look at me like that, it was still legal back then! Anyway, what does barking have to do with not-talking? She seemed to relax, and then chuckled something to herself. It sounded to me like "This guy needs some meat pinky pie," which got me wondering, what sort of meat pie is pinky pie? I hope it’s tasty. Maybe they put bark in their pies here? It’s been sooo long since I’ve eaten a good barque-au-bama...
“So you’re Finn, the Human, Princess Tyrannosaurus Rex, from the Dinosaur Empire, and Jake, the Dog,” Rainbow Dash summarized, pulling me out of my dreams of pie...
“Er, right. Wait, did they already tell you what humans and dinosaurs are?”
“Nope.”
“Are there any other questions you would like to ask?” Princess T. said.
“Nah, we’re going to land in Ponyville in just a little while, so I thought I’d just relax and let someone else do the questioning.”
She focused her attention on a little town below which we approached at high speed. We went slower and slower, and managed a pretty boring landing a quarter of a mile before the town’s gate. Then we walked. Tiny cottages, rustic, yet clean. Little fields full of blooming flowers and gorgeous shiny vegetables.
And there seemed to be mostly one kind of creature all over the place; tiny horses with short bodies and huge eyes. They made up for the lack of variety by coming in all colors and having some pretty rad hairstyles. Some of them had one horn, some of them had wings, but most of them had neither. Their eyes got all the more huge when they stared at us, especially Rexie, who looked so uncomfortable.
Still, as soon as they noticed we were accompanied by Rainbow Dash, they sort of rolled their eyes and stopped paying attention, pointedly so. We walked into the town and straight towards the central plaza, where they had... a tree-house! Maybe they had adventurers there too?
Jake, can I take it from here?
Sure, PB, show us what you’ve got!
Dude, you were talking weird for a while. What happened to your bombastic personality? You usually don’t get tired at imagination games!
Yeah, man, but coming up with a story’s different. There’s lots more stuff you need to think about at the same time. Didn’t you read The Freaking Manual?
No, man, I thought it would me more fun to learn this Freaking business on the fly. Heh, I wonder how PB will do Twilight... To be honest, I thought your Dash was kinda weak.
Aw, cut me some slack, man. I just...
Go ahead, Princess Bubblegum.
Yeah, we’re listening. We are. Please stop staring.
So. I was pouring over my tome on Hamiltonian Thaumic Fields, trying to wrap my head around some of the demonstrations. Authors love to skip steps to show off how smart they are, but I was pretty sure this was an actual case of “... and then a miracle occurs”, and if only I could manage to prove it...
“Twilight, look!” Spike, my number one assistant, interrupted, pointing at the window,
Rainbow Dash was back, and she’d brought some interesting guests! There was going to be a letter at the end of this story! In fact, there was going to be one right away!
“Spike! We need to alert the Princesses! There’s a talking dog on two legs, a dinosaur with soulful blue eyes and a tiara, and a...?
“Is that a human?”
