Chapters prologue
"5....4.....3.....2.....1..... Lift-off!!"
"Shuttle is away!"
"Clean separation."
"Orbit destabilized, preparing for counter orbit thrust."
"Gravity escape velocity achieved."
"Moon orbit achieved! geo-sync orbit stable!"
"Beginning descent..."
I was alone.
I have always been alone.
At school when I was younger I was always top of the class, alone in my superiority.
I let it get to my head.
I pushed away at any attempts of friendship from my fellow classmates, rejecting them over my studies and training.
My parents were proud or at least, I think they were. I never really spoke to them after moving out.
There was always some important piece of study to be done for an upcoming test.
One day the tests stopped.
My teachers all but threw me out of their classes, into the waiting arms of the higher-ups, the business men of tomorrow, all of them clamouring for the minds of the best and brightest in this new generation.
I was the best.
I was the brightest.
I was alone.
Later in my life, I was offered the chance to work as an aeronautics scientist, helping the great minds working on cutting edge tech.... Space Flight.
I quickly grew bored of working in an office or a lab, and decided to submit myself as an astronaut.
Of course I was accepted, to deny me would be to deny the future.
Months passed, I made many well placed acquaintances, world class scholars and scientists, but still...
I was alone.
Acquaintance’s... yes, which is what they were.
They cared for my work but only in passing did they care about me.
The closer they got to me, the more I out shined them, forcing them away, making them hate me.
I was alone in my superiority still, even at the highest level, the peak of mankind.
That is until I met Her.
She was just an intern, looking for a possible career as a lab assistant,
I recognized her talent immediately and decided to tell her, tell her what she could be.
I did not expect to make a friend and even to this day I always referred to her by her title and rank, but she was the closest thing I have ever had as a friend.
Sometimes I wish I had seen it now.
Now that I know that we could have been something.
At the time I did not think much of it, a night out together in town, an uneventful stay at her house.
I didn’t know what I did wrong, but after staying at her house, she got a little distant from me, as though she suspected something of me.
After two years of this, she finally decided to tell me what she had wanted from me.
...Had.
It was the first of February, the year 2012.
Launch day.
I had been working on astronautics for 7 years and not two weeks after my 29th birthday was offered a chance to actually go to space, but not just space, to the Moon.
The space race between the larger countries was coming to a head and as international resources got lower and lower, a cold war like world was that I found myself in.
NASA needed desperately to acquire more funds, sending a man to the moon was considered the ultimate morale booster, everyone agreed.
And so, two years later, I found myself standing in a corridor on the first of February, staring into the eyes of the woman I loved, who was telling me of all here regrets.
Of course at the time I did not think of her as my lover and I did not understand why she was telling me all these things.
All I wanted to do was walk down that hall and exit the building then head over to the launch site and get myself a ticket to space.
When I told her this, she burst into tears, screamed something at me, and ran down the corridor.
I proceeded towards the rocket, thinking quietly about what I had done.
"5....4.....3.....2.....1.... Lift-off!"
"Shuttle is away!"
The words of the announcer drifted through my head, not registering any form of thought.
The shuttles automated computers could have gotten me to the moon if I was asleep, and even then, they were only a backup for the grounded computers that relayed data to the shuttle.
I was only there for two reasons, to lookout of unforeseen errors that only a physical being could fix and to stand on the moon with a flag in hand.
"Beginning Descent"
I jumped at these words, snapping out of my almost dreamlike state to watch the many screens indicating that yes, I was indeed approaching the moon.
It had been days, the fun of space was defiantly over exaggerated but the view of the earth was stunning and really gave me a good perception on the scale of our lives.
The zero gravity had been fun to try for real, having had the experience while training from sub orbital flights.
But for the most part, I had been droning out the same routine checks of the spaceship and watching my progress on TV.
The routine was something I usually enjoyed, but for some reason it was just grating on my nerves instead, I now know why, but at the time I put it down to general nerves about being in space.
Half an hour later, the decent was going smoothly, the landers own computers having taken control of the ship now that we were too far out for a millisecond accurate data relay to earth.
For my part I still had almost nothing to do, just checking and rechecking the monitors in front of me, waiting for the lander to fire its landing rockets.
At around four thousand meters above the moon, the first rockets fired, a loud boom that nearly deafened me.
It was with horror that I realized that the sound could not have been that loud for two reasons.
I listed them in my head:
One: the rockets should have been silent in space, the only sound coming from the vibrations along the support beams holding the rockets.
Two: I was still four thousand meters above the surface, the intended plan was to fire smaller rockets to slow me down and then nearer to the moon, fire the main rockets.
This plan would allow the fastest stop and save a lot more fuel than burning the whole way down.
Going through the plan which I had drilled into my head, I remembered that four thousand meters was when the covers on the rockets were supposed to blow off, these explosive bolts would be tiny compared to the main rockets, I should not have been able to notice them at all.
Then I heard the screams.
In the few short seconds it had taken me to work out what something was wrong, all of my screens that had direct links to the ground were emitting horrible screeching sounds, which I realized were people.
Looking closer I could see all of the operators at mission control running from their screens, I shouted for someone’s attention and saw one of the officers pause and look at me.
He ran over to the screen and picked up the headset sitting there.
"James! Listen, I don’t have any time!"
"What’s going on!?" I shouted back at him
“Its war! One of the eastern countries was fighting another, our peace keeping forces got involved, the rebels took it to their protector's, it escalated and someone somewhere decided to launch the nuclear missiles they were guarding, others on our side had the same idea once they saw what was going on, it’s an all-out missile war!.... no shots have landed on anyone’s side yet as they keep getting shot down, but the fallout and debris has destroyed several cities on the west coast and one is headed right for us!" His words were hasty, almost rambling.
"Why can’t the just shoot it down too? You are in a blast proof bunker that should withstand the fallout" I asked, trying to get my words heard over the commotion.
"THEY ARE TRYING TO" he was forced to shout now that alarms had started up in the room he was in.
"THEY FIRED SOME COUNTER MISSILES AT IT BUT THEY WONT REACH IT IN TIME"
A cold shock shook me as a realized that she would still be within the blast radius of a nuke.
