Sierra Sky

Valerie gave me what she called a tablet. I figured it was some sort of human magic, so I didn’t question it much. She pantomimed what she wanted me to do until I figured it out. Stylized images would appear on the device, and I would name them. Valerie watched, but she didn’t spend any time doing any of the things I would have expected if she was trying to learn my language. I realized that this didn’t matter when she started talking in nouns. From there, we found our way to verbs and tenses and other stuff. Basic communication started to happen. We established things like the fact that she was a she, and so was I. Basic stuff.

I was waiting for the symptoms usually suppressed by my medication or any other normal bodily function. I wasn’t tired, hungry, thirsty, or in need of the little fillies room. So I decided to go with it until I could actually talk to the creature beside me, or I really needed something. At least the bed was nice.

It took hours, probably. My sense of time was not what it was the day before. I couldn’t say how long it was before I was asked a different kind of question. “Why do you come here?” she said with good clarity, if not grammar.

I hesitated out of surprise, but I answered, “Because my people need help. My whole world is in danger.”

She nodded slowly. I had learned that the gesture meant the same thing for her as it did for ponies, which was convenient. She said, “Where you world? Answer you best. I understand later, if not now.”

I had to process that a little bit, but I went ahead and replied, “It’s in a different… dimension or universe. I’m not sure which. The device I used to come here can open the way if we take it to the right place.”

There was little reaction.

Valerie finally replied, “I know words better later. I learn more now.”

***

Later...

Valerie soon took over from the tablet, asking me questions directly instead of relying on the tablet to convey what she wanted to know. Then the questions stopped. I blinked. Were we done? Valerie put the tablet on the table and faced me.

“So you’re from another universe?” The human asked.

I blinked in confusion until I remembered why I was here. “Oh, right! Well, um. I think so.”

“Wouldn’t you know?” she asked.

I tried not to act like a guilty filly caught by hospital staff… or parents if they were lucky, now that I thought about it. Luckily I could hide behind the truth. “Most of what was explained to me was on the practical side of what I came to do,” I replied. The reasons I was here came to focus in my mind. “I used the amster to come here. It was made to search for something called an anthropos. It said there might be one here, wherever ‘here’ is. Is that what you are?”

One of Valerie’s eyebrows rose. She said, “Anthropos is greek for human, which is the English word for my species. The ancient Greeks also had a myth about a creature called Pegasus. Do you know anything about this?”

“No,” I replied, surprised, “this is obviously important, but I had no idea anypony had ever gone to another world. Sorry, Valerie. Actually, there is probably a real chance that the princess knows. Um, anyway, Pegasus is what kind of pony I am. It probably wasn’t their name.”

“I hope I can learn more sometime,” Valerie said, taking all of the new information in stride before and back into the chair. “So, you came looking for humans. Why?”

This was the big moment. I took a deep breath and leaned forward. “We believe we are in danger. Creatures we call Nightmares are coming. We have survived them before, barely. Now the princess thinks we are outmatched entirely, and we want help. I am told that we think anth- uh, humans can help.”

Valerie leaned forward. We were now firmly in each other’s space. “So you’re here asking me to wage war against your enemies?”

I frowned. I did not like that framing, so I turned it around. “We want to live. If we can only do that through war, then yes. We would rather not. My sister is enlisted. She might die.”

“Alright. Answer me this, how do we get to your world, and how much time do we have?” Valerie asked.

I leaned over the edge of my bed, excited. “We should have several months. My understanding is we need to get back to the place I arrived at, and then we can use the amster to take as many humans as are willing back to my… universe or dimension or whatever.”

The human gestured to herself. “It just so happens that I am the only one even remotely nearby. That’s alright, though. If I can have the time I need, my machines can guarantee any outcome I choose. However, there might be a problem. You should see this. We might have a serious obstacle ahead of us.” She got up and opened my door. I spotted the amster in a rack oddly similar to the one it had once rested in when I first saw it, except some of the parts had sections that drooped and were obviously deformed by heat. The rack rested upon a tray that rolled itself into the room. It held the large topaz and a collection of glass bowls. One held several loose gems, one held many drops of metal that had cooled into various shapes, and each of the rest held one color of gem powder each. The rack rested upon some sort of wheeled machine that quietly rolled into our room.

I was speechless.

I carefully climbed off the bed, listening to my body for any of my regular aches and pain. I put weight on each limb one at a time to make sure they wouldn’t fail me. It was all going impressively well. I got close to the gem and thought the code word.

Password: Serendipity.
Password Accepted.

Alert! 28 faults detected! Use caution while operating!

“It’s not happy, but it connected to me. I can see words floating in the air right here.” I waved my hoof through the words above the topaz. “They are telling me that there are twenty-eight things wrong.”

Valerie nodded. “I can do something similar within my mind to interact with my own devices. Do any of those issues make it impossible for us to reach your home?”

I read the list of faults. I didn’t understand what many of them were talking about, but I understood things like air shield inaccessible and flight hardware missing. The transition spell, however. I faced Valerie. “Yes. This can’t get us to where we need to go, but it says the transition spell is working. Do you have a way to travel in space?”

