Luna and the Tree Poniesby McPoodleChaptersPart 1Part 2Part 3PostscriptsPart 1Betwixt Silver and Gold 3: Luna and the Tree Ponies This is a little story that little Luna tells herself to remember the time when she found the tree ponies. - Part 1 - Little Luna lived in the big tall castle on the sea-cliff in the Land of Neurth, with her Mommy and her Daddy and her big sister Tia. At one end of the land was the Sun, and at the other end was the Moon. They never moved, so Luna and her family would go to one side of the castle when they wanted to be awake, and later go to the other side when they wanted to sleep. All around the castle were volcanoes, and flaming plains, and negative energy zones, and a spot in the sky that made you taste broccoli whenever you looked at it, and all kinds of other nastiness which you couldn’t even see from the windows, or so Daddy said—he never let Luna go out there. Manticores and basilisks and chimeras roamed the plains, and got into frequent and noisy fights with each other. There were also two gangs of ghosts riding ghost alicorns that kept fighting the exact same fight in the same spot day after day; Luna knew it was bedtime when the big rock fell on them. Daddy said that there were towns out there, somewhere, of law-abiding creatures. Someday he would find them, and on that day the family would go join them, and Daddy would be accepted as their king, the King of Neurth. Luna didn’t want to leave the castle, as it was the only safe place that she had ever known. The castle was bright and cheery; if somewhat empty after Last Megan had gone away. It was kinda hard to remember Last Megan, as she went away so very long ago. She was an odd sort of creature, the only one of her kind that Luna had ever seen, apart from pictures on tapestries and ancient scrolls (and the ghosts, but they were hard to see). Tia called her an “ancient”, which was rather silly, as she was so very young and alive when she went away. Luna called her a Tree Pony, because she stood up high on her hind legs like Luna did when she pretended to be a tree, and because she had a short and bright red mane (but no tail), just like a tree in the autumn. Tia and Last Megan used to run and laugh and play and talk for hours and hours. This made Luna jealous, because Tia never had time for her. And Last Megan must have known this, because she went away so Luna could have all the time she wanted with her sister. But now Tia was sad all the time. One day, Luna decided she was going to bring Last Megan back. She decided that she had had enough time with Tia, and now she wanted her to be happy again. So she went down into the basement and wished for her to return. She wished, because Luna was an alicorn and alicorns could make things happen by wishing, or so Mommy always said. And she went to the basement, because she found that her magic was always better when she was next to the little boarded-over spot at the bottom of the basement. That spot was also where the weird dreams came from, and the voice that was both awful and soothing at the same time, but that was worth putting up with for just one wish. But Last Megan didn’t come back. Luna was disappointed, but not too disappointed—Daddy had told her that he needed most of the wishing power to keep the castle safe, and Luna knew that even Tia would not give up the safety of the castle to get Last Megan back. So Luna came up to her Daddy one day while he was looking out at the crazy landscape with his always-sad eyes, and asked him where Tree Ponies came from. And after she explained to him what a Tree Pony was, he answered her in a very long story, full of big complicated words like he always liked to use. Luna was too polite to tell him that she really didn’t know half of what he was saying, but the part she did understand went something like this: “Long, long ago, the Ancients...alright, ‘Tree Ponies’, came out of the Earth and fled from a great and nasty evil called The Taxes. And as they were running from The Taxes, they found Neurth, which was a nice place with no Taxes to be found. And to make sure they would never ever be found, the Tree Ponies put a big ball around Neurth, the Sun and the Moon, so nobody outside the ball could see them. And on the inside of the ball, they painted the stars that they remembered from when they lived inside the Earth. “Neurth was different from any other place in the universe, because it alone had wishing magic. And the Tree Ponies used this new-found magic to make their dreams come true, and a few of their nightmares, and they made every magical creature in the land, including us. And they used more and more magic, until one day they discovered that they had made the world so magical that only magical creatures could live there. And so the Tree Ponies, who weren’t magical, all got sick and they had to go away. First the ones that used all the magic and eventually even the ones who didn’t use magic, like Last Megan. But long before they left, they picked the alicorns as the wisest of their creations, and they named me as the next king. And as the Tree Ponies went away, Neurth got crazier and crazier, until it got the way it is today.” Luna thanked her Daddy for that rather confusing speech, and then went down to the basement. Her Mommy always told her that she could solve any problem through thinking, and so she sat down there and thought all the way until she was called upstairs for dinnertime. And in her bed that night on the Moon side of the castle she thought some more. She decided that Neurth needed Tree Ponies just as much as Tia did, and if they had to go away because there was too much magic, then it should be alright to come back now, because Mommy and Daddy had much less magic than they did a couple of birthdays ago, and they were much grayer, which definitely meant there was less magic. So if there was less magic, then Tree Ponies wouldn’t get sick anymore, so all Luna had to do was to find where they went and get them to come back. But where did they go? The next morning, Luna woke up bright and cheerful, because she knew where to find the tree ponies! She went out to the courtyard, found a spot of bare earth, and started digging with her horn. After awhile, she came up with a digging wish, and the hole started getting a lot deeper, but even after three or four forevers, she failed to find a single Tree Pony, not even a little bitty one. It didn’t make any sense! If Tree Ponies came from the Earth, and trees came from the earth, why couldn’t she find Tree Ponies in the earth? That story of Daddy’s began to sound a little funny, now. I mean, there aren’t any stars in this earth, so where did the Tree Ponies get the stars to put on the inside of their big ball? Luna looked up at the part of the sky near the Moon. She imagined the round ball of Neurth, with the Sun floating to one side and the Moon on the opposite side, and the big ball around all three with stars painted on the inside. And outside the ball... That was it! That was where the Tree Ponies went, to the outside of the big ball, Luna was sure of it! The moment she figured this out, Luna raced back into the castle, passing a listless Tia heading the other way. “Don’t walk into the hole, Tia!” Luna told her sister. “What?” Tia replied dully, not even turning her head. *THUD!* Luna went down to the very bottom of the basement, and stood on the rickety boards. She took a deep breath, reached out with her mind and pulled every available bit of magic into herself, and wished she could go to the outside of the big ball that surrounded everything she had ever seen or heard about in her entire life. And with a “poof!” she disappeared. Part 2Betwixt Silver and Gold 3: Luna and the Tree Ponies - Part 2 - Tia told me that I got this next part all wrong, so I’m going to let her write what happened next. I should warn you, though: she likes big words almost as much as Daddy does. With a mixture between a wheeze and a groan, a strange narrow blue shed faded into existence in seemingly-empty space. The shed was a most-unusual kind of ship, and those who saw it in its travels were often less mystified by it than the two “Tree Ponies” who piloted it. “Extraordinary! Most extraordinary!” exclaimed the taller of the two from the console room of the ship. He wore mostly-black garments, and his pink head was surmounted by a mane of purest white. He was in one of his favorite poses, his [hoof-claw thingeys] hooked around his lapels. “We appear to be resting on a solid surface, but no such surface is visible! Now how do you think that is happening, hm?” “I’m sure you’ll figure it out, Grandfather,” answered the shorter of the two. Her garments were pale lavender in color, and her pink head was topped with a short brown mane. She was sitting rather listlessly in a formless lump of a chair, and her thoughts were clearly elsewhere. “What we have here,” Grandfather concluded after consulting his instruments, “is a star system that doesn’t want to be found! It is completely transparent to all instruments, and neatly reverses all gravitational influences. The only way you could possibly find it was by crashing right into it!” “Or materializing atop it,” observed the granddaughter. “Quite right, Susan! Quite right!” He walked over to a closet and pulled out a complicated-looking device on wheels. “Come along, dear—I must get more detailed readings! And an excursion will do you a world of good!” Susan sighed, struggled out of the chair, and checked on the measurements shown on the hexagonal console in the middle of the room. “Grandfather...” she warned as he reached for the door switch. “What is it now, child!” he snapped at her. “There’s no air out there!” “So?” Susan tapped one [hoof?]