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Worlds Away Part 4

Also on DeviantArt: http://elusivemrmadden.deviantart.com/art/Worlds-Away-Pt-4-202547931

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“This... this explains EVERYTHING!” Twilight frantically ran about the room. “It said it couldn’t happen... The book said it couldn’t happen! But it DID! It DID happen! It DID!”

Oh lord, Kent thought to himself, what’s happening?

Rainbow Dash was still staring at his photograph, jaw open, eyes transfixed. The sight of Kent’s human form had apparently sent her into a hypnotic trance.

. . . . .

So they knew about humans already?

Well, that’s the message I was getting from whatever was going on.

. . . . .

Twilight continued spazzing out. “They said it was a LEGEND! It couldn’t have come true! But it CAME true! It happened!”

Kent sternly spoke. “So... what’s going on?”

“The book I was reading was talking about old stories of your species, mythical creatures who entered Equestria through hidden gateways that stretched between multiple dimensions. The picture that was in there looks exactly like yours! ...You MUST have been transported through a Tesseract. It’s the only way you could have gotten here!” Twilight told him.

“You mean I traveled through the fourth dimension?” Kent asked.

“Precisely! It’s the only possible explanation! But it still doesn’t explain why you turned into a pony...”

“I think it’d be more useful right now to try and find a way back out of here.”

“...right,” said Twilight. “Can’t keep you here forever. Lemme show you the book I’m getting thi--”

Twilight was cut short by Rainbow Dash’s sudden interjection. “OHMYGOSH! Th-this picture...”

“What about it, Dash?” Twilight teased. “Too handsome for you to handle?”

“Hey, what are you implying? I was gonna say that I’ve, uh, this is the first time I’ve ever looked at a real human.” Dash looked at Kent, then back at the picture, then back at him. “Alright, I’ll admit, he’s pretty darn cute...”

“Could that have been why you were staring at his photo for so long?” asked Twilight, playfully.

Rainbow Dash looked embarrassed.

“Aw, cmon, Dash, you know I’m just teasing you.”

“...whatever,” said Dash, walking over to where the other two were standing.

“Now, let me show you that book,” Twilight said. Walking over to a wooden podium, she used her magic to levitate an old and worn-out leather-bound journal. She carefully flipped open to a page near the center of the book, being careful not to damage any of the other pages.

“Here it is.”

On the right side of the page there was a full-figure sketch of a clothed man with extremely accurate physical features. Next to him was a complicated diagram of an 8-cell, otherwise known as a tesseract. There was some text on the left side, but it was composed of strange symbols that Kent found impossible to read.

“This is it. I have no idea how old it is in terms of years, but it looks pretty... experienced,” Twilight suggested. “Could use a little fixing up.”

“What do the symbols say?”

“Here, I’ll read them to you. ‘In some of the more recent years that I have lived here in town I have become fascinated with tales of anthropomorphic creatures who apparently pertain the ability to travel into our Equine world through undetectable atmospheric portals or gateways, which I believe to be wormholes that stretch through a fourth dimension. These creatures, who some call “humans,” are extremely intelligent and are able to perfectly understand our spoken language. The dimensionary portals they use to traverse between our world and theirs cannot be intentionally created on demand; they are rather stumbled upon at random intervals of time. While I cannot confirm any of the stories to be true, I can tell by the number of ponies who claim to have borne witness to a “human sighting” and the similarities between each of their stories that...’”

“That what?” asked Kent.

“I... I can’t read it,” said Twilight, squinting as she examined the block of text. “It’s wearing away.”

“That drawing,” Kent said, “is exactly what we look like. How did... whoever wrote this know that, without ever seeing us?”

“I have no idea. But whoever he was sure knew a lot about your species. Maybe...”

. . . . .

Could he have been a human as well?

It’s certainly possible.

. . . . .

Suddenly, the library door swung open. Applejack walked in carrying a parcel that was tied together with brown twine. “Heya, everypony. I got a package for Kent.”

“Thanks, Applejack. I’m a little busy right now, but I’ll take a look at it later,” Kent said.

“No problem,” Applejack said, placing the box on the ground. “Ah’ve got to get back to the orchard, anywho. Be seein’ y’all!”

As the door shut, Rainbow Dash spoke. “So what’s in there?”

