Luna and the Tree Ponies

by McPoodle

Part 2

Tia told me that I got this next part all wrong, so I’m going to let her write what happened next. I should warn you, though: she likes big words almost as much as Daddy does.

With a mixture between a wheeze and a groan, a strange narrow blue shed faded into existence in seemingly-empty space. The shed was a most-unusual kind of ship, and those who saw it in its travels were often less mystified by it than the two “Tree Ponies” who piloted it.

“Extraordinary! Most extraordinary!” exclaimed the taller of the two from the console room of the ship. He wore mostly-black garments, and his pink head was surmounted by a mane of purest white. He was in one of his favorite poses, his [hoof-claw thingeys] hooked around his lapels. “We appear to be resting on a solid surface, but no such surface is visible! Now how do you think that is happening, hm?”

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out, Grandfather,” answered the shorter of the two. Her garments were pale lavender in color, and her pink head was topped with a short brown mane. She was sitting rather listlessly in a formless lump of a chair, and her thoughts were clearly elsewhere.

“What we have here,” Grandfather concluded after consulting his instruments, “is a star system that doesn’t want to be found! It is completely transparent to all instruments, and neatly reverses all gravitational influences. The only way you could possibly find it was by crashing right into it!”

“Or materializing atop it,” observed the granddaughter.

“Quite right, Susan! Quite right!” He walked over to a closet and pulled out a complicated-looking device on wheels. “Come along, dear—I must get more detailed readings! And an excursion will do you a world of good!”

Susan sighed, struggled out of the chair, and checked on the measurements shown on the hexagonal console in the middle of the room. “Grandfather...” she warned as he reached for the door switch.

“What is it now, child!” he snapped at her.

“There’s no air out there!”

“So?”

Susan tapped one [hoof?].

“Oh, yes, I suppose securing a supply of air for our expedition might be useful.”

Leaving the ship turned out to be quite an adventure in its own right: the invisible surface repelled even the slight gravitational effect generated by their own masses, causing their spacesuits to slowly drift upwards. The original idea of a tether was eventually supplemented with a small gun that fired puffs of air, to keep them and their equipment grounded. For whatever reason, their ship remained motionless.

Susan in her pressure suit took in her surroundings, and found them to be breathtaking. Below her feet she could look right through the invisible shell and see what was on the other side: an upside-down vista that might pass for a normal nighttime sky on most of the outer rim planets she had visited in her travels. Above that, making up half of her view, was a zone of inky blackness, interrupted by the very occasional galaxy. And overhead, a hundred times wider than the Moon as seen from Earth, was a vast ball composed of millions of stars, tightly-packed together. It was a globular cluster—and one of the bigger ones at that. And here was this shielded star system, perched between the cluster and the Mutter Spiral below. It was indeed the perfect place to hide.

As she watched her grandfather in his white suit wheel his machine across the invisible surface, Susan thought that he looked like nothing so much as something known as an “ice cream salesman” from a time and place known as “1923, New York City, Earth”. This brought her the closest to laughter that she had ever been since the day that...

But she would never laugh again after that day. So she had sworn to herself. To laugh would mean that she had moved on, and it was such a small step from there to forgetting. It would be far better to use her air gun to blast herself into the depths of space forever...than to forget.

With a start, Susan pulled herself out of that morbid line of thought, and returned to the ridiculous image of her cranky old grandfather selling treats to children.

Ah, but there were no children to sell anything to...until she suddenly felt it. A faint, but very distinct cry for help, coming over the horizon.

“Grandfather! Grandfather!” she cried. “Do you hear her?”

“Hear who, my child?” Grandfather replied over the [sciency-thingy for talking when there’s no air]. “There’s only the two of us on this channel.”

“Someone’s in trouble!” she insisted, as she removed her tether and used her air gun to blast herself away from the ship.

“Susan! You will come back here this instant! Oh! Oh...” He stood there for a moment, indecisive, before finally removing his own tether and using his air gun to follow her, his instrument cart still held by an inattentive foreleg.

After less than a minute, Grandfather caught up with Susan. She was hovering over a crumpled purple form.

“She’s dying!” Susan cried, looking up at him.

“Well, I mean surely...” he sputtered.

“No, it’s not because of the lack of air--her species can handle that just fine. She’s falling apart, literally diffusing into a mist one molecule at a time! It’s like the very laws of the universe are tearing her apart!”

“How can you possibly know...” Grandfather began, but then he remembered all of the other times when his granddaughter knew things that she shouldn’t possibly know. “We must get her into the TARDIS. At the very least, the temporal grace will stop the process.”

The two of them gingerly lifted the dark form and draped it over the nearly-forgotten cart, and then used their combined efforts to wheel it back to their ship as swiftly as possible, a thin stream of purple gas streaming behind them.

As Grandfather had predicted, the damage to the creature, which he discovered to his shock to be a miniature horse, stopped progressing as soon as it was taken into the TARDIS, but it did not regain consciousness.

“Now this is a mystery!” he declared. “How did that creature find itself out here? And how did the TARDIS manage to materialize close enough for us to find it?”

Susan responded to this question by smiling mysteriously and patting the console affectionately. “She obviously came from the world on the other side of this shield,” she told him.

“And which world would that be?” he asked her.

“It shouldn’t be too hard to find out,” she replied. “She is an intelligent horse...” She leaned down to get a better look under the strong lights of the console room. “Make that horse-like creature...would ‘equinoid’ be the right word?”

“There are no intelligent ‘equinoids’, as far as I know,” said Grandfather, consulting the ship’s [answer thingy]. “There are several varieties of centaur, but no talking horses.”

“That reminds me: we’re outside the Omega Centauri globular cluster.”

Grandfather glanced up at the ceiling of the TARDIS as he remembered the globular cluster. “Last outpost of the First Human Empire,” he noted. “The final civil war sputtered out twelve hundred years ago. Many of the rebelling systems associated all technology with the enemy, and tried to descend into their own Dark Ages before the Omega Revival wiped them out. It would appear that this one had the foresight to hide itself away first.”

“The Omega Revival had the finest bureaucracy ever known, with the most feared tax collectors of all time!” exclaimed Susan. “If this system was on record, how could it possibly escape detection?”

“Oh that’s simple enough: every rebelling world had their name changed to New Earth and as the finest bureaucracy ever known, the Omega Revival had no choice but to honor each and every one of those name changes. Several hundred systems survived the purge as a result.” Grandfather had himself a good laugh at this example of a successful “tweaking of the nose” before returning to his instruments. “I have access to most of those records, and nowhere is there any account of a creature like that which is before us. Wait! A world between Omega Centauri and the Mutter Spiral...I wonder...”

“Grandfather, I wish you’d stop speculating and get this horse back to her parents!”

“Parents? Is this creature a child? Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place! A few adjustments, and then we’ll drop her off on the surface of ‘New Earth #8636’!”