Necessary Love

by Zurock

Chapter 32: Music

"... I'm sorry, what?"

Reality had just hiccuped. It felt like all the world had paused, and when it had resumed playing it had glitched ahead through a few corrupted seconds. No matter how much James squinted over his memories he couldn't recall those few vanished moments.

Twilight groaned low and uncomfortably, and the heavy strip of color already bulging across her sunken nose deepened in its redness.

"I'm ready to talk about s-s-sex," she reluctantly repeated.

James nodded, hearing the words without trouble, but he understood them not one measly bit. One eye scrutinized her, then the other, then the first again; each went in turn as his head spun. A menagerie of little hints shined from her ungraceful body, and he tried to read every possible clue he could out of her angles, colors, quivers, and expressions. He took them all in and analyzed them thoroughly.

And then he said, "... I'm sorry, what?"

This time Twilight's groan openly sparked with frustration, set off by all the unnecessary difficulty being added onto what was already a very difficult thing. But she channeled that anger into sterner self-control.

"I've decided that I'm ready and capable to talk to you about"—for a flash of a moment she snapped her eyes shut and concentrated hard—"sex... so... let's just get this underway... (while I still feel ready for it...)"

No fast response came from the man. Not even a slow one. But it wasn't as if he had nothing to say. There were too many dangling threads before him, each more frayed and absurd than the last, and in his effort to grab at any of them he wound up making several clueless, false starts.

When at last he got a hold of himself it was with a sudden crash back into reality. He glanced from table to busy table, up to the lively stage with its ongoing performance, and then back to her whereupon he uttered, quite startled, "Wait... right here? Right now?!"

"Y-Yeah," the unicorn weakly muttered. And she was very quick to justify her choice, "This is one topic where I don't know if I'd be able to handle talking about it in-, ah, in p-p-private. T-That is, I think it might make me very, v-very uncomfortable to talk about it one-on-one... all alone with somepony else... just me and them... b-b-because, y-you know, it's so-, uh... so... intimate... But out here, in the middle of this party, we actually have the best of both worlds: it's public so I won't feel very trapped, but there's so much noise and activity going on that nopony could possibly overhear us."

"I-... um, okay," James scarcely believed what was going on, "but... why? I mean, you've already made it pretty clear that the subject is off-limits. WAAAY off-limits. 'Ponies don't ever talk about it,' I believe were your words. And I'm good with that; I can abide; I genuinely don't want to make anypony uncomfortable. Besides, I even already promised you that I wouldn't speak a word of it ever again!"

"I know...," Twilight stumbled, "but I've done some thinking on it since then and... I guess I finally realized that... maybe ponies don't ever talk about it (uh, as far as I know), but..."

She looked a him with new, old eyes.

"... you're not a pony. You can talk about it. Somehow. So, while I do appreciate your willingness to avoid the subject and live by our culture – and I think that's very wise – maybe-... maybe there should be at least one of us whom you can talk to about it. If you need to. And-... and... uh..."

There was the shyest shrink of her body and the most delicate glance back at him.

"... I'm willing."

James still didn't understand.

"It's really not a big deal," he tried to back away from the topic casually. "You're making yourself so flustered over a whole lot of nothing. This isn't necessary."

"James."

Twilight inhaled solidly before casting the solemn breath back out with her hoof.

"You're my friend. I believe you when you say you don't want to make anypony uncomfortable. But more importantly, I trust you to be able to handle a discussion about such an... uneasy topic... in a way that is respectful to me and my sensibilities. Just as I hope that you also trust me to be a ready and capable ear for things that maybe you can't always talk to just anypony about. I want to show you that if there's ever anything – anything at all – which is important enough to you, then you can always at least talk to me about it, no matter how awkward it might make me feel. You don't have to hold it inside you, and be alone."

Earnest; sage; effortless. It was the most natural thing she had said since the very start.

"We can do this together."

The man released a gasp so sticky that the stretching saliva between his lips snapped apart like tearing fabric. He had to pry his tongue from the roof of his mouth with a crowbar. And even afterwards it still took him a lifetime to say anything back to her.

But finally he gave a thankful nod and answered, "Well, Twilight... that's very-, uh... very-... you know. I really do appreciate the sentiment of it. Really, I do. It impresses me how much consideration you've put into this little matter, and-... I mean, that's enough for me."

"James-"

"Listen, it's the thought that counts, right? So thank you. But it's fine. I don't need to talk about sex. This is silly."

"'Silly'?" she remarked. The word almost bothered her as much as it intrigued her. "Isn't there anything about... s-sex which is important to your kind?"

"Yeah, sure, but not... that important. Especially here. I'm the only human around for a billion miles, after all. It's not worth dragging you-"

Dude. Dude, listen.

Prism likes snuggling.

And kissing.

And God only knows what more...

Yeah?

Yeah??

Go get'em, tiger.

"... James...?" Twilight called to her abruptly frozen friend. Her horn clicked and there were pops that went off before his eyes, like fingers snapping loudly. She couldn't even read his face very well. Perplexed? Intrigued? Disturbed?

"I guess...," he eventually mumbled, waking up from his stupor, "... maybe... we could... talk a little and see how it goes? It... can only help me understand ponies better, right?"

"Absolutely," the unicorn smiled. "It can help us both understand each other."

And then their table went silent.

Laughter and chatter was bouncing about at all of the other tables, occasionally broken by piercing hoots or resounding cheers for the stage show. The huge speakers still thundered with music, and there was a bit of a hiss from them as Gallowayo hit a powerful crescendo, screaming out about a passion so burning it put the summer sun to shame. Every square inch of the boardwalk was jam-packed with vibrant noise.

Except for that ill silence between man and pony. They only spoke through distracting coughs and clumsy glances.

"So...," Twilight eventually opened the conversation again at a complete dead-end.

"So...?" James helplessly echoed.

"Well... aren't you going to... say something? Or ask me anything?"

"You're the one who came to me."

"Uh, yes, that's true, but... um... shouldn't you start it? Aren't you supposed to be able to talk about s-sex freely?"

"Okay, I guess, but... I don't even know where to begin! I mean, I know what sex is to me, but I don't really know what it is to you; uh, as a pony, that is. You dropped some clues before but... you were being purposefully vague to avoid crossing the line, right?"

Her tongue flopped about in her mouth before she finally answered uncertainly, "... Y-Yes?"

The man's knuckles gave his forehead a disgruntled rapping.

"Okay, how about I lead with a few questions then," he restarted.

"Right," Twilight took a hopeful breath.

"Alright, so, first: maybe you could explain why, for you and for everypony, it's such a big deal that apparently it can't ever be talked about, or even mentioned?"

Her lips trembled, "W-W-Well th-that should be obvious."

"N-... Not really," he said, quite amazed and disheartened.

"It's-... it's something incredibly private!"

"Private, sure, but that only means sometimes discretion is advised. Not 'always pretend it doesn't exist.'"

"W-We don't pretend anything!" she groped for any resistance. "It just... shouldn't ever be talked about because it's such a gross violation of personal boundaries!"

James wanted to pound his forehead so hard that it would open up and get his brain some fresh air.

"Again," he said, "if it's so personal that just means it's my business if I want to talk about it or not, yeah? It doesn't mean I should never talk about it."

Struggling still, Twilight reminded him, "But you went on about Venus and Vesuvius!"

"Alright, fair. I did," he conceded. "So instead, let's stick to me now. If we just talk about sex and me, then it's okay, right? Because the only personal boundaries involved are my own?"

She strained to answer, "... N-No..."

"'No'? Because...?"

"B-Because-... because..."

The empty space which followed ran so long that the man pretty much had to accept it as her full answer.

"Alright then," he said.

"No, listen," the unicorn hastily returned, "it's because... it-... it's something so important. It has to be treated with delicate hooves and oceans of respect. Any sort of casual treatment is too careless."

The man let the reasoning process for a few moments before he replied, "I guess I just don't see the link between that and the overly-thorough censorship of it."

Maybe Twilight didn't either. He saw such a searching look on her.

"Hey, let's try something else," James suggested. "I mean, I'm still trying to get a hold of where exactly it fits into Equestria, so maybe we should get a little more fundamental. Now... for ponies... (God, it feels so weird to even have to ask this)... is sex still the biological process by which a pair of ponies have foals?"

"Um..."

The question occupied the unicorn's thoughts for way longer than it should have.

"Yes."

"Okay...?" one of his eyebrows crawled upwards.

Dear Lord, this was not looking good.

He went on, "Now I have to ask: is having foals... the only purpose sex has for ponies?"

