9 - Good Cheerilee
Lyra sat across from little Lucy and their guest, Cheerilee. "I'm glad you could make time for us. I know your job keeps you quite busy."
Cheerilee smiled, putting a hoof to her chest. "Oh, no, for this I can make time. Lucy here has proven to be quite a unique case for me."
Lucy huffed softly, her tail wagging back and forth quickly. Lyra raised a brow. "How have things been in school?"
Cheerilee wobbled a hoof in Lucy's direction. "Lucy is a stunningly smart and clever foal. Her knowledge of math is far beyond that of the other students, but it's not all elevated. She has entirely fictional knowledge regarding alchemy."
Lucy sprung to her hooves. "It's not alchemy! It's chemistry! There's no magic involved, it's just the rules of the universe at work."
Cheerilee leaned forward a little. "It scares me a little. She says clouds can form all on their own and even describes how, though the process is entirely nonsense. She describes fire as air combining with things! How does that work?"
Lyra was no science expert, but what was being described sounded pretty crazy. She decided to give Lucy a chance to defend herself first. "Lucy, let's pretend I'm the student a moment. Teach me something."
Lucy flopped onto her belly with a bitter expression. "What do you want to know about? My world doesn't have magic, so things have to work out on their own, or they wouldn't work out."
Lyra rolled a hoof. "Alright, I accept that for now. How about that fire thing? We have fires without magic just fine. You can explain that, right?"
Lucy took a slow breath. "I can try. Fire is a chemical reaction. Oxygen combines with matter and releases a fair bit of energy, which makes the heat and light. The heat can feed more combinations, which makes more heat, and soon whatever it is that caught on fire is consumed in flame."
Lyra nodded slowly, trying to keep up a supportive face. "What's oxah gen?"
Lucy rolled onto her side. "The atmosphere, at least back home, was comprised primarily by a few key gasses. These were nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. There was also a good amount of suspended water."
Cheerilee suddenly butted in, "If there's water in the air, wouldn't everypony get wet, and put out all the fires?"
Lucy put her hooves at either side of her head like she was fighting off a headache. "It's a very small amount of water in gas form that can't get you wet easily."
This was beyond Lyra's comprehension. "Water is wet, except when it's frozen, then it's just cold."
Lucy suddenly sprung up. "I can prove this one! Do you have a stove and a pot?"
She looked suddenly so cheerful, Lyra couldn't bring herself to deny her. "Let's take a little trip, if that's alright, Cheerilee?" Soon they were on their way to the shop/home of Lyra and Bon Bon.
Lyra greeted her marefriend with a soft hug before asking to borrow the kitchen a moment. They filed into the room, with Sweetie Drops peeking in from the doorway between customers.
Lucy spotted a tea kettle and grabbed its handle in her mouth, moving over to the sink and filling it up, then hopping up onto the stove and getting the fire going under it. "Watch."
Patience was rewarded with the kettle starting to whistle softly. "See! Boiling water turns to gas, and that's what makes the whistle work."
Cheerilee extended a hoof carefully into the path of the tooting kettle and brought it towards Lucy. "But it is wet, see?" The steam had made her fur damp. "You're obviously a brilliant foal, but some of these ideas..."
Lyra reached over with her magic and turned off the heat, quieting the kettle. "Well I learned something today." They both looked at her and she tilted her head. "What? I didn't know why the whistle worked."
Cheerilee looked amused, but shook her head at Lucy. "There's another problem. How did you live in steam all the time? That's hot."
"What? No, I..." Lucy sank again, clearly frustrated. "Water doesn't have to be steam to be air, it's just the easiest way to show you. If you fill a bucket up with water, doesn't it slowly go down?"
"No?" said Cheerilee with confusion.
Lyra shrugged. "I've only seen that happen in really hot places."
Lucy gave a sudden cry of dismay. "This whole world is crazy!"
Cheerilee looked to Lyra helplessly. "I don't know what to do..."
Lyra sat beside Lucy and reached to gently stroke across her back. "Take it easy, we're not doubting you. Let's assume, for the moment, that things just don't function the way you thought they should. Maybe this place is different from wherever you came from." That she may just be dreaming it up was still a strong possibility in Lyra's mind. "We can't argue the facts in front of us. Our world, this world, does not work the way you think it does."
Lucy sat on her haunches and frowned at Lyra a moment before she nodded. "O-OK..."
Cheerilee smiled brightly. "I'd like to teach you about the world, if you want to learn?"
Lyra nodded at Cheerilee, then looked down at Lucy. "You have an incredible talent. It's obvious to everyone that you're a very smart pony, but being smart doesn't mean always being right."
Lucy hung her head a little. "Alright, fine. I'll pay attention in class."
Cheerilee clopped her hooves with joy. "If anything confuses you, or you have questions, you can ask me. See me after class if you're afraid to do it in the middle. I want to help you, Lucy." She turned for the exit. "I'll see you tomorrow."
