Foreward by Lyra Heartstrings
My name is Lyra Heartstrings, and the time is half past two in the morning. I sit here in the Royal Canterlot Archives adding the final segment to my thesis paper, which I intend to deliver to my instructor at noon this coming afternoon. There is a draft sweeping across me, constantly sending chills through my body (and occasionally sending a paper drifting away from my desk), but I cannot stop. I cannot pause. I cannot yield to the temptation to quit. What I write you here is the most important story I may ever tell.
Assuming you have already read or at least scanned my thesis essay (and since you have gotten to this point, I shall assume you have), you are now completely convinced that humans exist. The proof is irrefutable. Between countless first-hoof accounts of their existence, and the theory of their mental anatomy proving conclusively that, if given sufficient time to develop their technology, they would find a method by which to find us, or at the very least, emulate us. Taking that fact as read, a new problem arises. Humans are creative by nature. They are imaginative. Their minds never cease to create new fictional parallels of worlds familiar to them. But as chance would have it, they have taken to writing fiction not about their own world, but about ours.
Believing our world to be a parallel to their own, they write adventures and fantastic tales of love and hope and tragedy and sorrow and all other manner of emotion one could perceive. And this would not be such a problem - indeed, it is truly excellent - except that many have taken to writing not because they truly wish to write new fantastic stories, but rather, that they wish to be the one who wrote the fantastic story they once read. These intentions are harming them in such a way that their very creativity, the lifeblood of their civilization, is being threatened.
This fiction - which gained prevalence in the latter half of their twentieth century and continued into their twenty-first - is not an indication that they are skilled but that they are still in awe of the skills of others. Listening and repeating, much as a foal may do when learning to speak, or once could even say comparable to a foreigner rattling off not-quite-relevant colloquialisms as he or she becomes adapted to the local vernacular. Doing this is no crime, but the repercussions of doing so while under the illusion that such actions make you as skilled as those you mimic is dangerous to the foundation of the learning system. Indeed, those who still have much to learn have become teachers themselves.
And so it is with grave urgency that I implore you to read this, my second of three thesis papers, in which I describe my journey to find these humans and give to them the third of my thesis papers, titled "A Brony's Guide to [X in Equestria] Stories". This third thesis describes to them the mistakes they make and what action they might take to correct them.
