The next morning I was outside Twilight’s just like I’d been the day before, bright and early. She’d caught me a little after me and Rainbow had grabbed lunch and she’d said that we could try again tomorrow and tomorrow was now today, so there I was.
I’d knocked, but she had not answered. I’d knocked again but still there had been nothing. So now I was hanging around outside, hoping I didn’t look especially suspicious just loitering.
A handful of pony early-risers trotted past, going about their pony business. Some waved, others didn’t look my way. This was about normal. A friendly bunch, ponies, I couldn’t blame those who still regarded me with just a hint of suspicion. I had, after all, appeared out of nowhere.
I knocked again.
“Come on…” I told the door, which remained silent and closed. My head thunked against the wood. If today was just going to be another day I where got blew off I would have liked to know sooner rather than later. That way at least I could salvage something. Maybe see what Rainbow was up to. She was definitely working today, that I knew, but she surely had a lunch break or something.
Before I could leave, I heard activity on the other side of the door and had to stand back. Opening, it revealed a thoroughly dishevelled looking Twilight who squinted up at me with lidded, shadowed eyes, which she also rubbed. I knew that look.
“Late night?” I asked.
“No. Yeah. I was just - I was just - “she trailed off in a yawn. “Come in, come in.”
I did so and she shut the door, staggering past me. I followed.
“Sure you don’t want to just go to bed? You look like you might need it,” I said, watching her sway and very nearly bump into a bookcase. She straightened up.
“No. I’m fine. I spent the whole night going over my notes again for today! Would have done it during the day but-”
“Something came up. As it often does. It’s fine. You’re the boss, lead the way.”
Something was always coming up around here.
Much in the same way the weather in Ponyville flipped back and forth between wonderful loveliness and overwhelming horribleness, life itself was either rural, sedate and pleasant or else overrun with magical nonsense in need of fixing. I tended to stay out of the way, otherwise I’d only end up getting in the way.
I followed twilight along a corridor and through a door and down some stairs into where her lab was. Apparently she had a lab and that was a thing people were fine with. I’d been in there a few times already for tests and the like, so far with little practical result.
The place was much as anyone might expect a ‘lab’ to look in a magical land of talking ponies. Which is to say, it look like a hodgepodge mash of every lab of every mad scientist ever. Beakers filled with various chemicals. Strewn notes. Unusual and inexplicable machines. That sort of thing.
The first time I’d seen I had been, well, fairly certain that I wouldn’t be leaving. Expecting vivisection I had been glad just to leave the place alive. Then I’d realised that Twilight was mostly harmless. Now it just irritated me with how out of place it was.
Where she get any of this stuff? Did she make it herself? How? Where? Who made the tools to make these tools? The tech level in this place was all to cock.
More to the point, who did this space even fit inside this building? Were we underground? How deep? Best not to think about it too much.
Once in the lab I moved to the seat I always sat in when in the lab and sat down. If Twilight needed me to do anything she would tell me. This is how these things worked. I hung around, she prodded me with magical sticks or asked me questions about what I could remember before arriving here (answer: not a whole lot) and she ran the occasional test.
She told me she had some theories she was working on and I believed her. What other choice did I have?
Twilight herself clip-clopped past and started rearranging things and tidying up.
“So...whatever came up yesterday all sorted then?” I asked.
“Totally sorted, yes. Sorry again for that.”
“No no it’s fine. You guys have your stuff to do. Not like I’m on a schedule.”
I chuckled. She chuckled. We went quiet again.
“Oh yeah,” she piped up a moment later. “I wanted to ask: what did you and Rainbow talk about the other day? Because she was, uh, little off afterwards.”
A random question. I put it down to sleep deprivation. It threw me.
I wondered for one thing how Twilight knew how I’d spent my day off. Then I wondered which other day she meant - my actual day off or the impromptu one when our previous appointment had been postponed. Then I wondered how me poorly explaining human courting could have done anything.
I had a lot of questions.
“Define ‘off’,” I said.
“Like, unduly concerned about your safety but not really willing to go into the why.”
I grimaced. That narrowed it down.
“Oh, that day. She - we - she asked me about, uh, wars back home. And I told her. Guess it must have made an impression on her.”
And that impression in turn made an impression on Twilight. Weird, that.
