Journey To A New Home

Twilight Sparkle. Ponyville's resident librarian and allegedly, until proven otherwise, the saviour of Ponyville and greater Equestria three times over. Responsible for the defeat of a chaos lord called Discord, the banishing of another chaotic being known as Nightmare Moon, and the liberation of a place called the 'Crystal Empire' from the evil dictator Tirek. When I was first told about her while waiting for her arrival, I was expecting to meet some badass girl who could kick my ass five ways to next Sunday without so much as a lost breath on her part. Not the nervous but easily excitable bookworm that was standing beside my bed this very moment, who was just staring at me with a sense of hesitant curiosity from behind a notepad and pencil.

I swear, the silence in the room was driving me crazy. I wanted to say something, anything, to get her to start doing something, but every time I made the smallest hint of movement or activity, she would either jump back or start writing notes on whatever it was I just did. The last few minutes were spent just keeping eye contact, waiting for one of us to make first contact. I could start to see the slightest bit of frustration in her eyes; perhaps she felt that she dreamt me asking for her help back in the field. Maybe she thinks I'm not as sentient as I seem. Guess it's time to break that theory.

"Okay. This silence is killing me. Are you going to ask something or what?" I said flatly, shooting her a frustrated look. As expected, she flinched and took a few steps back away, before she regained her composure and walked back towards me. She averted her look down to her notes, and seemed to be avoiding the need to look at me again. I sighed and rubbed my face with my palm. "Sorry for the outburst, but one of us was going to crack soon anyway. Figured I might as well cut to the damn chase." I held out my other hand, thankful that Redheart had freed my restraints before Twilight had walked in. "Name's Davenport, Alvin Davenport. But you can call me Chopper, if you want."

She looked at my hand with obvious apprehension, before she took a breath, stepped forward and grabbed it. I started shaking it gently, then let go to let it rest back on the best. She looked to visibly relax after our greeting.

"I'm Twil-"

"Twilight Sparkle, yes, I've been told who you are and what you do." She recoiled at my remark, but I continued. "Nurse Redheart informed me that you were the one that spotted me. I wanted to thank you for that, actually."

"Oh, it was nothing at all, really..." I had to blink, because I swear she started acting like a typical bashful teenager; arms behind the back, fiddling with the feet, slight blush on the face, averted focus. "I just noticed that part of the cover to your vehicle, if that's what it was, was missing. The scorch marks around the edges hinted at a forced explosive ejection, so I mentally plotted the possible trajectories. It was just luck that you happened to have collapsed next to the missing component."

"But you noticed it in the first place. Without that, I might not have survived..." I trailed off, wanting to avoid that particular line of conversation.

"Well, you might have succumbed to shock but I really doubt you could have died from your injuries. Redheart told me that they were not as severe as they seemed."

"That's a good point." I took a deep breath, trying to regain composure after having flashes of my final moments over November City replay in my mind. I saw a glimpse of the stadium as I braced myself for impact.

"Alvin?" I was brought back from the quiet voice beside me. "You okay Alvin? You zoned out for a minute, something on your mind?" I shook my head.

"No, no, it's fine. Just taking this all in, that's all." I sighed and looked back up to Twilight. "I guess you have a number of questions about me and how I arrived here?" Her face seemed to light up at the very mention of questions.

"Oh! Yes, matter of fact, I do have some questions. You answered my first one already though, about your name. That brings me to the second question. What are you? You obviously aren't an Earth Pony, or a pony of any kind. Or any kind of race that we know of..." she trailed off into thought, before she regained focus and locked eyes with me. It was a little unnerving, to be honest.

"Well, I don't know everything, but I can tell you that I'm a human male. Scientifically speaking, and to my limited understanding, we are an evolved form of the great apes. From there, it gets a little muddled when you factor in the bits of missing evidence or the conflicting ideologies of the many religions out there." Twilight opened her mouth to say something, but I cut her off. "Before you ask, do not ask me about religion or evolution. What I just said there is basically all I know about that area." She huffed then looked to cross out something on her notepad.

"Now, where are you from?"

