Chapter 1: A Pony Arrives (In a Blue Box)
NINE YEARS AGO, I discovered a filly Twilight Sparkle lying in a blue wooden crate on the side of the road. On the side of the box, it stated in bold print: “Return to Dr. John Smith.” I didn’t know who this “Doctor John Smith” was, so I decided to take Twilight home and make sure she was okay. I didn't know who she was at the time, but I knew she needed help.
THAT NIGHT, when I got home, I first made sure the small equine was okay. “Are you okay, little one?” I ask.
“Uh huh!” she nods. I’m slightly startled that she can speak, but I was also surprised when I saw she was purple and had a unicorn horn, so it was expected she would have more surprises in store..
“What’s your name?” I inquire.
“My name’s Twilight Sparkle. What’s yours?” she replies in a high-pitched tone. I remember when I was a little kid, about 9, which is probably the human equivalent of her age. I had trouble pronouncing words with l, r, or s in them, and I got made fun of for it.
“My name’s Mark Dane. Are you hungry or thirsty?”
“I’m hungry. Do you have any soda?”
“How about a glass of water?” I ask, not sure if soda here was safe for her.
“Aww, okay.” She didn’t complain, and stood up on all four hooves from where she was lying.
“Where’s the kitchen?” she asks.
“I don’t think you can reach the sink, little one.”
“Ha, ha, you’re funny! You remind me of Princess Celestia!”
I hear a car door open and close. My parents are home!
“Listen, my parents are here and they can’t see you here.”
“Aww, why nawwt?” she whines.
“Because… I’m not allowed to have anyone over. I’ll get you a glass of water, but first you have to go to my room. It’s upstairs on the right. It’s the room with the big “Keep Out” and “Do Not Disturb” signs on the door. I didn’t know if she could read, but I hoped so. I heard hoofsteps on the stairs and a door squeal. I guess I left my door open a little. I finished pouring a glass of water almost exactly at the time my parents walked into the house. “Hi mom, hi dad, I’m,” I yawned, “feeling kind of tired, so I’m getting some water and going to bed.”
“Okay, good night Mark.” Says my mother, probably more tired than I am. I walk upstairs into my room, set down the glass, and close the door.
“Okay, so here’s the water. But… how do you drink it? You don’t have hands to hold it with…” The glass is suddenly enveloped in a purple aura the same color as Twilight’s unicorn horn. “Oh… that’s how.”
“Yeah silly, what did you think I’d do? Pick it up with my hooves?” She laughs, and I notice her speech is softer.
“Hey, your speech isn’t all high-pitched and… whiny any more..”
“I was faking it, duh! I was using the cute voice. No one can resist the cute voice!” she laughs after finishing her statement.
“I would have gotten you water anyway. I’m not cruel and heartless… am I? Do you happen to have some sort of X-Ray spell?” I joked.
“X-ray? What’s that?”
“It lets you see someone’s bones and organs.”
“Oh, that?” Her horn lights up and suddenly my chest is transparent. I’m not sure which was more surprising; a ten or eleven-year-old unicorn knowing what an organ is, or her actually being able to do spells.
“Huh. Guess I do have a heart. Who knew?” I joked. I took a spare comforter, pillow, and blanket and laid them out, making a small bed. “It’s not much, but at least it’s something.”
“Thank you Mr. Dane.” She lays down and falls asleep. I carefully walk over to my computer and sit down. I open up Firefox and search “Dr. John Smith.” I get a result for a lawyer and a fictional time lord from the planet Gallifrey. Next, I search “Twilight Sparkle.” I get a result for a purple pony unicorn with a similar color scheme to Twilight. I change my search to “Twilight Sparkle filly.” It pulls up an almost exact cartoon picture of Twilight. I bookmark the search page and close out the window.
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up with a filly Twilight Sparkle staring me in the face. “Hi!”
“Aah!” I roll over and land on my floor.
“Is everything okay?” I hear my mother ask. I assume she’s about to leave for work.
“Yeah, mom, I just tripped.” I stand up and hear the front door close.
