Love Letters Written on the Back of a Star Chart

Chapters

The Bat and the Believer (part 1)
The Stubborn and the Persistent (part 1)
The Boy and the Filly
The Bat and the Believer (part 2)
Valen and Marigold (part 1)
The Stubborn and the Persistent (part 2)
The Brony and the Mule (part 1)
The Bat and the Believer (part 3)
Valen and Marigold (part 2)
The Stubborn and the Persistent (part 3)
The Bat and the Believer (part 4)
At Midnight
The Brony and the Mule (part 2)
The Poet and the Changeling (part 1)
The Equines
The Astronaut and the Flutterpony
The Brony and the Mule (part 3)
The Poet and the Changeling (part 2)
At Dawn
At Twilight

The Bat and the Believer (part 1)

Rainbow Dash pawed at the searing sand. As it tickled her nose, a frustrated snort unwittingly escaped her nostrils, and in that split second, she would have given anything to be somewhere else.

Five hundred feet above sea level, for instance. That would have been perfect. Under any other circumstances, she would have been there already. Rainbow Dash really wasn’t the sort of pony to let social niceties keep her from escaping an awkward situation.

The snort was joined by a fierce ear twitch. Rainbow ducked her head, as if hiding her cheeks would keep anyone from reading how embarrassed she was. Being a pegasus was usually awesome, but the way Dash saw it, Celestia must have decided the race needed a drawback to make up for all that awesomeness.

Wingboners really sucked.

Being teased by earth ponies for what looked like a wingboner was one thing. Dash could shrug that off with her aura of all-around radicalness. Ground-pounders made that mistake all the time; they just couldn’t tell the difference between the myriad forms of subtlety in the body language of wings. Wings popped open whenever a pegasus was hit with a rush of adrenaline, an adaption meant to help them take flight whenever a hydra popped out of the ground where they were browsing.

But female wing erection was another story. That day in ‘Health’ class had been one of those many when Rainbow Dash had put her head down, silently sure that she didn’t need to pay attention. This would be one of those things a cool pony like her would never need to worry about.

She regretted that just a little bit now. Her flight muscles were locking up, and she was trying to fight it so hard that it made her wingblades hurt. Her wings turned stiff, losing their graceful curve and flattening out like a board. She could feel every single feather separating from each other. So it felt like everyone for miles around must have noticed her wingboner. Even though she squashed her eyes shut and tried to think about falling—everypony on the weather team said that helped—her wings just got flatter and harder.

With her beautiful wings so malformed, it was impossible to fly. The fact sank in as Dash tried a couple ungainly and extremely embarrassing flaps anyway. Her breath came short. Her hooves splayed. Her own body, her wings no less, had betrayed her. And she was trapped on the ground. There was no worse nightmare.

Of course, in a foul stroke of irony, that was the point. Pegasi were an extremely flighty race by nature, and as best as biologists could suppose, the adaption of wing erection had arisen to keep a pegasus mare from suddenly taking wing and disappearing in the middle of intercourse. Health class had probably thought that the knowledge would make fillies feel better, but it only gave Dash a target to rage at, her primordial ancestors for being total wimps.

It wasn’t her fault! Not really. This was supposed to be a day vacation. All she’d wanted was to have some fun as long as she was stuck on Earth for a month, being paraded around as the Element of Loyalty. When she’d asked her human friends what kinds of stuff they did for fun, an activity where she wouldn’t have to be stuck in a dress had sounded like a great idea.

But by the time they got to the beach, Rainbow Dash had done so many barrel rolls while following the van down I-71 that Tom said the FAA, whoever that was, had already called to say she couldn’t fly over the highway anymore. And what was worse, she had kinks in her wings. Kinks were still better than being enclosed in a tiny box like that car for an hour, but it didn’t put her in the best mood to join the others for a swim.

She’d been lying on her towel, preparing to just sort of nap it off like usual, when the most bizarre sensation gathered at the base of her withers. When her head snapped around, Luke was digging his fingers into the skin between her wings.

She would have gotten out of there quick. But Rainbow Dash could already feel the tension in her wing blades melting away like hot butter. So this was why Captain Spitfire was always telling her to get massages. And, yet another pleasant surprise, when it was a human touching her instead of a pony, she didn’t freak out as much. His fingers weren’t anything like hooves, and she could just sort of pretend it was a bunch of noodles circling her flight muscles.

Still, she’d made sure to tell him, “Dude, you don’t have to do that. I’ll be fine in a few minutes.”

Luke had just smirked. “This is an investment. I can’t have my fantasy stunt flying team go all to pieces on me.”

“Pretty sure that’s not…ah, right there…not a thing.”

This had been a nice discovery. For once she’d be able to join in when everypony else was giving out back rubs and nose pecks. It felt good to be chill about being touched, and Luke probably felt the same way about this, given how reserved he usually was. Luke was one of those friends of Tom’s who nopony knew very well. He looked friendly enough, with his face always clean, and his eyes bright. But he was an odd, quiet sort, keeping to himself even when he visited Equestria.

Dash didn’t think she’d ever seen him touch a pony before. And she was pleased to know he could be so relaxed with her. So she’d stretched out and given in to his administrations.

It had been pretty great until Lyra showed up and made a comment about how ‘comfortable’ Dash was getting. Stupid Lyra. Had to ruin the moment for both of them. Dash’s wings hadn’t been doing anything, not like she said. Dash was just unfolding them a bit so Luke could get at her back easier.

Of course Luke had stopped after that. And since Dash couldn’t un-hear what Lyra had said, she couldn’t keep from noticing certain things.

It still wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t told Luke to wear such tight green swim trunks to the beach. And she wouldn’t have cared if he did. She’d never even noticed a human guy’s arousal before, much less thought of them in connection to…that…stuff. Not that she’d been looking! It had been pure accident that she happened to notice. There were just so many bodies out here on the beach, and she’d never seen so many humans wearing so little before—hayseed! It’d just happened!

Rainbow Dash took surprisingly little comfort in the knowledge that almost no one in this sea of humans had even heard of a wingboner before. One was enough. Tom was wading in from the shallows as fast as his legs could churn, and Dash didn’t like the look on his face one bit.

“Luke!” he crowed, cupping his hands to his voice. As soon as he’d crossed the sand he poked Luke in the ribs, causing his friend to sit up sharply from his towel.

“Good work!” said Tom. “You got a girl looking at you!”

“What? Where?” Luke’s head spun in both directions. He sneakily drew his bony knees up to his chest.

There were a few people looking at him, but that was mostly because he was talking to a pony. They were speaking in Equus at the time, too. Most of Tom’s human friends were fluent in the language by now, which made things way easier for Rainbow.

Luke’s eyes scanned the crowd, passing right over Rainbow Dash.

Tom watched him try to find the girl. “Oh, come on now.”

“What? I don’t see her.” Luke frowned and drew his knees tighter. He shared a suspicious glance with Rainbow. “Miss Dash? Do you know what Tom’s up to?”

Rainbow opened her mouth and let out a brief squeak reminiscent of a rusty barn door. Backpedaling across the sand without thinking, she nearly tripped over a lanky pair of sunbathing girls. She was awkward on the ground, with her wings hanging out like great counterweights; although she managed to spin hard enough to avoid planting her plot on anyone’s face, she felt something squishy underhoof and heard a yelp of pain. When she rolled away, one of the girls was wringing her hand. Dash backed off further, apologizing in a language they wouldn’t understand, and nearly bumped into the next pair of sunbathers down the beach.

If she could even hover, this would have been so much better. Bad things happened to her almost exclusively when she was on the ground.

“Oh, Dashie,” Tom called. “Do you have something you’d like to tell Luke?”

Rainbow looked away before Luke could meet her eyes. She heard him yell, “Tom!” followed by the sound of somebody getting slapped in the leg.

Tom was unfazed. He whistled towards the sea. A clump of green broke from the seawater, where it had been tossing a beach ball with a circle of kids, and dog-paddled towards the shore. Once the water was shallow enough, it pranced through the surf until it could gallop nimbly onto the beach.

Lyra’s hooves were bare to the hot sand, her horseshoes piled up on a beach towel. But she was more clothed than Rainbow. She was covered by a pale red swimsuit bottom, a taut triangle edged by fuzz where it pressed against her coat. Rainbow thought it looked beyond ridiculous, but Lyra was clearly enjoying herself, so she’d decided not to say anything.

“Lyra,” cried Tom with a wave. “Give me a hand.”

Lyra giggled helplessly. She always did when he said that.

“Lyra,” Tom went on, “we have before us a profound opportunity. Our mutual friend has endured a long and oppressive state of being single, but I believe we’ve found his true vocation. We were just looking to the wrong species. He gave a mare a wingie just by looking at her, and do you want to guess who?”

“Cut it out!” Dash squeaked, her voice cracking into the n-th register. She pawed at the sand as if in preparation for takeoff. The nanosecond she could flap…

“Yeah,” Luke groaned. His face was buried in his knees. “I don’t share your—pony fetish.”

Lyra clicked her tongue. “I’m deeply offended that you think of me as a fetish,” she crooned, though the effect of her words was ruined by the way she waggled her hips as she said it.

“Lyra!” Rainbow whined. “You’re supposed to be on my side!”

“You don’t have to pretend,” Tom said to Luke as he squeezed his shoulder. “You’re among friends here. She’s a fine girl! Go on, offer to take her on a date.”

Luke met Rainbow’s eyes to share a moment of sympathy, then ducked his head to his chest, not unlike Fluttershy trying to hide behind her hair. His thin lips tightened, but he didn’t speak.

Tom waved. “Hey, Dashie. My friend here’s a little shy. You’re going to have to make the first move.”

Up until now Dash had been standing apart on her own little circle of sand, trying to make her erection go away. It had started to soften, but she still couldn’t get her pinions to fold all the way back. Maybe she had to do something to take her mind off it.

And seeing as Luke was the enemy of her enemy today, she felt bad for him. Trotting in between Tom and Lyra’s synchronized grins, she sat on Luke’s lap, covering him with her wings—as best she could in their current condition—to shelter the boy from the pair who were teasing him. “Don’t make fun of him, guys. There’s nothing wrong with being shy.”

She also did this without thinking about how a human might interpret such an action. As Tom’s grin widened even more than possible, Rainbow’s face purpled again. She quickly slid a few inches down Luke’s legs, glancing down to check out which way his sea-green eyes were pointing. Ever a gentleman, he was looking off to the side, even if it was in a rather strained and determined way.

Rainbow kicked herself silently for having made things worse. Luke was trying to subtly lean away from her, his arms dug tense like guywires into the sand and his face more red and sweaty than hers. When he crossed his arms, his knuckles brushed the down on Dash’s upper chest. “I’m not shy,” he said tautly. “I just don’t like ponies in that way.”

“What a shame,” said Lyra airily. “Because we had a date all set up for you.”

“We did?” Tom blinked. “I mean—yeah, we did! A date to kill for! You would have loved her.”

“I have to doubt that,” Luke muttered, trying not to sneeze when Rainbow’s feathers tickled his face. “She most likely wouldn’t have found me interesting, anyway.”

Tom dropped to one knee, massaging Luke’s thin shoulder. “Don’t be like that, Luke. You’re a great guy!”

He swept his free hand across the horizon, as if painting a picture. “Now that the Gates are open, there’s a whole multiverse to explore. Who knows what brave new worlds await discovery? And you know what that means? Tall, nerdy and religious has to be someone’s type! There’s a girl out there for you—or—a girl analogue. Or—you know what I mean.”

Luke frowned to one side. “What did you do? You went through the Gates to set me up?”

“Why not?” Tom spread his arms. “It’s basically a walk-on schedule right now! City’s so excited they said damn the power drain and they’re keeping the things open almost twenty-four seven. Opens every five minutes, anyway. Pretty much the same. Probably going to be broke soon, but in the meantime, Ponyville’s basically a thirty-minute walk from here.”

Rainbow peeked around her feathers. Luke seemed so pensive. Of course he always looked pensive, with such a drawn face capped by shining hair. If he was one of those humans who were alone all the time, maybe a date would be good for him. Rarity would have thought so. And she knew way more about this sort of thing.

So Rainbow acted like she knew all about it and batted Luke with a wing. “Oh, come on! What’s the worst that could happen? I’ll bet she thinks you’re really cool.”

Rainbow Dash struggled to fidget within the confines of her dress. It was her red dress. The one she hated more than death itself. Having to bring a wardrobe to Earth was one thing, but Rarity must have been out to get her to make a dress that Rainbow felt she had to pull down over her tail every five minutes.

Silver platters and uncomfortably polite laughter swirled around her like water, and broke on Luke like surf against a rock. He sat across from her in a worn suit, smiling so rigidly that she had to stifle her laughter into an awkward cough.

“In my defense,” she said, “I thought he had somepony else in mind.”

Luke didn’t answer. He had his gaze firmly fixed on the burgundy tablecloth between them. Dash didn’t blame him. The restaurant was carefully trimmed in pearly light. Besides feeling like a pegasus in a china shop, Rainbow Dash felt oppressed by the chandeliers, which seemed just a bit too romantic.

She craned her neck to look around, though. She was the only pony in the entire joint, and although that was hardly a surprise to her, ponies were still pretty hot news on Earth. Unlike everypony else, she loved the stares. She entertained herself indefinitely by sending air-hoof-bumps rapid fire at gaping diners.

Luke was remembered only when the drinks arrived, and Rainbows had to cross her eyes to bite her plastic straw out of its sleeve.

“Man,” she said around the paper, “This place is so fancy, I was worried they wouldn’t give me one. Still think glasses without handles are stupid. By the way, dude, people are looking.”

“Pray it isn’t anyone we know,” he muttered, and covered his face with a menu.

Silence sat between them. Dash tried to fidget some more, but it had been hard enough getting into her chair while wearing this dress. She was a little afraid that if she wanted to avoid knocking anything over, she’d have to ask Luke to help her down after dinner. There was an awkward thought.

Twirling a fork, Luke pushed out a few words. “So. How’s Equestria doing?”

“Pretty radical. You’re looking at a second-year flyer at Wonderbolt Academy!” Rainbow Dash pressed a hoof to her chest, removing it only to complain. “Sucks that I had to take a month off. I mean, Celestia gave me ‘special permission’ and whatever so I don’t get kicked out, but I don’t want to fall behind.”

“I’m sure you’ll be fine.” Luke switched from a fork to the rim of his glass. “You were at the top of your class.”

“But I want to stay on top. Last year wasn’t up to my speed, but this year we’re getting to the cool stuff. Captain Spitfire’s even come out to teach us personally. She showed us this really cool trick with downdrafts—I know what you’re thinking. Downdrafts are just annoying, right? How could they possibly be cool? But bam! Think again! You come in at just the ride angle, you can do this…it’s almost like a ricochet. You have to see it before you hit it and come in at a little climb, and then do that thing where your wings flare but only a little bit…”

The clouds cleared from her vision a moment. Luke’s eyes were glazed over. Rainbow broke off, rubbing one foreleg. “Eheh…kind of tough to explain to someone without wings.”

Luke cleared his throat. “No, that’s…interesting.”

The arrival of a waiter provided temporary respite. Rainbow Dash didn’t really want to order four small house salads again, so Luke helped her find another pony-safe item on the menu. Luke almost ordered a burger, but chickened out at the last second, to Rainbow’s quiet relief.

For a few minutes she buried herself in her second tall glass of Sprite. “So…how about you? Still in book school like all the other humans?”

“Sure am.”

“That must be lame.”

“No, actually it’s pretty great.”

Rainbow Dash leaned back as steaming plates of four-cheese ziti arrived. “If you say so. I barely survived my seven years of sitting still and listening to stories of other ponies that got to go outside.”

“I am doing cool stuff. I have an amazing theology class this semester. You see, it’s all about incarnation doctrine and the hypostatic union of Christ, and you’d think you wouldn’t be able to fill a whole class with that, but we haven’t even made it into the second millennium A.D. Right now we’re talking about the Monophysite heresy. It’s fascinating how many different ways people have understood the…Scripture…” He frowned. “Well, you don’t have to snore.”

Rainbow Dash’s head shot back up. “Sorry. It’s just…”

“Yeah. Hard to explain to someone without wings.”

Rainbow Dash let her head fall onto the table, and Luke, blushing, reached forward to lift her by the chin. He was signaling to her that table manners were in effect. She sighed. “I hope all dates aren’t like this.”

“Your first time too?”

“Yeah.” She looked at him dolefully through the bottom of her empty glass. “Maybe my last.”

Luke cracked his first genuine smile of the night. “Oh, don’t worry. I’m sure it will be a lot better when you’re with the right pony.”

Rainbow nodded. “Probably right. I’m going to be honest, man, I’m not much into you...” She crunched up her face and wiggled a hoof. “Shiny-ass monkeys. No offence.”

“Absolutely none taken.” Luke leaned back. “Good luck convincing Tom, though.”

“Or Lyra.”

“Those two.” Luke shook his head. “Say…Tom used to do this thing. By the way, I’m not supposed to tell anyone about it. But did Lyra ever dance around, singing about humans, when she thought no one could hear—”
“Ohmigosh, don’t tell me he did too—”

“All the time.”

“Hah!” Rainbow slammed her glass down loudly enough to draw more stares, but she mistook them for curious gawping and waved back.

Tom sighed a bit and took a few bites of dinner. “Could we just—I don’t know—pretend this isn’t a date or something?”

Rainbow’s eyes lit up. “Dude! I thought you’d never ask!”

She wriggled out of her chair, causing it to fall over in her rush. Rainbow held her head high despite the crash and walked through the maze of ornery human stares.

“Wait,” said Luke, jumping up to right her chair. “Where are you…”

He trailed off as she reached the front door. Rainbow Dash told the hostess she just needed to step outside for a breath of fresh air. She liked to imagine that Luke leaned in confusion towards the entrance, hearing nothing but ripping noises and a few high-pitched swears.

Rainbow trotted back into the building naked as the day she was born. And happy. She approached her empty chair, glared at it, and then seated herself on the partition between booths, with a single flap that sent two tablecloths and a dress spinning wild.

“Hey, Luke. S’up?”

Luke put his feet up on the empty chair. “Got something on your flank there, Dash.”

Dash blew a puff of air to dislodge a trace of satin clinging to her coat.

“So, how ’bout them Bolts?”

Rainbow leaned forward, excitedly gesturing with both forehooves. “Aw, man! You don’t even know. So, I went to see one of those Blue Angel shows you told me about? It was radical. And then I tell Fleetfoot about it, right? And a month later, guess what the Wonderbolts are announcing? They’re going to do a joint show with the Blue Angels!”

“Together?” Luke doubled over as if hit by a punchline, his face caught halfway between shock and glee. “But that’s—”

“Awesome!” Dash squealed unapologetically.

“I was going to ask if it was possible.”

“If anypony can do it, Spitfire can. Someone even talked her into giving tickets to all the trainees. Not everypony’s going to go, so I’m going to try and bump some extras off the workoholics. I know you wouldn’t miss it…”

Luke gripped the tablecloth when she trailed off. “What? What’s wrong?”

“Dude, what is that beeping? Your pocket’s been going off all night.”

He pulled a phone from his pocket and started swiping at the screen. “Oh, that. Sorry. I can shut that up. I wonder what…oh.”

The look on his face begged curiosity. Rainbow tried to peek at the screen. “What?”

“Nothing…” Luke had the phone halfway to his pocket before he changed his mind. “On second thought—I’d better tell the world you don’t like humans before anyone else offers to plan our wedding.

Tom thrust his staff into the puffy white cloud. Though his hands went right through the water vapor, the head of the plastic pole was covered in glowing hairs, akin to a giant pipe cleaner, and they rasped against the thick cloudstuff like steel wool on a brace of cotton candy. He worked up a sweat swirling the brush around, and it came out flecked with greasy, rainbow stains.

Lyra was already spattered with the stuff beside him. It stuck to her coat. She jostled for space in the hot air balloon, causing it to sway as she wrung out her brush in water. Prismatic spray from the falls overhead caused the sky all around them to glean, slowly staining both the balloon and their faces.

“So…” Tom leaned on his pole for a second. “Maybe he’s really not into ponies.”

“You sure he’s not gay?” Lyra muttered.

The minute they were both resting, a female voice cracked like a bolt from above. “Don’t forget the other side! The whole house has to be sparkling when I come back!”

Tom ripped off his safety goggles and yelled at the sky. “Just uninstall the stupid rainbow, Dash! This is too much work!”

A second later she appeared, upside-down and poking her head under the edge of the balloon. “No way. Deal’s a deal! Besides, how would I get into the Wonderbolts if I had to preen with that synthetic stuff? We’re talking pro-class flying. It’s liquid rainbow or nothing.”

With a heavy sigh, Tom plunged his brush back into the cloud. “You could always go natural.”

Dash stuck out her tongue. “Eww…maybe Luke’s right. You are kind of pervy.” With a swish of vapor, she vanished.

The pair that remained scrubbed in silence. Lyra’s horn glowed; she spun a small propeller clipped to the basket. And inch by inch, the balloon shifted to the next section of cloud. At least until Lyra accidentally maneuvered to close to the rainbow, and backed up in a hurry trying to spit out all the colors of the world.

Tom scrubbed busily at the cloud. “Anyway, about Luke.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “This is only a temporary setback.”

“Never give up! That’s the spirit!” Tom struck a pose with his brush held aloft. “We’re struggling for love. No matter how long it takes, we’ll find the right match.”

“But he’ll never go on another blind date after that,” Lyra noted. She turned the brush on herself to try and scrub a pasty bit of rainbow off her coat.

“Nah, I can talk him into it. I’ve known Luke forever. I know how he ticks.” Tom tapped his chin with the handle. “Let’s broaden our horizons though. I’m thinking we go big or go home. Find someone so striking he can’t resist. Does Dashie know any girls who aren’t ponies?”

Luke clutched the butt of his rifle and advanced, step by shaking step. He was surrounded by soft multicolored walls which confused his sense of direction, but he was certain that the last hint of movement had come from over here.

His instinct, then, was to run the other way. But by some miracle he’d survived this long—maybe she was saving him for last—and he’d learned that the enemy moved quickly. The best way to avoid running into her was to hide at her last known location.

The padded quiet was rent by a screech halfway between an earsplitting keen and a roar. It viscerally flattened Luke against the nearest wall, shaking his knees, for several minutes. He pointed his rifle skyward and tried to look in every direction at once. He was too paralyzed to go on. When he could twitch again he peeked around the corner, berating himself for the noise his earlobe made rustling against the wall. She could hear everything.

“Luke…” echoed a disembodied voice.

Luke crouched.

“I’m coming to get you!”

This time it was impossible to tell which direction the sound came from. Luke’s courage broken, he would have given up on his cautious logic and fled. But there no direction to flee.

He sprinted one way, then changed his mind and stumbled in the other. He didn’t get far before the maze echoed again. This time there was a shudder, and a sound like a heavy carpet beating the air.

“You can run, but you can’t hide!”

Luke gripped the rifle tighter. His lungs were sore. “If this is a date,” he cried out, “shouldn’t we be on the same team?”

“What sense does that make?” the voice screeched as he broke into another run.

The griffon appeared suddenly. Her body filled the corridor in front of him wall-to-wall, knocking him on his rear end in the middle of his sharpest sprint.

She was a magnificent tank, breathing alpine halitosis and covered in pie-crust gold. Feathers flipped against each other like rippling tank treads with the shifting of her shoulders. Luke was transfixed. For a moment he could think only that this was what it must feel like to stand down the avenging archangel. The only thing missing was a blazing sword alight with holy fire.

The griffon had a rifle instead. One end of the weapon was firmly braced in her beak, and her free set of talons was on the trigger. Luke should have been able to shoot first. But she was squinting by the time he could get his arm to move.

She wasn’t stingy with the paint, either.

Luke let Gilda lead him out of the maze. The waiting area was filled with disgruntled unicorns, most of whom had been waiting there for quite some time. Luke flopped onto a bench and joined the other players spattered with blood-red paint. Gilda stretched her neck, ruffling her pristine feathers in front of them all.

When she turned to Luke, however, she dropped the paintball gun like a rotten microphone.

“Dweeb.”

A distance from the maze, Tom sat with Lyra, watching the griffon stalk off to leave Luke dripping and alone.

“Okay,” Lyra muttered. “You win. Maybe they weren’t getting to know each other.”

“I lose too.” Tom split a crocus sandwich on a pretzel roll between them. “Ten minutes—I thought for sure he got to first base in there.”

He chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “It’s my bad, really. I should have known their personalities were incompatible. We need to find someone nicer. Perhaps Rainbow Dash’s social circle isn’t the best place to look. Who does Fluttershy know?”

“Fluttershy doesn’t know anyone. Why don’t we ask Twilight?”

Luke’s next date came in the form of a cryptic college-ruled note telling him where to be at dusk next Friday night. It didn’t give any hint of who he would be meeting, but it gave some brief instructions on what to wear, and suggestions for a gift to bring, because apparently someone was traveling a long way to see him.

Lovely. Mystery in the last place Luke wanted it. Tom’s usual handiwork.

At first, Luke thought Tom was just trying to pique his curiosity. He expected the note to lead him to a normal street corner, and maybe a mystery dinner theatre to go along with the cryptic theme. They were quite popular in the lower ring of Canterlot, and some were getting to be elaborate productions.

But he began to doubt himself when he was led straight out of Canterlot’s outer gate, and even off the footpath that ran beside the railroad. Train being the only way into the city, there was nothing out here but tracks and the mountain. Luke found himself counting off paces from where the peak of the Canterhorn appeared to pierce the Equestrian north star.

He ended up a clearing of mulberry and buckwheat on the trackless steeps of the mountain. It felt like a likely place to be attacked by a wild animal. Not much of a spot to meet a date—until, with a blinding twinkle, she appeared.

In the past, Luke had heard the story of the Ursa Minor in great detail from every gossip in Ponyville. And Twilight had once given a lecture about the variety of creatures which nested in Equestria’s exosphere. So he was fortunate enough not to faint on the spot. But he was a bit benumbed. The fox seemed to flash out of the sky, turning the black crag into a glowing blue hollow. Her body was nothing but stars and the halo of distant galaxies.

Her luminous eyes found Luke standing in the corner of her glow. She hadn’t said ‘Do not be afraid’ so he didn’t move. He wasn’t sure if it would be rude to try and count her tails—they kept shifting through each other as they leisurely fanned the light—so he remained mute and pulled the carton of brown eggs from his coat. Without the least sound, she padded towards him, and lapped each egg right out of his hand. The sensation of her tongue on his palm was not entirely unlike being burnt on a boiling pan.

Luke had to look up to find her face. His introductions were still dead in his throat, but she, in a voice like a pond-ripple chorus, introduced herself as a Vulpeculae. She said that she went by the name of Glittering North among ponies, and that she was very pleased to make his acquaintance. And though he was still largely paralyzed, she even lifted one foreleg and dipped her head in a very elegant bow, causing the mantle of her mane to cascade around her. It rustled with a sound of chimes.

Luke hammered out something along the lines of, “How do you do?”

These were poor manners on his part, since such a half-hearted courtesy didn’t really invite further conversation. He stood with his head craned back, peering at the bottom of her long, shapely muzzle, and there ensued the awkward pause which occurred in ever first interspecies date. Luke had grown familiar with it. It was the inevitable moment where neither party was quite sure what script they were supposed to be following.

It was she who broke the silence. With a warble and an unintelligible gesture, she plucked something in the fabric of the world, and the world shimmered. Luke looked for a casting aura, though she had no horn—but the stars seemed to be glowing in repose more than any part of her. The stellar blanket was thick and full over Canterlot. Even though the capital had as much light pollution as Baltimare, the Royal Pony Sisters who dwelt here had made a point of dismissing such paltry physics ever since Luna’s return.

The shimmer arranged itself into matter. Glitter had conjured something which looked like a great lilly pad, about the size of a carousel, formed from a ghostly bluish aura not unlike herself. Up from the rocks crawled a septet of star-creatures the size and shape of geese, who hitched themselves up to glimmering spider-light reins.

Glittering North padded to the center of the lilly pad and sat back. One of her tails floated outwards in a beckoning gesture. “Sit with me, Lucas Avignon.”

When a creature of such ethereal beauty made a request of him, he never thought to do anything but comply.

As soon as he’d crossed his legs, the little star-creatures took off. The lilly pad as it lurched felt almost frictionless, and as Luke had nothing to hold onto, he slid back until pressed up against the star-swirling belly fur of his date. He wasn’t inclined to blush or move away, either, not when he was quickly becoming airborne. He gripped what handfuls of fluff he could as they broke from the side of the mountain.

His loafers were dug in against the sculpted light, his breath was stuck in his lungs, he was holding on for dear life, and he was flying. Glitter’s craft was almost nothing between them and the sharp air; he could see right through the bottom to scrubby glades, plunging lower and lower beneath his shoes as the foothills of the Canterhorn fell away. The star-creatures pulled them soundlessly, like a ghost ship. A pegasus would have been bored to tears with the pace of their flight. But once Luke remembered to breathe, he smiled at the view. There was time to savor the countryside as seen under starlight. In just a minute, the first farmsteads outside the capital drifted close, with glinting rivulets and puzzle-cut stands of beech.

The city was well behind them now, only the largest star on the back horizon. The night didn’t seem very dark. Now that they were away from the trains and traffic, Luke could hear a faint sound of wingbeats, a noise like paddlewheels digging into a glassy river. The chilly air of also added a soft whistle. Luke shivered in his coat, and despite his better judgment found that he was snuggling closer to Glitter, whose half-intangible coat was very warm.

He craned his neck again. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this is a surprise.”

She smiled, and a brief blue-white halo seared her mane—every movement she made seemed to light up the tiny stars which composed her body. “You are a surprise to me as well, Luke. The friend of Twilight told me that ponykind had made yet another friend, but I didn’t realize how far afield they had been forced to search. You don’t smell of this world at all. Am I correct in assuming you hail from a planet with stagnant mana?”

“Ah—I guess.”

After a bit of sailing, he convinced himself to indulge his curiosity in the name of making conversation. “Glittering North,” he said, “would it be alright if I asked what—that is—”

“My story?” She draped a tail over his shoulders. He arched his back under the weight of goosebumps.

“I’m a widow. My mate passed on to the next life about ten years ago. The pony you know as Twilight was aware that I was about ready to start over.”

“Oh. My condolences. How long were you, um…married?”

They were passing over a chestnut glade now, with the creatures on the reins rising to bring them above the tallest trees. If they continued at this pace, they would be in Ponyville before long. A direct route would take them directly over the lake, as opposed to the roundabout route taken by train.

He felt a warm breath drop from Glitter’s muzzle. “Three hundred years, but still too short a time. For such…”

She clicked a long tongue. “Oh, I must sound selfish to you. Twilight has told me much about your kind. Here I am because I want someone to comfort me in my final decades, after having to myself more time than you can ask for.”

Luke creased his face in thought. “No, don’t—don’t apologize. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“And what brings you to Equestria, here in my little patch of the sky?”

Luke grinned self-consciously. “My friend is trying to tempt me to date outside my own species.”

Little shivers of light flew up to the tips of her tails. “A jovial pursuit,” she said. “There is so much in Equestria to explore. It must be very exciting if the whole of this world is new to your people.”

Luke bit his lip. Everyone seemed so sure of that these days, and it was starting to get to him. “Now, look just because it’s fun doesn’t…erhm, we’re not meant to…the college of cardinals came to the decision…”

He cut himself short. Glitter, he was acutely aware, had come down from the heavens themselves just to see him. The last thing he wanted was to say something she might find hurtful. And if he disagreed with Tom’s perversions, it was his fault for being a hypocrite weak enough to get talked into them. Would have been rather awkward anyway, to tell her he disagreed with what he was doing right now.

He never had the guts to say anything in front of the guys—he was certain he would be a minority of one, not that this was any excuse. Talking to Glitter was easier. But it didn’t matter whether he spread his gospel to her. The small portion of truth he held was of no use to a lady made of stardust. What grounds did he have to judge for a race of beings he knew nothing about? Horses took harems, wolves could only mate if they were heads of family, and ants gave themselves only to their queen. For all he knew, God had instructed the Vulpeculae to make love with whomever they wanted.

Luke turned to face the front of the lily pad. “…Yeah.”

Sweet Apple Acres was approaching below. Several of Glitter’s tails still brushed over Luke’s shoulder, their touch barely firm enough to feel. She was so warm. But she was acting distressingly generous with her touch. Maybe she thought he had the same physical reserve as a pony. Maybe Lyra had told her that on purpose.

Well, he was here. Might as well enjoy her company. “Can I ask what prompted you to take a blind date with a human?”

Glitter tilted her head to the stars. “The truth is, there are fewer of my kind remaining than there used to be. Ponies think of us as very mighty, I’m sure, but even we must come to ground to give birth. This world grows more full of steel than it used to be, and the constant light makes it difficult for us to reach the surface. The Night keeps open a little corridor for us over your mountain, but most of my generation passed on childless. My only friends now are these little ones, the Ansers.” She flicked a tail towards the star-geese that pulled their carriage through the night.

Since he had already given his condolences once, Luke thought he might come off as trite if he said he was sorry again. He was focusing on sitting upright without sliding, and not letting his hands wander on her belly, when suddenly her breath caught, and then her muzzle was right beside her ear.

“Look!” she whispered. A spoke of light emanated from her face, pointing out one bright star near the far end of the night.

“I see it.”

“There he is,” Glitter sighed contently, a butterfly-inducing breath swirling in Luke’s ears. “The Night told me that my mate shines brightest when sailors are lost. He always was a hopeless romantic.”

They flew over Ponyville with the same breathtaking calm as the rest of their flight, drawing a few stares from onlookers on the ground. Luke, to his own surprise, didn’t feel like trying to hide from them.

In fact, he was beginning to feel much better about coming. When he really thought about it, this wasn’t so bad. He didn’t think he was being drawn towards anything sinful here. Why, all he was doing was spending a little time with someone who happened to be an alien. That was all. No bestial lust had to be involved. He was even doing some good. Glitter seemed to get a lot of enjoyment from his company. Luke had to wonder if it was very lonely where she spent most of her days.

She was a nice person, really, and soft to lean against. So soft. It wasn’t wrong to enjoy leaning against her, just a little bit, was it? She was very beautiful, but Luke could admire that beauty the way a human was supposed to, the same way he would admire the beauty of a mountain or a waterfall. He did so unabashedly. What a piece of creation! What a monument to the artistry of God! It made him wonder what he’d done to deserve a close encounter with such a wonder.

Glitter had her construct land on the outskirts of Ponyville, where it wouldn’t cause a stir. She offered to fly Luke back the other way, which was a tempting choice, but he assured her that it would be easy for him to catch a night train to Canterlot.

Then that awkward silence happened again. Glitter was watching him step off the lillypad. Luke’s heart skipped. And he knew that, alien or not, he had a responsibility for her feelings. He shut his eyes and opened his mouth, not completely sure what would come out.

It was more or less gibberish and stammering. He thought he managed to convey that while he’d had a wonderful time and wouldn’t mind being friends, there was no possibility of a romantic relationship between them.

She accepted his mumbled rush with the same consummate dignity and grace that he’d already come to associate with her. A bow of her head, a lift of one paw. “Very well,” she echoed. “But don’t forget to say hello if you’re in Equestria when I come to ground again. Look for the first shooting star of summer. I’ll dearly love to hear how the child fares after she comes to term.”

Luke’s head tilted like a fallen camcorder. “Child?”

Glitter’s brows pinched together, causing a brief shower of stardust. “Please don’t tell me you didn’t want an embryo planted on your aura. Twilight said we were going on a date; I thought this was what you wanted.”

Luke’s muscles drew taut like rubber bands. “What child?” he repeated insistently.

“Why…” Glitter flicked her tail.

Luke followed her gaze to a point directly above his head. There the little one hovered, a nascent blue orb with a frail, fetal cluster of sparkles and quasars swimming in amniotic light.

Tom and Lyra originally meant to wait for Luke in Canterlot. But after a few hours, they’d both become too eager to see how the date was going that they were waiting for him at the Ponyville train station when he arrived with Glitter.

Or, rather, when Glitter arrived. Luke could be seen in the background, running screaming through the streets. The west end of the train station was abutted by larger buildings, so that anypony standing on it was presented with only a narrow segment of the road. Every few moments, Luke would pass from one end of that segment to the other, producing a Doppler effect.

Lyra squinted after him. After a couple passes, she turned to Glitter, covering her open mouth. “Glittering North, is that…what I think it is?”

The Vulpeculae hunched in order to slide under the roof of the station platform. “He seems surprised,” she said as she took a seat between them. “I can’t help but feel I’ve done something wrong.”

Lyra doubled over. Tom jumped from his seat, appearing to think for a second that the pony was choking. But she waved him off with a hand conjured of illusory light. Tom backed off tepidly when her withers started to shake.

“It…it’ll be fine,” she gasped in between bouts of stifled laughter.

“I wish I could be so sure.” The Vulpeculae’s muzzle turned like a lighthouse beam to follow Luke, who was making another pass of the station with his arms held high. “You did make sure he understood what he was taking part in?”

Lyra’s head snapped back up for a second. “Uh—yup. I totally didn’t forget about that but hey! I made him a card to give you!” She held up a paper card, covered in pink streamers, which looked as if it had been made by a foal for Hearts and Hooves Day.

Tom crossed his arms. “Someone want to tell me what’s going on?”

“Can we not?” said Lyra, slipping off the wooden post that had been propping her up and falling onto her side. “Can we not tell him that the gestation period is only five hours?”

Glitter let her light drift towards Tom. “Vulpeculae must find a creature of the earth to help bear our children when they are ready to hatch,” she said. “And most of us prefer not to pin our embryo on a stranger’s aura and dart back to the stars without knowing or loving who is bearing our children. For as long as I can remember, we’ve preferred to entrust ponies with this precious bond. But this human came with Twilight’s highest recommendation. She claimed he was—not excitable.”

Tom rolled his eyes. “I’m going to go get him.”

“Fine, fine.” Lyra recovered slowly, getting her hooves underneath her and letting out one final sigh of mirth. “Sorry it didn’t work out. I thought it was foolproof. He should have jumped at a chance with a star-creature. She’s so far out of his league it’s silly.”

Tom shook his head. One cheek rested on a finger, and he was focused intently on his friend running in the distance. After a moment, he straightened sharply. “I know what our problem is,” he said. “We’ve been focusing on the body. No offense, Glitter.”

The Vulpeculae shrugged, and as if in point, what astral glow passed for her body slowly faded from sight.

“Luke is a very smart guy,” Tom went on. “We need to find someone he can connect to intellectually. Stop thinking so much about looks. If we don’t worry about sticking to the expected matches for a mammal, we can throw our dating pool wide open.”

Lyra chewed the thought over. “Could be. I have been known to, er…” She glanced at Tom’s hands. “Focus in on that sort of thing a bit much.”

Luke hefted a heavy shuttered lantern. His arm trembling as he fought to extend its light deeper into the mothballed gloom. The piece was an antique even by pony standards, having been pulled from the Apple family shed, and lent only an acrid quality to the cool and sickly colors at the mouth of the cavern.

He peered to his right, and then to his left. Pale mist was gathering around him. In addition to the ominous hammering of his heart, and water trickling through the mountain, he could hear the mist, it seemed. It groaned with each blast of eerily warm air that swirled out from the precipice of the underground like breath after moist breath.

Teetering under the curled lips of boulders that marked an edge to the cave, Luke squinted. This was a good place to ask himself why he was planning to march into that unperturbed darkness. Nor was it the first time he’d wondered why he allowed himself to go on the insane adventures Tom labeled dates. It was an unavoidable question. Not even God meant for him to be here. He was sure of that. God didn’t mean for his friends to be projecting their sexual energies onto every form of life to smile their way—didn’t mean for Tom to be ‘on the market’, didn’t mean for Lyra to be fooling around with whoever she was fooling around with at the moment. For all sorts of reasons. Contrary to what the rest of the gang believed, there was a way humans were meant to live, and there were limits to what they could make of themselves—limits like this echoing throat between sun and shade. To try was to play with dangerous forces as though they were toys.

Why was he here? Only because there was nothing humans loved to do more than trifle with things they shouldn’t. Tom must know his weaknesses all too well. There was no justifiable reason for his bootprints across the Apple family land. But he was still going on blind dates because he hadn’t gotten to explore so many fantastic places since the portal to Equestria first opened. Nothing motivated Tom to move heaven and earth like the prospect of playing matchmaker.

Or, if he was less charitable with himself, it was flattering to pretend to go on dates with so many beautiful beings. But that was so self-centered Luke couldn’t stand to think about it.

Luke’s hair would get sopped if he stood here much longer. He shook his head, muttered a pox on Tom, and stepped forward into the Cave of Unimaginable Horrors.

Past the reach of natural light, green fungi grew all over the walls in shelf formations. As Luke followed Pinkie Pie’s instructions—humming the ‘Spelunking Song’ in order to remember the way—he was led to slip through increasingly tiny passages which sloped further and further downward. He couldn’t always fathom the height of the passages with his lantern. But somehow they grew ever more claustrophobic. The fungi grew larger and larger, and obtained a faint phosphorescence which kept the pitch darkness from swallowing his light.

Eventually the sound of the river faded. There were gibbers from some far-off place, perhaps below if echoes didn’t lie; the first time Luke heard them he froze, nearly shuttering his wick until the shrieking passed.

After his narrowest passage, a sideways shimmy through a cleft that would have stymied the average lamppost, the passages began to open up a little more. A second species of fungi appeared. These were ovoid, a sort of middle grey, and Luke almost didn’t notice them at first because they emitted no light at all. They started out no larger than marbles, crunching under his feet, and they too grew as he proceeded. Another ten minute’s hiking and they were nearly as tall as he was.

He knew his final destination when he reached it. Looking up in vain for the chamber’s ceiling, Luke used one hand to shutter his lamp—he wanted to save candle wax. The vast room was just shy of being comfortably bright from the immeasurable mass of bright green fungi. They shingled the ceiling, while the floor was almost entirely coated with what Luke now realized were grey eggs.

For they were littered with the gunky strands of a web that sprawled the entire chamber.

Something shook in the deep, and Luke was afraid. He stumbled, without having taken a step, at the very moment his mind started making the connections. He turned to run, but it was too late. The rumbling rose like a sneeze through the rock. He knew what he would see just a moment before the vast shadow dragged itself into the chamber with him. It landed at the center of its web.

Shelob would have been called a house spider next to this monstrosity. Luke fell flat on his back from the sight of it. He tried to scramble backwards, reaching for a handhold to pull himself up, but found that he was barely able to summon a nerve.

Not only could a comfortable suburban two-story have fit inside its thorax, but the spider-creature’s whole body was covered in eyes. There were round eyes and skinny eyes, eyes with no pupils, eyes of every size and color. Thumping glands on the creature’s sides belched odd bursts of noxious orange liquid. It pelted the eggs. Huge slimy scars ran the length of its abdomen, matching the cut of the six mammoth-tusk mandibles that swung effortlessly towards Luke. His frozen face met several hundred reflections in the beady compound clusters on its face.

By the grace of God, it didn’t twitch and strike him down in that first instant. He eventually managed to summon control of his limbs and found a rock to pull himself up on. The monster emitted a screech. Luke was about to sprint for the entrance when he realized that the noise was trying to shape itself into halting, high-pitched Equus. The voice echoed so powerfully off the cave walls that it was that much harder to discern the wrods.

After a hack and a chitter, she nailed it.

“Really? What are you supposed to be? I mean, I know Pinkie Pie said you’d be a surprise, but I was expecting someone…taller.”

Luke took a long, dark moment to process the implications of that sentence.

Slowly, and dripping cold sweat, he sat on the rock. His palm met his face with vigorous force.

His nerves still trembled with every move she made, but for the sake of politeness, he managed to gag back a scream. The spider-creature maneuvered its legs over the maze of eggs, clacity-clacking until her face hung over him. She continued to speak. Meanwhile, an unknown number of variously-sized limbs worked in the background, manipulating objects out of sight.

“I mean, what’s the point? Not that I’m surprised, mind you. After that pink pony showed up I knew things would never be the same down here. But she acts so unpredictable. Sometimes I’m just boggled, you know? Either she’s cracked, or she moves on higher dimensions than the rest of us.”

Her legs down a pony-sized garden table made of wrought iron, and even more impressively, furnished it with a full teaset and a tray of biscuits. Several of her limbs branched off repeatedly into smaller spindles nearly the size of human fingers.

“The whole ‘date’ thing is still a little hard for me to wrap my head around. I’m sure it makes good sense up on the surface world, but that doesn’t count for much down here. I mean, what good are you? Can you fertilize my eggs?”

Luke stiffened. His mouth worked open and closed a moment as he tried to figure out which eyes to look into. “Uh—I’d—rather not fertilize anything tonight if that’s alright with you.”

She held five little legs aloft in a hands-up gesture. “Say no more. Human sex sounds way too awkward. All sorts of bad experiences just waiting to happen. Makes for a good yarn, though. Thanks to that teal pony I got my mandibles on some Dostoyevsky. According to the foreword all the humans think he’s some hot shit. I think he’s alright. I mean, to be honest, once you factor out the characters, and they are very believable—but past that, what has he got going for him?”

“Uh…”

A high-pitched whistle echoed from some other part of the chamber. Her legs rustled again, and soon a single-hook claw brought over a porcelain teapot. She poured two tiny cups of steaming green tea, set them on opposite sides of the table, and then pushed them both towards Luke.

He sipped and found it to be green tea. It was thick as pea soup, but Luke kept on sipping for a moment anyway, because he didn’t want to open his mouth and look like an idiot. What could he say?

“Anyway,” he said, “I’m impressed by your Equus.”

“Equus. Bah! That’s a language for singers. Now, English. There’s something you can talk in. I might still be enchanted by the novelty of a new tongue, but it’s done a lot for the boredom, I can tell you. These days I always raise a few dozen of my little ones to speak English, just so I have someone to play riddles with.”

Luke forced down another gulp of tea. He worried briefly that he was staring, but the fact of the matter was there weren’t many directions to look that weren’t covered by some part of her.

