Each of the fillies wilted under the fierce glare of a relative.
Spike had retreated to the hallway. He wanted no part of the drama, but his curiosity wouldn’t allow him to completely leave. Plus, Rarity was here!
“So,” snarled Applejack, “jest how long have y’all been visitin’ this here portal? How many times have ya been to his world?”
Apple Bloom gulped.
“You have been designing dresses and you haven’t shown me your designs?” an upset Rarity growled.
Sweetie Belle hung her head down and avoided her sister’s eyes.
Auntie Holiday simply glared at Scootaloo, who mumbled, “I am soo grounded.”
Twilight sat back. “I’m going to have to tell Princess Celestia about how lax the guards have been,” she said thoughtfully, staring at one of the library bookshelves with her eyes out of focus. “Three fillies and a colt regularly sneaking past them, both night and day!” She shook her head ruefully.
She straightened up, “But first, Harry Potter, you’re going to show me this portal so I can examine it myself!”
Harry shivered. “No,” he said quietly, but firmly.
All the mares turned to him. “No?” echoed Twilight disbelievingly.
Still shivering, he said, “If I show you, you’ll go through it. If you go through it, you’ll go as you are and that means you’ll be naked in my world. If someone sees you — and someone will see you because it’s a public park — you’ll be arrested and taken to the guard station. Once the tree is out of your sight, you’ll never find it again.” He took a shaky breath, “So, no! I won’t be responsible for losing you in my world.”
He shivered so hard he almost fell over. He had never defied Twilight before. Snuck under her rules, pretended to not hear her warnings, but never had he out-right, to-her-face, defied her. At the Dursley’s, that would have rated a severe beating. Here, he knew it didn’t, but the echoes of the paranoia and fear were still there.
“Before I show you the portal, you have to have a dress to wear. You have to know how to walk on your rear legs — remember how hard it was for me the first few days? And you have to agree to do as I say. I know my world. Terrible things can happen very fast, especially if someone is trying to do what they think is the right thing for you. Which for you, would be the absolutely wrong thing.”
He forced himself to look straight into her eyes. “In its own way, my world is as dangerous to you as the Everfree Forest is to a foal. You simply don’t know what’s dangerous and what isn’t, nor where to look for the danger.”
Twilight was staring at him as if she had never seen him before.
“He’s right, Twi,” said Applejack. “He’s telling the truth. He’s really worried for ya.”
The mares stood quietly, thinking, while the fillies stayed grouped around Harry, with Apple Bloom slightly in front of him.
“I can make you a simple dress in a few minutes, if I had a pattern,” said Rarity, looking at Sweetie Belle.
Sweetie Belle gulped and nodded quickly.
“And Apple Bloom and I can show you how to walk,” Scootaloo said eagerly. “It’s really not as hard as Harry makes it sound.”
Twilight blinked slowly, then nodded.
“I’ll . . . I’ll . . . go get the patterns,” Sweetie Belle said hesitantly, “They’re in our clubhouse.” She started to edge away from Harry keeping a wary eye on her sister, who was still giving her a stern glare.
“I’ll do it!” declared Harry quickly, and popped away before anypony could object.
Sweetie Belle sighed, she had been looking forward to escaping her sister’s death-glare.
Apple Bloom sighed, she wished she, too, had a reason to dash out.
Scootaloo just tried to hide behind her friends and look innocent. “I’ll be grounded until I’m older than Granny Smith,” she mumbled, glancing at her Aunt Holiday.
Into the short silence that had descended on the group came another “pop” as Harry reappeared, beside the three fillies.
“Here,” Harry said, removing three dresses from the box balanced on his back and tossing them towards his herd-mates. He dropped the box beside himself on the floor, then removed several large sheets of paper and floated them over to Rarity. “Those are the patterns that Sweetie Belle created. They’re real simple. We didn’t want anything that would stand out and make people remember seeing us.”
He stopped and looked eagerly at the fashionista.
The fillies had slipped into their dresses, each a simple modified plain summer dress in a solid colour, and now were standing up on their rear legs. In length, the dresses fell to the floor, which, when they were in Harry’s world, were half-way between their knees and the ground. These were a decided improvement over the sacks they had first tried to use. Rarity was alternately looking between the fillies and the papers held in her magic, comparing what the fillies wore to Sweetie Belle’s diagrams.
Harry concentrated, and carefully cast an illusion beside Scootaloo of what she looked like on the other side wearing the dress. “See how the lines are different? How the straps hold the dress up? And how much longer her legs are?”
