The amnesiac stranger who knows too much

When we were done with our lunch and Shy finished cleaning up the mess that I inadvertently created, it probably was a little past noon. I was not feeling very enthusiastic after the whole bathroom door disaster, so I decided that I needed some fresh air to think. I went for the door, but was stopped by Shy’s voice when I was almost out.

As I turned to look at her, she shook her head. I didn’t even know what to think, so I raised a brow at it. She probably understood that, and was now thinking how to explain herself. She soon got an idea, as was evident by the change in her expression, and went upstairs and to the right. No idea what was there, the door was closed when I passed it before. Soon she returned with a pencil and some paper.

“Oh, she’s probably going to draw the answer. That’s a good idea.” She put the paper onto the table and started drawing, holding the pencil in her mouth. I came closer to watch. I could tell she was no artist, but the image she drew was easy to identify. It was a cloud, with rain falling from it.

“She’s trying to tell me that it’s going to rain? But it’s sunny, and I’ve only seen a few light clouds while I was outside not so long ago!” I looked out of the closest window, and sure, quite a few heavy dark clouds were moving in, and fast! “Huh, she’s right. At this rate, the clouds will be here in just a few minutes.”

I nodded to Shy, sighed, and just sat there. I still wasn’t feeling like doing anything, and there was little I could actually do. Shy looked at me for a while, and then sighed too. She went to the bookshelf, took one of the books, and settled on the sofa to read. Soon it started raining outside, and then it quickly became dark and windy. I heard a roll of thunder in the distance. It was going to be one wicked thunderstorm.

Shy got up and went towards the door. My confusion was quickly cleared when, instead of going outside, she tapped something on the wall, and the lights came on. I don’t know why it surprised me. Even though they never turned the lights on in my hospital room, for I was already asleep by the time it got dark enough, they still had that complex machine by my bedside. A simple light was nothing in comparison. As shy went back to her sofa, curiosity drew me to one of the light sources. “Heh, it’s some sort of crystal, and it’s glowing all by itself. Magic, again. They do use it for everything, it seems.” That did remind me that I had none presently, but between my detour from moping and looking at Shy reading a book, a thought came to me.

“I can do nothing about my present magic disability, at least I think so. And even if I can, I don’t know what or how. I know next to nothing about the world around me, the ponies, even myself, and I cannot learn much because I don’t know the language. Which is the problem I can do something about. And what better time to start than otherwise pretty useless rainy afternoon!”

And with that thought, a little determination and brighter mood, I went towards the table where the pencil and some paper still were. I took the pencil in my mouth, looked at the raincloud that Shy drew previously, and started slowly scribbling the words ‘cloud’ and ‘rain’ next to it. I remembered exactly what the letters looked like, but actually writing them with my mouth was a whole different story. About a minute later, not quite satisfied with my work but still enthusiastic, I put the pencil down, picked up the sheet of paper with my mouth and approached Shy.

She looked up from her book and at the paper. She took it in her hooves with curiosity, and I said the two words while pointing at them with my hoof. Then I pointed at the empty space on the other side, and at her. She definitely understood what I wanted her to do. She smiled, closed the book, left the sofa and went to the table. She added her own writing and pronounced the words, and I tried to repeat after her.

Repeating was not easy, for they apparently had sounds in their language that I wasn’t quite used to producing. Not that I could not, it’s just that whinnying didn’t come naturally for me. And when I replaced a short whinny with an ‘i’, shy insisted that I did it wrong by repeating the word, and adding some other word that had an actual ‘i’ in it when I failed for the third time. After I got close enough for her to approvingly nod, I started thinking how I could transcribe the pronunciation with my language, to write it down in case I forget it, but it was kinda difficult to do it precisely even without taking the weird horse noises into account. I quickly realized how much work it would be to transcribe every single word individually, and decided to try something else.

I dragged an empty sheet of paper closer with my hoof, took the pencil and started writing out the alphabet in a column. As I finished, I read it out loud. I realized that the letter names hardly sounded like the sounds they represented in words, and really hoped that that wasn’t the case with the pony alphabet. Shy thought for a little, and started writing another column of symbols, reading each one in sequence after she finished. It was a considerably larger alphabet, so hopefully there were separate letters for most of the sounds they used. I transcribed the pronunciation to the best of my ability, writing short descriptions for the weirder sounds. It took us at least ten minutes, maybe fifteen or more, for Shy to read every letter again, and for me to repeat it satisfactorily and write it down.