A pair of mandibles clicked. Then another. “So,” she screeched. “This is home. A little dark, sorry about that. The kind of light you’re used to hurts my eyes.”

Luke shrugged as a way of saying he didn’t mind. He wouldn’t want to impose, although the dim was a little close to candlelit-dinner levels than his conscience liked. She was magnificent, in a way, thrilling him the way a perfect horror movie might. To imagine such nightmares was one thing, but to meet one in the flesh! Things beyond ken roamed below light. Luke could have sung hymns to the breadth of creation.

She made a sort of slithering, whistling noise. If Luke didn’t know better he might have thought it was something akin to an awkward cough.

“I see you haven’t screamed or tried to kill me yet,” she said in a quieter voice, not quite as deafening. “I appreciate that.”

Luke set his teacup down gently. “All God’s creatures deserve my respect. Even the ones I don’t understand.”
A sigh. “Like my best friend, for instance.”

She paused on that for a moment. Since Luke wasn’t making much progress through his first cup of tea, she picked up the pot and dumped it between her mandibles.

“They set you up too, huh?”

Luke nodded wearily.

“Yeah. That Lyra was a nice lass. Braver than most, too. Not many ponies can come down here. But I got the feeling she was the kind who has to be in everyone’s business. Like she just doesn’t know when to step back, you know?”

Luke settled himself against an egg and raised one pinky finger through the grip of his teacup. “I’ll drink to that.”

The Stubborn and the Persistent (part 1)

Applejack sat up in bed when morning first poured over the hills like banana bread fresh from the oven. It took one swift motion to kick down the covers and roll onto her hooves.

Her morning routine was short. Normally she would brush her teeth, splash the rest of the washbasin’s contents on her face, and tap on set of thick three-nail horseshoes—the kind a pony needed for kicking trees all day. If she was feeling unusually self-conscious, she might drag a couple snags out of her mane with an old comb. Snap on a hair tie, grab her hat from the bedpost, and she was ready to face the day before the rooster roused his lazy self.

But on this particular morning, there was no rousing cock-a-doodle-doo to meet her as she opened the door. Instead there was an ear-splitting twang. Applejack’s ears went criss-cross.

She took a deep breath before deliberately stepping back to her bedroom window. At first, she couldn’t see the source of the awful sound. It was barely light out! Since when had he taken to showing up this early? For that matter, how? Those Gate contraptions didn’t even fire up until eight o’clock. Or had that part of the world changed on her while she wasn’t looking, just like everything else?

There was a human sitting on her front lawn. He was underneath the wild tree whose branches always had to be pruned away from the porch. His topmost guitar string had snapped—Applejack could see the wire curlicue even from the second story of the house. But as luck would have it, he’d brought a spare. He was patiently re-tuning the instrument now, which at least provided a short respite from any actual music. Applejack got all her glaring done, and then ducked back inside before she ran that risk that he would catch her looking in his general direction.

She tried to fumble her way down the stairs as if it were any other day. The walls of the old Apple home were sufficiently thick that she could manage, with just a bit of willpower, to pretend that the human’s strumming was only part of the daily floorboard-creaking. She lit the stove from last night’s embers, grabbed an apron, and had hay pancakes steaming in no time. The hay bin was running low, but Applejack managed to buck old habits and emptied the whole thing into her mixing bowl. There was another block in the barn loft.

Applebloom followed her nose downstairs around the time her older sister was setting the table. At the filly’s little yawn, Applejack couldn’t help but crack open a smile. Dawn was finally getting in under the eaves, making the dining room light enough to walk around in, but AJ lit a couple candles anyway just to make extra-sure that Applebloom wouldn’t trip.

“G’morning, darlin’.” She shuffled a wooden plate in front of Applebloom with two pancakes, taking the opportunity to sneak her sister a nuzzle and a kiss.

“Mornin’, sis,” Applebloom said sleepily. AJ sat back and watched her eat for a short quiet, idly pouring a second batch onto the tiny stove. She savored sleepy pride. When she regularly busted her flank for a season growing apples that would be ruined by one early frost from the Everfree, it was the little things she appreciated most. Like a sister burying her muzzle in a home-cooked meal. When Ma and Pa passed on, Applejack had been so scared for little Bloom. But here she was: safe, happy, and waking up to a hot breakfast, thanks to her big sister Applejack.

Then Applebloom had to go and ruin the fuzzy feelings by pricking her ears, and then fixing her sister with that curious grin Applejack knew too well. “Hey! When I grow up, will I have a coltfriend to sit outside my window and sing about me too?”

Applejack didn’t get a chance to answer before Granny Smith stirred from her rocking chair in the dark corner of the fireplace room. “Why, of course, dear!” she whinnied, stretched, and then began to nod again as if she’d woken up only to answer the question.

Nopony could see Applejack’s ear twitch in the melty morning shadows. She made a point of focusing on breakfast. Once the cooking was done, however, and everypony’s mouths were full, she couldn’t help but hear the resumed twanging outside—and even worse, make out some of the lyrics. He was singing something about frogs in a hollow somewhere. It made no sense. But Applejack tried to tell herself that it could have been worse. At least he’d eventually moved on from songs about apples.

Granny was the first one finished eating. She usually didn’t put down more than half a pancake, though when Applejack was in a better mood she would coax and nuzzle her into taking a whole one. Today, Granny Smith trotted a barely-dirtied dish over to the sink and Applejack chewed while staring straight ahead with cow-glazed eyes.

“Land sakes, Applejack!” said her grandmother. “You have a visitor! Aren’t you goin’ to go say hello?”

Applejack buried her head closer to her plate. “I’m a mite busy, Granny. Maybe in a minute.”

She did no such thing. Once Applejack had cleaned up, she snuck out the back door to the shed with the leftover pancakes. Big Macontish was there, just coming in from his pre-dawn rounds. There were bags under his eyes; he’d probably slept out there on his hooves last night, because he liked to think that he could go for days without proper sleep and never slow down. Applejack made a mental note to take a trowel and straighten any of the furrows he plowed today. Then she traded the pancakes for his help getting a yoke on her back and loading it up with empty apple baskets.

The only time she had to pass the human was when she was going out to field. It was the east orchard that needed her right now, and the shortest route took her right down the path in front of the house. She could have made a far loop around the hills if she’d wanted to avoid him completely, but she refused to let the human disrupt her day. She marched right past as he was finishing up his song about the frogs

“Good morning, Applejack!” he called out in a voice like amber. “Your mane looks wonderful today!”

Applejack hurried on without looking his way. She maintained that her mane was so long because she didn’t fuss over it enough to cut it frequently—never mind that it took longer to wash a long mane, or that flowing manes were the stylish look among the mares in Ponyville.

She could feel the human waving from behind her. “You have a wonderful morning, AJ!” he said, as cheerily as if she hadn’t ignored him.

There was nothing to be done about it. She certainly wasn’t going to be the rude one and ask him to leave. Sweet Apple Acres had always made hospitality a point of pride. The gates were open to anyone who wanted to visit, even that city slicker Trenderhoof. And if she was going to be honest—which she was—Trenderhoof had been a lot more annoying, even if he had only lasted for a few days. Applejack never did suss out if he was a racist or if he’d honestly never seen an earth pony before.

Elliot was a polite human, she couldn’t deny that. Too polite. He always asked permission before putting his feet on the family soil—which was a sight more respectful than Rainbow Dash, and, for that matter, any pegasus. Somehow he seemed to have a sense of what land meant to an earth pony. From the way he wandered around barefoot all the time, Applejack even wondered if he wasn’t trying to feel it sing, as if he thought he was an earth pony himself. And he usually bought a couple apples. You had to appreciate that.

When they first met Elliot had struck her as a decent sort. In fact, she’d rather liked the fellow. They’d gotten to be friends. Back when there were only a few humans in Ponyville, running around like foals in a candy store, it had all been kind of charming. The way they gushed over her pies was so flattering and at the same time so utterly ridiculous that she couldn’t help but laugh.

Charming. Sure—right until Elliot got up out of the blue and announced that he was in love. Why did folks always have to go ruining perfectly good friendships that way?

It wouldn’t have been the first time this had happened to Applejack. Normally it would have been dealt with efficiently. Applejack had always been able to keep away Big Mac’s unwanted suitors, and since she seemed to have a knack for attracting pushy males, he’d always returned the favor. They didn’t have to say a word for each other to understand when a little nudge was needed. Never even had to make a sign.

But this one. Of all stallions, Elliot had to be the clever one. He’d come to Granny almost before Applejack and asked permission to ‘court’ her, with a bushel of walnuts under one arm and six friends in bow ties testifying to his character. Seeds, saddles, flowerpots full of dirt from Ohio—the whole nine yards. Where in Tartarus he even found out about such old earth-clan traditions was beyond Applejack. But that’s when things had gotten sticky. Because Granny got involved.

Now, she’d always had odd spells, but usually they only lasted a few weeks. She’d bug Applejack about how she was ‘getting to that age’ and kept asking if she’d ‘found a nice stallion’. As if they still lived in a decade where ponies married at her age. Applejack wasn’t worried about turning into an old spinster, but when Granny got it into her head there was no reasoning with her. And apparently this interloper now qualified as a ‘nice stallion’. Of all the meddlesome ways!

Big Mac’s hooves were tied. He wouldn’t go against Granny for anything in the world. So it was up to Applejack to make the human give up. She took meticulous care to avoid giving him the time of day. If he wanted to set himself under that hickory, he could very well stay there. Applejack would go take care of the day’s chores, thank you very much.

By this point, as far as Applejack was concerned, Elliot could drown when it rained and starve when it shone—but everypony else always fed him. She’d caught Applebloom sneaking out of the house with pie and sitting at his feet to ask for stories about Earth. That had worried Applejack just a bit. But after chewing it over for a while she’d let it go. Hadn’t she been just as curious about the wide world when she was that age? She’d run off to Manehatten, and that was as far as a body could go at the time. As long as Applebloom didn’t gallop off to Timbuktu, she’d be alright. Applejack had to admit that Elliot wouldn’t steer her sister wrong.

Sure, it was sad that she didn’t talk to Elliot anymore. It wasn’t like she wanted things to be this way. But he simply refused to get the message. Nothing seemed to discourage him. Each and every day it grew harder to believe. Elliot must have been out here for almost a month now. Any sane stallion would have gone through three infatuations by now. Didn’t he have a job? Was there just something off about humans?

Might’ve been. According to Dash, all the girls had hordes of fans just like him on Earth. But aside from the diplomatic trip they might have to make as the Elements of Harmony, Applejack never thought about that. She didn’t care. The humans who came by kept fussing over it and wringing their hands—Elliot excepted, of course—but Applejack just rolled her eyes. She didn’t care two bits and a carrot stick what a bunch of folks on some far away world thought about an imaginary version of her.

Well…she hadn’t until one of them started hanging around.

One pair of apple baskets wasn’t hardly anything, so Applejack filled up her yoke in no time. That done, she went down a couple of the largest rows in the orchard, turning over leaves to look for spots that might mark disease or unwanted critters. She also grabbed a water pail and splashed a few gallons from the river on any tree that looked thirsty. The weatherponies had done a spotty job last time they sent a miniature cloudburst this way. As much as Applejack would have liked to blame Rainbow Dash, she knew that the Central Weather Commission just hadn’t given Ponyville as much water vapor to work with this year. The Apple clan didn’t really have a voice in Canterlot anymore, so it was at the mercy of the government for rain. A less proud Apple might have gone begging at the palace, using the Element of Honesty as clout to plead for more water. Applejack made up the difference with sweat and elbow grease.

Elliot showed up again after lunch. Applejack sniffed him a mile off, since he came from upwind. But she decided that, as always, there was nothing to do about it. She got on with her watering, so that when he caught up she was occupied enough to ignore him. He took one look around and went straight for the apple baskets.

Applejack went on watering, only keeping a watch out of the corner of her eye. Elliot wrapped his arms around one full basket and tried to lift it while she quietly snickered.

He collapsed against the rim, huffing. “A…Applejack! This looks like a lot of work. Can I help you buck these apples?”

“Y’all’d just hurt yourself, Elliot.” Applejack nosed her way under with the yoke, lifting both baskets with a barely noticeable grunt. Elliot was pushed aside as the basket rose into the air.

“Whatever you say.” He fell into step behind her, as if, like Winona, he didn’t think twice about following wherever she went. Which was a shame. Applejack was only bringing these apples in on the hope of ditching him. If she’d been serious about harvesting she would have brought a wagon.

“Maybe I can help with some of the other chores, then,” he said. “The pigs still need feeding today, don’t they? I can take care of that.”

Applejack tossed the words over her yoke. “No thanks, Elliot. Patsy likes her slop just so. You don’t know how to mix it.”

“Okay.” He followed her up the lane with his hands behind his head. “I could sort these apples if you want. Applebloom showed me how, so I’m pretty sure I could do it.”

“That’s Applebloom’s chore,” she said a little more darkly. “She needs to learn to handle her own responsibilities, so no thank you.”

“What about the back fence? It’s been sitting unpainted for a week since the last windstorm. I painted houses for a whole summer back on Earth, so I know I could help with that.”

Applejack swayed in front of the barn doors, searching for an excuse for several moments. “Elliot. Thank you. But no. I don’t need your help. That’s all.”

Elliot looked into her eyes, sighed—his shoulders drooped just little. Then, to Applejack’s surprise, he put his dopey smile back on. The smile like sunny-side up eggs. “Okay. Can I stay on the lawn and sing for you?”

It was Applejack’s turn to sigh. “Y’all can sing to your heart’s content.” And she swished her tail dismissively as she entered the barn to look for a brush and paint.

Elliot launched into his next song when she was on her way out. Applejack tried not to listen, since Granny Smith was sitting on the porch. But it had the phrases ‘fair lady’ and ‘glowing mane’ in it, so she still had to duck her head and scurry to get away without letting anyone see her blush.

The Boy and the Filly

Mr. Coxcomb came home from a long day at work and dropped his briefcase on the mudroom mat. It landed in precisely the same spot as always. Because his routine was precisely the same as always. He shut the door while his battered briefcase squeaked a sigh.

Normally he would have done all this without even noticing it, much less thinking on it. But tonight—perhaps it was because he’d skipped lunch and a bit of hunger sharpened his awareness. Or maybe there was something in the air. He watched himself coming in as though he was using a stranger’s spectacles, and he marveled to see what a cliché little routine he was carrying out. Loosening his tie. Striding into the kitchen and kissing his wife. She was working on her laptop as dinner stewed in the oven. Weren’t they the typical American family? One kid, two cars, a mortgage. Hah! Right out of a Normal Rockwell.

Who wouldn’t laugh, in his place? He knew the life that he and his wife and been through to get here, and typical? He’d call it anything but. But then again—as he hung up his coat, it occurred to him that maybe all families were this way. Every house looked normal on the outside. Everyone was normal on parent-teacher conference day. It was only digging underneath the veneer of banality that you could see the struggles and dysfunction that made every family unique.

But then again—as he changed out of a dress shirt, Mr. Coxcomb had yet another thought. Maybe they weren’t so different after all. For all he knew, everyone went through the same struggles and just avoided mentioning them to one another.

But the kitchen was warm and smelled of roast beef. What could he complain of? ‘Normal’ was a good place to raise a kid. Mr. Coxcomb would gladly be a cliché if it meant his boy didn’t have anything worse to worry about than the school dance.

“Where is the little scamp?” he asked, idly pretending to browse through the evening news over his wife’s shoulder.

“He brought a friend home.” Mrs. Coxcomb reached back and found his fingers to lace with. “I think they’re in the basement.”

“Billy again?”

“No.” Wrapping the other arm through her husband’s shoulder, she flipped the laptop shut and sat a minute, listening to the oven bubble. “Someone new.”

“Well, that’s good. Always nice to see him making friends at school.”

She tapped his cheek. “Ah, actually…not from school.”

“Oh? Where’d he meet his new friend?”

“It’s one of those aliens, Rob—one of those ponies.”

At this, Mr. Coxcomb looked into the black mouth of stairs leading to the basement. “How curious.”

His wife nodded. “Her name’s Strawblossom, and she told me her parents came to stay in the—what’s that building they’re putting up downtown?—embassy. That’s it. They’re coming to work at the embassy, so she had to move with them. She hadn’t made any friends here yet. And she’s just about Zander’s age—at least in pony years. That’s how Zander explained it to me.”

She turned in his embrace, rubbing the dry skin on the back of his hand. “Do you think it’s normal for a boy to be so interested in something like that?”

Mr. Coxcomb couldn’t help a grin. “Darling, the only thing that gets along better than a little girl and ponies is a thirteen-year old boy and aliens. I wouldn’t be surprised if he knows everything about them. You know what? I think I’ll go say hi.”

He descended the stairwell by dry creaks and bounds. As the dark plunged over him, he felt himself enveloped in the cozy warmth of heaters turned up against the fading chill of winter. Somewhere nearby was the sound of smacking lips. Mr. Coxcomb flipped on a light so he wouldn’t trip and turned the corner.

Zander was sitting on the couch only inches away from a genuine Equestrian pony. The both of them were sitting a little stiffly, and staring resolutely at the TV. Their faces were flushed, and their limbs straight like bars against the couch cushions.

She certainly was a girl—she was such a bright pink! But Mr. Coxcomb stopped to wonder. What was to keep a boy pony from being born with a pink coat? It might be rude to ask. But Zander would probably know. He could ask the boy about it later.

Mr. Coxcomb spun to look at the TV. NASCAR drivers hurtled down a track with engines roaring. So the kissing scene must have ended and cut to a race in the time it had taken him to round the corner. He shook his head. Television these days could go from zero to sixty in seconds flat. He worried sometimes about what Zander would see on this thing. But what was he to do about it? He tried to console himself with the thought that his parents had worried just as much about what he would see in the wide world, and he’d turned alright. Besides, Zander was a good kid. He could figure things out for himself.

“Hiya, Zander.” Mr. Coxcomb leaned against the TV set. “Bidding welcome to our new alien overlords?”

Oddly enough, Zander merely nodded. So Mr. Coxcomb took it upon himself to extend his hand towards the pony. “Nice to meet you, Strawblossom. I’m Zander’s father.”

“I’m so happy to meet you!” With a sunny smile, she lifted one leg and placed a hoof on Mr. Coxcomb’s open hand. It didn’t make for much of a handshake. After a second he realized she was making the effort and politely withdrew his appendage.

“Well, you’re very welcome here. Any friend of Zander’s is a friend of mine. And your English is even better than I expected aliens to have. If you want snacks or anything like that, just let us know. Mom’s cooking dinner upstairs and you’re more than welcome to join us—hmm.”
Mr. Coxcomb paused, scratched his five o’clock shadow. “What do you eat? Maybe not roast beef, huh? Being a little horse and all.” He chuckled.

“No, dad.” Zander rolled his eyes, beginning to relax against the couch back.

“Alright, alright.” Mr. Coxcomb held up his hands, though he was still grinning. “I’m an old man behind the times. Tell me something I don’t know.”

He turned to leave them be. But Zander followed him up the creaking stairs, and discreetly tugged his elbow when they were on the halfway landing. It looked like Mr. Coxcomb was about to find out why Zander wasn’t bubbling over with talk as usual.

“Dad?” Zander’s face was still flush. It was also taut, which caused Mr. Coxcomb to put his hands in his pockets and look down. He used the same motion when listening to something important, sitting at a board meeting, or reading a tragic news story.

“Actually, you shouldn’t joke about that meat thing. It really bothers her.”

Mr. Coxcomb covered half his mouth. “Oh, shoot. Sorry, Zan. Didn’t know she’d be sensitive about being vegetarian.”

Zander’s head spun, golden hair flying out like the spokes of a star. “No, dad! She’s not a vegetarian. She’s an herbivore. Like…” He leaned in closer. “She can smell our meat from down there, and it really bothers her.”

“Double shoot. Dinner’s a problem?”

“A real problem.”

Mr. Coxcomb’s frown deepened. Zander appeared to be worried that he wasn’t going to care whether his roast beef caused anyone distress. But Mr. Coxcomb lived according to a straightforward set of values, and they had no room in them for aliens. As far as he was concerned, there was a guest in his home with a special concern. And he’d be darned if his home didn’t stand by its most considerate.

Still, what to do? “Gee, Zander. I don’t think I can ask your mother to throw out dinner…”

“Oh no no no!” Zander swept his hands into his dad’s face. “You don’t have to do that! She understands. I mean, she gets it. But she totally won’t want to sit with us during dinner.”

“I suppose you’re right about that. Bit of a shame.”

“Well—it’s not so bad.” Zander shrugged, almost guiltily, towards the edge of the stairwell. “She, uh, ate before she came. And Mom made her carrot sticks too, so she’s not that hungry.”

“Ah. Good for your mother.”

“But I better stay with her so she doesn’t have to sit alone while we all eat.”

Mr. Coxcomb cupped his son’s head and gave that fine-grained hair a rustle. “You’re right, Zander. That’s awfully nice of you. You’re a swell host!”

He ascended the stairs with an amiable feathery sensation to his step, more than a bit pleased with himself for having raised a thoughtful boy. Before he left the basement, he passed the light switch panel and absently smashed his hand against it, flinging the rest of the bulbs on. It was so dark down here. Maybe the kids would appreciate a little light.

Right as he closed the door, he heard smacking lips and a high-pitched giggle. Kissing scene must have come back on.

Zander’s plan worked out pretty well. Dinner didn’t even suffer for it—Mr. Coxcomb enjoyed a quiet meal with his wife, the kind they hadn’t had in years. The table felt a touch empty without anyone reaching over its whole length for the gravy, but as a change of pace, it was nice.

“So,” he said as he was cutting them each a new serving of roast. “Looks like Zander’s caught alien fever.”

His wife smiled and rolled her hazel eyes. “You know how it is, Rob. But I think in the long run they still won’t be able to compete with dinosaurs for him. Dinosaurs existed too, you know.”

They shared a laugh. ‘Alien fever’ was their own little word. The world since these past few months was gasping and making great noises, as if in an uproar awaiting everything being turned on its head. News channels were running everything they could about ponies, true or false—some days you couldn’t say if they were any better than tabloids anymore. Supermarkets were changing their layouts, hotels were changing their rooms, and corporations were changing their mission statements. Everyone thought they had to do something differently now, no matter if it made sense.

But from where the Coxcombs sat enjoying their dinner, what was going to change? The world still needed web designers and middle managers. The price of gas was still too high. Housing anywhere near New York, still ridiculous. The high school was still three blocks down and their neighbors all still here. It was like a wink and a nudge, a secret between the two of them, that life would carry on as usual.

Dinner was particularly leisurely that night. Mr. Coxcomb helped to wash the dishes and put leftovers away in Tupperware. So once all was said and done and he noted the clock, it was getting on towards nine. A little late. Probably time to send Zander’s friend home. He didn’t know if she had made arrangements, so he decided to head downstairs and ask if she needed to call her parents. Mrs. Coxcomb whispered after him, making sure he offered to drive her home.

All the basement lights were off again. Mr. Coxcomb descended on tiptoe; he couldn’t entirely say why. Maybe he didn’t want to interrupt the movie. The pony seemed like such a sweet little creature. It was said they didn’t have color TV where she came from. And although he had some awareness of his own pretensions, he liked to think that he was a ‘cool’ dad.

The TV was off. Because Mr. Coxcomb was quiet, and because the boy and the filly were so absorbed that they didn’t notice him, he had as long as five whole seconds to observe the scene playing out on the couch. It was a ratty old thing, that couch, with a backing so thick and wrinkled you could have hidden within it. He had made love to his wife on this very sofa many times in the early days of their marriage.

The filly was lying on her back, with her hair spilling over the cushions and her head crunched up against the armrest. Zander was sitting on her tail—it was caught under his left leg, which he had folded into the corners of the sofa so that he could sit facing her. They were staring into each other’s eyes with an earnest, wide-eyed intensity, as if discovering a dangerous continent step by step.

Strawblossom's limbs splayed helplessly in the air. Her hind legs were spread open, and they shifted—wider, narrower, wider—with each of her slow, deep breaths. One of Zander’s hands was on the tuft of pink hair just past the hoof—the ankle? Fetlock? As Mr. Coxcomb watched, it slid, his son’s fingers dripping gently down the inside edge of the filly’s leg.

“ZANDER!”

The silence broke into red-hot pieces. The pair broke apart like cindered popcorn, falling off the couch in panic and terror.

Mr. Coxcomb stormed about the basement, throwing lights on here, there, everywhere. Let it all come to light! When he finally turned his face back to the duo, it was twisted murderously, with his nose crinkled into a white ball over rollercoaster lips. Both his son and the pony—the girl—winced in abject horror. He loomed over them like a colossus and opened his mouth wide.

He was going to yell more, of course. Because he had plenty to say. Plenty of things he had never said before. But he stuttered when he looked at the two of them. He couldn’t get any words out.

They were still there, curling their limbs up on the floor. Neither met his eyes. Zander’s knees were tucked under his hands, and he was flinching almost as if expecting to be hit. That probably would have been preferable to the tirade Mr. Coxcomb had in mind.

But—no words came out. Mr. Coxcomb was so lost that he didn’t even know what to yell. He had to retreat before his limbs started to quiver. Tripping once, he walked in reverse, falling upstairs backwards to escape his son.

Before he fled the basement entirely, he did hear the filly say something.

“Shit. We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

Mr. Coxcomb’s wife spent an hour rubbing his shoulders while he sat in front of the phone.

His son. His son, his son, his only son, his Zander, his boy. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

Mrs. Coxcomb found another knot in his collar, and after a jolt of pain he relaxed for a second. His head lifted from the kitchen table so that bleary red eyes could focus on nothing in particular.

He’d already placed a call to the embassy. In response to his incoherency, they promised to send two of her parents over shortly. He’d hung up before really listening to what they said.

Two parents. Two out of what? Households with only one parent were troublesome enough, hard for a child to make do with, but what could be the meaning of more than two? Since turning to Zander for an explanation was out of the question, he’d had to call up a friend who might know, and everything he heard was even more a terror. Ponies were polygamists? What was this?

No jokes about alien fever now. The world was about as solid as jello.

Mr. Coxcomb started to think—what if Strawblossom’s parents didn’t see the problem with what had happened? He himself was ready to admit he’d been a fool. At first he’d readied himself to eat crow. But if something worse happened, and they told him not to worry? There was no telling how they thought, these extra-dimensional creatures. No telling how they even perceived the world. And so what would Mr. Coxcomb tell his son? How could he raise any children at all? What would Zander do if he figured out he could sneak off to some other house and lead who knew what kind of life—a house of three, five, twenty-five parents?

The number grew each time he dared think of it. Before long it was making a run on the triple digits. Mrs. Coxcomb kept on whispering sweet reassurances, but she whispered into deaf ears. Nothing could console him while he couldn’t burn that image from his eyes. His son’s fingers tracing her leg. A horse leg. Yet so tender and curious. She was still in the basement, and Zander was locked in his room now. But Mr. Coxcomb still hadn’t said anything to the boy. Why not? He had to say something.

Yes, maybe that was it. It was better than staying collapsed on this kitchen table, that was for sure. Mr. Coxcomb stood tall, letting his wife’s massaging hands fall away like water. He made no secret of his footfalls reaching to the bedroom hall.

Zander’s door was covered in old stickers. Several dinosaurs and a radiation warning. Mr. Coxcomb tried to ease it open, in a non-threatening manner, but as so often happened the attempt to open a door slowly only cause it to protest more loudly.

The boy was on his bed, facing away, pitter-pattering something into a phone. A clear break in the clicks signaled that he knew his father was standing behind them, but he made no other sign, forcing Mr. Coxcomb to walk around the bed and take a seat on the coverlet.

He licked his lips. “Zander. I’d like to talk.”
Zander stuffed his phone under the covers while looking away. “Yeah, whatever.”
Mr. Coxcomb gripped the bedpost for support. “Do you want to say anything?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

He waited a moment, swaying back and forth. Then he took a deep breath. “Zander, you can’t do that with her.”

Zander spun, breathing hard. “Oh yeah? Why not?”

His lips were curled, baring his teeth but nearly in a smile. Zander lifted his chin upon his words. They were hoisted with all the vigor of a polished scepter, thrown down with all the bravery of an absolute trump card.

Mr. Coxcomb stared and stared. Zander was right. He didn't understand. But he would have given anything to know what was happening inside Zander's budding heart.

He backed away with ears alert for anything Zander might call after him as he left. Nothing was said. But Mr. Coxcomb left the door open. He returned downstairs to a wife who looked none too proud.

A car idled up to the house. When genteel hoofbeats clipped along the drive, Mr. Coxcomb’s muscles seized up. It might as well have been the claw-click of monsters stalking the castle gates.

Thankfully, Mrs. Coxcomb answered the door. It opened. A blue pony with angel wings stepped through. He was wearing a brown suit, not entirely unlike Mr. Coxcomb’s, and a short black tie that tucked in near the curve of his belly. Following him was a pale-grey pegasus wearing a simple green dress.

Mr. Coxcomb made himself stand. The man—the stallion—must have been ‘Soarin’. The one they said would come.

He had to deal with this. These were parents and they deserved an explanation, one way or another—no beating around the bush this time. So he cleared his throat. “I’m very sorry—”

“No.” Soarin’ didn’t even let Mr. Coxcomb get started before he interrupted. “I’m the one who’s sorry.”

“But I shouldn’t—”

“You didn’t do anything. Strawblossom’s never been to Earth before. I didn’t even think to find out how she felt about humans. I never should have sent her off to someone’s house without asking—”

“No, I should have been watching them. I didn’t even—”

“We should have sat down with her and had the talk about different—”

“Well, this has never happened before—”

“Not to Strawblossom either!”

“We never thought he—”

“But she shouldn’t have—”

“Neither should Zander!”

After they had stammered on like this for the better part of five minutes, their wives nudged them in the sides, causing them to trail off.

Their own flushed faces and deep sighs released into the pallid room, forcing its drained color to take on a closer semblance of domesticity.

After a silence, Soarin’ pawed the linoleum. “Teenagers, huh? Nothing so terrifying.”

At this, Mr. Coxcomb let out a short, uncontrollable laugh.

It was like being in the frigid depths of space and suddenly spotting a familiar lifeline drift by. He seized it. As he leapt forward, seizing the pony’s hoof and shaking it with a euphoric vigor. “Yes,” he said a little too loudly. “Yes! Hah! Hello! And nice to meet you! And, oh, certainly how true! Thank God. Thank God for you, Mr. Soarin!”

The Bat and the Believer (part 2)

Luke dove off the city bus with his head down, stopping only briefly to untangle his backpack from a parking meter. As he passed underneath a lattice of white steel the crowds of men and women his age surrounded him, swirling him deep into the smell—human bodies, fast-food wrappers, tasteless air. Everything to remind him that he was now on Earth.

Tom’s madcap escapades were gone like a dream come Monday morning. Now the break was over. As Luke settled his backpack on his shoulders, he almost chuckled at how he’d berated himself for agreeing to his friend’s blind dates. Things always seemed different from this side. Was it so wrong to choose a little adventure over this greasy greytop grind?

Of course, in a way it still felt queer to be here at school. He wove through a hauntingly familiar engineering department. The math tower leaned over Neil Avenue like a sentinel against fantasy. They were blasts from a past life. Coming here had felt queer ever since First Contact. Ever since Equestria.

As it turned out, even traveling to an alien world and bringing back the news didn’t exempt him from the need to get an education. Even after playing a personal part in bringing the United Nations into the Equestrian Alliance, the only thing Aunt Tara cared about was the fact that he’d skipped six months of school. And despite turning the world on its head, he would still be out of a job if he didn’t play catch-up to finish his degree.

A disappointment, but he tried not to let it bother him. He’d gotten to experience things most men had only dared dream of. It always struck him as selfish to be anything but grateful for that.

Besides, it wasn’t as though nothing had changed. He could see the fruits of his labors even here, even before the first class of the day. There were ponies on the quad. Five, by a quick count, all unicorns, all in the robes of Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns and all wearing custom saddlebags that mimicked the style of American backpacks. They were hanging around a statue near the library, busily pretending to be nothing but a part of the crowd. Luke couldn’t help but find it adorable—the way they leaned up on the statue, self-consciously chatting as though they weren’t drawing glances from every human being within a hundred meters. Ponies. They could be threatening Luke with a knife, and he still wouldn’t be able to help thinking of them as a beloved child somehow. Maybe that was why Luke and his friends had been able to convince the whole Earth that these aliens meant no harm.

If all mankind was lucky, other universities would begin sending their students to Earth soon. Canterlot University had entered into tentative talks with couple schools in the UK, though these were somewhat hampered by the fact that the nearest plans for a Dimension Gate facility were in London, and those not expected to go up for three years. Really, few of the schools would have been looking so early on if Twilight hadn’t been pushing it. She really wanted Equestrian universities to experience the full benefits of their new allies. To hear her talk, there would be no rest until Equestria was building spaceships and self-flying chariots. No one doubted her ability to do it, either; she was not alone in her quest to pilfer every engineering curriculum in the planet, because for once she wasn’t the only one who saw the possibilities. It was shocking—the number of ideas a Ph. D. in Thaumaturgy could spark just by trotting through a physics building. And so of course Tom loved to talk on podcasts about how magic would cause a new technological revolution. Even Ohio State was getting in on the action; according to rumor, someone was doing their thesis on an attempt to increase the precision of nanotechnology by an order of magnitude via combining magical telekinesis with electron scanning microscopes.

Yes, there was still some excitement in the air. In the early days everyone had been afraid to sleep, for fear they might miss something and awake to a world they no longer recognized. And even now most people were convinced that the Gates would cause a Second Contact any day. It had been several months without such luck, but not for lack of trying. Now that the economic benefits of exploring the multiverse were starting to show up on charts, heavily-funded explorers were tromping blindly into every dimension they could reach. Finding new sentient life was feasible, if challenging. But to everyone’s disappointment, not every alien was as friendly as a pony, or as interested in suddenly becoming close trade partners.

Still, hope sprung eternal. There had been tall blue aliens on this very campus once, Vedalkan if Luke recalled their name, although their attitude had been rather cool—

There was a dark blur and an animal smell. Luke’s hair stood at attention. His head snapped back. He stood rooted on a strip of concrete.

By the time he looked up, the alien had passed him by. She was trotting, by the sound of it, much faster than the average human walk. The corridor of humanity had already slid onto the grass in order to allow her passage down the center of the path. But she’d stepped neatly around an oblivious Luke and nearly brushed against his legs.

What was that retreating shape? She looked almost like a pony, and that almost looked like Royal Guard armor shining on her back. But although it was the most obvious explanation, Luke’s gut told him it was wrong. Those hooves—they weren’t quite right. And those ears—all wrong. They were huge!

But none of that made any sense. The only thing he knew was that the alien was female—he couldn’t say exactly how he knew—and that she wasn’t a pony. The most equine thing about her was the tail, a neatly-combed shock of purple hair that hung still as she vanished around a corner.

It was only then that Luke realized he was the last one still staring. Must have been because he was excited about the prospect of new visitors to Earth. It certainly couldn’t be because of the way those hips—or flanks, as Tom would have corrected him—swayed like top-heavy orchids in a zephyr.

Either way, she was gone. The only thing left was a trace of that musky smell, only vaguely reminiscent of Equestria, and the certainty that a girl had just touched his leg. Now, Luke could have given chase to satisfy his curiosity. But the world had only just gotten to the point where a pony could walk in the street without inciting a mob. The only way this whole Equestrian Alliance thing could work—the only way those unicorns could study here—was if everyone pretended, from nine to five, like they didn’t want to badger every alien in sight with unceasing questions. And everyone knew it. Luke, of all people, felt obligated to set a good example. So he put his head back down, setting his feet on the road to class. He tried to pretend that the vision which had stung him was just another student walking by.

But for whatever reason he couldn’t focus on class that day. Calculus was a maze of violins and meaningless alphabets. The politics of Medieval Europe was a game of thrones played by dull and greedy boors. Even theology somehow managed to turn obscure. Normally, Luke was the kind of student who would never skip class. But when even the Monophysite schism failed to lift his head from the desk, he admitted it might be time to make an exception.

He tried calling Lyra before doing anything drastic. Lyra loved to be called. She was a little too proud of being the only pony with a cell phone. And she only got the chance to use it while she was here on Earth, because passing a wireless reception through the Dimension Gates was still only a theory. Her brilliant idea of installing a landline hadn’t panned out, since the cord got sawed in half every time the portal powered down. But for the rest of the month while she and the Element Bearers were here, you could count on Lyra to pick up before the second ring.

On that mark, she didn’t let him down. But to Luke’s surprise, she wasn’t able to help him with his mystery. She had no idea who the alien might be. Apparently the merging of cultures which Tom forever dreamed of was finally beginning to take off. Gate travel was so booked that she could no longer keep a complete list via gossip of every pony who made the trip to Earth. And there were too many walls of secrecy for her to look it up. The UN had really started taking things over. These days, the young men and ponies who had made First Contact hardly got told anything. It was almost as if the nations of the world didn’t want a bunch of kids to be in charge of changing the planet.

He indulged Lyra by chatting about nothing for a while, since it would have been mean to hang up on her right away. After that, there was nothing else to do. So he got an M&M milkshake at the union. He tried, and failed, to do a little homework so that the afternoon wouldn’t be an academic waste. After that fizzled he went for an equally fruitless walk. He even resorted to the pastime of liberal arts majors and watched a movie on his roommate’s Netflix. That seemed to be going alright until he realized the credits he was glancing up to were the ending credits, not the opening ones.

He was almost despondent, then—kicking a pebble down the lane between the tennis courts and the soccer field. It wasn’t because he couldn’t find her, he told himself. She was just one stranger. More because he hated to waste time, that precious gift of life from his creator, and he couldn’t figure out why he was doing just that.

Then there was an animal smell, a dark blur in the corner of his vision.

Luke stood up straight faster than the hair on his neck. There she was, walking around the edge of Morrill Tower. Like a little patch of midnight cooling down the summer day.

He was pretty sure it was the same alien, anyway. She was moving away from campus, towards the river. Luke couldn’t make out any details from here because she was wearing a bulky harness over her armor, and the harness was hitched to a wooden wagon. The wagon blocked most of his view because it was loaded high with such things as coolers, toilet paper, and a tin pail, all atop a generous cargo of stone blocks. The average earth pony would have been sweating under a load like that.

Luke abandoned his pebble and jogged towards the river.

She must have been going faster than he thought, because by the time he got down there she was far along the riverside trail. He took off after her, alternately jogging and walking. Once or twice he thought about calling out around the bicyclists and roller skaters, but he already felt awkward enough running down an alien over this distance. Dusting off his Equus in a public space was a little too much.

She kept going all the way across the bridge, until the campus buildings started giving way to marsh. The sun was dipping by then. Luke lost it under the treeline. But even in darkness the wagon, which must have been of Equestrian construction, made plenty of noise to be found by. When she turned off the path, it made even more noise breaking limbs and twigs. Luke thought for sure he would catch up then; he put on a little burst of speed to the point where she had entered the forest. He followed his ears to a wide clearing and stopped short.

The round stone tower that stood there was a good three stories high, made of beautiful grey blocks each bigger than Luke’s head. The university certainly hadn’t built this. Then again, its craggy walls were hardly of an Equestrian architecture, either. They would, he imagined, have been at home on a world of pinnacle hilltops, where lightning strikes were not uncommon.

Already muttering a thoughtless prayer, Luke circled the base of the miniature keep, looking for a door. He didn’t find one; the only holes at all were in the second story, where wide windows cut away nearly the entire wall. But there were several smaller structures littering the clearing, including an outhouse, a stout square with an oven full of cold charcoal, and a wooden tub not far from an electric pump. A small mountain of firewood cords leaned up against the rock.

Something heavy smashed into Luke and drove him to the ground.

He didn’t see what happened right away. His vision turned red because his head bounced on a mat of topsoil, all the breath squeezed out of him like toothpaste. “What are you doing here?” demanded a volatile hiss from the weight atop his chest.

Luke struggled for breath enough to view the creature pinning him down. Her impact had been harder than a rockslide because it wasn’t just hooves that had clobbered him, but her unpainted hoofguards. She was hanging fangs long enough to be kitchen knives over his throat. Distinctly un-ponylike wings flared, black and bony, to either side.

To the extent that he was lucid, Luke wondered why he wasn’t wholly occupied by fear of those fangs sinking into his neck and ripping out his esophagus. She wasn’t a pony exactly, but the body language of her bat-wings was clearly analogous to that of a pegasus. They were at total extension, tilted back to show off their full size. She was making herself look bigger—the universal language for meaning business.

Instead of prudent terror, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of warmth seeping from the point of contact with those cold and heavy hoofguards. Her coat was the grey of lining on a cloud. Her mane was midnight blue, close-cropped. Almost a pixie cut. And the ears were long and notched, their edges twining like the curves of slender leaves.

Vague memories flashed before Luke’s eyes of staying up past bedtime long ago, drinking hot cocoa and watching Dracula a dozen times in a row.

“What are you doing here?” She repeated her demand and shook him a little. Luke’s head cleared enough to register the distinctly un-equine hiss.

“I-I…welcoming you to Earth?” he stammered. “I—saw you walking by yourself and I wanted to say hello!”

The ears dropped back until they were buried in her mane. “So you followed me?”

“Uh…”

Luke shrank. He was a little dismayed to conclude that he didn’t have any good answer to that question.

“Do not mistake me for a pony,” she sneered, spitting the final word. “I am a Vespertila. Solitude and I are not enemies.”

That stung even worse. Luke was ashamed to have unconsciously fallen back on the excuse of friend-making that would have gotten him into the clear with almost any pony. It wasn’t fair to this lady to be bothered by random strangers like Luke all the time.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, pulling burrs out of his crew cut. “I just wanted to say hi.”

She held him on the ground another second. Then, abruptly, her hooves left his chest. She kicked him lightly so that he rolled over a few times. “You’ve said it twice now. Your work is done.”

Her wings were already tilted against the air, and her back legs bent slightly, as if she were about to hop. Something about this made Luke panic, so he sprung onto his toes. But if there was anything he’d wanted to say, it perished miserable and nameless on his tongue.

She twisted her head back to see what he was doing, aiming a raised eyebrow in his direction. He must have been a sight just then—in a hoof-stamped cardigan and the distinctly unfashionable khaki pants that he always wore to class so he could blend in.

“I have no business with humans,” she said. With a sudden jerking motion, she was gone.

Luke had to look all around the clearing to find her again. He’d expected her to take at least a little gallop before taking off, but her flight was nothing like that of a pegasus. She shot straight off the ground, and once airborne, seemed to travel in every direction at once. The flight was hot and fast and short. Just as quickly as she’d plowed into him, she disappeared through the windows of her tower.

Luke finished brushing himself off. Peering after her, he could see a few furnishings through the windows, including wall hangings that might have been woven tapestries of the Royal Pony Sisters. But there was no sign of her. If he stayed and stood on his toes to find one he would feel like he was spying on her again. So, shaking his head, he turned to go.

But barely had he taken a couple steps when the wind quivered—broke. She nearly might have knocked him over a second time if he hadn’t dove out of the way. This time she stuck the landing with an audible snap, one forehoof raised. Dull metal rolled out of a fishnet sack and came to rest against Luke.

Because she’d nearly landed on him, Luke was on the ground again for her to loom over.

“If you’re not going to leave,” she said, “then make yourself useful. My armor needs a good scrubbing.” So saying, she opened her mouth to drop an earth-colored cloth at his feet.

“What?” he cried, scrabbling away from the metal edges. “I don’t have to do that!”

At once the Vespertila seemed to flinch. Still staring at him, she left rings in the ground by fiddling her horseshoes. When she stepped over the shards of metal to get closer, her expression was so pitiable that Luke was sure she would apologize. But then Luke reached up a hand to meet her halfway; all at once she snapped to attention.

“You’re right,” she said just as quickly. “Forget it. You can go home. Good night.”

Luke shuffled his feet. Unless Vespertila culture and social scripts were well beyond his understanding, this made no sense. Not that he understood what either of them were doing here anymore. All he knew was that he had embarrassed himself enough. He ought to get out while he still could.

The sun was all but gone, but this spit of unflattened ground was barely large enough to be called a forest. The lights of the city were visible in all directions. Luke would be able to get home with only a minimum of scratches from unseen branches and briars.

So it was a bit of a surprise when he said, “Sure,” and crossed his legs to sit down.

With her standing over him, he grabbed one piece of metal at a time. The rough wool cloth pulled away black specks of dirt and stain, slowly working the dulled armor to a shine that a Royal Guard might possibly deign to wear.

The Vespertila hardly moved at first—though Luke looked up every now and then, at the way the muscles in her wiry legs stood out against failing light. He felt a delightful shiver—perhaps from the cold, or perhaps from her irises, which were like broken red daggers permanently fixed on him. He even made a game of looking down and then back to her, just for the chills.

He thought he could read her facial expression much as though it were a pony’s. She looked surprised.

This carried on for a short time. Night fell. There was a lot of armor, so Luke just kept on working through piece by piece, folding a sleeve over his hand when the metal felt cold to touch. When he was struggling with a particularly difficult spot of rust on the peytral, she finally moved. A twitch.

“Don’t worry about it,” she muttered. “That’s a pretty fine cloth. You won’t get it.”

Then she flitted away again. Luke sensed it by sound, and by the nuzzle of disturbed air against his cheek. By this time the only real light left was a small fire-flicker from inside the tower. He could hardly see anything, though he doubted the same could be said about her.

The Vespertila returned with something fragrant held in her mouth. Her face leaned towards him from the shadows, and Luke’s breath caught in his throat. He found himself carefully accepting one of two meat shishkabobs which seemed to be roasted mice. He was careful not to let his fingers brush her mouth—it wouldn’t have mattered to a pony, but he wasn’t making any assumptions.

In two more trips, she moved down a platter of grapes and a wide candle for Luke to see by. They ate in silence. The mouse proved to be edible as long as Luke didn’t try too hard to imagine what it would look like in better lighting.

That quiet should have been distinctly uncomfortable. Luke believed—as he guessed she believed—that silence was an important way to grow closer to one’s self, an art lost to a world full of people who were afraid to be alone with themselves. But even he was susceptible to awkward pauses. He’d just barged into her home, and she in turn had nearly knocked him senseless. Could they possibly just forget all that? Even if Luke wanted to, there was no way she would go along. Why did he even want to?