“Well,” Kent said, “I’m not really sure if I should bring this up or not, but...”

“But what?” Twilight queried, looking a bit too curious. “Surely it’s not that secretive.”

“Well, it might be. When I was in town, Applejack told me that her granddad was a human.”

“WHAT?!” Twilight and Dash exclaimed, almost in unison.

“Yeah, she also said that he was from the Miami area like me. He was also flying in a heavy storm and got lost when he crashed here. What Applejack brought me were some of the sketches that he drew about what it was like back in Florida.”

Twilight and Dash were still silent.

“It might come as a shock to you, did for me too. Well, let’s... take a look at these drawings, I guess.”

“Oh... right,” said Twilight. Carefully, she undid the shoelace knot that held the box together. The lid lifted off of the package to reveal many small pieces of paper that had pencil sketches drawn upon them.

“Wow,” Kent said. “This is amazing.”

“Hey,” Dash said, pointing to a picture. “What’s that?”

Kent took one look at the object of interest and gasped. In fact, this object wasn’t a picture at all. What he saw was all of the proof he needed to confirm that Applejack did indeed have human blood.

. . . . .

What was it?

It was an old mechanical compass, like the one you’d find screwed onto the dashboard of an airplane’s cockpit. The only thing was, when I picked it up, it started spinning like hell.

Happy birthday StrawberrySpice

I’m not continuing this. It’s really old, and I have to say, very badly written. If you want to continue the series feel free to do so. This is where it left off, I think.

Worlds away - Part 5

http://elusivemrmadden.deviantart.com/art/Worlds-Away-Pt-5-203292248

Written by ElusiveMrMadden

“It... it’s a Compass,” Kent said. “But... I have no idea why it’s spinning.”

“Compasses only spin like that when magnetically disturbed,” came Twilight’s intrigued-sounding response. “But, I don’t see why that would happen... the one I’ve got over here works fi--whoa.”

Twilight placed her compass on the podium. Like Kent’s compass, the needle in this one was spinning rapidly in a counter-clockwise direction.

“I’ve... never seen it do that before,” said Twilight.

“Hey!” Rainbow Dash said after a few moments of silence. “Kent. Go stand over there, near the door.”

“What? Why?”

“Just try it. I’m not gonna do anything crazy, I promise.”

Kent shifted his focus away from the curiously behaving compasses and trotted to the door of Twilight’s house.. As soon as he hit the welcome mat, he spun around to face back towards Twilight and Dash. “Now what?”

Twilight spoke. “Hold on. Come back here for a second.”

“...I don’t get it,” said Kent as he returned to his original spot. “What are you doing?”

“When you walked towards the door...” Twilight said. “...the needles in the compasses stopped moving, and now they’re doing it again.”

“That’s so awesome!” Rainbow Dash blurted out. “It’s like... it’s like you’re magnetic!” After frantically looking around for a bit, she hastily ran to Twilight’s refrigerator door and pulled off a large magnet. Running over to Kent, she tried to stick it to his shoulder but it ended up falling to the floor. “Rats.”

Twilight laughed. “I don’t think that he’s magnetic, Dash. But this definitely does have something to do with all the inter-dimensional stuff going on...”

“Well, that makes no sense! You said that compasses only spin if there’s something magnetic around them,” Dash contested. “Why do they spin if he’s not magnetic?”

“I don’t think that’s something we can figure out right now,” Kent said. “Besides, we haven’t even looked at any of these drawings yet.”

“Oh, right,” said Twilight. “I suppose we should get started with those, then.”

Twilight used her magic to remove some of the pencil sketches from the box, laying them flat  upon the podium’s surface.

. . . . .

So, what were the subjects of some of the drawings you were looking at?

They were actually pretty interesting. I can remember that one of them depicted an old corner drug store with a vertical neon sign, with some old cars parked near the sidewalk. Another one showed a static shot of a street in some city, with tall buildings lining the road.

. . . . .

“...Wow! And what’s THAT?” Dash pointed to an automobile in one of the drawings.

“Well, it’s a car,” said Kent, “mainly used for getting around faster.”

“Wow, why couldn’t you just fly wherever you wanted to go? I mean, come on, wouldn’t that be faster than just driving places and getting stuck behind slow people?” She looked confused. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Dash had been asking all sorts of questions nonstop for the past 15 minutes. In the meantime, Twilight had been standing there in silence as Kent tried to produce answers.