"... 'The only-'...?"

Her eyes dodged the question.

"Yeah," he said, "like, um... if-... if I were sitting in the park and saw a family of ponies walk by – two parents and two foals – then would it be an accurate guess to say that the parents had only ever had sex twice?"

Swiftly a ghastly color flooded Twilight's face.

"Why would you even think about them having s-s-s-... um, d-doing that?! T-That's t-their p-p-private-"

James simply covered his eyes, shook his head, and sighed.

Game over. Done. No more.

Seeing this, the unicorn immediately tried to reassert her better self, to little good. She squirmed in her seat, her forehooves rested nowhere on the table without tapping away a nervous tune, and steady streams of sweat poured down from under her bangs.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she begged. "I'm-... I'm trying as hard as I can. Um... could you repeat the question?"

Reluctantly the man obeyed, "I'm only trying to feel out the exact place... it... occupies in your culture. So don't think about what I think, just... if you have an answer: do ponies only have sex when they want to have foals, and at no other time?"

This time she really concentrated hard, mustering together her every last drop of focus. No matter how difficult or agonizing, she was determined to scratch her way over that hill, and bit by bit she went crawling up it. At last, when all the math had been solved, and all the data collated, and all the history reviewed, annotated, summarized, and sorted; she had a delicate answer for him:

"Um... m-... m-maybe?"

"'MAYBE?'!"

Thank high heaven his loud gasp stole his voice away from him briefly. He was only able to mouth his foul vow to have sex with himself.

Embarrassed in more ways than one, Twilight shrunk.

No matter how badly James wanted to be understanding he couldn't manage it. His mind was positively, absolutely, unequivocally blown. On one hoof she could acknowledge a reality, and with the other she could deny its every implication! And this was from Twilight! Twilight! One of the smartest ponies!

"How much do you know?" he dared to ask.

The question haunted the unicorn. The remaining purple drained away from her face, leaving behind ghostly white except wherever anxious red swelled.

"H-H-How much do I k-know...?" she wanted to be really, really, really sure that was what he had asked, because she was hoping it wasn't.

"Yeah, about... it."

"W-, W-Well... I-..."

And she only grew worse.

Shame enslaved her. The silent lashes of its whips and the clanking of its frozen shackles brought her low. Shame for how ignorant she now appeared; shame for how she had dared to speak aloud about so vulgar a subject; shame for her foolhardy boldness and false confidence which had led her to approach the man to begin with. And above all, shame for how fast her defeat had been. Shame for how obvious and wrong it had been of her to have believed.

Like the unlearned, failed student who reaches far beyond their capacity out of their own stupid pride.

The many shames mixed into a monstrous soup, physically painful to swallow as it poured itself down her gullet and devoured her from the inside.

Desperately she clung to her last light: her unbeaten curiosity; the only grace within her which was still unshamed.

"... How much do you know?" she questioned him in turn, not at all as a retort but instead very withdrawn and earnest.

"In the past I would have said, 'Enough,'" he responded harshly, too flabbergasted to properly restrain himself, "but now I feel like the answer should be, 'A whole heck of a lot!' I mean... how do you avoid the consequences of knowing nothing? In my few months, I haven't seen any signs of the problems I would expect! I had to be taught this in school!"

And, completely subverting the man's primed expectations, his unduly strong attack didn't deal Twilight much damage. No; if anything she picked her sorrowful self up a little bit, rising firmer in posture and surer in voice.

"'In school'?" she almost didn't believe him.

"Yeah, I can still remember the teacher wandering about in the front of the class yammering on about sex while waving around a wooden dildo."

Again, instead of sending the unicorn running for the hills the strange comment only pulled her in closer, by just a little bit.

She peered at him, and she stumbled over the curious, unusual word, "A wooden... dil-... doe?"

"Yeah, it's a-"

Oh. Oh, Christ. What had he done?

He was finally getting some control of his bewilderment, sweeping it out of his tired, slightly-drunken mind. Unfortunately discomfort was fast to fill in the freed space. Maybe Twilight was getting stronger because he was somehow absorbing the embarrassment out of her.

Meekly he finished, "... it's a wooden model of-... of an... erect penis."

At first she merely squinted oddly, understanding the legitimate purposes of an anatomical model. It was only when her mind went further that the indirect damage laid into her. The description of his memory conjured in her a twisted mirror-memory; a fantasy film reel manufactured from her recall being distorted by his lewd suggestion. The projector clicked and whirred and cast its image into her mind all before she had any opportunity to resist it.

There was an old classroom; a familiar one which had always felt like a second home no matter how many years it had been since her last lesson there. Before the chalkboard was Princess Celestia, wise and powerful, strutting about while giving one of her lectures; so far identical to a thousand of Twilight's real memories. But then the wrinkle came. Her apparently prurient mind inserted something new:

Encased in the Princess's glowing, golden magic; being swung about as if it were a pointer stick for all the equations scrawled in chalk; was a long, gigantic, firm, wooden-...!

Every last drop of blood which had earlier ebbed from her face came flooding back, like a geyser erupting.

Silence again crowned itself ruler of their table. The only sounds which moved between them was the music of the stage show still rolling through the air. Gallowayo was coincidentally also singing about about a rush of blood, though naturally from tender excitement rather than heated dread. And when the chorus kicked in, energetic and excited for the feeling, Twilight slunk down further.

"I think that's enough," James said at last. He himself was actually fairly far down on his sitting-post, preferring the uncomfortable feel of a wedge up his butt to any uncomfortable flush in his face.

"W-What?" the pony jerked up.

"This is too much for you, Twilight."

"N-No!" she nearly climbed up onto the table and protested. Yet she hardly made a good case for herself: her legs were shaking terribly, her voice squeaked in half-murmurs, and she was still more red than purple! But she insisted, "I-... I can do this!"

"Maybe; I don't know," the man fidgeted while scratching his forehead, "but... whatever sex is, it is definitely not important enough to put you through all of this. We're done."

"No! I can-, I can handle-..."

She stopped.

She shut her eyes.

She searched inside herself and grabbed it all; every big glob of panic; every last shred of apprehension.

She threw them all beneath her hooves and pounded on them, packing them together into an uneven, oversized clump. She smashed and smashed them down until she was standing unbalanced on top of her hill of inadequacies.

The effort left her no less blushed, but far more calm.

"James, listen... This thing that you can do... How you can be so nonchalant and direct about something that is so-... so... ineffable... It's really-... it's-..."

"... Yes?"

Her voice buried itself under ten tons of cottony whispers, leaving behind only noiseless lips to be read. But what they spelled out came strong and unmistakably clear, and it wasn't anything offended or perturbed.

"... It's very fascinating...," she said.

The man backed into a dead-end of almost literal despair.

"Uh, okay? But how are supposed to even talk about it when-! Ugh! Twilight, this gap between us is so gargantuan! I cannot begin to wrap my head around your worldview on this subject! It sounds like you—like all ponies—legitimately know absolutely nothing about sex! Like you're scared of knowing anything! And I can't even grasp how that can be real!"

The gloom he presented had a strange effect on the unicorn. She was struck right in that odd place between confusion, amusement, and discomfort. The man, after all, was the very same fellow who had earlier been so outrageously flippant as to run down an endless chain of sexual euphemisms right before a whole crowd of ponies! He had sprung his indecent trap out of the blue, even delighting in his audience's lack of forewarning. But here, now, all that juvenile mischief of before was absent entirely. The level he was on now was so very different from before.

"I guess there's no sense denying that I'm much more ignorant about it than you," she said. But then, a little mischievous herself, she poked at him, "So, aren't you going to needle me about how quaint and in-the-dark I am?"

He was aghast.

"What? No! This is serious!"

"Really?" Twilight lit up in realization. "So, despite your impish display before, and your disregard for precious privacy, sex can occupy a profoundly serious, important place for humans?"

"It-...? What? Of course it can!"

"James."

Her magic lifted their empty drinks and carefully set them far aside. The plates and other particulars, too. Everything was put aside, leaving wide room on the table for an open discussion between mature adults.

"We can do this," she promised him, more sure than ever. "When you first displayed such an unbelievable willingness to even talk about sex, and especially after your cheeky hailstorm of vulgar colloquialisms – something so incredibly distant from every expectation of respectable manners and polite decorum that I know of – how could I have possibly guessed that sex was something you gave any serious regard to? But here we are! You're pulling back and hiding, and it's for something more than just to spare my feelings! So I've learned something new about you! Ultimately, no matter how wide a gap there is between us, it's going to be like everything else we've ever debated: if you can't grasp my views then don't you just have to try again until you learn something about me, too?"