“I apologize for striking you,” she blurted.

“It was nothing,” he breathed before the words were out of her mouth.

A short pause. “So what brings you to my little corner of the multiverse?”

She sunk one fang into a mouse and swallowed it whole. “Nothing a human like you would care about.”

Luke twirled an empty skewer between his palms. “Try me.”

Another raised eyebrow. She shrugged.

“I am one of the Night Guard. We serve as—”

“Guards to Luna! Oh, yes, I’ve heard of that.”

“Princess Luna,” she hissed. Her upper lip slid back to reveal her fangs again, and Luke leaned ever-so-slightly back until she stopped herself short. “We aren’t bodyguards. The Avatar of Night does not need the protection of mortals. I am a fifth-rank Novus who has served the Guard for ten full years. And—” She shuffled closer on her folded legs. “You?”

“I serve the creator of this whole universe,” Luke said openmouthed. “He who made the heavens and the earth, whose name is above all other names.”

He’d always been hard on himself for not having the guts to introduce himself that way. But he wanted to be courageous around her.

“Er—my name’s Luke, by the way.”

“Chlkthata,” she answered with the ghost of a grin.

“I should…probably go.”

“Yes.” She broke off eye contact. “Probably.”

“So…”

Luke scooted a little closer to her around the candle. She did the same.

The candle, though it burned warm, illuminated almost nothing but their faces. “What does a fifth-rank Novus do?”

“Mostly, I act as a guide for my people, and for those ponies who have a special devotion to the Star-Spinner.”

Luke’s smile opened wide. “Wow. You know, I always wondered. I met a pony in Ponyville who prays to Celestia, but nopony ever talked about Lu—I mean, Princess Luna quite the same way. I always wondered if there were ponies who revered her.”

Chlkthata downed a couple grapes, eyeing him skeptically. “Most humans don’t seem to grasp the concept of reverence.”

“Oh, no, that’s not true at all!” Luke clapped his face and sighed. “Maybe you haven’t met the right humans. I don’t know. I don’t blame you for being a little put-off, I mean, some of us have a pretty different image of Luna—Princess, Princess Luna.”

Her gaze dropped for a second. She examined his shoes, and traced his legs back up to his face.

“It was difficult coming here,” she admitted. “Many ponies have not yet offered Forgiveness for the Fall, either formally or in their hearts. I spent much of the past few years in training to rebuke those who still blamed her and show them the truth. Here I find that your people hardly hold an anger to forgive, but insist on making unforgivable comments about the Mistress of the Moon’s physical form.”

Luke chuckled and leaned back. The feeble candle flickered in a wind escaping the distant maze of skyscrapers. But a little more light joined them when a cloud pulled back from a corner of the moon.

“Ah.” Luke squinted upward. “Speaking of the moon, there she is now.”

Chlkthata was looking up at it with open eyes, holding still, the way one might stare down a dangerous animal. “Maybe,” he heard her growl.

Luke stroked his chin, mind racing. “Ah. I see. Not the right moon, is it?”

Her head swayed dolefully. “I am alone, without a single friendly star. Infinity on every side surrounds me, and on the inside only cold.”

It sounded like a quote. “Your Princess say that?” Luke guessed.

“This untamed night has thrown the more…dogmatic portions of our Guard into disarray. Some of them are certain this whole world is a plot to destroy them. Some would like to offer homage to the second moon. Others have had their faith shaken.”

“I’m sorry,” Luke said as sincerely as he could. “Oddly enough…I can relate. You’re a bit of a challenge too, you know. And ponies. The presence of real sentient aliens has turned the college of cardinals on its head. Oh, you should see those old men go back and forth about whether ponies have immortal souls.”

Still looking into the candle, the Vespertila chuckled darkly. The sound came out predatory enough to send Luke into a delectable spine-rolling shiver. “Souls. Hah! You do us credit. Few of the High Vespers credit you with being any more than animals.”

Luke leaned against her tower. “Ah, don’t worry about it. Sometimes I’m not so sure myself.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” she added, “animals are still granted a crucial role in the cycle of life under the Royal Pony Sisters.”

“I’m flattered.”

“But what is so challenging about ponies to the devotees of your…creator? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

A tongue-click. “Oh, it has to do with a few things. I don’t hold much truck with it myself. Think it really boils down to an antiquated need to feel like humans are more special than everyone else. You see, we’ve been alone for so long, and when we started out we had no reason to think there was other intelligent life. And if you really want to know how the whole thing works…”

They spent the night discussing divine incarnations, moons, alternate realities, and immortal souls. He finally managed to learn that Chlkthata was mostly here to investigate the strange new night of Earth, but that she held a quiet disdain for the quarrels of ‘the old stallions’ as she called them. Though it was technically impossible to reconcile Earth’s existence with the idea of Night itself as an ontological entity both created by and entirely subsumed within the presence of Princess Luna, she somehow managed to wave her hoof at the whole affair when Luke pressed her to get right down to the heart of the matter. What she told Luke, but wouldn’t have told her fellow Night Guards, was that Luna remained undiminished, since she was still the sole sovereign of Equestrian Night. The presence of this Earth night was a whole new entity, which, rather than subtracting from anything, provided an exciting new reality to explore and new splendor to discover. Chlkthata had gotten herself onto the front lines of that discovery. She had been on Earth for some months now, though she mainly came out at night and wasn’t usually out of her tower when classes were in session at the university.

Neither of them noticed the time pass, but Luke’s body eventually reminded him with a tumultuous yawn. If he didn’t stumble home soon, he would be tucking himself in under a light sky.

He rose reluctantly then—and bowed, because it somehow felt appropriate. “Chlkthata, I’d—like to learn more about Princess Luna, if that’s okay. I don’t want to interrupt your sleep or your work, but maybe in the early night sometime you won’t be busy. Could I come here again?”

She cocked her head and fixed him with her dagger-eyes. “You,” she said slowly, “are not one of her own. But still you wish to learn. So come even at daybreak if you wish. I would be happy to teach you of the beauty of the immortal Night. Perhaps you can tell me more of yours."

Valen and Marigold (part 1)

It was nine o’clock—not quite the end of day on the Ohio State campus. A young man and a mare walked together through the tungsten dusk The mare was a golden-yellow pegasus with the thick feathery coat of the northern tribes and an amber mane tucked into two loose ponytails. The man was short, with angelic features and hairy arms. Though just short of handsome by most human standards, the way he walked, especially by her side, suggested that he had a certain sway with other females. His surname was anyone’s guess, for he wasn’t fond of giving it out, but many ponies knew him by the name Valen. A few knew him as Best Background Human.

To Marigold Meadows, at least in that moment, his name was OhCelestiaOhCelestiaOhCelestia-I’m-actually-doing-this. She was young, and she was buzzed, but neither was the cause of her shivering.

They entered the saccharine glow of an old dormitory together. Valen showed her how to work an elevator, but she was distracted with attempting to convert Valen’s age to human years in her head. She was trying to figure out if, had Valen been a stallion, she would have thought he was too old for her. The difference in years between them had only just now assumed any importance.

The elevator opened up at the juncture between the men and women’s wings. Valen knelt and extended his hand for Marigold, encouraging her to take tentative steps into the rank-smelling side of this foreign land. They both smelled strong, but the women’s side sent out traces of fake cinnamon and cloves. The men’s side was a maze of body odor, body spray and stale food, as well as some other things Marigold wasn’t quite sure she wanted to name. Passing each set of doors was an olfactory adventure.

She’d still rather be here than at some hotel. Marigold felt dirty enough right now without being one of those mares who hooked up with their trysts in hotel rooms. She’d insisted against that.

Valen guided her down the turns. As they strolled the hall, she could feel his hand lightly combing through the strands of her mane. A novel sensation, but it felt wonderful. He kept his steps in pace with hers, and gently sang, but not so loud as to be heard inside any of the bedrooms.

“There’s a lady that thinks

all that glitters is gold,

and she’s buying a stairway to hea-ea-ven...”

They passed a common room full of board games. The pieces were lying scattered because a projector screen ran a football game in the corner. Even so, several young men within happened to see the pair walking by. They made noises that startled her. Before long half the room had joined in with whistles and catcalls, and they sounded like surprised dolphins.

“Oh!” One of them poked his head out of the common room to leer benignly at Valen. “T’s got a girl again!”

“Someone’s havin’ a good night,” another voice echoed over the TV.

Valen made a small show of blushing and trying to extricate himself by walking further down the hall. “Guys,” he said, “this is Marigold. She’s a friend…she’s coming to visit.”

“Uh-huh,” said a voice from the back. “You’re totally just gonna’ watch movies in there.”

He turned even redder. “Okay, you know what? I’m—we’re leaving now. Come on Marigold, let’s go.”

Marigold couldn’t help laughing in spite of her nerves. “Hi, guys.” She trotted up to the nearest person’s leg and patted it hello. “Guess Valen is a little shy.”

The room filled with ‘Aww’ sounds upon hearing her high, soft voice, and for a moment it was Marigold’s turn to blush.

“You really know how to pick ’em,” said the dry voice again.

Marigold turned playfully to look at her date. “Does Valen bring other mares home often?” she said with mock incredulity.

When absolute snickering answered the query, she let out a gasp and whipped Valen’s leg with her tail. “Bad Valen!”

They started back up with the dolphin noises.

Marigold played around a little longer, but soon she decided to let Valen escape. She joined him further down the hall. A few faces peeped out at them from behind painted doors, but Valen wasn’t blushing anymore, and neither was she.

“So you’ve known for a while that you were a background character?” she asked, feeling much refreshed.

Valen folded his hands behind his head. “Oh, yeah. Found out quick. The first time I ever saw a pony she ran up out of a crowd and started asking for my autograph. I had no idea what was going on.”

A giggle. “That must have been strange.”

“Oh, filly. You don’t even know. I hadn’t even heard we’d met aliens yet. But she was nice. Explained it to me. You know, it’s funny. Turns out on Earth we have a show about you, kind of like you have comic books about us. There’s a fandom for it, and ‘background ponies’ and everything. The Bearers of the Elements of Harmony are like celebrities over here. And I’ve heard some poor pegasus called Ditzy Doo gets a mountain of fan-mail even bigger than mine.”

“Wow.” Marigold slowed to appreciate the strange, obscene doodles on posters and whiteboards that she passed. There was plenty to look at in the hall, including a stolen construction sign which she warily stepped around. “So you…know about the fandom, then.”

“Mmm-hmm,” he answered inscrutably.

Marigold bit her lip, working up the courage for her next question.

He chuckled. “And yeah, I’ve seen some of the porn.”

“Oh.” She hung her head, deflating, especially since his answer triggered a few memories of her own. “I’m—sorry you had to see that.”

“Naw.” He shrugged. “I mean…it was pretty weird, but…flattering, in a way. You know?”

“That’s about the best reaction anyone could have to that.”

“I try.”

He went back to stroking the edge of her mane. They neared the far end of the wing, leaving behind rowdy noise for the quiet door to Valen’s room.

And if this were one of the million average trysts that happened every night, there wouldn’t be more worth noting. But then tonight wouldn’t have become a story that Marigold repeated to her diary and her closest friends. Telling a story about a normal night would be boring.

She swallowed a lump in her throat while Valen fiddled with the keys. Finally she was here, actually here, after this whole tumultuous day. It had been a long one. With the time-zone switch, that was true even literally.

She’d begun the day in Canterlot.

Even at a prestigious school like Canterlot University, the fillies kept good track of which colts were ‘easy’. Marigold had never paid any attention to that, preferring to think of herself as absorbed in more ‘important’ concerns like studies and comic books. She was an intellectual, above all that.

But when she’d woken up this morning with the thought that she had two tickets to Earth she wouldn’t use…or, more importantly, after waking up in the same empty bed…she just couldn’t take it. With a bit of a guilty slink, she’d sought out a particular friend of hers who kept track of such things as easy colts. And when the name of her favorite husbando from ‘Only Human’ came up—it hit her for the first time that he was real, out there, somewhere, and she could go talk to him. Her heart had fluttered like a little filly’s heart in the thrall of its first stupid crush. Not knowing what else to do at the time, she’d answered it.

So she’d gone on that trip through the Gate after all, albeit by herself. Stamping double tickets for one pony had made her feel pretty pathetic, but she’d gotten through—to Earth, the mystical land of humans. Really being there was enough to make her cry, especially given the state she was been in. Everything was huge. And it was largely the way she’d imagined it, if not quite. The clouds were so high up that she felt constantly uncomfortable even without knowing she wasn’t allowed to fly. She’d spent far too much of her life daydreaming about coming here, but when she saw that sky, out of reach, she’d almost hated it.

Everything was also slightly bigger than she’d imagined, so it was a good thing she didn’t give herself time to get lost. Valen was surprisingly easy to find. Her friend knew exactly what grapevine to trace, and before long Marigold even knew what library he was in.

Then there had been an awkward moment. She’d hidden behind a bookshelf, watching him sit on a plush red chair reading a book. It was astounding to see him in the flesh.
But—how did one approach an easy boy?

Was she supposed to be like one of those mares who wore makeup every day and practiced their sashay? Was she supposed to run her tail along his nose? How would that even work on a human? Besides, she couldn’t pull off a runway stunt like that. She’d probably just make him sneeze or knock him over.

Maybe she was supposed to use the oldest of pegasus pickup lines—fly nonchalantly overhead and hope he glanced up so she could smirk and say, “Liking the view?” But even if he’d been outside where she could do that, Marigold was sure she’d find some way to screw it up.

Was she supposed to just walk up and say, “Can we bang?” She didn’t think she could work up the gumption to do that.

Eventually, she’d been saved by the fact that she couldn’t come so close to Valen himself and not even talk to him. Somehow she worked her way over. He greeted her with a warm smile as he looked up from his reading.

“Hello there,” he’d said in crumbly but beautiful Equus. Oh, he even had an accent! This was better than the comic! “What can I do for a beautiful mare today?”

Marigold had stood there with her mouth hanging open. By Luna, she’d probably looked like such a doofus. It was embarrassing to realize the question on her tongue—without even thinking about it, she’d been about to ask him if he’d ever been in a relationship with a certain other background human just like all the ship-fiction said. But it felt like an idiotic question when he was there in front of her.

Instead, she’d tried to swish her tail a bit and murmured, “I heard you can—uh—make a mare feel better when she’s down?”

“Ah.” He’d snapped the book closed, both sets of fingers pushing at the covers to make it snap with a dusty thump. “Are you free the rest of the day?”

Marigold blinked. “Huh?”

“Do you have anything else you have to do?”

“You mean—you want to go right now?” She’d looked out the windows at the high, blazing sun. “I guess not.”

“Fantastic.”

And so when he went out the door, she had followed.

Her first car ride was kind of fun. She didn’t quite have the luxury of soaking it all in because her heart had been in her throat at the time. But he didn’t take her quite where she expected. She’d figured out as much when she saw the rollercoaster, like a whimsical skeleton hill on the horizon.

Marigold couldn’t guess how he’d known that a day at the amusement park was what she really needed. Maybe he hadn’t known. Maybe it was just a lucky guess. Either way she was just as grateful. They didn’t let her onto all the rides at King’s Island, but she could do the inner tubes. Valen spent a great deal of time laughing while she purposely shook herself dry on shrieking little kids, who bounced around her asking for ponyback rides. The two of them gorged themselves on cotton candy. And when the light died, a few drinks hadn’t hurt either. Valen had commented that the beer was pretty good, which didn’t say much for human standards.

“You didn’t have to do all this,” she’d murmured, stunned while they leapt across the cracks in a sunset parking lot. “Why did you go to all this trouble?”

He’d just made a funny face and opened the door to his car. “Are you kidding? I had a great day. There’s nothing better than love, ponies taught me that. All I want to do with my life anymore is give and receive it. But I’ve learned over the past year that sometimes it comes best with a few trappings.”

Then he drove to his place, and she’d remembered what she asked him for in the first place.

When the door of the bedroom clicked shut, they were alone. Just the two of them. Valen crossed the room shedding jackets and wallets and keys—so many things coming off of him! Marigold couldn’t breathe. When he was nearly half-undressed, he flopped onto the bed, sprawling, sitting half-upright against the wall. The little white socks on his feet were hanging off the edge.

Marigold stood in the center of the room, exactly where she’d started.

“I’ve never done this with a human before,” she admitted in a breathy squeeze. “I’m—not sure what to do.”

“Eh, don’t worry about it.”

She nodded. Swallowed again. Started to turn around so that she could put her forelegs up on the bed. “So, am I supposed to…”

Valen laughed and held out a hand to forestall her. “Hey, no rush!”

“Oh! Sorry!” She jumped down as quickly as she could. “I told you I didn’t know what I was doing!”

He covered half his chuckling face. “It’s okay! Here, why don’t you come up with me? You’re really cute and I want to cuddle.”

Marigold hopped into bed and nuzzled his arm. “That I can do.”

“Here. You might like sitting across my lap. Just put your back hooves on this side and…forelegs on the other side, just like that…and I can do this.”

He bent his knees, lifting his thighs so that Marigold could slip her hind pasterns underneath his legs. Now she could sit naturally on her haunches while her body crossed his lap. Valen wrapped one arm loosely about her barrel, pulling her a little closer, and she consented to lean against his chest. His cologne swirled around her, shielding her from the smells of the building. She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes. Then, relaxing bit by bit, she nestled her head in the crook of his shoulder.

This was actually pretty nice. Valen’s room was so fresh and clean, and his own scent wasn’t too strong. Clearly he understood how sensitive a pony’s nose was and knew how to please.

He began deftly tracing his fingernails along her head and withers. He wasn’t singing now, moreso humming, very quietly into her ears so that they twitched a little.

==SONG: Fields of Gold by Sting==

She kept thinking that she was supposed to do something. Surely this wasn’t how a mare acted in bed. But then again, as all mares barrel-deep in the fandom knew, humans played the same game by different rules. It was an unbelievably tempting proposition he made her with the tips of his delicate, smoldering fingers. To just stop worrying. To let him take over.

He was taking care of her, after all, and if she let him, he could keep on doing it. He was moving them along, just—slowly. Gradually his hands worked from her withers to her upper barrel, and from there, still running his nails through her coat, he explored the space just her forelegs. She tightened her grip on him as he moved further down, running along her back towards her intermittently-twitching tail.

“Hey. Marigold?”

Marigold’s eyes shot open. He had stopped singing now, and both of his hands were still. He sounded concerned. But what had caused her to fling up her lids was the way he said her name. He’d used it like a glass instrument, feeling the click of each consonant.

“Are you alright?” he whispered. “You feel a little—trembly.”

Marigold swallowed and forced herself still. She took her head out of his neck so she could hit him with a forced smile. “I’m fine!” For good measure she threw in a giggle.

He sunk his fingers back into the depths of her mane. But there was a thoughtful frown on him now. “Okay. Just so you know, it’s uh—normal at this point to talk for a while. Do you want to talk?”

The mare sat up suspiciously, pushing herself away with a hoof carefully applied to his shoulder. “We spent all day talking,” she said with narrowed eyes. “I mean, you’re basically a stallion, right? You don’t want to—”

Valen shrugged with adorable sheepishness. “Sure. But I want other things to. You said you wanted to feel better because you were down. I still don’t know what got you down in the first place.”

Marigold fixed her gaze on a lockbox in the corner of the room. Valen kept all his most important possessions there. Everyone who read the comics knew that. And it made for a good way to avoid meeting his eyes.

“Come on.” Still smiling, he hooked his hands under her front fetlocks and swung her legs around in the air like puppets. Marigold struggled to remain impassive when she wanted to laugh and cry now all at once.

“You shared all sorts of things about yourself with me before,” he said. “I was a good listener, wasn’t I? And you were ready to jump me anyway. What I want most of all, in this moment, is for you to share with me.”

She gave in with a sigh, gingerly unhooking her limbs. Still couldn’t bring herself to look directly at him when she spoke, so after a great deal of fidgeting around, she ended up cradled against him once more, with her head buried on his shoulder.

“But you’ll hate me when I tell you. I only asked you for this because I got turned down by a stallion. A stupid stallion at that…”

But he’d been perfect, somehow, all the way from his round-rim glasses to his unshod hooves. Marigold had entertained plenty of romantic crushes in her foalhood, but she thought she’d put those games behind her when she made it into a prestigious university. Ecology kept her busy. It hadn’t been until she met him that the thought of romance even crossed her mind again.

And this time, it was different. It was a slow, heavy feeling that overtook her through the course of months. Long into this slow burn, there came a day when she awoke and thought to herself—she was really in love. And she had to do something about it.

But somehow it was never quite the right time. He was always in the middle of a conversation, or studying, or eating. He was always in the middle of a life event, or doubtless too busy with final exams.
She had to find a clever way to force herself to say something. Two tickets to Earth would do the trick. Both her and her crush were unseemly fans of Only Human, and even back when they first met could spend all night talking about the most intricate idiosyncrasies of the imaginary world they shared. But even after buying the tickets, she hadn’t been able to work up the courage until a couple weeks before they expired. She’d meant to pretend that a friend had canceled their trip at the last moment, leaving her with an empty slot.

She would look back on that and tell herself over and over that she should have known he wouldn’t keep forever. She should have known that he wasn’t hers to save, as if nopony else would ever notice him the same way she did.

The day for her confession finally arrived. She knew something was wrong right away, when he was already beaming by the time she found him. She’d barely opened her mouth to comment upon his happy glow before he started begging to tell her about the mare he’d met.

“I asked her if I could take them both out,” Marigold sobbed into Valen’s arm. “I asked. I was really nice, too! But she didn’t even give me a chance. She didn’t like me. That bitch just wanted it to be the two of them!”

Though calling her that was unfair. Marigold would have done the same thing. Sharing him was a second-best fantasy.

After running out of words she came blearily back to the present, finding that she couldn’t quite remember all she’d said. She was crushing Valen in a hug, and Valen, without any complaints, was rubbing her back.

Finally he spoke. “You know, we don’t have to do this if we don’t want to.”

Marigold’s legs tensed. “N-no! Don’t be silly. You don’t…We’re totally going to do this.”

He lifted her by the belly so that he could look into her eyes. “I won’t enjoy it if you don’t.”

Marigold’s gaze slid away. “Maybe…no, no!” Shaking free, she dropped from his arms and buried her snout under her hooves. “That’s stupid. I’m—I’m so sorry, you shouldn’t have to see this. You’ve been great. Just let me show you a good time. I can do that much.”

She tried to straddle his lap, but instead of letting her go for his clothes, Valen held her tight, kissing the underside of her muzzle. “It’s not stupid. You can tell me.”

Marigold shook her head, eyes closed.

“I’m begging you, Marigold.” He said her name in that way again. “I want to hear what’s on your tongue. Let the words be free.”

With a half-groan, she let go and rolled onto her back. “I’m…actually out of heat,” she said haltingly.

She winced when admitting it, but Valen only shrugged as if it somehow didn’t matter.

“I—er, that is, I’d like it if—” She nosed at his arm solicitously, breath warm in the dark. “Maybe you could—sing to me some more?”

Her let her snuggle up how she wanted. Valen leaned back against the wall. And playing with her mane, he slowly tilted his head back to sing.

The Stubborn and the Persistent (part 2)

One day Elliot didn’t show up.

It felt spooky. Especially since it was a weekend. Normally you could have set the family clock on Elliot’s weekly arrival. Applejack could almost see the ghostly outline of his absence, right there under the hickory.

Applejack knew she ought to be counting her lucky stars, as she brushed her teeth in bluejay-sprinkled silence. But the feeling couldn’t be shaken—that there was something eerily quiet about the front lawn now. As if a creaky but beloved piece of furniture had been washed away in the last storm, the front path turning to mud as it did sometimes.

She had found out a week or two ago that he wasn’t even coming through the Gates anymore. He’d found a place to stay right in Ponyville. Apparently a twenty-minute train ride was too far away. But anyway, if he wasn’t even coming that distance, something might have happened. Maybe she could go and check on him.

She shook her head, tossing frizzy locks out of her mane-band. Clearly Elliot had been coming around too long if he was getting to her like this. She made up her mind not to worry about him. It normally seemed that only an act of Celestia could keep him away from the farm. But if he’d finally thrown in the dish towel, good for him. And if something had happened to him, it wasn’t her affair. She was going to take the opportunity to get on with her farm.

She hadn’t been applebucking all week. So that was the first thing on the list. Well, she had gotten a bucket or two in here and there when she was trying to hint Elliot away, but that hardly counted. Honestly, she’d been putting it off. The southeast field needed to be harvested proper-like. Wait any longer and fruit would be falling brown off the boughs.

Applebloom was still asleep, so she kept breakfast short in the misty morning. But of course, once she had everything ready, buckets and wagon and all the traces, she found her hooves trying to lollygag down the hill. Getting started was always the hardest part. Once she started she could just keep going.

Applejack found the first ripe matriarch in the line, laid out a couple buckets, and nosed them into place just a little more precisely than she needed to. Then she turned her rump to the tree. Giving a one-third hearted “yee-haw,” she kicked it with her hind legs.

Branches swayed in the breeze.

Applejack rolled her eyes. Alright, then. It always did have to be done the right way. But she couldn’t ever help checking to make sure. She gave a tight little breath.

She backed up closer to the old tree, until her blonde tail was getting full of bark chips. Then she jumped off her hind legs, bunching her weight forward onto her front withers until they nearly wrenched. All of her weight was thrown into a teeth-jarring crack. Both hooves slammed like jackhammers. Bark chips spraying in every direction. Applejack let out a little cry on impact.

With a soft, but satisfying rumble, apples tumbled out of the branches, landing in her buckets with the practiced neatness of a dozen harvests. Applejack gave a little nod of satisfaction. But as she picked up the buckets to haul her first catch back to the wagon, she could feel—already—a soreness at the base of her neck. Already? Thought it hadn’t set in until halfway through the orchard last year. This was going to be a long day.

She was sweating in no time. But that was nothing Applejack kept plowing into tree after tree until the sore feeling went all the way down her leg muscles and all the way up her back. It was harder this year. But she kept going. She had to skip lunch, since by noon her teeth felt half-shook out of their gums and her stomach was too churned to even think about food. Not on this side of a pond dive and a five-hour nap.

It got to the point, near the end, where she could feel her hoof-made horseshoes beginning to bend. That sore stretch was starting to travel below her fetlocks, becoming that sting she’d always been told was the precursor to a cleft hoof. This was the old orchard, after all, and these trees hadn’t been bred with the nice ‘bucking stems’ that broke easily when fruit was ripe. Applejack ignored the hoof pain, too. Who was she to stop and worry about every little ailment?

Big Macintosh would have wanted her to. He was an absolute worrywart. Last season he’d even managed to drag her to a doctor, and he had ordered her to stop applebucking entirely. “A mare’s body wasn’t built to handle that kind of physical stress,” he’d said. But the memory only made Applejack sneer—what did he know? A unicorn like him probably hadn’t picked an apple all his life.

She was the only one who could do it. Big Macintosh had to spend the season plowing the fields, weeding, hauling fertilizer and topsoil, pulling in barley…this season he’d have to get water in from the river, too. This job would get done fastest if it was assigned to Applejack. She was better at it than anypony for miles.

She made good progress that day, although she came in at dusk famished enough to eat a monkey. Even with her breath snorting like a bellows, she was ready to eat. Granny Smith and Apple Bloom had spent all day in the house working on bread and apple fritters, so there was a piping hot spread awaiting her.

For whatever reason, this put Applejack’s fragile mood into a foul state. It used to be, this time of year, that it wouldn’t matter if her stomach was upturned. She’d have to pretend not to be hungry so that there’d be enough for Applebloom to chow down. It was almost a tradition between harvests. But she’d known how to deal with that. To come and see all this food laid out—she almost didn’t know what to do with it. As if it was more frightening than hunger. And of course, the fact that she kept telling herself she had nothing to complain about only made her frownier than before.

Applebloom was the only one present to sit at table with her. She piled food onto a plate for her sister, eyeing Applejack nervously as the older mare swiveled a mashed oat platter back and forth.
“How’d it go, sis?” she hazarded.

Applejack snorted once and got up, pushing the steaming plate away in favor of the front door.

She didn’t even have to ask where Granny Smith was. Granny had gone to the market again. Alone. The trail to town was empty and cold as far as the eye could see. So the crazy old mare must still have been in Ponyville. Applejack tried to tell her she was too old for this, but she didn’t listen to a word anypony said! And now she was late getting home and probably couldn’t she where put her own hooves.

Applejack spent about half an hour pacing in front of the house, and then another half around the front gate to Sweet Apple Acres. Having soft ground to walk over barehoof helped to cool her down little bit.

She didn’t catch sight of Granny. But by the time it was dark, she’d come to realize how she’d just treated Applebloom. She was cranky after the first day of applebucking, like always, but there was no reason to make her little sister suffer for it. She had a mind to march in there and apologize, and then fully enjoy the meal Applebloom had held the good grace to set out for her.

But first she had to go fetch Granny in. Every night this happened, visions of her grandmother lying in a ditch with a snapped leg terrorized Applejack until she couldn’t have shut her eyes. She took a running start and vaulted the gate so that she wouldn’t have to leave it open while she went looking.

As luck would have it, she hadn’t got five steps from home when Granny’s familiar silhouette ambled over the rise.

There were colts and fillies farther back the hill, too; lithe little shadows leaping around the dark, following her along the trail. “Hey, old mare!” they were shouting on repeat. “Hey, grandma! Can’t you move any faster than that? Get off the road!”

Applejack reared, neighing at the top of her voice. “Y’all git! Get away from here! This ain’t your land!”

“Oh! It’s Applejack!” somepony whinnied. Then there was scurrying, and then nothing.

Applejack galloped to Granny Smith. The old pony was practically trembling under the weight of the parcels she carried. It looked like she’d bought a hammer and tools for Applebloom, as well as half a dozen bags of carrots from Carrot Top’s stand. She shouldn’t have tried to carry so much. It was fine that Applebloom was learning to build things, but there was nothing wrong with the family tools out in the shed. Applebloom didn’t need her own. It was a waste of money.

But at that point Applejack was more upset with her own foalish self than anypony else in the family. So without a word, she galloped up and slipped her head under the strings of the carrot sacks. She would carry those in so Granny could have the satisfaction of presenting gifts to her granddaughter.

That was the plan, anyway. Applejack saw that Granny’s steps were slow, even for her, the shape of her eyes melted and sad long before they neared the house.

Applejack shuffled along at Granny’s speed, pressing her side to the bony flanks of her elder. “Granny?” she muttered quietly.

Granny shook her head without a word, packhorsing her way up to the house. But Applejack wasn’t the type to give in so very easily, and Granny Smith was too old to keep any secrets. She could smell it all over her.

“Granny?” she said again, this time her teeth gritted. “You didn’t pay them hooligans any mind, did you?”

Her grandmother opened her mouth, but shut it again with a soft, “Oh,” as if deciding not to bother.

Applejack decided to hand her off to Applebloom anyway. It would help brighten her up a little bit. She herself spent a minute grinding her teeth, and trying to remember the cutie marks of shadows.

There were bright spots in the day, though. Celestia always gave her something to be thankful for. A visit from a friend, for instance. Granny went ahead, and as Applejack was strolling to the farmhouse she caught glimpse of an unusually large pair of wings, flying low and ponderous over her farm. Twilight was out in her namesake sky; she met Applejack on the porch as they both pulled in.

Applejack grinned. Be darned if she was going to let her own silly stress get in the way of a visit from Twilight. It wasn’t all the time you saw such a bookish pony on the farm. Her friend deserved a warm greeting. “Howdy, Twi,” she called out, coming up the porch with one strong bound.

So they talked about the weather, and they talked about their friends. They even talked a little about politics, since Twilight had become involved by necessity, like it or not. But it was a wonderful thing. It helped Applejack to forget about certain things, and before long she was digging laugh lines into her face again. Twilight was chattier than a honeybee in springtime. Unusual, for the purple pony, but Applejack sure didn’t mind.

And this dusk of girlish conversation and warm nuzzles lasted until Twilight, as if in afterthought, pulled out a little brown drawstring bag. “By the way, Applejack, I thought I might drop by with this. You can just keep it—”

AJ took one look at the bag and growled. Instead of nipping the object from Twilight’s mouth, she backed away. All her ill humor was back in one fell go. “You can keep that! I don’t need your charity.”

Twilight’s wings flapped. She was like a foal, in that way, that she hadn’t really learned to control them. Applejack, who had learned a lot from Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash, could read her dismay and her other emotions like any one-year old fledgling.

“You—don’t have to be like that!” Twilight said indignantly. “I was just offering.” With a hurt expression, she replaced the bag, and then—then Applejack caught her glancing through the farmhouse windows from the corner of her eye. Applebloom was inside finishing a cold dinner with Granny.

Blood tingled in Applejack’s face. “We are just fine!” she snapped.

“I know!” Twilight stammered quickly. Her wings flared again.

“Did Rarity put you up to this?”

“No! I mean—it doesn’t matter.” Twilight scuffed the porch. “We all know you’re—fine. You just don’t have to do this all by yourself! The girls and I are here for you.”

Applejack continued to glare. For a minute. Then she let up and drooped.
“Yeah.” Studying the marks their horseshoes made on the porch, she shuffled towards a balcony to lean against. “I guess.”

“After all, it would be ridiculous for an Element of Harmony bearer to go hungry.”

“Oh, so that’s what this is about!” Applejack shot back up with a sneer. “Can’t let the image down, can we? Now that we’re so gosh-darned famous!”

“AJ!”

A moment of quiet permeated the porch, time enough for hot words to cool, sink with the air, and seep in. Applejack’s breathing turned shallow. After breaking free from the feeling of being frozen stiff, she dropped her head against the rail and moaned. Honesty. Bah. What good did it do anypony to say whatever came into her mind?

She couldn’t even look at Twilight, afraid of how much hurt she might find there. Should she try to apologize? Could she? She eventually managed to glance up at her friend with an abashed face, looking in vain for some way to heal over her outburst.

Twilight was close to tears. But when Applejack met her eyes, she didn’t yell. She came close. Twilight wrapped her legs around the earth pony, and Applejack made no move to stop her.

“You…” Twilight swallowed. “You know it’s because we care about you.”

“I know. I know. I’m sorry,” Applejack squeaked. She crushed her own eyes shut. There was another nuzzle, and a kiss. Twilight hugged Applejack’s withers and held her there, patting her back.

Eyes still shut, Applejack opened her muzzle to apologize again, but then thought better of it. “I’m a shameful sight,” she said into Twilight’s neck. “We’ve had this same Celestia-forsaken talk too many times.”

There were so many things she could have said, and so few it was worth bothering to repeat. How would this night end? Would tell again the story of how Ma and Pa pulled themselves up by their own stirrups? How they’d left behind a legacy that loomed like a black pit she could never fill? Or would she talk again about the stories she’d been raised on? On one hoof, tales of Apple ancestors taming the Everfree, where even the weather was wild. On the other hoof, the Earthsong compact, where the heads of her lineage had stood with the other great earth pony clans, and even Princess Luna, and raw magic gushing like an umbilical cord between the soil and the rejoicing sky. Would she talk about how much it hurt to even think about living on alms—so much she wanted to buck her own legs to splinters just to end the pain? She knew where those coins in Granny’s bag came from, and whence all those new school supplies on Applebloom’s back. It wasn’t from selling plain, ordinary apples.

“You know…”

Twilight slid off her friend’s neck after a long silent comfort. “There are a lot of business opportunities on that new planet I’ve been telling you about. You should really come on a trip with me. Your pies would sell faster than Rainbow Dash can fly.”

Applejack chewed her lip. “Maybe. After we get all the apples in…finish with the jam…we’ll be making pies again, of course. But we always manage to sell out in Ponyville. What kind of pony would take away pies from her hometown to sell ’em to strangers?”

Twilight shook her head. “If…you don’t want to sell pies, you could do something else! They have events there—like the Farmer’s Convention, but for humans who are interested in Equestria. You could come and talk—and they’d pay you just for that! It’s called an appearance fee.”

“Really? I’ve never earned bits just by gabbin’ before. What would I talk about?”

“Oh, anything!” Twilight paced up and down the boards. “They’ve been asking to see you, Applejack. You and Fluttershy are the only ones who haven’t made a visit yet—they’d pay good money just to meet you! A businessmare like you couldn’t possibly pass it up. Look how well Rarity’s doing!”

“Sure she is.” Applejack frowned into her chest for a long time. “But where I come from, meetin’ a body wasn’t something you exchanged money for.”

Laying down on the porch, she looked miserably at her princess. “What am I doing, thinking so much about money, anyway? It’s making me sick.” She glared up at Twilight. “What’s with you? You been hanging around those humans for so long you’ve started to think like them?”

“No! No, it’s not like that. Just…”

Twilight obviously knew Applejack well enough to see her slipping. Her words flowed quicker and started tripping over each other. “It would be so easy, you could talk about fixing a wheelbarrow and they would love it, AJ…”

“Ah won’t do it.”

Twilight exhaled. Applejack hadn’t ruined her reputation so much that ponies didn’t know there was no sense going on when she said ‘no’.

Eventually, Twilight stepped down from the porch, taking off softly into skies of black. She was so considerate for a critter with wings—Rainbow Dash would have vaulted right over the porch rail, and bent it to boot.

Anyway, she would catch a chill if she stayed out too long, watching that purple speck twinkle away towards Canterlot. She had to get a night’s rest. This tension would all start to melt once she got the apple harvest in. Twilight and Rarity would stop worrying, too. All the more reason to push herself and get the job done.

She gulped down the remnants of dinner, putting some in the refrigerator and folding up the note Applebloom had left about how she loved her sister and hoped she didn’t mind that the food wasn’t quite warm anymore. The dishes went in the cupboard after a rinse, and the note went into the writing desk, into a jewelry box filled with paper slips.

Once everything was clean for the night, she found her way back to her old, rusty room. Back where the cradle of her foalhood still rusted in the corner. The same window she’d looked out almost every night of her life. It framed the new night’s stars.

She lay on her back in bed, stomach idly rumbling now and then. Her head was still spinning too much with thoughts of the things she wanted to get done tomorrow—how she wanted tomorrow to be better than today. She still hadn’t apologized to Applebloom. That was the first thing on her list. Painting the fence, bathing the pigs, and another round of applebucking after that. This time—this time—she wouldn’t let it get to her.

This went on until deep past midnight. Applejack could hear gentle snoring filter through the boards of the old home. Granny, Bloom, and even Big Mac all had distinctive snores. Her eyes were still wide open.

Then, like a secret sin, she slithered out of bed.

It took her a minute to reach the floor. She slithered by the inch, keeping the covers from rustling as if she was afraid of catching herself in the act. Once out, she got down on her belly. And with the same care, she withdrew a laptop from underneath the bed.

It had been a gift from Elliot. And a more expensive one than he let on, too, if Twilight’s appraisal was anything to go by. Apparently not every computer could draw its power from the sun. That was alright, though; she’d already given him a good tongue-lashing at the time for his audacity. He’d been pretty persistent that it was just a friendly present, so eventually she’d just taken the darn thing and stashed it here. He’d showed her how to use it. She couldn’t make any sense of the keyboard, but she did manage to partly get the hang of the ‘trackball mouse’.

Applejack drew on those lessons to their fullest now, sticking out her tongue to concentrate as she rolled the tiny cursor across the screen. It took care not to crush the mouse under her hoof. She clicked with slow, deliberate tenacity. In time she managed to center on the icons near the edge of the screen. There were pictures of manila folders there, filled with pictures of ponies.

Not that it was worth the bother. She ought to go to bed. She really ought to go to bed. But—

She found herself, almost against her will, navigating to the ‘Episodes’ folder. That took another five minutes. But at least there was no need for tortuous back-button navigation. She knew exactly where she was going.

The videos were a cartoon. A kind of moving comic for children—for foals. There was a bright red farm in that cartoon, with a barn so sparkling it looked like it got painted fresh every day. There were ruby red apples that never had worms, and fields that were never muddy. All the trees gave up their fruit without a fuss. Sunrise sprayed over glorious hills. There was an apple-green pony, so old that she should have barely been able to walk, dancing around during big musical numbers.

There was even this one episode where the Apple family had a pie cart capped by a giant pie on a spring! It made her laugh so much. Then she covered her laugh in panic, stuffing a leg in her mouth lest she be heard.

She only went so far. Applejack wouldn’t have dreamt of watching a new episode without Fluttershy. They always did it together, bedded down with hot cinnamon tea on rainy afternoons. Applejack could force herself to stop working then, and there wasn’t much for Fluttershy to do either unless one of her birdhouses sprung a leak. Fluttershy seemed to enjoy such afternoons. Even more than Applejack did. Although Applejack suspected the pegasus of liking her just a little bit, it wasn’t merely because of all the cuddling on a bay window sofa.

The yellow marshmallow in the cartoon was often scared, but everything always worked out somehow. Fluttershy always whispered that she understood why so many humans watched the cartoon. She thought the same thing drew them here. There was so much violence on Earth, after all, that all humans must at some point feel the way these two mares did on rainy afternoons.

Applejack would reply that she was wrong. She was being ridiculous. It was ridiculous for grownups of any species to behave this way. Fluttershy would then blow in her ear and ask why they were sitting here watching the show, and Applejack would set things to rights by explaining that it was because their families were broken and they were too weak to know any better.

After that Fluttershy would usually try to fall asleep on her side. Sometimes Applejack would wake her up, and sometimes she would allow her to doze off with her head on AJ’s barrel.

The latest episode they’d seen was “Maud Pie”. Once Applejack caught up to that, she went no further. Nor did she sleep. Instead she gingerly clicked to another well-trodden folder labeled “Songs”. Elliot had explained how the little metal plates inside the laptop could make all the sounds in the world, but Applejack still had a hard time believing that it wasn’t some peculiar brand of magic. Most of the music was very strange. But there were a couple tracks that she must have been wearing out inside the machine.

She hit the start button.

===Song: "Emerald Eyes" by 4everfreebrony===

As the song began, she gently pushed the laptop back under the bed, lying down on the floor so that she could hear it with the volume soft. Eyes fluttering shut, she imagined that she was in that place. Where nopony had to get hurt. The colors grew, more and more vibrant, and fuzzed her insides with a warmth that dislodged old, crusty pieces of spinster mare. It was with a candy-sweet smile on her face, imagining a dreamland, that she finally floated into sorely needed sleep.

And you know what? It was a pretty nice dream.

The Brony and the Mule (part 1)

It was, by all accounts, the most politically incorrect of all leisure sports. Not only was it especially demeaning to both species—a problem aggravated by the tenuous ability of most Earthlings to distinguish Equestrian ponies from beasts of burden—but it was dangerous. A risk of astro-turf burn, if nothing else. The predicted possibility for injury was high enough that most universities were able to claim banning it on purely medical grounds. This wasn’t to say that anyone was in the dark about the embarrassment an institution would face if it took any less lenient stance. No organization that wanted to receive Thaumaturgy students would dare allow what humans, at least, perceived as a grave insult to their new allies. On top of all this, its rule structure was hopelessly crude. The game was based more in soccer than actual polo, and suspiciously resembled the sort of idea someone might scribble onto the back of a study sheet at three in the morning.

In short, pony polo was the most perfect dormitory sport ever devised.

Tom had a spare key to the indoor soccer gym. His players ran onto the field during off hours—about a dozen mares sneaking over from the nascent tourist hostel, and roughly as many young men in track shorts and bargain-bin Queen’s Park Rangers shirts. Most of the mares were earth ponies. They were also mostly naked—since the mares talked the most trash and stretched for the most running of all the participants, they saw no sense in floor-length day dresses that might get in the way. A bit of an odd move for Equestrian visitors to Earth in the present day, but no one here was complaining. This was well known along the grapevine to be the event to beat for meeting mares who didn’t mind a little admiring—at least whenever there wasn’t a My Little Pony convention in town.

As Aloe darted to and fro simultaneously dividing and pep-talking two teams, players paired off. One pony to a rider. Humans grabbed swimming-pool noodles from a plastic crate, and then tried to balance themselves on the backs of their chosen sporting partners without letting their feet drag. It wasn’t uncommon for a human, his legs already lifted back to keep them above the floor, to roll right off a pony’s back. Even before the mares started walking, several young men managed to go flying in spectacular configurations. But a few of the more experienced pairs were already doing steady warmup laps around the field.

The game got underway without a coin flip, a bell, or any formal summons, though Aloe had brought a whistle and was disappointed not to use it. The seven-colored beach ball was battered around the field with great vigor by the contestants, who were only allowed to touch it with the foam noodles held the human players. A well-aimed kick by anyone would have sent the ball straight into the goal, but the floppy swimming implements were much less effective. They mostly managed to send the beach ball high into the air, so that contestants could run about and crash into each other while looking up.

Aloe handed off her usual role as goalkeeper to one Violet Glimmer, a new player recruited by a friend of a friend of Lyra. Despite tripping several times over a floor-length purple tail, she put up a strong game, prancing about as if the twiggy bicyclist on her back didn’t weigh a thing.

Their team pulled away a strong three-point lead in the first half, punishing the weak right flank of the opposition. Tom and Lyra were manning that flank, as well as Tom’s dorm-mate Dave, another experienced player. But most of the other players on their team were newbies who took several tumbles and avoided breaking out into an untenable canter. The attacking team was also able to take advantage of the fact that Lyra, as a unicorn, had a little trouble supporting a full-grown human’s weight, and furthermore was far more interested in making light-hearted passes at any of the players she hadn’t met before. Always in a flirtatious mood during a game of polo, and well known to be fond of males, she was especially hard-put to remain focused on her crucial defense when a comely young stallion joined the crew of spectators that often accompanied underground polo games. By the beginning of the second half, Lyra’s team was facing a stiff lead and an enemy defense who was quickly getting the hang of staying balanced.

But when Aloe’s whistle sounded, the balance began to shift. Lotus had switched to another rider and began moving in to cover the weak right flank, darting from a center-forward position to all corners of the field. Lyra’s partner started squeezing his legs to spur her away from the impromptu conversations that broke out on the turf. The losing team scored several goals, and the game came down to the wire, tied with two minutes remaining on Aloe’s bright blue oven timer.