“Wars?” Twilight asked, looking confused.
“Yes. Lovely girl, Rainbow, but does have a taste for the, ah, more unpleasant things I’ve picked up. I imagine wars are a little different here then they are where I’m from. Judging from her reaction, at least. And her being off, as you say.”
“How different could they be?” She asked breezily, smiling and waving a hoof as though to brush away such nonsense. I sucked my teeth.
“Uh, pretty - pretty different,” I said, running through a cavalcade of assorted horrors in my head that ran the gamut from grinding, soul-fraying counter-insurgency campaigns all the way to straight-up nuclear annihilation. From what little I’d managed to read of Equestria’s history I wasn’t even sure their wars even had fatalities. Figure that one out.
Probably just my imagination, but still. A war without fatalities? Not even Equestria could be so twee. The contrasts though were still clear. Certainly never read anything about pegasii firebombing anywhere.
I shook my head to reset my line of thinking, more for my own benefit than for Twilight’s. Wouldn’t pay to keep being so melancholy and morbid.
“But I don’t really want to talk about this. Not again. Rainbow seemed alright last time I saw her. She’s better now, right?”
“Oh yeah. She was just worried about you, is all,” she said, giving me an odd look.
I made a mental note to try and catch up with Rainbow again as soon as possible for a platonic cuddle and a soothing word or two about how unlikely I was to die in a war. I had no idea it had shaken her up so bad - she hadn’t seemed it at all, to me. I was also giving Twilight what I hoped was my most convincing ‘I’m fine, really’ smile.
“I’m safe as houses, me. I’m here, aren’t I?” I said.
“For now,” Twilight said with stiff resolve. I remembered we standing in her lab and were standing there specifically to try and find a way to get me home.
“For now, yes. Not for long I’m sure.”
I gave her a thumbs up and she smiled. The first time I’d tried that they’d just been confused, but I’d since explained it and they’d all got oddly fond of the gesture. I’d had to start rationing it to keep it special. Rainbow always strove to get the most, and usually did.
She was, after all, consistently awesome.
Twilight busied herself with things that I did not understand following this, stopping her tidying and actually starting her fiddling. I was left at a loose end. I sat and twiddled my thumbs and waited for something to do to come my way. Nothing did, and it looked for all the world that Twilight had just forgotten I was there.
It would not have been the first time that happened. More than once I’d come over ostensibly to provide information for her work on getting me home, only for to end up standing around doing nothing while she did something that apparently didn’t need me at all. That was why she’d put the chair in.
I hoped this wasn’t another of those times, and felt it best to remind her I was there.
“I’m glad it’s the war thing,” I said “I thought you might have meant what she’d asked me about yesterday, and that just would have been confusing.”
“Oh? Why? What was that?” She asked, not looking up. But at least she was talking to me, which meant she still knew I was there. That’s a start.
“What did she ask me? About human, uh, courting, you know? Romance. Was a bit unusual but then she does ask me a lot of questions. Would have been weird if that was what made her off.”
Twilight nodded, clearly only half-listening. Then her brain caught up with the words it had just heard and she stopped whatever it was she was doing. She peered over at me.
“Wait, what? She asked what? Rainbow Dash? Start that from the beginning.”
Trust Twilight to know the importance of context.
I gave a broad outline of what I’d done after our little appointment had fallen through yesterday morning. Me wandering off, me wandering to the lake, me sitting down. The preamble to the actual bit with Rainbow.
“...and then I started skimming stones - badly - Rainbow popped up with a day off, slandered my stone-skimming ability, fell into my lap while I gave her a little scratch behind the ears and then she asked me the stuff about human romance. After just sitting around quietly for a bit first.”
“She was sitting in your lap when she asked you?” Twilight asked, eyebrow raised. By this time she’d come over to stand in front of me so we didn’t have to talk across the breadth of the lab.
“Well, yeah. You ponies are all touchy-feely. She’s forever hugging me. That’s normal, right?”
“Have I ever sat in your lap?”
I had to think about that for a second, but the answer was undeniable. She had not, nor had she ever expressed any particular desire to. But that didn’t mean anything.
“...no. But that’s different,” I said.
Her look could have stripped paint with the sheer force of its unimpresedness.
“How?” She asked.