“Okay, we’re safe for a while. My parents won’t be home until late at night again. So… what should we do?”
“Do you have any science books? My parents always tell me I should read in my spare time.”
“Oh come on! Your parents aren’t even here, why can’t you lighten up and have fun?”
“I need to study for my HOOF tests… I mean, if I can take them.”
“We can play a simple game like Hide-and-Seek. It’ll only take a minute or two, and then you can study.”
“Alright, then I guess I’ll play. Who’ll hide and who’ll seek?” she asks.
“I call seeking!”
“Then I guess I’m hiding!” she laughs. “Count to twenty-two! I bet you can’t find me!”
I start to count and hear hoofsteps down the stairs and then more hoofsteps somewhere else. She’s actually pretty good! I finish counting and open my door. “Come on Twiley, I bet I can find you!” I look in the kitchen. Not in the pantry, not in the oven (although she doesn’t seem that unintelligent) and not under the table. I check in the living room. Not under the couch, the loveseat or the chair at the computer. She’s not behind the television, either.
“Hm, I bet you’re in here!” I open the closet and see a box with a small toy at the top. It’s lavender with purple hair. I laugh and pick up the doll. I hear laughing from the doll.
“Hey, stop that! It tickles!” I set the doll down and it becomes Twilight again.
“Knew I could catch you!”
“But hoooow?” she whines, jokingly. “It was the least obvious disguise ever!”
“It was lavender with a purple mane. Looks kind of familiar, huh Twiley?”
Twilight laughs, but then stops. “You… called me Twiley…” she sniffs.
“I’m sorry, Twilight, I guess I shouldn’t have.” She sniffs again and suddenly sneezes. I laugh. “Hey, cover your mouth when you sneeze! I don’t want to get sick with hay fever or something!”
She laughs. “I don’t have hay fever… do I? Oh no!” She runs around in circles, laughing. “Whatever shall I do?” She falls onto the floor dramatically. I laugh and help her back up to her hooves.
“So… why was it so important that I had called you Twiley?”
“Oh… it’s nothing, just something my brother used to call me. Don’t worry about it.”
“You have a brother? Could you tell me about him, if you don’t mind?”
“Well, his name is Shining Armor, and he really wants to join the Royal Guard. He does great in school but doesn’t want to become a scholar like I do. It’s a requirement to get into the guard that you must have good grades in school. In his free time, he “practices” for when he joins the Guard. He tried using a sword and accidentally broke a vase and decapitated Mom’s roses.”
I laugh. “Has he gotten any better?”
“Uhm… not really.” Replies Twilight. We both laugh.
“Maybe you could meet my older brother sometime. He’s training to join the Secret Service, which I assume is like your Royal Guard.”
“Cool!”
“So, Twilight,” I begin, “Do you have any toys from back home you really liked?”
“Well, uh… Noooo…?” She tries to hide the fact she’s lying.
“You don’t have to lie about toys, Twilight!” I laugh.
“Well, I didn’t have any toys back home… well, at least I wasn’t supposed to; my parents always said I needed to study and not play. I wonder what would happen to me if I had stayed there!” Twilight imagines her future self sitting in a library, alone, surrounded by books wearing reading glasses. “Actually, I’d rather not. Anyway, my brother would always make me toys; they weren’t much, just scraps of fabric sewn together, but I loved them. They were the only friends I had besides my brother; I studied so much that I didn’t even leave the house except to get more books… I… I think I’m starting to realize my mistakes. I should have made friends back home. I should have met ponies, said hello to everyone walking down the street instead of hurrying past them…”
I don’t know what to do, so I just sit down next to Twilight. “It’s okay… I’ll try and get you back home as soon as possible.” I then realize Twilight had only paused, and didn’t finish speaking.
“I’m… not even sure I want to go back.” She sniffs.
“Don’t worry Twilight. I’ll do anything I can do to help. That’s what friends are for, after all.”
Twilight looks up to me, and stands up. “Yeah. That’s what best friends are for.”
“So, best friend, want to play some games?”
“Sure!”