Aloe stole the ball from Reginald and Lotus and broke past the forward line. Defense moved in for a steal, but Aloe passed to Tom and Lyra, who dribbled back to Dave and sent the ball off-sides back to Aloe. Defense attempted to counter with a dance-off. But it was to no avail. Aloe moved in to score the winning goal.

When Lyra moved to block the shot, Aloe cornered hard, swerving into the opposite corner of the goal box. However, an earth pony could turn on a dime much easier than a human could stay mounted, and her rider went sliding off like hot butter. He rolled over Lyra’s head and into the goalbox as a startled keeper pranced out of the way. Tom ruled the goal invalid on account of being scored with the wrong projectile, and the rider came to a stop with his head against the back of the net.

“Goal!” Aloe cried, hopping around the field just before her timer sounded the end of the game. Both teams lost several points due to unsportsmanlike laughter, but in retrospect the game was deemed a tie, as the only scores on the boards were endearing stick-figures drawn by Berry Punch during the first half.

As long as everyone was out by eleven, the mares could grab a quick shower in the girls’ locker room. The indoor soccer gym, a shed compared to the primary rec center, was closed much of the day during the summer months, and all the polo players had to avoid were custodians who came in to check up on the place once a week. Plus, it was much more convenient to clean up right there. Many of the mares would be getting back to wherever they were staying on hoof. And for a few of them, that place was in another dimension. Aloe and Lotus, for instance, had to return to Ponyville before they would have another chance at running water. And it was well known that Berry Punch, who came along half to keep the twins happy and half to keep an eye on them, didn’t fancy walking with the smell for an hour even if there was a spa waiting at the other end.

They pushed open the door with their noses, herding in as a giggle-headed, lightly sweating cluster. Then they took over. Ponies were everywhere in the locker, making fun of the items they found in the corners of the lockers, or pawing and gnawing at shower handles that were just a little too high. Spouts hissed. The room filled with steam.

Lyra tilted all the nozzles so that the steady cascades were closer to the center of the gang shower. There was no awkwardness about bodies here. If they had been a bit older or a bit younger, there would have been a bit more discretion over washing in front of others. But most of them were in their own post-secondary studies or just setting off on their own, and they were a universe away from their parents. Given that, they relished the opportunity to face each other as they showered so that they could chat properly.

Pleasantries turned to speculation about politics, which turned to gossip, which turned in time to everypony’s favorite game of teasing Lyra over a certain boy who took a consistent interest in being her riding partner.

“She let him on, too,” added Violet with a salacious pout to her voice. “She spent half the match in the corner with Steve. That’s why we lost.”

“Oooooh!” Lotus stamped her front hooves.

Lyra began surreptitiously tilting her own showerhead back, retreating into the corner. But the glow of her horn gave her away, and Violet pulled her back into the ring.

“So have you asked him out yet?”

Lyra wiggled uncomfortably for a moment and blushed. “Actually,” she said in an uncharacteristically soft voice, “he asked me.”

A round of congratulatory giggles. “Come on then!” somepony else added. “You have to tell us everything!”

A shrug, as she scrubbed her back and withers with a loofa. “Well, after the game a few weeks ago—”

“A few weeks?” Aloe gasped. “How long have you been holding out on us?”

“Do you want to hear the story or not?”

Aloe made a lip-zipping motion.
“He stayed behind to help me pick up the cones and stuff,” Lyra said. “And then—”

Violet leaned into her, hugging her neck with both forelegs. “And then you trapped him in the closet and started passionately—”

A not-so-gentle push back. “And then he asked if he could go out on a date with me. And I said yes. So we went to Jeni’s Ice cream, and we both got double-scoops. He had Bangkok Peanut, and I had Goat Cheese. He let me pay his way. It was very nice.”

A half-groan, half-sigh escaped from Violet. “C’mon, Lye, we want the juicy details.”

Lyra lifted her chin, scrubbing her forelegs with aloof decorum. “He was a gentleman.”

“But you aren’t!” Berry Punch interjected. A round of chuckles rippled through the shower water.

“Come on,” Violet whispered. “How many times did he get you off?”

Lyra looked away slowly. She made a show of being occupied with her loofa, which fooled nopony since they were taking a rinse without soap. As the bated gazes continued to hang on her, she turned steadily redder.

Violet’s brow rose. “Alright—what’s the most number of times—”

“Four.”

A couple mares let out appreciative whistles; a couple others looked with on quietly with wide eyes. Aloe’s hoof shot up in the air. “Lies!” she cried. “Vile lies which will not go unpunished!”

Aloe’s antics were suffered with more amusement. “I told you humans were better,” said a butter-yellow earth pony to her friend.

“You’re right!” added another voice. “I thought the whole point of this game was to get them to sit on us.”

Lyra nodded and let the laughter chime.

Then she turned to look for the speaker. It was an unfamiliar voice, so most of the ponies instinctively sought a matching face so they could remember to make friends later. They blinked upon finding the source of the joke to be the one non-pony who had been a steed in the game that night.

There was a mule with them in the shower. Floppy ears and short, coarse fur, all as soaked as the rest of them. Her tassel-tail swung with droplets.

Not that they hadn’t noticed her before. They’d all meant to say hi, and some of them had. During the game an observer would have been hard-pressed to notice that one of the ‘ponies’ was any different, and judging from the way the ponies interacted, they weren’t terribly keen to point it out. But no one had shared a sly wink with her when she joined in the locker-room giggles.

They gossip circle went quickly and uncharacteristically quiet. It was readily apparent that several mares, in rapid succession, came close to clearing their throat and speaking up, perhaps to self-consciously proclaim that there was no reason for everyone to have gone so quiet. But they stuttered off one at a time. The mule was trying to wrap her ears in front of her eyes.

The mule was near trying to back out of the shower from embarrassment. She might have fled just so, too, had Lyra not leapt to stand in her way.

“Hey there!” She said with forced brightness, giving an introductory nuzzle. “You’re—Greta, right?”

The mule nodded, ears flapping in relief. “Yah! We met last week, when I came into Ponyfille to visit Uncle Cranky.”

“That’s really cool. I’m flattered you liked my silly little game enough to come back another week.” Lyra laughed loudly, and then thoughtfully placed a hoof on her chin. She looked the mule up and down.

“Hey,” she added slyly. “I’ve seen you with your eye on someone too.”

She nudged her shoulder into Greta, and the latter shied frantically away. “Oh. Oh. N-no, that’s not…”

“Aww, you don’t have to be coy!” With a wink worthy of Violet, she pulled Greta right into the center of a deep huddle. A hot shower made the circle even more intimate. Not even showerheads could be seen through the steam.

“Hey. Girls.” Lyra looked them each in the eye. “I’ve got an idea for next week…”

Next week, and at the same beautiful time, Tom unlocked the back door to the gym. The scent of ammonia floor cleaner hit him with his first step onto the rubber, and after a melodramatic snap of his fingers, so did the sheen of floodlights, one by one.

The first shape to step in behind him was Dave. They might quite a tight pair since last year, driving everywhere in Dave’s beaten pickup. Dave was quite a bit shorter and ruddier than his roommate, and a bit on the chunky side—but it was easy to forget his appearance entirely after talking to him for half a minute. The only feature strong enough to stick in memory was the bright pink ski cap he sported everywhere, and his hands, which were constantly a blur whenever he spoke. He was usually speaking. His sentences were full of finger guns, imaginary gang signs, and little waves with no meaning but their place beside his effusive smile.

Tom, meanwhile, usually stood a little to the side, looking serious by virtue of his quiet. But there was a time when these normal roles were reversed—when they were surrounded by ponies.

Speaking of ponies, Lyra was in a few minutes later. Tom didn’t see her until she was one the field, her head bowed to push the old crate of pool noodles to the center line. He greeted her with a sunny wave from across the gym.

“Hey, Tom,” she called, not lifting more than an ear to acknowledge them. “Hi, Dave.”

Then, as if suddenly remembering something, she stopped. Her head rose from the create. “Hey—Dave. You decided who you want to ride with tonight?”

Dave was busy multitasking; he was both tying his shoes and tripping over the weights laid out for serious athletes on the far side of the facility. But he answered once he righted himself, and tilted his eyebrows skeptically at her horn.

“Naw, filly. Not yet. And thanks for the offer, but I think I might try to win tonight. I got to get some exercise.” He grabbed his belly and attempted to jiggle it with an apologetic grin.

“Oh, no worries, no worries!” Lyra flapped a hoof at him and went back to pushing the noodles. “You know who should ride with, then? Greta! She likes to chase the corners, like you. You’ll work great together.”

“Greta?” Dave jogged through the field gate and helped Tom set out orange cones. “Greta, Greta…she new?”
“No,” Lyra sighed. “Long ears, brown coat…”

“Long ears?”

Tom snapped his fingers. “Dave, she’s that mule. You met her. Remember?”

Lyra stared openmouthed at Tom for a moment, followed by a tight nod. “…Yeah. Just like you’re ‘that human’.”

“Well, sure,” said Tom with an innocent blink.

Her ears drooped momentarily. “Nevermind.” She went back to pushing noodles.

Tom didn’t have long to stare after her silence before more of the regulars arrived. Berry Punch was next. She helped Dave in his quest to patch the old beach ball so that it could be inflated faster than the air leaked out. After passing several customary warnings to Lyra about the placement of her horn, they fell to shooting the breeze around the bicycle pump. Dave asked if Berry wanted to ride with him tonight.

“Er…thanksh. Maybe.” Berry’s characteristic slur came through even around the pump pin in her teeth. Her speech defect, eerily reminiscent of a tipsy pony, was the source of a great deal of teasing, but no one could really be mean to a pony who was so easy to be around. She and Dave got along famously. Tom honestly wondered why Dave hadn’t asked to ride with her sooner.

But Berry backed up a pace. “Actually…” Her face lit up only after a moment of intense thought. “Shee, I wash hoping to ride with Wolfgangh tonight. Trying to get a chance to talk to the guy. He’sh got black dreadlocksh…”

Dave lifted a hand and backed down. “Yeah, yeah, I get you. Totally fine.”

He occupied his mouth with biting off a strip of duct tape. A minute or two later, he added, “Actually, I wasn’t sure whether you were into that scene.”

“OhI’mnot!” Berry’s mouth fell open. She quickly forced it closed with her hoof. “I mean…uh, uh…even I can make an exsheption for dreads. But I don’t know if I can get him to notice me. He’sh all over Greta right now. I don’t know if I can compete with that.”

“I see.” Dave was pinching his forehead, staring at the ball between his knees.

“But I’m not shalty,” Berry shrugged. “Everypony lovesh Greta.”

A shrug from Dave. “Well, if you want…” A deep breath. “I’ll even put in a good word for you. We’re not homies or anything, but I know Wolfgang from Art History, and I think you have a chance—”

“Oh!” Blushing, Berry Punch slurred even more. “No, no…that’sh fine. Don’t do that. D-don’t worry about it…”

Dave watched her edge away with some confusion, and then seemed to give up on understanding. He tossed the ball a couple times to make sure it was ready. More players had appeared in spurts by this time, and the field was nearly full. Dave was about to rise and do some stretches when Daisy appeared, twirling near him in an oddly ballerina-like fashion and holding one foreleg to her brow.

“Oh!” she moaned sorrowfully, tipping backwards. “Oh, woe! What is become of me! I’ll never be as pretty as—”

Suddenly, Lyra appeared to chomp down on her tail and yank her out of view.

Dave was stuck in a quintessential expression of bemusement. He resumed pumping.

The game was a blur. Berry Punch rode with Dave after all, and Tom spent a slow game talking to Daisy from the saddle about her family Hearthswarming traditions. Greta was present, playing a serious defense with Wolfgang seated on her back. Competition was a bit stiffer than normal. The score finished tied at one point apiece.

And after the game, as everyone was rolling their sweat off on the astro-turf or slowly stooping to pick up pool noodles, someone trotted up to Dave.

Tom broke off conversation with his roommate. The mule crossed her font legs and swung her long ears back along the side of her head. “H-hello…Dave?”

Dave blinked. His only clue was Lyra, who stood in a row with Daisy unselfconsciously staring his way. He might have also noticed that Tom was paying close attention.

“Hey.”

“Hey…” She flashed a white smile and uncrossed her legs. “We, ah, we’ve met before. I was vondering…”

“Oh, yeah. I do remember you. You’ve been here before.”

“Yes, and…”

“And I don’t think I ever properly said hi.”

“Thanks. So, I wanted to ask you something…”

“You bet.”

With another gulp she bolted down the words. “Are you doing anything Friday night?”

Dave’s mouth formed a small o.

Twhump.

Tom coughed on the water he’d been guzzling. Greta stumbled back, rearing in horror from Dave’s suddenly-inert body as Daisy galloped over shrieking like a siren. “Sweet Celestia! You killed him! You killed Dave!”

The Bat and the Believer (part 3)

Kennedy Dining Commons was usually crowded with freshmen. Those who’d been in college for a while usually derided meal plans all together, with the expense of fresh sushi and five-topping pasta, in favor of cooking their own ramen noodles. But this didn’t mean that the occasional senior couldn’t be found here, hunched over a thick bowl of soft-serve ice cream. In particular, Tom liked to have a get-together lunch twice a week, with Luke and any of their other friends who happened to be in town. It was another way to try and keep in touch when he had so many foreign friends, everyone moved around so much.

Today’s lunch was a little lackluster. Tom was the only one savoring his ice cream, covering it with crumbled Oreo and Heath bar. Rarity was too calorie-conscious to touch the stuff and Luke had his head buried in a theological textbook.

Sadly, that wasn’t an unusual sight to those who knew Luke well. But Tom didn’t roll his eyes this time. Despite the fact that there was a book covering half of Luke’s face, it didn’t seem that the young raven-hair was actually reading the thing. He’d been on the same page since sitting down, and his eyes weren’t focused on anything.

Tom softly cleared his throat and tried to pull the book down by its rim. “Luke…” he called. “Luke…”

No response.

“I am your father!”

That got Luke to look at him. Sort of. He received a bleary blink for a response.

“Okay, that wasn’t funny the first fifteen times either. But hello there. Thought you’d be interested to know, Rarity’s in town. You want to meet her up at lunch.”

Another bleary blink, this time for the unicorn.

“You’ve been reading those things more than usual, you know. And that’s saying a lot. You want to talk or something?”

“Sorry.” Rubbing his eyes, Luke pushed a pile of reading materials into a tote bag and smiled apologetically at Rarity. She wouldn’t be on Earth for long, since she was only over to supervise interior decorating for the new embassy.

“It is most certainly impolite to ignore a lady at teatime.” Rarity drew her nose upright. It was quite an elegant rebuke, but Tom was afraid that the effect was wasted. Luke’s eyes had glazed over again, and he was resting his cheek on one arm.

Tom patted his friend’s shoulder. Luke had never been seen like this before. “Hey. Seriously, man. You alright? Should I be calling someone?”

Luke’s head shuffled a bit within its resting place. “Mm. I’m just tired.”

Tom narrowed his gaze. “Hey. You haven’t been on another of those Novanard binges, have you?”

“Novena,” Luke corrected automatically, yawning and rubbing his temples.

Then at least it was only lack of sleep. But with Luke, that raised its own mysteries. Seeing Luke tired in the middle of the day would be only slightly more surprising than seeing him with a lit joint in one hand.

That used to be the case, anyway. This wasn’t the first lunch where Tom had noticed something off.

Since Luke didn’t seem eager to be pestered, Tom made some small talk with Rarity so she wouldn’t be alone. After polishing off the ice cream for all three, he dusted off his hands and tried another approach. “Hey, Luke. You know what we haven’t done in a long time? Got the whole gang together to play video games. Remember how often we used to do that? Heck, you remember Jeremy? I haven’t even seen that guy since First Contact. Whaddaya’ say? Midnight my place?”

“Sounds good,” Luke answered absently. He was stirring his spoon across an empty bowl, oblivious to the scraping sound.

Tom came up short. The guy must not have heard him. He lowered his face across the table to look into Luke’s off-green eyes. “You realize I said midnight, right? Way after your bedtime.”

Luke shrugged. “Midnight’s not that late.”

“Okay…” Tom leaned back, befuddled. “In that case, how about tomorrow night?”

“Oh.” Luke paused for a moment. The spoon held still.

“Can’t come then.” The stirring resumed.

“Because you’re doing something?” said Tom.

“At midnight.”

Tom drummed his fingers through the awkward silence. “Dude. Let me in on the joke. What’ve you been up to?”

“I’m hanging out with Chlkthata, that’s all.”

“Doctor who now?”

“She’s our local Night Guard. Warden of all of Ohio, for now anyway. The Guard hasn’t broken it up into smaller wards because there aren’t many ponies here.”

Tom and Rarity engaged in mutual head-scratching as they regarded the half-asleep boy dripping hair into his uneaten macaroni.

Tom tapped the table. “Wait. You mean the bat-pony? Dude, that’s creepy!”

Luke’s head shot up sharply. “She’s not creepy!” he protested. “She’s…”

“Woah, woah.” Tom held up his hands. “I’m sure she’s a great person and all. I meant that in a cool way. You got to admit, Chkl…something-something would be a boss name for an Abyssal Lord.”

Ting!

Tom leaned back. Luke had stopped the spoon into his plate, where it stood upright like a mountain-climber’s flag in the macaroni and cheese. Rarity raised a telekinetic shield against the cheese sauce, but Tom got a couple spots on his thin cotton shirt.

“It means Peaceful Pinecones,” Luke muttered. “In Nocturneigh. Which is a language you might know about, given its historical relevance, if you recalled that Equestria had anything but ponies in it.”

“Woah, alright now…” Tom exchanged a glance with Rarity. “I’m sorry I don’t know every language in the multiverse. I mean, she probably speaks Equus anyway, right?”

“Oh sure!” Luke threw his hands up. “Because everyone should learn English and Equus in school, and that’s it. There’s no value in all those other cultures. They don’t have capital-F friendship and a sugar obsession.”

Tom coughed. “That’s not what I meant, buddy. It’s helpful to have a lingua franca, is all. It was really hard to learn Equus, and another equine language would take even longer. This way everyone can talk to each other.”

“Hmph.” Luke seemed to notice his tall glass of Sprite for the first time. He took a swig. “Maybe not everyone wants to be part of the Equestrian Alliance. Maybe not everyone in Equestria even wants to live like a pony, you ever thought of that?”

“I can’t imagine why not. How else do you think we can get to that peace on earth you’re always on about?”

Luke grimaced and turned away to the edge of the table. He seemed to list a little as his balance on the chair faltered.

“Okay.” Tom was breathing into his fingers. “Let’s go back to videogames. That sounds nice and safe. How about the night after tomorrow?”

“Um…” Luke screwed up his face only half a moment. “Busy.”

“Wait, what? You’re going to see her every night?”

“Yeah. I think I’m busy all week…”

He trailed off when he saw the expressions, at first startled and then very, very intent, that both of his friends were giving him. Particularly Rarity. She was leaning over the table with a steadily growing smile.

Tom folded his hands. “You, ah...you mind if I ask what it’s like with fangs?”

Luke blushed, picked up his bag, and dashed off.

Looking back on it later that night, Luke could only think, I could have handled that better.

But by ten o’clock he barely even remembered his wrecked daytime state. It was like a dream in delirium, and he was wide awake now, marching through the woods with a single pack over his shoulder. He wore long pants to ward off cold and poison ivy, and he held a single-battery flashlight so he could duck under low branches on the game trail formed by his shoeprints.

Her tower was bright tonight. Luke couldn’t help but grin to see her windows beckoning like houselights. She must have been burning extra firewood just to make him comfortable.

He tried to sneak up on the tower. It was becoming something of a game to see if he could. But although he was sure he didn’t make a single sound all the way from the footpath to the clearing, a rope flew over the window ledge the instant he touched the stone. It was generously knotted and easy to climb. Luke wasted no time pulling himself up.

Chlkthata was sitting in a ring of ornate stones worrisomely close to the fire. As Luke pulled himself through the window her eyes remained closed, but she appeared to yawn, exposing the full length of her fangs and giving Luke another of those delightful shivers.

“Do you like your new shoes?” she said.

Even now, echolocation caught him by surprise. Luke gave a start before looking down at his feet, which sported a pair of nearly-crisp white sneakers. “I like them. The old ones got torn up pretty quick walking out from campus, so I got a pair that should hold up better.”

Luke tried not to make much noise moving around so that he wouldn’t disrupt her Evening Meditation. He’d shown up early again. He really needed to stop doing that. She kept waking up early so that she could be done by the time he showed up, but he always showed up earlier than he said he would.

At least he didn’t mind waiting. Luke pulled oilcloths of several degrees of coarseness from a barrel beneath the banners of Sun and Moon. Chlkthata yawned again. And as she fed the fire with extra logs, Luke began to polish her armor.

It didn’t really need it after only a week of use. But it was something of a running joke between them on Saturday nights. One of those stupid little traditions all good friendships had. And it was a meditative act for him. No thought was required to rub away with the right grain of cloth. He was free to sit, scrub, and just…watch her.

Luke had never thought of prayer as an aerobic activity. Chlkthata’s wings were extended to their full nightmarish breadth. They quivered, not quite motionless—but she would perfect it someday, Luke was sure. She worked quite hard at it. He could see her sweat. She’d sat by the fire so long that whole patches of fur on her belly and on the inside of her legs were discolored by damp.
Maybe things like this were what made her so…interesting. Was interesting the word? He could never find the right words to describe how he felt about her.

He only snuck peeks at her in between yawns. The rest of the time, he looked around the tower to find out how she was doing. In the thick wooden rafters that formed a cage against the roof, a smattering of wooden handles had been nailed into the undersides of the beams. She must have hammered new ones in this week. Luke puzzled over this, especially since the willy-nilly woodwork was at odds with the ascetic symmetry of the room. Maybe she was trying a change of pace from her usual roost, or maybe there was something wrong with the old one. Could the wood be rotting? He cringed to imagine what a rude awakening that could lead to. Or maybe she just liked to flit from handle to handle in her sleep, a sort of fidgeting. Did Vespertila fidget? Luke was nearly driven to ask. He wondered at his intense curiosity what Chlkthata looked like when sleeping.

Luke also noticed that the bookstand was empty. Nothing new there, of course. The ‘bookstand’ was a piece of furniture which always sat between the banners, and it closely resembled a pulpit, or it would have if it wasn’t carved to pony height. Luke called it a bookstand. But he’d never seen anything at all on its clean oak surface. Even so, it was a beautiful piece, far surpassing most of Chlkthata’s furniture, with little flourishes and ornamentations running the swirling column.

When Chlkthata let out a deep breath and opened her eyes, Luke was first to break the fire’s quiet. “I keep expecting to see a book on your bookstand. But I never do.”

“I don’t own any books,” she said over the popping of hot cedar. “The Princess of the Night never deigned to leave behind any writings, and we of the Night Guard don’t believe in the hubris of setting our own words down for a false immortality.”

“But she said all sorts of things. Doesn’t anypony want to write them down so they won’t be forgotten?”

Chlkthata caressed the planed wood, shaking her head. “It wouldn’t be preserving, not really. That’s what we teach. A word is never the same again after you write it down. Whenever a book is read aloud it changes, and the author disappears. This is not a fitting fate for the words of the Duskbearer. I was always taught since my foalhood that if I want to hear what the Night has to say, I should speak to her.”

“Ah.” Luke pondered this for a moment, grimacing as he examined the elaborate stand. “I imagine that caused some problems when she…had to go.”

A tightness tugged at the lip between her fangs. “That was the least of our troubles,” she sighed. “Equestria still blames us for the devastation that happened in the War of Eternal Night. And they laughed at us for a thousand years for being loyal to an alicorn lost on the moon.”

Luke tried to nod in an understanding way. “I suppose you can’t expect ponies to forget easily when you do something to hurt them. They also use what you do to judge what you say, even if you’d like to think the two have nothing in common.”

“We…did some things during that war that I would rather not reminisce, Luke. Our numbers recover slowly now that our beloved has returned to us, but I fear they will never again grow as strong as before the Fall.”

Wearily, she let her wings drop—shrivel to her sides. “She’s not like that anymore, you know. I promise! I’ve spoken to her myself. We’re her little ponies too. And she loves us all so much. Even the ones that still hate her. She just wants a chance to be loved back. I wish I could make everypony see.”

Luke wanted to say something wise and comforting, but he found himself at more or less of a loss. Respectful silence was the next best thing he could give her—and there was one other thing he could do.

They hadn’t eaten yet, but Luke decided it was a good time to pull out the white paper bag sitting in his backpack. Greedily, he soaked in the sight of her eyes lighting up as she pranced around the fire.

Since Chlkthata so often provided him with dinner, he’d started bringing dessert. The mare turned out to have a tremendous weakness for cookies, but since she was required to live on donations she couldn’t buy them on her own. At first he’d naïvely thought she would like dark chocolate, but after bringing a few different flavors he found that her favorites were white chocolate with powdered sugar. So every other night their philosophizing was interrupted by chewing until the whole bag was devoured. And there was powdered sugar all over their noses.

After the last cookie had been broken between them, she fluttered out to the water pump and filled a pail. With a splash she turned the fire into a column of steam that rose into the rafters and stuck there.

Now the light went out. Luke could see very little but her eyes, glowing slits in the dark. He fumbled for his flashlight, but it mostly choked on smoke, leaving him in a gaseous acrid night.

Chlkthata’s voice echoed through the keep. “Why do you come? To hear my idle prattle?”

“Hardly idle…” said Luke. He reached his arms out like a blind man. Chlkthata had shut her eyes and so vanished, leaving him alone. “Why else would I be here?”

“Any number of reasons,” came the echo. “Do you remember that special night I offered you?”

“Oh!” Luke stood, feeling for the perilous window behind him. “Did you…want to do that now? I didn’t realize you were rea—”

“Shh. This feels right. Tonight’s the night.”

He experienced a sense of déjà vu for a memory recovered earlier that day. As Luke dozed his way through morning calculus, he’d recalled in dreams an evening from a far-gone autumn in Connecticut.

“I bet they have a clocktower where she lives.”

Luke rushed onto a vast porch. Behind him, someone else was fetching a broomstick. “A grand one, though…maybe without one of those big citrine faces. At any rate, the hands have been taken off, it being always midnight there.”

The wind, barely chill enough to seem unfriendly, carried with it no hint of civilization. It was blowing in from the moorish valley. Luke ignored what was happening behind him.

“She has a cozy place,” he continued trance-like. “A balcony on the ninety-second story of a dung-caked apartment complex. When she wants to go out, she steps over the edge, all lazy, like a model dropping into a warm bath—except her bath is a city static-speckled with plummeting hot bodies.

“I’ll bet she pulls up from her dive at the very bottom story, the sub-basement story in between the skyscrapers. Just to show off. The towers are broken in that midnight city—they’re the scabbed stumps of a thousand fingers which have been reaching up for six million years to clutch her.

“Rowdy boys lurk those brackish reaches, extracting tolls in cockroaches where the air turns sweet and shivers. But she doesn’t mind them. She couldn’t care less if they listen to her sing. Nor me. She has the whole universe for audience. And all the things her voice touches—mad legions of fireflies, the shingles on the barn, nettle leaves, and philosopher moths—sing back. They reveal their tiniest secrets.

“Those leathery sails are quite fetching on her. A cloak for accentuating curves. And her hair has the hypnotic quality of half-melted nougat.

“There must be a reason she flies so far tonight.”

A screen door squeaked, and then there was a shrill voice begging him to come inside. Luke, instead of hearing, arranged bare slender feet to take him down the steps to springy ground.

“Maybe this will be her last night here. Everyone met up last night, and they decided someone had to go on a quest. One of those things that someone has to do. And it’s a long way flying to the lighthouse on the moon. Once they fix that up, they have to trace its beam to the edge of the Milky Way, where waves of dark matter lap gently on the shore.

“Her favorite singing partners are roused to see her off. Why, look, Mary—already aspen are trying to circle the sky like ravens, there where the convoy will take off.”

Mary was a sprite in a pink pajama-blouse, with plastic hair clips making pigtails of pale blonde locks. Looking up at Luke, she made a scrunched face of horror and tugged hard on his sleeve. She could only budge him by leaning back with all her weight. “Come back, big brother! You’re scaring me!”

He turned away.

“So she makes herself a night on the town. She just—swirls until idle curiosity draws up the glow of a ranch house. There she hangs on a shutter and peers at the upturned moments of our lives.”

Mary had shrieked and clutched her hot chocolate, thinking that she saw a mouse. So the alien’s round eyes had locked for only an instant; vanished before Luke’s index fingers printed on the glass.

But in that instant he had a vision, just like he’d been told prophets were always having. He foresaw a parallel world—not far away, and not in between atoms, but right underneath his nose. He would have been hard-pressed to articulate it, but for a sensation that the human world, everything he knew and would ever understand, was but one dot intermingled with billions. A nearby sparrow trying to flap off the chill was another universe. That clump of moonwort, another still, unknowable. Suddenly the six-armed Shiva, who years ago had scared Luke out of his Indian playmate’s home, didn’t seem as frightening.

So he walked towards the ring of aspen that marked the end of the lawn, and the gate to the uncharted valley. The bare-naked aspen curled their branches like claws, furious over his newly voyeuristic gaze. The bark blushed white before his opened eyes.

Mary hung back. Clearly, she was fighting the overpowering urge to flee back into the light. Luke walked to the edge of darkness like a child who didn’t know to be afraid. And he clicked his tongue.

He clicked. “Little bat, little bat! Come on out! I won’t hurt you!”

He clicked. “Little bat, little bat! What do you know of God?”

He stumbled over wild pumpkins and poison sumac for hours, alone, and found no city, no cave, not even a shadowed wing darting needle-holes in moonlight. He found nothing as he had imagined it, but was sure, then and forever, that it was only because he did not have ears to see.

Valen and Marigold (part 2)

It was a quarter before dawn here in Columbus. This was a magical time of day, when the unlit sky unveiled with a snowy blush. If you were in a tower high enough, you could find some semblance of peace even in the depths of the city—and pretend, within that momentary quiet, that the only sound was puffy clouds tumbling their way to the sea.

Valen was in a tower high enough. He’d trained himself to wake up at exactly this time every morning, and so when the carpet beneath the window began to glow, he had just finished sailing gingerly upstream to consciousness. No matter how much the parts of his body wanted to stretch, he took care not to move then. Only his heavy-lidded eyes, which were allowed an exception, flittered open and roved about his surroundings.

There was a pony draped over him. Specifically, a pegasus mare with a yellow coat and a caramel mane. Nice figure, too. From the way felt like warm skin under his hand, he noticed right away how well her coat was brushed. She had a luxuriously lengthy tail; it went right off the far end of the bed. And, if he wasn’t mistaken, a touch of mascara on those big eyelids.

This was clearly a mare who took care of herself. A beauty by any standard—ponies would also have considered her pretty, with a full, round flank and a spine curved like the most sonorous violin. Definitely not one of those unicorns who settled for humans or griffons because she had a short horn. The fact that she was a pegasus alone made her quite a catch for a human.

Her muzzle and forelegs were nestled in the crook of Valen’s outstretched arm, which presently served as her pillow. One of her hind hocks wrapped over his knee. But that was no matter. Arranging an Indiana Jones-like switch between his limb and the genuine pillow, he slid his body parts away from her warmth one by one. He was easily able to slip out of bed without waking her.

For a long moment, he stood over her, looking down at the small, wrinkled space filled by a pony on his off-white bed. He was tempted by the thought of what it would feel like to run a kiss all the way down that fantastic spine. Very tempted. But no. There was a time for all good things to come to an end, including love.

Instead he restricted himself to drinking in her soft, snore-like whinnies. A deep sense of satisfaction filled him to the pores. There was nothing more peaceful than a sleeping pony. This was a perfect moment. If only he smoked.

“Another satisfied customer,” he whispered. And, having indulged himself in this one-liner, he tiptoed around the room to get dressed.

In minutes he was out on the blue-grey street with a frankfurter in one hand and a scalding cup of Starbucks in the other. He even considered getting a newspaper, just for the old-fashioned charm it would have had on such a brisk brick morning. Columbus scurried around him like a rat lost in a maze of its own devising, but he floated on a cushion of air. Memories from last night were filtering back, slow as dripping coffee. He strolled just above the sidewalk, savoring the show.

It was, he reflected, terribly validating to meet a pony who decided you were right for them. That went for every species. Every species said so. Valen had once met a griffon at the embassy in New York, and he’d called Valen a lucky bastard. But what with things being so stirred up right now, humans were still a novelty item. Validation abounded. Hairless they might be, but nearly anybody could grab a Gate ticket to Canterlot and find an equine date, if they had the resolve to do it. That made it an exceptional time to be alive.

And the supply and demand was tilted in a human’s favor by the fact that surprisingly few humans capitalized on it. Most were still skittish about the idea of hooking up with an alien. Valen was lead to believe that a large chunk of the internet was enthusiastic about it—had been even before ponies arrived—but there was a lot of talk and relatively little action. Valen couldn’t understand why.

Well, he did have one theory. But for now he was keeping that to himself.

After running these pleasant thoughts a few times through his head, Valen realized that he’d been walking aimlessly in the same direction ever since leaving his dorm. He examined the street signs at the next intersection to find out if he was going the right way, and only once he’d identified his location realized that he didn’t know what the right way was. Valen let out a belly laugh, discovering that he didn’t have any plans for that afternoon. There were no classes—he hadn’t scheduled any. Only a couple credit hours this semester. He couldn’t imagine the fools who wanted to be chained to desks in a time of the world like this. They were learning about the Earth that used to be, when a whole new Earth was about to emerge.

But Valen didn’t care. He had all the world at his feet! There was a tremendous feeling, like being wind, in the awareness if he so chose, he could get on a train, or a plane, be halfway around the country, halfway around the world, on another world—by this time tomorrow. But maybe he would only wander the monuments downtown. Maybe he would try to sneak into a concert at the Lifestyle Pavillion. Or maybe he would drive to New York after all, to watch Twilight Sparkle give a lecture on the Equestrian solar system to a gaggle of wide-eyed fourth graders. Because they were in fourth grade, she seemed to believe they could understand four-syllable words. She found it hard to grasp that humans could mature so slowly compared to ponies that their minds weren’t fully developed even at fourteen years of age. So that was always a good laugh.

If he was lucky, she might even say hi. She was surprisingly casual for near-royalty. But then again, these days kept her pretty busy. Rumor had it that the Equestrian Diplomatic Core had proposed putting a Dimension Gate right inside the embassy, so that their foreign service could warp directly in from the upper rings of Canterlot. But Washington had shot that idea down real fast. Valen suspected it was because they couldn’t stand the idea of a portal to another dimension sitting inside a zone of diplomatic immunity—never mind how reasonable it was, or how unreasonable the idea that any invasion could come from Equestria. “Who’s going to hurt you?” Valen would have liked to scoff. Were dragons going to fly all the way across the pony nation, up the Canterhorn, past the Royal Guard, the Wonderbolts and Alicorn Princesses, and squeeze themselves through those glowing doors for some unintelligible reason?

But that was world politics for you. Valen counted his blessings the same as everyone else. Weren’t any tanks rolling through Appaloosa yet. That would have to do.

He could have let a day float by like this, waiting until the death of the sun to come alive. But you know what? It was five o’clock in Ponyville.

This was enough to convince his friends to break free of their dreary prisons. He made the calls. As usual, they piled into Luke’s minivan and started driving before they talked about where they wanted to go. And as it often happened, little time had gone by before they found themselves at The Little Pony.

There was practically a table reserved for them at the place. Which was good, because you could count on it being packed at any time of the day; sometimes people came from halfway around the world. It was a happening place. The only trick to it was not to let Tom find out that his establishment had become the first and only bar for humans and ponies looking to eye each other from the neck down.

The Little Pony wasn’t known for its fine dining, but Valen and his pals spread the table anyway. It saved time going to a restaurant and helped their corner of the room to look more festive. The daisy sandwiches didn’t always get eaten—they were mostly there in case somepony came over to join them—but sometimes Luke would munch on them, since he turned pretty quiet during nights at the bar.

“So you’ll like this,” said Valen, nudging Luke over a plate of jalapeño nachos. “Got a car wash lined up for this weekend.”
Luke groaned softly. Before saying anything else he downed a shot (though only of milk) and buried his head in his hands. “How many souls?”

Valen grinned in spite of Luke’s stretched face. “Three. Twins and a friend.”

Over Valen’s silent laughter Mindy leaned in—Mindy being the American name taken by an exchange student from Mechanical Engineering. A confused look perched on her nose. “But Valen, you do not have a car.”

Luke tried to wave her off, rather languidly. “Don’t ask, it’s—too depressing.”

So of course Mindy thought she was being kept out of a joke, and kept pressing while Luke kept insisting that he wouldn’t speak of it. While that was going on Valen traded winks with a sapphire-blue unicorn on the karaoke stage. And, more importantly, kept tabs on the big black stallion near the bar. It was really rather hilarious. He and Mindy had been making puppy eyes at each other for the better part of an hour already, but if left to their own devices neither of them would ever make the first move. The stallion, naturally, was waiting for the mare to come over and say hi, and of course the girl thought that she had to wait for the guy to make a move. The signals being sent were so strong that maybe everyone in the bar but them knew that they were interested in each other. Valen would grab them both and make sure they got together by the end of the night, but he just wanted to sit back and laugh at it for a little longer.

He quickly hid his hand under the table when Dave leaned in. “Here’s what I don’t get,” he said, waving his hands over the nachos. “Why don’t you start a herd? You do realize mares…er…get along? You could have—maybe five. They might even take you back to Equestria to live with them. You could live in friggin’ Equestria! What’s stopping you?”

Valen smiled indulgently. “Ah, my poor naïve compadre. You still believe that marriage by any other name would not be as dreary. There’s no more freedom in it for ponies than anywhere else in the multiverse. I mean, come on. Do you really think there aren’t any unhappy marriages in Equestria? Real talk for a second. Five mares is just five more people to fight with if you’re stuck in the same tomb for all eternity.”

Dave rolled his eyes. “Silly me. So much for the power of love.”

“Ah-ah-ah!” Valen wagged his finger. “Au contraire. The only way anyone can truly give love is if they have the freedom to choose to give it. You—hey, Luke, pay attention to this one. I got the inspiration from you.” He patted his quieter friend’s silky locks. “Plus, I’m about to talk about how you go about setting up that lovely little giving situation, and you could use some—”

Suddenly, Valen sat up straight for the first time that night.

His sudden movement so jolted the nachos that the rest of the gang all tried to follow his gaze. “What?” Dave cocked his head. “See a pegasus?”

“No,” murmured Valen. Then, still staring over the heads of the other patrons, he casually added, “that was last night.”

That just might have been enough to make him sit up, but it wasn’t what Valen had found. He pointed. “There, on the bar…kind of behind the fridge.”

Dave squinted. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Or who, my erstwhile sidekick. Or who.”

Not one of them had ever seen an Equestrian zebra before. Heard of them, sure. But what reason would a zebra have to come to this world?

Through the dust and dim half-neon light, sipping some bizarre blue concoction from a globular container—it looked like a zebra. But could it be a trick of the lamplight leaking in stripes through the creaky floorboards above? Could it be the haze that made her mane look like the traditional mohawk of the Zebrahanian tribes?

No—she was a zebra.

“Strange.” Valen stroked his chin. Everyone knew he was referring to the lack of people approaching the mare to initiate conversation. She looked to be about the same age as every other Equestrian trolling this bar, and from there, it was no great leap to make an inference about her intentions. But if meeting people was her goal she was having a remarkably poor time of it. Perhaps they simply didn’t notice her. With the camouflage-like shadows on her coat, she seemed to blend into the walls almost to the point of invisibility.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Luke shrugged. “Ponies hog all the attention. The bright colors, the long hair. Not to mention the whole ‘make friends with everything’ vibe. I don’t want to say easy, but…”

Mindy raised her hands, a sure sign she was about to try and articulate something beyond the complexity of her English. “I think,” he said haltingly, “it is because ponies are most…like humans. You understand? Most like Americans. You have the same…culture.”

Valen had observed this dialogue with rapt attention. Abruptly he rose. “Think it’s time someone showed her we have humans with an open mind,” he could be heard saying as he wove between mismatched tables.

He arrived with his own drink. She was sitting in the only corner of the room with bare walls, near a blocked-off staircase to the second floor. The placement of the fridge gave it the feel of a private booth. So Valen arranged his chair with measured care, taking a distance that was respectful, but still sent a clear signal.

“Hello,” he said with a winning smile.

The first choice to make when approaching a mare was always what language to use, but Valen defaulted to Equus when he could. Most beings appreciated it when you made the effort to become fluent in their native language.

The zebra lifted her head long enough to regard him for an unblinking moment. Now that he was up close, Valen could see the fascinating texture of her coat—coarse and wild. Her ears were unpierced, but a series of intricate wooden bangles decorated both of her forelegs. In respect to the Earth custom of coming clothed, she had callously thrown on a coarse shawl which barely served to cover her back. Valen couldn’t help but wonder if she’d chosen the garment on purpose for the very fetching way it draped only inches down her flanks and sides.

He cleared his throat to pave a way onward. “My name’s Valen. I saw you were all by yourself over here, and I thought you might like some company. Would it be alright if I joined you?”

This basic, unassuming opener worked exceptionally well with ponies. Valen rarely relied on anything else. Many novices fell into the trap of thinking that ponies, with all their love of wordplay and schmaltz, would fall swooning for cheesy pickup lines. But the truth was that the American stereotype proceeded humanity across the multiverse. Furthermore, the affectionate exterior of Equestrian culture concealed many of the same fusty old ideas about love that plagued America. Any mare who smelled she was being ‘hit on’ generally turned up her nose, and you’d be lucky if she deigned to hit you with her tail on the way out.

Not that they were all uninterested in that sort of thing. Thankfully, the brave young explorers who came this far often had an open mind. In fact, Valen had been on the receiving end of some astoundingly inappropriate advances before. But it was a matter of social scripts. A guy who came on strong could be very off-putting. Save for the hardcore Earth nerds, mares expected their men to be demure and modest. Not exactly the strengths of most human guys.

But now Valen was swimming in unfamiliar territory. Zebras were an unknown quantity. He had to play it by ear, and discover how to adjust as he learned about this girl. His gut had suggested he take the initiative, and though wary, he was making the decision to trust it.

“That’s very kind,” the zebra smiled, “I wouldn’t mind.”
Then, pausing a moment, she curled her tongue a bit. “I’m Zehabel,” she added slowly, “and I’m practicing my English.”

Valen gave her a delighted look. “Why, I’m flattered. I’d be glad to help you practice.”

He snagged the first guy behind the bar and ordered an orange, which he took his time peeling. The tidbit that zebras liked the smell of oranges had come from 4chan, and was therefore more than a bit suspect, but Valen didn’t know much to go on about zebras. Besides, on some level it didn’t really matter if it was true or not. Showing the effort was what mattered.

The shavings fell in a little pile under his stained fingers. “So to what does Earth owe the pleasure of such a pretty set of stripes?”

Her blush showed up so nicely on white coat hair. “It was time to set out from my home village, and I wanted to go somewhere new. All enchantresses have to set out in their own sometime. And I was mailed by a business who said they would be interested in learning about my magic, once my apprenticeship was over. A farm of—something with a farm…”

“Pharmaceutical?”

“That’s it.”

Valen leaned back. “Neat. So you brew potions, then?”

“And lignuglyphs.”

With a sly expression, she dipped her hoof into the blue waxy substance she was drinking. Valen held still as the tip of her hoof traced a complex swirling sign on his arm. “That’s for good luck. I can put it in bark for you as soon as I unpack my tools.”

Valen pored over the dribbling symbol on his arm. “I’ll pay double!”

“Oh, no!” she shook her head. “Never charge for kindness. That’s what my master taught me.”

“Alright, but be careful. You don’t want to get taken advantage of out here.”

He kept a lookout to see if she ever eyed the drinks, in case he could offer to get her something. “By the way, aren’t zebras supposed to talk in rhyme? Is that another thing we Earthlings have got all wrong? Or are you a modern, liberal sort of zebra? Maybe you’re talking in blank verse.”

She paused for a long moment. Then, “Rhyme? In English? Are you insane? That would boil any zebra’s brain.”

Valen let himself laugh. “Zebras are fascinating! You know, it amazes me how you can live not more than a hundred miles from Canterlot and yet have a totally different understanding of magic. You’ll have to show me sometime.”

“I would be most happy to teach you,” she said, placing a hoof over his forehead. “Magic can live in any heart that wishes to use it for good.”

She took another sip and then nibbled at the rind of his orange. Valen offered her half the fruit and she bit it out of his fingers. “I must confess, humans fascinate me as well. This world is so big. There’s no telling what I might find here.”

“So true.” Valen leaned back. “And I can’t help noticing you’re chosen an interesting spot to take tea. Maybe you’re thinking you’ll find more than just adventure here, hmm?”

Before she could blush again, he rapped her shoulder lightly. “It’s okay! Nothing wrong with that.”

She let out a small hum. “Perhaps,” she admitted. “But I don’t know if I should be coming here.”

“Oh, now why’s that?” Valen lifted a glass and toasted the bar. “It’s not a bad place. Folks here are pretty friendly, so if you’re worried about being the odd duck out—”

“But I’m a zebra!” she exclaimed in confusion.

He tipped the glass back. “Turn of phrase. The point is, you’re welcome here.”

“My thanks.” Zehabel’s smile flickered. “But I’ve heard…things.”

Valen rolled his eyes. “Bet you have. People say all sorts of things about this lot.”

“Well, is it true?” She hunkered down over the counter, inviting him to join her in whispering. “What they call a…one-night stand?”

Valen bought himself a moment to think by setting his glass down carefully. Then he rolled the dice by putting his hand atop her fetlock. “Do you want it to be true?” he whispered back.

She became even more furtive and hushed. “What’s it like?”

He looked into her eyes for a long moment, rubbing his thumb along the top edge of her hoof.

“Well, first you meet someone who looks nice. Just to be polite you get them something to eat—” He swallowed the rest of his orange. “—or something to drink. You spend a while talking and getting to know each other.”

