pony.exe

by Blue Blaze {COMET}

Rating: teen
Tags: Other, Slice of Life, Human, Twilight Sparkle, Drama, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 48571

David Carrian finds a virus has infected his computer. Meanwhile, Twilight Sparkle doesn't know where she is, and there's data floating everywhere around her...

David Carrian can't help but be attached to his amazing, very expensive computer. As such, when a virus sneaks onto his system without his knowing, he puts all of his focus and knowledge into removing the threat that is screwing with his memory and CPU.

But he hears something coming from his headphones. A quiet, almost unnoticeable voice cries out from behind the computer screen. On one hand, knowing that the virus is playing such sickening sound effects drives him harder to fix the problem. On the other however, he stops to think after he finally makes out the words said to him...

"...Help me..."

This tale follows heavily on the Slice-of-Life and drama side of things, but sways towards adventure halfway through the story. As of Chapter 13 (treehouse.exe V1.31), we have not reached that point yet.

Episodes beyond season three episode two are ignored.

Click here to listen to a reading of the first chapter by Griffin Productions!

Published 2015-05-30 00:40:02 UTC
Last updated 2016-04-02 23:01:46 UTC

pony.exe

“Jinx ult! Jinx ult!”

“Shit.”

He was completely enamoured under the bright illumination of his computer screen in the still of night. The room was dark, quiet except for the light hum coming from the plastic rectangular case beside his left foot and the rapid clicking of his keyboard and mouse. His entire visage was lit by the flashing colours on the screen, feedback from his headpiece blasting too loudly into his eardrums, a green microphone bit settled an inch away from his mouth as it hung from the band holding the tiny speakers together.

“Focus Sivir!”

“Damn it, I’m dead.”

“Sion flash down!”

There was a hubbub of activity on his call. He listened in to his friends’ voices as they scrambled to come out of the battle of their computer game on top. His cursor raced all over the center of the screen, darting from place to place as he tried to make calculated clicks and keep all the data of the fight in his head at once. He could hear his breathing as everything came to a close, and he tuned out the chatter on the virtual phone for a second as complete focus encompassed him. His character dashed forward, and the next few seconds became another blank slate in his memory.

“You have slain an enemy,” the announcer notified him. He moved to the next target, keeping track of enemy movement.

“Double kill,” he heard, paying special attention to the crossed circular blade that was chasing him from behind.

“Triple kill!” an old woman said. His friends raised their voices in the background, his eyes on the price.

“Quadra kill!” His team began to cheer and scream into the chat, hopping in their seats as he targeted his mouse arrow over the final remaining enemy. His ring finger lifted up from his left hand and--

“Shut down!”

He gave out a sigh of aggravation as his cohorts cried out in disappointment. They shot a few jokes back and forth before reassuring him that his next spree would be a complete wipe out for sure. His hand slid back from their positions over the keyboard and mouse respectively and he pushed on the wall with his feet, rolling out his black leather chair from underneath the desk partially. He let out a yawn and stretched, arms reaching up, shoulders curving as his chest stuck out and his gross-green t-shirt pulled upward from the top of his white boxers. He subconsciously hit two keys simultaneously, kicking his screen out from the game back to the desktop, his vision lazily rolling over to the numbers at the lower-right corner.

It was 12:33 in the morning, a part of him feeling it was too late to stay up for a school night while the other telling him to not worry. The alt and tab keys were slapped and the game screen was brought back to him, tinted in black and white, the bright light reflecting off of his orange gaming glasses. There was still 36 seconds left on the death timer, and they were losing. It was getting further and further in the match, and he was getting fewer chances to grab a hold of the winning edge they needed to secure the big W that he so sorely wanted. His whole team was having trouble against their specified match ups. He couldn’t do everything for his squad. They were simply too–

His musings were interrupted. He narrowed his eyes and scratched the side of his head. There was a tiny voice whispering in the middle of the party call, a voice that seemed out of place and that he swore he heard. He ignored it and chalked it up to being so damn tired. His friends made absent-minded comments about the game and the school week’s events thus far, complaining about that fact that it was only a Wednesday. He ignored them for the most part, tuning them out until he couldn’t help but snort at a wise crack one of them made.

Then, he sat up in his seat and stared directly at the screen. The death timer was at five seconds. He heard the voice again, and this time he really didn’t think he was just hearing things.

He focused. There it was again. It was too quiet to properly make out words, but it was there, and it was totally out of place from the game audio and his friends. In a panic he pulled down his headphones, listening intensely to the room around him. All he could hear was the fan wildly spinning from the back of his $1000 custom-build gaming rig. A shiver ran down his spine, and he checked behind his back to see if his one of his roommates was peeking into the room and spooking him or something. The door was closed, and all he could see was the light from the monitor reflecting off the painted walls in an eerie mid-night glow. His gaze went to the window to his immediate left, the curtain pulled to the side for the moment and he witnessed the outside life in its entire quiet, peaceful glory. Nothing moved on the street two stories below, and the oak-filled neighbourhood kept its calm quota under the mild heat of mid-summer. A shiver ran down his spine and he slowly turned back towards the glass screen, putting on his ear gear with caution.

He was alive again, but he barely noticed. The voice was getting louder. Finally, out of all the chaos and confusion of his conflicting senses, he could make out the words in the back.

“…Hello?... Can anypony hear me?... H-hello?...”

His eyes widened at that. He leaned forward into his screen, as if it would help him understand what he was experiencing at that moment.

“Hey guys,” he started. “Do any of you hear that?”

The conversation in the call paused. “Hear what?”

“A voice. A tiny voice, it’s like a girl’s voice or something in the call.”

More of a pause. The enemy was sieging their base and failure was imminent. “Dude, I don’t hear anything.”

“Me neither.”

“Nope.”

“Your delusions are nice and all, but could you get out of spawn and help us defend?”

He paid no attention to the last comment. Suddenly something clicked and the camera on-screen scrolled over to a large, crystal structure at the back of their base, surrounded by enemy forces, exploding. Everyone in the call groaned in frustration, and the announcer declared “Defeat.” as the same words popped up on the screen in red. A button beneath the status of victory labeled “Continue” appeared, but he hit two keys again and returned to his desktop instead of clicking the button. He opened up the call window and closely monitored the microphone input of his buds. After a few seconds it became apparent the voice he heard was completely separate from the chat program.

“…Hey!...I’m right here!...Hello?”

He leaned back in his chair. His friends were complaining that he didn’t do anything when they were getting destroyed but he didn’t care. He cut in to the conversation.

“I’m gonna go guys, I, uh, my computer’s acting weird. Something’s playing audio files on it and it’s getting annoying.”

“Maybe you’re just tired,” one suggested.

“Yeah, maybe,” he returned, looking sideways at the screen. “I’ll get back in the call later. See ‘ya.”

He clicked the ‘hang up’ button as his friends were bidding him goodbye. Without the call, the voice was as loud and clear as ever.

“…I just…Hey! Hello?...” the voice said.

He terminated the game, realizing that it was still open and started checking his internet browser. The tabs at the top of the window didn’t indicate sound being played, not displaying a speaker icon in any one of the boxes. Just to be safe however, he closed the window. He right clicked the sound picture right near the time and date at the bottom right corner of his screen. A table opened up after selecting one of the following options, with bars indicating volume levels from programs that had the ability to output audio. He scrolled the box to the right, searching. Nothing was playing at the moment. He wasn’t playing his music, so all the bars were empty, the threshold line sitting at the bottom of the graph.

“…I…I don’t know where you are, and I don’t know where I am, but… please!”

Sweat rolled down his temple. He was getting warm, perhaps heated. At the very right edge of the graph, he saw one more bar without a designated icon that bobbed up and down to the voice, which was still growing in volume to an easily listenable level. The program didn’t have a name, or rather, it had an odd designation that included the file type at the end.

pony.exe

His thoughts immediately shot towards an explanation involving a virus. He had heard of the viruses of old days, playing pranks on the user, forcing audio clips to play, messing with the registry keys, screwing with important files. His heart jumped, and anger flared up in his soul. His computer was in danger. His precious media player was endangered, and he had to do everything in his power to obliterate the threat. He was baffled as to how a virus even got on to his computer in the first place. He never got malware or Trojans, and he always kept his anti-virus up to date and he always scanned downloaded files for any unwanted extras that may have gotten installed on to his hard drive.

He had to ask what kind of sicko would trick him like that and lead him into a false sense of security with a voice clip that sounded like a young woman calling out for help behind his computer screen. Where the author would get such files he had no idea, but he couldn't help but feel disgusted at the fact that so much effort was put in to a little program to screw with his head a little and a lot with his system. He grit his teeth and furrowed his eyebrows. The virus had scared him and was genuinely creepy, but he vowed to not let it beat him.

“…H-hello?... Why can’t he hear me?...”

He opened up Task Manager, and went to the processes page, organizing the list by memory usage. Sure enough, at the top of the list was a certain program eating up a whole eight gigabytes of memory as well as a steady strip of CPU. The name of the process confused him. It was so odd, so strange to call a virus a name such as that. He knew viruses could be named anything, and the meaning of names could be lost cross-language wise, but it was something he could understand. The name was in English, but what did it mean? What did horses have to do with a virus? He still had no idea what the virus was meant to do except to bother the user consistently with disturbing audio clips that caused unease in his heart.

“…I want to go home…I wonder if the others are worried about me, searching for me...”

The virus had many audio files to play, he gave it that. It was almost intriguing, as if the virus was telling a story of a lost life.

“…I hope Spike’s ok…He’s going to be all alone in the library…”

The corner of his mouth twitched, and he could feel his pulse beat against the sides of his head. He opened up the interface of his anti-virus, progressing to the ‘scan’ page, just to be ready to activate it as soon as he stopped the virus. He briefly wondered why the virus let him open Task Manager in the first place, or why it wasn’t blocking access from the anti-virus.

“…He can’t hear me…Maybe he doesn’t know that I’m here, wherever I am… Maybe I’ll be stuck here forever…”

He waited, the gears in his head turning.

“…Somepony…Help me…”

He had an idea. It was a simple, fleeting thought that dared to balance on the border between sensible and insane, spurred on by the last line of the virus. His shaking hand reached to the microphone of his headset, lightly gripping the extension that kept the mic to the plastic sitting across his crown. He made sure it wasn’t too far from the tip of the top of his lips or too close and took a deep breath through his nose, swallowing.

“H-hello?” he stuttered, whispering.

“Hello? I’m here!” the voice cried out from beyond. “I’m here, I’m here!”

“I can hear you loud and clear,” he responded, finding confidence in his voice.

“Oh, thank Celestia! I never thought I’d hear a response from you!”

“From me?” he asked.

“Yes, I heard you speaking before, speaking to somepony else. When I tried to get your attention I-I thought you couldn’t hear me.”

He really didn’t know what to say. “I-Well, I really couldn’t, at first. I thought I was just hearing things, or that you were a part of this game I was playing.”

“Game?” she asked. “N-never mind, look, can you tell me where I am right now? It’s cold and dark and I can’t tell where the room ends.”

More sweat rolled down his cheek. “I don’t know where you are.”

“What? What do you mean, you don’t know? You’re talking to me, aren’t you?”

“I mean that I honestly don’t know. I’m talking to you through a microphone. I have no idea where you are.”

“Well, that…” she trailed off, sighing. He still felt the need to be wary, and not forget that he was talking through a virus. It was likely a call like the one he was just in, except he was getting patched through by the program without his control. He hypothesized that someone in the game he played may have gotten and placed the virus in his computer while he was engaged somehow. Theories started bouncing around as his head, each one after the other getting less and less pleasant. “That’s unfortunate, to say the least. Where are you talking from exactly?”

This was the kind of thing he was keeping on his mind. “Umm, my room. In my house.” He didn’t dare give out anything else like that. He was talking with another human being, after all. They might have been closing in on his location or something. No, he was being stupid. The virus was already in his system, and he wasn’t doing anything about it. Technically, it could do anything it wanted with his computer at this point.

It was another human being, right? It wasn’t generating answers that were pre-recorded to play based on microphone input or something insane like that, right?

He had to wonder.

It was a virus, after all.

“Your room? Then how are you talking to me right now?” she asked aloud. “How can you communicate to where I am if you don’t know where I am?”

“You tell me! You’re the one that invaded my system and started talking to me!”

“Whoa,” she said, startled. “What?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is stupid. I can’t believe I’m doing this right now. I’m terminating the program.”

“Wait!” she pleaded. “Don’t go!”

He paused.

“Don’t leave me alone here! I-I don’t know where I am right now, and I know you don’t know, but,” she trailed off. “…I don’t know how to leave! I can’t see an exit anywhere, and I can’t even see the walls of the room! I don’t know if I’m in a cave or in a dungeon somewhere, and I’m all alone here… So please, even if you can’t help me, don’t leave!”

He sighed, thinking it over. It could have been a trap. It probably was a trap. “What’s your name?”

“Huh?”

“Who are you?”

“M-my name is Twilight Sparkle.”

He inwardly groaned. His eyes were locked on the words pony.exe in his Task Manager. He figured it to be a joke. It had to be some kind of prank, right? There was no way. The nature of the situation was too strange to be anything natural. He was experiencing something from some kind of bad story or poorly written anime. He checked around the room. Where were the hidden cameras? Where was the author that was writing what was about to happen next, dictating future events, determining his life? It couldn’t be real. He couldn't accept it to be real. It wasn't a possibility.

“Well, Twilight Sparkle,” he began, trying to think not of the best decision, but of the right one. “Nice to meet you. You can call me David.”

He could only imagine her resulting smile. “Nice to meet you, David.”

Author's Note

Choosing a pony to be featured cause me a bit of trouble. My first choice was my favorite, Luna, but I thought that limited the potential for interaction between the user and the program due to the age difference. So instead, I picked the next best thing.

Of course, the other problem I had picking Twilight was one simple fact. Some authors write her smart, and some write her smart, and I'm not smart enough to write her smart, so I hope that I can leave her at smart and the readers would be ok with that, especially considering the content heavily surrounds computers.

EDIT: I changed the cost of David's computer from $800 to $1000.

EDIT #2: Twilight's RAM usage increased from 1 GB to 8 GB.

EDIT #3: Apparently when I had originally envisioned this David was supposed to be living at his parent's house. He is not. Mentioning of his father has been replaced.

EDIT #4: Click here to listen to a reading of the first chapter by Griffin Productions!

questions.exe

David mulled over his next words. “Can you try and describe what you see in your room?”

It had been a few minutes since David and Twilight introduced each other. David had opened up the window after he determined his room was too stuffy and a cool night breeze glided through the opening, freshening up the air in the tight space. There was still sweat on his brow and he had wiped his head several times over with the short length of his shirt sleeves, his back getting soaked from the building perspiration. The headset wrapped over his skull felt uncomfortable with the sweat that his short black hair was matted with. He could feel dribbling salt rolling down from above his ears and soaking in to the cushions pressed against the sides of his cranium.

He sat in his chair, his glasses still pressed between his vulnerable eyes and the bright computer screen, which was currently showing his desktop: A flurry of several shortcuts to various games as well as the default Windows 12 background. His gaze was glued on to Task Manager, not leaving the process titled pony.exe as it sat at the top of the list organized by memory usage. He leaned forward in his seat, hunching his back and resting his chin on his intertwined knuckles from his hands that were standing up by his elbows on the desk.

“Well,” Twilight began. He had been running that name through his head over and over ever since she had mentioned it. It was so odd, so out of place that he couldn’t give any possible explanation as to why she choose that to introduce herself with. “Like I said, there’s darkness everywhere. I can’t see where the walls meet, or how high the ceiling is. I… I think I’m in some kind of room, or maybe an ancient underground cave, but... it’s hard to tell.”

David found himself questioning the last mentioned location. “Is there anything distinguishable in the room?”

He brought his hand to his mouse and guided the cursor over to the taskbar, over the network connection icon that sat two spots to the left from the current time, reading at 12:36 AM. Left clicking, he searched the list for his router, but only found his connection and connection type at the top. He dove deeper, right-clicking the same icon and opening up the control panel with the status of the network the PC was attached to. From the resulting screen, he couldn’t find a clear, visible way to disconnect from the router. He figured his only solution was to unplug the cord manually.

But he knew that also meant cutting the line between him and “Twilight”, and she seemed distressed enough that he wasn’t sure if leaving was morally sound. She was alone. She wanted him there, to at least talk to, and he figured that was the least he could do. A very odd part of him believed that it wouldn’t disconnect him, but it had to. He had to be talking to another person which so happened to give him a very odd name over the internet. He started to think it wasn’t a prank anymore, and began to take it a little bit more seriously. There was someone trapped somewhere that needed help and needed someone to talk to, someone to connect to. He considered calling the police after getting more information so they could help him sort out a potential missing person’s case.

…But what kind of a person calls themselves Twilight Sparkle?

“There’s… There’s numbers and letters floating all around me,” she answered after a second during during which he assumed was her looking around. “They’re traveling vertically and horizontally in linear lines, and they keep changing after every few seconds.”

David was without a doubt confused. “What?”

“I think they’re displaying some kind of information to me. I can see all kinds of number and words, variables and values, and they’re everywhere. They sink past the ground below me and,” There was a slight pause. “I-I think that the ground is made of glass, because I can see through it. Either that or I’m floating in mid-air, somehow.”

David gave a face. “’Twilight’, are you alright? Are you dizzy, thirsty? Do you feel really, really sleepy right now?”

“No,” she began. “Why do you ask?”

“What you just described to me sounds like some kind of hallucination,” he said, his head doing loops.

“No, I’m pretty sure they’re not hallucinations, they’re just… Agh, there’s something strange about this room.”

He put one hand to his cheek and started tapping his finger. “What is it?”

“It’s like there’s something missing, something important. It’s kind of hot in here, err… No, it feels hot but that’s not really it. I can’t put my hoof on it exactly. T-The numbers and words, they don’t have colour—o-or what I mean is that every time I look at a character, it’s a different colour, and w-when I recognize a colour it changes to something different.”

“Twilight,” he began. “Don’t try to do anything strenuous, and don’t move from that spot. I think you might be severely sick.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. “But I feel fine.”

“Feeling fine and being fine are two completely different things,” he pointed out. His head was developing a theory, one that he desperately didn’t want to believe. The floating numbers and letters, her location, her condition; they all were pointing to one answer. But it couldn’t be. It was impossible, and he didn’t believe it for one bit. “Now, I’m going to try something that may cut our connection for a dozen seconds or so. If it does, I’m going to try everything in my power to get back to you, ok?”

“O-Ok,” she stammered, nervousness in her tone. “What are you going to do?”

He pushed back his chair and got off, leaning forwards, getting on all fours and crawling underneath the foot space beneath his desk. He didn’t believe it was a joke any longer. Reaching around the back of his computer case, he fumbled around with the various wires in the dark, the only light available coming from the tiny system LEDs that were placed at the front of the machine but glowed through the case to the back. “I’m connected to you by my computer, but not by my own will. A virus has infected my system, and I think the only thing it’s doing is keeping you and I connected. But I have another theory…”

“A computer? A virus? David, what’s going on? What other theory?” Twilight said, thoroughly confused.

“Here goes nothing,” he finished, finding what he thought was the network cable and unplugging it.

The release of the cable let go with a snap and the wire fell, its firmness taut, forming a curve that leaned against the wall.

There was quiet. David held his breath.

“…David?” Twilight asked from the other side.

“Damn it,” David cursed under his breath.

“What happened?”

“It didn’t work. We’re still connected.”

“Did you want to disconnect?” Twilight asked, hurt edging into her tone a smidge.

“Yes, well, no,” he started, trying to find words to accurately explain what his goal was. He backed out of the niche and sat onto his chair, getting into a slump, his eyes too heavy for what his mind was demanding him to do. He lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyelids, sighing, thinking of what everything meant, what the virus meant and most importantly, what Twilight’s existence meant. “I was trying to see exactly how we are connected to each other. It was clear that we’re in both different locations, so there was only one possible way that we could speak to each other.”

“And what was that?” she inquired.

“Through my computer over a private connection,” he answered.

David imagined the frown on her face after her following statement. “David, it can't be. That isn’t technologically possible.”

He squint his eyes. “What?”

“I’ve heard of scientists in Manehatten making leaps in bounds in technology by testing short-ranged communication through machines, but it was very short-ranged. They were only a room apart, and besides that they only could communicate through text via punch cards! There’s no way that we’re speaking and hearing each other through a computer. There must be some kind of spell that’s set in place allowing us to do this.”

“A spell?” he scoffed. He was beginning to think that either she was insane, or he was slowly going insane. After all the progress he made so far, he was almost willing to believe anything at that point. “Like what, some kind of magic or something?”

“Yeah,” she answered back. “A long distance voice communication spell. It would probably take a lot of energy to keep it going, though. I wonder where’s the power source?”

David’s brain stopped. He could not computer her words. Manehatten? Hooves? Spells?

What kind of a virus did he have?

“Hang on,” Twilight said. “I think I might be able to find the power source if I search the ambient magicks in the area. It might take a moment, for some odd reason the magic in the air's very thin here. Just give a second and—”

There was a second or two of Twilight focusing in the background. David couldn’t comprehend what was happening. All the fact, all the hints, was pointing to one answer, one answer he didn’t want to believe. He suddenly felt very scared, not just scared for his computer with the virus but somehow explicitly scared for his life, as well as the lives of mankind. The name of the executable, the horse puns, the language used, it could only mean one thing, and that one thing left him not knowing what to think.

Suddenly Twilight cried out in alarm. David's headset began to give static in its feedback, screeching and howling in his ear drums. He yelped and shot up in his seat, flicking his headset back so the speakers leaned behind the folds of his ears. The red disk light on his case was lit up, the mechanical part itself spinning and writing like no tomorrow. David watched in horror as several dozen windows of a painting program, various files and Notepad copies opened up in an instant, clogging up his screen.

“Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa!” David called out, his hands shooting to the keyboard and using the alt-f4 combination rapidly, trying to close everything that had popped up. “Twilight, whatever you’re doing, you need to stop right now!”

His system lagged behind. He struggled to keep programs clogging his PC as more and more windows appeared, demanding resources from his normally powerful rig. Task Manager kept up in front over all the chaos, and with wide eyes David watched pony.exe try and eat up more of his CPU, reaching from the low 40s to high 60s and slowly going beyond. He swore he heard Twilight collapse on the ground and let out a groan. As he hit keys rapidly, static crackled underneath the desk and bounced between the glass roof of the desk and the wall. David felt a sudden pain shoot up his leg.

“What the hell?” he shouted, jumping in his seat and swiftly moving back, bringing his legs in as his headset threatened to unplug from the distance he made, tugging his head forward. He stared in disbelief as he saw the case of his machine crackle and spark with magenta-coloured electricity, the energy jumping up and down all over the plastic by some unknown ability, breaking David’s belief in physics. He put his hand on the damaged spot on his leg, hissing as flesh touched flesh. He looked down for a moment and saw the spot bright red, burnt, his leg hair singed. Twilight shouted in pain for one last time through the symphony of radio interference as his computer kept outputting programs.

And then the static stopped.

David tried to keep his breath steady as programs stopped popping up onto his screen. He looked on with wild curiosity and fright. Twilight gave out a groan and blew air between her teeth. pony.exe’s load on the system reduced substantially, going back down to its standard ten percent.

“Ow, my head,” Twilight complained.

“Twilight?” David asked.

“Ouch. Ow. Yeah?” she managed to make out.

“What are you?”

She took her sweet time to answer, nursing her wounds. “I’m… I’m a unicorn pony. Why do you ask? What are you, David?”

David said nothing. He stared at his hands, his mouth ajar, hunched over on his back.

“David, something weird just happened in my room. I-I don't know if you could tell, but I can't exactly tell what,” Twilight said on her accord. “My magic shouldn’t have acted like that. I-it’s like it had its own rules here. I guess that’s why it felt so odd; the magic’s different. Where exactly am I?”

David slowly reached up with both hands and grabbed his headset by the ears, sliding it forward off his head and letting it fall to the ground with a clatter. An unnatural, insane grin spread across his lips as he stared at the ground. He began laughing, singular chuckles escaping his throat as his lungs struggled to inhale properly. His eyes felt watery, and he kept still, unblinking as his hands moved in front of his vision, fingers curled like a dead spider’s legs. He could vaguely hear Twilight’s voice from the fallen communicator, concern in her tone. He couldn’t make out her words again.

The virus, the lack of internet, her mannerisms, her intelligence, her use of language, and her interaction with his computer all lead to the one thing that he didn’t want to be true.

After a brief moment, he picked up his headset again, placing in on his crown and adjusting the microphone after it was bent out of position from the fall.

“…David? David are you ok? I heard something fall down.”

“Twilight,” he started. “I think I know where you are now.”

“What?” she blurted. “That’s great! Where?”

“I think you’re in my computer.”

answers.exe

“I have an A.I. in my computer,” David thought to himself, tracing the life lines on the palms of his hands as his back curved forward. “There’s an A.I. in my computer and she has full control of my system!”

“David,” Twilight called out from behind the computer monitor. “Let’s just calm down for a second before we jump to any hasty conclusions. What makes you think that I’m in your computer?”

“Ah…” David sounded out, trying to find his voice. He suddenly realized that his lips were chapped and his throat was dry, with copious amounts of sweat glistening on his thin neck. He needed a drink, and the room was far too hot for his liking, even with the window of his room open. For a second he forgot how to breathe, how to speak, and the words he wanted to communicate were lost to the darkness in his head before coming back in startling clarity. “You know all those numbers and letters you’ve been, uh, ‘seeing’ around you?”

“Yes?” she confirmed.

“I’m pretty sure those are all the inner workings of my computer. Every single value and variable you see there is a part of my machine. Twilight, when you tried to use your ‘magic’, you screwed with my system!”

“What?” Twilight said, aghast. “But that doesn’t make any sense! Magic can’t interact with technology like that! It doesn’t work like that! Magical energy doesn’t translate to electrical energy, I wouldn’t even be able to begin to touch your computer with magic!”

David wiped off his forehead with his forearm, which was already somewhat damp. His shirt was becoming soaked like a used beach towel, and he cursed in his head. “You said it yourself. Whatever you were trying to do in there, you said it felt weird. You said the room felt odd, like it was missing something, and then you tried to do your magical thing and my computer went crazy right after.”

“T-That’s impossible. That can’t be true.”

“You got a headache, right?” David continued, pushing his point home. Abrupt pressure began to squeeze every angle of his head. “You got a headache after trying to do whatever the heck you wanted to do, and then our connection got interference and my system slowed down from all the programs you were inadvertently opening up. And remember that thing where I warned you about disconnecting from you for twenty seconds or so? That was me unplugging the cord that allows me to connect to others long distance, so there’s no way that we’re still speaking to each other from far away, magic spell or not.”

“There’s no way. There’s no scientific explanation possible!”

“The proof’s etched into my leg, right here,” David stated, a bit of a wild craze beneath his hazel eyes as he touched his newest wound, his heart hammering in his chest.

The system lagged for the split second pony.exe took to hog a large chunk of his CPU. “What?!”

“Heh, you threw my system into some kind of overdrive and burned my leg with electricity! My computer case had huge strands of static bouncing all over the surface!” he explained, a nervous chuckle following closely to his first words. “I don’t even know how everything stayed together after that and my hard drive wasn’t fried, and I don’t know how I’m not dead at this point, but I’m not complaining, and that’s what happened.”