Chapter 2: And Her Name Is Twilight Sparkle
THINGS WERE GOING well for Twilight and I; she had been here for almost a whole week and she hadn’t been discovered. I knew that my luck was running out and I had to figure out what to do.
I was in my 5th block classroom waiting for the dismissal bell to ring when, like I normally do, I began to worry. What if someone saw Twilight and called animal control? What if someone broke into the house? What if—
KZZT KZZT KZZT
The extremely annoying sound of the dismissal bell rang out. I grabbed my backpack and ran to the bus landing. I shouldered and shoved my way through the crowd of students waiting for their bus to arrive. The people I passed were shouting and talking about a weird animal, so I feared the worst. In the front of the crowd was… nothing but my bus.
“Someone, grab it!”
“Huh?” I turned around and the entire crowd stared at me.
“It can talk?” shouted a girl with a southern accent.
“It has a pair of wings! What cruel person would glue such a thing onto a poor defenseless animal?” said a fancy-sounding girl with clothes to match.
“I wonder if it likes cupcakes?” asked a girl in bright pink clothes.
“I bet even with its wings it couldn’t beat me in a race!” cockily proclaimed another girl in a somewhat scratchy voice. She was wearing the school’s track-and-field uniform.
“I-um, I wonder if it likes carrots?” whispered a shy girl hidden behind the group.
“Hold on, a pegasus? They don’t exist! It’s not scientifically possible! You are not scientifically possible!”
That last girl’s voice sounded familiar. I could feel the metaphorical gears grinding in my head, trying to figure out who that voice was. Suddenly I realize…
“Twilight?!”
“Mark, you’re finally awake!”
“Hm? Oh, Twilight, it’s just you.” I looked at the calendar. Saturday, that means both my parents are at work.
“Can’t I sleep in for once?” I say.
“No, you told me to remind you that you had friends coming over today.”
“Huh? Oh no, my friends!” I stood up and covered my face. “Ugh, we’ve been planning to meet up for weeks now, so I can’t just tell them not to come! But they can’t come, what if they see Twilight, how will they react? Oh my goodness, my parents said I can’t have anyone over, oh no, oh no, oh no!” I began frantically pacing. Everything was rapidly going bad. I headed down the stairs and made myself some coffee.
“I think I can help. When I have a question that I don’t know the answer to, I just follow a few steps.”
“Okay… So, what’s the first step in this scientific method of yours?”
“How did you know what it was called?”
I sighed. “Twilight, what experiment could we possibly design that could help with this?”
“Well, uh… Umm…” she began. “Well, there's a different way, too. First, we need to state the problem.”
“That’s easy, I promised my friends they could come over, but they can’t.”
“No, no, we have to be more specific. What’s the problem with that?”
“My parents wouldn’t like it if the house got trashed.”
“Well, then we should just be careful. Is there another problem?”
“Yeah… We can’t let anybody see you. Talking lavender unicorn girls aren’t exactly commonplace here.
“Aww… Okay, well that’s a starting place… Hm. Let’s see. Well, what if I became like you?”
“My friends would question why I had a kid here.”
“Hm. That might be a problem. What if you said you were watching me for my parents?”
“Like a babysitter? That could work.”
Twilight seemed visibly offended. “I’m not a baby!”
“Okay, okay! Sorry! You still get what I mean, though, right?”
“Yeah…”
“We still need to come up with alternatives, thought, just in case that doesn’t work.”
“Well, I could always use magic to make myself invisible…”
“That’s a great idea!”
“Except it’s really hard and I’d just have to hide the entire time anyway, so nopony bumps into me.”
“That’s… not so great. How hard would it be to make yourself a human?”
“Assuming that’s what you are, not very. I don’t even need to know much about humans; I provide the will, the magic provides the way, up to a certain point.” she summarized.
“That’s… that’s amazing! So it’s like making a wish?”
She scrunched up her nose. “Uh… kinda? Not really. It’s more like channeling thaumic energy so you can will it to do what you want. In that way, it's sort of like molding clay. It’s not intelligent like a genie is; it just does what you tell it to do, no trickery involved. Although you do have to be pretty specific…” she said, trailing off as she noticed me staring at her. “Umm… what’s wrong?”
