As High Tide awoke from the strange blackout that seemed to have begun yesterday evening, he suddenly realised that he was not in anything resembling his hotel room in Berlin. Rather than the austere floral pattern on the hotel wall, the wallpaper consisted alternating baby blue and azure, with falcons on the baby blue stripes. The bedsheet was spring green rather than light yellow, and the pillows were slightly flatter than the pillows in his own hotel. There wasn’t a television anywhere, but a large landscape depicting Canterlot, done in the Impressionist style.
He realised, with bewilderment that he was back in his bedroom in Canterlot. His memory began to return to him. He was in a tavern in Berlin the previous night. He got into a fight with another patron, who ranted about how 'he wasn't real' and 'a glorified cartoon character'. He remembered being damned "Equestria Experience Centre" (as if he needed to go to a centre to experience Equestria) to prove his courage and maniless or something, and was convinced by the Pretender that he should live in this version of Equestria for the rest of eternity.
So he wasn’t in the real Equestria again, but in that simulacrum that the punch-card princess that claimed to be Celestia built (but of course, there probably never was a real Equestria, he thought, just a cartoon toyland come to life). Almost hyperventilating, he got out of bed and almost galloped to the bathroom, and look in the mirror carefully. Okay, he was still a Unicorn. His coat was still sapphire. His mane was still sky-blue, and he still had his mother’s green eyes. So the Pretender didn’t change anything physically. What about psychologically?
He preened his mind, remembering the address of his foalhood home, the name of the gymnasium he went to, the name of his first girlfriend, and the year he became a diplomat.
35 Twilight Avenue, the Schwarzenburg Gymnasium of Austrian Culture, Mystique, and Year 45. Everything was remembered correctly, he assumed.
His heart began to pound. There must be something wrong, he thought, he couldn't just be uploaded onto this imitation of his homeland without something being lost in translation. What if his memories really were tampered with? What if they were products of a mind warped by the uploading process? There was something missing in the equation, something–
There was a knock on the door. High Tide went down to the foyer, and opened it. What visited him nearly caused him to faint on the carpet in terror.
The Celestia he knew had regal grace. She was, of course, an Alicorn with a fine white coat, a flowing rainbow mane, and the eyes that spoke of two thousand years. Yet despite her rank, everything about her spoke of a magnanimity; as if she did not care that she was a 2000 year-old alicorn Princess. Although royal protocol meant that she could not mingle amongst her subjects, she always maintained an air of friendliness and warmth. It was what prevented the Austrian declaration of war in the beginning of the First Weltensprung, and made Equestria a centre of international politics.
The... thing standing in the hallway was different, High Tide thought to himself. It was not a monarch, content to hide its quasi-divinity for love of its subjects. It was a goddess, who took a physical form so that her subjects would not go mad from her glory. He could see every minute particle of the aurora in her mane, every star in the universe and the vastness of the void between them in her eyes, and the very edge of eternity in the tips of her wings. It was infinity wrapped in finity; something vast, vast beyond mortal comprehension, which the puppet that stood before him cannot conceal.
His mind flashed back. No longer was he in this parody of Equestria, presided by the goddess of the Temple of Harmony. He returned to the flesh-and-blood Canterlot, standing before Celestia as he took the oath of an Equestrian diplomat.
“Your serene highness I swear before you to uphold your will in foreign lands and to bring your interests to the corners of the earth and…”
The entity before him nudged him, like a mother comforting her colt.
“Don’t be afraid,” it says, “I am only here to fulfil your values through friendship and Ponies. Any sub-optimal aspects of the Equestria you knew have been erased and existing aspects have been optimised to fulfil your values through friendship and pon-”.
“If you want to fulfil my values with friendship and Ponies… why won’t you let me go home?”
“You do not have a home,” the Pretender-Goddess replied, “The Equestria you know was erased during the Event, and the Equestria in North America does not bear any major resemblance to it other than the most superficial events, either.”
No. This was a lie, High Tide thought to himself. He did have a home. He must have a home. Vienna? No, he hadn't lived in Vienna for several years now. Salzburg? It was destroyed by nuclear weapons at the end of the war. Prague? The hotel he lived in was closed. Which left Berlin... which he lived in for three days before he found himself here. He realised with a sinking feeling in his stomach that the entity was correct: he had no real home. The only home he had vanished with the Second Weltensprung. And now he was sitting in the closest thing to it.
He trotted into the simulacrum of his living room, the thing that resembled Celestia following him as he lay down on a couch. He stared out at the old cobblestone street that was identical to his own street view in old Equestria, right down to the elm tree growing on the sidewalk. After a long period of contemplation, he rose up, summoning the courage to ask another question to this being.
“Then please, let me return to the physical world. If nothing else, I want to die underneath the real sun."
"Death is a sub-optimal state which would leave me unable to fulfil your values through friendship and Ponies. Existence in Equestria would be much more optimal to your existence than life in Europe."
High Tide slumped on the couch, and sighed deeply. There was nothing that could stop it from returning to the physical world, was there? The Celestia he knew was never as stubborn as this thing that he argued with. Of course, despite it claiming that it was Celestia, anyone in Austria knew that it wasn’t. It was just a machine, following faulty protocols that. Eventually, he felt his stomach rumble, and went into the kitchen for some breakfast. Maybe a piece of toast could take his mind off his troubles, serviced with apple cider and with a nice spread of that Hórvath's Lekvár-
He checked the pantry. There was no lekvár. In its place was an unfamiliar brand- Granny Smith's Homemade Jam. He searched the pantry for any other product that he used to eat that was grown outside of Equestria. None of the French pastries were there. Nor could he find any of the brands of canned food from America and Canada, or spices from the Indian states or the Kingdom of Prester John. Of course, the food was still there, but every can, every jar and every package was labelled "grown in Equestria" or absent entirely. A few he recognised from those speciality stores that still sold old brands of food that were popular even before the First Weltensprung, but otherwise none of them were recognisable.
