I was having the falling dream. I hate the falling dream. Every time, it’s the same old faulty sensation of downward acceleration accompanied by adrenaline-induced stomach discomfort. Then I wake up on the floor. Everything hurts after the falling dream.
This particular example was proceeding the same as all the others. I could do nothing but cross my legs, check my invisible watch, and wait for the dream to take its sweet time getting on with it. It wasn’t even a good falling dream. The good ones include the sensation of my mane going every which way as the not-breeze rustles against my coat. I doubted I could trust this specimen to even give me a view of my hooves.
Stupid, slapdash, falling dream. I know you never understand the fact that I have wings, but is it too much to ask for some bare minimum effort?
It wasn’t until my third tongue-drying time trial that I realized something was off. I should have felt the backache long before now. The thought shot through my mind like lightning.
“Whoa!”
My body spasmed in a mock-reaction to hitting the ground. But instead of feeling the cold, forsakenly hard floor beneath me, I started rotating about wildly as the cool, night air washed over me. No part of me reported contact with the ground, or anything for that matter.
Great, a falling dream within a falling dream. I started adjusting my imaginary fetlock watch to account for inter-dream time zone shifts while I waited for the real ground to get back to me.
Then I realized if I was falling, I was doing a good job of missing the ground. Specifically, if I was aiming for something below me, I should not be moving upwards. I took stock of my surroundings.
My library was below me.
I slowly shut my eyes and opened them.
My library was below me, and farther away.
My eyes slid shut and then opened again.
I stared at my library, which was undoubtedly below me, along with the rest of Ponyville, both of which were getting further away.
I was very still and quiet for a moment. Except for my eye, which was earning its Diarchal Decoration for twitching above and beyond the call of duty. My body drifted silently upward, surrounded in a green glow that had my coat standing on end.
But where am I going?
I stuck out a wing and scooped myself around, trusting the light to support me. All that was there was a thick bank of clouds growing steadily closer. My stomach suddenly felt the tiniest bit uneasy. Some discomfort is natural when a pony is mysteriously levitated from her bed towards an unknown destination by unknown parties in the middle of the night.
Unknowns. Too many unknowns. I set about trying to piece together an answer. Maybe it was Rainbow Dash playing one of her pranks? But then, she would never be up at this hour. Pinkie Pie, then? But she couldn’t stand on clouds…
My thoughts were cut short by a cold, damp, collision with the cloudbank. I still don’t know how pegasi stand sleeping on these things. Semi-frozen tufts of airborne water are not in any way comfortable. Doubly so when unknown forces are trying to yank me through them despite the efforts of my recently bestowed pegasus magic to make them solid.
I tried to relax the magic enough to at least slip through, but try as I might, I could not turn it off. I had to settle for a good five minutes of being dredged through a cold, damp, cloudbank that clung like so much spider web to every inch of my body. When I finally emerged on the other side, I had a sore nose, was coated with dew, missing a few feathers, and seriously considering knocking myself out to wake up when it was over.
That all changed when I saw what loomed silently in the middle of the cloudbank. It looked like two metallic grey saucers had been put together by their bases into some kind of broad hourglass shape. There were no openings at all: it was one smooth surface. The whole sight sent a tingle trickling down my spine, ending in a little flick of my tail. I certainly hadn’t read of anything like this before.
Before I could cast create notebook and writing implements, I found myself floating above the lip of the top saucer. The green glow about me vanished, and the pit of my stomach dropped out.
“Whoa!”
Bong-ka-tunk-shrisssssssssssssh-shrash.
“Ow!”
I found myself settled in a heap at the bottom of the metal funnel. I pried my eyes apart to get my bearings…
Hiss!
“Eep!”
Thunk!
“Oof!"
Shhhhhhhraaa-ct.
… and the bottom of the funnel opened up, sending me tumbling unceremoniously into the depths of the craft. My barrel collided with the hard metal floor, knocking the wind out of me.
As I lay heaving, there was a soft, sterile, whir from above, and something plucked a single hair from my mane. I took a sharp breath and instinctively curled my legs under myself. The creepy-crawlies danced all over my back, but I could not quite gather the effort to raise my neck yet. All I could do was be a small, exposed, shell-less turtle until my body recovered.
The soft whir retreated off to the side. My ears swiveled after it, but it faded into the background hum coming through the metal. I opened my eyes. I gathered I was in a thick-walled transparent tube in the middle of a circular room. Before me was a black chair with some sort of holographic displays projected around it: mostly graphs and charts surrounded by rapidly shifting symbols that I could not read.
Reclining in the chair was what looked to be a grey, hairless sloth dressed in red robes with gold trim. Its head rested idly on the bridge formed from its three-fingered hands. I stared into those big, black, stoic eyes, and it stared idly back.
My breath returning, I picked myself up and looked around. The clear enclosure was transparent all the way around, giving me a full view of the room. There were several raised rings around the space from which holographic displays popped up. The one nearest to me caught my attention: it depicted the double helix of DNA spiraling upwards surrounded with more symbols. The display was wired to a clear capsule whose contents were being scanned by a thin green pane of light. I looked closer.
It held my hair.
The room swam. Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. I had to lay down. I had scooped my share of frogs from ponds and caught jars of fireflies. Now I was the firefly. I looked in panic to the sloth, who looked on with indifference.
