An Earthling Earth Pony at Celestia's School of Magic: Year One

“Now arriving in Ponyville! Please make sure you double-check that you take all your belongings!”

“Come on, Summer Wummer! We’re here!” Spring said as she practically pranced in the aisle.

Summer gave her mother a dirty look. “Mom, please, no Summer Wummers! I’m not five anymore!’

Spring’s bouncy demeanor dissipated. “Sorry, Summer. I’m just excited to be going on this trip, just you and me-”

I cleared my throat, and Hannah just stared.

“Well, you, me, and your friends,” Spring corrected. “Come on, this will be fun!”

Summer silently got up from her seat. Hannah and I also got up. Hannah put on her saddlebag. I hadn’t bothered to bring mine, nor had Summer. Spring’s ears sagged as she gathered her saddlebag and put it on.

I looked around as we got off the train. The train station dock was surprisingly big compared to what was supposed to be a small town. There were a pair of ticket booths and at least a dozen benches to wait for the train to arrive. Many ponies were getting off the train, and just as many were getting on. It wasn’t just ponies; several humans were walking around, a griffin, and several other species I couldn’t identify. They were the minority, but they stood out. Nobody even batted an eye at seeing a pair of kirin get off the train.

“The map is over here,” Spring said as she trotted to a billboard with two large maps. One looked like a map of town, and the other looked like a map of train stops across the continent.

“Why do you need a map?” I asked. “Haven’t you been here before?”

“Oh, it’s been years since I was last here, and the town has grown. We want to get to the sanctuary quickly, and I could have us wandering the town for hours if we were going off my memory,” Spring explained as she looked up at the town map. “I know the sanctuary is on the edge of town, or at least it was, but I want to find the shortest path to it.”

I looked at the map momentarily, seeing many locations that didn’t mean a thing to me but were marked as notable landmarks. It didn’t take long to spot Flurtershy’s Animal Sanctuary. It may have been the edge of town at one time, and it technically still was…on two sides of it. The town had grown past one side of it and there was an arrow pointing off the map saying to New Eden, which had to be the Earthling settlement since no Equestrian would name a place that. There was a lot of town between the You Are Here label and the sanctuary.

Hannah stared out in the distance. “You know, I didn’t get to see much of the Crystal Empire. It and the portal station back on Earth were the only things that made me feel like I was on a whole other planet than Earth, but looking at that just gave me a big reminder.”

I followed her gaze and saw a big building made out of crystal shaped like a tree. It must have been a good distance away, but it still towered over everything else in town by several stories. It did indeed look like something you could only find on some alien planet.

In the old days, people imagined alien civilizations as super-technologically advanced things with an understanding of science that made Earth look like something out of the Stone Age. Then, people started to hear tales of what they were really like. Those super-technological civilizations had existed…in an early stage of the universe before Earth had even fully formed. Something had happened to them, wiping them all out. After that, they never advanced to what we would consider the industrial age, and even Equestria, before first contact, would have been considered unbelievably technologically advanced, the zenith of what could be done. Earth was the most technologically advanced planet that supported life. Humans were the most technological civilization. With that in mind, people started reimagining life on alien worlds after finding all that out, and I had to agree with Hannah that crystal tree building was the first thing I’d seen in months that drove home the idea that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

"That’s Twilight’s castle,” Spring said as she stepped away from the map. “Thing doesn’t just look like a tree; it grew from the ground like a tree. It’s somehow tied to the Tree of Harmony, but nopony told me how. Anyway, I figured out the shortest parh to the sanctuary. Fluttershy’s got a nice little stream that flows through there where Summer can take a dunk in when she goes nirik.”

It seemed to me that there were closer places that we could have gone if the goal was just to dunk Summer in water. This trip might only be a sneaky way for Spring to visit the sanctuary.

It still took us a while to cross the town. Ponyville turned out to be a bustling tourist hub. There had been crowds everywhere, especially around Ponyville’s more odd-shaped buildings. It was made worse because they’d apparently just elected the first new mayor in decades, and the new mayor was giving her victory speech mixed with some lifetime achievement award for the very elderly previous mayor outside of town hall. The old mayor was in attendance and looked ancient. I think I heard something about ninety years of service. How did a town keep the same mayor for nearly a century? Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. My hometown had the same mayor for the last thirty years; if he kept running, I could imagine him being mayor for the next thirty years. Whether it was a small town or a big city, career politicians always stayed in office forever.

The sanctuary had a big ivy-covered wall that ran along the town side. I suppose that made sense to have. They didn’t want wild animals wandering into town or people wandering into the sanctuary. Still, it was a little intimidating.

“This wall is new,” Spring said as she stared up at the top of the wall. She looked left and right. “There’s got to be an entrance around here somewhere.”

Summer took a deep breath before waving at a nearby earth pony stallion. “Hey! Do you know where the entrance to this sanctuary is?”

