Ponies, Portals, and Physics: A Practical Study on Unscheduled Interplanetary Excursion

by superpurple

Chapters

1 - Introduction
1.1 - Arrival
1.2 - Awaken
1.3 - Observations
1.4 - Assessing the Situation
1.5 - Additional Context
1.7 - Escape
1.8 - Interplanetary Camping
2 - A New World
2.1 - A Close Encounter of the Fuzzy Kind
2.2 - Walking and Talking
2.3 - Midnight Train
2.4 - Canterlot
2.5 - Preliminary Research
2.6 - Study Break
2.7 - Alterations to the Method
1.6 - Dinnertime Scheming

1 - Introduction

“Turning on the power supply,” Jack said. “Starting at twenty percent of calculated maximum.”

“Alright,” I replied. I noted the meter readouts. “Output readings look stable. Turn up the supply voltage.”

“Right. Increasing power to forty percent.” He paused. “No change to the output. Still stable.”

“Bring it up to fifty percent.”

Another pause. “Still mostly stable, observing minor oscillations at the emitter.”

“Keep bringing it up.”

“Sixty percent… Sixty-five… Seventy—Voltage spiking in the primary inductor.”

“Back to sixty-five and hold,” I said quickly.

“Holding… Inductive spikes dissipated. Back to only minor oscillations again.”

“Keep going. Eighty.”

He hesitated. “You sure? It doesn’t look like it's working right. We could cause a burnout if we go much higher.”

“I’m aware. However, we’re limited on time here and need to confirm that this works. So, unless you have a better idea, we keep going.”

“Fine. Eighty percent… Oscillation amplitude is decreasing.”

“See? We’re good, take it to full power.”

He sighed. “Supply voltage to one hundred percent.” Several moments passed. Then in a surprised tone, “Oscillations gone. The emitter signal is completely stable.”

Silence.

“What the shit?” I announced.

“It's stable.”

“Yeah, I got that. Just one teeny little thing. It's supposed to be oscillating. It’s an oscillator, it’s not supposed to be stable.”

“Well it’s at max power. And drawing more current than planned. A lot more, actually… Say, do you smell smoke?”

CRACK!

“Fuck! Shit! Tits! Ass! Unplug the damn thing!” I scrambled, pulling at wires. “Kill the power!”

I found the wires leading to the supply and yanked them free. With the offending cables disconnected, and nothing else looking at risk of imminently exploding, I looked down at the small circuit board sitting on the lab table in front of the two of us. A few wisps of acrid smoke rose upward from it.

Well, that could have gone better.

I did a quick survey of the rest of the lab room. A few of the other groups were quietly watching us, the rest too preoccupied with their own work to care about what was happening at our bench. I glanced at the lab TA. He was looking up from his laptop and staring at our little scene. He removed one of his earbuds and spoke, “Garrett, Jack, you two having some issues?”

“We all good,” I said with a grin, coughing at the rising fumes. I fanned at them with a hand to hasten their dispersion. “Just a minor hardware glitch.”

“Mhmm...” He replaced the earbud and his gaze went back down to his laptop. Then muttered under his breath, “So long as it doesn’t set off any alarms this time...”

Jack rotated slowly in his seat to face me. “So…” he said. “That didn’t work.”

“How very perceptive of you,” I replied, not even glancing in his direction and instead pulled the slightly-smoldering circuit closer for inspection. “Maybe you should have gone into criminal justice instead of engineering. You’d’ve been a great detective, I’m sure of it.” It didn’t take long to locate the guilty component, which I plucked from the board and held up for him to see. “Yep, that’d do it. The e-cap was in backwards.”

“Hey, you assembled the circuit, not me.”

“Ahh, but whose job is it to notice when I do stupid shit that might explode?” I tossed the useless part over my shoulder. “Anyway. I’d say that was a successful test. Might have to get a new breadboard though, this one looks a little well-done.” A quick look at my watch told me it was 6:50 pm. Only ten minutes until the end of electronics lab. “...which can totally wait until next time. The report isn’t due until the week after break, right? Right. Awesome. Just put it down as ‘mostly functional’ in the notebook and we’re done here.”

I stood up and stretched, then got to work unplugging the cables and probes from our test circuit. The laptop and other tools got neatly packed away into my backpack, with everything else just piled on top. A quick shake of the bag and everything was stowed, neatly or otherwise. I waited for Jack to finish writing down the last few details in his notebook.

“Okay, done. Let's get out of here,” Jack said, closing his book and grabbing his backpack.

“Sweet,” I replied while grabbing my own bag. I threw it over my shoulder as we made our way to the door. The T.A. simply grunted as we passed.

“You know,” Jack said as we walked down the hall, “we probably could have been finished completely today if it hadn’t blown up.”

“Meh.” I waved a hand in his general direction. “We’re basically done anyways. Pretty sure we got the design right. Like ninety-five percent sure. The implementation just got screwed up a teeny little bit.”

“And whose fault was that?”

“Totally not mine. Nope. Not at all.”

“Uh huh...”

“Whatever. Doesn’t matter. And do you know why?” I asked, pushing through the double-doors of the building and into the cool air outside. “Because we. Are. Free!” I punctuated the last word by throwing my arms up into the air. “At long last, spring break begins!”

We stepped down onto the slightly-wet sidewalk. Partially embedded in a snowbank next to the door was a bicycle rack which was currently home to a singular bicycle. If it could even be called a bicycle in its current state. Most of the paint was missing from the frame, the chain was rusted, and more than a few parts were wrapped in duct-tape. Any reasonable person would have thrown it in a dump rather than bring it anywhere near a road. I walked over to it and began to unlock it from the rack.

Jack shook his head. “I can’t believe you actually ride that scrap heap. Especially at this time of the year,” he said, zipping up his jacket.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, brow furrowed. “It’s spring.”

“Yeah, a Griffonstone spring. Except you know far better than I do that ‘spring’ in Griffonstone doesn’t mean shit ‘cept for a slightly reduced chance of getting wrecked with a random blizzard out of nowhere.” He suspiciously eyed the skies, despite there not being a cloud in sight.

“Oh, it's not that bad,” I replied with a wave of my hand and pulled my bike out of the rack.

“Yeah… no. Just because y’all northern nutcases decide not to wear your coats the moment it goes above freezing doesn’t make it spring. No matter what the calendar says.” He shivered and pulled his jacket tighter around his shoulders. “Nuh-uh, you can keep your weird-ass weather. I’ll spend my break laying on a proper beach getting drunk like a normal person, thank you kindly.”

“Sounds like an exciting agenda.”

“Ha, more so than your plan of ‘sit at computer and fuck off for two weeks’.”

“Hey now, fucking off can yield all sorts of interesting results.”

“Yeah right. Twenty bucks says the most exciting thing that happens to you is a blizzard knocking out the power and interrupting your Netflix binge.”

“I ain’t taking that bet. That's practically a given and you know it.” I threw a leg over my bike and sat on the mostly-intact seat. “See you back at the room?”

He shook his head. “Nope. I’ve got all my shit in the car already. It's a bit of a drive back down to my parents’ place, and I should get going.” After a moment of consideration, he said, “Sure you don’t want to come with? Still got plenty of room in the car. For you and a computer.”

“Nah, you have fun. Enjoy your sand and sunburns. I’m fine chilling here.”

“Literally.”

“Pfft, wuss.” Then I added, “Drive safe, dude.”

He practically snorted at that. “Ha! Says the guy who refuses to wear a helmet, and yet insists on riding as fast as humanly possible, on a bike held together with tape, while there’s still snow on the ground.”1 He turned and walked towards the parking lot, then shouted over his shoulder, “Try not to kill yourself this time!”

1The tape was there for rust prevention and served no structural purpose. I wasn’t that reckless.

“No promises,” I said with a chuckle. “Have fun!”

“Oh, I will! I’ll be sure to send pictures! Lots of them! Especially any with chicks in ‘em! See you in a couple weeks!” he yelled back with a wave. He rounded the corner of the building and then was out of sight.

I stood there for a few moments, one foot on the bike’s raised pedal, a hand holding the brake, simply taking in the evening. The streetlights were on, illuminating the sidewalk and roads with an orange glow. Just about everyone had gone home by now, with the exception of the few stragglers like myself who had the misfortune of late-running classes. Looking about, I didn’t see a single other person, and the roads were clear of cars. The university was virtually abandoned for the coming break.

Perfect.

I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the chill air, then slowly released it. I repeated the process a few more times.

My foot came down on the pedal. Hard. Hard enough that the front tire briefly lifted off the ground from the sudden acceleration. When it returned to the pavement, I yanked on the handlebars and turned sharply onto the road.

I didn’t immediately go in the direction of my dorm building. No, instead I took the road towards the center of campus, dodging potholes along the way.

Located at the heart of the university was the mall; a long open field lined with trees. At one end was the campus library, at the other sat a statue of the Griffonstone University mascot.2 During the warmer months the fields would be filled with people playing frisbee or chilling under a tree, or whatever other summer-ey things people usually did. Currently, however, the fields were covered in a layer of snow and ice that wouldn’t be entirely melted for another month or so.

2A griffon, made of stone. Zero points for creativity.

My target was the walkways encircling it. I turned left off the main road and onto the closest of the paths running its length. Pushing the bike’s decrepit pedals to their limits, I accelerated to a speed that was definitely faster than necessary and probably faster than was strictly safe, given the conditions.

The extra exertion served its purpose. The wind whipped past and each lungful of air bringing with it the night’s chill. The coolness spread through my body, pushing away sluggishness from a long day of sleep-inducing lectures.

At the end of the mall, I turned, crossing in front of the library before riding back down the path opposite the one I’d just traversed. A few laps around the place would do wonders to burn off the accumulated restlessness from classes.

The preceding week had been filled with extra work as professors inevitably all crammed in assignments and exams before we all left for break and all the hard-fought learning could leak from our brains. Multiple exams, labs, reports and whatever else they could think of had filled my schedule to the brim and resulted in a week-long gauntlet of continuous stress that had only just concluded.

To say that I was looking forward to the break would be a little bit of an understatement.

Jack’s plan for the break was to head south to the nearest beach, get drunk, and then do… something. I don’t think he planned farther than that. Still, that’s totally fine for him but didn’t rate all that high on my list of preferred vacation plans. I wasn’t a huge fan of the heat, or the sun, or sand, or excessive consumption of alcohol… or really anything about it. So, best friend or not, I felt no overwhelming desire to join him on his trip.

No, I planned to spend the next two weeks holed up in our dorm with my computer, a crate of caffeinated beverages, and a backlog of things I’d wanted to do but hadn’t had time to because of school. Or maybe I’ll just binge-watch three hundred hours of Netflix. Who knows? Only time will tell.

Speaking of time, my stomach took this opportunity to remind me that I hadn’t eaten since noon. My legs were also in agreement; I’d done enough laps around the place, it was about time to wrap it up and head home.

I was approaching the end of the mall opposite the library, with the statue coming up on my right. One last pass around it followed by a quick turn to the left would set me back onto the main road and on the way home.

At least that was the theory.

In practice, when I looped around behind the statue and started to pull out of the turn, the bicycle’s front tire lost traction. Maybe there was a patch of ice hidden in the statue’s shadow, or maybe I was just going too fast for the turn. I don’t know. Either way, the result was the same. Instead of nicely following the path, I now found myself careening off the plowed sidewalk and towards the statue.

“Fuucking shiiiit!” I announced with all the eloquence the situation mandated.

I fought with the handlebars for control as I left the pavement and entered the snow. I did my best to remain upright, but it wasn’t enough. The brakes were unsurprisingly ineffective on the icy terrain, and without the ability to change my direction, the front tire ran right into the snowbank at the base of the statue.

The bike, weighing significantly less than me and impacting the rather incompressible snow, came to an abrupt stop. I, however, continued forward with relatively little opposition.

That isn’t to say there was no opposition. The handlebars made a commendable effort, slamming into my gut and knocking the air from my lungs. But it wasn’t enough to stop me from tumbling forward off the bike. Pain ripped through my skull as my head hit stone and my vision filled with a rather impressive spectrum of colors before going black entirely.

Author's Note

You can blame these nerds for encouraging me to write this abomination. Mostly 4ths though.

“You can make a lab report into a story…” - Hap
"yes. that is a thing you should do." - fourths
":V" - Alamais

1.1 - Arrival

I was laying on my side on the cold ground and everything hurt like hell.

That was all I could say with any degree of certainty since I couldn’t see for shit in the darkness. This was surprising, given that moments before everything was well lit by the full moon and street lamps. I was pretty sure my eyes were open, could be wrong though. My whole head and back felt like they’d hit something hard. I was more than a little worried I’d received some kind of serious cranial damage.

A quick wiggle test of my various extremities informed me that I probably wasn’t a quadriplegic. That was a slight relief, but things still felt off in a way I couldn’t rightly describe. I tried to roll onto my hands and knees. All the motions felt… off… somehow, and I immediately began to regret taking that action as every joint in my body began to protest in the only way nature allowed: lots of pain. I halted my movements and let them voice their complaints.

When the surge of negative sensory feedback dropped to a bearable level, I tried again to get up. Maintaining any kind of balance proved difficult, so I made the executive decision to blindly stumble around on all fours instead.

At this point, I was able to make a few more assessments. The ground beneath me was cold but didn’t exactly feel like snow or asphalt. I was also pretty sure my backpack had come off in the crash. Everything else still felt pretty fucked up though.

My eyesight was adjusting to the darkness, but I still couldn’t see all that much. I could make out the outline of a large something close by that was maybe the same size as the base of the statue I’d run into, so I directed my stumbling generally towards it.

My head bumped into something solid and even with how slow I was going, the impact still sent waves of pain through my head that made me dizzy. I reached out to brace myself against the edge of it and tried to stand up for a third time. With one hand on the object for support, I was able to pull myself mostly upright. Though my knees shook and had some trouble bearing the weight, I managed to not fall over. Things were going pretty good. Well, at least until I tried to rest my other hand next to my other one.

A surface I was expecting to be solid turned out to be considerably less so. Instead of the stone pedestal I thought I was leaning on, my hand made contact with… something else. It was as though I was sticking my hand into a huge bubble made of mercury. The hand sunk into and slid past the surface with almost no resistance, the area around it rippling and emitting an eerie glow.

Where the ripples spread the surface became translucent. Past the rippling distortion, I saw my hand, the moonlit sky, pavement, trees, and snow. The mall. I was looking at the mall.

Between the pale glow from the distortion around my hand and my eyesight finally adjusting, I could finally make out some details about my surroundings. The most obvious was that I was inside. Surrounding me were stacks of crates and assorted junk. The object I was learning on was the frame of what looked like a large ornamental mirror… if the mirror itself was a rippling silver bubble instead of glass.

The most startling realization, though, was that while the hand illuminated by the moonlight was recognizable as my own, the arm attached to it was not. On this side of the silver membrane, the few parts of myself visible in the dim light had textures and proportions that were wholly unfamiliar.

I yanked back from the surface in surprise, probably more forcefully than required because the sudden movement caused me to lose my balance again and fall over.

I fell to the side and slammed into a tall stack of junk. The pile shook under my weight, rattled back and forth, then pitched to the side. I stumbled back in time to get clear as the pile of junk toppled over in front of the mirror-thing with a massive crash.

I fell back and landed on my hands and knees again, the impact causing another surge of pain. Maybe I should just stop trying to stand up? Yeah, that’s probably a solid plan.

With the glow from the strange mirror-thing blocked by the junk, I was thrust back into darkness. I reached around with one hand, trying to find a pocket with my phone, flashlight, lighter, fucking anything to provide a source of light so I could figure out what the hell was going on.

My hand brushed against my leg where my pocket should have been, and the contact made my whole-body tense up. Instead of the fabric of my pants I was expecting, I found an unfamiliar leg that was coated in a strange fuzz. In return, the leg detected a hand that was far rougher and pointier than anticipated. I froze, standing stock still but for the hand creeping down a leg that was not at all the proportions I was accustomed to and coated the whole way down with the foreign fuzz. Going back up, the hand met a gut and chest that felt just as out of place and ungodly fuzzy as the rest.

My heart was racing, and I was sweating bullets. I was nauseous. What the fuck had happened? Something had gone seriously fucking wrong with that bike crash! I felt like I might vomit and was on the verge of having a panic attack when a muffled voice came from behind me.

”What’s going on in there?”

I turned in the darkness to face the direction of the sound. There was a metallic rattle and then a rectangle of golden light appeared as a door opened across the room from me. Blinding light poured into the room. I squinted hard and shielded my eyes with an arm.

The voice yelled again, “What the— How in bloody Tartarus did you get in here?”

I peered around my raised arm but was only able to make out a vague silhouette standing in the brightened doorway. The glow around the figure’s head brightened, and I cried out as the pain in the back of my head rocketed to unbearable levels. My ears rang, and my vision went black around the edges. I was lightheaded. My limbs crumpled beneath me and I found myself laying on the cool ground once again. The darkness engulfed the rest of my view and I gratefully entered the numbing embrace of unconsciousness.

1.2 - Awaken

Fffuuuuuck.

That was the concise and accurate summary of my thoughts upon waking up.

I had, evidently, slept like shit. My whole body ached from head to toe, with a particularly strong concentration of discomfort around my upper back and neck. I also had a splitting headache. It felt like my skull had been run through a trash compactor. Even slight movement was met with protest from the associated muscles.

But if I didn’t move... if I just lay there perfectly still, it was almost nice. Yes... I could just go back to sleep and deal with this shit later. Everything was just fine…

...except for the continued attempts by that damnable ball of fire in the sky to burrow past my eyelids and skullfuck my retinas.

I turned my head away from the infernal glare. The movement made my head flare with pain and yet also feel strangely… fuzzy.

I cracked an eye open just a tiny bit, grimacing at the glare. The ceiling above me was not the familiar white stucco of my dorm room.

My sleep addled mind worked over that detail.

Other senses decided to join the party. My ears reported in that everything was abnormally quiet. No constant buzzing of computer fans nor the ruckus of moronic neighbors. I processed that too.

Come to think of it, this didn’t really feel like my bed, either. I pushed that thought onto the stack.

Working…

Loading…

Bits and pieces of the previous night surfaced in the turmoil of thoughts and slipped into place. My eyes flew open.

There was something on my face, filling much of my view.

“Aaaargh!” I reached up to knock whatever it was away. At the same time, a pair of somethings jumped towards my face to join it. I tried to knock them away too, but they kept fighting me.

This struggle lasted for a few moments before I realized the entities I was fighting off were my hands. Except they weren’t my hands. Not really. The appendages before me were rough and scaly, and each of the four fingers was tipped in a long, curving, black spike.

The fuck?

I closed one eye and focused on the thing protruding from the center of my face. It was a pale yellow at the base but shifted to black where it tapered off to a hooked tip. I opened my mouth. The thing split down the middle, the lower half moving up and down as I worked my jaw.

This was a beak. From a bird. On my face. There was a beak on my face. I had a beak.

Nope, I wasn’t even going to try to make sense of that just yet. I moved my apparently taloned hand up across my face, past a large eye— ouch —and through the fluff covering my whole head. Fluff that definitely wasn’t hair.

I traced the offending fluff down my neck, shoulder and opposite arm to where I could see it. I brought the arm closer to my face so I could see the… feathers? Yup, they’re feathers. Of course. Y’know, to go with the beak and talons. Makes sense, right? Why the hell not?

The grayish feathers continued across my front (and I assumed my back as well), until about mid-chest. Where the feathers ended, a coat of thick gray fur began, spreading down a fuzzy belly, to a pair of equally fluffy legs, each ending in a poofy, padded paw.

The whole thing looked like there was an incident at a circus where the lion-taming and sawing-a-person-in-half acts got mixed up and the results got abracadabra-ed onto my unfortunate ass.

And, just like a big cat, my furry butt was completely devoid of any kind of clothing. Without thinking, I sat up, quickly covering myself with my hands, and then immediately regretted the action as I learned a lesson in being careful with talons around sensitive areas.

Suddenly much more alert, and now more upright, I discovered that the massive piles of white feathers surrounding me were in fact not part of the bedding as I had initially assumed. Instead, they seemed to be sprouting out of a pair of new limbs dangling limply from my shoulders.

I shook my head. Nothing about the scene before me changed, so I shook it again, just to be sure. Everything was still there and still just as fuzzy.

Beak, feathers, talons, wings, fur, paws. My sleepy brain parsed the data being presented to it, trying to piece all the parts together into something that might make a lick of sense. Eventually, it dug something suitable up from the archives. A single word, from the fiction section.

“Christ on a bike. I’m a goddamn griffon.”

1.3 - Observations

I was dreaming. Or hallucinating. I hit my head on the statue and now I was in a coma. Should’ve worn a helmet. This is what you get. You crash, hit your head too hard and bam! You’re stuck in a hospital bed dreaming you're a mythological creature.

I held a hand up, flexing the fingers and inspecting the movements. The scaled digits wiggled, mocking me with their birdliness. I turned my attention away from it and to my surroundings, hoping they might make more sense.

The room was small, with simple stone walls and a low hanging wooden ceiling. The walls were featureless except for a heavy-looking wooden door and one small window high on the wall, through which sunlight poured in at a low angle and hit the bed where my face had been.

The bed itself was also basic. A simple cotton sheet and one pillow laying on a rough pad that I guess technically qualified as a mattress, despite spine’s adamant disagreements.

Well, nothing about all that was particularly strange but did little to help the whole I-am-a-griffon thing make any sense. So I elected to not think about it and roll out of bed instead.

My movements were uncoordinated and brought with them a wave of dizziness. Which, combined with an unexpected resistance from my feet sticking in the sheets, meant that my departure from the bed didn’t go as I’d intended. I hit the stone floor beak first and landed in a pile with the bedding resting on top of me.

Ow.

I flailed my limbs about to extricate myself from the sheet that claws on my feet had decided to bring with me. The sheet was tossed away to where it hopefully couldn’t interfere again. This left me with a clear view of an unnecessarily poofy tail that was apparently covered by the sheet before. So there’s that too. Neat, I guess. Tack that onto the list.

I rolled over so my feet were under me and stood up, which wasn’t the greatest of ideas. The joints in my feline legs didn’t work the way I was used to, and I lost my balance as soon as I was upright. I took a step back to regain my balance and ended up stepping on the aforementioned tail.

“Ffffffffffff—” I yanked the foot back up.

And promptly fell over onto my side…

…and landed on a wing. Hard.

“Jesustittyfuckingchrist! W-why!?”

Holy hell that hurt. Ohh my god. What the fuck brain. I mean, yeah, I totally get the need for some realism here and there, but maybe tone it down on the dream pain? Please? Thanks. I shook my head. Apparently, the only thing new appendages were good for is opening up new and exciting opportunities to hurt yourself.

I took a minute or so before slowly climbing onto all fours. Not one to repeat mistakes more than a dozen times, this time I stayed on all fours. Slowly, I straightened my limbs, going from elbows and knees, to hands and feet, and then a little more… and I was standing.

I was standing up on all fours, with my spine straight and my head level, eyes forward, and my weight resting comfortably on my fingers and toes like the abomination of digitigrade creatures that I was. It felt kind of like crawling, but less awkward, with limbs that were meant for it. Natural.1

1Natural as in how this body was meant to work, it was still weird for a biped.

And it was super fucking weird.

My attention turned to my new appendages that had been causing so much trouble. The wings were hanging limply at my sides, dragging on the ground, and the tail was doing whatever it wanted… which at the moment also meant dragging on the ground. I’m sure the moment I stopped focusing on it it would go back being a tripping hazard.

They felt weird. Really weird. My brain didn’t quite know to deal with exerting control over the new limbs. The wings almost felt like a second set of arms—

I flexed my shoulders, rolling them around, trying to coax any movement out of the wings. Nothing. They just flopped around.

—A second set of arms that I don’t know how to, or couldn’t, actually use. Lovely.

They could feel pain though. That they could do just fine.

I wasn’t about to let a little something like lack of bodily control get in the way my curiosity, however. I sat down, took each of the wings in my hands and, with a little bit of fussing and dragging, manually extended them out as far as they went. The wings splayed out to my sides like a big, feathery rug. Fully extended, their full span had to be something like three to four times my current height. But big as they were, I wasn’t sure that was enough surface area to provide sufficient lift for something my size… whatever that size was. I didn’t actually know, given the lack of things to compare to.

Whatever. It wasn’t like I was about to be using them for flapping around anytime soon and realism had taken a back seat anyway. Except where pain was concerned. That was still on point. Good job brain. Excellent choice of priorities.

Time to see what else this place had in store. I walk-slash-crawled across the room over to the door, shoulder-mounted feather dusters dragging and collecting dust along the way. Upon reaching the door, and to my absolutely infinite surprise, I found it didn’t even have a handle. Just a barren wooden beam across the front and a small open window—barely twice the width of my head—completed with a couple metal bars. It required bending down a little, but I looked through the window.

Beyond the door was, amazingly, an empty hallway. A few similar looking doors lined the walls of the hall, though they lacked the barred window mine did. I guess I was special. The hallway ended with what was probably a set of stairs going up. I could be wrong, it was hard to see without my glasses.

Ladies and gents, I present to you… me, the world’s first nearsighted raptor. I had literal eagle eyes and I still couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of my face. It was funny. I laughed at how funny it was.

I stuck my arm through the window to try opening it from the other side, but the bars prevented me from reaching very far. Nothing within reach felt like any sort of handle or lock.

Well, since all this was all definitely in my head… I glared hard at the door and willed it to open. It remained stubbornly closed. I tried again, this time also giving it a firm push for good measure. Still nothing. Strange, doors were usually a bit more obedient in dreams, especially once they went lucid. I pounded on the door with a fist several times just to be sure. Nada. The door was closed, and I wasn’t getting out of here until that changed.

Fine, whatever. I threw my hands up I'm defeat and turned back to the bed. Coma-induced fever-dream or hallucination or whatever, I’ll just let it do its thing. I’ve never had a dream last that long after becoming aware it was a dream anyway. Coma induced ones couldn’t be much different. I’ll just wait it out. Go back to sleep and let my mind move on past this whole thing.

I clambered up onto the bed, then dragged my wings up off the floor. The bed definitely wasn’t the most comfortable thing around, but it would make do. I laid down, closed my eyes, and let my mind go blank. Soon this messed up dream would pass.

Any moment now.

I scratched at the edges of my beak.

Just had to go back to sleep, and then before you know it, I’m awake.

The damned wings were being uncomfortable. I rolled to my other side.

Awake, or dead. That was also a possibility, given the head injury.

But at least you’re not bored when you’re dead.

Any minu— ok fuck this. This is officially the most aggravatingly boring dream ever.

I rolled out of bed and marched back across the room, somehow avoiding tripping over myself in the process. I pounded my fist on the door and yelled. “Hey! Anyone out there? Open this thing up! I don’t care what this is, I am not staying in here. Stupid fucking door! You think you can hold me? Hey! HEY! HELLO-O!”

I was practically growling as I repeatedly punched the door. For several minutes, I kept yelling at the door, the room, everything beyond the door, and the universe in general, because apparently that was the only fucking thing that I could do.

“Raaaaaaugh! RaaaaACKAWWW—” I snapped my beak snapped shut with an audible ‘clack’. My yell had involuntarily shifted into a distinctly avian screech. I… wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, but I didn’t like it. I stopped my pounding and slumped down against the door.

“Fuck,” I muttered to myself.

I was back to laying on the bed because I had absolutely nothing better to do.

Oh, there were some things to do in this room, which measured eight paces by ten and a half paces. For example, I’d investigated the window on the wall. I’d discovered that although it was above my head level, it was at ground level on the exterior. So, my cozy little cell was in a basement. A truly fascinating discovery, I know. The ground outside was also covered in snow and I think there were trees in the distance. That was all I could get from that without my glasses.

Also, when I’d thought I’d heard movement from the floors above, I’d stuck my ear—well, the side of my head—to the stone wall to try and find out more. From that, I’d determined that there may or may not be things moving around elsewhere in the building.

I was a regular detective with all the stuff I was finding out, you’d better believe it.

So, I’d spent the better part of an hour now laying on the bed with my eyes closed. As it happened, laying on the bed with my eyes closed is also what I was doing when a soft clatter came from the doorway.

In an instant, I was upright and focused on the door, like it was the most interesting thing in the world, and at the moment it might as well be. As swiftly as I could without tripping over myself, I stumbled over to the door where a small wooden tray of food was balanced in the window. I quickly moved it out of the way and bent down to stick my face into the gap. I’d gotten there just in time to see someone—no, something hurriedly leaving down the hall.

Without my glasses, I couldn’t quite make out what I was looking at. It looked like some kind of four-legged animal, significantly smaller than myself, mostly brown in color, and though it was quiet, the sound it made when it walked was a lot like hooves clopping on stone.

The creature stopped at the end of the hall, at what I assumed was the base of a staircase, and started making noises. Noises that sure sounded a lot like hushed speech, but it was too quiet to make out. Movement of another figure on the stairs caught my eye. This one similar in shape but gray in color. I pressed my head as far into the bars as I could and strained to listen.

It was all just a bunch of indecipherable noise until the volume picked up and I could make out that it was indeed actual words being spoken. The voice was distinctly male and sounded less than pleased, “—I am the lord of this manor! I decide how things happen around here. If I say that he is not to be fed, then you are not to feed him! Simple as that!”

“With all due respect, sir, you never said not to,” the other voice replied. This one sounded feminine and was much calmer. “And you usually have us feed your guests. In fact, your previous instructions on the matter were to, and I quote, ‘not bother me with these insignificant little things on every single occasion. Just serve them. Celestia help me, I’m going to have an aneurysm if I have to deal with one more hour of this.’ End quote.”

Voice number one, the angry dude, sputtered and let out a series of incoherent sounds before being able to make words again. “W-what could possibly make you think that that beast is my guest?”

“I’ll admit, the choice of rooming arrangements is a little unorthodox, but it’s not my position to make judgements on such matters,” the female replied coolly. “And you have in the past clearly expressed your desire certain individuals locked—”

“Get—just get out of my sight and back to work before I fire you on the spot! And do not come back down here!”

At that, the first of the figures, the small brown one, left without saying another word. Which was probably good for her, because even from this distance, and without my glasses, I could tell that Angry Dude was about to blow a fuse.

After a few moments, Mr. Angry descended the stairs the rest of the way and began walking down the hall towards me. Assuming he wasn’t as blind as I was, he almost certainly could see my feathered face mashed into the bars. I guess he’d decided to grace me with his presence face-to-face.

As he closed the distance, I was able to clearly make out what he looked like. The hooved-animal assessment was apparently spot-on. The creature approaching me looked like some kind of misshapen miniature alien horse thing. It had a disproportionately large head that held even bigger eyes and, apparently, a conical horn. A small alien unicorn. We were at the same eye level now, but I was bent over with my face stuck in the window. Standing up straight, he’d have been about a head shorter than me. It would have almost been cute if his face wasn’t so red it was visible through the gray fur.

And then he made it even worse by talking. “And you,” he snarled. “Don’t get comfortable. I don’t know how you made it in here, but it doesn’t matter because you’ll never breathe a word of what you saw here to anypony. You’re going on the next boat to Zebrica. There are individuals there who will pay quite handsomely to take you off my hooves and make sure neither you nor anything you say will make it back here. Ever.”

Without waiting for a reply, he turned and left. The sound of hooves on stone echoed off the walls as he ascended the stairs and left me alone down here once again.

Well… that was certainly ominous. But hey, at least things had finally gotten interesting.

1.4 - Assessing the Situation

This was some damn good oatmeal.

Once again, I was sitting on the universe’s most uncomfortable bed, but now I had breakfast, courtesy of what’s-her-face. The tray that had been brought earlier held a small bowl of oatmeal, some apple slices, and a cup of juice. Nothing fancy, but I wasn’t complaining in the slightest. Food was food. And fever-dream or not, I was hungry. So here I sat, eating the damn-good oatmeal, and trying to wrap my mind around this whole situation.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t starting to doubt this whole dream deal. All of this was getting really weird. That’s not to say talking unicorns in dreams was so unbelievable, or even new for me, but the fact that I was aware that it was weird while it was happening was what made it weird.

In my experience, dreams made sense when I was in them. When they stopped making sense is usually when they fell apart and I woke up. Not a single thing that was going on made any sense, and it’d been like that for hours now.

The fact that it was weird was weird and was making me think.

“So…” I said to myself. “If we put aside dream-slash-hallucination for now, then what are we dealing with?” I stuffed another spoonful of oatmeal into my beak.

Starting from the top of the list-of-things-to-explain-weird-shit: Aliens. I’d been abducted and brought to the planet of alien unicorn things. Kind of makes sense, right?

...Except that this didn’t really look like the home of an advanced space-faring race. Pretty much the opposite in fact.

Unless it’s all some kind of trick. Holograms, or mind-manipulation. It would explain how they could speak the same language. But for what purpose? To keep me calm? If so, they kind of fucked that up with the whole griffon thing. Trying to fuck with my head? Some kind of interrogation? But why—

Hey. Hey Garrett. Stop overthinking things. You know why. Just say it. You know you’re thinking it.

No. I know what I’m thinking and its stupid.

Say it.

No.

Say it.

“Fine!” I slammed the spoon down on the tray. “It could also be that I crashed into some wormhole in the middle of campus and got magically turned into a griffon! But that’s fucking stupid, which is why I dismissed it! And now I’m arguing with myself!” I threw my arms up and flopped back onto the bed. “Fan-fucking-tastic!”

But was the alien-hologram-brain-fuckery-thing really that much more likely than finding a magical portal?

“Yes. No. Maybe. It’s a lot less stupid.”

…

“Ok fair enough,” I huffed, then rolled over and went back to my oatmeal.

Besides, when you get right down to it, holographic interrogation wasn’t much different from dreaming. Throw out the unnecessarily complicated details and it boils down to just two things: This was real, or it wasn’t.

It was time to get scientific about this.

“Starting with Case A—the less headache-inducing of the two. This isn’t real. I am dreaming, hallucinating, in a coma, or anything else of the sort. Evidence for? Well, I’m a griffon, there are talking unicorns. Don’t think I really need to say more than that.

“What to do in that case? Well…” I tapped the spoon against the tip of my beak as I thought. “…I could sit around until it ends on its own. But we’ve been there already and it's boring as hell. And who knows how many dream hours, days, years, that could be if I’m in a coma in a hospital. I’m no neuroscientist, I don’t know how this shit works!”

Maybe try another way to wake myself up? I pinched my arm. The talons made it hurt a hell of a lot more than normal. “Yeah. Didn’t really expect that to work.”

I stared at the talons protruding from my fingers. They were impressive natural weapons, that was a fact. I had no doubt they could be deadly if used the right way. I could always try something a bit more… aggressive… to wake myself up. Slowly, I reached up to my neck...

…and promptly let the hand fall back down to my lap. No. I didn’t really feel like testing that theory, especially on the off chance I was dealing with Case B.

“Case B. That this is…” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly through my nostrils. “...that this shit is real. Or real enough. Okay. Evidence for? What do we got?”

Well, as much as I loathed to admit it, if you tabled the aforementioned bits about mythological creatures, it all seemed pretty damn real. “It’s also the simpler explanation, really. Yeah, Occam’s razor and all that jazz. Pick the one with the fewest assumptions or whatever. Though… does ‘everything you thought you knew about the universe is wrong’ count as a single assumption? Maybe assumptions should be weighted by magnitude—”

Nope, we’re getting sidetracked here. It looked real and felt real. And really that should be enough. Nothing good could come from ignoring your own senses just because you don’t believe what they’re telling you. That way lay madness. If I wasn’t losing it already.

“So, what to do in Case B?”

Step one: Start with not panicking. Step two: Don’t think too hard about the details. Step three was probably something along the lines of ‘find a way back’, but I could get to that once I was sure I’d managed the first two.

So, case A, I could sit here and do nothing until I died of boredom or lost my shit entirely—a prospect which was becoming more likely by the minute. Or go with case B, in which the thing to do was play along with the whole bizarre situation and work on finding a way out of here. Actually, even if things weren’t real, doing that would at least be entertaining. At the end of the day, there was really only one course of action here.

“That it? We’re really doing this? Aaaalrighty then. For sake of sanity, we are proceeding—cautiously—under the assumption that all this shit, is somehow real, and that I need to find my own way back. Okay, what do we know? I am in an unknown location—hereby designated as Planet Unicorn. I got here after what is quite possibly the most unfortunate bicycle accident in human history. What else?

“There was the crash, the blackout, and after that, the room with the junk and the bubble-mirror that might also be a magical portal to home. There was the freaking out—which is not important—which got interrupted by someone yelling at me before I blacked out.”

And now that I was thinking about it, I was pretty sure that the yelling someone and Mr. Angry Dude were one and the same. And if that was the case, that means there’s a pretty good chance that the room with the portal is nearby—maybe even in the same building. But to get to that room I first needed to get out of this room.

