I had the fabricators working as fast as I could to create the devices Dad wanted. It seemed odd, as I watched through the external sensors. Mom and Dad were chattering back and forth, of course, but I couldn't sense anything from the strange, PON-like creatures. "Mom, I can't hear what they are saying. Can't they interrupt?"

"As a matter of fact, Stellar, they can't. Ponies use audio to communicate. What you are working on will be needed to talk back to them." Mom's tone was instructional, without a hint of the barbs she enjoyed using on Dad.

Quickly running a check on the fabricators, I set one task to a higher priority. All the needed parts to construct the first of the audio transmitters were shunted ahead of the rest. The standard system, of course, was to efficiently make the parts as fast as possible to produce as many devices as required. "We should have one done shortly, but I had to sacrifice speed on the others to do it."

"Good work, Son." Dad's interrupt came at the same time as I noticed him prodding the fabricators for an estimate on when said devices would be done.

I disengaged my locking coupling and started to climb toward the hatch Mom and Dad had left by. A wordless query for information came from Shimmering. "I'm going to take a look around while the interface is finishing off. Do you want to come?"

Shimmering Star's response was immediate: her coupling released, and she started to make her way after me. "What are Mom and Dad doing?"

"Trying to talk in the least complicated way possible, I think." I flashed a link to Oxygen's sensors, showing Mom nodding and shaking her head to the ponies.

Walking to the doorway, I looked down and balked a little. The footage of Dad sinking his chassis all the way into the surface below proved to be something I didn't want for myself. "Hey, Shimmering, can you lower me with your horn?"

"You watched what Dad did, then?" Shimmering Star's interrupt was full of giggles. She had seemed very reserved around me at first, but had started to open up during our training.

Her violet magic wrapped around me. I stepped off the platform and started to fall. The worst that would happen, I figured, was I would land like Dad, but the closer I got to the ground, the more Shimmering supported me. My hooves touched down so gently my accelerometer barely detected it. "Very smooth. Your turn." I looked up and caught Shimmering in the same way.

Laughter poured out of Shimmering. "What is this stuff? Is everything here so organic?" She drew my attention to the ground, and I had to admit that it was odd.

Poking at the ground, I wished for a mass-spectrometer to get some good readings on the stuff. My proximity sensor suddenly drew my attention, and I lifted my head to see a smaller version of the ponies, clearly a PON, approaching. "Don't move too quickly, Shimmering. One of their foals is approaching."

They looked strange. Bright pink, the foal had no interfaces or connections that I could see. The bigger ponies had been odd in their own right, but seeing what should be a healthy and happy young PON without their interfaces was really out-there.

"What's it doing, Stellar? I can't get a reading on its ID number." I watched as she lifted up one hoof and held it out to the foal. Mom did the same to me while I was still in my bag, and when I had helped in the nursery, I had done the same thing with the foals in my care.

The foal moved parts of their face. My sensors were mostly mute about that, but then I realized that one was kicking up a storm of data. "Oh, right. They communicate by vibrating air into audio. They can't interrupt."

To both our shock, the foal lifted a hoof and connected it soundly against my sister's. Shimmering practically bubbled with excitement, sending me a wordless interrupt. I was recording a wealth of audio information now, and saw exactly what Dad had meant about a narrow frequency range. "Mom, can you transfer a translation table for this sound?"

When Mom didn't reply immediately, I sent a wordless query.

"I'm building one for you now, Stellar. This is just a little tricky." Mom sent a preliminary basic AI that could translate the audio.

Mom's words confused me a little. "But if you don't have a translator, how do you know what they're saying?"

I got a slight chuckle, along with an updated version of the AI. "Stellar, I grew up hearing and talking this. This is Equish."

Starting the little AI up, I hooked it through to my audio recorder.

"… look like metal ponies. Do you have a name?" My head snapped around to look at the foal—filly. I quickly passed the AI on to Shimmering, as well as Oxy.

The AI was not smart enough, yet (because I knew Mom would make it much more capable), to translate the other way, and besides, I didn't have a transmitter yet. I nodded to the filly. "This is terrible. I can't even tell her our names." I forwarded the interrupt to Shimmering.