The pony pointed off to the left. “‘Bout a block down that way—big Jurassic Park doors, ya can’t miss ‘em.”

Summer looked confused as he walked off. “What do Jurassic Park doors or blocks mean?”

“They’re Earth references. I’m guessing he’s originally from Earth,” Hannah explained.

We weren’t far from the Earthling settlement. It was just beyond the sanctuary on one of its sides. Its residents probably walked to Ponyville because of how close it was.

“So…how far is a block?” Spring asked.

“Not far,” Hannah said as she started walking in the indicated direction. “It isn’t an exact length, but it will be a minute, three at most if we keep walking that way.”

It turned out to be just over a minute of walking before we came up to a massive pair of wooden doors with a smaller wooden door inside one of the doors. They were big doors, but they weren’t that impressive, and there was no sign or anything to declare this the animal sanctuary. I was honestly a little let down by it. They must need big doors for moving big animals.

Spring went up to the smaller door, but before she could knock or push on it, it swung open, and some weird snaggletooth goat thing stuck its head out.

“I’m sorry, visiting hours end in twelve minutes. Fluttershy and I have a date for tea,” the thing announced. “You’ll need to return after teatime is over.”

“But my daughter needs somewhere secluded she can go nirik!” Spring protested.

The thing gave her a sympathetic look. “That sounds too bad, and believe me, I might normally be up to seeing a kirin turn into a fire monster and terrifying a bunch of wild animals as that could lead to so much chaos, but dear Fluttershy might not like that, and I try to avoid upsetting her. Why don’t you take her to that insufferably boring speech Diamond Tiara is giving? I’m sure a pony catching on fire would liven that up a bit. On second thought, hold off on doing that. They might ask Fluttershy to help calm the panic. That would seriously interfere with teatime.”

“What the heck are you?” I asked.

It looked at me, its eyes widened, and then it frowned. “Someone else will have to explain who I am to you because I see you and what’s connected to you, earth pony, and you look like trouble I don’t want to get involved with.”

Spring raised an eyebrow. “Trouble you don’t want to get involved with? You?! Since when do you avoid ponies who look like trouble?”

“How do I even look like trouble?” I asked in exasperation. People always accused me of being trouble, but this was the first time someone said I looked like trouble.

He gestured vaguely in my direction with a paw. “I mean, you have both Harmony and the Story digging their little tendrils into you, which would normally make you interesting. I like messing with anycreature that they’ve latched onto. The Story usually doesn’t even mind that I’m doing it since the Story understands there’s nothing worse than being boring, and it also is always fun to mess with Harmony’s playthings, even more so because I think Harmony gets annoyed, and that’s extra fun. These fillies also have connections to those two, but unlike them, there’s a third force connected to you. It gives me the shivers. I’m uncomfortable being near anyone it connects to, so I’m ending this conversation now. Please leave and don’t come back. Good day, sir!”

The weird goat thing slammed the door shut.

“Oh!” his voice called out from the other side. “The rest of you can come back in an hour and a half to resolve that whole nirik issue, but not the troublesome earth pony. He needs to scamper off somewhere else, preferably far away, or back to Earth...and then off to someplace I wouldn't visit like Kansas or something. Toodles!”

We all stared at the door for several seconds before anyone spoke. Did he know I was from Kansas or was that just a coincidence?

“Um, I’m not up on everything Equestrian, but I’d put money on that was Discord,” Hannah said, wide-eyed. She then looked at me. “And he really doesn’t seem to like you. What did you do to make a god of chaos not like you?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Are you sure that was Discord?”

Spring nodded. “Yeah, that was definitely Discord. I met him last time I was here. He and Fluttershy are kind of a thing, I think. He normally is ready to terrorize anypony for his amusement, though it is mostly harmless, but he seems to want to avoid you. I’ve never heard of him deliberately avoiding anypony. What’s so different about you?”

“I don’t know,” I repeated.

“He said Harmony and the Story have their tendrils in you…in all three of us,” Summer said. “I know about the Tree of Harmony and the Elements of Harmony, so I guess there’s some bigger thing that actually is Harmony, but what was that about a story?”

“I think that’s Earth’s equivalent to Harmony, the thing the Storytellers can tap into, but I don’t know much about it,” Hannah said. She looked at me again. “Do you know?”

I shook my head. “I really don’t, but he didn't seem to care one bit about that. He was worried about some other thing, that thing that scares him, but I have no idea what that is.”

But I did have an idea of how it got a connection to me. It must have gotten a connection when I touched that stone, and it lit up. I knew a little about Discord from reading the Journal of the Two Sisters, and he didn’t seem the type to be scared of anything. He was practically a god. If he was scared of whatever had formed a connection with me, and he was that powerful, how scared should I be of it? I promised to wait for answers, but it looked increasingly like I needed to know what I had accidentally gotten myself into.