. “Oh, yes, I suppose securing a supply of air for our expedition might be useful.” Leaving the ship turned out to be quite an adventure in its own right: the invisible surface repelled even the slight gravitational effect generated by their own masses, causing their spacesuits to slowly drift upwards. The original idea of a tether was eventually supplemented with a small gun that fired puffs of air, to keep them and their equipment grounded. For whatever reason, their ship remained motionless. Susan in her pressure suit took in her surroundings, and found them to be breathtaking. Below her feet she could look right through the invisible shell and see what was on the other side: an upside-down vista that might pass for a normal nighttime sky on most of the outer rim planets she had visited in her travels. Above that, making up half of her view, was a zone of inky blackness, interrupted by the very occasional galaxy. And overhead, a hundred times wider than the Moon as seen from Earth, was a vast ball composed of millions of stars, tightly-packed together. It was a globular cluster—and one of the bigger ones at that. And here was this shielded star system, perched between the cluster and the Mutter Spiral below. It was indeed the perfect place to hide. As she watched her grandfather in his white suit wheel his machine across the invisible surface, Susan thought that he looked like nothing so much as something known as an “ice cream salesman” from a time and place known as “1923, New York City, Earth”. This brought her the closest to laughter that she had ever been since the day that... But she would never laugh again after that day. So she had sworn to herself. To laugh would mean that she had moved on, and it was such a small step from there to forgetting. It would be far better to use her air gun to blast herself into the depths of space forever...than to forget. With a start, Susan pulled herself out of that morbid line of thought, and returned to the ridiculous image of her cranky old grandfather selling treats to children. Ah, but there were no children to sell anything to...until she suddenly felt it. A faint, but very distinct cry for help, coming over the horizon. “Grandfather! Grandfather!” she cried. “Do you hear her?” “Hear who, my child?” Grandfather replied over the [sciency-thingy for talking when there’s no air]. “There’s only the two of us on this channel.” “Someone’s in trouble!” she insisted, as she removed her tether and used her air gun to blast herself away from the ship. “Susan! You will come back here this instant! Oh! Oh...” He stood there for a moment, indecisive, before finally removing his own tether and using his air gun to follow her, his instrument cart still held by an inattentive foreleg. After less than a minute, Grandfather caught up with Susan. She was hovering over a crumpled purple form. “She’s dying!” Susan cried, looking up at him. “Well, I mean surely...” he sputtered. “No, it’s not because of the lack of air--her species can handle that just fine. She’s falling apart, literally diffusing into a mist one molecule at a time! It’s like the very laws of the universe are tearing her apart!” “How can you possibly know...” Grandfather began, but then he remembered all of the other times when his granddaughter knew things that she shouldn’t possibly know. “We must get her into the TARDIS. At the very least, the temporal grace will stop the process.” The two of them gingerly lifted the dark form and draped it over the nearly-forgotten cart, and then used their combined efforts to wheel it back to their ship as swiftly as possible, a thin stream of purple gas streaming behind them. As Grandfather had predicted, the damage to the creature, which he discovered to his shock to be a miniature horse, stopped progressing as soon as it was taken into the TARDIS, but it did not regain consciousness. “Now this is a mystery!” he declared. “How did that creature find itself out here? And how did the TARDIS manage to materialize close enough for us to find it?” Susan responded to this question by smiling mysteriously and patting the console affectionately. “She obviously came from the world on the other side of this shield,” she told him. “And which world would that be?” he asked her. “It shouldn’t be too hard to find out,” she replied. “She is an intelligent horse...” She leaned down to get a better look under the strong lights of the console room. “Make that horse-like creature...would ‘equinoid’ be the right word?” “There are no intelligent ‘equinoids’, as far as I know,” said Grandfather, consulting the ship’s [answer thingy]. “There are several varieties of centaur, but no talking horses.” “That reminds me: we’re outside the Omega Centauri globular cluster.” Grandfather glanced up at the ceiling of the TARDIS as he remembered the globular cluster. “Last outpost of the First Human Empire,” he noted. “The final civil war sputtered out twelve hundred years ago. Many of the rebelling systems associated all technology with the enemy, and tried to descend into their own Dark Ages before the Omega Revival wiped them out. It would appear that this one had the foresight to hide itself away first.” “The Omega Revival had the finest bureaucracy ever known, with the most feared tax collectors of all time!” exclaimed Susan. “If this system was on record, how could it possibly escape detection?” “Oh that’s simple enough: every rebelling world had their name changed to New Earth and as the finest bureaucracy ever known, the Omega Revival had no choice but to honor each and every one of those name changes. Several hundred systems survived the purge as a result.” Grandfather had himself a good laugh at this example of a successful “tweaking of the nose” before returning to his instruments. “I have access to most of those records, and nowhere is there any account of a creature like that which is before us. Wait! A world between Omega Centauri and the Mutter Spiral...I wonder...” “Grandfather, I wish you’d stop speculating and get this horse back to her parents!” “Parents? Is this creature a child? Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place! A few adjustments, and then we’ll drop her off on the surface of ‘New Earth #8636’!” Part 3Betwixt Silver and Gold 3: Luna and the Tree Ponies - Part 3 - Luna woke up in a bed, back in the castle. She was not in her room, but instead in a large room located in the unused “Hospital Wing”. Luna had never known what a “hospital” was before now, but she concluded it was where you put ponies foolish enough to wish themselves to the really-scary outside of the Big Ball without asking for permission first. Luna sat up and looked around. There were other beds, and at least one looked like it had been used, but the big room was currently empty. “Mommy? Daddy? Can anybody hear me?” she said out loud. “We can hear you, Luna,” said a strangely-familiar voice. And into the room walked two creatures that Luna had never seen before, which was very surprising. One was a pale lavender filly with a purple mane. And the other was a light blue stallion with a pale blonde mane with a purple ribbon tied into a bow around his neck, like he was a birthday present. He seemed to have some difficulty in walking. Both them were missing the wings that Luna’s family had. “W..who are you?” Luna asked. “These are your rescuers,” said Tia as she hobbled in. One of her forelegs was in a cast. Luna suddenly felt rather guilty about that, as she was certain her hole was the cause. The new filly bowed. “I’m Susan, and this is...The Doctor.” The new stallion bowed his head briefly. “We found you quite a long way from your home, miss. I hope you’ve learned your lesson.” “I have,” Luna said in a small voice. “Oh! If you’re both from outside the Big Ball, you must have seen the Tree Ponies! Could you tell them to visit Neurth, if only for a little while? My sister misses them terribly.” “Oh!” gasped Tia. “Is that was this was all about?” The Doctor harrumphed. “If you want to know what happened to your precious ‘Tree Ponies’, why don’t you ask your father, hmm?” “I don’t suppose reminding you that I saved your life for the fourth time is going to improve your mood any,” said Father, as he and Mother entered the room. Luna put a hoof over her mouth in shock at seeing how very grey they were—she couldn’t even tell their colors apart anymore. “I suppose I should be thankful I found the two of you unconscious so you wouldn’t resist the transformation spell. I didn’t suspect that all Ancients are as stubborn as Megan was.” Luna’s eyes glittered as she realized she was looking at two Tree Ponies, even if they were currently disguised as alicorns. “Perhaps I would have given my consent, perhaps not. But I resent not being given the choice!” the Doctor replied. “And now to learn that you...” “...you can’t turn them back!” Luna exclaimed in realization. “You don’t have enough magic left, do you?” Luna’s parents were shocked at how quickly she had figured this out, but eventually they nodded silently in acknowledgement. “I’m afraid we didn’t even have enough magic to make you into proper alicorns,” Mother apologized. Luna jumped out of bed and approached the two visitors. “I never meant to force anybody to stay here,” she said, sadly. The pony known as The Doctor looked down coldly at Luna, but then he sighed and his eyes softened. “It can’t be helped, child,” he told her. “You know, I don’t really mind all that much,” said Susan. “We were running away from our homeworld in any case—a change of species is not that much more to deal with.” “Ooo!” exclaimed Luna with big eyes. “Were you running away from The Taxes?” The Doctor laughed. “Something rather similar, yes.” Luna didn’t see much of either the Doctor or of Daddy over the next week. They spent their time talking and talking, using the biggest words Luna had ever heard before. From overheard bits of their talking, Luna figured out that Daddy had told the Doctor about what happened to the Tree Ponies, and the Doctor had told Daddy about things that made no sense whatsoever. The phrase “mistakes were made” was uttered by each of them at least once. Susan meanwhile helped Luna to fill in the big hole that Tia had fallen in, with the sister warily watching from a nearby bench. After that, Susan showed Luna how to plant flowers and vegetables. “We used to have a garden,” Tia said one day. “But not anymore. Mother said it took too much magic to tend to the plants the way that they deserved, so she goes out foraging now, once a day when everything goes still.” “My mother always liked to garden before she went to work each morning,” Susan said quietly. She was using her horn’s telekinesis to tend to a small sunflower seedling, and her eyes never left it as she spoke. “She said it was her only chance during the day to touch something she could comfort, to create life instead of death.” There was a long silence from the sisters. “...that was almost exactly what Megan said,” Tia said, finally. “This is Megan’s garden, then?” Susan said, looking over at Tia. Luna had made sure to tell Susan about Last Megan the first time she had gotten time with her away from her elder sister. “I hope you don’t mind...” “I’m sure she doesn’t mind!” said Luna, walking between them. “Right, Tia?” Tia tried to say something, but no words came out of her mouth, so she just nodded her head. That evening, Luna was on her way to the Moon side of the castle when she heard shouting coming from the Doctor’s room. She carefully snuck up to the partially-open door so she could hear what was being said. As usual with the Doctor, she was lucky to understand half of the words coming out of his muzzle. “Grandfather, I couldn’t bear to lose you!” Susan exclaimed. “I’m afraid that far more than my own life is at stake here,” said the Doctor. “I am now convinced this world is the one once known as Beach Head.” Well, he said that last word more like “beachhead”, but Luna didn’t know what that meant, so she just imagined a big alicorn head made out of sand. “Yes, Grandfather, I...” “Beach Head was the planet where the Oh-Sigh-Rans and the Gallop-Fray-ans defeated a dimensional invasion.” Luna sighed inwardly—not only was the Doctor speaking in big words, but they were getting kinda silly. “It was a bit more than just...” Susan once again attempted to explain, before once again being cut off by the elder pony. “And it was not just any dimensional invasion, Susan,” the Doctor continued, “but a threat to the very nature of existence! The Faerie came from a universe where matter and energy could be controlled by force of will.” At first, Luna thought they were talking