Chapters

Chapter 1: Lyra
Chapter 2: Instruments
Chapter 3: Rhiannon
Chapter 4: Gwyneth
Chapter 5: Travel
Chapter 6: Shocking Developments
Chapter 7: Tech Support
Chapter 8: Power
Chapter 9: Hot and Cold
Chapter 11: Wring
Chapter 12: Sunburst
Chapter 10: Replication

Chapter 1: Lyra
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The Exchange Program

Chapter 1: Lyra

"Yo, Rachel."

I looked up from my book. Rhiannon was in her bathrobe, her long curly hair frizzed out every which way. It's so bad she looks like a stereotypical witch. Normally she doesn't pull that off.

"If I didn't want to do any housework other than clean up after myself for, like, two months, how much would that cost me?"

"I dunno. Look in the yellow pages."

"I mean, without bringing in anyone from the outside. Just you."

So it's one of those nights. "Why? Can you make your point without basing it off of a mistake I made in a wild estimate?"

She blinked at me. "No, seriously. How much to hire you to take care of the apartment for two months? Shopping, cooking, dishwashing, cleaning the common areas. Laundry."

I rolled my eyes and visualized giving up piles of money and having to do the work. When I found myself torn between the two options, I gave my answer. "Seven fifty each month, and I'm not doing your intimates."

"Twenty-five a day? Well... all right."

And with that, she handed me a fat stack of twenties. Counting, I said, "What's this?"

"What we just agreed on, plus my half of rent for the next two months, obviously."

Rhiannon turned to go to her room as I finished counting. "I mean, what's going on? Did you get a ton more hours or something?"

"No, I quit. I've got something lined up for two months from now, don't worry."

At 'quit' I was up off of that broken couch and on my feet like I'd been spring-launched. She'd stopped short, so I had to back up to avoid talking straight into her sternum. "What are you doing, then?"

She smiled. It was uncanny. She was not a very smiley person. She could pull off a lip twitch at a joke, or relax her face when content, or when puckish, pull off a smirk. But a simple broad smile was not something I'd seen from her. This wasn't one of those either, but it... well, it was a two-sided smirk, without the eyebrows coming down. That's more like a normal smile, right?

She said, "Studying. Now, could I have some quiet for a while? Oh yeah, how much for you to keep it down when I'm studying?" She seemed not to think the question needed to be answered, and she headed into her room and shut the door.

And with that, I went to the kitchen to start on dinner for two. She didn't normally throw money around, and certainly didn't normally try anything like this. Something was up.

Shankar called, and we chatted and organized a movie date as I stirred the parsley celery marinara sauce. But I chatted quietly - my roomie had just handed me just over two thousand dollars, and I wasn't inclined to make her regret it.

When we were done, I poked my head in her room. She had done her room up magic-style again: a big pentacle inscribed in a circle drawn on the floor, with various bric-a-brac at the corners.

"Umm, that job you set up for two months from now... you're not... relying on magic to get it, are you?"

She paused pouring sea salt along one of the edges and looked up. "No. Just, applied for a job to start then, and got it."

This is going to be an interesting two months, whatever she does. I backed out and got back to reading.

After half an hour, she came out to eat; she was very distracted, I didn't ask her what she was doing, just continued reading. Partway through, she said, "Would you tell Joanne at the soup kitchen I'm going to be out for the next two months? This came up since my last time there." I nodded.

She finished her supper, nodded in thanks, then returned to her room and remained there.

When she began chanting, I didn't feel like listening, so I slipped out of the apartment and stood at the corner. If she keeps chanting, I'm handing the money back.

But I gave her this one time.

After an hour and a half, it got dark enough that it was awkward to read. I'd let that go longer than I'd intended. Hoping she was done chanting, I headed back in.

One thing I really didn't expect to hear was muffled crying. She hurt herself somehow? Doesn't sound like that kind of crying, though.

But I knocked on her door and said, "You okay?" I noticed there was a note taped to it, but it didn't say 'keep out' in big letters, so I figured I could read it after.

The crying subsided. "HELP!"

I opened the door and hit the light, and there she was, lying in the middle of her pentacle. Stark naked. Back arched, legs and arms spread to the points. The way she was elevating her body while partially supporting herself on the backs of her wrists, her toes, and her arched-back head? Well, that looked incredibly uncomfortable. I was impressed that she could even hold the position. "Geez, Rhiannon, give me some warning. Umm, what's the problem?"

"I can't move."

"Did you, like, drug yourself?" That wouldn't exactly be a first, but it would be unexpected - Rhiannon had tried a large number of things one time each, but never alone, and never in conjunction with her... religious activities.

"No? So, this... isn't normal? Not what you meant to do?"

What. "No. It is not, and I did not."

"Good!"

I came alongside her to help her up. In the process, I disturbed one of the lines, and she collapsed flat to the ground.

Now, the timing of that was kind of odd. I noticed my disturbing the line as I did it, and that that was the moment she fell... and she couldn't have seen it because she had been facing away. How did she do that? Must have heard it.

She rolled over onto hands and knees, turned around, and looked at me. I felt kind of awkward with us both on hands and knees. Especially with her tear-streaked forehead.

She blinked, raised one fist as if to shake hands with it, and said, "Hello, and thanks for freeing me. My name is Lyra. I'm here for the exchange program."

I sighed, closed my eyes and counted to three. Reopening them, I looked pointedly past my roommate's nakedness and said, "Rhiannon, I'm about five seconds from handing you back your two grand."

She turned to take a glance behind herself - and in the process, knocked over the crystal bottle of oil. Rhiannon's prized violet-glass bottle that she got from a Nepali mystic on the vernal equinox. She'd just turned and kicked the thing over by accident. And not really reacted.

I dove for it so at least the oil wouldn't stink up the apartment. The bottle wasn't damaged - not noticeably, anyway.

"Oh, I'm sorry! At least it didn't spill much?"

And right there, the notion that this was Rhiannon suddenly became preposterous, though not as much as magic working. Only a few drops had fallen out. I wiped it up with my finger and scraped it back into the bottle (her lack of aghast reaction at my spoiling the bottle reinforced my judgement that something was seriously up with her). Deciding to play along for a minute, I said, "This bottle belongs to Rhiannon. She is rather fond of it. Do you know who she is?"

Lyra pursed her lips. "No, but I'd guess I'm in her body. Are you my teacher?"

"No." An idea occurred to me: see if I could get her to crack. What's a good name? Once I'd pulled myself back up onto my knees, I said, "I'm Julie."

Lyra showed no sign of knowing that my name is Rachel as she smiled calmly and once again offered her fist as if to shake hands. When I offered my hand open-palm, she slowly opened hers. We shook. "Nice to meet you, Julie. Do you know where my teacher is?"

"Teacher? Well, I guess that would be Gwyneth. Rhiannon was mainly self-taught, though."

Then it occurred to me that there had been a note on the door. I stood up and was about to go find the note when Lyra gasped. "What? Wow!"

I looked down to her. "What?"

"You're tall!"

No one had ever accused me of that before. I laughed it off, reached over and ripped the letter from the door.

"Let's see what you had to say to me... 'R, I'm off to study with someone in a different dimension. Someone will be possessing my body. Before you free him or her from the circle, please do some basic checks to see if he or she is dangerous.'"

I looked over to Lyra, who was staring at her hands and moving the fingers one at a time. "I have so many toes!" she murmured.

Back to the page, I only skimmed the precautions, since I'd mooted them by freeing her - and she seemed harmless anyway. 'I will be back in two months. In the mean time, would you please direct the student to Gwyneth, or other teachers as appropriate. Since I sprung this on you, please have another $500.' No cash was attached, but I figured that I could search for it later.

For $500, I'd definitely 'play along', though at this point I was losing confidence that this wasn't legit. "So... Leia, was it?" No, that's not it. What was it?

I looked in to her - she was now trying to stand up, steadying herself with both hands on the side of her desk - but her back legs... er, her legs... were too far away from the desk. She was sort of half way between standing and a pushup. I asked, "Lyra?" Right, that was it.

She looked to me, clearly terrified. "I'm... stuck."

"Step forward. Get your feet under you."

She tentatively did as she was told, and soon she could have stood up. But she remained bent over, hands white-knuckle gripping the edge of the desk. Then with a lick of the lips she took one of those hands off, reached up, and put it on the wall. She released the other hand, and slowly straightened.

"Congratulations. You stood up."

"I'm really tall."

I heard a knock at the door. I snatched up Rhiannon's bathrobe and tossed it to her. It caught on her shoulder; I slipped out and closed her bedroom door before letting him in.

"Shankar! You're early."

He glanced to the clock. "Not much."

Thumps and bumps came from Rhiannon's room.

He went on, "So... we heading out for that movie?"

"Umm." I need time to think! "Rhiannon's either high as a kite while in some ways stone cold sober, messing with me much better than I think she can, or she temporarily switched minds with an alien named Lyra."

At that, Lyra opened the door to her bedroom. She was sort of half-standing, leaning against the wall with the front of her body rather than the side of her shoulder. She had managed to get her bathrobe on her arms properly, but was holding it closed rather than using the velcro spot. "Hello." she said.

I quickly interposed myself between them in case her holding it closed was incidental, and looked rapidly back and forth. "You can see what I mean?"

Shankar coughed. "You call that sober?"

I helped Lyra the rest of the way up, saying "Now, Lyra, it's much easier and better for you to stand straight. And these patches here hold the robe shut." I did up the velcro. "Anyway, whatever it is, I don't think we can leave her here alone."

And with that, she overbalanced and nearly fell backwards. I caught on to her arm, keeping her from toppling, but then her feet slipped and I ended up merely slowing her descent. Shankar whipped around and caught her other arm, and pulled her back to her feet.

Lyra, embarrassed, said, "Maybe I should sit down?"

We helped her over to the sofa. She put her right hand and leg on it, and we let go. She proceeded to lower herself onto it belly first, elbows in. She spent a little while trying to figure out what to do with her knees, as Shankar and I stared.

"Just what kind of creature are you?", I asked.

"A pony." She shifted her legs again.

"A pony." Well, that explains the reluctance to stand on two feet.

"I had expected to find, well, a school. That was what the exchange offer said."

I grimaced. "I don't know whether she was lying or didn't know what she was doing. Anyway, there's no school. There is someone you might learn from, and there are a number of books. I would have said they're worthless, but they were apparently good enough to get you here. And of course there's, well, our world. Exchange programs are supposed to broaden your horizons, right? Plenty of other things to learn."

Lyra brightened. "Right! So, Julie, I heard that you have movies here?"

Shankar, who'd been looking at me in confusion, finally could not contain himself. "Julie?"

I blinked, totally having forgotten my ruse with the name until having it shoved in my face. "Umm, oh right. When I said I was Julie, I was testing if you're Rhiannon. She would have been confused at my calling myself Julie, since I'm not."

Lyra gaped, then fumed. "Lying to me..." Meanwhile, Shankar's frown peaked and he said, "You're taking her seriously."

"Neither of you has seen what I've seen. Please, understand I'm in an awkward situation here."

Lyra accepted that and asked, "So, what is your name?"

Shankar had been about to make some objection, but he paused, turned to her, and stared with his mouth hanging open. This time, her tone had been totally unlike anything we'd ever heard from Rhiannon - simple, sweet.

"See what I mean?" I asked him. Then, to Lyra, I said, "I'm Rachel Anne Batson."

She repeated this. Then she looked up to Shankar and added, "And you, I gather, are Shankar?"

He nodded. "Shankar Malakar. I don't think you ever heard my last name anyway."

Lyra added, "And I'm Lyra Heartstrings. I'm a student in Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns."

Neither of us knew what to do with that. To me, he asked, "Is Rhiannon into LARP with Liz and Zoë? I forget."

"No. Nor is she in Ben's improv group. Lyra, I'm sorry, but we're having some difficulties believing that magic exists. You say you're a unicorn?"

Shankar interjected, "The main alternative being that you're an alternate personality of Rhiannon."

Lyra cocked an eye. "But I am, right? I'm a visiting personality."

I joked, "Let's not have her committed just yet, please?" I remembered the physical evidence of her falling strangely upon my breaking the circle. I definitely don't want things to leave my control. If Lyra is real, the last thing anyone needs is for her to go into treatment for multiple personality disorder or whatever it's called. And if that's what it is... She seems harmless so far, more so than the 'base' personality. Yes, I really thought that. Well, I suppose it's true - Rhiannon is a net good, but she is definitely not harmless.

Shankar fumed. "So, if we can't leave her, what?"

"I don't think a movie would make the most sense right now. Maybe walk down to O'Malley's? They have live entertainment on friday nights."

Shankar gave in. He turned to Lyra. "Sound good?"

She shrugged, and slipped off the sofa and struggled to her feet. We helped her upright, and I took her to her room. "So, we'll need to get you properly dressed to go outside."

Lyra wobbled a little on her feet for no clear reason, then steadied. "Why don't you pick my clothing? Seems safest."

"Yes. Yes, it does." I shuffled through the closet and grabbed a loose-fitting dress with no strings to tie or buttons to fasten. "I don't know where Rhiannon keeps her intimates... let's see..." I pulled drawers open. "Got 'em. These go here, these go here." I gestured to the appropriate body parts, then thought better and pulled out a bra. "Let me help you with this one. It's not trivial."

She held steady for that, watching with interest. Once she had that on, I left her to handle the rest. Shankar was waiting patiently in the other room, a bemused smile on his face.

He asked, "So, what was it that you saw that I didn't?"

"When I found her, she was sort of floating in air. Her hands and feet were touching the ground, but not hard enough to support her. It would have had to be one heck of a stage magic trick, considering I couldn't find any equipment."

"So she was crouching on the ground but not... hard?"

"No, she was on her back, legs and arms out, with one toe touching the ground on each foot?" That was only a slight exaggeration. I had also left out the way her head was touching the ground.

"So you're saying Rhiannon is actually a legit witch."

"Maybe. What she was doing could have just gotten the attention of the unicorns and they did it all."

"Yes, that is clearly a much more sensible explanation." If your sarcasm detector didn't go off there, take it back to the dealer.

"L. O. L." I said facetiously. "If you think this is Rhiannon... she disrespected her own sacred bric-a-brac. She... oh, right. She told me in advance that she'd be going to study, and she gave me over two thousand dollars to cover expenses while she was gone."

That got his attention. "Gave. As in, it's yours."

"Yup. Cash up front. In fact, why don't we swing by the bank on the way to O'Malley's?"

"If she's faking, that ought to draw her out. Could I by chance take a look at those bills?"

I pulled them out. The notion that they could be counterfeit hadn't occurred to me, but he soon handed them back, saying, "Look legit to me."

I knocked on Lyra's door. "Everything okay in there?"

"Yeah, just brushing my hair a little... all done!" She did her wall-hugging walk out the door; everything appeared to be in order, because I wasn't looking closely enough.

I was thinking of how she'd get down the stairs. Looking back to her, I realized this challenge was to be deferred, since she had not put on her sandals. "Feet too - we don't have hooves. Try the flip-flops. They're easy to put on." I tossed them her way.

She braced herself against her door frame with two hands and tentatively put one on. In a moment she recoiled, pulling her foot back out; she bent her other knee and bobbed back up from the involuntary dip. "Gah!" She stood there, shivering. "It goes between my toes!"

She took a deep breath and tried again. This time she kept the flip-flop on, though she drew in a few sharp breaths as she had to fight down panic reactions. Then she tried the other foot. This was easier. She stood up straight, and tried to let go of the wall. Success. She took a step out into the middle of the room. So far, so good. Another step. Wobble, recover. Step, then she rushed to the wall near the door to the stairs, almost toppling on the way, and clung to the frame.

Shankar said, "I give it an eight."

Irked, I asked, "What, as faking or as first attempt at unaided bipedality?"

"Either way."

The stairs, it turned out, were not particularly more difficult than anything else - she simply used the hand-rail and looked at her feet and it all worked out. She was faster going down than my grandmother.

At the bottom, she held up her free hand and commented, "You know, these forefeet are pretty amazing."

"Hands. We have two feet and two hands."

"Whatever they're called, I bet Earth ponies would love to have them."

Figuring she meant ponies that live on Earth, I replied, "Oh I bet they would."

Shankar said, "Would you like to meet some? We can stop by the stables on the way to the bank."

I took Lyra's arm and we set out, ambling slowly in a direction I did not often go.

Of course, the first car that drove by got Lyra's full attention. She looked to it, to us, to the parked cars on the street, then back to it, and tracked it as it moved. But she didn't panic. As it came closer, she gestured to a parked car and asked, "What are these called?"

"Cars. Automobiles. The big ones are trucks, or buses. We can show you more later."

She stared as another car passed, then stopped specially watching them.

As we crossed the street, she asked, "Why didn't you stop?"

"Huh? Oh, that sign is only for the cars. And bicycles, I guess."

She nodded. She stared at some things but not others. She seemed perfectly at home with trees and houses and even apartment buildings, but the television we saw through a window arrested her. As a lawn-mower started up, she gripped my hand and looked to me for my reaction to it, but made no other visible reaction.

When we reached the stable, Shankar hopped the gate, undid the latch, and let us in. Lyra frowned at the obviously lower-grade building. When we came to the open side-door, her eyes went wide open at the horses in their stalls. "What... what... this is horrible!"

She rushed in as far as she could, reaching from door-frame to stall to steady herself. "Hello everypony! Is... if... Everything's going to be all right. We'll get you out of here, won't we, Julie? I mean, Rachel?" She looked back to me pleadingly.

I wasn't ready for this - I hadn't really been thinking about it - so I was simply agape. Shankar bit his lip, taking her seriously for once, but similarly remained silent.

Lyra turned one way and then the other, getting a closer look at each of the horses. She came down from her panic. "You... you don't understand anything I'm saying, do you?" Then, to us, "They're not people. This is creepy." After a few more seconds, she headed for the door as best she could. "Let's get out of here."

I took her arm and we hurried out more directly. She clung to me and did not speak. I couldn't see her face. I wouldn't have known what to say anyway, but it might have helped.

At the bank, though, she seemed a bit better. The notion of an ATM was very interesting to her, and Shankar explained as I deposited almost all of the cash. I unproductively mulled over what I might do with Lyra on the medium term while Shankar explained the notion of electronics.

O'Malley's was full and noisy, as one would expect on a friday. As I was pulling out my ID in response to the host's request, Lyra asked, "ID?"

The host said, "Identification, like a driver's license?" - "Whatever for?" - "So we can see if you're over eighteen."

And just as I was saying, "We'll be dry tonight", she said, "I'm thirteen."

Shankar and I looked to each other in alarm. What did I get myself into?

I amended, "I guess she's going to be dry for the next five years."

Chapter 2: Instruments
View Online

The Exchange Program

Chapter 2: Instruments

The host led us out to a table in back; the noise of inside mostly stayed in, as people here were quieter, listening. A late teen girl with a guitar was providing the live music, accompanying herself through a neo-Celtic ballad, occasionally swinging her long red hair back out of the way as her head-bobbing freed it. She ended her song as we reached the table.

Shankar, realizing I couldn't sit until Lyra was off my arm, pulled out a seat for her. She focused intently and tried to lower herself into it. One hand on the table, one hand on the seat-back, which Shankar had to hold in place. She hesitated partway down with a look of mild panic, but resumed and made it without complaint.

The host missed this as he was fetching our waitress. Shankar and I knew the menu and so didn't need to think about what we wanted. And we had nothing to say, really - we were equally rapt Lyra-watching. She in turn was rapt playing with the utensils, the plastic cover of the menu, then watching how the others were eating. When the guitarist started up again, she stared like the guitarist was entering the combination on a safe Lyra needed to crack.

Watching intently was a simple enough thing to be doing that Shankar and I didn't find it so fascinating. "So." I asked him. "You seem to be treating her as legit."

"Yeah. Did you listen in while we were walking here?"

"Not closely. Something about the electrical wires and TV?"

"Yes. She groks waves. She knows trigonometry."

"So?"

"Rhiannon doesn't know a sine from a chord."

"Umm, isn't a chord a kind of line segment? And sine... I remember what the curve looks like, but I don't remember what it's for."

Lyra filled in without diverting her eyes from the strings, "If you start at twelve o'clock on a unit circle and go around it clockwise, the sine is how far to the right of your starting point you are, while the chord is the distance from your starting point. The chord is equal in magnitude to twice the sine of half the angle." Looking to us, she added, "As I said, I'm in Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns."

Shankar gaped. "The chord... wait a moment. Huh, yeah, that works! I hadn't noticed that. Anyway, as I was saying, convincingly not Rhiannon."

Lyra finally broke eye contact with the guitar to turn to him, look him in the eye, and say, "Thank you."

He nodded, and she slowly turned back to the guitar.

I asked, "So, what do you study back home?"

"Music."

"Oh! So this was a good choice."

She smiled. "Yes, it was!" Lyra's smile said she was under a lot of stress and this was a break from it. I couldn't imagine why she might feel under the slightest degree of stress, of course.

"What do you play?"

"The lyre."

Shankar and I shared a glance. I said, "Seriously?"

"Yes. Got my cutie mark in it... not that non-ponies get those, so you probably don't know what I'm talking about."

Shankar said, "Quite."

"Just a magical symbol signifying my special talent."

"So, unicorns get special talents and merit badges?"

"Oh, not just unicorns - every pony. Earth pony, pegasus, unicorn, or alicorn. Even zebras and giraffes, but not donkeys or cows."

Our wings came. Lyra stared. The moment I saw, I realized. "Ponies don't eat meat."

She closed her eyes. "Ponies can't talk here." A deep breath. "I remember eating near some griffons. It smelled like death." She sniffed. "This... doesn't. I wonder if this is what it smells like to them?" She looked up. "Are you - we - obligatory carnivores?"

"No. Shall I order a salad?"

"I'm not all that hungry." Of course. I just fed Rhiannon. "And... well, wait. I know ponies who fish, and eat the catch. And we have pet cats and dogs, and they eat meat. And anypony who's grazed has eaten bugs. I... I guess I can try it. Or I won't. Go ahead, anyway."

Shankar and I slowly began eating. Lyra went back to watching the music. When the song ended, her attention drifted back to the plate. After a minute, she tentatively reached for a wing, concern playing across her face. She held there for another minute, not quite taking one.

