Field Notes for 10 May 200-
AGENT: 🅱️ (owner of journal, automagically filed)
MISSION: at this point, returning. Survival is more or less guaranteed until our return attempt.
STATUS: homeward-bound?
The past two weeks have precluded me from finding a safe, private, and quiet opportunity to gather my thoughts. Precluded. There’s one of those fancy Lyra words sneaking in. Unsurprised, as she was the pony who cast the spell to let me write directly from my thoughts. If I were back in Equestria, this spell would just work. I’d think directed thoughts and words would appear on the page. Here, I can feel the connection from my words to the concentrated magic pellet at the base of Lyra’s horn and back to the page.
Current setting: As I am writing this, I am in the covered bed of what the humans call a “pickup truck.” The windows separating the passenger compartment from the bed have been removed, so I can talk to Trixie and have her relay messages to the human driving if I shout. Currently, Trixie is napping with her head resting in the human’s lap. I think his name is Dave. This bed is covered in pillows and straw. Starlight and Lyra are both asleep as the occasional tree rushes by.
Starlight and I seem to be the only ponies who can feel that there is a near-imperceptible flow of ambient magic. It’s as if there is a crack in reality with magic slowly flowing in. Lyra and Trixie both have their own internal magic. It’s weak, about the same grip strength as an unfocused human toddler, but it exists. They’ve told me that in Equestria, this internal magic is used to manipulate the ambient magic. As we continue east, I cannot help but feel that the magic levels slowly rise faster than when we were with the herd in the same general territory. It’s almost as if the planned destination for our return attempt is the source of the leak.
Lyra just flicked an ear—every bit as cute here as it was in Equestria. Speaking of Lyra, there are some truths I must write here that she should never know. She needs to keep her ears forward and never check her blind spot, lest she understand the unexpected consequences of her actions and lose her inner beauty. As the saying ends, “to the dead, we owe the truth.” The reason I have been unable to write lately is that we have been commingled with a large herd of Earth’s horses for the past month. Imagine a nomadic tribe of large Earth ponies, all in a limited palette of white, brown, red, orange, and black. We were attacked and chased by some black mechanical rotary birds. She had to defend herself and the herd. She needed to save all of us. Her aim was true: the blade’s impact on the magic pellet unleashed its full energy all at once. No birds remained in the sky. A small crater was born under their former location.
It’s the follow-up that I must shield her from. Four ponies were close to being caught when she destroyed the birds: the stallion, two mares, and a yearling colt. The concussive blast was too much for their bodies to handle. Lyra couldn’t have seen them in the dust. I did not see them. Trixie and Starlight were focused on running as far away as possible. The horrors do not end there. From what little of the radio chatter I can translate, the humans have been itching to go to war for a while and are now actively looking for “the home nation of the terrorists that cost us eight servicemen and two helicopters” so they can invade it. We must return to Equestria before they blow themselves into uninhabitability, unless that is the event that frees the planet from human control and allows equines to evolve to their rightful place.
Draft Mission Summary as of 10 May 200-
(minutes after previous entry)
AGENT: 🅱️ (owner of journal, automagically filed)
MISSION: complicated, at least 4 are relevantâ€
STATUS: homeward-bound
†Details of known missions will be separately listed under their own headers
TO-DO
- If I am reading this in Equestria, excise—there’s another Lyra word—the extraneous detail, resolve TO-DO items, and erase the editorial remarks
- If you are a human reading this or you are a pony for whom Equestria means nothing because it is still in the future, this means I have failed to return. Make as many copies as you can with this TO-DO list intact and disperse them where you may. With any luck, the fragments will permeate the ambient magic when Equestria forms so that the truth may be preserved.
- If you are reading this list in Equestria, you had better be in the reading room of a Time Temple (or at least that’s what we’d call them when I was an agent: Princess Luna says the Old a Castle had a Forbidden Library which served the same purpose XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXXXXXX XX XXX XXXX). If the very concept of a Time Temple is confusing, summon the greatest mages of the era and build a containment facility so that errant documents such as these may not pollute the minds of unaware ponies. Do not read the rest of this journal until such a facility has been built and you are safely inside it.
Location Logbook Summary
TO-DO: attach and annotate full log with maps
Shortly after Hearthswarming, 3–5 years after Luna’s returnâ€
†Apologies for the unclear timeline. Dates on documents directly from Equestria have had their dates muddled during travel.
I was informed of a possible update to the case of missing mare Starlight Glimmer. Two strong blasts of magic had been detected passing through Equestria, traveling rapidly from future to past.
What happened next is complicated—TO-DO: ask Lyra to make some diagrams of all the jumps forward and back, as this grew out of Lyra’s prior mission. Earth ponies are not meant for these calculations. Highlights of the aftermath:
- Equestria is on edge after Luna’s near-demise. We know what happens to her; we do not know when she will be sent there.
