Chapter VII
First steps
John was roused by knocking, it was soft and demure, and yet it broke the stillness of the massive room so completely that there simply was no alternative to waking up.
Despite being woken up, John was feeling refreshed, perhaps it was because of the fact that this was the first bed that he had slept in in over five years, or perhaps there was another reason.
Maybe being shown some kindness improved one’s rest, who knows.
John raised his upper body and arched his back, popping some of his vertebrae back into place in the process.
Another series of knocks sounded on the door.
More or less alert now, John wiped the sleep from his eyes and called out to the door. “Yes?”
The voice that answered was muffled, but still understandable. “Good evening, sir, I am here to wake you up. Princess Celestia has asked me to inform you that dinner will be served in half an hour, so you still have some time to freshen up.”, she informed him.
John was confused for a short moment, then raised one of his arms and took a whiff of his body odour, which almost caused him to retch.
“Uh, Thank you very much.”, he yelled back across the room.
“No problem, sir. A royal guard will be here to escort you in about twenty minutes. Have a good day.”, she said and left, judging by the sound of hooves clip-clopping and becoming less audible by the second.
‘Time to check out the bathroom’, John thought, and rolled out of bed.
He quickly made the bed, even though he was certain that a maid would come by at some point while was gone, and do it for him. Once he was finished, he moved to the bathroom door, opened it, and stood in awe at the sight before him.
A massive rectangular tub that was set into the floor took up most of the room. Much like the rest of the guest room, it was completely white, presumably porcelain, with golden detailing etched into its surface. The bathroom itself was decorated with tiles, white of course, and the rest of the equipment in the room ranged from a toilet fit for a biped, to a sink so big, one could comfortably submerge a small child in it.
Since he was already wearing his birthday suit, John simply turned on the faucets, and went about the rest of his morning business while the tub filled.
When the water reached a satisfactory level, he added the contents of a bottle standing on the edge of the tub, marked “Bubble Bath”.
The sensation of stepping into the hot water and submersing his body was glorious to say the least, but since he had a dinner scheduled in a few minutes, instead of lying down and enjoying the bath, he scrubbed himself furiously to rinse himself of the accumulated dirt, grease, and filth of more than five years without a proper wash.
Eventually he reached a satisfactory level of cleanliness and drained the tub, stepped out and dried himself with a towel.
Leaving the bath, he started wondering if he should wear his dirty old rags to a dinner with royalty, but he needn’t have worried, for there was a small wrapped parcel lying on the bed.
He skipped wondering about how someone could’ve snuck into the room without noticing. Instead he opened the package and found, to his surprise, a set of garments inside. A neutral beige shirt and beige pants, simple things woven out of cotton, but impressive, given how the clothes must’ve been made only a short time ago.
He donned the clothes given to him and was just finishing tying his old shoes, when a knock sounded on the door, this one was not soft and dainty, but instead masculine and authoritative.
John quickly stood up and opened the door to his room. A white pegasus fitted in golden armor that was polished to perfection stood outside, his expression carefully neutral.
“Good evening, sir. My name is Whispering Winds. I am your personal escort for the day.”, he introduced himself. “The princesses are expecting you, are you ready to depart?”
“Yes.”, John replied. “Lead the way please.”
The pegasus nodded, turned around and began walking down the hallway. John closed the door and followed him closely.
He led him through the same hallways that would eventually lead to Celestia’s study, but before they reached the inner courtyard, Whisper turned into a larger corridor. This one was grander, not only in size but also in appearance, busts, paintings and other knick-knacks lining the walls and ceiling.
John assumed that the princesses didn’t much care for extravagant decorations in their private quarters, but left the main walkways of the castle decorated to keep up outside appearances.
Eventually they reached a set of massive double doors leading to, John assumed, the dining hall.
However they never went through those doors, instead the guard turned towards a smaller door set into the side of the corridor and knocked.
“Enter”, came a voice from the inside.
Whispering Winds turned back towards John and nodded. “If you would please enter, sir. They are expecting you inside.”