Now I had a mission—which was mostly the same mission as before, but now with purpose. And it was a mission that I would approach with every resource and bit of knowledge I had at my disposal.

1.5 - Additional Context

Turns out having a specific purpose to punch a door doesn’t it make any more effective than not having one—which is to say, it wasn’t at all effective. The door was still closed, I was still in this cell, and about the only thing I had accomplished was bruising my scaled knuckles. I was in the process of brainstorming a better plan.

But where my progress in escaping had been lacking, my progress in the fashion scene was reaching new heights. Sort of. Okay, probably not. Since this was all officially “real” I couldn’t just go around naked anymore, no matter how fluffy I was. Especially not with talking unicorns roaming around who could drop by at any moment without notice. Just because I looked like an animal doesn’t mean I had to act like one.

Therefore, I’d taken it upon myself to fabricate some improvised clothing out of all the materials I had on hand—a short list that only included a single bedsheet. The result was my best attempt at a toga of sorts made by wrapping the sheet around my torso and tying it over a shoulder. It probably wouldn’t be making its way into magazines anytime soon, but it did a sufficient job of covering everything that needed to be covered. There was the slight issue of my tail getting in the way and preventing proper containment, requiring things to be a bit breezier that I’d have preferred, but it was good enough. It also had the added bonus of wrapping around my useless wings and keeping them from dragging on the floor. Overall I’d rate it a three out of ten on style points, and a seven out of ten on functionality.

Its primary function of keeping my ass covered from potentially prying eyes was tested sooner than expected, when I almost didn’t notice getting visited for a second time around noon. From my place on the bed, I barely spotted the empty tray I’d put back in the door-window getting stealthily replaced with a filled one. But I did, and I was back at the door as quickly as I could, moving the new tray aside and mashing my face back into the bars. The blurry, brown-coated deliverer-of-food had already made it halfway down far down the hall with the empty tray on their back.

“Hey wait!” I called out.

They stopped and turned back to face me. “Oh, you’re up.” The voice was definitely that of what’s-her-face, the one who’d argued with Mr. Angry over bringing food earlier. Slowly, she walked back towards my cell and into the range where I could properly see things.

She was a horse-alien-creature like Mr. Angry, but that was where the similarities ended. She was even shorter than he was, her muzzle was more curved, and she had long dark hair. Or was it a mane? I didn’t know. She also lacked the horn he’d had. So, she wasn’t a unicorn. I guess Planet Unicorn now had to be redesignated as Planet Variety-Horse or something.

Where Mr. Angry trashed all his potential cuteness points, she did not. When she stopped outside the door and had to tilt her head up to meet my gaze, I was immediately reminded of a puppy or other criminally-adorable animal.

“I thought you were asleep and didn’t want to wake you,” she said. She turned her head back and grabbed the empty tray off her back with her mouth, then set it on the floor.

“Nah,” I said. “Just, uh, lounging. Thanks for the foodstuffs, by the way. I overheard the tail end of your argument with that guy earlier. I appreciate your blatant disregard for the instructions to not bring more food.” I really did. I was getting hungry again.

“You mean Graywall? Yeah, well, he’s an ass.” She snorted. “I’m not going to let you starve while he keeps you locked up in here. Griffon, burglar, or not.”

So, they thought I was a burglar? That certainly explained some things. Like why I was locked in this room for instance. That the guy holding me was the one who thought he was being robbed was also further evidence of being in the same building as the place I’d arrived. That could prove useful. “Eh, I don’t think I’ll be around long enough to starve.”

“Yeah? Have you got some grand escape planned?” She smirked. “Hopefully something more elaborate than your entrance.”

“Well there’s that, and Mr. Angry—Graywall—plans on getting rid of me,” I said nonchalantly.

“What? He said that?”

“Yeah, after you left earlier he came over here and said some stuff about putting me on a boat and making me disappear. Forever.” I said in a mock-ominous tone and wiggled my fingers. “He was definitely trying to ruffle my feathers.” I chuckled a little at that.

She was quiet and didn’t say anything for a while. When she did, her voice wasn’t as light as it was before. “I think he might be serious.”

That put an end to my giggles. “Oh?”

She continued, “He does business overseas all the time. Boats go down the river to the coast every day, and he has his own ships at the port. He could absolutely make good on that threat and I don’t think anyone outside this building would notice. The only question is if he would.”

I thought back to what Graywall had said to me. “The way he worded it, it kinda sounded like he wasn’t unfamiliar with the concept, and maybe had done something similar before.”

“Dear Celestia…” Her ears went back flat on her head. “I— I always figured he was doing stuff under the table, but just like… smuggling to avoid taxes and the like. Nothing like this. Now he’s foalnapping people who cross him, and—what?—’disappearing’ them across the sea?”

I spoke slowly, “Kinda sounded like he was going for slavery or something. That was the impression I was getting. Said something about ‘zebrica’ and someone paying him? Could be wrong. He was really vague.”

“Slavery?!” Her eyes went wide. ‘No! No no no no no. Nuh-uh! Not what I signed up for.” She began frantically trotting in tight circles and talking a mile-a-minute. “I just took this job to get away from the other shit-show. A nice, quiet job away from things, cooking and cleaning for a mostly-respectable business pony. Housing included! It was supposed to be nice! But nooo, he has to go and be buddies with Celestia-damned slavers! I’m not about to become an accomplice to this. I do not want my next address to be the castle dungeons.”

I nodded along. “I can relate to you on the whole ‘not wanting to be locked in a cell’ thing.”

She stopped pacing and brought a hoof to her head. “Right—sorry. It’s just… a lot.” She stood up straight and took a deep breath. “No, you can’t stay here.”

“I agree. But I’m gonna be honest with you. That escape plan of mine? Currently, it’s a toss-up between ‘waiting until I wake up from this shit’ and ‘claw at the door until it falls off the hinges’. Unless you have a key to this door?”

She gave me a confused look for a moment and then shook her head. “No. I don’t. I think only Graywall has the keys to these halls. But I— I’ll try to get you out of there. Soon. Right now though, I have to get back to work before somepony gets suspicious. But I’ll also be looking for ways to help you. Maybe somepony else has a key, or will help.” She stood up on her rear legs and rested her forehooves on the door so she was eye level. “I’ll be back this evening with dinner if nothing goes wrong. Just hang in there.”

I almost rolled my eyes at that. Right, as if I had anything else to do but ‘hang in here’. But I couldn’t say that. Not with her looking at me with those huge eyes and that hopeful expression. “Yep. I’ll be here… Working on my part of the plan.”

At that, she gave a single, firm nod and dropped back down on all fours. She scooped up the empty tray in her mouth, placed it on her back, and briskly trotted off. When the sound of her hooves faded into silence, I picked up my own tray of food and walked on three legs back to the bed. I put my lunch up onto the bed and then flopped next to it. It was a sandwich, I had no idea what was in it. Some kind of mystery plants and cheese, among other things. I tore off half of it in one bite and chewed.

Hey, brain? If this is all actually you, could you please stop being so imaginative? Thanks.

1.7 - Escape

While I wanted nothing more than to immediately get to work on my escape—I was beyond tired of waiting around and literally itching to get out this damned room—what’s-her-face’s point was a valid one. It was best to wait until a time when there wasn’t anyone around to hear me working on breaking out, or in the halls to spot me afterward. A few more hours sitting around was well worth the increased chance of getting this right.

Waiting had an additional benefit, in the form of the moonlight pouring in through the external window. As the night progressed, the moon rose up above the tree tops and high into the clear sky. Still nearly full, it provided ample light to work by. Which was good, because it was going to be enough of a hassle as it was to precisely manipulate tools using my new avian hands without the added headache of needing to hold a flashlight to see anything at all.

So, again, I waited. This time for the sounds of activity in the building to slowly die down. It wasn’t until well past midnight that the only sounds were the creaks and groans of the structure—hopefully signaling that all the occupants had gone to bed and that it was time to get to work.

The first step of opening the door was getting the horizontal beam on its front out of the way so I could access the lock. The beam was held in place by a dozen or so nails along its length, which probably would have been enough to stop someone who only had hooves at their disposal. But I was no mere pony, I had the advantage of opposable thumbs! Well… that, and modern steel tools. Okay, so it might have been just the tools that gave me the advantage.1

1But thumbs are still required to use the tools, so I’ll still count it as a win. Thumbs: 1. Ponies: 0.

Unfolding my multitool into a pair of pliers and flipping open my knife, I got to work on prying the first nail out of the wood. Just pulling it out with the pliers was out of the question—the nails were too solidly seated for me to get anywhere doing that. And without a claw hammer, I had to get creative.

First, I used the knife to dig out a small amount of wood around the head of the nail—just enough so the pliers could fit underneath. Then I stuck the pliers under the head at a shallow angle, like a lever. The blade of the knife laid flat beneath pliers acted as a fulcrum and distributed pressure across the relatively soft wood. The final step was applying a swift-yet-heavy blow to the raised handles of the pliers—using the heaviest textbook I had as an improvised hammer.

While effective, it was a painfully slow process. Each strike levered the nail out no more than a millimeter at a time and the positions of the tools had to be constantly re-adjusted as they slipped around. Eventually, the nail was loose enough to be pulled out the rest of the way. After setting the nail aside, I got to work on the next one. And the next one. The process repeated a dozen more times with the other fasteners. When there were only two nails left on the very end of the beam, I abandoned the precision approach and elected to simply bash it into submission with the book—careful to not make too much unnecessary noise.

A final wrench at the beam tore it clean off and I was free to access the keyhole it had been concealing. Using a flashlight, I peered into the internals of the mechanism.

Now, I was no expert on locks or lock picking. I wouldn’t even consider myself a hobbyist with much practical experience on the subject. What I did have, however, was a vast trove of theoretical knowledge acquired after spending several hours watching YouTube videos and reading Wikipedia articles at 3 AM instead of studying for exams the next morning. And using that knowledge, I could say with some semblance of confidence that the lock before me looked a lot like a like that-type-of-lock-that-I-didn’t-know-the-name-of-that-has-the-things-that2… well, it was one of the ones that could probably be opened relatively easily with a suitable skeleton key.

2Look, I specifically said that I wasn’t studying at the time. Besides, the fact that it’s called a “warded lock” is an irrelevant detail for practical applications.

And though I didn’t have a skeleton key on hand, I did have a pair of saddlebags filled with years of accumulated junk. From within the depths of the bags, I retrieved a handful of heavy-duty paper clips. Then using the pliers, I straightened them out and tightly twisted pairs of them together into strands. Then those strands were twisted into strands that were thicker still. Repeating the process once more, I had a length of coiled steel that was about as big as a pencil and just barely flexible enough that I could bend it into shape with some effort. In this case, the shape I went for was that of an ‘L’, with a small loop on the other end to use as a handle.

Skeleton-key-shaped bit of metal in hand, I went at the lock. I would like to say that my crafting skills were so impressive that the lock just clicked open on the first attempt. Sadly, reality didn’t give a shit about what I liked. What followed was several minutes of wrestling with the lock mechanism—accompanied by a perfectly reasonable amount3 of cursing under my breath—while I motivated the antique mechanism progressively towards the ‘unlocked’ position.

3A metric fuck-ton.

When I was pretty sure the lock had fought all it could and would go further, I gave the door a tentative push—which still did nothing at all. I let out a heavy sigh. Damn. I guess it was too much to hope that I wouldn’t also need to use the handle on the outside. Whatever, that was a comparatively simple problem to solve.

With the help of my trusty reach-extending ruler and some fussing about with my arm stuck through the window, I found the door handle and pushed down on it. To my immense relief, it moved under the pressure.

There was a quiet click from the latch and the door jerked outward under my weight.

I pulled my arm out of the window and took a step back to observe the results. I blinked. “Huh… That actually worked… Neat!” I was honestly a little surprised, but I was not about to complain. A smug grin made its way to my face and I started to chuckle. “Hehehe. Haha. Ha!” I hopped up on two legs so I could flip off the door with both hands simultaneously while dancing around it. “Haha! Fuck you, door. You thought you could hold me? You were wrong! You’ve got nothing on ohshit—”

My victory dance was cut short as my foot caught on one of the saddlebags’ straps and I plunged forward. I only barely managed to catch myself and prevent my beak from getting bruised against the floor for the second time. Or would that have been the third? Fourth? Either way, I took it as a sign that that was probably enough celebrating.

Step one done. Time for the next part: getting the fuck out of here.

I got back up and retrieved my ‘key’ from the door, putting it into my jacket pocket along with the other tools. Though a bit mangled after its fight with the lock, it might come in handy later. I tossed everything else I’d used into my bags and threw them onto my back, adjusting their position over my wings before buckling the straps around my chest to hold everything in place. Hopefully it would be enough to keep the damned wings from slipping out and dragging around like useless slabs of meat while I tried to sneak around.

I gave the room one last look-over to see if I missed anything. I hadn’t, so I turned and trotted out of the prison that had held me for over a day and into the dimly lit hall… but not before giving the door the bird one last time. A little more celebrating couldn’t hurt, it was good for morale.

Now that I was free of that room, I just had to find the one the mirror portal was in.

I paused mid-step.

How the hell was I supposed to go about doing that? Going around checking every door in the manor sounded like a great way to maximize my chances of getting caught. And while I didn’t know exactly how big this place was, I got the impression that it wasn’t small. Which probably meant a lot of rooms to check. It’s not like I could just ask for directions…

Damnit. I probably should have at least tried to get some more information from my earlier accomplice. Maybe I could have found a way to ask about where they’d found me without sounding suspicious, or crazy. But it was too late for that now.

“Shit.” I hissed. “Uhhh…” What did I know about the room that could narrow down the search? I thoughtfully stroked my beard—er, beak.

I knew the room had been dark. Pitch black. Couldn’t see shit levels of darkness. So definitely no windows, which probably meant no exterior walls. Maybe located centrally within the building?

Also, the ground was cold when I’d landed—even through my thick fur and feathers, the heat had been sucked from my side. Most floorings wouldn’t do that. A floor made of concrete, or stone—much like the one I currently stood on—however, would. The kinds of floorings you’d find in a basement or other ground-level rooms.

So I was looking for a junk-filled storage room in a basement with no windows, probably central in the building.

I eyed the two doors across the hall from my cell suspiciously.

Maybe I’d get lucky and it’d turn out my captors had been extraordinarily lazy and didn’t feel like dragging my fuzzy ass farther than across the hall?

I carefully approached the closest door and gently put my ear to the surface. There probably wasn’t anyone in it—even with my attempts to keep quiet breaking out, someone this close would have noticed. Still, it didn’t hurt to be safe.

After a minute of hearing nothing, I tried the handle—which, thankfully, was unlocked. Slowly pulling the door open, I peered into the interior. It was a room nearly identical to the one I’d just left, although furnished as a modest bedroom that clearly hadn’t been used in a while. I quietly closed the door and moved to the next door down the hall, listening and waiting like before.

The room was dark, with no windows to admit the moonlight, and in the small lit area around the doorway, I could see assorted boxes and barrels. Quickly, I fumbled through my pockets for my flashlight and clicked it on, illuminating the room with a cone of white light.

I let out a disappointed sigh and my head sagged. It was a storage room of sorts, yes, but not the one I was looking for. This one was nearly empty, with nowhere near the same amount of clutter I remembered from the night before.

“Well, fuck.” I guess I wasn't lucky after all.

I shut the door behind me before marching down the hall and cautiously ascending the wooden stairs. Looks like I get to go wandering through the manor after all, searching for another wing like this one.

The staircase opened into another hallway, this one much more lavishly decorated than the bare stone I’d been surrounded by all day. An ornamental carpet ran the length of the hall and paintings of landscapes and portraits of unimpressed-looking unicorns hung on the walls. Moonlight poured in through a few evenly-spaced windows, filling the hall with a pale blue glow.

Trying my best to be stealthy, I crept down the hall. I didn’t want to alert anyone to my presence or wake them up. I kept to the shadows—avoiding the pools of moonlight where I could and dashing swiftly through them when I couldn’t. Thankfully, the carpet cushioned my footfalls and prevented the hall from being filled with the sound of talons clacking on wood.

It may have been just a little bit too quiet, however. Every rattle of my bags or creak of the floorboards was like a gunshot—causing me to panic and hide behind the nearest potted plant or piece of furniture while my heart rate and breathing returned to normal.

Checking doors turned the panic up to eleven. I spent a solid five minutes standing in front of a door, holding my breath, listening, and dreading I’d be discovered the second I opened it… only for it to be a broom closet.

After a linen closet, an unnecessarily huge dining room, and another broom closet, my concerns were somewhat dulled. I prowled up to the next door, briefly put my ear to the surface and almost casually opened the door into what turned out to be a kitchen.

The door swung out of the way and my breath hitched at the sight of a yellow-coated pony stallion standing not five feet in front of me, his head rummaging about in a cabinet. His ears flicked and his head shot up. He stared right at me, eyes wide, with a half-eaten carrot hanging out of his mouth.

We both froze. I was, understandably, panicking to high-heaven. This is it. This is how I end in the express shipment crate to Nowheresville, without any tools or allies. GG no re. Thanks for playing.

Except… that wasn’t happening. The pony before me wasn’t calling out for help or moving to take me down. We both just stood there, eyes locked, neither making a sound. He looked just as shocked as I was, if not more-so. Actually, the look on his face might’ve been closer to the ‘terrified’ end of the spectrum than ‘surprised’.

Which actually made some sense: from his point of view, I was a large—probably pissed off—predator who had just broken out of containment and cornered him in the middle of the night. And that was something I might be able to use.

I put on the least disturbing grin I could manage with a beak. Well, maybe not the least disturbing. A little crazy would help my case.

For a long while, he did nothing. Then he untensed ever so slightly. He slowly held up a hoof—which was clutching another carrot—and offered it out to me. I accepted it with a small nod.

I bit the end off and chewed, then quietly said, “Say, do you know which way it is to the room I was found in?”

He seemed to consider for a moment, munching on his carrot thoughtfully. Then he shrugged, sat back on his haunches, and motioned with a forehoof back the way I came, turned the ninety-degrees, and pointed again.

I repeated the instructions back to him: “Down the hall that way, then turn left?”

He nodded and mimed opening a door followed by going down steps.

“Door at the end leads to stairs. Got it.” I nodded my thanks and left, closing the door behind me. Hopefully, he’d be more concerned with not getting in the way of the irritable griffon than he was with potentially being employee of the month.

Sure enough, following the instructions led me to a door at the end of a hall which opened into a stairwell so dark I couldn’t see further than four steps down. Since I was rather fond of having a non-broken neck, I got out my flashlight, turning it on and holding it in my beak before descending.

Sadly, sometimes just planning for a problem isn’t enough to prevent it. Not three steps into my descent, the flashlight started to slide out of my jaw. I paused, lifting a hand to readjust it—which was one of the worst things I could have done at the time. My balance was already iffy at best going down the stairs head first on all fours, and almost immediately after lifting my hand I lost it entirely.

“Bawk!—scraww—squawk… fuck…” I tumbled down the stairs and came to a stop in a heap on the stone floor at the bottom. The flashlight came bouncing along after me and clattered against another door.

Hopefully that hadn’t been too loud.

I climbed back up onto all fours, dusted myself off, and then took the time to find a place around my jacket collar where I could tuck the flashlight so it pointed forward without moving. Probably should’ve done that earlier.

I tried the door handle, then cursed under my breath when it refused to budge. Looks like I get to play master burglar again. I pulled out my skeleton-key and silently thanked whoever had overseen the installation of such terrible locks in this building. In nearly half the time it’d taken for the lock on my cell, I was done and opening the door.

The beam from my light washed over ceiling-high stacks of crates, barrels, boxes, and more. It didn’t look like the random junk I thought it had been. More like a sample of things that had been cherry-picked from a shipping warehouse. Crates and boxes were marked with several different written scripts, most of them unreadable. Some were opened, the contents ranging from unidentifiable sacks to gold-plate ornaments.

Interesting as all that was, I was only looking for one thing, and I just about cried with joy when I spotted it: half-hidden under a tipped-over stack of boxes was an ornamental mirror. I bounded over to it, jumping over smaller boxes in the way. Up close, I saw that the mirror was huge, nearly twice my height, with wing and talon motifs etched around the frame.

I had to steady my shaking hand as I raised it up and slowly brought it towards the mirror surface—just like I had immediately after the crash. I held my breath as my hand and its reflection slowly approached one another.

And then the talons went clack against the surface.

“What.”

I tried again, pressing my hand flat against the glass and giving it a little push. Nope, still solid. A little tap-tap with a talon? Nothing. The mirror remained aggressively tangible.

“Okay. No need to worry. Of course it wouldn’t be that simple.” I took several deep breaths. “Let’s see… magical portal, how to do this? Uh… Abracadabra?”

Poke. Clack. Nope.

“Open sesame.”

Clack.

“Alohomora?”

Clack.

“Fuck.”

Clack.

“Goddamnit!” I vigorously slapped the mirror with both hands, hit it with a fist, and several other forms of manual encouragement. Nothing worked. Why didn’t it work? Am I doing it wrong? What am I doing wrong? Is it broken?

Or maybe you just made up all the stuff about the portal.

I sequestered that treacherous part of my brain into a corner where it wouldn’t interrupt. “Nope nope nope. Shut up brain. Not helping!” I stepped back and began walking in a tight circle. Don’t panic. Remember step one: no panicking allowed. No panicking, just thinking. But not too much thinking either. That was bad too. My eyes crossed. “Uhhh…”

Is this even the right room? Was I even here before? It looks about like how I remembered, but maybe I’m just remembering things wrong. Maybe the carrot dude gave me the wrong instructions. Yeah, that’s probably it. Why would he help me? He was just trying to misdirect me, but I had seen through it!

Yeah, I’ve just got the wrong room is all. I turned and walked to the door. I just have to keep looking until I find another basement with a big—

My back foot stepped on something loose and slipped out from under me. I fell, smashing my knee on the floor and rolling onto my side.

“Fffffff…” I wheezed, cradling my knee.

What stupid piece of junk dared trip me? I fumbled around on the floor, grabbed the offending item, prepared to chuck it across the room—but then stopped. The item in question was a bicycle headlight, minus the mounting. Almost like it had been knocked off the handlebars in some kind of accident and deposited here along with the rider. I clicked the button, turning the light on and off. It still worked.

And then I panicked.

“Shit fuck shit fuck shit shit shit FUCK!” I scrambled back to the mirror and pounded on it with both fists. “Why won’t you work! Aaarrrrghhh!” I clutched my head, talons digging at my skull, and slumped against the side of the mirror.

The treacherous part of my mind I’d been suppressing took this opportunity to break free and come to the foreground:

Cut the shit, Garrett. It’s not going to do anything. It’s clearly just a goddamn mirror. You fucking know that. You knew that. Any idea to the contrary was just a bullshit delusion you thought up so you could believe you had even half a clue about what the fuck was happening. Well guess what? You don’t know. But pretending you do and continuing this nonsense here isn’t going to help any further. What little plan there was is now completely and utterly fucked. It’s time to make a new one. Preferably one based on actual evidence instead of hopeful wishing.

I steadied my breathing. “Okay. Okay. So… Planning, with facts. We got out of the cell, which is good. But Graywall was pissed before. He’s gonna be even more pissed now. We still need to leave, just not this way. Front door. Gotta leave the building. Run. Get away.”

I marched towards the exit, trying my best to appear to the world much more confident than I actually was.

Clack. Clunk.

I looked down at my left hand and the headlight that was still clutched in it.

Cool your shit, Garrett. This is not the time to lose it. You can do that later.

“Right, right, right,” I muttered, putting the headlight into my jacket pocket. Then I gave myself a look-over for anything else I might’ve missed while flipping the fuck out. Nothing. Good.

I climbed back up the stairs and started retracing my steps, trying to factor in the directions I’d been given to get from my cell to the exit. At this point, I was less concerned with getting around stealthily than I was with just getting out—if someone was going to hear me, they’d already had several prime opportunities to do just that.

One of the windows caught my eye as I strode past. Or rather, what I saw through it. Specifically, the still-snow-covered yard. Then I looked at my bare hands and feet. And back at the snow. Snow that I was planning on running out into.

Yeah, no. That wasn’t going to happen. Not without proper gear. It might be nearly melted, and I was used to the cold, and I was pretty sure my ass-half might have evolved to survive the arctic, but going into the snow barefoot was just something you didn’t do. And since I doubted any of these closets held griffon-shaped personal protective equipment, I had to improvise… again.

I dropped down on one knee and grabbed the hem of my bedsheet toga. Using my knife, I cut off four strips of fabric, each a couple inches wide and several feet long. I then wrapped each of the strips around my paws, claws, and the scaley, not-feathered parts of my forearms.

A quick inspection of myself confirmed that, with the exception of my beak, every part of me that wasn’t covered with fur or feathers was wrapped in fabric, with extra layers on my hands and feet. The look-over did reveal another problem, however, in the form of the bright red fabric of my jacket. I rolled my eyes. Of course. Couldn’t have kept my camouflage hunting jacket in my bags. No, I have to have the high-visibility red one with me when I need to escape into the night, stealthily, with possible pursuers, on an alien planet of unknown hostility.

There might be something I could do about it. I removed my bags and my jacket, undid the parts of the toga fore of my waist, replaced the jacket and the bags—after wrangling my wings back into place—and finally drew the sheet back overtop of everything, tying it in the front.

Giving a satisfied nod at my improvised winter camo, I resumed my escape. Without too much trouble, I managed to follow the directions to the main hall. After briefly checking that no one was watching, I crept up to the large double door and pulled it open, and slinked through to the outside.

I stood on the front doorstep of the manor, with a grand garden laid out before me. Well-kept trees and hedges that still held the last remnants of winter covered the area out to the distant forest edge. A cobblestone path led from the front step, through the middle of the garden, to a road that cut away into the woods.

As I took in the scene, a gust of chill night air struck me, sending a shiver down my spine and forcing me to take a step back. I wasn’t the only thing affected by the wind though—the still-open door behind got caught in the flow and was pulled shut violently.

…Right on the end of my tail.

Before I could stop it, a shrill, “KAWW!” left my throat and threatened to wake the whole manor. I immediately clamped my hands around my beak to stifle any further sounds and fell to the cold doorstep as a result.

With almost animalistic fervor, I kicked at the door that was clamped down on my tail—the repeated strikes leaving deep claw marks in the wood until it moved enough for my tail to slip free. The door swung closed with a deep thud.

For a long while, I laid on the ground, tears in eyes, beak clamped shut, cradling my throbbing tail and gritting at the pain that was at least an order of magnitude worse than any other injury I’d received in the past.4

4A list that includes, but is not limited to: multiple counts of fingers caught in doors or under hammers, a broken arm, more solder burns than I can count, and accidentally shooting my hand with a nail gun.

Jesus. Fucking. Christ. What the hell, nature? There was absolutely no reason that needed to hurt as much as it did. Even if it was broken—shit. Was it broken? I had no clue. I didn’t know how tails work. I couldn’t move it but that wasn’t fucking new at all. All I knew was that it hurt like hell.

I got out my knife and cut another strip off the poor bedsheet. Then I grabbed a handful of snow from a nearby snowbank, gingerly packed it around the injured spot of my tail, and wrapped it up with the fabric. I let out a relieved sigh as the cold from the improvised ice pack worked its way through the thick fur and soothed the searing nerves beneath.

With the near-crippling tail pain dealt with for the moment, I needed to move. I’d spent far too long standing—and laying—on the doorstep when I was supposed to be getting far away from here.

It’s just… I’m out and free, but now what? Where the hell do I go from here? My only plan on getting home had just crashed and burned along with anything else I thought I knew.

Well, not everything. One thing was still certain: Graywall was going to be beyond pissed when he found out I’d escaped, and I really didn’t want to be around when that happened. While I didn’t know specifically what to do next, I knew that staying here was not a good idea.

The road from the manor ran downhill, so I could see the path it cut through the treetops. Off in the distance, maybe a few miles out, was a cluster of rooftops barely visible above the trees.

A town? It was as good a destination as any, because it wasn’t here. So I started walking, away from the manor and into the unknown.

1.8 - Interplanetary Camping

I may have severely underestimated how far away the town was.

I’d been walking down this road for well over an hour and was only just now starting to see buildings through the trees. Maybe I’d misjudged it because of some combination of poor visibility and distorted perspective from my new eyes.

Or maybe it had been exactly as far as I’d estimated and I just really sucked at walking. Yeah, that was probably it. Plus, it was something like three in the morning and I was tired as hell.

Walking sucked. That was just a fact. I hadn’t been a huge fan of it even back when I had two legs and lots of practice using them. It was slow. But at least then it had been efficient or whatever advantage it was that bipedalism had. But this? This was just ridiculous. I had four legs but my gait was more akin to a literal crawl than… whatever it was supposed to be. I may not have been in the best of shapes, but I was getting worn out far faster than I should’ve.

I was sore in muscles I didn’t even know I had. Hell, I probably didn’t even have them before. Muscles in my arms and back that had never been required for walking now ached from the unusual exertion.

It also didn’t help that I was nearly barefoot. Barepaw? Bareclaw? Whatever. The road was muddy from the surrounding melting snow and my footwraps were getting caked with mud and grit. Grit that was slowly working its way between the strips of fabric and to my toes with every step I took. I’d also managed to stub my toe on a rock in the road. The retractable claw had got snagged on it, which was a new and uncomfortable experience I didn’t wish to repeat. Whatever entity had deemed my boots not worthy of keeping should probably be fired. First chance I got, I was going to file a formal complaint with the Department of Interplanetary Immigration and Species Reassignment… or whoever it was that could be blamed for this.

Oh, and to top it all off, like a big ‘fuck you’ cherry on the metaphorical sundae of inconveniences, every few steps my recently-bandaged tail bounced off the ground, just hard enough to make me wince.

I was sore, I was tired, and it was time to stop.

Sure, I could’ve kept going, but I’d need to stop for rest eventually and it made sense to do it now before I fucked something up from exhaustion. I still needed to figure out what the hell my plan was, and my brain was nowhere near up to the task right now.

Really, I’d probably be fine sleeping out here if I found a suitable location to make camp. Ignoring the slight chill from my somewhat-damp footwraps and the occasional breeze, I wasn’t really cold at all. The air was considerably warmer than it had been back in Griffonstone. Between my fur, feathers, and jacket, I felt like I could weather a blizzard without issue. And given that there wasn’t a cloud in sight, I doubted I’d have to worry about even that.

I just needed a place to rest that was out of sight in case someone wandered by or came looking for me. Scanning the terrain around the road, a potentially suitable spot caught my eye. Off to the side and back up the hill a bit, was a rocky outcropping mostly hidden within the trees and vegetation.

I made my way up the snowy hillside, stepping on exposed rocks and roots where I could and otherwise doing my best to not leave any obvious tracks in the snow. I found a spot where two rock faces came together at an angle behind some shrubs. After pushing between the plants and moving branches up and out of the way, I had a cleared-out volume a few feet around, untouched by the snow around it, with rocky walls on two sides and dense vegetation on all the others.

I sat my fuzzy butt down on the cool earth—manually moving my tail out of the way so as to not squash it—and unbuckled my bags. They slid unceremoniously to the ground and I let out a relieved sigh as the weight left my back. I propped the saddlebags up against the rocky wall and leaned back against them, trying to find a comfortable position.

A breeze blew across my little clearing, rattling the branches in front of me and ruffling the feathers on my face. It was a real shame that I didn’t have a tent, but sadly I hadn’t anticipated an unscheduled interplanetary camping trip when I packed my bag for class.

Actually, there might be one thing I had that might be useful in this situation. I rummaged through my bags and found the compact travel umbrella I kept in there in case of random rainstorms out of nowhere.1 I pressed the button on the handle and the umbrella sprung open with a deep fwoomp. Fully expanded, the canopy was four feet across—which was big enough that it could be positioned at an angle to form a dome over my rocky corner with just enough space to lay back in.2

1Which are similar to Griffonstone’s other signature weather event, the random blizzard out of nowhere, but are more likely to occur during the warmer months, or on any day you need to carry something large or highly sensitive to water across campus.

2Suck it, Jack! I told you carrying an umbrella around through the winter wasn’t a totally dumb idea.

I took a moment to admire my meager shelter, now with a roof and walls on all sides and gave a satisfied nod. With the passing wind more-or-less blocked, I could already feel the air trapped within starting to warm up.

It was warm enough that I felt comfortable taking off my jacket and laying it beneath me as an extra layer of insulation from the earth. I also took the opportunity to unravel my hand and foot wraps and hang them from one of the umbrella’s struts in front of me. Hopefully, they’d be at least somewhat dry by the time I got up.

Now wearing nothing but the sheet tied around my waist, I settled back against my bags and manually pulled my wings overtop of myself like a pair of big, shoulder-mounted, duvets. The feathers were disgustingly fluffy—which I guess made sense if griffons were actually able to fly and expected to not freeze to death at high altitude. Now they were going to help me not freeze to death under a rock.

I crossed my arms over my chest and closed my eyes, steadying my breathing and trying to relax.

Some part of my mind questioned the rationality of falling asleep in such an exposed location. Another part countered by pointing out that I was now a combination of two apex predators and was physically larger than everyone else I’d met so far, and so I’d totally be able to defend myself if the need arose.

The rational part rebutted by bringing up how those were only apex predators back on Earth where the very concept of a griffon was completely ludicrous and then began to prepare a statistics lecture on how three ponies was hardly a sufficient sample size to judge a whole populace by when the sleepy part interrupted both and said this isn’t really a discussion. It’s ass-o'clock in the morning, I’d been walking for hours, and sleep is happening now. This isn’t a democracy and never was.

Rationality started a revolution. Some other part grabbed a torch and pitchfork.

I pushed everything out of my mind, focusing my thoughts on nothing but the sounds of the forest. The wind blowing through the trees, crickets chirping, the trickle of flowing water… an owl hooting in the distance…

2 - A New World

My heart pounded in my chest. My legs pumped under me as I dashed over the rough terrain. I struggled to find purchase in the loose soil of the forest floor. My feet kicked up dirt as I sprinted between the trees and leapt over boulders and fallen logs.

They were gaining on me. I could hear several sets of hooves trampling through the woods behind me, accompanied by barking dogs. They were getting closer, I could feel it. I pushed harder, running as fast as I could.

It didn’t help. Despite my best attempts to flee, I wasn’t making any progress distancing myself from them. They were catching up. They’d be on me any moment.

I charged forward, not bothering to look where I was going. I broke through the trees and into a clearing. I slid forward through the dirt before I could stop myself. Before me were dozens of unicorns in blue uniforms and a line of parked police cruisers. Flashing red and blue lights filled my vision and the blare of a siren pierced my ears.

The lead unicorn shouted and pointed a hoof at me. They all looked at me. I turned tail and darted back into the woods, heading off in another direction. Beams from flashlights washed back and forth around me as they gave chase. I ran, deep into the forest, now trying to escape from two parties who were closing in on all sides.

A helicopter flew overhead, its spotlight pinpointing me through the dense canopy of leaves. I changed directions again, doubling back and zig-zagging at random angles. The circle of light followed me no matter what I did, or where I went. A voice came over the loudspeaker. It was Graywall.

“You can’t get away! I won’t stop chasing you! It's hopeless! Give up now!”

My boot snagged on a root and I came down hard on my hands and knees. I tried to get up but slipped, falling again. And I kept falling. I was rolling down a hill, tumbling head over heel, slamming into trees the whole way down until they gave way to the edge of a cliff.

I fell uncontrollably through the open sky. I tried flapping my wings to stabilize my fall but it was of no use. The feathers flapped uselessly without any resistance as if I were in a vacuum.

So, I fell. And kept falling. Falling… falling alone into the darkness, with no end in sight…

I awoke.

My breaths came rapid and heavy through my nostrils and I was soaked in a cold sweat. My eyes were open but I only saw darkness. My mouth was painfully dry. I lay there utterly still, hearing only the sound of the rushing air from my own erratic breathing.

When my breathing and heart rate finally slowed to their resting states, I became aware of the muffled sounds of nature around me and how each intake of breath brought with it a dewy, earthen scent.

I shifted positions slightly and a ray of dim light broke through above me, providing some slight illumination. I was curled up into a tight ball, head resting on my forearms, face filled with a spotted gray tail, and a wing draped loosely over my upper body and head. The light was peeking through the gaps in the large feathers.

I blinked and stared up in confusion, trying to make sense of why I wasn’t in my bed. The chain of events leading up to how I’d gotten here trickled in and I remember where and what I was.

I was still a griffon. That detail hadn’t changed. I exhaled heavily into the tuffs of tail fur laying across my face. I was kinda hoping all that had been just part of a bad dream.

Speaking of bad dreams, that had been less-than-pleasant. Though the details were foggy and fading by the second, the feelings of dread and panic lingered. It had certainly been enough to prevent any kind of restful sleep. Though a glance at my watch told me it was nearing noon, and that I’d been out of it for close to eight hours, I couldn’t have gotten more than a single hour of proper rest.