"Tough question. Am I still on Planet Earth?" The blank look I received from her practically answered my question. "I guess not. Well then, I come from another planet, called Earth. It's located in the Sol system of the Milky Way galaxy, if that means anything to you." The blank look remained unchanged, though her pencil was slowly writing down something onto her notepad. "Which given the fact that I'm on another planet with different history and likely a different approach on science, is probably the correct assumption." I said that last part more for myself, but the frustration wasn't lost on Twilight.

"You're probably right in that regard. We haven't done much study of our surroundings in space, aside from Princess Luna. But that's a given, as she has control over the moon and the night's sky." A princess controls the moon? Well, new planet, new rules I suppose. "Her sister, Princess Celestia controls the sun throughout the day."

"I see... yeah, we didn't have anything like that back on Earth. We orbit around our sun, while our moon orbits around us. We also rotate on an axis during our orbit. Our orbit isn't perfectly circular as well. It's slightly offset, meaning for parts of the year our planet is closer to the sun, while in other parts its further away. It's for that reason why we get different seasons and different weather conditions." I waited for her to finish writing down this information. "At least, that's what we're taught in school and such. For all I know, it could be different."

Twilight finished up her last note and then crossed an item off her list while writing down something beside it.

"Okay then. What about that thing you arrived in? What on Equus is that?" I internally chuckled at her familiar but slightly different version of an expression I was familiar with.

"Well, that is... was an F-15C Eagle. It's an air superiority fighter aircraft, powered by two Pratt & Whitney F-100-220 afterburning turbofan engines." Twilight was rapidly writing down what I was saying. Normally I wouldn't be providing technical specifications of a front-line combat aircraft to a civilian, but then the information I was sharing was something a civilian could look up in an encyclopaedia or on an website. "It can fly at a maximum of sixty thousand feet–" Twilight's writing started to falter "– and can climb at a rate of fifty thousand feet a minute. Each engine can produce around fifteen thousand pounds of force, twenty-four thousand on afterburner." Her writing started to pick up pace as she started writing out what I thought might be equations to interpret the statistics. "With a typical load, it weighs about forty-four and a half thousand pounds. But the engines provide a thrust-to-weight ratio of one point zero four, which is typical for that kind of aircraft. The engines also allow it to reach speeds in excess of two and a half times the speed of sound." Twilight's pencil snapped at that fact. With wide eyes and open mouth, she looked up from her paper and straight into my eyes.

"T-t-two and a-a h-half t-times...?" Her voice was shaky, as if she had been told that something immensely sad or shocking had happened. I guess by her reaction, hearing that my jet could fly to such speed could qualify.

"Yeah, but that's at max output with a clean load. Very rarely do I ever actually need to fly at that speed. Plus, going that fast needs a lot of fuel, something that I can't carry that much on a regular basis." She just stared at me for a few seconds, before she shook her head and recomposed herself once more.

"Right, okay then. One thing that you said early on piqued my interest. What exactly does 'air superiority fighter' mean?" Oh. Yes... I was hoping she might not have picked up on that. Then again, they would have figured out what those long poles fitted with fins on my aircraft really were; AIM-7M Sparrow and AIM-9M Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. I drew in a breath as I pondered my response.

"Twilight, when was the last time you had a large scale war, where nations fought other nations?" She thought about this for a second or two, a few seconds longer than I was expecting.

"Well, the last documented war was the Griffon/Pony uprising, a few hundred years ago. There was a brief skirmish with the Changelings last year, during my older brother's wedding, but that only lasted a day and was fought off." A few hundred years ago... they've been at peace for that long? This was going to make this new admission hard to break.