She smiled. “Do I? I think we should head upstairs. If I understand events correctly, I know where we need to go, but it will take about fourteen days, which means we should get a move on. We have been at this for twenty-six hours. I could use a break.” She stood up and walked out the door.

I was partially relieved from my worries. “Sounds goo-” I blinked. “Wait, what? Twenty-six hours!?”

***

I half followed, and half chased Valerie out of the building, both confused and curious. We were near an exit, but it was a huge hospital, if I knew anything at all. It was clearly meant to handle a considerable number of humans. There really were none around aside from Valerie.

An odd vehicle was waiting for us. It was so different from what I was used to that I couldn’t help but study it, comparing it to the sight of carts usually pulled by an earth pony or a Pegasus, but this had no obvious harness for a puller. Instead, it was more like a rounded rectangle of glass set on four wheels with chairs inside. While I stared, the machine that held the remains of the amster rolled past me. It drove onto a mechanism in the rear of the vehicle that lifted it into a rear hatch that had silently opened at its approach.

A door opened toward me. Valerie walked by on my right. The shadow that passed over me reminded me that she was taller than I was by a good deal. She said, “This is our ride. Do you need any help getting in?”

I climbed up into the front right seat easily enough. It took some effort to sit upright in the chair at Valerie’s recommendation. My tail needed to be curved one way or the other to avoid crushing it, but it worked. She nodded in satisfaction and went around to the left side.

She climbed in herself and said to me, “I could have laid your chair back.”

I shrugged. I caught sight of a tall building, but I couldn’t see the top from where I was in the vehicle. I had leaned forward. What I thought was just a Manehatten height skyscraper just kept going up until it became just a line.

The vehicle started moving. I almost slipped off my chair before sliding back to where I was earlier. I had too many questions racing to escape my mouth. The first one I unleashed upon the world was, “Is this thing safe?”

While I wondered why that was the first one out, Valerie replied, “If we weren’t the only ones on the road, I would have you strap in.”

“Okay. By the way, what is that?” I asked Valerie, pointing my hoof at the tower ahead of us.

She didn’t even look. “An elevator.”

I didn’t even remember giving her that word. I paused for a moment, thinking about how surreal her ability to simply absorb the language was. Princess Twilight would be incredibly envious. I had never been in an elevator before, but I knew of them.

She seemed to guess my thoughts. “You gave me plenty of root words and suffixes to derive that word. So I’m pretty sure I guessed it correctly.”

I nodded. My thoughts returned to the last day. I didn’t feel tired or anything else I should have been feeling. I had charged out of the room I had awoken in without my typical arthritic restraint. I looked down at myself. There were no obvious signs I was different, but I felt different. I bent and twisted my forelegs, searching for any of the old tells of aging. My cream fur and indigo mane and tail remained pale rather than the shades I had when I was young.

We came to a stop, and our doors opened. “This way,” Valerie said, climbing out. I followed. I hadn’t paid attention as the base of the ‘elevator’ came into view. In the midst of what could have been office buildings and warehouses was something I had never seen. It looked like a one-pole tent leaning over, but the pole had poked through the top and reached into the sky until it disappeared. The walls looked like some sort of industrial sculpture made of huge trusses. I could see recognizable rails that cut through the far half of the structure while the near side was obviously meant for pedestrians. I looked for where the… elevator, I suppose, ended in the sky. It took a moment before I spotted where it seemed to connect to the center of a line that reached for both horizons. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to spot it before. A wide section of the building was covered in scaffolds. The place was surrounded by walkways that extended far from the building. I noticed that the cart with the amster was still following us.

Going inside was not unlike entering the Canterlot palace, but it was beautiful in a different way. I knew that dad would trade a leg to be here surrounded by such a work of metal and stone. We did not linger.

We arrived at a capsule-shaped compartment near the center of the large building that had many doors around the outside and several large windows. Valerie led me toward one in particular. It was the only one that had a green light above it. In moments we were inside. It was a forest of chairs. She followed the wall until we were in front of one of the windows.

“Take a seat or stand carefully. We are going to be rising in a few seconds,” Valerie said. I looked out the window, noting more details that said that the place wasn’t finished. It honestly felt spooky to be in a place made for so many humans but had only one. A sound rang throughout the large room, and I suddenly felt heavier as the building outside sunk below. It was only a moment before we were outside and ascending above the city. It was actually not as large as I thought. Part of it seemed to be up against an invisible wall, like a coastline without water. I also noticed how there was very little plant life across the landscape. There was green, but I couldn’t see what it actually was.

The experience was a thrill, not unlike my rare flights, to watch the ground sink below us, but it wasn’t something that would have satisfied a wonderbolt. I looked at Valerie and saw that she was looking down at me. I realized that she was waiting for me to speak, her expression neutral. “I can tell that my body,” I hesitated, looking for the words, “before I got here, I was more than a little infirm. I don’t remember what happened between the last time I fell asleep in the amster and when I woke up in that room. Now I feel better than any time I can remember, but I should not have been able to give my words to the… um… the tablet thing for twenty-six hours straight for so many reasons. Will you tell me what you did to me?”