And then the musicians changed - the next played the dulcimer. It was flat on a high table, so we could see the player's fingers poised as he expressively hammered out something slow and harmonically dense, with lots of lingering notes. The crowd was surprisingly quiet, and we could actually hear them pretty well. I pulled the plate out of the way so Lyra wouldn't get sauce all over her fingers as her hand sank to the table.

Shankar was grinning. "Now this is what I was hoping for when I suggested we come here. Just wait for the fast songs. This guy's great."

"No, I suggested we come here."

"What? Are you sure?"

"Yeah. You were all 'what do we do now if no movie?' and I said, 'O'Malley's'."

After a moment's thought, he carefully said, "No, you were the one who ruled out going to the movie. I remember reacting to that."

"Doesn't matter. So, Ly...ra." I looked around. Lyra was missing.

I looked around for Lyra: over towards the player, expecting her to want to get a better look. She wasn't standing there. I got up and went in the back, to the ladies' room. Not there either. Which reminds me, we'll need to get that sorted out before it becomes urgent.

I headed back out, but ran into Shankar heading in. "She's not around the side, and she didn't join any other tables."

"I'll handle the check. You look outside."

He didn't much like it when I took charge in emergencies like that - or when I covered the check. But I was the one with a real job. So he grimaced, but he did leave as I'd suggested. I went to the host and paid up, and did one last sweep. As I was leaving, I heard a guest behind me telling the host, "... curled up on the ground." That caught my ears, so I reentered and followed them out back, past the tables. Lyra was lying on the rug, head on the feet of the dulcimer player, who hadn't missed a note. He spared us a glance and a smile.

The host recognized her, then noticed me. I whispered, "I'll take care of it." The host accepted that. I sent a text to Shankar indicating I had her, and set my phone to silent.

Then I crouched down and shook her shoulder. Her eyes snapped open, and she looked at me with confusion. I helped her up and guided her back to the table. She got back into her seat with much less help this time. Leaning in, I said, "You have a bed at home. Sleepy?"

She yawned, and laid her head on her hands.

Shankar made it back to the table as the dulcimer player started up a new song at high speed. This woke Lyra up a bit. After a few moments, she said, "What just happened?"

Shankar and I shared our fifth confused glance of the evening. I said, "We were hoping you could explain that."

"I've never done anything like that before, and I don't know why I did."

Shankar interjected, "What was it?"

"Lyra used the musician's shoes as a pillow."

One finger raised for clarification. "Was he in them?"

"Yes."

"Were they comfortable?"

"Shankar!" - "Not really."

"Just trying to find an explanation."

We returned to listening and watching the performance. The third number started with him singing in some language we didn't know, and feathering some of the strings.

Lyra began to sort of roll out of her seat. I pinched her. She sat up briskly, and frowned. "Wha... it was happening again?" We nodded.

She watched intently, focusing on staying awake and in her seat - she periodically pinched herself.

Finally, to give herself something to do, she grabbed a wing and bit down. The effects slowly spread through her body in waves. First, the spices hit her. Then the true flavor. Self-revulsion at eating meat, rationalization. Disgust at the unfamiliar texture, then the third wave of flavor. I can say this with some authority since she described the experience to me at length later on.

That one wing occupied her for two minutes, and she wasn't done with it when the dulcimer player sat down between her and Shankar.

"Are you a unicorn?"

He was joking, obviously - and just as obviously she took it seriously. "Yes. How could you tell?"

He blinked. Then twice more. "Well, umm, the, umm. The virgin trap? Well, what were you doing if you didn't know about that? I thought it was hilarious, if a bit presumptuous." He blushed and added, "I'm Jack."

Shankar asked what I was wondering: "Virgin trap?"

"Yeah. If you want to find a unicorn, you get a virgin to play music in the woods. Keep it up long enough, and a unicorn will pop up and go to sleep on the musician. At least, that's how it's supposed to work." He'd seemed confused as he explained, but that expression melded into mischief as he went on, "It relies on there being a unicorn being within traveling distance, and unicorns are somewhat scarce these days. Or I'd been led to believe so."

Lyra said, "I wonder whether that's really unicorn-specific, or it's just that only unicorns have ever made it here. Is the same said of pegasi?" She blinked. "Sorry - I'm Lyra. Sorry about...."

"Nice to meet you, and don't worry about it. You're welcome any time." Gesturing to his head, he said, "You're a lot less horny than I imagined." Then he grinned a little, trying to hide it. Looking back on it with the benefit of online research, he must have been going for the double entendre intentionally, referring to the habit of unicorns caught in the virgin trap to rape their captors if they got the chance.

"This isn't my body. My true body does have a horn."

Jack nodded sagely. "I see. And where are you from?"

"Equestria... Ponyville, though I'm studying in Canterlot. Speaking of which... where are we?"

I answered, "Manville", and Jack noticed us for the first time. Turning back to Lyra, Jack asked, "So, how did you end up with these fine folks?"

"Exchange program. This is Rachel's roommate's body." He just sat there blinking once more. She added, "Do you know where I can get a lyre?"

"The instrument? Yes. I have one back at my place. Why?"

"I'm a lyrist. I'd like to see what it's like to play with my toes." She wiggled her fingers.

I put in, "Fingers, Lyra. Those are fingers."

Jack closed his eyes for a solid second. "Well. I've never really used it. I don't know how good it is, but you're welcome to come up to borrow it. Aa-and, so that isn't creepy, I mean you can all come over and get it together."

Shankar coughed and said, "Jack, she's 13."

Jack looked back and forth between them. "Okay, the last ten seconds have turned this from a weird pickup and funny conversation into 'X-files' territory. Lyra. You..." He crossed his eyes. "Seriously?"

We all nodded.

With a cock of his eyebrow, he said, "Whatever. Let me pack up the dulcimer."

I'd been worried that Lyra would continue to aim herself at him, but she passed up several opportunities to crash into him or grab him. When we made it outside, Jack asked, "So, seriously. Where are all the other unicorns?"

"Equestria. My turn. Umm. What kinds of humans are there?"

Blank looks.

"Like, him." She pointed to a seraph statue above a Catholic church we were passing. "What's he?"

Jack replied, "An angel. But they're not human. They're halfway between human and God."

"Oh. I think we call those, 'birds'."

I understood what she meant immediately and facepalmed. Jack was confused. "So birds have human bodies in Equestria?"

"No, that doesn't make any sense. What would you even mean by halfway between, then?"

Jack got stuck with his mouth open as he struggled with the misinterpretation, then finally threw up his hands. "Oh come on. God is the creator of heaven and earth. Separated the light from the darkness, created seas and dry land, the plants and animals, and people. He is love."

Lyra raised her eyebrows. "Wow! Your world must be positively utopian!"

"Umm... how do you figure?"

"Well, our world was created by Contradiction, who created the light and the darkness, water and land and air. She also spawned Discord, who set them against each other so they could no longer be the same things - and in so doing, killed his mother. Discord also created the victims and the killers. Some of the greatest killers, the dragons, despised the lesser ones, and manipulated some of the victims to be able to defend themselves against the lesser killers. Thus were the three modern types of pony created.

"In time, their powers grew. Once they had sorted out their differences, they created the alicorns, who combined the powers of all three - and in some cases, such as princess Celestia, were extraordinarily powerful. They defeated many of the killers, and then Discord himself.

"They ended Discord's victim/killer system over most of the land, and only since then we have lived in harmony. So, by comparison, a world with one creator who is made of love ought to have a neater history."

Jack had stopped walking partway through that, flabbergasted. I gave her a clap on the back. "Congratulations! You have discovered the Problem of Evil."

She blanched suddenly. "Wait. Are you killers? What do you even mean by 'love'?"

Jack was taking deep breaths. "Love is what we aspire to - to be greater than our inner killers."

Lyra swallowed. "And how are you all doing on that?"

I couldn't help it - I hugged her. "Pretty danged well. Relax."

Jack turned and led up the driveway of a mcmansion (okay, maybe he didn't stop from shock, just being home). A dinner party was on, visible through the front windows. As we came to the portico, he said, "Sorry, looks like I didn't take long enough at the restaurant. How about I bring the lyre down for you?"

Lyra nodded eagerly, and he disappeared inside.

Shankar looked like he was going to ask a question, but before he could even compose it, Jack was back with the lyre.

It looked like a wooden toilet seat with a bib. And strings.

Lyra accepted it hesitantly. "This is a little different than I'm used to, even aside from having to use these." she wiggled her fingers. "Actually, wait a moment. Do I still have my magic?"

She concentrated.

Shankar giggled. I gave him a harsh look, and he explained, "Made me think of Fooly Cooly." Once he said it, I was almost ashamed I didn't think of it first.

Lyra gave up and laid her fingers across the strings. "All right. Let's see. Seven strings. My options are a bit more limited - I'll have to either pluck, or strum and dampen. Hmm."

Jack offered, "It was meant to be strummed and dampened."

She nodded, and, setting aside what he'd just said, immediately plucked each string to see what tuning it was in. It wasn't. "Not heavily used, is it?"

"Been sitting in the corner next to the greatsword for about fifteen years."

Examining the head, she asked, "Have a tuning hammer?"

Jack led us back to the garage. It was loaded, and well organized. A square socket wrench of the appropriate size had to be in here. Jack began scanning for the appropriate tool as if in a library.

I murmured, "Allen wrenches, gerbil feeders, lyres, electric heaters..."

Shankar caught the reference right away. "Yeah, it does look like that, kind of, doesn't it?"

Then I remembered as Jack handed her a socket wrench fitted up to be a tuning hammer. "Lyra, do you need to go to the bathroom?" Before there was an opportunity for a ~~hilarious~~ misunderstanding, I clarified, "To, ah, empty your bladder or intestines, say?"

She didn't look up from her adjustments as she replied, "I know what bathrooms are for, and I'm fine." Barely ten seconds passed before she amended, "But given the trouble I've had moving around, maybe I should give myself some wiggle room. Jack?"

"Certainly, my lady." We followed him the back door. The sounds of conversation softly emerged from the front, but there was a lavatory right next to the rear entrance. As we were about to open the door, he asked, "How would you like it tuned?"

"Pick something reasonable. I'll figure it out." As he retreated to go do that, she faced the commode and concentrated. "So. I noticed that... well, I foresee difficulties. How do you do this cleanly?"

I tapped the toilet paper roll.

She looked at me in horror. "That's it? Just clean up after the horrible mess you have from having these lumps of fat on either side?"

"They're not fat, they're muscle. The biggest muscle in your body. But yes."

"And the hair? That seems like a terrible place to put hair."

"Yeah, thank the blind idiot god for that."

She frowned. "A blind idiot god made of love. Umm."

I facepalmed again. "A nickname I heard for evolution a while back." By way of Lovecraft, but let's not get into that just right now. "Jack and I... differ on the origin of life."

She started crying.

Confused, I said, "Umm, I'm sorry. Does that idea really bother you?"

"Ah! I saw her! I was right there!" Something was odd about her tone. "Oh goddess..."

"Well, yes, but she's there and we're here."

"I know that! That's the problem!" Rhiannon screeched. There was no doubt that we had Rhiannon back.

Chapter 3: Rhiannon
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The Exchange Program

Chapter 3: Rhiannon

My eyes widened. "Shush! There's a party in the next room!"

She crumpled her face, but quietened. "She kicked me out."

"Oh. Celestia?"

"No, the tooth fairy! Of course it was Celestia!" she hissed. "And get out of here. I don't need help."

I beat a hasty retreat to the garage. Shankar and Jack were tuning the lyre, and looked up.

I matter-of-factly said, "We appear to be experiencing technical difficulties."

Jack said, "Umm, is she really that bad at using a toilet?"

"Not that kind. I mean, Lyra's gone and we've got Rhiannon back. Celestia was apparently unimpressed."

Jack asked, "Rhiannon?"

"My roommate, the one whose body Lyra was in."

"Is she... like Lyra?"

Rhiannon fumed her way out of the house, looked around, spotted us in the garage, and tromped over. "All right. Where are we, and why? Why are we even outside the apartment?"

Jack said, "I'll take that as a no. I'm Jack, and this is my house. I was lending Lyra this." He held up the lyre.

She barely acknowledged him, instead cornering me, she went on, "And why am I not wearing my protective amulets?" Quieter, she added, "Nor, for that matter, underwear?"

"Amulets? I didn't read the whole letter yet, since I only found it after accidentally freeing her."

"Yes! That was a part of the deal, and by not putting them on her..."

"As for the other, I gave it to her to put on, but I guess she didn't."

"I... that's insignificant!" She backed away, then set out up the driveway. "I've got to go write all this down before I forget anything. Coming?"

Considering I was the only one with apartment keys, I figured I ought to stick with her. That meant Shankar was as well, and when Jack tagged along (lyre in hand) I didn't object.

Her pace was brisk, so it took a bit of effort for me to catch up and keep up. Once we were all gathered together on the move once more, Rhiannon explained. "Look. If anything physical happened to her here, that would only affect me in the long run. Even if she died, she'd be okay and I'd be dead. That's just a risk you have to deal with if you're going to do this. It's expected that the hosts will provide a physically safe environment, and the visitor won't kill herself. I trusted you'd do that for her just as you would for me, and it turns out I'm fine. Great.

"But when it comes to magic? While we're exchanged, we're both extra vulnerable to magical influences, and most of those will follow us back home. Add in unfamiliarity with the environment on top of that and the chances of getting burned are much higher. To make exchanging at all safe, the deal is, it's up to the hosts to ensure the safety of the visitors. And Celestia could tell that Lyra wasn't protected."

I glanced to Jack. Unicorn trap. "Oh. Right."

Jack was frowning intently. "Magic. You are seriously a worker of magic? A witch?" Jack? You were okay with her using magic when you thought she was a unicorn a few minutes ago.

Rhiannon snorted. "Compared to what I just saw? Not the least. She's... she's freaking Aslan."

The analogy made Jack blink. Aslan was a Christian-compatible symbol. "So, witchcraft isn't making pacts with devils?"

"Only if you're an outrageously competent evil idiot, which I'm not, and I don't think anyone is, nor has anyone been for centuries. For the most part, all you get out of it is a degree of protection from some kinds of bad things that can happen to people, and sometimes you can extend that to others. It's most akin to knowing to filter arsenic out of the water. General malaise is a big one. Irrational anger's another."

I'd heard this before, so I put in, "Rhiannon is usually rationally angry."

She was about to retort but stopped herself. "Yes. There's enough wrong with this world that being upset about it is a fair reaction."

We were home. I unlocked the door and she sprinted up. Shankar and Jack followed; Jack waited at the threshold. "May I come in? I..." He just looked so awkward.

Shankar joked, "Vampire?"

Jack rolled his eyes, stepped in, and stepped out again. "May I come in?"

I matched his rolleyes with one of my own. "Yes. Fer cryin' out loud, if we didn't want you around we would have very politely made it clear before you made it this far."

"Really?"

I can only imagine the horror that must have crossed my face. "Yes! What kind of people do you hang out with, that'd string you along, let you carry a lyre six blocks and then slam a door in your face?"

He looked down at his feet, then deliberately stepped in. "Let's not worry about them."

That was when Rhiannon started typing. It was nothing new to me, but neither of the guys had seen her type before, and it grabbed their attention. It was no wonder at all that she had been able to arrange a job - the sound of her keystrokes was like driving rain. The screens filled with text so fast it was like watching smoke rise.

The other three of us gave her room to get it out without distraction; Jack attempted to play the lyre. He of course kept his sense of musicality, but the change of instrument definitely interfered.

After a few minutes, he whispered, "I suspect that lyres were primarily intended for accompaniament rather than solos. There's so little to work with."

Shankar gestured for it, Jack handed it over, and Shankar began tuning it differently.

Rhiannon pushed her chair back and stood up. "All right. Got the important stuff down. Shall I tell it?"

She had our undivided attention; the lyre lay forgotten.

She said:

"I opened my eyes and found myself in a small grassy courtyard in gleaming bright white palace. The sun was high in the sky, and not at all painful to look at. I was an aqua unicorn filly with a few white accents. There were a three of us in a row, and I was at the left. Directly in front of us was princess Celestia herself. She was huge - the size of a large horse, while the rest of us were basically little ponies. She welcomed us tenderly and we introduced ourselves.

Furthest right was a brick-red unicorn colt. He came from a race of squid-like people living in the ocean under a thick ice sheet. His name was a bit on the long side - we called him Aloshuhipitachitel for short. Anything shorter than that he would have found rude (though fortunately he was tolerant of mistakes). His academy sends a student to Equestria on exchange almost every year. He was primarily interested in astronomy, since it was something he would have a great deal of difficulty studying in his own world, and he had a laundry list of other interests.

In the center was a yellow unicorn filly with blue mane and tail. She was really quiet, and let Celestia describe where she was from - she was a roc, from a world where rocs are hunted by dragons. She was studying under an elder roc and an efreeti, both of whom Celestia seemed to know personally. She seemed really nervous, which makes sense since if the pony who took her place slipped up, she'd be dead. Anyway, she asked us to call her Ell, and then she basically stopped talking. She took so much less time that I was left a bit unready.

Fortunately for me, Celestia took a minute to assure Ell that the pony who had been sent to her world had been carefully prepared for it, including getting an advanced degree in keeping her mouth shut (not the original phrasing).

And then came my turn. I said something I modified slightly from a little speech I'd memorized, so I can actually say what I said: 'I am Rhiannon. My kind are humans, a variety of ape, and, like Aloshuhipitachitel's people, we are the sole sapient species on our world. My world is largely ignorant of magic, and what we do know of it is surpassingly subtle, and likely seriously wrong. My mentor was not sure whether to believe me when I told her that my application to exchange had been accepted. She had tried once. I come to learn anything at all - especially those things that might apply to my world and help us understand what we so far cannot see.' Now, at this, Celestia became somewhat concerned. She asked me what manner of protections I had offered. I described the protective amulets and the tests I had performed on them.

Provisionally satisfied, she handed us off to some other unicorns. One started orienting us on being a pony, starting with walking and moving on up to using the toilet. These aren't our ponies at all - they have really thick legs for one thing, and keep their privates behind a 'vent' - so even though hardly anyone one was wearing much of anything, there wasn't really anything to see.

Anyway, after maybe an hour of that, princess Celestia came in and had some additional concerns to share with me. In particular, the pony I'd exchanged with was being affected by magic in an alarming way.

I described again what I'd set up, and she indicated that if it was as ineffective as that, she was going to have to send me back for the safety of her student. I didn't take it very gracefully, I'm afraid. Another few minutes and she was sending me home."

Then a strong, soft voice spoke, seemingly from nowhere: "Fairly told! Upon speaking with Lyra, I have decided a second chance may be appropriate - she was most insistent on returning. I will need to inspect these amulets, and you will need to entrust me with your true name."

The guys looked at me with alarm; Rhiannon threw herself from her chair and prostrated herself before me. "Certainly, your majesty. May I ask, where is Rachel right now?"

I said, "I'm right here. I... I'm guessing from the way you're acting that I somehow didn't notice that I just said all that."

Three faint nods. Rhiannon stood up and said, "I'll fetch the amulets."

The voice again said, "Rachel, if you do not mind, we will briefly exchange so I can inspect properly. Do not do anything precipitous." I could feel the muscles in my neck moving this time, since I was paying close attention.

"I, uh..." That was when I realized if we exchanged, I'd get to see Equestria. "Sure."

A few moments later, I was princess Celestia, seated on a cushion in a palatial room. The room was off-center within a city. The city was a bit off-center within a nation. The nation was well off-center of a world. The world was the exact center of a bubble of existence, and of special note was a sun orbiting it. The bubble of existence was way out on the edge of a multiverse. The various layers of awareness fled in under a second, but it was enough to leave an impression: Celestia's name wasn't idly chosen.

All that was left to me was that right in front of me was a tiny aqua unicorn filly. Only a few seconds after my viewpoint had solidified into something resembling a single first person viewpoint did I dare twitch. While waiting, though, I decided that I'd keep that information leak to myself for a while. I blinked, and said, "Lyra?"

Lyra reared up on her hind legs. "Wow, it worked! I can't believe it! I really helped! You're Rachel! Is it all working out?"

"Seems like it. We'll know in a minute if Rhiannon's amulets are worth beans. Quick - get me a mirror!"

She thought for a moment and ran off. I tried, very carefully, to stand up. My sense of body proved to be quite weak, so I decided that standing up counted as 'precipitous action' and stopped.

Lyra returned, gasped as she saw me, and levitated up the mirror.

Dayumn, that hair. The roots were pink, but about a third of the way out there was a transition to glowing ethereal infinity. The transition was fading away from my scalp visibly as we watched, leaving more and more pink.

I blurted, "I wonder what would happen if you braided my tail?"

Lyra's mouth opened in shock. "Rachel..."

"Yeah, bad idea. Don't want to risk creating a black hole when we switch back."

I lifted a hoof and felt my horn. It was spiral, like Lyra's, but huge. It had a peculiar lightness to it, almost lifting my head up of its own accord... though as I paid attention to that, I noticed that that effect too was slowly fading - much more slowly. The ethereal hair's retreat was actually accelerating, and a moment later, with a little sparkle, it was gone.

Movement drew my attention - another small unicorn had entered. This one was lavender. Her horn was glowing, and she was levitating a scroll. "Good evening, princess! I finished the essay you wanted."

Lyra said, "Twilight, could you come back later? She's... busy."

Twilight stared at Lyra for a few seconds, then looked to me. She was already drawing her breath to ask me something, but instead shrieked, "Gah! I mean, what's that? I mean, your manestyle is. I mean, umm." She prostrated herself and covered her face with her hooves. I could practically hear her thinking 'shutting up now.'

After dismissing the idea of trying to explain, various alternate ideas presented themselves: "I heard that corporeal hair was very in this century." - "I'm sorry, Twilight, but your princess is in another castle. Actually, more of a low-rent apartment." - "If you would like to leave a message, please say it after the beep. Beep. Sorry, memory full." - "Kneel before Zod!" - "Recite a hundred Hail Celestias and you're forgiven."

Before I could think of anything better, I was back in my body, in Rhiannon's room. Rhiannon's room was on the surface of a planet. The planet was in orbit of a star. The star was part of a galaxy. The galaxy part of a group of galaxies. The group was part of a filament of density of groups of galaxies. The filaments formed a sheet lying along a fractal surface of bubbles. This structure fit into itself like one of the repeating-figure Escher prints. This figure of existence was way out on the edge of a multiverse, indistinguishably close to Equestria at my level of ability to comprehend.