“And what happens then?”

He smiled. “Ah...it depends. I’ll tell you how I like to do it. First I give the grand tour of the world. Show them a movie theater, a fast-food joint, whatever they want to see. I learn a little about where they come if I can, since it’s always so interesting, and sometimes ask to see a little magic. Pack a picnic with a whole bunch of iceberg lettuce and strawberries. Lie on a hillside for a while and watch the world go by, talking about nothing and about everything. Learn everything there is to know about them. After that go down to the river and walk side by side in the moonlight.”

He reached to take her fetlock in both hands, wrapping both sets of fingers gently around her hoof. “And once it gets nice and dark, spend the night…mm…doing whatever makes you happy.”

She was getting near to blushing again. “As close as you can get to a pony—without even falling in love!”

“Naw, naw. By then I’m in love. Head over. Well—I don't fall. That’s the trick, you know. You don’t have to wait to fall in love. You jump in all-fours first.”

She blew through her cheeks. “That…isn’t dangerous?”

A shrug. “Around here we believe in following your heart. If a little love is what your heart needs, who are you to refuse?”

She hesitated, furrowing her brow. He caught her eyes flick up and down his body.

Swiveling her seat, Zehabel rapped on the bar. A small pile of bits jangled onto the counter as Tom Silverstone came out from the back, polishing a glass.

Valen bridge-shuffled a few dollar bills down, winked at Tom, and then helped the lady down from the barstool. As they walked out he had his hand on her withers, allowing his fingers to brush against the stiff hair in her mane.

Marigold stirred in the sheets, twitching her legs and letting out little happy sounds as if there was no one around to judge her. She had just come to. But she was in no hurry to wake up. Valen’s hand was pressed against her belly and she didn’t really want it to move.

Then something tickled her back—it proved to be the corner of a pillow, but at first she thought it might be Valen trying to wake her up. The unladylike snort she let out jolted her the rest of the way to consciousness.

The womb-like warmth drained away so fast when she rolled across the bed to find it empty. It was sudden. Like falling off a cloud. Marigold scattered the sheets in a panic, coming upright with a gasp. But he was nowhere to be found. The feeling of his hand was only the leftover of a dream.

She gave a tiny whimper and pulled in her wings. They had been spread messily across the bed, so relaxed that the pinions were spread apart—revealing the most sensitive spots on her wing. Now they hugged her sides. She kicked the sheets a little further so that she could examine the whole bed, as if she thought he might be hiding under the little clump at the end.

But the bed was empty. She was right back where she’d started yesterday morning.

Why did she feel like crying? Why was she so determined not to cry? She walked as if on rice-paper ice, rolling off the bed without using wings to steady her fall.

It wasn’t exactly a mystery where he’d gone. There was even a note on the desk for her: Out early. Help yourself to any of the salad in the fridge. I keep it stocked with good pony food. Don’t open the freezer, though. There’s chicken nuggets in there. The morning bus runs back to the Gate terminal. #17. If you want to go to the bar instead, you could get on bus #18, but it’s within walking distance. Just head west down the road and you’ll sniff it out in a few blocks.
Hope your morning is as sunny as you;) ~Valen

“A smiley face,” she whispered. “How thoughtful.”

Marigold went to the refrigerator, digging her hoof under the rubber seal to pry it open. Inside were stacks of boxed salads: sixteen identical containers marked with tiny icons of a pony in a circle.

She removed one and sniffed at the plastic package. It had radishes inside, iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, with some daisy petals and garlic croutons. Marigold tore it open so that she could bring the vegetables close to her face and breathe in the smell.

Then she walked to the waste bin and methodically emptied it.

She’d thought this was what she wanted. Last night had felt so good—not in the way she was expecting, but even better. So where had it all gone? She felt…forgotten. Like one of those dresses only meant to be worn once. Valen had made her feel so special last night. But if she was special, why hadn’t he stayed?

She’d have to sneak out of this dormitory on tippy-hooves. Marigold couldn’t bear the thought of anyone seeing her like this, with red-rimmed eyes. And she couldn’t break down for a good cry so long as she was here in this room. That was just as unbearable. Her only choice was to gallop for the elevator and hope she could hold out long enough to flee.

The Stubborn and the Persistent (part 3)

Elliot took his time walking to Sweet Apple Acres next morning. Coming back after a day away was like coming up for air, but that didn’t mean there was any reason to rush. All the more reason to appreciate the magic of fresh pebbles crunching underneath his shoes. It took a human about forty minutes to hike over from the train station, and the road there was filled with so many things. Things that, while living in the city, he had never known were so much like air for breathing. There were pillbugs and crocuses, and hoary mats of moss hung in ancient glades of birch. There were all the ways a hill could fold around grass and dirt, and all the ways the sky could color the ground.

Besides, it gave him a chance to warm up his singing voice. Elliot was considering singing The Song today. He’d probably chicken out before he got there, of course, the same as always. But still he had the lyrics in his pocket. He thought it was one of the most inspired things he’d ever created, although that didn’t necessarily translate to making it a good idea showing it to Applejack. He probably wasn’t as good as he thought at writing lyrics in Equus. He just felt that way because it was so much easier to rhyme.

It was probably best suited for unfolding while alone, in a moment like this, and singing to the shade of mockingbirds while he puttered down the trail.

To an Earth Mare

I comb through your mane, picking out pieces of dirt,
Out of a desire to crumble them,
Not to clean you.

This is when you’re at your most beautiful, Applejack:
Your coat crusted with little specks of dirt from working in the field.
This is your element, this is the way you came out of the earth,
Covered in the ground that worships you.
Only when you’re like this,
I can hold your sleeping form and inhale the sweet smells of harvest.
You shift under my touch; your face turns toward the sunlight coming through the barn door,
Like a plant, you reach instinctively toward mother.

Inside you, just an inch past the fine leather cover that separates my hoof from your cavities,
Are currents of magic that would electrocute me.
Your organs draw the magic of Equestria through your liver, your blood, your beating heart;
You are raw green mana,
The magic of life itself,
Dancing, laughing, working, sweating.
Science confirms it;
from Equestria’s womb you came,
and thence you shall return.
No death could diminish your beauty.
I’d plant you–you’d hardly notice the difference, already one with the earth.
The tree that sunk its roots through your corpse would be the tallest and strongest of all.
(Not for pegasi this ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
For me, maybe, but only as a cheap sermon–
You give the words invincible pride.)

Only if Equestria let its dearest child go,
And hurled you into orbit,
Past the thaumic field that holds your cells together,
Would you disintegrate into a mess worth crying over.
I want to hold you closer, to keep that from happening,
but my hooves have already wandered too far,
Just like I wouldn’t dare whisper these words in your ears
If I thought you real.
Gravity embraces you with fanatic devotion.
It is enough.

I trace your back,
Supple, curving like gentle waves of wheat;
I dig between your hairs, leaving marks,
–Furrows?–
and smell soil, the strength of moving earth.
Still soft enough to bury myself in.
A mighty fine piece of land.
I want to be planted here, in you.
Carry me forever.

Gravity embraces us both,
Drawing us closer, despite your cautions.
No matter where I go now,
as long as I touch the good earth you touch,
We’re together.

Yes...maybe singing this to Applejack wouldn’t be the best of plans.

Another reason not to hurry was that he’d only have to wait once he arrived at the outer gate. If he reached it early, he might meet Applebloom going out to school, but only if it wasn’t a Sunday. And he couldn’t arrive that fast when he had to take the morning train from Canterlot. He would just have to wait for Granny Smith to show up closer to noon; she would let him in then.

But he seemed to be blessed by a rare sort of luck that morning. Scarcely had he spotted the gate when he also saw an orange speck coming down from the hills.

He greeted her with a wave as soon as she was within pony earshot. “Good morning, Miss Applej—woah!”

He didn’t get very far before she was suddenly in his face. Her orange snout stuck up like an accusing promontory, eyes and freckles sharp in the morning sun. She had put on a burst of speed and crossed the meadow before he could finish his sentence.

“What is this?” she declared loudly.

Twisting back over her shoulders, she bit open the clasp to her left saddlebag. When her face came back out of it, there was a heavy black rectangle balanced in her teeth.

Oh dear.

Elliot smiled wanly. He held out his hands to balance the laptop for her when she tried to set it on the fenceposts. He remembered that gift. Perfectly well. Why had he ever thought that was a good idea? There were all sorts of things on that drive, folders he’d copied over from his own computer without thinking any farther ahead than the idea that Applejack would enjoy being able to see some of her own fandom without an internet connection.

Applejack angrily gestured for Elliot to open the computer. He pried back the lid reluctantly, sure of what he would see. At the impudent flick of her mane he scanned the screen.
But it wasn’t what he thought.

The worst thing he could see in this image was the word ‘Hurtful’, although even that had been crossed out and replaced with the word ‘Loving’. “Doing Loving Things to your Waifu”. In the comic panels below—admittedly, they were crudely drawn—a figurine of Applejack was being complimented…petted…being proposed to. All in all, rather nice things. At least it seemed that way to him.

“Not the porn, huh?” he deadpanned.

“This what you want?” Applejack snarled.

Elliot jumped back at this. He’d never seen a pony actually snarl before—never realized her lip could curl over her teeth as if she actually had canines, and in some primordial language scare the flowing blood halfway out of his body. He re-approached the fence as if it were the cage of something dangerous.

“Now, Applejack, there’s a…lot of stuff on computers. I don’t know if you should go poking around every…”

“Think we can’t live without you?” she whinnied. “Cuz’ yer’ just the plum darn greatest thing to fall out of the sky?”

Elliot winced. “Er…no?”

“Stallions!” she snorted. “Just the same everywhere I go. What do you think, Elliot? I’m just gonna’ roll over for you one day cuz’ you so darn sweet? That what you want?”

Her sides were heaving as if she’d run a race. Elliot stepped back again. He tried desperately to look up, but he couldn’t meet the sour fire in her eyes.

He looked away, and folded his hands behind his back. “Gee, Miss Applejack. It never crossed my mind that I might actually win you over.”

“You little—what?” Her head bobbed up; she back-trotted a couple steps.

“Sure.” He looked down again. “I mean, you’re the one and only Applejack, after all. I’m not that full of myself. But you seemed to like me, so I thought that if I was lucky I’d get the chance to…”

“Chance to what?” she asked with lowered ears.

“Uh...sing your praises, I guess. I’m still working on the singing part. But I am getting better.”

Applejack pawed the ground. While Elliot waited outside the fence, she paced, glared and stomped. When she locked down his gaze, it wasn’t so grin at him, but to scrutinize, plumbing whatever was behind to find it either shallow or deep. Elliot only hoped she wouldn’t tell him to go away.

“You’re bein’ plum ridiculous,” she whinnied. Looked down. “I’m nothin’ near as great as you think I am.”

Elliot shrugged, still wearing a bemused expression. “So?”

“So yer’ wastin’ your time!” she snarled. “You should go home! Leave me here, Elliot, and go find a filly fer’ yourself who’s actually as nice as you think she is.”

Elliot rolled his shoulders. “Nonsense. This is the opposite of a waste. And I don’t love someone else. I love you.”

She was looking away, glowering into the dirt as if she could plant her fury there. “But…I’m not…”

“Not a line drawing? Sure!”

“Elliot! I mean Ah’m not…” She spat, trying to make herself say something.

“Oh, horseapples! Love doesn’t care about that.” Elliot vaulted himself onto the fence. “It doesn’t care about stubbornness, or bursts of temper, and it certainly doesn’t care about an unwashed mane. It doesn’t even care about Breezies or late episodes. Applejack, you love something because…well, I figure love is its own reason. That’s as plain as I can say it, and I hope that’s enough.”

She glared at him, working her jaw.

“Well…if’n…” She stamped. “If’n you wanna’ be my gosh-darned minstrel, then cut it out with the frog songs!”

Elliot fell flat off the fence. “Y-yes, miss!” he cried with his legs sticking up in the air.

“And—and quit talking about my hair!” She pulled her mane down on both sides.

“Ask and it shall be done,” he said from the ground. “No more hair songs.”

The Bat and the Believer (part 4)

The air balloon was small, but the night was huge.

According to Chlkthata, the former was on loan from a well-to-do friend in Ponyville. Luke had already guessed that much when he saw the purple fabric. But he’d never been in a hot air balloon before, and it was more alarming than he expected. This may have been partly because the balloon was of pony make. The basket edges barely came up past his knees.

So he was working crouched over to avoid running his head into the burner. After he finished setting up a telescope, he snuck a peek at Chlkthata. She was looking back at him.

“I don’t mean to seem ungrateful,” he said, “because this really is a very special night. But when you invited me to go flying with you, this isn’t quite what I imagined.”

She sent over a deadpan glance. “Did you think I would carry you? Just how much lifting power do you imagine my wings have? Nevermind the fact that you weigh more than I do, have you any idea how much training it takes to fly at all wearing armor?”

Luke threw up his hands and giggled like a schoolgirl.

When Chlkthata took pains to correct him, it was best to just sit back and enjoy the wry humor of how wrong he was. That lesson had been cemented the night Luke asked if Vespertila drank blood. Somehow it had seemed like a good idea at the time. In the end, he’d dozed off draped over the forge, because it was half an hour before she was willing to let down the rope to her tower. Despite what she thought, she could be moody, like a thunderclap. But they always had a good laugh about it afterwards.

He opened a thick book and nestled it in the center of the basket. It was the easiest and most dumbed-down star almanac Luke had been able to find. Chlkthata already had her own references; there were sheets and sheets of parchment tacked to the walls, covered in work she’d already done. Star charts were the only way Chlkthata was able to explore constellations that never appeared over this portion of the world.

Several fresh parchments were incomplete, scribbled with many points and reference stars but on the whole left blank. They would be filled in tonight with ballpoint pens and feather quills. Luke had long looked forward to this night.

He squinted through the telescope, taking down a particularly bright point in the sky and then using an astrolabe to double-check his amateurish astronomy.

“Okay, that’s Saggitarus, I think.” He wrote the name in among a patch of stars, connecting the dots with ruler-straight lines. Beside it, in another color of ink, Chlkthata added a few Equestrian stars with several relative positions.

Luke stood back so she could stand over the map, her legs splayed to either side to avoid ripping the parchment. She couldn’t read from very far away, so she had to stick her face in the paper, squinting over her notes, yawning ineffectually, and at last adding a few extra sentences of mouthwriting.

She looked up. “That constellation looks a bit like one Luna drew in the Third Age of Harmony. A rearing pegasus, right?”

Luke grabbed the textbook and started flipping pages. “A centaur, actually. It’s sort of a half-human, half-horse. In the picture they have here it’s drawing a bow.”

“Half-human. As in a cross between a human and a pony?”

“Sort of—”

“And when did your people name this constellation?”

“Says here ancient Sumeria. So quite a long time ago. Any particular reas—”

Luke lowered the book. Chlkthata was on the other side of the cover giving him a long, amused stare.

“What?”

She shook her head and patted his knee. “Oh, nothing, my little human.”

“No, really, what?” Luke laughed as she climbed his chest with her forelegs.

Chlkthata grabbed his shoulders and pulled him down so that he was sitting in the corner of the basket. Looming over him much like she had in their first encounter, she brought her face close to his, grinning to veil all but the tips of her fangs. “I enjoy being here with you.”

Luke reached out and rapped the telescope. “Me too, Chlkthata. This stuff is fascinating, and nothing makes a job go faster than doing it with good friends.”

She dropped away, turning for some reason with her head down. “Yeah…friends." A short cough. "Best keep on looking for similarities.”

He happily complied. They scanned the sky together, comparing every inch with a stack of scrolls that detailed the many, many star fields of Equestria.

They were drifting over the city in a hot air balloon for two. There were no clouds out, so they had the sky all to themselves. It twinkled above, and it twinkled below, and if Luke hadn’t been so preoccupied with falling he would have lost track of which ways were up and down. A bit nippy too. But they were both bundled up in their respective coats, and besides, it only made the space around the burner that much cozier.

After an hour and a half they took a break for cheese croissants in a picnic basket. Luke unwrapped two sandwiches and sat down carefully so as not to disturb the charts. He good-naturedly prodded his Vespertila companion. “Well, Chlkthata? Feel like you’ve managed to tame the heathen night?”

“About as much as you’ve managed to kindle your non-existent one,” she replied with her eye to a spyglass.

Luke always felt giggly at this hour, so he fought back the urge to laugh again. It was true his sleep schedule was still trying to shamble out of its own ashes. Making regular visits to see a member of the Night Guard didn’t mesh very well with the strict schedule of early to bed and early to rise he’d held himself to for most of his school career. But he never dreamed of asking Chlkthata to change her schedule. He still felt to need to make her feel welcome in Columbus, and that didn’t entail imposing a huge change on her personal habits. Besides, other ponies expected her to be out at night.

She didn’t get a ton of visitors, but Luke had gotten the privilege of sitting in once when an elderly unicorn stallion had felt the need for council. Luke had been pleased to no end that he could keep up with the discussion of Luna’s nocturnal consubstantiality. The one thing he hadn’t been able to understand was why Chlkthata had asked him into what should have been a very private encounter between her and a member of her ward. But she’d taken him aside later and let him in on the secret; according to her, seeing Luke’s enthusiasm for learning about Luna had comforted that pony more than anything she could have said.

Luke would have been willing to sleep more during the day, and adjust his own sleep schedule to hers. But he had work on weekdays. There was no getting around that. No matter how late he stayed up, the world would be back at his throat by nine a.m. The best time of day was that free rush of energy that started around eight in the evening and carried him through the joyous company of midnight. But now it was drawing past that hour, and he found his eyelids growing heavy as a bag of ballast.

High air’s crispness kept him awake for a while. The two of them debated as they worked, about the stars they were scrutinizing and the empty space beyond. As usual, Luke hardly noticed the time pass. Being with Chlkthata was nothing like school. When Luke debated with his fellow students, time seemed to slow down. Based on how doggedly they fought, they all seemed convinced that their immortal souls were at stake should they lose the argument. Even the ones who thought they didn’t have one. But when Luke debated with Chlkthata, neither of them could stop smiling. They tripped over their words not in a rush to prove themselves, but in their hurry to learn everything.

After two croissants apiece they were both back to work. But once they had finished researching the seven more constellations, Luke sat down, resting one arm across his telescope. “I might just take a little nap,” he yawned carefully. He meant to get up directly after he said that, in order to prove that he was joking. But he discovered that his shoulder had nestled itself into a resting position against the edge of the basket. It wasn’t terribly comfortable, but it was the closest to reclining he’d been all night. Luke couldn’t dredge up the motivation to move.

Chlkthata laughed, which stirred him for a second—he had never heard her laugh before. It was, he thought, an exceedingly rare sounded he should capture lest he never got to hear it again.

“Sleep, then.” She leaned over to nuzzle the top of his head.

Luke, with a clumsy shake, tried to slip away and stand. “You need my help. I didn’t come here to fall asleep on you.”

As he was gaining his knees, she pressed him back down with a bare hoof. “Sleep, if it comes,” she insisted. “Dreams are a gift from the Night. Don’t fight them for my sake.”

With a lame grunt, he held himself in a sitting position. But the familiar sound of her voice was making him drowsy, and not by accident. The notion of leaving his eyes shut was irresistible.

“I’m going to get up in a second,” he threatened with a mutter.

Another laugh—wonder of wonders, two in one night. “Really, Luke. I’m not supposed to keep anyone from sleep.”

She stroked his head a couple times with her wings. Luke hadn’t ever felt her wings before, and that made him shiver awake for a little second. But the leathery surface was gentle. It flattened his hair and made it that much harder to avoid relaxing. There wasn’t really any way to get comfortable in this balloon, but as Luke’s body collapsed, he found himself cradled. His head rested against her chest as she stood above him, still surveying the stars.

The smell of leather and velvet and musk overwhelmed him like a blanket. Luke was nearly unconscious. Strange objects touched his forehead, and he frowned for a second before realizing they were the flats of two fangs. There was also a spot of moisture left behind. He smiled, leaned up, and returned the gesture, using his hands to cup her muzzle—

—before processing what either of them had just done. Luke sat up straight nearly fast enough to give her a glass jaw.

There. Awake. And sweating at half-past midnight. The air ice-cold and milling like a restless spirit. The dizzy sway of a hot-air balloon. Distant hiss of burning gas, and red slit eyes watching, watching.

He had jumped back against the edge of the basket with both of his arms braced against the edge. Against the sickening vortex of dread sucking away at his chest. She was watching him with an unreadable expression. But he could tell that she was as fully awake as ever.

“Chlkthata…” he gasped. Her name tasted like mint, and it knocked the breath out of his lungs.

Her whole face dripping concern, she reached out to him, hoping to brush at his shoulder with an unshorn fetlock. “Luke.” Her voice was as high and squeaky as always, but did it crack this time? “I—should have told you this some time ago.”

“Stop.” His fingers curled, chest expanded. “You can’t. You can’t.”

Another crease crunched her muzzle. She retreated to her corner of the basket like a shattered child. “I know I’m not supposed to take a lover from this world, but Luke—the way I feel about you. Don’t you feel it too?”

“No. Oh, this can’t be happening.” Luke squeezed his eyes shut, though now they wouldn’t stay shut, as if he hoped he could open them to find his bedroom around him.

“Luke, oh, Luke.” She moved slowly to embrace him, setting one leg on each of his shoulders. “Don’t you want this to happen? I can hear you looking at me every sunset. Haven’t you thought about this too?”

He shook her embrace away. He was ready to shake because he knew it was his fault. Those touches, those nuzzles, and all the broken cookies—how stupid had he been to think they wouldn’t add up to anything? To be so distracted and happy that he didn’t see these bestial feelings blossom in his chest? Tom was right. He really was clueless. How could he be so moronic? To think that lust wouldn’t follow wherever he went in life?

“We can’t do this,” he gasped.

“I know,” she squeaked, trying to come close again. “I know you wouldn’t let me do anything I’ll regret. All I want is for you to say yes. Tell me you feel the way I do.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he growled under his breath.

She gave a tiny high-pitched crack.

“It doesn’t matter because I can’t either!” He looked up, desperate. “Oh, God, what have I done? I feel sick. This is wrong.”

Was it? It had been so long he couldn’t tell good feelings from the bad anymore.

She backpedaled now, still watching him. Her mouth hung open, but she said no more.

Luke writhed. There was nowhere to go, but he twisted his body to look over the edge of the basket. “Put me down.”

“Luke, you don’t have to go.”

“Put down.”

“Please, just a few more stars—”

“Put me down!” The basket shuddered. “I need out!”

He was stiff now, desperately holding back from a shout at the top of his lungs. Without looking up, Chlkthata dimmed the burner. Not a word as she dipped the balloon into the strip of meadow between forest and university, or as Luke fled without picking up his books.

He didn’t stop running once he was beyond her sight. He sprinted all the way to the Newman Center. There was a tabernacle room there—which was a small, quiet sort of room with green carpets and plaster statuettes. A small row of benches allowed the faithful to come and pray in veneration of the gilded box sitting on an altar, but the place was usually empty.

Luke ground his knees against the varnished pew, and his thumb-bones against prayer beads. Even here he didn’t speak—no gasping words into the votive candles. His lips moved, as if her were mumbling, but even if Tom were standing over his shoulder he wouldn’t heard what was being said.

Three months later, Tom flopped against a brick wall and rolled his eyes. He was still waiting for Luke to come out of the tabernacle room.

Luke hadn’t been in there for three months straight, of course. But sometimes it felt like it. It had been three months since Luke’s mystery night trips ceased, and Tom was still waiting for Luke to tell him about it. Not for lack of asking. He would have interrogated Luke’s friends just as he’d interrogated Luke, if he’d thought it would help. But Luke was the kind of person who didn’t talk to anyone about important things.

Tom wasn’t about to let that stop him. Luke was one of his closest friends, and one way or another, he was going to find out what was up in his life. If that meant hiding behind a brick wall with a trench coat and sunglasses, so be it.

The trench coat was to make his form blend into the shadows. The sunglasses made it harder to see, but they made Tom feel more like a spy.

He ducked behind bricks as a glass door swung open on the other side of the road. The target was in sight. Luke emerged from the Newman Center right on schedule. The Newman Center was a gathering place for Luke’s brand of faithful here at the university, and he led some kind of activity group there on Sundays. Tom always pictured a bunch of kids in ‘I <3 Jesus’ T-shirts gathering around with anchovy pizza to pretend to study the Bible.

Luke also walked down Lane Avenue, just as expected. Nothing unusual there. If Tom didn’t know better, it would have appeared that Luke was simply walking home. But he could see how bleary-eyed Luke came into classes on Monday morning. He didn’t go to sleep until late on Sunday nights, and this happened every week.

But just once a week. On a schedule, too, like clockwork, not spontaneously every night the way it had been when there was a light in Luke’s eyes. When Tom had been overjoyed, and expected any day to be introduced to Luke’s new fillyfriend, or even to get a white invitation with cursive writing. No, it wasn’t like that at all.

But this was the last remnant of the recklessness the girl had inspired in Luke. If there were any answers to be found, Tom figured he would find them tonight.

His suspicions were confirmed when Luke made a wrong turn at the corner. He wasn’t going home. Tom darted from behind car to car, tiptoeing over the crosswalk just fast enough to keep his target in sight. The tiptoeing didn’t do much good—Tom wasn’t particularly stealthy. But it was dark, and Luke could be pretty oblivious, so Tom wasn’t worried about getting caught.

Minutes ago, the gardens on Neil avenue had been cozy. Now every road was made up of the same grey bars of shadow. Tom followed Luke through the deep maze of off-campus housing, and city traffic faded away until there was little sound remaining but Luke, whistling some hymn or other.

For a little while Tom had entertained the vain hope that Luke was merely taking a roundabout path to the river. But this route wasn’t going near the glade or the stone tower where his bat-pony lived. Tom wasn’t surprised. But he still grumbled a bit, hidden behind the tire of a Ford Fusion. “You had a chance, Luke,” he grumbled. “What did you do?”

He really should have been asking what he was doing. Tom was out in the middle of nowhere at night in a trench coat. Everyone but his clueless target was staring at him. It was cold, the sidewalk was preposterously uncomfortable to crouch on, and he could have been at home right now.

Did he honestly know what was in Luke’s heart? Maybe he couldn’t imagine. Both times Tom had lost a high school sweetheart, he’d spent three weeks feeling certain that he wanted to die. But Luke never had such complaints—you would have thought the idea of love never crossed his mind. Tom couldn’t recall ever having a single normal conversation with Luke about a girl. It would have been too awkward to start talking about his dates—and Luke certainly wasn’t going to bring it up.

Did Luke just not care? Or if he did, was he just that much stronger than Tom? Luke wouldn’t have said anything either way. Love was something far too important for him to talk to anyone about.

But Tom thought he could remember slip-ups. Little, innocuous words. Words dropped around the Warhammer table, said unthinkingly and meant to be forgotten. Excuses for not having gone to each high school dance. Given this, Tom should have jumped for joy when Luke met this Vespertila girl he liked so much. Everything should have been happily-ever-after. But Tom knew Luke much better than he wanted to, and the prospects, rather than exciting him, had terrified him.

Luke hadn’t asked for help. He definitely would have said no if Tom had offered. Even still...maybe Tom should just leave Luke to his own love life. After all, he was a nice guy in his own right. In time, surely, things would work themselves out. There were ponies now.

Jeremy had once been a failed attempt at setting up dates too. But then, without any help from Tom, Jeremy had met a mare. Now they played Warhammer every night. And there had been Cara, whom he once tried to set up with Jeremy—she was too much a fighter to act cute. But there was a griffon who’d started to flirt with her over the Equestrian Postal service. Tom hadn’t checked up on that in a while. Well, Cara knew she was loveable, she was probably set.

Please let Luke be going to a hotel, Tom thought in one desperate, last-ditch attempt to imagine that there was a bat-pony at the end of all this. But who did he think he was joking? And for that matter—who did he think he was asking for help, anyway?

God? he thought. Yoo-hoo? Are you there? Oh, what am I even doing? Of course you don’t exist. But just in case I’m not talking to myself, I’m begging you. Let Luke and Chlkthata be fornicating an hour from now.

Do hear me, you fuck? You owe him. He’s done more for you than you ever did for him.

Luke turned off the road and through a hedgerow. Tom got down on his belly like a commando to follow.

There was a park on the other side, nothing large—the kind of place for parents who were still in school to take their kids and play on a chipped-yellow swingset. Luke climbed a knoll towards a lonely elm tree, and Tom was about to crawl closer when a shape unfolded from a branch. Tom fell back, paralyzed, on his stomach, for it was the largest bat he’d ever seen in his life. It landed with a deafening hiss right next to Luke.

Once Tom got over the initial wave of awe, he managed to get close enough to listen. So this was Luke’s paramour. She was a nightmare! Still, she was here. The part of Tom’s heart that hadn’t gotten arrhythmia was singing for joy.

They both sat now, leaning up against the elm about a foot away from each other. Both were staring outwards, barely looking at each other, more towards the sky, which had a few clouds today but was clear enough to make out a couple stars.

They exchanged a few words that Tom couldn’t make out from this distance. Probably just catching up. As Tom was shimmying closer so that he might eavesdrop, Luke produced a white paper bag and set it between them. Tom tried and see what the bat-pony was plucking from it. Looked like—cookies.

Of course, by the time he was close enough to hear, they didn’t seem to feel like saying any more. They just lay back, just staring at the sky.

After a few minutes the bat-pony let out a little high-pitched Equus. “Mm. Look at that one, Luke. It looks like a train.”

Tom and Luke tilted their heads to follow where she was pointing. It was either a cloud or a washed-out patch of stars.

“So it is,” said Luke. “Check out that one over there. I think it looks like a pizza pie.”

“Or a cookie!”

Tom pushed down his glass of hard cider with a satisfying thump.

“I don’t think they’ve ever kissed,” he growled, half to Twilight and Lyra and half to the whole assembly of The Little Pony. “But every Sunday they meet on the same hill in the park. They sit under a tree, and they look at the clouds.”

“I thought this was Lyra’s story,” said Fluttershy bemusedly.

But Lyra squished her cheeks. “How romantic!”

“Romantic?” Tom turned on her. “It’s a fucking waste! A shame. That’s what it is. Stupid Luke. Stupid, stupid, stupid. They could have had a great relationship, a whole life together!”

Lyra retreated as Tom, sighing, leaned forward towards the center of the table. “Knowing Luke, they’ll probably meet once a week for the rest of their lives. It’s a waste. I—”

He was interrupted by something yellow poking him in the side. It wasn’t Porter’s pencil, which was tapping in a lost way against the reporter’s notepad. It was a bit of fluff attached to a hoof. Fluttershy, with a diminutive brown drink perched between her hooves, was trying to get his attention.

“I’m…I’m not no sure,” she murmured. Her face turned red with the effort of that sentence, and she shut down as soon as anyone turned to look at her.

Tom turned away so that his frown wouldn’t singe her. He shook his head and banged his drink again. “A waste.”

At Midnight

This was the point at which I pushed my seat from the table and made an excuse to rise.

“I need a little air,” I believe I said, most likely with the addition of a stammer. “Too, uh—too much to drink?”

Lyra inspected my retreat. I’m convinced she was looking out for me, because after a thorough look at my topped-off cup, she moved quickly to clear her throat. “That’s a good idea,” she declared. “You look a little pale yourself, Tom. Tom?”

Tom sat back in his chair with a crusty exhale. On multiple surreptitious nods from me, Lyra bit down on his hand to lead him from the table. Tom let her walk him outside. A break genuinely would be good for everyone, now that I thought about it. When Tom got a couple drinks into his system he had a tendency to become morose, and sometimes there was no telling what he would say.

The last I saw before walking outside, Dave was staying to keep company with Fluttershy. After downing most of the remaining pretzels, he kicked his feet up and attempted to engage her in a lively debate about which planet had the best pop music. I don’t think it worked, but I appreciated his sentiment in trying.

Obviously, I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol. I’d become quite skilled at that over the years. The trick was to say yes when someone offered me a glass, and just hold onto it for the rest of the evening.

But I still stumbled a little as I crossed the curb, and shook a bit while straddling the divider of the silent road. The only lights were from the brights of cars in the Little Pony’s parking lot.

What I needed more than anything was time to think. A part of me, I suppose, would always be that bookish unicorn who needed to run away from every life experience in order to analyze it. And there was a lot to think about these days, when I was getting to know this world and its muted colors.

What I hadn’t expected, for instance, was that it would teach me so much about my own friends. I thought I’d known everything there was to know about Fluttershy. By the sun, I thought I’d known Lyra. I could have merrily proceeded with my whole life without any idea of how happy this world would make her.

I was receiving letters, these days, from fillies, old friends from school I hadn’t heard of in ages. They wanted me to take them here. And while there weren’t nearly enough positions in the foreign service to accommodate everypony, I had to admit there were few better places for a young mare to run off to. Earth was dangerous, romantic, and filled with seeds of the future. Who wouldn’t want to be in the thick of the action? We had discovered an alternate dimension populated with advanced beings. Friendly ones, too, despite their occasional selfishness. Everything was getting ready to change.

So much change couldn’t help but force a pony to reflect on the progress of her own life. Tonight had been particularly provoking. Before coming to Ponyville, I’d have to say I was far too shy to do anything but imagine meeting a colt. And after…after. I guess I just never got around to it. Love had been around, but it was like one of those research projects that I never quite allocated the time for.

That’s not to say I never noticed stallions. A certain well-worn magazine—which was probably still lying under my old bed in Canterlot, come to think of it—could attest to that. But life was full of surprises, and when you lived in Ponyville, too many of them were monsters threatening to destroy life as you knew it. Dating just…didn’t seem important.

But when would it come? I wandered parked cars and billboards, pacing without straying too far. What would it be like? What would he be like? Or even she? And would the importance I placed on my friends get in the way?

It sounded like the kind of question that would make a good letter to Celestia. But I must admit I made a face even thinking about asking her about such a subject. It was revolting to think about Celestia anywhere near talk about stallions. To imagine her having the daydreams I sometimes had—I could have vomited.

Maybe—no, in all probability—it was because I still thought of Celestia as my mother. Heh. How about that? I never would have admitted that to myself as a foal. I must have been growing up.

But now I couldn’t help but wonder. Over thousands of years, had Celestia ever had a special somepony? I was rather confident that there hadn’t. Not that I had any rational backing for such an intuition. If there’d been anyone during my lifetime, I surely would have known about it. But when dealing with her whole span of millennia, I was forced to conclude that the statistics were strongly against me.

On second thought, there was one thing. Celestia didn’t have any family. If she’d ever borne a child, it was inconceivable that she would abandon them. There would be a whole Celestial lineage. The absence of any such evidence left me certain she had never—er—played around with stallions. Unless alicorns didn’t bear children like normal ponies. There was a scary thought.

How was it for Celestia high on her throne, or in the ecstatic reaches of her incarnate star? Was it lonely, to look down from such a lofty height by herself? Was it cold for her in the sun?

That couldn’t be right. I was as close to Celestia as anypony, and never once had she even smelled lonely. Just the opposite. But did that mean she had someone?

Lyra summoned me back to reality, and I cantered out of the street. She wanted me help shambling down the front porch steps with Tom. They were leaning against each other, but doing it carefully enough. They were probably fine, but to be safe rather than sorry, I accompanied them to the parking lot.

Lyra lit her horn and nudged Tom to his lime-green car—I still don’t know models, so I couldn’t have said what kind it was. But there was enough space in the trunk for her to sit him on the fender and lean him up against the back seat.

“There we go…nice and easy.” After popping the trunk, she levitated Tom’s upper torso, settling him against a folded lawn chair and a pile of Aldi bags. She reared back and hopped in to join him.

I felt fine standing, so I didn’t try to squeeze in with them. It was just as well. After kicking a few bag aside for a place to nestle, Lyra picked up Tom’s hand and began to lick it over, lapping up all the salt left behind by sweat and pretzels.

So I rather quickly made the decision to join Tom in looking up at the sky. There weren’t any stars to see, not through the rainclouds. Even if it had been a clear night the sky would have been blank this close to the city. But it was the thought that counted.

I’m happy to say Lyra wasn’t afraid to give him a talking-to. “You behaved rather shamefully in there,” she said in between licks. “As if Luke’s life was incomplete without a rutting, honestly. What with what you’re always saying about keeping a good image, I expected better from you.”

Tom folded one arm grumpily, though I noted he didn’t tear the other one out of her mouth. “S’not it,” he protested blurrily. “Not what I meant. You know that. They’re not together.”

“Mm-hmm.” Lyra sounded quite unconvinced. “Yes, that’s clearly it. You were just worried about their relationship—which seems fine, thank you very much. Not about a little tail for your friend.”

“Pah!” Barking suddenly, Tom extricated both his forelimbs. “You think that’s what men are all about. Popular misconception!”

“Oh?” Lyra had been nestling into his ribcage. But now she performed a maneuver that made me wince just watching, rolling onto her back and sitting human-style. To complete the picture, she even crossed her forelegs. “I can’t wait to hear this. Share the big secret, then. What do men really want?”

Tom languished for a moment, peering through the hood of his trunk as if trying to see stars through the light pollution. I was looking around for a good excuse to step away this whole time, but I judged I couldn’t leave innocuously for another minute or two, and besides, I wasn’t quite certain I was supposed to leave them alone together.

“What a man wants is a girl to need him.”

“Fantastic. Thank you so much.”

“No, really. What else is a man good for? Raping? Looting? Killing people? You know, if you didn’t have men around, you’d have almost none of that.”

“We’d be out a few other things too—”

“Tom!” I stomped, flush with indignance. “Now, you stop right there! Just because your society may have a few issues with how it raises its boys does not mean that men are inherently bad.”

I could tell, to my relief, that Lyra was also at least a little uncomfortable to hear him talking down the rougher sex. “She’s right, you know.”

Tom thumped the fender, causing her to skitter back. “Well, you asked me what men wanted, not what theoretical men wanted. And I know it sounds bad. But that’s how it is. It’s not about getting tail. It’s about knowing there’s someone who actually needs them around.”

He tried to sit up a bit, unconsciously curling his arm around Lyra’s head and pulling her close. “So no matter how disillusioned he becomes with his pretense of a career…no matter how far he falls…he’s still someone’s hero. What he wants is to know this world needs him for something, even if it’s just making one person a little happier.”

I put a hoof on his leg, looking at him tenderly. But Lyra, utterly unflustered, merely extricated herself from his grip. “You’re drunk, human. Go home.”

He flopped back in a cloud of lint and shopping bags. “Yeah. Could be. S’probably just sex.”

I suddenly remembered aloud that Fluttershy had wanted to ask me something, since I considered it an acceptable time to beat a retreat. I dove back into the bar. Maybe I needed to have a drink after all. Maybe I needed to make up a story, and tell it, and become drunk on that.

The Brony and the Mule (part 2)

Dave stumbled into his room feeling as though he was creaking more loudly than the front door. His bookbag dripped a steady trail of old term papers. He sloshed across the carpet, nimbly dodging pizza stains and bending his toes against books lying unlit on the floor. And like Jack Sparrow’s ship coming into port, he collapsed with an airy groan just as he reached a black plastic desk chair.

The room was unlit except a little light leaking in from the hall. But then, there wasn’t much to see. Only Spartan university furnishings and one added couch, lined in a comfy sheath of jackets and hoodies randomly strewn about. Without light for the Star Wars posters, it looked like a surprisingly empty cube.

Dave lolled his head back and took a moment to breathe now that he was home. He rubbed his eyes; he kicked up his feet. What a day. That had come out of left field. There was no predicting the stuff that happened in this world nowadays.

In fact, he was so wiped that it was tempting to just fall asleep right there. But it was only eleven o’clock. Dave was still an undergraduate, so he had multiple assignments guiltily lurking under the surface of his life. He’d need to get a little work done before calling it a day. But he didn’t feel up to digging open the books yet. Instead he fired up the computer for a little relaxation.

Within a couple clicks of browsing, he could feel the stress just peeling off. The human model of reality might be upturned, and Equestria Daily might have turned into the biggest news site on the web. But in some ways, bronydom never died. He could still count on his favorite clop artists to keep turning out their product as if Lyra’s little ‘photoshoot’ escapade had never been leaked onto the net. Tonight, he felt like a little…Applejack? Yes, Applejack. That would hit the spot.

A few minutes into this, he heard someone stomping around outside. That would be Tom. No surprise there. It always took Tom a little longer to reach the room when he insisted on running up all nineteen flights of stairs. Generally this meant he headed straight for the showers with a towel sitting in his duffel bag.
But tonight, without any warning, the pattern broke. The bedroom door exploded open.

“Dave!” Tom shouted far too loudly for the given time of night.

Dave fell backwards in his flimsy chair, hurrying to pull up his gym shorts. The plastic pressed his neck forward against the carpet and forced him to flop like a fish in order to manipulate his limbs. “Dude!” he shrieked. “Knock, like, knock, dude, we’ve been over this!”

Tom strode forward, hurling his unopened duffel onto a couch. As a triangle of light was now pouring in from the hall, he seized Dave’s Rainbow Dash body pillow from the couch and waved it in his face. “What the hell was that?”

“Hey, what I do in here is my—”

“I meant at the gym!” Tom thundered.

Dave finally worked himself into a sitting position. One hand massaging the crick in his neck, and the other was trying to untangle the cords of his ski cap, which had found a way to get tangled in his hair. His eyebrows and his whole face squinted. “Whuh?”

Tom lay about with the body pillow like a morning star, knocking over lamps and piles of books. The room seemed barely big enough to contain, let alone house, the both of them. Yet cramped as it was, it still managed, like all college dorms, to echo like a cave.

Tom flipped on a single light. “Did you even listen to Greta, or did you decide to pull your little fainting stunt right off the bat?”

Dave looked up indignantly from his neck problems. “Hey, that isn't funny, and furthermore…”

“You wrote!” Tom reached for the doorknob once again. “You said—or rather wrote, and I quote—” Pulling the outer door wide, he yanked a dry erase board from the hook on the other side. Tom read off of it. “The first pony who asks me out, I’m gonna’…smoke weed erry day? What’s this? Dave, you didn’t write this part.”

“Oh, yeah.” Still stretching out kinks, Dave got to his feet. “I think Skip came along and scribbled on that. Sorry, dude. Not admissible in court anymore.”

Tom tossed it the way of the duffel bag. “So what more do you want?”

Dave was reaching for his textbooks, and, as an afterthought, shutting down his computer. “She’s a not a pony, man! She’s a—what was it? A mule?”

Tom’s long white fingers clamped his bicep. “That mule has been pining after you for weeks! Hell, she even tried to use me to get to you! I knew about this a long time ago! After the game she used to do nothing but ask me questions about you. She even put together a bouquet tonight, but she threw it out when I told her human guys don’t like flowers.”

Dave frowned. “Well, no one told me—”

“And you know where she is now? Crying her heart out. Lyra doesn’t know shit what to do. They can’t even get her out of the gym. Because she finally worked up the guts to ask you and you didn’t even motherfucking look at her.”

Dave’s breath was shallow. He could feel the oppressive weight of the silence Tom gathered about himself like a majestic cloak. His roommate was drilling into him, breaking him into chunks, but didn’t seem to garner much satisfaction from successfully striking Dave dumbstruck.

At length Dave managed to stir. Quietly this time. By lifting his hands and dropping them into his lap. “If I don’t like her, I don’t like her. What do you want?”

Tom rolled his eyes, his head, his whole body back. “What do I want? Fuck that, Dave, let’s talk about you. Since that’s what it’s all about. Would you like to know what you just passed up? Her name’s Greta, in case you forgot. Do you happen to know what she does in Equestria? She works at the Royal Court of the Night Sky. That’s Princess Luna’s highest tower. The one with the astrolabes and the orrerries. The one in charge of star-mapping that was established after the Nightmare Moon Cataclysm. She’s an astrophysicist. She charts the courses of planets, and she does it with an abacus. But oh, no, she’s not good enough for you, because her ears are too long, pooh-pooh. I would be lucky if I could catch an eye like hers. But you can just consider that advice.”

Dave moaned in a quiet form of agony. His toothbrush was sitting forgotten on the desk. He was thinking about the flap of pale flesh over Greta’s mouth, and the way it moved when she smiled at him. He tried over and over. Every time he brought the image into his mind’s eye it made his skin crawl, and he already felt like a lizard right now. “Look …it’s none of your business, Tom. Just let me go to bed.”

“Dave. Give her a chance.” Tom crouched halfway to his knees, spreading out his arms to grip the desk prevent his friend’s escape.

“No, man, I just want to forget about it.”

“It won’t be hard to do, I promise! One date.” Tom held one finger nearly up Dave’s nose. “One. After that, whatever. You gave her a fair shot.”

“Dude!” Dave slapped the finger away. “You can’t make me.”

“You owe me, Dave. I don’t ask for much. But you gotta’ do this for me.”

“No I don’t.”

Tom crossed his arms. “You want it that way, I can call your mom and tell her what you do up here.”

“You think she gives a f—”

“I’ll put it on Faceboook!.”

“What are you, five?” Dave groaned.

“You’re going to thank me for this.”

“Like hell I am.”

“And so…uh…thanks to Tom, I have a chance to say that I’m really sorry about how I acted last week.”

Dave rocked back and forth on his feet. He squinted under the floodlights, trying to check out the corners of his vision. He hoped nopony was watching this. Celestia only knew why Greta had come to the game at all this week. That had Tom’s handiwork all over it.

Tom had quit looming next to him, but Dave was pretty sure he wasn’t off the hook yet. It sucked. Of all the times to finally get back to Equestria, it had to be scheduled the same week as the sacred football game! Oh, well. If he was going to do this, he might as well do it without trailing off every five seconds. So he straightened and traced a smile in the air. “See, I kind of have a little fainting thing, and you caught me by surprise. But what I wanted to say, if you’ll still have me, is sure. It’d be totally cool to go out this weekend. We could even spend a day in Ponyville if you want. I haven’t been there in forever.”

Greta’s mouth fell open. She dipped her neck ever so slightly, and answered in a velvety tone. “Yes. I mean, if you—I mean, I’d like that.”