The human nodded slowly. “I’ll tell you,” she said, “but remember that I had no other way to keep you alive. You landed hard. By some definitions, you were dead.” She explained to me how she had saved my brain with the help of ‘nano’ machines and how she built me a body that only imitated my old one. It was a shock, but while another pony might have been upset by such a loss, I could only be relieved. I hadn’t really come to terms, to really appreciate the fact that everything was different. The regret and guilt of what I had probably done to Flurry Heart by stealing the amster faded. Slightly.

I realized two things then. I had squandered any opportunity I had to fly, but if the human had made this body from scratch, somehow, then maybe I couldn’t fly anyway. It was a little freaky to consider the idea that my whole body had been switched out, although it raised possibilities that had never occurred to me before. Maybe there was a way to fly. I would have to think about this.

I focused again on the view. The land below was distant now. It was then that the heaviness I was still feeling transitioned to a lightness. I knew what this meant, even with what little flight experience I had that we were slowing down.

I returned my gaze to the tall biped beside me. She was similar to a minotaur in some respects, but I had never seen a female minotaur which was strange now that I thought about it. She seemed to have a stiff attitude but was willing to help us repel the Nightmares. However, I wasn’t sure she understood what she was getting into.

I responded to what she had just explained to me about my body. “I had months to live. I had very little chance of making anything of my life while my sister enlisted. I wasn’t supposed to be the one out here looking for you, but I took this task when the opportunity arose because I see… saw myself as expendable.”

“I can respect that,” Valerie said. “I think you won’t have to worry about living long enough to achieve your goals anymore.” She looked outside again. “We’re almost there.”

I turned around. What was once a line cutting through the sky now looked more like a long support beam we were about to crash into. My sense of time had once again failed me. It felt like we had just left the ground. The horizon below curved. In another moment, we were inside.

It wasn’t entirely different from the building we left on the ground. Large rooms were visibly incomplete. Finally, we came to a stop. I followed Valerie past several doors that did not open until we were returned to the one we came through in the first place. It felt like there was some sort of weak breeze in my feathers before they took on a numb sensation.

We went through several junctions of sterile hallways, feeling even lighter than I did on the ground. We went on, silently, until we went through a section that was missing a wall. I stopped walking and stared. Nothing was keeping the inside and outside separate. I saw only a few stars that weren’t washed out by the brightly lit planet below.

I focused on my breathing. It felt like there was plenty of air. I tried to flap my wings, but they met no resistance. There was no air. So the fact that I felt like there was air meant… what?

I put my wings back and took another breath. My lungs filled and emptied. Valerie was standing there, I noticed, watching me in my confusion. “What is…” I trailed off, not knowing how to even frame the question.

She said, “For the moment, just know that you are safe. You are different now, but it can all be undone when we get to your home. Sooner, actually, but I think it is wise to wait.”

I could barely restrain myself from asking for details, but I did. Instead, I pursued other questions. “So, uh, Valerie. I was wondering what’s holding up all this,” I said, gesturing around as we continued our journey.

Valerie smiled a little bit. “We have a moment. Check this out,” she said, turning down a corridor. We came to a compartment that seemed infinitely long, vanishing into the distance. It was clear that it was all still under construction. Unlike the other times I saw something that was unfinished, I could see machines doing work. I saw a giant mechanical arm lift a metal plate against a frame above it while others fastened it in place. That same frame extended all the way to where we were. Beyond the frame, there were long cylindrical objects that stretched in both directions as far as I could see. Oddly enough, their surfaces were blurry in my vision.

“The structure we are in is called an orbital ring. These cables,” she pointed to the blurry objects, “circle the entire moon, spinning so fast that there are forced into the shape of a circle. The cables are magnetic, which means that they can magnetically suspend a lot of weight. It would fall down anyway if it wasn’t secured to the moon. Structures like this are amazingly useful,” she explained with a bit more liveliness than I had seen from her so far.

I was impressed. I also saw how Valerie came alive when talking about this orbital ring of hers. Was she really as isolated as she said she was? How did this affect this creature that seemed to have so much ability to reshape a world and build great works but had no one to share her accomplishments with? It was something to ponder.
We climbed up a flight of stairs that were awkwardly sized for a pony. We entered a room with a view out of both sides through another triangle grid of reinforced windows. We had emerged above the surface. It felt to me like an endless metal pier stretching into the distance. Maybe that’s exactly what it was. There were rails set into the structure on both sides.

Moments later, a massive object appeared. Wheels supporting a dense collection of metal trusses carried an unidentifiable object that dominated the view.

“That’s our ride,” Valerie said.

Author's Note

I got this one out a little earlier than planned. I actually got much further into the story before I decided to change a lot of early content. A lot of stuff beyond this point is already written, but it needs to be adapted to this version of the story.

Here’s a better explanation of orbital rings.

Here’s another song. I thought of the name Valerie before remembering this song, but I thought the parallels were nifty so I’m sharing it here.