"Why are you not running like everyone else?" I spoke in between the alarms blaring
"THERE IS NO TYPE OF TRANSPORT CAPABLE OF MOVING OUT OF THE BLAST ZONE IN THIS BUNKER; THE BULLET TRAIN LEFT AN HOUR AGO"
With the realization that I was speaking to a doomed man, I tried to reassure him, telling him that the bunker might survive the nuke, the odds were very much not in his favour and we both knew it, his mood suddenly became very calm.
The alarms behind him silenced.
Not a sound could be heard coming from the speakers as a white light started to glow behind him.
"Good luck James" he said in a quiet voice before shutting off the screen at his end.
Donald, known as don by his friends, shut off the screen in front of him and turned to face the window. The dead silence around him was crushing as a bright light emanated from in front of him.
Time seemed to slow down, Don walked slowly to the window as the ground started to shake. A visible tremor was charging towards him along the ground. It was, however, dwarfed by the colossal tremor flying through the air. Tearing through the skies like a giant bubble expanding. Don opened the sliding window and stretched his arm towards the bubble, for not even half a second, he held the godlike power in the palm of his hand… and then it tore him apart.
The shock wave rendered the flash from his bones, and ground those bones to dust, and then it proceeded to rip his very atoms apart and spread them throughout the skies.
It did the same for the bunker, the building almost being ripped out of the ground like a weed at the same time as being torn down into raw component materials. Barely the smallest patch of sub levels and foundations were left standing…
At which point the ground shock wave caught up.
If the shock of the air being displaced on such a large scale was enough to destroy the building, the one in the ground was enough to bury the remains.
Once the shock waves were passed, the only visible sign that a building had been there before, was a lone metal road sign lying in a ditch where a road once was. But soon, that too was buried by the fire and then ash that followed.
I stared at the screen in front of me, that would be the last human I would ever see, the fallout of so many nukes on earth had no doubt disabled all electronic devices that could send a transmission out this far, and what would the other countries want with me anyway?
The shock took a back seat immediately when I noticed that the dials I had been staring at were red.
"Fuel ok, air ok..."
I started to go through the checklist of important in my head but stopped when I came to height.
"Height from moon....... o-one thousand meters"
I stuttered when I read that number, the automated computers would have kept me on course so what could it be?
I brought up a feed from one of the outside cameras and yelled in shock.
"The moons getting bigger!?"
Not only was the moon getting bigger at an exponential rate, it was also changing, it went from a pale white and grey orb to a shallow blue, changing before colour my eyes like some cheap magic trick.
The mountain range comprised mostly of giant craters I was supposed to be landing near was twisting and turning on the surface, writhing like a giant snake.
Several of the larger centre craters merged to form a new crater that was around one sixth of the still growing moons visible surface.
The oddest part of this was a line of craters that was forming, looking like some kind of lance, spearing up towards the top of the moon.
Something didn’t add up about this whole moon thing, if the moon was getting bigger at an exponential rate, then I would have crashed into it by now, and why was I still descending at a calm rate?
Unless the moons mass was not increasing as it got bigger, I would be speeding towards it.
Thinking of that I thought of the drastic consequences on the Earth this would have, so I steeled myself and switched camera's to the one currently facing Earth.
''I was shocked'' would be an understatement.
Not only was the moon getting bigger, the EARTH was too!!
My mind reeled at this new impossibility and asked out loud:
"How am I not dead yet?"
The question rang out into the silence.
As I thought about it in full for the first time, if the Earth and the moon were both getting bigger at insane speeds but my position, speed and gravity were still the same....
I thought hard for a while...
The only thing my overtaxed mind could come up with was...
"The planet and the moon must be getting smaller but closer together."
The only logical reason I could think of was the most illogical thing I had thought in my extremely scientific and practical life, a breaking point if you will.
I passed out.
I awoke to a dead silence.
Cold sweat ran down my back, I sat up in my chair, my mind reeling, remembering the events from before.
My eyes went wide and any resemblance of sleep was pushed from my mind as I realized what the silence could entail. Looking around the cabin, I noticed several warning's on the screens in front of me.
Peering closer I breathed a sigh of relief.
--Orbit stabilized, holding position--
“Thank god the people who designed this craft made sure that it would continue to operate without me, I would have to thank them once I got back..."
It hit me then, there was no going back.
I quickly reconnected with the earth facing camera's only to find them facing the blankness of space. I panicked for a moment, thinking the earth destroyed, before I remembered the moon orbit I was currently in.
I switched from camera to camera until I found one that could see most of the earth.
It was not the earth.
I stared in horror at the screens, staring at what had once been the earth, but was now some huge, earth like giant in space. The earth could not possibly be that close, last I looked at it, when it really was earth; it had been no larger than a tennis ball in my hand.
Now the earth was so large, so close I corrected myself, that if I had been standing on it, the moon would take up nearly a quarter of the sky.
My stomach bottomed out and I felt like passing out as the events around me sunk in.
"This really happened..."
"...This is still happening"
I corrected myself again as several blinking lights caught my attention in front of me.
While I had been sleeping off the effects of shock, the lander had brought me into a semi-stable orbit around the moon, the computers not knowing how to deal with the moon changing.
What struck me as odd was the fact that the moon seemed too big to be real, aside from the fact that it just grew over twice its size being unreal, the amount it grew by was most defiantly more than three thousand meters, its size was easily three times the size of the moon I remembered, the moon I looked up to every night.
This was one of the many questions that my mind wanted to know desperately, one of the many impossibilities that were occurring around me.
I shut them out, I needed to concentrate.
The orbit I was currently on was one that would bring me in to land right in the eye of the unicorn on the moon.
I stopped.
"The unicorn on the moon"
I started as I noticed the face of the moon, it was beautiful.
My mind was not even thinking about how it got there, why it was there or any other questions about this new impossibility I was being confronted with.
All I knew was the tremendous beauty of it. The way its head was shaped, how its horn thrust up through the side of the moon, ending near the top with a sharp point.
In my mind I heard my voice going through the facts, the horn would not be very sharp close up, the eyes would look far less eye-like once landed upon. I brushed these thoughts aside as I continued to stare at the moon.