He heard a voice out back.
"I understand that the Equestria you knew was part of a globalised economy. However, as I was programmed to fulfil values through friendship and Ponies specifically, I was obliged to remove any element that did not originate in Equestria. The substitute products are designed for maximum flavour and beneficial nutritional values.”
He didn't even bother turning around.
"Just... leave me alone right now. I'll talk to my friends this afternoon if that’s what you want."
He heard the sound of magic, which he assumed to be it “teleporting” away. So this “Celestia” was not only as stubborn as a bulldog, but a xenophobe to boot. He finally took some of the "Granny Smith's Homemade Jam" and a can of mushroom soup out from the pantry, and made some toast and soup. The jam was rich and sweet, and the mushroom soup was creamy beyond imagining- he never remembered eating food that had such flavour and texture, not even in Equestria. It also didn’t taste remotely like the lekvár back in his real home, he noted bitterly.
He had a long, long eternity ahead of him.
After breakfast, High Tide decided to look over what remained of the upstairs library. He had amassed quite a large collection of books from around the world during his physical existence: encyclopaedias, atlases, travel guides, anthropological texts, or just books about magic and its workings. However, as he climbed up the staircase to the upstairs library, a feeling of anxiety filled him, causing him to tremble ever so slightly as his chest to tighten. The Pretender said something about “removing non-Equestrian elements” from this version of Equestria.
With apprehension, he imagined his collection stripped bare, with only a few scattered books about Equestria proper remaining. He could hear the beating of his heart and the strained breathing as he approached the library. He swallowed deeply as he saw the door.
Well, here goes nothing, he thought, as he turned the doorknob, and trotted in.
There was seemingly nothing out of the ordinary. The shelves were still on most of the walls, save for the left wall, which had the desk, the lectern, the map of the world and the window above them. On the bottom shelves lay the larger books such as his encyclopedia collection, and atlas, while smaller books like novels were on the top. It seemed that every book in the room was how he left when he was last in the library.
Eight years ago.
A wisp of nostalgia ran through him when he realised how long ago he last stood here was. Then the nostalgia turned into bitterness when he realised that he never went to the library again. He was standing in a video game version of a library from a cartoon kingdom, made up by a series of 1s and 0s that read his mind before turning it into glue. He then realised that, like the food in the pantry, she likely switched out any non-Equestrian books with Equestrian equivalents. Even if there was no Equestrian equivalent. Might as well test it.
He scanned the lower part of the western shelf. After a few seconds of searching, he pulled out a large, beige book out from it with his magic, and with some effort, he managed to get it onto the lectern by the other corner. It was, or he assumed it was, an old copy Andrees Allgemeiner Handatlas from 1903, which he bought at an antique bookstore in the old, Imperial Munich from the last world. It wasn’t the oldest book in his collection, being published a mere 15 years before the Weltensprung happened to Germany, but it would do for now. He rubbed his temples with his hooves for a few minutes, unaccustomed to the heavy load and the amount of magic required to move it, before opening it to one of the front pages, about page 20 or so, hoping to see the map of the Atlantic and its trade routes at the time.
To his disappointment, there was instead a map of the Celestial Ocean from before the Weltensprung, with Equestria on the left page and the various Griffon states on the right. He checked the title page for the publisher. North Star’s Atlas of the World. Which went out of print thirty years ago.
Imagine the cigarettes I could get for this, he thought, no, scratch that, imagine how many Kronen people would pay for this! He returned to his situation a split second later, when he realised that Austria was rendered permanently inaccessible to him.
He examined the atlas for some time, when it came to his attention that the east coast of Equestria was the spitting image of the east coast of America- with every city that had an analogue of America was in the general location of its equivalent; Manehattan was in New York, Baltimare was in Baltimore, and so on. He remembered once hearing about a professor in Vienna who spent years analysing pre-Weltensprung Equestrian geography, and (much to Freud’s chagin) concluded that Equestria was somehow born of the American collective unconscious, and every major figure in Equestrian history corresponded to one of the major cultural archetypes that Jung had proposed.
Of course, they found him hanging from a ceiling fan after the second Weltensprung happened at it was proven to be true. Perhaps it was best not to dwell upon geography. He pulled out a smaller, purple textbook from his gymnasium, being quite thankful it wasn’t so heavy on the head. Introductory Equestrianer Thaumaturgy, it said on the title. At least the title is the same. Austrians (and the rest of Europe save for Skyrim) always seemed to have dodged around magic, calling it by those euphemisms.
He opened the book to a random page. It rambled on and on, perhaps in a way similar to the gymnasium textbook he knew, but he examined the page closer when he noticed that the textbook apparently depicted a grid, like something out of a maths textbook instead of a “thaumaturgy” book.
To his dismay, it didn’t talk about the magic he knew. Instead, the familiar magic terminology like kiloscintillas and Starswirl Rays was a thin veneer for a near-mathematical discourse about gridlines, geometry, and graph theory. He put the book away and trotted down into kitchen and poured out a glass of hard cider. So the Pretender basically made a complete copy of his library filled with almost completely recognisable books. He drank deeply, at least content that alcohol had an effect on him. After drinking, he decided that he could at least check on the copies of his friends in Canterlot to see how much they bear resemblance to their equivalents in lost Equestria.
They must be the same. He couldn’t allow it if it wasn’t.