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First off, regarding the tea kettle, hasn't anyone looked at the white water vapor that comes from a tea pot and though, "Wow, that really reminds me of a cloud!" Also, the white stuff you see coming from a tea pot is not true steam. Real steam is invisible. When you see a tea kettle that's boiling, did you ever consider that there seemed to be a hollow gap between the neck of the spout, and the white puff? That "hollow gap" is where the true steam is, before it quickly cools and condenses in the air back into its liquid form in tiny droplets.
Very interesting chapter. Lucy remains one of the ponies I sympathize the most with, mostly considering she's an older woman who's suddenly found herself as a foal. My head canon doesn't necessarily agree that the concepts of chemistry and physics don't exist in Equestria (mostly based on some of the more scientific work we've seen characters like Twilight doing in the past), especially if they have knowledge of advanced mathematics (I mean, math and physics go so hand-in-hand with each other that they're practically reliant on one another), but I can understand the author's changes here. There is plenty of material from the show to suggest that, even if they share similar ideas of chemistry or physics with us (like, I'd doubt they don't even know what oxygen is, or other elements for that matter), given the way elements work in their world, there are plenty of deviations as well. Winter Wrap Up (and the start of winter for that matter), the Running of the Leaves, the fact that clouds can be walked on by 1/3 of ponies (though that seems to be more due to the magical properties of pegasi than the physical make-up of clouds themselves since unicorns and earth ponies still fall through them unless they've been magically altered). Overall, while my head canon doesn't agree with everything contrasted in this chapter between human and pony worlds, it's interesting stuff nonetheless, and the author definitely addressed said differences more than most authors do in fanfiction, so kudos for that.
At least Lucy didn't try to make absurd claims like the aether not existing or trying to disprove the commonly accepted material property of phlogiston. Or even saying even more silly things like a rusting object gains weight.
I look at this and think: The Everfree! After all, nopony knows how storms form over the forest.
Edit: Actually, Lucy proved her point with clouds and steam. Where did all the steam go? It can't all have gone onto Cheerilee. Also, since this happens anytime you boil water, the water must go somewhere. Since we can observe that the surrounding area is dry, it must be in the air. Therefor, the cloud explanation is currently viable.
Another experiment she could have done is the boiling pot sealed shut. You just boil a large pot with a small amount of water until the water is basically gone, then seal the lid on top of it. Eventually the air inside will cool enough that the pot will compress and collapse. That would prove that just because we can't see things doesn't mean they don't exist. Also has a lot to do with molecules and heat in general.
6012770 Actually, wasn't that explained? It was the seeds that Discord planted ages ago, that is now under sway of the tree of harmony.
6012731 Dusty droplets, no less. Never forget the huge part dust plays in clouds and mist in general.
Nice chapter. Poor Lucy, I don't know how she can stand it xD. Being the only former human who has to go to school just because she got put in a filly body.
It's not just that all of the things that are done by ponies with respect to the environment seem strange to us, its that they need to be done. Let's take the most obvious example: Princess Celestia and Luna raising the sun and moon every day and night. Now, from a human perspective, not only is it physically impossible to move an object over a million times bigger than a planet around said planet, but there's absolutely no need to do it. Orbit is one of the most stable and predictable systems in the entire universe, and if the sun always needed to be raised by somepony, then how could life on Equestria have evolved in the first place?
To my knowledge, it's extremley rare in fan fiction for Celestia to explain why the sun needs to be raised, and its never ever because a human asked her.
As someone who took both highschool physics and chemistry in the same year, I hereby declare Lyra to be the bane of science.
6012803
You are making the assumption that the sun isn't a magical construct about the size of the moon in the setting, and around the same distance away from the planet. More than one story uses that as a premise.
6012811 Is Lyra at fault, or does Equestria just not play by your rules? Work out how pegasi can funnel water out of a lake high enough to reach Cloudsdale for a fun physics experiment.
6012819 Simple. It works as suction.
6012813
As I said, I was talking about the conundrum from a human perspective. Any human brought to Equestria would initially assume that its sun is the same as ours, until told otherwise.
6012770
I think we can agree the science experiment was not well thought out. It's obviously not her special talent, and to be fair making a genuine scientific experiment in the presence of skeptics, without hinting prompts, is not a skill taught well in our education system.
6012793
That does not at all detract from my initial statements.
6012823 Sure, how would they make this suction? How much suction would be needed? I'm pretty sure the power required would be more than they could do with the brief flying stunt they did.
Lots of hate for these poor ponies who KNOW how the world works, or at least, how it reacts.
Lyra knows magic works. Trying to explain things like cloud making without magic would be crazy talk since everypony knows that that is how clouds are made. It isn't a grand concept that she understands, it isn't something that she researched. It is something she knows because everypony knows that.
