I was sleeping, having a dream I thought, the kind of dream where you’re falling but it’s not a nightmare, and you land in bed, only when I landed in bed, it didn’t feel like my bed, and I still heard a voice where I shouldn’t, as I live alone.

“Hi, I—oh, I think it’s asleep.”

I know lots of people who are groggy in the morning, but that doesn’t apply to me.  If I’m awake, I’m awake.  But was I?  If I was, why was I seeing something so obviously impossible.  I was not in my dull, white-painted apartment, but in a rustic wooden house with smaller windows, and there was the small matter of the unicorn sitting human-style looking at me.  She had a green coat and mane and a grin I’d seen many times on image boards.

“Lyra?”

The grin turned to a look of shock.  “You know my name?!”

The human mind adapts rather quicker to the simply impossible than to subtler changes.  Had I woken up alone in a strange place, I’d likely be panicking, or if there was a regular human in my room, the same, but a pony out of the show I loved watching was something I was, if not prepared for, prepared to be prepared for.

“Er, yes, if that’s right, but how did I get here?”

She started getting excited.  “Oh, well, I’ve been researching humans for a while now.  Nopony else believes in them but I think they’re amazing! But, the few anecdotes I’ve gathered and the other ponies I’ve talked to about them all treat them as legends, so I wanted to really see if they were real.  I’ve been working on a spell to find one, which isn’t easy because spells to find something you know exists have been done, but a spell that just searches all of existence for something is fairly unconventional.  Actually, I might be the first to do one, and I’m quite proud, I mean, I’m not a major mage, I’m really just a musician, but I’ve worked so hard on this spell, working my horn day and night, you know how it is when—“

She stopped and looked at my forehead, then at my back.

“But you’re an earth human aren’t you.  I guess it would be easier to explain to a unicorn human, but I was just glad to find some human and then I worked single-mindedly on the teleportation spell to bring you here.”

“Actually, I’ve got to disappoint you.  There are no unicorn humans or pegasus humans.”

Shocked again.  “Really?! How wonderful, since you only have one tribe you must not have any wars in your history like ponies do!”

I got sheepish.  “Yeah, you’d think that, wouldn’t you.”

Her horn began to glow and from a table by the window a quill and piece of paper floated over to her and the one began to write on the other.  

“I’ve got so many questions to ask and I want to document everything!”

It was my turn for shock.  Seeing a talking pony was beyond the pale, so I could deal with it.  A glowing, floating pen and paper hit closer to home.  “You really can do magic!” I said, getting up to look at them.  It was in retrospect a silly thing to say, but I’d been asleep for the spell that had brought me there.  

“Of course, stuff like that’s easy, and for earth ponies and pegasi they can just hold the pen in their teeth and—Oh! You have hands, right?!  Can I see them?  That’s the part I’m most fascinated by!”

I finally had a moment to take stock of the situation.  The world of ponies, that I’d watched on TV and read comics and stories about with the other bronies and pegasisters was real, or at least appeared that way to all evidence, and if I couldn’t trust my senses, then there’s no point in considering anything.  And I knew Lyra from the fan theories about her, and they all seemed to be accurate.  She wanted me to help her understand humans, and that was fine by me, because she’d shown me, by doing this, that the cosmos was not a mundane place of meaningless physics, but that there was real magic in the world, even if it wasn’t the world I grew up in.

For that, I’d do anything, and the joy I felt at seeing this pony work something she’d call easy and I’d call a miracle was so much that I put some of it in mental storage for when I’d need it, and resolved to help her in any way I could, and to try to become her friend.  

While thinking all this I had held my hands out and she was poring over them.  I moved my thumbs in opposition because I knew that was something that biologists said was important to us.  She came over and stared, while my own eyes were glued to the rippling glow coming from Lyra’s horn.  I thought that later I’d have to show her cracking knuckles—that would really wow her.

“Lyra,” I began, relishing in saying her name, “I’ll be happy to give you all the help I can, and you can tell me more about Equestria and yourself, too.”

“That’s great! See, I have all these ideas that humans lived on Equestria long before ponies did, and they influenced a lot of our lifestyle.  If we can learn from you, we might better ourselves.  Though, you do know more about me than I do about you.  And I still want to know how you know my name, and you have to tell me yours!”

I told her, and then continued, “Well, I don’t think it’s as simple as us living here before you.  Now, this is just a guess, and I might be wrong, but, well, let me begin at the beginning.” I thought for a moment.  “Ponies have fairy tales, right, that you tell to young foals?”

“Sure, lots of them.  I remember as a filly my dam telling me stories about princes riding on white human steeds.  Although, you look like I’d hurt you if I tried to ride you, and you’re not white. You actually look at bit like my friend Pinkie Pie if she were paler.”

I chuckled internally at how they’d played with an idea to put their species on top.  Nothing wrong with that.  I went on, “Well, some humans have thought that maybe every time someone makes up a fairy tale, that world comes into existence in some other dimension.  Or perhaps they already exist, and what we think of as creation is really just perception.  In any case, Equestria is one of our fairy stories.”

“So. . . we’re just a made-up world and the human world is real.  I’m not sure I like that.”

“Our world might not be any more real than yours.  Someone might have just made us up too.  But if that’s the case, they did a much worse job.  We don’t have any magic at all, and no way to find out about other people and make a spell to get one of them to talk to us.  That was all you, Lyra, and I’m very grateful.”

I put my arms around her neck, and she put her forelegs around my back, and we held each other and embraced.  We talked all day, about our worlds and ourselves, and every time she absent-mindedly used her horn to open a door or bring food in or such, I wanted to clap and squeal.  I gathered she wanted to do the same every time I picked something up with my hands or wrote a note for her with her quill.