"What about if we draw them?" I was confused at Shimmering Star's comment, until she energized her horn. A flood of magic roared from her, and she paused for a moment. "Oh, this could be a game. Hold on." I watched a pattern appear, then it twinkled.

"Flash?" The filly's guess was pretty close. Shimmering adjusted the pattern a little, so that there was more twinkle and less precision strobe. "Twinkle? Shimmer?"

Shimmering nodded emphatically. "It's close enough. Your turn, Stellar." There was an edge of smug in her voice I detested, but it made me more determined.

Only I had drawn a complete blank. "Mom? You were drawing patterns in the ground for them. Can you show me how to draw Shimmering and my names?"

"What are you doing, dear?" Mom turned from the ponies she was standing with and saw us. "Making friends? Here you are." A short burst of image came to me. Turning to face the filly, I drew the pattern for my name on the soft ground.

"Stellar Hope? That's a cute name!" The filly bounced up and down excitedly, and I finally realized what was strange: she had no horn or wings. I forwarded Shimmering Star her own name-pattern. My sister wrote it out on the ground, and the filly squealed in what I realized was excitement. "And Shimmering Star! Those are such pretty names."

"She thinks your a mare too." Shimmering was bubbling with laughter herself, it seemed, as her interrupt showed. "Also, you cheated."

"There was nothing in the rules about not asking others for help." I had to cut my interrupt shorter than I would have liked, because Mom was sending a revised AI. This one supported the patterns we had drawn, and I could now see that I had written my name on the ground.

"What are you sending to them?" I watched Upper Crust keep turning to look at Stellar and Shimmering, as the two interacted with a pink, earth pony foal.

"Translation data, dear. It's not fair hogging all the limelight." Her tone implied I had and I was.

I was putting together a trite reply when an interrupt caught me by surprise. "Dad, the transmitter thing Stellar was making is done. Uh, one of them is." Oxy sounded distracted, and when I probed the interrupt system, I found her watching Stellar and Shimmering's sensors to see what they were doing.

"Love, I'll be right back. Oxygen just said the fabricator is done with one of the devices." I stood up and turned toward Oxy.

"Where's that one going?" Princess Twilight sounded surprised. "What is going on now?"

I ignored her and walked up to Oxy. "Can you get it to me out here?" No sooner did I ask, than a blue glow carried a small device out the hatch of the starship and floated it down to me. "Thanks, Oxy." Pride colored my words heavily, my little filly was quite amazing, as were all my foals.

Turning around, I walked back to where Upper Crust and Princess Twilight Sparkle sat facing each other. I had a moment to appreciate the explosive force a little communication could bring. Lifting the small device up, I plugged the power lead from it into my shoulder.

A new ID registered, and I connected to it and sent through what I hoped was the first test signal. A dull tone emitted from the little machine. Examination of samples of Twilight's voice helped me build somewhat of a translation. "Hello?"

"Jet, you might want to sound a little less like Princess Questions, here." Upper's suggestion was due to my test sounding exactly like Princess Twilight "Questions" Sparkle. I fiddled with the settings a little, built a translator and quickly integrated it into one of my nodes.

"Sorry, it's not the easiest thing remembering how to speak, and this isn't exactly a mouth." I actually said the words through the device, and now I had my voice a little lower, and had put slight changes in to make me not sound like a male version of Princess Twilight.

"Jet Set, if you don't show me how to use that thing right now, I am going to send you back to Star-0." I had no doubt Upper would try, and that would probably be worse than actually getting there.

"Of course, darling. I would not dream of keeping the Princess of Beauty waiting." Sickly-sweet tones and all, I sent what I had used to control the little speaker.

"Princess Twilight Sparkle." Upper Crust sounded different again than what I had, or Twilight did. "I must apologize for not making introductions sooner. We actually met some time ago, although you may not remember us. I am Upper Crust, and this is my husband, Jet Set."

"No you're not." Twilight Sparkle's reply was terse and sharp. She looked at us with suspicion now. "When Jet Set and Upper Crust went missing, over three hundred years ago, I tracked them to a strange place in the mountains north of the Crystal Empire. I found their bodies." I was shocked at how chill Twilight's tone became. "Now try again. Who are you?"