As I lost those perceptions, I became aware that Shankar and Jack both had their phone cameras on me. Then I became aware that my head was getting heavier. Returning to my my thoughts immediately prior to the switch back, I ran my hand through my hair. It felt normal for the first few inches. But then it reached nothing. An impenetrable nothing - my hand just stopped. Slowly, the impenetrable block of hair yielded. I pulled it in front of my head and watched the multi-hued infinity dissolve into hair as I pressed on it.

Now, this would have been surprising at a pretty basic level, but what made it especially surprising was that the harder I pressed, the more the hair kept coming. Perfect, smooth hair, not a split in sight, and already longer than the shoulder-length hair I'd started with. I kept up the pressure, pulling my hair up with my other hand. When the ethereal ends sputtered out with a sparkle and my hand flew free, my hair fell and hung around my knees.

The silence broke when Shankar said, "Ho-oly crow." A moment later, he added, "And it came through on the camera, too. Now, what do we do with it?"

Rhiannon coughed. "Considering that I'm a few seconds from being away for a couple months, maybe a farewell is in order." She gave me a hug and a smile. Aha! She knows how to do that after all! "See you later, and thanks." Turning to Shankar, she said, "Based on the past couple minutes, I've decided you're all right after all." And to Jack, she just said, "Don't get me pregnant."

Jack raised an eyebrow. "That's all?"

She shrugged. "The rest is between you and her, but I do not want to come back to find a bun in the oven."

"I won't get to first base. I will refuse to enter the batter's box. She's just 13 after all."

Her face distorted in horror. "She is? Awww cra... Hi again!" Lyra was back.

Chapter 4: Gwyneth
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The Exchange Program

Chapter 4: Gwyneth

Over the next few minutes, Shankar and Jack explained to Lyra what Celestia had told them about the proper use of the protective amulets. They were cheap silver rings, fiber bracelets and anklets, a belt, and an amethyst pendant.

I listened in while running my fingers through my new hair and watching the video Shankar had just taken, muted. The video showed princess Celestia in my body, speaking to Rhiannon, and examining the various amulets. She touched several to her forehead and at each there was a brief glow. However, the main subject of the video was the hair. By the time they'd started the video, the infinity wave effect had nearly taken over my regular hair, and was expanding to its full size.

In person, it had had the fascinating property that your eyes looked through it, focusing on lights that were not in the hair but far beyond it. In the camera, with its single lens, this wasn't apparent. It didn't even look real, seeming like it had been edited in. A nice memento, not evidence. Well, not strong evidence.

The video continued, Celestia finishing with the amulets and turning to examine the apartment. She ignored the run-down furniture, gesturing approvingly to our well-stocked bookshelves. Rhiannon bowed to her, and Celestia held still for a few seconds. Then her hair started to revert - Celestia was gone, and I was back. I stopped the video.

Seeing I was done, Lyra looked up from her tuning the lyre. "Can you arrange lessons with Rhiannon's teacher?"

"Sure." I hunted for and soon found Rhiannon's cell phone. To my relief, she hadn't locked it. In a moment, I had her on the line.

"Hi, Rhi." Her voice was surprisingly guarded.

"Actually, this is Rachel, her roommate." Meanwhile, Shankar began braiding my hair.

"You're using her phone."

"I know. Did Rhiannon say anything about a special project she was working on?"

"Ye-es... did she make a mess?"

"It worked."

"What? Just what did it do?”

"It's a bit long to explain over the phone, and Rhiannon isn't here right now."

"By which you mean she disappeared, she left the area, or..."

"She's not herself at the moment."

"Do you actually have any evidence that she's not just messing with you?"

Sticking to what could be objectively observed, I said, “Well, my hair grew three feet in the last ten minutes."

Near-silence, but for Lyra finishing tuning.

I added, "I don't expect you to necessarily believe that, but you might be curious to get a look at it. Anyway, we're not in trouble here. I was just wondering if you'd take on a teenage unicorn mind-swapped into Rhiannon's body as a student."

"What? Well. Umm. Well! One way or another, this is going to be interesting. I'll be by tomorrow morning. See you then. And don't cut your hair." With exquisite timing, Shankar handed me the end of my new braid.

I closed the phone, looked to Lyra, and realized that she'd never seen anything like it. "You took that in stride pretty well. Did I look like a crazy person?"

Lyra shrugged like a well-fed cat passing the recycling bin. She had lyre, and it was time for me to discontinue the yapping.

She closed her eyes, and played.

Frankly, by this point I rather expected that I'd wake up to find my head on her feet, so I intentionally left to secure the end of my braid.

Where did I leave my hair-ties? It's been a year since I needed them... Ah, right. Lying on top of one of the horizontal black bars in my woodblock-recreation of Mondrian's number 38. I didn't feel a tug coming from the other room, so I returned.

Yes, she was good. Her rhythm and phrasing was solid. Though she fumbled a little with her fingers, that wasn't severe. Missing a dampening produced a chord that already sounded good, so there was a pretty strict limit on how bad her fingering could get. But she wasn't as good as Jack. Give her a break, Rachel, she's just 13 and utterly new to having hands. Even if she is a freaking interdimensional unicorn.

That was when she started singing. This is where she shone - a determined soprano, as rich as an alto. I was surprised she could get this out of Rhiannon's vocal cords. (Incidentally, this song was a great example of how music can elevate lousy poetry)

A fire on a distant shore,

A candle hung in a tower,

A letter from one now gone,

These are why I travel on.

Tears were not flowing, but we were at a better-dab-it-now level. So when she perkily asked, "You liked it?", it was like a splash of cold water. As we nodded, she said, "That was the first one I learned at the academy. Simple enough. Let's see if I can still do 'At the Mill'.

She started up a vigorous line, plucking, but soon got finger-tied. She yawned. "What time is it?"

I checked my phone. "9:15. When's your bed-time?"

"'Bed-time'? I'm not a little filly. I go to bed 'round 10, 10:30. But I think we're not exactly synched up. Must be... wait, it's the other way. It's only 7 or so back in Equestria." She blinked. "But I think Rhiannon didn't get enough sleep last night." She put down her lyre, stretched, and yawned.

I gestured to the men - "Up and out. All Y chromosomes must exit the building."

Jack got up but asked, "First... phone numbers? Email?"

Shankar gave me a glance and gestured to him - I nodded - and he said, "I've got you covered. Let's go." Then he half-dragged Jack out.

I helped Lyra to her feet. We went over to her door... and wham. The odor of that scented oil assaulted us. I left Lyra by the door for a moment to seal the bottle more tightly and open the window. It wouldn't be clearing out any time soon.

So I dumped her in my bed, grabbed my PJs, and took the sofa. The lumpy, saggy sofa. Within five minutes, I was seriously considering joining Lyra. Within half an hour, I actually did.

I woke with the sunrise since I'd gone to bed so early, but I barely had my oatmeal in me and peeled my hard boiled egg before someone was buzzing for entry. I went down, wondering whether it was Jack or Gwyneth (Shankar knew that the outer door could be opened with the right jiggle) - and it was Gwyneth. I let her in, saying, "Lyra's asleep."

"Nice hair. Too bad I don't remember what it was like last time I saw you. Now, sorry if I beat around the bush a little when we were on the phone, but I was with company and I couldn't speak freely."

"Didn't notice at the time."

I was about to open the door to the apartment, but Gwyneth put a hand on the door, keeping me from opening it. "Well, the thing is, it's all fake. See, I let Rhiannon go weeks ago because she's a... poser. She was just in it for some magical powers that don't even really exist, and even if they did, she's way off on how they work."

I looked her in the eyes. "Yesterday, for four minutes or so, I was a unicorn pegasus with backdoor access to a sun. So what you're thinking of may not be how it works, but what Rhiannon was thinking of was."

Gwyneth rolled her eyes and sighed. "Well, I do feel a bit of responsibility for how she turned out. And you too, it sounds like." She moved her hand from the door and I opened it.

Lyra was standing on her hands and knees in the middle of the floor, naked but for the amulets, with a pad of paper front of her. She was writing on it with a pencil gripped in her lips. Without letting go, she looked up and said, "Hi! I'm Lyra! Are you my teacher? I... thought of thome questionth to get uth thtarted!"

I wish I had gotten a look at Gwyneth's face, but I was busy facepalming. And trying to remember whether she'd been naked when I woke up next to her. As far as I could remember, she'd still had the dress on.

I opened my eyes when Lyra asked, "What ith it, Rachel?"

"First: why are you naked again?" I took a glance at Gwyneth. She was looking up at the corner of the room, apparently thinking. Seemed unlikely that she was upset at the nudity.

"I like it better that way?"

"Umm, fair enough, but we like it better the other way." I said; Gwyneth amended, "Doesn't bug me."

"And it'th got more to do with me than you. What elth?"

She had a point: I didn't care all that much, and she seemed willing enough to go along with it when guys were around or outdoors. "Well, why are you writing with your mouth?"

She dropped the pencil and looked down at it for a moment. "I'm more used to levitating my quills, but I remember this enough from when I was a filly to get by. I know, soon I'll want to use my, umm, hands, but I tried and it came out really badly." Then, to Gwyneth, she said, "Why are you looking up there?"

Gwyneth tore her gaze from the cobwebs in the corner of the ceiling and looked down to her. "Just trying to remember something. So. What's your name?"

"Lyra Heartstrings. And yours?"

"No, you see, I don't think it is."

"Yeah, I know this body belongs to Rhiannon. She'll be back in two months. I'm here on an exchange program."

"Hmph. Well, how did she set that up?"

"I dunno! I'm just a student, not an administrator! What's your name, again?"

"Gwyneth. Can I look at your notes?"

Lyra reached forward, picked up the pad, and handed it up.

Gwyneth accepted them, saying, "I meant the notes from before. 'Her' notes, I suppose.... what is this?"

I leaned over and read the surprisingly legible writing:

Need to write an essay on each of the following:

1 - families

2 - food

3 - society

4 - history

5 - government

6 - music (and learn 2 each instrumental and vocal pieces for performance after)

7 - art

8 - magic

9 - tools

10 - biology

Ideas for topics:

blind idiot god (creator) made of love

Meanwhile, Lyra reached to me and I gave her a hand up. Gwyneth raised an eyebrow and pointed to the last line.

I interceded, "Uh, that was" - "Ssh." Gwyneth didn't want me making excuses, apparently.

Lyra got in position to read it. "Well, isn't that what you said? Jack said God is made of love, and you said it's a blind idiot."

"I wasn't talking about the same thing!"

Major disappointment. "Oh. Well, that's a lot less interesting. That would have been an A+ essay for sure."

I said, "Can you write something with your mouth again? That's a pretty neat trick, regardless."

She looked down at the pencil on the floor, then helplessly to me. "How do I get that?"

I pulled a fresh pencil off the shelf by the door. "I'll explain later." To Gwyneth, I clarified, "She's a little shaky on her feet."

Lyra grabbed the pencil, stuck it in her mouth, scratched out the topic idea and fluidly wrote: "Blind idiot god & god made of love."

Gwyneth nodded, impressed. Then, to me, "Do you know where Rhiannon's notes are?"

I shrugged. "Her room is still set up, mostly, if you want to check it out." Gwyneth headed in, took a contemptuous look at the circle, and began rummaging around. She commented, "Whoa, that is a lot of tarot decks."

Lyra looked after her. "So, it seems like she's not really in a position to teach me anything."

"Not yet anyway. Maybe once she's sorted out what's real and not. How are you on food?"

"Need it!"

"You're not big on meat - how are you with milk? Eggs?"

"Fine!"

So I poured her a bowl of oatmeal and offered her another of the hard-boiled eggs. She thanked me and took both (yet another difference from Rhiannon, who hates hard-boiled eggs), but was distinctly unimpressed by the oats. She tried various ways of gripping the spoon as she ate, and made do with several. Between bites, she explained her impressions of eating the wing the night before.

Gwyneth came out with two long, thin decks of cards and handed them to me. "Which of these is nicer?"

I flipped through the first. I'd expected it to be a tarot deck, but I wasn't sure that it was. It had lots of strong colors and geometric figures. I set it down and looked at the other. The top card showed three women in a triangle holding up cups. It was superficially innocuous, but there was just something wrong about it. "Er! The first one."

Gwyneth sighed. "Rachel, you're holding a somewhat-prettified but otherwise totally ordinary deck. And you freaked out over the most innocuous card in it. There's not supposed to be anything creepy about those ladies. The first deck, I gave to Rhiannon because I didn't want it anymore. It is the most emotionless, dead tarot deck I've ever heard of. Emotionally, it's like seventy-eight paintings by Hitler. But she's managed to infuse them with some sort of affect" [that's AFF-fect, as in emotional state] "that overrides what you'd normally think of them."

Even being told this, I had a hard time buying that there was nothing wrong with the deck I was holding. An idea struck me - I handed them to Lyra. "What do you think?"

She looked through the deck. "I don't see anything wrong with this. Of course, I'm protected."

"Right. Want to try taking amulets off until you find something wrong with this deck?"

She looked at me flatly. "It's mind control. I'm surprised you haven't tossed it across the room."

Of course, when you put it that way... I didn't feel like 78 card pickup, so I dumped the decks in a shopping bag and rolled it up before tossing them across the room.

Then Gwyneth burst out laughing. "Holy smokes. You'll believe anything! Totally made that up."

I wanted to hit her so hard so hard. "But how did you know I'd go for the other one?"

"Because it's the counterintuitive thing, obviously! And I was asking, and what's the point if I was expecting the obvious?"

"But I like geometric figures! Look at the art we have around here! Look!" A thin-lipped frown. She didn't move.

Lyra began loudly writing away, interrupting her. Gwyneth went and read over her shoulder. "'Everyone around here lies a lot.' Ha!"

I added, "Plus, I didn't expect there to be magic on them. If she could get magic to work that well, why not go and pick up a million bucks from James Randi? Plus, if you made that up, why didn't you expect Rhiannon to call you on it?"

"She's clearly having some sort of dissociative episode. She wouldn't remember enough - at least, not without her well-being on the line. And of course it was a chance for her to blow it."

I threw my hands in the air. Her new opinion of me really got to me. "Well, the notion of Rhiannon being able to pull that magic thing off... just isn't particularly unlikely. I mean, I wasn't specifically expecting it, but with all the other stuff I've just seen... have you heard of conditional probability?" I was treading on thin ice here, since my knowledge on this subject was pretty limited. But I did know of it. I struggled to remember how to phrase it. Something like 'Given what I've seen, this isn't all that unlikely', except more technical and not exactly the same as what I just said.

"Yes, I have. And 'conditioning on' your seizing on a magical explanation with little prompting, the chances of your being skeptical enough in your judgments of what is and isn't magic are pretty low!"

Glowering, I retrieved the plastic bag from next to the door and fished out the two decks. I sat there inspecting them, trying to figure out whether there was anything to my earlier feelings. The 'pretty' one was generally pretty innocuous, except when it was trying to be scary. But then I came back to the three ladies with cups. That card still struck me badly.

Knock knock. "It's Shankar." Thank goodness he's here. I need a second opinion. I let him in without thinking further. He looked at my hands. "Hi. What's up with the cards?"

"Which of these decks is nicer?"

He took a few seconds to look through them. "Well, they're different. The abstract one is more visually striking and better-executed, but I'm not sure how well it functions at evoking the ideas the card is supposed to evoke. If I were learning the tarot, I'd definitely use the other one."

"What about this one?" I pointed out the three of cups that had disturbed me.

"Meh."

"All right, whatever. Now, are you convinced that some magic went on here yesterday?"

He looked at me oddly, then noticed Gwyneth. And Lyra. Oops. His reaction to her nudity was oddly minimal, mere momentary surprise. "Yes. Absolutely. I've got it on video. I rewatched it this morning."

I pointed out, "It looks edited in."

"Given that I shot it myself and have zero video editing skills, I can rule that out." With another look to Gwyneth, he said, "But yes, she couldn't. You aren't on the cusp of being convinced, are you?"

Gwyneth shook her head.

"Are you going to call in the psych squad?"

She considered. "Any reason I shouldn't?"

"Because that's the interpersonal equivalent of calling in a nuclear strike?"

Lyra suggested, "Look, it's not too late to really prove it. I may not be able to use magic here, but I can let it be used on me. Let musicians try to 'trap' me. I'd only get caught by the virgins. I bet it'd work through a screen, even."

I said, "Then you're at the mercy of their honestly reporting whether they're virgins or not. It'd only take a few to make you look unreliable."

Shankar added, "Plus, they need to be good at playing. So if your standards are high, you might get false negatives."

Then I mentioned the clincher: "It'd be a lot of work to put together when no one but us would have any expectation at all that it might work."

Gwyneth came to the door. "That's the first reasonable thing I've heard any of you say. But it appears you two at least are basically functional - so, at least for the moment, I'm not going to make any phone calls. But I will be by to check up on you in a few days to make sure you haven't all forgotten how to use your fingers."

Shankar handed her the phone. Gwyneth looked, took a deep breath, and sighed. "She was right. It does look edited-in."

"Not that - did you notice how short her hair was?"

"Editing!" Gwyneth stepped out, rapidly closed the door - stopping it just short of slamming, then gently closed it the last few millimeters.

Shankar shouted, "I haven't known her long enough for her hair to grow that much!" But Gwyneth was going.

Lyra laughed. "Oh well. We didn't need her anyway." She reached towards us. "Could I get some standing-up lessons? I'm kind of stuck, and it's getting silly."

Chapter 5: Travel
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The Exchange Program

Chapter 5: Travel

Shankar and I worked on figuring out how we stand up ourselves so we could explain it. After watching us carefully for a time, before we'd even figured out quite how we were doing it in detail, Lyra was getting into and out of chairs like a pro, as if you could make money at getting into and out of chairs.

I continued to be amazed by Shankar's disinterest in her lack of clothing, but didn't mention it. So, gathered around the kitchen table, we examined her list. "So. Essays. What do you want to work on first?"

She shrugged. "Seems like mostly stuff I'll pick up just by being here, so I'll write as it comes to me. A library would probably help on the rest." She pursed her lips. "I am supposed to be taking classes of some sort while here, not learn all on my own."

I waved her off. "It's Saturday, so we've got two days before that's a problem. We've got to figure out what your story is going to be right now. If you try to be Rhiannon, you'll fail pretty hard. I don't think we can make you not look like her short of using dark foundation and a wig, and even then it'd be suspicious. And if you just try to be you, that will cause a boatload of trouble."

We mulled that over.

Shankar said, "Lots of trips to where no one knows Rhiannon. Use the library in Somerville or Bridgewater?"

I shook my head. "No need to go that far. I'm pretty sure she's not on a first-name basis with the librarians here. I'm mainly worried about running into her other friends."

"Well. Anyway, in the mean time, I'm thinking, how about we day-trip into New York? See the sights. I've never actually been up the Statue of Liberty."

"Still can't go up. But sure, we can go to the island." (This was true at the time, though I hadn't checked recently)

"Meh. The rest of the city, then?"

"Sure, it's not like we'll come close to running out of stuff to see. Lyra? Can you bear to cover up again? And maybe put on some underwear this time?"

She crinkled her nose. "I can handle dresses. But really, do I need to wear something between my legs? That no one's even going to see?"

I nodded. "At the very least, you'd better get used to it before Tuesday."

"What happens on Tuesday?"

"Our uteruses take out the trash." Shankar, unlike my two previous boyfriends who'd encountered this information, was neither over-the-top disgusted at it nor creepily overeager to hear about it.

She blinked, then sighed in relief. "Oh phew. I was worried I'd have to deal with this the whole time."

"What?"

"Well, if our uteri are emptying out, mating season must be coming to a close."

"Lyra, uh, we don't really have a mating season."

She blinked at me. "Then... what do you have?"

"We ovulate once a month, more or less fertile for about three quarters of that."

She stared in horror. "Once a month? So I'm going to go through this or stronger twice during my stay here?"

I shrugged. Going from 13-year-old pony hormones to adult human hormones abruptly could well be disconcerting, overwhelming. "I imagine you'll adapt."

Shankar asked, "How often do you get these mating seasons?"

"Every seven years or so."

Shankar and I shared a look. "Ponn-Farr!" I said; he added, "Pony-Farr!"

Ignoring us, she amended, "Not that we're locked into that! Some ponies go out of phase, and the astrologers say something funny is coming up. But yeah, for the most part, seven years."

"Maybe it'll be easier if you get dressed?"

She accepted this begrudgingly. She dropped by her room to grab some clothing, and took it to the bathroom.

Shankar said, "'Out of phase'? Now, that reminds me of Deepness in the Sky."

"I was thinking Left Hand of Darkness, but that fits better, unless they only become male as needed, which seems unlikely." I sat next to him on the sofa, and quietly said, "So. You seemed awfully comfortable around her."

He shrugged. "She doesn't mean anything by it, so it doesn't mean anything to me."

"Really." I said, skeptically. "Like, if you were at a nude beach it would just be a beach?"

"When I've been, I wasn't so much focused on the other people, really. Just nice to be there."

I hadn't expected that reply. "You never mentioned that you've been to one."

"Should I have?"

I thought for a moment. "It'd sound like you were just trying to get my pants off."

He nodded. "Plus, it's not exactly a core part of my identity."

Good enough for me. Moving on, I said loudly enough that Lyra should be able to hear, "So. NYC. Should we invite Jack?"

Lyra called from the bathroom, "Yes!" A moment later, the shower started up.

Shankar had him on cell a moment later. "Hi. ... Yeah! ... Oh. Well, hope that goes well. See you. No, we're heading out. All right." To us, "He's got a job all morning. Looks like we're on our own."

Lyra stepped out, again in a loose dress - and this time I looked for and found a wrinkle indicating the presence of panties. We had her wear walking shoes this time (they didn't give her any trouble like the sandals had, since nothing was going between her toes). I handed her Rhiannon' purse, and dumped her keys and phone into it. And so we went down.

And when she stepped outside, the first thing she did was look directly at the sun. "Aaah!" Shankar caught her and she spent a minute looking at the ground.

"Yeah, uh, don't look at the sun. I guess Celestia keeps it safe to look at?"

