Just a derivative work of a derivative work

Following my cursing Friendship One, I somehow managed to crack [sic] out this first draft of potential idiocy:

To say CMDR Flood was at a loss was... well probably an overstatement, given the losses she would be at later on in life. Actually, when you thought about it, she was indeed at a loss, just not as big as the losses looming in her future.

The loss she was currently in proximity of looked like a hospital room. There were the usual accessories: IV stands, check. Metal tables on castors sporting various boxes that flashed lights and beeped annoyingly, check. Wires connecting her to said boxes, check. Unpleasant smell of disinfectant and spilled body fluids, check. There were just a few anomalies.

Firstly, there were the lights. Instead of being the usual inset LED or fluorescent tubes – not even vintage incandescent bulbs – there was some sort of crystal instead. It didn't screw into a fitting, but was just... resting on the bottom of a sort of glass jar. The window – something you didn't see unless you were spending big bikkies for a private facility on an Orbis ring – showed, from her mostly prone position, rooflines that were thoroughly antique, in front of an almost cartoonishly blue sky. The occasional creature that seemed to flit by wasn't helping matters either.

The final anomalous aspect was that despite the room seeming to be a normal height, her bed was ridiculously low to the floor. So were other items: the posters on the wall, evidently reminders on hygeine and procedures, for some reason sporting pictures of cartoon horses. A sink, also low to the ground. Assorted cupboards, too low for people. And...

Flood squinted at one of the posters. It wasn't her eyes, but the writing wasn't any system she recognised, all circles and dots and curved lines, many above and below straight lines.

“Where the hell am I?” she wondered, trying to sit up and failing. A hospital, obviously, and equally obviously she was still overcoming radiation sickness. Something hard pressed under her shoulder, and with some difficulty she extracted a fat button with an unmistakable bell symbol on it. The text was still unreadable, but that didn't matter; she was holding it hard enough to depress the button.

“Looks like I'm about to get answers,” she said to herself as she ineptly attempted to put the call button aside.

The sound of hard boots approached, a rapid tapping. The woman frowned. Something was off about the cadence, was more than one –

…unicorn. Just the one. Something about the eyelashes said it was a female, and it was wearing a little nurse's hat thing.

It, she, froze for a moment with the most adorable gasp of surprise, before advancing, asking something in what could only be described as a stream of soft syllables, punctuated by clicks and snorts, and finished off with a rising hum that was evidently interrogative.

“I'm... sorry, I... can't understand you,” Flood said.

The unicorn sighed, muttering something monotone to itself. If Flood was a betting pilot, she'd said, “I knew it, this thing speaks a foreign language”. Something like that. Then the unicorn's horn began to glow, and demonstrate telekinesis.

Psychic powers. Feckin' psychic powers. No wonder everything was so low; these unicorns were clearly the dominant species here.

The nurse was currently levitating a pen and a clipboard. Flood was able to guess what was going on; the nurse was adding to her patient notes. The unicorn then moved in a businesslike fashion towards her, glancing over the various monitors, before Flood had the novel experience of a hands-off examination. Her hair was checked – she probably needed a haircut and dye redo. Human eyes were examined by huge alien ones. A pressure against her neck suggested she was having her pulse checked. All of which were dutifully recorded on the board.

The nurse glanced back to return the notes back to their hook, then said something that, judging from the eerily human expression on her face, was meant to be reassuring. Then she left.

The woman slumped back on the bed, too sick and tired to have a proper breakdown. She was able to have nightmares however, and she wouldn't do so alone.

Princess Luna observed the sleeping mind before her with renewed interest.

The fact the being had been piloting the extremely technologically advanced vessel made it crystal clear that it was an intelligent tool-using creature; it was mammalian, and female; and now she had an update confirming a language barrier (expected) and that the being did respond to magic (hoped for, and welcomed). Best of all, the being dreamed, and the shape of the mind was similar enough to that of her little ponies that she finally felt confident enough to enter.

The faceted polyhedron in front of her was flickering and flashing in ugly colours and patterns, like a disco ball in hell. The dreamer was having a nightmare. And Luna did bear the title of Watchmare of Dreams.

With all the care of a pilot entering a jet cone, Luna breached the edge.

Everything in the ship's cockpit made sense now. On the left side, the navigation panel. On the right, systems panel. Looking behind her, Luna knew that Poked It With a Stick was a Diamondback Explorer, and the door behind her led to a surface vehicle bay, and then to the hatch.

The sun in front of her... was massive. It actually looked swollen, what she could see behind the dark holographic panel occluding most of the cockpit windows. The being... Flood came to her mind unbidden, Flood was analysing the system, tracking signals to locate and identify worlds.

“Scan mismatch detected,” a male voice said. Another bit of knowledge was hanging off it. COVAS expanded to Cockpit Voice Assist System. “System scan required.”

“The hell?” Flood sounded bewildered. She tapped a control and the display vanished. Luna peered over her shoulder. Flood was squeezing a trigger, making a small bar grow on the centre display, but Luna's eyes were drawn to the sun. Something had changed about it...

With a thunderous sound like... like... Luna almost giggled at the juvenile image of a ceremonial horn operated by Celly's posterior. Words – scan results, probably – appeared top right.

