Locus

It was several hours later.  Rodger had tossed and turned his way through an uneasy rest, and was now on the last watch of the night.  Somehow, the predawn sunlight slipping its way over the horizon was worse than the twilight before dawn.  He didn’t like it, it played malevolent shadows through the trees, but it was a sign that they had made it through the night with only one incident.  The corpse of the monster was still apparent a ways off in the water where they had rolled it.  One of its clawed arms stuck out above its lifeless corpse.

Gerald had been able to determine that the creature could not functionally reproduce, and had the mental capabilities of an amoeba. It also looked engineered in some way, as if some Frankenstein doctor had designed the most terrible killing machine ever imagined, at the expense of any other capability that would allow it to survive without outside help.  Gerald’s summary to the group: It could not exist on its own; it was part of something larger.  This thought would keep Rodger from sleeping well for quite a while.

At this point though he wasn’t sure which thought he was more afraid of though.  That there was such a horrid monster that was, perhaps, just a type of space ant, or that Gerald had once again shown that he was far more intelligent than anybody realized.  Did Gerald set this all up?  He was certainly smart enough to, but...

No.  Rodger couldn’t start thinking about that until he found this Adahn character.  But even still something at the back of his mind whispered a dark thought.

“Nobody knows anything about him, he barely even has a D.O.B. All that academia and nobody’s even heard of him...”

In the camp, people (and pony) were beginning to stir.  Rodger decided that the first order of business was to decide which way to go this morning, and with any luck they might make it to Ponyville without going the wrong way around the other side of the world.

Rodger wasn’t going to hold his breath, though.

Applejack was irritated.

More specifically, Applejack was very irritated that nothing seemed to be going right for her today.  The farm’s more or less constant state of summer chaos was even more chaotic than usual.  The meteor had not helped things in the least, what with the strange creatures being sighted around and the sudden meteor landing.  It had fallen onto her to calm the various animal residents of Sweet Apple Acres down.

And then Twilight had wanted to go and study it, study some rock from the sky.

“It’s just the same as all the other rocks we got around here Twilight, what’s so special about it?”

She had said- Sweet Celestia, what is that?!

A gaggle of strange creatures were walking out of the forest.  And walking with the strangely dressed two-legged ape creatures... was Derpy Hooves.

Immediately after Derpy led the humans into sight of Sweet Apple Acres through an unintentionally indirect route Applejack took her aside.

“Derpy, I know we’ve talked about this.” Applejack was talking the same way she would to a disobedient pet.

“What?” Derpy seemed confused until Applejack pointed out the sizeable group of humans anxiously waiting to find out what was going on.  “Oooh, them…”

“Yes, them, what are they doing here.”

Despite having very good reasons, Derpy still looked guilty, after all, this wasn’t the first time. “Well, they aren’t from around here,”  And in a rare moment, she managed to coordinate her eyes and make a shy look down at her hooves.  “I think we should have Twilight talk to them, really.  They can explain it better than I can.”

Now Derpy is having trouble explaining to Twilight why there were well over a dozen alien interdimensional creatures are inside of her library.

“Ok, so they are from where exactly?”  Twilight wasn’t taking any of this well.

“I don’t know.”

“Ah don’t trust them Twilight, they look funny.  And they popped up ‘round the time those monsters started appearing around the farm.” Applejack was trying to stay out of sight of the windows as if the mysterious “Humans” for lack of a better word, had some kind of laser vision.  “Who says they aren’t related to them?”

“Do you know who they are?”  Twilight was getting annoyed and it seemed like nobody was helping.  Derpy could see Pinkie Pie peeking through the window mumbling what she sincerely hoped wasn’t another song.

“No.”  Right now Derpy was regretting bringing them here; all her reasons seemed rather flimsy.

“One last thing, do we know why they are here?”  Twilight looked very annoyed.

“Well… they say they are following somebody named Adahn who is supposed to have come through here.”  Twilight continued to look skeptical.  Then Pinkie piped up.

“Twilight, I think those are clothes they are wearing!” Everypony stopped for a moment and tried to find the problem Pinkie had with this.  Twilight, who was getting a feeling of deja vu here, shattered the silence with a stony stare and said, “This is almost EXACTLY the conversation we had about Zecora, now we are going to go in there and talk with them calmly.  OK?”

There were some minor grumbles to this but nonetheless, everypony crowded behind Twilight as she opened the door to the library and stepped inside, managing to hide very well her strong feelings about doing so.

Writing down everything that was said in the next 16 min and 28 seconds (according to Gerald’s watch) would be pointless and, in the case of Marco the accountant, a frivolous waste of time.

During that time there was a lot of arguing between Rodger and Twilight as to who or what this “Adahn” character is.  The various soldiers looked uncustomarily nervous surrounded by life size pastel ponies they last saw as a girl’s toy.  After a nervous pause Carlyn got to talking to Rarity non-stop about fashion which translated almost perfectly from one world to the other.

Richard had decided to stuff his inhibitions about talking to a life size doll and was now asking strange questions to Rainbow Dash, who looked more than a little creeped out.  Sanat seemed to be having a less creepy exchange with Applejack.

During the entire time only four people stood apart, Gerald, [Atuhor Name], Derpy, and Pinkie Pie.

Pinkie was having too much fun watching Rainbow Dash try to get out of a conversation with Marco.  Derpy was sitting looking dejected, she felt responsible for all this and nobody seemed to be listening to her.

[Atuhor Name] was in a state of nervous shock, caught between the world he’s dreamed of for almost a year now, and his sense of morals.

Gerald was working furiously on the final touches of something that had started when he first saw the Locus.  After a particularly frustrated outburst from Twilight he decided it was time to set all this straight.

“I think I have the answer here.”  Within seconds everybody in the room was staring at him.

“Umm… I’ll need something to write on, you people have blackboards right?”  The tremor of uncertainty in his voice managed to jolt everybody back into action, and within a minute he was chalking exceedingly complicated diagrams and equations on the board.

A short time later, he turned it over, and started writing on the back.  He managed to squeeze in the last parts of an equation in the corner.

Throughout this he was spouting a tirade of scientific polysyllables fully unaware that the only person able to understand any of this at all was completely unable to speak.

It was some time before Sanat hesitantly raised his hand like a student asking for permission to ask a question.

“Yes?”  Gerald was not quite fully aware that the tidal wave of math and science had gone well over the head of anybody who could speak and even Gordon looked puzzled.

“So.  Ummm, what does all that mean?”  Sanat gestured at it like it was an overly complicated tax form.  Gerald didn’t quite get that this was going way too far too above everybody’s heads and launched into a shorter tirade of polysyllables. Again, confused looks were the only result.

“Could we have it summarized into a single sentence?”

Gerald wrinkled his eyebrows in deep concentration and assembled, as his best effort, two sentences.

“I think the giant hellbeasts are going to start falling out of the skies because the interaction between our two universes has… ‘stretched’ the boundaries between universes enough for things from their universe to enter one, and possibly both, of our universes.”

Applejack seemed to get it and paraphrased.

“So… they’re slippin’ through the cracks?”

“That, and the interaction might be starting to tear both of our universes apart.”