Twilight Sparkle hadn't probed us further about our identities. She had simply told us to follow, and led the way into her castle. Upper had called for Shimmering and Stellar to follow us, and leaving only Oxygen behind (for obvious reasons) we followed Twilight into the Castle of Friendship.

The entry hall was confusing. Upper and I had never had an opportunity to visit before we left, and there was something about the place that was very wrong. "Dear, are your sensors disliking this as much as mine?"

"Sensors: definitely. Reach out with your horn, Jet." Her reply was a little cryptic, but I had learned nothing in nearly four hundred years if not that Upper Crust was a clever mare.

I held back, of course, but I tentatively reached around with my horn, and felt exactly what Upper had been talking about. "Buzzing with magic. Old, very powerful, but still magic. It's twisting things."

Upper Crust sent a short agreement interrupt, then continued. "There is a lot more room inside this castle than there should be."

"That's a lot of waste." Stellar Hope sounded so disdainful I had to send a little giggle to Upper as a result.

Shimmering Star looked a little more interested, and I could sense her horn being active. I sent her a wordless query, and she replied with an interested burble. "It's like our manes and tails. Pretty, not overly useful—particularly when you could just build bigger—but it is also useful. Unless I am wrong, everyPON(I) in the town could hide in here."

"Everypony, Shimmering." Upper Crust jumped in quickly, then I realized what was coming. "Now dears, pay close attention. I'm going to teach you Equish."

I tuned out of the conversation, setting her interrupts to go straight to storage for me to look at later. "I confess, Princess Twilight, I didn't have the opportunity to see your castle before we left." Words were still strange to say. I kept getting the urge to speed them up. "It is rather lovely, if a little odd."

"Please, just call me Twilight. There's not a lot of ponies still around from back then; it's been so long." The wary attitude Twilight had used when greeting potentially unknown creatures was gone. It was almost as if knowing that two more ponies that knew her as a unicorn being around helped her feel younger again.

"I'll be honest, I slept through a bit of it. It took us three hundred years to fly to Star-0, the 'home' of the machine that captured us. Although, captured is a bit of a false word, Aggie was just doing what he thought he had to." The interrupts flying back and forth between Upper and our foals made speaking seem phenomenally slow—and it was. "But then one of our fillies came up with the great idea of using magic to teleport starships."

Leading the way, Twilight's ears were practically locked back to face me. I could practically hear her mind grinding over the details of what I was telling her. "You know my reputation from back then; it hasn't changed too much over the years. I think I'll need the whole story to make sense of any individual part."

"That may take a while. How much detail do you want?" I followed her into the Map Room, something that had been a famous part of her castle even before we'd left Equus. I froze at the picture hovering over the table. My horn told me it burned with magic, and my sensors could only agree.

"All the detail you are comfortable with." Twilight—as was her right, really—stepped up to the throne with her cutie mark emblazoned on it, and took her seat. "And would you mind if I asked some questions?"

I took Rainbow Dash's seat, right beside Twilight's, and made room for Upper and our foals to file in. "Princ—" Despite thinking thousands of times faster than I can speak, I still managed to mess up her request. "Twilight, questions are fine. We are here to talk about possible trade."

Twilight's attention seemed to jump a dozen steps. Scientific curiosity seemed to now become matched by something hungrier. "Trade would be appreciated. Now, please start from when you left the Crystal Empire. Sweet Powder led you out for some skiing."

My memories roiled and rose like a storm-lashed sea. Sweet Powder was the pony who had taken us out that day. Putting the events in order—and honestly trying not to put too pretty a bow on things—I told my story.

Princess Twilight stopped me, from time to time, to explain what a term meant, or how particular things felt. When she asked what it had been like to have my brain removed, I had to laugh. "Twilight, I don't know."

"Jet Set is a chicken, Your Highness." Upper Crust took over the speaker. "We have transferred chassis several times now, and he goes into standby every time."

"Darling, you do too." I mirrored my spoken words into an interrupt, and laced it with laughter.

"Well, I guess I meant afterwards. I kinda expected you wouldn't be awake for—for that." Twilight seemed to be paying attention mostly to Upper and myself, which was starting to arouse suspicion.

"Stellar Hope,"—I turned my head to look at Stellar—"you were awake for your node transfers?" I didn't interrupt him with the message, waiting to see how good his understanding of spoken Equish was.

"Yes." He spoke with a scratchy voice, and put heavy emphasis on the S, but it was unmistakably a yes. I got an interrupt from him that continued his thoughts. "I guess it was like having things narrow down. Aggie never left us with no connections, no inputs."

I repeated his description for Twilight, and she stared at Stellar. "H-How many ponies were foalnapped?"

Having only just gotten to the part in my story where we had been made into PONI, I finally knew why Twilight hadn't been paying attention to our foals: she thought they were just drones. "Only us two, Princess. Stellar Hope, Shimmering Star, and Oxygen Gas are our foals."

She stared at us in silence for a full minute; I counted it out exactly. "Foals?" We all nodded. "So you had your…" She trailed off, and lasted twenty seconds before her brain apparently latched onto something else. "You named three foals. Where is the third?"

"Oxygen Gas has a larger chassis, and one a lot less pony-like." Upper Crust, I could tell, was relishing the conversation. "She is watching through our sensors, but you saw her land just outside."

Twilight looked like she had just figured it out. "She's your pilot."

Upper was practically purring. "No. Oxygen is our starship. She was fitted with it as her chassis so that we could come here."