Cheerilee is taking a giant step, assisted by a clever-thinking Lyra. She has realised that she really has a clever filly, a REALLY clever filly, who just has her basic facts wrong.
Consider for a moment that the greatest gift from a teacher isn't knowledge, but instead it is a way to explore the world around you to gain your own knowledge. Mathematics, physics, chemistry. Magic. Change a few constants, adjust a ratio. Oh no, there is a gap now that maths cannot explain, that chemistry cannot prove and that physics cannot test. But if we now have rules, functions, constants of magic those gaps could be breached and a new understanding and standard model built.
Lyra is really just applying what she knows to the problem at hoof. A sensible mare indeed.
to my knowledge, teachers make the worst students, and it is very difficult to get them to give up their preconceive notions, event when they are in the rough.
6012784
Wait really? If that is true I totally missed that.
Was slighty hoping Lucy memorized the periodic table and would just start rattling elements off.
Also I like how magic makes physics act differently, not wrong, just different. Now we have to figure out if magic is a particle, wave, both, or some nonsense bs.
Out of curiosity is the story going to end when they all accept their fate or is it going to be for each that accepts their new life a new pony appears?
"Lyra new human ponies are appearing one speaks Equestrian as a second language, another says he is a paraplegic but his hind legs work fine (or a perfectly healthy human becoming a crippled pony of you're cruel,) another seems to have been apart of some cult but is now doubting some guy named Jesus, and get this the last one says she worked on an international space station."
6012784 those actually only drained the magic from the tree of harmony until that was almost completely gone the everfree still functions as a zone of what we'd call 'normality'. Honestly the only reason Lyra is succeeding is because none of these humans are as pig headed as her in anyway when it comes to their preconceptions (luckiest therapist ever.) Because with the way she's handling them if they were she'd have alienated pretty much all trust from them at this point.
6012934 This creeping squarely into headcanon territory, but it sure seems that after the tree was restored, the forest ceased being a threat at all, not to mention it just makes sense that the plunder seeds made a place of 'chaos' where things happened all on their own, unlike the rest of the world.
Its interesting to me how what's currently happening in the story is Lyra helping them to adjust to life in Equestria as a Pony, which is something that probably would have happened eventually anyway, even if they had been believed about being Human in the first place.
Though in that case, efforts would have at least been made to return them home first.
6012803
Maybe that can be one of Lucy's questions.
"Yes Miss Cheerilee, you've explained that the Princesses raise the Sun & the Moon. But you haven't explained why they need to be moved in the first place. Do orbital mechanics not work here either?"
6012554
I really don't. I'm not expecting her to have any deep and sudden kind of professional insight into the situation or anything and I certainly don't think it's as awful and story-ruining as some of the sillier voices here have complained... but you kind of have to admit, given the sheer amount of absurd and and outright weird stuff that happened to that world and to Ponyville in particular since the beginning of the show, it's really kind of silly for Lyra and especially Twilight to have such a giant blind spot about this based on just one real test.
I mean, really, it's not like the idea is any stranger than your sister-in-law getting replaced by love-eating insectoid body snatchers.
It's not the scepticism so much as the lack of good reasons for it that's really bothering people. Just make up a few more "we checked for that and it came up blank" examples about possible magibabble thingies that could have caused the situation and you invalidate like 90% of the complaints you're getting.
6012997 But she hasn't, is the thing. She has not slammed the door shut in their faces about their past. She's kept her burning doubt -in her head- and out of the therapy. She is treating their disfunction, not their history. At no point has she leveled a hoof at someone and screamed. "YOU WERE ALWAYS A PONY, STOP SAYING YOU WEREN'T!", but the comments make it sound like she's doing that every chapter.
6012946 You mean as far as characters going in and out of it regularly? They were doing that before the plunder vines ever since season one with Zecora. As for after the vines it has been shown to still have the same look as before and still not require basic pony intervention in order to function, this still wouldn't mean it's operating under what we'd consider normal but neither is it what the ponies would either and I do beleive it's stated in the show itself that the tree is what's keeping the forest safe by anymeans and under control. (what if it's the tree that's restored normal functions to these processes not the vines making them function oddly?) Also what of places outside of pony control? Do they receive no weather at all? do they manage weather out over the open ocean? Places farther out then Appaloosa which is said to be on the border of pony control itself?
This one is headcannon but a commonly accepted one that their world once did work under rules like ours (Not assuredly the same rules as ours but ones none the less. but being like the windigos and Discord himself caused damage to the local spacetime breaking the normal passage of time in regards to physical reactions and other affects
6013018
I understand that's how you were planning for it to come across, but the repeated insistence on it is starting to make it sound like she doesn't, which is why you're getting this reaction from people. Sometimes, what you mean to say and what the readers see ends up not being quite the same even with the best of intentions, is all I'm really trying to say, and I was just trying to give an explanation for why people might think that way, as well as a possible solution to it.