No one decided to say anything. David finally leaned back into his chair and reclined it, relaxing into the black leather, listening to the chirping crickets outside in the thick, humid air of early summer. His head lolled off to face the open window, his mouth slightly ajar, staring out to the quiet neighbourhood street below, illuminated by several streetlights that dotted the stretching grassy terrace beside the road. Tall oak trees towered over the pavement, creating a soft canopy with leaves that weaved back and forth from the dancing wind, casting shadows from the bright silvery moonlight above. The green power light of his PC continued to burn bright, and the disk puttered for a second or two as time ticked by.

“…I’m sorry,” Twilight finally said. “I have no idea what I’m doing. I can’t control it.”

David let out a snort. “I have an A.I. in my system that has no idea what it’s doing. Great.” “That’s ok. Just try not to do anything else revolving around your, uh, magic, until we figure out what’s happening.”

“Ok.” she agreed. A sigh soon followed after. “How did I even get here in the first place?”

“Tell me, what do you remember before you found yourself in that room?”

He waited patiently for her answer, bringing his head back to his computer monitor, spotting the screen littered with useless windows that ate up more and more of his precious computer strength. He lifted his arms back onto the arms rests, spreading his perspiration all over the top surface. A streetlight outside flickered for a brief moment in the corner of his eye. “My friends and I got an invitation from Princess Celestia, the ruler of where I live, to attend a technology convention in northwest Vanhoover. We all agreed to go for the two day and took the train to get there. I remember that it got late into the evening on the train and we all went to bed with still a ways to go. And that…”

David closed his eyes, resting them.

“…That’s it.” she finished. “That’s all I can remember.”

“More about these horse puns on cities, eh?” David pondered to himself, his conscious growing slightly hazy.

“David, I’m not in Equestria anymore, am I? Have you heard of such a place?” Twilight asked, pleading for hope in her voice.

“I’m sorry Twilight. You’re not in ‘Equestria’ anymore. I’ve never heard of anywhere remotely named like that. You’re in a place called America.”

There was silence over the connection. Then, David heard quiet sniffling from the other end of the call. He briefly wondered what she was doing until it occurred to him that the sniffling quickly turned into soft sobbing. His heart broke in two.

“There’s no way an A.I. is supposed to be this smart,” David reasoned with himself, folding his hands atop each other on his lap, opening one eye a crack to check the time. It was 12:43 A.M. “No program can simulate emotion this well. Not even the crackpots at Google are even close to this level of intelligence. It sounds like she has a complete history to herself too, written up for her to believe.”

He had no idea what to do next. The virus on his computer was technically in complete control, allowed to whatever it wanted with a simple command or two, all the power of his system in the hands of a pony girl sitting somewhere in the hard drive, crying, wondering if she’ll ever see her home again. But was there a home for her? Wasn’t her home a fabricated story melded into the depths of her artificial memory to give her character and emotion?

It was all real to her, but what would happen when she learned it was fake? Would she accept it? Or would she turn it away and pull a Space Odyssey?

Those were the kind of questions David was asking himself.

“Twilight?” David called to attention, giving her a moment to steel herself.

She sniffled, and he imagined her wiping the tears from the bottom of her eyes. “Y-yes?”

“What is it in life that you like?” he asked.

“What?”

“What do you find enjoyment out of in your life?” he repeated.

“Well, I-I like to read books, a-a-and researching magical theory, a-and spending time with my friends…”

His eyes opened, looking through the lens of his glasses. “But why? Why do you like to do those kinds of things?”

She sniffed. “B-books are interesting, and they h-hold information and can t-tell stories and s-store all of pony history, a-and I have a special talent in magic, s-s-so I’m always trying to push my limits further and further, a-and I don’t know what I would do without my friends..”

Her crying became more intense after her last thought.

“Oh, Spike!” she cried out in the darkness. “Rarity, Rainbow Dash, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy… Princess…”

David waited, thinking.

“…I miss you all…”

He had made up his mind. With slow and patient purpose, he drove his chair back to in front of the desk, minimizing Task Manager and closing every single window that wasn’t being used at the moment. Twilight continued her sorrow in the background, with David systematically making his way through each copy of MS Paint, Notepad and every Windows Explorer window. Soon, the weight on his computer was alleviated as he lost count of how many he closed, reaching the upper fifties. As his task came to a close, it dawned on him that the almost unnoticeable filter that covered Twilight’s voice disappeared as he made more and more room for the rest of his computer to breathe.

“Twilight?” he finally asked once his job was done.

She inhaled through her nose, trying to bypass all of the mucus she had generated. “Yes?”

“Don’t give up hope. Don’t give up, and I’m going to try everything to help you get back home, ok?”

“Y-You would do that?” she asked.

“Yeah, yeah I would.” David said, staring down and off to the side, counting the soft grass-like stems of the dark-blue carpet. “I couldn’t just not help you. What kind of a person would I be if I did that?”

She sniffed. He had no idea what she looked like, but he liked to believe she had a warm smile beneath her bloodshot eyes. “Thank you. T-thank you so much…”

The corners of his lips crept up. “Heh, don’t thank me just yet. We still have to figure out exactly what’s going on,”

“You’re right,” she concluded. “I need to keep myself in control. J-just give me a second to get a hold of myself, I…”

“Take your time. We’re in no rush here.” he soothed.

He closed his eyes and pulled a lever beneath his chair, locking the recliner in a thirty-five degree position. Leaning back, he put his hands criss-cross on his lap and tried to take a small rest, listening to the peaceful nightlife outside his tiny, dimly lit room in his house. He heard thunder, which somehow snuck up on him during the chaos of the situation he found himself entangled in. The room flashed from beyond his closed eyelids and his smile evaporated while Twilight sniffed and wiped her nose.

“She’s a special girl,” David told himself. “Completely unique to her situation. If I’m going to play along, I’ll have to take extra care. She’s not simply just an unusually smart artificial intelligence anymore,”

His eyes opened, looking at the fresh computer screen on the desk he was so familiar with.

“She’s more like a soul trapped in a computer.”

“O-Ok, David” Twilight said after a few more moments. “I’m a bit more stable again. Sorry about that.”

“It’s perfectly fine. You don’t have to say sorry about anything.” he reassured her.

Twilight took one last, long breath through her nose. David had to wonder how exactly she knew how to simulate those sounds. It was if she had actually breathed before, it being so close to lifelike. “Ok!” she shouted, throwing all of her conflicts away for the moment. “What’s the first step?”

David suddenly let out a yawn he had been holding the entire evening. “Actually, Twilight, I…”

“Yes?” she asked.

David felt bad. He got her all riled up and ready to go and he was passing out on the spot. One, insistent half of him wanted to flop onto his bed and snooze until the morning while the other felt dedicated to what he had started already. What would Twilight think? Would she be disappointed, or understanding? He rubbed his eye, letting out a small groan and trying to wake himself up for the last moments he had of the day.

"Damn it. I could just leave the computer on, but I really don't want to leave Twilight alone like that. I probably won't be able to see her for another 18 hours, because of classes tomorrow, and that won't be good for her mind. I also really don't want to leave her with the faculties of my computer. I can only imagine the kind of things that she might try while alone."

“Is everything ok David?” Twilight asked after she hadn’t received a response in several seconds.

“Yeah, it’s just… Sorry Twilight, I know I brought you back up and all, but in reality it’s in the dead of night and I’m falling asleep, fast.”

“Oh,” Twilight simply stated. “Well, that’s ok, I guess. I can’t force you to stay awake. I mean, do whatever you need to do.”

David grimaced. She was definitely hurt a bit by his flip-floppy decision-making.

But then he had an idea. “Twilight, there is one thing we can do before I hit the hay,”

“And what’s that?”

“We can try turning off my computer,” David said, adorning a nervous smile.

Twilight had a late rebuttal. “Uhh,”

“Or at least put the computer to sleep so that I don’t have to boot it from scratch tomorrow. That way your program will keep running in a low-power state and won’t have to disappear completely.”

“Ah, that sounds like it makes sense, I guess,” Twilight commented, uneasy in her tone. “But what do you mean, putting the computer to sleep? I’m assuming it’s something similar to a living being going to sleep?”

“Exactly. Instead of turning off the computer completely, it shuts down to a state where it remembers everything, but isn’t exactly awake and running. I don’t know all the details and technical aspects of it, but just know that you’ll be safe since putting the computer to sleep doesn’t end any processes.”

“Processes?” Twilight asked.

David glided his cursor to close Task Manager, pony.exe’s information disappearing from his eyes. He realized that in his fervor of window-closing he accidentally closed every other program in the act, and nothing was left running. He cursed mentally, realizing that he lost all the tabs he had open and would have to start from scratch because he disabled the history function on his internet browser. Scratching the back of his head, he opened up the start bar at the top-right corner of the screen and kept the white arrow over the ‘sleep’ button.

“It’s what keeps the computer running,” David explained. “There are several things at once that have to keep on running in order for the computer to run properly, like, er, how the tracks of a train keep it running straight in the desired direction. It’s like a well-oiled machine.”

“I see,” Twilight affirmed, interest sparking in her voice. “Are processes the same as programs?”

David found a grin on his face but couldn’t muster the energy to pair it with a chuckle. “I’ll tell you in the morning. I need to test this out.”

“And I also have no idea what the difference between a process and a program are. I’m totally unprepared to teach an A.I. on how computers work. I guess it’ll be as much of a learning experience for her as it will be for me.” he mused, biting his lip.

“W-will anything happen to me?” she asked, poking her hooves together.

“What? No, nothing will happen to you,” David said. “Well, nothing in theory. We’re not turning off the computer, so the process that is hosting you on the system will stay running, although at a much slower pace, I think,”

“J-just tell me when you’re about to do it, so I can brace myself,” Twilight requested.

“Certainly. I’ll give you a count down.”

Twilight took a deep breath. David made certain that the button behind his cursor read ‘Sleep’, and not ‘Shut Down’.

“Are you ready?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok, here we go. Three, two, one…”

He clicked.

Nothing happened for a few seconds. Twilight held her breath in anticipation.

Then, it suddenly hit her. “David? I… I suddenly feel very dizzy…”

Without David’s knowledge, she fell down, and everything went dark.

Author's Note

A part of me feels like this chapter's a tad bit stupid, but another part says that just roll with it and have confidence in myself.

wake.exe

Twilight groaned, her head throbbing painfully, her eyes edging open bit by bit. It became apparent to her that she was certainly not in her room, and that she certainly wasn’t recovering from a long, peaceful sleep in her bed. Her first thought was about her location, where she was and why she wasn’t in the safety of her library, snuggled in the warm blankets in the early sunrise of the day. She found herself on a pitch black floor, looking down at it from her prone position on her side. Getting on her front hooves, she tried to shake off the sudden exhaustion that racked her being after waking up. She held her hoof against her temple, massaging the skin to try and sooth the soreness that the strong beat of her heart was causing. When she lifted her head sufficiently, her focus moved to the floating numbers and letters all around her, giving her a wide enough berth to breathe and exist comfortably, the characters sometimes forming words as they continuously slid down their vertical axis.

Her ears bent back as she remembered her situation. She looked at the ground, or at least where the ground was supposed to meet her hooves, and found the text slid past the imaginary horizon in the background through the threshold at the height of her hooves towards a vast emptiness below her. The pit in her stomach grew, and she nervously got to her other hooves and took a step back only to realize that there was no solid earth behind her either. She stared with terrified eyes at how hollow everything looked around her; there were no features, objects, or anything recognizable anywhere. There was no sun above her, no sky, no moon and no stars. The world she now lived in was as void and dark as Sombra’s heart, and Twilight’s fears came to fruition when for a very brief moment her paranoia let her believe that she was actually, in fact, inside the deceased evil king’s soul.

Suddenly the atmosphere reverberated around her, sudden rumbling shockwaves pushing the air around her, crashing in to her as she braced herself against the sudden oncoming storm. A few seconds past and the rush stopped, replaced with something that she had not expected in the least.

“Twilight?” David asked, putting on his headset and fiddling around with the microphone so that he wasn’t directly eating it, his fingers wrapped around the sensitive end of the device. “Twilight, are you there? Can you hear me?”

“David!” Twilight called out. “Goodness, I forgot about you for a moment. I’m so glad to hear from you. How did the computer-sleeping test go?”

David rolled his chair up underneath his glass desk, shaded with the hue of a soft, cloudless sky. The log-in screen was the center of attention of his 20 inch computer monitor, and he typed in his password, 18 characters exactly, giving him access to all the functions of his user once again. He scratched his head and reached over to grab the tinted glasses surrounding his mouse sitting on the rather large mousepad. He put the glasses on with ease, taking care not to poke his eye out from adorning them too quickly and kept his eyes glued to the screen as his desktop appeared.

His green t-shirt and cargo shorts were under the light of his monitor that reflected around the room. The window was open once again, but a large standing white fan was plugged into the socked near his bed behind him, blowing a nice, cool breeze in his direction. He rubbed his feet together in anticipation, his socks creating heat and a bit of static against the carpet beneath him. The computer hummed softly in the warm atmosphere of late evening, the moon outside obscured by a large mass of clouds floating by, the wind almost non-existent this time.

“Well,” he began, tracking Task Manager as it popped up with the rest of his icons on his desktop. “The computer went to sleep successfully last night. How do you feel?”

“Eh, I have a terrible headache right now,” Twilight said. “But what do you mean, last night? How long has the computer been asleep for?

“Twilight, it’s the next day already. It’s been a whole night, morning and afternoon since I put the computer to sleep. The sun’s already set by now.”

David instinctively tried to open his web browser after finding it closed for some reason he could not fathom only to remember what he did in his flurry of key strokes the prior night and that his computer’s connection to the internet was severed. A metaphorical storm cloud smouldered over his head as he realized he would have to venture several days without the contact of the World Wide Web if he wanted to manage his A.I. safely until she learned how to control herself in his piece of hardware. He pinched the skin of his forehead together with the index finger and thumb of his left hand, gathering up the grease and applying it to the stubble that jutted from his sharp chin, looking at his black Logitech mouse idly, trying to think of what the best course of action would be next.

“Goodness, I really didn’t think it would have been that long,” Twilight stated. “I mean, I know you had to go to bed and all, but I would have liked to know exactly I would have been ‘sleeping’ for before you sent the computer to sleep.”

“Sorry Twilight, it didn’t really occur to me,” David apologized, trying to rub the heaviness out of the dark bags under his eyes. He let out a yawn. “I kind of lose focus in things when I’m falling asleep. Don’t let that stop you from waking me up if I do snooze when we’re in a conversation, ok?”

“What were you doing during the day?” Twilight queried tentatively.

The muscles on David’s cheek flexed. “I had classes. I’m attending university.”

“Really? What’s your major?”

“Creative writing,” David instantly answered.

“Interesting!” Twilight chirped. “I’ve always wanted to write a book someday. After reading so many in my life I think it’s apropos for me to follow suit in my own ideas, especially considering how many I have! I have some very intriguing angles on semi-conductive metamorphic materials and arcane influx operators.”

“Uhh,” David uttered.

“Books are so neat. I don’t know how I could possibly exist without them. Although, now that I think about it…”

David assumed Twilight’s pause was her re-assessing her surroundings.

“I don’t think I’ll be seeing another one any time soon.” she said, deflated.

“That’s not true,” David informed her. “Computers can hold entire documents of stories, transcripts of articles and audio files that are books read to you.”

“Really?” Twilight asked. “Do you think you could get me some of those? At least one, maybe two to pass the time?”

“Sure. I’ll just have to get connected back to the internet to see what I can get.”

David opened up windows explorer from the start bar, and pane of the directory of his hard drive opened. He furrowed his eyebrows, going straight to the program files and looking through the names for something called pony.exe, or anything similar that was related to horses. He soon found nothing, and cursed in his head, thinking that nothing could be exactly that simple. He clicked on Task Manager, his eyes still locking onto the process at the top, powering the chatty personality running as electricity on complex rig. He had no idea where to start searching for the root of the program.

“Your technology in A-mare-ica is really amazing, David,” Twilight tittered. “It’s light years ahead of what we have in Equestria!”

“I could tell,” David notified. He began a search of pony.exe on Windows Explorer. The progress bar at the top slowly filled in with a softly flashing green, making very, very slow progress. David clenched his jaw, but tried to calm himself down. “And it’s just America, Twilight. You don’t need to emphasize the middle.”

“I have to be patient with this,” he thought to himself. “I don’t need to rush anything. I’ll let the search run and talk to Twilight in the meanwhile. This is just the first step in a series of discoveries for that damn virus. I have all the time in the world to work through this. I think.”

“I see. A-mer-ica,” Twilight tried aloud, letting the word roll off her tongue. “It sounds so odd without the emphasis, though. Your society seems to be very interesting, David. One this is all done and through we need to establish a stable connection between nations! Equestria has pretty much known all of the surrounding lands on the continent, but we hadn’t considered the possibility of such a highly advanced society overseas! We haven’t even gotten that far, yet. I have so many questions for America!”

“Heh, yeah,” David simply said. He would be lying if he said he wasn’t at least a smidgen interested too. But his mood sunk when he remembered that a place like that probably only existed in the memory of Twilight Sparkle. He idly tapped the left mouse button beneath his finger, his chin going on to his fist as his elbow was placed on the cool surface of the table. “I would like to know more about your world too.”

“My world?” Twilight asked. “What do you mean? Shouldn’t America exist overseas from Equestria?”

“Twilight, my race, the human race, has mapped out the entire planet, and we don’t have a place called Equestria.” David calmly informed her.

“N-No way,” Twilight said. “You have got to be kidding me!”

David shook his head, even though he knew Twilight wouldn’t be able to see him. “We’ve never heard about anything that you’ve mentioned to me before. You claimed to be a Unicorn. Well, on my world, Unicorns are creatures of myth, animals of old tales and legends. They’re very mystical and I bet some stories about them involve magic of some sort, but they certainly don’t have the ability to speak.”

Twilight didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds. The disk light of David’s PC flickered. “Are you sure? Maybe your race just called our continent something else? There are other races that live on Equiden. Have you encountered any Gryphons, or perhaps the Earth Ponies that live on the outskirts of the deserts near the south? Pegasus ponies, Minotaurs, the Deer folk, Dragons, maybe even the Horses from Saddle Arabia?

David was floored. How could one single fictional location span all those kinds of species? What kind of memory did Twilight’s creator put in her? “Those are all just from stories, Twilight, just from stories. Humans are the only sentient species on the planet. Everything else is just animals. Horses exist here, but they don’t speak either, which I’m assuming they do on your, uh, planet.”

Twilight choked on her next words. David’s shoulder slumped.

“I’m sorry, Twilight.”

Twilight groaned. “This situation just went from bad to worse.”

David inwardly agreed. He leaned back in his chair, reclining it slightly, folding his hands over his stomach and went deep into contemplation. It was truly a hopeless situation for Twilight. “Remember what I told you before? You can’t give up right now. If you got sent here, there must be a way to send you back.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said.

He closed his eyes for a brief moment, visualizing the inner workings of his computer, imagining what was going on in that world of hers, how she found herself in a swirling mass of darkness all around her, filled to the brim with symbols and objects that had no meaning or value to her. He thought up of a grid along a three-dimensional place, outlined in pure-white lines, his vision something along the lines of those cheesy movies from forty years ago that tried to make a visual for the audience of what the insides of a network or computer looked like. He knew what he had in mind was nothing like the real deal, but he tried to imagine what it would be like. He contemplated about being stuck, alone, with nothing to do, nowhere around you that looked familiar with only an ominous, booming voice in the air to keep you company, owned by a creature that you haven’t seen yet with its true intentions unknown. He was surprised that Twilight put so much trust into him already, and that she didn’t suspect him of secondary motives. But in the end, in her position, she really didn’t have any choice, did she?

“And Twilight,” David suddenly said, shooting up in his seat and looking back at his computer monitor, a sly grin stretching on his face. His hands landed on his keyboard, clicking on Task Manager and going to the page labeled ‘Performance’ to click on the button that lay in wait there. “You know what the first step towards getting you back is?”

Twilight tapped her hoof on her chin without David’s knowledge. “Research?”

“Exactly. Or more specifically, experimentation.”

“Ooh, now this I could help you with, David!” Twilight said enthusiastically. “If there’s one thing I can do, it’s performing tests.”

“Fantastic,” he stated, grabbing some spare paper and a pen near the end of his desk away from his computer. “Let’s get started then.”

Author's Note

When writing this kind of story, it's important to pay careful attention to what everyone is saying. Because there are really only two characters at this point, most of the story is going to be driven through what they do, with the hook coming from how they interact with each other. This took me a while to write because most of these chapters are filled with dialogue, as I'm waiting to connect David and Twilight later. Like I've stated before, I'm absolutely garbage at writing dialogue. Sure, you have a visualized point A that you start at, and you know you need to get to point B, but filling everything in-between without going off track is difficult. I had to cut a few portions of the dialogue and re-write them because of how stupid I thought they sounded. In the end, it isn't perfect, and I didn't get to the point B that I had envisioned when I started this chapter, but I stopped the chapter early so I could have an easier transition into the real meat of the story, where more things are explained, Twilight's abilities are explored and the whole mystery behind the virus and the A.I. are investigated.

Going over this chapter a few times, I really had to put an effort in to try and not make a repeat of the previous chapters. One main focus that I'm trying to incorporate here is that we're moving the plot forward, and if not then we're at least introducing one new idea into the story, whether it be Twilight learning something about David or vise versa. I don;t want this story to stand still one bit, because I know it'll be a tempting trap awaiting me in these next segments.

Expect me to take more creative liberty with future chapters. I'm dealing with a lot of technobabble here, but I really don't know what the inner workings of a computer actually consist of. So, I have two options: Either get a adviser or two to help me with this kind of process and explain computer elements to me as I go, or use my imagination. The problem I see with the latter is that people might get pissed off if I write something with my imagination and it is not accurate to real life. But, seeing as I want to work on my own schedule and own time and don't really care that much if I screw up the technicalities of technology, I'm thinking I'm choosing option #2.

Sorry that this is a slow chapter, and that there's nothing much to show here for it. This chapter's really a transition chapter, so I'll be able to develop more of the plot in the next installment.

effect.exe

David couldn’t help but facepalm.

He groaned in frustration, letting the pen in his right hand drop to a clatter on the desk top and bringing the appendage over his keyboard, right on top of the enter button. Rubbing his forehead, he blinked several times while staring at the glowing computer screen, trying to get the sensation of dryness out of his increasingly sore eyes. Even through the orange tint of his glasses he felt the glare of the only source of light in the room right on the surface of his irises. His finger slapped the enter button, shuffling through several dozen copies of error messages his computer had outputted, going through each and every one. His left hand ran over his face from high to low, dragging the skin along his fingertips, his youth pulling the stretched flesh back to their proper position in no time.

He heard Twilight let out a moan of soreness from the other side of the illuminated glass. “How’re you holding up on your end?”

“This magic’s not getting any easier to do,” Twilight complained. “No matter how many times I try to understand it, every time I try to cast a spell there’s some kind of energy feedback that creates a conducted pulse around the vicinity.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning a tiny explosion occurs right in my face.”

David’s eyebrows rose. “Why didn’t you tell me that seventeen spells ago?”

“Oh, they’re not that bad. They’re not really true explosions, they’re just sudden blasts of hot air and smoke materializing two inches away from my muzzle. It’s not any worse than what I deal with from one of my friends, Pinkie Pie, and her Party Cannon, and I’ve handled worse in my own experiments too.”

The last of the message boxes were dismissed from David’s screen. He placed his cheek on his balled fist, leaned his elbow against the table and sighed. Looking down, he briefly went over the three pages of notes that he had scribbled over the course of time that he couldn’t exactly keep track of. Recordings of causes, effects, hypothesise and details about the several experiments and tests they held made the blunt of the content in his writings. He didn’t consider it to be very much, and was hoping that they would have a little bit more to go off of after all of the so-called “progress” that they were supposed to be making.

His memory flashed back to various moments of high school. There was a reason why he was an English major and not something of a scientific background.

“Ok, before we go any further, let’s review the key facts that we know for certain about you inside my computer,” David decided, lifting his head and grabbing the pen with his right hand, tapping the end of it on the words of the parchment.

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Twilight agreed, her voice a bit woozy.

“We know that your ‘magic’ has an effect on my computer,” David began, starting at the top of the list, reading at points where the cursive was either legible or not crossed out. “We know that depending on the ‘magic’ you try to do, you will cause several different effects on my computer.”

His head thought about a brief moment of fright a mere ten minutes ago where Twilight almost crashed the entire system by opening up multiple copies of The Elder Scrolls VIII by accident as a result of her special “Mustache-ify” spell. He shuddered.

He continued. “We know that your normal means of casting magic doesn’t work inside my computer, and instead of producing the intended effect that the original ‘spell’ was supposed to have, it instead does something screwy with my software, and in some extreme cases my hardware.”

There was a brand new burn on David’s left leg that perfectly complimented the one right above it that he got the previous day. He rubbed his feet together anxiously against the blue, prickly carpet beneath him.

“We know that the ‘magic’ that you can normally sense around you has severely changed, and the ‘laws of magic’ as you have called it are completely swapped for a new set of rules that we don’t know yet. And finally,” David transitioned, letting go of the pen once more to look up at the computer monitor again, eyeballing Task Manager. “We definitely know that you can feel things while you’re in cyberspace.”

“Cyberspace?” Twilight asked.

“Yeah, Cyberspace. I can’t just keep calling where you exist ‘my computer’ all the time, can I? I have to give it a cool, new name that fits its importance.”

“Is there any specific meaning to the word ‘Cyberspace’? Where did you get it from?”

“Well, Cyberspace is a bit of an older term,” David explained, resting his left wrist on the desk while the other rose up in the air, gesturing to the wide monitor as he went. “But it basically means the whole of a network of computers. Of course, I’m not connected to any kind of network at the moment, but the word still fits the situation. You’re in a space that is very, very cyber.”

“What’s a cyber?”

“I have no idea,” David admitted, throwing his hands over his shoulder, shrugging while rolling his eyes.

“Argh,” Twilight enunciated, the sound of her hoof rubbing the back of her head barely getting through David’s headphones. “This would be so much easier if I could practice this in a controlled environment. The fact that I end up missing most of the results of each test because I don’t get to observe most of the effects put a real detriment in our potential progress!”

“Isn’t the ‘magic’ a real pain in the behind too?” David asked.

“Yes, it’s a part of my troubles, but only a part,” Twilight said. “All magic must rely on a base set of rules, no matter how nonsensical it may be. Even though there is only one common set of laws that all Unicorns use, Gryphons have documented the same laws from a different point of view, adding new lines and equations to things ponykind hadn’t the ability to explain before! The same thing happened with Minotaurs too, where they had a different view on what happened while observing magic, as well as Zebras. There's an entire equation proving the existence of logic in every single instance of magic. Therefore, if it is magic, then it must have rules!”

Twilight yelped as her last statement forced a bit of static to shoot out of her horn without her control, somehow causing a trace amount of electricity to bounce from the computer case over to the side of David’s foot. He jumped in his seat.

“But what if there isn’t any magic in my computer? You know, you're not exactly in Equestria anymore, so what if the magic that you're familiar with actually just doesn't exist and you're dealing with something completely different that you think is magic but isn't?” David followed, hissing as he held his affected foot in his two hands, his knee pulled up to his chest.