The unconquered part of herself – the studious, tireless, intrigued scholar – had gained complete control. She was excited.

"We can do this."

...

Christ.

"Uh... okay, I guess...," James just barely changed his mind, wiping the sweat from his neck.

This was ridiculous, though. She could hardly speak the word 'sex' without turning into jelly, but now suddenly she was fine? One step away from the topic itself, into its mere periphery, was enough to eliminate all her troubles? He had no reason to expect she wouldn't just slide right back into distress the very instant they directly touched upon any sticky detail.

But he had been wrong to have doubted ponies before. Again she was helping him see the difference between wisdom and arrogance. He knew what he knew, but of ponies he knew only what he thought he knew. Already he had admitted to being dumbfounded by their worldview. To assume that he couldn't understand it because he had better answers was the height of hubris.

What a selfish and conceited dick he had been to have even thought about exploiting Prism's cultural feelings.

"Excellent," Twilight said. She was disappointed she hadn't brought a quill or paper for taking notes, but nonetheless was primed if still a bit wary. Nodding for the man to once more take the lead, she sat up straight and listened.

Quietly he thought, then slowly he came out with his next question, "Alright, so... again, maybe it will help to get a better idea of how much you really know. So, carefully now: if you had to describe what sex is, how would you?"

This time she didn't crumble, but she did take a long moment to steel herself.

"It's... the process by which ponies... mate."

"Right. We got that far before. But do you know any more than that? I mean, could you explain the physical process as far as you understand it?"

Some of her dread returned. A cold sweat came over her.

But before she even opened her mouth in an attempt at an answer, James appended quickly, "Using whatever words you are most comfortable with! Just: to the best of your ability, and going into no more depth than you feel safe... could you describe it?"

"Ah, right. Yes. I can. Uh. O-One m-moment."

To herself she sighed, and then she gathered her wits. After a short pause she did it again, taking two deep breaths instead. Finally, she started to answer.

"... When two ponies love each other very much..."

Already James was shaking his head and biting his lip.

The pony nervously went on, "... that is, they are very... very, very, very much in love. So in love. And when they're alone! Very, very, very much alone. AND they are one hundred percent certain they will not be disturbed by anypony! Ever, without exception. Yes. Yes, that's it: when they're in love, and in privacy... once both those things are true... then-... well, then, ah..."

She swallowed a boulder.

"... then their b-bodies... e-engage a-and... ah... t-they... ex-ex-exchange essence."

Her sentence hit a hard, unfinished stop, and in her head she was very obviously double-checking her answer; dotting her i's and crossing her t's as judiciously as possible. There was a huge stumbling block though: she was no teacher of this subject and had no answer key to reference. There was only one way to verify her work.

Cautiously she gave the man an incomplete glance and asked, "... I-Is that right?"

"Uh... yeah," James confirmed halfheartedly. "Yeah, more or less."

To be fair, while less specific than he had needed, her response had honestly been more detailed than he had hoped.

"Is there... more?" Twilight was concerned by his reaction to her ignorance. "I-... I think I could be a little more detailed."

"How about this," he offered instead. "Outside of, like, the magic of love, do you know if there is any actual magic involved in the process?" Her phrase 'exchange essence' had been so unhelpfully vague, but it had triggered a new avenue of thought in his mind.

"I don't... think so?" she replied. But her own dim answer convinced her, and she shook her head. "I guess I don't know."

The admission was intriguing.

The man leaned forward, almost laying himself on the table, and he asked, "How do you even know the things you do know? I was educated in school, but you...? I'll confess: I've looked through the books in the library before specifically for details on sex – just in idle interest, I swear – and I never found anything. The closest thing I ever found were biology books with very sober and fast details on anatomy, but no mention of, you know, certain specific functions."

Twilight's nerves again found all of their ordinary strength. She straightened up like she was sitting down for an unremarkable breakfast: a hot coffee waiting to cool, a plate of ready food which needed minimal attention, and the morning news floating nearby where it casually flipped through itself one page at a time. All specks of terror had fled.

"Of course you wouldn't have found anything," she said. "Not in a public library, anyway. Research on such a topic, if any exists, would be stored where it wouldn't be generally accessible; probably, I'd guess, in the archives of Canterlot in the forbidden section."

"The 'forbidden section'?" James incredulously remarked, though really he shouldn't have been surprised.

"Sure. It's where any knowledge is kept which isn't for public consumption: the manifestos of history's villains, the lore-keys for any magically-stabilized but critical systems, doomsday spells..."

"Oh, so they just lock it right up with the world-enders," the man pushed back, happy with sarcasm. "Forget that one of the big purposes of sex is the exact opposite of ending life."

Even Twilight found the quip funny.

"I don't think it'd be kept there for any reason of danger," she chuckled.

"Then why?" he immediately asked.

"For the same reasons as before! It's private! Ponies don't need to know about it."

"Ponies don't need to know how to bake a cake either," he returned to sarcasm, "but they don't throw all the recipe books into the forbidden section."

"That's a poor analogy," the unicorn dismissed.

"No, I'm serious," he said. "What would happen if anypony could just waltz into a public library and read a book about sex?"

Her red-faced embarrassment and wobbling-lipped worry suddenly returned. Her security had been toppled so fast there hadn't been any good indication of what exactly had bowled it over.

"Th-Th-They w-wouldn't read it, e-even if it was t-there! O-Of course they wouldn't!"

"Then why bother hiding it?"

"B-Because-... because... it-... it-... it's too important!"

The man was again flabbergasted by her same, desperate, lacking excuses.

"Doesn't that stress how it should be studied, then?"

"W-What? No!"

"Well then why do you study friendship? Because it's not important?"

"No! That doesn't-... that doesn't follow! T-They're completely different things!"

But by that point even Twilight understood how badly she was rambling, throwing out gut answers in place of thoughtful reasoning. She rubbed her face in disappointed frustration.

"I've... never really thought about it much, okay?" she surrendered.

"Right, I know, I'm sorry. I'm just trying to understand," James pulled back. "So, maybe again: how exactly do you know any of the things you do?"

And again, the more she earnestly thought about his question the more she wandered away from whatever it was that had the power to flare up her crippling anxieties. Before long she became relatively normal once more.

"Some things you can just assume," she eventually replied.

"Can you really?" the man tried hard not to sound so disrespectfully doubtful. "I mean, understand: I really want to agree with you on that. I really do. But now, after the back and forth we've had here, I'm not sure how much can actually be taken for granted anymore. Like... are you really just completely guessing? You have no direct, or even indirect, source of information?"

Twilight gave herself an even longer time to think.

"... No," she answered at last, "I don't. I've never read anything, or been taught anything, or spoken with anypony about it before. Ever. The closest thing I can think of is the regular checkups I had with my doctor when I was reaching the age of maturity, but even then we only sort of talked around it. It never came up directly. We just... seemed to know enough to understand the things we had to allude to."

James sighed, pressing his fingers into his eyes. For him, that was confirmation of his new guess.

"Magic," he said.

Now that she had been forced to review it, the evidence seemed strong to Twilight also.

"I suppose that's a logical conclusion..."

It was a little disappointing for her, even. Magic, so she wanted to study it; but sex, so she felt compelled not to.

And even the man was disappointed.

"I guess that's the end of this, then?" he asked. "If magic is playing some mysterious role, but any study of it is 'forbidden,' how much could we really figure out?"

"Plenty," Twilight mounted an immediate resistance. She didn't understand at all his despondence. "Our goal isn't to uncover any great secret. We're just trying to learn a little bit."

He dismally replied, "It sounds like you're not supposed to be learning about sex, though."

She shook her head and clarified, "Trying to learn about each other."

Once again, James sighed.

But he nodded.

Starting anew, Twilight decided it was her turn to lead the way, "... You said something about how you wanted to agree with me that... certain things should be self-evident?"

"Yeah." It took him a moment to recognize that she was looking for more. "Oh, uh... okay, so... for people – for human beings – it's... such a fundamental part of yourself. It's such a fact of life. It seems impossible to imagine not knowing something about it instinctively."

"You've also been educated on it formally, though. As a matter of course, even," the unicorn pointed out, "and therefore—correct me if I'm wrong—you likely come from a culture which is simply flush with that kind of knowledge. (Not the smallest clue I had was your cavalcade of euphemisms. Are there really that many ways to speak about it?)"

"(Yes, and I was barely scratching the surface too. But then again I was also making a lot of them up off the top of my head, so that's why many of them probably sounded so terrible.)"

