"I'll teach them both."

The words shocked me. I looked at Dad and Mom, then across to Princess Twilight Sparkle. The lack of outgoing communications was annoying on a new level. "I don't need to learn magic. I'm happy being an engineer!"

"Our mission, Stellar, is to gain any and all information on magic and spells. If you have to go along with this too, then so be it." Mom's tone served as a warning, but her words reminded me that this was the reason for being here.

I looked at Shimmering, and realized she was staring at the princess. "You're really into this, aren't you, Shimmering?"

My interrupt caught Shimmering Star's attention, and she turned to me and nodded. "It'll be so exciting, don't you think?" Her tone was infectious, and I found myself surrendering to fate.

"Yeah. It'll be great. We need to get our own speakers first." Having told her that, I probed Oxy for a status report on the fabricators. Then something hit me. "Mom, what about Oxy?"

"Stellar, you are a dear to think of your sister." Mom sent me a hug via interrupt, and waited for her moment to speak in the achingly slow conversation Dad was having with the princess. "Oxygen, dear, you're taking this course too."

"What?" Oxygen sounded much like I did moments earlier.

"Ahem." Mom cut in after Twilight said something to dad. "Excuse me, but if you are going to teach Stellar and Shimmering, you will have room for one more?"

Ponies wore all their emotions externally; you didn't need a single interrupt to know that Twilight Sparkle was excited. "Who else?" She looked between Mom and Dad, and I realized she assumed it was one of them.

"Oxygen Gas is interested in magic. She would love to learn as well. Right, dear?" Mom sounded particularly smug, from what I could glean of spoken Equish. "Come on, Oxy. I noticed you poking at the speaker before." The last was sent via a good, clean interrupt.

"Yeah." Everyone turned to face Dad—or more precisely, the speaker he wore—used a different tone, and the word sounded dry and flat. A quick probe of the interrupt system gave me PONI-7413 as the source: Oxygen Gas.

"Show off." I interrupted Oxygen with a raspberry as well for good measure. I reached inward, closer than my interrupt system, and started to shuffle recordings of spoken Equish around, compared it to Mom's decoder, and started to build rules for how to speak.

I threw myself at the task, simply diverting my audio recording to dump to storage. Initiating my PAI, I instructed it to start optimizing the synthesized output for the audio range ponies had.

"Stellar, the princess asked you a question." Dad's tone implied that I should have been listening, although his interrupt had cut through to me easily enough.

"Sorry Princess Twilight." I spoke the words through Dad's speaker, and was surprised how stilted it seemed to be compared to Mom, Dad, and the princess. Ignoring that, I reviewed my recordings and realized I had been asked what magic I knew already. "I learned to lift things, push things, and…" It felt strange dynamically generating language, and worse still seeing reactions to my every word as I spoke them. "What?"

Twilight's expression was hard to read, mostly because I wasn't used to it. I think she was smiling, and that probably meant she was more amused than annoyed. "I asked about what spells you know."

"Move and light." When my answer seemed insufficient—just the slightest expression change caused me to reach for more words—I was set to continue. "Moving stuff without it being in-between. And light, making the area, uh, brighter." My vocabulary was so annoyingly small. The range of sounds Mom had given me was fine for decoding, but encoding was another matter. I hastened the words I needed through my PAI and quickly put together what I wanted to say. "Teleportation, the ability to move an object from one place to another without passing it through the intervening spaces, and by using advanced techniques as discovered by Bright Hope, I achieve a seventy-three percent efficiency. For my illumination spell I can consistently construct light sources of up to nine-hundred lumen with a power efficiency of ninety-six percent. I can manage two such light spells at the same time with only a twenty percent drop in efficiency."

I blinked as the speaker finally finished my script. When no one said anything, I felt compelled to fill the silence. "My personal energy level is within the top fifteen percentile among PONI, and the last full-test scored me at—"

"Wonderful!" Twilight Sparkle actually cut in on me, and caused me to stop my data flow to the speaker. "It's great to hear you already know spells, but I think we might have to go back to basics. Do you know how to read magic script?"

"Wait. You don't have to answer immediately, dear. Any of you can answer this one, and while I'm proud of your vocabulary, you should probably let Shimmering or Oxygen have a turn." Mom's tone was gentle, but I could see it for the mild rebuke it was.

"I know the spells too, but my efficiency with the light spell is lower than Stellar's." I had to prod at the interrupt handler to find out it was Oxygen Gas who transmitted the words. Her tone was softer than mine.

I reached out to Oxy. "You sound really good. How did you optimize your output?" Interrupts were definitely the superior way to send data, not only for clarity but speed; I managed to get my interrupt off before Princess Twilight fully acknowledged Oxy's words.

"There's something moving toward the castle at great speed. It's the pink one, Pinkie Pie!" Oxy's shouted interrupt hit us just as the doors to the room exploded inward.

"Happy birthday, anniversary, welcome to Ponyville, chassis gaining, princessing…" Pinkie Pie, the bright pink pony that Oxygen had warned us all of, stood in the doorway with a huge cylinder device and a tray covered in organic compounds. "… and back!" Pinkie tugged on a little piece of string attached to the cylinder.

My optics were almost too slow. I reviewed the footage a moment after our chassis were all half-buried in multi-spectrum, tiny shreds of thin organic material. As I replayed the explosion, I was fascinated by how pretty it was.

