Chapter 1

Visitors from Fantasy

Ugh, my head. The young girl thought as she began to regain consciousness. What happened? Last thing I remember was—Urk! She struggled to regain her senses after what had happened… . What exactly had happened?

She finally had enough sense about her to open her eyes, and what they saw, she did not expect. Before her was a bright world of many vibrant shades of all different colors. The girl began to look around in amazement. "It's so beautiful," she muttered to herself, still a bit disoriented from whatever had taken place just before. She tried to stand, pushing herself off the ground with her two front hooves. Wait a minute… hooves? "What happened to my hands?" she asked herself aloud.

She began to inspect her body. She still had her red and white dress with detached sleeves and her red bow, but her body had been changed. She was no longer human. The girl had been transformed into an equine form, with a white coat and black mane and tail. "What the hell's going on!" she said to herself. She figured it was no use trying to find out what happened just standing around in the middle of a field, so she began to inspect the area.

Nearby she found another unconscious pony; this one had a black coat and blonde mane and tail. She was wearing a black and white dress and hat. A rather large hat. "Marisa?" the girl asked. She began to nudge her with her right foreleg. "Marisa, is that you?" she continued trying to wake the girl. Eventually she came to.

"Ack! What's going on?" She caught sight of the filly that had woken her. She was still a bit disoriented as she was looking up at the other.

"Are you okay?" inquired the girl in red.

"I must have a concussion, 'cause I could swear this little horse was talking," she remarked in her delirium.

"Marisa, it's me, I think we've been transported somewhere and our bodies have transformed."

"REIMU!" she had finally snapped back into reality, or what was left of it "What the hell happened to you? You look like some kinda candy-colored pony!"

"I said we've been transformed; you look like this too."

"OI! REIMU, MARISA, IS THAT YOU!" the voice came from above. A winged pony descended upon the two. She was wearing a blue and white outfit similar to Reimu's. The pony herself had a light gray coat and green mane and tail. She had a frog-shaped hairclip in her mane and a snake-shaped piece coiled around her tail. "So you two wound up here too. I think everyone who was at that flower view ended up here, although that's just a guess; you two are the first I've seen."

"Flower view?" asked Reimu. She attempted to recall the events before she had passed out. "Oh yeah! We were having a flower view at the shrine before this happened. But how did we end up here? And more importantly; where is 'here'?"

The gray and green pony then replied, "I only just woke up myself; it only took me a few minutes to find the two of you from the sky." Marisa began to attempt to stand at this point. During the attempt, her hat fell off and dropped to the ground. The other two gasped.

"Marisa, you have a horn on your head." Reimu felt like she was stating the obvious, however this was news to Marisa.

"Eh? Whatta ya know, I do." Then, without much thought, she used her horn's magic to lift the hat back onto her head.

"How did you do that?" inquired the gray and green pony. She then revised, "How did you know you could do that?"

"I figured it out earlier." It was an obvious lie; Reimu had just woken her moments ago. "So, what we gonna do? Just stand around here all day? Sanae, did ya see anything when you were flying around, like a village or somethin'?"

"I did. There's a small town not far that way," she pointed one hoof in the direction of the town. You could barely see the buildings from that distance, but they were there, and they were definitely buildings. "They don't look like Japanese buildings though; they look to be more western style architecture."

"Western?" inquired Reimu.

"Oh right…. You know how the Scarlet Devil Mansion, other than being much larger than the buildings in the human village, has a different overall style? These buildings are similar to that, not exactly the same, though. I think the mansion has more European-style architecture where these are more American-style."

"So we're not in a Japanese world. Reimu pondered. "These bright colors… they don't seem very real at all; we must be some kind of fantasy world."

Sanae replied, "To the real world, Gensokyo is just a fantasy world." Reimu acknowledged the statement. She then began looking around frantically.

"Crap, where did I leave my gohei? Did it even follow me here?"

Marisa replied, "My broom followed me here, but I don't know how I can ride it like this." She gestured toward her bamboo-shafted broom that she always seemed to have with her.

"I've got my gohei," Sanae said as she reached her head around to her back. She pulled a small wooden stick with some rectangular paper on one end from her dress, promptly replacing it after a few seconds.

"I'll go back to where I woke up and get it; you two can start heading for that village and I'll catch up in a second." She began backtracking to where she was when she woke. Marisa and Sanae headed towards the town. Reimu arrived at the spot where she had woken up and sure enough, a long, thin staff with two strands of zigzagged paper on one end was there. She picked it up and attempted to string it through the back of her dress. After a bit of struggle, she finally got it to stick.

Before heading back to the others, she took a second to get a better look around. She noticed a dark, foreboding forest in the opposite direction of the town. She didn't think much of it at the time. She trotted along and headed back to catch up with the others.

"I don't know why, but something feels great about flying with wings. It's a bit more work than with magic, but it just feels so good; the air under my wings." Sanae was saying when Reimu caught up with the two other girls.

She then noticed a purple coated unicorn with indigo mane and tail that had a stripe of purple and pink through them. She was carrying saddlebags that looked somewhat weighted down by their contents. Sanae didn't recognize her in the slightest; Reimu and Marisa looked somewhat familiar in their equine forms, but she wasn't from Gensokyo. "Oi!" she called out to the unicorn and began to fly over to her. "Hello, my name's Sanae Kochiya, my friends and I aren't sure where we are and were wondering if you could help us." The purple unicorn looked surprised at first, but then calmly and respectfully replied.

"Nice to meet you, I'm Twilight Sparkle and the town over there is Ponyville. If you're lost and need a place to stay, I'm sure somepony would let you stay with them for a while." Sanae was grateful for the response, but it was missing something.

"You said the name of the town was Ponyville? Uhh, this may sound strange, but could you tell us what world we're in? We just woke up not far from here and have no idea where we are. Our bodies aren't even their usual shape." The unicorn called Twilight seemed a bit taken aback.

"You just woke up here? All of a sudden? I'm… I'm not sure what to say. I guess if you don't have any idea where you are, this is Equestria." She tried to continue, but was at a loss for words. No one had ever just appeared in Equestria from another world, at least to her knowledge.

"Sanae, who's this?" Reimu asked as she trotted up to them. "She looks kind of flustered."

Sanae answered, "This is Twilight Sparkle, and she's one of the locals, she says this world is called 'Equestria'." Twilight was starting to recover from the initial shock and started to become a little giddy.

"You said you're from another world? Do you mean like another planet, or another dimension?" She was trying to contain her excitement as she spoke; she did a good job masking it.

"I believe it's another dimension; we just sort of woke up here and our bodies had changed shape. On top of that, I saw the buildings from afar; they resemble the buildings in a different part of the world I'm originally from. So I think it's a safe bet that it's just an alternate dimension of some sort." She pondered that as she spoke, another planet hadn't occurred to her, but she was pretty sure after thinking it over that it wasn't a different planet.

"Come with me!" Twilight said excitedly. "I have sooo many questions." She began trotting away with glee.

"Weren't you going somewhere with those bags?" Reimu asked.

Twilight stopped and replied over her shoulder, "Oh right, it's nothing urgent, it can wait until later."

"Thank you very much Ms. Sparkle," said Sanae as they followed her back to Ponyville.