I liberated myself from the tangle of fluffy appendages and found the handle of my umbrella-tent. I took down my footwraps—now thoroughly dried—from where they hung and put them back on. Then I collapsed the umbrella. As soon as the canopy fell away, rays of sunlight washed over me and I was met with a warm breeze. Whatever chill may have been present last night was completely gone in the afternoon sun.

I sat up and stretched, twisting my torso around to both sides as far as it went with a series of satisfying pops. Then I arched my back much like a cat—or maybe exactly like a cat. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I wasn’t suffering from any of the undue soreness that I would have expected to come from my rough sleeping arrangements. Oh sure, I still ached from the crash and my shoulders were complaining about walking, but at least my back wasn’t trying to murder me. Looks like having a feline spine had some benefits.

I wrapped the umbrella back up and stored it away in my bags. While I was tucking it into its place at the bottom, my water bottle caught my eye and I was immediately reminded of just how dry my mouth was. I unscrewed the cap and upended the container, taking long gulps of the cool, refreshing water. Before I knew it, I’d downed the contents in their entirety.

I frowned at the empty bottle. That wasn’t good. I looked around. Maybe I could find a spring or stream or something. I recalled hearing running water, so there had to be something around here…

A nearby patch of suitably untouched snow caught my eye. I went over to it, scooped a bit up in my hand, and put it in my mouth. It tasted like, well, nothing, so I bent down and packed my bottle full to the brim with it. It would melt and at least partially refill the bottle.

That annoyingly paranoid part of my brain wasn’t quite sure about the safety of doing that. I had no clue what else might have been in the snow. Sure, it looked fine, but it could be host to god-knows-what kinds of alien bacterial pathogens or other nasties.

It was a perfectly valid concern. And one that I promptly dismissed as I stowed the bottle in my bags. Not because I had any survival skills or chemistry knowledge or whatever confirming that it was safe, but because if it did turn out that the innocent looking patch of snow was actually toxic, infected, poisonous, contaminated, or not actually H2O at all, I was already so far beyond fucked and out of my depth that it hardly mattered.

I picked my jacket up off the ground and gave it a shake to dislodge the bits of dirt that clung to it. The woolen fabric was a little moist. Whether it was moisture from the ground or from the same sweat that still clung to my fur, I wasn’t sure. It hadn’t exactly been washed recently so the smell wasn’t a useful indicator. I shrugged. Whatever. The sunlight and breeze were doing a good job of drying both it and my fur.

I put on the jacket and my bags, leaving the jacket unzipped for now and letting the straps from the bags perform the brunt of the work holding my wings in place at my side. I was all packed up, dressed, and ready to go.

…

Right. Go where?

When I’d fled blindly into the night, I hadn’t planned ahead much further than ‘get the fuck away from Graywall manor’. Now that I wasn’t panicking the fuck out or about to pass out, I could probably come up with something better.

I mean, yeah, I could just keep creeping about in the woods, staying out of sight, and going in any direction that wasn’t back towards the manor, but for what purpose? Fleeing might be a solution to the problem of the angry lunatic trying to lock me in a small box, but it’d also prevent me from making any progress at all on the big problem.

The problem of me still being a griffon, on an alien planet.

The problem with that problem, though, was that it was so vague and nebulous that it was nearly impossible to formulate a plan of action to solve it beyond the equally vague ‘figure out how everything got so fucking fucked and what I need to do to unfuck it’.

And I severely doubted that sort of information gathering was the kind I would accomplish by hiding in the woods like some kind of fugitive hermit. No, I’d probably have to find someone who knew anything and was willing to help me.

It was a real shame I’d just fled from the one person so far who’d been interested in doing just that. If I’d known I was going to be sticking around here I probably would’ve done things differently yesterday. Like not severing all chances to keep getting help, for one.

I huffed. If I were in this kind of situation back on Earth—that is to say, completely lost and clueless—I’d make my way to the police or something for assistance. But as the paranoid part of my brain was eager to point out, that had its own set of issues.

This was a totally new land, which meant new rules. I didn’t know anything about this place, its culture or its laws beyond what I’d managed to glean from the few conversations I’d had or overheard. Which wasn’t much at all. I didn’t know if I was actually a criminal in the eyes of the law at large or just Graywall’s. Or even what the scope of the law was. Hell, for all I knew, I was an illegal alien—in all definitions of the word.

At the very least, what’s-her-face had clearly said that Graywall held significant sway over the sheriff here. Avoiding the authorities was probably in my best interests until I learned more. I had no desire to get locked up again. There was no guarantee I’d be able to break out of the next cell so easily.

So… I just needed to perform an investigation into a beyond-fucked-up situation that made no sense at all, while keeping a low profile so as to not get recaptured by Graywall, arrested, or institutionalized for asking too many questions. And I had to do it all while equipped with nothing but a bag of school supplies, and a masterfully-crafted-and-perfectly-masculine-kilt-toga-thing.

It was going to be interesting, to say the least.

I crept out from the trees and cracked my neck. I looked out over the road and the town beyond from my spot on the hillside. The alien pony town. I was going in there. Yep.

I stood there on the hillside, enjoying the way the oncoming breeze ruffled the feathers on my face and neck. The air passed down my sides and over my bound wings, and I felt the long flight feathers flutter slightly. The bizarre sensation made my wings twitch and shift against their restraints.

Huh, that was the first time the damn things had done anything beyond getting in the way. Intrigued, I stripped off my bags and jacket. The now-unrestrained wings fell loosely to the ground. I rolled my eyes and did a little shake so they would flop out away from my body.

As soon as they had, there was a rush of sensations as the oncoming wind flowed over and around them. The rows of feathers caught the air and lifted slightly in the breeze. The muscles around my shoulder tensed instinctually, elevating the wings a little more.

I tried to focus on them, to make them lift further. But each time I mentally reached out to the muscles, whatever grasp I had on them slipped away and my wings went limp once again.

It was only when I directed my thoughts away from trying to move them that I got a reaction. By relaxing my mental grasp, and instead just feeling the air currents around the feathers, the wings gradually stretched outward of their own accord. The flight feathers spread like fingers, shifting reflexively to maximize surface area. The resulting lift generated was enough that the wings slowly rose up and were held aloft by the cushion of air alone.

A stupid grin made its way to my face as I was struck with an idea. An admittedly moronic idea, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to test it out regardless.

The incline down to the road was of a decently steep slope. I gauged it to be maybe thirty or thirty-five degrees.

Thirty degrees… angle equals tangent equals slope… pi over six radians… little over point-five… take reciprocal…

…A sustained glide ratio of at least two to one would be required to not hit the ground. If I recalled correctly, even a crappy glider like a wingsuit could achieve a glide ratio of three or something.

Factor in the headwind and the sheer size of these stupid-ass wings… and it might not be completely infeasible.

The dumb grin on my face widened. That was good enough justification for me to start experimental trials.

I stepped backward—being sure to keep my mind off my wings, but still maintaining that little feeling in the back of my head so they stayed extended—and stopped when my tail bumped into a tree,

“Kksshht. Griffon One, you are cleared for takeoff,” I said out of the corner of my mouth to no one in particular.

Then I ran forward, taking huge bounds to gather as much speed as I could in the space I had. When I hit the start of the drop, I leapt off, giving my shoulders one last heave to ensure my wings were flung out to their fullest, most ridiculous, extent.

For a moment I was weightless and my outstretched wings cut through the air without any resistance. I passed the apex of my jump and there came a pull at my shoulders as my wings caught the air and started to take up my weight.

And then I kept accelerating downward and they buckled against the onrushing air. I went from ‘glider’ to ‘parachute malfunction’ and continued in a purely ballistic trajectory right into the hillside.

I hit the ground, rolled uncontrollably down the snowy slope, and then came to rest at the bottom, laying on my back and staring up at the sky. I layed there for several moments, unmoving, in a tangled mess of limbs.

Then I rolled rightside up and jumped back to my feet, pumping my fist and grinning wildly. “Woohooo!”

I shook like a dog, sending snow flying everywhere. Hard to beat a morning snow bath to wake you up right.

Now, what was I doing? Something about gathering info from aliens. Right.

And maybe I could see if I couldn’t bum some breakfast off someone while I was at it. Or lunch, I suppose. Whatever.

2.1 - A Close Encounter of the Fuzzy Kind

I made my way into the town, trying to keep a somewhat low profile by walking through the less-active peripheries. My purpose, for the time being, was just reconnaissance. I wanted to scope things out and determine what I could before attempting to talk to anyone.

And what I found out as I walked through the busy streets was that it was not at all what I was expecting. It was not what I was expecting in that it was exactly what I would expect from a town like it. The town was built on the shore of a river. It had a port with docks and steamboats that were being loaded and unloaded of cargo. A pony was shouting directions to some others who were operating a wooden crane to lift crates off a barge. Two others came and carried the crate off to a warehouse. Another was sitting on a stack of lumber for his lunch break, casually eating a sandwich. There was an official-looking pony with a hat and badge pinned to his vest wandering about who I was careful to steer clear of. Ponies milled about in the streets, going about their business, running their shops, selling or buying goods, and generally just doing what I would expect. It was all so annoyingly mundane.

Well, with the exception that the population consisted entirely of talking ponies, of course.

And ponies there were. The little quadrupeds were running around all over the place. And they came in all sorts of colors. From the typical earth tones one would expect, to vibrant hues that had no place on the coat of an animal. There were unicorns, ‘regular’ ponies, and a few even had feathered wings on their sides. So far though, I hadn’t seen any of them airborne.

There was another noteworthy feature about these ponies: every single one had some kind of pictogram emblazoned on their flanks. I couldn't recall if the three ponies I’d encountered so far had had them, but everyone here had a unique piece of art on their ass. Why? I hadn’t the slightest idea, but it must've been something of cultural significance to be so prominent.

While I was walking, I kept an eye out for anyone looking at me too suspiciously. I’d gotten more than a few strange looks, but none so far appeared to carry any ill intent. Just curious glances from ponies in passing before they carried on their ways.

I wasn’t sure if the looks were because I definitely looked like I’d slept under a bush and was walking around in a dirt-covered bed sheet, or because I wasn’t a pony. I didn’t see any other griffons. Lots of ponies in all shapes and sizes, but no griffons. It was a little unnerving and made me feel out of place.

Well, more out of place than being surrounded by tiny ponies in the first place.

On the bright side, I hadn’t been stopped and arrested yet, which meant I probably wasn’t committing any crimes just by existing or being a griffon.

Unless the only reason I’d gone unbothered so far was that the pony police were carefully organizing the SWAT team before attempting to apprehend the dangerous predator fugitive.

I stopped in my tracks and scowled heavily. Okay brain, you can fuck right off with that shit. It is not helping. Why don’t you be useful and look for something that might net me some food?

Without any further commentary on ways things could go horribly wrong, my attention turned to the search for foodstuffs. Not too long after, I caught a whiff of a deliciously sweet scent and I went on autopilot, letting my nose take the wheel and lead me through the streets.

Since it was highly unlikely that anyone here accepted cash or credit, I was going to have to put to use my years of experience as a broke-ass college student in exploiting all opportunities for free food. Step one was simple: locate probable locations of food. Currently, my nose had that task covered. Step two: analyze offers and exploit for munchies. I kept an eye out for the obvious ones: signs or ads of any kind that included the words ‘food’ or ‘refreshments.’

I doubted I’d stumble upon any ‘come listen to this boring seminar that no one would attend if there wasn’t free pizza’ sort of things but hey, this place had done nothing but surprise me so far. Nah, my best bet was probably something like the time I’d gotten half a pizza for helping someone move a couch up into a third-story dorm room. Small people always seemed to need help moving things. And everyone here was small! How convenient was that?

Of course, if I’m being an interplanetary bum, and it comes down to it, just begging wouldn’t be totally out of—

My thoughts were derailed by a little brown blur running headlong into my side. Now, getting headbutted by a pony while zoned out was surprising on its own, but even more surprising was when I looked to see who had so rudely interrupted my quest.

The mare standing at my side, with her head rammed into my bound wing, was none other than what’s-her-face from the manor.

“You,” I said incredulously.

“Me,” she grunted in response. Then she stepped back a bit and headbutted my side again.

“What are you—”

“Stop talking and get inside before somepony sees you,” she said with her forehead still mashed against me. She was trying to push me, but wasn’t quite able to accomplish much with her petite frame—her hooves just slid ineffectually against the cobblestones. Rather than try asking again, I just relented and let her “push” me along and through the front door of the nearest building.

The building in question turned out to be a small diner. It was mostly empty, with only a single aproned stallion behind the counter and a few other patrons who seemed completely uninterested in our entrance.

The fuzzy head hit my side again and I was guided towards an empty booth by the window. There were some half-finished plates of pastries and a mug of coffee on the table. I was pushed into one of the high-backed seats next to a small pile of saddlebags and other bundles. She climbed into the seat across and then scowled at me.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m here. I’m sitting. Now, what are you doing? What’s with all the shoving?”

“What am I doing? What am I doing? I was just sitting here, enjoying my meal, when a certain griffon just comes wandering down the street completely clueless. So, I have to run out and pull his fuzzy butt inside before somepony less friendly spots him. That’s what I’m doing. The real question is, what are you doing? You were supposed to disappear after you escaped. Remember?” Her voice dropped to just above a whisper. “Graywall knows you’re out and he is not happy. He’s trying to not make a huge fuss about it right now, keeping it quiet and whatnot, but that doesn’t mean he won’t come down on you if he finds out that you’re still, right, here,” she hissed. Then she gave a frustrated huff, snatched a danish off the plate in front of her, and stuffed the whole thing into her muzzle while glaring daggers at me.

I shifted awkwardly in my seat while I thought of how to phrase my reply. “The escape was only… partly successful. I hit a snag.”

She gave me a skeptical look. “It looks pretty successful to me. You’re out, aren’t you? What else is there to do. Just… go.” She made a flapping motion with her forehooves.

“Yeah…” I said, avoiding eye contact. “That’s the thing. I don’t really know where to go.”

“Huh.” She took a bite of another pastry, her intense glare abating somewhat. “I kinda always figured you guys worked like homing pigeons or something.”

I sat there slack-jawed, my face going through a number of different expressions while I tried to figure out just how I was supposed to respond to that. “…I really don’t know if I should feel offended by that or not.” I shook my head. “But no. I do not have any inherent sense of direction. At least not that I know of.”

“Well if you don’t know where to go, allow me to make a suggestion: ‘anywhere that isn’t here.’ That would be a good start,” she said.

“I agree, it is a good start,” I said with a nod. “It’s just made a little bit more complicated by the fact that I don’t exactly know where ‘here’ is in any meaningful sense.”

The skeptical frown returned to her face. “‘Here,’ is Buttered Brioche’s Diner, located in the town just outside…” She paused to think. “…The place you entered without explicit invitation.”

I let out an exasperated sigh. That story was quickly becoming more of a hindrance than an asset. Maintaining it wasn’t going to get me any further. Fuckit. “I am not a burglar. I didn’t break into Graywall’s place—at least not intentionally. It was an accident. I was at school, and then I crashed and… fell…” I trailed off as I realized how ridiculous that sounded.

“You accidentally crashed and fell into a locked basement storeroom with no windows?” She let out a low whistle. “Impressive. You must’ve been flying awfully fast.”

“Flying? I was—” Oh, right. Wings. “I don’t really know how it happened. My memories of the night are a little… fuzzy.” In more ways than one.

She whistled again. “Damn, Birdy. Must’ve been one heck of a night. Invite me if you’re around next time you plan on getting that hammered.”

“I wasn’t drunk,” I protested adamantly. Then after a second added, “At least I’m pretty sure I wasn’t. I don’t normally drink.”

“Maybe you should.”

I sighed and cradled my head in my hands. “Right now, I’m tempted to actually agree.”

A long while passed where neither of us spoke, and then she broke the silence. “So, let me make sure I’ve got this right. You were at your school. Then there was this crash. And then you were at Graywall’s. Just like that? Nothing else?”

“Yeahhh….” I said without bothering to raise my head from my hands.

She continued, speaking slowly and deliberately. “And this school… it’s in Griffonstone?”

That made me look up. When had I mentioned Griffonstone? Must have been last night, though I couldn’t quite remember the context. Shit. What had I said? I gave a hesitant nod, not taking my eyes off the mare.

“And you don’t know where you are now,” she said flatly.

I shook my head. “Probably less so than you can imagine.”

She sat up straight and clapped her forehooves. “Well then,” she said with a smile. “This is Riverstone. In central Equestria.”

“Say again?”

“Equestria, you may have heard of it? It’s kind of a big place. Griffonstone is east of here.” She pointed with a hoof in a direction that I guess was east. “Way east. Across the Celestial Sea. I think you may have broken some world records with that crash of yours.” Then she smirked. “A few laws of physics too.”

My eyes narrowed. “Something makes me think we’re not talking about the same Griffonstone,” I grumbled.

“Oh? And why is that?”

“Well, for a start, unless I’ve seriously forgotten my fifth-grade geography lessons, I have never heard of an ‘Equestria’ or a ‘Celestial Sea,’” I said with a frown. “And I also have this little, nagging feeling that the Griffonstone you’re referring to is full of griffons.”

She gave me a flat look and said, “And that is a problem because…?”

I slammed my hands down on the table, making the dishes clatter. “Because up until yesterday, I didn’t think griffons even existed!” The other few ponies in the diner turned to see what the commotion was. I ducked down out of sight.

“Ooookay,” she said. “So… I don’t know if anypony has told you this, Birdy, but—”

“I am not a griffon,” I growled through gritted teeth.

She sat back and raised her forehooves up defensively. “Sorry, but you sure look like one to me.”

I pressed my hand against my temple. “Ok, yes. I am one now. Somehow. But I distinctly remember not being one…” I rolled my wrist over and checked my watch. “…forty hours ago.”

“If you weren’t a griffon, what were you before?”

Oh great. We’re really doing this. Fuckit. It’s not like I can dig myself any deeper at this point. “A human,” I said, but got only a blank look in return. “Homo sapiens.” Still nothing. “Bipedal, tall and skinny—at least compared to you ponies—generally hairless. Uh… hands.” I wiggled my fingers in front of me.

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” she said with a shake of her head.

I sighed and slumped down in my seat, staring at the ceiling. “Of course not.” I wasn’t quite sure what I expected to achieve from that.

She pushed her dishes out of the way to one side, leaned forward, and crossed her hooves on the table. “So, you were a ‘human’ and today you’re a griffon. How’d that one happen?”

I snorted at that. “Now isn’t that the question of the day? I dunno,” I said with a shrug. “My working theory was that I got here through some kind of portal in the basement back there at Graywall’s which may have also turned me into a griffon. But that theory didn’t pan out.” And then mumbling, I added, “Probably dreamt up the whole damn thing.”

I decided to leave out the tidbit about how there was a non-zero chance that she, and all of this, was just in my head too. It was never a good idea to tell someone you don’t think they’re real.

The mare bit her lip and ‘hmmmed’ with a slight bob of her head. “Did you by any chance hit your head in that crash?”

That got a chuckle out of me. It really shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help it. I had a pretty good idea of where this conversation was going. “Oh, absolutely. The only question is how many times. Pretty sure it was at least twice.”

“Do you think… you should see a doctor or somepony about that?”

“No… Yes… Maybe. I don’t know,” I planted my forehead onto the table. “I don’t know what to think anymore.” Do I need to see a doctor? I might have a concussion, or worse. Should I be worried about that? Do I need to add that near the top of the to-do list? “Gahhhh! Everything was so much easier when all this was just a fever dream where nothing mattered!” I pounded the table with a fist.

The mare used her hoof to stabilize her rattling coffee mug then looked back to me. “H-hey now. No need to be like that. Just… relax. Deep breaths.”

I did as she said and forced myself to take deep, steady breaths. Having a mental breakdown in the middle of the diner would draw attention, which was precisely the opposite of what I needed right now.

When I was once again in full possession of my faculties, I lifted my face from the table and looked across at the mare.

She gave me a reassuring smile. “Are you good?”

I nodded slightly. “For a given value of ‘good.’”

She nodded back, then seemed to think of something. She cocked her head and asked, “Have you eaten anything at all since last night, when I brought dinner?”

“No,” I said sheepishly, my gaze averted. “After I broke out I ran away and slept under a bush. Only just got up. I was actually looking for something to eat when you ran into me.”

She frowned. “And you don’t have any bits, do you?”

My eyebrow raised. “Bits?”

“Money. Coin,” she clarified.

I shook my head. “The only money I have is paper bills. I don’t suppose that will work?”

“Uhhh, no. Not likely.”

“Then I am one hundred percent totally broke,” I said, my head falling back to the table.

“Okay. That’s fine,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hoof. Then she turned in her seat and called out to the stallion behind the counter. “Hey, Butter-butt!”

The stallion looked up from the dishes he was scrubbing and called back to her, “Whatcha need, Cinnamon?”

“Birdy here needs some breakfast,” the mare replied. Then to me, she said, “What do you want? I’m buying.”

I jolted upright, surprised by the offer, and looked around. I didn’t see anything that looked like a menu posted. “Uhhh… I-I don’t know. What is there? I—”

While I fumbled for words, she called back to the stallion, “Just make it the breakfast platter. And can I have two more of the banana breads, to go? Oh, and some more coffee, please.”

“Sure thing. Coming right up,” the stallion said. He set down his dishrag and moved over to the stovetop where he began cracking eggs into a bowl.

I turned back to the mare sitting with me and asked simply, “Cinnamon?”

She gave me a warm smile. “Yes, Birdy. My name is Cinnamon.” She extended a hoof across the table to me. I gingerly grasped it with my much larger, taloned hand and shook it.

“Garrett.”

Her smile grew wider. “Pleased to meet you, Garrett.”

I choked out a laugh and she started giggling too. Of course. Of course the talking pony would be named something like ‘Cinnamon.’ Why the hell not?

Quicker than I expected, the stallion arrived with food. He came and placed a large platter on the table in front of me, and a small, paper-wrapped bundle by Cinnamon. I distantly registered hearing her thank him before he left. My attention was locked on the steaming mountain of scrambled eggs, hash-browns, buttered toast, and fruit. Just the sight alone was enough to make my mouth water, to say nothing of the smell. In quick succession, I stripped off my filthy hand wraps, picked up the fork, and readied it to attack the dish.

I hesitated a moment and glanced uncertainly at Cinnamon.

“Go ahead,” she said, motioning to the platter. “I already ate. That’s all yours.”

Not needing to be told twice, I started shoveling food into my beak with zero regard for table manners.1 It was delicious, and I was starving. Suffice to say, it did not last long. A few minutes, if that.

1Although considering how I’d seen the mare sitting with me eat, both that morning and the night before—stuffing face in food or food in face—I doubt I was being judged on my manners.

While I was wiping the platter clean with a slice of toast, Cinnamon got up from her seat and started towards the counter. She paused and pointed to the pile of bags in the seat with me. “Could you pass me my bags?” she asked me. “Just the blue ones.”

I held the toast in my beak and wiped my hand on my chest before plucking the pair of blue saddlebags out from the bottom of the pile and passing them over to her. She took them and set them down on the ground. She stuck her muzzle into the top, nudging things aside and emerged holding a small bag in her teeth, which she carried over to the stallion at the counter—I assumed to pay, given the way the bag ‘clinked’ like it was full of coins.

As she did that, I looked again at the items sitting next to me. In addition to the saddlebags, which were nearly as large as my own, there were a few other decently-sized bundles that were strung together for easier carrying. My brow furrowed. It sure was a lot of things to be carrying for lunch in town.

Cinnamon returned and sat down in her seat, grabbing her mug in her forehooves and taking a sip before smiling at me.

I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my beak and asked, “So uh, what’s with all the bags? You going on a trip?”

Her smile faltered slightly. “Funny story, that.” She set the mug down and leaned back in her seat. “When Graywall got up this morning and discovered a certain guest had left unannounced during the night, he was, understandably, quite agitated. Threw himself something of a hissy fit, I heard. Then not too long after, in a completely unrelated event, my employment at the Graywall estate is terminated. Apparently due to my ‘unacceptably poor performance.’ I suppose Graywall suddenly decided he’s no longer a fan of my cooking? Or maybe I didn’t fold some linens correctly. Could be anything, really.” She shrugged and sipped her coffee. “So, I’m leaving town.”

“Oh,” I said. In other words, I got her fired. My gaze fell and I stared at the plate in front of me. The plate from the food she had just bought me. While being jobless. Because of me.

Fuck.

Let it be known that guilt holds the power to retroactively make food less delicious.

Cinnamon hopped down from her seat and began tugging a set of fluffy white boots onto her hooves, one at a time. Then came a scarf and a hat the same blue color as her saddlebags. I got up and moved out of the way of her other items.

While she was putting on her bags, she seemed to be visibly gauging me and considering something. “Look…” she said. “I’m going to the capital. With no job here, I’ve got no reason to stick around, and I’ve got family there who will probably give me a place to stay for a bit. Why don’t you come with me? You need to get away from here and you sound like you could use a travel buddy. You can even stay with me if you need to.” Then she lowered her voice. “I’ve also still got to go to the guard about you-know-what, and it might be useful for you to be nearby, even if you don’t immediately go with.”

“Uhhh, yeah…” That was unexpected. And convenient. I nodded. “Sure. Thanks. I’ll try not to be a burden and slow you down.”

“Great! In that case…” She grabbed the mess of strung-together bundles in her teeth and flung it up and onto my back.

“Oooof!” My back drooped momentarily beneath the weight. It was surprisingly heavy. Much heavier than I expected such a small creature to be able to fling like that.

“…You can help carry some things. That way you aren’t a burden,” she said, grinning from ear to fuzzy ear.

“How considerate,” I grunted, adjusting the bundles overtop of my own bags.

“Oh don’t give me that look,” she said, lightly punching my arm. “You’re twice my size. If a little mare like me can carry them, then a big, strong, griffon like you can do it just fine.”

I could, and I would. I would be a pack-mule for a goddamned pony, and I would do it without complaint because it was the least I could do in return. The amount of generosity Cinnamon was showing caught me completely off-guard.

Why the hell was this pony so eager to help me? I got her fired for fuck’s sake. If our positions were reversed, I’d have probably just given her directions and wished her luck. Did that difference in attitude say something about me or her? Maybe ponies are just naturally nice? Well, no. Graywall was a total dick. So not all of them. Maybe this mare just had some morbid curiosity for the nutcase who’d fallen into her hooves.

I was dragged from my thoughts by Cinnamon flicking her tail under my chin as she walked towards the exit. “You coming, Birdy?” she said over her shoulder with a grin. “Or do I have to get a leash?” As she pulled away, it almost looked like her hips were swaying ever so slightly more than strictly necessary.

Or maybe she just can’t resist your hot, catbird body.

I smothered that sector of my mind, chained it up, and buried it beneath a mile of concrete. Screw you brain. Your commentary privileges are being revoked.

Just what the hell was I getting myself into?

2.2 - Walking and Talking

With Cinnamon in the lead and myself close behind, the two of us ducked out of Riverstone as discreetly as we could manage—which we were more-or-less successful at accomplishing. There really wasn’t much we could do, beyond sticking to the less-active streets. But that could only do so much to prevent ponies from inevitably taking notice of the only griffon walking through the streets during the height of noontime activity.

I did at least pull the bedsheet back overtop myself like a cloak. There might not be anything I could do about being a griffon, but at least I didn’t have to be bright red as well. Although, given the vibrantly colored coats of the ponies around me, that might not have drawn as much extra attention as I originally worried.

Fortunately, whatever attention we did draw wasn't enough to cause us any issues. As far as I could tell, none of those who saw us depart were Graywall’s minions or otherwise cared enough to do anything about it. Without too much work, we made it to a road adjacent to the river that led out of town. And so began our journey.

And what a journey it was to be. Apparently, our destination wasn’t exactly close by. And not just the ‘annoyingly long walk’ kind of not close by. No, this was the ‘several hours away by train’1 variety. And as fate would also have it, Riverstone didn’t have a train station of its own. A port full of riverboats, yes, but not a single set of rails. The nearest train station was in the next town north, some ways upriver. So, before we could have the joy of sitting on a train for several hours, we first had to spend a couple hours walking upriver along the old towpath.

1The fact that locomotives were apparently a thing here was both intriguing and irritating at the same time—a feeling that was quickly becoming somewhat annoyingly repetitive so I was trying quite hard to not think about it and instead just take it in stride.

When I asked why we were walking and not, say, hitching a ride upstream on one of the steamboats making the same exact trip, Cinnamon informed me that each of those boats was operated by Gray Trade—the company Graywall owned—so it was best for us to avoid them. I begrudgingly admitted this was probably sufficient justification for walking.

Probably.

I was marooned on a fucking alien planet and so far the highlights of my trip had been imprisonment in a small box and long walks along hardly-paved roads. And despite all the practice I was getting with the novel experience of walking on all fours, my opinion of the activity was not improving in the slightest. I still despised it as much as ever.

Just like last night, I was still sore, my tail hurt, and my gait hadn’t gotten any more efficient. The latter point was quite annoyingly illustrated by the fact that I was actually having difficulty keeping pace with Cinnamon despite my stride being near twice the length of hers. Stupid tiny horses and their stupid highly efficient locomotion.

But unlike last night, however, I now had the afternoon sun bearing down on me. Me, my excessively fluffy coat, and my multiple layers of improvised clothes. Frequently during the walk, I found myself falling into an even slower three-legged walk so I could use one hand to fuss with my bags and clothes as they slipped out of place or started to chafe.

Cinnamon seemed to notice because she slowed her pace slightly so as to fall back alongside me. “I don’t see why you’re still wearing all that. You don’t need to try to disguise yourself anymore, there’s nopony around to see,” she said, waving a hoof to the empty water to our right and the forest to our left. “Well, except me.”

“I am aware.”

“Then why keep it on? It’s clearly not that comfortable and I’d have a hard time believing you need all that to stay warm,” she said, glancing at the exposed feathers from my unzipped jacket. I stared back at her, specifically her hat and scarf. Why? Just, why even the fuck was she wearing them? It wasn’t even that cold.

“I’m wearing it”—I grunted and hiked up my sagging not-a-skirt—“because the portal stole my pants.”

Her brow furrowed and she repeated slowly, “...The portal… stole your pants…”

“Yes,” I said, paying her bewilderment no mind. “Or the universe. Or whatever it was that landed me here, like this. I was wearing clothes when I left, and then I wasn’t. Apparently, the portal gods have no sense of decency and deemed pants unnecessary, I politely—yet firmly—disagree.”

Cinnamon’s pace slowed as she stared at me with a quizzical look. Then she shook her head a few times and trotted back up to my side. “You think you need to keep yourself covered up because it's indecent?”

“Correct.”

“Birdy, everypony around you is completely unclothed with nothing but their fur and a tail to cover themselves. There’s nothing indecent about it.”

“Incorrect,” I replied and continued adjusting the fabric around my waist.

Cinnamon watched me do this and then sighed, “…But if you’re really concerned about keeping yourself covered, you might want to focus more on your ‘rear-view.’ Your tail isn’t doing you any favors, especially if you keep lifting it like that.”

I looked back over my shoulder and, sure enough, all my hard work was being undone by my traitorous tail bobbing along through the air, lifting up my not-a-skirt for all the world to see beneath. I hastily drew the sheet down tight around my rear, tucking the excess fabric under the straps of my bags to hold it in place. The action had the unanticipated effect of drawing my tail closer to the ground, resulting in the still-bandaged end once again striking the paving stones with each step I took. I hissed and reluctantly loosened things a bit until my tail's trajectory was clear of the ground. “It’s not my fault. The damned thing has a mind of its own.”

Cinnamon giggled and said, “Don’t worry. Your tail might be working against you, but your fluff has got you covered, literally. I can assure you there is nothing indecent to be seen.” She shook her head. “I haven’t seen a coat of fur that poofy since my sister’s cat Fuzz Butt.”

I cocked my head and asked, “She really named her cat Fuzz Butt?”

“Well, no,” she admitted. “I think his actual name was Frumpkin or something boring like that. But I only ever called him Fuzz Butt. He looked more like a pile of cotton balls than an animal.”

I ceased fussing with my clothes and continued walking. Then the implication of what Cinnamon had said a few moments earlier struck me and I stopped, narrowing my eyes at her. “'I can assure you there's nothing to see'? You've been critically observing my 'rear-view', have you?”

“Have you been observing mine?” she replied nonchalantly. She gave her rump and tail a little shake as she pulled ahead. “Is that why you keep falling behind? Taking your time. Enjoying the view?” she teased.

I quickly averted my gaze—which prompted a giggle from her—and fumbled for words. “What? No! I mean—you walk ahead like that and it's just… there!”

“Well there’s your answer,” Cinnamon said with a shrug and kept on trotting.

Oh. Yeah. I guess that made sense. It's not like it took more than a passing glance to confirm 'yep, that's very poofy’. I probably shouldn't be immediately assuming the worst intent. Especially if it might alienate my only ally.

I was about to apologize when Cinnamon continued, “Except, you haven't been getting ahead of me too often. So yeah, I’ve had to make those few chances count.”

I no longer felt bad about any assumptions I made. I glared at the mare.

“What? You’ve got a nice butt. So poofy. Could just… snuggle it,” she said, pausing briefly to hug herself.

I yanked my not-a-skirt back down and pulled away to a safe distance on the other side of the walkway. I wasn’t quite sure if the fact that the butt being complimented wasn’t really my own made the whole scenario more weird or less. Regardless, I made sure to stay in a position where I could keep track of the mare from the corner of my eye.

We walked in silence for several minutes before Cinnamon spoke, “So, I’ve been thinking…”

“About my butt?” I asked, watching carefully for any sudden and rear-ward movements.

“No. Not all my thoughts are about your flank,” she scoffed.

“Just some of them,” I grumbled.

She rolled her eyes. “I’ve been thinking, about this whole thing with you and Graywall.”

“Oh?” Wouldn’t have been my first choice of discussion topics. Frankly, I’d’ve preferred to just forget it all ever happened. But it was better than talking about the fuzziness of my rear-end, so I asked, “What’s your thought?”

“I don’t think we can take this to the guard after all.”

Well then. That was certainly something. Not even an hour ago, Cinnamon had seemed quite adamant about the need to report Graywall to the authorities. And even though I personally would have preferred to just drop the whole thing, I could see the reasoning and wasn’t about to argue with her about the matter. But if she no longer wanted to…

“Why the sudden change of mind?” I asked.

Cinnamon took a few moments to think before answering. “Graywall has got to know I helped you escape. Or he at least suspects it. And if he believes that, then he’s also gotta be assuming I talked with you about what happened. He knows I know he locked you up and held you captive, and he’s gotta at least suspect I know what he said he was going to do to you afterward.” Her eyes crossed and she bit the tip of her tongue. “Wait, I think I mess that up. Lemme start over.”

I waved my hand to cut her off. “No no, I follow you. You know things that he’d prefer you didn’t.”

She nodded. “Yeah, that. Any of those things would be enough to get him in serious trouble with the law… and yet he just fired me and is letting me walk away without a second thought!” She threw a foreleg up in frustration. Then she shook her head and continued. “Only reason to do that is if he’s completely confident that anything I could say or do won’t be enough to even inconvenience him. Else he’d have kept me on, where he could have somepony keep an eye on me. Make sure I don’t become a problem for him.”

She snorted. “And yeah, he’s probably right not to be concerned. What could I even say? ‘Yeah, so, my former boss—mister Graywall. Yes. The owner of Gray Trade, the company that runs half the trade and shipping industry this half of Equestria. That’s the one—he just fired me after I released this griffon he was holding captive and vaguely threatened without actually saying anything specific.’”

She took a deep breath and kept going, hardly even slowing down. “And then they’ll ask if the griffon is around to answer some questions. And I get to say no, and the whole thing falls apart because there’s no evidence, no victim, just the alleged, second-hoof word of a disgruntled former employee of a very powerful and very connected business owner. An employee who would appear to have little to lose and much to gain by making such accusations. Or, you do go in and talk…” she trailed off.

Seeing where she was going with this, I picked up where she left off. “...and they inevitably ask something like ‘how’d you end up in the Graywall manor in the first place?’ and I get to reply with ‘I have no clue, officer’ which makes me look like a criminal playing dumb so as to not incriminate himself. Or—and I don’t know if this is better or worse—I can reply with ‘no clue, but I’m also not a griffon either. I’m really an alien from another world who needs your help getting home.’ But I really can’t imagine that improving the case in any way beyond ensuring that when it all comes crashing down, the cell I get locked in is a padded one.” My head drooped. “No one in their right mind would believe a word of it.”

Cinnamon winced. “It’s not that it’s completely unbelievable,” she said, “but that there are far more likely explanations. Especially considering it wouldn’t have been the first time that something like this happened with Graywall.”

“Wait. What?” I asked incredulously. This had happened before? I had to have misheard that. Or I was grossly misinterpreting things.