“Fantastic!” Tom slapped his roommate’s shoulder. “See, Greta? What did I tell you? Just a misunderstanding. Bet you’ll have a great time.”

He was turning to go, when—

“Hey, Tom?”

Tom spun back, hazel eyes still sparkling.

Greta crossed her forelegs. “There’s someone I wanted to introduce you to.”

“I love meeting new ponies! Introduce away.”

“Okay…now don’t laugh. It’s kind of silly. See, I have a friend who asked me if Dave had a friend, and I asked Dave if he had a friend…she said she vanted to meet you.”

The gym door was thrown slammed back on his hinges.

An off-beat clip-clop followed. There was a booming shadow there, dun white, and looking a touch outrageous, or so Dave thought, in gold earrings and sparsely applied eyeshadow.

“Hey there!” The cow skipped forward. She laid an introductory and only slightly forward nuzzle on Tom’s arm. “I’m Hilda! Greta here says you…like cows?”
She turned her head to one side, pouting her lips.

“Aww yeah he does!” Suddenly Dave was fiercely energetic. He applied a savage nudge to Tom’s ribs and answered for him while his taller roommate gasped. “He would love to join you Friday, darlin'. We’ll make it a double-date.”

Coloring, Hilda exchanged a quick glance with her friend. “Oh. Greta didn’t tell me you two were…”

“We aren’t.” Tom wheezed and held his ribs. But he was smiling again. “Different connotation of double-date. Separate dates. But together. We’ll split the Gate tickets.”

The Poet and the Changeling (part 1)

One day a sycamore tree appeared in a poet’s front yard.

This struck him as a precipitous event, mainly because it was a fine plant. Though young, it seemed to be growing into the beauty of its race quite well; its bark had just the right peel to it. A mottled pattern diamonds fell away slowly up the trunk, revealing the limbs as a symphony clad in pure and naked white.

He was also duly impressed with its apparent disregard for the laws of physics and continuity. The poet, whose name was Ars, had knocked himself half-unconscious walking out his front door in the morning because there was suddenly a branch present which hadn’t been there before. The tree had clearly performed its translocation with the most delicate expertise; it appeared to the casual observer as though it must always have been standing there.

Ars circled the tree three times, partly to see if he could find an explanation and partly to admire it. Then he made the circuit it one more time, since circling a sycamore exactly three times sounded like something that would be a step in an ancient spell druidic, and Ars didn’t want to accidentally trifle with magic at least until after lunch.

That done, he decided it must be thirsty, and offered to buy it a drink. The sycamore didn’t refuse. The garden supply shop was within walking distance, so Ars easily obtained a green plastic watering can.

Actually watering the tree proved to be the difficult part. As Ars was returning home, he discovered that his new sycamore friend was more popular than expected.

There was a man standing on his lawn, under the tree.

He looked to be about twenty, although the trim brown suitcoat he wore was far too dapper for anyone of that age. His hair was dark and gleamed like a beetle shell. It was astounding that a passerby was taking such appropriate notice of the brand-new beauty, and normally Ars would have been very much encouraged—most citizens couldn’t even name the plants they shared every day of their lives with, let alone appreciate them. But it was, perhaps, a matter of concern that the young man had chosen to park himself on Ars’ lawn. He was watching the poet with eyes as green as envy. And for a moment, as Ars reached for his pocketknife, he seemed to disappear—the branches flashed in the wind, the young man was bathed in mottled diamonds, and then there were only emerald shadows.

Ars hesitated then, on the rim of his driveway. He hadn’t seen anyone leave the property. There might be no telling what was there. And the pocketknife had never really been sharpened, being mostly used for spreading peanut butter.

But after a moment of thought, he decided that anyone who admired a good deciduous tree couldn’t be all that bad. He filled up the watering can at his hose. Then he approached the trunk with a swing in his arm and a whistle on his lips. He was just about to begin sprinkling when his arm was seized in an impossibly strong vice grip.

Ars froze. The young man was with him, one foot on the roots where he’d jumped forward to seize his target. His whole body was tense. The watering can flew out of Ars’ grip, and the young man’s grip became even tighter as he watched it tumble, wobble, and fall over.

Water sloshed out. The young man’s grip loosened somewhat, which was a great relief to Ars, who was bent over in a rictus of pain. After staring at the poet, he released his wrist suddenly and dropped to all fours. First he sniffed at the liquid in the can, and then used his finger to taste what was already seeping into the ground.

Once he had gotten up, the young man danced around Ars like a boxer, watching him with menace, and now just the least trace of wariness. Ars happily picked up his watering can and picked up where he had left off. Swinging it back and forth, he watered both the sycamore and the young man’s loafers.

Once every drop was gone, Ars faced his new acquaintance and smiled. He wondered what would happen next.

“You are watering this tree?” said the young man.

Ars straightened his back. This was the first time he had heard this young man speak. And what a sentence! You are watering this tree. Strong and clear like an unbroken sapling. Could have stood to shave off a pronoun, but then, nobody was perfect. This confirmed what Ars already knew—he was dealing with no everyday person.

“It seemed like the right thing to do,” he replied. “It only appeared today, you understand. If it stays I might have to tear up the house. Those roots are dangerously close to the front door.”

The young man dropped into a combat crouch. “What are you playing at?” he shouted.

“Life,” answered Ars without missing a beat. “I haven’t quite decided how I feel about this whole theory of ‘reality’ yet. I think it’s a clever idea, and might be put to good use, but for now I’m just having fun with it.”

The young man didn’t seem to know what to make of that. After relaxing his posture an inch he retreated even further away, as if treating an unmeasured threat with extra caution. “Why did you water her?”

Ars gave ‘her’ another look. There was a fine fork near the first knot in her wood, and a black squirrel was already racing towards it with a buckeye nut.

“I already told you what I know,” he replied. “I can’t tell you why I felt this way, but I thought that maybe she showed up at my doorstep because she was lonely. So I wanted to do something nice for her. That’s all.”

“Don’t lie to me,” the young man hissed.

“No problem!” Ars said cheerily. “Ought to be the least I can do.”

“There are no human beings like you.”

“Aw, shucks. You’re just saying that!”

He bent to his hose to refill the watering can, and then made a shrug towards his lawn-mate, dripping springtime rain over his shoulder. “Here, now, you’ve already threatened my life once today. Don’t you think that’s enough? The least I can do is invite you to tea.”

“Ah…what?”

“Exactly!”

Ars moved swiftly. Minutes later, the tree’s shade had been further adorned with a picnic table, Pillsbury scones, and a tall pitcher of pink lemonade mixed from powder. The young man was unbalanced enough to go along with being seated, but he seemed agitated the entire time. Ars poured him a glass. “Let’s have your name, then.”

The young man downed his lemonade in one disinterested swig, not making a face in the least as he guzzled the entire sour drink. “I don’t have a name. And before you ask, neither does my…sister.”

He’d been staring at curls of sycamore bark. Ars twisted in his chair to follow the young man’s gaze. “Why, how lovely! You have a sister. You two must get along famously.”

The young man chuckled, but it was like air hissing from a tire. He doubled over. Ars caught the first hint of a smile on his face, but it was an angry smile, full of cracks, as if he might burst open any moment.

“I wish. If she keeps wandering off, neither of us are going to survive. This world is altogether too large.”

“Couldn’t agree more.” Ars threw his legs up on the table. The young man merely glared at him.

So he passed the boy a scone. “You shouldn’t be so hard on her,” he went on. “I think all trees should get out and explore the world a little more. You have to do it while you’re young. After all, how can you travel once you get to my age and put down roots?”

The young man did not touch his scone. He didn’t seem to notice it. Instead, he chose to look at Ars, staring intently and for a long time at a point just above his left shoulder. Unless his feet tapped under the table he was perfectly motionless.

Eventually he spoke again. “My sister has a genetic disorder, sir.”

Ars set down the glass he had been sipping. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. Hemophilia? Curiosity?”

The young man shook his head. “There’s no name for it in this language. But I suppose ‘involuntary telomere tremors’ might be the closest translation. That’s why I have to watch her constantly, you see. There’s no telling when her next tremor will be. It could arrive in an hour, or it could be a week.”

“What happens then?”

The young man tapped his empty glass twice, took a deep breath, and pushed himself up. “In order to explain that, sir, I have to tell you something. It will be impossible to believe, so you must promise to hear me through. In addition, I must insist that you keep absolute secrecy about what I am about to share, whether you believe me or no. My people guard every secret we possess with the utmost jealousy. And as for my people, sir—we are not human.”

Ars leaned back in his garden chair. He was just then opening his mouth, but the young man flung a hand up to forestall him. “I can prove it! You must believe. My sister is a tree because my race has the power to transform into any living being. Respecting our biomass limits, of course, though even there we have our trick to stretch it. Here—” He started to push his seat back. “I will show you. I have already assimilated the epigenetic code of several species from this world.”

Ars gently pushed the young hand aside. “Don’t trouble yourself. I believe you.”

The young man frowned blankly.

“No you don’t,” he said. “None of your species—”

“Good lord, man, you ignored a scone. Whatever you are, you don’t carry on with the same subsistence as my species, do you?”

The young man stood back with an open mouth. Then, knocking the chair over, he stood. “I will you show you, sir. You must believe.”

Ars shrugged and leaned back once more. “When even my belief is disbelieved, what can I say? Whatever miracle you please, my good man.”

The young man set up his demonstration by walking down the sidewalk perpendicular to Ars’ line of view. “Let me change behind a tree,” he said. “Most people are—unsettled—by our true forms.’

“Good, good.” Ars made himself snug. He should be pleased, he thought, if her true form was something hideous to the human eye, something so grotesque that he would fall straight dead from fright was he ever lucky enough to behold it.

When the young man passed behind a spindly oak there was a flash of magnesium-colored light. Out the other side walked a man even younger than the first, this one wearing smooth black skin and a white suit. He was just as dapper as before. But he was just as agitated in manner, and he kept the same voice, probably because he thought it would avoid disorienting Ars.

He made it clear that he meant to install himself on the front lawn, so Ars decided that he might as well be hospitable. He brought out some wicker chairs which were more comfortable for sitting in, and later on, when it got towards dinnertime, he moved that outside as well. Ars hadn’t forgotten that the young man wasn’t helped by human food, but his guest seemed to appreciate the principle of the thing anyway. So there was a blue tablecloth and six inches of pasta all the same. Ars even set out his bowl of plastic pears. And, strangely enough, it seemed to work. The young man didn’t touch anything, but he seemed nourished somehow, and Ars caught his flinty expression softening as he watched the poet eat.

The sun took a dive then. Light was slaloming over the rooftops, and the sycamore’s leaves turned all to gold. Ordinary cars and pedestrians passed by, occasionally noticing the pair dining on the front lawn but never sparing a glance for the glowing tree. Ars could see that the young man noticed it. He seemed impressed with his sister. Ars wondered if he was proud.

Neither showed any sign of leaving, so Ars had one more thought and fetched a warm blanket. The young man seemed tired, by that point—haggard. But it may have been the light.

“If you don’t find my curiosity too morbid,” he said while draping it over the non-responsive young man, “Just how serious is your sister’s malady? It won’t—kill her, will it?”

The young man shrugged. “I’m not sure. Transforming unpredictably usually leads to an accident, and the disease is very rare. I don’t think there’s ever been a case who lived out their natural lifespan. But all the same, sir, you shouldn’t feel so bad. Drones only live for about six months anyway. Unless we hibernate.”

Ars crossed his arms. “Who said I feel bad?”

“I know how you feel, sir.”

“Sympathy is fine, but don’t pretend you know me so well!”

The young man gave another ghostly smile. “We—the Changelings—feed on emotion, sir. To grow strong, we must consume love. I can taste your feelings. Right now, for instance, you’re curious about my sister, worried about me, comfortable because you just ate and just a bit unsettled—which is growing now…”

Ars twiddled his thumbs.

At length, he coughed. “Let’s not be morbid. After all, you don’t look a day over three months.”

“I’m four.”

“But still, very well bred.”

“Thank you sir.”

Fidgeting under the covers, the young man sighed and looked at the tree. He seemed to find some comfort in her gently swaying branches. “I’d hoped she’d have changed by now,” he muttered.

Ars shrugged. Since it hadn’t rained that day he turned on the hose and gave her one more swig of water. “Feel free to spirit her off in the night if she does. If you’re still here tomorrow, I’m making waffles for breakfast.”

“Don’t trouble yourself, sir,” said the young man. “I very much doubt I’ll survive that long.”

Ars caught the hose mid-twirl. He stared.

Had he simply failed to notice it before, or was it really happening before his eyes? There were holes appearing in the young man’s suit. It was now less dapper and increasingly moth-eaten. Even the skin underneath was starting to peel.

The young man went on with a long-suffering look. “I’ve spent most of my life pursuing my sister. I haven’t had time to hunt or feed. Back at home where my hive is, there was hardly any love worth speaking of. Just scorpions and cactus flowers. Here on Earth, the pickings are even worse.”

“Hey, now!” Ars snapped. “There’s no need for—see, now, maybe this is why you feel so unloved. You start with suspicion, and then you move on to criticism.”

The young man tried giving Ars a deadpan look, but it came off hollow instead. “There’s love enough, if I could take it,” he said flatly. “We aren’t permitted to take our feed by force. Not on Earth. It is the will of our Queen, and her will is our will. She views you with caution, but she doesn’t want an open conflict. So neither do I. If my hive felt differently, I would have already killed you and drained you dry. You’d be juicy enough to keep me going for a while.”

Ars leaned back. He couldn’t find much to say to that.

The young man was looking into his lap. “You should see me as a manticore,” he said quietly. “You wouldn’t pity me then. I do a splendid manticore. Never had a chance to use it.”

“Ye Cherubs, look and wonder,” said Ars. “What an irony for a creature that only wants to be loved.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” said the young man. “Normally, during peacetime, I would infiltrate a host society like Equestria by pretending to be a part of it. I could live comfortably on the love I receive that way.”

Ars, storming over, slapped the young man on the back. “Why didn’t you say so! What are you moping around here for, then? Quit whining and go take care of yourself! I’ll watch the tree.”

The young man tensed up again. “No. You’ll cut her down if I leave.”

“Good lord, man! If you know what my feelings are, you know I wouldn’t do that!”

“Humans are very good liars.”

Ars groaned to the skies in aggravation. He hung up the hose, leaned against the sycamore, and silently apologized to her.

“Look!” he cried. “Isn’t there someone who would come help you? Your fellow Changelings. You could stay here and I could bring word to them.”

The young man gave an apathetic shrug. “They wouldn’t come. I’m expendable. The hive queens birthed millions of us this past few moons, in case your kind proved determined to wage war on us. They wanted to be ready to go to war with all the hosts of Earth if they had to. The skies were red with our afterbirth. It was quite glorious, sir. But humans decided to be friendly. So our soldier training has no use. We were put to work building asphalt roads in the badlands. I could have stayed, doing that. But when my sister wandered through one of your Dimension Gates as a pony, I decided to follow her instead.”

He got up at last—creaking as he rose—and walked back to the tree. His hands ran tenderly over the trunk, jumping back as if terrified when his touch shaved off a bit of bark. “I can’t feed either of us properly,” he murmured, “let alone both of us. My sister may not make the night either. And to be honest, sir, I don’t much care to go on without her.”

It was now obvious that the holes weren’t merely growing in the young man’s suit. Several of them went as far as an inch into his flesh, and they were steady riddling him through. Ars could barely force himself to look. It must have been too painful to describe.

The road was getting darker now, and the clouds were moving on. It would be warmer and much more comfortable inside.

Maybe Ars could wrap up this farce and get to bed at a reasonable time. He grabbed the young man by the shoulders and shook. “Maybe they won’t help you,” he cried, “but I will! Go! Take care of yourself before you fall apart in my arms! I’ll take care of your sister while you’re gone.”

The young man’s voice was unchanged, sardonic, almost amused. “Will you now?”

“I’ll give her all the love she needs!”

He tried weakly to wriggle himself free. “I must insist you lie, sir.”

Ars’ face hardened. “Very well then. You'll see.” Roughly releasing the young men, he shed his jacket and spun around to face the sycamore.

“Just watch how it’s done!” he cried over his shoulder. He took a step towards her.
Now—just how did one go about this?

But he was uniquely determined to succeed. If poetry hadn’t prepared him for this, of all things, he’d be forced to conclude that his entire way of life was a waste of time. He could do this.

His first thought was to try and channel an elderly gardener. The sort of person one might find working the grounds at Buckingham Palace or at a Minnesota lake—or a Japanese man who had planted a cherry tree when each of his children were born and cared for them all through life. That sounded like love, didn’t it?

Trying to keep this ideal in mind, he watered her again—a little more conservatively this time, since he’d recently given her a sip from the hose and didn’t want to smother the roots. He worried over her a bit, wondering what else gardeners did to keep their plants healthy. And though it made the young man exceedingly nervous, he dug up a pair of pruning shears and took off a few of the sicklier branches so that, if she were to remain a tree, she would grow nice strong limbs. He even stooped a little, imitating the way a devoted gardener might dodder around their favorite plant.

While he was doing all this, he intermittently glanced over his shoulder to see how he was doing. His litmus test, which was the expression on the young man’s face, never changed. It still looked like the face of a dying man enjoying his last good joke.

So eventually he made a change of tactic. Maybe a more direct route was necessary. Maybe he should write a poem about her. Poetry was an excellent way to express love, after all. And earlier today it had occurred to Ars that ‘sycamore’ had a lovely rhyme with ‘evermore’. Surely he could do something with that.

When all is gold but listing trails of stone,

When I walk these woods in her favored melting hour,

When she deigns to grace the grass, a queen of snow,

With all the warmth of summer in her tower—

Above me now and evermore,

The Changeling Tree, the Sycamore…

Though Ars circled her a good half-dozen times, lifting his arms and reciting, it did no good. Neither she nor her brother showed any real improvement in condition. In fact, when Ars made the mistake of checking up on the young man, he found that one of the holes had eaten right through his bones and out the other side.

But it wasn’t entirely a surprise. Ars knew even more about poetry than he did about love. And these improvised lines were maybe capable of brightening a languid summer afternoon. No more than that. In his heart of hearts, he knew with absolute certainty that the words weren’t powerful enough to bring anyone back from the brink of death.

Ars was running out of ideas. He leaned against her with one hand, taking a breather. The fear of failure had made this evening quite a drain, and he was getting tired. Selfishly, his imagination was turning to his bed, and its warmth. It conjured up image after image of the blissful nap Ars would take once this mess was over.

“No!” Ars slammed his fist against the trunk, spraying his own face with bark. It was cold, but he couldn’t just give up on her. It wasn’t the right thing to do. He didn’t think he would save this tree now, but he fully intended to keep on trying until she was stone dead. He tried to resolve himself right then to spending the rest of the night here, in the company of misery and cold.

He slowly drummed his head against the wood. Eventually he thought of something stupid he could try. There was one thing he hadn’t done in a while, ever since he was a boy. It would be exhausting. But he could try and climb a tree.

It was harder work than he remembered it being when he was a seven-year old on the shore of a teardrop lake. A little tricky, too, but he remembered that sycamores had always been very climbable trees. With just a little running start he managed to get his legs wrapped around the lowest limb, and eventually swing himself into a sitting position.

From there it was easier going, made most difficult by sticky sap gluing millipedes to his fingers. The bark shed like confetti under his feet as he clambered from branch to branch. Ars was able to make to make it halfway to the highest leaves.

Wheezing, he rolled to his back on a cage of branches. He was scuffed to the nines in dirt, and surrounded on all sides by leaves—dark, quiet, and alone up here. Beyond the leaves was only sky. Ars had never realized how lonely it could be without the ground.

Right here, then, he thought. He would stay here with her until the end.

Then something happened. It occurred as he was dozing off, daydreaming about similar trees he had climbed as a boy. Something seemed to meld the daydream into his waking. When he opened his eyes again, it might have been his head playing tricks on him, or it might have been a little brighter. A house sparrow took off from a clump of twigs, leaving behind twittering sounds and a few threads of yarn. Ars combed bark out his hair with his fingers, but then thought better of it and arranged them in his bangs.

From here, he had a seat from which he could look down on nearly the entire world. And it didn’t seem so large. The moonlight sieved through the ever-shifting green over him, shining on a game board of grass and concrete down below. The sycamore’s clothing made the whole world demure, covering it in green until its sense of mystery was restored.

A wind came through, and her leaves, her ocean of clapping hands, sounded like a private rain. A concert put on just for him. Ars took a moment to realize he was laughing.

Throwing his legs out, he jumped down from the tree in three strong bounds, enjoying the weightless feel of falling. He rolled on the ground and sprang up, looking about. “Hey!” he shouted like a boy.

But there was no dapper changeling in his wicker chair. Though Ars looked every which way, the young man without a name had vanished.

The Equines

Clouds of dust kicked a battered truck across the steppe. Or perhaps it was the other way round. Motor vehicles were rare enough anywhere near this barely-paved ribbon of a road. But this particular vehicle was an even more uncommon sight. There was a pony on board. A yellow pegasus perched in the bed, with all four limbs splayed to keep herself firmly there.

They were in between cities. They were in between clusters of ger, the traditional dwellings, and city grids made from ugly Russian concrete. Both miles and miles away. But the stop was here. Here was nowhere. Nothing but bitten hills, tentatively called green, as far as the eye could see.

But Marigold was still grateful to get off, because the ride had been more than long enough for her satisfaction. She collapsed on her belly as the truck pulled to a merciful stop, waiting there until an old man in a brown robe and fur hat emerged from the driver’s seat. He helped her to pull her packs down from the truck. The pegasus loaded up with as much as she could carry without shaking legs. She tied what was left of her chopped-short mane and tail into elastic bands. Then there was a grunt, a roar, a cloud of dust. And she was alone.

Fine.

Marigold took a deep breath of Mongolia. There wasn’t even a trace of human on the wind from where she stood, let alone of ponies. This road was the only evidence of civilized habitation. But this was all okay. Marigold thought she’d had enough of humans for a little while, and would be able to tolerate this otherwise-disconcerting solitude. Besides, the open space was very comforting to a pegasus. There were no ceilings anywhere for countless miles. After spending so long in claustrophobic Canterlot, it was enough to make her prance across the hard ground.

She followed her nose on a long walk. The going wasn’t too tough, with firm soil underneath her horseshoes. And the sweeping green carpeting of the world calmed her in a way that felt mysteriously familiar. But for the first few hours it was never quite warm enough. She should have come in midsummer. Marigold tried to tell herself that the thick northern-tribe coat she’d inherited from Dad was finally coming in handy for something, but the truth was she was used to Canterlot’s perpetually mild clime.

Around mid-afternoon she found what she was looking for. In the distance, seven equine forms browsed next to an arid little lake. Even from a distance, they clearly weren’t ponies; they looked as though some alicorn had taken the Saddle Arabian form and made a parody out of it, part joke and part eerie specter. But Marigold was used to seeing horses from pictures. To her, they were at once awkward and beautiful. She got as close as she could.

She didn’t even have to worry about approaching from downwind; they smelled similar enough to ponies that her presence didn’t seem to alarm them. The only possible cause for concern among her supplies would be the gas stove. She might be eating cold sandwiches for a few days. Unless she wanted to try some of the feather grass poking up all over the place.

It was almost too easy to be true. The horses merely milled around, browsing or flicking their tails at each other, while Marigold took as long as she wanted setting up her plastic tent. One of them turned her way and caused her to freeze up for just a moment—but the animal was only taking a dip in the lake. The water muddied and splashed. Other than that, there weren’t many noises out here.

Well, what did she expect? A welcoming committee? It was time to begin.

Marigold sat at the mouth of her tent and pulled out her first notebook. It was purple, her favorite color, shielded by a hard cover of recycled cardboard and full of fresh white pages. She produced a pack of one hundred pencils and sharpened the first in a purple plastic sharpener.

Found my first observation subjects, a herd of seven in Khustain Nuruu, Mongolia.

The first thing to do was form a clear picture of this social group. Marigold used her first page to assign a number to each horse and match it with the most detailed notes she could make about their appearance. A bit more involved than trying to describe ponies, because each wild horse was colored the same peachy dun. There were a couple skinny mares which she had some trouble telling apart, but one had a faintly juniper-ish scent, as she discovered when she crept around the lake to get a better whiff. Hopefully that would be enough.

Based on my initial observations, #5 seems to be doing well. There’s only one stallion in the herd, so I assume all of these females are his. A sizeable harem. I will refrain from making snarky comments that personify the subjects.

At least on paper.

Marigold ground her pencil down over the course of the afternoon, tailing the herd as they went on a jaunt to browse for fescue on an adjacent hill. And that was all she did for the rest of the day. Quite a change of pace for a city filly. It would have been quite boring if she hadn’t been waiting to do this for so long.

But she was chewing on her pencils, eyes darting over the animals’ smallest gesture. What was here that a human researcher would miss? What was here that a human wouldn’t even bother to look for?

Probably more than she could fit even in her stack of notebooks. The Takhi were the last truly wild horses on the entirety of Earth. It astounded Marigold—just as it had ever since First Contact—that humans hadn’t taken more time to plumb the precious goldmine of information here. In fact, they were so careless that the wild horse had nearly gone extinct some decades ago.

But maybe it was to be expected that ponies would care more about such things. Just as well. Marigold intended to make her scientific career proving how much a pony could learn of these majestic creatures.

She wrote her observations on every other line of her notebook, leaving space for corrections, addendums, and footnotes. There were thousands of pages of space among what she’d brought with her. Marigold had been saving these notebooks for so long that it made her giddy to finally be filling them up.

Each horse in the herd, as I have noted in my initial labels, has a slightly different smell. Some of the more piquant strands in each subject’s scent resemble grass smells, which may be an indication that each individual favors a slightly different diet. I have yet to learn the smells of all native plants in this region, but I will be able to make more confident conclusions about this evidence once my studies in flora are complete, and once I have been observing the herd long enough to separate each subject’s personal odor from the smell of what they’ve been eating. (NOTE: Collecting qualitative information by smell is a well-established and reliable practice in Equestrian biology. Our noses can tell us just as much about the world as our eyes. I will, of course, attempt to corroborate each finding with as many forms of datum as possible.)

In keeping with patterns seen among mustangs, the herd appears to have a lead mare in the form of #1. She has so far exerted dominance over all the other mares in the herd. I also believe her to be the oldest subject in the herd, even older than #5, and so far note that she seems to spend more time with #5 than any of the other subjects.

“Tut-tut, number five,” Margiold muttered around her pencil. “Don’t you know you need to spend time with everypony in your herd?” Then she shook her head to continue writing.

In contrast, #4 and #7 seem to exhibit a form of submissive behavior towards the rest of the herd. As of now, I’ve been observing the herd for four hours (CORRECTION: 4:27) and three times the pair of them, who were standing together under the lone shade tree in the area, have been moved out of the way by another horse looking to take their spot. #1, #2, and #6 have each dislodged the pair respectively, stayed under the shade for a time, and then moved away, at which point #4 and #7 resumed their original spot. I should re-iterate that these two mares appear somewhat smaller than the rest of the herd. Though they may simply be malnourished, I wonder if they are in fact offspring of one of the other subjects, perhaps #1.

Marigold was determined to miss nothing. Celestia knew she’d been telling everypony she would go observe wild horses for months now. Almost none of her friends believed she would really do it. So it had become a little something more than her scientific dream. When she came home with a field-shattering field journal it would prove them all wrong.

So much for her crush on humans. Coming here had been the best decision of her life so far. Everything was going swimmingly.

Almost swimmingly. Marigold was still bothered by the sky. That cloud layer was so high, the whole expanse so gunmetal and huge. It was unnatural. And it disturbed her just as much as ever. She wasn’t averse to hiding under her tent with three blankets when the sun set, and the cold dropped like a cymbal onto the steppe.

My first morning in Nuruu was eventful. I awoke to find half the herd sniffing at my tent.
My first thought was that I should have been more cautious, knowing the old truism that a researcher invariably affects whatever she observes. My second thought came as half of my right wall collapsed, and the hoof tangled within it crushed my stove. The horses were strong enough to trample me by accident.

I was lucky to slip out of my tent intact, and even luckier to salvage the rest of my supplies by leading the curious horses away. Since they all immediately turned to look at me when I emerged, I surmised they were far more interested in the newcomer than in her oddly-shaped rocks. I set off at a careful trot and got all of the welcoming committee to follow.

They didn’t seem quite able distinguish me from another horse. With this in mind I was careful to keep my wings folded, for I didn’t know what kind of alarm they might engender.

#1, 2, 3, and 7 followed me for three miles. Then #1 left off to head back to the others, and the rest followed me for two more miles. It was a very queer experience to hear hoofsteps behind me—the first sound of life I’d heard in a day—and know that I was being followed by wild animals.
I thought I might discourage them by crossing the road, but I hadn’t made it across the last hill when two of the mares broke into a canter and surrounded me.

#2 and #7 approached the closest, coming near enough to circle me and sniff. Holding completely still was the best defense I could think of. I could only hope that they would lose interest after a minute and let me go.

But more likely they were waiting for a response. My fears were confirmed when #2 pressed up against me. It was a benign overture, but she didn’t seem to realize that she was large enough to knock me over. I had no recourse but to break into an open gallop. And when their tall legs proved faster than mine, I was forced to reveal my wings to make an escape.

Marigold shivered and tucked her notebook away. That was enough for now. She was still airborne. She was trying to clear her head. Flowing air was needed to wash away the smell of wild horses, if just for a minute, and she didn’t want to touch ground until she felt more settled.

That mare’s touch had spooked her. It was so immense, and so warm—the only warm thing in this hard plain. Most eerily of all, it reminded her more than anything of the touch of her cuddly roommate from Canterlot.

What was she going to do now?

Marigold could have screamed for her carelessness. But out here, it wouldn’t have given her the satisfaction of annoying anypony. Now how could she argue that her close observation wasn’t corrupting the results? She’d be lucky if her grant-writer didn’t tell her to throw her precious notebooks away.

She’d had a hard enough time convincing her Canterlot professors to take her seriously—nopony else seemed to find Terran horses a worthy topic of research, for what reason, Marigold couldn’t fathom. And she’d had every advantage at school. Her family came from five generations of higher education, on all three sides. She’d been hoping that the natives of this world would take more interest in her ideas. But it was also a world where research was dominated by males, who weren’t even of her species to boot. What chances did she have for publication if she couldn’t force them to take her seriously?

At least when she came in for a landing, her supplies hadn’t been molested any further. Marigold had just about been making contingency plans to run home, half-expecting that the mustangs would get into her 7-grain bread and her jar of daisy petals while she was on the wing. Daisy petals, she imagined, would be a gourmet treat for any horse living on the steppes, but apparently the airtight seal on the jar did its job.

At the final tally, nothing but the stove was really unsalvageable. So she managed to talk herself into staying. She made a few observations of the local plant life to help herself feel like she’d accomplished something that day. She moved her tent three hills further out to discourage any more welcoming committees.

And she tried the feathergrass. It was disgusting.

Week Two has been quite profitable so far. Today, I observed #3 leading #4 to a patch of greenthread. This, combined with my observations three days ago, leads me to be very confident in my hypothesis that the horses actively share food and feeding opportunities with one another, and even that they are aware of each other’s preferences.

The social dynamics of the herd have also become more clear. There are clear bonds present between several subjects. #1 and #5 spend much of their time together, as do #2 and #3, also #4 and #7. But the herd definitely has a certain amount of cohesion. The entire group is quick to respond to any individual in distress, and though clear displays of dominance have been observed, all instances of aggression that I’ve seen so far have been quickly resolved.

#5 has proven to be a more equitable stallion than initially thought. He makes some effort to spend time with every mare in his herd each day. This is aside from mating, which he is also doing with every other subject except for #7.

This brings me to my next point of interest. #7 has not gone into heat, even though she most certainly should be by this time of the season. I’m quite sure that she is at least three years old, so there must be something wrong with the poor mare. #7 has been examining her for much of the day. He appears to be more concerned about her than anything; this hypothesis is supported by the fact that he took number #1 this morning to help escort her to a patch of unidentified shrubs, taking great care that she should eat her fill, and by the fact that he hasn’t once tried to mate with her despite the lack of signals in her scent. I will match the shrub to its Latin classification later so that I can record any further instances that may suggest the horses instinctively view it to have medicinal properties.

Most interestingly, I’ve witnessed several instances of nuzzling between mares of the herd. It leads me to suspect that I may be witnessing the seeds of Equestrian sexual behavior. Our own scientific literature theorizes that in prehistoric times, the pattern of a single male in charge of a larger group of females was dominant in many regions, long before we developed the more equitable herd system which we practice today. Obviously, forthcoming findings related to the Cross-Contamination Paradox (see Lewisheiner, Jerry, “How did we Know about My Little Pony?”) will inform the field further as to whether any species indigenous to this dimension can be considered a ‘missing link’ for ponies.

Week Three has been a disaster. It—it got worse. I’ve been holding off writing it down, because it feels like admitting it to myself—but #5 is taking an interest in me.

He was the only one who’d trotted all the out to her tent, and circled it while she was still stretching off the morning. He made patient circles and stamped once or twice as if to wake her up. Marigold had nearly shrieked when she stepped outside and felt something sniffing her withers.

And she nearly fell to using the pop-gun she’d swore she wouldn’t use. Wild horses were even flightier than pegasi, or so she’d read, and if she gave in to that temptation she might lose everything she’d worked for.

Instead of scaring off her research subjects, she’d cursed under her breath. Threw a few English swears in there as well, just for color. “Shit” was a word she found particularly satisfying. Marigold had dealt with unwelcome attention from guys before. But this was ridiculous.

She ground her teeth whenever she imagined what her Canterlot professors would think of this farce. All her dreams of proving everypony wrong about her seemed to be crumbling. She’d spent the better part of a year preparing her paper on mustangs despite everypony telling her it was a waste of time. Her elder mother had worried she wouldn’t graduate.

It had taken a rash trip to Earth and an empty bed in a stinky dormitory to convince her to finally chase her dream across the Atlantic. And now she was trotting at half-speed, trying to ease herself away from a horse without appearing to run away. It was motion-for-motion the same trot she’d used to skip out on horndog colts when she ate lunch around undergraduates.

The idea of a pony coming all the way across an unfathomably vast alien ocean just to do this was so funny that she would have laughed him away, if it hadn’t been infuriating. She wanted—so badly—to be anything but a joke.

Before long she was desperate to get away from the stallion so she could return to her tent and hide from the world under a blanket. In that moment, it felt like there wasn’t a single living being in the multiverse who took Marigold Meadows seriously.

But she did get something out of that fury. It must have been her peeved scent that finally convinced the stallion to give up.

Marigold had hoped that would be the end of the day. Observing wild animals 24/7 had proven to be so boring that she’d worked her way through the whole stack of novels she packed, but today, boring would have been perfect.

But the mares wanted to say hello too. Later in the afternoon, while I was making sketches of the shrubs I had seen #7 favoring, #2 and #4 approached. #2 has consistently seemed—and I must be pardoned for yet another attribution of pony emotions to an animal, but there is no other way to put it—very eager to make friends. #3 was always more suspicious of me, however, especially after my first fly-over of the herd on my second day. She tries to turn #2 around whenever the latter starts to approach me around the lake.

Marigold moved her tent another half-mile away.

A boring day today. Most of the herd spent it napping. #3 galloped off to the east for a while, but came back hungry.

I wake up each day worrying they’ll be gone. Though the cohesion of the group is striking, over the past week they’ve taken to disappearing for longer journeys. When they go downwind I’ve often spent days just trying to find them. Perhaps it should be surprising that a wild herd has stayed in one place for so long. The lake must be a valuable resource. But even that can’t tie a horse down forever. I don’t know how I know this, but they’ll be moving on soon.

Boredom made Marigold even more antsy, especially since she had long since finished all her books. She’d eaten through the Manehatten Bestseller list in a mere week, although the English books she brought with her had lasted a little longer. Marigold’s English was pretty spotty, and she’d brought the books specifically to work on that so she could make her journals as successful as possible when she translated them.

It turned out that the effect boredom had was to let the sky get under her skin even more. Marigold had thought she’d gotten used to it, but when she once made the mistake of spending half an hour lying on her back, staring at it, she started to itch. All this wide open space may have been fine, but it had the side effect of exposing her to the full breadth of the dome day and night.

Eventually she must have dumped all her anger on that sky. It was the only logical explanation for her madness. She pawed the ground, snorting at the sky, and rummaging around wordlessly in the grass while watching it with suspicious eyes.

Clearly, sleeping outside of the tent for a few days hadn’t had the desired effect of curing her. It only made the situation worse.

And one morning, she made a quick running start and took off.

Marigold was in flight before she knew what she was doing. The tent, the lake, the herd was far beneath her, and she was letting out a long breath. She wasn’t supposed to leave the herd, of course. Neither was she supposed to show them her wings. But this sky, this sky that refused her its caress—she was going to reach it.

She had moonlit as a weather pony for a couple years in school, since the Canterlot weather teams were an easy gig. She was a strong flyer. Not being able to touch the clouds made her feel as if even the sky thought she was a joke.

The climb was slow. Tortuously so. It had always been difficult to gain altitude on Earth. She had to pace herself anyway, because before long she found herself so high that the pressure difference might have knocked her out.

Naturally, there wasn’t a single updraft to be found. She clambered through the middle sky flap by flap, thrashing against the vignette that gathered at the corners of her vision. It was cold. Worse than down below. She felt as though she must have been alighting on the top of the Canterhorn, and wondered if icicles could form on a pony’s wings in summer.

Her feathers scrabbled for purchase on the increasingly thin wind like they never had before. At one point, the pressure dropped so low that Marigold suddenly panicked, overtaken by the feeling that her wings weren’t doing anything. She was dead certain for one instant that she would fall straight back to the steppe, and for an instant, a pegasus knew vertigo.

She had to close her eyes for the home stretch. The clouds still weren’t close, then—they were as far as they would have been were she standing on the ground in Fillydelphia.

And then all at once she felt the cool blast-kiss of moisture. Marigold gasped, eyes coming open onto total whiteness, squelching out one more anemic flap and then letting herself grab onto the cloud-stuff. She scooped it together into hoofholds she could dangle from, a couple thousand wingbeats off the ground. Tunneling through the cloud from underneath like a diamond dog, she emerged exhausted and flopped to her belly on the whitecap.

“Hah!” Marigold had occasion to speak for the first time in a month. Her voice felt cramped and needed a stretch. So she punched the cloud. “Take that! Not so…” huff, “…big,” huff, “, are you?”

Collapsing again to catch her breath, she shimmied around until she found a dip in the cloud to settle in. “Stupid, big ugly clouds anyway. Probably no point in coming—”

Then she looked up.

The clouds in this sky were vaster than the mountains. A plane of cirrus stretched out in front of her, sloshing with gold-foaming waves under the noontide. There were a couple darker cumulous hanging over the cirrus like tors of a fantastic shape, throwing deep blue shadows miles wide.

And in the far distance, the sea rose up to become a high valley pass. At least, it would have been a valley, verdant with little streaks of green and yellow, if the vapor hadn’t closed up overhead to turn it into a cloud tunnel. It was the largest cloud tunnel Marigold had ever seen, and the through the distant end the sun was blinding.

Had this just…swirled together, all on its own? Whole teams of pegasi worked for hours to sculpt cloudscapes one-tenth this size. Still light-headed, she shuddered to her legs like a newborn foal. The fact that she felt faint didn’t register. She just had to know what it would be like to walk this endless plain.

Marigold trotted the skies. For what felt like an eternity, she forgot that ground even existed. But she never did catch her breath. She was in danger of freezing to death the whole time as well. When she had to fall to Earth, she did it reluctantly, letting herself sink through the crust and gliding steep across the underbelly. The climb had felt nearly hard enough to kill her. She knew that she might never come back to this utterly silent kingdom.

She was still shivering late that night. She wasn’t sleeping in her tent, but she had at least brought out the warm part—the blankets—and laid them over herself.

Something moved. She startled. Before Marigold could get up or even complain, the smell of a horse hit her like a brick thrown from the dark. Their sides were practically touching. And she knew perfectly well who it was.

“Hey, Fiver,” she sighed. “See me flying, huh? Are you suitably impressed?”

Fiver gave a wordless snort that could have meant anything.

Marigold laughed—part chuckle, part whinny. She was too tired to drive him off again, and he didn’t smell like he was going to try anything. Her heat was out as of yesterday, so that would keep her safe enough.

“I wish everypony else was so easily impressed. Not hard to make you happy, is it?”

This time he didn’t answer. Marigold pricked her ears and found that he was tearing up a clump of greenthread near their outstretched legs.

“Of course not,” she answered for him. “Why wouldn’t you be happy? You’ve got six mares all to yourself out here. Of course, there’s worms to worry about….drought. Hypothermia. Or wolves. You can get wolves down here, did you know that?”

She flopped onto her side. “Oh, listen to me trying to get you down. Maybe I’m jealous. It’s not your fault I’m an idiot. Honestly, if I don’t want to be such a joke, why am I so obsessed with horses? I should be studying computers like everypony else. My roommate came out here to study computers. I ever tell you that? She’s living west of here. A little place you’ve never heard of called California. And she got a grant five times the size of mine.”

There was no impetus to talk quickly, no rush to get in everything that she wanted to say. Fiver wouldn’t interrupt. Marigold eased her words over his heavy breathing. Now that she had woken a little, she could hear horses breathing all around her. Near the base of the hillock she’d chosen for bed, Spot and Periwinkle nickered good night to each other. Peach Cobbler was sleeping upright. That made Marigold smile. Peach needed to relax, for she was always in such a hurry. Just like silly old Fiver needed to stop thinking that he could lure her away from his favorite stand of purple flowers with a charming neigh. She saw right through his little game. Personally, Marigold wondered that she was never tempted to play along. Fiver may have been a bit thick, but he was a sweetheart.

“I must be scared of something,” said Marigold. “Hey, Fiver. What do you think I’m scared of?”

Fiver snorted.

She closed her eyes and smiled. “You’re a good listener.”

He nuzzled her shoulder—Marigold jumped up and skittered away, lying back down only when she was out of nose-reach. In the dark, he looked almost disappointed.

Marigold couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, at least I know you’re serious. As far as the stallions in my life go, that puts you pretty high on the list. How sad is that? But I should warn you, I’m a new wave mare. I’ve always hoped to get a stallion all to myself.”

For some reason she thought of the Vespertila Warden back at Canterlot University. There had been one assigned just to the school, and for some reason he’d always had time to talk to Marigold about how ‘wonderful’ it was to have a big herd. About never being alone, having the company of other mares in a relationship, and accountability and sharing and all that tripe. She hadn’t wanted any part of it. Those were old ideas, her parents’ ideas, far too old for her, weighed down and spicy with the smell of incense to alicorns.

For a moment, Marigold’s head drooped. She shuffled in a roundabout way towards Fiver and leaned against him for just a second. “At least you want to keep me around. I almost wish…”

Suddenly breaking out in a cold sweat, she jumped away. Marigold stomped and shook herself. “I must be losing my mind out here!”

But when she fetched her notebook to try and salvage some scientific detachment from what was left of her daily rambles, she felt a bolt of inspiration. There might be a new, even better way to continue her studies out here, and learn even more about wild horses.

What did she care if Nature wouldn’t publish her? There were other places to go. She could present her research directly to Twilight Sparkle. The Element of Magic loved science, after all, and she was in with Princess Celestia. Surely she would find a way to make her findings known.

There had to ponies out there who wanted to know what a field biologist could accomplish if she used the magic of friendship as her guiding method.

She still had bread for a lot of sandwiches. She couldn’t give up so long as she had that. Maybe she would stay out here a few months, and lose her mind for just a while longer.

The Astronaut and the Flutterpony

Brock Starthumper exhaled air as thick as syrup. He was alone with her in his dark bedroom. This tiny space, furnished with only one small porthole, was hot, and heavy, and green with the muted light from Brock’s fishtank. Heavy in a literal sense, in fact. As a humble zero-G technician, Brock had his room near the outermost layer of the outermost station ring. It wasn’t making his shallow breathing any more relaxed.

He could barely see her, there across the papery shadows. But he knew she was with him. So he smiled, moving into the light where she could look at him. Fishlight bounced off his clock; the time was eleven at night, February, 2056.

Brock labored for one more deep breath. “Okay, Aria.” He felt a tingle as he said it. “Here we go.”

The Cadenza ritual had been around for nearly as long as humans had been courting other species. So growing up, Brock had learned about it the same time he learned about the birds and the bees. It wouldn’t have crossed his mind to do this any other way.

The first step was exposure. Brock almost frantically unzipped his UV-shielding suit. He used for walking around outer access halls and unshielded machinery domes, and it had both a look and feel of tinfoil about it. He was more than happy to get it off.

Next came his blue jeans and a thin cotton shirt. Brock tugged and tore until every shred of his clothing was gone. It was awkward to stand naked outside of the dry-press shower, but Brock realized with an odd twinge that he was neither cold nor ashamed. He smiled shakily. And he kicked his jeans underneath his tool bench, careful not to wrinkle the burgundy throw rug that softened the clearing in the center of the room.

Now it was her turn. Aria stepped into the light for him.

Flutterponies tended towards very pale coat colors, most commonly butter yellow. Aria had a rare coat color for her kind. Blue—her hair-tips so light she looked like a patch of Earthside sky over a blazing beach.

She had to step carefully, because Brock’s ceiling wasn’t very high. Her head came up just past his waist, but her folded wings loomed over the fishtank, and it would have been agonizing to smash them into the titanium hull overhead.

He’d only ever seen them like the way they were now—closed, a tight sail rising straight up from her back. The outer edges were rippled in dark pink. Nearly purple in this light. Flutterponies always had their wings closed when they went out in public areas. They weren’t comfortable showing the inner edges. The only way a stranger could hope to see them was by happening to pass over one in a flight hallway. A pegasus, for instance, might catch a glimpse. But if they were discreet they wouldn’t mention it.

Since Brock couldn’t fly, it was his first time seeing them when she turned around and opened up as far as the walls of his room would allow.