about fairies, which she wasn’t sure were real or not. But later she learned these were different creatures entirely, and asked Tia for the correct spelling. Doing all of this thinking caused Luna to miss most of the rest of the Doctor’s explanation. There was something about a Supreme Will, and people in one universe getting sick in the other universe, and “slow portals”. “The Supreme Will built a world called This M-Bark-ation on his end of the slow portal, and Beach Head at the other end. Some of the Faerie came to live on This M-bark-ation [what a weird name!] and as the laws of this universe slowly leaked into the earth of that world, the Faerie became more and more able to live in this universe, while at the same time the laws of the Faerie were leaking into the earth of Beach Head, until it became able to support Faerie life.” “I know, Grandfather. The Oh-sigh-rans...” “The Oh-sigh-rans first discovered this invasion when they learned that the worlds of Oh-Muh-Gah Cent-Aw-Why were becoming sterile,” the Doctor continued. Luna was certain that the Tree Ponies had the weirdest names for things of any creature ever. There was some more here about these Oh-sigh-ran people getting other people to help them, and finding a way to land on Beach Head without getting hurt, and talking with that Supreme Will person, but this was all getting really boring, and Luna was beginning to wonder what this had to do with the shouting. “So there was no other choice but war.” This got Luna’s attention. Last Megan’s song about the “War of Ballantree” was one of her strongest memories of the Tree Pony—the little alicorn liked to imagine that the ghost fight outside the castle was the very same war, and she had even written a new verse for the song about the giant rock that fell on them every night. “So, on one side you have the Oh-sigh-rans and their coalition, and on the other side you have the Faerie with the power to control the very fabric of reality! Now you would think that that the Oh-sigh-rans wouldn’t have a chance, yes? What could they possibly do under the circumstances?” “They dropped a rock on them,” Susan said, not expecting to be heard. It was with great effort that Luna was able to keep herself from squealing in delight. “They dropped a rock on them. Wait, how did you know that?” Susan sighed. “Father was the Gallop-fray-an observer. The rock was his idea.” “Wait, how...?” There was some indistinct mumbling here, before the Doctor finally gave up. “Very well! And how, pray tell, did he get this wonderful idea of his?” “When he was visiting the Faerie homeworld, he noticed that gravity didn’t exist there, and he told that to the Oh-sigh-rans. They didn’t think much of this, and so tried a number of other things to defeat the Faerie, but just to keep Father from complaining they also positioned a planetoid so it would eventually collide with Beach Head. Everything else the Faerie defeated, but the slow-moving rock was not seen as a threat until it had built up so much speed that it could no longer be stopped. The impact created a new moon, the same one we see today, apparently. It also caused the massive portal to fall to the center of the planet. Since the two portals were linked, the portal on This M-bark-ation was also pulled to the center of its planet, and thus became completely worthless. And that was the end of the matter, or so everybody thought. The cluster was resettled by Hue-mans, and so was this world, which appeared to be perfectly ordinary.” “However,” said the Doctor, “the fact that this world no longer obeys normal physical laws is proof that the portal between dimensions was never completely closed. You can probably figure out what happened to the settlers on this world. By building that shield, they managed to save Oh-muh-gah Cent-aw-why without even knowing it. Now our host tells us that an object that I think is the portal is located at the bottom of a shaft right under this castle! I’d build a machine to measure how fast the portal is working, but nothing more complicated than a toaster can survive the transition when I take it out of the TARDIS, so I’ve been working on a spell that should do the same thing. I should be able to determine if the portal is acting passively, or if it is once again under the control of the Supreme Will.” “But Grandfather,” Susan protested. “We’re not truly alicorns. How can you be sure that you can survive being that close to this portal? For that matter, how do you know that even a magical creature can survive?” The Doctor sighed. “Well to be frank, Susan, that is a risk we have both agreed to take, for the safety of the entire universe.” The next day, Father and the Doctor removed the boards at the bottom of the basement, and wished themselves to the room at the bottom of the big hole that was under it. And then they got in trouble, so Luna went down after them. The bottom of the hole was very weird. What should have been sights were turned into sounds, and sounds into tastes, and tastes into feelings. And what you smelled was some new sense nobody had ever sensed before. But Luna had taken many naps while laying on top of the wooden boards, and in her dreams she had the same problem with her senses, and had heard the same awful but at the same time soothing voices, so it was not hard for her to find the two confused stallions, and lead them back to the bottom of the hole. But the Voice had promised Luna enough wishes for ice cream, and cotton candy, and an end to all of the scariness ever, so she would finally be able to leave the castle. All she had to do was open this tiny little door... This made Father mad, and he rushed back into the room and shoved Luna away from the little door. Maybe he was worried that Luna would get cavities from the cotton candy. Anyway, he grabbed the door between his hooves, and tore it off of the shimmering wall. And out of the hole behind the tiny door poured a million wishes, and Father drank all the wishes like they were water. And that was how Father got his color back, all while saving everybody everywhere in the whole universe. Later, the two Tree Ponies stood outside of their magical blue shed, ready to continue their wanderings. “By my reckoning,” the Doctor said, “Neurth will be safe for Tree Ponies in ten thousand years, if you spend the whole time bringing and keeping the magic of this world under control. Tree Ponies by their nature are very crafty, and sooner or later, they will find this world, no matter how well it may be hidden. Tree Ponies are also rather remarkable creatures, but not all of their traits are admirable, so you need to be prepared to deal with them eventually. “By a coincidence, ten thousand years is also roughly how long it will take for the Supreme Will to regain control of the portal, so you must prepare yourselves doubly for that day, to face the threat from without as well as the threat from within.” “It seems that you are predicting the beginning of a new era,” said Mother. Like Luna and Tia, she had been taken by Father to bathe in the wishing light before he turned it off for good. She had back her color, and when she spoke, it was like Neurth itself was speaking for her. “You may not have noticed this yet,” said Susan, “but today is the first day of a new era for this world. The Fourth, if I’m not mistaken. The First Era was that of the Faerie, and ended in darkness. The Second Era was that of the Earth Empire, and ended in fire. The Third Era was that of the Wizards, and ended in madness. Today we see the dawning of the Fourth Age, the Age of the Equestrians.” Father nodded. “I agree completely. Every age has had a different name for this world, and I propose to continue that tradition. From this day forth, the world of Neurth will henceforth be known as...Equestria!” The Doctor pulled his granddaughter aside. “Shouldn’t you have used ‘Equinoid’ instead of ‘Equestrian’?” Susan shrugged. “What, and have this planet called ‘Equinoidia’?” The Doctor sighed. “No, I suppose not.” He turned back to face the others. “Farewell. I’m afraid I cannot guarantee that we will ever meet again, but rest assured that we will never forget you.” Mother cast a protective bubble around the two visitors and their shed, and then Father pushed the tip of his horn into the bubble and a blinding burst of light sprang forth. When it faded, two tree ponies could be seen waving. Luna rushed forward to just outside the bubble and waved, her eyes drinking everything in. This would be a sight she would never forget for as long as she lived. The Doctor and Susan walked into the blue shed. Mother lowered the bubble and with a funny little sound, the blue shed faded away. The End. Wait, no, there’s more! A few years later, The Doctor and Susan came back, and found us in our new castle. We told them how Father had managed to unite the warring tribes and bring peace to nearly half of Equestria, and how Celestia and myself had taken on the tasks appointed to us at birth, of moving the Sun and the Moon through the sky. Susan gave me a detailed map of the heavens as seen from Earth, and I have been working hard to make the inside of the Big Ball truly represent the sky as it was once seen by the “Tree Ponies” on their planet of origin. I also left a surprise. Someday, perhaps many millennia after we have served our purpose of preparing Equestria for the Twin Threats and moved on, someone will reinvent the human telescope, and use it to examine my night sky. Maybe they will figure out that they live on the inside of a Big Ball, and hopefully by then the ten thousand years will be up, so that it will be as safe for them to leave as it will be for the humans to visit. But until that day, if they ever want to know where in the cosmos that Big Ball is truly located, all they have to do is point their telescope at the Omega Centauri globular cluster, 13 hours 26 minutes right ascension, -47 degrees 28 minutes declination. If they pick just the right spot to focus on, they will see a circle of pitch blackness, with a tiny little animated version of me standing on top and waving at them. Well, not too tiny. A telescope can only magnify so far, after all. The End. For Real. PostscriptsBetwixt Silver and Gold 3: Luna and the Tree Ponies - Postscripts - Postscript by Celestia, written in the Year 36 of our joint reign: Luna enchanted this scroll so it would last forever, and that spell still appears to be holding. She’s been reluctant to read it for several decades now, and I can’t say that I blame her. There are certain subjects that are far too painful to discuss. At the time of the first visit by the “Ancients” (as I’ve come to call them), that particular subject was Megan “the Last” for myself, and Susan’s parents for them, with the sole exception of that day in the garden. So reticent were they in fact that to this day I am still not sure whether it is Susan’s mother or father who was the child of the Doctor. Well, the TARDIS came to visit us once again, but this time when the Doctor emerged, he was accompanied by a human named Steven instead of his granddaughter. He tried to use talk of how he had duplicated the effect of the transformation spell with a cunning