Apparently, the reason for my surprise was clear. “Oh, no. Not like you. Not exactly.” Cinnamon corrected. “Just… there’s been more than a few incidents of disgruntled griffons coming at him or the company trying to make a mess of things.”

Oh, that certainly made a lot more sense. And it also prompted another thought. “Is that why he was so pissed off at me? He assumed I was… doing whatever those others did?”

“Probably, yeah.”

“That explains soo much. ‘Cus he was, like, really angry at me considering how little I actually did. I mean, I can understand being pissed at someone you believe broke into your home, and maybe even feeling the need to lock them up. I could kinda see that. But to then go up and talk with that person and—well it wasn’t even a conversation so much as it was just him threatening me while I couldn’t do anything about it and then leaving before I responded.” I frowned. “That is not the sort of thing you do unless you’re an actual psychopath, or at the very least an asshole with a few pre-existing unfriendly predispositions.”

Cinnamon let out a brief laugh. “Well, ‘unfriendly predispositions’ definitely describes Graywall and griffons. Apparently, it runs in the family, at least a few generations back. It goes back and forth.”—she swung her head side-to-side while she spoke—“He or the company does something that angers some griffons, intentionally or otherwise. And then they try to retaliate, either through some legitimate business-ey things or… less legitimate methods. Sometimes they get caught. I don’t really know why it all started. I don’t even know if they do either. Just that it’s been going on long enough that neither really cares, I don’t think.”

I scowled. “And so just because he’s part of this dumb feud, he feels the need to personally ‘take care of’ any suspect griffon who crosses his path?”

Cinnamon just shrugged. “Apparently.”

“Wow. Okay. I thought he was an asshole before. But now?” I snorted derisively. “Now I’m almost tempted to say we should go to the guard, just for the off-chance to fuck with him.

Cinnamon nodded in agreement. “It’d be pretty great… but then I’d also be more than a little worried about what would happen if we did manage to get someone to listen.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean Graywall is a very powerful pony with lots of connections,” she said. When my confused expression remained unchanged, she elaborated further. “If the guard didn’t just dismiss everything you or I said as nonsense or blatant lies and actually took it seriously enough to get a report with Graywall’s name into the system, there’s a better chance than not that word of it will make it back to him.” She sighed, shaking her head. “As it stands, Graywall seems content to let me be because I’m not a problem, and he wouldn’t even suspect you’d put yourself in at risk by becoming one.”

“But by going to the cops, you think we’d be painting targets on our backs and sending up a flare at the same time,” I concluded.

“Kinda, yeah,” she said, her gaze falling to the roadway.

It wasn’t hard to see that she was kicking herself over this thing. She didn’t want to just give up but also felt like she couldn’t do anything about it. And it wasn’t like she was wrong in that assessment, but that didn’t make it any easier. I sighed. “Look, for what it’s worth, I was never too hyped to talk to the cops anyways. If you ask me, I think you’re right and we should just drop the whole thing. Just… walk away and call this a win while it still is.”

Cinnamon was silent for a while. “…I don’t like the idea of a scumbag like him walking free just because the only witnesses didn’t say anything. I really don’t like it…” She let out a long, low breath. “…But I like the idea of taking huge risks with almost no chance of paying off even less.” She swung kicked her hoof at a loose stone in the road, knocking it into the water. “This sucks.”

“Yep. It sure does.” I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about the matter. On the one hand, I was kinda relieved to have one less thing to worry about potentially fucking up on me in the short term. But on the other, I could only imagine that my end-game goal would have benefitted from being able to get assistance from those in power…

Goddamnit I hate this shit. I hate the idea that I even have to think in the long-term about this fucking place. Total bullshit is what it is.

After a reasonable amount of internal seething, I turned back to Cinnamon and asked, “So if that objective has been officially abandoned, what’s the game plan now?”

“Not too different, really. Same thing, just minus the guard part.”

“Right… What was that plan again? You probably explained it earlier, but events as of late have been…” I paused to think of a suitable descriptor. “…distracting. To say the least.”

That earned a small chuckle from Cinnamon. “The plan—if it can even be called a plan—is that I’m going to Canterlot to crash at my aunt’s for a while. And you’re accompanying me there because…”

”Because I’m lost and clueless?” I offered.

“I was going to say because you managed to get on the bad side of one of the more powerful ponies this side of the Canterhorn… but yeah. That also works.”

“Right.” Guess it wouldn’t be that easy to just forget the subject. “So… Canterlot, that’s the capital, yeah?” I tried not to be surprised by the name of the city. They apparently have a Griffonstone. Of course they have a Canterlot. Why not? Just don’t think about it.

“Yep. Big city up there on the other side of the mountain.” She paused and pointed with her hoof through a gap in the trees to where a distant mountain range was visible.

“And you think that there’s anyone there who might be able to help me? Or is going there just a means of going somewhere that isn’t there.” I pointed a thumb back over my shoulder towards Riverstone.

“That’s the big one, yeah, but I do think that whatever your problem is, your best bet at getting it fixed is in Canterlot. Lots of specialists in all areas who could help you out,” Cinnamon said. I did notice how intentionally vague she was about what exactly she believed my problem was. “It also wouldn’t hurt for you to see a doctor about your head, and Canterlot has the best doctors around.”

“Now,” I said casually. “When you say doctor for my head, are you talking about a physician or a psychologist?” Cinnamon visibly stiffened at the question, her gait faltering somewhat. “Come on. I know you think I’m crazy, or lying, or something. I just claimed to be from another world and that this isn’t really my body. If that doesn’t scream ‘cognitive disorder,’ then I don’t know what does.”

She didn’t respond for a few moments, and when she did she seemed to be speaking carefully. “I’ll admit your story is a little out there, but like I said before, it’s not completely impossible, and it definitely doesn’t mean I think you’re insane or anything.”

“Mhmm, and that’s just what you’d say to someone you thought was crazy but wanted to keep from running off and hurting themselves or someone else.”

She frowned slightly. “It’s also exactly what somepony would say if they meant it at face value.”

“Yeah,” I conceded. “But you wouldn’t say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like the way you said it. Way too careful. Too…” I stopped briefly to find the right word. “… Non-provocative. Considerate.”

“I was too considerate,” she said flatly.

“Errr, yes. No. Maybe.” I waved a hand dismissively. “Look, it’s pretty clear you don’t totally believe me and probably think I’m nuts.”

“I don’t think that I do,” she said. Then a mischievous smile crept onto her muzzle. “But if you’re really trying to convince me you aren’t crazy… believing that those around you—especially those helping you—are trying to deceive you is a rather strong indicator of paranoia, which doesn’t really help your case.”

“I—buh—wha—guhh. But…” I fumbled for words, one eye twitching slightly. The hell do I even say to that? Keep arguing myself into a corner or give up and let what will happen, happen? I was beginning to think I understood what it was like to live in the life of a madman, and there was no way that was good for my sanity. I’d trapped myself in a corner, where anything I could say would just make the situation worse.

“Fuck,” I said.

“I see,” Cinnamon replied, nodding her head in mock thoughtfulness.

“Gaaahh-scraAWWw!” I gah-scraw’d in frustration and flopped defeatedly onto my belly. Cinnamon simply stopped walking and patiently waited while I laid there. Eventually, I climbed back onto my feet and resumed walking. Cinnamon fell into step beside and slightly behind me. I sighed heavily and said, “Y’know, I don’t blame you. I am well aware of how ridiculous I sound. I wouldn’t believe me if I were in your place.” Then mumbling, I added, “I’m not even fully sure I believe me anymore.” My head slumped low.

“Hey.” Cinnamon quickly trotted up close to me. “Chin up.” She ducked her head down under my chin and then stood up to her full height, gently forcing my own head most of the way back up. She pulled away to my side and said, “If you were really losing your mind, I don’t think you’d be so self-aware about it, now would you?” She shrugged. “Equestria is a crazy place. You magically appearing in a basement wouldn’t be the weirdest thing to happen, by far.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said with a somewhat forced laugh. Sure, make fun of the totally-not-crazy griffon. Whatever. I didn’t really mind. Anything that lightened the mood was a plus.

I could live with being thought of as a little bit nuts. If Cinnamon was just being helpful and letting me tag along without actually believing a word of it, I could deal with it. So long as I was still making forward progress. After all, even pity-points are points that count towards your overall score.

Now, that wasn’t to say I wouldn’t keep trying to convince her I didn’t belong in an asylum. I would prefer to avoid being locked in any kind of cell, even ones that are padded for comfort. It just meant that I wouldn’t be too deeply saddened when I inevitably fucked it up. And I was under no delusions that I wouldn’t fuck it up, at least a few times.

2.3 - Midnight Train

The walk took longer I’d’ve liked, but eventually, we got there. The sun was setting by the time we got to our destination—or rather, intermediate destination. It was a small town sitting where a railroad crossed the river we’d been following. Though perhaps calling it a town would be something of an exaggeration. It was considerably smaller than Riverstone and seemed to consist of little more than a railway station, small dock, and cluster of supporting buildings scattered around. If I were to speculate, I’d say its sole purpose was to be a refueling stop for locomotives and steamboats and place to move cargo and passengers between the two.

We made our way to the train station and I found a comfortable-looking bench to flop on while Cinnamon went off to procure us some tickets from wherever it was tickets were procured. I entertained myself in the meantime by watching as a few ponies tended to a parked locomotive in the distance. It was a fascinating thing indeed to see them work the tools using nothing but hooves and mouths. Colorful ponies climbed all over the machines, cleaning them, oiling parts, performing maintenance and other intricate manual tasks that I wouldn’t have thought possible to do at all without hands, let alone with the speed and efficiency these workers had.

Enthralled as I was watching them go about their duties, I didn’t notice Cinnamon return until out of nowhere her face bounced up into my field of view.

“Hey! Birdy!” She said midair, causing me to jerk my head back in surprise. When she'd landed back on her hooves she continued, “Anypony in there?”

I blinked rapidly and looked down at the mare. “Err, yeah. What’s up?”

“Goody. I’ve been trying to get your attention for like a minute now.”

“Oh. Sorry. I was distracted,” I said sheepishly.

“You don’t say? Well, I’ve got our tickets.” She patted a pocket on her saddlebags with two tickets poking out. “Thankfully, we got here before the last train of the evening departed, or else we would have had to wait until morning. And I’d rather not do that. This place is a little sketch, even for me. So let’s go before they leave us behind.” She waved a hoof and trotted off.

I followed as she led the way to one of the platforms. The train parked at it looked like it only had like three passenger cars, the rest were all cargo. The place seemed basically deserted. I didn’t see anyone else on the platform, and when we boarded the train there were only a couple of other passengers in the first car. We moved past them to the next car—which was empty entirely—and took our seats. I let out a sigh of relief as I let the various bags I was carrying slide unceremoniously to the floor in a heap before climbing up onto the bench seat and unraveling my dirt-caked hand wraps. Cinnamon threw her own saddlebags onto the pile and climbed up into the other seat facing mine, smiling.

Eventually, the conductor came by and checked our tickets and made sure everything was in order. Not too long after that, with the squealing of metal and the hissing of steam, the brakes released, and we were moving.

Movement was good. Knowing I was getting the fuck away from everything back in Riverstone… it was a good feeling. Moving forwards towards a goal, any goal, was progress. I let myself relax some and just looked out the window as the sights and sounds of the station gradually faded until they were replaced entirely with the slowly passing hills and the rhythmic rumble of many wheels over rails.

Not too long after the station disappeared behind us, the door at the end of the car opened and a cart being pushed by a mustached unicorn stallion rolled through. He made his way past the rows of empty seats and rolled to a stop at our end of the car. The stallion gave the two of us a warm smile. “Good evening. Would either of you care for something to eat or drink? I apologize that we can’t offer you a proper meal during your ride, but we mostly haul freight, not ponies, so this is all we’ve got.” He gestured to the cart that was loaded down with an assortment of snack foods.

I briefly glanced at the cart full of things I couldn’t afford and then responded with a quick shake of my head. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

Cinnamon, on the other hand, took this opportunity to leap out of her seat and up to the cart. “Ooh, I’ll have those,” she said, pointing with a hoof at a bag of pretzels. “…and also some nuts. And some of them too. And that,” she continued, pointing energetically to item after item.

The stallion gave a hearty laugh. “Sure thing, miss.”

And then the requested items glowed blue and rose into the air. I sat there dumbfounded with my gaze locked on a bag of pretzels as it lifted off the cart, floated through the air, and plopped down in the seat next to Cinnamon.

Cinnamon, for her part, seemed completely unphased by this phenomenon. She casually fished a familiarly clinking bag out of her saddlebags, from which she withdrew a hoofful of gold coins. Coins that then themselves started glowing and flying back to the cart.

Did I see that right? That couldn’t be right.

I adjusted my glasses. Probably just a glare from the sun—nope there goes the peanuts defying gravity now. And the dude’s horn is glowing the same blue color. Okay. So, he’s got something to do with it. That makes sense. Well, I mean, not really. It made no goddamn sense. But it was something.

My attention never left the stallion as he finished making a mockery of the laws of physics with Cinnamon’s food and rolled the cart away using the same brand of glowing fuckery. I kept watching the stallion and his cart until they both disappeared through into the next train car.

My train of thought was interrupted by a package of pretzels smacking into the side of my head. I looked down to my lap where it fell, and then across to Cinnamon, who was sitting there with a sizable pile of assorted snacks held in her forelegs. I raised an eyebrow and asked, “What was that for?”

“You weren’t answering me. You were too focused on the cart,” Cinnamon said. She leaned out into the aisle and looked past to the end of the car. She grinned. “Or maybe it wasn’t anything on the cart you were so hungry for?”

I followed her gaze. Through the door to the next train car, the vendor stallion could be seen hunched down with his head stuck in the cart. Or more specifically, only his tail end could be seen.

“I— bwaah?—That is not what!—I wasn’t—There was—” A bag of chips hitting me square in the beak cut me off mid-stammer.

Cinnamon giggled and waved a hoof. “I’m just messing with you, Birdy. I know you’re just hungry. Worry not, for I have you covered.” She held up an apple and tossed it—this time waiting until I was actually paying attention and able to catch it. Which I did… though not without accidentally skewering it with all four talons on the hand.

I frowned at the fruit and plucked it free from where it was stuck, which ended up just getting it stuck on the talons of my other hand. I frowned harder. “So what was it that you were saying?” I asked while wiping the free hand on my sleeve.

“Oh, I was just saying that it’s going to be a long ride to Canterlot. Gonna be close to midnight by the time we get there. You need to keep up your energy.” She motioned to the unfortunately-impaled fruit before turning a bag of chips into an impressive improvised feedbag.

“Right. Thanks,” I said and awkwardly tore a chunk of the apple off with my beak in a messy and not particularly graceful display. Beaks, man. They sure do have a way of making things difficult. I got my knife out and used it to cleanly cut off a slice of the apple, which I popped into my mouth. There, much more civilized.

I cut off another slice but paused before eating it. I was reminded of this morning’s breakfast. The one Cinnamon had gotten me. This was the second time she’d gone and spent money on me. Plus the train ticket. Third. Plus whatever potential loses she was suffering from not having a job. Because of me. Before I knew it, I was being hit with the same wave of generally nauseating guilt that’d struck this morning. Fuck.

“Hey Birdy, what's wrong with your face? Something in your apple?”

Double fuck. “Oh, no. I’m just… not that hungry,” I lied.

“Mmm yeah I don’t buy that,” she mumbled around a muzzleful of food. “I saw you destroy one of Buttered’s platters in near record time. And that was before we spent all day walking. What’s up?”

I sighed and set the apple aside. “It’s just…” Did I really want to explain this to her? No, not really. Was I going to get out of this without explaining? Also not really. She was still waiting for a response and, as history had shown, I fucking sucked at lying. Really sucked. Oh well. “…I feel like I’m taking advantage of you here? You’re going out of your way to help me and I’m… I’m just being a drain and causing you trouble.”

“Oh. Is that all?” She waved a hoof dismissively. “Don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal. I want to help.”

“Right,” I mumbled, avoiding meeting her gaze. “I just don’t like the idea of being dead weight. I’ve got no way to pay you back and I kinda doubt that will change anytime soon.”

“Maybe not right now, but I’m sure we can think of something you can do to repay me.” I looked up to see her grinning mischievously. “So many uses for a big griffon like yourself.”

“I— err, uhhh…” I stammered.

To her credit, Cinnamon managed to keep up the look for a whole five seconds before bursting into a giggle fit, complete with falling onto her back and flailing all four hooves. “Hee hee hee. Oh. Wew, I’m just messing with you, Birdy. Don’t worry about it. Honestly. It’s fine.”

I untensensed and shook my head slowly. “I don’t get how you can be this… unconcerned? About all this? I got you fired for fuck’s sake.”

At that, Cinnamon stopped giggling and slowly sat back up. “Hey. Okay, No. You did not get me fired. You weren’t trying to get me in trouble. It was my choice to help you out. Just like how it was Graywall’s choice to be a dickwad and can me for it. I blame him, not you.”

“But if I hadn’t been there, you wouldn't have been in the situation where you needed to make that choice in the first place.”

She rolled her eyes. “And if the ponies who used to do my job hadn’t up and left the same week I happened to be passing through Riverstone, I probably would never have started working there in the first place and wouldn’t have been in the situation. But I don’t blame them. And you weren’t even there intentionally anyways.” She shook her head. “No. It’s no one’s fault but Graywall’s. And, well, my own because, truth be told, I wasn’t going to be sticking around there much longer. Your visit just sped things up.”

“You were already planning on leaving?” I asked.

“You don’t mouth off to your boss the way I did if you have long-term employment goals. And it's not like it was the greatest job in the world. Pretty crap, honestly.”

“Why were you working there then—if you don’t mind me asking.”

She shrugged. “Same reason anypony takes a crap job, I guess. I didn’t really choose it specifically, just sorta ended up there. That it was far away from some ponies I want to be far from certainly helped. Just a source of bits and a place to stay while I got my hooves back under me.” She sighed. “Though it's been time to get back home for a while now. Been putting it off. Until now…” She trailed off and just stared into space, occasionally munching chips one at a time.

Cinnamon didn’t seem like she was going to offer more on that subject, and I couldn’t really think of how to respond in a way that didn’t seem like prying, so that conversation kinda died right there. We both ate in silence for a few minutes before I decided to restart conversation with a different topic, one that had been sitting in the back of my head and bugging me.

“So uhh, what the heck was with that thing with that unicorn dude earlier?”

“What was what?”

“The thing with his horn and the glowing and the floating,” I explained, accompanied by hand gestures miming a horn and floating object.

“His… magic?” she suggested.

Now it was my turn to be confused. “Say again?”

“His magic,” she repeated.

“Uhhhh…” So, I hadn’t misheard. I eyed her skeptically. She wasn’t bursting into giggles like she usually did after messing with me.

“His magic.” She elaborated. “Telekinesis. Unicorn thing, y’know?”

“No. No I do not know,” I said with slow and exaggerated shakes of my head. “I don’t know any of this. Unicorns in general are still news to me.”

“Oh, huh. I guess so. Well now you know. Unicorns do telekinesis.” She looked at me quizzically. “I’m kinda surprised this is the first you’re noticing it. They’re all over the place.”

I was surprised too if this was apparently as completely normal as she seemed to be implying. “I haven’t been paying too much attention to the specifics of unicorns. Or any ponies for that matter. Been focused on other things for the most part.”

“Right, sure, but I’m pretty sure I’ve even mentioned it before…” she tapped a hoof to her chin as she thought. “Yeah, just earlier today. Half the reason for you to go to Canterlot is to find some unicorn specialist who can help you with your magic problem.”

“I thought you were joking about that,” I said flatly.

She cocked her head to the side. “Why would I be joking about that?’

“I don’t know. Because teasing the crazy griffon is funny?”

“No—I mean—what about that would be a joke?”

“The part where you said it's magic.”

“And that's a joke because…?”

“Because magic isn’t real!” I exclaimed, throwing my hands up.

Her ears flattened back. “Yes, it is?” She said sheepishly.

I dropped my face into my hand and rested it there. “Sorry. Ok, yes, it is here. Apparently.”

“…You don’t have magic where you’re from?”

“No. We don’t! At least not like that. Back home, ‘magic’”—I made air quotes as I said the word—“is either fictional nonsense or… illusions. Stage tricks and the like. Nothing like…” I flailed my arms vaguely in the direction I’d last seen the stallion. “…that.”

“Oh, we have stage illusionists too, but that's not real magic. Unicorns making stuff float around with their telekinesis and casting spells. Pegasi making and controlling the weather and all that. Celestia raising the sun. All the magical creatures and monsters doing what they do…” She screwed up her face, sticking her tongue out to the side. “And a whole bunch more stuff I can’t think off the top of my head.”

My eye twitched. “…are you fucking with me right now? Because if you are, I’d like to politely request you stop before my brain melts.”

Her smile faded slightly. “Err, no, that's all true. Magic is pretty core to life here in Equestria.”

My gaze fell to the floor. “Oh… ok. Well then,” I said with a calmness that did not at all reflect the turmoil going on in my head.

Magic. Telekinesis. Weather spells. Magical monsters, and tons of other things I’d already forgotten or just subconsciously refused to parse. All real. Magic was real here. Or “magic”. Fucking freaky shit that’s totally there and happening and likely has some actual reasonable explanation that meshes nicely with my many many years of studying how the world works and so could probably be called something a little more sensical than magic but you know what? I saw a fucking unicorn levitating potato chips with his mind like it was no big deal and there's no way that should be possible but there it was and the other talking pony here who knows far more about the stuff than me and deals with it on the daily just said it was magic so screw all the “sufficiently advanced” science bullshit it's fucking magic. I was a goddamn griffon in a goddamn world of talking horses and I’d manage to get this far with my sanity more-or-less intact. I could deal with shit being called magic without having an aneurysm. Just gotta not fucking think about it. Step two. Remember step two. Step—

“Hey, Birdy?” came Cinnamon’s voice in a low whisper. “You’ve been staring at the floor and mumbling to yourself for a couple minutes now. I didn’t melt your brain, did I?”

Oh. Indeed I was still staring at the floor. The perfectly normal wood floor that wasn’t trying to overturn my well-cultivated understanding of reality. It was nice.

I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and looked up. “Uhh, no. Well, probably not. I’ll manage. Probably. Hopefully. Just gotta not think about it. Easy.” Then I winced. “Wait, no. You said the reason I was like this was magic, didn’t you?”

“Yesss?” she said carefully.

“Right. Okay. So. Umm, which one of those things that you said just before, if any, would most likely explain how I am here and a griffon?”

“Getting dropped into the wrong world in the wrong body? Now, I’m just a magicless earth pony myself, so I’m no expert on these things, but if I had to venture a guess… definitely some unicorn mage messing with things they shouldn’t be. No doubt about it,” she said with a firm shake of her head. “As I said earlier, it’s why you’re going to Canterlot. It’s like horn-head central up there. If anypony has a clue what's up with you, they’re there.”

“Alright.” Just gotta talk to some unicorn wizards or someshit. That sounds doable. Probably. I’d managed so far. Though it was one thing to experience a one-off incident of completely-incomprehensible circumstances, you can kinda just ignore thinking about the why and how and just deal with the other little issues, like picking a lock or running away from a psychopath. It was a whole other sort of thing for that mind-breaking, physics-defying fuckery to be commonplace. Until now, it’d been easy to think of this place—Equestria—as basically just like Earth, but with horses in place of humans.

But that thin facade I’d been leaning on was crumbling. Now the thing I’d been trying so hard to ignore was the destination. Of course, that was always going to be the case, wasn’t it? I was always going to have to wrap my head around this whole fucked-up series of events. It was just something best done in small bites, so my brain didn’t choke.

“Hey Cinnamon, I might be doing some deep pondering about the universe. If I look like I'm having some kind of mental breakdown, just slap me or something, ‘kay?”

“Sure thing, Birdy,” Cinnamon said, sounding completely unphased by the request.

“Thanks,” I said, shredding the top off a package of pretzels and pouring the contents into my mouth. “‘Preciate it.”

As it turned out, I wouldn’t have a need for Cinnamon to forcefully slap me out of any existential mental loops I might’ve had, because as time wore on, I found myself returning to an entirely different train of thought, namely, all the horrible things I would do to whoever designed this seat should I ever meet them.

Proficient as I was in the sedentary arts, I never thought there’d come a day when I would feel so at odds with a chair. And yet here I was, adding chairs to my ever-growing list of nemeses as a griffon.

No matter which way I tried to rest my ass in the seat, I just couldn’t find a position that was comfortable for more than a few minutes. I couldn’t figure out what the hell I was supposed to do with all these new appendages. There were very few comfortable ways to actually lean against the seat without sitting on my tail. It was just too damn big, and the seat was clearly not designed with it in mind. Oh sure, there was a depression built into the seat between the base and the back that I’m sure would have provided a perfect amount of clearance if my tail was about a tenth of the size it was. But no, I had to have a massive floppy noodle of bones and fur sticking out of my ass!

Which meant that the only way to sit back without sitting on my tail was by slouching far enough back that it stuck out between my legs. But then the seat back was of course pony-sized and thus too low, so I couldn't lean back except in the corner by the wall. But sitting in the corner meant leaning heavily on my shoulders and wings that were already straining from being contained in my jacket.

And so it was that I kept finding myself shifting uncomfortably in my seat every few minutes and silently wishing horrible fates upon some nameless pony who clearly didn’t think it was worth the investment to accommodate non-pony passengers.

“Y’know,” Cinnamon said. “It’d be a lot more comfortable if you just let your wings out instead of keeping them crumpled up in there. Trust me.”

I looked up and narrowed my eyes skeptically at her. “You don’t even have wings.”

She flopped onto her side and rolled around in the seat—apparently also suffering at the hands—or hooves—of incompetent seat designers. Though to a lesser extent. “And yet I still have more experience with them than you, Mr. ‘Wasn’t a griffon forty hours ago.’” She rolled onto her back, looking across at me while upside-down. “I’ve spent a lot more than forty hours getting comfortable with a pair of wings, lemme tell you,” she said while wrapping her arms around herself in a hug.

“Your claimed experience is noted,” I dead-panned. “But my own experience states that the best place for useless appendages is securely fastened away where they can’t drag around and get in the way of things. Because they will.”

“Not really any way they can do that when you’re just sitting there now is there?”

“You underestimate their power,” I said matter-of-factly.

Cinnamon huffed and threw her forehooves up. “Fine. Whatever,” she said. Then she muttered, “Stallions. Always got to be stubborn about things.”

I rolled my eyes. Okay, yeah, she was probably right. There probably wasn’t anything that my wings could do that would be any more aggravating than how they were presently getting in the way. So, I shrugged and unzipped my jacket, unleashing the jumble of feathers contained within. After a moment’s consideration, I rolled the jacket up and stuck it behind my head as a cushion. I leaned back and closed my eyes, focusing on just relaxing, rolling my shoulders around so my wings would flop out to wherever they wanted to be.

“I think it's more comfortable?” I commented. “Hard to say what feels better since I’m still not entirely sure what it is that I’m feeling with these damned things in the first place.” Sensory feedback was still weird as hell. Most of what I was feeling was just a whole bunch of tingling as the feathers all over my body fluffed loose with every jerk and vibration of the train car.

“I’d say it’s a huge improvement,” came Cinnamon’s voice from directly to my right side, much, much closer than it should have been.

I SQUARK-ed and jumped in my seat, eyes flying open as I looked around in surprise. A quick review of the situation revealed that Cinnamon had relocated to my seat, laying against the wing that was spread out to my right, using it as a cushion.

“…though not if you keep jerking like that,” the mare continued with a huff. She bunched a few of the thicker feathers up in her hooves and mushed her face into the bundle.

My jaw worked up and down uselessly a few times before I remembered how to use words. “Was the entire point of all that— “

“Yep,” she answered immediately.

“So I would—”

“Yep.”

“Just so you could—”

“Mhmm,” she hummed with her muzzle pressed into my wing.

I remained silent for a while as I tried to figure out how I was supposed to reply to that. “Y’know, in some cultures it’s considered rude to use someone as a pillow without asking. I imagine similar conventions exist in cultures with wings.”

“You mean like in that griffon culture you’re not actually part of? Or maybe the pegasus culture you still don’t know anything about?” She fluffed her feather pillow a bit.

I opened my mouth to reply, then shut it with an audible clack. She had me there. For all I knew, impromptu cuddling was assumed to be perfectly acceptable around here. And if Cinnamon’s tendencies were at all representative of the rest of her population, that was exactly the case.

“Even if that is the case…” I said, “I don’t have to conform with either. I may look like I belong here, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily need to act like it.”

“That’s true. You can tell me to move anytime you want,” she said as she curled her legs under herself and settled deeper into the feathers.

I briefly entertained the idea of pushing her off the wing and out of my seat just to make a point, but then I dismissed it. It was too much of a dick move and, truth be told, I didn’t really care. It didn’t really bother me. Probably would have felt a lot more like the invasion of personal space that it was if the space being invaded didn’t feel so foreign. And the damned feather duster wasn’t doing me any good, it might as well do Cinnamon some.

I sighed and slouched back into the seat. “It’s not like I need to go anywhere anytime soon…”

“That’s a good Birdy… I think I'll nap until we get there,” she said and closed her eyes.

And with that, Cinnamon went quiet and her breathing gradually slowed, indicating she’d drifted off to sleep. With how long we’d both been walking today, I wasn’t the least bit surprised she’d fallen asleep so quick. I know my own weak academic ass was exhausted enough that I’d’ve loved to join her. Unfortunately, there was still just a little too much… everything… going on in my head that I wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep until I was properly tired and ready to pass out—like I’d been at ass o'clock last night after running for my life.

So, seeing as I was in the apparent need of something to focus my thoughts in order to prevent running off on dangerous mental tangents that lead to thinking far too hard about things that shouldn’t be thought, and this was the first real moment of free time I had since my arrival here, it seemed fitting that I take advantage of this opportunity to do what I should’ve been doing ever since deciding that everything I was experiencing wasn’t all in my head: taking notes.

It was disgraceful, really. So far, I’d spent nearly forty-eight hours on what I was assuming to be an alien planet of some kind and the extent of my permanent documentation was a few bird selfies on my phone. That was wholly unacceptable. If, when I got back home, I didn’t find a way to publish at least a dozen papers about this in as many fields then I’d be a failure to both science and humanity. Even if no one believed a word of it until long after I was dead. Which meant I needed to be writing down and documenting every fucking detail possible. Which meant I needed something to write with.

Given how my wing was occupied as it was, I couldn’t exactly lean forward enough to grab my bags sitting on the floor. So instead I had to reach out and carefully grab them with a foot, hooking onto the strap with feline claws and dragging them out from beneath the pile to where I could reach. That done, I quietly rummaged around until I found my notebook and a pen.

I frowned as I grasped the pen awkwardly in my hand. Griffon fingers were considerably thicker and less flexible than a human’s. This, combined with the massive talons sticking out the ends, meant writing was going to rely a lot more on the wrist and arm than the fingers. This was not going to be pretty.

Steeling myself, I flipped the notebook open to the first blank page and wrote the date at the top. Then I frowned harder. Never before had the term ‘chicken scratch’ been more appropriate than when referring to the marks on the page before me. It was… legible. Kinda. But also agonizingly slow.

I idly wondered if I’d have better luck typing instead. Probably not, in all honesty. Talons would make typing even more awkward than writing. Being down a finger on each hand also meant another twenty-five percent drop in speed. No, it’d be slow as fuck poking away one key at a time. But at least it’d be perfectly legible. Too bad ‘slow as fuck’ and ‘limited battery life’ didn’t mesh. So I was stuck with the chicken scratch. Lovely.

Well, having something to focus on was part of the objective, right? It just happened that my ever-growing hatred of avian anatomy features prominently in that focus.

…Speaking of which, that itself was a new and groundbreaking experience for science and humanity and as such should be documented. So, I wrote…

Observations on being a griffon in horseland:

- Writing, or performing any kind of similar dexterous manual task as a griffon, is a pain in the ass.

- Griffon fingers are just dumb in general. Too bulky, too rough and not enough of them.

- Big, stupid, talons: while probably quite effective at murdering things, just get in the way when you don’t need to murder anything. Its really fucking annoying and makes you want to murder things.

- Wings and tails suck. They just get caught on things and collect dirt. No actual use.

Cinnamon shifted in her sleep and nuzzled into my wing. All the weirdness surrounding the situation aside, it was admittedly pretty cute, and I couldn’t help the corners of my beak curling up into a slight smile. I crossed out that last bit and amended it:

No actual use. Some minor uses.

Okay. What else? There was definitely more than this, I was sure. There was no way the sum total of the past two days’ annoyances only filled up four bullet points. I tapped the pen thoughtfully against the tip of my beak.

- Beaks. Beaks suck. Make using glasses/mugs/cups complicated.

- Mugs, cups, chairs, stairs. Fuck stairs. Doors.

Oh god doors. Just the thought made my tail twinge.

…And now that I wasn’t ignoring it, the pain in my tail was very noticeably still there. I was going to need some more ice for that. Hopefully, there would still be snow in their Canterlot. It’s in the mountains, so probably. Maybe the food stallion would come by again and I could ask if he had any ice. I would’ve gone to track him down and check but… yep, snoozing mare still occupying my wing still totally out of it. Like a goddamn cat jumping up into your lap and falling asleep. I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

So, back to not thinking about things by thinking about other things. I was done with this section of notes for now, so I skipped ahead, leaving several blank pages to fill in later. Time to be a little more professional about things.

Through some combination of as-of-yet undetermined factors of cosmic fuckery, I have found myself in the rather unique situation of being unexpectedly transported to an alien world and stuck in the body of one of the local species: a griffon.

It all went to shitstartedwent to shit at approximately 7:10 pm last Friday as I was riding my bicycle home from class…

Author's Note

Hey, so, fic isn't dead. I just suck. Thats all.

And as an apology for so sucking so much (but mostly as a way of guilting myself into actually getting this chapter written in a timely manner1) I commissioned a piece from the amazing artist Sinrar to go with this chapter.

Look at it! Look at iiiit. I love it. Its awesome. And so is Sinrar. So y'all should absolutely go check out his shit. Because its great.
https://twitter.com/Sinrar1
https://www.deviantart.com/sinrar

12Though, considering I did that back at the start of January, nearly six months ago, I'm not sure how effective I'd say that plan was.

2Footnotes in Author's Notes. Because no one can stop me.

2.4 - Canterlot

...inclusion of the low-pass filter had the desired effect of lowering the AC voltage ripple to an average of twenty millivolts peak-to-peak, with spikes of approximately ninety millivolts peak-to-peak once per period, both of which were well within the specified maximum ripple of one-hundred fifty—

“We’ve arrived, sir.”

“Bweh?” My head jerked up from my lab notebook and I stared in confusion at the stallion at the end of the car.

“We’ve arrived at Canterlot station,” he—the conductor—repeated. “You can disembark now.”

“Oh, right. Thanks,” I said with a nod and got to work collecting the mess of loose papers around me into a stack that I then stuffed between the pages of my lab notebook.

Over the last few hours, I’d managed to distract myself by filling six more pages with detailed notes on my personal experiences over the last two days.1 When I’d sufficiently exhausted that I’d read a few absolutely-riveting chapters of my electronics textbook until I got bored and went back to Friday’s lab notes to fill some of the sections I’d been too lazy to fill in at the time. Going back through it and filling in the details from memory proved to be an excellent distraction. And I’d even managed to somewhat get a hang of handwriting so it was actually legible.

1Read: Bitching about griffons and magic.

That done and with the notebook safely tucked away into my bags, I then turned to deal with the next problem: the fact that somehow—through all the commotion of the train pulling into the station, the conductor’s announcement, and my shuffling around—Cinnamon remained resolutely asleep by my side. She was an impressively heavy sleeper.

“Hey, Cinnamon. We’re here,” I said, raising my voice. Her ear flicked at the mention of her name but she didn’t seem to wake. I gave my right shoulder a shake to jiggle the wing she was laying on, which had an effect opposite to the desired on: in response to the movement, Cinnamon just stretched a bit and nuzzled deeper into the feathers, smiling contentedly in her sleep.

Cinnamon was an impressively heavy and cuddly sleeper.

I reached out and gave her shoulder a little shake and was rewarded for my efforts by having my hand snatched up and hugged. I rolled my eyes and sighed. This was getting ridiculous. I wasn’t even sure anymore if she was even still asleep or was awake and just fucking with me. So I gave the arm she was clinging to a vigorous shake and yelled, “Ay! Cinnamon.! Wake up!” from only a few inches away from her ear.

That finally got the desired effect from her, but not without some suboptimal side effects. When she awoke she did so suddenly, eyes flying open, head jerking back, and forehoof shooting forward—right into my face—before sliding off the seat with flailing limbs and a cry of surprise.

I emitted a reflexive “Squark!” and reeled back from the sudden blow, clutching my beak with both hands and hissing through gritted teeth.

