As they came back, water was still dripping from Rainbow's wing tips. "I'm sorry, for how I behaved.", she said head hanging down. "I will respect you and won't reduce you to parts of your body."
"And...?", Fluttershy pushed her to go on.
"I will not try to touch your udders... unless you want me to... Ouch!" Fluttershy had kicked her.
I was surprised how much control Fluttershy had on her, I hadn't expected that.
"Thanks a lot for this nice apology, it wasn't a big deal.", I said. "There had been worse situations back in my world... Let's start again. Hi, I'm Stella, a human wo... mare from another world.", I held my hand in front of Rainbow Dash.
She smiled at me. "Hi, I'm Rainbow Dash, the fastest flyer in Equestria." She took my hand and shook it. I still didn't know how they were able to grab anything.
"Oh, so maybe you can show me some flying then, Fluttershy told me she preferred the ground."
She immediately started to hover just under the ceiling. "Well, that's nothing. It's too bad it is already dark outside, or I would have shown you some cool flying maneuvers. Maybe tomorrow morning?", she asked.
I still was in awe how she was able to keep her body in the air, with very slow wing movements. "I would love to see that.", I finally answered.
She landed on the smaller armchair to my right. "So tell us something about your world."
I took my cup again and sipped on my tea while I thought about what to say. Meanwhile, Fluttershy brought another one for her friend.
"Well, there are billions of us on our planet. We... ", I started.
"What is this number?", Rainbow interrupted me.
"What is the biggest number you use here?"
"Thousand.", she answered.
"Okay, we can work with that. Imagine a place where 1000 ponies live. Do you have one?"
They looked at each other. "Canterlot, I guess.", Dash suggested, and Fluttershy nodded in agreement.
I continued: "So imagine we put Canterlot and all its ponies one thousand times on a huge piece of land."
Their eyes widened in surprise. Rainbow was about to say something, but I cut her off.
"And now we take this piece of land with all its ponies and put it one thousand times on the world. And there you have one billion ponies, but we have 7.5 times even that."
They both sat before me, their mouths wide open.
To my surprise, Fluttershy was the first able to speak again. "But... but this can't be true, how are you able to feed them all?"
This question killed my mood. "Well... we take everything from our world we can and still there is a huge part of us living in hunger."
"Well, I think we should talk about something less depressing.", Rainbow tried to quickly change the topic as she saw Fluttershy was on the brink of crying.
So for the next half hour, I talked about the inventions we had made, phones, television, the internet, planes... I even showed them my smartphone, although without the internet it was very limited in its use. We laughed when Rainbow tried to use it with her hoof and wasn't able to make it do anything.
This brought the focus to my fingers. "They are so thin. They must break all the time...", a comment from Dash of course, which made me poke her ribs with my finger. It turned out she was quite ticklish, and I got her into a fit of laughter in no time. But I stopped very quickly since one of her flailing hooves nearly hit my jaw. We had a lot of fun, and I almost forgot I was talking to ponies on another planet.
Then it was their turn to tell me about Equestria. Rainbow told me about her controlling the weather, while Fluttershy gave me more information about their other friends. I found it to be a bit frustrating that many questions had one answer: "Magic"
"How can you walk on clouds? How do you lift heavy objects? The sun does not move on its own?"
"If you have questions about magic you should talk to Twilight.", Rainbow told me while she yawned. "It's getting pretty late. I think I fly home now. See you in the morning to show you my amazing moves.", she winked at me and flew out of the door.
I looked after her. "She is quite nice when she is 'normal'."
"She looked out for me ever since flight school and had always been there when I needed her.", Fluttershy answered with a warm smile. She nearly seemed to glow from the inside when she talked about her that way.
"Well then, I'll eat one of my sandwiches and after that make myself ready for the night.", I announced while I yawned.
"The bathroom is upstairs, first door on the right. Make yourself at home."
...
When I entered her bathroom, I once again was surprised how similar everything looked and worked. You really would expect a toilet for ponies to be fundamentally different, not that I wasn't grateful for it to be the same.
The kind soul she is, Fluttershy offered me her bed, but I declined that of course... and I guess it would have been to small anyway.
I snuggled into my sleeping bag after I looked around one last time. This world was so similar but so different at the same time.