John returned the nod and entered the room without a word.
It was a small, rather rustic looking affair, dark oak floorboards and lower wall sideboards, with a neutral white tapestry on the walls. Inside there was a large wooden table with seating cushions and a chair set around it.
At the head of the table sat Celestia, with another alicorn, which John presumed to be her sister, Luna, sitting to her left. The chair was set opposite to Luna and directly next to Celestia.
Celestia greeted him with a warm smile, while Luna looked at him curiously.
“Good evening, John. Please, have a seat and join us for dinner.”, Celestia bid him.
He did as he was asked and sat down on the chair. “Good evening to you as well, your highnesses.”, he nodded his head in a way of formal greeting.
Celestia looked back and forth between John and Luna, before speaking. “John, this is my sister, Luna. Luna, this is John, although you have met him before, in a manner of speaking.”
John remembered what Discord had told him about his being found, and his face lit up with a warm smile. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you, your highness. I can’t stress enough how grateful I am for you saving my sorry self.”
he said, genuinely happy about finally being able to thank her in person.
“Thou art welcome, John. We art pleased as well to meet thou. We were afraid that it might be bad form to simply pick thine self up and bring thee into town without informing thee of said action.”, Luna replied, quirking the edge of her mouth into a slight grin.
John was perplexed for a moment, it was not often that one heard middle english in use. In fact, He had never heard it being used at all, only seen it written down in texts and dictionaries.
Nonetheless, he got the hint and replied.
“Ah, don’t worry about it, your highness. I’m certain it was worse of me to simply faint in the middle of the desert, and to not be awake for your rescue.”, he quipped.
Luna let out a chuckle. “Indeed, Thank harmony that our resolve was steadfast despite such rudeness. Alas, we feel we shall also have to thank Discord. If it were not for his foolery, we fear we would never have been alerted to thine presence.”
“I’ll make sure to thank him, this time without calling your world a product of my insane mind.”, John replied with a smile.
Luna quirked an eyebrow. “Why wouldst thou think such a thing?”
“Ah.”, John began. “You see, while I was wandering through the desert, I began to think that after the attack on me, my mind simply began to leave the coils of mortality behind and chose to imagine itself in an endless desert. As you can imagine, I did not take well to Discord when I first saw him.”, he explained.
Luna laughed at that, but quickly got herself under control. “No, We imagine thou were not quite pleased by his presence in thy situation.”
“Heh, It got worse for me when I saw Doctor Bones. I hadn’t quite accepted Discord yet, and when a talking pony levitating things came into the picture, I think something snapped.”
He sighed. “Eventually when I had calmed down a bit, Discord explained to me where I was, and when he got to the part about you two raising the sun and the moon, that was the proverbial nail in the coffin.
“When I was about to meet your sister, although delayed, I reacted quite adversely to the entire situation. However, I suppose I did eventually get through the initial shock.”, John finished and looked to Celestia, who nodded.
“Yes you did, and I’m glad I could help you come to accept what had happened to you.”, Celestia added.
“But enough of that, you must be starving.”, Celestia stated, matter of factly. However, she mentally chided herself for missing an important fact.
“I almost forgot, John. I don’t know what you usually like to eat.”, she admitted.
“Ah, well. If you were to talk about humans as a whole, we are omnivores.”, he said. Luna raised both eyebrows this time.
“But if you were to talk about me, well, I have lived on the streets for a few years now, so I take what I can get, whether it be stale bread or expired canned goods. So I think I’ll just take whatever it is you are having. If that’s okay with you.”
“Absolutely”, the solar princess affirmed, and rang the small dinner bell sitting atop the table.
Almost immediately afterwards, a side door to the adjoining kitchen opened, and a trio of waiters came out to serve the food.
They placed the trays onto the table, served each of them a plate filled with a mixed salad in dressing, and placed a steaming loaf of bread between the three of them.
The waiters finished by setting down pitchers of water, juice, and for Luna a small carafe filled with wine.