Twilight sighed wearily. “Yeah, and I remember you said before that magic doesn’t exactly exist on your world, does it?”

“Nope.”

Twilight growled, stomping her hoof into the invisible floor that she claimed to be on. Then, she took a moment and deeply inhaled through her nose, breathing back out in a slow, calming fashion. This repeated several times, all in which David took the time to slowly put his foot back down and lean forward in his chair with one ear towards the monitor, listening intently. Her sudden change in demeanor was soothing his anger for some odd reason. He was trying to figure out what she was doing, but shook his head once he realized how stupid he must have looked, trying to listen in on something with his headset firmly wrapped around his head.

“I’m way too tired for this crap,” he thought to himself. “At least we’ve begun to make a list of what spell does what.”

“Yep!” Twilight piped up, suddenly sounding more joyful than ever. “I've got it! Spi—David, could you take a note?”

“Uhh,” David uttered, scrambling to get a relatively fresh piece of paper and grab his pen. “Yeah, sure. I’m ready.”

“Title: Effects of Arcane Sciences in computers, observation one. The effects of altered magic in the confined area of a computer are puzzling. However, when considering Metal Alchemy’s three laws of conversional mass, we can conclude that existing Mana in the environment when channeled through a traditional cast is not translated into an auric form, but instead translates as some sort of electricity-based form. The evidence is shown through the reactions of the computer, through which according to my fellow, er, researcher David, reports to me that there is a clear cause and effect from the use of conventional spells such as levitation, barriers, focused pressure, applied pressure, sub-casted auto-genius animation—”

“Whoa whoa whoa, hang on Twilight,” David stopped, taking the moment of her pause to shake out his wrist. “You’re going too fast!”

“I am?” Twilight guessed. “Sorry. I’m normally used to having somedragon write my scientific observations for me during my experiments.”

“Some dragon?”

“Yeah. His name’s Spike, and he’s the best little assistant a pony could have. I-I’ve known him since he was first hatched, and I hatched him with a spell for an entrance exam to Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns—”

“Twilight, I’m really, really sorry,” David interrupted again. “But you’re getting off topic. Do you think you could tell me about ‘Spike’ later, after you’ve finished your thought so we don’t lose it?”

“O-oh,” Twilight stuttered. “Ok. Alright. I mean, you’re right, of course. We need to keep on topic anyways. Ahem, as I was saying…”

The following minutes were lost to David as his hand rapidly drew strokes against the paper pinned by his opposite palm. Twilight continued to dictate her thoughts through the connection they were given, David’s thoughts in the back of his mind still percolating about theories on how pony.exe tied to everything. A slight breeze started to pick up outside and drift into the house, mixing the scent of oak seeds and wet mildew into David’s darkened room from the second floor. His low bed sat with its red blankets somewhat fitted onto the rectangular frame on the top face, although not tucked in properly to the sides with a multitude of pillows near the head. The mattress laid rest in the one corner, with the door from his room right beside it and the window near the feet. Across from his beds horizontal sat light wooden drawers holding every single piece of clothing he ever owned inside, stuffed in haphazardly by their owner as he tried to make some sort of effort into organizing his wearable belongings. Strewn across the wall above the drawers were several video game posters consisting of characters slaying dragons over a burned landscape, a singular man dressed completely in metal stalking down an ominous, futuristic corridor, an elf with green attire striking a pose while surrounded by menacing lizard-men and many others.

David posted the final period of the analysis with a single dramatic dot, and he blinked when it occurred to him that Twilight had stopped talking. He looked up from his screen, expecting to meet eye-to-eye with his speaker. He felt emptiness in his chest when the gentle glow of his computer monitor was brought to his vision instead. His pen dipped towards the desk as he loosened his grip on it and he straightened his back.

“Is that all?” he asked, stretching his arms high over his head and letting out a deep yawn.

“Yep,” Twilight responded. “That’s pretty much it.”

“Ok, so we definitely have a few more spells to go through from what I can tell of your extensive knowledge of magic, so—”

David stopped in an instant. His eyes grazed over the time at the bottom right corner of the screen, widening.

“David, what’s wrong?” Twilight queried after sensing his worry from his sudden halt in words.

“Oh crap,” he said, reading over the numbers for the fourth time. “I lost track of time. It’s really, really late, and I need to be up for classes tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Twilight stated.

“I’m real sorry Twilight, but I’m going to have to cut off our study session here. I need to get to bed, and if I’m lucky I’ll fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillows,” David prattled, closing useless windows that were sitting around as the results of some of the activities that Twilight had been acting in.

“Oh, ok,” Twilight said weakly.

“I’m going to need to put the computer asleep, so get ready—”

Twilight didn’t say anything as David stopped. His mind was restless, racing as he put two and two together.

“Oh my goodness,” David began, running his hand through his hair, taking off his glasses and letting them fall onto the desk. He could taste his dehydration between his lips, a disgusting sourness on the top of his tongue. “I completely forgot about you explaining Spike! Oh god, I’m sorry Twilight, I really am. I can listen to you all you want tomorrow once I get back from work, alright?”

“Ok,” Twilight responded quietly. “That sounds good.”

He frowned. “Twilight…”

“No! It’s fine!” she suddenly shouted, pushing through her point. “It’s fine, really. I’m ok with it. And I’ll be happy to talk to you tomorrow, David.”

“Ok,” David said, getting up from his chair. “See you tomorrow?”

“See you tomorrow.”

As David clicked the sleep button, Twilight tried to smile into the empty darkness as it closed in on her.

Author's Note

Woo hoo! I was really able to get this next one out quickly. This is the kind of effect this story is having on me. I'm a writing maniac!

This chapter was a lot easier to write. With this, I didn't simply just have two points to get through, but instead I had a checklist to cross while I was getting through the two points. This made it a lot easier to keep things on track and stay focused on what I wanted David and Twilight to get through during the chapter. This is the result. I'm actually very happy with it, because I was also able to discover several new dramatic moments that I was able to add that I didn't think of before that also developed the plot and the connection between the two characters.

Also, with the roll of this update, you may have notice that the cover image of the story has changed slightly. I made that in five minutes thanks to the use of GIMP, and it does its intended effect pretty well. It's still not the exact cover image I want though. I hate how I'm using a laptop instead of a desktop, but I honestly couldn't find anything better on Google Images. I'm probably either doing something wrong or just not trying hard enough. Regardless, if I do find a more fitting picture that features a desktop with the correct lighting, then I will certainly update the cover picture to feature that and not this.

Dang. I'm content with this.

On a separate note: Dang, I use a lot of em-dashes.

cause.exe

"Do unicorns dream, Twilight?"

That's what David had to ask as he stood in his room, his feet bare on the carpet (which was feeling extra fuzzy to him at the moment), his hand resting on the top of the rectangular black monitor of his computer, heavily believing it to be warm. He stared out his window, his neck and back as straight as a tie, arms relaxed with a tingling sensation going through his toes, or so he thought. The day was bright outside, almost too bright for the indoors, and he could only make out the thick green foliage of the oaks in the great outdoors. He could look directly into the reflecting sunlight and make out the edges of his darkened windowpane without much effort. The words he spoke flew out of his mouth without much thought, announcing them to the only other being in existence as if every single thread of his consciousness was immediately translated to language.

"Of course they do, David," Twilight answered back. "Magic and rainbows and apple-wood tables. That's what every unicorn dreams about."

David absent-mindedly rubbed Twilight's back, his hand going through the fine hairs that were her pearly white coat. He liked the feeling of her silky soft strands on the tips of his fingers, and enjoyed how the ends of the lengths tickled and itched underneath his nails, or that's what he liked to believe. He kept his gaze on the infinite meadow before him, expanding outward in gentle rolling hills, stretching out as far as the eye could see with knee-height grass calmly dancing in the wind, motioning air that for somewhat reason David couldn't identify on his cheeks. The singular elm that stood towering above him gave him a nice shade through its umbrella of leaves, the strong tall trunk trailing upwards with patterns and grooves in its bark. He felt nice and cool underneath the behemoths shadow, sheltered from the harsh summer weather when the air was dry and there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

Twilight in her graceful, heavenly glow bent her head down to David from her horse's level above and looked straight at him with her shining black eyes, her long golden mane out of her face and letting go to the merciful breeze surrounding them in a safe circle. Her spiraling, pure white horn jutted out of the center of her forehead, pointing proudly towards the sky, the tip as sharp as a spear, gleaming by some invisible power. The distance of her muzzle reached far down her face, her nostrils as large as big marbles, her mouth closed but keeping elegance despite her animal appearance. "What do Humans dream about?" she asked curiously.

"Well, uh," David began, pivoting on the spot, looking around and trying to avoid Twilight's eyes. "They dream about all sorts of stuff, like money, and power, and love..."

David spotted a thief dressed in a black shirt and grey sweatpants fleeing from a convenience store behind them, a balaclava keeping the culprit's identity, a pistol in one hand and a peach-coloured bag of goods in the other. He sprinted away from the scene, the yellow and red-striped roof boarder of the store glowing harshly in the sunlight, the actual items inside the store hidden to David's eyes. There was an old lady on the sidewalk, staring at the scene of the crime with her jaw agape, hunched over in an old lady dress that reached down to her ankles and covered up her unsightly wrinkly legs. Pink slippers covered her feet and she peered through her half-moon glasses with aged eyes that matched her wrinkled face and neck.

Suddenly, the thief ran up to the lady and pointed the gun at her in a threatening manner. She froze, her mouth in an open scream while her arms were thrown up and the cane in her possession went flying behind her in a humorous, cartoon-like manner. It landed on top of a triad of metal trash cans against a building, sending the garbage inside all over a business man in a blue suit walking on the nearby sidewalk. Several sound effects from a cartoon were added for additional effect, followed by a corny laugh track being played in the background. The old lady was stuck on the back of her heels with her balance unnaturally leaned backwards, and she somehow still stood. Then, the thief thrust the gun into the lady's face and David panicked.

"Whoa whoa whoa, we don't need to see that right now," David told Twilight, turning in the other direction, using his left hand to cover her vision while making the right direct where the front of Twilight's head was facing, lightly pushing on her neck so that she would turn her head where he wanted it.

"Is that really the thing you chose to show me?" she asked aloud, not particularly affected by the previous scene one bit.

David watched as the sun sank into the horizon, lighting the sky ablaze in a beautiful mixture of vermilion and stark red. The change in light cast over the entire meadow, and suddenly all the grass turned into tall wheat stalks, ripe for the harvest. He rolled his eyes. "Ah, why do you care? You're just a computer program."

The lights turned off with a deafening clack, and when they turned back on David found himself in a barely lit run-down hallway, the paint of the concrete walls peeling, the corners of the floor stained with a dried brown substance, scrapes all over the tiled stone, his sneakers and jeans illuminated by the blue light that shone through the open, steel doors at the end of the hall two dozen feet away. He stared at the light as it was reflected all around him by every surface, no light bulbs to be seen above, the luminescence burning his eyes, or so he told himself, even though he didn't feel any pain or discomfort.

There was a loud, bassy boom that caused the floor to rumble, and David looked over his shoulder behind him. The other end of the hall widened out to accommodate his computer desk with the computer sitting beneath it near the legs and the screen on top with the keyboard, mouse and mousepad. It sat the same distance away as the exit, the leather office chair that he usually sat on missing, the monitor on with a bright blue background. The power indicator glowed green with the disk-notifier above it streaming a steady bloody red, staring right into him. He could hear the buzzing hum of the light from his distance, like a dying elongated bulb in some kind of warehouse facility, and he was suddenly very, very annoyed.

The sound of a ticking clock echoed through the corridor. Each second struck the foundation of the hallway, shaking it, causing old crusted pieces of the ceiling to dribble down in tiny amounts. David gazed back at the open doors, his mouth a fine line. He swallowed, and the seconds passed. The glows from both sides of the passage met in the middle at David's feet, where the darkness was the greatest and where it slowly crawled up his figure from the bottom of the heels of his sneakers until it reached the tip of his chin, where the illumination splattered all over his face and defeated the shadows eating up at him.

It sounded like something big, something huge, was approaching him. The steps got more intense and demanding and David felt the temperature in the air continuously rise. His body refused to sweat, and he kept a steady eye on both sides of the hall, trying to keep his vision focused from all the chaotic movement around him. He didn't budge from the tremors, even if the world around him was rocked to the beat of the coming monster, his center of balance solid from a straight-legged stance. He took his time, deliberating on his choices, staring at the doors and the computer for equal moments of time. He didn't panic. He willed himself in control, but he could not stop the rumble of the earthquakes beneath his feet, nor could he halt the crumbling foundation of the hallway.

When his eyes met the monitor of his computer for the thirteenth time they stayed there, staring, his mind wondering if anything new was going to appear out of that screen. He almost expected it to happen. Unlike the doors, David actually knew that something was behind the blue inside the glass, something inside the computer. He kept his breathing steady as the shaking raised to a peak, swearing that he saw movement behind the monitor. In the background of blue, he was absolutely certain that he saw the outline of a pony's head trot up to the monitor and looked straight at him at an angle, its horn jutting out slight from their forehead.

He blinked.

"...Don't let it stop! With the wind on your heels,"
"Don't let it drop. Unless it's somebody else,"
"Just let it rock! Take a trip down memory lane,"
"And remember what you have to do..."

David groaned, his eyes heavy with thoughts puttering on the first gear, reflexively reaching out to the stand right near the head of his bed and grabbing the vibrating device on it. His waking fingers fumbled around with it until it found a button on the side near the top, and he pressed it. The electronic beeped once, the deep-voiced man stopped singing and silence reigned.

His eyelids creaked open, and his view was blurry for the first few moments, misty until the morning light across the room burned through a fresh new layer on his retina, something that he didn't feel that suddenly but opened the world around him. He noticed the sensation of lying on his side, his thoughts a mess with the tiny workers in his head scrambling about in an attempt to get his memories in order. He stared at his wooden cabinet a few feet away from him with the posters above it, his mouth slightly ajar with some dried spittle trailing out the corner down his chin, the surface of his tongue tasting like death. He smacked his lips once, twice, then sniffed through his nose, removing the lodged nuggets stuck in his personal mine and loading it into the back of his throat for the moment.

He turned onto his back, and the sound of early birds chirping through his open window focused in on his eardrums. He could feel his body waking up, slowly warming to sensation and filling his brain with the senses he needed to function for that day. He grunted, scratched the base of his back and curved his torso, creating a gap between himself and the mattress below. With practiced aim, he cleared his throat, tilted over to the left side of the bed and spit into a tiny plastic garbage can filled with opened candy wrappers, used tissues and dried mucus. The singular, thin ocean blue blanket that he had was kicked to the end of the bed, an action that occurred during the middle of the night without his control. He sighed, took another moment to gather himself, and sat up.

He was looking across his abode. His skinny, hairy legs stuck underneath him to the end of the covers, where his pale feet pointed up, his toenails long overdue for a trim. He swiveled his heels left and right, testing the motor action, then brought his attention to the light pouring into the room. The shadows of moving tree branches swaying in the wind cast over sections of the angled sun in his room, and he could smell a faint wetness from the outside air: Scarcely applied dew on the tips of the blades of grass. The monitor of his computer sat on the glass of his desk, off, the screen black with evidence of dust sitting on the surface through the scrutiny of the morning sun's rays. The green power light of the computer faded on and off, indicating its current energy status. David gave a thoughtful look towards his most prized possession, wiping the sleep out of his eyes as his head tilted back, trying to hold on to the fleeting memories of his waking dream as it slipped through his grasp.

A few seconds passed.

"Ah hell," David murmured, getting out of bed.

Author's Note

Dream sequence in one of my stories? Check.

This dream scene wasn't very deep. I've written deeper. However, I didn't want the purpose of the scene to be lost in translation if I did make it too deep, which is why I kept it simple. A pet peeve of mine in stories is when they ham up a dream sequence to provide a point but make it completely unrealistic; it's too random, or too outrageous, or too outright in its message. I tried to balance the three with this chapter's sequence, and I hope I did it correctly.

Short chapter, I know. I gotta find more motivation, that's all. Besides, I was looking for a way to pace the story the way I wanted without having content that's too irrelevant to the plot, and this is what I thought of. Whether or not you see it, this chapter does have a purpose.

I have a strong belief that pacing is one of the most important elements in storytelling. This chapter is me working that rule.

On that note, I've submitted this story to Equestria Daily. I've done this once before, and I'm a bit daunted by the high requirements on getting onto the site. I'm my only editor, so I hope I haven't missed anything mechanically. Cross your fingers guys...

PoSSCapture.exe

A fatal error has occurred. The process has been terminated. (PERMISSION DENIED REF:0100156)

David held his head in one palm while clicking the ok button underneath the message with the other. He had seen messages like that many times before in the past few days, the first one causing him unhealthy amounts of panic. He couldn’t make heads or tails of what the computer meant and originally thought that it was talking about Twilight’s process. His relief found him when he could hear Twilight’s concerned tone over the audio wave. As far as he knew the error message with the scary-looking-but-artistically-stylized glossy red X as the icon for the window meant nothing. The text box displayed and life went on. The funny thing was that there was no title with the message. It popped up, but the top of the window had no text to indicate where it had come from, and it didn't take up a space on the taskbar. It was like a ghost text box. He sighed as the window closed.

“Red nose spell,” David commented, picking up the pen with his mouse hand and writing down more notes on a piece of paper that was on top of a growing pile. “Effects: Error message. Conclusion: Useless.”

“Darn, another error?” Twilight asked from her side. “I thought that would for sure have gotten us somewhere.”

David shook his head. “We can’t find a winner with every spell. In fact, I think we have a pretty good track record so far, all things considered. That dusting spell cleaned up my recycle bin pretty nicely and the, uh, soap-hooves spell certainly sped up my system for a little bit. I’m just waiting for the one cast that’ll blow up my computer.”

“You think there’s a spell that can do that?” Twilight asked worryingly.

“Heh, no, I’m just joking. Don’t worry about it, Twilight,” he reassured her.

“Although, come to think of it, it’s not outside the realm of possibility, seeing as she’s already given me electric shocks through the computer case, mouse and keyboard. Who knows when she’ll overload the system with power and makes it explode? Errgh, nope, can’t think about that too much. I can’t let that discourage me,” David thought to himself, shuddering.

Checking the clock, he wiped his eyes beneath his glasses, noting that the hour was going into the ninth. He organized his thoughts and realized that he had promised himself something earlier in the day. It was time, and he couldn’t dawdle. He took a deep breath in and gathered up his courage.

“Get ready for the next spell, David. This one’s called the Mystic Song spell, and it’s primarily used to stimulate objects around a designated zone to produce sound. Most of the time it'll create music, but if the spell is improperly cast the wavelengths of the waves generated will be skewed and useless. Interestingly, depending on the mass and volume of the object, it will play a different note, with heavier items getting lower tones. It’s a bit of a difficult spell to pull off, but I had to write a paper about it in eleventh grade, and I've done it a few times before myself, so I should be able to get it right with the first try." She paused. "Am I going to fast?"

“Actually Twilight,” David began. “I think we should call it a day.”

Twilight pondered that. “Oh. Ok.”

“I mean, we’ve been at it for three-and-a-half hours now, so…” David explained, scratching the back of his head.

“We have?” Twilight asked, incredulous. “Goodness, I would have never guessed! I guess you need a break?”

“Well you don’t really have a concept of time in there, do you?” David thought to himself. “You don’t get hungry, you don’t get thirsty, you don’t get tired and you can’t seem to find the clock in there. I guess it’s pretty easy for you to lose track of time in a vortex like that.” “It’s not that, exactly. There’s some university work I need to get going on.”

“Oh, I see,” Twilight stated cheerfully. “Ok.”

“And, well, I actually do need a break, now that I think about it,” David said, taking a moment to stretch, reaching for the air above his head, his chest puffed out as his back curved. “But really, the work from the U was on the forefront of my mind. Honest.” "It's actually been a miracle that I've been able to last this long without having to do anything with my computer."

Twilight let out a puff of air, and David pictured her behind the screen. Well, pictured the best smile a unicorn could give, anyway. “I see.”

“But the thing is, I need to type this on my computer, so…”

“So?” Twilight inquired.

He grimaced, steeling himself. “So that means that you may have to twiddle your, uh, hooves, for a while until I can get this finished,” he explained.

“Oh, really? What do you mean?” Twilight asked, continuing the onslaught of questions.

“Ehh,” David nervously started. “Well, the only reason I would actually resume the computer from sleep would be to do more research on getting you back, Twilight. I haven’t touched my computer for any other reason. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but a computer like mine has a lot more uses besides, uh, holding a pony inside of it.”

“Oh!” Twilight exclaimed. “I hadn’t even realized. I…”

Twilight took a moment. Unbeknownst to David, Twilight was observing her immediate surroundings once more, the realization of her current predicament sinking in once again. David patiently waited, one elbow leaning back on the arm rest of his chair with his right hand on the surface of his table. His eyes drifted from the brightness of the monitor to the left corner, and he turned his head slightly to view out the window, with cool, stormy weather rolling in from the sky above, the sunset muted by the dark clouds above. Trees outside rustled in the harsh wind, but David was glad that the heat had finally let up a bit.

“Go ahead. I’m fine with it. I’ve been occupied enough lately. I can do a little waiting and take a break.” Twilight answered.

“Are you sure?” David asked. “I’m going to be doing a lot of typing, and my microphone might pick up the feedback. It will probably get annoying. I could unplug the microphone for a little bit, if you want.”

“No!” Twilight shouted suddenly. “Don’t, do that. I don’t think that’ll be necessary. I’ll be fine.”

David flinched. He wanted to slap himself. “Sorry, Twilight.”

“It’s alright. I know you meant well. And,” Twilight stated, searching for her next words.

“And?”

“Thank you, for everything you’ve done so far. And all the hours you've put in into getting me back home. I really appreciate it.” Twilight finished.

David smiled. “No problem. It’s my pleasure.”

No one said anything. David could vaguely hear thunder off in the background, his green-shaded desk lamp reflecting a soft light against the glass below it, giving off a measurable amount of heat where the bulb was at.

“So… How long do you think it’s going to take to finish your work?” Twilight asked tentatively.

“As long as it takes,” David said, figuring out that was his cue to get up and get to it.

Twilight sat on her haunches in near silence, the far ambience of David’s key strokes and her hoof taps the only other distinguishable noises. She thought back to moments when David turned on the computer but needed time to activate his microphone, leaving her in the soundless void, the lack of volume creating feedback on her own eardrums as they generated a fake, high-pitched white noise for her just to keep her from feeling true nothingness. She relished in her mind’s lies, and as she kept her position solely on one spot she couldn’t help but stare down the multitudes upon multitudes of text and data passing before her eyes, floating down two directions on a flat plane, their colours unidentifiable. One minute they were white, the next cerulean, then sometimes orange, and if Twilight tried to think about it too much she would get a slight headache, something that almost never happened to her ever.

Her front hooves tapped at the invisible floor, cooling her through her behind like it was some kind of stone tiling. It made no sense to her, the correlation between the solid ground not actually being there and feeling the lack of heat of it against her being. She decided that the looping path of logic was a waste of time and energy to think about, so she decided to look upon the numerous words before her. She listened to David’s intense concentration, noting how he had stopped interacting with her the moment he began his typing, as if she was put far off in to the back of his brain, placed at the least of his worries. A part of her in that past moment opened up her mouth to begin small talk, an essential skill of socializing that she quickly learned during the first week she stayed in Ponyville, but then thought back to how he already spent so much time with her and concluded that he needed some time to himself, a few minutes where he wasn’t to be disturbed from his work.

Her eyes traced the background again, this time reaching to the far upper reaches of the odd dimension after an out-of-place tingling sensation in her skull gave her the abrupt urge to look in that specific part of cyberspace. More meaningless words passed by her attention, and she gave a heavy sigh. She cursed her missing fatigue and her strange limitless energy. She wasn’t one to lose interest in anything at any one moment very often, having being surrounded by books at the Ponyville Library, friends, or her scientific equipment on a daily basis. Her tail swished on the see-through floor, her left ear twitching as she waited patiently, her focus bringing in more text.

She soon found herself reading line after line of letters, passing the time and trying to make waiting for David more bearable. For once in her life she truly understood Rainbow Dash and her lack of patience. She found the text to be extending in size, continuing downward like a map marking down an extended, almost endless path, characters added on in intervals that seemed to match the tempo of David and his typing. But, as Twilight read through the same lines twice, thrice, and over again, her eyes widened.

“…In the considered lack of care Arbuckle displayed against Mr. Roy, as shown in his actions of failing to give the nearby assistant the correct orders, it is safe to assume that Arbuckle cannot control himself against others who insult his presence of being. Arbuckle has a large ego, earlier established after he got his new car and casually but no so subtly introduced it to his friends and openly bragged about it, therefore when a person shows their worth and outsmart Arbuckle, such as Mr. Roy did as he won the rigged bet…”

“Outsmart should be outsmarts, David,” Twilight said, breaking the silence.

David squinted at the screen.

He had to retrace his steps after Twilight’s comment. He knew what she was talking about, but he had written that three minutes ago. Finding the passage, he reviewed the sentence, the contents of the paragraph and mulled it over.

“I think you’re right,” David stated, adding an 's' at the end of the highlighted word. He took a breath in and out. Suddenly, his eyebrows shot upward. “Wait. How did you–”

“And you misspelt grandeur. It’s D-E-U-R. And you can’t use ‘wrought’ in that context. And–”

“I get it, Twilight,” David finally said, holding his hands up in defeat, rolling his eyes.

“Uhh, I hate to ask David, but are you really an Equestrian Language major? Or were you just joking around again?"

David balled his hands into fists, slunk his shoulders and faintly muttered “It’s only my first draft,” through a clenched jaw.

There was a notable pause on Twilight’s end. Then, she gave a large gasp. “David, I think I just–”

“–Read off of my document?” David finished for her.

“Yes! I think I found your document! I can read everything you’ve written here!” Twilight told him.

“You’ve found it in that mess of code?”

“Yes! And, I think… Are you writing on something called ‘winword dot E-X-E?” Twilight asked.

“Yeah,” David answered, pleasantly surprised. A wide smile grew on his face.

“I’ve figured it out!” Twilight announced, as happy as can be. “I’ve made progress inch by inch, but I think I can make out a little bit of your computer now!”

“Really? How?” David had to wonder.

“Well, everything’s organized in a specific manner. It’s like an essay, where the intro is at the beginning and the end of the data is at the bottom. There’s a whole bunch of strings, variable and booleans in-between, but when you’re writing a stream of information like this, I can make out the difference between the lines made by the computer and the lines made by you because the computer holds the two in completely different ways!”

“That definitely sounds like everything I’ve heard of about a program,” David said. “But how did you figure that out all by yourself? I thought computers were simplistic in Equestria. I didn't know you knew terms like that, Twilight.”

"...I didn't."

David was stunned.

“And now that I think about it… I don’t really know how I got to that entire conclusion, like, all of it, not just what I've explained to you so far. There's a lot I haven't told you, it's just been a rush of information, I... It’s like there was something telling me about the format of the data, or that I was being hinted on by something. I don’t know. There was nothing that was telling me how the program was being compiled a few minutes ago. I was reading the document several times over before it hit me.”

