Contact

After a few minutes of staring at this planet in awe, we land in some small village. It’s the stereotypical sort of little community you’d imagine fairytale protagonists live in. There’s only a tiny sliver of sun left on the horizon, giving everything a pretty, golden glow.

We’ve landed next to a big tree with doors and windows, and a lavender unicorn is standing next to a lizard that's standing on its hind legs. They walk up to the chariot, both clearly ecstatic about meeting me.

“Are you the creature the Princess told me about?” the horse asks. It sounds like a woman, which makes sense since it looks drastically different than the other unicorn in Canterlot.

“I guess,” I moan.

“My name is Twilight Sparkle,” she says, pointing to herself, “And this is Spike!” She points to the lizard, which smiles and waves at me.

“Nice to meet you,” I lie. “My name is Keerthana.” I slowly swing my legs to the side and slide like overcooked spaghetti out of the chariot. When I’m all the way out, I end up on my knees and holding onto the side to keep myself from falling face-first onto the ground.

“This is going to be so exciting!” Twilight beams. “I don’t think anypony in Equestria has ever seen anything like you before, and the Princess let me be the first to learn all about your kind! Ooh, this is going to be so exciting!”

I smile a bit. At least one of us is looking foreword to this ordeal. “Yeah, and I’ll have to learn more about here as well.”

“I can’t wait to get started!” she beams again. Spike rolls its eyes a little, telling me either that the lizard’s a jerk or Twilight really is as bad as she seems to be.

I try to get up, but I’m so weak that I instead just push myself a few inches foreword. “Help me get up?” I ask, extending my arm.

Her horn lights up, and my hand becomes encased in a light purple glow. Instantly, I panic and flail it about, but it doesn’t seem to move. Twilight gets a look of concern on her face and stops it, which just leaves me moving my hand wildly.

“Ohmygosh!” she exclaims. “Are you okay?”

I stop my hand and then wiggle my fingers to make sure that she didn’t do anything really crazy to them. “What were you doing?” I yell.

“Oh, no!” she cries out in defeat. “I’ve scared you! Oh, I’m so, sooo sorry, I didn’t mean anything! Are you scared of my magic?”

“No!” I yell defensively. “Well, okay, a little bit. Only because I don’t know what the hell you were trying to do to me! You should really start warning people before you go around grabbing them.”

“I was trying to help you up!” she says. “I’m so sorry if I scared you!”

“It’s fine,” I sigh. “Could you just help me up the old-fashioned way?” I ask, extending my arm again. She seems to take the hint this time and just reaches her foreleg to me, which I grab. As she pulls me up, I can see a look of some weird emotions on her face. It’s sort of a mixture of shock, awe, and possibly a little bit of disgust.

“Something wrong?” I ask when I’m fully up.

“Your claws…” she says emptily, fixated at my hands. “They’re so…soft, and big.”

“They’re not claws,” I start to explain. “They’re hands. And they’re not that much softer or bigger than normal, they’re pretty average hands.”

She just stares at them for a few more seconds, taken in awe by the idea of fingers. I don’t see where she’s getting her fascination from, frankly; Spike has claws that are pretty close to what hands are.

“Anyways,” she says, “I can’t wait to learn all about,” she looks at me strangely, “Whatever it is you are.”

I groan in my head, both from my pain and her enthusiasm. Now I can see where Spike gets it.

Twilight opens the door to the tree and stands beside it, waiting for me to walk in. I trudge over to it and walk through it, the top missing my head by a couple inches. The inside of the tree is magnificent; there are shelves everywhere, completely packed with paper books. I’ve seen so few in my life, so it’s so strange to see them encircling the room like they are. It feels like I’ve gone back a few hundred years in time.

“Welcome to the library!” I hear Twilight from behind me. I chuckle a little at the irony of keeping so much paper inside of a tree. She walks to the stairs and looks back at me. “If you’ll follow me,” she says, “We can go to my house, and I can show you where you’ll be staying! Then you’ll have to tell me all about your kind.”

I groan again and unwillingly follow her. After a very forced trip up a small flight of stairs, we end up on the second floor of the library, which still looks more like a library than someone’s home. There are still a lot of shelves up here as well, and there are rolls of parchment, quills, and books scattered everywhere on the floor. “Sorry about the mess,” she apologizes as she walks to a room at the far side of the room. “I’m usually a lot more organized than this, but I was looking through everything I had trying to find out what you were, and if there was a book on what to do when you meet new species." Her ears droop down and she nervously smiles. "There wasn’t.”