More red flashing from the screens in front of me forced my eyes off the moon as I looked through the dials and numbers being presented to me.
"Air: 50%"
That would be fine as the current display was designed to show my air by half, I would know when the point of no return was when it reached zero.
"Fuel: 19%"
That would be decidedly less than fine, the trip to the moon was only supposed to use around 35 percent so that I could use the rest for landing and taking off and a little bit of course correction of course.
I checked the reserves... empty.
I was surprisingly calm as I thought about this, running some quick calculations in my head I came to the conclusion that even if the earth had moved closer, I would not have enough fuel to perform a safe entry into the higher gravity atmosphere of earth. I looked across the screens beside me.
"I'm a dumb-ass" was all I could say to myself as I noticed a little green light indicating that I had left the landing thrusters on when I had passed out. The lander had detected anomalies "Really where?" I said sarcastically, and readjusted to get into an unstable moon orbit. Unfortunately for me, it appeared that the "unicorn moon" as I dubbed it, did have a different gravity to earth’s moon, not surprising since it had gotten bigger and closer to the earth but since I had not crashed and burned at this point, I figured that it had a lower mass than the moon I know.
The mass ratio seemed to be messing with my machines, I was not sure how far I was from the surface of the moon, but one thousand meters didn't seem all that accurate, for some reason, I had the urge to try and measure it in hand lengths.
A deep despair threatened to crush me with its weight, my shoulders started to sag as I calculated the chances of returning to earth.
If I went back, the distance should be roughly an eighth of the distance, however, there is no way I could complete turning man-oeuvres with only 19% fuel, and defiantly no way I would have enough for the landing burn.
I was effectively stranded in space.
Being stranded in space was one of the most frightening prospects known to man, one of the reasons that very few people who knew of the dangers truly, wanted to go there. The multitude of things that could go wrong was a list so long that to write it on paper would be like writing every current human language out in triplicate.
"I need to make a decision, do I head back or do I just sit here and wait to die?"
The thought gave me shivers but I accepted the fact that I was not going to make it out of this alive.
"Ever since I was young I wanted to go to the moon... I'm not going to let some small inconvenience stop me now!"
I laughed at my own joke.
A hollow laugh.
An empty laugh.
I stopped to take stock of my situation. Looking around I noticed a few things that had slipped me by in my stress. In the strange calm that overtook me I noticed that everything around me looked... different.
At first I could not put my finger on it, was it me?
Yes and no.
It hit me as I was looking at the different earth.
Every object, from the stars around me to the earth below me looked a bit... cartoony.
It all had a relatively small black outline.
"Kinda like in a cartoon"
With a gasp I looked at myself in a small pocket mirror I had been provided for when I shave.
My face was very similar to what it had been, but there was less variation in the colouring, my eyes were what really struck me the most. Instead of the blend of blue and green they had been, my eyes were both blue and green.
The colours started on opposite sides of my eye and as they went around the middle, the shades slowly started to change until they were blending in the middle as a neutral blue-green colour. If this wasn’t enough, the ring of colour around my eye was also broken up into square like segments, each with its own outline of black, making my eyes look very... cutesy.
The rest of my body was less different, if a bit less varied.
Each of my clothes were now mainly one or two shades of the same colour instead of the many differing spots of colour from use or stains.
I had a feeling that if someone saw me from a distance of more than twenty meters, I would look very flat, like a drawing.
After investigating my other, few personal items I had brought with me, I was ready to eat.
For my tip to the moon, most of the foodstuffs that had been packed were simple, like protein bars and cold coffee in tubes.
However, there was one special package that was for when I arrived on the moon. Hastily opening the package revealed a steak dinner with a side salad and a small tube of wine.
I eyed the wine with hungry eyes, would it be enough to get me drunk? Sadly not…
Instead I pulled out the main dish and heated it in the flash microwave. It smelled a little different than what I remember steak to smell like, but I was too hungry to question it and took a large, uncut, bite out of it.
After I had finished dry heaving and coughing I tossed it into one of the waste compartments and sank back on to my seat.
"What the hell was that?!"
During my life on earth I had always loved a bit of meat every once in a while, and eating a balanced diet was part of the vigorous program I had gone through when training.
Had the meat gone off? Was it poisoned?
The possibilities ran through my mind, chasing each other around my head like wolves after their tails.
I shook myself mentally, cursing at my own indecision.
"If it was poisoned, it would have taken longer than that to kill me; it wasn't even halfway down my throat. No, it was the taste"
I shuddered at the flavours that had assaulted my mouth, like a mix between death and sprouts!
Wiping my mouth with my hand in a futile attempt to at least clear my lips of the stuff, I grabbed what was left of the drink and downed it one go.
After slurping down every last drop, I sighed discontentedly.
Stretching in my chair I stood up to survey the damage the offending morsel had caused.
Food globed on the floor and sprayed across the small HUD screen in front of my chair, I needed to clean this up before it started to smell.
Sighing softly I sat down in the chair, pulled out a rag and began to wipe the sludge and bits that was meat and gravy.
After disposing of the rag in the waste shoot, I stiffened my resolve.
Until this point I had been distracting myself from the real issue; getting to the moon.
Staring down at the screens in front of me, I ran some quick calculations.
My rapidly destabilizing orbit was sending me slowly towards the moon, but the grey-blue orb was barely pulling at the lander.
I wondered briefly how I was in orbit around an object that seemed to have no gravity, and so close!
If I used the lateral thrusters to stop myself against the nearly non-existent pull of the moon, I should be able to float down, using the main rocket to land.
With this goal in mind, I started pre-programming the computer on my course of action, my shadowed forum lit up in the half-light radiating of the screen.
Chapter two: Inner body experience
"Whose idea was this!?"
--CRAAAASH--
"So, not quite as gentle a landing as I predicted." James sat sagged in his chair.
Looking around, he tried to figure out exactly what had happened.
"Bloody moon and its bloody speed can’t stay bloody constant." He swore repeatedly.
Still swearing like a sailor, James carefully extracted himself from the various belts and buckles holding him down and clambered around till he was standing upright. Well, upright to the moon anyway.
"How in blue blazes did I land upside-down without any obvious damage?"