“But maybe you just didn’t realize it at first,” David tried to assure her. “And maybe it finally did hit you because you actually started to read what I was typing. That’s why it took you so long.”

“But something dragged my eyes to that specific corner of the space,” she said in a more careful tone. “It didn't look particularly interesting at first, I just had an odd feeling that I should have. A-And I didn’t really know about the difference between the computer code and the user code. Sure, I was putting pieces together, but I didn’t really have anything figured out until I–”

Twilight stopped in the middle of her sentence. A few seconds past before David swore he heard her fall over, her body hitting the ground in a slump.

“Twilight?” he asked. “Are you ok? Twilight!”

Suddenly, his monitor flashed white, blinding him through his glasses as a heavy, intense glow penetrated the protection of the orange lens. David cried out, throwing his arms in front of his face and pushing his chair back away from the desk, turning away from the assault on his eyes. He peeked through the gaps between his arms, trying to make out what was happening on his computer monitor. The bright screen flashed an array of colours, quickly swapping through many shades and mixed hues of different types of static took over the monitor. The light curved all around the room, even going as far as pressing light on the leaves on the trees through his room’s window.

David’s headset got unplugged from the force of his retreat. He sat staring at the edge of his seat, wide-eyed at the surge of energy from his system. His mind was reeling, trying to figure out what was going on. A blaze of lightning flashed through the window and not two seconds later crashing thunder followed. David yelped and jumped out of his chair.

Then, the monitor stopped flashing colours. David’s heart was beating a mile a minute, his eyes locked on to what was still a potentially dangerous object in his opinion. He let a few seconds pass. The screen of his computer was black; completely blank. He was afraid that it had broke, and was almost certain that he could see smoke rising out of the top vents of the equipment. With his arms still up along with his guard, he took steady steps towards the machine. His attention darted down to the case for a second to spot the power light was on and running, along with the spinning disk icon. He kept his eyes on target, and once he had realized it, he reeled in the cord of his headset away from the computer and shoved the end into his pocket.

After, he heard it, albeit faintly at first. His computer was installed with built-in speakers, a consumer’s choice that he found himself questioning after he had bought the piece for his custom PC in the first place. However, he wanted to have a back-up just in case his headphones blew so he wouldn’t have to game for a day without complete silence from the hardware. Now, he was relieved to have made what he believed to be the absolute correct choice.

Twilight was coughing from the other side.

“Ack, David?” she wheezed, her voice tinny through the low-quality speakers inside his rig. “David, are you still there?”

“I’m here!” David called. He was quick to remember that his headset was no longer plugged in and fumbled around with the end of it after yanking the cord out of his pocket, trying to pinch the nob with his finger and thumb. The plip-plop of raindrops started to play outside, beginning at a slow pace with heavy droplets that dove into every single surface outside. The crashing boom of electricity in the clouds accompanied the newly descending water. “I’m here, Twilight, hang on!”

David got to his knees in front of the desk, holding the plug of his audio device in his right hand only to switch it to his left once he realized he was too close to the desk to reach all the way over and bend down under to plug in the set into the correct port, the desk surface blocking his arm. The headset was plugged in, David adjusted the microphone to make sure it was in the proper position and he hit the side of his monitor in a flash of irritation.

“David?” Twilight asked, her voice wavering.

“I’m here, Twilight!” David called out. “Can you hear me?”

“Oh, thank Celestia!” Twilight said. “I can hear you definitely! I thought something happened to you!”

“Are you kidding me? I’m fine! Are you ok?” David queried.

Twilight groaned. “Ugh, I got dizzy all of the sudden and it was hard to stay upright. I’m better now, but the rooms still spinning a bit. What was I talking about again?”

“Are you sure you’re fine? Do you remember if you accidentally cast a spell?”

“Huh? What? Why?”

“Twilight, my computer just went crazy,” David divulged, his hands hovering above the desk as he looked sternly at the broken monitor like it was a face. “The screen flashed a whole bunch of colours and now I think it’s busted. What happened? Do you know?”

“No, David, I have no clue. I think I–”

Twilight stopped. David’s heart raced.

“Twilight, don’t do this to me again, talk to me. What’s going on in there?”

“David,” she began. “There’s something in front of me right now, something strange.”

David couldn’t think it was possibly any good. “What is it? What do you see?”

“It’s a single line of text b-but it’s highlighted. It’s different then all the other words I see here. Normally the text is constantly moving, changing and passing by in different directions, but this one… this one is sitting still. It’s not moving, and it's right in front of me, a-and it given a colour. No characters here really have a colour, I normally can’t detect them.”

“What colour do you see? What does the text read?” David asked.

“It says ‘P-O-S-S capture dot E-X-E’ and it’s the colour orange,” Twilight informed him.

“Twilight?” David said. He looked over his shoulder to spot his chair sitting a few feet away from him. He got to one knee before standing up and reaching behind to grab the base of the seat, trying to claw at it while not turning around, bending over his back to make sure that the connection between his voice and Twilight’s ears was not severed again. “Whatever you do, don’t move, don’t blink, do not look away, and do not cast any sort of spell or use your magic right now.”

“David–” Twilight tried to say.

“We don’t know what it is, and I pray to god that it’s not another virus that’s been hiding on my computer this entire time,” he continued, interrupting her.

“David, I think I need to do something with it. I’m getting this very strong feeling that–”

“No no no, Twilight, stay back. We don’t know what it is! It could be dangerous!” he pleaded.

“But I’m certain, David! This thing wants something out of me! I need to do something with it, and I… I think I’m the only one who can! That’s why it’s highlighted compared to everything else around here. I can interact with it somehow!”

David scowled. The sound and pitch of her voice was becoming abnormal. “Twilight…”

“David, I’m going to touch it,” Twilight announced.

“No-are you kidding me? Have you been listening to a single word I’m saying?”

The rain began to pour.

“This is it, David. I think this may be a step forward towards getting me to Equestria,” Twilight tried to reason.

“Twilight, wait! Stop before you do something stupid!” he begged.

Thunder burst through the window. Rain was getting all over the inside of the windowpane.

The monitor suddenly turned on, brighter than ever. David cried out, shielding his eyes one more and stumbling back.

“Twilight?” he yelled into the microphone. All he got for feedback was some static. “Twilight? Are you there? What did you do?”

The monitor wasn’t smoking anymore, but all it could output was a white screen. David thought it to be going crazy, especially since he couldn’t look at it through his gaming glasses anymore. He kept a low base, his knees bend, one foot forward and the other pointing sideways with his left arm helping his vision and the other hanging at his side. He waited a few seconds, listening to the white noise from the speakers around his ears.

“…Twilight?”

The monitor turned off. The rage of the storm outside crackled, and a deep part of David’s consciousness told him to close the damn window already so he didn't get his room soaked.

Then, the monitor booted back to its normal state, showing Microsoft Word with his document in all its minimalistic glory.

But David noticed an immediate difference. A box was suddenly added to one quarter of the screen. It took him a moment to process what he was seeing.

His jaw dropped. He could not believe his eyes.

Author's Note

This is basically an apology chapter for the last chapter I posted. That was crap and I released it too early. I should have really bunched it up with this one. Well, no matter, I can't be crying over spilled milk at this point. Instead, have an absurdly long chapter (for this story's standards), one that I stayed up until four in the morning to write and complete, taking four uninterrupted hours to write the damn thing.

I hope you enjoyed it. (And I can't tell you how nervous I was posting this.)

Writing David's typing piece was probably the hardest thing to do in this chapter. As you might be able to tell, I'm not an English major, so I really had to kinda guess as to what a first-year English paper might look like. Writing stuff like that out of the top of your head without any context and making it all up is really, really hard. I hope you can all look past the unrealistic-ness of it all.

I hope I'm not getting talking head syndrome while writing this, i.e. too much dialogue and not a lot of anything else.

I think I'm having a little bit of a problem with the opposite of Lavender Unicorn Syndrome, if you know what I mean. I feel as if I'm using names too much, when I could be using other descriptors. The thing is, normally descriptors are discouraged in these types of works. I tried to balance every out as much as possible. Everything in moderation, I guess.

Boy, I sure use dashes a lot.

And last but not least, I'm going for vacation for at least two weeks. That doesn't mean I won't be writing, it means that you may not see another chapter for two weeks. That's actually why I worked so hard to get this chapter done, so I wouldn't be sitting at my vacation worrying about it. Summer, baby. If I do finish a chapter in the meantime, which believe me, I will try to do, I'll edit and upload it in about five days or more. That's not a promise, though.

EDIT: Gosh dang it it's supposed to be PoSS, not PPoS! I'm so stupid! Dang it! Oh well, fixed.

Storm.exe

He couldn't bring himself to lift his jaw.

"David," Twilight said.

His eyes were frozen open, eyebrows up, brain stuck on one thread of thought.

"David, are you there? Hello?" Twilight had asked.

He shook his head slowly and carefully.

"What happened? Is everything alright?"

Rain continuously pattered on his windowpane, the paint on the wood chipped from age along the line where the window would have clamped down against oak. Then, he let out a stream of hot air from his nose.

"What?" David asked. "I mean, whh—what?" His speech fell into a wheeze as it reached the end of his question.

The purple creature at the bottom-right corner of the screen in the new window scowled for a split second before its expression loosened, staring off into the distance, the background behind it completely black and void. "David, what's going on out there?"

His hands had been sitting in his hair, pushing it up before he brought them back down to a position where he was trying to use his arms to present his brain what he'd been witnessing.

"I-I-I—Hoo, you got to be kidding me!" he said, the corner of his upper lip twisting into a smirk. His right lower eyelid twitched.

"For Pete's sake David, could you please give me a straight answer?" Twilight inquired before the creature shifted on all fours, turning to face him. Its plump body was covered in a royal purple, with all four of its limbs touching an unseen floor. Its head was two-thirds the size of its frame with amethyst eyes taking up the upper space, the bottom holding a protruding but short muzzle. Its hair was neatly done, darkened to a navy blue and nicely draping over the back of its neck with bangs hanging over the forehead just above the eyelashes. There were pink and deep purple highlights in a selection of hair strands directly to the right of the center, which was marked by the spiraling horn jutting out of its skull a few inches. There was a strange mark on its lower body that looked like a purple star with five smaller white lights orbiting around it. It had a long, elegant tail that widened out from the base until it reached the end, too matching the highlights that were on the cropping of hairs on its crown.

Its gaze suddenly stared right back out of the computer screen onto his eyes, passing right through him. He shivered. "Hmm? What's this filming camera doing here?" She asked as David watched the creature's lips move with Twilight's words in a mixture of absolute shock, horror, and curiosity. They perfectly matched.

He suddenly broke out into a fit of breathless laughter, the air coming out from the bottom of his lungs. Bending his back, his cheeks painfully tightened so his mouth could complete the smile that was forced upon him, placing his hands on his knees to keep his balance and structure stable. His chortles were near silent, almost unnoticeable, and only when he breathed in did he make noise. He hung his head, shaking it slowly, not able to break out of his incessant giggling. The storm continued actively outside, rain pelting the leaves of the trees right near the window.

"D…David?" Twilight asked meekly. The thing on the screen had concern etched all over its face, looking around and away from what David figured was the 'camera lens'. Its tall ears folded back, taking a few nervous steps back, one leg held up, bent and pointed down when it stopped.

"Concern, or fright?" he asked himself casually.

He finally lifted his skull after a few seconds, staring right into the glowing computer screen, straight at the wonder that was rendered inside the mass of soldered metal chips and electric bits underneath his glass desk. "You have got to be kidding me."

"David, I can't help you if you don't give me any details!" Twilight complained. "What's going on out there?"

An honest grin formed on his face as David stood up straight, stretching his lower back by arching his spine and applying pressure with his hands. "Heh, sorry Twilight. I just got a little freaked out, is all."

The animal in the moving picture looked quite peeved. It turned around in a one-eighty, searching for something off in the distance, jumpy and agitated. "Freaked out? Freaked out from what?"

"Look at the camera."

Miss periwinkle turned to gaze out the screen. It squinted, ears folding back again. David considered it to look kind of cute in an odd sort of way. "What about the camera?"

"Hi, Twilight." David simply stated, folding his arms. His smile widened.

A couple of seconds passed. Realization reached her after time, and David got to watch it all as her eyes widened, mouth forming an "o" as her ears flicked upward in the air. "No. No way!"

"Glad you've figured it out."

"No way! You can see me?" Twilight said excitedly. She practically bounced on the spot, a wild smile on her face. "How is that possible?"

"P-O-S-S Capture? Pony dot E-X-E? What the heck was installed onto my computer?" "I don't know, but it had to do with whatever you did with that glowing line of text on your end," David reasoned, putting his left arm across his stomach and his right elbow resting on top, rubbing the bottom of his chin with his right hand. "Which, by the way, was extremely risky."

She shook her head. "I'm sorry, David. I don't know what had overcome me. It was just this utter urge that I couldn't control!"

"Well,” he began, pondering. “I want to say that it's alright, but considering what else that could have happened, I really can't."

"I guess anything really could have happened, huh?" Twilight added, although a bit quietly.

"Absolutely anything," David agreed. He shrugged with his hands and shoved his thumbs into the waistband of his white boxers. "And I'm sorry, Twilight, but you need to try harder not to do that. We don't know what is causing you to do that and until we find out, a lot of crazy stuff might happen when you, uhh, interact, with text you don't know about."

Twilight sat on her haunches, looking down with her ears bent. "I'm sorry. I really couldn't resist. It was this strange, overwhelming feeling that went over me!"

"Seriously, what caused that?" David mused, sucking on the inside of his cheek through a slightly open jaw. "Was it the program? But doesn't Twilight exist inside the program? So why would the program force her to do that? Was there a purpose? Wouldn't I have just figured out how to make that camera appear eventually? Why did that exactly happen, and why now?"

The wind howled outside, picking up speed. It swept into David's room, causing a chill down his spine as the cool night air rolled into the bottom of his shirt and up his back. He pulled his thumbs out of his wear and turned to the window. He didn't even realize that it had started raining, and raining hard, no less. A gust shot across his desk, making a load of unsecured papers float off the platform. Startled, David tried his best to scoop up his work as best as he could without crushing the sensitive materials, placing them back on the surface and weighing them down with a variety of pens, cans, plastic cups and game controllers. Lightning flashed against the walls of his normally cozy place. Locking down the last pieces, his attention turned to the open hole in his room, window slid up and locked in position. It crossed his mind on whether or not to close the darn thing to keep more chaos from entering his domain. He decided he liked the breeze during the heat though and the free circulation helped create a comfortable temperature, as well as the rain water not flooding over his windowpane due to the plethora of trees.

He let out a huff as he slumped back triumphantly into his black leather seat. "Well, at least I'm actually able to see what you look like now. That's what a pony is, huh?"

"Yep," Twilight replied, smiling at the camera. "Everything from the tip of my nose to the end of my tail," she said, touching the end of her muzzle and looking behind her while flicking her tail for added effect. "Do you not have ponies in your world?"

"We do," David began. "But they, uhh, don't look anything like you."

"Really? How so?" She inquired, tilting her head.

"Well, ponies are usually just small horses, with thinner legs, a much smaller head, beady eyes and a tail and mane that are much more messy," he explained. "Now that I think about it, you kind of look like you came out of a cartoon."

"A cartoon?" Twilight replied, raising a single eyebrow. "What's a cartoon, exactly?"

"Ehh, well," David began, his eyes wandering off to the upper left, trying to think up an appropriate response. "You probably don't know what a TV is, but cartoons are rapidly moving pictures on a screen that match up well enough to create an animation."

"Oh, an animation, huh?" Twilight responded, tapping the bottom of her chin. "I think I remember reading about something like that in a newspaper a year or two ago. There was something circulating around various cinemas in the bigger cities, something that was done by playing drawn pictures quickly. It looked really interesting, but the film never came to Ponyville for me to watch and I had limited resources on the subject. I was researching something else at the time too. Princess Celestia asked me to write a paper on the subject of dreams, which proved to be quite deep and intriguing. There was a whole science behind how they worked, and used to have ancient magic that has been extinct for about five-hundred years now that was entirely dedicated to the craft of dream-weaving. Well, five-hundred years until Princess Luna came back, but—"

"Twilight," David abruptly stated.

She blinked. "Yes?"

"You kind of jumped focus there."

"Oh, I did?" she questioned. "Sorry."

"Anyways… Ponyville?" he had to ask.

"That's the town where I live."

He snorted, and tried to hide it.

"Hey, what's so funny?" Twilight inquired, squinting at David.

"Nothing, nothing," he feigned, not looking at her even though she couldn't see him.

Twilight didn't look like she bought it, but continued anyway. "So you're saying I look like a bunch of moving pictures?"

"Yes, well, kind of," David tried to explain. "You're animated in bright colour and not realistically represented at all. Then again, I couldn't imagine how a pony in my world could possibly be able to talk."

Twilight scrunched up her face. "And why's that?"

"Well, ponies don't talk in my world, Twilight. They just don't." he informed her.

"Oh yeah," Twilight said, having forgotten their previous conversation on the topic of worlds and Humans. Her eyes dropped to the ground and lingered there, searching for something.

A harsh cold front met with heat outside and it rattled the window, blowing a harsh blast of air into the room. David's hair fluttered and he squinted, sharply turning towards the source. The rain started to pour.

"What the?" David asked himself.

"Is that rain I'm hearing?" Twilight asked, looking directly into the camera.

"Yeah, there's a bit of a storm outside. Hang on, I'm just gonna close my—"

David was cut off. A blaze of light suddenly filled his vision and he yelped, temporary blinded. White stabbed into his eyes once, twice, three times, in rapid succession, and then he finally squeezed his eyelids shut, trying to get a fresh coat of tears over his damaged retinas. When he opened them, he was already getting out of his chair, sliding his headset off his head and blinking several times to try and reset his sight.

"David?" he heard Twilight's tinny voice ask as he lowered his headpiece to his desk.

"What was that?" David had to ask himself, his expression stern, taking three long strides to get to his window. He was in the process of removing the stick that held the window up in place when he was blasted in the chest by some invisible force, a crack of thunder blowing out his eardrums as he visibly stumbled back.

"What the heck was that?" he asked aloud. Rushing to the window, he reached to lift the slide up and grab the piece of wood.

There was another beam of light that hit and this time was met with a sharp crack. The entire house shook and David was thrown off his feet as he got shoved aside by Mother Nature herself. His back hit the carpet and he let out a grunt, opening his eyes to find that they saw nothing. Panic rising in his throat, he rubbed his eyes, trying to get the darkness out. It didn't work. He tried for a couple seconds and let out a breath of relief to find that it was, in fact, coming back to him, although damaged to the point where he could only make out outlines. A low, groaning sound came loudly and steadily from somewhere beyond the room. The trees cried in pain as wood scraped, bent, and finally snapped. Something collapsed outside not too soon after, shooting out snaps of static, or rather, that’s what David figured at least.

Slowly he got up to his feet, heart racing. When he put his hands on the window pane and looked out, he could hear that the rain had slowed down significantly somehow during that single moment, taking the rage of the wind with it. During the third time which he reached for the window stop, the smell of ozone filled his nostrils. He tried peering out the window. The neighborhood was cast into a deep shadow, but David made out what he thought to be a few trunks of fully-grown oak trees collapsed onto each other into a heap, with long strands of rope lying beneath them.

He rubbed at his eyes, trying to fix them and refresh his vision. But then, something occurred to him. He realized that he could barely see anything outside not because of the flash in his eyes, but because that the street lights along the road went out.

His breath hitched in his throat. No light was cast behind him either.

He turned around. The lamp on his desk was down, too.

And his computer monitor sat pitch black, and empty.

Author's Note

Darn. This was so much easier to do three months ago.

And here I was struggling to get this chapter right for a couple of days when I wrote the last chapter in a matter of two hours.

I really need to get back into the groove. Or maybe it's because I really wished this chapter to be done right. But then again, when do I not want my own chapters to go right? Never.

And no, "Sotrm" is not the word "Storm" scrambled. It's an acronym.

EDIT #1: Damn it. I really should actually read my own story before I type new chapters. Twilight's surprise at the Human's world lack of talking ponies has been changed.

EDIT #2: Changed the title from "Sotrm.exe" to "Storm.exe". A very kind user pointed out that there's no point in having acronyms as titles if I don't provide hints (which I haven't in this chapter) and no one can figure it out. Might as well change it to something that makes sense. Sotrm was supposed to stand for Storm-of-the-real-machine, but like I said, no clues.

EDIT #3: Drastically changed the ending. Before, it was a bit abrupt, cutting from David getting knocked down to getting back up to looking at his desk. Now, there's a little bit of an in-between part where he just... listens.

EDIT #4: So apparently Ponyville does, in fact, have a cinema. It was featured in an episode One Bad Apple, but I didn't watch that episode. Funny thing is, for a fan of MLP:FiM I haven't watched that much of it. I mostly indulge myself in fan works, not the actual show. Oops. Fixed so that Twilight isn't speaking nonsense about Ponyville not having a cinema.

autorecovery.exe

He dashed over to his desk, knocking his office chair out of the way, the seat lifting off the ground for a second before it landed back on the floor, its plastic wheels clattering, the disturbance it caused slightly muted by the carpet. The palm of his hand blindly pressed down on a handful of keyboard keys all at once, pushing down for a second before desperately tapping the escape key, his other hand pressing the on button of the monitor.

"Come on, come on," David muttered to himself under clenched teeth. He slapped the side of the screen when it didn't turn on and soon after dropped down to one knee to check on the case of his computer. No lights were on. The disk didn’t have its iconic scraping sound and the fans in the back of the hardware ceased to spin. He pressed the power button, holding it until he finished counting to four under his breath and released it, the button clicking back into place. There was no response from the machine. He tried several times, but to no avail.

He crawled underneath his desk, carefully pulling his computer out from against the wall. Tracing the wall with his fingers, he found the power outlet and the computer’s cord with it, tugged at the base and pulled it completely free. As soon as it came loose he tried sticking it back in, stabbing at the wall several times in the dark until he scraped the prongs of the cord along the metal surface of the outlet and lined up the shot, shoving it back into place. Not bothering to push his computer back into position, he got out of the small space and tried turning it on again. No progress was made. He could feel sweat start to form on the back of his neck, goosebumps popping straight up.

"This can't be happening," he stated, standing back up. He peered on where he thought his lamp was on his desk and fiddled around the base of the object until he found the switch, flicking it on and off repeatedly. Nothing happened. He threw his hands up, and when they were brought down by gravity his palms slapped against his thighs. Thunder crackled off in the distance.

He swore under his breath. Grabbing his phone off the glass table, he backed away from his dead rig and threw himself on his bed, flopping face up. A heavy sigh came from his lips and he tried to rub his eyes, but found his fingernails scratching the lens of his glasses along with his fingertips smudging the view. The eyewear ended up sitting to the left of him after he threw it at his pillow and his hands were up massaging his eyelids and temples. He groaned, staring at the ceiling, his eyes finally adjusting to the dark around him. His brain was tired, muddled and in a state of scramble. Lying there, he chose to do nothing. He let the soothing sounds of the rain wash his worries away for the moment. He could feel a cool, light breeze come in through the window, as if nature was apologizing to him for the wrong it had done. His eyes closed.

Sleep started to grasp him after a few minutes. Refusing rest, he opened his eyes and flipped open his smart phone sideways, the device fitting perfectly into his hand widthwise, but more than outreached the tips of his fingers lengthwise. He could barely see its shining red finish in the lack of light in the room. It immediately responded, and the Samsung Andromedus displayed the time, date, and background between its twin touch screens. It read 11:30 at night. He sighed again.

He closed the device and got up, grabbing some red sport shorts off his clothing drawers near the door and putting them on. Brown slippers went under his feet and he walk to the door of his room, twisting the modern door handle and swinging the weightless wood open. Walking out to the second floor, he spotted someone leaning against the edge of the mahogany railings of the pathway that looked down to the level below, pressing and sliding her thumb on the screen of her iPhone X. Her head turned towards him.

"Everything’s dead in your room too, huh?" was the first question asked by David as he took two steps towards the staircase a foot away from his room. His left hand rested on the railing, the other gripping his phone tight.

"Yep," she answered before going back to her phone, the glow of the handheld illuminating her face with details of a sharp, pointed chin. Her Victorian nose pointed directly wherever her attention was at all times, and brown eyes dotted between her black, curved eyelashes. Her usually snide and moody lips were formed in a fine line, and she wasn't bothered by the light of the phone at all, choosing to embrace the glow instead of bothering to turn down the brightness instead. Long black hair scaled down the back of her head to the top of her back, acting as a curtain over her shoulders and cut into shorts bangs in the front. A grey t-shirt with a faded design on the front hung onto her modest form along with the baby blue shorts following her backside.

David looked down the stairs down to the main floor. The last step fell onto warm orange tiles that split into two directions and went around to the back, as well as up the front door not two meters away. The left of the stairs followed quickly to a living area, the walls painted a laid back white with a gas fireplace build in to the structure. There was clay pots with curious swirls designed into the material, painted in green. They were tiny enough to fit onto the ledge of the fireplace, three sitting around a ship in a bottle. Above the fireplace was a large, beautiful painting of a white mare lying beside her foal in a green field during daylight, her motherly presence looking over the child as he pressed up lovingly against her warm body.

There were dark crimson sofas all around a coffee table underneath a white carpet that was built into the floor, vacuumed and clear of any fluffs. The table’s base and legs were made of a rich, syrup-brown maple, but the surface was actually fine glass, design painted onto the edges of the window onto the floor, held in place by the wooden frame around it, a blue flower vase sitting on top in the center. There were bookcases along the west side of the room beside the fireplace, filled to the brim with various meanderings on the works of law, business and the church, as will some bits and pieces about plant wildlife, all aging back by thirty to forty years. Behind one of the sofas near a giant curtain-covered window was a glass cabinet, showcasing clean teacups, plates with elegant etches sketched onto them and other various pieces of fine china. The front door itself was closed, with metal bars covering the front as an added security measure.

"I'm trying to figure out what exactly is going on here," she said, browsing the contents of her phone as David's attention was brought back to her.

"You do know that we just lost power a few minutes ago, right?" David pointed out. "I don't think the city's had enough time to respond to anything.”

"They can be fast if they want to," she simply stated, not looking away from her activity.

"So are you just going to stand there, refreshing the Hydro Twitter page until something comes up?"

"Yes," she replied, mashing what David could only guess was the spinning arrow on the phone's URL bar.

He rolled his eyes and started down the stairs, shuffling as he guided his hand down the railing. "Have fun, Raini."

"You too, David," she said, a tiny smirk on her face.

He reached the bottom step and dropped off, continuing to the right and around the bend. Down the following hallway on the left was a door that he directed himself to, turning the door handle and pulling it open. The insides were pitch black, but after flipping open his phone for a second and tapping the screen a few times, the phone's flashlight turned on through the back of the device and he pointed it at the enclosed space. Several coats were hanging on a rack, with boots and shoes sitting at the floor, all neatly placed in their proper pairs, one after another. He found his own blue rain jacket, pulled it out and began sliding his arms down the sleeves.

"No need to do that," an elderly, weathered voice called from down the corridor. David stopped putting the jacket on and turned to face his speaker, phone pointed down to keep anyone from getting blinded.

"Mr. Geary," David greeted, turning off his phone's light with the press of a button near his index finger and shoving it in his pocket. He started taking off the coat. "What's going on?"