“Well, not everyone has enough money to afford one.”

“Well, what about attaching wings TO the cars? I don’t see why that wouldn’t wo--”

Twilight cut her response short. “I... think it’s getting kind of late, don’t you think?”

Just as soon as she had finished speaking, the clock on the wall chimed to signal that midnight had arrived. “What? Wow, I gotta go!” exclaimed Dash. “See you later, Kent! ...Oh, and bye, Twilight!”

“Bye.” Twilight looked at Kent once the door had completely shut. “Here’s an idea,” she said with a hint of playful sarcasm, “why don’t you take her back to Florida with you?”

“Oh, good lord,” he said. “I think I’m gonna go and hit the hay.”

“Well, suit yourself, human,” Twilight responded.

Kent stood in the middle of a darkened void which seemed to stretch for miles. Everything around him, including the floor upon which he was standing, was colorless. A deep, menacing voice spoke to him from somewhere in space. “Years and years... six thousand long years...”

He could sense his whole ponified form as it started to tremble with fear. “Six thousand years... the future, Kent... the future...” The space around him transformed into a dark hallway. At the opposite end he could see a portal in the wall. As he ran towards the portal trying to escape the voice, it kept repeating the same two words over and over, drilling them into his mind. “The future... the future... the future...”

Kent sat straight up in his bed, letting out a gasp, then a sigh of relief as he plopped his head back down upon the pillow. Whatever he had dreamt had sure shaken him up quite a bit.

. . . . .

So you didn’t remember what had happened?

Not right then, I do now of course. Now that I know more about the fourth dimension it kind of makes more sense.

Actually, I’m not quite familiar with how the fourth dimension actually works.

...I guess you could call it the dimension of time.

So... six thousand years... the future?

...Yep.

. . . . .

Twilight had awoken from her slumber. “Ugh... Kent? What’s wrong?” she asked, half-awake.

“...just a bad dream, I guess... I can’t remember exactly what it was...” Kent replied.

“Oh. Well, g’night.”

The voice continued to hammer into his consciousness. “The future... the future... the future...” He could begin to feel his own sanity wearing away like wood being scraped against sandpaper. At last, he was almost inches away from jumping through the portal...

Kent could smell pancakes. As he rubbed his eyes with the back of his hoof, he noticed that it was now mid-morning and the sun was shining bright through the window’s translucent glass. He slowly stepped out of his bed and climbed the ladder downstairs into the kitchen.

“Hey, Twilight,” he said groggily. “Those pancakes you’re making?”

“Uh-huh. You hungry?” she asked him as the golden-brown discs sizzled on the frying pan.

“Sure am.”

The purple equine grabbed a few plates and divided the pancakes equally between them. “Spike!” she called towards the upstairs loft. “Wake up! I made pancakes.”

“Ugh,” came the small dragon’s reply. “Pancakes again? Don’t we have any more gems?”

“No, Spike. You ate them all as snacks yesterday.”

“Rats,” he said. “Pancakes it is.”

“Well, order up, guys.” The pancakes were steaming hot, fresh from the stovetop. “I found the recipe in an old cookbook. How do they taste?”

Spike took a bite. “Actually, these aren’t half bad.”

“Glad to hear! Oh... Kent, you can’t really use a fork, can you?”

“I’ll manage.” Hopefully. Spike actually had fingers, Twilight had her horn, and Kent was stuck with, well... nothing. After thinking for a bit, he propped the fork up between his hooves and awkwardly lifted the pancake towards his mouth. It had a soft, fluffy texture. “Hmm,” he said between chews, “I’m impressed.”

“Thanks!” Twilight returned to the stove and took some for herself. “I don’t suppose that...” Before she could finish, three knocks sounded from the front door.

“What? Who’d be visiting this early?” Spike announced.

“I... really don’t know. Let me go check.”

Twilight walked out of the kitchen to answer the door. Spike, who was already finished choking down his meal, eyed Kent’s plate. “Hey, you gonna eat those?”

“Yeah, I just need some time,” Kent replied, still fumbling around with the fork.

“Kent!” Twilight called, running back to where he was sitting. “There’s somepony here who wants to see you.”