//------------------------------//
// Twilight's Time 
// Story: Twilight's End 
// by MasterThief 
//------------------------------//

Twilight’s mind soon repaired itself, but she decided to take no chances, and remain offline and low-emissions until nightfall.  Her hexapodal caterpillar friend crawled all over the cave, at first just feeding on something found on the walls.  Then he crawled over Mule Alpha Charlie, and then over her, chirping rhythmically at her, softly, as if waiting for her.

Establishing linguistic matrix.

And with every chirp, the web of understanding grew.

Twilight’s internal clock reactivated her, thirty minutes before sundown.  Evasion protocol all but mandated travel by night whenever possible to minimize chance of detection.

Twilight now chirped. {Hello?}

The caterpillar was sleeping, but awoke with a start.

{Hello? Learn you?}

Twilight made a guess.

{Learn I. Small.}

The caterpillar looked at her sideways.

{Manner what?}

Twilight thought.

{Here not. Far star.}

The caterpillar’s eyes grew wide.

{You! You disrupt!}

Twilight swallowed hard.  This was not going well.

{Not me. Other.}

The caterpillar looked at her, excitedly.

{Good is! Good is!}

Now Twilight was even more confused.

{Disruption… Good?}

{Yes! Yes! Yes!}

Twilight thought, quickly but carefully.

{You here… origin?}

{Origin me! Origin me! Disrupt you good!}

It likes what I did?

{Query. Disrupt Good?}

{Yes! Yes! Yes! [Untranslatable] make [me?/us?]...}  and the caterpillar put his stubby claws to his head and moved them outward, as if exploding.  {Make [me?/us?] not [me?/us?]}

Twilight parsed the untranslatable, sounding it out in the strange chirp she had heard.

{Su…ha…ya?}

The caterpillar shook his claws.

{Yes! Yes! Su’ha’ya. Make me not me.  Make us not us. Me negative desire su’ha’ya. Positive desire me. Su’ha’ya [Untranslatable].}

{Mi…trro?}

The caterpillar took a claw, and rubbed it straight down his body, then pantomimed something spilling out of him.

{Su’ha’ya death make. Su’ha’ya bad/evil. Me negative desire.} Twilight heard a rasp in the caterpillar’s chirping.  {No be su’ha’ya. Negative.}

Twilight nodded.  {Learn I. Us… go?}

The caterpillar waved his acknowledgement.  {Go we. Go place?}

Twilight commanded Mule Alpha Charlie to wake, and then remapped the name protocol to Mac.

I wonder how Big Mac is doing back in Equestria?

Twilight peeked out from the cave, as dusk turned to night.  In the distance, she could see a few of the alien ships on what was left of the UNSV Harmony, but they seemed utterly focused on the dead ship.  She scooped up the caterpillar in her hooves, and sat both of them on top of Mac, commanding the droid to move at a balance of speed, low emissions, and silence, along the path Concordia had given her.

When they were over the next hill, and out of sight of the Harmony, Twilight brought out the small emergency droid shelter, and opened it.  Then she turned to her caterpillar friend, and laid him inside, making him trill happily.

{Thank.}

Twilight nodded.  Then she pointed to herself with her hoof. {Twilight Sparkle I.}

{Ti-li-zpa-ku.}

Close enough, she thought.  Then she pointed at the caterpillar.

{O-zee}... the caterpillar chirped, then stopped, tapping his claw on the ground six times.  {O’zee Six.}

{O’zee Six.  O’zee?}

The caterpillar thought for a moment, then gestured acceptance.  {Ti-li.  O-zee,} the caterpillar said, in turn.

Twilight extended her hoof, and O’zee his claw.

{What do?}  O’zee asked.

{Learn I} Twilight said.  {Speak you.}

{Learn you learn you learn you!} O’zee trilled. Then the caterpillar  began pointing at everything, naming all in sight.  Then he started wiggling and dancing around, pantomiming various actions.  Twilight quickly figured out his mouth and jaw structure were too different from the standard human for him to speak Common Standard English, but she could trill and chirp in much the same way O’zee did.

As the stars whirled overhead, and Mac lumbered from one hill to the next, Twilight let O’zee teach her.

O’zee was a male of his species, sa’pay’da. and had lived on the planet for all his life.  He had seen eleven of its rotations.

Twelve was when the su’ha’ya would take the sa’pay’da, and transform them into more su’ha’ya, and that was a fate O’zee was desperate to avoid.

Twilight summoned up her courage, and told him, as best she could say, what happened to her ship, her fellow ponies, her human friends, the adults, the children.  It made O’zee visibly emotional, and he trilled long, low, and slow.

{Mind seeds,} he said.  {Make beings not beings.  Make sa’pay’da su’ha’ya. Query make you su’ha’ya also.}

{Negative,} Twilight replied. {Mind seeds make humans die. Not make me. Query response unknown.}  She took a breath.  {Query you know su’ha’ya… explain?}

O’zee patiently filled in the details.  He was one of six sa’pay’da, the youngest of four males and two females.  All of his siblings had been {called} by the su’ha’ya and were no more to him.  But he resisted.

{I want me stay.}  O’zee said that so often it was almost a mantra, and Twilight wondered how she knew that human word.