Mr. Geary was in his stripped white-and-mint-green pajamas, adorning a full head of short grey hair with wrinkles below his eyes, on the corners of his lips, and on the front of his forehead. An old flip-phone was held in his right hand at his side, closed, with his other clutching a black flashlight with a red rim. The short man gave a warm smile that matched the creases in his slightly sagged cheeks.

"I've been calling around the neighborhood," Mr. Geary explained. "Everyone's power is out, but Tracy’s had the worst of it. Apparently a tree near her house got hit and fell onto the power lines right onto her yard. Thank goodness that it wasn’t her house that got hit."

David was in the middle of putting his rain jacket back. "Thank goodness is right. That’s where it hit, huh? I'm surprised lightning got this close."

"Indeed," Mr. Geary replied. "It seems a bit odd to me, but not unbelievable. Hopefully no one got hurt and it'll be fixed in the morning."

Mr. Geary started moving past David as he got out of the way. "Did the thunderclap wake you up?"

"Yes, it did, and Suzy too. She let me handle it though, or rather, I told her to try to get back to sleep while I looked into it," Mr. Geary said as he turned to meet David right at the base of the steps. David heard a door close upstairs, guessing it was Raini's.

"Yeah, Raini's been on top of the news on the internet, trying to see when a response team will come and fix the problem and how long it'll take." David recalled, pointing up to the floor above them. "Hopefully she'll tell us what she figures out as soon as information gets online."

"I'm glad she's keeping up with things," Mr. Geary stated.

David took a step forward, and lightning briefly flashed over his face. "I guess Ron's not back yet?"

"I'm afraid not," his host responded, straightening himself. "He's out late again. He'll be quite surprised once he comes back, though. Won’t have all his usual gadgets to toy around with without power."

"I wouldn’t be surprised if once he got back he just flopped down onto his bed and instantly falls asleep. I'll go send him a text, regardless," David decided.

"That's a good idea," Mr. Geary commented. David continued forward before he was stopped by a hand. When David looked up, Mr. Geary’s practiced green eyes were studying his face. "You look woefully tired, David. Might be best if you get some rest soon, huh?"

"Yeah," David agreed, subconsciously rubbing his eyes. "I just lost some important work on my computer when the power went out, is all."

Mr. Geary's expression softened. "I'm sorry to hear that, David. Hopefully you'll be able to recover some of your work tomorrow."

David started back up the stairs, Mr. Geary trailing behind him. "Yeah, I hope so too."

Twilight was opening her eyes. Her first thoughts were all over the place as she came out of slumber. She let out a wide yawn and wiped the sleep out of her eyes, looking around. Once again she had to remind herself where she was, staring at the lines of code floating about the space. She idly traced the edge of her hoof against the translucent ground, watching as a trail of finely buffered white ripples follow her touch. Smacking her lips, it took her brain a few moments to realize that she had fallen asleep sitting on her haunches. It escaped her how she possibly could have fallen asleep in such a position without her lower legs going numb. But then an odd thought occurred to her, and she scratched the back of her head.

What had she been doing?

"Twilight?" she heard. Her ears flicked for a second and she searched around the environment. It sounded familiar, but she couldn't put her hoof on the voice.

"Twilight? Are you there?" it had asked with the tiniest amount of apprehension. She narrowed her vision, eyebrows furrowed. Who was that pony talking to her?

"Spike?" she asked aloud.

"No," the voice replied after a moment of hesitation. "It's me, David. Remember? You're stuck in my computer."

Suddenly it all came back to her. Her eyes widened, and her attention was grabbed as she leaned forward, back straight. "Oh! Yeah, I remember!"

"Oh thank goodness," David said on the other side with the creaking of what Twilight understood was David’s office chair, as he described it to her previously, breathing out a sigh of relief.

Twilight frowned. "I can't believe I forgot. How could I? I—I—I—” She had to shake her head to clear her mind and stop stuttering. An odd, tingling sensation went over her, from the tip of her ears to the base of her tail. Her mind was stuck solely on one word for some odd reason before the moment passed. “I'm sorry David, I just—"

"Don't worry about it," David immediately cut in. She heard him hit something in his workspace, muttering under his breath about a device or tool “not crapping out” on him now. “But tell me, how are you doing?”

"I’m fine, thank you," Twilight replied, the gears in her head turning. "Although maybe a bit zonked out. Waking up inside cyberspace doesn’t give me headaches anymore, and usually Spike has to help me get up in the morning otherwise I sleep in past lunch time. Did you just get home?"

"Yep, got back by ten.” David divulged. Twilight looked behind her shoulder and up, spotting the number up in the vast black sky without thinking about why she exactly peered there.

"Ten at night, you're right," she confirmed as a little bit of heat filled her cheeks. “I guess I’ll be waking up past lunch whether or not I like it.”

"Well, I could leave the computer on for you," David answered. It sounded like he was typing something on his keyboard. “You would be alone all day though.”

Twilight shook her head, even though she knew David wouldn’t be able to see it. "No thanks. That wouldn’t be very pleasant. What were we doing last night? I remember seeing this orange text and wanting to touch it, but nothing after that. I think I might be still half asleep."

There was a moment of silence on David's end. Then, he chuckled. "Is that how it is, huh?”

David was about to go into some kind of explanation when Twilight turned her head to her right and spotted something very odd.

"Huh?" she sounded out, standing up and moving forward a bit. "What's this camera doing here?"

She heard David give out a sigh, followed by a harsh laugh. "Oh boy. Ok, let me explain a couple of things to you first, Twilight..."

Author's Note

Ok, so there. I introduced some minor characters. Dunno if I'm going to use them at all (which makes introducing them in the first place a huge mistake if they have no importance in the plot), as they weren't part of my original plan (which I try to follow very closely, as when I stray from the path and try to write something not what I planned it ends up making the story worse), but I couldn't figure out a way of getting David out of his rented abode without explaining where he was, others around him, what kind of environment he was in, etc.. We'll see how this goes, and whether or not I will regret this later.

Also, as a very important notice I changed the ending of the last chapter just a tiny bit to make the story a bit more believable so I don't have to rely on suspension of disbelief as a crutch. I feel foolish for having to make so many fixes to the last chapter after I publish it, but that's what I get for pushing it out the door so soon.

LiveChat.exe

“Rrrgh!”

David let out his frustration under grit teeth, feverishly scratching his head as he arched his back, leaning his seat away from the monitor, the screen filled with words. He got up out of his seat, grabbing the white coffee cup off the desk and bringing it with him to the window. The cord of his headset extended due to a new purchase that left a long, looping wire sitting at the foot of the computer case. With some effort he lifted the window and propped it open with the spare block of wood that sat below the window against the wall.

“What’s wrong?” Twilight asked. David turned around to his computer, and her window automatically maximized itself. They still didn’t know why it did that.

“Ah, writer’s block,” he explained, leaning onto the windowpane and bringing his attention to the outside. “This short story is kicking my butt. I wish my professor wouldn’t assign such an odd subject to write to.”

“What is he having you write about?”

“Crime fiction.”

“Well, that’s not so uncommon.”

“I haven’t really touched anything like it before,” David said. “It’s difficult to put a mystery onto a page and make all the characters set up so that everything matches in place and makes sense.”

“Why don’t you do some research? Maybe that’ll give you a good idea on how to write it.”

“That’s what we’ve been doing all semester. We’ve been going through all the big murder novels, from new to old. I’ve got an idea, and I’m taking several hints from those novels, it’s just…”

David struggled to find words. He took a sip from his steaming cup.

“Augh, I just can’t do it,” he concluded. “Not right now at least. I’ve been on this for a few hours anyways. I need a break.”

“You should at least save your work before you stop,” Twilight pointed out.

David for the moment was at odds. His head swiveled back to the computer screen. “How do you know about that?”

Twilight cheekily stuck out her tongue with a grin beneath it. “I’ve gotten a bit through those e-books you’ve given me. Here, let me do it for you anyways.”

David’s eyes widened. He immediately turned around and practically leaped to his keyboard’s side, staring at the document beneath Twilight’s window. “Did you actually?”

“Yep,” Twilight acknowledged with a proud smile. "Saved."

He stood up straight and stretched his arms. “That's incredible, Twilight! I can't believe you've gotten so far in so little time! How long has it been since I've given you those books, anyways?”

Twilight sunk into her sitting space. “Three days. It's not much, though. I've still barely scratched the surface of what everything has to offer.”

“That’s ok. This is a huge step up in the right direction anyways, and a huge step away from not shocking me through the mouse.”

"Hey!"

Twilight pouted. David had a chuckle to himself and went back to the window, drink in hand. He leaned back out the window, staring down, his eyes losing focus until the growing green grass at ground level became an unidentifiable sea of swaying emerald waves. He held his cup in both hands, rubbing his fingers together beneath without being aware. His grin reset.

“Good thing she can’t see my face when I say that. It’s not that I can’t think of what next to write,” he thought. “It’s just that I can’t think about anything else except…”

David looked up into the western sunset, the sky ablaze with orange tearing up into the lower atmosphere and beyond, the canopy of trees overlooking the street painting veins of nature with its branches along the horizon. He leaned onto the windowpane with one arm across the wood and the other holding the coffee mug in his hand, the surface of the liquid visibly steaming. The air cooled steadily as the sun made its decent, bringing all the life and sounds of day to a calm.

“Tell me more about your world.”

“What?” Twilight asked, startled.

“Tell me more about where you came from. Equestria. Tell me about that.”

“Uh, well,” Twilight started. “Where should I start?”

“At the very beginning. Start from there.” he suggested.

There was a moment of thinking from Twilight. “Alright,” she said, clearing her throat after. “The land of Equestria, known to our ancestors as Rainbow Valley, was founded around two-thousand, five-hundred and seven years ago. It was dubbed ‘the land of the ponies’, as it was found under a coalition of the three pony races working together. The ponies of the Unicorn, the Pegasus and the Earth all signed a treaty to establish peace and harmony between each other. The founding of Equestria was helped by the presence of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, the two Royal Sisters that arrived in Rainbow Valley soon after the ponies found it.”

“Jesus, this is going to be heavier than I thought,” David mused.

Twilight continued. “The capital of Equestria, Canterlot—” David had to snicker at that, “—was originally located within the Everfree Forest, which was at the time a forest of flourishing nature that had the uncanny ability to produce fruit and vegetables at an accelerated rate. It was also a safe location, as most of the wildlife inside the Everfree was tame and friendly, and the thick forest border kept invaders out for several centuries. Seven hundred years after its founding however, a mischievous spirit named Discord attacked Canterlot.”

“This feels like a mixture between a kid’s story and a grand fantasy tale,” David had to note.

“With the powers of the Elements of Harmony, the Royal Sisters managed to push back against Discord’s assault and encase him in stone. However, Canterlot was lost, and Discord’s chaotic magic cursed the Everfree Forest to become wild and untamed, removing the ponies’ abilities to keep the nature in check. Dangerous creatures began appearing throughout the wood and Equestrians had to flee from their capital.”

The wind rustled David’s short hair. “Yeesh. That’s rough.”

“Mm hmm,” Twilight agreed. “The ponies quickly found a place to hold their capital, though. New Canterlot found its place on the side of Big Mountain, which was later renamed to Canter Mountain because of the influence of the capital.”

“On… On the side of the mountain?”

“Yes, directly on the side. Canterlot’s platform was built straight out from the mountain face, and it took the combined ability of the Earth Ponies’ understanding of construction and materials, the Pegasus Ponies’ smarts and weather control and the Unicorn Ponies’ magic to complete the city. Thus, New Canterlot was found, although as the ages passed ponies forgot about the old Canterlot and simply dubbed New Canterlot as Canterlot.”

“Sounds like it can be a silly place at times.” he said, holding back a snicker.

Twilight tapped her hoof on her chin. “Perhaps sometimes. I grew up in Canterlot, and I can testify to the dumb shenanigans that the aristocrats get to in the politics of things, but Canterlot holds a special place in my heart.”

“I can get behind that,” David commented. “So you were saying that you grew up in Canterlot. Where do you live now?”

“I live in a village west from Canterlot called Ponyville. It’s a quiet, quaint place with rolling hills and fields of apple trees that sits at the border of the Everfree.”

“Really?” David had to question. “Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”

“Well, when it was first established there were two oversights: The fact that the town center was nowhere near Everfree Forest made the threat seem small, but then the border of the town extended to the threshold as time passed, and they also simply forgot about the forest.”

“How could they forget something as important as that?”

“Well, my friend Applejack originally told me the origins of Ponyville, as it was her grandmother that help found the town. When I asked her grandmother the same question, she just said that they forgot about the forest. She said that it was more important to hold down the bonds that they made around the land that became Ponyville rather than worry about the dangers that the Everfree presented.”

“That seems both dumb and smart at the same time.”

“The Everfree’s not that dangerous, really,” Twilight vouched. David took a sip of his coffee. “Sure, the odd monster stumbles out of the brush every two months or so, but it’s nothing that the town can’t handle. It becomes evident how powerless the creatures of the Everfree are when they aren’t in their natural element. The chaos magic of the forest normally gives them strength, but once that disappears and their fuel is replaced with standard magicks in the air, they lose much of their ability to combat and cause destruction. If anything, it’s us that creates the most havoc in the town, not Everfree Forest.”

“Uh,” David intelligently muttered. “Us?”

Twilight laughed nervously at the other end. “Eh, there are a lot of strange things that occur around my friends and I. We’re kind of important for Equestria, and as a result trouble seems to find us in one form or another. We’ve been a few adventures here and there.”

David blinked. “What makes you and your friends so important?”

“We have the ability to wield the Elements of Harmony,” Twilight replied.

“I thought you said that the princesses had them?”

“They did, but a thousand and one years ago, Princess Luna was corrupted by something called The Nightmare. Princess Celestia had to use the Elements in order to prevent destruction worse than Discord could have ever conducted, but the loss of harmony between the sisters rendered them both unable to use the Elements. My five friends and I picked up the Elements a thousand years later.”

“What are the Elements, anyways? Some kind of super-weapon?”

There was silence from Twilight’s end. David curiously turned around and took a look at his monitor, Twilight’s face on the corner of the screen frozen, with eyes wide open and jaw agape.

“Twilight?” he asked.

“Sorry,” she responded finally with a huff. “I’d just never heard the Elements to be referenced that way. Yes, they do have extraordinary powers, but those powers only combat evil. The Elements can’t touch anything that is good; they only refresh them. They’re w-weapons, I guess, but only to those who want to see them destroy and cause misfortune, which they wouldn’t.”

“I guess that makes sense. They wouldn’t be called the Elements of Harmony if they didn’t work for the forces of peace and tranquility.”

“Exactly,” Twilight affirmed.

“So how did you and your friends get your hands on such power?”

“Hooves, David,” Twilight politely corrected. “And we found the Elements during the return of Nightmare Moon, or rather, corrupted Princess Luna. She had come back from being trapped in the moon by Princess Celestia a little bit more than a year and a half ago and my friends, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Rarity and Rainbow Dash all went out to stop her. We ended up finding the Elements, figured out how to use them and stopped her from invoking everlasting night.”

“Jesus. That sounds nuts.”

“You don’t even know the half of it. At the time, we didn’t even know each other, Rainbow Dash thought I was a spy for Nightmare Moon, and I didn’t even want to be in Ponyville. I was researching the legend of the Mare in the Moon at the time, and I tried to warn Princess Celestia, but instead of doing anything about it she relocated me from Canterlot to Ponyville in order to supervise the Summer Sun Celebration, a holiday celebrating Princess Celestia and her power over the sun during the longest day of the year.”

“Her power over the sun?! Wait a minute. Is the royal line of Equestria always named Celestia and Luna? I thought Celestia and Luna were the original Queens?”

“David, Princess Celestia and Luna are immortal. They’ve been living for longer than anypony can account for, and were even young adults when they helped found Equestria.”

David spat out his drink. “What?”

“They’re goddesses, David. Princess Celestia has control over the sun and the day and Princess Luna keeps a hold on the moon and the night sky. That’s why we hold the Summer Sun Celebration and the Winter Moon Celebration: It’s to express our gratitude to our rulers for their work and efforts in keeping Equestria whole and at peace.”

“What? But that makes no sense! How can someone move the sun and moon?”

“They use magic. In fact, the princesses have arcane capabilities only unicorns can dream of. Although, there have been conflicting record on whether or not the princesses still raised the sun and moon before they were crowned, but they don’t want to answer that. That’s also a part of why they were appointed rulers of the land. Their power is matched by no one except for the strongest of spirits.”

“What the heck? That’s not even how the sun and moon work! The Earth revolved around the sun, and the moon revolved around the Earth! You can’t control anything about that! They’re too massive and too far away!”

David accidentally dumped some of his drink when he tilted his hand too far.

“Maybe in your world, David,” Twilight quietly suggested. “But in mine, that’s how things work.”

David gave out a sigh. He said nothing, staring at the ground and collecting his thoughts.

“Ok. Sorry Twilight. This all seems a little far-fetched to me, but I think I get it. Immortal royalty aside, what happened after you found the Elements? I mean, they sound kind of important to me, so were you and your friends put into big castles or something to be protected?”

Twilight let out a snicker. “Oh no, David. We all stayed in Ponyville – well, after I decided to stay in Ponyville instead of going back to Canterlot – and everything just kind of smoothed out from there. I got to stay in the Ponyville Library, and we didn’t even need to use the Elements until next spring.”

“Isn’t that kind of dangerous? I mean, you six are imperative to Equestrian security, right? If you suddenly couldn’t use the Elements anymore, wouldn’t that be really bad? Where did you even keep the Elements, anyways?”

“Princess Celestia at first kept the Elements in Canter Castle under her protection, and told us she would summon us when they needed to be used, or they could be sent to me via Dragonfire magic if needed in short notice. However, when Discord returned we had a bit of trouble when he stole the Elements from right underneath us. After that the princess decided to let me keep the Elements in the library underneath a copy of the book that I had originally used to pinpoint Nightmare Moon’s return: The Book of Harmony.”

David frowned. “That still isn’t very convincing. What if something terrible happened to one of you? Wouldn’t that mean that you can’t use the Elements anymore?”

“Nothing too bad ever happened to us, David. There was never a situation where one of us was physically unable to use the Elements. Even when Rainbow Dash had her wings broken she was still able to use her Element if needed. The only condition where we wouldn’t be able to use the Elements is if one of us dropped off the face of the planet.”

David straightened his back, eyes widening. His cup was empty. “Oh,” he simply stated.

“Yeah, that’s another reason why I need to get home,” Twilight explained with a small sigh.

“That’s still a work in progress, though,” David said, turning around and putting his mug onto his desk. He closed the window and sat back in his office seat, swiveling around until he was facing the computer. Leaning to the right, he reached down into an old, low bookcase, pulled out a purple binder, placed it on the glass surface in front of him and began to browse through the pages. “I mean, we have gotten quite a bit of progress done since you shot static at me, but—”

“Not this again,” Twilight complained.

“Heh,” David chuckled, the corner of his lips pulled up. “But we haven’t found anything along the realm of ‘sending one entity to another dimension’. Well, besides your theories, of course, but we have nothing to test those on, right?”

“Right,” Twilight affirmed. She turned her focus away from the camera for a moment to check something to the right, her horn lighting up as she stared intently into the distance. “There’s nothing else besides me to send, if we were to try and send something to a different plane of existence. From what I remember of Night Fire’s studies, we can theorise a location and with enough arcane power sent an item there, but it would be hard to gather data on it because it would need to be able to come back to its original location, which means it needs its own Aura, which means it either needs to be living or—”

“Yep, Twilight. Got it right here in my notes,” David stopped her, lifting up the page to the screen. After a delayed moment of realization he put the binder back down on the desk as quietly as possible. “How far have you gotten on those e-books?”

"I'm about halfway through the first seven," Twilight said.

“Holy smokes, it’s only been three days, Twilight!”

She grinned sheepishly. “I know. I’m a bit of a fast reader. And you know, I have a lot of time on my hooves to do things like read, not that I’m complaining, of course.”

David’s lower lip pressed against his upper. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine,” she reassured him. “I know you’re trying your best to keep me comfortable. The music you’ve been playing has been, uh, refreshing, and I really appreciate you keeping me company when you can.”

He sighed. “But my music must sound a bit odd to you, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, well,” Twilight had to admit. “Some of it seems a bit foreign, yes, but a lot of the ‘electric’ music that I’ve heard is similar to somepony’s works that I know of.”

David had to raise an eyebrow at that. “Really?”

“Yeah. There’s this famous DJ that lives in Ponyville, Vinyl Scratch, who plays music much like what I’ve heard from you. She’s out of town most of the time, but from the events that she’s played in it’s fairly similar to what I’ve heard.”

“But that makes no sense!” David was arguing in his mind. “I thought computers were barely in the Pony world!”

“And,” Twilight continued, “She lives with another musician, although not quite as famous. The two of them do complement each other very well, though, and…”

David placed his chin in his hands, leaning on his desk with his eyes staring above the monitor, lost from the rest of the evening to Twilight’s elaboration.

“Are you sure you’re going to be ok?” David asked.

“Yep, I’ll be fine. This’ll be a first, and if it goes well then we can do it again and it’ll be nice to have a few hours to myself once in a while.”

“You won’t be lonely?”

“I’m sure your music will keep me company just fine,” she reassured him, giving a warm smile at the camera.

“Ok,” David finally gave, standing up from his chair and turning his monitor off. “I’m unplugging the mic now. I’ll see you in the morning, Twilight, to turn the computer to sleep.”

“Got it. Goodnight, David.”

“Goodnight, Twilight,” David finished. He bent down, pulled the plug of his headset out of the jack and slid the equipment off of his head, placing it on the desk before the keyboard. His index finger pulled his glasses off, and he rubbed his eyes, letting out a yawn. A quick check from his phone told him that it was way too late at night to stay awake any longer. He glanced at the window, reminding himself to close the blinds before he got caught by Mr. Sandman.

There was a tiny stack of somewhat messy papers laid out to the left of his workspace. David reached and grabbed the sides of the first few, straightening them. As he flipped through the contents, pinching between two pages to separate stuck paper, he reviewed the words on the page. It still befuddled him. That work wasn’t for Twilight, wasn’t for school, but was for his interest, and the conversation that he had from Twilight made him frown as his eyes scanned the pages. His thoughts weren’t relevant anymore.

Notes on various thinking and theories were scattered along the lines. Some articles on artificial intelligence and viruses were included in the package. Several of the printed pieces had lines highlighted, phrases circled in red pen and meanderings written on the sideline. He bit his bottom lip. He had figured he was getting nowhere, and that the more he moved forward the more confusing and complex everything seemed.

With the pages sorted and straight he put them back in the open purple binder to the right on the desk and the binder back where it belonged. He sat straight up, put his hands on his hips and made one conclusion:

She was simply too alive to not be real.

“I’m going to have to get a second opinion on this one,” he muttered to himself, lifting his phone and flipping it open, pressing his thumb to the touch screen to send a text.

Author's Note

Sometimes this story might take a more "slice of life" side to it. Truthfully, I wanted to tag pony.exe as both slice of life and adventure, but the site would not let me as they contradict each other. In the end I tagged it as adventure, because I figured it would be more fitting for what I had in mind for most of the story. Not right now, mind you, but we're barely out of the starting gate, and we've got to get around the bend first before anything thrilling starts happening.

This chapter takes a slower pace than the previous chapters, where it focus is not on exploring Twilight's abilities and limits within Cyberspace, but more on who she is (as a pony and as a program). A common problem I have seen with human fics (and I say "have" because I don't read them as nearly as often anymore) is that the interaction between two species always occurs during cuts or transitions or between chapters. It never happens during the actual story where the narrator describes many details of the conversation between human and pony. I can understand why authors choose to do this; they want to shorten chapter lengths or they believe that it will be useless and contribute nothing to the actual plot or they don't want to put the work in.

I believe that the interaction between human and pony is one of the main hooks to a HiE fic or something in that line of genre. It's the exploration of the known v. the unknown, what is human compared to what is pony, and I thoroughly enjoy stories who flesh out these details between worlds and their differences, and I have a lot of respect for authors who spend the time and effort to include these details into their tales.

I've always wanted to make sure in my FiM stories if there's a human involved on first encounters with ponies that there's reasonable and realistic interaction between the two species. My first attempt was with my second story Chronicles, and with this second attempt I've tried to apply my knowledge of what is important to the reader's eyes and what isn't and add it to the equation to try and deliver a chapter that doesn't get boring.

As usual, I hope I succeeded.

I wouldn't have written this chapter if I didn't think it had a place in the story. But if you readers don't see a point to the chapter, then I've failed at my job as a writer. I had this problem with the chapter "cause.exe", where people considered it to be an empty chapter. It was too vague of a dream sequence. However I also think of it as a tempo chapter, where there's a bit of cooldown from one major plot point happening to the other. It establishes minor things about David (although I failed at this because no one can see them) and gives a little prep time for the drama that occurs in the next chapter. Of course, in that same string of though, if I have to explain this, then I haven't done a good enough job at writing.

Lastly, all episodes past season three episode two are ignored.

outlook.exe

David tapped his fingers on a table. He rested the side of his head on the palm of his left hand, fingers curved against his cheek, his view turned at an angle with his elbow resting on the surface. He sat with his right hand taking the radius of the round table, moving his digits in a mechanical but rhythmic fashion. With his eyebrows furrowed, he stared at the passing people beyond the wooden patio fence, walking by to their own next destination, cars periodically passing and lining up at the nearby stoplight.

He briefly checked his phone and grumbled. His attention swept the sidewalk, looking, searching. His chin moved to the cradle of his hand and the beat of his fingers changed. The flow of traffic had increased twofold since the last ten minutes, although he noted there hadn’t been that many cars coming and going in the first place. His stomach pained him. He regretted not picking up a small lunch when he had the chance between classes, and the empty pit only served him to angle his brows even lower.

He let out a heavy sigh. “My one day off work and I’m spending my time waiting for this jackass.” He wanted to be working on homework. He wanted to be out with his friends at a burger joint or something. However, irony fueled the distinct frown on his face, and he waited onward for his “guest”. He figured it was partially the other party’s fault. He had never wanted to meet where he was, in the middle of a restaurant outside on the patio instead of in an office, or at a park, or at someplace decent so he would be able to do something else besides feeling trapped while waiting. He tried to persuade to meet somewhere else of course, but he shouldn’t have wasted his breath. David took a precious moment to bury his head in his arms and slump over onto the table.

“Annoying. Annoying. So annoying.”

Just then, his phone vibrated. He instantly pulled it out of his pocket and answered it. He didn’t bother to check the caller info. He already knew.

“Where the hell are you?!”

Something touched his shoulder. He jumped.

“Right behind you.”

David turned around, glaring over his shoulder, his mouth screwed into an unpleasant arch. The tall man behind him looked down, the corner of his lips curved into a cheeky grin. His thick maroon eyebrows etched the amusement on his face, the nostrils on his thin nose flaring. He had a mustache lacking volume sitting on his upper lip and a soul patch sprouting in the curve between his round chin and lower lip. His long, thick, curly hair was absolutely ridiculous, spiraling down onto the shoulders of his brown leather jacket. Thin black gloves covered his hands, and his white cotton shirt hugged so close to his stomach one would be able to see his abs—if he actually had some. His jeans were ripped, although not naturally so from wear. Narrow, blue sneakers adorned his feet with the brand name printed on the white strip that touched the floor, David secretly wishing that it read “tool” to accurately represent the wearer.