I shifted uncomfortably. I hadn’t really come here for an interrogation. A few of the normal questions about what I’d been doing before I arrived, sure, that was normal. But not this. Context-free questions about back home were one thing, questions about me right then and there were quite another. I waved a hand to generally indicate her work space and all the fancy stuff that was in it.
“You’re always busy whenever I come over. You’re working, so, uh, you don’t have the chance. That and - ah - you and we don’t spend as much time together compared to me and Rainbow. No downtime together, yeah? So no opportunity.”
“So you spend a lot of time with Rainbow?”
She knew I did. Everyone knew I did. Was this a trick question?
“Lots,” I said and I folded my arms as I did so.
“And you’re assuming because Rainbow likes sitting in your lap and getting scratched behind the ears and hugging you while you’re spending time together we all do?”
“...no?”
This was a lie. This was exactly what I’d assumed.
Not with me personally, of course, but just in a general sense. Personal space worked differently for ponies. Was much smaller. This I had seen.
“I mean, you guys are always hugging and stuff. You and the pink one. And the white one. And the yellow one. And the, uh, orange one?”
Colourblindness a distinct disadvantage in Equestria.
Twilight’s look was now a fierce blend of long-suffering exasperation and low-level amusement. Like someone have to slow down in order to explain a simple concept to someone else too dense to understand it, but also someone who’s finding it quite funny how oblivious the dense person is consistently being. So not far from what was happening, really.
“Yes that’s because we’re friends,” she said, drawing the last word out.
She’d fallen into my trap.
“Exactly! Rainbow and me are friends. It’s normal,” I said. Triumphantly.
Twilight was unmoved and, again, unimpressed.
“Yes, we’ve noticed. Very good friends.”
There was something in that sentence she clearly wanted me to pick up on but for the life of me I couldn’t work out what it was. Jealousy of mine and Rainbow’s excellent friendship? That didn’t seem likely. Then what? I did not know, and the more she stared me down expecting me to get it the more I didn’t know. I squirmed.
“Anyway, aren’t we, you know, doing important stuff here?” I said, clearing my throat, leaping to my feet and walking across the lab just to put some distance between me and Twilight. I came to a stop in front of a machine that was big and imposing and thoroughly incomprehensible and put my hands on my hips. “Do you need to take measurements again or something? I need to stand on any plates? Give blood again?”
“What blood?” She asked, alarmed. I waved towards a table in the corner, practically invisible beneath scattered parchments.
Question: What did they make parchment out of here? Presumably not, you know, actual parchment. It was probably just paper. But olde-worlde paper. Bloody ponies.
“I cut my finger on some of your notes. Figured you’d use it for something.”
“Is that was that was?”
“They were on the floor! I was picking them up! What is this thing anyway? S’big. Looks important.”
This I said while moving around the giant metal thing that dominated the lab and had been the elephant in the room the whole time we’d been talking. It was terrifying. All flanges and prongs and wires and vents. I wanted to poke it, but I was too afraid. Twilight trotted up looking immensely proud of herself.
“It is my trans-dimensional matter relocation and transportation device!”
No amount of jargon could stall me. I was wise to these sorts of tricks.
“A teleporter,” I said. “You’ve built a teleporter. And it looks like this?”
“It’s only a prototype,” she said, defensively.
“No no, I’m impressed! I mean, what, you knocked this up in like a week?”
This being based off when I remembered her mentioning that she was working on something. Which had been about a week ago, by my estimation.
“Eight days,” she mumbled, blushing a little bit and then blushing much harder when I gave her a pat on the back.
“Eight days! Fuckin’ incredible. Snaps for Twilight.”
I snapped my fingers. She gave me a look as though I’d gone mad.
“Nevermind. So how’s it work? I don’t mean the technical details, I mean, like, what will I have to do for it to operate on me?”
Stand somewhere while a beam of light sent me far, far away, presumably. Hoped I didn’t end up half in a wall. That would be unfortunate.
“I’m not going that far quite yet. I have tests to run. Which reminds me…”
She trotted off again and floated something out from underneath a pile of miscellaneous crap, her horn glowing. Trotting back again she proffered the thing towards me until it was a couple of feet from my face. I had no idea what it was
“Do you mind if I use this?” She said.