"Darling, allow me." I kept the message to Upper on a tight interrupt, then I prepared to prove our bona fides to what had become a rather angry-looking alicorn. "Princess Twilight, it is us. As you can see, there is not much of our old selves left. You will remember exactly what was missing from the bodies?"

Twilight's face shifted, becoming unreadable. I hated it when ponies managed that when I was on Equus the first time, and this situation was not one I wanted to be in without any hints as to if the alicorn across from me was angry or calm. "Their brains, along with many of their internal organs, were missing."

I almost cursed at forgetting that there was more missing than just our brains. Of course, I wouldn't think having all my internal organs replaced, now, was odd. "The brain is the important one. You would have found, if you searched around there, that our internal organs were… probably somewhere."

Twilight cut in before I could continue, snorting out a sharp breath. "Are you trying to tell me that inside that,"—she gestured vaguely to my head with one hoof—"is Jet Set's brain?"

"I would take it out and show you, but given that this isn't the most clean of environments, I might have to withhold that." My words got a quirk of a half smile from Princess Twilight. "How many ponies saw the remains of that old starship wreck? Or the mining system nearby?"

"How did you know it was a ship? It took me years to work that out, and I—" Twilight snapped her mouth closed mid outburst. Her eyes narrowed. "Either you are who you say you are, or you were the ones who did that to Jet and Upper."

"Jet, you aren't going to win. She can see through every argument you could raise, but one." Upper Crust didn't interrupt the words, she spoke them through the speaker.

Twilight's head turned to face Upper Crust, obviously picking up on the obviously feminine voice. "And how would you do that?"

"Rarity." Upper's voice sounded smug. I would have loved to work out how she managed to get such tone into her vocal reproductions, but I thought it best to let her show me how clever she was. Not that I needed such a lesson, my wife was amazing, and we both knew it.

Princess Twilight Sparkle's horn illuminated, and she produced a slip of paper and a pointing device. I stared as she used it to scrawl a message asking Rarity to come once again.

Message and writing implement both vanished, and we all sat in silence while waiting for Rarity to return. All of Twilight's friends had left us in her capable hooves, once they realized we weren't here to attack. Of course, I could see Rainbow Dash hiding in a cloud high off an on what would have been a pony's blind-side, and I knew Applejack would likely have stuck nearby too.

A loud POMF sound heralded Rarity's return. "Darling, what's the matter?" She looked to Twilight for answers.

"They claim to be Jet Set and Upper Crust, and I didn't know either well enough to be able to verify it is them." Twilight didn't take her eyes off us the whole time she spoke, and I realized she was reliving the memories of finding our bodies in the snow. A new respect filled me, that the Princess of Friendship would care so much for two snobbish ponies like us.

"Well I hardly knew them either, Twilight. I don't see how they could possibly convince me that they are who they claim to be." Rarity raised one sharply coiffured eyebrow at us. "Except for any private conversations we had."

Upper Crust turned her head to face Rarity. "I am glad you had the same idea. For example, if my husband pardoned himself, and introduced us, I would ask, 'where did you get that simply marvelous chapeau?'"

The change in Rarity's demeanor was immediate and shocking. Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened. "T-T-Twilight, darling? You know the drill."

The Princess of Friendship was quick with her magic, and summoned what appeared to be a very old, and very cared-for fainting couch. And Rarity used it immediately.

Author's Note

This chapter marks the end of the story. Any further chapters in this should be considered epilogues (denoted by a v in their chapter names). (Bonus points if you know what the v represents.)

Support me on Patreon or fuel my writing on Ko-Fi!

Join me on Discord. Warning, said chat may contain NSFW material and should be considered adult in nature.

Awesome ponies who are already helping to keep me in keyboards and rum:
A.P.O.N.I.
Boulder
Canary in the Coal Mine
CrimsonPhoenix
Daremo
Dio-Drogynous
Javarod
Lazyreader19
Nils
Shaushka
Sirion123
Tanis

And special thanks to the following, for careful eyes and friendly words:
Cross Lament
Vutava