John ate slowly, deliberately, choosing to savour each bite of the food. He thoroughly enjoyed the meal even though it wasn’t much more than salad and bread. It was a delight for him to be able to eat freshly prepared food, especially food of this quality.
When the meal came to an end, Celestia rang the bell again, and within a few seconds the table was cleared of every trace of food there was.
“That was wonderful, thank you.” John said to both of the princesses.
“You are quite welcome, John.”, Celestia chimed, happy that the food had been to her guest’s liking.
The three of them were alone again and silence permeated the room, a content silence, but silence nonetheless. At a loss for a better subject, John decided to broach a topic that had been eating away at the back of his mind for the better part of the meal.
“I don’t know if it’s rude to ask, princess Luna, but I am a bit curious about something.”, he began.
Luna nodded her head slightly, allowing him to continue.
John dipped his head slightly to return her gesture and then went on to ask his question.
“Well, I hope you can excuse my curiosity, but I was a bit surprised to hear you speak in Middle English - err Equestrian, not that that is a bad thing or anything, it’s just that I’ve never personally heard it used before. I have only seen it in written form, so I wonder how that came to be. Is it in common use in Equestria or somewhere else?”
If Luna was perturbed by the question, she did not show it. Celestia on the other hand nearly choked on the juice she had been sipping, and quickly looked off to the side, pretending to examine the room’s walls.
The princess of the night looked at her sister for a short moment before returning her gaze to John.
“We presume that Discord hath given thee a short version of the history of this land?”, she asked. John nodded.
“Hath he also mentioned our banishment?”
John tilted his head to the side, his expression one of puzzlement. “Banishment? No I don’t believe so.”
Luna closed her eyes for a moment and began filling John in on the events leading up to, and following her banishment.
“A little over a thousand years ago, We decided to rebel against our sister, t’was an act of jealousy. We felt that ponies did not appreciate our night as they did mine sister’s day. With each passing day, we grew more solemn in our belief that the night should last forever, a foalish thought as we can now see, but at the time it seemed to be the only logical solution to getting ponies to appreciate our work.”
She stopped to sigh and look at her sister again, whose face wore a neutral expression, but as John could easily assume, she probably regretted what had happened as well. After a few seconds, Luna continued.
“In time, our mind had become clouded enough by jealousy and ill-directed hatred, that an outside influence found it more than easy to persuade and corrupt me into attacking mine own sister. This was the Nightmare. At this point, my sister had come to realize that any attempts to reason with us were futile, and when we struck out and blocked out the sun with our moon-”, Luna blinked away a single tear. “She had no choice but to use a series of ancient artifacts called the Elements of Harmony to banish us to the moon.”
“But to make a long story short, a few years ago, mine sister with the help of the new Element Bearers, succeeded in freeing us from the Nightmare’s influence.” A small smile adorned her snout as she glanced over to her sister, who was still wearing a neutral expression, although it seemed a bit lighter now.
“To answer thine question, John. Even though we have had a few years to adjust to changed times now, It has not been quite enough to break old habits. Perhaps in time we will be more comfortable with the changed language, but that time is not now.” She took a sip of her wine and looked at John.
His eyes were wide and he mentally slapped himself for asking such a personal question. He had not quite expected such a response.
“I-I’m sorry, princess, I shouldn’t have asked. I’m very sorry if I made you uncomfortable. It’s not my place to ask such personal questions of you.”, he apologized.
“Nonsense John, t’is quite fine. Thou hast been very forthcoming with thine own personal history and we would be remiss if we kept our’s from thee”, she chirped.
“Besides, It has lead to our betterment, we were reunited with our sister, and have been given a chance to make up for our misdeeds.”, she explained her point of view on the matter.
John, to put it mildly, was dumbstruck. To be able to live through such events and come out the other side with that kind of attitude towards it spoke not only of great wisdom, but also a strength of character that was, quite frankly, extremely admirable.
Celestia regarded her sister with a loving expression, the kind that only family and friends were capable of. It was obvious that she was not untouched by the burden of having been forced to banish her own sister, but it was also plain to see that she was happy to have regained her long lost sister, and that she would do anything to keep it that way.