- The fate of time-traveling unicorns has been uncovered. Lyra is one of the few survivors, likely because she was merely along for the ride instead of a mage capable of casting her own time-traveling spells. Her classmate (and valedictorian, she insists I add) Twilight Sparkle was among those “time-traveling unicorns.”
- Lyra and I put in words to our respective agencies that we are to stick together and be assigned to the same time-travel missions from now on. My emeritus director and the Princess were both understanding and accommodating.
The Next Winter Wrap-Up
Preparations for our journey have been completed. Celestia and Luna gave Lyra and me a hero’s farewell dinner before sending us. Whatever they did, the spell was complex enough that it still required engravings to channel the magic, even with the two most-experienced alicorns casting it. Once the time box was summoned, we stepped inside and exited into the deep past.
Future entries will be in local human time. Humans increment their year count a week after their equivalent to Hearthswarming.
Mid-Summer
About a week after we arrived, the humans had some kind of fireworks holiday. We then learned that the local ungulates do not understand fireworks. Mass panic all around. No signs of Twilight, Starlight, or Luna.
September
Despite this world being generally devoid of magic, I could track down a signature. We encountered an unexpected Equestrian unicorn. Lyra recognized her as a traveling showmare. I recognized her name as one of my co-workers’ cases to apprehend. The fact that she was not included on my recovery docket implies that she either had nopony to care she was missing or that she will not disappear from Equestria until sometime in the future—future being relative to when Lyra and I left.
Trixie had been on Earth since March (human time) and has been living as the roommare of the human whose property she was grazing upon since around May. Prior to that, she was captive of a hostile group of humans who quarreled among themselves over her fate before she escaped and was rescued. Only about three or four humans know of her existence outside her old captors and her host.
Most surprisingly, Starlight Glimmer was alive and inside the same house when Trixie showed us inside after introductions.
Winter
We headed south into warmer pastures, carefully avoiding humans. The local equines have many predators, both real and imagined. One consistency from herd to herd are the rumors of free-living equines throughout the West. Once the weather started to warm, we made our way to investigate.
Spring
Meeting the herds and the events described in today’s entry.
Mission: Apprehend Fugitive Trixie Lulamoon, “The Great and Powerful”
Trixie recovered and willing to consider a return to Equestria. Recommend Crown drop charges. Office betting pool can cover her tax penalties, as nopony suspected the wagon wreckage next to the mirror pool to belong to her. A most unexpected find, trace magic may still bind us Equestrian ponies to find one another. Recommend setting her gift of tongues to good use as an ambassador to the Crown. Her personality is far improved when she is forced to utilize wilderness survival skills and interact with other species.
Major obstacle to recovery: she is with foal. Two unique challenges.
- The dosage of magic required to make the trip would be dangerous to an unborn foal
- The sire is one of Earth’s ponies. Even if the foal arrives safely, if it grows up healthy, it may introduce genetic anomalies to Equestria once it’s old enough to fall in love and make more ponies.
Ethics training never covered this.
Assuming her honesty, she made it to Earth by purchasing some “Alicorn Amulet,” then visiting the Mirror Pool with a command to “take Trixie somewhere where she shall be great and powerfully respected.” The amulet is in a secure human facility we plan to invade to make our escape. At least she was easier to apprehend than if she had wished to end up somewhere where she would have been “powerful and greatly respected.”
Mission: Recover Missing Mare Starlight Glimmer
My dedication to solving this case is what got Lyra and me in this mess in the first place. Had we filed her as “missing / presumed dead” instead of following the tendrils of magic, she would have turned up alive in about three years’ time if we had kept pulse of the rumors swirling around the desert villages outside Equestria. Speaking of dead, she is firmly convinced that she has died and is in the afterlife with us. See attached transcript of interview for details.
If nothing else, the timeline she tells is at least plausible, as she is about twenty years older than the teenage filly her father reported missing last year.
Mission: TWILIGHT SPARKLE
For Princess eyes only (and my former director, should she choose to leave retirement to assist in final report compilation)
Even editing this ought to be done in a temporally-secure facility once in Equestria.
It is unclear from Starlight’s story whether Twilight turned out like the rest of Celestia’s failed students or if she was a successful protégé later overcome with the same affliction that took Luna from us long ago. The attached transcript should provide clarity once recorded.
Most alarmingly, a select few humans seem to have access to some miscut documentary of her first year in Ponyville. If true, this level of causality violation requires Luna’s immediate attention. Ponies may not be the only species with time travel capabilities.
Mission: Investigate Forerunners and prehistory
This is Lyra’s nominal reason for accompanying me. It turns out the Forerunners call their own species “human” and are mostly-naked monkeys with slightly blubbery skin and are not tailless dragons. The magical link establishing that we are several million years in Equestria’s past is undeniable, even without ambient magic.
