//------------------------------//
// How To Fix A Damaged Human 
// Story: Kono Utsukushii Chikyuu no Tame ni 
// by alarajrogers 
//------------------------------//

It wasn't Tuesday, but Discord sat in Fluttershy's living room, chattering amiably with her as if he had no cares in the world and no purpose for being out and about in Equestria except for the pleasure of her company. This wasn't true, but he was trying to make sure Fluttershy didn't know that.

"...said, 'I thought they were bananas!'" He laughed at his own anecdote, and Fluttershy laughed with him, the gentle sound of her giggle the most beautiful music in the world. 

"You have absolutely the silliest things happen to you," Fluttershy said, smiling. 

"I know! Isn't it awful?"

"I actually think maybe you like it. Chaos is pretty silly sometimes, after all."

"True enough." He leaned back in the armchair and took a sip of his tea. "So how goes things at the sanctuary?"

"Oh, it's wonderful! We just got in—"

For the second time today, something tore a hole in the thaumic field, making Discord shudder as if his limbs were made of rubber. "What's wrong?" Fluttershy asked.

"Hold that thought, Fluttershy, there's something I need to investigate." Discord got to his feet and snapped his lion paw's digits.

And then he was floating above the ground, in a clearing, where there was a bleeding human being lying sprawled on her back, her elaborate long-sleeved and tailed tunic torn and ripped, and tears on her face.

The last place this had happened, Discord had shown up to investigate half an hour after it had happened, because he'd been in his chaos dimension and hadn't sensed it the moment it had happened. There'd been nothing there when he got there. So he'd been waiting at Fluttershy's to see if it was going to happen again... and it had. Again. The first one had been a trot or two away, but still within the Everfree, as was this one. Not surprising. The Everfree was where most of the dimensional incursions happened.

He dropped down to the human's side immediately, checking to make sure she wasn't dead. Her tunic/gown/cloak-thing was magenta, with a black turtleneck underneath. Neither color showed the red of human blood well, but he could smell quite a lot of it. Her face was clammy but not yet cold like a dead thing... and she had magic. Not a huge amount of it, but most humans didn't have any, unless they were from a high-magic universe and he could tell that she was not. Her clothes had no magic clinging to them, but it lived inside her cells and in her brain.

Dead creatures didn't have active, living magic. Discord floated her up to keep her body in the same position, put his arms under her, and teleported frantically back to Fluttershy's cottage. 

"Fluttershy!" he shrieked. "Fluttershy, help me!"

Fluttershy had gotten into the kitchen in the time it had taken him to go investigate the disruption and find the human. She came out of the kitchen at a gallop... and stopped dead, staring. "Oh... oh my. Is that... is that an ape?"

"Kinda, it's actually a human, I mean she's actually a human because she has breasts which is a dead giveaway that she's a human because none of the other apes do and also no coat—"

"Like the world that Sunset Shimmer lives in?"

"Those aren't quite the same kind of humans, those are more like, parallel humans to Equestria so they have cutie marks and skin colored like coats. This one's from the more common type of human, but Fluttershy! She's dying!" He set the injured human down on the couch.

"Calm down, Discord. We'll help her. Can you teleport her clothes off? I need to see the injuries—"

"On it," Discord said, and snapped, leaving the human clad only in the thin cotton panties covering her genitals and buttocks. She was a very, very pale human, with a riotous blonde mane that was simultaneously long, frizzy and a wild cloud around her head. She was also a very tall human, much taller than the average human female, somewhat taller than the average human male, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, broad hips, and very large breasts, which along with her abdomen were bruised with giant splotches of purple, blue and almost-black. Red bubbled from her mouth with every weak breath, and there was a seeping reddish-brown wound directly under her breastbone.

"Okay. This looks like internal injuries, mostly. I could stitch up this open wound, but I can't do anything about the internal bleeding, so for now I'll just apply a dressing. We're going to need someone with more knowledge of her anatomy than I have. Go get Twilight and tell her to bring any medical information she has about humans whatsoever, and if she doesn't have any, information about great apes."




Twilight was deep in drawing up plans for the school she wanted her friends and herself to run, if she could just find an opportune time to talk to them about it and convince them, when Discord appeared. "Twilight it's an emergency life or death do you have any medical texts about humans?" he said in one run-on breath.

"Humans? In Equestria?"

"Do you have any yes or no she's going to die!"

"Who is?"

"The human!"

"One of my human friends?"

"No! She's not even the same kind of human! Sapiens sapiens, not sapiens harmonia!"

"I think you mean sapiens harmonious if you're speaking Roaman—"

"Fluttershy said if you don't have any medical texts for humans bring whatever you have about apes!"

Discord seemed uncharacteristically panicked. That was strange. He'd been somewhat weird since the whole thing with the Storm King, which he had never explained why he hadn't been present for despite the fact that he'd been promising for weeks that he would attend the Festival of Friendship and had sounded quite enthusiastic about it... but Discord was always weird in one way or another. Still, if a life was at stake Twilight didn't have time to figure it out. "I have books about apes. I don't have anything about humans, but, are you able to go through the portal? I can quickly send a message to Sunset to gather up medical texts and get them ready for you if you can go pick them up from her."