While O’zee talked and talked, something within Twilight’s exobiological database made her curious.  So while Twilight taught O’zee the game of patty-cake she had learned from Megan, she touched her hoof to her horn, swiping up the skin sample she had been compelled to surreptitiously collect. 

O’zee was describing his siblings when Twilight heard the high pitch and felt the electromagnetic sweep.  It’s an engine! We’ve been spotted!  She looked around, and directed Mac to a rocky defilade nearby, and Mac did as he was commanded.

{What happen?} O’Zee asked, as Twilight handed him cargo netting and zipped him into the droid shelter.

{Take and do not let go! Su’ha’ya seek us! Must flee!}

Mac moved at the highest speed a mule could, servos pulsing under them, as Twilight felt the buzz of another EM sweep.  Then she looked up, into a white light of an alien craft.

And the craft spoke.

{Far-Star Being! Far-Star Being! Cease! Cease!}

Twilight made no response, but only stared up at the craft in anger.

She aimed her own sensor pulses at it, trying to warn it away.

{Cease! Cease!} the craft spoke again.  {O’zee know we have you! Is ours! Harm not!}

{Lie lie lie lie lie lie!} Twilight heard O’zee half-screaming.  {Ti-li! No su’ha’ya take me! No no no no no!}

Twilight’s contingency plans activated.  She could not ignore the directives Concordia gave her, but perhaps she could bypass them.

Her wings did rely on small electromagnetic pulses.

If she could just get close enough…

Twilight flew off of Mac, straight up into the air, into the light, into the pursuing su’ha’ya craft.  Something in it made it dodge, and the current almost sent Twilight spinning.

But Twilight remembered her flight lessons with Rainbow Dash [no they were programmed memories they were real they were not], and swooped down over the green lights of the craft, what could only be its propulsion source.

She sent a message to Mac to catch her.

Then she let her own EMP go.

There was a boom, and a crackle of electricity, and both her and the su’ha’ya craft began to fall from the sky.  Twilight felt her mind fracture, yet again, and she used what little processing power she had left to keep her wings straight and level.

Something in her exobiology/exoengineering routines seized control of her sensors, unbidden, and she sensed the life form in the craft as it somehow was thrown clear of the craft, unconscious, and into her.  The two half-floated, half fell down beside each other, and Twilight sensed and saw and hypothesized and–

Twilight impacted the ground.  Her left wing broke.  Her left front and left rear hooves broke.  There was a huge gash in her outer covering.

When she rebooted, O’zee was standing next to her as Mac lay prone. The caterpillar hauled Twilight on top of Mac with all of his strength, completely ignoring the pilot of the craft next to him, its insectoid form, the tufts of cilia it had rubbed off upon Twilight, its wings and the mindseeds it carried.

{Go we now go we now go we now please!} O’zee chirped in a panic.

With her other working limbs, Twilight hauled herself up into the cargo netting, wrapping it around herself.  With a thought, her feedstock tube and data jack connected her to Mac.  She ordered Mac away at best speed, instructing him to find the nearest cave where she could hide while her auto-repair systems worked to stabilize her body.

O’zee stayed close to her the whole time, and trilled nothing.

Twilight shut down her fractured and fragmenting memory, trying to contain the damage from her EMP so that she could continue on her main mission, and she almost heard Concordia herself curse the little droid for her foolishness.

And it was then that in the light of her slowly-self repairing mind, she made the connection. She reached over with an undamaged hoof, and swiped off a bit of the pilot’s cilia that stuck to her fur.  Then she held it up to her horn.

Curiosity killed the cat and/or/including the friendship

It would take her higher-level processes to confirm, but the structure of the cells she had collected from O’zee, and from the pilot, were almost an exact match.

Su’ha’ya. Sa’pay’da.  One and the same.  The one was the mature form, the other the immature.

The sun was about to rise, but Mac soon found a low rock overhang at the base of the mountain the Harmony had identified on its crash-landing.  Twilight knew she would be offline for a great while.

{O’zee}, she trilled.  {Sleep must I. One day. Two maybe.  Stay close. Sleep you also if can.}

O’zee trilled nothing.

Twilight strained to think, and then glitched out an idea for how to keep her friend distracted and yet close while her mind healed, and she thought of a plan.

She dumped the logs of her friendships back in Equestria–221 episodes, a movie, two specials, assorted short films–into Mac.  Then she ordered up a small LCD screen with speakers–the backup from the emergency communications array– which Mac’s internal cargo transfer gantry moved to the top of the cargo sled.  It was placed in front of the droid shelter, that was now O’Zee’s sanctuary.

Then she copied over the linguistic matrix.

{O’zee.  While sleep I, you watch if want. Is stories mine. Can control here with buttons these.  Sleep be I. Stay close. Su’Ha’Ya near.  Accept you?}

O’zee acknowledged with a sad wave of his stubby little claws.

{Acceptable is.  Friend you mine.  You I see, short time.}

{Thank}, O’zee chirped.

As Twilight’s mind began to repair, rest, and reconstruct, Twilight Sparkle heard something familiar in a yet unheard, and distinctly trilling, form.



 Once [before/time/no/time], in land powerful force E-Kwe-stree-a, two high female siblings directed all in union. Harmony created…