“But it's the same, isn't –“

Smaller text. Discovered Warniae FD-Z 3F-7 1 (Type E supergiant star).

Flood stared at the line. “Type E? No, no, it's a type F...”

Luna got some garbled information about star types, since Flood was more interested in planets. Especially planets with life on them. She blinked at the star, then stiffened in shock.

She knew, probably from dream osmosis, that the ship was “stopped”, crawling through space at just thirty metres per second.(Memo to self, she thought, Need to determine measurement conversion.) She also got the impression that the ship could not go in reverse.

But the sun in front of them was shrinking.

“Oh shit,” Flood gasped, repeating that panic mantra as she hauled on the controls, causing the stars to slide past until a wrinkled grey planet appeared.

It was getting brighter.

“Scan mismatch detected. System scan requi –“

“Fuck!” Flood rammed what must have been the equivalent of a ship telegraph to 'full ahead', then turned to her left, fumbling with controls that started bending away from her fingers.

Catching the eye, hard to starboard, the planet flared too bright to look at.

“Danger,” COVAS stated the obvious, “Massive solar ejection detected.”

Flood was in total panic, scrabbling at uncooperative controls, trying to select a star to jump to. Alarms began to warble, scitch, and scream. Warning lights began to flash.

“Danger,” COVAS said, “Extreme gamma radiation detected.”

Flood screamed, falling out of her chair as the holographic display and controls flapped and oozed away, unable to hear the...

Luna frowned.

The alarms stopped dead.

The lights stopped flashing.

Flood hit the floor with a thump.

Luna listened. The small voice was very, very familiar.

“So 'twas our sister who led you to us,” the alicorn of Night said, nodding at last, “And in doing so did save thy life.”

Flood had been picking herself up off the cockpit floor, breath rasping and hitching, but now she froze. Slowly, she turned her tear- and snot-streaked face to look at Luna. She stared at the horselike creature that could not possibly fit in back of a DBX. That sported a midnight blue coat, a horn, and wings.

“Before thou asks,” the creature said in what, to the woman, sounded like archaic English, “Nay, we could not reside within thy vessel in waking, but only in dream.”

“Okay.” Flood's voice was shaky. “So I'm dreaming. Yeah. Yeah I have to be. I escaped. I managed to pick a system and gee-tee-fo before I got cooked.” She chuckled, an uncertain hysterical sound. “Never thought I'd be at ground zero of a supernova.”

“Mine sister doth feel kinship, not only with our Sun, but also the stars,” Luna gazed thoughtfully at the now frozen starscape. “Thou hast shown us proof positive that the stars are Suns too, and that they...”

“Yeah, they die. They use up all their hydrogen, try helium, right up until they hit the iron barrier, and boom.” Flood seemed to be pulling herself together. “Supergiants like that? They collapse into neutron stars or even black holes. Wait... your sister?”

“Celestia, Alicorn of the Sun, Co-Ruler of Equestria, and other titles that we personally consider so much fripperty-pish.”

Flood snorted.

“We are Luna, Alicorn of the Night, Co-Ruler of Equestra and Watchmare of Dreams.”

“And somehow I don't think you're a figment of my imagination, even though I did meet a real live unicorn today.”

“And now thou hast, by proxy, met a real live alicorn,” Luna's muzzle twisted in a grin, before falling. “Yet a boon we must ask thee.”

“A boon?”

“We share the tongue of dreams here, but not one of waking. F... Commander Flood... we wish to learn your speech from thee, by copying that part of thy mind into our own, for use in preparing a translation spell.”

“Telepathy and telekinesis, huh? Look, I know I'm probably still in shock right now, and I should be freaking out about meeting aliens that aren't Thargoid, but I can't even right now. Sure. Go ahead.”

In Flood's hospital room, some of the shadows began to lengthen unnaturally. Swelling up the wall, they began to resemble a pony at first, maybe a unicorn, but they continued to stretch, the shapes of the barrel, head, horn and legs becoming more like that of an old Earth horse, until they suddenly pulled free of the surface and Luna slowly walked towards where Flood lay.

After all, they hadn't told the woman that the spell needed to be cast in reality.

Luna had said her goodbyes before sending Flood into a far more pleasant dream of chasing down s. tectonicas. With her dreaming away, Luna was able to embrace the woman's head in magic before sinking it into her brain.

Language is not an easy thing to copy. Words do not exist as isolate absolutes; they accrete meanings only understood in social contexts. As such, Luna did in fact learn more about Commander Flood, Ranger and Geneticist, and her people, the humans.

She learned that Flood was actually a bit of a loner, preferring her own company; hence her signing up with the Pilots' Federation and soon leaving that to pursue her own fortune. She learned about the concepts of modern space travel in passing, and a smattering of Bubble politics. And the Thargoids.

Carefully, she pulled away, cradling a sparkling matrix of magic, then placed it in a crystal she brought with her. Some pruning would be required, but this was a task worth staying up for.

Like so many of these sort, it's the First Contact setup that's fun to write, as opposed to whatever Game of Bubbles political crap eventually kicks in.