MLP Friendship is Epic 01

MLP and characters created by Hasbro & Lauren Faust
Random references by lots of other sci-fi and fantasy

Friendship is Epic is taken from random craziness in pony-chats across the internet.  I have collated them into a story - but the ideas in general are fueled by the casual comments of dozens of random anonymous fans.

MY LITTLE PONY:  FRIENDSHIP IS EPIC
by Noir deSilhouette

It was a peaceful day in Ponyville.  The pegasus ponies had done a great job of clearing the sky to a beautiful blue with just a few decorative white drifting clouds.  The bright spectrum of pony colors strolled the streets as the inhabitants of Ponyville enjoyed the weather, the warm sun and cool breeze.

A tan pony with a dark brown mane came galloping through the town, the hourglass on his flank marking him as Doctor Whooves, Ponyville's resident mad genius.  Usually he was pretty sedate, just wandering around and helping out, but every once in a while he could be seen, such as now, galloping around as if Equestria itself stood on the brink.  His home was filled with all sorts of weird contraptions, and he himself was full of the most bizarre little facts.

Today, he was galloping haphazardly  towards the center of town.  He nearly upended the Sweet Apple Acres apple cart, even though there was plenty of room to go around, just because he was so frantic in his mad dash.  "Hey!" cried Applejack, the orange-coated blond filly running the cart.  "What in tarnation?"

He reached the door of the library, built into a huge, lush tree just off the town square, and his hoof clattered wildly on the door.

The door opened to show a lavender unicorn pony with darker purple mane, streaks of red running through it, and with a cutie mark of one large star with five smaller ones around it.  "Um ... it's the public library," said the unicorn, Twilight Sparkle, who lived in the library.  "You don't really have to knock."

"Right!" exclaimed Doctor Whooves.  He looked over his shoulder quickly, towards the edge of town where he lived in a little hut in the woods.  "You don't have to work to get into libraries, just to get out!"

Sometimes, Twilight thought, the strange stallion made as little sense as Pinkie Pie.  She stepped back and let the frantic earth pony into her library.  "Can I help you with something?" she asked.

"No!" replied Doctor Whooves, "Really no chance, far too complicated, sorry.  But you can let me use your equipment!"  Doctor Whooves was already past Twilight and pressing through the door into the basement.

"My -  ... what?" she asked, confused.

"In the lab!  Come along, Twilight, keep up!"

Doctor Whooves already had the panel off the side of her computer by the time she got through the door.  It was hooked into a magical aura detector, most recently used to try to determine the source of Pinkie Pie's strange "Pinkie Sense."

"Hey, that's delicate equipment!" Twilight shouted, hurrying down the stairs to try to stop him.

"Don't worry!  I won't break it!" cried Doctor Whooves.  He ducked his head into the innards and pulled, and came up with a nest of wiring in his teeth.  Sparks flew from the computer.

Twilight let out a cry.

"Perfectly normal!" cried the brown pony, nuzzling into his saddlebags and pulling out a small metal cylinder with a blue light on the end.  He squeezed it between his teeth and it let out a whistling noise as he pointed it towards the magic crystals making up the control matrix of her computer.  "I'd use my sensors but they're being jammed!  He won't have thought of blocking your equipment, though, cause it's too primitive."  He stated it very matter-of-factly.

"Hey, that's state-of-the-art!" cried Twilight, indignantly.  Doctor Whooves spared a moment to roll his eyes.  "What are you doing?  Who jammed your equipment?"

Doctor Whooves just let out a sigh of frustration, squeezing the cylinder over and over again, the tone of the whistling changing with each squeeze.  "Huh.  That's odd.  It's not working."

"Well, of course not!" cried Twilight, "You yanked half its wiring out!"

The intruder waved his hoof.  "Unnecessary," he said.  "Just was getting in the way.  Ah!"  He turned around and gave a good solid kick to the computer.  Twilight let out a wail of objection as she heard one of the magic crystals shatter inside the metal casing, but Doctor Whooves didn't seem to notice.  Rather, he let out a delighted noise as he peered at the screen, the tube in his teeth letting out that whistling noise again.  "There we go... oh, that devious stallion.  He really did it!"

"Did what?" cried Twilight, "What are you doing?  How are you going to fix my computer?"