He cupped a hand to his mouth. The inner edges of Aria’s wings were a riot of spots and bands in every color imaginable. Maybe thirty or forty of them. Gazing upon the shuffled rainbow was the next best thing to a trip home. He immediately guessed that Aria’s wing pattern was different from that of every other Flutterpony’s. Unique like a thumbprint, or a cutie mark.

Then they tilted—just an inch—as Aria failed to keep them perfectly steady. The colors moved. Brock reeled. He held perfectly still for a moment, watching to see if they would change again. Then, experimentally, he swayed his head. The colored bands wove across her wings like a lenticular print. Brock laughed and started rocking back and forth like a maniac.

But she tolerated his silliness.

How else would anyone date a man named Brock Starthumper? It wasn’t his real name, of course, and it had sounded like a much better idea from the bottom a late night of antique sci-fi movies. Technically, as on his ID card, his name was Cloverthumper. But he hadn’t gone by that name since walking through the Dimension Gate to the International Space Station. He didn’t want any of the guys on the zero-G crew to make fun of him. Even after sixty years, some things didn’t change.

When Brock had been a stupid young man, fresh onto the station with the latest batch of glorified welders, he’d done what any one-worlder from a backwater farming town would do. He’d blown the entirety of his first day in space by exploring the full length of Market Hall One. As the most trafficked public place in the entire station, it had species-specific facilities for every kind of life that might have cause to pass through—little nooks off to the side every thirty meters, hideaways where a given race could find a sensibly organized bathroom or a breath of home. Well, the human one was kind of a joke. A couple Coke machines and a soccer field’s worth of astro-turf. But then again, Brock did appreciate a cheap Coke.

Not even knowing the most basic of station etiquette—that he shouldn’t walk into any other species’ nook—he’d seen a room full of giant flowers and marched straight in out of curiosity.

Once inside, he hadn’t had time to take in the sight. He couldn’t see anything but the fluttering wings which suddenly filled the room like a glazed tornado. Brock had been forced to shield his face from the miniscule buffets of a hundred-odd Flutterponies, all at once taking flight. He was standing right in the face of a gentle tempest.

Butterflies, he had thought dumbly. Butterflies with wings wider than hang-gliders. That was where he’d met Aria. She was the last one to take off—slowly pulling her legs out of a tall orchid. She was the only one to hover and glance back before flying blindly into the recesses of the sky-painted ceiling.

Now, Flutterponies had been described by almost all other sentient races as ‘shy’. In that regard, they faced many of the same challenges as solitary predator species like dragons, who had also been one of the last races on the Equestrian planet to join the Equestrian Pan-Galactic Alliance. It took Flutterponies some time to find ways of working with other species and thus moving their civilization into the spacefaring age. Ponies in particular had a surprisingly hard time getting along with them.

So Brock, who considered himself half-pony by upbringing, didn’t start off with the best chances at dating one. It took him days just to figure out who Aria was. A week to get her to say a single word to him. Still, even that was more than his co-workers had thought he’d be able to do. They told him to give up and date an earth pony like everyone else—or an Asari, or a kitsune—or, God forbid, one of his own kind. A Flutterpony was way too much work.

It took a month of constant visits before she agreed to go anywhere with him. The whole family had gotten to know him better than they liked by that time, and he’d learned to pick out their sprawling nest of cloudstuff and giant leaves from across a five-degree hallway.

That first round of dating hadn’t lasted long. On the second date he accidentally slapped her barrel, just once, when he turned around without looking. It took two months of constant apology letters and Giant Ambrose flowers to get her to see him again.

But as a blessing in disguise, this had helped their relationship truly take off. Once they began to test the waters of courtship once again, Brock kept writing letters. And she wrote back. In writing, Aria wasn’t a tenth as shy as her natural flight response made her in person. She could reveal an inner life profuse beyond anything Brock had expected. She could also express affection without restraint. Until that first letter of hers—six pages long, and still kept in a lockbox under Brock’s bed—he hadn’t really been sure that she liked him.

In their fourth month together, Brock stole his first kiss—in the middle of a maintenance tunnel, no less, with many promises stammered under hissing steam. After seven months, the family stopped looking at him like trapped deer each time he brought her home.

And now he and Aria were finally going to do the deed.

She was still a little tense—it was just a part of who Aria was that she could never be as relaxed around him as with other Flutterponies. But they’d made enough progress together that her instincts were dampened enough for their want to overcome.

Touch was the second step. Aria went first. Leaning forward, she lifted a marshmallow-soft hoof and placed it over his crotch. Brock swallowed and lifted one of his own arms.

Aria flinched. “Jen?”

“You know I’ll be gentle. Here, in fact—it will easier if I don’t have to reach. Turn around again?”

She pivoted. The most sensitive area on a Flutterpony’s body was their wings, particularly near the base, where the nerve-endings were thickest. Brock was required to show that he knew at least that much. But he’d never touched her wings even on the outside before. If he looked at her from straight on, they vanished. That’s how thin they were. Dear Luna—what if he broke them? He was almost leaning back as he drew a pair of fingers across the wing, with the lightest touch he could possibly maintain. They felt like silk dissolved in air.

Her breath caught for an endless heartbeat. Brock, almost sweating with the effort of maintaining his light touch, frowned. This wasn’t how he wanted it to be. He removed his hand, thought a moment—and had a stroke of genius.

Aria’s head snapped back; of course she panicked when Brock got down onto his knees. She started turning around to see what he was doing.
“Don’t worry, I just want to try…this…” Her flanks tensed as he leaned in, then relaxed again as he blew a puff or air right across the surface of her left wing.

Her wings dipped as her flight muscles relaxed, along with the rest of her body. Even her tail twitched. Brock, grinning irrepressibly, blew again, this time a little harder. Aria let out a fillyish moan.

Brock thought that the goosebumps would tear him apart at the seams. Aria had never made that noise before.

Expectation was the third part of the Cadenza. Actually, Brock would have been quite happy to stay on this part for a while, but Aria moved them on, turning to pull those precious wings away from him.

As she was rearranging herself on the tiny floor space, she nearly tripped over his busted holo-set—the expensive one Brock had never gotten around to fixing. He winced and made a note to move it. It was perhaps odd that Brock, who considered machines his life’s passion, had never gotten around to fixing the thing, especially when it would be so practical to do so. Maybe if it had broken before he started dating Aria it would be whole right now.

“What…” Aria inhaled and move her face close to his. She gave a tiny grin. “What s’mean?”

“Me first?” Brock had to bite his lip before he answered. Although he knew exactly how the Cadenza went, a lot had been occupying his mind leading up to tonight. He hadn’t actually thought about what he was going to say.

“I guess it means…well, it means I love you, Aria.” He lifted his hands. “I’m a hundred percent sure I love you, and so I want this as much as you do. I’m not sure what I can add to that. Okay. Your turn.”

Aria shuffled closer and tapped Brock on his right arm to signal him to turn around. They often did this when she had too many words to say and not enough patience to force them all out. It was easier for her to whisper into the back of his ear.

“…Mean we’re mated,” she murmured happily. “Forever. Might have foals—oh. Can’t.”

Brock solemnly held his knees. Aria had never mentioned that before. He wanted to turn around and say something—mostly, to hold her close. But it was one of those little hiccups that always appeared in an interspecies relationship, and there was nothing to be done about it. Besides, Aria hated being interrupted. He was glad he hadn’t turned around when he heard her take another breath.

“And when you die…me…too.”

Brock waited to make sure she was done.

“Okay,” he said. “You know, I wondered if you might say something like that. I heard one time that Flutterponies might mate for life, and—”

He collapsed into the closet with his mouth open. “Wait, whattaya mean, die?”

Aria was startled by the sudden fervor of his voice. She fluttered backwards onto his bed, knocking over several hydro-spanners in the process. Brock flinched, and that only made her flinch again.

He tried to hold still. “Aria, what do you mean?”

With her eyes crunched shut, she heroically forced out the sentence. “Always…when…mate dies…first. Can’t…change.”

Brock was on his feet. His hands were on his head. He was pacing—and he had once sworn to give up pacing for her. “Is this a Flutterpony thing?” he exploded. “That can’t be right! You’re not some kind of bug. You…you didn’t tell me about this!”

She squeaked out a nod when he looked her way. Aria had a firm grimace plastered on her muzzle. Both knew things were going south. This whole night had been a delicate arrangement from the start—but at least he’d been prepared for the risks he knew about. There was a footstool by the bed so that Aria could climb up and down. The door buzzer, which was loud and unpleasant enough to startle a human, had been disabled.

“You didn’t tell me.” Brock sat down. Then he got up again. He knew he couldn’t stay here in the room. If he let himself become any more stressed, he might scream or even hit something. Then, if she couldn’t flee past him and out through the door, she would really lose it.

He took a deep breath. “I’ve got to go outside for a minute,” was all he said, and then demonstrated what he thought was a great deal of restraint by not slamming the aperture-door on his way out.

Brock was two degrees down the hallway before realizing that he hadn’t put on any clothes. All the apartments were kept at a perpetually balmy temperature, which could make it hard to notice. There were a few humans out in the dim corridor at this hour, and there were stares. Maybe they assumed that he’d come right out of the shower by accident.

Brock ran to the nearest hatch in the wall and used his ID card to access a maintenance tube. He jump upwards at a steep angle into darkness. Like a mole he ducked inside, and out of sight.

Once inside the tunnels, he was in his element. Brock knew how to slip through even the little cross-hatches that weren’t meant for human maintenance workers. He was so good that he’d once sat down with a piece of paper and worked out that he could get anywhere in the station without ever setting foot in a public hall. He’d never taken advantage of that fact before, since walking was much easier than crawling, but now seemed like a pretty good time to test the theory. Brock came out of the tunnels about twenty degrees up from where he lived; it was still afternoon there, so he streaked to the nearest door. He jammed his keycard into the lock, bashing buttons until the security system believed that there was a serious enough electrical emergency to let him into the room on maintenance grounds. His back was plastered against the aperture almost before it pinched shut.

This room was the same shape as his, albeit more thoroughly decorated and better-lit. A redhead sat on a bed with a red comforter, reading a book. It took her a few moments to notice an adult human male standing on her welcome mat without any clothes on.

“Brock…” she said warningly, reaching for a wrench on her nightstand.

Brock threw up his hands. “No! No no! Elaine, I just need—I need—I need—”

“Clothes?”

“Yes! Brilliant!”

Elaine gave a tight sigh and then leaned over in bed, waving at a bronze circle set into a far wall. It popped out as a dresser drawer which gradually grew to six feet in length. Brock, too grateful to be picky, grabbed the first outfit that caught his eye and started throwing it on.

Elaine was a homeworld girl. She was born and raised her whole life in Aerotropolis, so life on the International Space Station was practically second home for her. It made her the perfect friend to come to for advice when Brock had been new. Elaine was in the big leagues compared to him—she had a hand in planning the missions which sent new Dimension Gates on rockets across the stars. When the rockets landed, explorers would hop out of this plane into Equestria and then slip back through the new Gate, thus charting a new world for the Alliance and spreading the seeds of space travel Princess Twilight had planted some forty years ago.

But Elaine always had a unique way of yelling at Brock. He sometimes wondered if it was because of her upbringing. She’d been co-raised by something called a Kushiban while her mom was still in school. Common enough on Earth, but not where Brock grew up.

Elaine watched him dress with all different kinds of concern on her face. “You found out about mated pairs, didn’t you?”

“You knew?” Brock said through the shirt fabric. His eyes narrowed, although he was still pulling a top on and couldn’t see her face. “I thought you said I should stay away from her!”

“That was before I saw how crazy she is about you.” Elaine dropped her book.

“Elaine!” Brock shook his arms through the sleeves and held them out pleadingly. “Flutterponies can live to be, like—sixty years old!”

“Life expectancy is around forty, but sure.”

“And—and—my job is hazardous! What if I get hit by an asteroid!”

“An asteroid? Brock, what in the Milky Way…”

“She’s only six months older than me!” he gasped. “We’re starting off at a disadvantage! I might die before she does! I might kill her! If I love her I can’t kill her, right?”

“What if that’s what she wants?” Elaine said in a cold slither.

Brock shook his head vehemently. “What if? Don’t ask me about what if! What if we break up? Then what, she has just has to worry about dropping dead any old day? How does that even work? Why does any species mate for life?”

Elaine watched him lace an ill-fitting pair of rubber shoes. Her face was intently pensive, an expression Brock had learned to recognize as a warning sign.

“So do humans mate for life?” she asked.

“What? What the hell are you even saying?”

She steepled her hands. “Is this really about being scared for her?”

Brock stood, flushed. “What are you talking about? Of course it is!”

“Brock, even if you’re not going to bed her, you have a relationship that’s withering away every second that you stand here. And—hold on a second. Are you wearing pink?”

Brock looked down. “Guess so.”

“There’s like—maybe one pink shirt, one pink bottom…one pink pair of socks in my entire drawer. And you picked them all.”

“I guess so. Why?”

Elaine rubbed her temples and dropped her head against the wall. “How could I forget? You’re ‘half-pony’. Probably half-stallion, then; that’s why you have a double legacy of cluelessness.”

Brock took a deep breath and punched the button in the center of her door. “Good talk, Elaine. But I know what I have to do.”

Her eyes shot open. “What? I didn’t say you could go! Brock! Brock, those are my good clothes, you can’t just run away—”

She chased him halfway out into the hall, shouting at the top of her lungs. “Brock Starthumper! Come back with my pants!”

The last he saw, she was cringing and trying to duck back inside. But she would be fine. There was a construction project nearby on an elevator to the next ring over, which covered some of the noise of her shout. So there were at least a few faces in the hall not snickering at her.

Brock ducked his head and sprinted to the nearest metro waypoint.

There was still time to get out of this. He had to wait in line for half an hour, but he purchased a pass for a one-way trip on a private tram. It would take Aria back to the center of her own district, dropping her right in the Flutterpony commons. And then, after that…he could just avoid ever being in the same room as her again. It was a big station. It wouldn’t be that hard.

He would just take this card, explain himself, and give it to her. He was almost back to his room now…

He lay in a maintenance tube, staring at oxygen pipes.

The heat running through the metal catwalk was discoloring Elaine’s shirt. It might have been curling the expensive tram pass in his pocket, too. But Brock wasn’t ready to open his front door.

Instead, he slipped underneath the grille, into the space between floor and the bottom of the Jefferies tube. His waxy orange hair spread out when hit by the static. He’d spent many hours pressed flat in spaces like this, routing power conduits back together with laser-heated mercury filling up his nose and giving him someday cancer. He did his best thinking here.

Brock’s back pocket buzzed. He contorted his body to try and reach a hand into it, accidentally ran his elbow into an exposed resister and hissed with pain.

On the second try he managed to pull the silver wafer out. There was text on it. A message from Aria.

But I did tell you. Wasn’t this the designated time for talking about these things?

Brock sighed. Under Aria’s typical brand of logic that made perfect sense.

He would have given anything to talk to Dad right now. Not being able to was torture. But that wasn’t one of his two options. And, uncertain whether to go down this tube or crawl further up and hide, he couldn’t decide. He was stuck in place.

Night began to pass. Brock had slept in tubes before, by accident on long shifts. For now he would just rest his eyes. As he lay there, he tried imagining what his father would have said to him if they could walk together in a meadow, just the way they had so many times before.

Instead, perhaps because Dad was dead, his memory dredged up a conversation some fifteen years old.

“Cloverthumper,” Dad had said, in the same basswood voice that never changed even as the brown earth stallion aged into his thirties. Every talk began that way. Most of young Brock’s friends rolled their eyes or tried to run whenever a parent began a conversation that way. But Brock always liked to hear his dad say his name. It didn’t mean he was in trouble. Dad just liked saying it. As if he liked the sound. As if he was impossibly pleased with himself for being able to put his name on someone.

“You’ve been saving up for a new toy. Is Mother getting a lot of chores out of you, then?”

Young Brock had probably rolled his eyes and dodged an affectionate nip to the hair. “It’s not a toy, Dad. It’s an exploration drone.”

And they had probably been walking down the shallow side of the hill, off to the right of the log cabin where Mother and Grandmother and Auntie hustled around the kitchen. They’d be making pumpkin pies and setting them on the windowsill so that the south wind would spread the smell all across Orange Hills. Cows would be waiting for automobiles to cross the main avenue, and friends Brock knew would be heading back to the one-room schoolhouse to make ornaments for Hearthswarming, or cards for Hearts and Hooves day. Or maybe carve pumpkins for Nightmare Night. Something about the spice in the air suggested that this memory was a holiday, but Brock couldn’t remember which.

“Naturally,” Dad said. “A good drone must be expensive these days.”

“So much,” Brock sighed.

“Well, that’s how it is, Clover. The good ones are never easy to get. But don’t worry. Working for it is half the fun!”

Brock wrinkled his nose.

“You’re going to play with Steven when you get it? Be careful. I don’t want you boys spying on anypony. Or breaking any windows. You use that in the forest, or out in the field if you want.”

“I don’t know.” Brock shrugged with a feigned nonchalance that he probably assumed was grown-up. “I didn’t say I’d get it. I already saved up thirty bits. I might just get another action figure.”

“Ah.”

And they walked together over to Choco Chunk’s house, where they sat on the railing and bought mugs of hot chocolate. Choco was open half the year, and her hot chocolate never failed to taste like whatever season’s breath was on the wind.

After that, they’d turn around, and start heading back towards the house. By this time the local teacher would be poking his head out of the schoolhouse to see who was around. He’d wave when he saw Brock.

It was a tiny town, Orange Hills. Frustrating for any ten-year old whose ears were filled with tales of Tokyo and Aerotropolis. But Brock had to admit, looking back from across the years, that it was a fine place to raise a child. Not one person had ever, even once, batted an eye at a little boy calling a stallion his daddy. Almost half the kids in town were adopted. The orphanages of Earth, as the saying went, emptied straight into Equestria, and nowhere was that more true than in Orange Hills.

They were about halfway home before Dad felt moved to speak again.

“The way I see it, you have two choices.”

“Between a Daring Do action figure and a Luke Skywalker?”

Dad waited before speaking again.

“You could keep saving up, keep pulling weeds for Mom, and someday buy your drone. But that means you won’t be able to buy anything else for a long while. You have to make sure you really want it.”

Brock stared grumpily at his sneakers.

“Or you can get another action figure, like the ones you already have. It won’t be as nice as that drone, but soon, if you don’t give me any reason to stop your allowance, you can get another one. And maybe another one after that.”

“Hey, you’re right!” Brock pounded his open hand. “That sounds awesome!”

“But you’ll forget about those toys sooner or later.”

“Nuh-uh!”

“What about that Applejack figure you got for Hearthswarming? I found it behind the radiator.”

Brock frowned in intense concentration. “That doesn’t count!” he sputtered. “Her legs don’t even move!”

Dad nickered, tipping his muzzle so that Brock would look up at the house. Mom was there, in the window. “Before we got you,” Dad said, “we had lots of different kids. We would take one out of foster care for a little while, see how well we got along, and then put them back.”

Brock furrowed his nose. Not paying much attention, like usual, he was instead trying to see if he could look down at the top of Dad’s mane. He was getting towards the age where he would tower over his father soon.

“Some of the families we were friends with just kept on doing this forever. They would bring home a child every month, and never pick just one. But you mother and I knew that wasn’t what we wanted.” He looked over, leaning his head back knowingly so that he was once again taller than his son. “Now, when we got you, do you think you were easy to get along with?”

Brock gaped for a second. “I must have! I was the best, wasn’t I?”

Dad chuckled. “Nope. You set our favorite carpet on fire.”

“Oh. That was before you adopted me, huh?”

A nod. “But we decided that we had to make a choice. We knew that it wouldn’t always be easy being your parents. But what we wanted was a real child, someone who we could call ours. And if we wanted that, we would have to give some other things up.”

“Like the carpet?”

“Yes. Like the carpet.”

Brock was still pouting as they clambered back up the hill. “But I’m not the best? Then how come you got me? I mean—you’re the best parents.”

Dad had snorted with laughter, nimbly tossing Brock’s carroty hair before the boy could leap away. “You’ll understand someday.”

In the year 2056, Brock sat up and hit his head on a metal grille. He growled, rubbing at his bangs the same way he used to rub away kisses left by the old stallion.

After slithering out from under the walk, he dropped himself out of the tunnel and sprinted through his front door. The aperture shut behind him with a gentle click.

He could hardly see in here. Brock wheeled the bedroom light up a couple stops so that he could find Aria without startling either of them.

She was there, lying on his mattress. Aria didn’t look angry or upset at being left alone in his room, but she did look worried about what Brock was about to do.

What he did was move slowly. First he sat cross-legged in the middle of the room. “Aria, I’m so sorry. I just—” He scratched his head. “Well—you scared me.”

Aria shook for a minute. But after she stepped down the footstool near his bed, she managed to smile. “…Understand.”

Braxis chuckled. “Yeah. Guess that arc-welder cuts both ways.”

He took a deep breath and looked straight into her pinprick eyes. “Okay. Last step.” Acceptance. “And—yes. I do. I still want this.”

Aria covered her mouth. Her wings buzzed, and she could but nod.

A week later, on an identical night, that’s what they did.

The steps were knocked out like dominos, and impatiently, Brock slid forward bit by bit. As he neared his bed, he noticed a silver glint underneath—an old-timey ‘exploration drone’ they used to market to kids in the forties. It was little more than a model ornithopter, with a few cheap sensor outfits and a laggy VR interface. You probably couldn’t find many intact these days. But Brock’s was in excellent condition. He still maintained it, and its wings were still painted, as colorful as a butterfly’s.

He stretched out on the bed and waited for Aria to join him. As soon as she was close he reached out, wanting to touch her. His hands carefully roamed from her eartips downward. She climbed onto his torso as if she was scaling a mountain, stopping every half-step to make happy chirrups or to flap, fanning the recycled air of the space station into his face.

And she got all of him.

The Brony and the Mule (part 3)

Tom dipped his knuckle into the loam. It came up with a fistful of wide green blades, even though he had already torn away much of the grass where he sat. He reached over his shoulder. And as his fingers unclenched slowly, Tom meditated on the raspiness of the tongue that licked them clean.

He was reclining against Hilda’s barrel. Even lying down, the cow was taller than a high-backed chair. It made for a relaxing seat, but Tom could feel every little gurgle and undulation to pass through her, breathing and the turning of four stomachs. In fact, he could feel her spotted coat right down to the hair. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. Tom frequently went without anything but a pair of gym shorts while in Ponyville, because nopony cared. He thought it wouldn’t have been kind to pointedly forego his usual habit just because he was on a date.

At least Hilda was having a good time. At least Tom thought she was. He was pretty sure. The judgment was based mostly on the way she pressed up against him, and the way her wet tongue lingered when she accepted each handful of grass. He’d never spent enough time around cows to become fluent at reading their body language, even though the outskirts of Ponyville were full of them. Not that he was proud of that. But it was unsettling, having to guess what thoughts lurk behind those blackened eyes and rolling jaw.

No matter. He was glad to feed her like this. It cost him nothing, and if her earlier hints were any indication, it gave her a great deal of satisfaction. Being hand-fed was at least as romantic in Equestria as it was on Earth. So maybe it was something Hilda used to daydream about.

Another plus was that it was something Tom knew how to do. That was a step up from most of today. He’d thought he could rely on his ability to figure things out as he went along—much like he’d done on his first time in Ponyville. But it wasn’t like that. Once or twice he’d tried giving her a sort of hug, with his outstretched arms wrapped maybe a quarter of the way around her barrel. But that hadn’t gone anywhere.

It should have been the perfect picture of a romantic afternoon. It was the kind of spot for a date that even Tom daydreamed about—a creek-side bluff dotted by dandelions and wild petunias. The sun was warm. And over a copse of maples, one could see the rotunda of town Hall, like a mild reminder that the world’s friendliest town was only a minute’s jaunt away.

Hilda seemed to belong here. Like a postcard for the fictional Wisconson that only existed on packages of butter and cheese curds. Tom only wished he meshed with these gorgeous wilds so well. Humans, at least the way Tom saw it, never seemed perfectly at ease at ease in Equestria, as though they weren’t really suited for this paradise—only getting along because the land was far too tolerant to dream of turning them away. But Hilda, she fit right in. Tom thought that this was something he could admire. He could find that beautiful, if he let himself soak it all in.

But he still wanted a little break from skin contact. Trying to be subtle, Tom leaned forward, unsticking his back from the cow’s coat, and then got onto his feet for a little stretch. With his eyes closed, he secretly relished his moment of freedom from any touch but the loose grasp of wind.

Hilda lifted her head to look at him, so Tom quickly shaded his eyes, letting on that he was getting up to scan the horizon. “You seen Dave and Greta?” he said. “They’ve been gone a while.”

Her tail flopped from one side to the other. She shifted her shoulders in a bulky shrug.

Tom frowned at the empty meadow. Now that he thought about, maybe it really should be worrying him. Neither Tom nor Dave had been to Equestria for a few months now. They’d always talked about taking a proper trip together before someone raised the price of a Gate ticket. There were a few towns in the tiny country which Tom hadn’t explored yet, including a place called Orange Hills out west that was supposed to be quite beautiful in the spring. But they’d never gotten around to it. Part of it was because Tom knew he would start running around gawking at things and wouldn’t get any work done for an eternity. He was trying not to get overly distracted while there was so to be done on Earth. Tom had made an exception for a date, of course. But that was just him. He wouldn’t put it entirely past Dave to try and ditch that mule so he could go off on his own.

“Hmm. Hope they’re doing alright.” Tom sat back down slowly, still sweeping the meadows and the winding blue track of the Candywine. He kept a sharp lookout for the rest of that day, concocting the terrible things he would do if he found his roommate causing trouble and heartbreak.

Dave’s head rose out of the shrub like a periscope—rotating silently to scope out the terrain in every direction.

So far as he could tell, the coast was clear. There was no one on the trail, and no one in the glade behind him. As soon as he had determined this, Dave began pulling his legs out of the shrubbery. Ponyville was only a short sprint away. It beckoned in the distance. As soon as he was free, he rolled to the next patch of cover, and hunkered down into the next bush, preparing to repeat the process.

Greta’s head popped out of the foliage next to him.

“There you are! What are ve running from?”

Dave fell over in a scatter of leaves. “Running? N-nothing! I was just...looking for some tastier flowers!”

Hurriedly he patted the ground and plucked a tiny purple plant with narrow petals. Dave held the bud out in his cupped hands. “Yay…flowers. You like?”

Greta sniffed at it from a distance and stuck out her tongue. “Dave, that’s a thistle. I hate thistles.”

“Oh.” Dave drooped, held the flower close to his chest, and coughed. “Then, uh,” He stooped again. “…how about this yellow-ish thing?”

Another sniff. “I don’t know. It could be full of bugs and stuff. It hasn’t been cleaned!”

He lifted one finger bemusedly. “Uh…that’s true. Never thought of that.”

Greta opened her mouth around the chrysanthemum anyway. She was just about to bite down when she gasped. “Gentle Celestia. What if it has worms? I might get worms! Do you haff any idea how much it sucks to haff worms?”

Dave held the flower between two fingers. “Can’t…can’t say that I do.”

“My cousin died that way!”

Greta rollicked the air with a snort. “Who got to decided that feeding a girl wildflowers was romantic? Ugh. You just know it was a Ponyfillean. Nopony else could be that hopelessly romantic. Whoever it was deserves a good kick in the tail.”

Dave’s hands fluttered in a queer spasm. Had he been of a different inclination, he might have clapped a hand over his mouth. But it wouldn’t have stopped guttural burst of laughter which knocked him onto his back and upset a small family of quail in the process.

Greta poked him nervously. But he couldn’t reassure her that he was still breathing until a few minutes later. He’d spent way too long being jealous of Tom’s stories about First Contact, such that he knew just how many of Tom’s friends thought that what he was doing right now was the hottest thing around. And he knew how many mares had lured them into the hills with the exact picnic that had just made Greta stick out her tongue.

“Oh…” Gasping for breath, he pulled himself back to his feet with one first cocked. “Hoof bump, girl. Hoof bump. You earned it.”

A hoof bump was especially nice because it took the focus off the goopy eyes Greta had been making at him ever since they left the Canterlot Gate. For the first time, they laughed together, snickering over the remains of a couple shredded flowers.

When Greta caught her breath, she stood back, looking at Dave from behind a blustery veil of swirling petals and floppy ears. She was smiling so fondly it seemed that she might try to nuzzle him any time. Dave readied himself for it.

“You know…” she said slowly, “we don’t have to stay out here. If you don’t vant to.”

This was the opposite of what Dave expected to hear. He flung his hands out. “No! No, no, you don’t have to do that. Let’s totally go walking again, I was cool with—”

“No, I’m serious.” She tilted her head. Her expression was more inscrutable than usual.

“Well so am I. I'm totally serious all the time—”

“We could hit the Lick if you want. I think they’re putting the OSU-Michigan game on TV.”

“Wait. What?” Dave froze as if struck. “You know about that?”

“Duh.” Greta rolled her eyes. “Ponyfille’s close to Ohio now. We have to be at least a little curious what football is, since it makes you apes go so crazy. Besides, it gives a ‘ground-pounder’ like me something to talk about when the pegasi in my tower are going on about their stormball teams. I thought it was really sweet you were willing to miss the game for me, but honestly, I vouldn’t mind seeing it either.”

“And—they have a TV in Ponyville? I mean, this is Ponyville.”

“Ponyfille’s first idiot box. Tonight’s the debut night.”

Dave glanced past her at the chuckle-puffing rooftops. Greta followed his gaze over Ponyville’s chimneys.

“Dude,” he murmured into the wind. “You’re serious.”

“Well, by ‘TV’ I mean Lyra’s smart-phone steampunked to an old slide projector, but no one knows the difference. They figure if the Gate stays open until midnight, and they get Twilight to cast a Starswirl’s Eldritch Corridor spell to bend space and time, they can pirate wi-fi from the Starbucks on the Earth side of the terminal.”

“No, I mean…”

With a little twitch of his left hand, Dave trailed off. A fine-toothed gear had clicked into motion somewhere in his mind. Its teeth dug deep into his thoughts, and within an instant the whole of the clockwork was in motion. His other thoughts were suspended, unused to so much commotion. He felt cast adrift, and just a little nauseous—

But not entirely lost. The sensation was familiar. He’d felt this way once before.

It had been a lazy Saturday afternoon. Long ago. As Dave recalled, Tom had invited him over to watch some show or other, and Dave had accepted only because Tom was a pretty nice guy and he didn’t have much else to do. But he’d felt tricked when the screen powered on to unveil a chorus of singing, dancing ponies in all the colors of the rainbow.

“What the hell is this?” He remembered saying that. Tom, being the kind of person Tom was, had pushed Dave back into the armchair when he tried to get up. Dave had eaten the entire bag of pretzels out of petty spite.

Because what kind of show for little girls could possibly be worth watching? Sure, girls were just as smart as guys; they could do whatever, be engineers if they really wanted, so on and so forth. But when Dave turned on the TV he wanted to see adventure. He wanted to see explorers and warriors, people setting out to change the world. People fighting for what they believed. What use was putting a girl on the screen if she didn’t even have boobs?

But Tom hadn’t needed to push Dave into his chair a second time.

This time Dave recognized the turning of the gears. His head was still twirling, of course, so in flux that he felt he couldn’t recognize the creature sitting before him. But his vision focused on her momentarily. She was paying close attention to him—he’d been standing still for so long that she was probably worried about him. Her face had concern on it, but also a smile as warm as a fuzzy jacket fresh out of the dryer.

“I can pretend to get drunk on salt?” he mumbled plaintively.

This time he caught Greta’s smirk of amusement. “Act wasted off your ass. No one vill notice.”

Dave hesitated a moment—on a precipice. But now that he was pausing to think about it carefully, it seemed important to note that the whole My Little Pony thing had worked out pretty well. Maybe he should follow this feeling for a little while. See where it led.

“Well, then? What are we waiting for?” He jumped to his feet, smacking his palm, her shoulder, his shoulder. “If we don’t miss the kickoff—let’s watch football!”

Tom, meanwhile, was turning green and trying to hide in the corner.

“And that’s how it’s done!” proclaimed a blonde cow perched atop a low wooden stage. She finished off her presentation by giving a rattling kick to the tall aluminum buckets scattered about the display. “Cap it up for the creamer’s and Bob’s your uncle.”

A three-year old foal quavered forward, slipping right under the rail and its lacquered information signs. He nuzzled the presenter’s foreleg as he looked up at her with big brown eyes. “Does it huwt, Misses Mawy-Ann?”

“Of course not!” she said, looking with care at the green spindly fuzzball. “No more than getting a hoof trim.”

“But I hate getting a hoof trim!” shrieked a pink filly, jumping up on her classmates. To avoid being knocked into Tom scooted back further, although he was already pressed against the back guide ropes.

“No—no, dearie.” Mary-Ann tried to calm the roiling masses. “It was just a metaphor.”

“Do metaphors hurt?” belted a blue colt.

Hilda waved from the back. “Heeeeeeeeey! Mary-Ann!” She probably would have been at the front of the tour group if doing so wouldn’t have blocked the view. Tom, for his part, was determined to stay far away from the wooden stalls at the far end of the large cabin.

The blonde tore her gaze away from her primary audience for a second. “Oh, hey, Hilda! About time you stopped by to say hello! Your mother coming in Wednesday?”

“I think so. Little Jeffrey’s starting to wean, you know, but she said a few more weeks yet.”

“Just lovely. You know I’d chat, but I’m giving a tour now. By a dear and help these sweeties on to the gift shop?”

The dozen or so Canterlot foals swarmed about Tom’s ankles, herded to the far door by a navy-blue teacher with an apple for a cutie mark and a frazzled grey sprout for a mane. Dave followed at a distance, but he did surreptitiously hand out bits to a few of the foals who were clamoring for pocket change to buy cups of ice cream from the gift shop. He saw the semi-terrified stares with which the grade-schoolers regarded him, and watching them transform into gleeful smiles was far too much to resist. It wasn’t a big handful of bits to give out anyway. The principal feature of Equestrian gift shops was that the prices were actually in the range of basic decency.

“You should try some too,” Hilda said. “This stuff’s even better than what you get at Sugarcube, don’t you know. Fresh out of the mixer.”

“Oh…” Suddenly paling once more, Tom raised his hands and backed away from the cooler. “No thank you. I’m—not quite hungry right now.”

“Really?” Hilda tossed her head. “Are humans squeamish about everything?”

“Where’s this coming from?”

Hilda led the way past shelves filled with gleaming cheese wheels. “I don’t know. You just seem…squeamish since we got here.”

Tom scratched his neck. “I don’t know about that, I’m just…under the weather a bit, maybe.”

They exited onto a path of well-fit granite plates, which led past a small herb garden, and down the steep hill to one of Ponyville’s main road. It was a lovely cottage. The daisies lining the fence were wild, inasmuch as anything in central Equestria could be considered ‘wild’.

“Still,” Tom admitted, “I sometimes imagine Equestrian society would collapse if it weren’t for your dairy products. It must really defray the cost of raising a calf.”

“Why would you say that, silly? We all split the profits. Everyone helps out, after all. It brings us together.”

“Ah! Of course, of course.” Tom placed his fingernails against her coat and tried to scratch his way up to her ears—but they were too high to reach.

“It lets the old sows gossip,” Hilda went on, “the kids have someone to play with…how else would we have time to catch up? If it weren’t for Saturdays I wouldn’t know what was going on in anyone’s life!”

As opposed to the present state of affairs, Tom thought, wherein Hilda seemed to know the name and history of every cow in Ponyville.

“How do humans keep up with each other?”

“Oh, you know.” Tom shrugged. “I guess we all just sort of—do our own thing.”

The Lick wasn’t quite what Dave had imagined when Greta referred to it as the seediest spot in Ponyville. Perhaps this should have come as no surprise. It struck him as more a seven-year old girl’s idea of a bar than a bar itself.

There was hardly a spot of drab or ill-lit brown anywhere to be seen. The façade was impressively pink, and the interior was dominated by the back shelves—which were stuffed with such a rainbow of exotic-looking drinks that Dave couldn’t believe anypony actually knew what was back there. But salt and hard cider were on tap, as long as apples were in season. And the barkeeper, who whistled when they came in, was more than friendly. A couple mares brought their foals to watch Lyra duct-taping a smartphone to a contraption of mirrors atop an Equestrian slide projector. One was even breast-feeding her youngest, standing over the knock-kneed foal and caressing its fuzzy mane.

The one real bar-like characteristic the place had was that it was never quite big enough for a real party. The place was packed to the rafters even an hour before the game. Greta passed the time by telling everypony about Dave’s polo exploits, without his permission. When Lyra got the screen to come on, Dave was summoned to steal the spotlight by explaining the rules of football. He got away with stretching the facts a bit, because ponies made allowance for his having downed nearly half a block of salt. But Lyra eventually did call him out on that and everypony pulled him down to give him noogies.

Interestingly, Greta pressed him for a sober explanation of the rules. Dave started to take great pleasure in initiating a willing student to the great game.

He was just debating whether to actually intoxicate himself—Ponyville hard cider was a weighty opportunity—when Greta rescued him from Lyra’s noogie grip. “Dave! You’ll neffer guess who’s here!”

Dave was going to guess, but he didn’t have time before she sat him on a swivel bench and spun him round. When he blinked, he was being examined by three copies of Greta.

Dave blinked again. Two of the Gretas were taller than the original, and one had slightly darker coat hair. Dave stiffened up and released a cramped hand-wave.

“Mother,” said Greta, a little twinge of nervousness in her voice, “this is Dave. We met at—er—at the planet Earth. Dave, this is Mom, Dad.”

“Charmed.” Dave bumped two hooves, keeping his smile nailed in place.

“Oh, that’s just darling,” said Greta’s mother. “Are you haffing a nice time?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re so tall. Are you fully grown yet, or vill you keep getting bigger?”

Dave nodded. “Fully grown,” he added quickly when that failed to answer the question.

“You look good together,” observed Greta’s father.

But the Mrs. tugged on his neck. “Ooh, Sugar-cakes! Look at what that unicorn’s up to!”

The second they had drifted away, he turned to hiss at Greta. “Who brings their parents on a first date?”

Greta’s nervous smile melted into an honest giggle. “An Equestrian, silly! Now stop looking at them like you’re about to get interrogated! You’re going to make them feel bad.”

Dave glanced suspiciously over his shoulder. The mules were clustered around Lyra’s impromptu vaudeville show at the moment. He tried to steer himself and Greta off to one side, where they could have a couple drinks on their own. Greta downed a sip of cider with him, but went for a small bottle of clear stuff that looked as though it burned on the way down.

Then, while Dave was keeping an eye on the parents, another mule snuck up on him from behind. “Yo!” said a tall mare with a nearly peach-colored coat and sunglasses. “You must be that Dave chap! I’m Periwinkle Star, say, Greta tells me she never once met a human who had mule pie before.”

Dave hung there with his mouth open as the new arrival wriggled his way closer around the crowd. “Now that you’re in town,” she went on, “Gloria should be making a couple as soon.”

“As soon as we can get the cashews!” added another, smaller mule which popped up on her back. His voice was squeaky as a train whistle. “She has to send all the way to Trottingham to get the good ones! You can’t make real mule pie without good cashews.”

“No way, no hay!” they chorused in unison.

“Don’t mind the cousin,” Periwinkle said with a nudge to Dave as she pushed her echo down behind her. “He’s never seen a human before, probably wants to add you to his butterfly collection. Welcome to the Starsaddle clan!”

“It’s….just one date,” Dave waved both hands about in a vague defensive posture.

“That’s cool. But listen, you ever need a place to crash while you’re in Ponyville, drop by my place! Sixty-two Whinny Court, the poshest pad on the block. Oh, and before I forget, take one of these. Couldn’t forgive myself if I let a date of Greta’s go without the proper welcome.”

Greta barely nudged Dave into raising his hands in time for Periwinkle to drop a steaming funnel cake on a plate. It was three layers high and decorated with a smiley face of cherries and molasses.

Dave stared at Periwinkle.

Greta rolled her eyes. She eventually got the chance to wheel Dave away on the pretense of bringing him for a cider refill.

“He’s trying to be nice!” she whispered “What are you scared of?”

“I…” Dave shrugged. “It’s just weird.”

“What’s weird?”

“You know, all these mules. They act like they know me.”

“Dave, you act like you know efferyone!”

“Yeah, but this is…different. Took me by surprise is all.”

Greta bit her lip. “Sorry if you feel a little claustrophobic,” she said earnestly. “We were bound to run into someone, though. There’s about forty Starsaddles in and around Ponyville, and I’m sure half of them know that I’m going on my first date in a year.”

“Really?” Dave tried to spy on them over his shoulder. “Do you just all…keep up with each other all the time?”

“Das’ how it is.” Greta took another swig from her bottle of fire-starter. “It gets kind of annoying sometimes. Why do you think I work in Canterlot? When fifteen mules come running every time I sprain my ankle, you’d think I couldn’t take care of myself, you know? Kind of annoying.”

“Yeah…” Dave stared at the funnel cake waiting for him to bite into it. “…Annoying. I’ll bet.”

Tom strode away from the wooden fence, waving both hands over his head.

“Nope!” he cried. “I just can’t. Not going to do it.”

“Tom!” Hilda lumbered after him. “Don’t be like that! A little gambling never hurt anybody.”

Tom spun about, still walking backwards, eyes crooked with bewilderment. “It’s not…Hilda, how is it even gambling? Whoever goes on the field basically just decides which square wins!”

“It’s not like that. You enter a sort of zen state.”

He tried to refocus his vision, see something curvy in the blotches falling into step behind him. But trying so hard made his eyes redden.

Several dozen mules, and not a few earth ponies, clustered about the grassy space in back of the Lick. The tailgate party was officially in full swing, but there was no longer enough space to fit everyone inside the building.

Dave was inside a chalk rectangle, with Greta on his side, and three other mules on the far side of the net. Periwinkle was standing in the back corner, spinning a volleyball on the tip of one hoof. It was tied for the winning point. Dave knelt close to the ground and cracked his neck.

“Waboosh!” Periwinkle cried. The ball came zinging in, but Dave jumped forward with surprising agility for the largest player around. He punted the ball up almost at ground level, setting up for Greta to dive over his prone form and spike it back over the net.

“We did it!” she shouted as the other team tripped over themselves in the final rush, and the ball bounced off to the side. She clapped Dave’s shoulders almost before he’d gotten up. “Number one! Number one!”

Dave picked her up on his shoulders and ran about the yard, roaring and scaring as many of the fillies as he could. “That’s how it’s done!”

She shrieked with laughter, bouncing on his shoulders.

“Not bad for a nerd,” he said, looking up.

She batted his hair. “Yah! I was going to say not bad for a knucklehead. Volleyball is a mental game, efferypony knows dat.”

“Hey!” Now there was a yellow unicorn shouting at them from the door. “Game’s about to start! You in or not?”

Dave looked about, trying to count the number of bodies around him. There had to be at least thirty, and that wasn’t even beginning to count the already rafter-high crowd inside. “But there’s no way to bring it outside, is there?” he called out. “I don’t see how…woah!”

His words were lost when the flood of equinity swept him up in its tides, squeezing him through the door and into the now-musky dim of the Lick. Ponies and mules stacked on top of each other. The smells of crusty salt and fermented apples were present in quantity.

Dave wasn’t completely sure what happened, but he wound up seated on a round table with two other ponies, a mule, and some pegasus foal who kept bawling until somepony picked her up and burped her. He was afraid to move his legs, as he would only have been able to see who they were touching if there’d been more light than the silvery glow from the projector screen.

Somepony poked Dave in the arm. He turned to find an oval face and curled hair squinting back at him. He screwed up his face and stuck out his tongue. “Wait…” he said, “wait…”

“Greta’s mom,” she whispered with a little smile.

Dave snapped his fingers. “That was my second guess!”

She shimmied a little closer, to whisper a bit more conspiratorially. Dave felt odd for a second, but decided not to scooch away, and watched her carefully as she settled in near and patted him on the shoulder.

She whispered. There were mules stacked up behind them into a mountain which seemed to help block the sound. “Greta hasn’t been home for a couple months, and you must know how I worry being a mother. How is she doing?”

Dave pinched his brow. “You want to know like if she got in trouble?”

“Horseapples, I hope not! I just want to make sure she’s happy. You don’t have to spill her private life, but I want to make sure she’s okay.”

“Well…” Dave rested back on his hands and tried to conjure up an answer for that question. “I haven’t known her super-long. But she’s real smart. She came up with a one-man rule to avoid extra polo collisions. And she smiles a lot. Most of the time, anyway. Yeah. I guess she’s doing just fine.”

He came up with a good idea for what to say a second later, and puffed out his chest with a grin. “Hey. She scored a date with me, didn’t she?”

Somepony noogied his head with a hoof, causing Dave to cringe under the friction. “Ow, ow! Hey! Not cool!”

Then a horseshoe-shaped stadium appeared on the screen. A brown warmth closed in as the crowd quieted down. Everypony was fixed on the moving images now, and Dave took the opportunity to glance around himself. He was surrounded on all sides.

Ohio State was going to have the kickoff. Dave cleared his throat at the appropriate time. “Alright,” he declared loudly, “when that guy runs at the ball, we have to do what’s called the kick-off chant. Just follow my lead!”

The punter began his journey. Dave threw up his arms. “Ooooooooh!”

He was alone in a room. Dave trailed off before the second note, turning rapidly red as he looked around until suddenly something jumped onto the table.

“Oooooooh!” Greta shouted, throwing her hooves in the air.

Leading by example, they managed to get everypony doing the Ohio State kickoff chant by the time the ball was in the air.

OSU opened strong. They were able to get keep getting first downs for the longest time, and had a couple lucky field goals. But just a little after half-time, the streaming video was interrupted by a flurry of sparks. Both smart-phone and projector went up in smoke to a chorus of disappointed groans.

Dave and Greta weren’t too disappointed, though. As far as they were concerned, they won that game.

Tom and Hilda walked back into town slowly. From a distance, they looked like two lovers savoring a slow return from an afternoon away from civilization. Up close, they looked like two fillies who’d just lost their favorite cardboard Royal Guard armor to the rain.