With the alphabet written down, it was time to check if I could actually read the words out loud with it! I’ve read the words ‘cloud’ and ‘rain’ again, and the pronunciation matched. I’ve drawn the sun, written ‘sun’ next to the picture, and silently pointed at it. Shy added her translation. I looked up the two letters that the word consisted of, pronounced them in succession, and looked at Shy for her verdict. She smiled and nodded.

“Yes! They probably have no weird pronunciation rules like my language does, which will make things quite a bit easier.”

Time flies when you are having fun, and it seemed we both enjoyed playing charades. We went over some common stuff like ‘hello’, ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘I don’t know’ and so on, random things from around the room, a few of the critters, some actions. Some words required much more guesswork than others, like how do you even explain the abstract concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’? We also covered some simple sentences, questions, that kind of thing.

I noticed a small clock on the wall while we were pointing out random objects to describe, and by the time Shy yawned it was already around nine, while I think we started no later than at two o’clock. It was definitely time to call it a night, so I pretended to fall asleep for a moment and then wrote ‘sleep’ on the paper. Shy wrote the translation down and nodded.

“Yes, it’s ???, ?time? to sleep.”

“Yep, the words would not just stick in my head by themselves, I’ll have to spend time memorizing them.” I watched as she arranged the paper back into a stack, and I suddenly realized something.

“Um... What you... call?” asked I. “Ugh. I don’t think I got it right.” I looked at her confused face and tried again. “I call you what?” I looked at her again. “Who could have thought that asking ‘What’s your name?’ would be that difficult.” Shy seemed to understand now, thankfully.

“My name is Shy.” She smiled at me as I repeated her name a couple times. I could not make anything of it, it was just a sequence of sounds to me, but it sounded nice. She wrote both the word ‘name’ and her name down. As I was adding my translations, she asked me the same question.

“What is your name?” I stopped writing. I thought for a little while, but of course I could not remember it.

“I not know.” said I and tried to smile at her. After a little pause, I asked, “What you call me?”

She sighed and said, “We call you %name%,” and then wrote the name down.

I repeated it slowly, and said “Good!” with a smile. I took the pencil and added ‘Me!’ next to the name. It felt surprisingly good to have a name, even if I had a hard time pronouncing it yet.

Shy smiled at that, said “?Follow? me,” and went upstairs. I followed her, unsure what that was all about. When she opened the door to the right of the staircase, I looked inside. That was, unmistakably, Shy’s bedroom. With a single queen sized bed, and not a single other place to lay down in sight. Can you guess what kind of thoughts were flying through my mind at that moment? As I turned to look at Shy with bewildered face, I felt heat creep up my cheeks despite my best efforts to stay cool.

It took Shy but a moment to realize what I was thinking. Her eyes widened, she tried to hide behind her mane and blushed fiercely, and started slowly backing off, while quietly but frantically stammering semicoherent words, of which I could only really pick out ‘no’, ‘not that’ and ‘didn’t mean’. I put a hoof on her back and took a few exaggerated and loud slow deep breaths. She mirrored me and slowly calmed down. I used the time to calm down myself.

“Explain,” said I. She still was hiding behind her mane and replied rather quietly, but calmly nonetheless.

“You ?? sleep here, I sleep on sofa down ?stairs?.” My face probably acquired the bewildered expression again.

“This pony is way too shy... kind?.. whatever, for her own good. Giving up her bedroom for a sofa, so that a mostly stranger could sleep on a proper bed!” I shook my head.

“Thanks. No. I sleep sofa. You sleep here.” I smiled at her, turned around and went downstairs. Midway there I turned my head and said, “Good night, Shy!” She was still staring at me with blank expression, but smiled at the words. I continued down the stairs, went to the door to turn off the lights, and then slowly and carefully went to the sofa, barely lifting my hooves so as not to step on an unlucky critter by accident. I laid on the sofa, yawned, and finally closed my eyes.

“That was a good day. And a long one. Feels like it was longer than all the days in hospital together. And for once, I am actually exhausted.” The storm was still raging outside, rain beating on the window above me. I smiled, and soon drifted off to sleep.