invention to distract attention away from the person who was no longer with him. He also spoke at great length about the humans he had traveled with over the years, and it was apparent that they had had a great effect on wearing down his once-perpetual distrust of his fellow men. Nevertheless, the loss of Susan was profound. On our side, of course, the forbidden subject was the matter of our parents, and the devastating war that followed. Before they left, the Doctor gave us a present, a musical box carefully crafted to work in either of our two worlds, which, sadly to say, means that it barely worked at all. From the way he handled it and his inability to look us in the face, I’m convinced that it had been made by Susan before her mysterious fate overtook her. Unfortunately, this also means that we may never learn the meaning of the haunting song it plays on those occasions when it decides to work properly. I have named the song “Mother Dear”, because when I hear it, I think of all we have lost: Megan, Susan, and especially all the mothers: Susan’s, ours, and oh, so many alicorns! It is lonely now, so very lonely. Perhaps it is finally time to ignore my inner voice and follow Luna’s plea, to repopulate the land with our own creations, so they might bring balance to a world once again gone mad, and so they can carry on our dreams once we have succeeded in transforming this world into one where men can live, but we cannot. P.P.S. by Princess Celestia, written in the Year 5002: It turns out that even a spell of perpetuity runs out if the spell caster stops caring about its preservation. This story is now transcribed onto a new scroll, with a new spell cast upon it, by One who would like to keep it up to date. Unfortunately, We cannot reproduce any of the doodles that once adorned its borders. A pity, that. The ghosts looking up in fear at the falling rock, the charming stick figure of “The Tree Pony Last Megan”, and the simple but disturbing crack in the wall that Luna labeled “The Voice” now exist only in Our memory. We are now halfway into the ten thousand years allotted to Us by the strange alien known only as the Doctor. He never returned after the last visit described above. We thought that rather rude, and so we cast a recalling spell upon the magical transformation invention he keeps in his blue shed. Imagine our surprise when the spell succeeded in retrieving not one, but ten blue sheds, each of them occupied by a different Time Pony claiming to be the Doctor! It appears that the Doctor’s complex relationship with Time allows him to cheat death by regenerating his form at the point of mortal injury, and that strangely this fact makes the serial aspects of his lifespan accessible as separate entities. Of course, We are still trying to comprehend the whole “smaller on the outside” business of the blue shed, so this explanation may be equally far from the truth. The collected adventures of the Doctor would fill a thousand scrolls, so suffice it to say that he has had a full life. Most of the Doctors were accompanied by Companions, individuals (usually Ancients) that he met on his journeys that wished to share in his adventures. This causes Us to reflect on Our relationship to Luna, and how close We might be to succumbing to the family curse if We did not have her company and advice. If only she would spend more of her days with Us, and less with her own counsel. The Doctors and Companions stayed for several months, and eventually managed to wear out their welcome. They are all more or less contemptuous of authority, unfortunately, and fail to distinguish between the flawed authority of mortal governments and the enlightened perfection of the Divine Principality. Also, they have developed a bad habit of visiting and altering Equestria’s past, so that We were eventually forced to put a lock on the timestream and send them away. Once again We are alone, while surrounded by life. The ponies are locked into their customs and superstitions, and the dragons continue to resist our attempts to extend the name “Equestria” from the Principality to the planet we share (We are also adverse to their suggestion that We name the planet “Draconia” instead). Luna drifts further from Our understanding with every passing century. The music box finally fell apart, but We I had a replacement made, that faithfully plays “Mother Dear” every time it is opened. I still don’t know the words to that song. P.P.P.S. by Tia, written in the year 6028: I am a foal. The answer was before me all along, but I ignored it, and look how my family has suffered as a result. Where will it end? And how can I possibly keep her from knowing? P.P.P.P.S. by Tia, written in the year 7014: That’s a lot of P’s. Luna has returned. Luna is free. That last fact I owe to six incredible ponies who embody the Elements of Harmony so perfectly that their actions shame me at times into being a better goddess to my subjects, my little ponies. As an example, let me cite the case of the Element of Laughter, an earth pony named Pinkie Pie. Jokes are inexplicable things that cease to be funny the moment they are explained, and so it is with Pinkie Pie: she is completely inexplicable. Today she wrote Luna and me this letter. Maybe someday we will understand it: Dear Princesses Luna and Celestia: As goddesses, you not only know everything that ever happened, but also everything that’s going to happen, right? So that means that you already know about that secret thing we’re keeping from you, but you’re not mad because you also know that Twilight is going to send you a letter explaining everything. So I thought, if you already know about the secret, and you already know about Twilight’s letter of next week, why should I wait until next week to lend you one of my secret CDs, when I can just give it to you now! That way, I don’t have to send it by post or by dragon-belch (bleh! smelly CD!), and you can give it back to me after you’ve listened to track 11. That’s the song that Luna’s music box plays, right? The one that she never wants anypony else to hear, right? But you’ve always wanted to know what the words are, Celestia, so now you’ll know. Although come to think of it, if you two were really gods, then you’d already know that, right? Yours in Perpetual Pinkness, --Pinkie Pie The letter was accompanied by a compact disc. An actual Ancient-manufactured compact disc, millennia old and simultaneously brand new. How did Pinkie Pie get her hooves on such an object? Furthermore, how does she know about the music box, when neither Luna nor I have listened to it for hundreds if not thousands of years? I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out. To borrow and lightly mangle a phrase that I by all rights shouldn’t know, “Of all the Pinkie Pies in the universe, she’s the Pinkie Pie-iest.” The Compact Disc Player is one of about a million Ancient inventions that perished at the end of the Second Age. A few discs survived in a vault. Those discs were destroyed by my order, during an unfortunate fit of paranoia awhile back. Like I said, I have much to learn from the Elements of Harmony. A unicorn inventor recreated the CD player and started manufacturing new CDs, under slightly suspicious circumstances. Perhaps I will wait a week before investigating. So then, here is the answer to a seven-thousand-year old mystery, the lyrics of my song of loss, taken from track 11 of a CD called simply “1”, and sung by some bugs: Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away Now it looks as though they’re here to stay Oh I believe in yesterday Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be There’s a shadow hanging over me Oh yesterday, came suddenly Why she, had to go I don’t know she wouldn’t say I said, something wrong Now I long for yesterday Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play Now I need a place to hide away Oh I believe in yesterday. Why she, had to go I don’t know She wouldn’t say I said, something wrong Now I long for yesterday Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play Now I need a place to hide away Oh I believe in yesterday. I must admit, it was a slight relief to finally know. P.P.P.P.P.S. by Luna: A “slight relief”, she says? Balderdash. She cried like a baby. Author’s Note: I am a science fiction kind of guy. I’ll enjoy The Lord of the Rings as much as anybody else, but if you present me the choice between mediocre fantasy and mediocre science fiction to read, I’ll pick the SF every time. It is for that reason I had the following tiny problem with My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: My Little Pony: Equestria is an Earth-analogue world of talking ponies. Me: Um...alright, I can buy that. I’ve certainly seen stranger concepts for a series. MLP: It is ruled by a pair of pony goddesses. Me: ...fine, whatever. MLP: One goddess causes the sun to rise each morning. Me: Well unless the series is lying to us, that would mean that the Sun is revolving around the Earth. The Earth is being orbited by a world 333,000 times more massive than it is. MLP: It’s magic! Me: Nnnrgghh...no, wait, I can wrap my head around this. She’s a goddess, right? So she just uses her immense power to keep the bigger world orbiting the smaller. A factor of a third of a million is not that impossible. OK, I can accept that. What else have you got? MLP: The other heavenly sister causes the moon to rise each night. Me: Easy-peasy! MLP: Along with the heavens. Me: What? WHAT?! She causes...the entire universe...to revolve around the Earth? Once every 24 hours? MLP: Eeyup. Me: That’s impossible! The universe is 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more massive than the Earth! (That’s five hundred octillion, or a 5 with 29 zeroes after it.) It’s 78 billion light years across. For it to rotate once every 24 hours would mean that the outer edge of the universe is moving at 2.33 million times the speed of light! No. No, I can’t accept that. Not here, not there, not anywhere! MLP: Are you quoting Green Eggs and Ham? Me: Shut up. Now you might want to argue that in creating Equestria we don’t have to bring along the whole universe, that surely a plain old Ptolemaic solar system, with its sphere of fixed stars, is adequate. And to that argument I reply, “But what about Doctor Whooves?” Where’s the fun of having him in there if you can’t bring along all of the aliens that go with him? And so I hereby propose an alternate cosmology for the series. And put it in the mouth of a cute little pony. And devised a series of increasingly-less believable explanations of why this Equestria ended up with a solar system outwardly identical to Earth’s, down to the constellations, which is utter and complete balderdash... Shut up. Credits: My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is copyright Hasbro, with due respects to Lauren Faust for her brilliant re-imagining of the franchise. The characters of Luna, Celestia and Pinkie Pie are borrowed from that source, although any fault in their interpretations is entirely my own. The First Doctor and his companions Susan and Steven Purvis are from the program Doctor Who and are the property of the BBC. Finally, “Yesterday” is copyright Lennon—McCartney.
