Chapter 2

I’m awake, unfortunately. It’s too bright for me to sleep like this.

I groan, and try to roll my body over to block the offending light source. When that doesn’t help, I blearily open my eyes- I must have forgotten to shut the stupid curtains…

A chill runs down my spine as I open my eyes and see that I am not, in fact, in my apartment, but in some sort of rustic wooden-walled room. The shock wakes me up enough to remember last night, and I take a deep breath. Okay, calm, let’s take stock of what’s going on. A cursory glance around the room doesn’t yield much information; there’s bookshelves on all 4 walls, there’s the normal furnishings of a room, a desk, a chair, a bedside table. A simple door lies on the other side of the room, and I can’t really hear anything coming from the other side from where I lie. The only thing of interest is that I’m apparently hooked up to an IV, and after gingerly running my finger over the point where it goes into my arm, I cringe away, imagining the needle tearing whatever it was that it went into.

Well the room doesn’t look out of the ordinary, but how am I? I’d missed that I was hooked up to an IV, but in my defense it doesn’t really feel like much. Other than that, I do notice that my body seems to ache- the muscles in my arms and neck are screaming at me, and when I flex my legs experimentally, those are the same. There was no use fighting something like that, I suppose, so I lay back down and stare blankly at the ceiling. Hopefully whoever’s meant to be looking after me comes in soon, because I have some questions.

As if on cue, I hear the door open softly, and I resist the immediate urge to sit up and look at the stranger. “Good morning.” I say pleasantly.

“Good afternoon, and hello. I see you’re awake!” The voice is female, and seems rather pleased. “Was I out for a while?” I ask. I know I’m currently sick, but I still feel a little guilty that this woman has carried my unconscious body to what I can only assume is her house, and is tending to me. “Mm, a few days now,” she hums, as if that were the most normal thing in the world. A few days?! I didn’t let work know where I was, and shit, I’d planned things with my friends! Ugh, why couldn’t Luna have just told me about this sooner? “But that’s perfectly natural though, so don’t worry too much.” She must’ve picked up on my reaction. Though it would be quite the effort to conceal my facial expression with everything aching like it was.

“This happen often?” I joke, and she giggles. “Something like that. I’ve brought myself to magical exhaustion quite a few times in my schooling career, so I’m used to dealing with it.” Interesting, I wonder how that happens? I try and fail to recall any relevant information that Luna had given me in the dream last night, but it’s all starting to blur away. A dream is still a dream I guess. She walks into view now, and it’s still amazing to me that sentient magical horses have somehow evolved in this place. I take a minute to look her over; she’s got a pastel purple coat, and her mane is a deeper purple with a pink highlight, which is striking enough, but what really stands out to me is that she has a horn. “It’s not polite to stare.” she says, and when I shake myself to my senses and look at her face, I can see she’s teasing.

“Sorry, it’s quite a surprise to see a real unicorn.” She smirks, and gestures to the IV as if to say ‘oh yeah? watch this’. I crane my neck, and see as a shimmering purple haze surrounds the dial. I can only gaze in awe as the dial turns slightly, and a little more of whatever I’m getting dosed with drips into the bag. I look back at her, mouth agape, and her horn is surrounded in the same shimmering purple. She’s grinning like a cat, too.

“Was my reaction that entertaining?” I say, laying back down, and she lets out a little laugh. “Sort of? Magic is something so simple that we take it for granted. Especially such a simple spell- even a child can manipulate objects with their aura.”
I smile. “Ah, gotcha, so you’ve just shown a caveman a lightbulb.” Now it’s her turn to be confused, but she doesn’t rise to the conversational bait.

I can hear her busying about, and when I look over next, she’s produced some strange sort of device from god-knows-where. I can only describe it as being as though someone merged a tripod camera and a strange steampunk microwave, all gears and dials on the side. I’m about to ask what it is when she saves me the trouble. “It’s a thaumatogram,” She explains. “It takes a photograph of the magic inside of a creature or object.” I raise an eyebrow, hoping that the seeming similarity to x-rays ended with being able to see inside what it was pointed at. “That’s pretty cool, how does it work?” Her eyes light up, and she stops whatever she was doing with the device. “Well, you see, the technology in here uses the first principle of Thaumaturgy to-” She tuts, apparently remembering that I have no way of knowing what that is. “The first principle of Thaumaturgy is that free magic is attracted to focused magic, it’s how your body absorbs magic from the atmosphere, for example.” She explains rather hastily. “Anyway, yes! The device uses that principle to make an image of the magical circuitry of what it’s pointed at, and then when the shutter is pressed, the runes inside convert the image it has into a photograph.”

I roll my eyes. She’s clearly not used to teaching things to people who know a lot less than her- or maybe the foundational knowledge at play here is so basic that nobody here would really know how to explain it? Regardless, that satisfied my curiosity about how that thing works for now, and thankfully it didn’t seem like it would expose me to any radiation. “Cool,” I say. “What do you need to look at, anyway?” She’s back to work adjusting a few dials, and it takes a minute or two before I hear the shutter click and she feels the need to tear herself away from what she’s doing and answer my question. “Oh, I’ve been taking these daily, I just wanted to see your progress.” The emphasis she put on ‘your progress’ was worrying. It was the same emphasis a mad scientist in some tacky movie might put on the phrase ‘my creation’.