The next few hours were spent conversing amicably, John learning more of the history of Equestria in the process, and the princesses getting a glimpse of human history in return.
To say that Luna was excited when John told her about the almost fervent interest in the cosmos that humanity possessed, and John’s own dabbling in the subject, would have been a massive understatement.
“So thou art saying that thy people have held a great interest in the stars throughout the ages?”, she inquired with not a small amount of held back glee evident in her voice.
“Well, yes. It has always been one of humanity’s greatest dreams to reach out and touch the stars since time immemorial.”, John answered, and for a moment he was sure that he had heard the princess squee. “And in the last few decades we have even managed to send unmanned craft out to other planets using rockets. We reached Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, we even landed a few probes on Venus, although they didn’t survive too long in the immensely dense atmosphere.”, he counted off the achievements of the human race in the space faring age.
“But I’d say our biggest achievement was landing the first man on the moon.”
Luna’s eyes widened visibly at the mention of the earth’s constant companion.
“Surely thou jest?”, she wondered. It was not easy for her to believe that a race so completely without magic, had managed a feat that was almost impossible for even the most advanced magic users in Equestria, namely alicorns.
“No, I’m completely serious.”, John reassured her. “It’s actually an interesting story. It began some time before the second world war.”, he started, and as Celestia made to inquire about the last three words, he quickly added. “I’ll get to that later, I promise.”
“Anyways.”, he continued. “A young man by the name of Wernher von Braun was studying in a boarding school in Weimar around 1925. He was a relatively normal student, not very gifted in the fields of Physics and Mathematics, but at some point it is said that he read a book and soon after started applying himself more and more into those very fields. Like many people, he had become fascinated with the cosmos, more specifically with interstellar space.”
John gauged Luna’s reaction to his words before moving on. She was still listening with rapt attention.
“He would later come to work for the National Socialists in germany, building weapons of mass destruction in a futile effort of our then leaders to enact a vendetta against our former enemies.”
This caught Celestia’s attention again, but John figured she would wait for him to finish the story before asking about it.
“There’s still a debate about whether or not he shared the same views as those people, but it is clear that he wouldn’t shy away from using more extreme methods to achieve his goals.”, John made sure to be as honest as possible about this. There was no use in trying to paint what had happened in a better light.
“He used their weapons program to further his own research into rocket flight, achieving space flight with weapons of terror and destruction. At some point though, the war was lost, but von Braun was picked up by the allied forces, one of our former enemies, and was enlisted into their own space program.”, John did not particularly like his home country’s history but he went on nonetheless.
“A few years after the war, two of the formerly allied nations, namely the United States and the Soviet Union became wrapped up in a cold war, ready to strike each other at a moments notice, but at the same time prevented from doing so by mutually assured destruction by means of nuclear weapons, which are essentially bombs with the destructive capability of several million tons of conventional explosives. While all that was happening, those countries were battling to bring the first people into space and beyond. The Soviets managed to claim the first victories, bringing the first man into space, sending probes to the lunar surface, landing on venus with a probe etcetera.”
He told them the events of the 1950’s to the 1960’s in a few short words, but their effect were more or less the same as a full history lecture.
“But when the time came to bring the first human beings to the moon, von Braun outdid himself with a rocket one hundred and ten meters long, ten meters wide, and weighing around three thousand tons. It was a masterpiece of engineering to be sure.”, John cheered up a bit himself as he moved into a lighter subject matter.
“Using that rocket, we sent three men into space, to the moon and onto its surface. A lot was learned during those days, it essentially turned our world view onto it’s head, assumptions made about the moon were proven wrong, others were proven right, and so on.
And of course, as all great stories go, we were also blessed with some great words of wisdom from one of the men on that mission.
It’s a phrase that is commonly known all around the planet. Out of seven billion people, I’m almost sure that around eighty to ninety percent know about it.”, he said.