David’s scowl could cut gems. The man burst into deep, loud laughter as he made his way to the seat at the opposite side of the white table, pulling the chair out and sitting down. David grumbled, unable to meet the man’s eyes after he was certain that everyone else on the patio was staring at them. He crossed his arms on the table, tapping his foot impatiently.

“Oh man, you had the wildest look right on you there,” the man explained, trying to wipe the tears out of his eyes.

“Yeah?” David rhetorically asked. “Glad I could make you laugh.”

“No, it was my pleasure, truly,” the man said, leaning back into his chair so that only two of its legs were on the ground. He put his hands behind his head and kicked his feet onto the table, pressing against the patio fence for balance. David was staring beneath the soles of his feet, the white rubber in squeaky clean condition with no signs of scuff marks at all.

David could barely keep himself from punching that smug toad in his pie hole. “Cut the crap, Jack. I need this to be quicker than your normal bouts of stupidity. I’ve got to get going somewhere in thirty minutes.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Jack said, putting his hands up in mock surrender. “Aren’t we the busy man, Dave? What’s the rush? I haven’t seen you in seven months. Why don’t we just kick back, relax and get to know each other again?”

“I know you have things to do too, Jack,” David replied, sitting up, massaging the muscle of his thumb in his right palm. “But I need to be specifically somewhere after five and I want to preferably leave without any extra baggage that you give me, like the damn bill. You owe me for the past fifteen times already. Besides, if you were here on time thirty-five minutes ago, maybe we wouldn’t be in this predicament.”

Jack held his hands over his heart. “Oh David, you wound me! The great David Carrian has no time for a little ol’ computer geek like me, who slaves away at his tiny, damp office, trying to get dozens upon dozens of orders done on time. Truly, I am a one-man army to suffer!”

David shot death from his eyes. He knew Jack’s line. He wasn’t a fish. “You have a business, Jack. What are you complaining about?”

Jack planted his feet back on the ground and grabbed the inside folds of his leather jacket like it was a business suit. “And a pretty good business, too! Many things have changed since you’ve last been in the office, Dave! We’ve expanded! Hired four new programmers to the office! The University of South Dakota is asking us to do applications for them! We’re set for the next fifteen years!”

“Yeah yeah, I get it,” David said, rolling his eyes.

The waitress took that moment to step in and ask for their drinks. David got a simple glass of water and Jack ordered a beer. The two of them eyeballed her as she left with their requests.

“So, what does the David Carrian need from me?” Jack asked, putting his elbow on the table and leaning forward.

“I need you to tell me how to find a virus.”

Jack snorted. “What, can’t find a virus on your own? Use your antivirus for god’s sake. If you don’t have one, use Windows Defender. Every PC has one.”

“I tried, but it didn’t find anything!” David claimed.

“Really now? Then how do you know you have a virus?” Jack inquired, leaning forward and raising an eyebrow.

David bit the inside of his cheek. “Random copies of programs keep opening onto my desktop and I can’t stop them.”

Jack rolled his right hand in a circular motion. “No, you gotta be more specific than that. When does it happen? What opens up?”

“It happens randomly!” David exclaimed. “I can’t tell when it occurs. One day it happens seven times in an evening and another only once. And it opens up any kind of program, really. Once it was twelve copies of paint, then five copies of Counter-Strike. That was a great day. I had to wait thirty minutes for my computer to calm down so I could shut down all the windows!”

Jack pinched at his chin and looked down at the table, frowning. “And nothing else has been happening that seemed odd? Nothing of notice? No messages popping up?”

“No, not messages,” David said. “But I think I’ve been spotting an out-of-place program or two in task manager. They don’t look like anything that belong there.”

“How do you know? Have you tried Googling them?”

“…No,” David hesitantly said.

“Hmm, well you probably have yourself some malware that got onto your system when you’ve downloaded and installed something, although I would think that malware would do something other than opening up random stuff, unless it’s trying to do something deeper inside your system. I’m curious as to why your anti-virus didn’t pick it up, though.”

“So? How do I find it?” David asked.

“You don’t. You go Google 'Malware Adhesive' and let it find it for you. It’s an anti-virus supplement that boosts the security of your system, specifically against malware. Download it, install it, run it, and let it scan your system. Give me a phone call if it didn’t find anything, because then you might need to bring it in to the office for a look-over.”

“I’m not bringing in my computer to you! You would charge me!” David said.

Jack gave David a queer look. “I wouldn’t charge you much, you dolt. You know I’m not a computer repair shop, so what rates would I charge you with? You would only have to pay for the most basic of service fees, and no, that’s not a rip off. You should consider it a favour between friends. I thought you wanted this virus off of your system?”

David didn’t know what to say to that. “It hasn't really done anything too destructive yet. I've been able to restart my computer without any problems, and as far as I can tell I'm not missing any files.”

Jack’s look intensified. “Well, I’m glad to know that I wasn’t lying about you being special. Why the hell did you call me over if you don't want my help?”

David grunted. "I need your advice, Jack, not your help."

"Touché," Jack said, crossing his legs and leaning off of one side of the table.

The waitress came over and delivered their drinks, asking for their order. After a few moments of consideration, David asked for a burger meal, and Jack a steak. The waitress left once again.

“What can you tell me about artificial intelligence?” David asked.

Jack was startled. He scratched his temple, looking at the sky for his answer before he squinted and returned to David. ” You’re doing the ‘purposefully vague’ thing again. You gotta be more specific.”

“Tell me about artificial intelligence,” David tried to clarify. “How does it work?”

Jack rubbed the bottom of his chin, one elbow on the table. He took a swig of his beer. “Well, there are multiple types of AI. You could consider some everyday programs to be AI, such as electronic thermostat readers that moderate the temperature in a room. There’s CS, or cognitive simulation, where we try to get the computers to reflect the human thought process, like recognizing a face, or researching paranoia. Then, there’s strong, or hard, AI.

“Hard intelligence is exactly what it sounds like. It’s when programmers try to get a computer to act and think like a human being. This usually involves interacting with it through conversation and making it generate responses that are both sensible and unique. Very hard level AI have some form of thinking ability and emotion. Well, as best emotion as their programmers can give them. We still haven’t been able to perfectly create an artificial intelligence that is like the human brain, though.”

David bit his lip. He hoped Jack wouldn’t notice the sweat slowly matting on his forehead. “Really?”

“Yeah, really. The idea of cognition in a computer has always been popular since the conception of AI. We would get stories, TV shows and movies exploring on the idea, years back. It’s pretty interesting stuff, all the crazy things those Hollywood writers come up with. Hah, you’re lucky at all that I know a thing or two about artificial intelligence! I’m just glad I touched upon those classes last year.”

“Is it possible to get a personal AI?”

Jack blinked. “What, like a software helper for your phone or computer?”

“Uh,” David uttered, his brain stalling. “Y-Yeah, one of those.”

Jack folded his arms. “Well, it’s not like they're a hard thing to come by, David. There’s a lot of tiny developers that create and sell virtual assistants to the average business-goer. You could find a myriad of easy AIs on most app stores. Of course, the price will vary depending on the quality of companion you want, but I would ballpark the amount to, say, about one-hundred and twenty dollars starting price.”

“But these assistants, they’re just for helping you, right?” David inquired, leaning forward in his seat, hands on the arms of his chair. “They can’t actually carry a conversation with you, right? They don’t hold their own opinions or emotions; they’re just there for suggestion.”

“Of course, David,” Jack scoffed. “Vocal and text interaction with helpers are limited. You can’t carry a conversation with them for long, unless you get one of those thousand-dollar AIs that can help you with multiple things at once, and even then they will probably limit you to talking to them about things they already know or can help you with. These assistants normally won’t learn from your habits or mistakes and only get smarter when developers push out a patch.

“Are there speaking AIs available to the public? Is it all just for helping you do office work or whatever?”

“What, are you kidding me?” Jack started with a laugh. “The normal customer can’t possibly get an AI that's that intelligent!”

“And why not?”

“Because we haven’t figured it out yet!” answered Jack, shrugging dramatically and looking around as if there was an audience behind David. “The human mind is not easily simulated! The brain already is a condensed and complex thing. To be able to understand it is not within any programmer’s reach. God knows psychology is the study of the human mind, but it is a study. Doesn’t mean we understand it, and therefore, because we don’t exactly understand it, we can’t exactly copy it perfectly onto a hard drive, no matter how much space it is given.”

David felt the blood drain from his face. He prayed that Jack wouldn’t notice. “Not even on a high-end rig?”

“Not even close,” Jack responded, shaking his head. There was a sudden pause in the cadence of his speech, and Jack suddenly leaned forward out of his chair cushion, eyes slyly scanning the nearby area as he licked his lips. His next sentences came out in a hush. “In order for computer programs to think, they need intensive, complex algorithms to sort out their thought processes, logic and proofs for every single possible case of conversation, and limitless places for memory in order to sort out emotions.

“Those kinds of AI could only exist in large scale operations that are properly funded, where a team of programmers would have access to the proper hardware, and not pieces of a PC that can be found on the common market, custom parts or otherwise. Without special parts, the AI would be really, really slow to respond to simple sentences and commands. It would take dozens of minutes for formulate the proper response, if the response was purely made by the AI and not generated from answers it already has.”

David became aware of his slightly unhinged jaw for a moment and promptly brought it back up. He blinked a few times, his brain on overtime. He leaned back into his seat as slowly and calmly as possible, throwing a long, hot breath out of his nostrils as he mulled over Jack’s words. The patrons of the restaurant were minding their own business, gently chatting to each other, David spotting them from the corner of his eye. The sky was clear, the overhead blue letting the sun come down to ease the noticeably cool wind that swept down the narrow street into the patio. Jack’s eyebrows pointed to the nose below them, his crusted lips frowning in a polygonal fashion. His gaze bore into David’s eyes, but David failed to notice. His attention was reached only when there was suddenly a blurry red blob floating between his pupils.

His eyes went into focus and he moved his head back to see the object properly. Jack was practically over the table now, his right elbow threatening to topple his drink over as he held the red piece out in front of David’s face. It took David a few seconds to actually recognize what Jack was shoving in his space.

“Take it,” Jack instructed. David gingerly pinched it with two fingers. Jack shifted so he wasn’t as much over the table anymore.

“What do I need this for?” David asked, pointing to the USB stick, looking at Jack. It wasn’t immediately apparent to David, but the piece of obsolete hardware was actually more bulky than it should have been, with the USB plug a third of the area that the rest of the stick took up. There was a black bulb sticking out of the top, surrounded by two half-circles that made into a whole.

Jack went back into his seat, letting his eyes relax from David. He pulled out a cigarette from his jacket and a lighter from his pants, holding the piece to his mouth and lighting it. A small trail of smoke led from the end, and after a moment he pulled away the cigarette, letting out a breath refilled with patience. “I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, David,” he said, putting up a hand to stop David from getting out of his seat as David began to stand to object. "And no, I'm not going to ask. I already know you wouldn't tell me anyways. But just in case, in whatever you are doing, if something goes wrong, something nasty happens to your computer, I want you to have that just in case."

David swallowed. “Why? What does it do?”

“That,” Jack began, pointing at the device. “Will zap your computer. A literal electric jolt, from a battery inside the stick, right through the USB drive, into the system and flips the tiny switch that keeps everything in your system up and running. It circumvents PC permissions and delivers its purpose front-and-center. One use only. From there, you can decide whether you want to pick up the pieces that are left of your rig, or bring it in for a check-up. Think of it like an EMP, except it won't fry everything completely and it won't blow up.”

“Are you crazy?” David exclaimed. “I mean, wouldn’t that hurt my computer?”

“It might leave your USB drive a little burnt, and some data might become corrupt, but otherwise your computer should be able to boot back up. I wouldn’t be giving this to you if I knew it would completely break everything in your computer,” Jack said, turning his shoulder to the right and drinking the last of his beverage.

"Where did you even get this from? And how do you know this will work?" David had to ask.

“I made this for personal use, David. Don’t think that this was a special gift just for you. Sometimes some things go wrong and you need a backup plan to make everything right again.” Jack revealed the insides of his jacket to him. The inner lining was filled with see-through pockets, each filled with either a USB stick, a small, compact screwdriver or a wire. He adorned a wild grin. "And when you're on the job, you always have to be ready."

David sat, puzzled. He let time pass, with Jack staring at the road while everything was brought out of focus. He knew how smart Jack was. He knew how to put the pieces together very quickly when they were all laid out in front of him. David cursed himself. He looked at Jack as Jack smoked the rest of his cigarette, his gaze lazily rolling off of some young friends having a meal together at the corner of the patio. Jack sipped lightly at his booze. David bit the inside of his cheek. Would he find out, somehow? Would he remotely get onto his PC and take a look at David's "virus" himself? If Twilight got onto his computer so easily, then what would stop Jack? And is Jack's USB stick a ploy? If he plugged it in, would it upload information to Jack? Could a USB stick do that?

What would Jack do if he found out about Twilight?

Would it be that bad if he found out?

It both threw his stomach in loops and pulled a weight off his shoulders.

The waitress from before abruptly arrived to deliver their meals. David’s eyes met her hands with a startle, and Jack seemed to be drooling as his plate of steak fell before him. He didn’t waste as single moment’s notice before he took a fork in one hand, a knife in the other, and dug down.

“One more question, if you don’t mind Jack,” David asked. Jack looked up, his mouth stuffed with beef. His response came in a garble between his full cheeks. “How do I find a program from Task Manager?”

David collapsed into his chair, his computer already woken up and logged on, monitor turned on with Twilight silently reading something on the invisible ground in her corner of the screen. His backpack rested on the floor to his right, and he still had his red sweater on from outside, even though he was sweating. He slumped in his chair, left hand hanging limp off the edge, the other massaging his forehead. Wiping off the grease from his fingertips onto his pants, he grabbed his headset and glasses on the desk and slid them on, lowering the attached microphone from the speakers and adjusting it properly, pressing the on button on the side of the device when he was ready.

When he opened his eyes, he was looking into Twilight's world. He had already noticed a week earlier that she began to read completely lying down instead of sitting on her haunches like she had previously been, staring below her hooves into something she could see that he couldn’t. She was reading something invisible underneath the floor. The concept of that happening was beyond David, be he could accept it if Twilight had gotten used to it so quickly. He almost felt a pang of sympathy for the poor girl, having to read something flat on the cold ground. It almost looked awkward to him, but Twilight didn't budge an inch when she was focused in her activities, except for her tail occasionally switching side and her horn giving off a glow here and there.

“Hard day?” Twilight asked without looking up. Her horn glowed for a moment before shutting off.

“No, not really,” David responded.

“That was quite the tired sigh,” she pointed out.

“I didn't realize I did," he admitted. "I have a lot to think about."

This time she looked back through the screen. "Wanna talk about it?"

"No, not really."

His hand flew to his mouse, gaining control of the tiny white arrow on the screen. He clicked on an icon with a computer monitor that had a blue heartbeat sensor wave on the front, and Task Manager opened for him. He organized the processes listed by memory, and found pony.exe sitting as the top contender once again. Right clicking on the process, he took special care to avoid the option listed as “End process” and moved the cursor right over underneath it to “Open file location”.

He clicked.

A window popped up on the screen with a white “x” behind a soft blue background.

ERROR: Access Denied.

He tried again after giving himself administration rights. He got the same message. His cheek fell into his hand, resting his weight on the surface of his desk.

“Figures. Nothing worthwhile is ever that easy.”

Author's Note

This took a while to brew. Once again, I have no major excuses. Usually in my free time I'm playing video games instead of writing, so really this has no reason to get out so late. That said, this was a bit of a daunting chapter to write (but I feel like all chapters are becoming like that). There were topics that I wanted to cover with dialogue that both made sense and was believable. Going into the chapter I did a bit of research, because I have limited knowledge on viruses and A.I. I didn't do the kind of research you would for a research paper, but I did enough so that I wouldn't be fumbling around in the dark.

With that said, I hope you all like Jack. Unlike other minor characters I've introduced, Jack plays a much bigger role than them. Well, as big of a role as a minor character can have, anyways. This story still is primarily focused on getting Twilight and David to talk to each other, Jack is just the spectator that helps his friends out once in a while... being a total dickwad while he's at it.

The setting of the story was finally elaborated on. I had originally planned on telling you all when David told Twilight his student work back in chapter 2 (I think), but decided against it. Truthfully, I'm Canadian, so I have no idea what anything looks like in the US besides New York (the only place I've been to in person). But I had to lay a name for you guys for Jack's sake, a name that was important enough to make him look somewhat successful. I ended up choosing a place that had at least a familiar ecosystem and weather patterns. Don't get your hopes up for anything accurate in location, though. I might do a bit of research when I need to explain something, but that'll be all through Google, which is nothing compared to first-hand experience.

And once again, dialogue is hard to write. It's like I'm writing a play, except it's not. I need to write the actors like their having a conversation between the two of them and you, the audience, as if the audience wasn't able to respond but still needed to listen. It's hard.

Small hint: David likes to lie.

EDIT #1: I tried fixing some of the technobabble that occurs. From the comments I got, the stuff I wrote about the USB stick and how AIs worked was wrong, so I did a tiny amount of looking stuff up and changed Jack's dialogue to give a (hopefully) better description of what was going on.

explorer.exe

“Found it.”

David blinked, and had to check himself when Twilight’s face returned back to her screen after she was done leaning to the side, her attention deep in concentration as she peered off-camera. Her horn glowed magenta, and David heard disk activity as she manipulated the system.

“Hang on, let me open it up in a window for you,” she said.

A second Windows Explorer window popped up beside the one David had already used for searching. There was a document file highlighted in blue, the details of the file below on a strip of space with a preview of the text to the right. He gave an approving frown, nodding.

“Wow. That was really fast,” he noted.

“Yep. It wasn’t too hard to find. I saw that you were already searching under ‘documents’, so I figured that it was probably somewhere in your user folder.” Twilight replied.

“I can’t believe I saved it to pictures!” he exclaimed. “How the heck did I manage that?”

“We’re lucky you didn’t save it anywhere else,” Twilight noted. “And lucky that everything is so organized! The user is given folders ready to save that are separated by medium and are labeled as types that are commonly looked to be saved! The developers’ insight is amazing! They must have been geniuses!”

David took a hold of his mouse and double-clicked on the file. “Well, they had blueprints to work from. The code, or whatever, of the previous versions of Windows was available to the programmers, so it wasn’t like they had nowhere to start from, and there’s no doubt that they had an idea of what to improve on from Windows 11. I’m just glad that they brought back the old Explorer interface. Damn Windows Looking Glass…”

Twilight’s visage for a second was overlapped by Microsoft Word, the document appearing before David’s eyes. A wild grin formed on his face. That was everything he needed.

“Hey David?” Twilight asked.

“Yeah?

“I also found this in your pictures folder,” she said, opening up Windows Picture Viewer quickly and presenting a photo on the screen. “What is it?”

David took a second to identify the picture. “That’s, uh, that’s a gun.”

“Hmm?” Twilight sounded out, her window choosing to move itself over Word again. “What’s a gun?”

David bit his lip. His answer came out slow and deliberate. “It’s sort of a weapon we humans have. You hold the handle with two hands, aim down the sight and pull the trigger with your finger.”

“Interesting,” Twilight noted, although David couldn’t read the thoughts on her face. “How does it work?”

“Well,” David began, preparing himself. “You load a clip of bullets into the bottom of the handle, where there is a slot, and there’s a hammer at the back of the gun that rams into the back of the bullet at the top of the clip. The bullet is filled with this ignitable powder, so the hammer ignites the powder and the projectile at the end of the bullet flies out of the chamber.”

Twilight stared at what David believed to be the picture, which he couldn’t spot from the camera’s angle. Her right ear flicked while she was engaged deep in thought. “It seems like a very efficient weapon, certainly steps up from the crossbows we have in Equestria,” Twilight observed. David took note of the fine line her lips made. “Why do you have a picture of this?”

David leaned forward on to his desk. “I used it for a game I used to play a few years back. You could paint custom pictures from your computer onto any surface in the game, and that’s what I used when I was first introduced to the feature.”

“Okay,” Twilight stated, tilting her head. Her forelegs took a position very familiar to David, one reaching across her body and supporting the other that connected to the bottom of her chin.

He leaned back, tilting his seat and putting his hands behind his head, taking a deep breath in. “So I guess you can see pictures now, huh?”

“Oh?” Twilight muttered. “Yeah, I can. I read about it in one of the books you gave me, how computers can hold pictures inside them by having a piece of data for every pixel in the picture. All I had to do was figure out a spell that could decompress the data. It was a bit difficult to figure out until I got to take a look at the libraries that uncompressed certain picture types. The spell ended up following along the lines as the browsing spell I made.”

“You made a spell for browsing my computer?” David asked dubiously.

“I did, yes.”

“Is that how you do all those things in my system? With magical spells?”

“You make it sound silly if you put it that way,” Twilight said. “But yes, that’s how I work the system. I had to figure out how to properly navigate your computer sooner or later, and after reading those books I couldn’t help but try to figure it out. I made out a relation between computers and magic, and formed a basis for my spells to work on. My magic works in here, it’s just a bit different. So, I composed spells based on theory after making some gratuitous extrapolation on the arcane laws. We just ran a test on it last week, remember?”

“I thought that was you just calling functions or whatever from the computer.” David stated.

“I don’t exactly know how to do that,” Twilight clarified, looking to the side at the floor. “I mean, I technically am calling other programs to help me do specific things in your computer, I just can’t do it without magic. It’s the only way I can make the computer do what I want it to do. The relation I made between the different types of logic a computer and the arcane arts have aren’t too far off from each other. I put the two together and it helped me understand what I need to do in order to get a spell to work in here.”

David nodded. “I think I get it.”

Twilight bit her lip, thinking. “Oh! There’s something I forgot to mention.”

“What is it?”

Suddenly another Explorer window opened before David, and he looked to see exactly what it was. He almost recognized the folder location instantly. He paled.

“I was testing an improvement I made to my searching spell a few days ago and I came across this. Why’s there a folder labeled with “Environmental Pictures” even though there isn’t a single environmental picture in it? And what’s with their names of the pictures inside? ‘X GONNA GIVE IT TO YOU’? ‘Guide to Skyrim’s Main Quest’? What’s Skyrim? I know you could misplace your folders, but why are there so many files in here? Why is the folder titled so… oddly?”

David’s head was racing. He slowly moved his hands to his mouse and keyboard, edging the cursor to the red “X” in the upper right corner of the window and clicking on it. “Eh, to answer both of your questions, Skyrim is an old game I’ve installed, and sometimes I can’t think of names to label my folders or files as, so I make up some random gobbledegook to use.”

Twilight pondered that for a moment. “Some of these files take up huge amounts of space, but they have small resolutions. Why is that?”

“Ah, heh,” David chuckled nervously. “My friend Jack was teaching me how to hide programs in picture files. These programs are, uh, hidden beneath picture file types, so when opened instead of displaying a picture they’ll execute a program instead. It’s actually pretty neat.”

“You must have been working for a long time for these programs to get so big,” Twilight said, once again looking off-screen, squinting. “And you have multiple programs here! I thought you said you didn’t know anything about computers?”

“Twilight, knowing about computers doesn’t equate to knowing nothing about computer programming,” David said, lying in the implication. “But there’s also an odd conversion rate from code when you hide it in a photo file. The file size massively inflates, which can be a huge problem when you’re trying to make something that’s not anything beyond simple.”

There was a pause. David looked at Twilight’s window halfway with his head turned to one side. Her face was leaning out of the window again. After a few seconds, David wondered if Twilight had frozen again. He almost panicked.

“Wow,” Twilight stated, moving back into vision. David was slightly disturbed by the starry-eyed stare that Twilight gave the camera, adorning an open smile. “That’s so neat! Do you think you could get Jack to teach me how to do that some day?”

He covered the microphone bit at the end of his headset and let out a sigh of relief, closing the other Explorer windows as he got his brain into order. “I don’t know, Twilight. I haven’t told anyone yet of your existence. The only one who knows you’re here is me,” he said after removing his fingers from the mic.

Twilight gave a wide-eyed frown. “What? Why haven’t you told anyone? I thought we were working together to try and get me back home. It’ll be easier if we had more ponies, uh, I mean people, to manage this. You know, if you could find an expert on computers, maybe it would shed some insight as to how I got here!”

David winced. “Twilight, no one knows because it will do more harm than good. You know how hesitant I was to believing that you were actually stuck in my computer in the first place instead of just being a virus that infected my PC. Imagine how it would be if I tried to convince someone else that there was something living in my computer who was as intelligent and advanced as you! We don’t have anything that’s as close to having a life in a computer system with both a personality, a history and the skills to learn!”

Twilight opened her mouth for a second before David spoke over her. “And even if I hid some of the details to make it more convincing, what would that mean for the other party? I couldn’t trust anyone else with the knowledge of your existence, Twilight. I wouldn’t be able to stop them from going to the media and telling them about you, or them going to the police, or them telling their friends, and suddenly I’ve got a huge problem on my hands with news centers hounding me for more information and the local university shipping off my PC to study you inside it!

Twilight’s ears folded back. “What about your friends?”

“I don’t trust Jack for anything,” David established right off the bat. “And all my other friends are still in my hometown, which I can only communicate with through the internet, which I haven’t had for two months,” he spat bitterly. “And no, before you ask, I don’t have any other friends from University. I don’t have the time for that. Between classes, work, doing homework and trying to help you get back to your world, I simply don’t have the time.”

Twilight’s lips made a downward arch. She blinked worryingly at the camera, and David caught his breath while he glared back. Relaxing his tensed eyebrows, he slid his headset off and lifted his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose, feeling greasiness on the tips of his fingers. His eyes were brought to the time on his monitor. Normally he had more patience this time of night, he figured.

“Sorry Twilight,” he apologized, putting the headset back on. “It’s just hard to explain why I haven’t told anyone. I don’t trust anyone, and if you knew a single thing about the human world, you’d be hard-pressed to trust anyone outside your friends too.”

“Oh, David…” Twilight uttered.

“Don’t worry about it,” he informed her, typing something on the computer, refusing to look at her window. “It’s nothing. And we’re getting off topic. I want you to find something else for me.”

Twilight straightened up to attention. “Yes, David?”

“I need you to look for a file named pony-dot-e-x-e.”

“Okay,” Twilight said slowly before turning to the side and lighting her horn again. “Where did you last leave it?”

“I can’t tell you that,” David answered. Twilight rose a single eyebrow. “I don’t know where it is, and I didn’t make it.”

“What? What do you mean?”

David opened an Explorer window of his own, even though he only clicking through folders he already knew wouldn’t contain the file. “It was put on my computer by something. I didn’t put it there, but I need to find it and I can’t.”

Twilight tapped her hoof on her chin for a moment, and then got up. “Hang on, this might take a bit more work than finding your document. Give me a couple of seconds.”

She stepped to the right of the video footage and disappeared.

David rose his eyebrows. He tried clicking inside Twilight’s window and scrolling around the camera. The viewpoint didn’t budge. “Hey Twilight? Twiii-light?”

“Yeah?” she called off in the distance.

“Where did you go? I can’t see you!”