I slowly catch up to her at the door, and she opens it. There’s a small bed in there with my backpack on top of it, with the biggest pouch halfway open. I can tell she was going through my stuff. On the back wall, there’s more of, you guessed it, bookshelves, and they’re also packed with books. I walk to the bed and sit down on top of it. It’s surprisingly comfortable, even though as it’s more of a cot than a real bed. Still, it beats having a chain around my wrist and sleeping in the Canterlot dungeons.

“Is everything okay for you?” Twilight asks. “I’m not exactly sure what you’re used to, so I just tried to make it simple. Does this work?”

“Yeah, it’s fine,” I reply. “It’s a big improvement from my dorm at college, I’ll give you that much.”

“So,” she says, sitting down onto the floor. “Tell me something about your kind!”

I half of want to tell her to scram, but I can see she put a lot of trouble into this and it’d probably devastate her if I shooed her away. “Well, okay. I’m a human; scientific name Homo Sapiens. That answers your question of what I am, could you tell me what you are?”

“I’m a pony,” she says back with a smile. “Specifically a unicorn. Could you tell me something else about ‘humans’?”

“Well, there’s so much to tell. Anything in particular you want to know?”

“Everything!” she yells excitedly.

“Eh, no. Sorry,” I reply. “You’re going to have to be a lot more specific.”

She thinks this over a minute. “Where are humans from?”

“All over,” I say back. The features of her eyes shrink as I tell her this. “Don’t think there’s a single place on Earth we haven’t been. We’ve even been all over in space. The Moon, Mars, Venus, and the Asteroid Belt, a human has set foot on all those places. And we’ve sent satellites even further; we’ve even had things go to other solar systems. That answer your question?”

Her mouth opens a tiny bit in pure awe. “I guess,” she says. “Where are all those places? Where’s Mars? And Venus? And the Asteroid Belt?”

“You’re rushing yourself a bit there,” I reply, holding up my hand to stop her constant flow of questions. “We’ll ask a few more, then I really want to go to sleep. It’s my turn, so I’ll ask where you learned English.”

“English?” she asks with a confused tone. The way she asked it, you’d think I’m just making up words on the fly. “What’s English?”

“It’s a language. I’m speaking it right now. You’re speaking it right now. And it’s from England, which isn’t even on this planet. Or at least, I don’t think it is. So I’m wondering how you learned it.”

“No, we’re speaking Equestrian,” she says back firmly. “It comes from Equestria, which is right here. I don’t know where England is, but I can certainly say that I’ve never heard English before.”

I’m starting to rethink how real this place is. You don’t just jump to possibly another universe and have every resident speaking perfectly fluent English with nearly no accent. “Never mind. Do you have something to ask?”

“Where did you come from?” she asks. “You said England isn’t on this planet and said humans are from everywhere on ‘Earth’, but I’ve never seen any before, so this clearly isn’t ‘Earth’. Is it close?”

“I can’t say I have an answer to that,” I admit. “I was in an international base hundreds of feet underwater on Earth one moment, I walked through some portal, and I was lying in the middle of a field on Equis the next. This planet is called Equis, correct?” I ask, making sure I have all my facts straight. She nods.

“What kind of portal was it?” she asks, eager to learn more.

“I don’t know. A portal-y one.”

“I know that!” she laughs. “All portals are 'portal-y'! I mean what kind of portal was it? What sort of spell did you cast to make it?”

“Spell? We can’t use magic, Twilight. I thought that was pretty obvious when I freaked out because you cast a spell on my hand.”

She makes a face that is inexplicable by words, but it is clear she’s trying to wrap her mind around something big. “Wait,” she starts to ask, “If you can’t use magic, then how did you make the portal?”

“I didn’t do it, and some of the best physicists in the world don’t exactly know how it happened, either. It just…did.”

“But there has to be an explanation for how it happened!” she asserts. “Things don’t just happen spontaneously!”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Twilight,” I say. “It might be magic, who knows. All I know is that I wasn’t here, then I was.” She sighs and accepts my terrible answer, obviously wanting to know more. “Can I ask a question now?”

“Sure,” she sighs, irritated by my lack of a real answer.

“Can I go to sleep now?” I wearily ask. “It’s been a long day, and I just really, really want to sleep it off.”

“Come on!” she pleads. “There’s so much I want to learn!”

“Tomorrow, Twilight. I’ll tell you some more then. But for now, I just need to sleep.”