“When Neil Armstrong stood on the ladder of the Lunar Lander, about to step onto the dusty surface, he uttered a phrase that was heard by every person near a radio or television set that day.”, John smiled, putting on a slight American accent. “This is one small step for a man… One giant leap for mankind… And then, he jumped off the ladder and explored the surface with Buzz Aldrin, his partner on the excursion, while the third man, Michael Collins, stayed behind in orbit around the moon in the command module.”
“It made mankind’s imagination go wild, before it eventually stagnated again in an inescapable monotony that is very common to our world nowadays.”
John sighed. “Nowadays, everything revolves around the accumulation of wealth and material possessions. The government’s aren’t properly funding their space programs anymore. Everything that’s left over from those times are communication satellites, forgotten space probes just now returning to a position near earth and the occasional, although very rare, new launch to explore Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons in greater detail. There seems to be a chance that Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons could possibly be harboring microbial life. Although getting there and finding out is just too expensive. Anyways, I digress. I’m sure I can tell you more later.”
Luna took a few seconds to realize that John had stopped sharing his limited knowledge of the space age, but her expression didn’t fall, in fact, she seemed content.
“Agreed, It would be sad if thou were to tell us everything tonight, there would be no more left for other occasions. But still, thank thee, John. It is most delightful to hear about thy people’s endeavours amongst the heavens.”, Luna assured him.
“You’re welcome, your highness.”, John turned to Celestia, “I think I’m safe in assuming you have some questions about what I said earlier?”, John asked.
Celestia nodded.
“Indeed. You have spoken briefly of some tragedies and two world wars, and while I promise that I won’t judge you for your people’s history, I would still like to hear more about these events.”
John rubbed his temples in anticipation of the daunting task of explaining humanity’s rather bloody history to someone who is completely blind to some of the atrocities that his species has committed in its long history.
“Well, I suppose we always were a pretty violent race…”, He started, and did his best to recollect some of the major points in the history of mankind’s uprising, development of culture, and of course war.
It was a lengthy tale, but neither of the princesses seemed bored for even a moment, instead they actually confronted John about things that seemed odd, other things that needed explaining because of cultural factors such as religion, and others that just screamed of stupidity on the part of the humans in question.
It took John nearly three hours to satisfy the curiosity of Luna, and two more hours after that to sate Celestia’s hunger for information and explanation.
“And that’s that.”, John said, feeling tired after racking his brain for every iota of knowledge about the human race.
“I hope that I could help you, although I have to admit I don’t know a lot about human history, just the basics. And now you know as much as I do.”, John exclaimed, hoping that the subject was closed and they could move on to other topics.
“Indeed we do John, thank you.” princess Celestia said. “And I had hoped to have something to present to you as well, but alas, as much as I tried, I couldn’t find a reasonable explanation as to what brought you here.” the princess informed him.
“That’s alright, your highness. To be honest I don’t really need to know why. Although my world has its wonderful moments, I still don’t care much for it.”
And it was true, even though none of the events leading up to his arrival in Equestria made much sense, they still led to him arriving here. That was more than enough for John, and there was the old saying that you shouldn’t look the gift horse in the mouth. Or maybe it was gift pony, John didn’t want to look either of those gift animals in the mouth. Only now did he come to realize that, although he hasn’t seen a lot of Equestria, he already liked it and its inhabitants several orders of magnitude more than Earth and its dwellers.
But Celestia wasn’t one to be shot down quickly as she quickly picked the topic up again.
“Actually, John. There was one thing I have not tried yet, and I was hoping you would give me permission to bring in some help.”, Celestia said, a small pleading glimmer present in her big magenta eyes as she looked at John.
He couldn’t hold her stare for long and soon gave in to her demand.
“Uhh, sure. Why not. Who or what did you have in mind, your highness?”, he asked.
If only he knew…
****
A burp worthy of legend resounded through the enormous crystalline halls of the Castle of Friendship. Shortly after, the tip-tapping of claws could be heard echoing through the corridors as a young voice called out loudly.
“Twilight! Twiiiilight! Letter from the princess!”.
****