Crashlander
Chapter Three: Phone Home
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Yanvorren sighed and turned the radio over in his hands. It had been damaged in the crash, but he was confident he could repair it. The radio wasn’t the problem.
“So it encodes the data and broadcasts it to the other ships,” Twilight Sparkle said. “How do you tell who’s saying what? I assume you have a large number of ships out at once.”
“Our ship would send out between three and twelve fighters,” Yanvorren explained. The constant questions, those were getting to be annoying. “But before that, I was the Second Engineer on a carrier. They’d send out two hundred in a heavy combat situation.”
“But how do you tell who’s talking to whom?” Twilight demanded. Yanvorren shrugged.
“Part of it is how it’s encoded and what frequency it’s transmitted at. Mostly it’s what’s said. Like, ‘Yanvorren to Dufojorr Avoyigo, request landing clearance,’ or something similar.” He felt himself beginning to pant—this planet, wherever it was, had a stronger gravity than he was used to, though he’d guess it was almost equal to Terra. They were approaching Fluttershy’s cottage, and he was eager to get to work.
“Fluttershy, why is there a catapult in front of your cottage?” Twilight asked, pointing a hoof at the huge wooden contraption that had been erected in front of Fluttershy’s cottage. From what Yanvorren could see of it, it resembled pictures of ancient siege weapons from Terran history. What were they? Launched rocks, big swinging arm…the purple pony just said it! Catapults! They were called cat—why was the angry white rabbit aiming it at him?
“Angel!” Fluttershy shouted (that is, spoke at what others would consider a normal volume) and flew forward. The white rabbit (with a dark green helmet strapped to his head, his long ears poking out of holes in the top of it) glared up at her and pointed at Yanvorren. Fluttershy looked back at him, then at the rabbit. “Well yes, I think he just wants to use the table.”
The rabbit stamped his foot impatiently and waved his arms before pulling his lips back to reveal sharp fangs (Yanvorren wasn’t sure how—he was sure the thing had normal oversized incisors a second before) and gnashed them together. The rabbit pointed vigorously at Yanvorren again.
“Oh, no, Mister Yanvorren is harmless,” Fluttershy said. “He’s just like the other animals.”
The rabbit growled in frustration and yanked hard on a lever on the catapult. With a creak and a solid thump, the arm swung up and launched a rock the size of a football right at Yanvorren. Reflexes and years of military training took over and he dove to the side, tucking into a roll and drawing his pistol. In his peripheral vision, he spotted Twilight with her horn glowing purple and the rock floating in front of her, coated in the same purple glow as her horn. Yanvorren’s roll ended in a crouch with his pistol held out in both hands.
Step One: Disable enemy weapons.
The Rabbit from Hell was already turning a crank that was steadily pulling down the catapult’s arm. A pile of similar rocks was resting behind the catapult. Fluttershy was hovering next to the Rabbit, probably trying to negotiate. Yanvorren spotted the catapult’s weakness, aimed, fired, and fired again. Two balls of plasma the size of marbles shot from the muzzle of his pistol at near the speed of light and easily burned through the rope that connected the crank and the catapult arm. It creaked ominously and the Rabbit stopped turning the crank. He looked up to see the smoking holes in the rope and had just enough time for his little black eyes to widen in terror as it snapped. The arm jerked straight up with a heavy thunk.
The Rabbit turned the crank futilely—without a way to arm it, the catapult was useless. Step One, done. The Rabbit reached behind himself and pulled out a baseball bat, holding it above his head as he charged at Yanvorren.
Step Two: Disable enemies.
“Angel!” Fluttershy roared. She dropped to the ground between the two and stared down at the Rabbit, who stopped in his tracks and looked up to her. “What did I tell you earlier?”
The Rabbit—Angel—made a few gestures Yanvorren couldn’t see. He stayed kneeling with his pistol drawn as Twilight stepped next to him.
“He is a guest, just like any of the other animals,” Fluttershy said firmly in response to whatever Angel had mimed. “Be nice, or…or…or no sandwiches!”
That seemed to finally scare Angel into compliance. He put the baseball bat down and scampered inside, but shot a nasty glare at Yanvorren once Fluttershy had turned around.
“I’m very sorry about him,” Fluttershy said quietly. She decided she liked the alien better this way, on his knee—he didn’t tower over her imperiously. “Angel Bunny is a bit protective of me. I’m afraid he thought you might be trying to harm us.”
“No apologies necessary, Miss Fluttershy,” Yanvorren said as he thumbed the safety on and holstered his weapon. “I assure you I only want to go home.”
“What is that?” Twilight demanded. Yanvorren looked down to see her staring intently at his pistol from only a couple of inches away. He quickly stood and stepped away, but Twilight followed. Her horn and the pistol glowed purple, and the latter lifted out of his holster on its own. With a startled yelp, Yanvorren grabbed it back and rechecked the settings—narrow focus, high intensity, safety on.
“It’s a mark six pulse laser pistol,” he said quickly and re-holstered it, snapping the strap down over it securely. “Standard issue. Now where did that radio…ah, here it is. Right, then. I’ll just get to work trying to fix this, and hopefully I’ll be out of your hair—manes—whatever.”