She ignored my comment and murmured something that involved 'lestia' and sounded rather like a curse. But then she got up and we piled into Shankar's car. Driving is one thing I'm happy to leave to him, especially this time - I sat in the rear so I could be with her.

"Now, Lyra - it could occur that we'll be separated. We'll try to avoid that, obviously, but if it does happen, we need to be able to get in touch again and for you to get back home."

She nodded. "I'm watching the route."

"Here's your phone. You can call us using it... focus, Lyra." She was watching Shankar driving, and the houses rushing by.

She blinked. "Sorry. Just, this is really cool! We have self-rolling carts, but this is so much faster and smoother. Not too many ponies could keep up with this thing."

"I'd be very impressed if any could."

"On the ground, that is. Almost any pegasus could outpace this in a heartbeat."

"And almost any airplane could outpace this too. Can we get back on things like how you get home if we're separated? This is your phone..."

She listened, and summarized: "If we're separated long enough to worry about, call you. If phone can't connect, get outside. If that doesn't work, use subways to get to New York Penn Station. Use PATH or NJ Transit to get to Newark Penn station. Switch to Raritan Valley, go to Bridgewater, and retrace the route he just drove. Ask directions if there's any doubt."

We arrived in the Bridgewater train station. I took her to the ticket machine, gestured to it, and offered her enough cash to cover it. After a moment's hesitation, she tried. The touchscreen was very intuitive, and she managed to muddle through, even operating the bill-collecting device.

While the tickets were printing, a helicopter flew by. It wasn't particularly low, but it still was close enough to make conversation inconvenient. She looked hard at us not reacting, and took some deep breaths. "What is that?"

I pointed.

"Awfully noisy way to fly! I thought you said they were fast!"

"That's a helicopter, not an airplane. Planes can go much faster than that. Some helicopters can, too."

Then the train came. As we boarded, she was very impressed. "We have trains, but this is much larger than any I've seen. And so little smoke!"

I was surprised to hear that they had trains at all. "Well... is this one electric, Shankar?" I hadn't noticed; it appeared he hadn't either.

"Oh, electric. That would explain it." They have electricity?

We settled at the end, where two pairs of seats were facing each other.

Lyra knelt on the seat across from us and peered out the window. After a few minutes, she quit and started rummaging around in her purse. "What is this?" she asked.

"A skrunchy. Good for gathering your hair together in a... well, we call it a ponytail."

"Thought so. And this?" She held up a small black bar.

"That's a strong permanent magnet. Keep it away from your wallet. No idea why she has that in there." She held up a pack of tampons. "You'll need that on Tuesday." She grimaced and moved on. "Block of aluminum - no idea, again. Bag of colored chalk. Double-A batteries - they provide a little electricity for a while. Thumb drive - holds a lot of information, accessible through computers. Tarot deck. Mini first-aid kit. Bubble gum. Pentacle."

She recognized the next few items herself and continued, "A bunch of folded-up maps. Toothbrush and toothpaste. Napkins. Underwear." She pulled out a sheaf of packets and read the labels. "Alcohol swab. Pre-moistened towelette. Condom?" She felt it for confirmation and looked at Shankar incredulously. I noted that the packet didn't actually say 'condom'. She knows about that, but isn't 14 yet for the second mating... oh wait. Pregnancy is not instantaneous.

"You just finished up your second mating season, right?"

Lyra nodded but amended, "The one when you're 6 doesn't really count. But 13? Yeah. I survived being shut in a tower with forty other young mares for three months and told to ignore the tower a few dozen yards away with forty young stallions. Not the happiest time of my life."

"Nor the most productive, I imagine."

She coughed and blushed. "Moving on!" Back in the bag, she riffled around for more. "Compass, other kind of compass, pens, pencils, ruler. A stencil for the letter 'F'. A half-full mini-notebook. Glass beads. A tiny half-full flask. A damaged figurine of a human. And I don't know what this is."

Shankar held out his hand and she handed it to him. "Swiss Army Knife!"

As he demonstrated, I snagged the plastic army man. Why did she have one of these in her purse? I tossed it back in. Why did she have half of that stuff in there?

Lyra took the knife back and experimented with it for a minute, then dumped it back in the bag and stared out the window while silently playing air-lyre. After two minutes, she said, "It just keeps going and going! There's no gap between towns at all!"

Looking, I saw we'd reached the area where that was true. "Not around here, there isn't."

She pulled some maps out of her purse. "Philadelphia... Baltimore. Sounds oddly familiar... Ah. New York." She spent a while looking the map over. Chuckled at 'Manhattan' for some reason.

When she looked up, I asked, "Is electricity synonymous with magic?"

"It's magical, but synonymous? No. See, magic has neat things like electricity, and messy things and some pretty crazy things."

"Like?"

"Well, last summer when I got home from the academy, there was this new earth pony filly in town, my age. She took a minute, no less, to say hi to me and get to know a little about me and tell me about herself. I found out later that she had done the same to every single one of the other eight thousand-some ponies in town, before dinnertime. There aren't enough minutes in a day. Not even close. You can't even do that with the mirror pool."

I asked, "With the what?"

She laughed sadly. "The mirror pool is a bit of wild magic out in the Everfree forest that can make and absorb imperfect copies of a pony. Like, my best friend back in Ponyville is always short on bits, so every year at Winter Wrap-Up, she gets a good half-dozen of herself and puts one on every team she can, to work all day. At the end of the day, she gathers them and sends them back into the pool, where they're happy to go because they're bored and/or exhausted and that's all they know. And she pockets their pay." She gave a wicked little grin, which faded to the echo of exasperation.

"At least, that's the plan. But one time she couldn't find one of them. So that copy got to see what life was like when she wasn't being drafted into unskilled uncompensated labor, which made her not want to go back. What's worse is, like most mirror-pool copies, she's flighty, stupid, and rude - quite insufferable. At least we convinced her that she was really her identical second cousin, Empty Wrapper."

Lyra sighed. "Even after that, she still does it every year. If they ever got halfway organized about it, she'd have to quit."

Shankar waved his hands. "So wait. You guys live near a source of crazy-powerful wild magic, and you use it to pick up a little cash?"

"Well, it's forbidden magic, and as I said the mirror ponies aren't exactly the most helpful sort."

"Oh yeah, like forbidding something ever stopped everyone from using it. Just say no to mirror pools!" Lyra pouted as Shankar appeared to be ignoring the part where she'd said it was a bad idea to use it, but fortunately he continued, "Well, if it's clearly a bad idea, I guess that helps. Is there anyone, what was it, 'flighty, stupid, and rude' enough that they don't think the difference is all that bad, and narcissistic enough they want more of themselves?"

Lyra thought on that for a moment. "Not yet, anyway. It's also in the Everfree forest. That deters most. And of course it isn't exactly common knowledge. And you need to know the rhyme."

I pointed out, "Security by obscurity isn't so bad when you haven't got crawlers and botnets around."

Shankar asked, "If it takes a rhyme to use, how did anyone even figure out that that it works in the first place?"

"Probably some talented earth pony intuited it. Maybe a unicorn investigated it, but I'd bet on the earth pony. I mean, Zap Apples. Just..." she looked up as if asking the sky, "How would you ever think to do all those random things?" She looked down to us again. "So. What about you two? Any wild stuff you know of?"

Shankar replied, "The laws of our world have been remarkably consistent, to the point that until Celestia's hair began acting up, I still thought it was reasonably probable that this whole unicorn business was bogus."

I put in, "So, our 'wild things' are going to be more in the 'people doing stupid things' line and less of the 'our universe is utterly inexplicable' line. Like, okay, two days ago. I'm at work, and this lady calls in an order for a box of makeup. How she got my number I don't know - I do graphical design for internal publications. No conceivable connection. So I tell her that if she wants a box she can call a store, but she doesn't want to hear it. Every time I send her off to customer service she hangs up on them and calls me again. Eventually I got permission from my boss to just hang up on her, but she didn't let up, just had it ringing off the hook. And I'm probably going to have to explain a whole bunch of what I just said."

"Do you think she was just lonely?"

"Maybe. There are better ways to deal with that than call someone who's trying to do something else."

"It's a sad story. I don't think she was all right."

Crud. "It is, and you're right." I was at work, though! I didn't have time to be her personal free therapist! But... "I took her number down so I could screen it. I can give her a call, when I'm not at work, find out what's up."

"Let's do that."

I inwardly groaned. Dealing with a crazy woman's problems just didn't seem all that appealing.

Then we came to Newark Penn Station. As we got off, the noise and the crowd were pretty intense, even for me. Lyra began hyperventilating, and clung to me. It finally got to her? I guess everyone has limits. Shankar and I guided her down to the quieter and not-very-crowded concourse. She sat down on a bench with us, hung her head, and took deep breaths.

"I'm not afraid." she clarified after a minute. "It's just very unpleasantly loud. Does it get worse?"

Shankar hedged, but said, "No, no worse. There's a little that's as bad as that was."

I added, "If we don't take the subway to Battery park where it screeches like crazy, we should be okay. Want to go on, or go back?"

"Just a minute, then we can go on."

After a few minutes, we headed up, waited in silence, and caught the next train. On board, she took a nap on my shoulder. NY Penn station strained but did not break her equanimity (equine-imity?).

And then we stepped out into Madison Square Garden. Her jaw dropped and she looked to the sky. She teetered and we caught her.

"Is she all right?" an approaching young man asked without slowing down; he noted my nod just in time before passing by completely.

"Wow. Tall."

Shankar laughed. "This is nothing. Now, a few blocks over..."

I nudged him. "Don't taunt. Do you want a good, wide view, from high up?"

"My dormitory room back in Equestria has a thousand-yard vertical drop off the balcony."

Eye-blinks. Shankar's mouth hung open. "That's... way taller than the tallest building we've ever built anywhere."

I clarified, "It's on the side of a steep mountain."

"Ah." Either it didn't occur to him to ask how I knew that, or he figured I'd seen rather than having directly gained some intuitive knowledge of Equestria's capital city.

"How about we go see the Natural History Museum?"

Lyra clarified, "What's the tallest building around? If this isn't as high as it gets, I'd like to see it, if not go up."

I almost reflexively said 'The Twin Towers'. They were just so ingrained into my psyche that seven years of their absence couldn't take them away. As I pushed the memories away, Shankar said, "The Empire State Building - it's a few blocks over."

We set out with an idle walk, looking around. Lyra abruptly noticed my expression. "Rachel? Are you all right?"

What kind of answer could I give to that? I shrugged. Shankar put a hand on my shoulder and gripped it gently.

Lyra pursed her lips and fiddled with her protective amulets nervously. "Is it something I need to worry about?"

I shook my head. Though if it were to happen again, the Empire State Building would be a target... but it won't happen again.

And then, though we weren't to it yet, there it was, looming even higher than the other monsters around us. We could see it as clearly as one could from so close, anyway. While Lyra stared and tried to count floors, Shankar took my hand and quietly asked, "Where were you?"

I whispered back, "Visiting a friend at NJIT. We were close enough to smell it. Let's talk about anything else."

"Sorry." A little squeeze.

Lyra gave up and we began walking back to Penn Station. I said, "Whatever we do next, we'll want to take the subway. Up for more trains?"

Lyra nodded, and I guided her through getting us our three day-passes, this time using my debit card (I handled the PIN, though. No need to swallow that can of worms). We followed her as she went down to the nearest track to see an A train leave.

Shankar and I started planning the rest of the visit. He started, "Empire State Building, check. Cloisters?" - "Meh. Natural history. Or Guggenheim?" - "Let's not throw her in the deep end." - "All right, not the Guggenheim. The Intrepid? The Met? MOMA?"

"Oh shit!"

Chapter 6: Shocking Developments
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The Exchange Program

Chapter 6: Shocking Developments

Shankar vaulted down onto the tracks and pulled Lyra off the third rail. "What the hell were you doing?"

"I'm fine! The amulets protected me and I got all charged up!"

"We'll talk in a minute. Get off the tracks."

He made a step for her with his hands and I gave her a hand up. Once she was up, Shankar vaulted up with a great deal more agility than I'd suspected he had.

I nervously eyed the gathering crowd. Wishing to avoid entanglements with the authorities, I ushered the other two off towards another set of lines. Once we were well clear, I took Lyra by the shoulder and declared, "If that hadn't worked, Rhiannon would be dead right now."

"Dead?" Lyra exclaimed. "But it's just electricity!"

"And around here, electricity can kill you."

Indignantly, she said, "Shoot, if lightning can kill you, what else can?"

"Lots of things. Some of the most relevant? Infectious disease - wash your hands after handling anything here. Blood loss, so try to avoid profuse bleeding. Blunt trauma like, say, being hit by a train, but it doesn't need to be that drastic. Falling down the stairs can be enough, or even less."

Lyra swallowed. "Falling down the stairs? I, uh. I've known pegasi who flew through stone walls and were just stunned. Falling down the stairs might hurt, but it couldn't kill."

"Well, we humans can't take that sort of punishment. Be gentle with this body. And if something stuns you, it might be a concussion, in which case if you get another one within a few weeks, that can kill you, or cause permanent brain damage."

"I could have... I thought when the signs said danger they meant this might hurt a lot. I'm sorry! I'm the worst exchange student ever!" Lyra choked up, and worked her way up to crying. Shankar and I just stood there and let her. No soothing to soften this - it was an important lesson. After twenty seconds, she began squirming. She began trying to unclasp one of the amulets, a necklace. "What was this one for, again? It's running hot."

Her dexterity was terrible - she hadn't a prayer of getting it off without help.

Shankar said, confused. "It didn't have anything to do with shock protection - it's the one that keeps you firmly in that body so nothing knocks you free."

"I did without it before! Get it off me!" She leaned forward and it hung away from her body.

Nodding, he moved in to help her. As he touched it, there was a spark.

They both stood still for a moment. Then she laughed. "Well. Nothing Celestia can't fix, right?" She spoke with an odd tone, voice low.

He said, with no hint of his usual accent, and in a high register, "Yeeah. If she has to come back here again, though, she might just take me home and give up, especially the way I just screwed up. Can we try to fix it ourselves first?"

Based on that, I guessed, "Did you two get switched?"

They nodded. Even though I'd guessed it, I just couldn't come up with a coherent reaction. It was just so unexpected.

Lyra (in Shankar's body) grinned apologetically. "Yeah, so, uh, even with the protection working, that wasn't the best idea after all."

Shankar (in Rhiannon's body, lately occupied by Lyra) touched the necklace hanging from her neck (I am using 'he' and 'she' for Lyra and Shankar respectively since they chose to present as those genders while in those bodies; I am not asserting anything else about how they should be interpreted).

She said, "Guess neither Rhiannon nor Celestia put in a power regulator, so when you gave it a normal amount of juice it kind of went haywire? Dragged you into the body that it was in better contact with, that being mine? It's cooling off now. Maybe that discharged it?" She stood up straight, then bent again - apparently it was still very uncomfortably warm.

Lyra took a deep breath and crossed his arms, over-affecting a strong male presence. "So. Where to next?"

I said, "Maybe the nearest subway track, to repeat the process?" How can they take this so easily? I guess there have been enough swaps flying around that Lyra's used to it by now and Shankar might have been jealous and wanted to get in on it... and as they said, it's hard to imagine them getting stuck like this. Still!

Shankar said, "I don't trust that amulet to take that abuse again. It was really hot for a bit." she straightened and let it fall against her chest. Then she grabbed the skrunchy from her bag and gathered her hair as if she'd done it every day of her life. "If I keep wearing it, that should revert us as quickly as possible, right? It's dragging Lyra, however slowly, back here."

I offered, "Home, then, to get this sorted out less destructively?"

Shankar said, "We just spent a lot on train tickets to just turn around. I really can't see any way this is going to be permanent, so I'm in no rush. Getting it sorted out by monday morning seems soon enough."

"I doubt either of you can go home to your parents like you are, so where will you be staying tonight?"

She grinned beseechingly. "Your place? I can text them."

I sighed. That would be going a bit out of order, relationship-wise, but these were exceptional circumstances. "Fine. Off to wherever we want to go!" Which museum would be most likely to have one of those highly charged plates you touch so your hair goes up? Seems like the best bet - get them on that and most likely there we go, and there's no danger. The Franklin Institute has one for sure, but that's in Philadelphia. We can go tomorrow, if we don't overload on science museums today.

Lyra said, "Well? I'd like something... exciting. And not just tall buildings."

I offered, "Intrepid, then? It's a museum of a warship. And fast airplanes and helicopters, and maybe rockets."

"Perfect."

Shankar's phone began ringing, which confused Lyra, as it was in his pocket. He eventually pulled it and handed it to me. I passed it to Shankar, and she said, "Hello. Oh, hi, Jack. Yeah. NYC. Oh! Funny about that. We were heading to the Intrepid. Ohkay, I guess we can do that. I'll run it by the others." To us, "How's sushi sound for lunch, at 1? Okay. Let me get that address down..." She pulled out Rhiannon's pad and pencil, and took down the address. "If something comes up I'll call you back in advance. Hope to see you." She hung up and yukked, "He didn't notice a teeny change in my voice!"

I turned to Lyra. "So. The Intrepid. Do you have... okay, you knew what a warship is, so you at least know what wars are."

She nodded.

"So, some background. About seventy years ago, we had the largest war we've ever had."

"We've had some big ones. In the last war with the griffons, over six thousand died."

I did a bit of quick division with round numbers. "This war lasted around six years, and the average death toll was over ten thousand a day."

Lyra blinked and gibbered.

Shankar frowned and opened her mouth as if to correct me, but closed it again. "Wow. That's... right, if you count the holocaust and the purges."

Lyra pursed his lips and said, "Please tell me that a year is a couple days long." The absurdity of the question and the fervor with which he asked it got Shankar and me laughing pretty hard - but briefly. Shankar told him, and he winced. "What is wrong with you? That's... in the millions! Lots of millions!"

I said, "Well, how things got that bad is a long story. I was only really taught American history, and as far as we're concerned we just looked across the Atlantic ocean in 1914 or so and realized things were getting really messed up in Europe, and things go from there." I thought for a moment. "Things calmed down a lot once we got superweapons a thousandth as effective as what Celestia has."

Lyra looked at me oddly for a moment, then considered. "I guess she does. We don't normally think of it that way."

"I am fairly confident that the leaders of the nations near Equestria do."

Lyra squinted. "Can we do something else?"

"Sure. Art museum sound good?"

He nodded absently. "Sweet Molestia. Dozens of millions?"

"Old and conventional, or new and weird?"

He looked at me, uncomprehending. I decided on a little downtime in Central Park to start off; I began maneuvering them down to an appropriate track, and got us on the front of a 1 train. Lyra numbly looked out the front window and into the driver's booth.

Shankar reached out to Lyra and whispered, "There were a few billion people even then. Anything big that happens affects a lot of people. We can't even understand it ourselves. Science fiction authors throw around thousands when they mean millions, or millions when they mean billions - or in some cases of far future stuff, even trillions."

Lyra nodded.

I coughed. "Not to disrespect the dead, but I think we could all use a little distraction from that line of thought." I leaned forward. "You said 'Sweet Molestia'. That sounds amusing."

Lyra squinted and put a closed fist up against his face. Then, a moment later, spread the fingers, producing a facepalm. He grunted out a laugh. "Yeah, I guess. So, there's this book. It's been in the school for hundreds of years. Everypony knows about it. If you're perverted at all, you know how to find it. If you're perverted enough, you add to it."

Lyra stopped; I prodded, "And in it, Celestia has developed a slight flaw in her character?"

He nodded. "I think you get the idea. Well, I guess so. I haven't read... much. It's not very good. Well, some of it isn't very good. Legend has it that Princess Celestia found it, and returned it to its spot the next evening with improved grammar and spelling, and a new chapter."

We got off at 79th street and headed towards the park. The art museum was on the other side, but I'd thought it would be nicer to walk than wait for a connection. Of course, we came to the Museum of Natural History before even hitting the park. And once we'd seen that, there was really no way we weren't going in.

So we spent the rest of the morning there. Lyra had many of the obvious questions about evolution, dinosaurs vs dragons, Heliocentrism, etc.. Surrounded by so many things and explanations, we didn't even get any juicy tidbits about Equestria. It was a good choice in the end, even if Shankar and I didn't get much out of it.

We weren't really done when it was time to go meet Jack, but Lyra was feeling pretty overwhelmed so we left anyway. Hopping back on the 1, we went down to Canal street. Lyra was very thoughtful along the way, blinking and staring out the front window again - though now just in contemplation rather than distress.

"Not bad for a morning's introduction to our world, I think." Shankar put out her hand for me to take, and I accepted it.

I looked at Shankar. I couldn't really tell just by looking that she wasn't Rhiannon. "What are we going to do about you?"

She shrugged. "Is there a problem? I wasn't going to make a move on you today or tomorrow anyway."

Really? You were going to let us get through a third and maybe fourth date without even a kiss?

Then she amended, "At least, nothing we can't do as we are."

Urk. "If you're not thinking of our holding hands, forget about it."

She blinked and grinned. "Look, I'm going to make my big move!" She shifted from a mitten grip on my hand to entwined fingers.

Lyra seemed transfixed, "That's so... intimate. It's like a miniature full-embraced tangle of limbs."

When you put it that way... I tensed and began to pull away, but Shankar held me - gently, calmly, not so hard I couldn't get free if I were to actually seriously try, but enough that I recognized that she wasn't simply letting go. Shankar replied to Lyra, "For now... no, it's not like that. We can let it mean that later, maybe."

Lyra experimentally crossed and uncrossed his fingers until it was time to get off. On the other side of the exit stile, I sought out Shankar's hand again and crossed fingers. "I think... it's one thing to do it walking, and another to seek it out when it's less natural."

Shankar nodded, saying, "Walking along like this, you could do it with either of us and it'd be fine. Sitting, that's another thing altogether."

Lyra came up alongside me and twitched his arm. "Then may I?"

Before I could accept, I had to drop Shankar's hand and grab Lyra full-force because he'd tripped on the stairs. Once he was back on his feet, he groaned, shook his head, and gratefully accepted both of our hands (mitten-style).

And that was how we approached Jack.

"Hey! How are things? How's your first day?"

He had been addressing Shankar with that, obviously. He replied, "We had a minor body-swapping accident. Lyra and I switched places."