The fillies were shuffling from hoof to hoof, unsure of how their relatives would take their new look. The unusual sight of their filly standing and moving almost naturally on only their rear hooves while wearing the most unusual dresses any of them had ever seen had the mares flummoxed into silence.
Rarity walked over and took a closer look at Sweetie Belle’s dress, then Scootaloo’s and Apple Bloom’s. Then compared them to the illusion Harry had cast.
They had decided on backless dresses to accommodate Scootaloo’s wings on this side. Unfortunately, Scootaloo had what looked like an extremely detailed tattoo of wings on her back when in Harry’s former world.
And to give a child a tattoo was very illegal in Britain and inevitably got Child Services involved. While the kids in the playpark might not care, their parents would surely notice and report Scootaloo to the constables. And the constables would take Scootaloo to their station and try to track down Scootaloo’s parents.
So, to keep anyone from questioning why and how she had gotten something so illegal, Sweetie Belle had sewn a cloth panel across the back between the wide shoulder straps. The bottom of the panel attached to the dress by two buttons. That kept the panel closed so the wind couldn’t blow it up and reveal Scootaloo’s secret, while allowing her wings to manifest in Equestria without causing her discomfort.
Twilight also moved closer and studied how the fillies were standing.
Auntie Holiday and Applejack continued to glare at their respective reckless niece and sister.
Rarity took a step over to Harry and looked into the box. “What about your clothes, Harry? Wait, what’s this?” A magazine floated up. Across the top was “VOGUE” with a headline at the bottom that said “Fast Forward . . . Summer Fashion on the Move, Glamourous Sportswear.” The background was a lake or bay with a city on the opposite shore. The woman on the front was wearing a red thigh-length bare-shoulders dress —a shorter version of what the fillies were wearing except theirs had wider neck openings — with green and blue animal designs.
Her jaw dropped. The cover opened and pages flipped by almost too fast for Harry to follow, but with each page Rarity became more excited. “This . . . this is a gold mine! The fashions . . . they’re nothing I’ve ever seen . . . nothing I’ve even imagined. This will revolutionize the fashion industry!” She turned to Sweetie Belle. “You’ve had this for months and you never told me?”
Her hurt expression made Harry feel terrible.
Sweetie Belle looked about to burst into tears and stared guiltily down at the floor.
“It’s my fault,” Harry confessed. “I made them all Pinkie Promise not to tell anyone,” he gave a half-hearted smile. “I was afraid that Princess Celestia would make me go back if she knew about the portal still being there and working.” He shuddered. “Later, well, I was afraid of how much trouble I would be in for keeping the portal a secret. And how much my world could do to hurt this one, even by accident.” Harry could just imagine what his uncle would do if he saw this idyllic world and the relatively defenceless ponies. He shuddered. “There are some very evil people in my world who wouldn’t hesitate to lie, cheat, and steal once they got here — and they act like perfectly nice people so you never suspect them.”
Twilight walked over to him and nuzzled his neck. “Harry,” she said softly, “We would never send you back to those horrid ponies, I promise.”
“People,” Harry corrected quietly, leaning into her mane.
After a moment, he reluctantly cleared his throat and said, “So, if you want to investigate the portal, Rarity needs to put together something like the girls are wearing for you mares. And while she is doing that, the girls can show you how they learned to walk.”
Twilight immediately turned to her unicorn friend, “Rarity, how fast do you think you can throw something together?”
Rarity was too wrapped up in investigating the magazine page by page to hear her, still flipping pages and occasionally stopping to stare.
“Rarity?”
Still nothing.
“RARITY!”
The white unicorn jumped and looked up at Twilight. “This thing has almost four hundred pages, and it says it’s a monthly publication,” she said dazedly. “That’s more pages than any fashion magazine in Equestria publishes in half a year.” She turned a stunned look to Harry. “What’s the circulation?”
He shrugged, “I don’t know for sure. A million?”
That seemed to snap her out of her daze.
“A million? Nonsense! That would be almost an eighth of the entire population of Equestria! And I can guarantee you that the number of ponies interested in fashion is far fewer than that!”
“Well, uh,” Harry stumbled, “London, the big city near where I used to live has a population of six million, and Britain as a whole is fifty-six million, if I remember correctly.”
“Fifty-six million?” half-whispered Rarity. The other mares, except Twilight, of course, looked just as stunned. He had told her this stuff months ago.
“Yeah, the world population is about five or six billion.”
“Billion?” Rarity said breathlessly.
“Uh, a billion is a thousand millions,” Harry explained.
They stared at him.
“Fillies,” said Applejack quietly, “He’s telling us the truth. He really believes those numbers.”