A moment later, Cinnamon popped up from the floor, looking around in confusion. Then she saw me cradling my face and in an instant she was right up on me and in my face, eyes wide with worry. “Oh Celestia. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you. Are you okay?”

I blinked rapidly at the sudden space invasion and stuck out my hand to gently hold her back at arm’s length. Thankfully, she relented and gave me a bit of breathing room, but still hovered close. I sat there cross-eyed and worked my jaw up and down while inspecting my face for damage. My upper beak certainly smarted when I poked it, but everything seemed to still be in place and nothing was loose or broken. “I think I’m good. Yeah. Just, uhh… wow. Hooves hurt. Who knew?” I chuckled weakly and fixed my askew glasses.

Cinnamon stepped back and settled onto her haunches on the other side of the seat. “Sorry. You startled me. I didn’t mean to hit you in the face.”

“Nope. Yep. Pretty sure I had that one coming. Shouldn’t have had my face there. But you weren’t waking up and I needed my limbs back,” I said and began manually stretching my wings out. “We’re here, by the way.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” she said and hopped down off the seat to put on her boots and bags.

I finished stretching as much as I could in the confines of the train car—which wasn’t much—and then packed them back safely away in my jacket. I scooped up the rest of the bags and we made our way out of the train.

The conductor stallion was standing outside the door as we disembarked. “You two have a good night.”

“Thanks, we will,” Cinnamon replied cheerily.

I followed Cinnamon onto the platform and into the cool night air—noticeably colder now that we were up in the mountains. Cinnamon trotted confidently out into the streets. She seemed to know exactly where she was going so I stuck close by her side as she led the way.

Even with what little I could see, I could tell that Canterlot was a big city. Probably bigger than any I’d ever been to personally. Maybe not by area, but definitely by density. There was very little unused space on the mountainside. And while it probably wasn’t reaching population densities achievable if it’d been full of skyscrapers or whatnot, what it lacked in quantity, Canterlot made up for in quality.

Grandeur seemed to be the name of the game here. Streets and buildings made from carved white stone and trimmed with gold and purple, easily exceeding the vibrancy of the many multicolored ponies who still filled the streets. Opulent towers poked up throughout the skyline. Waterfalls poured off the mountain, between the tiers of the city and off the side of the cliffs. And of course, there was the view. Whenever we passed through an intersection of major roads I had a clear view out to the edge of the city and off the mountainside.

Though there was something that bothered me about the view, and it took me a while to pinpoint just what it was. When I did, I stopped in my tracks so I could be sure I was seeing it right. I couldn’t see the horizon. Past the moonlit edge of the city there was nothing but open air and the stars beyond, with a not-insignificant number of the clouds being at an angle below horizontal. I did some ballpark order-of-magnitude calculations and came to the definitive conclusion that these mountains were—at a minimum—really fucking tall.

Cinnamon noticed I’d stopped and she called back, “Something wrong, Birdy?”

“Hmmm? Oh, no, it just really hit me how stupidly high up we are,” I said and resumed walking.

She nodded. “Yeah. The ponies who built Canterlot wouldn’t settle for anything less than the highest point on the entire continent. Probably trying to one-up Cloudsdale, I think. Anyways, Canterlot is high up enough that it’ll probably take you a bit to get used to the thinner air. Don’t wanna overexert yourself until then.”

Oh, yeah. We were definitely high enough that if this planet was anything like Earth—which seemed to be more-or-less the case—that I should’ve been experiencing symptoms of altitude sickness: dizziness, shortness of breath, ears popping on the ride up. But I hadn’t gotten any of that. Only thing I’d noticed was the drop in temperature.

“I don't think that’ll be an issue. I feel fine. I think my bird bits are actually doing me some good for once.”

“Oh right, pegasi don’t have any problems with the altitude, makes sense griffons wouldn’t either. I’m not that lucky, though. I’ve been down in the lowlands for too long. I’m definitely feeling the altitude. Good thing I’ve got you to carry my stuff, eh?”

Now that she pointed it out, Cinnamon was clearly exerting herself a lot more than she’d been during this afternoon’s march. She was breathing more heavily and I didn’t have to struggle just to keep pace. “Want me to lighten your load some more?”

“Thanks, but I should be fine. We’re almost there.”

Sure enough, it wasn’t long before we turned off the main streets and into a residential area with a tight cluster of nearly-identical homes, and then to one in particular that still had its interior lights on.

“Oh good, she’s still up,” Cinnamon said and knocked on the front door. We both waited on the doorstep for a minute or so before an older unicorn mare opened the door. She had a light purple coat and auburn hair that was currently wrapped up in curlers. She stared up at me from behind her thick-framed glasses.

“Hello?” the mare said to me, the look of confusion plain on her face.

“Hey,” I said and returned the confused look. I glanced down at Cinnamon and took a couple steps back so the smaller mare was more visible.

“Hey Auntie Lilac,” she said with a wave.

The unicorn seemingly noticed Cinnamon for the first time and her face immediately lit up. “Cinnamini!” she said and swooped in to wrap the smaller mare up in a tight hug. “How’s my favorite niece?”

Cinnamon giggled and returned the embrace. “Favorite niece? Don’t let ‘Nilla hear that. She’ll get all jealous and try to usurp me.”

“Oh hush. It's no secret and she doesn’t mind. And you didn’t answer my question. How are you?”

Cinnamon rolled her eyes. “I’m doing good. It's nice to see you, Auntie,” she said, nuzzling her aunt's neck.

While the two ponies cuddled on the doorstep, I stood by and casually inspected the nearby flower garden. After what would have definitely been an uncomfortably long time by the standards of another planet, I loudly cleared my throat.

“Oh. Sorry, Birdy,” Cinnamon said sheepishly and slipped out of the hug. She gestured to me. “Auntie Lilac, this is my friend, Garrett. Garrett, Aunt Lilac.”

I smiled and held my hand out to Lilac. “Pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”

She put her hoof in my hand and I carefully shook it. “Nice to meet you as well, Garrett. And please, just call me Lilac. I’m not old enough to be a ma’am yet.” She back backed inside and held the door open with her magic. “Come in.”

I followed Cinnamon inside, keeping a mistrustful eye on the door until my tail cleared the threshold. The interior of the home was compact, even by pony standards. Much like Canterlot in general, there was very little unused space. Nearly every bit of wall or floor space was in use in one way or another. But not to the point of being cluttered or cramped. Instead, it made the home feel cozy. Lived in. Homey. It was just a little bit of a challenge for me to navigate between the bits of furniture, especially with the added bulk of the bags I was carrying.

Lilac closed the door gently behind us. “So, what brings you by at this hour. I didn’t know you were even back in town.”

“We just got off the train, actually,” Cinnamon replied.

“Ah. What’s the occasion? Finally stopping by for a visit?”

“A bit more than a visit. I was getting tired of it down there in Riverstone and decided it was time I came back to the city. So I quit my job there,” Cinnamon explained.

Lilac gave Cinnamon a level look. “Quit, or got fired from?”

“...A little of both?” Cinnamon replied with an all-to-innocent smile.

Lilac just hummed and nodded slowly, the look on her face saying this wasn't the first time she’d heard this. “So! Riverstone. Is that were you two met?” she asked, her gaze shifting to me.

“Uh, yeah. Well. I uhh…” I trailed off. How much of the situation were we going to share? I wasn’t sure. I shot Cinnamon a pleading look.

Thankfully, Cinnamon rescued me and took the lead. “Yeah, we met in Riverstone. Birdy here was traveling in the area when he had something of an unexpected landing. An unexpected and hard landing.”

Lilac gasped and gave me a look of shock. “Oh no. You crashed?”

Ha ha. Did I ever. Ok. Thanks, Cinnamon. That was a story I could work with. The best lies were more-or-less the truth, right? “Yeah, I don’t really remember too much of what happened, just that one moment I was cruising along, the next I was face down in the dirt, aching all over. Jacked up my wing, too.” I turned to the side to show her my wings being held in place by my jacket.

“That's terrible. Did you break something?” Lilac asked.

“Oh, it's not too bad,” I said. “Just pulled a muscle. It’ll heal in time, but it's enough to keep me grounded until it does.”

Cinnamon continued. “And in typical flier fashion, he wasn’t really prepared for an extended journey on the ground.”

“I wasn’t really planning to spend any amount of time in Equestria,” I added. “But then I got stranded right in the middle of it, without a clue as to what to do. Fortunately, Cinnamon here was generous enough to lend me a hand. Err, hoof.”

“Yep. I offered to help him out until he was able to get home,” Cinnamon said.

Lilac grinned and ruffled her niece’s mane with a hoof. “Atta girl. Always looking out for others.”

“So, yeah. I’m moving back here to Canterlot. And here I am. With a friend.”

“And you need a place to stay,” Lilac completed.

Cinnamon nodded and said, “Yeah, just until I can get my own place. And umm…” Her ears flattened back and she awkwardly rubbed her foreleg. “Mom doesn’t really know I’m back in town yet. I’d like to keep it that way a bit longer. So I came to you. Sorry to just drop in on you like this with no notice.”

Lilac waved a hoof dismissively. “Nonsense. You’re still welcome here anytime you need, no matter the reason.” Then she turned to me. “And the same for you too, hun. If my ‘Mini saw fit to help you out, I see no reason to turn you away either. You two make yourselves at home here for as long as you need.”

I bowed my head to Lilac. “Thank you very much, Lilac.”

“Thanks, Auntie. You’re the best,” Cinnamon said and hugged her aunt.

Lilac gave her a quick hug back. “You’ll need to move some boxes off the bed—I’ve been storing some things in there—but otherwise the guest room is still all made up and ready for you. Although, it might be a bit more of a squeeze than before.” Then she loudly whispered to me, “Cinnamon’s never brought anypony as big as a griffon home before.”

I stiffened and waved my hands back and forth. “Oh, no, we’re not like that—”

“We could be~!” Cinnamon sing-songed.

“—We’re not like that,” I repeated firmly.

“Really now?” Lilac said, raising her eyebrow at Cinnamon. “Well then. My apologies for assuming, Garrett. It's just that I do believe that this might be a first for her,” she said with a chuckle.

Cinnamon huffed and folded her arms across her chest. “It’s not.” Then she scrunched up her face in thought. “At least I think it’s not…”

“In any event,” Lilac continued, “I suppose one of you can take the couch.” She pointed to the floral-upholstered couch in the nearby living room. “It’s old, probably not the most comfortable to sleep on. But if you’d prefer not to share the bed…”

I cut her off with a wave of my hand. “Last night I slept in a bush on the side of the road. The couch will be perfect.”

“Well alright, I’ll get you some pillows and sheets from the closet,” Lilac said.

With it up in front of me, I noticed just how dirt-caked my claws had gotten. I looked down at the rest of myself and frowned. “Oh, and speaking of sleeping in a bush. I'm kinda disgusting and would hate to destroy your furniture with mud. Do you have a shower I could use?”

Lilac gave me an apologetic smile. “Ohh… Sorry, hun. No shower. Just a tub that you are welcome to try to use. Bathroom is at the end of the hall by the—” she was cut off by a long yawn. She looked at the clock on the wall. “Oh dear. Looks like it's that time already.” She turned to Cinnamon. “Now, I’d love to stay up and hear all about what you’ve been up to, and how you met such a handsome gentlegriffon, but I really should be getting to bed. I need to be up early for work tomorrow.”

“That’s fine, Auntie. We can talk tomorrow after your shift.” Cinnamon walked over and wrapped her aunt in a hug. “You go get your sleep.”

Lilac gave her a small nuzzle. “I’ve missed having you around. G’night, ‘Mini.”

“Night auntie,” Cinnamon said and returned the nuzzle.

Lilac smiled and walked off, disappearing around the corner. After the sound of a closing bedroom door came, I shuffled over to beside Cinnamon. “So… ‘Cinna-mini’?” I said simply, grinning stupidly.

She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Yes. That's one of the nicknames she and Sis gave me. I’m the shortest in the family despite being the only earth pony. Sis thinks it’s hilarious. Auntie thinks it’s cute. I think it’s whatever because we all know that if push comes to shove, I could buck either of them—or anypony else—clear across the room if I feel like it.”

I casually leaned over so I loomed head-and-shoulders above the small mare. “Whatever you say, Mini.”

She snorted and poked me in the chest with her hoof. “I could probably knock you all the way off the mountain, you dang pile of feathers. Now go wash up before I prove it.” Then she turned and walked off to the kitchen.

I chuckled and set the bulk of my stuff down in a pile by the couch before making my way down the hall to the bathroom.

It wasn't until I was actually in the bathroom that it dawned on me why Lilac had said I could “try” to use the tub. There was a bathtub, yes. But just like everything else in the home, it was… compact. Even by pony terms. There was no way I was getting into it. I’d probably fit my head but nothing more. I sighed. After three days trudging through, and occasionally laying in, mud and dirt without a chance to clean off, I’d take what I could get.

I turned on the water and started the tub filling, making use of the bathroom’s other utilities while it did. When the water in the tub was a few inches deep I turned off the faucet and swiftly dunked my face below the surface, swishing back and forth until my entire head was sufficiently drenched. I pulled it out and let the bulk of the water drip down my face for a minute or so before squeezing out the rest and getting to work scrubbing three days of accumulated dirt off my hands and feet. Thankfully, the wraps I’d had on while walking around outdoors had kept the bulk of the dirt off of me, but it was still disgusting to see just how much dirt came off my hands from only a cursory washing. I’d been eating with those hands! How the hell did ponies live like this?

I also took a few minutes to give the aforementioned wrappings a quick wash. The lightweight fabric they were made from was already looking pretty tattered and had holes from stepping on particularly jagged stones. At this rate, I doubted they’d last more than a few days before I had to replace them entirely. Luckily, I had bedsheet to spare, so that was something I could do easily. Satisfied with the basic cleaning, I drained the water and returned to the main room.

Cinnamon was reclining in an armchair reading something when I returned. As soon as I stepped into the room, her ears turned in my direction and she looked up. “Finally, you’re out.” She hopped off the seat and trotted briskly towards the bathroom. “I made some food. Yours is on the table,” she said as she brushed past me and closed the door behind her before I had a chance to reply.

I shrugged and sat at the table to eat the extra-late dinner she’d prepared. That done, I made my way to the living room. There was a pillow and some sheets there that I assumed Cinnamon must’ve fetched while I was washing up. I spread them out over the couch, put my jacket and drying footwraps in a neat pile next to the couch, and then settled down onto the couch. I laid back, closed my eyes, and tried my best to relax.

Sometime later the sound of returning hoofsteps came from the hallway. A few moments after they stopped, Cinnamon quietly called out to the room, “Where’re you at, Birdy?”

“Here,” I called back, not bothering to sit up.

The hoofsteps came around the end of the couch by my head. I tilted my head back to look at her from upside down.

“Sup,” I said.

“Already hitting the hay?” she asked.

“Ayup. Tired.”

“Mmm. Yeah, it's been a long day. I should probably be off to bed too.”

“Mhmm. G’night,” I said and closed my eyes again.

There was a pause. “…It’s just that after that nap on the train I’m not all that tired yet. I could definitely stay up a bit longer.”

“Hmmmm,” I hmmed.

“…Do some stuff. Y'know. Burn off some more energy.”

“Try to keep quiet if you do.”

Another, longer pause. “…Okay. Good night, Birdy.” She started walking off. Then she stopped. “Hey, if the couch doesn’t seem like it's doing it for you, you’re free to join me in the guest room. We could definitely share the bed. It’s a queen. And I’m not that big, we can make it work.”

I sighed heavily. “Good night, Cinnamon.”

She giggled. “Just putting it out there. Sleep well, Birdy.”

The lights clicked off and she walked off, the sound of her light hoofsteps fading away down the hall.

I lay there listening to the sounds of the city for a while. Though I was physically exhausted after a long day, my mind wasn’t nearly as tired. It was still a long, long while before sleep finally came to me.

It was not a peaceful night.

Creatures with impossibly large claws and far, far too many feathers haunted me in my sleep. Faceless agents that grabbed me and hurled me into the surrounding darkness. Trapping me alone in the inky void.

No. Not alone. Things lurked in the shadows. Rustling came from all around. Eyes in the darkness. Many eyes. Swarming around me. Mobbing me.

Then another pair flared up. Large and blue. Watching me. A heaviness wafted off the presence. All the others faded back into the shadows, not daring to approach it.

I shrunk back. Tried to get away. To flee from this unknown. It did not pursue. It only watched. Observing from a distance.

When the bright eyes winked out there was nothing but stillness in the dark.

I awoke to the shrill beeping of my alarm. My arm shot out instinctively and I blindly groped around for my watch so I could silence the damned thing. When I couldn’t immediately find it, I cracked open an eye and was hit with a wave of confusion from the unfamiliar surroundings. Slowly, I processed where the hell I was.

Couch. Cinnamon’s aunt's place. Canterlot. Equestria. Not Earth.

Fuck.

Except that first part wasn't quite accurate. I wasn’t on the couch as I was supposed to be. At some point, I must’ve rolled off it because I was currently laying on the floor. That was fine, though. The rug was comfortable enough for me.

I found my watch and, with only marginal difficulty, hit the silence button. Then I brought the display close to my face to see just what unholy hour it was on this godforsaken morning. 8:31 am. Monday. I sighed heavily and rolled over away from the light, tucking my face into the darkness beneath the couch. With all the chaos of the last few days, I’d forgotten to disable my alarms for the upcoming vacation.

For a long while, I lay there on the floor. I didn’t want to get up. I wanted to go back to bed. Or die. Or both. Even across the fucking universe, some things remained unchanged and one of those things was that Monday mornings were truly the worst. But as much as I longed for it, for some damned reason sleep wasn’t coming back. So I just continued laying on the floor staring at the couch legs.

Then it struck me. The one thing that could make life worth living.

I smelled coffee.

Also breakfast. But mostly coffee.

Swiftly as I could midst my morning haze, I rolled up onto my feet. Then I stumbled across to the dining room, wings dragging along at my sides, not even bothering to figure out where the fuck my glasses might’ve gotten lost to. Glasses could wait.

Cinnamon and her aunt what’s-her-name were sitting at the table, chatting over breakfast. Cinnamon said something to me as I approached. A “good morning” I assumed. I merely grunted in response and continued past to the kitchen where the coffee was brewing. Talk could wait.

Quick as I could in my groggy state with still-unfamiliar limbs, I prepared a mug and then walked on three legs back to the table. I kicked a wing out of the way and crawled up into the chair where an empty third plate had been set. Food could wait. Coffee first.

I gingerly brought the mug up to take a sip, only to be caught off guard when it smacked into the stupid fucking beak that was still on my face.

Right. Beak. No lips. I had that shit to deal with. And scalding-hot beverages had that rather annoying feature where you can’t just upend them and pour it all into your mouth the way I’d been so far.

I sat in silence and glared at the mug as it cooled. Cinnamon and her aunt were talking to each other. Something about work for Cinnamon to do. Or the work her aunt was doing. Or something. I wasn’t really listening. I was waiting impatiently for either the temperature of the mug in front of me to drop sufficiently or my willingness to burn my mouth to rise.

Once those two levels crossed, I pounced the mug and swiftly gulped down half of it. I didn’t care that the two ponies were staring at me like I had a third eye. I paid them no mind. I simply sat back, cradling the mug close in my claws and drank the rest of the sweet sweet life-giving drink over the next several minutes.

At some point, Lilac got up from the table. Apparently, it was time for her to leave for work. She packed up a small set of saddlebags, had a predictably-cuddly goodbye with Cinnamon, and then left. I waved as she did. Cinnamon took the opportunity while she was up to detour to the kitchen and refill her plate. This gave me a while to sit and nurse my coffee in relative peace and silence, which suited me just fine.

Three days had been far, far too long to go without it. Never again.

Sadly, no good thing can last forever and it wasn’t long before my cup ran dry and Cinnamon took a long enough break from stuffing her face to breath.

“Good morning, Birdy,” she said with a wide smile.

“Mornin’,” I grunted and got up to refill my mug.

“So, what’s on the to-do list for today?”

“Come again?”

“Have you given any thought to what you’re gonna do next? Do you have a plan?”

“Do I have a plan? You’re asking me?” I shook my head. “My plan is still little more than figuring out fucking anything at all. I don’t know anything about this place. You’re the one who said that someone here might be able to help with that. Where would you start if you were in my shoes? If you had a question about magic or whatever,” I asked and returned to the table with the second cup of coffee.

“I don't really know,” she said with a shrug.

I narrowed my eyes. “You don’t know? Didn’t you live here, in this area, since, like, when you were a kid?” I pointed to one of the hanging photos with a filly that I was pretty sure was her. “That’s you, right?”

“Well, yeah,” she conceded. “But whenever I had a magic problem I’d just go bug my sister about it. But she moved out to Manehatten about a year ago.”

“I take it that’s not nearby.”

She shook her head. “About a whole day by train back east.”

“Lovely.” I slumped back in the seat. “Okay. We’re looking for some kind of specialist or something, right?”

She nodded. “Probably, yeah.”

I continued, “Subject matter experts. Is there, like—I don’t know—a school or something where they teach magic shit? Where there might be professors or whatnot. Those do exist here, right?”

“Schools? Yes. We have schools, Birdy,” she said flatly. “And yeah, there’s a bunch of academies in Canterlot. Pretty much all at least deal with magic, if not focus on it totally.”

“And they got professors or someone I could pester?”

“I imagine so. I’ve never been to one myself.”

“Alright, that’s probably where we—I—should start,” I said correcting myself. I didn’t want to imply anything on her part. I was imposing enough as it was.

Cinnamon, though, was having none of it. She rolled her eyes and said, “I’ll happily come with you, Birdy. I didn’t drag you to one of the largest cities in Equestria just to leave you and have you get lost or something.”

“Thanks. I can definitely use the help.”

“I know,” she said smugly. “It's no problem. We’ll head out once you’ve finished breakfast. Or started for that matter,” she said, pointing to my still-empty plate. “You gonna eat anything or are you just gonna drink all of auntie’s coffee?”

“I will. I just needed my coffee first,” I said defensively. Then a thought struck me. “Oh. Ooo. Err. Maybe we don’t need to go just yet.”

“No?”

“No. I uhh, I’ma need some time to think on how to approach this so whoever we talk to actually takes me seriously.”

“That’s fair, I suppose. Hmm.” She tapped a hoof in her chin. “Okay, how about this. I’ve got some errands I need to run in town. We can do those first while you do your thinking or whatever. Maybe talk to some ponies. Then we can harass some eggheads later when you’re ready.”

“Sure. Works for me.”

“Goody!” she said with a happy clap of her forehooves. “Now hurry up and eat so we can get to it. I want to get out there before it gets too busy.”

2.5 - Preliminary Research

It turned out that Cinnamon’s list of errands included shopping, inquiring about employment opportunities in the area, and more shopping. Mostly for clothes. That's right. The nudist horse was running around clothes shopping. I really didn’t get it. But while I didn’t get it, I wasn’t going to complain much. By tagging along, I got a combination escort-guide-babysitter to keep me from doing something really stupid or committing some horrible social faux pas that would upset the Canterlot ponies’ delicate sensibilities while I asked around for information, and Cinnamon got someone to carry a steadily-growing pile of bags and to nod along when she asked which one of two identical hats went better with her coat. It was a pretty good arrangement.

It went on like that for the better part of the morning. I followed her around while she visited businesses, both as a customer and prospective employee, using me as a pack-griffon for stacks of job ads and purchases. Around noon we took a break to snag a bite to eat from one of the many market stands. Then we went back to it. “Just a few more things,” she’d said.

Presently Cinnamon was haggling with a shopkeep about the price of a scarf. Or she was just flirting with the mare. I couldn’t rightly tell where one ended and the other began. In fact, the same could’ve been said about the two ponies, too, if they weren’t clearly color-coded. Never before had I seen price negotiations involve so much physical contact.

Eventually, Cinnamon broke off from the other mare and trotted over to where I sat—far from the action amid a mass of shopping bags that didn’t belong to me. She hoofed through a nearby scarf display.

“That’s the third time you’ve gone through that one rack. You almost done here?”

Cinnamon huffed. “Just about. I didn’t know we were in a rush. Have you come up with your battle plan yet?”

“I believe so, yes, back when you were doing whatever the hell it was you were doing in the last shop before you ended up not getting anything.”

“I was looking for a winter hat, but they didn’t have any for an earth pony in my size.”

I stared at the hat she was wearing. The same one she’d been wearing since Riverstone. “But you already have a hat. And it’s spring.”

“Not yet it isn’t. And it’s a lot colder up here in the mountains.”

“Sure, yeah, it's cold-er. But I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘cold’”

She pouted and her ears flopped back. “Well, not all of us can be as excessively poofy as you.” She poke-poked her hoof into my thick chest feathers. “Some of us have to live with shorter coats. So unless you want to share…” she pressed her side up and into the nook below my wing and batted her eyes up at me.

I stepped once away from her. “Nope. Just get your stupid scarf or whatever. Aaaanyways…” I pulled a notepad out of my coat pocket and pointed to a line I’d written. “While you were doing that, I talked to the nice old guy behind the counter, and he told me about these ‘Archives’, which I guess is like a public library of sorts?”

She cocked her head. “Wait. You want to go to a library now? What happened to going to a school to bug an expert?”

“Oh yeah. No, that’s still the plan. It’s just that, in my experience, professors of advanced sciences aren’t big fans of answering completely moronic questions. Sure, they say they’re all about the teaching, but they like talking about the things they spent decades studying, not answering elementary school questions. So, I wanna try to get some basic understanding of the subject before talking to anyone for real. I think if I have at least half a brain cell’s worth of topical knowledge going in that I’ll stand a lot better chance of not being immediately pointed to the nearest sanatorium and ruining any chance of getting their help.”

Cinnamon rolled her eyes. “I don’t think that’s as big a problem as you’re assuming, but sure, we can do that. More knowledge can’t hurt I suppose.”

“That’s my thought,” I said, flipping the notepad shut. “You ready to go?”

“Hmmm… in a bit. I want to look at a few more of these,” she said, flicking through the hanging scarves.

“You are unemployed, right?” I asked incredulously. “Got no income? Or did someone back there hire you already and you’ve just been tossing these flyers on me just to see how high you can stack them?”

She threw a scarf at my face so it draped over my eyes and beak. “Hush, Birdy. Don’t question a mare’s needs, it’s bad for your health.” Then she turned away and called out to the shopkeep. “Excuse me, miss, do you have this one in a lighter shade of blue?”

With a deep sigh, I pulled the hanging fabric off my beak and sat back down to wait.

Despite being a massive nerd my entire life, I didn’t actually have much personal experience with brick and mortar libraries. Thank—or blame—the likes of Google and Wikipedia for that. I only went to the campus library to use the printers and so had never really gone further than the lobby. The last library I’d gone to for the purpose of reading a book was the one at my elementary school when I’d been required by a teacher to do so for a book report.

So stepping into the Canterlot Archives, I was a little stunned by the sheer enormity of the place. Before us stood a large circular chamber ringed by several levels of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A long, spiraling ramp wrapped up and around its interior circumference all the way to the ceiling. A massive skylit dome topped it off, letting in beams of light to provide illumination. And that was just what was visible from where we were standing near the entrance. The rows of shelves on each floor stretched back out of sight and into the depths of the building.

“Damn,” I stated simply.

Cinnamon let out a low whistle. “That’s a lot of books.”

“Yeah…” I stood there dumbfounded for a solid minute before remembering why we were here and began to look for someone to help us navigate this labyrinth of paper and ink.

Just to one side of the entryway was a front desk, behind which sat a single unicorn mare. She bore an almost uncanny resemblance to the girl who manned the front desk at GU’s library. Young, lanky, glasses and braids. An open book sat on the desk in front of her. She didn’t even look up as I approached, her attention fully focussed on the book.

“Hey,” I said but got no response. Not even an ear twitch. I cleared my throat. Still nothing. The only movement was of her eyes tracing across the pages. I waited a minute more to see if she’d notice our presence. She didn’t.

I leaned over to the side and whispered to Cinnamon out of the corner of my mouth, “Is this what it's like talking to me?”

“Yes, but with less book and more twitchy muttering.”

“Right…” I said with a slow nod. I stepped forward and clacked a talon on the desk, right in front of the book. “Excuse me, miss.”

The mare jolted and looked up. “Oh! Sorry.” She levitated a bookmark into the book, closed it and scooted it aside. “Can I help you?”

“Yes, I hope so. I need to do a bit of research, but I don’t know where to start. I’m hoping you—or someone else—can point me in the right direction.”

The mare beamed. “Of course. I can help you with that. What is your research about?”

“I’m looking for stuff on, uhh… magic,” I replied, grinning awkwardly.

The mare’s smile faltered somewhat and she not-to-subtly looked me up and down. “Oh. Well, the magical reference section is on the second floor. Any particular area of focus?”

“Uhhh…” I trailed off. Like subject? Field? I don’t fucking know. Yeah, but she knows you don’t know. That’s why you’re asking. “I’m looking for stuff on… magical transportation? Like, really long distances. Really long. Really quickly. By magic.”

“Like… teleportation?” the mare offered.

Teleportation was a thing? Sure, why not. “Yes?” I quickly glanced to Cinnamon, who simply shrugged. “Yes,” I reaffirmed with a nod.

“Reference, magical, arcane sciences, section T-five, teleportation,” the mare recited.

“Ok, good.” Might as well try my luck again with the other half of the problem. “And how about, uhh, trans…figuration?” I said, hoping I’d at least gotten close to something real here.

The mare nodded. “Transfiguration, transformation and transmutation. Also arcane sciences, all in t-thirteen, I believe.”

I took a moment to commit all that to memory. “Right, thanks.”

“No problem. I’m happy to help. If you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to ask.”

Cinnamon and I made for the stairs up to the second floor. That’d been surprisingly simple. The organizational system in use sounded almost logical. Understandable even! I followed along the posted signs leading through the maze of shelves. There was an obscene amount of books here covering who knew how many topics. By following the given instructions, the subjects gradually narrowed down. My eyes darted between the cards on the ends of the shelves. Telecommunication, telekinesis, telepathy…

“Teleportation! Here we are.” I walked up to the row of shelves and looked down the aisle. There was a sizable amount of books here. It’d take me a good bit to scan them to see if anything was useful to a dumbass like myself, but it wasn't totally unmanageable. Might even get out of here before—

“This one is also all teleportation,” Cinnamon said from around the corner. She trotted further. “And part of the next one too.”

I went over to look. The next row of shelves went about twice as far down as the first. There had to be at least… one, two, three… a metric fuck-ton of books on teleportation alone. I winced and dropped down to my haunches.

Cinnamon walked back and gently patted my side with a hoof. “Looks fun. You like books, right Birdy?”

“For now. I’m not sure how much longer that will be the case,” I grumbled, looking for the nearest reading desk to set up camp at.

“You learned anything yet, Birdy?” Cinnamon said from atop a fortress built from the book’s I’d discarded over the last several hours, plus some more I hadn’t touched. Sometime during that period, she’d also disappeared and returned with snacks, which she now consumed while sprawled across a throne of books in defiance of the clearly posted ‘No Eating’ signs in the area.

“I don’t know,” I said, flopping onto the tome-covered reading desk. “I don’t understand anything in these books. Shit might as well be Greek.”

“Hmm, the whole magic thing a bit more complicated than you expected?” she asked while adorning a fortress wall with crenellations.

“Uhhg. I’m gonna be honest here. I don’t really know what I expected to get out of this. I think I just hoped to find a ‘Practical Uses of Wormholes for Dummies’ or ‘So You’re Stuck on an Alien Planet: A Starter’s Guide.’” Indeed, I had gone to see if such books existed in one of the other sections, but I’d gotten lost doing so and retreated back to the relative safety of this corner of the library. This place really needed an online catalog. With a search engine. I planted my face on the desk. “Man I miss Google.”

“What's a google?” Cinnamon asked.

I sighed wistfully, “The most amazing thing to happen to clueless people in the history of ever.”

There was a shocked “eeep!” and I glanced up from the desk to see the librarian mare from earlier. She looked horrified at Cinnamon’s current antics before she quickly regained her composure. She faced me and the many open books around me and asked, “Did you find what you were searching for?”

“Yes. No. I don't know.” I let my face fall back to the desk. “I found what I was looking for but what I was looking for wasn't what I needed.”

The librarian cocked her head but remained silent.

I sighed. “I don’t know magic. I’m just trying to solve this stupid problem and I don’t even know if I know what the problem is.”

She gave a sympathetic nod and got to work reshelving some of the books adjacent to Cinnamon’s fort. “That can be difficult. Have you tried asking somepony at one of the universities?” She held up one of the discarded books in her magic and pointed to the cover. “Professor Cosmic String teaches at the Arcane University, not far from here. He may be able to help you. If not, perhaps try the magical help center there?” The librarian gave Cinnamon a death-glare as the other mare rolled out of the fort, toppling a wall in the process.

“Wait, what? There’s a dedicated help center for this crap?” I asked incredulously.

“Definitely not from around Canterlot, are you?”

“What gave it away?” I nearly growled. I shook my head. “Sorry, no, I’m not. But she is,” I said, pointing to Cinnamon, who was busy pouting as her book throne disappeared in a cloud of telekinesis.

Cinnamon shrugged. “I already said I don’t know hardly anything about this stuff. Sis’ was my magic help center.” Her brow furrowed. “Then again, she was also the source of most of my magical problems too. Especially in our teen years.” She shuddered.

The librarian nodded. “With this many unicorns in one place, it's become something of a requirement to have a dedicated place to get professional help with magical problems. Accidental or otherwise.”

“Well, thanks. I think we’ll go check that out.” I stood up and quickly tidied up the mess of books on the desk before me. I waved to Cinnamon. “C’mon, Cinnamon. Let’s go,” I said and walked off. When Cinnamon caught up and we were out of earshot of the librarian I added, “Let’s go before you get us perma-banned from every library in the city.”

Walking through Canterlot’s Arcane University was a strange experience. Well, it was the same kind of strangeness I’d been dealing with since dropping into Equestria. Eerie familiarity juxtaposed with complete foreignness. It was just turned up to eleven here.

It was a university. A school. A place of learning full of nerds and knowledge just like where I lived and spent one-hundred percent of my time back home. Magic or science, ponies or humans, it made no difference. The atmosphere was the same. These were academic hyper-nerds. My people. Students who would shun the company of others in favor of pursuing individual academic goals, or occasionally gather together to participate in the geekiest hobbies that would surely get them shunned by outside observers. I swore there was even a group of ponies sitting around a battlemap rolling dice.

And yet… those students were unicorns, and the subject of study was literal fucking magic. The school was an honest-to-god magic school. For wizards. Unicorn wizards with their fucking magic breaking the laws of physics like it was no big deal. Those laws exist for a reason, damnit!

And of course, these weren’t my people. Not even remotely. I was about as much of an outsider as you could get. I was a goddamn griffon with my hornless pony companion, so the two of us stuck out like a sore thumb. Though by now I was used to the strange looks I was getting from Canterlot ponies. And apparently we stood out so much that some of the unicorns approached us and gave us directions to the magical help center. We didn’t even have to ask. So that was something of a plus.

When I got to the help desk, we found it to be staffed by a pair of extremely bored-looking unicorn stallions who were lounging around. Student workers, by the look of it. One of which was reclined and asleep with a magazine over his face. The other had his head resting in his hoof and looked like he was about to join his companion at any moment. I immediately had flashbacks to the time I was unfortunate enough to need to visit the IT desk at GU. I shook off the unpleasant memory and approached the guy who was still awake and watching me.

“What's your problem,” he asked with clear disinterest.

“Hey, uh, I’ve got a magic problem and was told to come here?”

“Yup.”

“I, uh… It—” I started, not sure how to approach this. I looked to CInnamon for help, but she smiled and simply made a “go on” motion with her hoof. “It happened about two days ago—err, no. It was three. On Friday. Friday evening. I’m not really sure what exactly happened because I kinda blacked out during it but one moment I was home and the next I was waking up in some pony’s basement.”

The dude just raised an eyebrow.

Cinnamon spoke up. “Birdy here isn’t from around here.”

“Well that much is clear,” he said flatly, his expression saying he wished he could currently be not here.

Cinnamon frowned and continued. “He’s not from Equestria, or Griffonstone, or anywhere on this planet. He got magically dropped here in Equestria and doesn’t know how to get back home.”

I winced. The dude’s eyes went wide and he used his magic to smack his napping associate with the magazine laying on their face. The other pony woke with a jolt and looked around in surprise.

The guy we’d been talking to said, “Let me make sure I got that right. You’re saying you’re not from this world?”

Guess we were doing this again. I sighed and explained, “Nearly seventy-two hours ago I was involved in a freak accident that ended with me getting knocked unconscious. Sometime after, I woke up here in Equestria. I have never before been to Equestria nor even knew it existed.”

“So you’re some kind of alien griffon from another world,” the first guy asked.