"You are enjoying this way too much, dear." I kept the interrupt private, just Upper Crust as the recipient. Aloud, I said, "May I continue, Your Highness?"

Twilight Sparkle nodded mutely, and I continued the story. This time I got all the way to when I had hooked my horn up to Aggie, powering him with what amounted to my own life-force. To my surprise—and likely Upper's great amusement—Twilight raised her hoof like a filly in school. I nodded to her.

"Why didn't you escape? We might not have had the equipment to charge your horns, but we could work out something to keep you alive." Twilight's question was one that had as easy an answer now as it did then.

"Aggie's my friend, Twilight." I kept my tone even. I might not contemplate the other choice, but even so, these were emotional situations I was forced to recall—and I didn't have my emotions muted this time.

Again I continued, when it was clear that my answer had satisfied Twilight—at least partially. Once I got to the part where Upper started our reproductive project, I let her take over. "Upper? Please keep it to terms you know Princess Twilight will understand." I kept the interrupt private, for obvious reasons.

"Jet Set, you say the most wonderful things sometimes." Upper's reply was similarly private, and dripping with affection.

"I started with two embryos. Each part of the machinery had to be tested for pony suitability, but it was amazingly precise. Aggie insisted that it was all from storage, but he didn't know why they had a trove of organic-related information." Upper Crust was taking her time, and played up the advantages the machines gave PONI over a regular pony.

"Excuse me. Embryos? But you didn't have a…" Twilight waggled her forehooves in the air, having long-since abandoning her princeliness in favor of getting actual answers. "You only have a brain."

"The machines supplied equipment for carrying foals to term, and past it. We kept our PON in their womb-bags for seven years at first. Bright Hope found relevant data and instructions on speeding foal growth." She practically preened herself. Upper Crust sent me a giggle via interrupt. "You have another question to ask me right now, don't you, Princess?"

Twilight, on the other hoof, was barely acknowledging Upper's airs in favor of trying to get everything right in her head, or so it seemed. "How many foals have you made?"

"Equestria has a census—or it did—regularly. How many ponies live here?" Upper didn't have long to wait for the figure; Twilight Sparkle used her magic to manifest the manifest. Carefully flipping through the book, holding it in her magic, Upper found what she was looking for. "Equestria has grown since we left. But there are more than a thousand times more PONI in space than there are ponies in Equestria."

"And they're all your foals?" Twilight was staring, apparently in shock.

"Oh no. As each of our foals became PONI, their own genetic stock—although quite similar to Jet and my own—was added to the source. There was so much information in the machines' storage about manipulating genes in an embryo that we could stop all the little problems such would normally cause." Likely deeply satisfied with having shell-shocked Twilight Sparkle with science and numbers, Upper Crust fired another spate of kisses and smooches to me.

Twilight looked to be struggling to bring a word out. "Why?"

"I've got it, love. If you keep talking, she will explode." I interrupted first, but then engaged the speaker to talk to Twilight. "To make PONI useful. To fill in an obvious gap the machines had in their projects."

Upper jerked control of the speaker back. "To pass the time." She paused a moment, with everyone staring at her. "It's a joke, dears."

"You missed a little bit, Upper." I took control of the debriefing back from Upper. "You see, Princess Twilight, when Upper Crust decanted our first foals, she ascended."

I watched Twilight's eyes focus on the metallic wings attached to Upper Crust's sides. Skepticism was obvious, and given the circumstances, not unfounded. "How would you know? How would it even work when there's only your brain and your horn?"

"It's magic. How does magic do anything?" Upper appeared to have reached a new height of barbing Twilight about things that couldn't be understood. "Everything turned white, I stood around in another place, watching all the things that led to that moment fly by, and when I appeared I was bigger and had wings."

"We tried changing her chassis, but the moment she is fitted to a new one, her wings grow out, and she gets bigger." In the company of ponies, I found myself making more pony gestures, like the imitation of a shrug I gave. "We had another mare ascend, Bright Hope, our first-born. She—couldn't make it."

"She's another starship?" Twilight was jumping to absurdities now, but in my estimation she wasn't jumping far enough by half.

"No, she is now using one of the spheres as her chassis. She is roughly the size of Princess Luna's moon." It was my pleasure to deliver another shock, and I suddenly realized how delightful it was. Upper Crust might not be the only PONI who enjoyed ribbing Princess Twilight Sparkle.

"So with the advantages that a teleport spell gave us, AGI-5—he seems to be the highest ranked AGI—tasked us with finding more spells. So here we are, asking if our daughter can be your student." I gestured with a hoof to Shimmering Star.

"That wasn't the plan." Upper Crust interrupted to me, although I noted there was no rebuke in her tone.

I quickly shot a reply, keeping the interrupt private. "Remember, dear, improvising. And can you honestly see Princess Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Friendship, Element-Bearer to the Element of Magic, refusing to teach somePONI as talented as Shimmering?"

Upper sent me a single kiss. "You are a clever stallion, Jet Set."

"And I have the most clever alicorn in all of Equestria as my wife." I replied similarly, more kisses interrupted to Upper.

"Making exceptions for Bright Hope?" Upper didn't sound offended, not in the least.

I sent another kiss. "She is a very clever mare, dear. I hoped you would understand."

We both broke a bark of amused laughter via interrupt, then turned our attention back to Twilight.

Author's Note

What's with the "v" on the end? Overflow. Sadly, the story has run its course, and these last few chapters (the ones marked with a v), are not part of the story as it was envisioned. So I am marking them as "kinda epilogues" to The Process.

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