“I can prove it,” he pulled a thick book out of the box. “This is an almanac, it’s the 1985 version so it’s about five years out of date.”
Twilight snatched the book out of his magic field so fast it looked as if she had teleported it. She started reading, flipping the pages at a steady, and fast, rate.
“Where’d ya get these things, Harry,” Applejack asked.
Harry blushed, “Bin diving.”
At Applejack’s blank look, he added, “I went through the portal late one night and then went through people’s trash bins looking for magazines and stuff. To answer Twilight’s and the fillies’ questions.” He ran a hoof through his mane, “I got lucky and the first night I found those two things, so I took them.”
He shuffled uncomfortably, “I took the almanac because I wanted better answers for Twilight, even if I couldn’t tell her about the book. I just said I remembered more stuff a couple of days after she asked questions about where I came from.”
Applejack walked over the Twilight and waved a hoof between Twilight and the book. Twilight reared back, “GACK!”
Applejack glared at the purple alicorn. “Focus, Twilight! Portal!”
She then walked over to Rarity and did the same, snatching the magazine from her magic with her hooves. “Rarity, how long to make a simple dress!”
Rarity blinked, and returned to the problem at hand. “Not long, I just need to get some material.” She looked over to the colt, “Harry, are these dresses still appropriate for the weather in your home-world?”
“Oh, yes, it’s the high-summer there, quite like it is here now.”
She walked over to the alicorn. “Twilight, dear, stand up,” she gestured with her hoof.
Awkwardly, Twilight reared up. She was about to lose her balance when Harry used his magic to help push her back to her balance. She staggered a few steps, but managed to stay up right. Rarity spent the time comparing her with the fillies and Harry’s illusion. “Thank you, dear,” she said, “Now I know about how much material to use. I’ll be right back.” She trotted quickly to the door, stopping to stare back at Sweetie Belle, “And you have some explaining to do later, young mare!”
Sweetie Belle gulped and suddenly found something on the floor very interesting. Scootaloo, Apple Bloom, and Harry closed rank to let her know they supported her.
As unhappy as she was, Rarity still managed a quick smile at the sight before she turned and left.
Twilight thumped back to the floor. “Is standing and walking in Harry’s world as difficult as it is here?” she asked the fillies.
“We might as well start calling it Earth,” Harry advised. “Otherwise it sounds like I own the place.”
Twilight and the fillies gave him smiles and nodded. “Earth it is,” said Twilight.
“Actually,” said Scootaloo, back on the original subject, “standing and walking is easier, there.”
Twilight raised her eyebrows.
“Watch this,” she instructed, removing her dress. She sat down and slowly leaned back until she was balanced on her butt and back legs. Then she slowly straightened just the upper parts of her legs, leaving her hocks, fetlocks, and hooves on the floor.
“It’s a little weird feeling at first,” she explained, “But everything from your hocks to your hooves are actually flat on the ground and you use them to help balance. And they’re really short, barely two hooves long instead of almost half your leg sticking out in front of you like now. Try it.”
Twilight followed her directions and was soon “standing” easily, rocking back and forth testing her balance.
“See how easy it is? Awkward, but easy.”
Twilight nodded. The other two mares were now doing the same, experimenting with this new way of standing. Even aunt Holiday was trying it.
“You’re right, it is much easier to stand,” Twilight said, and then tried to take a step. It was a short step, and she almost fell, but pressing with her fetlock kept her upright. After a few more attempts, she said, “It’s interesting, I have to consciously not go up onto my hooves when I take a step.”
“On Harry’s . . . ,” Scootaloo glanced at the colt, “Earth, it’s not a problem at all. If you want to go up on your hooves, what Harry calls our toes, you have to consciously try to do it. But it’s really hard to keep your balance, though.”
Harry thought that watching the mares clump around the room like clowns with really big shoes on their feet was hilarious, but he couldn’t explain to them why it was funny.
While Twilight was practicing, she had Spike send a six-foot missive — she called it short at merely one celestial long — to Princess Celestia summarizing the situation. She included a separate one-foot-long explanation on how the fillies taught her to walk upright. And then ended with a “brief” two-foot-long explanation of her intent to study the Portal and ascertain its stability and usability as a permanent link to Earth, and to expect another message later this evening. She also included duplicates of the almanac, magazine, and Sweetie Belle’s drawings.
Watching as Spike sent the tightly rolled scrolls, the shorter ones inside the longer one, off to the Princess, Harry wondered how Twilight expected her very busy ruler to have the time to read the unexpected message. He knew she would have to hand the almanac over to others to read.
Barely an hour after leaving, Rarity returned with not one, but four dresses.
“Took ya long enough,” Applejack said snarkily.