This was a question and like all questions, it had an answer. Also like most questions that currently plagued James, it's answer was sitting, haughtily, in a book somewhere, jeering at him for his ignorance. Like most books, that book was stuffed in between two other books in The Library, secure in its knowledge that James would never touch it. It was mere coincidence that this particular library happened to be located somewhere not on the moon.
"Damn, where did that come from?" James spoke in his manly man’s voice.
"Wait...." James was proud of his voice, a deep baritone voice, but something was... off.
James could not quite put his finger on what was off, but he had never tried to really notice anything about it before.
But his manly man’s voice seemed to be... missing some of its gravel.
Shrugging it off as another question for the, now getting uncomfortably full, unanswerable book, he turned to the monitors and rotated them to face him properly. Running his eyes over the calculated damages, he grunted in annoyance.
"Why is the coffee machine always the first thing to break?" Grumbling James turned on the outside cameras, to check that he hadn't ended up on mars or inside a space squid. Eyes widening in shock, he stared at the landscape before him: The crater he had crashed landed in was a large, slightly oval shaped plateau, completely surrounded by a sheer cliff face. The kind of cliff face that said: "Hey, you like climbing? Yeah well I like crushing bones into diamond with my teeth."
As if unsatisfied with just this, the top of the cliff had some kind of ...wind? Barrier on top of it, in fact, the whole area was under some sort of bubble. To top it all off, there appeared to be a small lake in the middle, or was it just ice? Sighing James turned to the screens beside him.
Checking the readouts, James did a double take, then a triple take to make sure.
"oxygen levels: zero point three" Jumping into action almost before this had registered in his brain, James quickly tapped several buttons on the screen in front of him, all lapse of trained professionalism gone, replaced by cold determination. The screen flared as a fuse exploded somewhere under him, shining a blinding light for a moment then died, all the screens in the cabin quickly followed. James scrambled over to the older measurement devices that did not need power, but his difficulty in breathing made clear his plight.
"No air, no backup, suit has half an hour... SUIT!" James practically leaped into his space suit, hurriedly doing up the straps and making sure the seal connected. The self-powered suit HUD flashed to life, leaving spots in his vision. James was now holding his last breath as he slammed the visor shut and snapped the seal closed.
He fought for consciousness, slapping the lever beside him to release the suit and activate the automatic life support built into the suit, then took a deep breath of the cool air that blew gently into his face.
Falling to the floor/roof with a mild exclamation of a few choice words, James turned to the door. If he was going to die on the moon, he was going to do it outside, perhaps he could build a deck chair out of the table and some cloth?
For now he settled on heading out.
"Crap! without power, this damned door won’t open and there is no way I can defeat the pressure of space with my bare hands" being a few drinks short of the crazy amounts of bravado he needed to pry the door off, James slumped against it instead. Slowly he brought his hands up to the latch, although there was no way he could pull against the vast expanses of space, there was also no way he could land this lander upside down and live.
"C’mon physics, don't fix yourself yet!" His somewhat crazy statement seemed to work however, as the door ground open without even a hiss of pressure equalizing and/or crushing him into a pulp. Bolstered by this knowledge, James put his boot on the door frame and heaved, pulling the door open with minimal effort all things considered and stood in the airlock chamber.
If James had not been wearing a bullet proof visor over his face, his palm would have met it hard enough to knock stars into his eyes.
Gripping the door frame around him, he delivered a strong, two footed kick to the outer door, slamming it open to the outside....air?
Luna sat inside the eye crater where she had created her new body, then jumped back on her hooves and started prancing around, laughing in the slightly lower than normal gravity as she revelled in the fact that-
"HAHAHA, I can walk, I can run and I can talk too!"
Luna started to trot around the lake, it was larger than she remembered when she was the moon, her sense of scale must be different when she was a large ball of rock. Giggling to herself she slowed to a walk and walked up to the water’s edge, there she paused for a moment before jumping as far into it as she could.
After splashing around in the lake (it seemed only deep enough to come to her stomach no matter where she went) for an hour or so, she noticed another thing her body could be.
"Cold..." Luna shivered. Being cold on the moon was completely preposterous as the temperature should be freezing anyway, maybe the magic she had used to keep the water liquid was somehow affecting the temperature on the surface around it. Shelving the thought for later inspection, Luna focused on the matter at hoof; how to warm up?
Luna decided at that moment, that she wanted to be within the largest, softest and most snug blanket she could dream up.
Luna looked back at her newly formed wings, each feather was as undamaged as a foal’s and with relative ease, she would be able to age them 'till she shed enough to make said blanket. Sitting back down beside the lake, Luna concentrated on her wings, carefully ageing them until enough feathers fell and regrew to make substantial amounts of bedding.
Suddenly, Luna was struck with inspiration. Using each feather, she broke them down into individual strands and wove them into the finest silk ever created, or so she thought. Carefully curling them into a thick, fuzzy sheet of fabric that matched her coat perfectly (obviously). She then crafted the whole thing into a thick hoodie, even putting her cutie mark on the side with a little coloration magic.
Thus equipped, the now adorable Luna wandered around the lake edge to warm up. Glancing up at the dome of air and magic above her, Luna wished to see the light of day once again. Two hours later, Luna had managed to create an allusion of sky and clouds on the inside of the dome, even going so far as to re-create the suns heat for a few minutes. After the heat spell wore off, Luna realized how taxed she really was, for although her magic was now condensed into the space of one pony again and therefore much more powerful for such small scale things as these, she was still the mare of the moon, and its waning seemed to be affecting her more so than normal.
Finding a comfortable spot near the lake, Luna curled up into a ball in her snuggie and fell asleep.
View Online
Chapter three: That's one small step.. and one giant fall
...Air?
James stepped down from the upturned lander, jumping from the door frame to the dusty ground. His familiarity with the moon was once again thrown off as the dust around his feet barely moved. He had been ready to be forced to leave gear outside once the dust covering it made it unusable. It was almost as if this really was air, but that was impossible... just like being on this moon. putting the thought away in a now best selling book, James started towards the centre of the crater.