6013064 Sure, if this were a subtle matter of inflection, I'd be all for that, but this is action. Each chapter she's tackled issues that have nothing to do with proving or disproving their proported past. She's dealt with social anxiety, biological and social eating taboos, making friends in school, gender dysphoria, potential suicidal thoughts, finding your place in the world, and how not to do the scientific method as taught by Twilight Sparkle.
At none of these points did she attempt to contradict their past.
6013087
Look, like I said, I understand that and I agree with you that it's really not that bad. I'm just talking about people's subjective perception of it - and fiction is all about subjectivity. You have to accept that sometimes people won't take the things away from your stories that you wanted them to see, in which case you can either accept their criticism and adjust the story or stick to your guns and leave it as it is, both of which can be justified. I'm really not trying to tell you what to do here, just why people could reasonably see it that way.
6013087
If it matters at all, I agree with you completely. Lyra may have many doubts and crazy theories, but she isn't saying it to them directly beyond corrections in speech and generalizations about themselves that don't apply to other ponies. Even if they infer that may be her position and clam up a bit when she starts asking pointed questions like "tell me about your parents". Her actions on the other hand, in every single case that I can think of, have been to try and reach them through multiple different ways, and helping them directly whenever she could and sees a way.
6012262
Yeah, you're right, I do have a lot of posts.
I was talking about Twilight ignoring evidence lyra talked about, specifically the hamburger thing.
6012554
Your argument works for Lyra, but my main gripe was with Twilight. It seems like she's ignoring things like Lyra now.
6013288 Twilight's barely involved. She's busy being a princess, and doing whatever it is that keeps her busy. Lyra has it under control, right? She doesn't tell the cakes how to prepare cakes, unless they're cakes she ordered (insert OCD frost distribution scene here).
6013301
Yes, but she was told that she had eaten meat, and that's the sort of subtly horrifying thing that sticks with you.
It'd be like if I was once in horsey dimension, and then someone claimed they knew someone from there and that the hay burgers could've been filled with human, or at least with something weird like vegemite. At the very least, it seems like something strange that would stick with you.
6013332
I'm pretty sure Twilight is in denial about that. After all, what does that mean if they are right? NOPE! NOT GOING THINK IT.
6012803 My Headcanon is that the sun in their universe is not only smaller than their world but is also made of magic and those that move it do so by commanding it rather than pushing it. The moon might be solid as shown by the comics by again its must have magic of its own that is commanded by Luna to move rather than her putting the actual force needed to move it.
As to why they have a day/night cycle that needs to be handled manually something happened to the real sun they used to have and was replaced with a magic one long time ago.
6013338
But there's always going to be that nagging voice in the back of her mind...
Twilight... TWILIGHT...
Hamburgers are made of meeeaaat...
6012856 Ponies: 1. This person: 0.
6013359
If they go to the mirror world I fully expect Lyra to ask and Twilight to not want to hear the answer.
6013358
And this was all explained in the official comics? (I'll have to take your word for it, as I've never read the comics myself.)
6013372
He said it was headcanon, so no.
I'm fully expecting all of Lyra's good intentions to go south with catastrophic results.
6013372 No like i said it's my headcanon as in what I "think" is the case, the only thing that was confirmed by the comics was that the moon is solid when Twilight and friends went there to save Rarity who was possessed by the nightmare that once had Luna.
6013368
Eh, I'd like to think Twilight has grown some during the series. As a ruler of the friggin nation, she should be able to put her people before her own squeamishness.
I just hope that the humans dont end up like this:
6013463 Who, exactly, is she letting down, and how?
6013556
In the case Canary was talking about, Twilight would be specifically ignoring things that the humans said because she didn't want to acknowledge the fact that she ate meat. And those would be things that would definitely help humans prove themselves and feel like they're not crazy, especially if Lyra was going out of her way to figure those things out.
That was more of a specific case. In your story, it just feels like Twilight ignored some disturbing but possibly very important information, which doesn't seem to match her actions in the show from what I remember. There is Feeling Pinkie Keen, where Twilight ignored evidence and did science poorly, but much of Pinkie's Pinkie Sense is ignored by the writers themselves except for in the occasional gag or reference, the writers aren't scientists, and Pinkie's Pinkie Sense flew in the face of what she read about magic before. I also just feel like this scenario would match some sci-fi adventure story that she would've read before.
6013358 Actual canon shows that it has to be "Pushed", as shown by the Journal of the Two Sisters, and that it's drastically taxing on the magic to do so as it eventually drains the magic of the unicorns that move it overtime away fully due to the strain of it all.
Hell no. That doesn't make sense. Lucy wasn't describing it right, but physics still work in that world.