Part 1Betwixt Silver and Gold 3: Luna and the Tree Ponies This is a little story that little Luna tells herself to remember the time when she found the tree ponies. - Part 1 - Little Luna lived in the big tall castle on the sea-cliff in the Land of Neurth, with her Mommy and her Daddy and her big sister Tia. At one end of the land was the Sun, and at the other end was the Moon. They never moved, so Luna and her family would go to one side of the castle when they wanted to be awake, and later go to the other side when they wanted to sleep. All around the castle were volcanoes, and flaming plains, and negative energy zones, and a spot in the sky that made you taste broccoli whenever you looked at it, and all kinds of other nastiness which you couldn’t even see from the windows, or so Daddy said—he never let Luna go out there. Manticores and basilisks and chimeras roamed the plains, and got into frequent and noisy fights with each other. There were also two gangs of ghosts riding ghost alicorns that kept fighting the exact same fight in the same spot day after day; Luna knew it was bedtime when the big rock fell on them. Daddy said that there were towns out there, somewhere, of law-abiding creatures. Someday he would find them, and on that day the family would go join them, and Daddy would be accepted as their king, the King of Neurth. Luna didn’t want to leave the castle, as it was the only safe place that she had ever known. The castle was bright and cheery; if somewhat empty after Last Megan had gone away. It was kinda hard to remember Last Megan, as she went away so very long ago. She was an odd sort of creature, the only one of her kind that Luna had ever seen, apart from pictures on tapestries and ancient scrolls (and the ghosts, but they were hard to see). Tia called her an “ancient”, which was rather silly, as she was so very young and alive when she went away. Luna called her a Tree Pony, because she stood up high on her hind legs like Luna did when she pretended to be a tree, and because she had a short and bright red mane (but no tail), just like a tree in the autumn. Tia and Last Megan used to run and laugh and play and talk for hours and hours. This made Luna jealous, because Tia never had time for her. And Last Megan must have known this, because she went away so Luna could have all the time she wanted with her sister. But now Tia was sad all the time. One day, Luna decided she was going to bring Last Megan back. She decided that she had had enough time with Tia, and now she wanted her to be happy again. So she went down into the basement and wished for her to return. She wished, because Luna was an alicorn and alicorns could make things happen by wishing, or so Mommy always said. And she went to the basement, because she found that her magic was always better when she was next to the little boarded-over spot at the bottom of the basement. That spot was also where the weird dreams came from, and the voice that was both awful and soothing at the same time, but that was worth putting up with for just one wish. But Last Megan didn’t come back. Luna was disappointed, but not too disappointed—Daddy had told her that he needed most of the wishing power to keep the castle safe, and Luna knew that even Tia would not give up the safety of the castle to get Last Megan back. So Luna came up to her Daddy one day while he was looking out at the crazy landscape with his always-sad eyes, and asked him where Tree Ponies came from. And after she explained to him what a Tree Pony was, he answered her in a very long story, full of big complicated words like he always liked to use. Luna was too polite to tell him that she really didn’t know half of what he was saying, but the part she did understand went something like this: “Long, long ago, the Ancients...alright, ‘Tree Ponies’, came out of the Earth and fled from a great and nasty evil called The Taxes. And as they were running from The Taxes, they found Neurth, which was a nice place with no Taxes to be found. And to make sure they would never ever be found, the Tree Ponies put a big ball around Neurth, the Sun and the Moon, so nobody outside the ball could see them. And on the inside of the ball, they painted the stars that they remembered from when they lived inside the Earth. “Neurth was different from any other place in the universe, because it alone had wishing magic. And the Tree Ponies used this new-found magic to make their dreams come true, and a few of their nightmares, and they made every magical creature in the land, including us. And they used more and more magic, until one day they discovered that they had made the world so magical that only magical creatures could live there. And so the Tree Ponies, who weren’t magical, all got sick and they had to go away. First the ones that used all the magic and eventually even the ones who didn’t use magic, like Last Megan. But long before they left, they picked the alicorns as the wisest of their creations, and they named me as the next king. And as the Tree Ponies went away, Neurth got crazier and crazier, until it got the way it is today.” Luna thanked her Daddy for that rather confusing speech, and then went down to the basement. Her Mommy always told her that she could solve any problem through thinking, and so she sat down there and thought all the way until she was called upstairs for dinnertime. And in her bed that night on the Moon side of the castle she thought some more. She decided that Neurth needed Tree Ponies just as much as Tia did, and if they had to go away because there was too much magic, then it should be alright to come back now, because Mommy and Daddy had much less magic than they did a couple of birthdays ago, and they were much grayer, which definitely meant there was less magic. So if there was less magic, then Tree Ponies wouldn’t get sick anymore, so all Luna had to do was to find where they went and get them to come back. But where did they go? The next morning, Luna woke up bright and cheerful, because she knew where to find the tree ponies! She went out to the courtyard, found a spot of bare earth, and started digging with her horn. After awhile, she came up with a digging wish, and the hole started getting a lot deeper, but even after three or four forevers, she failed to find a single Tree Pony, not even a little bitty one. It didn’t make any sense! If Tree Ponies came from the Earth, and trees came from the earth, why couldn’t she find Tree Ponies in the earth? That story of Daddy’s began to sound a little funny, now. I mean, there aren’t any stars in this earth, so where did the Tree Ponies get the stars to put on the inside of their big ball? Luna looked up at the part of the sky near the Moon. She imagined the round ball of Neurth, with the Sun floating to one side and the Moon on the opposite side, and the big ball around all three with stars painted on the inside. And outside the ball... That was it! That was where the Tree Ponies went, to the outside of the big ball, Luna was sure of it! The moment she figured this out, Luna raced back into the castle, passing a listless Tia heading the other way. “Don’t walk into the hole, Tia!” Luna told her sister. “What?” Tia replied dully, not even turning her head. *THUD!* Luna went down to the very bottom of the basement, and stood on the rickety boards. She took a deep breath, reached out with her mind and pulled every available bit of magic into herself, and wished she could go to the outside of the big ball that surrounded everything she had ever seen or heard about in her entire life. And with a “poof!” she disappeared.
Part 2Betwixt Silver and Gold 3: Luna and the Tree Ponies - Part 2 - Tia told me that I got this next part all wrong, so I’m going to let her write what happened next. I should warn you, though: she likes big words almost as much as Daddy does. With a mixture between a wheeze and a groan, a strange narrow blue shed faded into existence in seemingly-empty space. The shed was a most-unusual kind of ship, and those who saw it in its travels were often less mystified by it than the two “Tree Ponies” who piloted it. “Extraordinary! Most extraordinary!” exclaimed the taller of the two from the console room of the ship. He wore mostly-black garments, and his pink head was surmounted by a mane of purest white. He was in one of his favorite poses, his [hoof-claw thingeys] hooked around his lapels. “We appear to be resting on a solid surface, but no such surface is visible! Now how do you think that is happening, hm?” “I’m sure you’ll figure it out, Grandfather,” answered the shorter of the two. Her garments were pale lavender in color, and her pink head was topped with a short brown mane. She was sitting rather listlessly in a formless lump of a chair, and her thoughts were clearly elsewhere. “What we have here,” Grandfather concluded after consulting his instruments, “is a star system that doesn’t want to be found! It is completely transparent to all instruments, and neatly reverses all gravitational influences. The only way you could possibly find it was by crashing right into it!” “Or materializing atop it,” observed the granddaughter. “Quite right, Susan! Quite right!” He walked over to a closet and pulled out a complicated-looking device on wheels. “Come along, dear—I must get more detailed readings! And an excursion will do you a world of good!” Susan sighed, struggled out of the chair, and checked on the measurements shown on the hexagonal console in the middle of the room. “Grandfather...” she warned as he reached for the door switch. “What is it now, child!” he snapped at her. “There’s no air out there!” “So?” Susan tapped one [hoof?]