Jack nodded sagely. "There was a whole amulet to prevent that. Did it come off somehow?"

We headed into the sushi bar and were seated in a booth, me facing Shankar along the wall, with Jack to my right facing Lyra.

Lyra explained in simple words what had happened, then, "We think it went haywire after being overcharged, and grabbed onto Shankar or something."

"And she's still holding it? Have you tried trading?"

"Ah, no!" At that, Shankar unclasped it, passed it left, to Lyra. For the moment they were both touching it, they both winced with surprise if not pain.

Lyra left it in her hands and objected, "That felt a bit like the transfer. I think it'll work. Can we... wait? I'm not done here."

Shankar took it back. "Yeah, I understand. We can try later."

I groaned. "Sweet Molestia, are you holding off for what I'm thinking you are?"

Shankar smirked a classic Rhiannon smirk. "Something dirty? You suggested it, not me. On my end, I don't think I'll be doing anything. But he certainly has my permission."

Lyra shook his head. "No. Actually, the other way around."

"What?" the three of us said as one.

"It was really overwhelming being in her body. Lots of wants and needs all the time. Here, it's barely noticeable."

"Reeeally?" said Shankar. "Because I'm hardly feeling anything, here. A whole lot less than before."

Lyra scowled at her. "That doesn't make any sense." Shankar just shrugged.

We got the menus. Shankar asked for her phone, and pulled up some notes. Jack asked, "What's that?"

Shankar was busy comparing, so I answered, "The first time we really noticed each other, actually, was in a sushi place with a bunch of shared friends, and he was taking notes on the sushi. Everyone else was making fun of him for being pretentious about his thoughts, as if he was imagining himself a food critic. But he just wanted to know what the heck to order next time, and I got that. Well, it's next time."

I'd seen Shankar and Lyra whispering through that; they got up. Shankar said, "BRB. Gotta go teach him how to wash his hands."

Once we'd all gone and returned, we all got to teach Lyra how to use chopsticks.

In retrospect, maybe sushi wasn't the best idea.

Chapter 7: Tech Support
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The Exchange Program

Chapter 7: Tech Support

While Shankar and Lyra worked on chopstick technique, I was getting progressively more annoyed with sorting them out - I could remember they were switched, usually, but then I'd flip them. It didn't help that Shankar was nearly as bad with the chopsticks as she was. Finally, I got up and borrowed a blue pen from the host's booth, and sketched Lyra on my napkin. After returning the pen, I fished a safety pin out of my purse, hooked the napkin with it, and offered it to him.

His eyes went wide. "Wow. You just did that? You're pretty good! So, ah... okay, I know safety pins, but I'm not sure how to use them without a horn or hard hooves."

Jack got up and came around to get a closer look. "That's what you look like?"

"Yeah! She really captured the mane."

"Aside from being blue, I suppose."

"Well, a different shade."

Jack squinted at him. "You're... blue."

"Aqua. And there's the white stripe."

"You're aqua-colored with white stripes and your hair looks like Cloud's."

"No, it looks kind of spiky, not like clouds at all. Do you have spiky clouds here?"

"Sorry, I just never imagined that unicorns would be brightly colored like that."

"I never expected you all to be basically the same color. It's one hue of brown all around. Light, dark...and that's it. And your hair? One swoop from orange to yellow through brown to nearly black, and that's it? You're all the same type, even. You said New York had all kinds, and, well, you all seem to be one kind to me."

"So we all look the same to you?"

Lyra slowed down, raising an eyebrow. "No, just similar in certain ways."

Shankar backed Lyra up, "Yeah, Jack. That wasn't what he said at all. Anyway, we went through a population bottleneck a few hundred thousand years ago. Which is a nice way of saying there were like thirty of us all told."

Jack coughed. "I presume you're talking about our mitochondrial DNA? That's not what that means at all. If there had been thirty of us, we wouldn't be here."

"That's a funny position for a creationist to be taking."

Jack blinked at her. His eyes flared, unamused. "Genesis spans billions of years."

Shankar shrank back. "Oops. Sorry. I kind of forget that you guys exist."

"We're only the majority."

"Yeah, total derp there."

Lyra looked back and forth between them. "Uh, what just happened?"

I offered, "Well, remember the dinosaurs, and the big bang, and all that?" Lyra nodded. "So, Jack appears to think God did that, and we think it happened on its own, but a bunch of other people think that's all wrong, God did it in under a week around six thousand years ago."

Lyra frowned. "Well, why that look, then? So, they've got a different opinion about things that happened a long time ago, before anyone was there to see it."

The three of us sighed. How to begin? "That," said Jack, "is a question to save for later, I think. In other news! I mentioned meeting a lyrist to a harpist I know this morning, and she gave me two comps - complimentary tickets - to a concert later this afternoon. I'm not entirely sure that regular tickets cost anything, actually. Classical music of some sort involving a harp." He pulled them out and put them on the table in front of Lyra. "They're yours. Just... she's going to want to talk with you after, and, well, she thinks you're female. And at the moment, you're not plausibly female."

Shankar added, "And I'm not plausibly a lyrist." I noticed she was passing Lyra some of the amulets. I really need to find out what each of those is for.

Lyra rolled his eyes. "Is all this confusion really necessary? I can just go, talk, whatever. It's no one either of us knows, so... okay!" His eyes darted among us. "Right?"

I nodded. "Right. So, which of us will you bring?"

Lyra thought for a moment, then pointed to me... with a relaxed fist. I gently took his hand and extended his index finger. "How to point."

He examined the hand. "Huh. Right."

While I was there, I folded in the index finger and extended the middle finger. "Not that you would, but just to be sure... how not to point."

He nodded, and Jack said in a lecturing tone, "Boom. This demonstrates the importance of not extending your middle finger."

"...except in such cases as you extend your index finger.", Shankar amended, demonstrating and chuckling.

Lyra and I shared glances, and I said, "I don't get it."

Shankar chuckled again and added, "It just sounded funny."

Jack stared at Shankar and me. "You guys don't... I could have sworn you'd know your Monty Python."

That tone suddenly made it clear to me why he might have had friends abruptly want him not to be around them any longer. This is not how you geek out. You're doing it wrong. Shankar coughed and said, "Having only watched Holy Grail, Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life, two full episodes of the show, and the most famous sketches..."

Jack shrank back, recognizing the frost, if not necessarily understanding it. "I guess you just happened to miss that one. It's pretty good."

"Yes. I expect it is."

Of course, the fact that Shankar has seen quite a lot of it isn't really the problem with what he just said... Still, I figured that going along for now would help, so I added, "We could catch up?"

Silence fell. After a few moments, Shankar interrupted it (though she was breaking into silence, the tone was as if interrupting), "Lyra, does it occur that supreme executive power is granted by some sort of farcical aquatic ritual?"

"We don't do much granting of supreme executive power these days. If we needed to at some point... that would be really, really bad. But speaking of aquatic rituals, I need to go to the bathroom."

I got up to let him out, then realized that I needed to go too. As we approached, he murmured to me, "I think I can handle it."

"Don't forget to wash your hands."

By the time I made it back, Shankar and Jack were finishing up tag-team singing "Isn't it awfully nice to have a penis" to Lyra, who was just left blinking in confusion.

"Guys... maybe not here?" I gestured to some of the other folks in the restaurant, some of whom were giving them irritated looks.

Jack began to object, "We were qui...", but then noticed they'd been noticed. "Sorry."

Lyra added, "Anyway, I completely agree - at least, as long as I'm here. You knew what you were doing and took what, twice as long?"

We finished lunch without further incident. Jack drove us up to Juilliard for the recital; Shankar and Jack hung out outside at Lincoln Center, and Lyra and I went in. Lyra naturally knew how to politely attend a concert, and the music was good if not exactly my style.

And then, a soft whisper - "Hi. Please leave the concert." Before the voice was done, I could tell it was someone borrowing mine. I really need to get something to stop that from happening!

I grabbed Lyra's arm and exited with him over his silent objections.

I said, "All right, we're clear to talk. What's up?"

"Hello. I've been assigned to solve your problem as a test."

"Ah. We think we have it under control?"

A pause. "You don't."

Lyra observed, "I'm right here, and I think we do. I felt the..."

A dismissive tone - "So why haven't you snapped back yet, if you're so in control?"

"Because... it's... cool and exciting and different, and the guy I swapped with agrees?"

A sigh. "And it didn't occur to you that there are bad things that happen?"

"None of them sneak up on you if you know what to look for."

Five seconds of silence. "Well, I'm supposed to solve the problem. Do you at least have a plan for what to do if those problems do come up? Aside from calling princess Celestia."

Lyra nodded. "We have something to try before it comes to that." I'm not sure if she can see that nod.

Another several seconds. "Okay. I asked, and I can finish my assignment if I check that your plan will work. Rachel, may I be swapped with you?"

I said, "In three minutes, go ahead."

"Three minutes it is."

Lyra and I headed back out to and across to the fountain at Lincoln center. Just as I was waving to Shankar, I felt the transition starting, and quickly sat down.

I paid close attention to the very, very different way I went this time - I felt like... well, at the most concrete level it felt as if I was flying out of the exploding Death Star II with the flames creeping behind me, only the Death Star was made of gigantic crystals and it wasn't being destroyed.

But at a more abstract level, I was feeling like the complete destruction of complete order, a falling of darkness... and like that was the right thing to happen in this circumstance. Kind of. It's not like it was a religious experience or mind control; it gave that impression like a well-crafted piece of music. A piece of 'music' that played directly on my sense of self, much as my perspective had been forced outward when Celestia had been carrying out the shift. So, it was obviously external, even if it used channels that I normally thought of as internal. Kind of odd, yet very intuitive.

Anyway, it was intense, and when I zoomed out of the tunnel and my viewpoint suddenly became that of my new body, I gasped - instead of the rebel fleet, I had come face-to-face with a pink unicorn with a mane that was also yellow and lavender. Correction - unicorn pegasus.

She smiled. "Hello, Rachel. Welcome back to Equestria. I am princess Cadence."

I swallowed. "Nice to meet you." A glance gave me my wider surroundings - a palatial stone room overlooking a garden. "Just, one question. She said this is a test. Is, well... the outcome in doubt?"

Cadence inclined her head. "Only for her. Rhiannon has already looked your situation over and knows how you can fix it. Your world's magic is not much like ours, but her solution is sound."

I brushed a crimson strand of hair out of my eyes with a yellow hoof and replied, "Yeah, about that. Any idea why we, well, for the most part, it doesn't work... at least, not so it can give a convincing demonstration?"

Cadence shrugged and shook her head. "I can guess, but... why don't we take a walk?"

I struggled to my feet (it kind of felt like being on hands and knees, except not horribly awkward. Adding legs was much easier than taking them away - who would have guessed?) and slowly followed her. Cadence led me to a bench under a tree. Patches of sunlight flickered across her as the breeze shifted the leaves. She finally suggested, "One possibility is that your world is shadowed by a magic-rich world, or worlds. You only get what makes it through them."

"Like us and the tree we're under."

She nodded.

"Nice visual aid there."

"As the world or worlds above yours change - using more or less magic, or different kinds - you can find more or less magic, and different kinds. That would explain everything I know about the situation."

"It would. It seems plausible." But it could very well be wrong.

"And it's just a guess. I could very well be wrong. Your variety of magic is so different from ours, I don't know if something about it makes it happen this way regardless. But we know that can happen. It is true of one world very much like yours."

"Really? How much? Like just, there are humans, or am I there?"

"No. People there are humans, but you aren't there. I am, and the other ponies. As humans."

"Wow. So... wait. If... if that world is a magically-overshadowed world of humans with mirror-universe twins who are ponies in the world that overshadows them, then, if my world is overshadowed by another, are we - am I a twisted reflection of some other Rachel who's some other kind of creature?"

"Maybe. If so, though, then they are a twisted reflection of you, too. You make sense on your own terms. You are not a dream."

"Okay, so it's not like there's some reality projector and I'm under someone else, getting my reality second-hand. The projection is just magic."

Cadence nodded. "I do not think you are twinned, though. If you were, Rhiannon probably would have contacted her twin, instead of us. Or both of you would have contacted us."

A cough got our attention - a hunky white unicorn in a bright uniform - the first male I'd seen - stood across the garden. Princess Cadence invited him over with a gesture, and he trotted to her and whispered in her ear. She nodded, and smiled a little. He whispered again, and she turned and whispered back. He nodded and left, with a glance back.

When he was gone, I asked, "Who's that?"

Cadence stared at me for a long moment. Then a big smile came across her. "You know? I can actually tell you. Just don't tell anyone. Promise?"

"What? I mean, sure."

"He's my husband-to-be. Barring calamity, in three years, two hundred and ninety three days, we will be married. We will be totally in love, so much it would be madly in love but for how utterly balanced in affection we will be."

Her voice didn't seem like the voice of a creepy stalker. "Run that by me again?"

She glanced down to her flank, and I saw a heart mark. "My talent is love. I can feel the shape of love, see it, predict it. And that stallion, right now, is just that nice reliable, capable guy who's a little funny and a load loyal and has always been there. I can see why I'll love him, but it just hasn't hit me yet."

I blinked. "That's... kind of how I feel right now."

She nodded, then looked closer into my eyes. "Hmm. I can see some parallels." And then, silence.

"And?"

She looked away and shook her head.

I suddenly realized. Messing with causality, inviting her to invade my and Shankar's privacy, asking her to do possibly hard work for me, possibly asking her to take on responsibility for actions I take in response, risking my feeling a loss of agency... not to mention we're aliens, or she could have bad news to deliver. "I'm sorry, there are so many reasons I shouldn't push too hard on that."

A flicker of smile. "Thank you."

Then she levitated a scroll out from inside and explained what we should do if the test failed. The scroll referred to some rituals Rhiannon had kept notes on in the computer. A proper fix was not going to be very straightforward - at least, not with just the tools Rhiannon had available. Fortunately, most of the complexity was in the rituals, with relatively little to memorize about which ones and how to apply them.

When I had it down well enough, I looked up from the notes and recalled that Cadence had excused herself. I got up and walked around in the garden and, in line with the principles of spaced repetition, focused on anything but that.

I came to a gap under the garden wall, peeked out, and saw that this garden was perched on top of a cliff. This garden, in which the wall was loose enough to have a gap under it, was perched on top of a cliff. I backed away. Once I was more than a few feet back, I went wandering, looking for Cadence, or Rhiannon, if I could find her. I found Cadence soon enough, but she was clearly busy speaking with a pegasus and a unicorn, and it seemed fairly official.

Then I got a look at myself in a mirror. Huh. I also have yellow hair, not just red. And wow, that gravity-defying swirl. Not quite up to princess Celestia's standards, but yeah.

I found someone and asked whether the School for Gifted Unicorns was nearby, and it wasn't. So, visiting Rhiannon was pretty well out. I got to wondering what was going on back at home. And then, I got to wondering if I could actually use that horn.

I went back to the mirror and touched it with a hoof. Just feeling something there was really freaky. It didn't have a corresponding spot on my internal body map, really - or maybe it did, and that particular sensation was not at all what I was expecting. Like how injections don't really hurt so much as they feel really wrong because you don't usually feel things there.

But I got over that and began feeling and sort of exercising it, focusing on it in different ways, feeling what was possible.

There was a gigantic pop and princess Celestia appeared facing me from the side, and she looked pissed, and she was focused on me, and almost before I could think 'holy crap!', I was being yanked back to my own body so hard I couldn't even form a coherent image of the process.

Chapter 8: Power
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The Exchange Program

Chapter 8: Power

My awareness reformed in a moment, and I was tense - what was she doing to my body, that Celestia did this?

Well, we were waiting for a light at a crosswalk. Jack was holding my hand firmly. Why Ja... BUZZ.

I jumped a little as my cell phone went off, full-power vibrate, right against my hip. I checked - it was a text from the electric company telling me my bill payment had been accepted.

Jack guessed, "Rachel? Did, ah, did the buzz shock you back, or are you still Sunset and somehow intuited how to use a cell phone?"

I looked up. "Nope, it's Rachel. I got here just before it went off." Eyeing a stranger next to us, I added, "My hair donor returned me in a big hurry."

By now, I was an old hand at recognizing when a pony was about to speak through me, so I raised a hand as if a sock puppet as Celestia said through me, "Is everything all right? No one in danger?"

Shankar replied, "No, we're fine. What happened?"

Celestia did not reply immediately.

Jack glanced around and added. "Looks pretty safe. The traffic is creeping. It'll be marginally safer once we're in my car."

I felt Celestia about to speak for a second, but not quite. Then, "It appears that you accidentally claimed a portion of my power in the form of hair. My student Sunset Shimmer's new top priority is to reclaim that."

Created mass -> E = m c squared, and this hair weighs maybe a kilo? Could explain the emergency. "Dang, that could have, umm." The bystander was definitely giving me odd looks. Maybe he wouldn't noticed if I hadn't sockpuppeted. But, the walk signal came, and he went; we remained. "... caused a city-wrecking cataclysm, couldn't it?"

"That is precisely what I acted to prevent."

I want this off my head ASAP! "Just let me hand off a potentially alarming thing." I stuffed my cell phone into Rhiannon's purse. ... that could be what triggered this, if Celestia came due to precognition like Cadence displayed. Her realizing what she had done on her own wouldn't have produced that look on her face or asking if we were safe, I think. "Done. And the rest of you all keep her from freaking out, okay? All set." By the time I said it, though, I didn't feel her connected. "And... Sound recording app, Shankar?"

He provided it in moments, and I took the opportunity to dictate Rhiannon's plan before I had a chance to forget it. That done, I took a deep breath and waited. Ten more seconds later, I made my FIFTH trip between home and Equestria. I was a regular commuter. The sensation was like the first time, only this time I found we were on the other side of the mountain.

Princess Celestia was gone by the time I settled in. I looked in the mirror and took a deep breath and suppressed freaking out over knowing my head had a power supply on par with a nuclear reactor stuck to it, and that I wasn't around to do anything about that.

If she does have precognition, nothing can sneak up suddenly. And... she delegated this to a student whom she trusts is capable enough to handle it. And... that isn't maximally reassuring. Given the hurry she was in, she doesn't have a long warning time. Something could gradually go wrong and mess us up.

I heard hoofsteps behind me. I focused into the mirror, and saw a blue-maned stallion approaching behind me. He softly said, "Hey. Everything okay?"

I blinked. "Umm, well... it's complicated..."

Then he nearly kissed me on the cheek; I shied away. "Come on, you can tell me over a bite to eat."

As he turned to go, I finally said, "I'm not Sunset."

He halted cold, and turned back to me. Perplexed, he asked, "Then... who are you?"

"Sunset is taking a test, and it involves being body-swapped into my body, in a different dimension."

Blinks. "Umm. What? You're..." I repeated myself, and he slowly said, "Oh-kay! Suddenly my orders make sense!"

My stomach grumbled, and I said, "So, we're on for dinner anyway?"

He nodded and, grinning, declared. "Flash Sentry, cadet of the Royal Guard, at your service." He led me down the hall. "So. This is weird, even for you. Her. What's your name?"

"Rachel. Do you, like, change your name when you grow up, or were you Flash Sentry from when you were a kid?"

"Ah... the second."

"Huh." This was partly at our stepping outside. The small palace's side entrance faced an unmistakably wattle-and-daub building... selling dirigibles with lots of shiny brass, and small radar dishes with oversized electrodes attached for no obvious reason. "So steampunk! I didn't see that coming."

He asked some basic questions about what that was, and then more generally was going on, and I gave equally basic answers. Then we arrived at the restaurant.

"Hay-burgers."

He looked to me in mild alarm. "You want something a bit more up-scale?"

"No, this is fine. Just, the idea. It's like, umm, something my mom would have made when she was on her experimental foods kick, except more so. Humans can't digest grass, and I don't think drying it out would help. But I'm presently in charge of a stomach that can, so sure."

"What are humans like?"

The waitress skated up alongside the table. "Yer usuals?"

Flash nodded, but, noting that she had two pencils tucked in her pad, I added, "Can I borrow a pencil?"

She levitated it over. Then started the hard work of answering his question verbally while attempting to draw one of us, or anything at all, on my napkin.

Lyra used her mouth. Maybe that would work best. But she knew how to do it already. Hooves seem ill-suited. Levitation would probably be the best way, but I have even less idea how to... I interrupted my halting description to ask, "I know you're a pegasus, not a unicorn, but do you happen to know how I can levitate this pencil?"

He didn't know, so I just closed my eyes and willed it to be in places. I figure that holding it to particular places would not send it flying. Instead, nothing happened. So, I moved on to imagining that the horn's magic was just my hand, and I could grab the pencil. I closed my eyes to help visualizing the hand.

I felt like something was happening, and when I opened my eyes, I found that I was levitating the pencil. In short order, I drew the points of a tiny square. "Well, that was... easier than I expected."

Of course, having said that, I proceeded to ruin the napkin with failures. And the next. I began to reconsider attempting to repeat my cross-dimensional napkin portrait feat when I suddenly got the hang of it and dashed off a first-pass body layout sketch.

I heard a cry of surprise to my side, and looked. A colt was pointing at my butt. "Her cutie mark just changed!" he shouted.

I looked down. I hadn't noted the mark before, but HOLY SHIT I'M NAKED the new one was IN PUBLIC a human-form posing-doll AAAAAH.

"Are you okay?"

I took a deep breath and began hacking:

let A = "This is normal. No one else notices or cares. It's not my body anyway. The one whose body it is actually alieves the previous statements, so I might as well, too."

while ( freaked out ) think ( A ).

"I will be."

I let that self-hack run until I regained control of the pencil, whereupon I began adding details. Once I was focused, I stopped freaking out.

"So you have the head of a sphinx?" Flash was looking at the napkin.

"Umm. Sure, if you want to take it that way. Head of a sphinx, upper body of a minotaur, and legs of a, umm..."

"Ape? Actually, it looks like ape all around, except the details on the head."

"Yes! Ape is it. We actually are a kind of ape. I'm not sure why I didn't think to suggest it."

Then, the food came. I set down the pencil and was about to levitate the food when I realized that Flash was eating with his hooves. My mind came to a screeching halt. How can he do that? Like, he walks on those. And also, HOW?

I lifted my front hooves and looked carefully, flexing everything I could. There wasn't much to work with. I leaned in and looked at his grip on the sandwich. It didn't make physical sense. He had gripped it, kind of, but it should have slipped away.