"I see... Twilight, before I arrived, I was in the middle of fighting a war. It had only started a few months ago and was being fought by former allies: Osea, my home and the nation I was fighting for; and Yuktobania, a nation across the Ceres Ocean. I don't understand why they attacked us, or why we retaliated in kind. I was only fighting to defend my home, not invade them after we successfully pushed them back. Anyways, my F-15 is a weapon of war, called a fighter jet. It flies in the sky and supports surface forces, as well as keeps the sky clear of opposing aircraft. F-15's in particular are made to fight and clear the sky ahead of support and attack aircraft. I can carry upwards of eight self-guided high-explosive missiles designed for the sole purpose of shooting down and destroying enemy aircraft. They can be fired at and hit a target at roughly thirty-one miles away, well before I'd be able to physically see them." I took a moment to think, and study Twilight's reaction. Surprisingly enough, she wasn't writing any of this down. She was just looking at me intently, hanging off of every word I said. "You know how I said I was in the middle of a war? I was speaking literally; I was in the middle of a mission when I got transported across to here."

"Is that why your aircraft was pull of puncture holes and bellowing smoke before you crashed?"

"Pretty much." Twilight was about to go and ask something, but I saw her hesitate. I knew exactly what she was going to ask next.

"Originally, our mission was a ceremonial fly past during a speech to be made by our Vice President. It was some pro-war rally he was holding to gain civilian support for the war. Before you ask; even though they are weapons, jets like the F-15 can be a pretty sight to watch in the sky. In the right hands, they can be made to dance beautifully. Anyway, we completed our flyby and took up our station to fly our patrol. With leadership out and about during a war, we had to protect them one way or another. It wasn't too long after we started our patrol when our 'eyes-in-the-sky' reported possible hostile contacts approaching the stadium where the rally was being held. We flew out to intercept and visually confirm their identity when they fired on us.

The situation went down hill from there. Myself and my flight, we had to fight through wave after wave of enemy fighters. I remember pulling into a position behind an aircraft making an approach on the stadium, before I felt a sharp jolt run across my own. I'd been strafed by another aircraft, and his rounds had impacted in such a way that it knocked out one of my engines and shorted most of my critical electronics. It was by some miracle that I hadn't exploded as a result of my fuel igniting. Still, I was basically out of the fight by that point. Now, I could have ejected from my plane then and there, but I didn't. If I did, my wreckage would have landed on one of the thousands of homes below me, potentially killing a family. I didn't want that on my conscience. I instead kept my jet flying while looking for someplace to put my jet down. One of my flight members, Nagase, she recommended I put it down in the stadium. Only problem was that it was still packed with civilians. So I kept flying until it was clear.

By that point, the amount of damage I had sustained had wiped out my only lifeline: my ejector seat. Every combat aircraft like mine is fitted with a seat designed to be fired out and away from the aircraft in case of an emergency, like if you had sustained critical battle damage for instance. Each seat has a parachute that is clipped into a harness that the pilot wears. Once the pilot ejects, and gravity takes effect, the seat falls away from the pilot to free the parachute and deploy it, giving the pilot a safe way to the ground. Mine was broken. I was effectively trapped in my aircraft, resigned to my fate. Still, if it meant that I lost my life saving tens of thousands of others, it was going to be worth it. That's what we're trained to do, do whatever we can to save lives, even if it means making the ultimate sacrifice.

I waited until I thought it was going to be clear, then I guided my crippled aircraft into the stadium. I listened to the cries and pleas from my friends to bail out, to do something other than what I was currently doing. I braced myself, waiting for my life to end in a ball of flame. Next thing I know, there's a flash of light, then darkness, then I see I'm still gliding my damaged aircraft through the skies here. Looked like it was clear enough for me to attempt a crash landing, so I did. Slid to a halt, popped my canopy and made my way out of my jet. Passed out shortly after you found me, and then wake to find myself in medical care."

I sighed, catching my breath and letting my jaw rest from the sheer amount of speech I had just undertaken. I rubbed my eyes of the small tears that had started to develop, and then looked at Twilight. She just sat there staring at me but also staring into space, eyes glistening as tears ran down the sides of her face. Her arms were wrapped around her sides, like she was hugging herself. She sniffed and her eyes refocused on me. She said nothing as she stood up from the chair she was seated in and stepped over to me. I was going to ask what she was doing when she leaned over and started to hug me. I was shocked by the unexpected contact, but I did what I thought was right and returned the gesture.