It was perfect for the task. A giant metal structure, supported by two jointed legs. If you talked to it in the right way, it could even walk. Though Fluttershy had quickly found that watching her house walk left her feeling more than a little queasy. There was something strange, somehow unnatural about anything walking on two legs. If one of them got a cramp, or missed its footing, the whole thing might topple over. But it felt stable enough when she was on the top, or riding on the large stage that seemed to fold out from the upper part. She was sure there was something else she could build into that space, as well, if she just knew what would work best. Maybe a stage, for some kind of musical show, though she worried that might disturb the chicks a little too much. They’d taken to their new home tike ducks to water, the only problem being the one or two hatchlings who kept on scratching around the edge of its hooves, almost like they were trying to dig a hole under the thing, or bury it in the ground.
Still, it did everything she could have hoped for. She could only hope that whoever had built and lost this strange contraption didn’t want it back. Even Rainbow Dash thought it was cool, and demanded to be taught how to pilot the thing. Even Twilight thought it was just an interesting curiosity, though she wondered if the big empty space inside the top part had been intended to hold some kind of weapon. Nopony could find any problem with the thing at all, and eventually Fluttershy joined the others in the realisation that if they needed to fight a monster like Tirek again, her new home would make a great protector as well. Perhaps fate, or the Tree of Harmony, has sent it to them for a reason.
“It was Discord,” Twilight pointed out, “He doesn’t do reason.”
“Oh. Oh yeah. But it might be fun, anyway.”
A portal opened, right in the centre of the town square. It didn’t look like any kind of magical nexus the ponies had seen before. It was little more than concentric spinning rings of white energy, slowly forming the shape of a dome as they grew larger and larger. They didn’t even spin that fast, more like the ponderous energy of a flywheel coming up to speed.
The first sign that there was somepony behind this, rather than a random fluke of magic, was when a voice came from out of the portal. It was a female voice, the observers were pretty sure, coming as if from a great distance.
“… loaded the temporal matrix convertor upside down?”
Ponies looked at one another. They knew some of the words in that sentence, but nopony knew what it might mean. It sounded angry, though.
“I know that!” the voice yelled, “But I’m not going to lose it, not after all the work I put into that robot. And let’s face it, out the whole expanse of the space-time continuum, what are the odds of landing somewhere worse than there?”
More looks of confusion. The voice seemed to be talking to someone they couldn’t see, but it also seemed to be getting louder, and closer, by the second. Most of them weren’t too surprised to see the person speaking tumble out of the portal and fly at high speed into a conveniently placed hay wain.
“Well at least there might not be overgrown apes trying to–” were the figure’s last furious words, but most of the observers didn’t wonder what an ape was, or what they might have been doing. They were too surprised by what they were seeing to think about the words too much.
After the thud, there was a momentary click of a disappearing portal, and then the creak and rustle of movement within the hay. Eventually, a strange looking face appeared, and the strange figure spoke again.
“My god,” she whispered into her headset, “It’s full of ponies!”