He obliviously continued eating as I watched his forehooves from about 3 inches away.

And then, a piece of hay slipped off the burger and swung straight to his hoof, like a magnet. I relaxed back into my seat. Ah. A short-ranged inward-sucking force field. He can presumably turn it off, since it didn't pick up all the sand on the ground. And I suppose I have it, too.

I experimented with my hooves, and felt very, very strange. My body was wrong. Weird that it took that long to kick in. Yup, this isn't my body, relax, I'll get the right one back soon. Go back to pretending it's a VR video game.

That... worked. And it got me thinking. It really is just VR, isn't it? If she kills my body, then I die but she just gets booted. Which means, my brain there is doing my thinking? Probably? I wonder what happens if she gets me drunk. Or if only one of us falls asleep.

With that thought, I realized that if I was hungry, she might be the one who gets lightheaded, so in the interests of my survival I ought to do something about that. I levitated the burger up with some difficulty (it was much larger than a pencil), and took a big bite. It tasted... very, very unfamiliar. Connections gradually grew. I imagined the swapping spell going and trying to figure out what analogues were between the worlds, and wiring my brain into her peripheral nervous system like a 1940's telephone switchboard.

So, after a minute, I decided I kind of recognized celery, corn, and horseradish, but I wasn't entirely sure. It certainly felt spicy, but maybe it was because my mouth felt a little bit like it was recovering from having fallen asleep. I could see why Lyra had been so raptured with her first wings. She might have been similarly raptured to eat tofu under those circumstances.

Flash saw I was done (whoa, I'm done. Guess I was hungry after all, despite having just subjectively eaten lunch), and handled the check. We walked around the mountainside town, looked at the sights, and so forth. It would have been a really nice date, if we were dating.

Eventually the grand tour ended, and we returned to the small palace.

He said, "Well, that was surprisingly... straightforward. If you were Sunset Shimmer, something probably would have caught on fire by now."

"Drama queen?"

"Oh, no, she hates drama."

So, drama queen. Or... magical bad luck? Is that a thing?

Oh. "I should be trying to learn everything I can! This isn't just Rhiannon's job!!"

Flash belly-laughed. "Are you sure you're not Sunset?"

"This is the most interesting - important - thing I've ever been involved with, and I can't just drift through it! How should I find out everything I can?"

"About..."

"Magic. Umm, especially the way magic might work in my world. We, ah, don't really have much at all, I think."

"I'd check the library for that."

"All right, off to... no, wait. I should coordinate with Rhiannon. How do we get to the School for Gifted Unicorns? Or communicate with someone there?"

He considered. "From here? Best to fly." My face fell, until I realized he wasn't saying it wasn't going to happen - it was an offer. This became clearer as he said, "We can use a chariot."

He gestured up with a hoof, and I spotted a chariot being pulled by a pegasus, and supported by nothing in particular. This looked so wrong, I had to remind myself that I had been levitating things continuously for the past hour or so (I hadn't let go of the napkins).

So off we went to the landing platform, and Flash got ready. As I braced myself, I wondered whether getting into a car must have been similarly scary. Then I looked forward and it felt like I had my face in Flash's butt. OMG I'M STILL NAKED AND NOW I'M STANDING UP AND ANYONE CAN SEE... what... is... totally... ordinary... around... here. Deep breath time, Rachel. And also, holy crow - I can't see his actual package, but I can see how long the slit for it is. I can also see why Lyra was chuckling at our condoms.

And then we were off. It was a good thing Flash didn't turn around to take a look at me, or he would have seen me ungracefully wrapping my forelegs around the front edge of the chariot. Which put me in an even better place to look straight down, since I wasn't going to stare forward.

After a moment, that plan changed. Let's not look down, shall we? For one thing, I'd freak out even harder. And for another, I'd probably poke him in the butt with my horn, and even if that didn't endanger us, it would be extremely embarrassing. Hmm. Those are some nice clouds and blue sky up there, aren't they?

I managed to relax a bit as we came in for a landing a mere minute later.

Fortunately, Flash knew where the school was, and once there I was able to ask around and find out where Lyra/Rhiannon was - the library. And further-fortunately, the librarian knew where all of the exchange students were, as they needed frequent help.

When I spotted her, the differences from how Lyra had carried herself were just as striking as the differences had been in Rhiannon's body. Rhiannon was focused, concerned, and frustrated. So very herself. She was poring over a book, others strewn across the large table she'd claimed. I stood next to her, and she turned her head. A few blinks, and she asked, "Rachel, what are you doing here, and how did you get your own cutie mark?"

Wh... Ah. That's how she could tell. "Waiting for the pony I switched with to fix up the mess between Lyra and Shankar. And I drew some humans." I set the napkins down on the table.

She blinked. "It didn't even occur to me that I could replace mine. Exchange students normally don't. Might help. Probably want to try doing a reading, or something."

"Sooo... I was wondering if you wanted a hand carting masses of useful information back home. Anything I could memorize or otherwise transport... whatever."

She stared at me and smiled. It looked natural on Lyra's face. After about four seconds that seemed a good bit longer, she said, "That's really nice of you. Unfortunately... I got nothing. I've been here for what, a day? I don't know what I might need help remembering later. Anything you'd bring would be random, with no context. If you could come on the last day, that would be golden. As it stands, I have no idea how to use it."

Sigh.

"Thank you." she added. "How are things with Gwyneth?"

"Bad. She denies the existence of magic. What's the deal with that?"

Rhiannon's face fell. "Oh." After five seconds, she said, "I think she tried this before, and it didn't work. No one responded."

"This - as in, applying to an exchange program?"

"Yes - she's where I got it. She might have tried to apply in Latin or Celtic or something, rather than the language that she knows best. And if she got the feeling of certainty that comes with its working, and then nothing happened?"

"Or, if someone out there replied with a feeling of 'this is nonsense'?"

"Yeah."

It's a theory. "Any ideas on bringing her around?"

"It all depends on energy. I completely blew my stash on this, but just being here... it's like I saved up four years for a postage stamp and now I have a thousand dollar per diem."

"Lyra said she was all charged up after she stood on the third rail. Also, Sunset was sent to my body partly to recover energy that Princess Celestia left behind by accident."

"Yeah, we don't want hers - not that there's anything wrong with it, but it's not ours. But if Lyra can work something out that would be good. Just, I wonder... wait, third rail? I guess that amulet got upgraded. I made it to mitigate touching an electrical socket, not thousands or millions or whatever third rails carry, and I don't think it would have absorbed energy. That... could be useful. Anyway, I never kept energy in me. I'm not sure how to absorb it. And I'd rather not that you mess around with my blood with experiments."

As she pondered, I backed off, looking around the room at the various titles for a while, and then Sunset suddenly announced, "All done."

Flash suddenly looked at me. "Sunset?"

I suppressed her startled reaction of 'Flash?' and asked, "Yes. Any caveats, advisories, or other warnings we need to be aware of, Sunset?"

A pause. "Don't play around with lightning again. That should do it."

Rhiannon said, "Really? You're all done? My method would have required them to spend all of tomorrow apart, at the very least."

I could imagine an almost Malfoy-ian smirk on my own lips as she replied, "With the power I had to hoof? It was so easy that I think it ruined the test. I... could really get used to this."

Rhiannon suddenly said, "How did you use magic in human form?"

There was a pause, and Sunset said, "I just did it like usual? It was a bit awkward. I don't know how to describe it."

A deep breath, a last look around, and I said, "All right. So, how do we get back?"

Sunset said, "I just end the sp..."

My return was again the abrupt yank, and I was in the back seat of Jack's car, between Lyra and Shankar. We were in a parking lot.

"Hey all. So... what did I miss?"

The three of them pursed their lips, each hesitant to be the first one to say it. A further glance around showed that the parking lot was surrounded by a highway - we were on the segment of route 22 with stores in the median.

A thought struck me and I unbuckled my belt and yanked my pants down a notch. A moment later, I glanced down... and found the top half of a red and yellow sun peeking above my pants as it faded away.

"Whoa." Lyra, Shankar and I said in unison. Jack craned his neck and said, "What? What?"

As it vanished, there was a little flash of light and the posing doll appeared in its place.

Lyra squealed. "You got a cutie mark! What's the rest of it?"

I pulled my pants up. "Later."

As Jack asked and Lyra explained cutie marks, I realized I felt utterly exhausted. I moved to gather my hair up, and... "Did she get me a haircut? This is shorter than I remember."

Shankar said, "Oh, right. Jack?"

Jack nodded and said, "Mind if we hit a store on the way home to get a charged fire extinguisher?"

And with that, my chances of falling asleep were pretty shot. Seriously? I should have expected it. Her boyfriend says she can't get through a date without setting something on fire.

But since the thaumonuclear pilla (that play on words worked better in my head) on the back of my head were gone, I was able to calm once more and drifted off.

Chapter 9: Hot and Cold
View Online

The Exchange Program

Chapter 9: Hot and Cold

So, Shankar and I are in the driver's seat of a car like the one we're actually in. We're in the same body or something like that. We do that all the time, and also we've been married or at least together for years. Jack is in the passenger seat, and in the seat behind him is Lyra - no. An actual pony, but not Lyra, like, oh, a colt with cobalt blue coat and light brown mane, wearing - no, that's silly, scratch that, he's naked. Eh, we're all naked. Like it doesn't matter.

Anyway, we're heading down route 1 in California, and the sea level has risen to the point that sometimes the tires get wet, not that we're in danger of being washed off the road or anything. We're here to do something about this. We just need to get to the right place.

We pull in to that beach I went to. It is not underwater, despite the sea-level rise... because of the sea-level-lowering magic it has! Right, that makes sense.

The human-sized tarot card in the seat behind the driver gives off the impression that this is all very silly. It's 13-Devil (no, wait. Devil's 14, I think?). It has no moving parts. Like a slanted cardboard Monolith.

So we get out. The guys are wearing white slacks and I'm wearing a white dress and I'm not in the same body as Shankar anymore. And for some reason I made Shankar white, let's fix that. Better.

Cobalt (for that is the pony's name, now) does some sort of weird dance and we trace a pentagram to spread the magic out.

"That's perfectly, exactly backwards." comments 14-Devil, which is now standing, still slightly askew, behind me on the beach.

Of course. I knew that. We were... getting the magic level up to something usable, and then we'd disperse it into the ocean afterwards.

But first, a message from Rhiannon! Cards begin slamming down onto the beach. Problem position: Five of Pentacles (impression: take at face value. Seriously, I should just look at the card) (unfortunately, the dream did not contain a visual impression of the face of the card). Default Solution: 19-Sun (also take at face value). Outlook: Ten of swords. Alternate Solution: Four of Pentacles, Ace of Pentacles. Outlook: Seven of Wands.

What?

Jack and Shankar and Cobalt and I look at it in confusion.

I turn and look to The Devil. "Any tips on interpreting this?"

14-Devil gulps, suddenly remembers an urgent appointment somewhere else, and vanishes.

I'm alone on the beach, and I feel nakeder than naked, like my skin was peeled back in places. This is metaphorical Thank you, I don't need to tell myself that this is a metaphor. This is not good. It's... I don't feel comfortable being asleep right now. So I'm going to wake up. Please. Come on, wake up!

Once I was panicking, I did wake up with a gasp and bolting upright out of Shankar's lap just as we pulled in to the train station.

"Dictation. Now. Possibly-prophetic dream."

Shankar fumbled out his phone and as soon as it was ready I began recounting every relevant bit of the dream - at first, the detailed data like the five cards and their roles. Then, taking it from the top.

We sat in the parked car silently for a few seconds. Jack was the first to respond. "Soooo… we're going to have a problem and the obvious solution would be to get Celestia" - "or Sunset Shimmer" interjected Lyra. Jack continued, "Help from Equestria, or perhaps from the sun itself, and from the fact that she's sending a message at all I'm guessing it wouldn't work, and the solution has to do with a bunch of pentacles."

Shankar, meanwhile, was looking the relevant cards up. "The five is cripples in the snow outside a church. The sun is a baby on a horse with a flag, and the sun. Ten of swords… all ten are stuck into some guy. That was the result of the obvious solution… let's avoid that. Four of pentacles… a miser? And ace is just basically a big pentacle. Seven of wands is some guy with a stick in front of a row of sticks."

Jack added, "And the devil. That's not ominous at all, nosirree."

I replied, "The end was worse. The Devil card was not nice, but I didn't get an actively malign feeling from it, for all that it was the Devil."

Shankar added, "Incidentally, the Devil is 15, not 14. 14 is Temperance. And 13 was Death. Hmm. Well, so about the rest… one of us might lose a limb or otherwise be crippled, and we should… be miserly about it and use magic?"

I said, "We don't have enough information to pin down what it's talking about. If there's something to it, then chances are good that we'll recognize the situation in time - I don't get the impression that she means to be cryptic. SO, what shall we do now?"

Jack said, "I offered to take Lyra to church tomorrow, and she said okay if you think it's okay."

I blinked. "I guess we can go. I was thinking nearer-term, but sure."

Lyra said, "You need a haircut."

I grimaced and nodded. I didn't know what my head looked like yet, and began to fear the worst.

Shankar said, "We can experiment with my nifty new amulet, or use it as proof of magic."

"Proof of… Wait. We have actually-working, reliable, externally visible, non-compliant-with-physics-as-we-know-it magic at our command?"

"To get me back in my body, she supercharged Lyra's old keep-her-in-this-body amulet, but attuned to me. Its main work of getting me back in me is done, but it's still charged up. We can use it to swap me into people if they put it on, which'll work a few times, or we can just both touch it to be able to sort of feel each other's bodies, and that's a lot cheaper. Except, while she's here, swapping Lyra and me lets the amulet recharge slowly. And it leaks slowly, and it'll wear out in a couple months. Want to try?"

He held it to me, and I put a finger on it. It was subtle for a moment, then it clarified. I could feel his fingers holding it, and his sweaty armpits, and the warm spot on his lap where I'd put my head. I could feel that his fingers were about to tighten before I saw them pull it away.

"Holy molé. We really need to sit down and think about what we're going to use that on. We can use that to give maybe hundreds of people direct evidence that magic is real, and get it in a lab and everything. If that's a good idea, which it might not be. And we don't have all the time in the world to think about it. Can we get another after this one breaks? That would give us more time to decide whether we want to blow open the masquerade or enforce the statute of secrecy."

He nodded. "That was one of the main topics while you were out. We're worried that it might do more harm than good, mainly causing hysteria, unless it's conveniently benign and we can make it so easily accessible that ordinary people could figure out that it's benign for themselves. Or if the good it can do is so massive that it would actually make things better despite all that."

Jack added, "I need to figure out some things spiritually speaking, since this is kind of outside the realm of what I was expecting, even given magic – what I had been told about things like this was more along the lines of 'pelt you all with rocks until dead' but I kind of ignored that part because I didn't take seriously the possibility that magic actually existed. I'm hoping that instruction was just because all the witches at the time were horrible, rather than something not so nice like 'in this world, magic corrupts you', or 'magic is an intrinsic evil'."

Lyra (back in Rhiannon's body - I had to remember for a moment that she wasn't Shankar) had been nodding along but stopped and sharply exclaimed, "Excuse me!"

"Make that, 'humans using magic is an intrinsic evil.'"

I mused, "What would that even mean anyway? I don't recall morality-as-dictate-of-God being a consistent position. And I wouldn't expect any metaethical theory to produce anything like that without another reason. Maybe humans using magic has some sort of negative consequence, which some ancient magically-aware being informed the ancient Hebrews of, and we should stop using it because of that… but given that the command skipped convincing them with good reasons and went straight to stoning, I'm not so confident of that."

Shankar put in, "Could be a tragedy of the commons. Using magic is beneficial for the individual but harmful for the collective. If they tried to explain that it would backfire hard, but just stoning could work."

Jack facepalmed. "Wait. The two atheists who are using magic are arguing in favor of stoning witches?"

Shankar corrected, "I don't think it's safe to call us atheist anymore. I am taking Hinduism a lot more seriously since yesterday."

With that out of the way, I actually answered, "We're not arguing in favor, we're trying to figure out why the rule is there. Chesterton's fence, if you're familiar with the idea. It could be a religious dominance play and there's no real problem, or it could be on to something. So. Since we need to know a lot more to make an educated decision, all in favor of getting back home and reading Rhiannon's notes?"

This motion was approved by general acclamation, and Shankar got out to bring his car back to my apartment.

Lyra asked what I had been up to while swapped, and I told them. When we pulled up, I saw Gwyneth leaning against the door-frame, reading a notebook.

She looked up as we approached, smiled, frowned, and sighed. "Hello there. How are you doing?"

I nodded. "All right. Managed to remember how to use our hands."

By this time, the others had caught up, and she had clearly been waiting for us, so I invited her in. The apartment was warm enough to be mildly uncomfortable. Not proud of it, but at the moment, that was fine by me because it might get her to leave earlier. Unless she was going to come around, but she didn't really look like it.

We sat down at the table (Jack and Lyra took the sofa).

She leaned forward, finger holding a place in her notebook, and asked, "Seen anything new?"

That was relatively promising. I figured that the most relevant thing would be the dream, so I recited it again; she stared at her notebook. In the beginning she nodded along idly. Partway through, she got very focused, frowning harder and harder. By the end, she was silently mouthing foul language. Shallow breaths, a slight quiver. She looked past me, then through me. Did she see that dream? Did she get a similar warning from Rhiannon? Was she the Devil card? She finally said, "I… it's probably silly, but can you get some wood to help me test…"

She stiffened for several seconds, then with a little jerk came out of it. "Could I lie down for a bit? Maybe get an open window?"

I led her to collapse onto my bed. Figuring I had overdone it on the heat, and she wasn't being as unreasonable as last time anyway, I opened the window. Then I went downstairs to the apartment's storage area to grab my pine crafting scraps.

By the time I was up, she was coming down the stairs, still looking pretty bad, and now shivering. "I'm sorry to bother you. I need to get home and…"

"You're not driving anywhere like that. Stay, please."

I heard the door behind me and there was Shankar, finally.

He looked at her, at me, at the wood, and at her again. "You look ill." he said. "How about you…"

"I'm fine! Just cold, that's all. Need to get into the sunlight."

Shankar and I shared an alarmed glance. I said, "Do it."

He charged up, picked her up in a fireman's carry. I followed him up the steps and dumped the pine in the main room. He sat down in the pentagram and lowered her into his lap, ignoring her feeble protests. I found the flaw I'd made in the diagram when freeing Lyra, grabbed the salt, and fixed it.

Shankar said, "She's freezing."

Jack and Lyra came to the doorway, confused. It registered with me that they had exclaimed in confusion as we had passed. I explained, "She was cold, like the cripples in the snow, and wanted to get into the sunlight. So, pentacles it is."

Shankar clarified, "Like, literally, I see frost forming out of her sweat. I'm touching her with the amulet, and what I can feel of her is cold to the bone. Pentagram isn't doing the job on its own. We need something more."

I checked it once more, and fixed a spot where Shankar had disturbed it sitting down. I glanced up - Jack was praying. For once, praying in an emergency might be a good move. All hands on deck, give it everything we've got. Lyra approached, knelt, touched the diagram with a fist, then with her forehead.

I kept orbiting the diagram, looking for anything out of place. It all looked good. I wrung my hands. What else could I do?

Shankar noted, "The frost melted. She's still really cold, though. Let me get that thing touching her again… okay, the bone coldness is gone, but she's still cold. Space heater?"

Now, this room was the warmest in the apartment, up around a hundred. It wasn't the kind of place I expected to be applying a space heater. But if the cold was out of her bones, maybe it wasn't magically imposed anymore, and we could deal with it by ordinary means. So I set it up, keeping it aimed so it wouldn't hit the salt. Having run out of things to do, I searched for Rhiannon's notes.

Lyra was staring at the two of them and frowning. "This is really strange. Why did it suddenly happen then?"

"Trap." Gwyneth croaked.

"What?"

"When I think magic is real."

I was confused. "When you think magic is real, you get cold?"

"Just change my mind."

Lyra summarized, "You have a trap on you that goes off when you think magic is real, and it changes your mind?"

She nodded.

"But this time, you're freezing. And it appears you didn't change your mind about magic."

She weakly said, "Yeah."

I cut in. "Who put the trap on you?"

She buried her face in Shankar's chest and murmured something.

Shankar said, "I think she just said 'demon'."

Chapter 11: Wring
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The Exchange Program

Chapter 11: Wring

"So, what about the demon?" asked Jack.

Gwyneth shrugged. "There is no demon. Or, well, it doesn't look like the trap was laid on me by a demon, so we don't have any reason to suspect there is one, anymore. I put it on myself. More of a voluntary block, really."

Shankar added, "That's concerning. Not as much as a demon, but still. If you made yourself forget magic, that's a bad sign. Were you protecting yourself from… secrets man was not meant to know?"

She shrugged harder. "Why I did it is probably going to be in those notes, somewhere. Probably towards the end." She reached towards him to take the last notebook. "If it were dangerous, I probably would have destroyed them."

As he hesitantly handed it over, I asked, "How did you figure out that it was all from you?"

"I meditated on my energy."

"Your energy? Rhiannon said she had never used herself as a power source."

Gwyneth raised an eyebrow and her ears drew back ever so slightly. "I think you must have misunderstood her." (She was correct - Rhiannon had said that she never absorbed external energy into herself), Gwyneth explained, "If you do magic that's only on yourself, it is best to only use your own power. I can feel no intrusion, and I can feel that I'm doing something to myself. If I were to stop it, I think that would take the block apart." She opened the journal. "Can I focus? I need to figure out whether I want to remember magic or not, before I can set foot out of this room."

So we retreated from Rhiannon's room. Jack sat on the sofa, taking advantage of its having partially collapsed to recline back; Shankar and Lyra sat at the table, and Lyra began explaining the math of magic. Though, she hedged heavily, saying that she didn't fully understand it herself.

I sat down next to Jack, and let my energy (anxious, not magical) escape. There was no demon, we had things under control. Phew.

Shankar and Lyra, though, got more animated - Shankar seemed downright incredulous. "You can't be serious. That's… magic is governed by the Schrödinger Equation?"

