I was confused. I know, brand new observation, right?

But I'd seen a lot of stuff in this journey. Starting out finding that odd machine sitting in the waters of the Oregon lake all that time ago, then finding the hat and becoming Sprout, then wandering around Maretime Bay trying to fix things Sprout might mess up, but not succeeding, but it was certainly worth trying it out.

Then fighting that machine, getting the people in Congress to get that bill through, the massive military buildup- all of it weighed heavily on my conscience. I had to take the matters into my own hands, and then I decided to make a decision that Sprout probably never had- set off beyond Maretime Bay and into the wild unknown.

Across those lands towards the pegasi, seeing they were going a bit far with the weapons, being the firsthoof victim of racism (not something I ever wanted to experience), then finding Misty, battling some ghosts, then arriving here.

It had been a wild journey, but vastly preferable from staying in Maretime Bay, becoming a demagogue, and then starting a race war. Yep, seemed the universe had it out for me.

As we continued on our way into the forest, I noticed some oddities around me, and it concerned me greatly. Most of the team seemed to be here- I could see Pipp and Hitch talking to each other, and Sunny and Izzy seemed to be pretty close to one another in most senses of the word. This made sense, as they'd known each other for much longer than the rest of us.

Misty was, of course, here, far before she should have been. And I was, of course, here as well.

Which raised a rather obvious question in my mind.

Where was Zipp?

Wasn't she meant to be on the team, given she goes on to become one of the new main characters? Sorry, mane characters- we have to leave in the horse puns, after all.

If she wasn't here, then what else was going on? Where was she? Why was Pipp here, but not Zipp?

I tried to figure out how to explain this to myself, but that wasn't seeming to work, and I went along trying to puzzle out what was going on. I tried to head towards Pipp, but when I tried to get her attention there was no response from her. Well, that didn't work. She was too busy being in conversation with somepony else.

So it was back to Misty, I guess. It took a bit of data extraction, but I started to construct a better picture of what happened. It seemed they'd left Zipp behind, which surprised me. I had thought they'd want to go back for her, but for whatever reason they didn't. Odd, but I guess I wasn't there.

The forest continued to loom over us, which I found a tad unsettling before we continued along our path. I hoped we got inside soon, as the place seemed to loom over us.

But, at last, we found our way indoors, after Izzy conducted a strange ritual and produced a key from nowhere. How was she able to do that? Things just appeared from nowhere and disappeared to nowhere.

It reminded me of a game I played in the old world. Back in 1993, a game called Doom was released, which featured the player blowing up monsters threatening them. One feature of the game was a massive arsenal of weapons available, far more than the player character could realistically carry. An endless debate was where in the world he stored them, as it made little sense.

Maybe Izzy had something similar.

Wait a second. You say there's a game like that for earth ponies?

Oh, it involves shooting unicorns and pegasi. Why does everything in this place link back to propaganda around here? No doubt that'll need editing, even if I do suspect unicorns and pegasi have similar entertainment drawing on the same stereotypes. Misty had mentioned one of the movies she'd looked at whilst a prisoner consisted of an earth pony villain attempting to destroy pegasus things using a big robot, so the other races aren't exactly innocent when it comes to discriminatory mindsets.

Anyway, we were now indoors, so we could soak up the details inside. I have to say stepping inside the house was quite fun. Seeing it within the confines of a home cinema setup was one thing, but seeing the world before my eyes was stunning, as I could see just how much detail was sunk into these places and moments.

For example, there was a nice set of things hanging on the walls, as well as a calendar with all the months of the year in it. Well, there's a little bit of lore I thought would never be addressed. I took a glance at it and saw the names of the months given; Storm, Gale, Thaw, Rise, Bloom, Heat, Harvest, Frost, Reap, Bounty.

Hold on a moment. I took a closer look at the calendar again, and noticed something a bit weird. There were only ten months in the year, not ten.

Back in the old world, there were twelve months; January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, and December. Most of these were 30 or so days long, with one of them being 28. Then again, that month got an extra day every four years to correct time drift, as Earth takes 365.2422 days to complete a full orbit. This meant odd leap seconds were added in order to correct any time drifting.

One thing that had never been established in the show was how long the planet Equestria was on took to complete an orbit. It appears that it takes 24 hours to complete a single spin, based on clues we get in the movie and my own observations based on timekeeping, but if there were 365 days as on my homeworld (as I had no reason to think otherwise), how did that square with ten months?

Only once I took a closer look at a later page did I figure out how this worked. Heat, for reasons I could only guess at, had 92 days in it. Well, thirty plus thirty one plus thirty one does at up to 92. And as the other months had the same number of days in it as the old months, I could figure out how long the year was.

Turned out it was 365 days. Well, that's handy to know.

Once I was done looking at that, we gathered for a tea break. The others had been looking at things, and Sunny had been oddly interested in a basement- not sure what that was all about.

Turns out the plan would be delayed, as Izzy didn't have enough stuff to disguise us all- she'd planned for disguising four ponies, not our group. As a result, she needed more supplies in order to complete the disguises. But as it was quite late in the day, the sun was too low in the sky for her to travel to Vanhoover in order to collect some more from her favorite craft store- which was shut at our current time in the day.

We later had dinner, and I was feeling off. I felt out of place here, like I didn't belong. I couldn't help but feel I was occupying a seat meant for somepony else, which was a serious problem for my mind. By all rights, Zipp should be here, not me.

As nice as the food Izzy had cooked was, I found myself struggling to enjoy it as I continued to worry. I sat there, realising that my actions had caused the very harm I had tried to prevent.

I realised that the guy we had encountered with the ghosts was the same one as the one I had fought in Maretime Bay- the dude with a striped shirt that was happy to gloat about his power and seemingly had a chip on his shoulder against us. He was the big threat.

But there was Gulfstream too. He was arguably the bigger threat right now, as I had learned we sit on top of nuclear weapon stockpiles. If he fired those off we'd all be doomed.

If I hadn't put in that push for rearmament, we wouldn't be in this mess.

"Are you OK?"

I was abruptly brought back to reality, only to see Misty looking at me.

"Not really," I said. "I hope we're in time."

Once we were done, we got the place set up for bed. Izzy only had one bed as she was the only one who lived here, and we didn't all fancy sleeping in the same bed as that would get very awkward. So separate beds (which Izzy had produced from nowhere) it was.

As I placed mine into place, I could only hope we weren't too late. I could only hope I would be able to sleep tonight.

Author's Note

And we're back for more of Sprout in this week's last stretch for of Phase Four of Rebirth of Magic. ^^