"(Right... well...)" She coughed to break off the aside and return to the real conversation. "My point is, it honestly sounds like your society is saturated with sexual information, so maybe all of the things which you imagine are assumptions are instead absorbed through that thick cultural atmosphere? Observation, not intuition. Maybe total ignorance of the subject is something you can't actually perceive because you come from somewhere its influence is unavoidable?"

James reviewed his memories, scanning for what would have been his earliest exposures to sex. Thankfully his childhood had contained no upsetting real world experiences, not as a witness or as a victim. But as he thought about it he realized he had been receiving sexual clues as far back as his earliest youth, when he had been just barely aware enough to take in the world around him.

The utter importance everyone had placed on clothing, particularly for below the waist.

The hard rules on touching others, specifically when and where it was not okay.

The conspicuous ways adults had disguised some things they had talked about in his presence; to an impressionable youth it had always been easy to accept as 'just the way big people talk' but even then it had felt like something obvious was being kept from him.

However, maybe the most significant stream of information in all his childhood had been from the television; the portal to culture at large.

There was the weird way folks on TV had sometimes hugged and kissed, which had not been at all like the way mommy and daddy had hugged and kissed him. In cartoons, too, the interactions between romantic partners had born comically-rendered hints of lust that had only become much clearer to him as an adult; cartoonish double entendres. And, by God, the commercials! People in them hadn't seemed like real human beings sometimes because of their extremely exaggerated preoccupations with an unnameable something.

True that he had never had an outright moment of sexual enlightenment from any of those sources, but the ever-steady drip had ensured that the basin hadn't been dry when the time had come to dip his toes in...

Perhaps Twilight was right: his ability to see the line between known and unknown was poisoned by one simple fact: humans behave like humans.

"Hmm..."

"Yes?" Twilight encouraged him to share.

"You have a point, I think," he said, "but it makes me wonder. As you've said, you don't have that cultural foundation. But there still is a side of sex which is instinct. And I mean literal instinct; the things innately felt in response to something. You know, like hunger."

The idea didn't seem to take with the unicorn, and she studied it with a disfavorable glare.

"Like a nutritional need?" she ruefully questioned.

"No. No, not quite," he replied, though he sounded unconvinced of himself. "I just mean those physical and mental sensations that grab you and try to steer you. Like being hungry: you feel something in your stomach, and in your head you get sort of occupied with it."

"Oh. Oh! Hm..."

But she still didn't relate.

"What kind of sensations?" she asked.

"'What kind of-?'"

The man's forehead crashed into his waiting palm. He could feel the burning of his brain right through his skin and skull.

"So you've really-? You've... never felt anything... you know... hot inside? When, like, you're looking at somepony?"

She shook her head, "Felt what? You're going to have to be more descriptive."

"No, no, no. I was only going to ask because there's-... there's got to be something!" he said, and then he pointed towards one of the other tables specifically. "I mean, I swear I've seen Rarity checking out the tall, dark guy there. Like, a lot."

Twilight looked, catching sight of Rarity with her unusual entourage at their table. When she came back she shrugged, "I'm sure Rarity doesn't mean to be so impolite by staring that much, but even I admit that Mr. Sweet Nothing is a remarkably handsome pony."

"'Handsome'? No, no; it's not always his face she's looking at," the man disclosed. "I'm pretty sure I've seen her eyes kissing his butt whenever she's gotten the chance."

The claim startled Twilight and she looked again at the other table.

In Equestria, fate must have been a magical thing too because the unicorn couldn't have peeked at a more perfect moment.

Sweet Nothing stood up and walked off, on his way to loyally retrieve yet another something-or-other for Rarity. Right away the dressmaker proved James' assertion: she let her gaze be pulled in by the dark stallion's hypnotic hindquarters. Her eyes bulged to every flex of his trim muscles as he went along.

Even Twilight's stare lingered. When she finally broke herself free she came snapping back, and a tender strip of color was on her nose.

"H-He...," she felt a certain difficult obligation to be honest, "... does have quite a shapely rear."

It was a humorous moment so normal in its nature that it took James a long time to realize the discrepancy he had witnessed. But, like a hunter come upon baited quarry, he pounced.

"That!" he pointed at her, and her flushed cheeks, and her nervously delirious gaze which was leering inwards at the delicious memory it had just absorbed. "That right there! That's it! You're having a sexy thought!"

"What?! No I'm not!"

And all over again she crashed into the deepest ends of her embarrassment. Face a tomato, steam rising from her cooking scalp, eyes so far retreated into her head they had come out the other side; it was perhaps her worst case yet.

She squealed desperately, "I-I-I'm n-not th-thinking a-a-about-...! I-I'm-...! I w-wouldn't ever th-think about another pony in that-...! W-Why-... why would you even s-suggest that?!"

"I dunno! Because to me it looked like you were! If not that, then what were you thinking about? You know, what was going through your mind while you were staring in slack-jawed lust at his 'shapely rear'?"

"Lu-Lu-Lu-Lu-Lu-Lu-Luuuhhhsssss—?!"

As her teeth sealed her mouth shut, crushing her tongue and lips in the process, she was left hissing out a spray of saliva.

His accusation of unforgivable mental impropriety had been scandalous to be sure, but somehow it had been his follow-up question that had really disturbed her, and not straightforwardly. In every way, shape, and form it had seemed to be a dig at her; an attempt to excavate a little more mortification out of her. Every way, that is, except for the fact that he had asked it with such an innocent face.

The context of their whole conversation came back to her. He may have been speaking in his usual way, as his usual self, with his usual idiosyncrasies... but he had genuinely meant it as a part of their discussion.

He honestly wanted to know what had been in her mind.

She tried to work her way up to a coherent response.

"Ah, w-w-w-well... I w-was-, um... I was j-just..."

Yet, for another time, the movement into her own headspace was like emerging from a thick fog. That was not to say that she was no longer flustered; she was still being made to talk about her private attraction to strong, honed haunches. However, any impossible thoughts of sex which may or may not have been in her head had all but put there by the man's suggestion. Her return to self meant the banishment of all that foreign filth, and what remained was only her tender, innocent reflections on one of her secret appeals.

But confiding to a friend about the things which made her heart awkwardly flutter was at least something she could do, however embarrassing.

Twilight cleared her throat.

"I was just... a little mesmerized by how well-developed his gluteal muscles are," she admitted sheepishly. Pushing herself further, she faded a bit but went on, "... And I was thinking about how-... how if I were to ever... fall in love... then... I hope my special somepony might have a backside like that..."

"... 'Fall in love'...?" James echoed in wonder.

She squinted suspiciously at him.

"When you see somepony very beautiful," she pried, "and stare longingly, what are you thinking about?"

Caught unprepared, the man burbled something meaningless, too certain that any frank reply would've sent Twilight diving under the table in fright.

His drivel was enough though. It was the little string Twilight had needed to sew together all the facts she had learned so far.

"You think about sex?!" she gasped.

"N-Not always... but... it happens," he tried to respond.

"You see a butt and you think about sex?!"

Then the next horrific leap of logic hit her.

"Wait a minute..."

On the very first night she had met the man, months ago, they had spoken at length about human society and its supposed need for clothing. 'Modesty' he had credited it to awkwardly. She had thought it a very interesting if strangely delivered answer. It was different, especially compared to ponies, who...

"... we're naked all the time! You can always see our butts!"

Though the table blocked much of his view of her, it was obvious to James that she was crouching lower in her seat and curling her tail tightly around her bottom like a shield. Her forelegs tucked in to guard her chest and abdomen. Really, any lady might have reacted in the same way if the shower curtain had flung open unexpectedly.

"H-H-Have you been st-staring at our butts?" she almost didn't want him to answer her outrageous question.

His delay before responding didn't help, but he was again dumbfounded by her visceral and almost out-of-place reaction. On the one hand the way she protected her body was such a natural response to her embarrassment, for a human. But on the other, the abrupt appearance of that defense was very jarring. All her life she had wandered naked in comfort, because she was a pony, but it was only in this specific moment that it had suddenly become such a mortal issue.

Like Adam and Eve biting into the fruit of knowledge and suddenly realizing their nakedness...

"No, I haven't," he said, and thank goodness he was able to be fully truthful about it.

Mostly.

Thank double goodness her horn didn't allow her to steal peeks into his head, since she would have briefly seen the image of a braided rainbow tail swishing to and fro, attached to the seductively swaying rear of Prism.

"I mean, not particularly..."

Twilight's stare shifted from shock to leer.