After she affirmed it, he leaned the chair back and thought. "On the other hand, everything here is governed by it, in a way that it would be very hard to interface two worlds together without their both following it. Or at least something a lot like it. Having two worlds even have a causal relationship where one was classical and one was quantum would be… gibberish to both. Okay, so it fits within the QM framework. That's good to know. Bet it screws around with a lot of other things, though. That's going to be one funky potential."

Jack, without moving his head, asked, "You know physics? Like, serious physics?"

Shankar laughed. "Well, I can solve some problems in it from doing physical chemistry, but I only know its broader implications from reading stuff on the internet. So, you know, grains of salt may be applied. This is not my specialty."

Specialty… I suddenly realized I wanted to check on my cutie mark. I went to the bathroom, pulled my pants a bit down for a moment… nada. Again, further, on the off chance I'd forgotten where it was. As blank as it had been before. Both sides. Ah well.

While I was there, I looked in the mirror and finally saw my burnt hair. Ugh. Well, nothing for it but to go downstairs and get a haircut. I rubbed my fingers through it. Actually, seems like there's so little I might as well use a shaver rather than a true haircut. Save my $20. So I got out my trimmer and put on the longest separator, which I'd never used. Before I started, it occurred to me to head out to ask, "Does anyone have any reason to suspect that my hair is going to magically grow back, before I trim it to be even?"

Lyra and Shankar were deep in some discussion, with Shankar drawing diagrams. Neither took note of my question, but Jack shook his head. "No, Sunset didn't mention anything like that."

"Hey, Shankar. Should I trim even? Shave bald? Mohawk?"

He took a moment to change gears. "You can't leave it? More hair is better."

"My scalp looks like a worn out teddy bear. A cross between Calvin and Harry Potter would be a step up."

He got up, approached, and took the trimmer out of my hand. I totally thought he was going to kiss me and tell me it didn't matter, but instead he carefully looked over my head. I can live with that. Taking my problems seriously is good too. He said, "I think it could come off a little over here and then it's not balanced exactly, but looks coherent." He turned to Lyra. "What do you think?" She shrugged.

So I went along with it. We headed into the bathroom and I kept my head over the tub. Over the next few minutes, Shankar trimmed my hair so it was, though short, at least mostly symmetric except in ways that looked not entirely stupid.

While he trimmed, we all talked over magic and reductionism. Principally on the question of, if our minds are made of brains which are made of matter - a fact which Lyra also seemed to take for granted, which was interesting in itself - how did magic identify them to act upon them in all the non-destructive ways we'd observed? The mechanism clearly had to be extremely complex. Lyra had no particular answers to any of these questions.

Abruptly, Gwyneth called out to us and asked us to help with her reading. So we headed in and grabbed notebooks. The one I got was unreadable. It was code, but not so much for encryption as simply being highly-abbreviated. Tables of letters and numbers without context. After a minute I realized it was list upon list of tarot cards, each list with a brief label up top, and followed by statistical summaries. On page 40 I finally got some text, which was conclusions, again highly abbreviated. A taped-in computer printout of a graph, that was made with a printer older than I was… was that an exaggeration? Possibly not, I realized - I came across one date, putting it in January 1989. That was around when I was proudly reading primary phonics.

Gwyneth interrupted us. "Okay, you can all stop. Thanks."

"What?" we all cried in near-unison, and crowded into the room.

She explained, "The block isn't at full power, but it was still able to get me to not think of certain things. Having all of us thinking about them overpowered it and I could remember some things. Enough to think on for now, and enough to give me pause."

She took a deep breath. "I wish I could say I came by effective magic by a stroke of genius or personal virtue. But it was just that someone walked into our Litha observation and told us we were irritatingly close to not completely wasting our time. This would normally not be a great way to get on our good side, but she was a dog."

She stopped and seemed to be thinking more. Jack eventually asked, "Where's the dog?"

Gwyneth chuckled. "The dog probably died fifteen years ago, now. But the fairy who was possessing her? Probably alive, but probably not here, either."

"A fairy." I said. "Where did you encounter her? Can we find her again?"

"First time, Sandy Hook. After that, mostly at Jim's place on Staten Island. Anyway, she told us some things about how to find magic and gather it." She frowned. "Haven't seen her in a long time."

Shankar asked, "So… why make yourself forget?"

Gwyneth shrugged. "I haven't got that part yet."

Lyra asked, "Is this world's magic chaos magic or something? We had a big problem with that for a long time, what with Discord. You might want to forget that."

"No… it's more… from what I can remember… oh, I can't think about it properly. When I think back, all that comes to mind is the old Battlestar Galactica, and I wasn't even a fan. But that suggests robot apocalypse or the destruction of Earth. Since that hasn't happened, I think it must be some sort of prophecy?"

Lyra seemed very worried. "This sounds like the kind of thing I ought to actually call princess Celestia about."

I held up a hand. "We assumed that Rhiannon's warning was about Gwyneth, but what if it was about this? No getting her involved yet. Or Sunset Shimmer. But we could ask Rhi…" I stopped, suddenly expecting what happened a second later:

Sunset Shimmer said, "Did you say my name?"

I nodded. "Yes, I did."

"What's up? How are things going? I'm doing some tedious reading, so I jumped when I got the ping that you said my name."

Thinking quick, I asked, "See, I got a cutie mark when I was in Equestria, and I had it a minute after we swapped back, but now it's gone. I understand that is a magical thing, and I wonder if you sucked it away with that sponge thing."

Sunset sounded thoughtful. "I don't know. If I did, it'll come back on its own when I empty it."

"Oh! I get to keep it?"

"If you really got it, it's part of you. But if it was my magic filtered through you when you were in my body, then it'll return to me. Well. I guess I can wring the sponge out now. Wherever it came from originally, this will put it back. Ready?"

She didn't confirm, but I was ready. A pop and a crackle, and I saw a little flash of light peek up over the top of my pants. "Looks like it's mine, then. Yay?"

Lyra quivered. "Maybe I have mine now? I didn't earlier, but if that restores magic…" She hiked her dress all the way up, and, upon discovering her mark, squealed with joy. "I feel complete!" Even though she still had panties on, Jack practically dove onto Rhiannon's bed face first and stayed there. Shankar and Gwyneth gave the mark looks around as curious as mine. Meanwhile, Lyra sat on Rhiannon's bed right next to Jack, and gradually got the dress the rest of the way off.

Sunset clarified through me, "The marks might disappear when I set start soaking up again, but they should come back each time I stop, and will stay in the end." A pause. "Speaking of which, my sponge has caught a lot of magic that isn't Celestia's and doesn't have anywhere obvious to go. Seems like there's a lot of… cold in it."

Gwyneth seemed to remember something; she cut in, "Yes, that's mine, and, if you can put it back where it came from, not dumping it in me, I would appreciate if I could have it back."

Sunset replied, "Sure… hmm. The sponge doesn't know where to put it, and you don't have anywhere to put it nearby. How about I bottle it up on my side for a little while, and when you find where it should go, I can give it back?"

Gwyneth nodded. "That sounds good."

Sunset added, "That is quite a lot of cold. Do you know what you're doing?"

Gwyneth hesitantly said, "We are finding that out."

"Why are you sitting in a diagram, anyway?"

Gwyneth smoothly replied, "Part of finding out what we're doing. Trying things out."

Sunset's voice started bright and got darker and darker. "Ah, want some practice with solving problems with magic? Fair enough. To grow, you need practice. Real, practical practice. Celestia keeps me studying in books so much, I'm behind where I should be. Especially since I only have a few years to get ready. That's why I made Shankar's amulet so much better than it needed to be. I've had more practice with the guitar than with actual heavy spellwork or artifacts. I've examined, what, four artifacts? That was the second one I ever made. It's ridiculous."

Jack lifted his head out of the pillow while facing the wall, and asked, "You play guitar? Maybe that's practice for fine control of your magic. Intricate little motions and all that."

"But you play guitar by hoof, not horn. I'm learning from Flash, who isn't even a unicorn. You met him, I understand, Rachel?"

"Yeah. Your boyfriend? Seems nice enough."

Lyra interjected, "You have a boyfriend? And you're Princess Celestia's student? How old are you?"

"Thirteen. One of the perks of being a personal student, especially one living around Princess Cadence instead of the school proper, is that she didn't lock me up for the past month."

"You lucky…!" Lyra shrieked. (Meanwhile, Shankar pointed out to Jack that she was wearing enough to cover more than a bikini, so he could stop making a show of not watching)

I felt Sunset grinning. "Yeeeah. Anyway…" A weariness set in her voice. "The sponge is all wrung out, and I'm putting it back in place, and I'm sorry, but I think your cutie mark is going to vanish until next time. I think I can leave Lyra's, but maybe not. All set?"

We all nodded, and I got the impression she was no longer there.

Jack, having gotten up and sitting next to Lyra relatively normally, then asked her a very sensible question - "How long are your years, anyway?"

"Well, it depends…" She launched into an explanation of weather control and seasons in Equestria, which as an answer to Jack's question amounted to, 'years are only used as a measure of age because of tradition', which ended up with how most earth ponies used moons instead, and when you factored in everything, by the count of seconds spent awake, she was more like seventeen than thirteen, which made it much more understandable how she knew a little calculus, but left her still well out of dateable range.

The discussion of time led me to check it - it was six. "We are past time to start getting dinner ready. Who's sticking around?"

Gwyneth got up, dusted herself off. "I've disassembled the part of the block that I was triggering just by knowing about magic. And I'm not tripping the rest, so I should be good to go home. I'll be in touch about meeting again." And with that, she headed out, seemingly preoccupied.

Jack said, "So, Lyra - church tomorrow? Rachel?"

I closed my eyes. "I'll pass. If you think you can get her prepared, though, and she wants to go, sure."

Lyra asked, "What sort of preparation?"

Jack clarified, "People could ask awkward questions, and no, you can't just explain that you're a unicorn. So let's at least go over the basics."

I said, "If you'll take care of that, I'll count that as helping and you can stay for dinner."

So they did; Shankar came and helped me prepare. Since Lyra was vegetarian for the most part, we made a salad with sliced cucumber, tomato, carrot, and radishes. While we were cutting, Shankar suddenly said, "Rhiannon knows heavy math. She had written more notes in that last notebook, and her ritual chant was apparently made with the help of a computer program. Did you know any of that?"

"Are you sure it was her? My notebook was from nearly twenty years ago."

"Mine was from last year, and she signed it."

"Well, I knew she was writing web pages by hand, that's all. I never really paid attention. Also, depending when last year, it might have been before she moved in."

After another minute, he added, "I think it'll be helpful if you know calculus. Do you happen to?" - "No." - "Algebra?" - "Rusty. Why?" - "I don't want to have to grow our little circle more than necessary until we know more, and we'll know more sooner if more of us can understand more. I don't think you stopped studying math because you couldn't do it, but because you didn't see the need - right?"

I shrugged. "It got hard, but I could have dragged myself through it if I needed to. Do you think I need to?" He nodded. "Well, then, get ready to teach me. I can handle the rest of the food."

He asked me a few questions to figure out where I was, and then grabbed a sheet of paper and began planning. He also asked Jack, who didn't commit to joining in, and put off answering his questions. Shankar took the hint and dropped it, and Jack got back to preparing Lyra for going to church.

Dinner was astonishingly uneventful, considering the jam-packed day. Jack left a while later, and I fell asleep on the sofa while Shankar washed the dishes. Lyra woke me enough to move me to bed. I was aware that they kept talking for some time, but I just felt really tired.

I woke at 1 AM, drenched in sweat. The apartment was crazy hot and humid. And they were still talking intermittently. I got up and went to the kitchenette. Lyra was sitting at the table, naked, head propped on her hands, eyes flickering. Shankar had stripped down to boxers and was leaning back in his chair, working on some long math problem.

He turned and smiled at me as I approached.

I stared at them. "Time for bed."

He looked at the clock and practically jumped up. "Wow. Yeah." Lyra also got up at a more sedate pace, and I guided her to her bed. While I was there, I started the window fan. Back out in the main room, Shankar was bending over and slowly fitting his right foot into his jeans. When he looked up, I jerked my head toward my bedroom. His eyebrows rose. He got up, stepped back out of his jeans, put his hands on my hips, and nuzzled me.

I whispered, "Is there some very special reason not to be doing things? Like, are you holding back because you have an arranged fianceé you want to break off with before you do anything? Or is being swapped with Lyra has totally screwed up your sex drive altogether? I mean, earlier today you said you'd be interested in kissing, but here we are and…"

He took a deep breath, and answered, "I did once have an arranged betrothal, but we broke that off years ago. Yes the swap has had some odd side effects, but they aren't a problem at all. No… It's just that I can't focus on us, can't really think about it. Everything else is so overwhelming. And yet I do want us to be dealt with properly since in the long run we're going to be important to each other, and I don't want to go forward without thinking, on autopilot, boom go too far and then drama and fail. I just don't know where we should be doing in the mean time. I don't see any good Schelling points, I guess is the thing."

"Ah. You may be right that there isn't one, but… we don't need to coordinate without communicating, so we don't need a Schelling point, just a way of stopping at a good place. My usual rule seems to cover situations like this - I decide how far I want to go only when I'm by myself and not excited. When together, we can do anything up to that limit. I can hold to that limit because I know I can change it in just a few hours. But if I'm too distracted to change the limit, it doesn't change."

Lyra interjected through the door, "That's a great rule! But can you talk it over quieter? I don't have anyone with me in here."

Shankar rolled his eyes. "Yeah, our sexy, sexy discussion of decision theory."

"Well it is."

I suddenly asked, "Lyra, have you actually bathed since you got here? Go take a shower."

Pause. "Okay." There are enough traction grips on the floor she shouldn't have trouble, I think, and it should give us a few minutes of privacy.

We went to bed and talked a little more about it while she showered. Then there was kissing but not much more – mainly, he hadn't had a chance to properly place his line yet, and anyway the lines weren't meant to be excuses to rush things.

It was only when Shankar was in the shower and I was reviewing the day that I remembered what we'd been talking about when Sunset Shimmer heard us mention her and jumped in - apocalypse. I thought back to it and tentatively concluded that no, Rhiannon's warning couldn't have been about that because hardly any of the card meanings lined up. So yes, we'd talk to Celestia about it. And the prophecy was decades old. It'd wait until morning.

Chapter 12: Sunburst
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The Exchange Program

Chapter 12: Sunburst

I woke to the feeling of some pony being there in my head. As I came towards wakefulness, I was a little confused on account of having Shankar's arm over me, hugging me close against an unexpected draft of cool air coming in the window, and thinking it had something to do with that, but nope, it was a pony. So, after a few seconds, I said, "Hello?"

After another two seconds, I got a funny reply. I sounded kind of masculine. "It worked! Ah, hello. I… my cousin Sunset Shimmer asked me to help with your problem. Not that she couldn't do it, but it's an interesting problem while being low power, and… she thought I'd be a good fit for it."

I shrugged. "All right. What do you need? And which problem do you mean?"

"Princess Celestia's hair unraveling and possibly having unpredictable magical effects. I can track it down, maybe." A few seconds passed. I was about to speak when he continued, "I would like to switch into the body of somepony around there. Preferably male."

"We don't have any ponies here. There are horses a short walk away, but I don't know that you could talk in it, and if you could it would be very conspicuous."

"I'm sorry, somebody. Doesn't need to be a pony."

I nudged Shankar, figuring he was probably awake by now, and said, "Shankar, want to go to Equestria? Got some unicorn stallion here who wants to switch with you for a bit. At least, I think he's a unicorn."

He groggily began, "That's be awesome. Who are you?"

The hesitant voice said, "I'm Sunburst. All right. I'll see about getting this going. Also, I… heard you wear clothing."

"Yeah, normally. Problem?"

"No! Actually, Shankar, could you get dressed before I come over, if you aren't already? I don't mind anypon-one else not wearing or wearing, whatever, I'm used to it."

Shankar nodded. "OK. Anyway, I guess that I should not undress you while I'm there?"

Emphatically, "Yes, please."

Shankar got up and pulled his his pants on over his boxers. Even though Sunburst was still on the line, I also got up and threw on jeans and a T-shirt. I also picked out a neutral gray XL T-shirt I kept around as pyjamas and threw it at Shankar for him to wear on top instead of his shirt from yesterday. When we were done, I asked Sunburst, "When will this be?"

"I'm sorry, this is a terribly complicated spell that princess Celestia cast, and Sunset Shimmer modified it, and somepony else did too, and I need to make another change… I understand how it works and what I need to do to it, but actually doing it is quite another thing." Resigned, he added, "I… I think I should get some help with it. I'll be a few minutes. In the mean time, can you go near the last place you saw the hair?"

"Well, that's the problem. It's in another city. If I shed… somewhere in the New Jersey side of the rail system of New York metropolitan area, which is around a hundred miles wide. Or in the middle. "

"I see. Maybe go to the central rail terminal? Anything you shed might come back there, and we only need to be within a few miles of the hair, for a few minutes. And I could set up a relay." He seemed doubtful on that last part.

"Oh phew. So we don't even need to go into Manhattan, just go up to the river? Or does running water block magic or something?"

"There are some kinds that would have trouble with that, but not this kind. It might even help. All right. I'll be back in a few minutes. I mean, Sunset will."

I got the impression that he wasn't there anymore.

Lyra was waiting for us. She sat at the kitchen table, jiggling her legs, grinning. I was mildly surprised that she was fully dressed, and indeed dressed appropriately for church. "So?"

I blinked. "What?"

"How was it? What did you do? How important is it?"

"Well, we haven't started it yet. Sunburst will be along…"

"No, you two, last night."

"Impertinent question, but hardly anything beyond what you already know - he was there. When something more substantial happens, you will not get any details."

"When! Not if!" Her grin shifted to be directed at Shankar. I did not turn to look at his reaction, but her grin faded a bit as she did.

A knock on the door, and Lyra speeded down the stairs. There was the sound of a stumble, but before I could get into motion came a cry of "I'm fine!". Then, "It's Jack. See you later!" The door closed again.

I sat down at the table in the seat Lyra had left, and Shankar pulled out the opposite seat. I groaned lightly. "I feel exhausted. You?"

He nodded. "Started late, and I'm not used to being next to someone."

I put my head down on the table. "How do you want to go in?"

"Since we don't need to cross into NYC, car would probably be quicker."

I nodded dimly, and dragged myself through a simple breakfast. I actually got myself some of Rhiannon's cereal instead of making something.

Shankar frowned. "Why are you so tired? I got less sleep than you did, but you're just… droopy."

I shrugged and noticed that he'd eaten. "Can you drive?"

"Sure, so long as they don't change the plan and Sunset talks through you before throwing him into me."

"I'm reasonably confident they'll ask first. Sunset saw enough of cars to know that jumping in is a poor idea." I half expected her to jump in at that point, but she didn't.

So we went down and got in Shankar's car and the next thing I knew I was waking up. Still in the car, and not particularly better rested, in what was probably Hoboken.

Shankar was poking me with his hands curled up and I guessed, "Sunburst?"

"Yes, it's Sunburst. This… this is amazing."

"Yeah." I murmured. "What's really amazing to me is how drained I feel. Lethargic."

"Hmm." Sunburst considered me. "I wonder… oh. This is very strange." His tone made it sound like it was a human thing, not a magic weirdness thing. He continued, "While using magic is roughly the same in this body, it's much harder to feel it. It's like doing things with numb hooves."

My mind churned a little. "Wait, so I can do magic the same here as I could in Equestria?"

"I'm not sure." He held out a hand and held it just above Shankar's cell phone where it was sitting on the dashboard. Then it leapt up to his hand. "Yes, the power's there, but it's so hard to feel what I'm doing." He set it down again. "I guess that explains why Sunset's amulet just broke."

"The amulet broke?"

"Yes. I think it broke when I swapped into his body? Maybe he should have taken it off first."

"I feel a disturbance in the force, as if a million perverted ideas cried out in anguish, and were suddenly silenced. Dammit, we hardly got to do anything with it! Why couldn't it have lasted a few more days? We didn't even get to use it for the useful things, like proving the existence of magic!"

Sunburst seemed a bit confused, but asked, "But didn't I just say you can do that anyway?"

"Oh, right." I yawned again.

"You have to get up and move."

"What?"

"Wake up. Walk around. Get out of this thing. And bring me with you. My legs want to move. At least, I think that's what that feeling means. Show me how to walk and I'll show you how to use magic."

That was a good enough deal that I dragged myself up and out. I walked around the car and opened the door for him, and helped him out. That was actually quite involved. While trying to get him up, I took stock of the situation in more detail. We were in a business district, near-deserted on a Sunday morning. There was the sound (and smell) of diesel trains idling. Once I got him up, I took his hand and led off slowly along the sidewalk. "Here's that rail hub you mentioned we should stay near."

"Ah. Yes. About that. I'm not so sure that'll work. There's much more local magic here than I was expecting after what I heard from Sunset. But it's worth a try."

We walked around it until we found the entrance, then realized we didn't actually need to go in, so we went down to the nearby waterfront park and wandered. He explained magic at me but I persistently couldn't understand what he was referring to. After a time it came out that even when I'd been in Sunset's body I hadn't been hooked up to the senses in her horn at all. And yet, I'd managed to control the magic enough to draw. After a while I managed to recreate the feeling I'd had when I was levitating the pen and paper.

"Hmm. Yes, that works too. Cruder than you can achieve by direct control, but having the magic control itself does seem like your best option. Back in Equestria, that's advanced, but lacking a horn of your own, it might be your only option."

For a moment, I was glad he agreed, and then I realized he was saying things I hadn't realized and then I realized I was levitating a tiny scrap of bubblegum wrapper next to my shoe. I dropped it hastily, ashamed that I hadn't thought not to do this in public. On the other hand, I hadn't expected to succeed.

Also, I didn't feel tired anymore.

Sunburst nodded. "I think you succeeded because the last bit of hair just got sucked up."

"How would that help me do it? Did I steal the magic again?"

"No, Sunset's 'sponge' as you've called it noticed it was done and stopped sucking on you. I also expect you have your cutie mark back."

I was tempted to just check right then, and then was shocked that I was so tempted. Ponies rubbing off on me. "Well, great then. I guess you can switch back and we'll go home and thank you for explaining what you did."

He pursed his lips. "I suppose so. It looks like I…"

Sunset used my mouth to interrupt him. "You did it! Only an hour!"