Discord rolled his eyes. "Really, Twilight. Can I go through your silly little magic portal to the land of magical humans? What do you think?"

"Well, the first time I went I lost my magic, and I would imagine that would be really bad for you—"

"Yes, but I'm not going that way. Think about it. I'm a dragon-pony; wouldn't going through that portal turn me into a werewolf?"

"A wha—never mind. I'll grab the books about apes. I'll teleport over to Fluttershy as soon as I've got them." She finished scrawling in the magical notebook. "Sunset will try to get something together for you, I'm sure." Spike wasn't here, so she had to grab the books with her magic herself rather than asking him to grab them for her.

"Arrivederci!" Discord caroled, and vanished. Moments later, Twilight teleported to Fluttershy's house.

The human on the couch was naked, except for underpants and a dressing taped directly below her ribs. Twilight winced. "Fluttershy, should we cover her with something? Letting people see their teats like that is a real taboo for humans."

Fluttershy shook her head. "Later, when she's stable. Right now we need to be able to access the injury. I think she's got a broken rib poking into a lung, and extensive internal bleeding in the intestinal region. And she's definitely got a wound here –" Her wing pointed at the dressing. "Unless you have some spells that can help, she might need surgery, but I'm not qualified to do surgery on humans. I've never even operated on an ape."

"I sent Discord to the human world to get medical texts from Sunset. If I can tell what's wrong with her, and what her body's supposed to be like, I might be able to cast a healing spell." She fired off a magic health bubble. "At the very least I've just sterilized the area so she won't have to worry about infection."

They opened up the anatomy books to review various apes. Centaurs, minotaurs, gargoyles, satyrs – oh, wait! So that was what the Storm King had been! She'd wondered – baboons, gorillas, chimpanzees... The human was fully bipedal, like the minotaurs, gargoyles and satyrs, which affected the shape of her spine and hips but didn't have much impact on her lungs or abdomen. None of the ape species had breasts; having had them, Twilight knew they were sensitive, squishy and probably didn't have much inside them aside from milk-making apparatus and fat, but she'd never actually read an anatomy textbook while she'd been in the human world. In retrospect that seemed like an oversight. 

Between the two of them, and the magical scans Twilight was able to perform, they managed to figure out enough of it that Twilight could telekinetically get the rib back into place and cast a healing spell on the lungs, and suture the knife wound and mostly seal it, but there wasn't going to be anything either of them could do about the internal bleeding; it had been obvious where the lung was injured because there'd been a rib stuck in it, but it was not at all obvious where, exactly, the rest of the internal bleeding was coming from in the human's abdomen.  

Then Discord popped in with a pale pink human woman with green hair, who was wearing a lab coat. "This isn't – I can't do a thing in this – wait, are those ponies? I've heard about this magic thing and that it's linked to ponies somehow..."

"I got us a doctor!" Discord said proudly. "Dr. Crash Cart, ER trauma surgeon!"

"I can't do anything here! You have no sterile field, you have no equipment, this woman needs a saline drip at the least and probably a blood transfusion—"

"Discord, would you be able to snap up the equipment Dr. Crash Cart would need?" Fluttershy asked.

"Say no more," Discord said, and equipment that actually looked like real medical equipment appeared all around them. They were still in Fluttershy's living room, but her furniture had turned into the medical equipment. "I'll have to go to the human world to get actual blood, though. None of this equipment will stick around for more than a day or two."

"Get type O negative, she'll be able to take that regardless of what her own type is. And I'm going to need an anesthetist, and they'll need anesthesia equipment." The woman shook her head. "What can we do to sterilize the field, pony people? Anything? Do you even know--"

"Uh, I already cast magic health bubble, and since you're here, I'll cast it again," Twilight said, doing so. "That sterilizes everything within the bubble."

"Oh. Well, good. For some reason I didn't expect ponies would understand germ theory."




Once Discord was back with the anesthetist and a few trauma nurses, the doctor went into action. Twilight watched intently as she cut the injured woman's abdomen open carefully, sutured holes in the woman's stomach and intestines closed, and then stitched her back together. With magic health bubble and a few healing spells, plus the blood transfusion and saline, they had the woman stable, though still weak and in need of bed rest until she was fully healed, within an hour, at which point Discord brought the human medical team back home.

They were likely to have some interesting stories, Twilight thought.

"Who is she?" she asked Discord when he got back.

Discord shrugged elaborately. "I'm sure I have no idea. I found her like this. Well, like she was when I brought her to Fluttershy."

"You went to investigate something," Fluttershy said. "And humans aren't native to Equestria. What were you looking for?"

His face was uncharacteristically series. "An incursion from another dimension." Discord turned to look at Twilight. "I sensed one, but by the time I got there to investigate there was nothing there. So I figured I'd hang around and see if it happened again... and when it did, I found this human."