I’m almost afraid to ask, but I’m nothing if not curious, so I don’t let it stop me. “What do you mean, ‘progress’?” I ask, narrowing my eyes. She just nonchalantly walks over to me, and five photographs float over to her from the thaumatograph as she moves. “Take a look!” One of the pictures floats down in front of me, and she looks expectantly at me. I give it a look, and put simply, it looks wrong. The picture shows a winding map of faintly blue tendrils running in a vaguely human-shaped pattern, but where in some places the tendrils are thin and simply arranged, in others they are wide and twisting, making strange eldritch patterns and occupying far more space on the diagram. What immediately concerns me is the head area, where the patterns are most wild, and tendrils most concentrated- the effect is eerily similar to the roots of a tree, running down through my body.

“Th-that’s… Me?” I choke out. The picture is pulled back a little, and arranges itself as the fourth in the series of photographs as the rest levitate in front of me in order. “Yep! You see what I mean about progress?” She says excitedly. Even a child could tell you the trend in the images. The snaking tendrils of magic in the image were growing stronger as the days went by, and after only five days… I looked at the last image, in which the roots were notably more equal, and the swirling snaking patterns more frequent. “This much, in only five days…?” I whisper. The horse woman titters, and the fifth picture is pulled to the right of the other four. “Sorry for confusing you! No, you’ve only been here for four days. The last one is of me- I tried my best to get my body in the pose you have while you’re asleep, and apparently I did too good a job!”

I should be worried, but instead I feel a sort of nervous excitement, maybe it was some morbid curiosity. I pluck the last two pictures from the air, much to my host’s chagrin, and compare them more closely. It’s a lot clearer upon closer inspection that the fifth belongs to her, and when I think about it, the increase of thickness in the magical tendrils was surely a lot more when it was to-scale than it appeared on a relatively small image. The only clear similarities are that the patterns in the heads of both images are uncannily similar. Almost identical, in fact.

“It’s fascinating, isn’t it?” She says, snapping me out of my trance. “The Princess did tell me to expect something like this, but I didn’t think for a moment that she’d be so precisely accurate.” Ah, yes the Princess. Apparently it wasn’t only her that spoke in riddles around here. “Do you mind sharing with the class?” I say, trying my absolute best to not smirk at getting to say one of my favourite snarky lines twice in as many days- or I suppose days conscious. “Oh, right. She did say she didn’t get to explain everything.” No shit, sherlock. “Basically, looking at the timeline of this, a type of magic from here latched onto you and has been slowly trying to ‘fix’ your body for a few months. Princess Luna told me to expect that you were suffering severe thaumic exhaustion, because the world you lived in was very low in magic, so I brought you here so that you could recover!” She has a beaming smile on her face, as if incredibly proud of her role in this. This is a lot to process though, what the hell?

“What do you mean ‘fix’- and, wait a second, I’m not on earth?!” My eyes dart around as if there’d be a helpful sign, or I’d be able to see a green sky out of the window. She cocks her head to one side. “Did the Princess not tell you that?” I shake my head, and she facepalms- or the equivalent of doing that but with hooves. “That was one of the things I was meant to tell you, whoops?” She offers, sheepishly. “You’re in the Kingdom of Equestria, which is a large country in our world of Terra. As for the ‘fix’ part, we think the particular type of magic you came across was Harmonic magic. It’s meant for purifying evil, or for healing, so it’s basically harmless to ponies, but it does also have a slight tendency to, well…” She shuffles her hooves awkwardly, not making eye contact with me. “To what?” I prompt, when she doesn’t seem quite ready to continue. Awkwardness be damned, I ought to know. “Well, it has a tendency to change whatever it affects, physically or otherwise. I think it’s trying to make you, well, like us.”

I blink. I blink again. Two more times.

I hadn’t misheard or misunderstood, had I? I’d better check. “It’s going to make me into a pastel colored magical horse?”

“We’re ponies, not horses!” She huffs, before clearing her throat. “But, ah, yes, that’s the long and the short of it. I don’t know how long it will take, but I can say with certainty that it’ll happen.”

I let out a little chuckle. “I wake up after a four-day coma, and a magical unicorn pony I don’t even know the name of is telling me that I’m on an alien planet and I’m gonna turn into something just like her. I don’t know if I should laugh or cry!”

I opt for both, and to her credit she waits for me to finish before offering a slightly sad look. “I know it’s not much help, but I swear by the Princess that I’ll do my absolute best to look after you and help you acclimate here…” While I can’t say I don’t appreciate the sentiment, and obviously I’d rather have the offered help than not, I’m not too enthused about being a stranger in a strange land.

“My name is Twilight Sparkle,” she says, abruptly launching into a new thought, in that way she does. “You can just call me Twilight though. I wanted to know your name, and Princess Luna didn’t tell me yours- she said something about you having a lot of them?”

I let a smile cross my lips. Hah, take that Luna, your mind magic is no match for my ridiculous number of internet pseudonyms. Oddly, I do feel a bit better after that, whether it’s from the crying or from finally knowing the name of the pony that’s been taking care of me the past few days. I open my mouth to tell her my name, but for some reason, I hesitate before giving my automatic response. I feel a little of the giddy excitement of before creeping back in as I settle on the answer to give her.

“Thanks, Twilight. My name’s Bookish Velvet- nice to meet you!”