“Oh!” she exclaimed. Suddenly the darkness of the background window was turned a shade of pink before Twilight swung into vision a dozen feet away from the lens. “Sorry about that, it didn’t occur to me I could move the camera at first. I just have to take a look at some specific folders so I can pinpoint a location.”

The rose tint faded away and David found himself staring dumbly at Twilight as she looked up into nothingness. She moved here and there, from one side of the screen to the other, occasionally standing on her back legs for moments before landing and moving across Cyberspace. Her horn would ignite for a few seconds, and squares of pink would be pulled towards her area, floating before her face until she doused her magic.

“So you’re examining text, huh?” David muttered, although Twilight turned her head to face him for a moment at his words.

“Yeah,” she confirmed before resuming her search. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, you know,” David started. He explained to her what he was seeing through the computer screen.

“That’s strange,” Twilight commented. “Why would you be able to see my telekinesis but not what I’m casting it on?”

“Another riddle which answer lies behind the mystery of that dumb program,” David thought.

Moments passed. Twilight grew increasingly more concentrated in her search. Sometimes David would see her move into the background, far away from the camera, while others her neck would almost be touching the rim of the lens. They kept quiet, Twilight focusing deeply while David waited patiently. He refused to touch the computer, seeing that disk activity was high from the light on the computer case. He kept his fingers crossed beneath his desk, hoping, praying that Twilight would be successful. He considered the situation where he would have to bring his computer to Jack after all, just to find the damn program, and he began to imagine all the chaos that would ensue with him trying to explain who and what Twilight was, accepting all the laughter that Jack would throw at him for all the inquiries on viruses and artificial intelligence he had given Jack. He could see Jack’s eyes bulging out of his head, rolling on the floor laughing as he realized that David had been talking to a tiny purple unicorn for two months alone in his bedroom.

He hit his head on the desk.

“What was that?” Twilight asked, brought out of her trance.

“Nouffing, Twiright,” David said, his lips smooshed against the glass.

“David?”

David snorted, almost asleep after closing his eyes one moment, leaning back, his arms folded with his neck relaxed. “Huh? What? Yes, Twilight?”

“Why are you looking for pony-dot-e-x-e, anyways?” she asked. David looked at Twilight, and she was still busy observing something to the side of the shot a few feet away. “What do you need it for?”

He gave a grunt of understanding, sat up in his seat, and stretched, slathering his tongue inside his dry mouth. He gave the question a few seconds of silent thought.

“David?” Twilight asked again.

“Hang on,” he prompted. “I’m just waking up from a nap. Give me a second."

She gave a second. That second turned into half a minute in which he finally came to a decision. “I’mma be honest with you, Twilight.”

“Okay?” she said, confused.

“I’m pretty certain pony-dot-e-x-e is you.”

Twilight stopped what she was doing and turned to gaze out the computer screen, wide-eyed. “What?”

“When I first got you, a new program popped up in Task Manager. I had initially intended to end the process the instant I saw it running. That’s what I meant by ‘terminating the program’ all those days ago.”

“Oh,” Twilight enunciated. “So it’s the program that’s running me?”

“Yep. I’m pretty sure it is. Can you access a list of computer processes from where you are?”

Twilight looked in a completely different direction, and Task manager maximized itself, moving itself from one end of the screen to slightly off the other. David stared at the window frowning, and shivered.

“Yep,” she said.

“Organize your list by memory and take a look at the top result.”

She took a moment to do just that. Suddenly her mouth was open in an “o” and she stared upward, her head craning back. “No way.”

“Your process is the top result,” he summarized.

“I never knew,” Twilight added, still gawking. “It never occurred to me to check the computer’s processes. I didn’t want to touch those because I didn’t want to accidentally harm your system somehow.”

“Well, now you know,” David concluded.

“But what do you plan on doing with it?” she queried, looking back at David.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Open it, check the folder it’s in, copy it to a portable drive if I can. Whatever I do, I need it to know where it is in order to try and figure out how you’re tethered to my computer.”

“Do you think it’ll help?” she had to ask.

“Oh, definitely,” he responded. “And once you find it, we’ll be one step closer to getting you back home.”

“Yeah,” Twilight said solemnly, a small smile on her face.

David opened the door to his room, and sighed. Walking in, he flipped the nearby switch on the wall, lighting the room. Then, he took off his black wool sweater, let the door swing shut, and dropped his backpack at the base of his dresser. He threw the sweater onto his bed, with the red one he also wore underneath following suit quickly. His toes flexed and stretched as he welcomed the cool fresh air to his tiny feet bits while making his way toward the window at the west side of the room. His eyes were glued to the floor, until he pulled his phone out, flipped it open and checked it, scanning his email and text centers. He had an urge to rub his eyes, and he could feel the signs of a yawn coming on to him.

When he made to the closed glass, he put the device away and looked out. It was already dark out, with the streetlights illuminating the pavement below, their sunset-like essence casting an orange tone onto the setting. The gardens in the neighbouring houses had their flowers stripped and flowerbeds cleaned for next spring’s countenance. Some of the usually brighter front lawns looked cold and bare without the normal colour that usually scattered along the grass line. The trees had shed, but there were no signs of leaves clogging up the sewer drains, nor were there tiny autumn rivers that had plagued the streets for weeks. A biting wind rattled the windowpane, and David subconsciously rubbed the goosebumps on his arms. The skinny limbs of the trees skittered and clacked with bony impudence, their vein-like structure a silhouette of a spider web against a starless sky.

“I wish there would be snow already, damn it.”

He checked his phone again, shook his head and shoved it in his pocket. Jack was being a dick again. Ever since David re-established contact with the fool, he wanted more and more attention from David. David ignored the message and continued to stare out the window.

There was a whisper along the wind. He figured that there had to be a draft in the house, because there was a tiny whistling in his right ear that refused to let him be. It was a soothing sound, trying to give him the lull of sleep, asking him to take a rest already. He closed his eyes and let his head drop, almost banging his forehead against the window. He could already feel himself nodding off despite the uncomforting feeling of a lower back soaked with perspiration. The air spoke softly to him again, although more urgently. It began to sound like a warning to him, a slight caution of something to come. He had the audacity to ignore it more, telling himself that something was coming at him every moment, and that every moment he engaged it head on, caution or not. There was no choice in the matter. He could handle one more foreboding sentence against a flood of previously identified problems.

If he couldn’t, then why was he even there in the first place?

The whisper almost turned into a shout. David opened his eyes and breathed in, feeling his ears move ever so slightly to a sound that they were picking up from behind. David turned, and his attention met his computer sitting on his desk, the monitor off in an eco-friendly state, the green power light on the case still glowing brightly. He took a look at the headset sitting in front of the black-and-orange keyboard, tracing its green outline, and focused his hearing there.

“David!”

His eyebrows rose. “That’s Twilight,” he figured, and he leaped to his desk. He swung the back of the chair counter-clockwise and jumped into the seat, rolling himself back under the desk with the use of his feet swiping against the carpet.

“What’s up, Twilight?” he asked before he had the microphone fully put on, the headset sliding parallel to the crest of his head. He pinched the edge of his gaming glasses next to his mouse, lifted it up, flicked his wrist and adorned the eyewear in one smooth motion. His right hand rapidly waved the mouse to and fro, the monitor coming to life a moment later.

“There you are,” Twilight sighed with relief, “I thought I heard you come in! I finally found it!”

David went wide-eyed and leaned forward. “The program?”

“Yes! Finally did. It took a while, but I finally did it.”

Twilight appeared on the screen in her window. David took note of the slightly frazzled state that her mane was in, and the dark circles under her eyes. Her back was to the camera, and she was sitting, but she turned her neck to look out the monitor, giving David a tired smile. He wasn’t sure if that was a sign to worry.

“Where is it? Can you bring it up for me in a window?” he asked.

“That’s something I was about to tell you,” Twilight informed. “I can see the file and the folder it’s in, but for some reason I can’t open it up in Explorer. It’s not that Windows won’t let me, it’s that it doesn’t think the folder exists. There’s something blocking it that’s keeping it from being read and I can’t figure out what it is.”

David’s eyebrows furrowed. “Well that’s weird.”

“Yeah, it is,” Twilight agreed. “But I can read the contents of the folder to you.”

“Uh,” David uttered, trying to think. “Ok.”

Twilight looked off to the side, reading. “The folder’s called ‘p-o-n-y program’, and it has pony-dot-e-x-e inside. It also has a folder called ‘data’, a file called ‘settings-dot-s-l-d’, another file called ‘logs’ with the same file type, a folder named ‘s-c’, and a file named ‘pony-g-u-i-dot-e-x-e’.”

“g-u-i-dot-e-x-e?” David clarified.

“Yes.”

David put one hand to his chin and the other beneath his elbow. “Hmm, I don’t know what kind of file type ‘s-l-d’ is. What’s in the contents of the other folders, Twilight?”

“Lots of stuff,” she answered. “There’s a lot of files here, some text, some i-n-i, more folders. There’s another file type called ‘s-d-f’, but I can’t get any information on what it means. The system doesn’t give a definition, and I’ve checked all the e-books I have, but none of them mention use of such a file. I could read them all out to you, but it might take a while.”

“Is there a ‘read me’ anywhere?”

“No,” Twilight answered.

“Are there any signs of instructions anywhere? Like a text file or a document or something?”

“Nothing labeled like that. I took a look into some of the text files, but they contained a bunch of variables that I assume are for the main program,” Twilight said.

David looked off to the upper left, biting his lip. He didn’t notice Twilight turning back around and walking closer to the camera.

“I don’t know what any of that means,” he reasoned with himself. “And there’s no read me, so we’re left in the dark. I could try running pony-dot-e-x-e, even though it’s already running, but what could possibly happen? Two copies of Twilight? My system crapping itself due to not enough memory? The program terminating itself because it’s not allowed to run two copies?”

“Do you have any idea what the g-u-i thing does?” David inquired.

“I’m pretty sure it generates some kind of user interface,” Twilight said.

“I knew that much,” David stated. His eyes went back to Twilight. “But did you get a chance to look into the program?”

Twilight shook her head. “I can’t. I haven’t figured it out yet. I can look into raw data, and see files that aren’t compressed, and pictures, but executables are beyond my ability.”

“Darn,” David muttered. “I guess we’ll have to try something. Twilight, will you do the honours of taking notes?”

She grinned, and her horn glowed. Notepad opened up for a fraction of a second of David’s screen before disappearing altogether.

“Ok, Are you ready?”

“I’m as set as I’ll ever be,” Twilight responded, her expression much more perky than in the state he found her in. At that moment he realized he was smiling too.

“Great, then let’s get this going. Execute pony-g-u-i.”

Twilight had her grin stuck on glee as she looked over to the ground behind the camera and her horn lit brighter for a second. David sat in his seat, searching the screen for any changes. Nothing happened. He blinked.

“Twilight?” he asked. She didn’t move on the screen. Her horn was still lit, and her mouth was stuck on the “happy” setting, but she didn’t say anything.

His hands went on the keyboard and mouse. “Twilight?” he asked again, moving his mouse around. She still didn’t say anything. He clicked on her window, and it turned a shade of white. A window popped up on David’s screen:

PONY has stopped responding.
Windows can check for a solution online. If you close the program, you might lose information.

--> Search for a solution online and close the program.

--> Close the program.

--> Wait for the program to respond.

David held his breath. He clicked on the window a few times, and the informant pop-up flashed several times, indicating that it was waiting for a response for him and that he couldn’t interact with the window without making a selection. He frowned, clicked the third option and clicked on task manager’s icon.

“No. No, no, no, no…” David said under his breath. He kept clicking on Task Manager several times, but it wasn’t opening. He clenched his jaw, and tried to move the mouse somewhere else. The cursor refused to budge. His breathing quickened, his eyes studying what was before him at the moment. The mouse kept moving under his influence, but nothing happened on the screen. He tapped the Caps Lock key with his other hand. The light didn’t activate on his keyboard.

“Uh oh.”

He pushed down on the floor with his legs, backing his chair up as he took a look at the front of his computer. The disk light was shining bright, and he could hear something going on behind the metal hull of the system. He pressed the Caps Lock key a few times again just to make sure. Nothing happened. He grit his teeth and pounded the desk with his fists.

“Come on, don’t do this to me!”

His attempt to move the mouse a third time had failed too. He tapped Control-Alt-Delete, trying to get something to work. The computer did not respond. He let out a low growl and kicked the side of the computer with his foot. It teetered to one side for a split second before it landed square on its base. Nothing changed. Regret began settling in.

He slouched forward, submitting his head to gravity as he rested it on his interlocked hands leaning against the smooth glass surface. Resisting his first instinct, to hold down the power button of his computer until everything was better, he waited. He didn’t want to hurt Twilight. Twilight was trapped in there, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. His eyes were wide, stinging behind his glasses from the attention of the day. He couldn’t help her. He didn’t begin to understand where or how he could help her. When he agreed to try and get her back home, he didn’t have an inkling on how he would do it. He just didn’t want to see her so upset like that. It broke his heart. But in reality, he figured he had made her an empty promise. He couldn’t get her back, he was too stupid! He made his PC, but he didn’t know how it worked, all he did was follow some instructions he found online! He couldn’t even try his very best for Twilight, because he had school and work to do! He couldn’t do his “Twilight” life, and his school life, and his work life, and his own life, all without compromise.

“Twilight needs an expert, not a damn idiot.”

So he sat there. He looked back up to the screen, covering his mouth by resting the top of his neck on his fingers, and waited.

He waited.

And so, reality awarded him. Task Manager suddenly managed to pop up in front of him, and he immediately grabbed the mouse and went to processes. The computer took another moment, the disk doing some activity unknown to him beneath the desk. Almost every resource was at one-hundred percent. Pony.exe was still at top of memory usage, but only because it used every single scrap of memory the system would allow it to allocate. It hogged the CPU, using the ninety-one percent that the rest of the computer wasn’t working on. The disk was all on pony.exe too, and was writing a whole gigabyte per second to the hard drive. David’s jaw dropped.

He blinked. He didn’t believe it. Then, he closed his mouth, folded his arms and leaned back, a stern expression on his face, watching the computer screen. He waited some more, and watched numbers in Task Manager jump around as pony.exe took more and more of what it could.

His pocket vibrated. He pulled his phone out, and read the text message from Jack. His expression relaxed, and he tapped the touch screen dozens of times in his own reply, putting the phone on the desk once he was done.

He didn’t know how much time had passed. He didn’t pay attention to the clock when he got onto the computer, and he didn’t know how much the corner clock on the monitor skipped after it was done being completely frozen. He kept waiting, his eyes open and awake. He wondered if Twilight was still inside, doing stuff without him knowing, unable to communicate with him. It was an amusing thought. Twilight was stuck inside, and just because her window stopped responding, and she didn’t answer his calls, didn’t mean she was as stuck as the rest of the computer was. David liked to think that she was the only one keeping things together in there, the only one to keep the computer going and prevent it from stopping altogether. He imagined the little unicorn racing around Cyberspace, trying to get things fixed, a panicked expression on her face as her tiny horn glowed and lines of text he couldn’t see were moves around all over the place. It brought a chuckle to his lips.

Finally, everything calmed down. He had closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them it was two in the morning. Twilight’s screen was still tinted white, but the information window changed.

PONY has stopped working.
Windows can check for a solution to the problem.

--> Check for a solution online and close the program.

--> Close the program.

He let out a heavy sigh, and clicked on the latter option. His task manager told him everything was alright now. His resource-use was at an all-time low, with no games being run to eat up CPU, no internet browser to leak memory, and no antivirus to spin the disk like a late DJ. Pony.exe disappeared from the processes list, nowhere to be seen.

David leaned back into his seat. He lifted his glasses up and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He still had no idea on where to go. He couldn’t run pony.exe; Twilight said it was hidden and only she could see it, but she wasn’t there anymore. He could try and restart the computer to see if pony.exe would run itself. That would probably work, but he wasn’t certain. After a decision was made, put his glasses properly back on, and looked at the screen once again.

The screen had changed.

There was a start-up window of a program that was beginning its functions, sitting in the middle of the screen as a rectangle. The text inside was of a simple font, the title not too big with copyright information at the bottom-right side of the box. There was loading text below the title stating what was happening with the program at the moment, changing periodically as progress was made. David was stuck in shock when he read the window:

PONY Graphical User Interface ver. 1.04
Loading Simulation Assets…

© Richard Louis 2033

He leaned back and held his hair, letting out his breath in a steady stream over tight lips. The program continued to load, the disk light activating in short bursts once in a while.

After a minute, the window disappeared. David held his breath as nothing appeared on the screen for a moment.

Then, a new window popped up, and David whispered the top of the window aloud:

“Personality Observation in Neuropsychological Interactions Editor?”

Author's Note

David has friendship problems!~ *Squee* :pinkiehappy: (This was a theme I had wanted to cover. It's on my mental checklist. You can't write a FiM fanfic without involving friendship somehow.)

It was this chapter that started me rethinking what tags this story is set to. It is Adventure, or is it Slice-of-life and Drama? I'll probably make a blog post about this later so I don't dump walls of text into the author's notes.

Also, this chapter had to be re-written from scratch 3 times. Good thing that I didn't get far in all 3 copies before I realized I had to redo what topics of discussion came at what time, as well as where the chapter started. Originally it opened up with David looking for the document before asking Twilight to look for it for him, but that was a whole lot of words that would waste everyone's time, so I bumped up the beginning to start where she actually finds the file. I'm a bit disappointed that there was still about 3 000 words that were in the way before David and Twilight found pony.exe, but there had to be some kind of setup before the event. Throwing it in without any sort of build-up or setting some context first would just be a slap to the readers.

Also, this is the longest chapter yet. Originally I only wanted chapters to be around 2 500 words long; it's short, concise, allows me to focus on what needs to be written and I can get chapters out faster. However, after I made my story outline I wanted to make sure chapters I would write would cover the content I laid out for them. Like I said, this chapter took until 3 000 words to reach the main point. Not sure if this is a sign on whether or not I am an efficient writer, but whatever. You guys tell me.

Finally, at least we know what pony.exe means now.

HOW ABOUT DEM ACRONYMS THO?!

wheredidthericego.exe (APRIL FOOLS 2016)

Author's Note

Unedited. Unfiltered. Completely biased. Done in two hours. Barely done in time for April Fools. Have fun.

wheredidthericego.exe (APRIL FOOLS 2016)

The room was quiet.

David sat, leaning back on his leather office chair, feet up on the desk, crossed, idly checking the widely known website Plebbit. His computer hummed quietly in the background, heating up the otherwise slightly cool room as a miniature heater. His headset sat beside the unused keyboard and mouse, forgotten. The Earth was frozen over outside the house, trees barren of leaves, branches frosted over white, the cold kiss of winter covering the grass and pavement. Twilight laid in the nothingness that was David's computer system, swaying her tail back and forth, her eyes glued to the artificial book that sat in front of her. She turned the pages with her magic, a twinkle of interest in her eye as everything outside her world was dead to her.

The door to David's room was kicked open. David jumped with a startle, fumbling with his phone until it dropped to the floor with a clatter. He let out a yelp, and twisted his neck around to see what the noise was.

Standing in the doorway was a teenaged boy, his straight brown hair sticking up all over the place, wearing a red sweater worn over his shoulders unzipped with black track pants that had a trailing line of white up one of the pant legs. His white runner was comedically raised in the air where it had kicked open the door previously, the poor white wood of the entrance stuck partially in the wall after the force it had endured. He stomped into the room, his thick eyebrows making him look beyond grumpy.

"Hey!" David shouted with an angry start. He swung his chair around so he could face his phone and try to pick it up. "Who are you and what did my door do to deserve that?"

The boy swatted aside David's phone, sending it to a clatter near the floor of his dresser. David's surprised look quickly turned into one of contempt as he stared at the stranger.

"Cut the crap," the boy demanded, pointing an aggressive finger at David. "What the hell have you been doing for the past three months?"

David continued to glare up at the boy. "I've been on my phone on and off, going to class and helping Twilight with researching ways to get her home. What's it to you?"

"Move like you've been doing a whole lot of nothing this entire time," the boy said. "I've seen it all. You can't lie to me. When you wake up, you're on your phone. Then, you lose track of time and have to take the bus to class instead of biking it like you usually do. On the bus, you're on the phone. In class, you're on your phone. On the walk home you almost get run over every day because your eyes are on your phone screen instead of on the streetlights. You have been fired from your job because you want to be on your phone instead of at work! Your rent is three months due but your landlord hasn't kicked you out yet because he's too damn nice and thinks you like his grandson! And I swear to god, you would be on your computer twenty-four seven instead of your phone if Twilight wasn't on it in the first place. Do you realize she's gone through your library of e-books and has started going to the internet for reading material?"

"But I thought I disconnected from the internet?" David pondered.

"You idiot!" the boy exclaimed, hitting David's forehead with the back of his hand. "Twilight has shocked you though the computer's frame before! She can manipulate the forces of the computer! Don't you think that she could find a way to connect the wire back to the internet too with enough time?"

"How does she even figure out she could get more books from the internet in the first place?" David had to wonder.

"Bah! You ask too many questions!" the boy said, pushing David on his chair out of the way and approaching the computer. His hand shot out to the fallen phone on the floor and suddenly it zipped to the boy's open palm. With his other, he grabbed an old smart phone from 2012 out of his own pocket and first pointed one end at David's phone, shooting a small blue spark out before pointed it to the computer screen. The computer was zapped and immediately powered down. David stared in horror as his precious, $2 000 000 rig folded into itself until it became a tiny, two-inch by two-inch cube.

David fell to his knees, tears falling from his face. "What have you done to my computer?"

"Ah, quit your crying," the boy said, summoning the cube to his grasp. "Your computer's fine. We just need it to be a bit in a more compact state. And if you were going to ask, yes, Twilight's fine. I put her in your phone so she can keep a tab on things while we make a break for it to Jack's office. Here, catch."

The boy tossed both David's phone and computer to him, which he struggled to catch until he hugged them both close to his stomach. He looked up for a second before his own sweater fell over his eyes.

"Get your shoes on," the boy said as David put on the sweater after shoving his stuff into his pockets. "We're going out."

David just had one question as he got up. "Who are you?"

The boy looked back, cocky smile and all. "I'm Blue Blaze."

David and BB walked down the sidewalk, the narrow street of cars passing by them as they traveled through the many locally owned shops that sat close together in the buildings around them.

David looked around, puzzled. He stared at one of the grown trees planted in the sidewalk, it's green leaves swaying in the light wind. "Why is it suddenly spring?"

"Narrative continuity," BB said. "And I'm too lazy to keep anything consistent."

Suddenly, a large shadow blotted out the sun. David and BB peered up to see a ginormous alien battleship shaped like a dagger, painted a royally putrid green flying over the air space of the city with large cannons sticking out of the belly. The ground shook, and pedestrians began screaming as they ran away, trying to find cover.

"What the hell is that?" David asked.

"Shit! It's a plot device from one of my really old stories, back when I was garbage at writing!" BB explained, taking a defensive stance. "And it's so old the website couldn't even load the chapters properly! It gave the damn thing an awful paint job!"

BB looked over his shoulder to David. "I think I might need some backup for this."

All of the sudden, David' pocket glowed with a golden light. He pulled out his phone as it shined in his hands, and he took note of the warmth coming out of it. Just then, a large lightning bolt streamed out onto the sidewalk in a steady stream. David let out a shriek, almost dropping the device, squinting as he tried to see what his dumb phone was doing. There was a figure forming from the lightning, quickly growing from the size of a peanut to a tall dog.

The shock fest stopped, and David could see once again, although he could not believe his eyes. Sitting on the sidewalk with her legs like a chicken was a young woman with a purple starburst t-shirt and denim vest matching her skirt. Her glossy black shoes covered the long white socks that reached up her shin. Her hair was black, but had a pink and purple highlight through one of the strands to the side. Her bangs hung over her forehead, and she opened her eyes slowly, revealing purple irises beneath, curiosity forming on her lips.

"Where am I?" she said.

David's jaw dropped. "Twilight?"

"I said I needed a little help, didn't I?" BB reminded as Twilight shakily got to her feet. David grabbed a hold of her arm, helping her up, unable to look away from her eyes. When her gaze met his, it was if time stopped altogether.

"She's hot," David thought.

"No!" BB shouted, separating the two. "No no no no! I am not having any of that crap in my story! Not here, not now! Do you see the romance tag anywhere on the front cover? Do you? No, you don't, and I have no plans of any kind to have a human being and a cartoonish horse-thing going kissy-kissy on each other! Hell no!"

"But she's human now," David tried to defend.

"Fuck you!" BB stated.

Suddenly, thunderous booms shook the air. David, Twilight and BB all turned their attention to the alien ship up above as their cannons began firing large-caliber shells at the denizens below. More screaming erupted that was quickly swallowed by the crunch of buildings collapsing.

"Cut the chit-chat, it's time to take that thing down! Sparkle!" BB called, looking back at her. "Do you have enough of a handle of your new form to help me take that thing on?"

She stood on her own two feet, one hand on her hip and the other in the air, a purple glow emanating from it. Suddenly, the Book of Friendship flew out of the nearby used bookstore, shattering the glass of the window and soaring to Twilight's side. "It depends," she said, "on how overpowered your write me."

"Good," BB stated, turning back to the alien ship, getting into a low battle stance again. "I can write you any way I want."

Twilight was just about to jump up in the air and cast some flight magic. "But!" BB started, interrupting her. "Luna's still my waifu. Ain' nothin' that's gonna change that, ok?"

Twilight gave a nod before the nearby building across the street blew up.

"Nooooo!" David cried, falling to his knees. "That was my favourite cafe!"

"Well then," BB began, his fists alighting with a blue fire. "Let's get this party started."

And Twilight and BB launched themselves into the air, tackling the alien battleship head-on and dealing massive amounts of damage over time.

"Holy shit!" BB swore, a wide grin on his face, bursting from an old blue door. "Thank god Jack's office wasn't blown up by that huge battle we went through."

David, a slightly soot-covered Twilight and BB walked into a car repair garage, with cars all around being propped up by car-propping devices missing several of their key components.

"Why are we in a car repair garage?" David asked dubiously.

"Shit," BB muttered before speaking at a normal volume. "The narrative is falling apart. We need to act quickly and find Jack."

"Well, why is the narrative falling apart? Aren't you the author? Can't you fix that sort of thing?"

"I can't fix every single little thing!" BB shouted, quickly turning around in a rage. "There's a lot of shit to get through! 4 000 words is nothing to laugh at, sonny Jim! I have to write it, read it, edit it, and pray to god the readers will like it! It's can't be as easy as one, two, three, boop-de-bab-de-boop done! There's work that's involved! There's elbow-grease that needs to be applied! There's t's and i's that need to be crossed and dotted! Can't you see? So no, I can't fix 'that sort of thing'."

"What the hell," David stated, facepalming. He suddenly looked up to the audience. "Is this guy seriously my author? Really? This sixteen-year-old is writing a story about a university student? Who thought this was a good idea? Can I get a new author, please?"

BB rose a deflated arm up with a single finger in tried defiance. "I'm not actually, well, sixteen, you know."

David turned to face him in shock and rage. "Well then, what are you then?"

"Well," BB began, pushing his index fingers together awkwardly. "You know how some bronies might see their OC as a pony or maybe as an anthro? That's the same thing that applies here, except instead of a pony or anything close to the brony fandom, I'm instead a sixteen-year-old boy."