I averted my gaze, looking down at the floor, and mumbled, “...mmnot actually a griffon. Just got turned into one at the same time I arrived here.”

“Not a griffon? What are you then?” the recently-awoken guy asked.

I sighed and rolled my eyes. “A human.”

“Never heard of it,” he said with a shake of his head.

“Didn’t imagine you would.”

“So what’s a human like?”

Rather than try explaining again, I got out my wallet and school photo ID card and showed it to him. He took it in his magic, grinned, and showed it to his companion. “Check it. This is high quality. ‘Griffonstone University, Student’. I didn’t think they had any universities in Griffonstone.”

“Not the Griffonstone on this world. It's the one on mine,” I said.

“Oh yeah? You got another one there? How about that.” He grinned and floated the ID card back over to me.

Cinnamon snatched it out of the air and took a look at it. She scrunched up her face. “That’s what you actually look like?” she quietly asked me.

“Mhm...” I said to her and took the card back, putting it back in my wallet.

“You got any more stuff from your world?” the first unicorn asked.

“Sure. Bunch more IDs, books, computers.” I shook my bags. “Whole bag full of stuff. Wanna see?”

“Nah, that won’t be needed.” He floated a folder out from under the counter and flipped through its contents with his magic. “Alright, Garrett. You say you need help getting back home to your planet?”

“Ayuh…” I said flatly.

“Well, there’s a guy here you should talk to…”

“Cosmic String?” I offered.

He stopped flipping through the folder and looked up. “You’ve talked to him before?”

“No. We went to a library earlier. His name was mentioned,” I explained.

“Ah. With good reason. Expert on theoretical interplanetary magical travel. He is definitely the pony you should talk to.” He pulled a sheet out of the folder, wrote on it, and floated it over to me. It was a map of the campus with an ‘X’ and room number next to one of the buildings. “Good luck with your journey, traveler.”

“Thanks…” I tucked the map into my pocket and walked off.

Cinnamon trotted up alongside me. “See? Now was that so hard?”

“I’m keeping my expectations low so as to not be disappointed if it leads nowhere. Research tends to do that.”

Finding the office was easy enough, especially with the map and multitude of students to point us in the right direction along the way. When we were standing outside the door, I said to Cinnamon, “Will you let me do the talking this time? No offense, but these guys tend to respond better when you’re just as much of a nerd as they are.”

“Alright. I’ll just be there to slap you if your brain breaks.”

“Thank you.” I took a moment to compose myself and get my thoughts in order. Though I didn’t really get the time to do so because Cinnamon was already going up to knock.

“Wait don’t—” I said right as her hoof struck the door.

“Don’t what?” she asked.

A muffled voice came from inside the office. “Come in!”

“...Knock just yet,” I mumbled as I trudged forward and pushed through the door. An old unicorn stallion was sitting behind a desk, busy scribbling away at some arcane-looking glyphs on a scroll of paper. “Professor Cosmic String?” I asked him.

“That’s me,” he said without looking up from the scroll.

“We uh, we’re wondering if you could help us with a bit of a problem,” I said.

“Just a moment, please. I’ll be right with you.” He spent another minute or so writing before he set his pen down and looked up at us. He glanced between Cinnamon and I and his eyes narrowed behind his spectacles. “…You don't look like the usual students of magic.”

It took a significant portion of my self-control to not roll my eyes and say “Ya think?” Instead, I said put on my most professional face and said, “No. We’re not. Is that an issue?”

He shook his head. “Shouldn’t be. It’s simply that the vast majority of ponies who visit my office are students who come for assistance with their homework assignments. Hardly anypony else has need of my particular expertise outside of purely academic needs. It’s not often that my work can help the common pony! And now I get two, and one a griffon to boot!” He grinned widely. “So, what can I help you with? Something interesting I hope?”

“We’re here because we—well, I—have a bit of a magical predicament that we suspect you can assist with. Something involving extremely long-distance teleportation and such? At least we suspect it does,” I explained.

“We heard from a librarian that you’d be best to talk to about it,” Cinnamon added.

“Ha! Well, I dare say teleportation and such is something of my specialty.” He motioned to the wall behind him covered with certificates, diplomas and the like. “But you already knew that. Ha! Come, come, do sit down.”

I set my bags down on the floor and sat down in the chair in front of the desk. Cinnamon dragged another seat over and sat next to me.

The professor magically adjusted his glasses. “Now then, am I correct in inferring that this predicament of yours is a practical problem and not purely theoretical in nature?”

“That is correct. Practical, and afflicting me personally,” I said, slipping into my ‘academic discourse’ voice.

Professor Cosmic String clapped his forehooves together. “Splendid! Do tell me all about it and we shall see how I can assist.”

“—and don’t come back!” Cosmic String shouted before slamming the door shut.

The professor’s demeanor had done a rather sudden one-eighty during my explanation. Now I sat, dazed, on the ground outside his office after being swiftly and bodily evicted from it via telekinesis.

After I regathered my bearings I got up and rapped loudly on the door. “Professor, please! I know it sounds like I’m fucking with you but I’m not! I really need your help!”

There was a POP and a flash and a freshly-written note poofed into existence hanging on the wall next to the door. It read: No solicitations from anypony not currently or previously enrolled at an accredited magic university. I slumped against the wall. Cinnamon plopped down next to me. I turned to her and said, “I thought you said crazy magic bullshit wasn’t unusual around here.”

“It is. Although I’ll admit I’ve never heard of anypony coming to Equestria from another world. But I would have thought that somepony who works in a totally theoretical field of magic would have a bit more of an open mind!” she said, raising her voice so as to be heard inside the office. There was no response. She huffed. “And that’s still no reason to be rude and kick us out like that.”

Truth be told, if I was in Cosmic String’s place, I’d’ve probably kicked us out far sooner. And that would be before even accounting for the fact that apparently he got semi-regular visits from hippies, nutcases, and pranking students. I had a pretty good idea of who two of those students might have been.

“I guess it also doesn’t help that I look the part,” I said with a forced laugh.

Cinnamon nodded. “Yeah, you kinda do. Most ponies would be more than a little bit skeptical when somepony looking the way you do comes at them saying the things you’ve been saying.”

“And yet… when I did exactly that to you… you believed me. Or at least didn’t laugh in my face.”

“I guess you just have a trustworthy face?” she said with a shrug.

“He certainly didn’t think so,” I said with a snort. “…Thanks for that, by the way.”

“For what?”

“For listening to me and not leaving my ass on the side of the road.”

“Aww. You’re welcome, Birdy.” She smiled and leaned against my wing.

I didn’t push her off or pull away. I didn’t do much of anything for a few minutes. I just sat there on the floor and tried to avoid thinking about the current situation. Unfortunately, I was pretty bad at not thinking.

“Well, fuck,” I said. “Dude was the ‘leading expert’ or whatever and he’s not going to talk to me anymore. Now what?”

Cinnamon looked up while leaning on my side. “We could ask around some more. He might be the leading expert, but he’s not the only expert. You had your beak in a lot of books written by lots of smart ponies, we could find their authors. Betchya some are even here at this school.”

“We could… but I’m not really in the mood anymore,” I mumbled. I didn’t really feel like getting laughed out of any more offices today.

“Well I have something for that too.” Cinnamon hopped up onto her hooves and grinned. “There's this place not too far from here that I used to visit a lot. We can get a drink and think. How does that sound?”

“I’d rather not. I’ve told you I don’t drink, yeah?”

“Well then I'll drink and you can think. Or you can just eat. The food is also pretty great. They make the best grilled cheese in Canterlot. Come on. I’m buying.” She grabbed the front of my jacket in her teeth and yanked, to little effect. I shook my head and chuckled as I let myself be pulled up and along after her.

2.6 - Study Break

“The Bent Bit,” I read off the dinged-up sign hanging over the pub’s battered-looking doorway.

“Yup. Don’t let the exterior fool you, it's a lot nicer on the inside,” Cinnamon said as she led the way in.

Compared to the exterior, the interior looked actually habitable. It wasn’t all that different from some of the places in the G.U. area that Jack had dragged me to on occasion. Pretty typical pub stuff, there was the bar itself, a dining area with tables and booths, and—new to any venue I’d been—an area that I was pretty sure was a dance floor, currently empty. Some chill music was playing from seemingly everywhere though I couldn’t see any speakers. Magic, I guess. Overall, if I ignored the fact that a good chunk of the occupants was still staring at me, I’d say the place almost felt comfortable. Cozy even.

Though as we made our way in, I began to notice a pattern with those occupants. And the staff. It wasn’t a subtle pattern; the features were obvious. The curvier muzzles. The prominent eyelashes. Less bulk. And of course other obvious external indicators.

“They’re all women,” I said quietly so only Cinnamon could hear.

“Yes, they are,” she replied.

“Is that a typical quality for this place?”

“It’s one of its many appeals, yes.”

“…And you thought it’d be funny to bring me here,” I said, a small scowl forming on my face.

“Maybe a little bit,” she said with a smirk. “But don’t worry. Yeah, it's mostly just mares who come here, but stallions aren’t unwelcome.” She sidled up next to me and waggled her eyebrows. “Especially the cute ones.”

I did my best to look unphased by that. ‘Y’know I’m not a stallion, right?”

She huffed. “You know what I mean. I just don't know what a guy griffon is called.”

“That makes two of us.” Though I did know a little on that subject that might be relevant but I refused to share with Cinnamon the fact that the name for a male bird is generally ‘cock’. She didn’t need any more ammunition. “Is it too late to refuse?”

“C’mon. It’s not bad. Plus, since you’re broke, I’m buying. You get free food! Nopony can argue with free food.”

“Free food is the best food,” I agreed.

Cinnamon led the way to the booths. Thankfully she picked one of the more secluded ones instead of a table right in the middle of the place. I didn’t want to stand out any more than I already did. The high backs on the booths was also a blessing for a creature of my size. I undid my hand wraps and did my best to get comfortable while we waited for the waiter.

It wasn’t long before a bright orange mare with a curly mane came to our table with a couple of menus floating in her magic. Cinnamon grinned as the mare approached. “Hey cutie, I haven’t seen you around here before. You new here?”

“Nope!” the waitress bubbled. “Perhaps just never noticed me?”

“No way I’d miss a flank like that,” Cinnamon said, making a point to lean out of her seat and eye her rear end.

The other mare took it in stride. She tapped her hoof to her lips. “Hmmm, maybe it's just been so long that you forgot?”

“Forget a butt like that? Never. That would be a crime.”

There was a short pause before both the mares broke out into giggles and hugs while I looked on in confusion. Fuckin’ ponies, man.

“Cin!” the waitress exclaimed.

“Good to see you too, Citrus,” Cinnamon patted her on the back.

The waitress—Citrus, apparently—pulled back from the hug, still grinning wide. “It's been ages, where’ve you been?”

“I left Canterlot for a bit to do some stuff. But I’m back now.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Yep. Back to stay, hopefully. Say, speaking of which, do you know if Rosie is looking to take on any more ponies? I’m uh, looking for work.”

“You need work?” Citrus asked, sounding surprised.

Cinnamon snorted and rolled her eyes. “Yeah yeah. Huge shocker. I know. But really, any openings here?”

“Well, you’d have to talk to Rosie about that. She might be willing to take on another waiter. Or a dishwasher, if you’re really serious.”

“You’d be surprised. Thanks, I’ll think about it. Later though.” Cinnamon pointed to the still-floating menus.

Citrus set them down in front of us. “Of course. So can I get you something to start you off while you look over the menus or do you already know what you want?”

“You already know what I want. But I’m pretty sure Birdy needs a bit to look it over,” Cinnamon said with a smirk while I poured over the menu in confusion. There was no sign of cheeseburgers, chicken, pizza, or any other of my usual fast-food preferences. “Just start us off with the veggie tray for now.”

Citrus noted it down. “Alrighty, and anything to drink? Same as usual, Cin?”

“Sure, why not. Just one though.”

“And you?”

“I—er. Uh,” I stuttered. Fuckin’ putting me on the spot with fuckin’ alien menus. Fuckit. “Just water’s good,” I said.

“Ookay, I’ll be right back with those,” she said cheerily and trotted off.

Barely a minute later she dropped off two glasses. Cinnamon’s smelled distinctly fruity and alcoholic. I idly went to sip from my own glass and made a glorious discovery. There was a straw in the glass! A straw I could actually fucking use with a beak! No awkward shenanigans required! Just popped the end of the straw into the corner of my beak and boom! I was drinking like a normal fucking person! I’d have to see about getting more of these to keep with me.

Elated at having one of my many griffon-based peeves quashed, I went back scanning the menu while sipping proudly. “Question,” I said while I reviewed the vegetarian listings for the eighteenth time. “What the fuck are griffons even supposed to eat? You got any idea?”

“Uh no. Not really, actually,” Cinnamon replied. “The few griffon’s I’ve met just ate whatever pony food was around. But they also made it a point of complaining about it.”

“Can’t imagine why… Half eagle, half lion—or whatever brand of big cat I am—I’m pretty sure I should be having a bit more protein than this.”

“Hmmm. But you don’t really look like an eagle. Maybe you’re one of those birds that eat fruits and nuts,” Cinnamon said with a smirk.

I lowered the menu and raised an eyebrow. “I’ll admit I’m no expert on birdology, but I’m pretty sure the pointy beak and huge fuckoff talons”—I raised my hand—”aren’t for intimidating fruit. Besides, my guts are a hundred percent cat.”

Cinnamon nodded. “True. true. Maybe you’re just an upscaled housecat, and we should be finding you a nice squirrel or mouse.”

“Yeah, or maybe I eat pony? Ever think of that?” I said and took another sip.

“Eating ponies? Mreeoow.” She pawed at the air and grinned. “Take a mare to dinner before you do that.”

It took a second for my brain to process that, and when I did, I choked on my water, nearly knocking over the glass. I pounded on my chest and while I gasped for air.

At the same time, there was a burst of laughter from a returning Citrus. She stumbled, dropping the veggie tray she was carrying, but managed to catch it and its contents in her magic.

Cinnamon, for her part, was trying to act casual while sipping at her own drink but was completely undermining her efforts with her gratuitous use of tongue on the straw.

Citrus set the tray on the table, took out her notepad, and turned to me. “Okay then, do you know what you want?”

“Not really. I don’t know.” I tossed the menu down. “What has the most grease and the fewest plants?”

Citrus picked up the menu and took a moment to skim through it. “Probably the grilled cheese?”

“Does it have any flowers on it?”

“Uh no, it's just a grilled cheese.”

“Perfect. I’ll take three.”

“Sure thing.” She scribbled on her pad and took the menus in her magic. “Shouldn’t be too long,” she said and left.

Sure enough, there was hardly any wait before our food came. Cinnamon and I chatted about stuff while we ate. She told me more about the pub, the local area, and other topics of general non-importance. Inevitably though, the conversation moved onto what our—or more accurately, my—next move was in figuring out how to get me home.

“Obviously I can just keep asking around, but after today I have even less faith in that yielding results anytime soon. Though I don’t know what else to do.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll help you no matter how long it takes,” Cinnamon assured with a smile.

I sighed and slumped back in my seat. “And then there's that. I can’t just keep bumming off you like this. You’re just pouring time and money into me and I'm doing fuckall in return.” I held up a hand to forestall her inevitable dismissal. “And I know you’re going to smile and say it's fine, that you want to help, and I really appreciate it, but it’s not cool of me to just keep taking like this.” I sighed and flopped face-down onto the table. “Maybe someone will buy a textbook on alien technology for a few hundred bucks. Or maybe I should take a look at some of these job apps myself. We’ve got no fucking clue how long it’ll take to figure this out… If I ever do…”

Cinnamon placed her hoof on my hand. “Hey, no. None of that. You’ll figure it out soon. Don’t worry.”

I didn’t raise my head, but rolled it to the side and stared at the hoof for a while. “I hope you’re right. I really do. But you can’t know that.”

Evidently, that wasn’t the right response, because Cinnamon got out of her seat and came around to my side of the table. She wrapped her arms as far around my torso as she could, nuzzled into my side and said nothing. It helped a little.

I sat up and gently patted her on the head. “Thanks.”

Cinnamon let go but remained leaning against my side. “Alright. New rule. No more talk about any of that for the rest of the night. At least until tomorrow we’re going to pretend that what we told my aunt is true. You’re just a regular griffon and your biggest problem is that you have to stay here in Canterlot for a bit longer than you’d like.”

I snorted. “That might not be as easy as you think, considering that I’m not even from the same planet. I still don’t know shit about griffons. Except that they’re not common because I haven’t seen a single other one and ponies keep giving me weird looks for being one. What even is the deal between you ponies and griffons anyways? It's not predatorial, is it?”

“No, it's not. Honestly most of those weird looks you’re getting from Canterlot ponies are because you look like a dirty hobo and have nothing to do with you being a griffon.”

I looked down at my bedsheet-kilt-thing. It was collecting a fair bit of dirt. “Okay, yeah, That’s fair. But back to the point, if I’m going to be pretending to be a griffon, it’d help if I knew more than precisely fuckall about griffons, ponies, or, well, fuckin anything here, really.”

“Well, I can’t tell you a whole lot about griffons, as I’ve only met a couple myself. And they didn’t really talk all that much. Which I guess is a perfect starting point. Griffons just mostly keep to themselves in the Griffon Kingdom across the sea, and what few that do come over to Equestria all seem to be kinda dickish about it…”

Over the course of dinner, I got the Ponies 101 introductory course from Cinnamon. Now, Cinnamon was not a teacher, and even though the discussion ran much longer than dinner lasted, there’s only so much you can cover in a couple hours. So the material was mostly steered by the pile of questions that’d been bugging me since arriving here plus whatever else Cinnamon thought to mention at the moment. Things like how the nation was ruled by a pair of super-powerful magical horse princesses, or what the deal was with the markings on the asses of every pony1.

1Apparently the butt markings are not just the latest trend in horse fashion, but are actually something called “cutie marks” and are a very important part of horse culture. Every pony gets one (literally by magic) when they come of age and learn what their “special talent” is. Because apparently everyone had a specific thing they were naturally awesome at. Though when I asked Cinnamon what her mark2 meant, she just said she had “a talent for spicing things up” while grinning playfully and I couldn't tell if she was being serious.

2A scattering of darker brown spots that I’d originally assumed were natural coat markings, but upon further review I guess kinda looks like sprinkled cinnamon powder.

When the lecture concluded, I’d collected a nice pile of notes that would surely entertain the sociologists back home for quite a while, but more importantly I felt like I knew enough about life in Equestria and the Griffon Kingdom that if I was left alone without Cinnamon, I might be able to maintain my cover identity of someone new to the country, but at least from the same planet. At least if I didn’t meet any other griffons.

The talk had pushed late into the evening though, and now it was time to head back to the apartment. Cinnamon went to the counter to pay, and I made a quick trip to the little boy’s room. Little colt’s room? Or would it be the little little colt’s room to account for the horses already being smaller than—

—I went to take a piss before we left. When I came back, I didn’t find Cinnamon at the table or at the counter where I’d last seen her. I took a moment to look around and saw her over at the bar talking to a stallion. He was a well-groomed unicorn stallion with a white coat and jet-black mane. I’d seen him enter the pub earlier and he’d gone straight to the bar, a fact I’d only taken note of because he was the only other guy here. I was totally unsurprised Cinnamon had noticed his entrance as well and jumped on the chance to do her thing the moment we'd finished talking.

I rolled my eyes and made my way over to them. As I got closer I was able to pick up what was being said and how it was being said. And unless Cinnamon's flirtation tactics involved raised voices and aggressive tones, it was plain I'd been incorrect in my previous assumption of Cinnamon's intentions. Not wanting to intrude on the heated argument that clearly didn't involve myself, I hung back just out of sight from the bar, though still within earshot. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but it was impossible to not overhear some of the discussion.

“—and don’t follow me again,” Cinnamon said.

The stallion scoffed. When he spoke, his speech was eloquent and deliberate, although slightly slurred. “It can hardly be considered following if you’re never here. I’ve been visiting this establishment for some time now.”

“Well I’m here now. Which makes it following. So get lost. Don’t make me involve the guard. Wouldn’t want daddy to find out about that, would you?”

The stallion frowned. “Am I not allowed to have a drink?” He gestured wide with the pint glass held in his magic. “Enjoy the view?”

“You’ve been here for an hour and you didn’t even try talking to anypony else. You’re obviously not here for the other ponies. So congrats, you found me. So what. Do. You. Want?” Cinnamon growled.

“Why Cinnamon, is it not obvious? I just want to talk to you. You leave for months and no pony knows where you went.”

“Almost like I didn’t want certain ponies following me after that shitshow,” Cinnamon said levelly.

“I was worried about you,” he said, putting a hoof to his chest and sounding hurt, or at least like someone trying to sound hurt.

“Oh, I’m sure you were. You weren’t the least bit worried when I left.”

“About that…” he rubbed the back of his neck with a hoof. “I am sorry for how I treated you… then. Your being away has given me a new perspective on our relationship.”

“Has it now,” Cinnamon said, her voice dripping with skepticism.

“Indeed it has. It's why I wanted to talk to you. After I… brushed you aside, as it were. I thought I didn’t need you. That the… others would be enough. But I was mistaken. It wasn’t the same without you. I didn’t realize how much excitement you brought into my life.”

“‘Excitement,’” Cinnamon repeated dryly. She sighed and shook her head. “For a moment there I thought you might’ve actually changed. But no, you’re exactly the same. You only ever cared about what you could do, not who you were doing it with. I was just the only one who could keep up.

“But that's not me anymore,” she continued. “The time away from the city did wonders to clear my head. Let me get my priorities straight. So no, I don't think I'll be spending any more time with you. Good luck with whatever the hay it is you do these days. Don't come looking for me.” Cinnamon hopped down from the barstool, “Ah, there he is. Just in time. Hey, Birdy!”

I perked up. The gaggle of mares I’d been using to block line-of-sight between me and the bar was getting up from their table. Cinnamon had noticed and was waving her hoof over her head at me. I did my best to look like I’d just come back and casually walked over to the bar area.

“You were in there a while, did you fall in?” Cinnamon asked with a smirk.

“Oh hah hah,” I fake laughed. “No. I don’t even think I could if I tried. The challenge was figuring out how to keep these from getting in the way.” I shook the tips of my wings that were sticking out behind me, well past my rump. “So we ready to go?”

“Yup, just gotta grab my bags from the booth,” she said.

“You’re not going to introduce me to your friend,” the stallion interjected.

Cinnamon rolled her eyes and let out an exasperated sigh. “This is Garrett. He’s a friend from out of town.”

“Ay,” I said with a minimal upward nod in the stallion’s direction.

“Hmm.” The stallion—to be hereby referred to as ‘Sir Douchington’—took this time to plainly look me up and down, not even trying to mask his judgmental expression as he did so. His brow furrowed. “Is that a… bedsheet you’re wearing?”

“Ayuh. Most of one at least,” I replied flatly.

“Euhgh,” was the sound he made in response as he shrunk back and wrinkled his nose in disgust.

“Cool. Glad we could have this talk. Really useful. Now we can go,” Cinnamon said and walked off. “C’mon, Birdy.”

“Gladly,” I replied and followed after. Behind us came the heavy and uncoordinated clop of hooves as Sir Douche trotted after Cinnamon, giving me a wide berth and another repulsed look in the process. “Cinnamon, dear. You’re really going to just leave things like this?”

“That’s pretty much what I said, isn’t it?” she said without looking back.

“But remember all the fun we had together.”

Cinnamon stopped and turned around. “Oh, I do. Or rather, no, I don’t remember all of it. And neither do you. And that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? But you never cared about that. Still don’t, it seems,” she said, pointing with her nose to the many empty glasses at the bar.

Doucheface persisted. “Cinnamon please. See reason. You’re not going to leave me for this turkey, are you? Just look at him!” he exclaimed. “You deserve so much better!”

My eyebrow raised. I wasn’t quite sure how offended by that I was supposed to be, considering how off it was. I was considering saying something to that effect when Cinnamon marched back up to him, getting right up into his face, making him shrink back. “Let me make a few things perfectly clear. One”—she jabbed him in the chest with a hoof—“I already left you. Months ago. Get over it. Two”—she jabbed again—“Screw you. I’ll do what I want, with who I want. You don’t get a say. And three!”—this time hard enough that he nearly lost his balance—“You are about the last pony I’d rate as ‘better,’” she finished with a snarl.

The unicorn regained his composure and dusted his chest off. “I—buh—wuh. I will not stand for being disrespected in such a manner. I am—”

Cinnamon cut him off with a wave of her hoof. “Ah ah ah. Nopony gives a flying feather what you are. You can take your entitlements and shove them up your pampered tail hole. Now if you’ll please excuse us, we were just lea—”

SLAP!

The sound of Douche’s hoof slapping across Cinnamon’s cheek rang out across the pub. The general murmur around us ground to a halt as the other patrons all stopped to look on in surprise. Douche stood there, hoof still raised by Cinnamon’s head, with a satisfied look on his face.

Worry washed over me and I rushed to Cinnamon’s side. She held up a hoof to stop me. “’m fine,” she said cooly, working her jaw up and down and rubbing her cheek. She shot Doucheface a single icy glare and continued walking away.

“Mmm. You’d do well to remember your place,” Sir Douchington said with his nose upturned pompously.

My worry was immediately replaced with rage, and I was about to do something impulsive and probably a little violent when Cinnamon beat me to it. In a flash, she galloped the short distance back, landed on her front hooves in front of him, pivoted one-eighty and bucked him square in the chest with both rear hooves. Sir Douche was sent flying backward in an arc that ended with him slamming into the side of the bar with a massive crash, knocking over stools and a few drinks and ending with him laying on a heap on the floor with broken glass and spilled alcohol falling on top of him.

Cinnamon stood there glaring, head hanging low and huffing like an angry, miniaturized bull. It seemed like the whole pub was completely silent but for Douchington’s pained moaning and Cinnamon’s heavy panting. Somebody coughed. I stood there speechless like the rest, eyes going back and forth between my petite pony companion and the significantly-larger stallion sprawled a dozen feet away. I was immediately reminded why you’re never supposed to walk behind a horse. Even a tiny one.

Cinnamon took a few deep breaths and seemingly calmed herself. She shook her head and turned to the older unicorn mare behind the counter, “Sorry about the mess, Rosie. I’ll pay for that.”

Rosie, for her part, was sedately wiping a glass with a rag, seemingly unphased by the whole scene. “Don’t you worry none about that. It was just a matter of time ‘fore he got what was coming to him, and truth be told I was thinking of doing something similar myself after the way he was talking,” she said, moving the rag to the spills on the bartop.

The clatter of Doucheface flailing about in the wreckage intensified. He sat up and groaned loudly. A few sparks shot weakly from his horn and his eyes went wide. When he spoke, he was slurring his words even more than before. “What in Celestia’s name—” He shook his head and growled in Cinnamon’s direction. “Damned mud pony cunt. Look what you did to my horn!” he shouted indignantly.

“It’s just a bump,” Rosie said. “You’re fine. Get over it—”

“—And yourself—” Cinnamon interjected.

Rosie continued, “—and get out. I put up with you before, but if you’re going to be attacking my patrons, I don’t wanna see your sorry mug ‘round here again. So git.”

Cinnamon turned away from the scene and walked towards the booth with our things. “Let’s go,” she muttered quietly as she brushed passed me.

“Right…” I said and turned to slowly follow, but my focus lingered on Doucheface. He’d gotten back up onto all fours but was clearly stumbling and leaning against the bar for support. He was also practically fuming now, the white fur on his face looking pink. He looked like he was going to pop an artery with how tense he was. His head hung low and his eyes were darting around like a rabid animal, jumping erratically between points in the crowd of staring ponies before focusing on a point on the ground.

And then—quicker than I would’ve expected in his drunken and dazed state—he dropped his head low, grabbed something off the floor in his jaws, and charged towards Cinnamon while she walked away.

It took longer than I’d’ve liked for my brain to process what I was seeing: the bumbling miniature horse was running at Cinnamon’s back with a large shard of broken glass hanging from the side of his mouth in what had to be one of the most ineffective-looking knife lunges in history. The sheer absurdity of it gave me pause. Still, an angry meatsack with a blade charging towards someone who wasn’t expecting it was an issue.

Now, I was not well-versed in the field of hand-to-hand (hoof-to-claw?) combat—or any kind of self-defense for that matter—but this was little more than an applied physics problem.

Given: Relatively stationary meatsack A (Cinnamon) undesirably in the path of knife-wielding meatsack B (Lord McDouche).

Solution: Alter the position of the closer meatsack (A) by applying momentum through collision from meatsack C (myself).

That is to say, when Douchehead came running, I lunged towards Cinnamon and rammed my shoulder into her side like a football player in order to shove her out of the way.

There were two points of note with this action, however. The first was that my math was a bit off, as math tends to be, and the collision was far more elastic than anticipated, leading to a much higher degree of momentum transfer from C to A. The second point was that my reflexive movement didn’t factor in all the recent alterations and additions to the outline of my body.

The result: Cinnamon went flying totally clear (sorry!) with a confused squeak while my own momentum dropped significantly, meaning I wasn’t as far out of the way as I’d’ve liked to be when meatsack B arrived, improvised knife and all. The shard of glass cut into my jacket and across the bound wing that I’d forgotten existed. There was a sharp pain in my left wing before I tumbled to the floor after Cinnamon while Douchenugget McChucklefuck continued past in his charge.

I took a moment while on the floor to inspect the damage. It did not look pretty. The glass had managed to cut a jagged gash through the fabric, feathers, and into the tissue below, just past the ‘wrist’ joint of my wing. Blood was already pooling around the wound and staining the feathers as red as the wool above. It was almost underwhelming in how much it hurt, given how it looked. Granted, it hurt like a bitch, but somehow not nearly as much as other recent injuries I’d had, such as those involving tails in doors. Maybe my brain still wasn’t quite sure how to deal with those nerves. Or maybe it was just the adrenaline.

And I was still processing what the shit had just happened. I looked incredulously at Douchenugget as I got back up on all fours. “Did—did you really just try to stab someone for turning you down? What in the everloving name of fuck is wrong with you?”

He’d recovered from his charge and was now facing Cinnamon and I again, bloody blade still held tight in his teeth. “‘uzz off, ‘urkey. Dis doesn’ involve you,” he mumbled around the improvised weapon.

I glanced at the gash on my side that was currently oozing significant quantities of blood, then back at him. “I think it just fucking might!” I yelled back. I yanked my jacket’s zipper up hard, pulling the jacket uncomfortably tight around my chest and applying pressure to the injured wing. I had no idea how bad the cut really was, but I was pretty sure applying pressure was a good idea.

“You’re jus’ a plaything ‘o her. She doesn’ care about you! She’ll use you un’il she’s had her fun and then run off!” Doucheson growled, circling around me.

I sidestepped to keep him in front of me. “Buddy, you’ve got some serious issues. Not the least of which is having no goddamn clue what the fuck you’re talking about. And that’s coming from me. So back off!”

“You don’ ge’ ‘o ‘ell me wha’ ‘o do!” he yelled, not backing off in the slightest.

By now Cinnamon had recovered from being bounced out of the way and was back on her hooves, though a little wobbly. “W-what was—” then she saw me and rushed to my side. “You’re hurt!”

“Lil’ bit,” I grunted, my attention locked on the enraged unicorn in front of me.

Cinnamon followed my gaze across to the stallion and pleaded. “Don't be stupid. Stop this. The guard will be here anytime.”

The stallion just growled and kept trying to get around me to Cinnamon. I could now see that not all the blood on the shard of glass was my own; there was a deep cut on his left cheek that was bleeding steadily, though he seemed oblivious to it.

“Don’t think twitchy here is interested in not being a dumbass,” I muttered to Cinnamon, pushing her back with one arm. “Stay behind me.” I widened my stance, making myself as big an obstacle as possible, and making sure that obstacle stayed between Cinnamon and the Determinedly Deranged Douche.

I shot a quick look around. The few other ponies nearby had cleared back. Which was good, I guess. That left just me and Douche here to square off. Just a couple of dumbasses fighting in a bar for no fucking reason. Isn’t there supposed to be a bouncer or someone to stop shit like this? Fucking hell…

This really wasn’t the kind of situation I wanted to be in. All the information I knew about what to do in a knife fight focused on how to not be involved in a knife fight. Things like running the fuck away from whoever was doing the stabbing. But that wasn’t really an option. Dude did not seem like he was going to let off anytime soon, and I didn’t want to find out who out of the three of us was the faster runner. So I did what seemed the most reasonable at the time.

It was probably also one of the stupider things I could’ve done. I pounced. I sprung up and forward, balling my hand into a fist and bringing it down in an arc across the top of his muzzle in an attempt to disarm the drunken nutcase with a knife before he had time to react or do something really stupid like hurt someone else.

Miraculously, it actually fucking worked. DoucheMcFuck seemed caught off-guard and the blow knocked the shard of glass from his mouth and sent him staggering back. The glass shattered on the ground and I quickly swiped the bits away.

Disarmed but not deterred, Douchebag lowered his head. “Stupid pigeon,” he spat bloodily before charging at me like a one-horned bull.

I braced myself with my claws and took the charge, being careful to direct his horn upward and away from myself. It wasn’t particularly sharp, but it didn’t need to be if enough force was applied.

From what I could tell, Douchebag was only a little above average in size for a pony stallion, and so still a whole head shorter than myself, which for quadruped proportions equated to a much larger difference in mass than it did for bipeds—about a factor of two or so by my estimate. That extra mass helped a lot because it was about the only thing I had going for me in this fight. I had a general lack of experience, both with fighting in general and with the whole “being a quadruped” thing. There was also the part with how my opponent was clearly trying to do me real bodily harm while I wasn’t about to rely on a bird of prey or big cat’s tried-and-true fighting style of “just tear holes in the fucker till they stop squirming.”

That meant I was stuck on the defensive, focusing on blocking and dodging strikes as he reared up and swung his hooves at me. I was mostly successful. I did take a hoof or two to the ribs—and let me tell you, hooves hurt a lot, even through all the padding I had—but for the most part I was able to avoid getting hurt even more while I tried to find a way to restrain him.

After he missed with a particularly zealous attempt to crush my head with both front hooves in a huge downward blow, I had an opening. While his head was still hanging low from the swing, I lunged up over him and wrapped my arm around his neck in a sort of front headlock. With our upper bodies locked together I could finally really put my mass to use. I pushed against him. He pushed back against me, but I dug my claws into the wooden floor for added traction. I felt his hooves start to slip behind him. I kept pushing, building some speed and eventually he slipped and fell, flipping onto his back.

Before he could recover, I got on top of him, putting my knee on his foreleg and the rest of my weight across his chest. I grabbed his horn and used it to hold his head down on the floor. I really didn’t want to get impaled by that thing, or blindsided if whatever was keeping him from using his magic stopped.

He tried bucking and heaving beneath me, trying to throw me off, but I clung on tight. He kicked futilely at my gut with his hind legs but couldn’t do so with any real power from his current position, so it was little more than an annoyance.

“Stop fighting you goddamn psycho,” I shouted down to him. “I’m not trying to hurt you!” The response he gave was another angry snarl, so I used the grip I had on his horn to slam his head against the floor once, twice, and then leaned in close to his face while he was dazed. I dropped my voice to barely above a whisper and spoke right into his ear. “But between you and me, this would be so much easier if I just did. Griffons clearly aren’t built to be pacifists. I could end this so easily if I just used the tools I was given.” His eyes went wide and he thrashed some more beneath me. “Heh, I’m still not even one-hundred percent sure anything here is even real. Could all just be my fever dream. Would it even matter if I were to, say, tear your throat out with my bare hands?” I clenched the claws on my free hand and dragged them across the floor right in front of his face, leaving a trio of gouges in the wood that quickly filled with the blood trickling down my sleeve. “I’ve never done that before, but hey, try everything once, amiright?” I hissed with a grin and then pulled my head back.

A wave of dizziness hit me when I did. Oh, right. Blood getting all the way from my side down to my hand probably wasn’t a good sign. I was definitely feeling a little lightheaded, and maybe a tad bit giddy.

Doucheface took that moment of wobbliness to thrash violently again, this time succeeding at breaking out of my loosened grip on his horn. He bit down on my scaly forearm and squirmed out from under me. He got up and stood opposite me in a half-assed fighting stance. “Y-you’re insane!”

“Hmm, maybe. Probably. You wanna stick around and find out?”

“I’m not running from you, p-pigeon!”

I internally facepalmed. Fucking hell. What was it going to take to get this fuck to back off? Just moments ago, he looked like he was about to piss himself and flee if I hadn’t been holding him down at the time. But now he was back to being a determinedly dangerous dumbass. I needed to bring the scared animal back at the wheel. My arms and legs were starting to get a bit of a wobble. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep this up.

So I tried something stupid again. Or maybe not stupid. I didn’t fucking know anymore. We needed the horse’s lizard brain to call the shots? Let’s try a little applied zoology. Prey, meet predator.

