Old Mind, New Body

I swung my head wildly, trying to discern who was speaking.

“Could you stop that? It's quite dizzying when you aren't expecting it, though at least I don't have worry about my motion sickness anymore.”“Where are you?!”“I appear to have been reincarnated as a voice in your head.”“What!?”

“Well I was sitting at home having a perfectly lovely day. When I went to make myself a sandwich I found that my roommate had nicked the last of the butter, so I went to go buy more. I was just crossing the street to get to the TESCOs and my phone binged. Got distracted and fell face-first into a speeding bus. I woke up a few days ago, but you were a bit comatose for a chat. Gave me a nice bit of time to come to terms with this died-and-came-back-in-another-universe-as-a-voice-in-someone's-head business. Then I figured that it sounded like someone trying to put a new spin on an HiE tale, so I set our author up for a cliffhanger and set up our introductions nicely.”

“meep.”“Now I gave this a bit of a test run while you were out, so let's see if I can get us-”*“Out of here. Right, that's the voice working, let's try the limbs. Might need a bit of help here, I'm used to a two-up, two-down system based on imbalance rather than an all-four-down like around here.”“*What in Celestia’s name is going on!?”“Well you needn't think so loud. It's not like there's anyone else in this head that might need to hear, I checked while I was up there. Like I explained earlier, some sort of cosmic accident after my unfortunate death in another universe has lead to us sharing bodies. Probably some wayward magic from around here. This body is more than well enough for a little excursion, so we’re going to get out of here and visit a library, unless there are any free newspapers. I need to catch up on some things.”“What kind of things?”“Mainly, when and where we are. After that, we can get some proper planning done for our future together.”“What do you mean, planning?”** “Well depending upon what year it is and how closely this world is to the one that I know, we can exploit my knowledge of various events to get ahead in the world and change it for the better. Hopefully we're pre-Luna so we can sort everything, and the tech I can see means that we can't be too far back, but another part of the timeline wouldn't be that bad.”I, or rather my body, loped out of the room. Rid of the various leads and monitors, the nurses didn't pay us much attention, and we were quickly out into the bustling streets of Canterlot. We moved along reasonably smoothly, and as the other one played quite the tourist, I had chance to think. While the sort of magical accident that he mentioned didn't sound impossible, it was also entirely possible that I was just suffering some after effects from the magical blast.Apparently the tourist-y look that my other self had adopted was not entirely by accident, as he had piloted us over to a patrolling guard and had begun interrogating him about navigating the city, the existence of public transportation, how to get to the local library from our present location, and how one might contact the Princess, should it become necessary. “Why are we heading to the library?”“Because that's where you should always go in situations like this. I'm a loner with a boring life and a boring job, I've had a lot of time to think about things like this. The first step, in a situation such as this, is to do research. Learn the lay of the land and a series of basic skills, as necessary, so that you can pass for a normal citizen. This head injury of ours is actually useful, since we can easily use it both to excuse strange behaviour and to elicit sympathy, should we need to get people on our side. For example, if the librarian asks why I'm looking up children's books on magic, I can mention the head injury, and say that I'm making sure nothing's gone missing when it comes to my knowledge of how to use magic, when in actuality I will be learning how to use an entirely new set of physical laws to my advantage. Oh look, we're here.”While my body began to explore the shelves of the Downtown Canterlot Public Library and practicing basic spells, I began to think about whatever was currently sharing my brain. Based on what it had said, it was from some sort of four-limbed, bipedal race, had never before used magic, if it even existed wherever it was from, and yet was familiar enough with Canterlot and with pony society to be able to blend in and convince everypony that it was simply a tourist from some far-away village that had decided to take a trip to Canterlot and sightsee. This meant that whatever they were, they were apparently capable of blending in to pony society without arousing suspicion extremely well, had been for enough time that even someone who seemed to be an average citizen knew a lot about us, and were capable of some advanced mind magics, capable of inserting an entire new mind into an occupied one without being detected and with no trauma.“You realise that I can still sense your thoughts even when we aren’t conversing, right?”Oh horseapples. It can read my internal monologue.“Yes, I can. And for the record, I’ve never used magic because my species disproved its existence ages ago, none of us have ever visited here as far as I know, and I’ll explain my knowledge to you later when we aren’t in public. Speaking of which, where do we live now that the house blew up? What’s floated up from your memory leads me to believe that we haven’t legally hit the age of majority yet, and all our ID went up in smoke, as did our valuables and money, so we can’t get a cheap hotel room until we sort out permanent arrangements, which leaves us with somewhat of a dilemma, doesn’t it?”“Oh. I suppose that would be a problem. I guess… I guess we can stay at Uncle Crate’s for the next couple of months until we can go to the School for Gifted Unicorns and stay at the dorms there, then by the time we graduate we’ll be legally an adult and we won’t have anymore problems.”“Right then. I’ve got a rough handle on light and telekinesis, probably some muscle memory bleeding over from you, so you can have your limbs back for now to get us there. I have some thinking to do and it would be helpful to not be distracted by having to operate anything.”“Oh. OK then, to Uncle Crate’s.”**