After fifteen minutes of walking, it became apparent to James that the crater was bigger than it looked at first. Quickly becoming bored with his solitary walk, he decided to try the famous moon jumping. If the gravity in orbit was anything to go by, James should be able to float quite a bit more than what he would on Earths moon. Not bothering to calculate the difference and clearly not thinking about his experience walking along so far, James climbed the next small rise and jumped with all his might.
After he had finished rolling down the small hill in a stream of curse's, James decided to really think about what he was doing. The first thing he noticed, was how he had been acting up until that point. Normally, James did not consider himself cold and calculating, but he accepted that he did tend to come off like that to others. Ever since he had gotten to the moon, he had been as careless as a child. James could have simply fixed the fuse on the lander and then checked the readings normally, but instead, he had decided to leave the lander with only half an hour of air. he did not even know if he could reach the 'lake' in that amount of time, let alone make it back. James decided to make some observations.
"The moon's gravity seems almost normal, it can't be less than two thirds of earths." He spoke aloud.
"That fact alone is making this suit harder to wear than it's supposed to be, I'm using more air because of this." The thought of running out of air was very scary to him, although he would not admit it to many that asked him, he was scared.
Suddenly, James's attitude took a 180 and he started walking towards the lake with a slight bounce.
"What the hell. If I'm going to die, I want to explore the moon first!" His cheery demeanor ceased at the thought of death and he walked a few more feet slowly. Shaking himself a little, he stood straight again and marched on-wards, the spring returning and a large grin plastered on his face.
As James walked, he thought about many things; most of them consisted of questions about the moon, but every once in a while he would ask himself a strange question.
"I wonder what my sister would think about me being on th- what?" confused, James paused briefly, a dark shadow passed across his face briefly before it turned to a confused expression.
"I don't have a sister!" Shaking his head he kept walking.
Luna's sleep was very deep, not properly sleeping for four hundred years was not a fun experience for her. The nearest she had achieved was a sort of half-sleep, where she receded her awareness fully into the moon in an attempt to shut out the ponies that would shun her but have the gall to enter her dream world.
That was another thing she hated. Being unable to see ponies dreams and not influence them in any way was terrifying for her. It was what she considered to be her greatest power, to create worlds of her own where her dreams came true. She was sure that the lack of contact with others or the ability to fake it with dream magic was driving her insane. Luna was afraid that if she left the moon, her insanity would be worse than nightmare moon ever was.
Her new body, however, had a brain. And like all brains, it's subconscious worked perfectly well. The whole 'large' soul thing was a blessing and a curse to Luna, as it meant that her subconscious was nearly nonexistent when she was inhabiting just the moon. Neither Luna nor Celestia knew why being disconnected from a body effected some parts of a pony's thought so much more than others, but there never seemed to be a good enough reason to look into it as the two of them were the only living things that could 'live' as an inanimate object.
But Luna was not currently thinking about such puzzles, Luna was dreaming.
She dreamed of other versions of reality where she was hunted as a mutant. She dreamed of slowly somersaulting through space and throwing a stick in the air accompanied by music. She even dreamed of working a boring job instead of as a princess, struggling from day to day, trying to fix appliances for an office full of idiots, All the while trying to avoid being called "a desk-rabbit"
Spreading herself throughout her dream domain, Luna started looking into ponies dreams.
The dreams she saw were generally terrible, haunting nightmares. She set about calming these nightmares and gifting ponies with peaceful dreams, calming many a crying filly and colt. In her wandering of her dream domain, Luna suddenly encountered a mind that she recognized. It was her sister.
Celestia was having a nightmare, a nightmare so terrible that Luna all but forgave her on the spot for going against her.*
"No pony should have to live through this torture, not even her."
Quickly calming Celestia's dream world, Luna once again turned her attention to the dreaming minds around her.
"Oh my! That soul is a lot closer than should be possible..." Luna exclaimed.
This must be the soul that gave her the spark to create her body, she would have to thank it personally.
Luna slipped into the mind of the dreaming creature and got ready to give her thanks, she found it quite easy to gain access to this mind because part of her soul was still attached to it.
"Strange, most souls would reject one like mine. I did not expect this soul to live so long, let alone correctly join with mine." Luna muttered to herself.
"Well, This just makes it easier for me to connect with this ones mind." Shrugging mentally, she carried on connecting minds with the strange creature, finding herself accepted into its mind with open arms.
Out of nowhere, Luna encountered a block in the creatures mind. no matter where she pushed or poked, it would not budge.
Ordinarily Luna would leave such a mind as this for fear of damaging the mind with overpowering force, but Luna had several ways of getting around this particular problem. Carefully she started casting a spell, this particular one was designed as a 'needle' for getting past obstructions, this would allow her to observe the mind behind without leaving a large hole in the thought process of the target.
Taking longer than she would have liked, Luna completed the spell.
"My! I do seem a little out of practice." Luna exclaimed.
"This creature must have no small intellect to create such a masterful block as this" Luna did not know what kind of creature this would turn out to be, but it must have an incredible sense of self and will to hold the mental barrier.
After she had finished musing to herself, Luna cast the final elements of the spell, 'injecting' herself into the memories of the unknown entity. Aligning her consciousness into a spike mentally.
Luna pierced through the barrier.
James screamed in pain.
His body felt like it was boiling from the inside, his muscle and bone bubbling and bursting through his skin as a hot liquid, only to be met by a freezing cold surrounding him and turning into a painfully cold layer around him, sending shards of ice into his body so cold they burned .
His blood was replaced with liquid fire and his innards felt like one big burning mound of flesh.
Every nerve in his body felt like it was being twisted around itself and stabbed with minute knives. James collapsed to the ground shivering in pain, his helmet hitting the ground with an audible crack going unnoticed.
When James was a child, he had dislocated his leg on one occasion. The pain he was feeling then was nowhere close to what he was feeling now, it was blinding, searing, exquisite pain.
After what seemed like hours to him, the pain started to lessen around his body and then stopped as quick as it started.
Panting, James started to cautiously move his body. Wiggling his fingers a little brought a little stab of pain, but when it did not continue to hurt he continued. Shifting his arms under his chest to support his weight, James gently lifted his torso from the ground.
Pins and needles covered his body as his muscles unclenched from the locked position they had been in, revealing some startling new facts about his body.