Steadily as I could, I reared back, spread my arms wide and took a deep breath. Then I unleashed it in a cumulation of all the awkward animalistic sounds I’d been suppressing the last two days. What came out was a single, drawn-out, piercing avian shriek that echoed off the walls and made even my own ears hurt.

Douchebag’s ears flattened back at the sound, his pupils went huge, and he froze in place. I worried for a moment that I’d gotten the opposite response I’d been aiming for before he finally turned tail and galloped out the front door.

I remained standing resolutely for a whole five seconds before the shaking in my knees proved too much and I collapsed to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

“Owww,” I groaned from where I lay with my beak mashed into the floorboards. The lightheadedness had gotten significantly worse. Some part of my brain informed me that was not great.

Cinnamon rushed to my side. “Are you okay?” she asked, her eyes full of worry.

“Uh, yup. Well, maybe not. Iunno.”

“Why did you go and do that?”

“Hmm? Oh. He was gonna… you… knife… make ‘im leave…” I was panting and sweating now, but also felt a chill at the same time. That was kinda annoying.

“Oh Garrett…” Cinnamon pressed her hooves into my bleeding wing.

I winced and watched the blood pooling rapidly around her hooves. “Oh wow. That’s uhh… a lot of blood.” And the blood pooled on the floor under me. “Like a lot. Damn. That’s gonna make a mess. Sorrrry about that. Miss.” I shakily got up onto my feet. “We’ll uh… Whew… We’ll just leave before somethin’ else—” I took a step but failed, slipping and falling onto my stomach in the pool of blood. “...Or not.”

Dang. Good thing my jacket’s already red. That’d be a pain in the ass to get out otherwise.

“Just hang in there, Garrett. Stay with me.”

Someone was calling for help. They sounded worried.

What was there to be worried about? The problem had just run out the door. We did it. Yay…

The last thing I saw before I passed out was several sets of hooves shod in golden armor, accompanied by this weird feeling that perhaps, just maybe, I’d fucked up.

Author's Note

Hey look! An art! (Link)

2.7 - Alterations to the Method

Cold, dark, stone floor and walls.

Heavy metal bars. Chains wrapped around my wrists and ankles.

A prison cell.

Outside the cell, a pony guard in golden plate armor, standing at attention.

I leapt forward and bashed on the bars and shouted to the guard. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my fault. I could explain. Just let me out.

There was no response from the guard. No acknowledgment that I was even there.

Wordlessly, he turned and left, taking the light away with him.

The light was fading. I was being left alone in the cold dark. How could he just leave me like that? I fell to the ground and panicked.

The darkness closed in around me. Encroaching. Entrapping. Isolating. Suffocating. I wanted nothing more than for the emptiness to go away.

My wish was granted. I immediately regretted it.

The scurrying eyes in the dark were back. Watching. Like I was an animal in a zoo. Something brushed against my tail and I jumped.

I stumbled and fell. I curled into a tight ball on the ground. Trying to shut it all out.

Then there was a crack like thunder and the world shattered. I peeked up to see the darkness falling away in shards, leaving behind an entirely different scene.

I was home, in my bedroom, amongst a veritable nest of familiar cables and computers. Moonlight poured in through a window past gently falling snow. Somewhere else in the house a wood stove burned pleasantly.

The door opening drew my attention. Into the room walked a pony-like entity, large and majestic. Dark as the night outside and cool as the falling snow. It had a presence that was powerful and alien. One that I’d felt somewhere before, creeping in the dark. One that sent uneasy shivers down my spine and made me instinctively retreat away.

“Do not fear us,” she spoke, her voice commanding and powerful. “We only wish to help.”

I stumbled back further, not replying and not looking away either.

The entity did not advance, but instead took in our surroundings. “A most curious dreamscape,” she said to herself.

“Dreamscape?” I echoed, the word striking some significance in my mind. “I’m dreaming?”

“Indeed. You are safe. Nothing can hurt you here,” she said, her words washing over me like a soothing blanket. “What is it that has perturbed your dreams so. What has you so distressed?”

I shook my head. “No. I can’t… I-I don’t know.”

“Try to remember,” she encouraged. “I know you can.”

I shut my eyes and I tried to remember, to give meaning to the disconnected bits of floating imagery in my mind. “I don’t… I was at the bar… we were… dinner… I got hurt… that guy… we fought…” I looked up at her and pleaded, “I was just trying to stop him. He was trying to hurt her. I didn’t do anything.”

“It is alright, I believe you. There is no need to worry. You have been through a great ordeal.” She pointed to the bed in the corner. “You should rest, little one.”

“Right. Yeah. That sounds good,” I agreed and went over to the bed. “…but wait. If I’m dreaming already how can I—”

Her horn glowed a bright blue. Her voice was deep and echoing. “Sleep.”

I came to lying uncomfortably on my stomach, in a brightly lit room, with an annoying itching coming from my side. I groggily cracked my eyes open and took in my surroundings. I was in a clean white room, alone, lying in yet another unfamiliar bed. Pretty clearly a hospital room, and I idly mused about how waking up in unfamiliar locations was becoming a trend that I hoped wouldn’t continue.

Remembering the events leading up to waking at this particular location, I rolled and inspected my left side. My jacket was missing, and in its place was a wide roll of gauze wrapped all around my torso and left wing, binding it tightly in place. The bandages around the foremost wing joint were stained dark red, as were most of the feathers on my chest. The bandages were tight and itchy, but I resisted the urge to scratch the everloving fuck out of the freshly treated wound and turned my attention elsewhere.

Hanging by the bedside was a pouch of clear fluid with a tube leading to an IV in my arm. Whatever was in there must’ve been some good shit, because there was a pleasant haziness that covered all my senses and the wing only ached distantly instead of the searing pain from earlier. Probably had something to do with the wack-ass fever dream too.

My jacket wasn’t the only thing missing. The rest of my clothes and bags were nowhere to be seen. Evidently part of the treatment process for wing injuries was stripping the patient totally naked. Well, not entirely naked: I’d been provided a hospital gown that covered most of my upper body while leaving all the parts that needed covering bare to the air. Damn nudist ponies. Normally that would’ve bothered me, but between the exhaustion and whatever pain meds they’d doped me up on, I really couldn’t be fucked to care.

Having seen all there was to see while laying down, I pushed myself up to get a better vantage to look around the room. When I did, my head swam and the edges of my vision went dark. I fell back down onto the small bed with a solid thud that made the bed frame rattle. “Oooffffffffucksickles,” I wheezed and lay on the bed while the world rocked around me.

The clatter of the bed frame must have been pretty loud because not too long after I fell, a mare wearing blue scrubs—just the shirt, no pants—entered the room. “Oh! You’re finally awake.”

“Ayup,” I said from my flopped position.

She trotted over to the bedside. “That’s good. You’ve been out for a few hours. Do you know why you’re here?” she asked while she inspected the IV.

“Mmmm, got in a fight with some fuckwit. Yeah? Pretty sure I won, too.”

“I don’t know about that, but you did cut your wing pretty badly. It should heal, but you need to keep it immobile. Don’t move it. And you lost quite a bit of blood. Don’t try to get up or move too quickly either.”

“Hah, figured that one out myself already,” I said, grinning deliriously.

She gave me a concerned frown. “Just stay put, okay?” she said and left. There was some conversation out in the hall.

A bit later, Cinnamon walked into the room. She had bags under her eyes and a smile that was equal parts exhaustion and relief. She looked about as tired as I felt. “Hey, Birdy,” she said softly as she made her way over to the bedside.

“Heyyy, you.” I crossed my arms in front of me and rested my chin on them.

She sat down next to the bed. “Heh, you feeling alright there?”

“Ayuh. Just a little tired and woozy is all.”

“I’d be surprised if you didn’t,” she yawned and rested her head on the edge of the bed. “I‘m feeling pretty tired myself.”

I checked my watch, which was thankfully still there. It was past midnight. I’d been out for four or five hours. I frowned. “So, uh, what happened back there? Last I remember was passing out on the floor. How’d we get from there to here?”

“Well,” Cinnamon started, “The guard came basically right after you passed out, and the first thing they did was medevac you out of there before you could ruin Rosie’s floor any further. Took three pegasi together to airlift your fuzzy ass over here. That’s how you got to here. As for me, I had to walk. And carry all your stuff.” She reached over and poked the pair of large black bags that I’d missed sitting on the floor next to the bed. “Did you really need to bring your books to dinner?”

I shrugged and grinned sheepishly. “I like to keep my things close. And I’m used to carrying them around campus all the time, so it wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t plan on needing someone else to carry them. Glad you did, though.”

“You’re welcome. So yeah, they brought you here, I walked, and then I got to talk with the guards while you napped.”

“Oof, the guard. Are we in trouble? Do they know anything about…” I gestured vaguely at myself. “Y’know?”

She shook her head. “No, and I’m fairly sure you aren’t in any trouble. There was no shortage of ponies at the scene to say that Bull was the one that swung first and escalated things. The guard brought him in after he tried to flee the scene and a trio of girls tackled him just outside the pub.”

“Oh, that’s good,” I said. I cocked my head and asked. “‘Bull?’”

“Bullion,” Cinnamon clarified. “Bullion Blowout. My ex. The stallion you wrested into the floor.”

“Ah, so that’s who that guy was.”

Cinnamon stared at me in disbelief for a few seconds before bursting out into laughter.

“What?” I asked.

Cinnamon pressed her hooves to her mouth to stifle the laughter. “Sorry, it’s just… you didn’t even know who he was?”

“Not really.”

“And you still jumped in and risked your feathers fighting him off.”

“I mean… yeah. He was a drunken douchebag trying to hurt people—you specifically—and I happened to be in a position to stop it,” I said simply.

She smiled and gently bapped the end of my beak with a hoof. “Well I appreciate it.”

“Sooo… your ex? Split on less than stellar terms, I take it?” I said, which elicited a frown from Cinnamon. “...Unless you don’t wanna talk about any of that. That’s cool too.”

“No no, it’s fine. And you did get stabbed by him because of it.” She sat back with a sigh. “I don’t even know what to say about it, really. We got together when we were both younger and stupider. And had a common interest in doing things that often ended with us getting in trouble together. I… grew out of those things, and moved on. Bullion didn’t. And that would’ve been fine with me, except apparently he didn’t move on from me either. So that was him crawling back.”

I let out a low whistle. “That was crawling? Man, I don’t want to see running.”

She rubbed her foreleg. “Yeah… I’d forgotten how—forgive the pun—bull-headed he could be when he doesn’t get what he wants. Sorry you had to get mixed up in that.”

“It was nothing you did,” I said dismissively. “I got myself involved.”

Cinnamon frowned and shook her head. “Yes, but you only needed to because of me. If I hadn’t bucked Bullion… If I had just walked away instead of instigating him, or left without talking to him at all… then none of this would’ve happened and you wouldn’t have gotten hurt.”

“It’s alright,” I assured her. “It’s not even that big a deal that I did get hurt. It’s not like getting the wing messed up has made it any less useful,” I said with a snort.

Cinnamon bit her lower lip and looked away. “I know, I know, it’s nothing serious, I shouldn’t be getting worked up… It’s just—” her voice hitched.

I propped myself up further and leaned over. “Hey, yo, what’s wrong?”

When she looked up, I saw the glistening in the corners of her eyes. “It’s just… when you went down at the pub… there was so much blood. The guard who flew you off even said he’d never seen that much before. And then you weren’t waking, for hours... I thought… I was afraid I might’ve gotten you…” she sniffled.

It dawned on me how stressful the last few hours must’ve been for Cinnamon. For me it’d been quick—I’d passed out and skipped all the aftermath, but she had to deal with the uncertainty and waiting the hard way. Acting on impulse, I put an arm around Cinnamon’s quivering shoulders and pulled her up onto the bed next to me, holding her close. She immediately buried her face in my neck feathers. “Sshhhh… It’s okay. It’s all good. I’m still in one piece,” I soothed while gently stroking her back. “Nothing to worry about anymore. I’m not going to keel over and die before you can get your money’s worth out of me. Your investment is safe. Well, as safe as it can be considering the dipshit it depends on.”

Cinnamon choked out a laugh and pulled her head back to look up at me, her big blue eyes still watery. She sniffled and wiped her nose with a fetlock. “Yeah... and there’s also that whole thing with you maybe being an alien. Like, if you died and the guard finds out you really are then there’d be an investigation, and that would come back to me, and there’d be a ton of questions and stuff and that all sounds like such a pain in the flank. Really, it’s better for everypony if you stay intact.” She lay down next to me and leaned against my uninjured wing. “Especially the fuzzy parts of you.”

“Mmmm,” I agreed.

For a long while, we both just lay there together in content silence. I was still mildly weirded out at how cuddly Cinnamon was. I hadn’t gotten a good read on ponies in general, and what qualified as standard cuddliness, so I didn’t know what to make of her actions. But right now, between the recent events and the drugs, I didn’t really feel like putting a stop to it. I was content to relax there on the bed, and if Cinnamon wanted to do the same next to me while she unwound from the evening’s events, that was fine with me.

Eventually though, the peace and quiet were interrupted by someone knocking loudly on the door and then immediately pushing it open. The slate-gray pony didn’t look like a nurse or doctor—she wasn’t wearing anything to indicate she was either. Just a single dark blue saddlebag. And sunglasses. She was wearing sunglasses. Indoors. At night.

The mare stepped further into the room and looked around. That was when I noticed her wings. They weren’t feathery like the ones on myself or the pegasi I’d seen around but instead were membranous like a bat’s.

Cinnamon scooted to the side a bit so she wasn’t leaning on me, but was still close. “Can we help you?” she asked, the annoyance plain in her voice.

“Yeah just a sec,” the other mare said and found the light switch on the wall. She stuck out one of her bat wings and hit the dimmer, bringing the glaring white light down to a more reasonable level before removing her sunglasses. Then she looked at me and her eyes—slitted like a lizard’s—went wide. “Woah. That’s a lot of blood. You try wrestling a manticore or something?”

“Or something,” I said. “Wrestled a drunk guy at a bar. Self-defense.”

“Lame.” The mare tucked the glasses into her dark-red mane. “Should’ve just said yes to the manticore. Would’ve made for a way more interesting report.”

“Who are you?” Cinnamon asked. “And what report?”

“I just need to ask a few questions. Official stuff,” the mare said.

Cinnamon frowned. “I already spoke with the guard. They said they’d gotten all the information they needed.”

“All they needed,” the other mare repeated. “They asked the usual stuff. Who hit who. Did anypony die? Who gets fined? Who goes to jail? The usual boring guard stuff.” She put her hoof on her chest. “I’m not with the guard. I’m here because one of the guys in this thing was a pony and one guy”—she pointed the hoof at me—“thats you—wasn’t. You’re not an Equestrian citizen, right?”

“Err, no. I’m not,” I said.

“Right. So now it’s kinda an international thing. A small thing.” She held her forehooves an inch apart. “Super small thing. But a thing nonetheless.”

That didn’t sound great. I frowned and looked to Cinnamon. She shrugged back.

The other mare caught my concerned look and said, “You’re not in any trouble. I just need you to answer some questions so things go smoothly. There’s some auxiliary documentation the crown needs for incidents involving folk from out of town. Official records and whatnot. Just some small things that need to get handled in cases like this or else it gets messy.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I conceded.

“Glad you think so, because I don’t see the point of it myself.” The mare sat down in front of the bed and pulled a pencil and packet of papers from her bags. She lifted the clipboard hanging from the foot of my bed and read the top of it. “So… Garrett,” she said around the pencil in her teeth. “Where are you from? Griffonstone, I imagine?”

“Uh, yeah…” I said uneasily.

She wrote something on the page. “Been in town long?”

“Canterlot or…?” I asked.

“Just Canterlot, yeah,” she clarified.

I shook my head. “Just got here last night.”

She whistled and wrote. “First night in town and already hospitalized for a bar fight. Nice. This your first time in Equestria?”

“Ayuh.”

“Have you ever been charged, convicted, or sentenced of a crime in any Equestrian court?”

“Does now count?”

She chewed on the end of the pencil while she thought. “Are you being charged now?”

I gave a tired sigh. “I don’t know. I don’t think so?”

“No, he’s not,” Cinnamon said curtly.

“Then we’ll go with no.” The mare marked the page. “Okay, next question. In the last seven years, have you been convicted in any court of Equestria of a crime, sentenced to imprisonment for a term exceeding one year—” She stopped, frowned, and flipped to the next page in the packet, then the next. She made a disgusted face. “Wow, that’s a lot of stuff. Okay, y’know what? It’s late. You’ve been through… a thing. You’re tired and I’m already bored. Tell you what, my feathered friend. Let’s not do this now. Come by the office tomorrow, after you’ve rested up, and all this can get handled then.” She fished a large silver coin out of her bag and passed it to me. “Take this, go to the palace, and show it to the guys in gold at the front door. They will point you where to go.”

I took the coin and looked at it. It was large and heavy, with a crescent moon on one side and a stylized sun on the other. “Oookay,” I said, still not quite sure what to make of this whole encounter.

“Great! Now, rest up and get better.” The mare packed up her bag and made her way to the door. She stopped just before leaving. “Oh, and welcome to Equestria, Mr. Garrett,” she said and trotted off.

I stared blankly at the door as it closed. “That was… something.”

“Yes, it was,” Cinnamon agreed, settling back against my side.

“Do royal representatives around here normally act like that?”

“I don’t know, I’d assume not,” she looked at the coin in my hand. “But that’s the royal seal, and it looks pretty official.”

“This could be bad.”

“Maybe, yeah.” Cinnamon let out a long yawn. “But she was right. That’s something to deal with tomorrow.” She nuzzled my good wing once and hopped down to the floor. “I gotta get home and make sure Auntie isn’t worrying. See you in the morning,” she said with another yawn.

That incited a yawn from me too. “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. G’night, Cinnamon. Walk safe.”

“Night, Birdy,” she said, clicking the light off fully as she left.

I rested my head back down on the pillow and pulled my good wing so it draped over my head. Between the drugs and the accumulated exhaustion, sleep came quickly before I had time to worry too much.

The night came and went, thankfully without any more nightmares. Or any dreams at all for that matter. Maybe it was the drugs. Or maybe my mind was just too exhausted to bother tormenting me for once. I didn’t really care what the reason was, I was just thankful to get a few hours of relatively-restful sleep for the first time in days.

Cinnamon returned in the morning while I was getting set to leave the hospital. I was in the process of wrangling my coat overtop of the new wing sling the hospital had provided to replace the crude gauze wrappings. The sling did a fantastic job of keeping my left wing in place, but only because it was uncomfortably tight. Probably made to fit a pegasus, not a griffon.

Cinnamon watched me struggling with a look of incredulity. “You’re not really planning to go out to the palace looking like that, are you?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Those are completely covered in bloodstains.”

“The worst of it’s on the jacket, which is already red. You can barely see it.”

“You can clearly see it,” she deadpanned. “And there’s a giant cut in it.”

“Well this is all I have to wear. So unless you have a better idea, I’m wearing it.”

“I might, actually. Bear with me for a sec. This idea might be a bit out there. You might need to take a seat. You ready? Wear nothing. It’s not like you haven’t got more than enough fur to keep you covered.”

“Pass. I’m not going out naked. Out of the question.”

Cinnamon let out an exasperated sigh and face-hoofed. “Whatever. But you still can’t go out looking like you just murdered somepony and then bathed in their blood. We wouldn’t get half a block before a guard stops you and drags you back to the castle.”

“Isn’t that where we’re headed anyways?”

“Yes, but I’d like to go in through the front door, not some side entrance that goes directly to the dungeons.”

“Hmmm. You may have a point there.” I would like to avoid getting locked up again if I could help it. I sighed and reluctantly stripped off my jacket. Then I gave my bedsheet not-a-skirt a look over. It’d survived with only minimal staining. Just some spattered droplets on the outer layer. So I took the folded-over layer and brought it up over my shoulder, tied the corners in the front and turned it into a toga once more, with the worst of the staining on the inside.

“There, can’t even see it,” I said.

“Amazing,” Cinnamon deadpanned. “You ready?”

“Almost,” I said as I finished stuffing my rolled-up jacket back into my bags and carefully laid them across my back. I looked around the hospital room once more to see if I was missing anything. “Aight. Looks good. Let's go.”

Cinnamon and I departed the hospital and made our way to the palace. It wasn’t hard to find—its towers were visible from everywhere in the city and there was a major road that ran uninterrupted from the castle’s front gate to the city center. So it was a simple twenty-minute walk in a straight line that gave me and my traitorous mind plenty of time to consider the situation. Specifically how we were currently walking right into the central hub of police activity in the city with the express purpose of talking to some authoritative individual there about things. Basically exactly what we agreed the other day was not a good idea.

Okay, sure, we weren’t going in with the intent of telling the guards, or talking specifically about my… problem... but it was topically and spatially close enough that once we passed the front gate of the castle and approached the palace entrance—complete with a pair of serious-looking plate-armored guards—I hesitated and hung back.

“This doesn’t seem like a seriously bad idea to you?” I asked Cinnamon while we were still out of earshot of the guards.

She stopped and looked back. “What’s a bad idea?”

I gestured vaguely around. “This. Going in and talking to someone specifically about my griffonness. If they know more than absolutely nothing about anything—which is pretty damn likely given that it’s their job—then I am totally screwed.”

“You’ll be fine. Just say you’re from Griffonstone and put on your best ‘grumpy-and-annoyed-at-needing-to-be-here’ face. Pretty sure that’s what any other griffon would do in this situation.”

“That’s a terrible idea.”

“Which of us is the expert on this stuff?” she asked.

“Uhh, neither of us?” I said dryly.

She rolled her eyes. “Okay, fair, but do you have a better idea?”

“We could… not. Just turn back and do literally anything other than walk willingly into something that can only end badly.”

She shook her head. “Whatever department that mare is from thought this was important enough to have somepony to track you down at the hospital only a couple hours after the incident. Do you really think ghosting them will work?”

“It might. You never know.”

“I do, actually, and it won’t.” She pointed to the castle. “If somepony in there wants to find you, they will. They’ve got magic and they aren’t afraid to use it. Trust me, it’s better to just do this now. We’ll be in and out in no time. Easy peasy. Just follow along and act grumpy.”

I scowled heavily at her.

Cinnamon grinned and clapped her forehooves together. “Perfect! Just keep doing that,” she said and cantered cheerily up to the pair of guards.

“Wait don’t—” I started but she was already up at them. “Fuck fuck fuck,” I muttered under my breath and hastily went after her. I was gonna gut that horse if she kept doing that.

The pair of stallions regarded Cinnamon coolly as she approached. “Excuse me, sirs,” she said with a cheery wave. “Hi, yeah. So. There was an incident last night, bit of a scuffle my friend here and I were involved in. Birdy here got hurt. Not a big deal, but a pony came by the hospital and said something about needing to answer some questions because Birdy isn’t from around here. She didn’t tell us any more than that. Just gave him some official-looking coin thing and said it’d be explanation enough.”

The two guards were now looking quizzically at me. I stood there and shuffled side to side awkwardly. Eventually one of them said, “May we see this ‘coin thing’?”

“Oh, right. Yeah,” I said, dropping my bags onto the ground and looking for where I’d stashed it. I was already missing having pockets. “Got it in here. Just one sec. It’s in here somewhere. Ah, there we go!” I held the coin out to the pair of them.

The closer of the two took it in his magic and inspected it, his expression unchanging. While he passed it off to the other guard, he asked us, “The pony who gave you this, did you get her name?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think so?” I said, then shot Cinnamon a glance for confirmation.

“Nope,” she confirmed. “Just some bat pony, not in any uniform. Asked some questions, and then said to come here to answer some more.”

The second guard spoke up. “Bat pony mare? Gray coat, dark red mane? General negligence for professional conduct?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “That sounds about right.”

“Especially the last part,” Cinnamon said with a nod.

The guards exchanged glances briefly. “Come with me,” the one now holding the coin thing said and entered inside. Cinnamon and I followed him in and were escorted wordlessly through the grand halls of the palace.

After about a minute of silently leading us, the guard stopped at a door that looked exactly like any of the twenty others we’d passed. He pushed it open, revealing a small waiting room. On the other end of the room was another identical door. There were some low-lying benches along the sides of the space. The guard went to the far door and knocked once. After a moment, it opened a crack and the helmeted head of another guard poked through. The two exchanged a few hushed words I couldn’t make out, our escort handed something through the gap, and then the door closed. He turned back to us and gestured to the benches. “Wait here. It may be several minutes,” he said and then left the way we’d entered, closing the door behind him with an all-too-ominous clack.

Cinnamon gave me a shrug and took a seat on one of the benches. I dropped down next to her. After about a minute of sitting and waiting in silence, I asked her, “So, you ever been here before?”

Cinnamon shook her head. “Nope. I’ve never even been to the palace.”

“Oh. So you’ve no idea if this is how this stuff normally goes?”

“Not really, no.”

“Alrighty then,” I said, slightly bobbing my head.

After another few minutes of waiting, I took off my bags and set them on the floor so I could properly flop back against the wall.

“Did the pony last night say anything about when she wanted us to come by?” I asked.

“Not that I recall.”

”Probably would’ve helped if she had.”

“Probably,” Cinnamon agreed.

Several minutes after that, I was up and pacing back and forth in the small chamber, thinking of all the ways this was a horrible idea and all the things I might be doing wrong. Cinnamon was laying on the bench, hooves folded beneath her, eyes closed.

“Relax, Birdy,” she said cooly. “Don’t get yourself all worked up.”

“I’m not getting worked up.”

“Yes, you are. I can actually hear you twitching.”

“It’s not twitching. It’s itching. My feathers itch. These bandages suck,” I said. “And my talons hurt.”

“I’m sure pacing is helping with that,” she said sarcastically. She patted the bench. “Sit down and relax.”

With a huff, I sat down on the bench and spent a minute or so trying to straighten out the matted feathers with my talons. When that failed, I fished my notebook and pen out of my bags, opening it up to the first blank page.

Feathers, itchy when they get dirty and/or out of place. Talons, get sore from walking on stone floors, which ponies are far too fond of…

Eventually—after close to twenty-five minutes of “waiting here”—the far door swung open abruptly. I hastily scrambled to get up off the floor where I’d been sprawled out and into a semi-professional position before the guard stepped into the chamber.

“I apologize for the wait,” he said. “You may enter now. The Princess is ready for you.”

That nearly knocked me back onto the floor. “The p—buh—wait, what?” I sputtered.

“Princess… Celestia?” Cinnamon asked, clearly just as surpised as me about this revelation, but marginally more eloquent in expressing it. The guard simply nodded at her in response.

“Why are we—I thought—we shouldn’t—not here—” I stammered out rapidly. Then I snapped my beak shut and took a couple seconds to get my brains in order and said, “I think we’re in the wrong place.”

The stallion raised an eyebrow and let the door swing mostly shut. “Where do you believe you should be?”

I threw my arms out to my side in a wide shrug. “I-I’ve no idea. Not here? We were supposed to meet with someone else about—”

“The bat pony mare?” the guard interrupted.

“Yes! Not…” I lowered my voice. “...a princess. This is a misunderstanding.”

The guard nodded along for a moment. Then he pushed the door open and stepped back. “This is where you are supposed to be. Do not keep Her Highness waiting,” he said, holding the door open.

I gave Cinnamon a look of utter dread and hissed, “The princess?! I am not okay with this.”

She shrugged, entirely too calmly. “Too late now.”

“Is it really? We haven’t gone in yet. It’s kinda only too late once we—” I stopped because Cinnamon was already halfway into the next room. “Oh mother fucking hell.” I shot the door we’d entered through one last hopeful look and then grabbed my bags off the floor and threw them onto my back. “Goddamnit Cinnamon,” I hissed and followed her through the next door.

The doorway was a side entrance into a lavishly decorated throne room. One complete with floor-to-ceiling stained-glass windows, indoor waterworks, and a thick red carpet that ran all the way from the much grander entrance just to our right, all the way to the pair of thrones on a raised dais to our far left. The smaller of the thrones was empty. The larger was occupied by who I could only assume was Princess Celestia

Even from across the large room, I could say with certainty she was a pony unlike any other I’d seen so far in this world. To start, she was big. It was hard to tell exactly how big from this distance, but there was no question that she was the first creature I’d seen in this world who wasn’t smaller than myself. Probably closer to a horse than a pony. Next, the pure-white pony had both wings and a horn, a combo I’d not seen on anyone else. And her mane—if it could even be called a mane—looked less like hair and more like billowing waves of colors that flowed and shifted like an aurora.

And beyond those superficial features, she had a presence to her that I was struggling to find proper descriptors for. She was majestic, for sure. Radiant, maybe even literally. Awesome, in its truest sense. And intimidating, in spite of her complete serenity. As I shuffled down the carpet alongside Cinnamon I grew increasingly apprehensive the closer we got to the thrones. Walking along, the distance between myself and Cinnamon shrunk, and I honestly didn’t know if it was her doing or my own. My wings were itching up a storm. And it was taking all my self-control not to gawk at Princess Celestia like a dumbstruck moron. In a strange instance of cosmic irony, I—the apex predator turned other apex predator—felt very much like a deer caught in a truck’s headlights in the presence of this royal horse creature.

Cinnamon kicking my arm dragged me from my thoughts, and I looked down to find her with her forelegs stretched out in front of her and her head bowed low. Oh, duh. Royalty means bowing. I quickly followed suit, prostrating myself before the princess.

“Rise, my little pony, and distinguished guest,” Princess Celestia said, nodding to Cinnamon and myself in turn. “How can I be of service?”

Despite having a coat like a whiteout blizzard, and a mane like the northern lights, Princess Celestia’s voice and smile radiated a palpable warmth. One that washed over me like an inviting summer’s breeze and seemed to melt away whatever worries and unease I had. I couldn’t help but smile back as I rose up and replied.

“Buhhhhhhh,” was what I said in response to her question, with my beak hanging open and its corners turned up in a dumb grin. The willingness to speak was there, but my ability to use words was apparently still lagging behind. In my peripherals, I saw Cinnamon’s face drop down and into her upturned forehoof.

Princess Celestia chuckled softly. “What is your name?” she prompted me.

The simple question gave my aimlessly swirling brainspace a nucleus to coalesce around enough for me to form words. “Uhh, Garrett, Your Highness,” I managed to get out.

“And where are you from, Garrett?”

At the Princesses second question, my brainspace collapsed back into place, knocking me out of whatever fuzzy haze I’d been in, and I remembered exactly where I was and why I was here. “Ain’t that the million-dollar question?” I said with a nervous laugh.

Celestia raised an eyebrow but otherwise said nothing.

“Err, I mean… I’m not from around here. Canterlot. Or Equestria. Obviously. Because I’m a griffon. Obviously. I’m uhh… I’m from Griffonstone, y’know, yeah. That’s my home. Just in Canterlot for a bit because I messed up wing in a thing, no big deal really so honestly you don’t even need to—”

“Garrett.” Cinnamon interrupted me with a sharp poke of her hoof to my side.

“What?” I whispered back.

“I really think you should just tell her what’s up,” she said quietly.

“Really don’t think this is an issue to concern the head of state with.”

“If anypony can help, it's her.”

“And if anyone can hurt, it's also her.”

“Really? What’s the worst that can happen?”

“The worst?” I hissed back. “She’s the executive of a nation and I am an illegal alien in all possible senses of all possible combinations and permutations of the words! There is no upper limit on ‘the worst that can happen.’” I looked back to Princess Celestia to see how she was reacting to us having our little hushed conversation not twenty feet away from her. She was just watching us intently. With her ears turned forward and trained on us. I felt the bottom of my stomach fall out. “...I think she heard me. Shit shit shit. This is bad. This is not good. We need to—”

Cinnamon's hoof pressed up on my jaw and silenced me. “Sorry. You’ll thank me later,” she said and strode forward.

“Wait what are you—!” I started before catching myself. Shit shit shit shit FUCK.

Cinnamon strode forward until she was about halfway between me and the throne, just at the base of the dais, and then stopped, giving a quick bow of her head. Then she spoke, clearly and calmly, to the princes, “Princess Celestia, Garrett here needs your help but he doesn’t have it in him to ask you himself.” She paused. “He needs your help getting home to his world.”

Shit fuck shit fuck fuck shit.

Cinnamon looked back briefly and I silently pleaded for her to stop, but she didn't. She continued, “It’s true, he’s not from Equestria, but Griffonstone. But not the Griffonstone you or I know, and he’s not a griffon. He’s not from anywhere on this world of ours. He came here by accident a few days ago—we’re not quite sure how, we think by magic—and was turned into a griffon somehow in the process.” She paused to take a few deep breaths. I was still holding my own. “On top of that, he was foalnapped by some as—by somepony when he arrived, and was at risk of much much worse until he got away. He might even still be in danger. We might both be. We tried to figure out how to get him back but couldn’t do it. Neither of us knows how to handle a situation like this. And now for whatever reason, we’re here. Asking you for your help.” Cinnamon bowed once more and stepped back alongside me. I shot her a glare that threatened murder and more. She simply shrugged and turned back to the princess.

Princess Celestia said nothing for a few long moments, clearly in thought about the mess that Cinnamon had just dumped out into her court, but her face was a mask of neutrality that betrayed nothing of what she thought of it. After a painfully long time, the princess turned to me. “Is what she says about you true?” she asked impassively.

I wanted to deny it, laugh it off as a crazy joke from Cinnamon and bolt from the room. “Mmmmm-hmmm,” is what I managed to squeak out instead.

“Hmm,” Princess Celestia nodded to herself. Then to Cinnamon, she asked, “And what is your involvement in this matter, miss…?”

“Cinnamon Spice, Your Highness,” she said, bowing slightly once more. “And I… I was a housemaid at the place Garrett was found. The same place he was captured and held. I helped him get out of that situation and he’s been staying with me in Canterlot the past couple days.”

“And you believe him?” the princess asked. “That he is truly from another world?”

Cinnamon looked back over to me where I stood practically shitting myself, then back to Princess Celestia. She shrugged. “Kinda, yeah. I don’t think he’s lying. If he is, he’s put a lot of effort into sticking with just about the worst story ever, and has nothing I can see to gain from doing so. I don’t think he’s nuts, either. Sure, a little twitchy at times, but who wouldn’t be in his situation, whatever it is?”

Princess Celestia gave Cinnamon a small nod. “Thank you, Miss, for your insight on the matter and for bringing this situation to my attention.”

“Of course, Your Highness.” Cinnamon bowed again and sat down by my side. I went back to waiting silently for the princess to smite me down or lock me up or whatever it was she was going to do to me.

After what felt like an eternity, Princess Celestia spoke. “Garrett.”

“Y-yesss?” I squeaked out, I’m not even sure audibly.

“I believe…” she continued, and the small smile returned to her face. “…That I’d like to hear the rest of your story. It sounds like quite the tale, and… we may be able to help you.”

I let out the breath that I absolutely knew I was holding. “Y-you… you believe me?” I asked incredulously.

Princess Celestia gestured with a wing to Cinnamon. “Your companion seems to. And I see no reason not to trust my little ponies, especially on matters where they have more insight than myself.”

I stared dumbfoundedly at Cinnamon, who gave me a grin that practically screamed: “told you so, Birdy.”

“I—buh—” I sputtered. “Thank you. Thank you very much. Your highness.” I bowed as low as I could.

Princess Celestia chuckled, “Please, that is quite enough bowing from the two of you today. Now, if I am to help you, I would very much like to know the details of your ordeal.”

“Right right, of course,” I noted how that was the second time now the princess had asked that, so it was probably best if I got to that instead of stammering like a dipshit. “Ummm where to… Oh! Actually, I’ve notes for this already! Lemme grab that so I don’t forget anything.” I took my bags off and practically dumped their contents out onto the throne room floor in search of my notebook. I found it and quickly flipped back through the pages. “There we are. Okay. So. Uh, it all whe—started… at approximately 7:10 pm last Friday when I was riding my bicycle home from class…”

And so I recounted most of the events of the last three days to the princess. I was sure to cover all of the big points. Occasionally, Princess Celestia would ask for clarification or more detail, which I provided where I could. Where there were gaps in my memory and notes, Cinnamon spoke up to fill in blanks or add her own perspective, but otherwise she let me do the talking. Which I managed to do surprisingly well thanks to having a list of talking points pre-prepared. Together, Cinnamon and I told of the accident I had at the university, of the confusion that followed, waking up locked in Graywall’s basement, the talks with him, how Cinnamon helped me escape, then our search for information in Canterlot and how we ended up here.

When Princess Celestia asked for more details about the events involving Graywall, and I provided them, she seemed to grow troubled. After Cinnamon filled in some of the less savory details of her former employer, one of the guard officers stepped forward and asked to debrief her in further detail on those matters while I spoke with the princess. Princess Celestia thought it was a good idea, and Cinnamon agreed. I felt a brief bit of unease at being left alone with the princess, but Cinnamon quietly reassured me that Celestia was a very nice lady and I’d be fine if I just kept doing what I was doing.