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Twilight had more questions than she could count, but she recognized when someone was working and didn’t want to be disturbed. The radio was now in half a dozen pieces spread out in a neat, organized pattern on Fluttershy’s table. Yanvorren was sitting with his legs crossed over each other, a toolkit laid open beside him. One of the purple boards inside the radio was in one hand, and the other held a small tool with several probes at the end. He prodded the board, his small brown eyes staring intently at it.
“What do you think?” Twilight whispered to Fluttershy, who sat beside her. The butter-yellow mare looked away, and Twilight decided she hadn’t been clear. “I mean, he’s an alien. A real space alien!”
“He doesn’t seem like an alien,” Fluttershy said. They watched as the board sparked a few times before Yanvorren set it back down. “Even if he’s a bit…strange.”
“I wonder how he knows our language,” Twilight said aloud. She watched as Yanvorren started to reassemble his radio, but stopped when he picked up a silvery cylinder about an inch in diameter and four long, with shining knobs on both ends. He frowned at it and growled in his throat. The sound reminded Twilight of recordings she’d heard in the Canterlot Library of angry wolves and set the fur on her neck standing on end.
“Is something wrong?” Fluttershy asked. Twilight looked at her friend incredulously—the painfully-shy Pegasus seemed to have no trouble around the strange creature. Then Twilight realized that Fluttershy must see him as just another wild animal that she had taken in. In truth, he seemed to have completely recovered already, other than the extensive bruising over most of his body, but there was a reason Fluttershy was the Element of Kindness.
“I don’t have a power source,” Yanvorren said. “Normally it pulls from the power systems on the fighter, but the reactor is a few quintillion atoms spread out over a two mile radius by now. I need to find some other way….” He trailed off and glanced down at his pistol. A look of realization flashed in his eyes and he quickly pulled a triangular bar with rounded edges and a few tiny blue lights on the long side out of one of his bandolier pockets. “Pistol power cell…could work.” He quickly set about attaching the triangular bar and the silvery cylinder with the knobs together, mumbling to himself the whole while. Fluttershy stepped back, and Twilight went back to watching him intently. While Twilight was intensely curious about what Yanvorren was doing, Fluttershy only gave him a passing glance as she roamed about her house and tended to the animals there.
“There!” Yanvorren said, triumphantly holding up the radio, though it had several wires looping out of it and the “power cell” was hanging precariously from one corner. He set it back down and poked tentatively at the controls. It slowly flickered to life, and Yanvorren grinned. “Perfect! Now then…set it to emergency channel…bump up the gain a bit…and here. Record message. Nu lrao Redel Yanvorren vyo. Nu i’tanlakpen bumprijhek. Nu utmehardu mikap. There, that should do it. I don’t want to make it too long, best to keep it simple. They can follow the signal if they need to. Now to just set it…and there! Emergency beacon from scrap parts.”
“Will your people be able to hear that?” Twilight asked. Yanvorren shrugged noncommittally.
“They should. The fighter’s radio is designed to operate with a maximum range of ten thousand kilometers, so as long as they get at least that close, they should pick it up. My worry is the power cell. It was designed for this thing—” he patted the pistol at his hip “—not continued use. For now, all I can do is wait.”
“What did your message say?” Twilight asked.
“’I’m Redel Yanvorren. I crashed my ship. I need help.’”
“What language was that?”
“Kavrr. My home tongue.”
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. How are you speaking our language? Did you spend months in orbit, monitoring us secretly so you could learn our ways?”
“Uh…no. You’re speaking Inglandrr—sorry, English. You’re speaking English.”
“Equestrian,” Twilight corrected with a huff. “The chances of our two species developing an identical language without any prior interaction are…well, nonexistent. It can’t happen.”
“Exactly,” Yanvorren said. “This, plus you with your glowy-horn-stuff-lifting, just proves the idea I’ve been operating under this whole time.”
“And just what idea is that?”
“You’re a delusion,” he said with a sage nod. “I didn’t really crash. My instruments went out, I had no way to get on the catcher, and—well, I guess I did crash. But in the ship, not outside the—you said it was the Everfree Forest?—and now I’m in a coma on a gurney in the infirmary, where I’m imagining all of this as a sort of pseudo-Freudian fantasy.”
Twilight stood dumbfounded, mouth ajar, left eyelid twitching.
“You think,” she said slowly, trying to make sure she heard right, “that you’re in a coma.”
“Yep.”
“And that Fluttershy and I, everything around us, is a delusion.”
“Yes Ma’am.”
“And that even though I assure you I am perfectly real, you’re lying in a bed in a hospital?”
“The ship’s infirmary, but close enough.”
“Ugh!” Twilight groaned in exasperation. Of course she meets an alien, and he’s completely insane! Hopefully he’d realize his delusion theory was itself a delusion, and eventually come round. But, whether that happened or not, there was a more immediate concern. A question, the answer to which Twilight dreaded.
“Where are you going to stay, anyway?”
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AN:// Hello All. Experiment seems to be going about as expected--at least no one's demanded my head.
I know this is a bit slow getting into things, but is just how it goes. Comments would be greatly appreciated, even if it's just to say I missed an apostrophe. Thank you.