"Really," James put forward a stronger effort, "I don't go looking for butts to ogle. I'm more respectful than that."

"... Yes... you are," she acknowledged, and she slowly eased down some of her guard. "But... you're suggesting that you can feel innate... sexual sensations... just by looking at others?"

"To me," he said, "it doesn't seem any different on the outside from the way you and Rarity blush over a chiseled tush. But I guess something on the inside is pretty different."

"I'll say," the unicorn agreed, shaking her head in amazement.

And then lament infected her voice.

"What a terrible curse."

"Now hold on a second," James objected. "I don't call it a curse, and I would not give up my sexuality even if presented the option."

"But you're saying you feel some sort of sexual urge, like hunger, simply as a reflexive response to casual visual input. That's fine on Earth where everypony is clothed all the time, but here in Equestria where we don't wear many clothes, everyday you have to suffer such a filthy reaction when-"

"Woah, woah, woah," the man nearly stood up from his offense. "Hold on. No. No, no; disgusting and sexy are not remotely the same thing. They're very opposite things, in fact."

Her hoof came up, and her mouth opened to return fire, but she caught herself in time.

"I'm sorry," the unicorn humbled herself. Little effort was needed to be sincere about it, too; she knew how unfair a judge an unthinking gut was. "We suspect now that, because of my culture and my magical physiology, I actually have some sort of hard set aversion to it; and that's my nature, not yours. It was wrong of me to call any natural part of you filthy."

"It's alright," he calmed himself quickly, and offered, "I apologize for getting a little angry over it."

"That's part of your nature too," she smiled, "but you've been getting a lot better about controlling that."

The similarity struck her.

"I suppose," she said, "if you can manage your anger then you probably have some ability to manage this... response of yours. You know, to visual stimuli."

"Yeah. It's not anymore uncontrollable than your tittering over a pony's butt."

The unicorn thought, then nodded as everything fell into place.

"An instinct," she explained aloud to herself. "A complex responsive behavior. A triggered sense, felt inside. But where one goes once the instinct has activated is their own decision. Like... choosing to suppress your hunger because you have too much studying to do. Or"—she snorted in amusement at herself—"being conscientious enough not to stare at somepony's butt, no matter how nice it is."

"Ha! Yeah, exactly. That's me and pony butts. All the prancing around in the buff hasn't bothered me at all."

He entirely declined to mention that he had only begun to feel real impulses of that nature ever since meeting Prism, and he still wasn't sure how he felt about it, or if he had control of it.

But Twilight believed what he had said wholly, and it was a big relief to her. The last of her fears scurried away into the darkness and her tail went back to its natural resting position.

"Come to think of it," she said, "in all these months I haven't seen a single thing from you that was untoward or... suspiciously sexual. Except that episode in the garden, but that was really the very first thing that had ever happened. So it was pretty ridiculous of me to assume your species was so completely sexually unmannered. (Sorry again, by the way.) But, that does lead me into something else I wanted to ask."

"Oh? Let's hear it."

"It's obvious to me now that though there are sexual things humans feel very easily, even on Earth there are times and places where expressing those feelings, or acting on them in certain ways, is improper. Just... less rigid than compared to us, right?"

"Right."

Now very far into her curiosity, she said, "What I want to ask is: was it rude by your standards, when you announced to us your take on Venus and Vesuvius' relationship? You know, when you declared to all of us, out of their earshot, that they were 'banging'?"

Her nose twitched from a tickle because of the funny phrase.

The man thought it over. Then...

"Yes, actually," he was surprised and ashamed to learn. "On Earth it wouldn't have been the worse transgression, but it was still unsolicited speculation of their personal affairs, which is kind of rude in any situation. So, I'm sorry again, too."

"So that was just you being incorrigible, like usual," she snickered.

"Well, if I can weakly defend myself for a moment," he smiled back, "outside forces slightly encouraged me to act in such a devilish manner. I had never seen ponies behave like Venus and Vesuvius before, so I was sort stuck between 'I really want to know what's going on here with ponies and sexuality' and 'it's just us friends, so let's talk about things we shouldn't normally talk about in polite society.'"

Twilight chuckled, "Ah, gossip. That is pretty rude!"

The bizarrer bits of his reality happily flummoxed her, but there was more on her mind.

Carefully, and not without a bit of remorse for violating the law of respect they had just pointed out, she asked, "So it was something about how they acted? Venus and Vesuvius, I mean. Something they were doing seemed sexual to you? Because I can tell you, even to my observation, they are both... kind of eccentric."

Briefly James held back on answering, caught instead by something he saw behind the shimmer of the unicorn's amethyst eyes. There was a glow in her fearful, bold spirit. She knew what kind of 'vulgar' response he could have given to her question but she had come forward virtuously anyway.

Finally the idea of her complete trust made sense to him.

"Yeah, they were acting weird," he told her plainly. "It really reminded me of some human couples who are in that kind of physical relationship, which... is the first time I've seen that sort of thing in ponies."

"Interesting," Twilight said. "And your guess that they aren't married?"

"Oh, that was much more of a baseless guess," he assured her. "I suppose the thinking goes like this: if they were married then they'd have probably been together long enough to be a little more comfortable with each other; enough to be a little less obvious about all the... you know."

"Ah. Hm," she was again intrigued. Yet she pointed out the glaring flaw in his comparison, "But these are ponies, and not people; your intuition is probably misleading you. It was a bit of a guess on my part—(okay, a big guess)—that unmarried pony couples don't... h-have s-sex... but the most likely possible explanation is that Venus and Vesuvius are just... unusually brazen about the physical affections they do express."

"They don't care who knows that they snuggle and cuddle twenty-three hours a day," he laughed.

And the same thing for Prism, too, the disappointed thought flitted underneath the man's laughter.

"So," Twilight was keen, if a little nervous, to ask, "that's the way people behave when they're... 'in such a physical relationship'?"

"Some, yeah; again, if they don't really care who can read their hints. Others are more discreet. Others... less, heh."

She blushed, but stayed in control. She also looked inwards. It seemed to the man that she was probably reviewing years of her own innocent observations of pony couples; comparing, contrasting, reevaluating.

"It's sort of like this:" James decided to elaborate for her, "they look at each other and they feel those instincts inside, like we were talking about, but instead of getting all shy or cagey about it they open up and let themselves enjoy it. So... it is kind of shameless, in a way."

Twilight pondered what he had said, though with some difficulty. Her face squirmed. She weighed and she wondered. She consolidated and she considered.

And then...

"... Really?" she said, mousy but marveled. "I find it so hard to imagine that those instincts can feel... nice... but..."

"Yeah, they're... good feelings," he answered. "Even if our heads go different places, it probably isn't much different from when you look at a hunky piece of flank."

"... But," she intruded, so shy for the knowledge, "we don't actually know if it's any different or not..."

"Yeah, but-..."

He would rather have avoided trying to describe immeasurable feelings. It would be like evaluating colors for the prenatally blind. More personally, it was embarrassing because he didn't have any good, ready words, and he hated his moments of ill confidence.

But this was sort of what he had signed up for by joining the conversation, wasn't it? And Twilight had been brave enough to have shared with him her love of pony butts. That alone had earned her an honest effort from him.

"Ooooogh," he groaned.

But he gave his best.

"So... like... when you, say, look over a sweeping vista... it makes you feel different inside. Your breathing changes, there's this well that springs up in your chest, and an easy wind sort of caresses your thoughts. You've felt that, right? Those good things? That all happens cause you're looking out at something and you're witnessing beauty.

"Well, the same principle applies to witnessing... sexy. Just... things feel different, I guess.

"You-... you feel... your blood move inside; you really feel it. And... your face gets warm; it-... right at the tops of your cheeks, especially. Warm like... coming-in-from-the-cold kind of warm. There's also this tingling tension that-... it comes over you, sort of like when you can sense something exciting is just about to happen. It's not... electrifying exactly, but the... energy that sort of buzzes over your skin; here and there at first, but then everywhere; it's hard to describe. And-... and-... all in your head there's this lightness, and... your mind wanders a bit more freely and happily than it would otherwise."

Digging deeper and deeper into his own thoughts he fell into a focused silence, closing the door on the world around him. In his workshop he crafted diligently the next pieces of his message, trying to figure out how he could speak about the more desirous elements without troubling Twilight.

She spoke first though, startling him out of his ruminations. Very suddenly, and with thin breaths, she said, "That-... that is... not at all how I imagined it might feel..."

"Oh. Yeah, it's something else," the man replied.

"And that is as a preliminary reaction to just seeing something?"

"Someone, yes," he specifically corrected her.