. “Oh, yes, I suppose securing a supply of air for our expedition might be useful.” Leaving the ship turned out to be quite an adventure in its own right: the invisible surface repelled even the slight gravitational effect generated by their own masses, causing their spacesuits to slowly drift upwards. The original idea of a tether was eventually supplemented with a small gun that fired puffs of air, to keep them and their equipment grounded. For whatever reason, their ship remained motionless. Susan in her pressure suit took in her surroundings, and found them to be breathtaking. Below her feet she could look right through the invisible shell and see what was on the other side: an upside-down vista that might pass for a normal nighttime sky on most of the outer rim planets she had visited in her travels. Above that, making up half of her view, was a zone of inky blackness, interrupted by the very occasional galaxy. And overhead, a hundred times wider than the Moon as seen from Earth, was a vast ball composed of millions of stars, tightly-packed together. It was a globular cluster—and one of the bigger ones at that. And here was this shielded star system, perched between the cluster and the Mutter Spiral below. It was indeed the perfect place to hide. As she watched her grandfather in his white suit wheel his machine across the invisible surface, Susan thought that he looked like nothing so much as something known as an “ice cream salesman” from a time and place known as “1923, New York City, Earth”. This brought her the closest to laughter that she had ever been since the day that... But she would never laugh again after that day. So she had sworn to herself. To laugh would mean that she had moved on, and it was such a small step from there to forgetting. It would be far better to use her air gun to blast herself into the depths of space forever...than to forget. With a start, Susan pulled herself out of that morbid line of thought, and returned to the ridiculous image of her cranky old grandfather selling treats to children. Ah, but there were no children to sell anything to...until she suddenly felt it. A faint, but very distinct cry for help, coming over the horizon. “Grandfather! Grandfather!” she cried. “Do you hear her?” “Hear who, my child?” Grandfather replied over the [sciency-thingy for talking when there’s no air]. “There’s only the two of us on this channel.” “Someone’s in trouble!” she insisted, as she removed her tether and used her air gun to blast herself away from the ship. “Susan! You will come back here this instant! Oh! Oh...” He stood there for a moment, indecisive, before finally removing his own tether and using his air gun to follow her, his instrument cart still held by an inattentive foreleg. After less than a minute, Grandfather caught up with Susan. She was hovering over a crumpled purple form. “She’s dying!” Susan cried, looking up at him. “Well, I mean surely...” he sputtered. “No, it’s not because of the lack of air--her species can handle that just fine. She’s falling apart, literally diffusing into a mist one molecule at a time! It’s like the very laws of the universe are tearing her apart!” “How can you possibly know...” Grandfather began, but then he remembered all of the other times when his granddaughter knew things that she shouldn’t possibly know. “We must get her into the TARDIS. At the very least, the temporal grace will stop the process.” The two of them gingerly lifted the dark form and draped it over the nearly-forgotten cart, and then used their combined efforts to wheel it back to their ship as swiftly as possible, a thin stream of purple gas streaming behind them. As Grandfather had predicted, the damage to the creature, which he discovered to his shock to be a miniature horse, stopped progressing as soon as it was taken into the TARDIS, but it did not regain consciousness. “Now this is a mystery!” he declared. “How did that creature find itself out here? And how did the TARDIS manage to materialize close enough for us to find it?” Susan responded to this question by smiling mysteriously and patting the console affectionately. “She obviously came from the world on the other side of this shield,” she told him. “And which world would that be?” he asked her. “It shouldn’t be too hard to find out,” she replied. “She is an intelligent horse...” She leaned down to get a better look under the strong lights of the console room. “Make that horse-like creature...would ‘equinoid’ be the right word?” “There are no intelligent ‘equinoids’, as far as I know,” said Grandfather, consulting the ship’s [answer thingy]. “There are several varieties of centaur, but no talking horses.” “That reminds me: we’re outside the Omega Centauri globular cluster.” Grandfather glanced up at the ceiling of the TARDIS as he remembered the globular cluster. “Last outpost of the First Human Empire,” he noted. “The final civil war sputtered out twelve hundred years ago. Many of the rebelling systems associated all technology with the enemy, and tried to descend into their own Dark Ages before the Omega Revival wiped them out. It would appear that this one had the foresight to hide itself away first.” “The Omega Revival had the finest bureaucracy ever known, with the most feared tax collectors of all time!” exclaimed Susan. “If this system was on record, how could it possibly escape detection?” “Oh that’s simple enough: every rebelling world had their name changed to New Earth and as the finest bureaucracy ever known, the Omega Revival had no choice but to honor each and every one of those name changes. Several hundred systems survived the purge as a result.” Grandfather had himself a good laugh at this example of a successful “tweaking of the nose” before returning to his instruments. “I have access to most of those records, and nowhere is there any account of a creature like that which is before us. Wait! A world between Omega Centauri and the Mutter Spiral...I wonder...” “Grandfather, I wish you’d stop speculating and get this horse back to her parents!” “Parents? Is this creature a child? Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place! A few adjustments, and then we’ll drop her off on the surface of ‘New Earth #8636’!”
Part 3Betwixt Silver and Gold 3: Luna and the Tree Ponies - Part 3 - Luna woke up in a bed, back in the castle. She was not in her room, but instead in a large room located in the unused “Hospital Wing”. Luna had never known what a “hospital” was before now, but she concluded it was where you put ponies foolish enough to wish themselves to the really-scary outside of the Big Ball without asking for permission first. Luna sat up and looked around. There were other beds, and at least one looked like it had been used, but the big room was currently empty. “Mommy? Daddy? Can anybody hear me?” she said out loud. “We can hear you, Luna,” said a strangely-familiar voice. And into the room walked two creatures that Luna had never seen before, which was very surprising. One was a pale lavender filly with a purple mane. And the other was a light blue stallion with a pale blonde mane with a purple ribbon tied into a bow around his neck, like he was a birthday present. He seemed to have some difficulty in walking. Both them were missing the wings that Luna’s family had. “W..who are you?” Luna asked. “These are your rescuers,” said Tia as she hobbled in. One of her forelegs was in a cast. Luna suddenly felt rather guilty about that, as she was certain her hole was the cause. The new filly bowed. “I’m Susan, and this is...The Doctor.” The new stallion bowed his head briefly. “We found you quite a long way from your home, miss. I hope you’ve learned your lesson.” “I have,” Luna said in a small voice. “Oh! If you’re both from outside the Big Ball, you must have seen the Tree Ponies! Could you tell them to visit Neurth, if only for a little while? My sister misses them terribly.” “Oh!” gasped Tia. “Is that was this was all about?” The Doctor harrumphed. “If you want to know what happened to your precious ‘Tree Ponies’, why don’t you ask your father, hmm?” “I don’t suppose reminding you that I saved your life for the fourth time is going to improve your mood any,” said Father, as he and Mother entered the room. Luna put a hoof over her mouth in shock at seeing how very grey they were—she couldn’t even tell their colors apart anymore. “I suppose I should be thankful I found the two of you unconscious so you wouldn’t resist the transformation spell. I didn’t suspect that all Ancients are as stubborn as Megan was.” Luna’s eyes glittered as she realized she was looking at two Tree Ponies, even if they were currently disguised as alicorns. “Perhaps I would have given my consent, perhaps not. But I resent not being given the choice!” the Doctor replied. “And now to learn that you...” “...you can’t turn them back!” Luna exclaimed in realization. “You don’t have enough magic left, do you?” Luna’s parents were shocked at how quickly she had figured this out, but eventually they nodded silently in acknowledgement. “I’m afraid we didn’t even have enough magic to make you into proper alicorns,” Mother apologized. Luna jumped out of bed and approached the two visitors. “I never meant to force anybody to stay here,” she said, sadly. The pony known as The Doctor looked down coldly at Luna, but then he sighed and his eyes softened. “It can’t be helped, child,” he told her. “You know, I don’t really mind all that much,” said Susan. “We were running away from our homeworld in any case—a change of species is not that much more to deal with.” “Ooo!” exclaimed Luna with big eyes. “Were you running away from The Taxes?” The Doctor laughed. “Something rather similar, yes.” Luna didn’t see much of either the Doctor or of Daddy over the next week. They spent their time talking and talking, using the biggest words Luna had ever heard before. From overheard bits of their talking, Luna figured out that Daddy had told the Doctor about what happened to the Tree Ponies, and the Doctor had told Daddy about things that made no sense whatsoever. The phrase “mistakes were made” was uttered by each of them at least once. Susan meanwhile helped Luna to fill in the big hole that Tia had fallen in, with the sister warily watching from a nearby bench. After that, Susan showed Luna how to plant flowers and vegetables. “We used to have a garden,” Tia said one day. “But not anymore. Mother said it took too much magic to tend to the plants the way that they deserved, so she goes out foraging now, once a day when everything goes still.” “My mother always liked to garden before she went to work each morning,” Susan said quietly. She was using her horn’s telekinesis to tend to a small sunflower seedling, and her eyes never left it as she spoke. “She said it was her only chance during the day to touch something she could comfort, to create life instead of death.” There was a long silence from the sisters. “...that was almost exactly what Megan said,” Tia said, finally. “This is Megan’s garden, then?” Susan said, looking over at Tia. Luna had made sure to tell Susan about Last Megan the first time she had gotten time with her away from her elder sister. “I hope you don’t mind...” “I’m sure she doesn’t mind!” said Luna, walking between them. “Right, Tia?” Tia tried to say something, but no words came out of her mouth, so she just nodded her head. That evening, Luna was on her way to the Moon side of the castle when she heard shouting coming from the Doctor’s room. She carefully snuck up to the partially-open door so she could hear what was being said. As usual with the Doctor, she was lucky to understand half of the words coming out of his muzzle. “Grandfather, I couldn’t bear to lose you!” Susan exclaimed. “I’m afraid that far more than my own life is at stake here,” said the Doctor. “I am now convinced this world is the one once known as Beach Head.” Well, he said that last word more like “beachhead”, but Luna didn’t know what that meant, so she just imagined a big alicorn head made out of sand. “Yes, Grandfather, I...” “Beach Head was the planet where the Oh-Sigh-Rans and the Gallop-Fray-ans defeated a dimensional invasion.” Luna sighed inwardly—not only was the Doctor speaking in big words, but they were getting kinda silly. “It was a bit more than just...” Susan once again attempted to explain, before once again being cut off by the elder pony. “And it was not just any dimensional invasion, Susan,” the Doctor continued, “but a threat to the very nature of existence! The Faerie came from a universe where matter and energy could be controlled by force of will.” At first, Luna thought they were talking about fairies, which she wasn’t sure