“Uh…
“I looked closer.
It was a chunk of the seat I’d arrived here sitting in, cut up into bite-size. Well, smaller at least. I had wondered what had happened to that. Made sense Twilight would have gone back into the forest to nab it.
Just some random piece of GWR property now a long way from home. I had no emotional attachment to it whatsoever. In fact, thinking back on how much of my life and my money I’d had taken from me by Great Western Rail, whatever emotion I might have felt would only be negative.
“You can do whatever you want with that,” I said. Twilight beamed.
“Thank you! I think it’ll be perfect,” she said, moving off around her teleporter and settling the chunk on an open space of floor in front of it. The danger zone, I assumed, stepping back.
“How’d you figure?”
“I theorise that this object from your home dimension will - like you - have a level of magical desaturation markedly different from anything else in Equestria. With that in mind, it will serve as an excellent if crude stand-in for you - a perfect test for my prototype teleporter!”
Nothing sinister about anything she’d just said. Not at all.
“Whatever you say, you’re the genius,” I said.
Grinning enough to split her face in half she flicked polarised lenses down over her eyes and rubbed her hooves together.
When, exactly, had she got those goggles and had time to put them on without me noticing?
“I am, yes,” she said.
“Wait wait, we’re doing this right now? You’re doing this right now?”
“Why not? You’re here. You said I can use that thing. It’s ready to go. This is what I plan on using to send you back so knowing if it works or not is kind of important.”
No arguing with that.
“Uh, alright. You’re the motive force here, Twilight, go nuts. I’ll just stand here and look impressed.”
“You do that.”
Circling around the room she stood up on her hindhooves behind a bank of knobs and levers and switches and dials and displays spread out across an expansive console. She started fiddling with this, and the giant device clicked on with a hum, what parts of it that were meant to move jolting and making me jump.
“Can you just climb up there and start the rotors for me? There should be a switch,” she said, pointing.
“I’m helping,” I said, climbing the ladder. Why did ponies even have ladders? At the top of this one was a switch, which I threw. The top-most part of the machines slowly started to turn, quickly picking up speed until it was spinning at speedy, steady pace. I climbed back down.
“Good?” I asked.
“Yes, thank you,” she said, not looking up.
Nothing about what was happening at that moment made me feel good. The teleporter had been crammed into a space that was far too small even before it had started spinning around and I could see that the only thing keeping it in place were the bolts affixing it to the floor. It was also starting to whine as it spun.
This wasn’t something I’d have felt especially safe about watching from behind a few inches of reinforced glass in a comfortable steel-lined room. And I wasn’t even that safe. I was barely a dozen feet away and everything I touched gave me a shock. The walls. Myself. Everything started zapping me.
“Uh, it’s not a problem - probably,” I heard Twilight say. “- but I’m showing a small discrepancy in...well, no, it’s well within acceptable bounds again. Sustaining sequence.”
I was suddenly filled with a deep and abiding dread the source of which I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Something caught my eye. A bracket on the housing of the machine seemed to be looser than all the other brackets. As the machine whirled around and the whine increased in pitch, the looser it got. The whole thing started to rattle from side to side as the balance shifted.
“Uh, Twilight is that - is that meant to be loose?” I shouted.
“What?” She shouted back, the whole of her mane stuck on end from the static
“There’s a loose bit! There!” I said, pointing.
“Loose?”
It was only then she seemed to notice how alarmingly the thing was rocking. The spinning part was spinning wider and faster with every rotation, the floor bulging up where it was bolted in place. The static in the air was increasing. The whine was getting louder. It had started spitting sparks and questing, twisting arcs that grounded on the floorboards and scorched the walls.
With those goggles on it was impossible to tell, but I imagine that her eyes widening.
“G-get away from it!”
I was backed up as far as I could by this point, and just running away and leaving her to her fate didn’t make me feel good. She was still a good twenty feet away, but I could cover that with a brisk shuffle. No problem. Nothing to worry about.
While I shuffled across the wall to get to Twilight she was frantically pulling and pushing every lever and button she had in front of her. The console was spitting sparks, too.
“Shutting down - no - attempted shutdown! It’s not - it’s not shutting down! It’s not-”
Author's Note
No aliens, sorry. Just amused me to throw that stuff in at the end.