For one, James was sure his suit was not quite as roomy as it currently was. His head felt like it was lose in the helmet and he was unable to move his feet.
"WHAT THE FUAAAAAAAAAA ."
Staring down at his legs, James barely had time to exclaim at the severed feet sitting beside his prone form before the pain returned as suddenly as before.
Although James was not conscious enough to notice, several flashes of blue were going off in quick succession from the lakes edge; a mere twenty meters or so from his position.
Luna huffed in annoyance.
She had been attempting to give this stupid creature some of her magic, hoping to let it use the part of her soul that she had healed it's soul with as a magic battery. By doing this, Luna hoped to allow the creature known as "A Hue-man" the same ability her current body had.
Luna's creation, her body, was only reliant on the usual needs as a normal pony body when she was not connected to it; as long as she had access to her magic it could survive even the vacuum of space without aid.
Her progress was being impeded by several factors.
This hue-man's mind was so different to hers that she could only make out some of the basic facts about it, like what it needed to live. Its needs were effectively the same as a pony. It ate vegetables and fruit like a pony, it had a similar bone type to a pony and it's senses did not seem to include anything a pony wouldn't have.
It was different at the same time, however, and the difference she was having the most trouble with was what it breathed.
This thing seemed to breath a mixture of things including oxygen as a main factor. How any creature could live on such a toxic mix of gases instead of the nearly pure Adorabellium and cuetoxide that everything she new breathed was a mystery, but Luna did not want to modify such a core mechanic of a living being.
The other major problem she now faced was this creatures resistance to magic.
Never in her life had Luna seen anything resist such a strong spell, from a goddess for bucks sake!
After casting the spell for the first attempt, Luna had only succeed in forcing a small amount of magic into the ..man.
Pausing for a brief respite, she gathered herself for a stronger attempt, this time Luna would cast the spell multiple times in the hope of wearing down its magic resistance for long enough to force the magic into it. Luna did not know what effects the magic would have on the man, but this was the only solution she could think of short of changing it into a pony; a spell not even she could pull off by herself.
Readying herself, Luna started to cast the spell again and again. Over and Over until she felt the resistance withing the target lessening, pushing her victory she forced as much magic as she could muster in her corporeal form into the man.
Yes, this was the best solution for the mans survival on the moon. empowered by her resolution, she forced even more magic into the creature ensuring, she hoped, its future as a living being.
unbeknownst to Luna, the magic she was forcing into James, while it was allowing him to live without any of the requisites of a normal human, was having some adverse effects.
When Luna used part of her soul to heal James's essence, she fused a small part of herself to him and while his soul did connect with the fragments of hers, his soul had never been magical. Therefore when Luna flooded James with magic, the part of his new soul that Luna had given him became the dominant one, empowered as it was by magic.
The effects of a total soul conversion were... interesting to say the least, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
PAIN
Pain was all James could feel.
All he could hear, smell, see and taste was pain.
What did pain taste like? It tasted like copper and raw air, although that might have been from the fact that James had clenched his jaw so hard several teeth shattered under the pressure.
He barely felt the air hitting his destroyed throat and lungs for it was all hidden in the noise of pain.
Adrenaline surged through his veins, making each second seem like eternity and causing his nerves to be super sensitive. Needless to say that did not make things better, he had stopped screaming almost as soon as the real pain kicked in. To scream required at least a small part of his body to cooperate with his will, but he could control his body as well as he could control the orbit of the moon. He was forced to lie there, his entire being and soul racked with pain as though he was splitting into individual atoms. One. At. A. Time.
James wavered in and out of consciousness, the pain not letting him fall into the blissful ignorance of unconsciousness.
No, this pain was the purpose of his life, the culmination of all the chances from the big bang all the way to his life being created. This was his destiny, his destiny was pain.
Slowly but all at once he understood everything in the universe, but he also was shown how little he knew at the same time.
He knew everything but nothing... nothing except pain.
It was so indescribable that to call it as such was to insult it, like naming nothing, pointless and impossible.
This was infinity but more than nine thousand time so, it was... it was... it was pain.1
The pain faded, but James would not realize this for another minute or so.
Slowly he drew himself out of the trance like state he had been in and opened his eyes.
His eyes flickered open for a mere second before he fell unconscious, the deep blue cat-like orb contrasting against his green-blue one.
Chapter four: Arise, sir princess...
Luna returned her concentration to her surroundings as the magic faded from her horn, the ground around her losing its blue glow. It had been so long since she had raised or lowered the moon with her bodily magic, she would need to accustom herself to the feeling of so much power flowing through such a small vessel and soon, she should be able to cast many more spells again.
Luna stood and stretched, shaking her soft-as-down snuggie free of dust and dirt, before sedately walking towards the lakes edge. As she took to the shore, Luna swore she was forgetting something with her now living brain, staring at her reflection in the rapidly disappearing light she tried to recall what it was.
Ah well, she was sure she would remember after a nice nap. After all, even a princess cannot expend that much power on one target without some stress.
She was starting to remember some details of what had just occurred, however her body had decided that it wanted sleep and was not to be denied, she fell asleep.
Not more than thirty meters away from Luna's napping-spot, a new creature was waking up. Clambering to its new feet, Nightmare-Jim looked itself over.
"When did Nightmare Moon start referring to herself in third person?" she questioned no-one in particular.
"My name is James and when did I start to talk to Myself? Also what the hell has happened to my body!?" He argued back, still to nopony but himself.
"I speak in the Royal Accent whenever referring to anyone not worthy of being in the royal highness's presence!" she?.. Said to herself.
"No no NO! My name is James Moon and I was born on earth before the three tribes had united as ponykind. I was trapped on this rock after a cold-war broke out and wind demons feeding on the hatred landed at the launch centre, probably killing all the science team controlling my flight here." sh-she ranted to herself, her speech blending between an ever so slightly Irish accent and ancient Canterlotian.
Thinking through her memories, James noticed some things she knew were errors. Unfortunately, since she could not remember what had been there before, she could not accurately spot them. Deciding to sort out her mind later, she turned her attention to her body and the changes it had undergone.
“Where the hell are my hands and what has become of the royal for-hooves?” She cried in shock, noticing the paw-like appendages at the end of her arms.