Tom kept playing the day over in his head. Sitting had been too boring for either of them to bear after a while. Letting Hilda give him a tour of Ponyville had seemed like a great idea. After all, it would get her talking. And it was always nice to let a girl talk, or so Tom had been told.

But even that couldn’t last forever. When he got desperate, Tom had drawn on some of the wilder stories from his friends who’d been in relationships with mares. Timidly, he suggested that maybe Hilda give him a ride on her back. That simply hadn’t gone well at all.

He coughed. “I had a good time today, Hilda.”

She was looking directly forward.

“But…I, uh…I don’t think it would work out.”

“Obviously,” she said tersely. Tom winced.

She swung her head to fix him with an incredulous gaze. “Hey. What were you trying to prove, anyway?”

Tom threw up his hands. “I don’t know. Celestia damnit! I have to go apologize to Dave. I can’t even imagine how those two have been faring.”

“Have a nice trip back to Earth,” Hilda smirked.

“You aren’t coming back?”

“No, I think I’ll stay with the family. Earth was nice to visit, but…this is home.”

Tom looked around at the colorful houses and the sunny sky. “Can’t argue that.”

“Besides, there was some guy at the bus station that kept looking at me and licking his chops. It was really creepy."

Tom didn’t say much else until they found Dave.

It took so long because they weren’t in the back nine or at the designated meeting point, out behind Carousel Boutique. Of all places, they were in the Lick, and it took sifting through quite a crowd to find them there.

Tom didn’t get a chance to use his choice words, because a minute after he caught sight of Dave, Greta popped up behind him.

“What did you do?” Tom said. “And…how did you get those?”

Dave and Hilda tugged at the collars of the OSU jerseys they both sported. Hilda’s was fitted rather trimly, and if Tom’s judgment meant anything, ran some small danger of starting a new trend. “Three words, mah man,” said Dave. “Unicorns ain’t the only ones who can tailor like lightning.”

Tom smiled wanly. He took a deep breath and snuck a peek at Greta. “Okay. Dave? Listen. Um, I…feel like I owe you an apology. And…for what it’s worth, you’re uh…you’re done now. You know. With the thing.”

“Done?”

Dave exchanged a look with Greta. After a pause, during which they seemed to have a short conversation with their eyes, they gave subtle nods.

“Actually,” said Dave, glancing at Hilda, “we were gonna’ ask if you two wanted to tail us to King’s Island next week.” His gaze flitted between them. “Guess…that’s a no. But hey! That’s cool.”

Tom made a face. “But…Dave, what happened?”

Dave made an innocent face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. You said this little number was going to be a swag date and she was. I’m thinking I might make it a habit.”

Tom stared slackjaw. Dave stared back nonchalantly, sipping a flagon of cider through a crazy straw.

Tom put his hands on his pockets, and tried to chuckle, but it came out breathy and hopeless. After covering his mouth for a second, he smiled. But then he had a thought and the smile disappeared just as quickly. “Say Dave, you’re not going to tell anyone about all this, are you?”

Dave leaned forward just long enough to poke his roommate in the chest. “Dude. What happens in Ponyville stays in Ponyville.”

Tom shut his mouth, because he recognized this statement as an immediate and universal truth.

The Poet and the Changeling (part 2)

When Ars awoke next morning, the tree was gone.

He scoured the sidewalk with twigs, in growing dismay. She had vanished almost without a trace—the only sign that a sycamore ever stood here were the holes left by her roots, now ready and waiting to trip him every time he walked out of his front door. Ars knew that trees didn’t simply abandon a perfectly good yard without provocation—this must have been what her brother had called a tremor.

So that was it, then. She could be anywhere now. Nightmares played through his head of a shriveled, slimy mass of tentacles shivering in a ditch. Or, even worse, crying out from the gurney-gleaming depths of a government laboratory. There was no way to find her.

He felt like going right back to bed. In desperation Ars scraped the bottom of the bin for cookie dough, and baked it all on one giant cookie sheet. When they came out he poured himself a sixteen-ounce glass of milk and sat down on his front steps..

His plans changed when he noticed the panther on the lawn.

Half-dropping, half-dumping the cookies out of the tray, Ars held it in front of himself like a flimsy Teflon shield. “Nice kitty…”

He managed to back up slowly without making eye contact. But the three-foot journey back through the front door was long. After making it inside, Ars immediately locked every orifice to his house. Then he stood plastered to the parlor window, with his nose squished against the class in awe.

She was a black spot, easy to miss against the morning light. Ars wondered when she had transformed. How long had she been there, curled up sleeping as if the passing cars were of no concern? Even the garbage truck must have failed to faze her. She slept in stretching power as if the whole world was hers.

A watering can wouldn’t do much good anymore.

Ars didn’t know what would do her good. He didn’t much feel like offering up any of his limbs as a smackerel. So he took shelter inside and contented himself with checking up on her every now and then. It was a terrifying morning. Mostly he paced in his study, working on poems and finishing letters to friends he had long forgotten. Lunch consisted of cold deli meat on Wonderbread. In short, things indoors were very normal, but this in itself drove Ars to fascination.

Because every time he did check on her—every few nervous minutes at first, then less and less as the day wore on—she was doing well. No holes, at any rate, though he kept a sharp watch for leopard spots of a grotesque persuasion.

There were so many things he’d wanted to ask that young man about love before he vanished. Or at least about what he meant by the word ‘love’. The word had been so trampled in English, it was hard to say what it meant. If it really was Ars’ doing that she seemed comfortable, did it mean that this was love? A second of sitting backwards on a tan sofa to make sure she was safe and sound?

At night, trashcans rattled and terrified neighbors phoned in. Ars pacified everyone as best he could. He had to fall back several times on his well-known habit of falling from abstraction into irrelevant imagery. More than one piercing question was deflected by speaking at length about how butterfly wings were like the stalk of a panther in the depths of a suburban jungle.

But Ars was biting his nails when the sun found him next morning. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe she wasn’t doing well. Were panthers supposed to sleep so much? He hadn’t seen her move all day, save for the odd twitch of a pipe-cleaner tail. He didn’t know enough about panthers to tell if that was normal. All he knew was that instead of meat, this mighty cat needed love.

Ars fell to tearing his hair in frustration. As a panther, she was frightening enough to paralyze him. One sidelong look could send him into flight. How? How could he love her when it was so dangerous?

Despite having Tennyson, Frost, Donne, Morris Bishop and Silverstein on his shelves, he could make no progress on the conundrum. When he found himself too distraught to write a villanelle instead, he scrapped it in favor of dealing with another, equally pressing worry. What would happen if she wandered off? Her brother had said she was a danger to herself, and now Ars could see why. One call to the police and she would be shot. In fact, it was a miracle they weren’t already on their way.

Ars was too afraid to make a break for his car. But dug through his refrigerator for all the meat that wasn’t microwaveable—a few burger patties and a ham-bone of Christmas Past. He threw it into a clean trash bag and snuck out the back door, laying the meat on the lawn with a swiftly beating heart.

He felt like a walking jackhammer. Every step he took felt like a gunshot, because if the panther had gotten up already, he wouldn’t even hear her coming. But somehow he managed. First, he unlatched yard gate, and then crept a circle around his house, shutting the gate behind her as soon as she was inside.

Would it keep her in his backyard? Surely she could jump the fence with ease if so inclined. But luckily, it seemed she chose to stay. This made it a little less nerve-wracking for Ars to sit outside—on the roof, naturally—and watch her.

Perhaps a physical snack gave her current form a burst of energy, or perhaps she was showing off for Ars. Either way, he got to glimpse how powerful that panther body was. The sapling he had planted when Rodney King died, with all its wire ties, never stood a chance.

She wasn’t showing off. That’s the conclusion Ars came to. This was grace without artifice, without thought. And Ars wondered—was this love the same as yesterday, merely changing as she changed? Or was he falling in love all over again?

But he didn’t have time to find out. The day wasn’t quite gone when suddenly the panther vanished, twisting in the evening shadows until Ars couldn’t see anything. He climbed down the gutter with a stick in one hand, shaking, until he tripped over the box turtle which sat in the panther’s place.

So he took her inside to keep her warm, and the next day it started all over again. First panic, then figuring out what to do. This time, to prove that his love wasn’t lazy, he did his research. Box turtles ate a variety of foods, including earthworms, peas, potatoes, and dandelion greens. He measured out amounts precisely by the book. And he even made another trip to the gardening store for a spade, so that he could dig her a pond with a plaster cherub fountain and everything. When that project failed to produce anything but a well-decorated mud puddle, he inflated a kiddie pool and filled that up instead.

She had a rash of tremors through the next couple weeks. An ostrich, an African violet, a skunk. One day Ars couldn’t find her, and he was pretty sure she spent that day as a gnat. The same story unfolded over and over. The neighbors quickly decided he was crazy. But Ars didn’t mind that. He was at a loss as to how it had taken them this long. And he was constantly occupied these days. She wasn’t easy to keep up with. Every week, her life was something new, and he was along for the ride. Every day he couldn’t be sure if she was really the same person he remembered—and was there ever any guarantee that he would fall in love again?

But although he was busier than before, his poetry began to flow—faster, thicker. The needle-thin stream from his pen was incapable of delivering ink fast enough. Ars started questioning his old decision to move into solitude for the sake of the art.

Some days, when he was very lucky, she would talk to him. She spent one day as an old Norwegian man. Ars learned to make a thick porridge while she told stories about growing up in the badland hives. For a few hours, on a night much later, she was a beautiful woman with hair beyond her waist, and she let Ars try to kiss her before turning into a woodpecker at the last second and darting to his eaves. They never did introduce themselves to each other—not in words, when words were precious.

But just as he needed her, she depended on him. Ars determined to learn everything he could about her, and not just about her costume of the day, either. He needed to know about her as a Changeling.

There were many things about Changelings which you could only learn from other Changelings. But that proved to be a surmountable obstacle. Changelings were everywhere. Ars eventually figured out that he could find them if he stood in the center of a crowded supermarket, and while looking over the pomegranates whispered something about loyalty to the queens of ever-shifting shadow. Eventually some dapper-looking individual would stand over his shoulder, and Ars would explain his story in the fewest words possible before they realized he wasn’t one of their own.

The secrets weren’t free, of course. The young man had been right about the jealousy of Changelings. None of his contacts seemed particularly sympathetic to his story about taking care of a defective drone, either. To buy what he needed he offered himself up, sometimes as a one-night stand, and other times, as some Changelings preferred to take him, like the liquid in a syringe. These latter encounters left him feeling unable to write a single line of poetry for weeks on end.

But what he learned helped him to take better care of her. So it was worth it. Although one of his discoveries confused him for the longest time. It was one of the first things he learned, in fact. Changeling drones were androgynous. It made sense for the young man to have thought of himself and his sister as siblings, especially if they’d hatched from the same cluster of four or five eggs. But what had compelled him to call her his sister?

Perhaps—though Ars wasn’t convinced—it was because of her fickle nature. One day, for instance, just to prove to him that she had no limits, she was a statue when he got up to greet her.

He stood before her with his body slack. He arms hung loose, his jaw hung loose—pretty much everything. Her likeness was angelic, a perfect replica of the Venus de Milo. But her plaster was cold and hard for Ars to beat his hand against.

How could he even touch this? What place was there for him, if not to stand awkwardly to one side? There was no way to be nice to a statue. It just stood there, until after a few millennia the dust in the wind weathered it away. That’s what statues. Convinced there was no way to love an invulnerable lump of rock, Ars gave up and retreated into his writing desk. He managed to ignore her for over a day.

Of course, that only sent him flying up in bed with a cold sweat next afternoon. Weeping as he stumbled to the yard—what had he done to himself?—he leapt out, inspired to polish her from top to bottom and put up a tarp against the pounding rain.

That took very little time. So once he was done he ate lunch and dinner under the tarp, with her, by the light of an electric lamp. As if they’d had a fight, he bathed in her presence, pressing his cheek against her plaster robe. It wasn’t, but he tried to let himself admire her beauty without worrying what part he played in it.

That particular night was a long one. He didn’t feel like going to bed, only sitting as his tiny yard turned to mud. He some poetry there, using her plinth as a table. And as far as first drafts went, he was rather pleased. Not surprised—the best poetry was always written with itchy skin at midnight. But this was particularly promising. With a little work he might be published.

Eventually, as weeks passed, he stopped complaining about how his hands were tired. He started to smile at the bewildered lovers on the iron-wrought bridge, and shared knowing nods with the new parents, ruddy-faced in the early morning. Love was a lot like writing poetry—not because of any analogy Ars could think of. He just felt that way.

And when she became a falcon, some months later, he knew without philosophizing that he had to let her fly. She didn’t look back as she took off to wheel around the sun. Ars let the wind sting his eyes. It would be up to her whether or not she ever came back. But he, for his part, would be here waiting. And trying not to worry. Wherever she went in this world she would at least be well-fed.

At Dawn

Applejack stumbled out of the house early on a Tuesday. The day had a welcoming warmth to it, with clear white sunshine making even the apple trees seem to wave hello. Clearly no accident on Rainbow Dash’s part. The pegasus been getting better and better at doing real weather lately, instead of just thunderstorms. And nowadays she always asked when the apple harvest was about to start. It seemed that after all these years she was finally starting to mellow out.

But despite the perfectly-sculpted cheeriness, Applejack could only grunt sullenly at perky bluebirds. Her mane hadn’t been brushed. Her hat was on backwards. And against all better judgment, Bloom was being allowed to cook breakfast. This meant Applejack wouldn’t be eating until later.

The apples must come down. Everything was down but the east orchard. She’d saved that awful place for last again. At this point, she had today, maybe tomorrow to clear it out. Then the rot would appear. If ponies saw brown apples coming out of Sweet Apple Acres, the family would never live it down. Well—she wouldn’t, anyway.

But the way her hooves dragged down the porch steps was her fault, and no one else’s. She must have been up all night watching My Little Pony on the cable. If only she was a little more disciplined, she wouldn’t be so tired all the time.

Elliot was under the hickory. Same place as always. He was re-stringing a couple broken strands on his guitar at the moment, but Applejack slowed down even more as she passed, knowing that once he began to play, the music would relax her enough to keep going.

He looked up as she drew near, smiling like it was his birthday all over again. Elliot winked the way apple blossoms winked in dappled shade.

“Good morning, Applejack!”

“Morning, Ell,” she grunted.

“I don’t suppose you want any help picking apples?”

Applejack gave a soft snort of amusement. It must have become something of an inside joke at this point. Elliot said it every day, every season, except for winters, of course, when he had to play guitar from the hearth. Elliot didn’t mind the sitting room, but the hickory had always been his favorite, perhaps because he was a maudlin sort of human and it had been the first place he planted himself back when he’d started playing to Applejack.

Suddenly, as if inspired despite her grogginess, Applejack ground to a halt. Her left forehoof plowed a little anthill in the path.

She rested there for two breaths. Her head swung towards Elliot, who was still tuning.

Then, almost under her breath: “I could use a little help in the east orchard.”

A third guitar string snapped with a mighty twang as Elliot’s wrist jerked. He stared up at Applejack for some time.

It took him a full minute to double-take, stretch, and then—up on his feet so fast that Applejack nearly fell backwards.

“Sure! All you had to do was ask.”

He lifted one of the largest baskets from her saddlebags, and Applejack gave a short sigh of relief at the missing weight. They walked side by side into rows of heavy apples and the rising sun.

Ars doubted he would ever see his Changeling again. The odds of her wandering back to his yard by chance were pretty much absent. She was getting on in months anyway, and the world would not be graced with her presence much longer.

But he couldn’t be sure.

From the outside looking in, his life was exactly the same as it had been before. The neighbors were a bit more suspicious, but he went on aggravating them in just the same way, and pretending to keep a garden. He wrote his poetry on rainy afternoons.

Only nothing was alike kind. What if, just maybe, she was nearby? What if, every so often, she passed by in disguise to keep an eye on him? Technically she could be anyone. She could be that girl from the drug store who always caught his eye. Or she could be the pigeon who always pooped on his windowsill. She could even be the grocer who tried to shortchange him every time he spent an hour sifting for the freshest pomegranates.

There was no way to know. Everyone was suspect. It might have driven a lesser poet mad, but Ars found a way to move on. It wasn’t worth agonizing about, after all. All he had to do was treat every single life form he encountered as though they were his beloved.

So life went on, and nothing was the same.

But as fate would have it, he did see her one last time. It happened months after the falcon tremor, well after he’d begun to suspect that she must have taken on the form of loam and stardust. He stepped out of his house one morning to find himself surrounded by impossibly thick mist, and there were eldritch noises in the air.

Ars didn’t run from the chittering sounds. They could have been coming from far away, or they could have been coming from inside his yard—everything was so obscured that he couldn’t see as far as the chain-link fence. But he stood on a tiny circle of grass to meet the sound. Incidentally, it was the same spot where he’d once stood with her falcon’s talons digging into his arm, just before take-off.

A resplendent alien stepped forward.

It made for a terrifying sight, despite not being quite so tall as Ars. The creature walked on all fours and seemed to carry the strength of a small horse. Its wings were like those of an enormous dragonfly, but without the rainbow shimmer. And its carapace was thick and grease-shiny, pockmarked as if with bullet holes. Acorns crunched under its feet.

“Oh, Ars,” said a buzzing voice. “You’re still here.”

“I am,” said Ars. “Now how do you know my name?”

The cragged jaw split to unleash a short, earsplitting screech. Ars could barely register the pitch before the alien flew nearly close enough to crack him in two.

“It’s me, you fool! Who else would love you enough to sneak up on you?”

Some part of him looked, and knew that it was her. But he didn’t trust it. Some part of him looked at everything around him, every day, and always ‘knew’ that it was her. Every face, every passing shadow. Every blade of grass.

Ars crouched protectively. The motion brought his face level with hers.
“How can I know?”

“This is my true form! Can’t you see?”

He remained wary as he pored over her face, and smelled her odorless breath. “No. I don’t remember knowing anyone who looks like you. Unless I put my fingers into the holes in your side, I will not believe.”

She turned, lifting one wing, leaving her whole side exposed. He gently used one finger to trace a circle through her gaps—careful not to irritate the raw flesh underneath the shell.

“Oh, it is…”

Ars could barely contain himself. He didn’t know whether to shout or sing, so he wrapped his arms around her neck and kissed the cold, slimy surface. “You have holes,” he giggled. “Holes shot right through you. No wonder. Who could resist falling in love with a girl like that?”

===SOUNDTRACK: “Follow You, Follow Me” by Genesis===

Tom noticed that for a while, Porter had been staring at Dave with a mystified and vaguely disturbed expression. Fortunately, Dave was too occupied talking to Fluttershy to notice. But Tom was curious. He made sure to keep tabs on things from the corner of his eye, and eventually found his answer when he happened to see that Dave was showing Flutters his wallet pictures of Greta.

So he waited for the question. Tom didn’t give any indication of what he’d seen. Porter was still trying to be discreet, and Tom didn’t feel like calling him out. The chap was even trying to pretend he was still writing things down in his notebook.

After a few minutes Porter cleared his throat and interrupted the story Tom was telling. Right on schedule.

“Say, Mr. Silverstone.” His eyes lurched between the wallet pictures and Tom’s face. “Can I ask you…”

Tom interrupted Porter by passing him a drink. He leaned close across the table.

He raised one hand to keep Porter listening. “Okay. Listen tight. I’m gonna’ share a secret with you. This isn’t the kind of thing I’d tell just anyone. And you could have been a little more open-minded, but it occurred to me it's my job to teach you how. So I guess I feel like sharing."

Porter eased his notepad from blank page to page, glanced to either side, and nodded.

Tom gestured him to lean closer. Porter moved until their forehead were almost touching. Tom shook his head. A little closer.

“Kissing on ponies is actually kind of icky.”

Porter looked at his surroundings and proceeded to take a long drink.

“Hey, think about it,” said Tom. “First of all, have you ever actually smelled a pony? Like, walked right up and planted your nose on one? Er—silly question. But anyway, I have. And you know what they smell like? Horse. There’s a shocker. The rumor that ponies all wear a lot of body spray is true, but just while they’re out here on our world, and it’s not because they’re valley girls. They’re trying to be considerate.

“Actually kissing one isn’t for the faint of heart. I mean, first of all, there’s hair everywhere. It gets in everything, gets in your mouth. It’s like making out with a girl who has a giant mustache. And a beard. Secondly, your mouths really aren’t the right size for each other. The muzzle is a pretty awkward shape to smooch on. Sorry if I’m getting gross, but you know. You kind of asked. If she doesn’t know what she’s doing it’s kind of like sticking your face in a jar.

“But all that said—all of that—if you’re with the right pony, that kiss is the hottest thing in this life. In a way, it’s even better because it’s weird. You catch what I mean? Mashing your lips together? It’s because you know she wants you even though you don’t have any coat hair. It’s steamy because you know that despite how weird it feels, she still wants to give her tail a shake and jump up on your chest to plant one on you. Works both ways, too. You’re just that eager to kneel down for her. And that feels like nothing else I can describe. Once you get hooked, normal kisses seem boring. Every kiss with a pony shares how much you mean to each other.”

Tom leaned back, throwing his arms out to encompass the bar. “Now if that’s not the kind of sexy the rest of the world is into, fine. If they want to call that deviant, I’m not going to fight. But we’re going to be up here on Saturday night. Welcome to join us.”

I probably should have lingered a while longer, even once we’d talked that poor journalist into submission. But I quite simply needed another breather. My body was the one to let me know; almost before I knew what I was doing, I’d found an excuse to get up and was out front.

There was an old porch swing to one side of the steps. It didn’t swing, but I could sit and look inside from a relatively comfortable distance. Through the windows I saw blobs of color drifting from table to table. Lyra was nervously walking up and down the length of the bar. Hoping to get noticed, as always.

With my vision blurred a bit from the shape of the glass, I couldn’t tell the difference between what was going on in there and what went on during any day at home. Lyra had thought everything would be different here. And I was happy that she liked humans. Really, I was. But the same problems that kept her from going out and meeting other ponies weren’t going to magically disappear just because she was talking to a human. I think she was discovering that everything, even humans, were more intimidating in person than on a comic book page.

I was distracted from my dismal reverie by a squeaking door. Trying hard to pretend I hadn’t been spying through the window, I straightened to see who it was. Porter walked out.

He made for the steps, with his camera in his backpack and his notebooks in his back pocket. I supposed all that he’d come for was in order. He leaned against the post nearest the doorframe and stood there for a while, staring at the approaching storm. We were the only two presences on the porch. I don’t think he noticed me.

Some time later, he pulled out a phone and dialed a number. I tried not to listen to what came out of the speaker, but there was no blotting out the crisp clear words on his end.

“Hi, Joan? It’s me…yeah. Listen, do you want to—I don’t know. Hang out? …No. I’m serious. No, I…I don’t want anything. I just want to see you. Yeah, really. I’ll try to explain when you get here. I’m on…just a second.”

He stumbled down from the porch, hazarding a foray through the dark sidewalk, and sliding back and forth to guess which way the nearest street sign lay.

“Maynard Avenue,” I called out helpfully. Porter looked up in surprise, appearing to notice me for the first time, and then repeated my directions into the mouthpiece.

After he’d hung up, Porter dashed around the building into the parking lot. There was a beep, and he returned a minute later, racing up the patio steps with an enormous sheet of paper in his hands. He set it on the boards, uncapped a pen, and began writing. Every couple of moments he’d look my way, prompting me to try and convey the impression that I wasn’t staring at him. He filled up the paper to every extremity, and once there was no more place to write, he started to fold.

Sometime later a black car pulled up to the curb.

A plump woman in jeans stepped out and found Porter waiting at the base of the stairs. “Porter,” she said drily. “What the hell is up with you?”

But Porter was having none of that. He stepped forward with both arms wide to give her a hug. This seemed to alarm her at first, but once she realized what he wanted she vaulted forward and latched her hands around his neck.

I looked towards the corner of the patio and tried my hardest to become invisible. Because of magical training, I succeeded; the spell was well within my ability.

Once they finally separated, Porter stood back just far enough to hold out his folded paper flower. “I just started thinking,” he said—spinning around once to look at the Little Pony— “About some stuff.”

“What?” she grabbed his shoulders. “What’s the big idea? You can’t just call me out of the blue—”

He put his hand over hers. “It doesn’t matter. The important thing is, you’re here. Do you want to go for a walk with me?”

“Really?” She kept hanging back, eyes pinched in just a trace of suspicion. “Where?”

“Um…” Porter spun, looking all around. “I think there’s an ice cream shop down this way. If you want, we could go get some.”

It took a second. But once her mouth closed, she slid her hand inched forward, settling it on his arm. “Wow. I’d like that.”

His face fissured with a smile. “Wow. Alright. Let’s go.”

He offered his hooked elbow, which she accepted, and they set off down the road.

I quietly lifted myself off the swing and followed them a ways, tip-hoofing across driveways and letting the grass muffle my horseshoes. When the rains came, they stayed hand in hand. He swung off his jacket and held it over her head, to which she laughed and pulled out an umbrella for both of them.

I couldn’t hear their conversation from this distance, only catch a little bit of Porter touching the hair above her cheek. My horn glowed. With a smidgen of spellcraft I shaded the rain around them in a soft pink glow—not so much that they would notice, but enough to do a little something for them before I turned back.

These love stories Tom thought were so important—they weren’t anything really. I could have read embarrassments just like them in the Golden Oak’s paperback section. Not much had changed. And yet…

I am the Element of Magic. And personal student to the greatest spellcaster ever to live, on top of that. I know magic when I see it. And this was it.

Author's Note

A hearty thank you to everyone who enjoyed these stories.

At Twilight

18 Months after First Contact

Three ponies walked into a bar.

No, this isn’t the one about the donkey and the unicorn, and no, none of the ponies said ‘ouch’. In fact the doorframe was elevated far above our heads. If there was a joke to this, it was that we were stepping into a building of elongated scale, on a vast and strangely-colored world known as Earth.

That doesn’t seem like much of a joke in retrospect. We thought it funnier at the time, I suppose; we were all reasonably flushed before we even arrived at the bar. Alcohol was probably an unwise excess to add to the fun we’d already had that day. Earth may have the combined landmass of thirty-six-point-seven Equestrias, but three mares can subject a surprisingly large portion of it to their boisterous presence given a full day. Even worse, given the two humans we were dragging around with us. Er, not that I mean we were carting them around like servants. If anything, they were the ones showing us around. But ‘dragging around’ was how Lyra put it. She tap-danced some of the peeling blue paint off the porch and cried, “Hurry up, boys! What am I going to do with you? Do the girls have to drag your slowpoke butts everywhere?”

I probably should have said something. It’s trivial to say that after the fact, I know. I should have spoken up the past dozen times that day. Lyra kept making little jabs, and it became annoying when it added up.

Don’t misunderstand me, I have a deep affection for the mare. Lyra is one of my closest unicorn friends, and the only pony who ever truly appreciated the genius of my trans-planar windowing hypothesis—everypony else seems to assume it’s just a simple application of the Pythagorean theorem. But I can’t help suspecting that she views these trips to Earth as a chance to engage in a little old-fashioned sexism. She knows she can get away with it because most of the men don’t notice, let alone mind. I dare postulate that Tom even seems to enjoy it. But I wasn’t raised to think that it was acceptable beyond the age when colts still had cooties.

But I was in too exuberant a mood to let it ruin my day. A trip out to Earth was a treat for me. Although I’m ostensibly the official liaison to this planet, the position leaves me surprisingly little time to spend on its surface. Things were especially hectic back then, what with the peace accord having been signed only weeks ago, and I was spending most of my days fending off barbed letters from nobles at the Court of Dusk and Dawn. Most of them only wanted to know how many tax dollars I was planning to ‘waste’ on our newest allies—as if I somehow had I number I could conjure out of thin air! I hope I never have to take over Celestia’s job. Dealing with Canterlotian elite day in and day out—if she can survive a thousand years of that, she must really be immortal.

Today was something of an anomaly for me, then. Through clever multitasking, I’d managed to scrape up enough time for a day off. Both old friends and new were more than eager to take this opportunity and show me a day on the town, homos sapiens style.

Columbus held plenty of things for a pony to see and do. We had already stolen the show from the exhibits at the Columbus Zoo, been mistaken for Susan Rothenberg sculptures at the exhibits of the Wexner Center, and played the largest game of Frisbee I’ve ever seen in a park by the Olentangy River. I admit, I’d worried somewhat about how Fluttershy would handle the attention, but she showed a downright unusual amount of energy during the game, leaping with wings outstretched to catch high passes. I was so proud of her. Lyra, on the other hand, was expelled for cheating with telekinesis, but got back in when popular demand invited her back.

Even the Dimension Gate facility was one of the sights. It was shaping up nicely, with two new fifty-foot arches being welded in according to my exact specifications. Tom loved to complain about how the powers-that-be were trying to outdo us with a bigger Gate terminal in New York, right next to the United Nations. To hear him talk, it actively sucked the soul out of anyone traveling through it. He claimed it took all the fun out of hopping between dimensions by reducing it to the sterile discomfort of an airport. I usually couldn’t resist pointing out that he shouldn’t have been surprised; his was the species that had somehow managed to take the joy and freedom out of flight.

But the Columbus Gate had been the first real doorway to go up. And it was a ramshackle affair as far as design went, with the hyper-plane surfaces open to the air. On a sunny day, one could stand out on the platform, buy a hot dog or a daisy hayburger, and watch the travelers come and go from Canterlot. When the two new portals were completed, it would be possible to look out at three different cities of Equestria at once. Gate Two, Manehatten. Gate Three, Baltimare. So close you could literally reach out and touch them.

I admit to being rather proud of it all. Normally the wonder of it all, not to mention the proximity of my world, would have been too much for our human friends to resist. But today, they were determined to show off their own planet. I recall making an off-hoofed comment about being able to enjoy myself much more now that I could walk around in broad daylight. In fact, our excursion likely had as much to do with flaunting our freedom as anything else. It seemed like only yesterday we hadn’t been able to do more than peer out at each other’s worlds through darkened bedroom windows. Well—we’d occasionally done a little more than that. But only in the middle of the night, and only by involving, as Tom put it, ‘every kind of glorious indignity’. He may refer to it as glorious. I try to avoid bringing up the topic of ski masks in conversation.

To be clear, it wasn’t my idea to go out drinking at the end of the day. Now that I mention it, I can’t think whose idea it was. It probably just seemed like a sensible idea at the time. After all, Tom still technically owned the bar we were patronizing, though it ran itself entirely. And the building held a lot of memories for us.

The Little Pony was located far away from most of the bars in town. It didn’t even sport a sign. In fact, you might say it bore a suspicious resemblance to a small fraternity house that someone had bought out and repurposed for activities very similar to those which had gone on before.

When the five of us finally burst through the pale green door, the whole establishment came to its hooves—and feet, respectively. It was mortifying. Poor Fluttershy hid behind Lyra. Lyra lit up her horn and started signing autographs three at a time. I demurred the praise and general cheering that was being hurled my way, and tried to hide my blush behind a violet leg. “This is why I don’t like going out,” I mumbled.

But like it or not, we were celebrities here even more than everywhere else. They awarded us a round table in the center of the age-wrinkled floorboards; with a couple quick seat swaps it was set with two chairs and three short benches. It was a relief to see some pony-appropriate seating, after having to choose between finagling human chairs or standing all day.

“I see you didn’t have to change the decorations,” I said to Tom, counting the anime posters on the wall. “The crowd is new, though.”

“I thought turning it into a bar would keep it from becoming a pilgrimage site,” he replied. “More dignified that way.”

Lyra smirked. “Clever.”

I adjusted my seat with a quick burst of magic and plopped myself down. But I couldn’t help but notice Tom standing very close to Fluttershy, whispering as he pulled her bench out for her. “You want me to get you something to drink? Anything you want is one the house here, you know that.”

Fluttershy dipped her head. “Oh, thank you. But I really shouldn’t drink much. I’m a lightweight, even for a pegasus. I’ll just have a glass of milk.”

Tom must have known that all the ponies at the table could hear his little tete-a-tete. Lyra certainly didn’t fail to notice. She was looking towards the ceiling and humming suggestively when, all of a sudden, something else caught her attention. Whatever comment she had in store was immediately forgotten as her mouth fell open. “Tom,” she snorted. “You framed my poster?”

Tom followed her gaze. Above the clock on the far back wall was a sign made from black marker and construction paper. It wasn’t entirely legible, since it bore Tom’s handwriting, but it had been framed and laminated since the last time I saw it.

‘Please do not feed the ponies human food. Too much salt is bad for them.’

He had pinned that up one morning while everyone else was still asleep. Underneath, in Lyra’s more elegant script, was the notice we’d awoken to find beside it the following day.

‘Please do not kiss the humans. It messes with their hormones.’

The waitress came and spun a few glasses of rum and coke across the table with Fluttershy’s milk. Everyone smelled fairly happy. We also smelled like peanuts, which I must admit I wasn’t fond of. Dave was trying to make everyone laugh by bouncing them off his beer belly, and they were accumulating all over the table.

I should have known better than to think we would be left alone. The respectful personal space we were being given only lasted for minutes. But perhaps I shouldn’t deprive them of the benefit of the doubt—what did Tom call them?—Bronies? I think the stranger who finally pulled a chair up to our table was someone else. I hadn’t noticed him come inside, but his cream-colored hair was still flat with water from the misting rain. Since he was sitting next to me, I also happened to observe the camera poking out of his backpack. It looked expensive. And the way he was looking at Tom somehow reminded me of Featherweight.

The fact that he recognized Tom didn’t necessarily mean we were dealing with one of the initiated; Tom might not have been world-famous, but it wasn’t hard to pick him out of a crowd. He was so pale. He was perpetually telling everyone how he wanted to give up the internet for a life of working outdoors and get a real tan, but none of us believed he would ever do it.

Seizing Tom’s hand, the newcomer introduced himself as Porter and muttered the name of a small online magazine that none of us had heard of. “And can I just say,” he added, “that I’ve always wanted to meet you, Mr. Silverstone? As soon as I heard you were in town I rushed right over. I hope this isn’t an intrusion.”

“You know, it’s amazing how interesting people find you once you make a headline,” Tom chuckled. “But don’t sweat it; you don’t exactly need a press pass to get in here.”

“I’ll try not to get underfoot. Or underhoof, right, Purples?” He looked to me, which left me shying to one side. “If I can just sit in on this merry party, we can all chat. In fact, I’ll buy you guys a round. What do you say?”

Lyra snapped the table with her hoof. “Deal! Oh, waiter!”

Tom sighed. “The first story you should probably have is that the pony you’re sitting next to is the Bearer of the Element of Magic. It would be more polite to address her as Twilight Sparkle.”

Porter glanced my way again. “Sparkle? That’s cute.”

The humans at the table couldn’t hear Tom’s tiny sigh. I wanted to speak up and tell him that I didn’t mind, but regrettably, I was still hiding behind the ruffled shoulders of my dress—it was hard to resist when they made such effective blinders. There’s never a day when I wouldn’t trade magic in a heartbeat for Rarity’s social skills.

A phone rang in Porter’s pocket; he looked at it for a second, rolled his eyes, and put it back. His head came up just as the waitress was returning with his drink, so he smiled and tipped the glass. “Nice ass.”

The lady came to a halt, letting out a tight sigh before she turned around to glare—at Tom. “Who let this guy in?”

“No one let him in,” said Tom, staring at the drink which he was stirring with a coffee straw. “Our doors are open to everyone.”

“Uh-huh, that’s great.”

She moved on. Dave was downing Fluttershy’s free drink for her, and Lyra was pickpocketing the newcomer’s camera. Porter either didn’t notice or let it slide when she started levitating it upstairs, pressing the shutter, and giggling with Dave every time they reeled the camera back to look at the LCD screen.
Porter was talking to Tom. “So to hold onto our readers with all that’s going on, we’ve got to find something new—something really special. Something with a little zing to it. And of course, something about ponies. This might sound a bit unrealistic—but I was hoping there was something you could share with me that you haven’t already told Oprah, as it were.”

Tom leaned forward onto his elbow. “Oh, don’t worry about that. There are so many things to tell I can’t make enough podcasts. Information needs to get out; there are too many rumors going around. What’s really sad is that I’m impressed you’re out trying to gather real facts at all. By all means, I can give you something. For instance, how about—it shocks me that no one’s asked me much about the economic implications of the new accord.”

“Woah.” Porter pushed up his glasses. “There are economic implications?”

Tom facepalmed. “See? No one’s thinking big enough! We’re talking about another planet here! We’re talking about another Columbian Exchange. Businessmen are totally going to want to do business with these ponies once they realize what they have to offer.”

“Like what?”

“Well—let’s take natural resources. That’s one of the more obvious places to start. Equestria is blessed with an extreme abundance here—they have enough precious stones to permanently crash the market on Earth. But—but!—I’m a little worried people are going to think they can just rush in and start making deals. You have to remember, alien culture, Equestria doesn’t run on the same ideas about economics, and it’s going to take just a little work to get the two economies to mesh.”

“Yeah,” said Lyra, leaning in helpfully. “Ponies need to learn more efficient practices if they want to compete in American markets.”

“That’s just it,” said Tom, gesturing wildly as he turned to her. “They shouldn’t have to compete. If anything, humans should have to learn to hold themselves to the same standards as ponies!”

Porter, Dave and Fluttershy were discreetly looking past Tom’s head at a young man who was sashaying his way to the karaoke stage. The individual had a green pegasus feather stuck in the band of his hat—and yes, he knew what he was doing. Every few seconds he would reach up to adjust the feather, perfect evidence of how conscious he was to its appearance. I’m shocked she let him put it there, whoever she was.

Tom paused only to wet his throat before launching back in to his talk. “Here—let me try and explain some of these differences. So back before this all went public, a bunch of us who knew about Equestria get together and tried to suss out how much an Equestrian bit was worth—to come up with a theoretical exchange rate, if you will. But it was a complete failure. Start with produce. A Jubilee Cherry—costs one bit. I’ve never seen it sold for any other price. A Golden Delicious apple, that’ll be two bits. You look at these, a bit seems to settle somewhere around thirty cents. But then try and look at something manufactured. You can get a pretty sturdy wagon for only thirty bits. Hell, you can get a beautiful house for a little over five thousand. A bit could be anywhere from a buck to two thousand bucks.

“You could try and chalk this up to differences in the market—Equestria has very strong agriculture, after all—but it’s too wild. It just doesn’t add up. We didn’t figure out what was going on until we realized that every price we’d ever seen was an even number of bits. You know why a Jubilee Cherry costs one bit? Because it’s the smallest price bigger than zero! Ponies didn’t bother using fractions. And what we figured out was that these prices weren’t being set based on a market valuation. Most were based on custom. It was how much the seller thought something was worth. And you have to tie this back to cutie mark culture, really. Business in Equestria isn’t usually about making a profit so much as it is about adding something to your community. So price isn’t about how much somepony is willing to pay for it. It’s about getting a fair reward for your efforts. You look at it that way, the economies might look similar on the surface but they’re almost incompatible. Don’t panic, though, don’t panic! I’m more than sure we’ll find a way to make it work.”

As the karaoke began, filling the room with the sultry sound of smoke, Porter glanced back at Tom. “Er, yeah. That’s great. But…” He trailed off a moment. “I’m looking for something a little more human-interest. A little more…personal, maybe. You’ve always been very enthusiastic about bringing ponies to Earth. Why is that?”

“Well, ponies are a fantastic species for us to have come into contact with. A great way to get used to interacting with other sentient life. I often call them a great first stepping stone. Because think about it—how could they have possibly been better for us? Their culture is
very comprehensible to us, they’re fantastically kind, and there’s so much we can learn from them. You know, there’s no guarantee we would have made First Contact with any sort of beings we could communicate meaningfully with. We could have run into the face-huggers from Alien. But with ponies…”

He lifted his hands. “Ponies have already given us so much. Don’t—err—I’d appreciate if you leave this off the record. But as far as I’m concerned, Equestria is as close to heaven as poor old homos sapiens is ever going to get.”

“Could you elaborate on that?”

“Just think of it! We are not alone, after all this time. And not only are we not alone, but if we can just accept the friendship they’re offering us, we need never be alone again. I think even ponies don’t usually realize how much that means to us. They have a hard time imagining how cold outer space felt when we had only ourselves to talk to.”

When Tom dropped, there was a moment of quiet.

“Maybe that’s the reason,” Lyra murmured enigmatically.

When asked, she pointed with her head to a corner of the room. Behind the last ratty sofa, a grape-colored earth mare was necking furiously with a thirty-year old man in a torrential mullet. The surprising bit, at least to everyone but Porter, was that the human had on a faded ‘My Little Pony’ T-shirt—rarely worn these days, as now more of a collector’s item than anything.

Dave clapped once. “Hey! You two! Frisky! Not in here!”

He shook his head as he watched the pair slink out, only the least bit abashed. “Crazy time to be alive.”

“Let them enjoy it,” Tom shrugged. “Everything’s new and exciting. By the time they don’t have to hide here to make out, it won’t be new anymore.”

Porter was staring after them as they left. “So, Tom. Just came up with a question for you.”

Tom smiled into his drink. “I bet.”

“Sorry, should I…”

“We used to not talk about it with outsiders,” Dave piped up.

But Tom waved him down. “There are ponies on Main Street, Dave, I think that ship has sailed.” He turned to Porter. “Some things aren’t appropriate for national television. That’s all. Now what did you want to know?”

I almost reached out to touch Tom’s arm. Tom didn’t seem to mind these questions—but I was getting vaguely unsettled.

“According to your podcasts, a few months after First Contact you arranged to have a large number of Bronies transported to Equestria for several weeks. You booked out a building called the Baltimare Convention Center, am I right?”

“Ah.” Lyra took a knowing sip. “He wants to know about that.”

Tom sighed.

“Now you stated that it was so a number of ‘ponies involved in the decision-making process, and any ponies who were interested’ could get to meet some humans. But I was wondering if perhaps you’d like to respond to some of the rumors—”

“Look,” said Tom. “Think of it this way. The people who came to that convention center were a bunch of college kids. And even most of the ponies who showed up were basically the equivalent of that age. So if a bunch of college kids get together in a building that big for a whole week, wouldn’t you be more surprised if nothing happened?”

Porter spun a pencil which was suddenly in one hand. “Is that—on the record?”

“Oh, come on.” Lyra rolled her eyes. “Is that the best you got? Don’t act so tough. You want to get tough, ask the real questions! Like why do human girls claim to love stallions so much, but always balk when they ask her out on a date?”

Tom made a stunned sour face. “What? No—Lyra!” He leaned across the table to her. “That’s not a mystery at all. It’s simple, really. Lots of women have love horses. But also puppies and baby turtles. See…”

The two of them wound up engaged in a lively debate over the relationships between the males of our species and the females of his. The conversation became rather graphic at one point, and they injected any discretion only once they noticed they effect they were having on Fluttershy, who by that time had sunk so far in her seat that nothing below her nose was visible. I seemed to be the only one who was watching Porter take copious notes.

“You seem…very knowledgeable,” Flutteshy squeaked.

Dave flicked a peanut. “Hah! He thinks about it all the time.”

“Shut up, Dave,” said Tom.

Dave, who was trying to take the focus away from poor Fluttershy, made a face at our guest. “Oh, but it’s true. So imagine this. Tom’s sitting in the upper room right here in this building one night, just working on a paper, right? And all of a sudden a swirly green blob opens up in the fabric of the universe and—zwoop!”

He made an intricate an unintelligible gesture with both arms which ended in pointing at me. “Just like that, Twilight Sparkle out of nowhere. What do you think the first thing he said was?”

Porter shrugged. “I don’t know, something along the lines of ‘What the hell, a talking pony?’”

Dave made a loud buzzer. “Not even close! It was—and I quote—‘Oh, no. How will I keep you safe from the fans?’”

Lyra had a good laugh at that. I managed to enjoy a quiet smile while Tom was busy blushing.

But Tom shot back, “Was I wrong, Dave? Was I wrong?” He brushed my cheek to get my attention. “Twilight, how many proposals a week do you get in the mail? Hmm?”

And it was my turn to sit up and blush. Everyone was looking at me. “Oh! I, um…don’t count anymore. Spike…screens my mail.”

Porter broke a pencil. “So would you say you looking forward to a future where actual relationships with these—aliens—are common?”

Tom turned even redder. “Hey, there. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ve got a lot of hurdles to clear before our species even have a future together.”

“Nah,” Dave cut in. He waved dismissively at Porter. “It won’t happen. Long term, we’re really not pony material. You have a shot if you’re really gorgeous. Or if they’re major otaku. It’s just that right now things are kind of crazy, so you get some wild stuff.”

He ran a finger around the rim of his half-empty glass. “Oh, I could tell you stories about the last party I hosted.”

“Oh please.” Lyra’s eyebrow arched salaciously. “Your parties? I’ve been around the rodeo, Dave, and that’s nothing. Bet you haven’t heard anything I couldn’t top.”

Tom was grinning, even while he rubbed his hands over his face to work the blood out. “You two. Trust me, I know what goes on. I’ve been in the thick of all this.”

A tiny cough cut him off. The group looked around for a second or two before sighting Fluttershy, who was lifting one hoof just over the edge of her glass.

“I…I think I have the best story,” she whispered.

Tom blinked.

“Hey, I know!” Porter jumped in. “A story. That sounds great. Why don’t you share, Buttercup?”

“Why don’t we all chip in?” added Dave.

Tom was rather wincing at this point. “I don’t know if that’s a good…”

“Hey, man.” Dave crossed his arms. “You scared I’ll show yours up?”

“Oh, alright.” Tom leaned forward, shaking the table. “You want to play that way? Let’s play.”
His rumble tipped Fluttershy’s seat back on its uneven legs. As it reached the tipping point she spread her wings, pedaling hooves in the air until she tumbled backwards off her seat.

“Boys.” Lyra lifted her snout. “I thought we didn’t bring Rainbow Dash along so we wouldn’t have to engage in all this posturing.”

“Twenty bits my story is saucier than yours,” said Dave.

“Done, pretty boy.”

“Dave,” I cut in. “You don’t even own bits…”

“Twilight, you can be the judge.” Dave swept his arm grandiosely across the tabletop, knocking over several red solo cups. “Heartstrings? Ladies first.”