“How many hours do you usually sleep?” she asks. “I want to know when it would be safe to wake you up.”

“Please don’t wake me up,” I ask her wearily. “I don’t know how long I’m going to sleep. I’ll be up when I’m up.”

“Okay, but approximately how long will that be?”

“Twilight,” I moan. I’m starting to get more and more annoyed with her overenthusiasm.

“Oh, sure,” she says, walking to the door. “Ooh, this is going to be so exciting! I can’t wait to hear all about you!” She giggles gleefully and walks out, closing the door behind her.

I breathe a sigh of relief, because now she’s finally gone. My attention turns to my backpack, which I open and look inside. It appears as though everything’s still in here, but it looks like everything was just sort of thrown in here haphazardly. I can only guess that this means that Twilight really did go rifling through my bag, probably trying to find something trivial to be awestruck about.

I place it on the ground and swing my legs onto the cot she’s put out for me. It’s shorter than the average bed, but I’m shorter than the average person, so my feet just barely miss the end of the bed. Probably a good thing I’m the one in the tree house of some quirky pony, not someone really tall, like Jay.

Speaking of Jay, where is he? And where is everyone else? I turn onto my side and look out the window. The sun’s set now, and the sky is a dull gray. I decide to worry about it more tomorrow, and I fall asleep almost as soon as I close my eyes.

***

I wake up to the sounds of birds chirping, hooves hitting the soft ground outside, and general sounds of chaos coming from the library. Either this damn place is real, or I really need to see a therapist about these hallucinations.

I get out of bed peacefully, something I haven’t done since I was home for vacation in December. No classes to get to, no physically draining exercises, just the abject hell of talking to an overzealous unicorn. Suddenly, waking up for history at 8 in the morning doesn’t seem that bad.

The first thing I notice is that most of my pain is gone. I’m still somewhat stiff, but the general aching of my body is gone. I walk around a bit to make sure that I really am better, and I am, thankfully. I go to the door and push on the handle, but it doesn’t budge. I try instead to pull it, but it won’t move that way, either.

“Twilight?” I call. “I think the door’s locked.”

I hear an old-timey deadbolt move, and I push on the door again. When it doesn’t move, I pull it, and that works. I step into Twilight’s house, where she’s moved a table and set it for three. Spike’s sitting at the table, looking pretty annoyed and hungry. Twilight’s standing at the head of the table, eager to do something.

“Is there anything specific you eat for breakfast?” she asks.

I sit crossed-legged at the table, on the other side of Spike. “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m not really sure what you can make, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to be different that what I normally eat on Earth.”

“I’ve got lots of things!” she says. “Why don’t you just say your favorite breakfast food, and I’ll make it! If I don’t know it, you can tell me about it, and I’ll try!”

I think of something I could say that I’d like, but also something that would probably exist here so I don’t have to get roped into explaining everything to her. I take a gamble and say my favorite food, unsure of how she’ll react. “Pancakes?”

A smile grows on her face, which I can only interpret as a bad thing. “I can make those!” she says. Well, that’s one thing I just avoided. “Do you put anything on them on Earth?”

“There are a lot of things you can put on them, but I just like peanut butter. Do you have that here?”

She nods and levitates a jar onto the table. I open the lid, and it actually doesn’t look too bad. Looks like peanut butter, at least. She can see I’m satisfied, and she then starts to make some breakfast.

I lean in close to Spike. “How do you live with her?” I ask.

“You get used to it,” it says in a voice that sounds like a little boy's. Well, that certainly didn’t make me feel any better.

After a few minutes of sitting in awkward silence, Twilight comes over with a plate of fresh, steaming pancakes. I instantly realize how hungry I am, since I haven’t eaten anything since I came here about a day ago. She watches me as I spread them out and put a layer of peanut butter on them, which melts slightly. I take the fork and cut a tiny piece off, then skewer it. Right as I put the piece in my mouth, I immediately regret it. I try to hide my disgust, but it just tastes so strange that I can’t help but make a face at it.

“You don’t like it, do you?” Twilight asks, defeated.

“Don’t worry, Twilight,” I reassure her. “It just tastes…odd.”

“Odd?” she asks. “How so?”

“Well, for one,” I say, looking at the ones still on my plate, “They taste like grass.”

“Of course they taste like grass!” she says. “They’re not called ‘grass pancakes’ for nothing!”

“Is it, you know, normal to make these out of grass?” I ask. She nods her head, and I look at Spike for confirmation. He nods his head as well.