The unicorn had to know, "So then... pr-presumably the r-response g-gets... concordantly greater the cl-closer things m-move to-... to-..."

Led on helplessly by her hint, James couldn't stop himself from giving a big nod and a hearty, "Oh yeah."

And that one reaction – with the satisfied shiver in his voice, the far-off look to his eyes, and the warmth with which he sat up straight – finally clued Twilight into something that she simply never would have guessed otherwise.

"W-Wait... You-... You've-..."

"Hm?"

"Y-You've h-had-...? B-Bef-fore...?"

She knew already that he had never been married, he realized, so therefore her natural assumption as a pony was that he-...

"Uh, yeah," he answered for her slowly and plainly, hoping to keep any more unintentional physical hints to a minimum. "It's not uncommon for sex to be a part of a dating relationship, and I've dated so..."

The pony just stared at him from behind her bright, burning face.

He coughed into his fist and then held up some fingers.

"Three," he said. "I've been in a few relationships, but three of them got to the point where we... you know. I don't know about ponies, but for people it's for more than just having foals."

Twilight sizzled. Her blood-rich cheeks became so lit up that they hid the entire rest of her face behind their crimson shine. With a swift drop of her head she brought her mane down to cover as much of her ripening bashfulness as possible. There was an endless stream of uncertain twitches from her body: jitters in her legs, shuffles in her hips; like she was getting ready to run but was too discombobulated to fire the starter pistol.

James pinched himself in punishment for his bad behavior. Although he thought they had been dancing around the topic respectfully, obviously he had slipped up. His failure became clear to him belatedly:

Ponies usually keep everything sexual at a distance with a thirty foot pole.

He had made her realize just how much she had shortened that distance without knowing it. He was the literal closest she had ever been to sex.

It must have been like waking up from a nightmare only to find herself already inside the dragon's closing maw.

Or maybe not.

Faintly her eyes came up. Radiantly her the tip of her nose glimmered red hot. Softly her voice crept out.

And she asked, "... What's it like...?"

Right away she buried herself under her mane again, aghast that she had even dared to wonder such a thing. But her ears stayed up and alert. Her invincible curiosity still listened. She was braced for what she knew would be a trying response.

"There's... no good answer," James stalled. "There's not any one simple thing to compare it to." This had already gone too far! It would have been a dumb idea to push it any further!

"... But...," she again scarcely roused herself, "... what's it feel like...?"

"Geez, God, Twilight! With no point of reference I don't know how you think you can-"

"... Just...," she came up again to beg, "... describe it... Describe it in whatever way you're most comfortable with..."

The music from the stage still pulsed explosively, but it wasn't nearly as loud as the man's throbbing blood. His own moisture made the air about him so thick that he was drowning in it.

"Okay... okay... okay," he covered his face with his hands. "Just... stop me if-"

A weak nod from her let him know that she understood.

Oooooh, no way in hell was this what Princess Celestia had in mind when she had said there were perhaps things Twilight could have learned from him.

"... Alright, okay... so... there are... physical sensations involved. Uh, physical stimulations. Pleasurable stimulations, ah, of... your body. It just... happens... when you touch, and get touched. Not like a massage feels like but... it's-... it's... kind of like those other sensations we talked about before but... much more intense, and immediate, and direct. Like... something crashing into you slowly at first, then quickly; all of it just... good.

"Certainly for some people, just chasing that stimulation is enough, and for them that might be all there is to it. But... that can be like... reading only the climax chapter of a book. Exciting, sure, but... there's so much more there, you know? If-... if you want to bother with it...

"And... much like a book, well... there are good reading experiences and bad ones, right? Sometimes a book is so terrible that you feel worse for having read it; like, you can't even finish it, it's so bad; you put it down and walk away, and you're sad, or upset, or angry, or-... Right, and, uh... sex too, I guess. Not-... I mean, the emotions it can make you feel, like how a... bad book stirs all this... negativity and awful feelings. That-... that kind of thing can happen with sex.

"One of my relationships kind of ended because of that. It-... yeah, things weren't made better by the decision to get more physical. Cause it didn't matter how our bodies felt; there's got to be more than that in a relationship, I think. I... don't know how it works for everyone, but we-... um, we... couldn't build something on just that. Where there should have been some heart we-... I, I guess... I just left my body to handle it and... it ended badly not long after that.

"So... I guess what I'm trying to say is... it's... easy to think of it as just a thing of biology... like bodies and senses, but... there's a big connection to your emotions too. There's hardly a part of yourself it doesn't affect. So... you can shut the door on those emotions as much as you can, if you want; some people do, cause... some of those feelings can be pretty depressing, or scary... but-..."

He glanced Twilight's way.

Though she was still very warm in her face, the man's winding trail had left her utterly confused. He'd seen that look before: her trying to piece things together when he had given too few pieces to make it possible. And certainly he now saw how badly he had veered to one side.

He hastily tried to correct his course.

"... Uh, but-... um... so, bad books, right? Well, of course, a good book-... uh... Some are so good to read that it's... incredible. Right? Like, they can be... life-changing. They make you think and feel so many... things... that you never knew you-... Ah... And-... and anyway, uh, at its best I think that sex is... kind of the same. If you can really... let-... Um... There aren't... the words to sort of... explain it... Um..."

He had moved too quickly and his ramble fell apart.

The silence he gave left plenty of space for a particularly strong burst of singing from Gallowayo, which came pouring down from the stage:

It's not just a kiss that loves you
There's more that I miss without you
A feeling of bliss above you
In rain, showers this about you

Every sight, every sound; perfection!
Everything you surround; an obsession!
I'll breath only you
Just breath in me too
We'll be whole; one, in our connection

"Sort of like that!" James borrowed the song. "But-... but more, if you can believe it."

He had in mind one particular moment of his life. A magic moment, where he had been certain all crooked fears had been smoothed away, and all ambiguities had be made bright and clear, and the way to a perfect, golden, inevitable future had been laid down before his feet. Things had come apart painfully sometime later, of course; such was romance and life. But that moment had an eternal life of its own in the quietest beats of his heart, sharing the space so peacefully with the heartache it was bound to.

Something incorruptible. Engraved in stone so imperishable it could not be weathered down by time or pain. Perfect words he didn't quite have, but those feelings he had memorized down to the tiniest detail.

"There's a connection; you connect with you partner... Something happens. You... get close to each other; so close; closer than is possible... The barriers just... go away, and then... you can-... everything you both are can just... mingle...

"... It's not just her skin you feel... That touch; her heat... her heart... The warmest... most powerful feeling...

"... And the sounds... The noises you hear... Her breathing, and whispers... Just... unreal secrets being told without words...

"... You look at her and... she's not the same as ever before. You see every beauty: outside, inside... Everything, without a veil...

"... Close enough, too, that... you can smell her sweat; her body... It's... beyond any flower... or garden... or vast wilderness...

"... Ah... and... each kiss... Each taste... nourishes somethings untouchable but essential...

"All of your senses get filled with each other... You become full, because there's nothing else you can feel but each other. Nothing but you and her. You... become each other. I-... I don't know any other way to describe it. It-..."

He, really and truly, for a short and divine moment, forget everything of where he was; who he was; how he was; why he was.

"... It's the closest thing to a transfigurative experience that I have ever felt, by far."

His numbness to the world quickly faded after the moment had passed. Surprised to find himself back in the warm island night, he looked up to find that his distant glimpse of Eden had made quite an effect on his pony friend.

She was somewhere else, though he couldn't tell where exactly he had sent her. All that remained behind in her place was a ball of glowing heat and silently blazing imagination, in the form of a frozen Twilight. So thoroughly petrified, it seemed like she might never return. The only sign that she wasn't some luminously red statue was the tiny crack in his lips which opened now and again to exchange soft wisps of air.

When eternity finally came to a close some of her brightness started to fade, very gradually like a slow-setting sun, and she spoke a loud whisper:

"... Wow..."

"Yeah, that... might be a better way to describe it," the man said gently.

"... That's what it's like...?"

"That's what it can be. When it's perfect. And I don't know how often that is but... it's happened."

Twilight was conflicted. Horror; wonder; she alternated between the two states constantly. Each shudder she suffered for having invited in such unthinkable thoughts was followed afterwards by her muscles relaxing to warm sighs of imagination.

Eventually she became visibly frustrated with herself; with how every time she tried to focus on her amazement she found herself stumbling into unclean and guilty sensations.

"I can't grasp it," she complained with a sour grumble bouncing from her lips. "I want to think about it, but I don't want to think about it. And I also don't want to think about why I don't want to think about it, even though I really want to think about it!"