“You’re… wearing my glasses.”
“Oh, these? Sorry, however I got here apparently didn’t bring my glasses.”
“No, no, you can keep them on if they’re the right prescription. I have contacts.”
“Why does it matter that you know ponies? Er, humans. People?”
“People, and that’s not what I mean by contacts. Contacts are lenses you place on the surface of your eye to correct vision problems. But as soon as I turn eighteen, I’m getting laser eye surgery. The small cost I’d have to pay for that would be nothing compared to the lifetime cost for all the contacts I’d need.”
“That’s… that’s brilliant. Why didn’t we have those back home?”
“I don’t know. Maybe our technologies are advanced in different ways? We have better electronics and things like contacts, but you… ponies… have magic, which in a ton of ways is so much superior. You’re nullifying almost every law of physics with your magic.”
“And what laws of physics would those be?” said Twilight, her eyes lighting up.
“I’ll tell you later, Twilight, but we should really see if that spell works first. You do know the spell, right?”
“Yeah, the adaptable transformation spell. It’s one of the only spells written by Starswirl the princess would let me learn. Something about time loops and temporal paradoxes... Anyway, all I need to do is name the species I want to become and have a general picture of what they look like, and the magic will fill in the details… to a certain extent. I will also have no idea what I’ll look like.”
“Hmm… So you’re sure this will work?”
“Yes, it may.”
“That’s… not a clear answer.” I said.
“What I mean is, I’ve never, uh… cast the spell before. I know a lot about how it works though. It’s perfectly safe. I just don’t know if I have enough magic to pull it off.”
“Well, it’s worth a shot, right?”
“Yeah, I guess. So… should I try it now?”
“Sure.” Her horn lit up. “Wait. How will you cast the spell to change back after you become a human?”
“It just wears off after a while.” she says, smiling.
“Oh, and one more thing.” I say.
“Yes?” she says, tapping her hoof.
“Can you create clothes? It’s basically taboo to be naked in public as a human.”
“But this property is owned by your family!” she says.
“You get what I mean.”
“Fine… yes, I can, although they won’t necessarily look good. They’ll fit, though.” When she finished talking, her horn began to glow, wrapping herself in an aura of lavender energy. Suddenly, she was a young girl, wearing a t-shirt and jeans. “Hmm… What are these?” she said, examining the garments of clothing.
“They’re a cotton t-shirt and denim jeans. They’re quite common casual clothing here.”
“Really? Hm. They are pretty comfy.” she says. “Now… how do I walk with these things?” she asks, looking at her feet, examining them carefully.
“It’s quite easy. You put one foot in front of the other—”
“This isn’t time for Hearth’s Warming Eve songs, Mark.”
“Wait, that exists in your world?” I shook my head. “Nevermind that. You just move your legs and feet like this,” I say, demonstrating a walking motion.
“But how do you stay balanced without a tail?”
“I think our leg muscles do that automatically. You might want to hold onto something until you get the hang of it, though.” I say, looking at her apprehensively as she tries to stand up.
“Hey… this is kind of like how Spike walks. I remember him falling a lot a few weeks after he started walking.” She looks at her hands. “And these look like his claws, too. Why do humans look so much like baby dragons?”
“Wait. You have dragons in your world?” I quickly rephrase that as, “You know a baby dragon personally?”
“Yes, he’s like a little brother to me. He’s six years old since he hatched. Princess Celestia takes care of him, and since I’m her student, I see him a lot.”
“You’re the student of a princess with a baby dragon as a little brother?”
“Yes, I just told you that.”
I sighed. “All right, all we can do now is wait until my friends get here.” I sit down on the couch. Twilight managed to awkwardly shuffle over to the couch, supporting herself with the table and armrest, and she sat down beside me.
“When are they supposed to get here, anyway?” she asks curiously.
“I’m not sure exactly; it should be pretty soon.”
Suddenly, I hear the doorbell ring. “Oh, boy. They’re here.” Well, it’s now or never.
“Showtime, Twilight.”