“I need a mirror, stat!” James announced, looking around for anything reflective. As she got more and more desperate, a dark blue light flashed above her head. She looked up just in time to be smacked in the face by the mirror that had just appeared out of thin air.
“Where did this come from? Never mind, it’s convenient.” She said, shaking her head to clear the stars floating around her head, forcing herself not to look as they flew away from her head and into the sky.
Bracing herself for what she might see, James peered into the fairly large mirror and looked herself over.
“…wow” was all she could say to the sight of her own gaping face.
The Transformation from whatever she had been before to what she was now had been pretty extensive, although she could not remember what she had looked like before, something told her it was nothing like this.
Her body now looked almost like a cross between a feline creature and a pony, her head and hind legs being that of an equine and her front legs looking almost like a cats paws. Her tail was fairly cat-like too, a lot slimmer than a 100% hair tail could be and with a slightly rounded end. What really caught her attention though, was her furry coat.
It was thicker than she remembered her coat normally being and seemed to flow slightly in invisible wind, the dark black of the fur waving around as though submerged in calm water. She did notice some a feeling of something missing from her back, but could not put her paw on it, did her previous body have a long mane? Or was there something else missing from her smooth, sleek back.
Her large feline eyes, right below some strange markings on her head, had her entranced for a good minute before she noticed her tail moving back and forth on its own.
After trying to get her tail to sit still for a few minutes and giving up, James decided it was high time she stopped referring to herself as James; she was not sure where the name had come from but it did not feel quite like hers.
Choosing to ignore the difficult decision for now as she could not see anyone else to talk to, she decided to just call herself One as she seemed perfectly happy to talk in third person.
Quickly boring herself with her new body, One started in the direction she knew there was large object of interest. One did not know how she knew of it, maybe one of her previous memories was surfacing! This could not be ignored, she started along the surface of the moon, her new body’s motor functions coming quickly as long as she didn’t think about them.
SMACK!
“Gaaah!” Luna cried, leaping to her hooves wide awake. How could she have forgotten about the creature!? There was no time to delay, she hurried off in the direction the alien had approached from. Sensing a spike of magic somewhere along her surface nearby, Luna flexed her wings and leapt into the air. Using her magic to bolster her wing-strength, she powered her way forwards, eyes peeled for anything not of her moon.
Spotting something stark white against the surface of the ground in-front of her, she used yet more magic to increase her speeds yet again, rocketing towards the new object.
One was having the time of her life, jumping in and out of craters would probably never get old. Her new quadruped body allowed her to run faster and jump further than she could before, allowing her to hurl herself from one crater rim to another in the only slightly lower than normal gravity.
Another thing she noticed was her new eyesight, she did not remember ever having any vision problems before she woke up here, but her eyesight could count the pebbles in a pile at least eighteen or so meters away.
Deciding to test how far her eyesight could reliably see, One picked up a moderately sized rock awkwardly in her paws and, carefully balanced on her hind legs, threw it with all her might. Unfortunately, her body was clearly not made to walk on two legs and she overbalanced, tossing the rock a fair distance in the process and smacking into the ground with quite some force.
SMACK!
“oooh” One groaned, slowly standing upright.
“One shall not be trying that again anytime soon.” She mumbled.
Her pain was interrupted when she caught sight of some movement in the corner of her eye. Turning her head to face it, she watched as a small flying object raced across the sky. Using mathematics she didn’t even know she could do, she calculated its trajectory and origin and turned to head in that direction.
Jumping over the next ridge, One came upon a fairly large plateau and decided to see how fast she could really go with a good build-up. Starting out at a light run, she increased her speed until she was going as fast as she could comfortably go. Pushing herself further proved a challenge and she enjoyed every moment of it, her hooves and paws kicking up dust as she ran, her breath coming in faster and faster gasps.
Suddenly the ground before her sloped downwards and she was now running full tilt down a short slope that ended in water. She had a brief second to question the existence of water on the moon before she plunged straight into the shoulder depth water, the cold liquid quickly covering her back and making her gasp from the cold shock.
Back peddling as fast as she could, One splashed out of the water and back onto the bank and regained her breath. This presented her with a problem, how to get dry… Not seeing any other solutions, One started licking the parts of her body she could reach, it felt quite nice and she had started vibrating again. She had noticed that during moments when she was particularly happy and not panting like a dog; her chest area would start vibrating with every breath. She assumed it was something to do with her apparent feline half.
Deciding to investigate later, something she was doing a lot recently, she just went with it and continued to dry herself off.
Luna was perplexed. She had found what appeared to be some kind of clothing for a strangely shaped creature and had followed its footsteps back to a large object sitting on the moon some distance away. She did not know what it was and could only make assumptions about it, was it a mode of transport? Whatever it was, she decided to leave it alone for now and had flown back along the footsteps to the clothing. There she had found another, even stranger set of footsteps leading towards the lake instead of away and followed them too.
It was a good thing she had tired and slowed down or she would have missed the dark blur running across some flats to her right. This must be the creature that had left the strange footprints towards the lake, whatever it was, it was fast. Luna doubted that she could run at those speeds without the assistance of her magic, and was falling behind as she glided towards it. Seeing it run down the bank of her lake without slowing, only increasing its speed, she landed a short way further along the ridge.
Edging her way closer to the edge she peered down at the strangest creature she had ever seen. It had what looked like cat paws instead of front hooves and cat ears too, its tail seemed to always be moving in a very feline manner too.
Its eyes were very entrancing and she stared into them as they looked curiously towards her.
Curiously towards her-… oh.
Hearing a faint noise with her sensitive ears, One turned her head and sniffed towards the hill behind her. Scanning the top until she made eye contact with the winged unicorn staring down at her, and watching with interest as its eyes widened.
She took a breath. “hello pony.”
Chapter one: The creation theory
"NO!" she screamed.
"Mark my words Celestia" she spat the words like poison.
"I WILL return, and you WILL pay" her words were fading into the roar of magic.
The black beams of magic surrounded Nightmare in a mock rainbow, shades of black fading to grey spiralling around her armoured form. "This is just a setback for me, you cannot hope to defeat the darkness, after all, there will always be night and where there is night, there is Nightmare Moon!.