He moaned, "I didn't really do anything. And I'm wondering why the energy was lost in the first place. This isn't a magic vacuum at all."

As she said it, Sunset's objection faltered - "Yes, it is!…n't. Huh. Yeah, it's still a bit of a desert, but there's more than in the parts of the badlands. I think. It's hard to feel." A pause of a few seconds. Then, doubtfully, "Do you think the hair triggered the local field to be self-sustaining?"

"Probably not, no. I have some thoughts. Did you really feel it sucking, or did you assume it was sucking because that's what happened to the hair?"

I gave Sunset some time; after ten long seconds, she replied, "There was definitely less magic yesterday than there is today. But, I don't really know for sure that it was so little that it would suck hard enough to crack Celestia's hair open, let alone leave physical hair as residue. What other ideas do you have?"

"Well. If it was definitely less, there goes one idea."

Sunset took over my voice as if about to speak again, but merely remained about-to-say-something for around a second. It finally came out, "Which was?"

"Sympathetic stimulated resonant antiparallel parasitism."

My eyebrows rose, and Sunset deadpanned, "I don't think bashing jargon into each other is the answer. Reeks of overcompensation."

He continued, ignoring her remark, "Orrr… maybe it's something simpler, like if something pulled on the hair, extruding it. No vacuum, but magic becomes hair."

Sunset groaned just as I'd been about to. After we were done, I said, "Yes. I pulled on it."

He added, "Yes, so Shankar just pointed out. That would have been good to know. Sunset's amulet might not have broken if…"

Sunset sharply interrupted, "It broke?" She suddenly claimed my arm and used it to reach out and pull on the amulet's lanyard until it pulled out of Shankar's T-shirt. Once it was partially exposed, she touched it. I could abruptly feel simultaneously being Shankar, Sunset, Sunburst, and myself. It was a little overwhelming for the moment until she released it. "Seems to be working to me."

"That's intended?" Sunburst shouted in alarm. "That's… not… it doesn't…" Suddenly, Sunset was gone, and after a moment I realized Shankar was back.

He scratched the back of his head and asked, "Uh, how are you feeling?"

I gave him a thumbs-up. "Much better. You?"

He shrugged. "Sunset was being Sunset again. Just, this time I was a unicorn. So on the net, pretty nifty, actually. Kind of wish it went longer."

I nodded. "Yeah, I totally understand that. So, what…" I held up as I felt Sunset rejoin us.

"So… we did get all of Celestia's magic, but there are some odds and ends to wrap up. Do you mind if Sunburst swaps back again?"

Shankar grinned. "How convenient. Yes, that would be very nice."

"All right! Ah, would you give me the amulet for a minute?"

Shankar handed it over, and I reached out - I felt Sunset was also reaching out, but my arm's motions matched my intentions and not hers - and took it. I felt all four of us for a moment, but then that stopped. Sunset closed my eyes, and then nothing happened for a little while.

I hadn't previously held my eyes closed while a pony spoke through me, and since I wasn't doing anything with my own body, I thought of checking for anything else I was aware of on her end. After a few moments I heard faint hoofbeats outside, and smelled ink. Then my eyes reopened and it crowded out the other sensations. "All right. I made some improvements Sunburst suggested. So. I see you're back near Manehattan again. Do you plan to go home?"

Shankar nodded. "We have my car. If Sunburst is switching with me, Rachel can drive. Or we can put it off around forty minutes."

Sunburst's voice took over. "If it's all the same to you, now would be better. What I want to do, I can do while riding, if it's anything like riding a train."

I took a deep breath. I didn't much like driving on unfamiliar roads, or in unfamiliar cars, let alone both. "All right. Sunset, don't interrupt me for the next hour." - "Understood."

So we got up and headed back to the car, and I adjusted the mirrors. "So, what are you doing, Sunburst?"

He put a hand to the bridge of his nose as if adjusting nonexistent glasses, and then felt his face a little. "Trying to figure out a bit more about how your magic works. Because it seems to be changing as we watch."

"That's worrisome."

"Exactly. So I'm doing some very basic experiments to get some readings, and I'll repeat them over time."

I opened Shankar's GPS and told it to give me directions home. Sunburst had many questions for me now that I was alert, and I spent the trip telling him about the superficialities of a sequence of topics - GPS, satellites, space flight, (pause for him to perform magic tests), technological progress over the ages, origin of man, evolution of species, (pause for him to perform more magic tests), cosmogony…

"… so yeah, we can't really see any further back than a few thousand years after the beginning, or whenever the cosmic microwave background is from. But, everything after that is pretty well-founded because we can just look up and see it. Even with now knowing about magic I remain…" My thoughts were interrupted by my realizing that the GPS's directions had gotten me off the highway at an unfamiliar exit. I was stuck crossing the river into Highland Park. I took the turn the GPS directed me to, spotted a parking spot, and pulled into it.

Deep breaths.

"This is why I don't like driving. Now I don't know how to get home." I poked at its interface.

Sunburst watched in interest and confusion. "Didn't you ask it to direct you home?"

"It's Shankar's GPS, so it was directing me to his home, not mine."

"Oh. From the way you were… umm. I thought you lived together."

"That was a one time thing so far, but we're hoping that could happen again. Say, can you get hold of Shankar to ask if there's anything we should pick up from his apartment?"

Sunburst boggled. "In principle, yes. In practice, no."

"Oh well, let's head home, then. Let's see if he's got me in there. Sort by… recent. Mechanic, work, home, parents, airport. Well, that's not promising. Maybe it's in forwards order so I'd be last? Hmm. Beach. BF." I raised an eyebrow. Boyfriend?Well, that would explain some things, but not others. Maybe his sister also uses it. "GF, finally! This… is not my address. On the other hand, it's back in Chicago, so I guess it really was recent first and it's not that he's been two-timing me, he just hasn't updated his address book lately. Sorry, rambling."

I backed out of the menu and found the way of inputting addresses manually. Entered my own, and saved it as 'Rachel'. More deep breaths, and I hit the 'go' button. The GPS began directing me home, but I was not feeling so together that I wanted to resume the science talk. Plus, if he wanted more detail, I couldn't give it. And it's been awfully one-sided. I should be gathering more information myself. On the other hand, I'm driving. It's one thing to spout off things you already know while you're driving, it's quite another to learn new things. So we'll get home and it'll be his turn. What should I ask about… we had something we wanted to ask about yesterday… oh, right. Only the apocalypse.

"Is something wrong?", he cut in.

"Well, I just remembered a prophecy of some sort that we heard about yesterday, that was… worrisome."

"Hmm. Prophecy is really unreliable back in Equestria, barely even worth thinking about most of the time, because they're hard to make, and anyway any prophecy can be interfered with by enough magic working against it directly and precisely. And we have a lot of magic. But here? There isn't so much magic. Maybe prophecy is more reliable here. What does it say, exactly?"

"We don't have the exact text, if it's textual at all. We only have a vague recollection by someone who has altered her own memory in the mean time."

Sunburst gave me an incredulous look that I caught out of the corner of my eye, and sighed. "That's less than… what were you hoping to find out, if that's all you had?"

"You've already said enough to be helpful - we can break it if we can find out what it is."

"Two more problems. First, it takes a lot of magic. More than Sunset has. More than Starlight probably does by now. Maybe more than princess Cadance has. Maybe she could crack a weak one. There are a few that princess Celestia can't shatter. Second, you need to know exactly what it's predicting so it doesn't just accommodate whatever you're doing, in a way you don't like. Exact texts are important. So it sounds like you're going to have to work within it."

"What about if you know at least one thing it requires, and prevent that?"

"Each prophecy only requires one thing. Sometimes a complicated thing."

"Like, 'every X does Y' is one thing? What if we can make at least one X not do Y?"

"That doesn't sound like the kind of wording prophecies generally use. Also, if you try to break it without using enough magic to actually break it, something will come up to make you fail, some way or another."

Ah. That was what Cadence meant about 'barring catastrophe', with predicting her wedding. She had a prophecy, but was acknowledging that something really big and magical could conceivably come along to break it.

We pulled into the alley behind my apartment and I helped Sunburst out of the car, up the stairs, and to the table. "So. Magic. Got anything else you can teach me about how to do it?"

Sunburst made a glasses-pushing gesture again, and swallowed. "Do you have any notes already? I understand there was… something."

I went to Rhiannon's room and retrieved her notes. Sunburst read through a bit. "These diagrams could be better." I handed him blank pages to fill with better diagrams. He had some difficulty with hands, but it wasn't crippling, merely slowing. I wrote what he said about each one. "… used for detection of disturbances… Say, did you do the tests recently?"

"Oh my. Let's see, I did it after we sat down, but how long has it been? We should write all the results down…" So I copied down the figures as he dictated to me.

It consisted of three short time series - the first started at 12.1 and changed to 12.2, the second was all zeroes, and the third bounced around in the low nineties. "So, not rapid change."

"Not rapid, but there seems to be an upward drift. Will want to keep checking. Now, about these… uh, just a moment." He squinted. "I think Shankar's trying to contact me."

After a few seconds, Shankar said, "Rhiannon didn't send that dream, Rachel."

I blinked. "What?"

"I just asked her how to interpret the dream she sent you, but she has no idea what I'm talking about. Hold on, here's princess Celestia, looks like she wants to talk."

Then he slumped down in his seat - it seemed that neither of them was in charge of Shankar's body. After a few seconds, I had the bright idea of touching the amulet to join in.

Chapter 10: Replication
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The Exchange Program

Chapter 10: Replication

Demon? That put us on our heels for a moment.

"What sort?", asked Lyra "We don't use the category 'demon' much, but it covers everything from scary but harmless shadows to… things that Celestia would prefer to avoid."

Gwyneth kept her head buried in Shankar's chest. He said, "She just shrugged."

After another moment she gathered herself together and pulled her head away from him. Softly at first, then gathering strength back towards a normal level, "I don't know what else it could have been. I didn't summon it. I had doubted that they even existed - everything else I'd seen of magic was… passive. Not alive in itself, even if it was made of life. But then that dreadful feeling showed up, and I abruptly decided that this was all very silly and I was wasting my time trying to do something when this was just a religion and you shouldn't expect it to work. I put all the books I'd collected, notes I'd made, and the materials in a box, and didn't take them out until Rhiannon expressed an intellectual curiosity in them, and then only because I thought of them as… historical artifacts, I guess. A few times in between, I've seen things that fit in so strongly with magic that I was convinced it was real, and bump, suddenly decided it wasn't. I think it happened twice this morning. Maybe three times. Enough times in a row that I noticed something was up and set about testing it, just so I could prove to myself it wasn't and could just stop thinking about it. Only, you know, it worked, instead of not working."

I guessed, "So you sent me a dream?"

She nodded. "I drew a major arcanum from the tarot without looking at it, took one of your hairs that I'd gathered…"

Urgently - "You have some of Celestia's hair?"

Slightly embarrassed, she replied, "Well, yes."

"Where? Is it safe?"

"It is in a safe, so yes."

"I don't mean 'safe from being stolen' - it's literally made of magic and isn't stable. Celestia said that what I had on my head could have wrecked NYC."

Gwyneth blinked. "The safe is still inscribed with pentagrams on the inside and hexes on the outside - I didn't get rid of them when I stopped believing it would do anything - so it should be reasonably well contained, on the one hand, and insulated from things that could set it off, on the other. Far safer than it was on your head. What happened to all of it, by the way?"

I turned to the others and added, "Yeah, what DID happen there?" (she also gestured for me to turn off the space heater, and I gratefully complied)

Jack said, "Sunset pulled the magic out of it. Toward the end she thought she'd gotten almost all of it and it was really slowing down, so she tried to get the rest in one go, but the new way made it get hot, so she got out and used a little magic to make herself fireproof, including the hair and your clothes… but she only covered fire. She didn't expect your shirt to melt. When that happened she lost concentration and the parts of the hair she'd drained went up in flames. Once we'd put her out, she repaired the shirt by magic. Had to put a lot more effort into it than she expected, but it worked."

Huh. "How melted was the shirt?" I felt the back of my neck. Oh man, my hair was short.

"Your modesty was preserved."

Shankar added, "Anyway, she decided to soak the rest of the energy up more gradually with a sort of sponge she'll periodically empty."

Lyra hummed. "Maybe it slowed down because she didn't have all of it right there."

Silence fell for a moment. I grimaced. "Well, I guess we'll have to make like Inu Yasha and gather…" my comment was interrupted by Shankar laughing like crazy at the deadpan delivery. Gwyneth exclaimed in pain from that erupting next to her ear, and stood up from his lap – carefully staying in the circle.

Shankar took the opportunity to get up and step gingerly out of the circle, then hesitated. "Sorry. Ah… was it safe for me to leave?"

Gwyneth nodded. "Actually, I have no idea why this would keep the trap from going off. If anything, it ought to be making it go off harder. And it's not even a perfect pentagram."

I crouched down and ran my hand past the section I repaired, checking.

She clarified, "Even if you patched it perfectly, the mere fact that it was repaired is a kind of damage. Anyway, I performed a ritual that was supposed to - and, it appears, actually did - impose a vision of that card into all of your dreams, until you acknowledged it. And that card was The Devil. And when I checked back, the hair I used had burned up, as it ought to when you had acknowledged. So I figured I could easily disprove magic and get this stupid thing over with just by checking that you hadn't actually been asleep during that four hour interval in the middle of the day. So I visited you. I was about to leave, figuring that if you weren't home you hadn't slept. But instead, you arrived and confirmed the prediction in detail."

I had finished my examination of the repair, so I pulled my hand back and put it on the floor further away from the diagram so I could push up to standing again… and in doing so, noticed that the part of the floor I had just moved my hand to was much warmer than it had been right next to the circle. "The diagram seems cool. Maybe it's sucking the cold out?"

Gwyneth frowned, knelt, and felt around near the edges. "Seems normal here." Shankar also checked around the perimeter, touching just outside the circle. "Normal here too." Gwyneth continued, "As your dream suggested, this diagram is used to contain, not draw out or repel something. So it can't really be sucking out the cold." I found the cool spot again, and found that it was still there. Wasn't my imagination.

Shankar made it around to just outside the other spot I'd patched, and reported, "Cold here. A little."

We looked to Lyra. She shrugged. "My class on diagrams was based around a different sort of design, and was more practical than theoretical, so I don't know. I do understand the basic idea behind this simple one, but the rules are tricky and have lots of exceptions, even in simple cases like this, so… I don't know."

Gwyneth's jaw slacked, then she recovered. "So wait. You understand this one at least a little, so magic is the same for you as for us, and you have taken classes on diagrams more complicated than pentagrams and hexes?"

Lyra nodded. "How we do magic is different, but it seems like mostly it's just a matter of different tools. Having a horn is so much faster and easier than using anything else, for instance. But some magic isn't from unicorns, or not entirely, so it's useful for that. And sometimes it helps keep a spell stable for a long time. But once you get past that, it's the same basic system."

"Teach me!"

Shankar pointed out, "Electricity isn't magic to us, but it is to you. We have mathematical laws for it and everything. So it can't be exactly the same."

Lyra shrugged. "We have mathematical laws for magic. Usually impractical to work out, so you normally do it by feel. But getting the real solution is important for diagram stuff, and spell design. And if you're going to improvise with entirely new kinds of magic like Sunset Shimmer did, you can't get a full solution, but knowing how the math works really helps. So it's not like understanding what's going on doesn't help with horn work at all."

He sat down on Rhiannon's bed, hard. "Wow. All right, sign me up too."

I coughed. "So, project 'hair retrieval'. Can I get to it?"

Gwyneth stood up again. "Let me see if I can get out and not freeze. Could have broken it." Before waiting for objections, she stepped out of the circle. We froze, not sure quite what to do - that had been precipitous. Over the next ten seconds, she said, "Normal… a little cooler… getting cold." She stepped back in. "Still cold but not colder… warmer… normal. Well, that was informative. All right. I…"

"That was risky!" Shankar countered.

Gwyneth frowned. "A bit, I guess. Anyway, now we know that I'm pretty well stuck here." She frowned. "Actually, you're right. That was really risky. It didn't occur to me at the time. I'm usually much more careful about these things. Anyway! If magic is real, and also if I'm stuck here, then we need to get some things from my place." She gave me her keychain, her address, the combination to her safe, and the locations and descriptions of certain notebooks. "My neighbors recognize Rhiannon, so it won't seem odd for her to visit and grab some things. Hurry back so we can talk about how this all works."

Lyra looked to Shankar. "Or we could swap again so he can get your stuff, and I can tell you what I know in the mean time."

Gwyneth took a few deep breaths. "What?" So they explained the deal with the new amulet to her, with re-emphasis that Lyra and Shankar's swapping regenerated it when she objected they shouldn't waste it.

Once they were swapped again, Shankar rummaged through Rhiannon's drawers for a pair of jeans and T-shirt, saying, "I think I've had enough of dresses for a while. [This'll] help me feel a little more familiar and manly." - Lyra offered, "If it bothers you we can switch back." - He refused, "This is important and may be time-sensitive. I'll be fine." He pulled the jeans up, then pulled the dress off and shirt on, then reclaimed his car keys and cell phone.

As we headed downstairs, I asked, "How are you holding up?"

"It was one thing when everyone was nice like Lyra, but now we've got something that could have killed someone, and was trying to do mind control. And if they can just make people not believe, then we could lose all of this whenever. Before I was amused-excited-scared. Now, it's not so amusing, and the excitement is wearing off." Once we were in his car, he added, "What about you?"

"Same. I was hoping to just get home and collapse a little after all that walking, and metaphorically collapse after the excitement, but it looks like we're in for much worse if we're going to save Gwyneth."

Even so, we took a minute to collapse a little - rather than start the car, he put his hand across to mine, and I took it. I closed my eyes. "Is there a particular reason you haven't kissed me yet?"

"At the end of the first date you shrank back. I was giving you some time."

Did I? "I'm not sure that was intentional. Could have been a bug in my face or something. But yeah, first date… I wasn't feeling it so much then. Second would have been good. After yesterday and today, I've been too distracted to think about it. You've been awesome though, so as soon as you aren't wearing my roommate's body, I expect I'll be very interested. So, how about we get this fetch quest done with?"

I opened my eyes and looked at him for that last sentence; he smirked and started the car.

We reached her home without incident, entered easily, not even seeing any neighbors. The safe was in the second-floor office, where she'd said it would be. The combination worked. Aside from a number of documents like you'd expect to find in a safe, there was a sealed glass jar with hair in it. I grabbed it, made sure there weren't any others, and re-closed the safe. Then we went looking for the notebooks.

A minute later, my cell phone went off. "Hi, Jack."

"Rachel! She left!"

"What?"

"Well, she had me leave the room so she could make the circle work better by getting naked and lying down. She did, and Lyra talked a little, but then she got up and got dressed and said this was all utterly ridiculous, there was no way that she could be freezing cold, magic doesn't do that. She got out of the circle, and didn't freeze. Not even a little."

I objected, "But we have her keys. She can't drive home. Where is she going?"

"Walking home, or maybe even randomly. She seemed disgusted, distracted, confused. I'm keeping her in line of sight… looks like she's making a call."

At that, Rhiannon's cell phone went off, and Shankar answered. "Hello. uh-huh. Of course you can. I see. How about we meet at your car? We'll be right over." He hung up.

To Jack, I said, "She should be heading back to her car."

"Got it. I'll go back in the apartment. She seems a bit more together, and I don't really feel like being around her spelled-up obnoxiousness any longer."

"Stay on the line?"

But it was too late - he'd closed the call. Shankar had found at least some of the notebooks, and we hurried back. We found her leaning against her car, tapping a foot. Even as we got out, she approached us. "Rhiannon, this has gone quite far enough. I don't know what you slipped me, but it's illegal to drug people. Get that stuff back to me, now. I ought to burn it, with all the trouble it's caused."

Shankar sighed. "You can have everything." He went to the back of the car and grabbed the notebooks, and muttered, "Return to the status quo pro ante isn't so bad, I guess. At least she isn't dying of cold."

I had to agree. No teacher, but no threat to life either. Without thinking, I moved to hand her the jar of hair… and it was quite visibly smaller than it had been, glowing red, and twisting.

She stared. "That's funny. How did you set it on fire like that without breaking the seal? And it is twisting around quite a lot. What did you make that extension out of anyway?" Can we overpower the trap with evidence? This isn't exactly the strongest evidence ever, though.

And then it burned out. She prompted me, "Well?"

Recalling her question, I said, "So far as I know, it was not made of regular matter."

Her frown deepened. "So far as you know…" Pause. "Maybe I should be…" she shivered, and began walking "… getting the fuck back in that pentagram! Crap! It got me again!" We realized she was heading to the apartment, and I rushed to unlock the door; Shankar brought up the books. Since she had started earlier, she made it into the pentagram considerably less cold than she had the first time, and with no further damage to the diagram.

By the time I'd escorted her in, Shankar was back in his own body. We convened around the pentagram.

Gwyneth took a deep breath. "Rachel? What time did you open the safe?"

I shrugged. "About a minute before you called. Maybe two."

"Then I think I know what's going on."

Shankar nodded. "I have a guess too."

I said, "Beyond the idea that my new magic-sucker sponge thing is sucking away the trap as long as it's on and I'm near you and it hasn't got something fatter to suck on like Celestia's hair?"

They nodded.

"And the pentagram is slowing the sucking down enough you don't get cold, but not so much that the trap can go off?"

They nodded.

Shankar said, "Hold a finger in front of your lips and close them nearly all the way and blow really hard. That air is actually colder on your finger than it was in your mouth. I think we're looking at the same thing with magic. Immediately downstream of where it gets past the bottleneck, it gets cold. Whether that's right outside the diagram, like now, or in Gwyneth's body, when she's not in the diagram. When you're not around sucking everything up, then there isn't a pressure drop so it doesn't make a temperature drop."

Gwyneth had raised an eyebrow. "That… doesn't fit with what I know of magic, but it would explain certain things I still found mysterious. I wonder if it's also right in its way. Lyra?"

Lyra was trying the experiment Shankar had proposed. "That's really weird. I never noticed! Anyway, I have no idea."

Gwyneth took a deep breath. "I think I know how to get the trap off, permanently."

Yay! But her tone… "But you're going to need help you're worried we might not want to give?"

She shook her head. "I need to figure out why I put it on myself in the first place."