Doctor Whooves blinked and stepped back.  "Oh, no, it's stuffed.  You'll need a new one."  He paused a moment.  "Sorry about that," he said insincerely.  "I'll replace it if I can.  But now I gotta go!"  He was already dashing up the stairs with the same manic energy he had arrived with.

Twilight chased after him angrily, up the stairs and out into the street.  "Get back here!" she cried, but he just kept galloping along through the town and out into the forest, towards his odd shack.

Doctor Whooves lived in a little run-down house in the forest, with all sorts of odd gizmos around it.  Some sort of big metal barrel with rows of big copper bumps down the sides rested against the side of his house, collecting rainwater.  All sorts of antennae were perched atop the house.  The bizarre self-propelled carriage was propped up out front, missing one of its wheels.  Thick wires ran out the front door to small dishes pointed up towards the sky all around the front yard.

Doctor Whooves ignored it all, running past his house to the small blue shed he had out back, the one with the light atop it.  "Derpy!" he called, "Come along, Derpy!  We're leaving!"

A grey pony with a yellow mane, and a spray of bubbles for a cutie mark, popped out the back door of Doctor Whooves' house.  "Coming, Doctor!" she called back, grabbing up her mail bag in her teeth and tossing it over her withers.  Ditzy Doo, the town's mail carrier, was frequently nicknamed "Derpy" for the fact that her golden eyes looked in two entirely different directions.

Twilight glanced at Derpy, curious, then back to Doctor Whooves, but he already had gotten the door to his shed open and had ducked inside, disappearing.  Twilight sighed and waited for him to come out as she demanded, exasperated, "Would you tell me what's going on?!"

Derpy ignored Twilight too, trotting past her merrily to enter the tiny shed.  There should barely have been enough room for Doctor Whooves, much less Derpy too.  They must be packed in there... the door started to swing shut.  Twilight sighed, and darted forward, lowering her head to force the door back open and make her way into the tiny shed...  "Would somepony tell me-"

Twilight stopped, her pupils shrinking as she looked around wide-eyed, her front hooves beating out a rapid, nervous pattern on the floor.  Derpy was trotting up to the middle of the large room, where Doctor Whooves was pulling levers and nosing buttons on a broad console around a pillar in the center of the bizarrely organic room made mostly of copper and brass.  There was no way this massive room could fit inside the tiny shed.

The door closed behind Twilight, and the column in the center of the room started to lift up and down, making that bizarre wheezing noise that everyone in the town had wondered after from time to time.

"Ah, Twilight!" cried Doctor Whooves.  "You decided to join us, did you?"  He grinned at Twilight's discomfort.  "Go ahead, say it.  I love it when ponies say it."

"It's ... bigger on the inside?" Twilight said weakly, eyes still wide.  Doctor Whooves grinned even more broadly, giving the console a fierce kick with a hind hoof, then a second and third kick.  He turned to peer at a display dangling over the controls.  "What's going on, Doctor Whooves?" Twilight asked.

Derpy turned around, a big grin on her face.  "We're going on an adventure!" she declared merrily.

"In a shed?" Twilight asked, still feeling a bit lost.

"In a blue box!" Doctor Whooves cried.  "Or The Blue Box, rather.  We call it the TARDIS.  And you can just call me Doctor.  It's easier that way."

"Right," said Twilight weakly.  "I'll ... just ... step outside, I think."  As she turned around, the pillar made that wheezing noise again.

"No, wait!" cried Doctor Whooves, clopping quickly towards Twilight.  Twilight's horn glowed purple as she tried to open the door, but it wouldn't budge - her magic just seemed to slip off of it.  The pillar stopped making the wheezing noise as Twilight lowered her head to grasp the door knob in her teeth and yank the door open, hurrying outside.

She stopped, again, receiving yet another shock.  It had been the middle of summer when she went in, the trees full of green leaves, the sky bright blue, the weather warm and gentle.  Now, though, only half a minute later, the sky was a sickly yellow, the grass and trees all brown and dead.  The weather wasn't just warm, it was outright sweltering, oppressive.  And Doctor Whooves' little shack was burnt nearly to the ground, nothing but a few black charred pieces of wall lifting above the dead grass around it, worn slick by the passing of years, as if it had happened long ago, rather than during the few seconds she'd been inside the shed.

Twilight sat down hard in the grass as Doctor Whooves peered out of the door over her shoulder.  "Ah," he said.  "Right.  Um.  It's a time machine, you see."