"Pinkie Pie!" Twilight's yell seemed to freeze everything in place. Somehow she had reacted faster than even we could. Although once she started talking, she got much slower again. "You're making a mess and causing an—an interplanetary incident!"

A small plastic disc was thrust before me with a section of the stacked organic matter that Pinkie Pie had brought in on it. "Pfft. Don't be silly, Twilight. They had to have a party. Think of all the birthdays, and wedding anniversaries, and… and… and all that stuff!"

The interrupt system was going crazy, but I ignored most of the wilder, panicked messages. I poked at the organic matter on the disc and sampled it. "This is just simple sugars and complex fats."

"See, Twilight? They like their cake." Pinkie Pie seemed to move faster than even a teleported starship, fast enough that one moment she was beside the exploding cylinder, and the next she was beside me, putting a foreleg over my shoulders. "Don't you… uh…"

I froze. These ponies were mostly made from soft organic matter, and I was explicitly aware of how easy Dad sunk into the ground with just the aid of the planet's gravity. "What do I do? She won't let go!"

Dad was the first to respond. "She's being friendly, Stellar. Lean into it if you like her, hug her back if you really like her, or kiss her."

"Jet Set! Don't you dare give him such advice!" Mom sounded angry, but I could also sense laughter within her interrupt.

Turning my attention from my squabbling parents, I lifted one foreleg up and set it over Pinkie Pie's back. The reaction was immediate. Not immediate in the slow pace ponies seemed to react in, but immediate-immediate. One moment we just had our forelegs over each other's back, and the next Pinkie Pie pulled me toward her, hugging me like I had seem Mom and Dad hug.

Pinkie Pie was soft. I could feel the give in her body as my servos tightened against her. I was careful, focusing the majority of my attention on stopping those servos before the softness gave way to bones. I realized what she felt like: a PON.

"See, Twilight? They are fine." Pinkie Pie squeezed me a little tighter, and to my surprise she pressed the tip of her snout to mine and made a loud (compared to normal conversation) noise. "And they're great huggers, too!" She released me, and I quickly did the same. She giggled a little, my translator not needing to tell me that it meant she was happy.

Twilight moved herself, with magic, to stand beside us. "You can't just do that, Pinkie. Poor Stellar Hope is probably scared!"

I wasn't scared, I wasn't even panicked. "Shimmering, did you just see what the princess did?"

"I can't see anything, Stellar. Let me use your feed." Shimmering Star's interrupt came with a request for optical data and recent recordings. I approved both. "She teleported herself. She teleported herself!"

I had to shunt Shimmering's interrupts to storage for a moment, and wrote a quick filter to notify me when the contents had changed. I reached out to Oxy, and found the second of the speakers had just finished.

Our entire conversation took less time than Twilight Sparkle spent opening her mouth. She glared at Pinkie Pie. "Pinkie, stop that right now!"

Rumors had circulated Canterlot—before we left Equus—of a pink pony from Ponyville that was a little more startling than your average spirit of chaos, and I now knew that to be true. Pinkie Pie had fired her canon into the room, buried one of our foals in confetti, and then proceeded to hug and kiss the other.

Twilight sparkle was trying, and failing, to get the situation back under control, but at that moment Stellar Hope moved, putting himself between the princess and Pinkie Pie. With a flash of magic, a second speaker unit appeared beside Stellar.

"Princess, it's okay. She does things a little different to back home, but I don't think she could hurt us even if she wanted to." Stellar's words cut off whatever Twilight had been about to add.

Upper leaned against my side. "Our little colt is growing up. Look at him standing up for a pony against Princess of Friendship, Twilight 'Funny nose' Sparkle." The tone of Upper Crust's private interrupt was a mixture of pride and humor, and even without the words, I could tell Upper did not particularly like Twilight. "He's fallen for her. Look at the way he defended Pinkie Pie, stood up for her. I think that was his first kiss, too."

I stared, not hearing any voice or interrupt but Upper's. I gulped at the idea that my little colt had fallen for one of the Element Bearers. I snapped out of my daze. "Your Highness! I don't believe anything was intended to hurt us, and it is good to be reminded of our pony roots. I am sure our foals would be happy to postpone the start of their classes until the morning."

"Spoilsport. I wanted to see him singe her snout." The private interrupt flowed in as Upper's voice issued from the speaker. "Of course. There is always time for a little party. Pinkie Pie, do you know anypony who might like to attend?"

Given a license to plan a much larger party, Pinkie Pie's eyes widened, and she nodded to my wife. "I'll be right back!" A blur of pink was all my sensors could detect before the entity and pony known as Pinkie Pie was gone again.

"Stellar. You alright, son?" I kept the message private, just for us stallions.

Stellar sent a short burst of confused static before getting a real interrupt formed. "Dad? Are all ponies like that?"

"Oh no. She is probably one of the best of them. What did you think of her?"

"She was so soft, so pretty, and so warm. Why are they warm? Don't they have adequate cooling systems?" His question was so stereotypically "engineer" that I sent myself the burst of giggles I felt swell inside.

I barely got hold of my interrupt circuits, struggling past the rolls of laughter I was sending to loopback. "You should probably ask her, Stellar. Ask about her lips first. Trust me."

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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