Rarity sniffed and tossed her head dismissively. “Quality can never be rushed, dear,” she said in a snooty voice, lifting her snout up, and then grinned at the other mare.
Twilight slipped her dress over her head and admired its straight simple lines. It was a deep purple that matched her coat perfectly, with the slightest shimmer of stars in it. And it seemed to fit her well. She looked up questioningly at the white unicorn.
Rarity rolled her eyes, “Dear, you know I have your measurements, all I had to do was stand up a ponykin and select the correct fabric.” She floated one of the other dresses to Applejack. That one was apple green.
Applejack looked at her questioningly.
“Dear, are you really going to let Twilight walk through that portal, alone?”
To Scootaloo’s aunt she said, “I had to guess at your measurements, but I’m usually good at that.”
Five minutes later, an alicorn, three mares, a colt, three fillies, and a young dragon headed out to Sweet Apple Acres. Twilight had the almanac firmly in front of her face rapidly absorbing as much information as she could. The colt and fillies were closely packed, rubbing shoulders and flanks for reassurance. The mares had wanted to leave the fillies behind, but Harry had said, “They have spent hours on Earth, and even talked with some of the other kids. They are far more likely to keep you out of trouble than you, them.” It was a rather persuasive argument. And while the mares were not all that convinced, Harry’s stance of, “If they don’t come along, then I won’t show you how the portal works,” had been the final close of the discussion.
When they arrived at the Guard Post, Twilight greeted Sergeant True Sword, “Harry Potter, here, knows where the portal is. You will accompany us while Corporal Runner goes to the Guard Station and brings reinforcements.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” responded the Sergeant, with a salute, before turning to his Corporal and issuing the order to send every pony who could be spared. The Corporal nodded and stood unmoving.
Harry was wondering why the pony wasn’t moving when he abruptly vanished. Ah, he understood, now. The Corporal was one of the few unicorns who had taken the time to master the teleport spell. Harry had to wonder why they all didn’t learn it.
The small group headed into the Everfree Forest, the Sergeant leading the way and carefully inspecting the path for any dangers ahead or to the sides. Shivering at being in the Everfree forest, Holiday made sure to stay between Applejack and Rarity.
They had barely gone twenty paces when the Corporal ran up to the Sergeant.
“Sir,” he said, gasping a little at his expenditure of magic, “The pegasi are on their way and will be here soon. The others will be here as fast as practical.”
“Excellent, Corporal,” the Sergeant said approvingly, “you watch the left while I take forward and right.”
A salute and, “Yes, Sir,” was his answer.
They had almost reached the portal tree when five pegasi Guards, weaving through the trees, flew up to them.
Once they all arrived at the tree, the Sergeant posted the guards in a ring around the tree and civilians. “Shall I be accompanying you?” he asked Twilight.
“Um, no, unfortunately the portal changes our shapes and you wouldn’t be of assistance due to your unfamiliarity with your new form. Stay here and keep everyone else safe.”
Twilight then turned from the Sergeant and began casting spells at the tree, the other trees around it, on the ground, and even a few that seemed to go up into the air. Her quill shot across a floating scroll almost too fast for the ink to flow. Finally she returned her attention to the tree and walked around it several times studying it from every angle and continuously casting more spells.
Harry shrugged on his shirt and trousers, which were an odd fit in his pony form; he had to leave the buttons undone on the shirt and the trousers draped over his back. He had to hold them in place with his magic. The fillies slipped their dresses on and stood up on their hind legs. Twilight, Applejack, and Rarity followed suit, but with much less grace. They had to hold the dresses’ hems off the ground with their hooves in this new stance.
“And you’re taking the fillies and colt?” the Sergeant asked incredulously, with a raised eyebrow, as Harry and the fillies lined up beside the tree-portal. They clearly intended to go through the portal.
“Well, Sergeant,” Twilight said dryly, “It seems the fillies and colt have been sneaking past your post and traveling to the world on the other side of this portal for over a year now.”
The Sergeant, a grizzled veteran, blinked slowly. “They have, have they?” He turned a glare on the four. He would have a few words with his ponies when today was done. And he knew his superiors would be having words with him over the Post’s security failures.
“And they are the experts in what to expect over there,” she finished.
Harry gave the Sergeant a guilty look and turned back to the tree. Twilight stepped up beside him. He looked up at her. “To make it work, you have to want to go to Little Whinging. Just think, ‘Little Whinging.’ Wait about fifteen seconds for me to make sure there’s no one there to see us come through, okay?”
He looked back at the tree, stood on his back legs, and stepped into it.
۸- ̰ -۸