“Is it not normal to make these out of grass on Earth?” Twilight asks, taking my plate away.

“It’s not even normal to eat grass. We can’t digest it.”

“Well, it’s probably my fault,” she explains. “I didn’t bother to learn your dietary needs before trying to feed you, so I will say that I am sorry and it will not happen again!” For an apology, she said it fairly confidently and upbeat. She’s clearly priding herself in the fact that she gets to harbor an alien for a while.

“No, come on, Twilight. It’s an honest mistake.”

“I will make sure that you get fed this morning!” she proclaims triumphantly. “Is there anything else you eat?”

“If you have some fruit, that’d just be fine.” I decide to go for something I know ponies eat and I can too.

“Any requests?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Just whatever fruit you have, bring it here, and I’ll just pick and choose.”

She walks off and comes back a few minutes later with a gigantic bowl of all sorts of fruits. Thankfully, I can recognize them all; cherries, apples, grapes, and bananas are all sitting in the huge container. I know eating only fruit will be hell on my digestive tract, but at least it’s edible. I grab a bit of everything and put it in front of me.

“Now, what we have here,” Twilight says, pointing to one of the bright red apples I grabbed, “Is an apple. Do you have apples on Earth? Can you eat them?”

I smile a bit, then pick it up and eat it. “All of these fruits are on Earth, and unless they’re drastically different on the inside, I can eat them all. Thank you.”

A huge smile grows on her face as I give her my seal of approval. “Oh boy oh boy oh boy!” She starts prancing around the room in excitement. “Do you want to talk about Earth now?” she asks.

“I will, but I think there’s something you can do to get even more information,” I tell her.

Her eyes light up at the promise of more information. “What is it? Tellmetellmetellmetellme!”

“You’re going to have to find four more humans for me.”

“Oh, I get it!” she says.

“Get what?” I ask. Did I just make a joke or something?

“You told me that to find out more about Earth, I had to find four more humans!”

My eyes stare at her blankly. Turns out her sense of humor is as dry as the guy I punched in the face yesterday. “I’m clearly missing something, fill me in.”

“To find four more humans, I’d have to go to Earth!” she says. “And then I’d see it for myself!”

“Oh, I see the confusion here,” I explain. “No, there are, or least there should be, four more humans on this planet. I came with four others, and I don’t know where they are. Celestia doesn’t know either.”

“Princess Celestia,” she corrects me. “And did you really come with four more humans?”

“Yeah,” I say, nodding my head. “I was with them when we went through the portal. Then they just disappeared.”

She mulls this idea over for a little bit, and then gets an idea. “I know what we can do!” she says.

“Do tell,” I say in a sarcastic tone.

“We can recreate the portal that you came through and go back to Earth!”

“Are you listening to me, Twilight?” I ask bitterly. “Stop thinking about learning about Earth and realize there are four people somewhere out there in this world. Maybe they’re not even in this world. We can’t just jump the gun and do the first thing that pops into our head. We need to find them, then we’ll focus on education.”

“But it could help us both!” she insists. “I could study your planet, and maybe somepony on Earth knows where the rest of your friends are!”

I instantly stop being angry with her. “I…I hadn’t thought about that at all, Twilight. I mean, the scientists somehow figured out that this planet is like ours, maybe they also know where the others are.”

She smiles broadly. “Great, all we have to do is recreate the spell you used to come here, and we’ll be good to go!”

“Uhh, Twilight? No magic, remember?”

“Oh! Right. Maybe if we go back to where you landed here, I could isolate and copy the spell. Of course, that’s only if it truly is magic-based.”

“Worth a shot,” I say.

“Do you remember where you came into Equis?”

“Some field. There were mountains to my right, and there was a big city built off of the mountain. Ringing any bells?”

“Of course!” she practically yells, making me feel stupid for not knowing this place. “That’s Canterlot, everypony knows that! I even grew up there!” I’ve really got to be more careful with what I say; I keep getting her really overexcited.

“Also, about the whole ‘don’t jump the gun’ thing, please try and get a really good idea of where it is before we go tromping around in the middle of a field for hours, trying to find the exact spot where I was.”

“No problem!” she says. “Get your things together. I’ll send a letter, and we’ll be off in no time!” She runs off to a table full of typical supplies and starts writing a letter. When she’s done, she gives it to Spike, who blows some fire on it. The paper turns into some very sparkly smoke and goes out the window.