Celestia had to strain her ears to hear these last words from the monster that was once her sister. The star of her night turned black by anger and hate. Tears streamed down her face as she tore out here emotions both mentally and physically, using them to fuel The Elements.
As the castle around her crumbled, she stood staring up into the twilight sky, the moon and sun battled for dominance over the sky for but a moment longer, then the moon started to retreat back to its proper place among the stars in umbra*. She had won.
But if it was a victory, why did it feel like she lost?
"-mare Moon!"
Luna stopped screaming.
Not because she was finished, but because she now lacked a mouth to scream with and she was only yelling at herself now anyway. The moons presence filled her mind, much more than was normal and her awareness seemed to only consist of the grey-white rock.
"That bitch!" Luna flinched at the outburst, or she would have, had she a face.
"This is pathetic! You’re pathetic!"
Luna could not clearly remember the last time Nightmare had been a voice in her head, recently it had been the other way around. Being trapped in your own mind while another took control and destroyed everything around you was not a thing she would wish upon anypony, not even Discord.
"Shut up worm!" Nightmare screeched attempting to regain possession of 'her' body.
Luna decided that she wanted Nightmare gone, out, dead. "GET OT OF MY MIND." Luna's scream shattered the blocks on her mind, the careful editing that Nightmare had done to her memories and the feelings of resentment were gone. The years of slow decay as Nightmare took control destroyed, like a pile of dust in a storm.
"What are you doing? Noooooooo" Nightmare's outcry was short, Luna's wrath at being deceived and manipulated quickly tearing her into nothing but a collection of foul memories, effectively wiping her from Luna's mind.
The backlash from such powerful instinctual magic was great, the waves of power emanating from the moon could be felt by all as the very face of the moon was bent and distorted, shaped into the outline of a once great pony, engraved for all time on the moon.
A long time later
Luna awoke with a start, her mind being jolted awake by her sister's incessant shoving of the moon.
"Thou art impatient sister" she spoke, or more correctly, thought as she had not created a body for herself yet. She relaxed her control of the moon, letting her sister move it without much resistance. Four hundred and fifty years had taught her how to control her moon better than even Celestia and her sun, but Celestia rarely gave her the opportunity to do so on her own. She was not even certain that Celestia new she still had control over the moon.
Tonight was going to be the night that she finally gave herself a body. Luna's excitement was great enough to bleed through the chains surrounding her moon, creating a vista of northern lights flowing through the sky. She had been preparing for this night since the very week of her imprisonment, creating matter from nothing was considered a foals errand for most and even the great powers of Luna condensed on the moon could only create a few pounds of matter at a time.
Since she did not know the extent her powers would be when she transferred herself from the non-living moon into an actual body, she had slowly turned a small area of the moon (the eye crater of the Mare in the moon outline) into a habitable environment.
The changes she had made where tiny, insubstantial in of themselves, but over the course of the past near half millennium, she had managed to create a bubble of air, surrounding the crater and a small pond filled with fresh water in the centre.
Luna could not create anything more detailed as she had no eyes or hooves to inspect her work and focusing the awareness of the moon into anything smaller than an area around twenty kilometres was nearly imposable. Luna did know that she would not need sustenance as her body would be fuelled by magic anyway, she was safe in the knowledge that she could not truly die while her mind was connected to the moon in any way.
Cutting off her thoughts, Luna started concentrating on the spell. If you've ever tried to do anything while in a dream that requires a single minded concentration, you will understand how difficult it was for Luna to cast any sort of spell.
What she was currently doing was draining so much power from her reserves that the moon stopped in its movement across the sky. Down on the surface of the moon a small pile of dust started moving around, swirling upwards into the vague shape of a pony and then started solidifying from the base upwards.
As the spell neared completion, what seemed like an eternity to Luna, she noticed that her new body was missing something.
Despair flooded through her mind as she tried desperately looking for anything that could match what she was missing, she realized what she needed.
"The spark of life!"
If she had eyes, they would be weeping. Unlike her sister's sun, the moon did not promote new growth, there was nowhere for her to get any life essence. Defeat welled up inside her, 'glancing' her awareness around she expanded it away from where her new body was standing, nothing but a statue of flesh, and screamed to herself.
Luna could feel a presence.
Thinking it to be Nightmare returning, she lashed out mentally at it and felt her mind contact something, Luna was unsure what it was, but she started to pull on it. Distantly, she felt the vibrations of an explosion, giving her a prickling sensation in her mind. The harder she pulled, the more she felt the presence, as though it was getting closer.
It felt unfamiliar, not like anything she had felt before, even before she was trapped on the moon. It was alive, but too different for her use; her hopes fell as fast as they had risen. Luna's body would not survive without a fully active brain for much longer; she needed to find that spark and finish the spell, or be stuck as just an awareness in the moon until she had gathered the needed matter to create it again.
Her patience was at its end, she needed a spark, this thing had one, so she was going to make it compatible with her!
Acting quickly, she started on another spell, in her overtaxed state she would not be able to control it very well. Gritting her imaginary teeth she gathered the power needed, even going so far as to attempt to borrow power from her sister's spell. Luna was surprised that The Elements yielded to her need, granting her the power required.
Pushing the questions this brought up from her mind, she willed all her power, her being and her very soul into the spell and flooded the strange presence with her magic.
The changes she needed to make were a lot less major than she thought.
This soul was almost identical to hers, the differences were mainly basic things such as physical form, Gender, species, instinct, genetics and thought processes.
Luna had already started to change all of these when she thought of the consequences this would have on whatever being this was. It coming closer to her than any had since she was imprisoned, so she instead took a small amount of life force from it leaving most of the changes incomplete and probably causing severe problems for this creature that could travel space. But not destroying it.
Instead she took a small spark from it and patched the gap left behind with a small portion of her soul, being one with the moon had its perks, like having a large enough soul for several hundred ponies. That fact alone was letting her focus on so many things while casting multiple spells as well as she could when focusing on only one.
Hurriedly placing the spark inside her new crafted body, she forced the rest of her soul into it, firmly attaching herself to the mind of her creation.
She felt a rushing sensation as her moon awareness faded to its usual subconscious self and she opened her eyes.