were real or not. But later she learned these were different creatures entirely, and asked Tia for the correct spelling. Doing all of this thinking caused Luna to miss most of the rest of the Doctor’s explanation. There was something about a Supreme Will, and people in one universe getting sick in the other universe, and “slow portals”. “The Supreme Will built a world called This M-Bark-ation on his end of the slow portal, and Beach Head at the other end. Some of the Faerie came to live on This M-bark-ation [what a weird name!] and as the laws of this universe slowly leaked into the earth of that world, the Faerie became more and more able to live in this universe, while at the same time the laws of the Faerie were leaking into the earth of Beach Head, until it became able to support Faerie life.” “I know, Grandfather. The Oh-sigh-rans...” “The Oh-sigh-rans first discovered this invasion when they learned that the worlds of Oh-Muh-Gah Cent-Aw-Why were becoming sterile,” the Doctor continued. Luna was certain that the Tree Ponies had the weirdest names for things of any creature ever. There was some more here about these Oh-sigh-ran people getting other people to help them, and finding a way to land on Beach Head without getting hurt, and talking with that Supreme Will person, but this was all getting really boring, and Luna was beginning to wonder what this had to do with the shouting. “So there was no other choice but war.” This got Luna’s attention. Last Megan’s song about the “War of Ballantree” was one of her strongest memories of the Tree Pony—the little alicorn liked to imagine that the ghost fight outside the castle was the very same war, and she had even written a new verse for the song about the giant rock that fell on them every night. “So, on one side you have the Oh-sigh-rans and their coalition, and on the other side you have the Faerie with the power to control the very fabric of reality! Now you would think that that the Oh-sigh-rans wouldn’t have a chance, yes? What could they possibly do under the circumstances?” “They dropped a rock on them,” Susan said, not expecting to be heard. It was with great effort that Luna was able to keep herself from squealing in delight. “They dropped a rock on them. Wait, how did you know that?” Susan sighed. “Father was the Gallop-fray-an observer. The rock was his idea.” “Wait, how...?” There was some indistinct mumbling here, before the Doctor finally gave up. “Very well! And how, pray tell, did he get this wonderful idea of his?” “When he was visiting the Faerie homeworld, he noticed that gravity didn’t exist there, and he told that to the Oh-sigh-rans. They didn’t think much of this, and so tried a number of other things to defeat the Faerie, but just to keep Father from complaining they also positioned a planetoid so it would eventually collide with Beach Head. Everything else the Faerie defeated, but the slow-moving rock was not seen as a threat until it had built up so much speed that it could no longer be stopped. The impact created a new moon, the same one we see today, apparently. It also caused the massive portal to fall to the center of the planet. Since the two portals were linked, the portal on This M-bark-ation was also pulled to the center of its planet, and thus became completely worthless. And that was the end of the matter, or so everybody thought. The cluster was resettled by Hue-mans, and so was this world, which appeared to be perfectly ordinary.” “However,” said the Doctor, “the fact that this world no longer obeys normal physical laws is proof that the portal between dimensions was never completely closed. You can probably figure out what happened to the settlers on this world. By building that shield, they managed to save Oh-muh-gah Cent-aw-why without even knowing it. Now our host tells us that an object that I think is the portal is located at the bottom of a shaft right under this castle! I’d build a machine to measure how fast the portal is working, but nothing more complicated than a toaster can survive the transition when I take it out of the TARDIS, so I’ve been working on a spell that should do the same thing. I should be able to determine if the portal is acting passively, or if it is once again under the control of the Supreme Will.” “But Grandfather,” Susan protested. “We’re not truly alicorns. How can you be sure that you can survive being that close to this portal? For that matter, how do you know that even a magical creature can survive?” The Doctor sighed. “Well to be frank, Susan, that is a risk we have both agreed to take, for the safety of the entire universe.” The next day, Father and the Doctor removed the boards at the bottom of the basement, and wished themselves to the room at the bottom of the big hole that was under it. And then they got in trouble, so Luna went down after them. The bottom of the hole was very weird. What should have been sights were turned into sounds, and sounds into tastes, and tastes into feelings. And what you smelled was some new sense nobody had ever sensed before. But Luna had taken many naps while laying on top of the wooden boards, and in her dreams she had the same problem with her senses, and had heard the same awful but at the same time soothing voices, so it was not hard for her to find the two confused stallions, and lead them back to the bottom of the hole. But the Voice had promised Luna enough wishes for ice cream, and cotton candy, and an end to all of the scariness ever, so she would finally be able to leave the castle. All she had to do was open this tiny little door... This made Father mad, and he rushed back into the room and shoved Luna away from the little door. Maybe he was worried that Luna would get cavities from the cotton candy. Anyway, he grabbed the door between his hooves, and tore it off of the shimmering wall. And out of the hole behind the tiny door poured a million wishes, and Father drank all the wishes like they were water. And that was how Father got his color back, all while saving everybody everywhere in the whole universe. Later, the two Tree Ponies stood outside of their magical blue shed, ready to continue their wanderings. “By my reckoning,” the Doctor said, “Neurth will be safe for Tree Ponies in ten thousand years, if you spend the whole time bringing and keeping the magic of this world under control. Tree Ponies by their nature are very crafty, and sooner or later, they will find this world, no matter how well it may be hidden. Tree Ponies are also rather remarkable creatures, but not all of their traits are admirable, so you need to be prepared to deal with them eventually. “By a coincidence, ten thousand years is also roughly how long it will take for the Supreme Will to regain control of the portal, so you must prepare yourselves doubly for that day, to face the threat from without as well as the threat from within.” “It seems that you are predicting the beginning of a new era,” said Mother. Like Luna and Tia, she had been taken by Father to bathe in the wishing light before he turned it off for good. She had back her color, and when she spoke, it was like Neurth itself was speaking for her. “You may not have noticed this yet,” said Susan, “but today is the first day of a new era for this world. The Fourth, if I’m not mistaken. The First Era was that of the Faerie, and ended in darkness. The Second Era was that of the Earth Empire, and ended in fire. The Third Era was that of the Wizards, and ended in madness. Today we see the dawning of the Fourth Age, the Age of the Equestrians.” Father nodded. “I agree completely. Every age has had a different name for this world, and I propose to continue that tradition. From this day forth, the world of Neurth will henceforth be known as...Equestria!” The Doctor pulled his granddaughter aside. “Shouldn’t you have used ‘Equinoid’ instead of ‘Equestrian’?” Susan shrugged. “What, and have this planet called ‘Equinoidia’?” The Doctor sighed. “No, I suppose not.” He turned back to face the others. “Farewell. I’m afraid I cannot guarantee that we will ever meet again, but rest assured that we will never forget you.” Mother cast a protective bubble around the two visitors and their shed, and then Father pushed the tip of his horn into the bubble and a blinding burst of light sprang forth. When it faded, two tree ponies could be seen waving. Luna rushed forward to just outside the bubble and waved, her eyes drinking everything in. This would be a sight she would never forget for as long as she lived. The Doctor and Susan walked into the blue shed. Mother lowered the bubble and with a funny little sound, the blue shed faded away. The End. Wait, no, there’s more! A few years later, The Doctor and Susan came back, and found us in our new castle. We told them how Father had managed to unite the warring tribes and bring peace to nearly half of Equestria, and how Celestia and myself had taken on the tasks appointed to us at birth, of moving the Sun and the Moon through the sky. Susan gave me a detailed map of the heavens as seen from Earth, and I have been working hard to make the inside of the Big Ball truly represent the sky as it was once seen by the “Tree Ponies” on their planet of origin. I also left a surprise. Someday, perhaps many millennia after we have served our purpose of preparing Equestria for the Twin Threats and moved on, someone will reinvent the human telescope, and use it to examine my night sky. Maybe they will figure out that they live on the inside of a Big Ball, and hopefully by then the ten thousand years will be up, so that it will be as safe for them to leave as it will be for the humans to visit. But until that day, if they ever want to know where in the cosmos that Big Ball is truly located, all they have to do is point their telescope at the Omega Centauri globular cluster, 13 hours 26 minutes right ascension, -47 degrees 28 minutes declination. If they pick just the right spot to focus on, they will see a circle of pitch blackness, with a tiny little animated version of me standing on top and waving at them. Well, not too tiny. A telescope can only magnify so far, after all. The End. For Real.