"But why?" David asked incredulously.

BB shrunk further from David's gaze. "Because I'm insecure about my age and want to stay in the mindset of a youth forever and never want to grow up?"

David facepalmed. Again. "I can't believe this."

"Hey!" someone shouted from somewhere. The trio looked under one of the red cars to see a figure slide up from underneath it with a wrench in one hand. He stood up in the dim light of the garage. "Can you two keep it down? I don't mind if you visit here, but I don't want you bringing any conflict into my establishment."

"Jack?" David asked, almost not recognizing the guy, save for his mustache. For somewhat reason, he was wearing terrible-looking blue and white stripped overalls that were stained with oil in various places, a white t-shirt over his chest. He adjusted the train conductor cap on his head before wiping sweat on his forehead with his arm.

"What the hell? Why are you fixing cars?" David inquired.

"Meh. I got bored with the whole software development thing," Jack explained. "Now car repair? Now that's where it's at! The tools, the models, the fresh smell of oil and gas," he inhaled loudly through his nose, "aw man, it's just great."

David turned his wide eyes to BB, who took a moment to figure out that all the attention was on him all of the sudden.

"F-Forget about that," BB said, taking long strides to approach Jack. "Look, there's something funky going on in this universe and I'm gonna need you to help fix it all."

"Sure!" Jack replied cheerfully. He walked over to the far wall to a computer that was turned off and looked like it was from the early 2 000s, the case stained yellow with age, the monitor all square and big and disgusting. "Let me just get my computer running here and we'll get started."

David's eyebrows were stuck taut and pointing up. "Wait. What's that thing beside your computer, Jack."

Jack turned around after kneeling down to press on the power button. "Oh, this? This is my portal to Equestria."

Twilight, David, and BB, all were speechless for a few seconds as they look on at the mass of metal that formed a four meter tall rectangle against the wall, the hull made of various soldered-together parts.

"Your portal to what now?" David asked.

"Equestria!" Jack shouted, a bright smile on his face, raising his arms up in fanfare. "I thought that because you were so crap at both your day job and your job of finding a way for Twilight to get back, I would just use my supreme intellect to create a gate of my own so that at least one of those two failures would be fixed by the end of the next MLP season."

Twilight's demeanor brightened significantly. "That great," she said, grabbing David's arm, causing him to blush. "I can go back home, David!"

"And all I need to power the portal is that computer cube in your pocket, David," Jack stated, holding out an open hand to David. "So, give it here."

"Oh no you don't!" BB shouted, pointing an offending finger at Jack. "If you turn t hat portal on, this universe will collapse as we know it! You'll destroy everything!"

"Well gee, that doesn't sound very good," David commented.

A gunshot sounded out, causing Twilight to scream in alarm and take cover, throwing her hands over her ears. BB turned around, shocked to see David fall to the ground limply, a fresh trail of blood seeping from the new hold above his eyes.

"Hey!" BB yelled, his fingers curled into an angry fist. "You killed my main character!"

"You really don't have a choice in the matter, Danny boy," Jack stated darkly, turning the smoking revolver in his possession to BB. "And not even the author can stop me from getting to Equestria!"

Jack shot. Twilight couldn't even see what happened as BB's blurred arm waved in front of his face withing a matter of a millisecond. A round, dented piece of metal fell at BB's feet. "That sort of trick won't work on me," BB sneered.

Jack grit his teeth in frustration, throwing the gun to the ground. "Well I guess we'll just have to do this the old fashioned way!"

BB barely had enough time to register Jack's tackle. The two were suddenly on the floor, grappling for control as they threw punches here and there. Twilight stared in horror as BB was pinned to the ground and repeatedly socked in the face. BB bumped his hips, and Jack was completely thrown off, with BB getting up quickly and pinning him to one of the cars with his shirt. He slammed Jack's head into the red paint of the car until Jack threw a random hook and critically hit BB, sending him back and making him lose his grip. BB was sent to the ground again after Jack plowed into him, with BB landing painfully onto a tool box.

"Bastard!" BB shouted, dodging a punch even though Jack was on top of him before firing off his fist into Jack's stomach. Jack lost all breath and strength as BB shoved him aside, getting on top of the bigger man as they struggled for control once again.

"Twilight" Jack yelled as he kept his hands locked in combat with BB's. "You have to do it!"

"What? Twilight yelled, her mind lost in confusion.

"You have you get David's computer and plug it into the portal!" Jack struggled to say under BB's offensive pressure. "There's a slot for it right on the front, to the right! Get David's computer from his pocket and plug it in!"

BB shot a panicked look to Twilight."No! Don't do it, Twilight! Everything in the human realm will be destroyed!"

"He just doesn't want to see you go back to Equestria!" Jack claimed, pushing back against BB. "He wants to lock you in twenty more chapters with David before he gets to the conclusion! You'll be stuck in his computer for god knows how long until he completes his story!"

Twilight bit her lip, her legs wobbly as she stared at David's unmoving body, a pool of red appearing from under his head on the concrete. Her eyes went to the square bulge in his right pocket. A glint of greed lit in her eye.

"Ung!" BB shouted after taking a straight to the cheek, still on top of Jack. "Twilight, think of the repercussions! David won't have anywhere to live anymore! The Earth will be swallowed into a void of nothingness as the universe collapses on itself!"

"David is dead, you fool!" Jack screeched.

"But I'm the author! I can bring him back Twilight, just trust me!"

Twilight looked nervously at David, then at Twilight before returning her focus to the object in David's inventory.

"Do it!" Jack hounded.

"Don't do it!" BB pleaded.

Twilight closed her eyes for a moment, then opening them, her resolution realized.

In a matter of moments, the gate was equipped with the computer cube after Twilight robbed it out of David's pocket. The machine started humming to life as sparks of electricity began jumping from the inner rim of the rectangle.

BB's eyes widened. "No!"

The portal powered on, showing an image of Ponyville inside the blue-tinted portal that hung in the gate. A rough wind ripped around the garage, forcing air everywhere until it started sucking in the small tools and papers that lay about in the workspace.

"No!" BB shouted again, getting off of Jack in haste and grabbing onto one of the cars.

"Spike! I'm coming home!" Twilight cheered, willfully throwing herself into the swirling portal.

David left a bloody trail of red on the floor as he was slowly dragged across the ground into the glowing blue hole.

"Hell yeah!" Jack yelled. "This is what I've always dreamed about!" He was pulled into the portal too.

"All the characters I write are idiots!" BB cried before the portal sucked in the rest of the garage, cars and all.

The town of Ponyville was peaceful in the afternoon. The sun was shining, the weather was warm, not too many clouds were in the sky, and the ponies were happily prancing around the pavement, chatting, going places and having an all around friendly time.

Well, that is, until a massive blue portal appeared floating above town square.

Ponies gasped as Twilight Sparkle came out of it with great force, rolling until she stopped with a huff. Her head spinning, she got a hold of her senses and lifted her head up, getting focus of her surroundings.

"I'm back?" she questioned before her ears pointed straight up with her smile. "I'm back!"

The Ponyville citizens who were either frozen in fear or refused to move from their spot were horrified to see the corpse of a brown earth pony fall out of the portal with a heavy whump, a hole right in the center of his forehead. Lily, who was watching it all from afar, promptly fainted in front of her flower shop.

"Whee!" a voice cried as a red stallion with a suspicious mustache and a spiraling horn atop his head jump out of the portal, landing perfectly on all four hooves. He looked around with childish wonder. "So this is what Ponyville looks like in real life!"

Several metallic beasts came out of the portal right after, crushing the poor dead pony lying right beneath the entrance to anotehr world. The last thing the phenomenon spat out was a blue unicorn with blue hooves and a blue, spiky mane. His flank was covered with the image of a swirling comet burning blue. He came out at rocket speeds, flying forward, screaming until he hit the ground rolling. His velocity sent him forward until he hit rest at the hooves of another pony.

With a groan, BB peered up, trying to stop the world from spinning. His vision finally focused on the stranger staring down at him. It was an orange stallion with glasses and a goatee wearing a black top hat.

"Blue Blaze?" the stallion said, shock evident in his voice. "I've been looking for you everywhere! Where have you been for the past six days?"

BB's muzzle was screwed up into a crude attempt at a grin. "Uh, heh. Hey there, Hatty."

treehouse.exe V1.31

It was a blank, grey window.

David stared at the computer screen. The interface was very simple, with the title of the program labeled at the top of the window, a few tabs available underneath with the rest of the program's visual space taken up by an empty square. His arms were glued to his sides, his eyes wandering to the mouse right beside his keyboard. He had no desire to touch it, to even let his hand near it, in fear that the program would suddenly jump up and take a hold of the rest of his system as soon as he moved the cursor. He leaned forward, bringing his face inches away from the glass surface of the monitor, squinting.

"Ok, calm down David," he mused. "Let's take this one step at a time here. No need to rush. Just examine what you've got here and don't click on anything."

Moving his head away from the light source, he hopped in his seat to get better posture and slid the chair forward. His left hand went to rest across the desk with the right gingerly hovering over the mouse before decidedly grasping it. The white pointer moved from the start menu to over the general vicinity of the window.

"Let's see here. 'File'..."

He slid over to the file tab on the menu bar. Clicking, multiple options presented themselves for him.

"'New', 'Open', 'Open Recent', same things per usual. Version info? That sounds interesting. Let's click on that."

He clicked. A new window popped up.

PONY Graphical User Interface ver. 1.31

© Richard Louis 2033
All Rights reserved.

He frowned, closing the window. "I've already seen this before." His eyes wandered back to the tabs to explore more. The next button was labeled "General Settings", which he clicked. He became wide-eyed at the myriad of different options that he could change from the resulting window he opened. His attention glazed over them, unable to make too much sense of what he was seeing at that moment.

"I think I'll take a better look at that later. I better skip the next option in 'File' too, 'cause I have no idea what 'SOPHIA' is."

The cursor made its way over to the "Edit" tab, selecting it.

"Hmm, this tab it pretty empty. 'Undo', 'Redo', nothing out of the ordinary here."

Deciding to move on, he followed the cursor to the right. The next option made him grimace.

"'Runtime'? Ok, that manages what happens when the main program runs, I guess," he thought, biting his lip. "We've got 'Runtime Settings', 'Camera' — now that sounds interesting — and, an option that says run with an un-checked check mark box. There's also a 'Pause' option too, but it's grey text. I can't select it."

He sat straight up. His vision became unfocused as he went deep into thought. The low hum of the computer soothed the room's atmosphere in the dark of night, the window behind David still firmly closed. Beneath the desk, the air was heated by the little machine, keeping David's toes warm, heating the underside of the glass desk surface and transferring the heat to the top side. He blinked twice before returning to reality. His pupils rested on the "Run" button. Taking a few seconds to reconsider, he nodded and clicked once.

The program hanged while David tapped his fingers on the edge of his keyboard, leaning at an angle back on his chair, forcing himself to control his breathing. A dozen seconds passed, then two, then three. David momentarily checked Task Manager, a scowl growing on his face. His eyes checked the clock; it had been a minute since he pressed that single button. Suddenly, the next minute passed, and he let out a harsh breath, his eyes widening as he pulled his head away from the computer screen. Scratching his head, he clicked inside the window. The window obtained a grey-white hue, and the cursor indicated loading when he placed it over the program. He grunted.

He loosened his eyebrows when the window turned back to normal and a new message popped up. He scanned the text carefully.

Warning: Current runtime environment missing elements:
bookofhmny.txt not found.
lab01.bsp not found.

Error Code 152:489:7B

[Stop] [Replace with Default] [Close Program]

"Uh," David said. He clicked "close". Another message became apparent to him.

Are you sure? This will close the program.

[Yes] [No]

"No no no no!" he rapidly declared, eyes wide, immediately gravitating the cursor to the latter answer and clicking on it. When the program went to the previous window, he breathed a sigh of relief. "Replace with Default" was selected instead.

More loading was done. Time passed. David took a moment to stand up and stretch, wandering over to the window to take a peek outside. He saw a black cat with yellow eyes that glinted from the streetlight it was under. It took one look at him and scurried away in a hurry. He could only imagine how cold it was out there, nights becoming even chillier as the month grew on. He went back to his desk to grab his phone, check his texts, and check his emails, before looking back to the monitor to see if anything progressed. He rolled his eyes, and could only wonder what was happening to make the program run so slow.

Suddenly the window became normal again. His eyes locked onto target and he sat back down in a dramatic flourish, sliding the chair along the carpet before grabbing the edge of the desk and pulling himself closer once again. New features presented themselves on the screen. The window had grown bigger, taking up two-thirds of the screen's resolution instead of minding its business like before, the insides no longer grey, but black. The status bar changed, displaying everything from CPU usage to memory allocated, as well as some other numbers David couldn't make head or tails of. The opposite side of the status bar read "loading libraryDefault.bsp". The fans of his computer became louder, activity starting up behind the small metal case where the hardware was being housed. David stared at the screen. Nothing happened for several seconds.

Just then, David heard muted groaning somewhere. He checked his immediate area, determining that it was coming from his headphones as they sat on his desk. He grabbed them in one swift motion and set it on his head, shifting it so it fit properly, putting the mic bit the correct distance away from his lips. The black screen suddenly displayed Twilight waking up on the ground, holding her head, her eyelids still heavy.

"Ugh, I have to stop waking up like this," Twilight muttered to herself.

"Twilight!" David called out.

"Huh? David?" she asked. "What happened? Why do I feel so nauseous?"

David face palmed, making a resounding slap that carried into the microphone. "I should have figured you lost data. What's the last thing you can remember?"

Twilight appeared thoughtful. "I was still searching for pony-dot-e-x-e, but then... Oh, David! Did I ever get to mention—"

"That you found it? Yep, you did. That's why you're waking up in a mess like that. You found it and told me and we started a different program, but pony-dot-e-x-e crashed as soon as the other program was started."

"What's the other program?" she inquired.

"It's some kind of editor," David said, rubbing his chin, following to the 'Environment' tab to the right of his cursor. He clicked. "Environment. 'Import', 'Template', 'Location', 'Geographic Data'? What in the crap? 'Object List'. Ok, that last one makes more sense."

"What does it edit?" Twilight continued.

"Uh," David said, hesitating. "It edits your program, I think. I mean, it changes how pony-dot-e-x-e behaves. There's a bunch of different settings that I think I can fool around with. Haven't touched anything yet, though."

"I see," Twilight replied a bit slowly. She turned her head here and there, scanning the environment for something. “I can't seem to find the window for this editor anywhere. The process is missing too."

"Really?" David asked, confused.

"Yeah. In fact, there's a lot less data that I have access to. I'm missing a lot of programs and threads from my view."

"That's probably a safety feature," David shared. "I don't think it would be good if you had the ability to change how the program manages you."

"Why not?" Twilight asked.

"What if you accidentally nuked yourself?"

"What?"

David paused. "Sorry, you wouldn't know that saying. What I'm trying to say is, what if you accidentally did something horrible to yourself without knowing? You could try and make the editor do something but it does something else, or you cast a spell to do one thing with the program but the program has an entirely different reaction than you expected. It could be dangerous."

"You're right," Twilight said. "So you haven't tried anything yet?"

"Nope, not yet. I want to see what everything does first. I already had an error message that—"

Twilight's screen filled with light, and a loud hissing sound erupted from the headphone speakers. She cried out behind the computer screen, throwing her forehooves over her closing eyes.

"Twilight?" David asked with alarm.

"David, what's happening?" Twilight cried, unable to see through the blinding light.

"I don't know," David stated, checking the program. The status bar at the bottom of the rectangle had changed once again, displaying a different message.

"'libraryDefault.bsp loading'? What the hell is a b-s-p?" David thought with both hands on the desk surface, leaning forward.

Twilight's space was abruptly filling with details. David watched in shock as thin black lines drew themselves over the background, colour bleeding in from the light where lines were joining together to create boundaries between each other. The doodles swirled and curved, all moving as one, the disk light on the computer case lit like a fire in the night. Twilight kept still, unsure what to do, unable to open her eyes.

David blinked several times, unsure of what he was seeing. Twilight's environment was filled with wood, brown oak that lay across the floor, walls, and ceiling. Several spirals and designs etched into the material in various places. Holes were filled out in the sides of the room, forming smooth, mostly rectangular bookcases. Rings of a tree's age originated from the center of the appearing room and extended outward until they kissed the corners of the walls. There were stairs at the back of the room, with a green-painted door right beside it that had a tiny window to the inside. There were lofts all over the upper portion of the area, the ceiling reaching high up, an orange and yellow sun painted right on the wood. Several glass panes offered sunlight from the outside, which poured in copious amounts, lighting the room, motes of dust floating in the rays of warmth.

He couldn't believe his eyes. A tiny tree stump was smoothed out at the top, creating a book stand that held an open book which was empty for the moment. A maple statue of a unicorn head sat against the wall at one end of the space, while a small laboratory set with empty vials, clear corked casks and Bunsen burners took its place at the other side, put away for later use. To the north was a work desk, clear of any parchment, ink pots sitting neatly near the back of the surface with pure white quills of different sizes, multiple rolled-up scrolls sitting on the ledge above.

And the books. Oh, the books. David couldn't begin to count how many books he could see before him. Red hardcovers, green paperbacks, works of old, and large collections of encyclopaedias filled every single notch in the walls, acting as the population of the residence. It was a bibliophile's dream. Some were already open on two round tables that had deep purple cushions lying right beneath them. He couldn't make out any writing on them, but thought that the resolution of the window couldn't render the pixels properly from that distance anyway. The last details of the environment filled in, and suddenly the noise from his headset was gone. Instead, morning birds chirped from outside, singing lovely tunes of joy with the freedom of the blue sky above.

Twilight lowered her hooves, opening her eyes slowly. She sat up on her flank, stabilizing herself with one foreleg, looking around. David gaped. A spark filled her eyes as she took in the setting.

"I'm... I'm back?" she whispered.

David turned his head away from the screen, but his eyes kept glued on.

"I'm really back?" she asked herself. Her gaze went down to her hooves, and she tapped the ground with both. The resounding clop that came from the oak could not lie to either her ears or David's. A small smile lit her face. "A-Am I... Did I truly..."

“Hang on, Twilight,” David said slowly. She looked around the ceiling of the room, as if there was some foreign entity hanging about, their presence bouncing off the walls. “I can still see you from this location.”

“What?” she questioned, her ears folding. Panic took hold. “B-But I could have sworn, I… T-This is the Ponyville Library, so where…?”

“I’m sorry, Twilight,” David said, pained. “I’m pretty sure you’re still in my computer.”

“No way,” she enounced, taking a look around the room once more. Her eyes appeared lost, and her body turned this way and that, unsure where to start. Twilight’s breathing quickened. “No way! T-This is my home! My house! How can I still be in your computer when it’s right here before me?”

Twilight finally found the camera floating above the room. Her pupils shrunk. Tears welled up in the bottom of her eyes.

David was troubled. “I think the program is generating the room for you, graphically speaking.” He brought up Task Manager and took a peek. “It looks like it’s eating up a bit more of my system than usual.”

She collapsed, her head hanging. Lifting up a hoof, she wiped her cheeks, and although David couldn’t tell for what at his angle, he could guess. “I-I really thought I made it home,” she said, pawing at the wood beneath her. “It feels all so r-real to me.”

“And I don’t even know how it’s pulling all of this off,” David declared, throwing his arms up in a stretch before letting them hang back behind his head as he leaned into his chair. “If this was some kind of game-like environment where you were the player and the Library was the map, then the program is generating a lot of proper collision detection real fast.”

Twilight frowned. David didn’t think she got all of that, but some of it did get through. He guessed that some of the learning she’d been doing had paid off, after all.

“Can you see the system properly now, Twilight?” he asked, bringing his hands back to the controls on the desk. “Like all the code and stuff?”

Her horn lit up. He didn’t like the sign that the suddenly appearing dark circles under her eyes gave him. He swore her mane was sticking out in some places too. “I d-don’t know,” she said, trying out her magic. “I-I think it’s there, it reactivated again, it’s just that all I see are the walls of the library.”

Suddenly, Twilight's pink magic enveloped the nearby door with a candle etched onto it. She shrieked as it slammed open, jumping back a bit.

“Twilight?” David asked, alarmed. “What was that?”

She stared at something in front of her for a few seconds, her eyes almost going cross. A nervous laugh came before her next words. “It’s just the system-viewing spell I made.” She peered out the open door, but David couldn’t see what was beyond. “I think the code is located outside the Library.”

David rose a single eyebrow. Bringing his attention out of the center of the window, he swung the cursor around to the menu bar again, getting back to where he was exploring before Twilight spawned in.

"Ok, so the next tab is 'windows'," he thought, clicking on the button. His eyebrows twitched at the results. "I've seen one of these before, I know what this is. If I wanted to open different editor views, I could use this. Not touching any of that for now, there's too many options. So, that just leaves one thing left."

He heard a door close. "You done peeking?" he asked.

"Heh, yeah," she answered, taking a few slow steps back away from the entrance. "It's just a bit odd how my library is kind of floating in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing out there. In here, there's sunlight, but there's no sun outside. No Ponyville." Her head turned towards the books on the shelves, gulping. "I'm curious as to what these books are, though. There's nothing on their spines!"

He saw she grabbed a hardcover with her magic and brought it towards her. It opened inches away from her face. She let out a gasp and flipped thought a couple of pages, her eyes glued to the screen, scanning rapidly as she went through the content easily.

"What? What is it?" David asked.

"It's completely blank!" Twilight said. She reached the end of the book, firmly closing it with a slam and sliding it back where it belonged. "There was nothing in it!"

David gave an odd look. He watched as Twilight pulled out another book and started reading it. "Empty," she declared, placing the book back and taking the one right next to it, reading it immediately. "Empty," she said again, not even bothering to put it away this time as she summoned another from the wall, now having two in her telekinesis. "Empty," she stated after flipping through the next. "Empty, empty, empty. Empty! David, these are all just empty books!"

David scratched his chin. "Well, maybe the map doesn't contain your library's contents. It's your library for certain, but maybe the developer couldn't pull all the books you owned into the program."

Twilight sat firmly in frustration, letting the last book in her possession fall onto the pile she made, not noticing that she left them all facing down on the floor, completely open. "This is ridiculous! I finally have my house back and I've lost every single book it had?"

"I can't even tell if those are supposed to be proper books or if they're just there as placeholder props," David pondered, his eyes wandering to the bottom of the window. The words "empty.txt opened" took hold of his interest. He clicked on the line, curious if it would actually do anything. Suddenly, a new window popped up, showing him contents of a folder that was labeled "Library". All it had in it was "empty.txt" and a "read me" file. He clicked on the latter, which opened up notepad for his use.

"Place any readable text files into this folder," David muttered under his breath, reading the screen. "Is really that it? Hey, Twilight,"

"Yeah?" Twilight returned a bit irritably.

"I found a folder named 'library'. See if you can find it and try putting some of your reading materials in it."

Twilight's horn lit up for a second before the front door slammed open again, sending Twilight jumping with a shriek. A part of her mane became more disheveled.

"I don't think I'm calling up any system searching anytime soon," Twilight said, holing a hoof to her chest as she caught her breath. "I have to change my spell a little so it stops doing that."

David frowned. He manually opened Windows Explorer and went to Twilight's e-books. He had a theory, and experimentally clicked-and-dragged one of the files from the Explorer window to the file viewer of the editor. There was a beat, and the reading file moved from Explorer to the editor successfully.

"Sweet," David stated.

Twilight turned sharply around, letting out a breath. David clicked back on the interface, trying to guide the camera to see where she was looking. A book on one of the shelves was glowing in a golden light before simmering down to nothing. Getting up, Twilight trotted over to the face of the wall and pulled down the book with her magic, slowly opening it up with a curious expression. Her eyes widened at the words inside.

"Hey! This is a copy of Computer Science for Dummies!" Twilight declared, looking into the camera lens.

"Ha! Just as I thought! We can populate your library with anything kind of e-book or text file! We just have to put it in the right folder! Is it ok if I move all of your readables to the library?" David asked.

"Uh, sure," Twilight said a bit hesitantly. Suddenly, the room around her was filled with glowing, newly placed books. She noted no new books appeared, but instead random reads would begin to shimmer light, and when they calmed down there would be a title along the spine of the book.

"Very interesting," Twilight stated, putting the book back and grabbing another that had finished glowing. "I'm going to need to organize these later." She gave a smile she couldn't hold back. "This is great! I can actually read physical books again! I won't have to read them off the background in weird colours of text anymore!"

"I wonder how the program formats the e-books into physical reading material for you," David question aloud. His focus was pulled back to the screen as he saw Twilight flip through the book, a wide grin on her face with her glittering eyes. He smiled back.

He blinked. He scanned the last tab at the top of the window, his smile disappearing. "Just the last tab left, 'tools'," he said again, clicking on it.

His mouth hung open as his eyebrows shot up. He shook his head, speechless.

"David?" Twilight asked.

He didn't respond.

"David?" she tried again.

"Hmm? Yeah?" He said, blinking rapidly and getting out of his stupor.

"Thank you for finding this," Twilight said, looking at the camera. The book in her grasp lowered slightly as the aura around it grew in opacity. Her magic enveloped the hill of forgotten, artificial books that she left previously and tried to put them back in some sort of attempted organized manner. "This actually means a lot to me, seeing the library again. I know I'm not exactly, you know, home, yet, but I think that finding the editor will be a large step forward to finding the solution to get me back."

"Oh," David simply stated. "You're very welcome, Twilight."

"I think that this is a perfect time to start a new book that I just got," she announced, taking a book from one of the shelves and trotting over to a purple cushion at one of the round tables in the room. She took a seat, the book on the table, her tail happily swishing back and forth as she was lost to the world. Unbeknownst to David, her mane actually started to go back to normal.

David nodded, lifting a shaky hand to his headset and lifting the mic bit back into place so it turned off. He took off the headset, placing it slowly on the desk, and reached over to his cell phone, his palms sweaty, eyes not leaving the menu that dropped down from the tab he had clicked.

The phone was flipped open. He didn't even need to look at the interface of the touch screen on the phone to put in his password and start a call. He brought the phone to his ear.

"Hello? Jack? Are you still at work? Listen, I need you to list me the best webcams you have to offer..."

Author's Note

And now, for some housekeeping.

The version of treehouse.exe represents how many times I had to change things in this chapter to make it right.

As you might already know, Griffin Productions has been doing a reading of pony.exe. So far, he has gotten up to chapter 3. I highly recommend that you check it out.

In other news, I've been working on a collaboration story for the past 4 months now. No, it wasn't the reason of the long hiatus that the story had, but I think you'll all be happy to know that it is heavily involved with pony.exe. I'll make a blog post when it's finally out, so keep watch for when I do.

Also, I wrote another story between the last chapter and this one. It's called Alpine Star. Well, that's just part of the title. It's basically about a mare and her friendships and duties on a mountain. It's an adventure tale with lots of snow with it. All the characters are OCs, so if you are here specifically for characters in the show, then this might not be for you. But at this point it's only going to be two parts long, and only the first half is out as of this chapter being published, so it's not like it's going to be a huge series that takes up all your reading time.

Lastly, I have no excuses for the lateness of this chapter. well, actually, I might have one. Had to do a lot of thinking about the direction of where I want this story to go.