"Well, hey...," James didn't know what to tell her. Trying to be jovial and sympathetic, he settled on echoing, "... the more magic goes into the world, the more magic gets taken out, right?"

Even as a bit of friendly snark, it was a good band-aid.

She brightened and said, "That's still nonsense. But... I suppose this is a fairly concrete example of your idea. I cannot—I CANNOT—get it all the way through my head, no matter how much I try."

Once more she gave it a go, closing her eyes and concentrating furiously. But once more she quickly hit the same brick wall, pounding up against it with disgruntled moans.

"When I try to think about sex," she explained, "I get overwhelmed by how personal and intimate it is. From every busy corner of my brain I'm shouted a thousand deafening reminders of how important and private it is, and there's this crushing dread that I'm doing something I'm not supposed to be doing and I'm going to get caught; like if I were digging through a pony's drawers for their darkest secrets when they weren't at home. I can scarcely think at all once the tidal wave of uneasiness, guilt, shame, and so many other paralyzing feelings washes over me."

A light came from her horn; a soft, faintly glittering one. It drew a small, sealed box in the air which Twilight regarded with a sense of sad mystery.

"When I really quiet my mind, it seems like I have this... something... that's so special that I can't even take a peek at it. To open it up just a crack would expose it too much and it would spoil."

As the shimmering image faded she sighed.

"Do you think," she asked the man, "that ponies just aren't able to grasp it the way that you can?"

"I don't know; not with magic being what it is," James said. "Like, I can understand simply being a little shy of sex and wanting to avoid being very public about anything sexual, but I can't quite wrap my head around how... immune you are to it. Or it is immune to you, maybe. That's all too unreal for me."

He gave her perspective another chance, trying to weigh it as fairly as he could, but it was out of his reach. The failure only made his resolve more stubborn.

"In fact," he objected, "I have to believe that deep down inside, somewhere, ponies must to be able to feel the good, special parts of it, even if they usually can't. Like... do married couples turn away from each other in shame when they talk about having a foal? When the time comes do they cower, and blindfold each other, and just get it done as quickly as possible while weeping the whole time and then are too embarrassed to speak to each other for days afterwards? Do they feel resentment for everything they went through, each and every time that they coddle their beautiful newborn foal?"

He shook his head.

"I don't think so. I don't care if I'm wrong; I don't think so."

"There could be a hundred other answers...," Twilight mulled.

Another warmth came into her; not of embarrassment.

"... but... I really want yours to be the right one."

The kind remark tickled enough that the man scratched behind his ear, and he said, "Ah, well... I'm only guessing. Maybe I'm just clinging to home, right? See, to me, irrespective of magic, the whole thing isn't just about personal relationships but is also a matter of species survival. On Earth—"

Confident, intelligent, lecturing like a professor; the unicorn took over for him, "—things are, at times, broadly chaotic and dangerous. Without magic to offer solutions, ingraining an instinctual inclination towards sexual activity into a given species would result in strong reproductive numbers to act as a bulwark against any large assortment of deadly environmental pressures. I've been able to piece together that much myself."

James was surprised as much as he was impressed, and immediately sorry for doubting her (again). He gave a praising bow of his head.

"Hehe! So," Twilight continued, "I hope you're wondering about how that applies on the Equestrian side of the threshold. I know I am, now. Ponies have no such instinct (apparently), yet we've been perfectly fine without it."

"So this magic must be substituting for instinct, somehow."

"Or compensating," she molded his theory a little. "In the past I may have demanded more proof of such a thing, but after today I think the strongest hypothesis would assume a link. What exactly that link is... hmm. I don't know if any Equestrian scientist will ever be able to answer that, given that the subject may be impossible to study rigorously."

Her smile lit up.

"However, we're free to conjecture!"

"So what do you think?" the man rubbed his chin.

And Twilight, being Twilight, of course already came forearmed with all the facts.

"Well, the birth rate of ponies in Equestria has been at a very stable 15.0 for a thousand years. Probably longer, but we don't have much older data; more accurate census data was one of the reforms implemented as part of Princess Celestia's Renewed Dawn initiative shortly after the banishment of Nightmare Moon. However, of what data we do have, we've seen that the trend line hasn't changed once; not an inch, not even for a single moment in recorded history."

"Uh," James politely intruded, "I'm not up-to-date with how birth data actually works, so...?"

"A birth rate is defined as births per 1,000 of a given population annually. Another way to interpret things, which might be more useful here, is the fertility rate. Perhaps not unrelatedly, that rate also hasn't changed in a thousand years, sticking to a healthy 2.025."

"You mean," the man summarized, partially to himself as well just to make sure he was keeping up, "the population barely grows year after year."

"That's a matter of other factors as well, including the mortality rate," she informed him, but confirmed, "however, you're correct. Population growth is incredibly steady, but slow. I'm sure that's a bit of a shock to you; 'healthy' for us is probably pretty low for humans."

He wavered, "Depends on the circumstances, really... but that makes it a bigger shock that the Equestrian numbers have been so stable for so long. I guess it explains why all the old maps I've seen in the library haven't changed much in forever: the frontier probably hasn't moved in a long time."

"No, it hasn't," she said. "Ponies migrate around within Equestria, but there's never been much need to expand. Moreover, marriage here perhaps isn't as common as you are used to (now that I have Earth to use as a point of comparison). It's hardly rare, but many ponies are too busy following the call of their cutie marks to settle down into marriage."

"So," he interpreted her, "a fertility rate just barely above two, but when families happen it isn't unusual to see three, four, five foals?"

"Correct."

"Probably also the occasional oddball number, like when a pony comes around who has a cutie mark of a crib on their flank and so they go off and have ten foals."

"The current record of foals from a single mare is thirty-six, set 189 years ago by a pony named Baby Factory."

"I-..."

Okay. Yeah.

Wow.

So unnecessary... but so... astounding.

"... I am feeling so many things right now," he said.

Those heroic hips! And she was a pony too, so of course she had probably managed to perfectly love each and every one of the little soldiers in her personal army.

And he could have assumed that she had only earned her record due to promiscuity, but no. No, these were ponies. Every one of the rascals had the same father, for sure.

That stallion! What a disappointment if he hadn't had a cutie mark of an enormous bowling pin flanked by two humongous bowling balls, because that stud had to have been rolling strikes every day!

James had to hit his head to knock the distraction out of it.

"Anyway," he blinked away the stars and narrowed on Twilight, "before today you really weren't prepared to call an iron fence's worth of straight lines in the population data the work of magic?"

"Things have been that way for a thousand years, at least," she said casually. "Why should I have assumed anything was being influenced out of the ordinary? Technically even influenced it isn't out of the ordinary, for Equestria."

The man opened his mouth and raised his finger, but stopped short of objecting.

"... Fair point," he realized.

"Given that we now know how a world can work without magic," she pointed at him, indicating Earth, "it leads us to the biggest question of all..."

If their entire conversation prior to that point had been serious, then Twilight suddenly crossed the line into profound and world-shaking.

"Magic is many things," she said. "Powerful. Complicated. Vast. Mysterious. Infinite! But one thing it is NOT... is ignorant, and purposeless. So..."

She asked the question which most consumed the universe entire...

"... Why?"

More of a prayer than a question...

"Why influence ponies' sexual behaviors in any way, let alone whatever ways we presume it has? That is, what are its specific purposes?"

"... I don't know," answered the man softly, quitting after an extended silence which Twilight had given him.

"I'm sure you don't," she gently replied, "and we'll probably never know, really. The full relationship between ponies and magic is fraught with unknowns that some of the best minds in history have spent lifetimes studying, only to barely scratch the surface. Finding full, satisfying answers for something like this, which besides being tied to magic is also so unapproachable and even practically untestable... I don't imagine we'd get very far in a hundred thousand years of research."

The eon empty of answers passed by her in a brief moment; one sad glance aside at the floor.

"But," she asked the man, "do you care to guess anyway?"

"Why me?"

"You have the outside perspective," she pointed out. "So, what does that intuition of yours tell you?"

"Geez, I don't have a magic brain here... but... if I had to make a blind guess? Hmm..."

The only answers he had were from his raw imagination.

"'Better safe than sorry'?" he shrugged.

"What do you mean?" Twilight found his answer unsettling. She lamented, "From everything you've told me, it sounds like we're missing out on a lot..."

"Of good and bad things, yeah."

She twisted her eye at him, but when it became obvious that he was intentionally declining to elaborate, she hummed with some disappointment.