“Hey!” I shouted, pounding the transparent cage with my hoof. It thunked like metal. Melody’s Musical Metals placed it as aluminum in particular, if memory served. “You’ve captured a living, breathing, thinking pony, and you’re not even going to take notes!? What kind of researcher are you?”
The sloth observed. Nothing more.
My ears lay back: I was less than a firefly to it.
I looked around the room again. And why should I be anything else? The equipment in the room was ages ahead of anything I had ever seen. My DNA was being sequenced by light and kept perfectly intact. We could hardly do it with chemicals and clunky, hacked together spells, and that destroyed the sample in the process. Then I recalled I hadn’t seen any form of wings or other form of propulsion, yet the craft had gotten here somehow.
My breath caught in my throat. Where had it come from? This creature was like no other I had seen or heard of before. Ponies had visited every corner of the planet by now. Certainly any race that wished to know of us would have only had to ask. A race this advanced would certainly have made contact.
That only leaves… My ears fell, and I chewed my lip. No, it was a crazy thought. Princess Luna knew the night. The stars were hers. Certainly, she would have known of this creature if it were from… up there.
“Too-weit beep too-onk oik…”
My thoughts were interrupted by some chatter outside of my cell. I strained my ears, but could not understand the language. Fortunately, there was a spell for that. My horn lit, and the noises garbled around in my ears until finally:
“-completed. Genetic tests read below required investigative ranges, awaiting dismissal command.” The voice was monotone and did not come from the sloth. In fact, it did not seem like it was made by a creature at all.
The sloth just stared at me. No, not at me: through me. The me who had studied for years under the best tutors a pony could have, managed every test, and even completed spells that had troubled unicorns for centuries!
My stomach tied itself in knots.
Me, who was the firefly.
The sloth looked on. And on. And on. It did not even look at its displays.
Hey! Fireflies are interesting too!
A fire lit in my belly. I reared up and pounded the tube with my forehooves.
“Hey! You took me out of my bed in the middle of the night with no explanation! You’ve taken my hair without even bothering to ask me if you could! And now you’re not even going to look at your findings!? How can you call yourself a researcher if you’re not even curious about what you’re studying? You know what you are? I’ll tell you what you are, you…”
I gave myself unto my inner poet for a fitting description of his deplorable study habits. I am also pleased to report my incidental discovery that poetry is sometimes foaming at the mouth.
“New report: high entropy detected in sound waves emanating from the subject,” came a monotone report. “Possibility exists that species is intelligent. Commencing base sapience detection. Legal team is on standby, line 2.”
Test!?
The word brought my train of thought to a screeching halt. I was suddenly aware of the slobber down my front, which I set about brushing off with my hoof posthaste. Examiners hate a sloppy student. Then my ears flattened against my skull: I forgot my quill! My breaths came faster and faster.
Whoa! Calm down, Twilight, I coached myself.
I’m a firefly, but I’m not a firefly, and I can show them but I forgot my quill, so I’m gonna fail and make us all fireflies! myself babbled.
Me had a point. Examiners are really picky about being prepared. But I couldn’t think about that now.
Uh, maybe you can ask somepony for one? I suggested. Some examiners are nice like that-
Thunk!
As the arm withdrew to the top of the chamber, I found myself staring at what looked to be a low metal table with three holes in it: one a triangle, one a square, and one a circle. There was a small cylinder in front of me, also of metal.
Whew, no quill needed for this one. I sighed with relief. But wait: there weren’t any instructions! Maybe I have to use the quill I was supposed to have- No, no, no, get ahold of yourself, Twilight! All of Equestria is being tested here, and you’ve got to be one of their best test takers. You can do this. You have to do this. We’re not fireflies. Focus.
Step one of test taking: review the facts. I cast my attention over the simple setup. There was a cylinder, and there were holes. It was allegedly a test of intelligence, but that could be a blind. This was a scientific study, after all, and those couldn’t be valid unless the subject did not know what the desired outcome was. It would be biased otherwise.
Or maybe they hadn’t counted on my inter-linguistic transformation spell? Maybe it really was a test of intelligence? Well, then they wanted a sign of intelligence. But what sign would satisfy some strange creature I’ve never seen before? Ponies studying pony intelligence was a convoluted field in and of itself. Some ponies had made tests for it, but then that always begged the question: were they measuring intellectual ability or just the pony’s ability to take the test? The really smart ponies usually failed-
“No detected reaction to stimulus within acceptable timescale,” came the voice. “Conclusion: non-sapient. SES funding forbidden for the study of non-sapient creatures. Engaging auto-dismissal.”
“Wha?” I yelped.
Chunk! Shwish!
“Aaaaaaah!”
The floor below me opened up, sending me plummeting into the cold night air. The last I heard from the ship was a new voice:
“Wha? Terribly sorry, Sadi, I must have dozed off there. Anything to report?”
I tumbled over and over. There were two fluffy things clamped to my sides, but I couldn’t stop to figure out what they were: I was a firefly, and I was falling, and I wasn’t going to miss the ground, and I was a firefly, and I failed the test, and that meant we all failed the test, and I failed everyone, and-
Thwuff! “Oof!”
And clouds were really cold. And they weren’t soft when impacted at terminal velocity.
Sniffle, sniffle, hoooooooonk! Bwaaaaahahahhh!
But they make good tissues.
And sometimes that’s all a firefly needs.