PostscriptsBetwixt Silver and Gold 3: Luna and the Tree Ponies - Postscripts - Postscript by Celestia, written in the Year 36 of our joint reign: Luna enchanted this scroll so it would last forever, and that spell still appears to be holding. She’s been reluctant to read it for several decades now, and I can’t say that I blame her. There are certain subjects that are far too painful to discuss. At the time of the first visit by the “Ancients” (as I’ve come to call them), that particular subject was Megan “the Last” for myself, and Susan’s parents for them, with the sole exception of that day in the garden. So reticent were they in fact that to this day I am still not sure whether it is Susan’s mother or father who was the child of the Doctor. Well, the TARDIS came to visit us once again, but this time when the Doctor emerged, he was accompanied by a human named Steven instead of his granddaughter. He tried to use talk of how he had duplicated the effect of the transformation spell with a cunning invention to distract attention away from the person who was no longer with him. He also spoke at great length about the humans he had traveled with over the years, and it was apparent that they had had a great effect on wearing down his once-perpetual distrust of his fellow men. Nevertheless, the loss of Susan was profound. On our side, of course, the forbidden subject was the matter of our parents, and the devastating war that followed. Before they left, the Doctor gave us a present, a musical box carefully crafted to work in either of our two worlds, which, sadly to say, means that it barely worked at all. From the way he handled it and his inability to look us in the face, I’m convinced that it had been made by Susan before her mysterious fate overtook her. Unfortunately, this also means that we may never learn the meaning of the haunting song it plays on those occasions when it decides to work properly. I have named the song “Mother Dear”, because when I hear it, I think of all we have lost: Megan, Susan, and especially all the mothers: Susan’s, ours, and oh, so many alicorns! It is lonely now, so very lonely. Perhaps it is finally time to ignore my inner voice and follow Luna’s plea, to repopulate the land with our own creations, so they might bring balance to a world once again gone mad, and so they can carry on our dreams once we have succeeded in transforming this world into one where men can live, but we cannot. P.P.S. by Princess Celestia, written in the Year 5002: It turns out that even a spell of perpetuity runs out if the spell caster stops caring about its preservation. This story is now transcribed onto a new scroll, with a new spell cast upon it, by One who would like to keep it up to date. Unfortunately, We cannot reproduce any of the doodles that once adorned its borders. A pity, that. The ghosts looking up in fear at the falling rock, the charming stick figure of “The Tree Pony Last Megan”, and the simple but disturbing crack in the wall that Luna labeled “The Voice” now exist only in Our memory. We are now halfway into the ten thousand years allotted to Us by the strange alien known only as the Doctor. He never returned after the last visit described above. We thought that rather rude, and so we cast a recalling spell upon the magical transformation invention he keeps in his blue shed. Imagine our surprise when the spell succeeded in retrieving not one, but ten blue sheds, each of them occupied by a different Time Pony claiming to be the Doctor! It appears that the Doctor’s complex relationship with Time allows him to cheat death by regenerating his form at the point of mortal injury, and that strangely this fact makes the serial aspects of his lifespan accessible as separate entities. Of course, We are still trying to comprehend the whole “smaller on the outside” business of the blue shed, so this explanation may be equally far from the truth. The collected adventures of the Doctor would fill a thousand scrolls, so suffice it to say that he has had a full life. Most of the Doctors were accompanied by Companions, individuals (usually Ancients) that he met on his journeys that wished to share in his adventures. This causes Us to reflect on Our relationship to Luna, and how close We might be to succumbing to the family curse if We did not have her company and advice. If only she would spend more of her days with Us, and less with her own counsel. The Doctors and Companions stayed for several months, and eventually managed to wear out their welcome. They are all more or less contemptuous of authority, unfortunately, and fail to distinguish between the flawed authority of mortal governments and the enlightened perfection of the Divine Principality. Also, they have developed a bad habit of visiting and altering Equestria’s past, so that We were eventually forced to put a lock on the timestream and send them away. Once again We are alone, while surrounded by life. The ponies are locked into their customs and superstitions, and the dragons continue to resist our attempts to extend the name “Equestria” from the Principality to the planet we share (We are also adverse to their suggestion that We name the planet “Draconia” instead). Luna drifts further from Our understanding with every passing century. The music box finally fell apart, but We I had a replacement made, that faithfully plays “Mother Dear” every time it is opened. I still don’t know the words to that song. P.P.P.S. by Tia, written in the year 6028: I am a foal. The answer was before me all along, but I ignored it, and look how my family has suffered as a result. Where will it end? And how can I possibly keep her from knowing? P.P.P.P.S. by Tia, written in the year 7014: That’s a lot of P’s. Luna has returned. Luna is free. That last fact I owe to six incredible ponies who embody the Elements of Harmony so perfectly that their actions shame me at times into being a better goddess to my subjects, my little ponies. As an example, let me cite the case of the Element of Laughter, an earth pony named Pinkie Pie. Jokes are inexplicable things that cease to be funny the moment they are explained, and so it is with Pinkie Pie: she is completely inexplicable. Today she wrote Luna and me this letter. Maybe someday we will understand it: Dear Princesses Luna and Celestia: As goddesses, you not only know everything that ever happened, but also everything that’s going to happen, right? So that means that you already know about that secret thing we’re keeping from you, but you’re not mad because you also know that Twilight is going to send you a letter explaining everything. So I thought, if you already know about the secret, and you already know about Twilight’s letter of next week, why should I wait until next week to lend you one of my secret CDs, when I can just give it to you now! That way, I don’t have to send it by post or by dragon-belch (bleh! smelly CD!), and you can give it back to me after you’ve listened to track 11. That’s the song that Luna’s music box plays, right? The one that she never wants anypony else to hear, right? But you’ve always wanted to know what the words are, Celestia, so now you’ll know. Although come to think of it, if you two were really gods, then you’d already know that, right? Yours in Perpetual Pinkness, --Pinkie Pie The letter was accompanied by a compact disc. An actual Ancient-manufactured compact disc, millennia old and simultaneously brand new. How did Pinkie Pie get her hooves on such an object? Furthermore, how does she know about the music box, when neither Luna nor I have listened to it for hundreds if not thousands of years? I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out. To borrow and lightly mangle a phrase that I by all rights shouldn’t know, “Of all the Pinkie Pies in the universe, she’s the Pinkie Pie-iest.” The Compact Disc Player is one of about a million Ancient inventions that perished at the end of the Second Age. A few discs survived in a vault. Those discs were destroyed by my order, during an unfortunate fit of paranoia awhile back. Like I said, I have much to learn from the Elements of Harmony. A unicorn inventor recreated the CD player and started manufacturing new CDs, under slightly suspicious circumstances. Perhaps I will wait a week before investigating. So then, here is the answer to a seven-thousand-year old mystery, the lyrics of my song of loss, taken from track 11 of a CD called simply “1”, and sung by some bugs: Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away Now it looks as though they’re here to stay Oh I believe in yesterday Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be There’s a shadow hanging over me Oh yesterday, came suddenly Why she, had to go I don’t know she wouldn’t say I said, something wrong Now I long for yesterday Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play Now I need a place to hide away Oh I believe in yesterday. Why she, had to go I don’t know She wouldn’t say I said, something wrong Now I long for yesterday Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play Now I need a place to hide away Oh I believe in yesterday. I must admit, it was a slight relief to finally know. P.P.P.P.P.S. by Luna: A “slight relief”, she says? Balderdash. She cried like a baby. Author’s Note: I am a science fiction kind of guy. I’ll enjoy The Lord of the Rings as much as anybody else, but if you present me the choice between mediocre fantasy and mediocre science fiction to read, I’ll pick the SF every time. It is for that reason I had the following tiny problem with My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: My Little Pony: Equestria is an Earth-analogue world of talking ponies. Me: Um...alright, I can buy that. I’ve certainly seen stranger concepts for a series. MLP: It is ruled by a pair of pony goddesses. Me: ...fine, whatever. MLP: One goddess causes the sun to rise each morning. Me: Well unless the series is lying to us, that would mean that the Sun is revolving around the Earth. The Earth is being orbited by a world 333,000 times more massive than it is. MLP: It’s magic! Me: Nnnrgghh...no, wait, I can wrap my head around this. She’s a goddess, right? So she just uses her immense power to keep the bigger world orbiting the smaller. A factor of a third of a million is not that impossible. OK, I can accept that. What else have you got? MLP: The other heavenly sister causes the moon to rise each night. Me: Easy-peasy! MLP: Along with the heavens. Me: What? WHAT?! She causes...the entire universe...to revolve around the Earth? Once every 24 hours? MLP: Eeyup. Me: That’s impossible! The universe is 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more massive than the Earth! (That’s five hundred octillion, or a 5 with 29 zeroes after it.) It’s 78 billion light years across. For it to rotate once every 24 hours would mean that the outer edge of the universe is moving at 2.33 million times the speed of light! No. No, I can’t accept that. Not here, not there, not anywhere! MLP: Are you quoting Green Eggs and Ham? Me: Shut up. Now you might want to argue that in creating Equestria we don’t have to bring along the whole universe, that surely a plain old Ptolemaic solar system, with its sphere of fixed stars, is adequate. And to that argument I reply, “But what about Doctor Whooves?” Where’s the fun of having him in there if you can’t bring along all of the aliens that go with him? And so I hereby propose an alternate cosmology for the series. And put it in the mouth of a cute little pony. And devised a series of increasingly-less believable explanations of why this Equestria ended up with a solar system outwardly identical to Earth’s, down to the constellations, which is utter and complete balderdash... Shut up. Credits: My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is copyright Hasbro, with due respects to Lauren Faust for her brilliant re-imagining of the franchise. The characters of Luna, Celestia and Pinkie Pie are borrowed from that source, although any fault in their interpretations is entirely my own. The First Doctor and his companions Susan and Steven Purvis are from the program Doctor Who and are the property of the BBC. Finally, “Yesterday” is copyright Lennon—McCartney.