“How did he…?” I can’t even finish my sentence because of how actually amazing it is. I mean, it wasn’t that weird to see Twilight use magic since I can tell unicorns can, but even the lizards here are magical. Does everything here have some crazy magical power?

She runs up to where her bed is and starts packing. I go back into my room and look at the backpack on the floor. It’s already fully packed, provided that she didn’t take anything out. I put it on my back and walk out.

Twilight’s shoving a lot of sheets of paper into one suitcase, and a lot of quills and little bottles of ink into another. I find it a bit interesting that she’s only packing things so she can take notes on Earth, but in the short amount of time that I’ve known her, I can’t say that I’m surprised in the slightest.

I sit down at the breakfast table and wait for her to be done. There’s knocking at the door, and she puts down everything she’s doing to go and get the door.

“Twily!” I hear in a familiar voice as Twilight opens the door. Where have I heard it before?

“BBBFF!” she says back, excitedly.

“Are you okay?” the voice asks her back, concerned.

“Don’t worry, I’m fine. She’s upstairs, as are Spike and my things. Why don’t you come in for a bit? I don’t think you’ve ever been to my house in Ponyville.”

I can hear some hooves coming up the stairs, and I can now see whose voice I recognize. It’s the guard that I punched in the face not entirely on accident. He still doesn’t look very angry about it.

“Well, hello there,” I say, trying to avoid the elephant in the room.

“Good to see you again,” he says, smiling.

“Do you two already know each other?” I ask. “It sounded like you do.”

“Of course!” she says, again acting like it’s the most obvious thing ever. “Shining Armor is my brother!”

Great, the guy I punched in the face is related to the psychotic, easily excited unicorn that I have to live with. I can already tell that this will not end well. “Anyways,” I say before anything awkward can come up, “We ready to head out?”

Twilight levitates both of her bags to Spike, who very reluctantly takes them. Because, you know, doing things for yourself isn’t worth it; you have to make someone else do your grunt work. “All ready!” she chimes.

We walk downstairs and outside, where a chariot similar to the one I came here in is sitting outside the library. We load out things and take off, and I’m left to still wonder how two ponies with wings can carry a heavy chariot filled with two full-size ponies.

Twilight and Shining Armor are sitting together and talking amicably, like good friends that haven’t seen each other in a long time. They’re saying something about Shining’s wedding and things called “changelings”, which I assume are things that change. I’m probably right if they’re named as creatively as everything else in this world. Spike’s just drifting around, pretty indifferent to this trip, which leaves me sitting alone on the opposite side. I don’t mind it at all, since I really just want to get out of here. I half consider just running through the portal and stranding Twilight, seeing as she probably can’t get through.

After a few minutes, we land in a field, which does look pretty similar to the one I landed in. I can even see the tree I was using to prop myself up. I jump out, and the others do as well. Twilight’s horn lights up, and she starts walking around, looking for something. After a little bit, it glows a lot brighter, and it looks almost as though she’s struggling. Still, a giant flash of purple light emanates from her horn, and then a portal identical to the one in the base appears in the middle of the field.

“Wow,” Twilight says, staring at it. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s a type of magic I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. I can’t wait to find out what it is!” I sigh and realize that she probably hasn’t paid attention the last few times I told her that we don’t have magic. She turns around and goes to her brother, who catches her in a big hug.

“Have fun and be safe, LSBFF,” he says to her. She then goes to Spike and picks him up in a hug.

“I’m going to miss you, Spike! I’ll be sure to tell you if there are any dragons on Earth!” So there are dragons here as well? This place just keeps getting stranger and stranger. Still, I guess it explains the fire breathing.

“Twilight, do I have to go stay with your parents while you’re away?" he moans. "I can take care of myself!”

Twilight giggles and sets him down. “Yes, you have to. Do I need to remind you of the other times I left you alone for more than a few hours?”

“Come on, Twilight!” he insists. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that I didn’t have anything to do with the spaghetti-pault!”

She smiles and rolls her eyes. “Okay, do you want to go first, or should I?” she asks me.

I’m tempted to say her first so at least she won’t think I abandoned her when I abandon her. Still, in the extreme off chance that she can get through, I think me going first would be better than her accidentally stumbling into one of the most secure and heavily fortified places on the planet. “I’ll go first,” I say.

I walk up to the portal and look at it. It’s the same portal for sure, and this time it feels a lot less climactic since I don’t have the entirety of the human race watching me do it. I walk forewords toward the portal, and all I feel is my nose hitting something that is definitely very solid.