"I suppose," she said, "maybe it's a bit like something as wonderful as magic being used for selfish, wicked, and destructive ends?"

"Yeah, and more," he replied. "That's really why my best guess is what it is: maybe magic is just lifting the responsibility of sex off of you?"

"Hm?"

"Well, when you're given responsibility for something..."

He sighed a long, broad sigh.

"... there's always a chance you can screw it up and make a big mess of things, right?"

Twilight fell quickly into a cold rumination; one glaring enough that the man didn't want to intrude, but he had to wonder what had seized her so strongly. Her thinking face wasn't new with realization; something old was in her head.

It was a great surprise to him when she suddenly spoke grimly.

"Equestria stands on a very fragile line because of magic."

"What do you mean?" James asked.

"I only realized it after you came here and I had a chance to glimpse a truly magicless way of life, but I've been thinking about it a lot, on and off, these past few months. Everything we've talked about here only adds to my theory."

She explained, "You see... on Earth, as you've told me, there are plenty of fantastic and beautiful things, but also many, many terrible things. Brutal wars full of senseless violence. Cruelties with no apparent source and no obvious solution. Even widespread maladies like hunger and illness which go untreated, infecting the souls of populations. Things the likes of which just aren't really found here in Equestria.

"Here, ponies'll fight and disagree quite vehemently, but we'll never raise armies to spill each other's blood or in a selfish lust for power. The worse disagreements might be long-lasting and bitter, but never deadly, and in the end they can always be overcome.

"We'll feel jealously against our fellow ponies, but we'll never explode in a rage and kill them because of it. Friendships sour and become lost, but mortal enemies are never found.

"Our hearts break and despair chokes us, but we'll never do anything to harm ourselves just because we're at wit's end. For us, destruction is not a solution to any problem.

"Equestria is virtually free—blessedly so—of these particular kinds of awful suffering which are so unfortunately common in your world. I've taken to referring to them as micro-evils."

"A little bit dismissive a name for some pretty serious stuff," James commented.

"It's not in reference to size or gravity of any one evil," she beseeched him to listen, "but how they're so endless, in all sorts of terrible forms, and they're spread like seeds of misery in the wind across the world. They're evils which exist so harshly and intimately on the level of individual lives.

"Now, because Equestria doesn't have these things I could certainly look upon them and shake my head and say self-righteously, 'That's terrible.' But..."

She could have taken a wound, she suddenly looked so distressed.

"... here we have what I've now taken to calling macro-evils. Magical supervillains; beings who have had the might to have nearly conquered the whole world singlehoofedly; who could have brought endless enslavement on every innocent life if they hadn't been stopped. Around Equestria there are fonts of corrupt magic so corrosive that if they ever got out of control they could rearrange the face of the planet or even irrevocably distort existence itself. And, as you highlighted: there's actually a shelf in Canterlot where there are spells just sitting there which can make the oceans literally boil, or crack the sky apart so that the jagged shards rain down and pierce the world."

She stopped to scrutinize her friend, and she asked, "Do you see where I'm going with this?"

The man answered in understanding, "It's a question of if you want your evil as one thousand cuts to your body or as one huge blade right through your heart."

"Right."

Her long-lived ignorance had her shaking her head in dumbfounded shame.

"I never realized how alarmingly regular these tremendous threats to Equestria have been," she said, "in no small part because it's always been this way. But, with perspective, I'm beginning to see that while magic's influence does so much to protect us from micro-evils like Earth has, it is perhaps the single biggest reason we are exposed to so many macro-evils."

"... That's quite a heavy load, Twilight," James said after absorbing it all. "But... what brought this on? I mean, we were talking about sex."

She waggled her head, "Well... assuming that some of our guesses are at least partially accurate... I thought about it because it seems like sex has now fit into that same mold. On Earth its existence as an ingrained instinct grants your species a sort of existential robustness; against even immense catastrophes humans will survive, if only because of their endurance through propagation. But in Equestria... we have something else. Something that maybe has been custom-tailored for us by magic and has serves us well for countless generations, but..."

Loose speculation was supposed to be idle fun, but this time she doubted herself and hesitated. Maybe it wasn't worth giving this worry a voice?

However, she persevered.

"... magic might have gained such an extensive influence that all it would take is one hard enough knock to our delicate system to throw everything into terrible calamity. Maybe even enough to end everything..."

The man knew rather well how much Twilight almost deified magic, so that she had spoken so suspiciously of it was upsettingly blasphemous. Worse: it was so heretical that he knew she wouldn't have shared it at all if it had been some sort of pleasant-pastime hypothesis. There was something alarming about how she had needed to share it.

It set him thinking. And thinking. And thinking. Until mountains erupted from his brow and his eyes went low and dark, and he broke the grim silence to ask her:

"You said... the civilization on this island just... disappeared at some point... right?"

Comments

[Zurock]

If I may say: a very interesting chapter to write, but I think it probably isn't nearly as interesting to read (though of course I hope it's still enjoyable). Probably a good example of how the hipshot writing method I've chosen for this story can play oddly very easily.

Obviously at the start the idea was sort of to use ponies to create an alternate possible sexual worldview and then have it clash against James' human worldview, but that didn't really wind up happening. The biggest reason was that the ground I gave Twilight, though a fairly solid take on a cartoonish sort of sexuality (that is, it conforms to Standards & Practices by being out of sight and out of mind), was so hardline that it gave her no room to argue with. What's more, both characters really didn't have much to argue for either, in the end; they weren't in places personal enough to make that important, really. So what wound up happening is you get the characters struggling to close the gap and find the middle very quickly. I thought it might have turned out differently, but ah... well... I had fun, and it didn't hurt the machinations of the story.

And that's one thing I am very happy with in this chapter: the character beats. Characters are moving into position perfectly for what's going to be happening next.

---

Anyway, no chance I'm getting another chapter out before the new year. Enjoy your holidays, everyone! And a toasty, warm, wonderful New Year to you and yours!

[Uros]

You are Zurock, chapter hunter, and today you bring fine prey! (Hope everyone catches the reference).

In all seriousness, good chapter ^^ I want more, naw :3

[Hallucination]

Ooh, maybe entire Pony civilizations have just been wiped out before. Since there were no survivors, nobody would ever know anything happened. Whatever great evil or cataclysm wiped out the civilization would then either dissipate naturally or simply have no direction and then eventually be defeated. Destroyed civilizations like on the island would be lucky to be found at all, let alone have their culture deciphered. Is the fruit a "macro-evil"? A disease that kills everyone on the island, and anyone who comes to research it or find out what happened is consumed by the fruit and becomes obsessed with it?

[Jack Kellar]

... damn. I don't even know where to start on how disturbing this talk was, and how much it makes the Passion's Embrace crew seem normal and very relatable from our point of view.

Your version of Equestria is not one my sanity pool would appreciate a visit of, Zur...

[Inugami]

7806576
mm
well i really loved this chapter
simply because i love arguments..eh...intellectual arguments
especially when they explain what they are talking about
THIS CHAPTER WAS LIKE HEAVEN TO ME MATE

the highlight of this chapter made me giggle

"That!" he pointed at her, and her flushed cheeks, and her nervously delirious gaze which was leering inwards at the delicious memory it had just absorbed. "That right there! That's it! You're having a sexy thought!"

heheheh
great chapter brother
hope you have a happy holiday and a even better new year

[Danger Noodle]

Okay, so that went from embarrassing for our human and pony to sociological doomsday.

[grouchopony]

Wrong word choice?

"I was just... a little memorized by how well-developed his gluteal muscles are,"

I think 'mesmerized' was the word you were looking for.

[Zurock]

7835597
Noted, and corrected. Thank you.

[Truthseeker]

A ridiculously rough start, but the end result is nigh unfathomable. What a conclusion to come to! Holy cow!

On an entirely different note: Baby Factory? I laughed so hard I all but passed out.

On a MUCH darker note: the obvious conclusion here (for me anyway) is that the Ponies on the island became promiscuous and thus the natural magic of the world wiped them out to maintain the status quo of the rest of the world. That is one hell of a DARK take on what happened. If that is indeed what occurred, it would require, nay DEMAND, a more focused look at what magic does and how it interacts and affects the world and Ponies at large. The realization of this truth (if it is the truth) would then dictate that magic is a sapient force which is controling Ponies to the point of a malignant dictator (depending on how you view such things). That is one HELL of a scary thought.

[KvAT]

So if the cult is pushed on, the magic of Equestria will kick in and just delete every pony that had eaten that forbidden pleasure fruit? That's harsh.