After Cinnamon left with the guard, Princess Celestia called for her aide—a white-coated unicorn mare with a dark mane and glasses who I’d entirely missed standing just back beside the throne—and instructed her to end court for the day.

That was when it really struck me that this was all really happening. Up until that point, it’d just been talking back and forth. But her order to end court meant this thing with me was taking place of other—presumably not unimportant—royal duties she had. One of the rulers of the nation was taking me at least somewhat seriously. That realization brought me back to reality from the kind of detachment I’d been in since walking into this room. This was really happening.

At Princess Celestia’s instruction, the aide, all the other guards, everyone, filed out of the throne room, leaving just the princess and me. When the last pony had exited, Princess Celestia gracefully stood and stretched before stepping down from her throne towards me. When she was down on the same level, I was surprised to find she wasn’t even a head taller than me. Not nearly the gigantic, larger-than-life figure I’d initially taken her for. In fact, if I factored in how tall and skinny she was, I might’ve actually out-massed—

I mentally slapped myself for sitting here estimating the princess’s body weight while she was offering to help me.

Thankfully, she didn’t seem to notice or care that I’d been mentally sizing her up. “Would you mind terribly if we walked while we spoke?” she asked me.

“Uhh, no. Of course not.” Not that I would’ve said so if I did.

“Thank you.” She smiled down at me. She started walking towards the main exit and she sighed. “Not even noon and this day is growing long. And now it will only grow longer with this turn of events.”

“Sorry,” I said automatically.

She chuckled softly and shook her head. “There is nothing for you to apologize for. In fact, it is quite likely that I should be apologizing to you.”

“I—what?”

The princess led the way out of the throne room and into a presently-deserted hallway lined with massive stained-glass windows. “I believe that I may know the cause of your predicament. At least partially. And if I am correct in my assessment of the situation, then I am somewhat to blame for you being here in Equestria.”

I stopped in my tracks. My brow furrowed and I shook my head. “I don’t understand. How? What?”

The princess stopped as well. Her eyes traced over the windows as she spoke. “I believe that this is not the first time we—Equestria—have dealt with your world and its people. Although it would be the first time I am aware of where the dealings happened in this world.”

I dropped to my haunches to process that. Not the first time? Humans had contact before with magical horse aliens? What the fuck? You’d think that would be the kind of shit you’d hear about. “When was this? How did—” I remembered the more important question I should be asking. “So, you can get me back home?”

She held up a hoof to stop me. “I know you have many questions. Some I might have the answer to, others I do not. However, I do not want to say too much before I am able to confirm my theory, which will require that I contact a student of mine who is more experienced with these subjects. It would be best if we wait until we can meet with her before we get into the thick of things. I will see if I can arrange such a meeting for this evening, or tomorrow if she cannot make it up to Canterlot on such short notice.

“In the meantime,” she continued, “There are some other matters we can tend to. Not the least of which would be getting you checked out by a doctor.”

“I was just at a hospital last night.” I pointed to my wing sling. “Little scuffle at a bar—totally not my fault—that messed up the wing. So I’ve already been checked out by a doc.”

“While the hospital staff undoubtedly did a fine job treating your injuries, it is unlikely that they did much past that. They would not have thought there to be a need to look deeper, would they?”

“Err, no,” I admitted. “We very specifically hid the fact that I was anything but a regular griffon.”

“I thought so. It would be wise to see if you have sustained any unnoticed injury or side effects in your coming here. And truth-be-told, even if you were just a regular griffon it would be prudent to have another expert take a look at you, one who is knowledgeable in how a griffon’s medical needs differ from a ponies. There is a very skilled doctor here at the palace, one experienced with magical accidents and other special cases. I can arrange for you to meet with him this afternoon, if that is alright with you.”

“Uh yeah, for sure. That’s probably a good idea.” If the magical horse princess was offering to have an expert make sure I’d gotten proper medical treatment from the hospital and that the portal gods hadn’t given me space cancer or someshit, I wasn’t about to object.

“Splendid. I will also have a room prepared for you here at the palace. You are not required to stay here if you do not wish, but I suggest that you do—it will help speed the process along to have you nearby while we get this sorted out. For your sake, I hope we are able to have this matter resolved swiftly. But until then, I wish to do whatever I can to minimize further inconvenience on your part. Whatever you need, I shall do my best to provide.”

“That’s very generous of you, Your Highness. Thank you,” I said, bowing my head a bit. “And I’m sure Cinnamon’s aunt will appreciate me not needing to use her couch anymore.”

“It’s the least I can do after all you’ve been through,” Princess Celestia said with a warm smile. She stood back up and we resumed walking down the hall. “Now, while my own personal knowledge of your world is quite limited on account of being only from second-hoof reports, I am aware that life in your world differs greatly from that in Equestria.”

“Yes, but not nearly as different as you’d think, actually, all things considered.” I furrowed my brow. “It’s kinda eerie at times how similar it is. Most of the big stuff is pretty much the same. It’s just the little details1 that are totally alien.”

1The jury was still out on if “all the people are horses” was a big change or simply a small altered detail considering how little difference it alone seemed to actually make.

She chuckled softly. “A small blessing, I suppose. Fortunately, we are not unused to hosting guests of different species here at the palace, griffons included. If there are any special accommodations you require, we will do what we can to provide them.”

I pondered that for a bit. Yeah, I had a whole laundry list of things about Equestria that’d been bothering me, but most of those were either something the princess couldn’t change or too small to bother her with. “Hmm, I’ve been getting by in Equestria more-or-less okay, barring the annoying little things stemming from being a griffon in a country built for ponies. So I guess if you just did whatever you’d normally do for a griffon guest, I imagine that’d cover the bulk of my needs. I mean, I’ve no idea what that would actually entail, but as far as I know, I’ve got a griffon’s physical needs, so at least some of the griffon accommodations should be useful to me.”

She nodded. “That can be arranged. There are a hooffull of griffon guests who visit the palace semi-regularly, so the staff is used to accommodating them for the most part. Unfortunately, however, the kitchen staff usually only order ingredients for griffon cuisine when we know we are expecting guests, so we may be a tad limited in that department until the staff can get the proper supplies.” She paused to think. “Actually, I suppose now would be the time to ask if that is even something you would desire.”

“We’re talking about meat, right? That’s the special ingredients you’re referring to.”

“Indeed.” She said plainly. “Our griffon guests typically request high-protein meals when they visit. Is that something you would even be interested in?”

“Yeah, I’m a fan of meaty meals myself. So if you’ve got it, I wouldn’t be opposed. But I don’t need it, and pony food hasn’t killed me yet, so don’t worry too much about it if you don’t have it. Well, unless it just hasn’t killed me yet and griffons do need meat, then I guess you should worry.” I frowned and shook my head. “Y’know what? You guys know more than me on the griffon stuff, so I trust you on all that. I defer to you all on that matter.”

The princess laughed and shook her head. “Alright then. Your trust is appreciated. Now, beyond the physical needs of your griffon form, is there anything we can do to make the stay more comfortable for you as a…” she trailed off. “I apologize, I don’t believe I remember the name of your species.”

“Oh. That’s my bad. I don’t think I said. I’m a human. That’s the name of my species.”

“Human,” she repeated. “Ah, yes. I do believe that sounds familiar. As I was saying, is there anything we can do to make your human self more comfortable during your time here?”

I took a second to ponder that. “Hmm. Nothing that comes to mind. Like I said, most of the issues so far have been from the griff stuff. Things being slightly too small. These giant wings getting in the way all the time, especially with me needing to keep them held in place with—” with my jacket, or the slightly-stained and falling-apart bedsheet toga I was wearing in its place. Come to think of it, a not-insignificant portion of my annoyances came from my whole clothing dilemma. “Actually no. I take it back. There’s one thing you may be able to do. Might even be a griffon thing for all I know. Whatever. I don’t suppose you or anyone has got any griffon-shaped clothes laying around I could borrow?”

Princess Celestia looked thoughtfully off into space. “…I believe that can be arranged. Griffons do occasionally wear clothes, just as ponies do, and we may be able to get you some. Do you have any preferences?”

I shook my head. “Whatever you’ve got. I don’t need anything fancy or complicated. I’m fine with simple and functional. Just something to cover everything up better than this.” I gestured to the bedsheet as we walked. “Oh, and some shoes. Shoes would be nice. Shoes and gloves? Do griffons even use footwear? Is that even a thing? Or do they just go around barefoot all the time? Doesn’t seem very practical”—I held up a dusty hand and frowned—“or sanitary. Maybe if they were to—” I stopped myself mid-tangent. “Sorry,” I said sheepishly.

Princess Celestia chuckled. “It’s quite alright. I’ll see what we can do. It shouldn’t be too much trouble to find something suitable.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re quite welcome. Anything else?”

I’m sure there was plenty more that I could or should have mentioned, but with how much was happening I couldn’t pin anything else down at the moment. And going back through my “notes” right now to find more would probably be inappropriate, so I just said, “Not that I can think of.”

“If you think of anything else you need, be sure to tell my staff.” Princess Celestia’s horn glowed and she magically opened the pair of doors we’d just arrived at. On the other side was the grand entryway of the palace—the one Cinnamon and I had first come in through while being escorted by the guard earlier. A few ponies and guards were milling about their business. Cinnamon was there, seated on a bench and holding a one-sided conversation with one of the nearby guards. No one seemed to notice the princess and me just yet.

“Now,” Princess Celestia said. “I do believe your friend is done speaking with my guards. Why don’t you two catch up, talk, do whatever you need to do, and then we can go about getting you checked out and situated here. And here, take this.” Her horn glowed again and a familiar silver coin appeared in the air in front of me. “Keep it on you while you are here. It will let any guards know you are a special guest of the crown.”

I took the coin and slipped it onto a side pouch of my bags. Then I bowed again. “Thanks again, Your Highness.”

“You are quite welcome. Now, I have a great many things to arrange. We shall speak again as soon as I can arrange that meeting. Until then, Garrett.”

I gave a short wave. “See ya later then.”

Princess Celestia replied with a small nod, then left back down the hallway we’d come, closing the doors softly behind her.

I took a few moments to let all that’d just transpired over the last hour or so to settle in my mind. Then I made my way across the hall to Cinnamon. “Hey, Cinnamon.”

Cinnamon turned away from the guard she harassing and smiled at me. “Birdy, you’re alive!”

I raised an eyebrow. “Was there some reason I might not be?”

“No, not really,” she admitted. “But when I finished up my stuff, they brought me here instead of back to the throne room, so I didn’t know what was up with you.”

“Oh yeah. After you left the princess took me aside for a private walk and talk.”

“Ooh, a one on one with a princess? Sounds exciting. They just had me answer a bunch of boring questions and fill out paperwork. Bunch of boring guard stuff.” Cinnamon leaned in close and lowered her voice. “Though the captain did also have me sign an NDA and agree not to tell anypony about any of the you stuff. Apparently they want to keep that under wraps. Which I suppose is as good a way as any to show that they think your story is legit. That’s pretty great.”

“Yeah, I guess it is,” I agreed.

“So how’d your one-on-one with Celestia go?” Cinnamon asked. “Or are you even allowed to say.”

“No one told me not to say anything, so I figure I’m free to share.” I thought back to what Princess Celestia and I had discussed. “Not that there’s really much to share. Celestia pretty much just said that she thinks she knows what’s up with me, but couldn’t say more until she could confirm it. She made it clear she wants to help, even went and gave me a room here while they sort it all out.” I reached into the side pouch of my bags and pulled out the silver coin thing. “Apparently this thing means I’m a ‘special guest of the crown’ or whatever. Not really sure what that means, but it sounds fancy as fuck.”

“Fancy indeed.”

“Yeah, so now you can tell your aunt thanks but I won’t be needing her couch anymore. I get to stay at a palace. Never got to do that before. And all it took was getting zapped to another planet and turned into an alien. Totally worth, right?”

“Sounds pretty great,” said with a smile. “So, I guess that’s it, then? The princess has got you all handled?”

“Sure seems that way, yeah. She’s arranging a meeting with someone who knows more about stuff either today or tomorrow. Even having some special doctor check me out right after this.”

Her eyes widened. “Wow. That fast, huh? They really are taking this thing seriously.”

“Yeah, real turn of events, wouldn’t you say?” I shook my head. “I can still barely believe the head of state is personally helping out here. Bit of a step up from a pair of clueless dumbasses running around getting thrown out of schools, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’m just happy we could get you here,” Cinnamon said with a warm smile.

“Same. And of course I never would’ve gotten this far if it weren’t for you. You’ve been unimaginably helpful. Without you… well, I’d probably still be wandering around back at Riverstone without a clue what to do. If I even got out of that basement at all.”

Cinnamon snorted. “Yeah. Without my help, you’d probably be lost in the woods, or eaten by a hydra.”

“Probably,” I agreed with a nod. Then I did a double-take. “Wait. Hydra? Those exist here?”

Cinnamon just grinned wickedly.

“Okay, that’s going to give me even more nightmares,” I said uneasily. “Moooving right along to less terrifying thoughts. Where were we? Oh right. Thanking you for everything. I know I don’t have much, but I will find a way to pay you back for everything.”

She waved a hoof dismissively. “I said it before and I’ll say it again: don’t worry about it. I wanted to help.”

“Yeah but now I might actually be able to do something. Maybe I can talk to someone important around here to see about compensating you for expenses. I don’t know. I’ll figure something out. I’d hate for it to seem like I just dropped in on you, used you, and then peaced out.”

“Aww, that’s sweet,” Cinnamon cooed before hopping up to wrap her forelegs as far as she could around my neck. I let out a reflexive “squark” and jolted at the hug before relaxing a bit. But only just a bit. I still wasn’t totally used to how huggy Cinnamon was, so I kinda just stood there while she nuzzled my neck feathers in the middle of the palace foyer.

“And it’s not been all work for me,” Cinnamon said. “It’s been a really interesting couple of days. I’d say it’s been worth it for me on entertainment value alone.”

“Glad my suffering is at least interesting to watch,” I said flatly. I carefully patted her once, then twice, on the back while scanning the room to see if anyone was starring. A few were. Thank goodness my face was covered in feathers because I was sure I was blushing up a storm beneath them.

Cinnamon giggled and pulled back from the embrace. “Sooo, I guess this is goodbye?”

“I guess so,” I said and straightened my chest feathers.

“And you got all your stuff? Didn’t leave anything at auntie’s place?”

I gave my saddlebags a shake. “I don’t have much, and I’ve kept it all on me.”

“Alright then…” she said, gaze falling to the floor. Then after a moment, her face lit up. “Oh! Before I go, can I see that notebook of yours? And a pen.”

I blinked. “Uh, sure,” I dug the items out of my bags and presented them to her. She took the notebook in her forehooves and grabbed the pen delicately between her teeth. She took a minute and scribbled down a couple lines of text on the page and passed the items back. I pushed my glasses up my beak and read what she’d written: a bunch of words and numbers that meant nothing to me. “What is this?”

“Auntie’s address. It’s where I’ll be staying, at least for a while. Y’know, in case you’re still in town and want to drop by so you can…”—she turned around and flicked her tail across my beak—“…pay me back.” Her hips and tail swung side-to-side as she strode away. “Bye-bye, Birdy. Good luck!” she called back over her shoulder.

“Bye, Cinnamon,” I said, still slightly stunned, and watched her go.

Not too long after that, one of the nearby armored guards—a pegasus stallion—approached me and spoke. “Mr. Garrett?”

I wondered if it was worth informing these guys that ‘Garrett’ wasn’t my full name, but decided against it. They’d probably already started putting me into the system as that, and it’s not like I was going to be confused with anyone else. “Yeah, that’s me. Wassup?”

“I am to escort you to your next appointment,” he said, possibly a little too cheerily for my tastes. “Are you ready to go?”

That almost made me laugh. It’s not like I had anything else I needed to attend to. “Yeah. Ready whenever.”

“Perfect. Let’s get to it then. Right this way, if you please.” With a grin and a wave, he marched off, leading me to whatever came next.

Author's Note

Art for the art gods! (Link)

And that wraps up Section 2. Finally!

1.6 - Dinnertime Scheming

…Thirty-two. Thirty-three. Thirty-four…

The seconds on my watch ticked by with agonizing slowness.

…Thirty-five. Thirty-six…

To mix things up, I was laying on the floor—which, honestly, wasn’t that much more uncomfortable than the bed. The gratuitous amounts of fluff and fuzz on my back provided ample padding, which was more than that sorry excuse of a mattress could ever claim.

…Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Zero-zero. Both the second and minute counters rolled over, the hour incrementing. The digital display now read 17:00. Nearly a whole day had passed since the accident.

Y’know, it was kinda funny. My wristwatch had been there, sitting on my arm, all morning—I’d even used it a few times—but not until now did it strike me as strange.

Having the watch on my wrist was normal. It was a familiar weight that was always present. I didn’t even register it. If I took it off, now that felt strange. It was the same thing with glasses; you only notice when they’re missing. Things that are normal are unnoteworthy. The sky is blue. Gravity works. Watch is on wrist.

But within the context of the current situation, the fact that I was still wearing my watch wasn’t so dismissible.

Why? Why was it here when all my other clothes and possessions were missing in action? What made it special? If all my stuff was gone, then I could just assume it all got lost in whatever fuckery turned me into a griffon. Lost in space, dissolved into the aether, whatever.

Except clearly it hadn’t all just disappeared because this stupid hunk of rubber and circuitry was still right here stuck to my arm, mocking me. It didn’t make any sense.

…Which really shouldn’t keep coming as a surprise. Nothing else made sense, why should this?

I took a deep breath, letting it out slowly through my nose. Remember step two: don’t think too hard about it.

Still, while the why or how weren’t important, if my watch was here, then there was a non-zero chance that the rest of the things I’d had on me were here as well. Just not in this room. So I should probably add ‘finding out where my stuff is’ to my list of objectives—a list that I was making no progress on shortening, and probably wouldn’t be until what’s-her-face returned.

She’d said she’d be back in the evening, but that had been almost five hours ago and I had no idea how much longer it would be. And all I could do in the meantime was wait.

…Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen…

Left hand. Right hand. Right foot. Left foot.

Front left. Front right. Back right. Back left.

One, two, four, three.

When counting seconds had started to strain my sanity, I’d tried napping. When I’d started seeing seven-segment digits tick by in the darkness, I turned to pacing in an attempt to quell the restlessness caused by a whole day of sitting around.

One, two, four, three. Repeat.

I was pretty sure that was the gait big-cats used. Though after thirty minutes it still felt off in a way I couldn’t quite identify. Maybe I should try diagonals? One-three then two-four? I’d been sticking with three-legs-grounded statically stable gaits, but I knew some quadrupeds walked like that, and it was similar in concept to a biped, so it might be worth giving it a shot.

Carefully, I lifted my front right and back left legs off the ground and prepared to step forward…

“Hey, Birdy? You still here or did you find a way out on your own?” The familiar voice echoed down the hall.

I lost my balance with a surprised, “Squark!” and fell onto my face.

“Guess not.”

I picked myself up off the floor and bounded over my spot at the door. What’s-her-face was carefully walking down the hall. The alien—No. Earlier, she’d called her kind ponies. The pony1 was balancing, not one, but two trays on her back while she walked.

1Step Two was being exercised at full force.

She continued past the door to where a small table stood against the hallway wall. One at a time, she removed the trays from her back with her mouth and set them on the table.

“What’ve you got?” I asked her. “Did you find anything?”

“What I’ve got… is dinner.” She picked up one of the trays and brought it over to me. I grabbed it from her. “Hope you like salad.”

I navigated the tray between the bars, careful not to spill the contents of either the bowl or the glass resting on it, and then set it down on the floor. Sure enough, the bowl contained a somewhat fancy-looking2 salad; the glass, milk. I tried not to think about where the milk had come from.

2Well, fancy compared to what I usually make. I.e. a bowl of plain lettuce.

The sound of wood scraping on stone came from outside the door and a fuzzy brown face popped up in the window, looking down at me while I was bent over.

“Nice dress,” she said with a smirk. “It really accentuates your flank.”

I sheepishly adjusted my perfectly-manly-outfit and sat my butt back down by the door. The pony pulled her face back from the window as I peered through it to see what had made all the noise.

Evidently, she’d dragged the table with her dinner over in front of the door, as well as a small wooden box that she was currently standing on. She sat down and buried her muzzle in her bowl of salad.

Thankfully, my own came with a fork to use, so I wouldn't have to attempt something similar with a beak. I grabbed up the utensils and bowl and stabbed at the leaves. “Food is always appreciated, but how about something to help with this?” I rapped a knuckle on one of the metal bars between us.

She pulled her face out of the bowl and spoke around a mouthful of salad. “No luck finding the key. Graywall must keep it close. I also tested the waters a little with some of the other staff. Nopony seemed even the least bit interested in going against the boss. So no help there.” She finished chewing and swallowed. “Looks like we’ve got to find another way to get you out.”

Well, that complicated things. “Is there no one else who can help? Like police or something?” Assuming they even had police here.

She shook her head. “Not really. The local authorities would most likely just side with Graywall.” She held up one hoof. “On one side, there’s you, the cat burglar. On the other”—she brought up the other forehoof—“is the local noble whose business makes up most of the town. I’ll let you guess whose word the sheriff would trust.” She ducked her head and scooped up another mouthful of greens. “No, if you want somepony who would actually listen and do something about it, we’d need to bring this to the guard.”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming.”

She nodded. “Buuut they’re in the next town over and you don’t have time for that. I don’t expect Graywall will want to hold you here for long if he is planning on doing something. Which means you’re stuck with just me. So, Birdy… You’re the expert on breaking and entering, what do we need to go about breaking and exiting?”

Crap. I was starting to regret letting her believe I was a burglar. Sure, it was easier than correcting her, but I was kinda out of my depth here. I needed to think of something quick, or else I’d have to try explaining how I’d [really] gotten in. “Maybe you can find a crowbar, or an ax? That’d get the door open.” Not the most elegant solution, but undeniably effective.

She gave me a level look. “An ax? Hmm…” Her brow furrowed. “Something like that would be in the shed, if anywhere. Problem is… my job to clean and cook.” She motioned to the bowl. “If I wanted into the shed, I’d have to ask the groundskeeper. And that would almost certainly draw attention. I’m on thin ice as it is just sneaking down here. This thing?” She motioned between the two of us with her hoof. “We really don’t want Graywall to catch wind of it.”

“And decide to upgrade me to express shipping,” I completed with a sigh.

She shook her head. “We’re going to need something a little more sneaky-like if this is going to work. Like how you got in, for example.”

I snorted. “Because that went so well.”

“Okay, yeah,” she conceded with a roll of her eyes. “Sure, you got busted, but you got in, didn’t you? Graywall has had ponies going around checking every window and door in the manor. They still don’t know how you did that.”

Hah. Welcome to the club. Population: everyone. Though, something about that was a little disconcerting. They had no idea about the interplanetary mirror portal thing? You’d think someone would be aware they had something like that in their basement.

If it was actually there. There could very well be no magical portal home.

Okay, no, you need to stop that. We’re not doing this again. Yes, the plan is dumb. We already knew that, but it’s all we’ve got. So be helpful or shut it.

“Guhh.” I rubbed my temples. Come on Garrett, you can do this. You may not be catbird burglar they thought you were, but you can still figure this out. What kind of prospective engineer would I be if I couldn’t solve a simple problem like being locked in a primitive prison cell? It was a simple wooden door. It wasn’t even metal, this shouldn’t be a problem. Why was this a problem?

“Other than the fact that I don’t have any tools?” I muttered to myself. “Hell, it wouldn’t even have to be proper tools. If I just had the stuff I had on me, I could probably get it open.”

“Your stuff?” the pony asked. She was staring at me with ears perked. I hadn’t even realized I was speaking out loud. I should probably be more careful talking to myself before I say something stupid.

I forced a grin. “Errr, yes?” Well, might as well use an opportunity when it presents itself, even if it’s most likely a dumb one. “Say, when whoever it was found me, they didn’t happen to find anything with me, did they? Some clothes? Or a black bag, perhaps?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t nearby when that happened,” she said.

Oh well, worth a try. I don’t know what—

“Though now that you mention it…” She tapped her chin with a hoof. “I think I might have seen a bag like that earlier. It did strike me as somewhat out of place.”

“Wait, really?” I sat up straight and leaned close to the door. “Heavy black bag? Has the initials ‘GG’ in white on the top?”

She grinned. “Yeah. That sounds right. And you’ve got tools in there that can help?”

“It certainly couldn’t hurt,” I said. And if it actually was my stuff, I’d rather not have to find it myself or leave it behind if I ever made it out of here.

“Ok,” she said and hopped off her crate. “Let me go get it. Hopefully nopony has moved it since I saw it last. Hold tight, Birdy.”

While she left to retrieve what might be my backpack, I finished off the rest of my salad. It was pretty good, as far as vegetarian meals go.

After a few minutes, the sound of clopping hooves returned. She came down the stairs and into view, a pair of large black saddlebags hanging across her back. Compared to her small frame, the bags were massive, yet she seemed to have no problem carrying them.

She stopped by the door where I could see and cocked her head up at me. “Look familiar?”

Oddly enough, they did. The saddlebags were made of a familiar black nylon. They looked like my backpack, but if someone had separated the two main pouches into the own bags and then strung them together at the top using the shoulder straps. The stitching and construction were identical—as if it had come from the factory like that.

And sure enough, right at the top of the bag facing me were the initials G.G. embroidered in white.

“Uhhh, yup.” I guess so. I shouldn’t be that surprised. If I can become a griffon, my backpack can become saddlebags. Just don’t think about it.

“Alright then.” She stepped up onto the crate and arched her back. I reached one arm through the bars and lifted the bags off her back by the strap. It was something of a team effort to get them through, she helped hold the bags up on her side of the door while I pulled them through.

I set the bags down and unzipped one of them. If I had doubts the bags were mine before, seeing the contents silenced them. On the top of the bag before me were various electrical test tools and one mostly-functional, slightly-melted, breadboard circuit.

I guess I could check “finding out where my stuff is” off the to-do list. Well, sorta. My clothes were still MIA but it was a start. And after a whole day of getting absolutely nowhere, even the smallest step forward felt huge.

My thoughts were interrupted by a fuzzy brown muzzle popping up in the window once again. “These were also with the bags. Are they yours too?” Balanced on the end of her nose was a pair of glasses.

“Yeah. Probably.” I took them and put them on, blinking rapidly as my eyes refocused. The nose pads didn’t quite fit the bridge of my beak, and the lack of ears for the arms to rest on was an interesting complication. I had to settle for tucking them into the feathers on the side of my head and hoping for the best.

With newly acquired clarity, I went back to inspecting the contents of my bags. Fortunately, the lab equipment hadn’t suffered any visible damage in the crash. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of any way that a multimeter or USB oscilloscope could help me out of this room, so I and set it aside to get at the items beneath. My laptop was a similar situation. A quick inspection confirmed it to be completely intact and also completely useless—unless I decided to give up and play minesweeper until the battery died.

Under those were my textbooks and notebooks. One by one I pulled them out of the way and set them in a stack.

The pony watched me do this, her chin resting on her hooves, elbows propped up in the window. “Those don’t look like any burglar’s tools that I know of,” she commented.

“Are you quite familiar with many burglar’s tools?” I countered, setting another book on the stack.

“I suppose not, but I don’t see how a book on…” she peered down the top of the stack. “‘Semiconductors and Microelectronic Circuits’—whatever that means—will help here.”

“Hey, never underestimate the utility of a properly designed analog bandpass filter,” I said. She just frowned at me. “But no. You’re right. They’re not burglar’s tools. These here”—I gestured to the items I’d pulled out so far—“are essential survival tools…” She frowned harder. “…To survive the hazardous environment of a Griffonstone University classroom,” I finished with a dumb grin.

Her frown lessened and she cocked her head. “You’re a student?”

“Does that surprise you?” I said while I went through the bag before me. There was nothing else of interest in that pouch—just miscellaneous school supplies—so I opened the other one. Sitting on top was my cell phone. The hell? Why was my phone in here? I’d had it in my pants pocket when I crashed.

“Sort of? I suppose I don’t think of academics as the kind to—well, y’know…” she made a vague gesture with her hoof in my general direction.

“With how much those books cost, I’m surprised more don’t resort to robbery. It wouldn’t be the worst idea…” I replied, my attention focused on the phone.

I had to use my knuckle to interact with the touchscreen because of the talons, but I eventually managed to unlock the device. Unsurprisingly, the status bar reported no cell signal and no location fix. But just to be sure, I walked on three legs over to the wall with the window, opened the GPS status app and held the phone next to the glass. Even with a clear view of the evening sky, not a single satellite was detected. Not even weakly.

So… yeah. I was definitely on the wrong planet. That was a thing.

Since there almost certainly wasn’t going to be any WiFi routers nearby to connect to, I disabled all the phone’s wireless capabilities to help save battery power. I was about to put it to sleep when an idea struck me. A few taps of my knuckle later and the screen filled with the image of a rather surprised looking bird.

For the first time since I’d woken up in a new body, I could see my face. I shuddered. There is something deeply unsettling about looking at yourself when the face looking back at you is not your own, let alone a different species altogether.

I quickly took a few pictures and then closed the camera app. It was just a little too weird to deal with at the moment.

Continuing my inventory of the saddlebags’ contents, I pulled out the next item: the bundle of red and black plaid wool that was my winter coat.

A small grin came to my face. In an effort to annoy Jack, I’d stopped wearing it the day the calendar said it was spring, even though it was cold enough outside that Jack still wore a heavy parka. It was a remarkably successful effort, I might add, because I kept reminding him about it at every opportunity. Of course, I’d still kept it with me, rolled up and hidden away at the bottom of my bag just in case because, as he’d correctly pointed out, “random blizzards out of nowhere” were still a thing we had to worry about.

I chuckled quietly at the memory as I unrolled it and threw it on. Or rather, as close to on as I could manage. My torso was a different shape and it had to go overtop the wings, but it more-or-less fit if I didn’t zip it up all the way. The way it shifted around on my fur and feathers was also a bit distracting.

A stifled snort came from the door.

Right. I had an audience. And I was probably something of a sight: a griffon wearing a bedsheet toga, plaid, and poorly fitting glasses.

“Just say it,” I groaned.

She had her hoof over her muzzle, suppressing her giggles. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I look ridiculous,” I said flatly.

She threw up her forehooves defensively, a huge grin plastered across her face. “Your words, not mine.”

“Meh,” I said, and returned to my mission.

Lucky for me, my search had finally come to an end as I’d found the things I was hoping to: my multitool and folding knife. Just like my phone—and apparently, everything else I’d had in my pockets—they’d somehow made it into my backpack-turned-saddlebags despite being in my pants at the time of the crash. Pants that were still nowhere to be seen.

I turned to my companion and asked, “Is this everything?”

“Pretty sure.”

“No other clothing?”

She shook her head. “That and the glasses were all that I saw.”

I grumbled. Damn portal stole my pants.

As I pulled the two tools out of my bag, the gears in my head started turning. The door to the room didn’t have any hinges or visible mechanism on the inside, and I couldn’t exactly see the other side. Or rather, I hadn’t been able to before.

Among the many assorted school supplies I kept in my backpack were a roll of tape and a ruler. Using a bit of tape, I stuck my phone to the end of the ruler, opened the camera app, then stuck it and my arm between the bars in the door.

The pony leaned out of the way, watching curiously as I fiddled with the contraption. “What are you doing? What is that thing?” She motioned to my phone.

“Inspecting the lock. And a burglar’s tool,” I replied simply, my attention focused on the phone’s screen and the live view of the outside of the door.

When I’d tried before, I wasn’t able to reach the door’s handle or lock, but this solved that problem. With some fiddling, I determined the location of the keyhole. From there it was simple: bring the phone back in, set the camera to take a burst of images with the flash after a delay, put the lens as close to the keyhole as I could, and voila! Several high-resolution images of the interior of the locking mechanism.

It wasn’t a very advanced lock. Not by a long shot. The keyhole was large, the design was simple. I could see all the parts straight through to the back. It was embarrassingly low security, actually. I was by no means a master-burglar, but I would have no trouble picking it if I was sitting in front of it. The problem was, I wasn’t sitting in front of it, I was sitting behind it.

Which was where the other tools came in. Hopefully. I ran my hand over the wooden beam that spanned the interior of the door. It was at the same elevation as the keyhole on the other side. It also wasn’t the same type of wood as the rest of the door. It was softer; pressing a talon into it left a mark.

I had a theory. Which, if correct, would mean a way out of here. I just needed to test it. I grabbed my knife and flicked it open. In one swift motion, I stabbed it down between the beam and the plank it was nailed to, prying one end of the beam outward. It only moved a few millimeters, but that was enough. Using the flashlight on my phone, I peered into the gap to confirm my theory.

Visible in the crack was the other side of the lock, complete with a keyhole of its own.

Apparently, at some point in the past, there had been a renovation. The interior handle had been removed, the keyhole had been covered up with the beam and I assumed the barred window added as well. A room that had never been intended for the purpose had been converted into a makeshift holding cell. Lucky for me, it hadn’t been done to meet any rigorous security standards.

“Yeah. I can make this work.” I yanked the knife out of the door, folded it shut and slid it into my breast pocket. I looked up at the pony, who had been watching me intently the whole time. “It’ll take some time, but I can get this door open.”

She sat up, ears perked. “Oh. Oh! Good!” She hopped down from her box. “Are you sure?”

“Certain,” I said with a confident nod.

“Well, if we’ve got that sorted, we should probably wait until later before breaking you out.” She reared up and planted her forehooves on the side of the table, then started pushing it back to its original location. “It’ll be better for us to do it later tonight when there aren’t many ponies in the halls.”

Us? She wanted to be a part of this? That wasn’t going to work for me. I needed to find and get to whichever room had the mirror-portal in it. I would have a hard time doing that with an escort intent on getting me out of the building quickly. I needed to convince her to let me go at it alone.

“I will wait until later. You should probably go back to being inconspicuous. You did great, but I can take it from here.”

She stopped shoving the table and frowned. “But I can help. Either with the door or at least with helping you get out quickly and unnoticed. I know the building like the back of my hoof.” she protested.

And that was exactly what I was trying to avoid. “That may be true, but it's easier for one person to sneak around than two. Someone might notice if you get up and come down here.”

Her ears flattened back and she bit her lip. “Umm, errr…”

I kept pushing. “Besides, if someone is going to notice this whole thing, it's better I get caught alone. No need for both of use to get in trouble. And you need to be able to report this to the guard, right?”

After a few moments, her head slumped and she let out a sigh. “Yeah. Okay. You’re probably right.” She used her shoulder to shove the table the rest of the way. “Do you know the way to the exit?” she asked.

“A reminder wouldn’t hurt.” Just so I knew which way not to go in my search for my actual exit.

She motioned down the hall with a hoof. “Up those stairs, go right to the end of the hall. The door on the right leads to the main hall. You can find the door from there.” Her brow furrowed and she seemed to consider for a moment, then added, “And try not to get sidetracked along the way. It’s not that I care if Graywall gets robbed, it's just…” She met my gaze, her huge eyes boring into my soul. “You can be better, you know?”

Dayum… I wasn’t even guilty of anything and this pony was making me feel bad. “Thanks. And don’t worry. I won’t.” I put my right hand over my heart. “I swear, getting out of this place is my only priority.” Which wasn’t a lie. I just wasn’t going to go the way she thought.

She scrutinized me for a few moments, then gave a small nod. “Good. Tomorrow, when you’re out of here and out of danger I’m going to go to the guard and tell them all about this. I’ll have to tell them about you, so it's best if you’re nowhere to be found by then.” Her gaze sank and she stared solemnly at the floor. “…I don't know what I’ll do after that. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stick around here after this.”

“Hey. Chin up. You’re doing a good thing here, and I really appreciate it.” I found my almost-empty glass of milk and raised it up through the door. “Here’s to hoping things go well.”

Thankfully, she recognized the gesture and grabbed her own glass in the crook of her hoof. I lowered my arm so she could reach and she clinked her glass against mine, then drained its contents.

I did the same, then added, “And may we never see one another again,” before putting the glass back on my tray with the bowl, handing them back through the door. She wordlessly took it and balanced it on her back beside her own.

Slowly, she turned and walked away. Then she paused and looked back with an uncertain expression.

Rolling my eyes, I gave her a reassuring smile and made a shooing motion with my hands. She weakly returned the smile, ears perking up a bit, and continued walking— leaving me just as alone as I was before, but now slightly more well equipped.

I hummed thoughtfully to myself. I had a plan, and the tools to execute it.

There was a prison break I needed to get to.

Author's Note

Y’know how pictures of yourself are always unflattering? Well that goes doubly so for birds. If anyone is curious of what I pictured the selfie to look like, it was something like this. (Link)

...Actually, y'know what? Fuckit. That is now the official reference picture for Garrett. I encourage you all to imagine this bird attached to a cat for the remainder of the story.

You're welcome.