"You seemed really panicked at the thought of the human dying," Twilight said.

"I wasn't panicked," Discord said, dismissively waving a paw. "I was just... concerned. I knew Fluttershy would be very upset if a strange animal died in her care—"

"And you would be very upset," Fluttershy said, taking his paw in her hoof. "I know how much you hate it when creatures die, Discord."

"Oh, well... yes, I guess that is true... I'm not a fan of death in any way, but when they're old, well, I'm used to it. But when creatures who are young die... that's not what chaos is for. That's not what it's about."

No one here had claimed it was, but Twilight suspected maybe he was responding to a very, very old argument. "Do you think she's responsible for the incursion?" she asked.

"If she was, whatever she used to do it blew up in her face. Well, literally in her chest," Discord said. "I don't know. There's something very odd about her. It's refreshing, but... potentially dangerous."

"Odd?" Discord calling something odd was... not exactly the norm. "In what way?"

"Her entire body is suffused with magic, of two different types. I didn't have time to really inspect her closely, but it seemed like one might be her own and one might be something someone cast on her. But she's a human, and she's from a lower-magic world than the one your pals come from. I've met plenty of humans with magic, but they came from high-magic worlds. Humans from low-magic worlds don't usually have magic, and they don't usually have magic done to them." He was suddenly wearing a detective hat and holding a large magnifying glass. "It's going to be fun to investigate."

"Well, not until she wakes up," Fluttershy said, "and is strong enough to answer your questions. She was in very bad shape, you know. If you hadn't gotten the human doctors here to treat her, I think she might have died." She touched Discord's paw, making him smile goofily. "I'm very proud of you. You saved her life."

"I did, didn't I?" Discord said, in a tone that sounded like he was going to start preening his wings, or grooming himself like a cat. "She was lucky I was there when she came through!"

"She certainly was," Fluttershy said. "But now that she's in recovery... can you put my living room back? Not everything, of course, I know she needs that saline drip with the poppyseed extract and of course she needs a bed, but—"

"Say no more." Discord snapped, and restored the living room, with the exception that the couch was still missing and the bed, with an IV pole next to it, was still there, the injured woman lying in it.

Twilight lifted the woman's clothes off the floor where Discord had discarded them. "I'm going to take these to Rarity to have them repaired, and if she can make a robe or pajamas or something that the poor human can wear while she's recovering... these things seem really complicated. I don't even see how she got these on in the first place." There were a pair of boots that were, disturbingly, made of leather, and they were as tall as Fluttershy was at the head. Humans used things like leather because cows weren't intelligent in their world and they were predatory omnivores, like griffins, but it was still upsetting on a gut level. "Maybe Rarity can come up with some better shoes for her, too. These boots... ugh."

There was a sudden banging on the door. Neither of the ponies had expected anyone – Twilight and Fluttershy looked at each other in bewilderment. Discord facepalmed. "I'll let you two deal with this," he said. "I have investigations to conduct."

He vanished. Twilight went to the door, figuring she'd spare Fluttershy the anxiety of answering the door for a stranger, but as soon as she put her hoof on the knob, the door swung open, narrowly missing her head, and Pinkie Pie bounced in. "My Pinkie Sense told me there's somepony new in town who needs a party, and that they're at Fluttershy's? Who is it? Where are they? Tell me!" This last was said with her face pressed up against Twilight's, somehow staring down at Twilight even though she was shorter than Twilight.

"Pinkie!" Fluttershy snapped. "Be quiet! The person you're looking for is recovering from terrible injuries and she is sleeping."

"Oh, sorry," Pinkie whispered, very loudly for a whisper. She noticed the bed for the first time. "Wow! Is – is that a human?"

Twilight nodded. "Discord says she's a different kind of human than the kind from the alternate world we know about. He found her, with life threatening injuries. We've had doctors in here to stitch her up and she's stable now, but I don't think she's going to have the strength for a welcoming party for a while, Pinkie."

Pinkie nodded somberly. "We'll just have to have a super big one when she's well enough, to welcome her to Ponyville and celebrate her getting better!"

"I'm taking her clothes over to Rarity's. Humans need clothes, they don't have coats, or tails to hide their, um..."

"Naughty bits?" Pinkie suggested.

Twilight flushed. "Yeah, those. These clothes are a wreck and I can't figure out how a human would even wear them but I'm sure Rarity can figure it out."

"I'll go with you! She's not gonna want to have a party if she's naked!"

"I'll stay here and take care of her if she needs anything," Fluttershy said.




Rarity found the outfit... bizarre, to say the least, and she had seen some very strange fashions in her time. There was a black turtleneck and bright blue leggings, with a golden belt. That wasn't too strange. There was a garment that seemed to be designed to hold and restrain the strangely enlarged human mammaries, which made a certain amount of sense; Rarity certainly wouldn't want to be running around with those things hanging off her body without anything to keep them from bouncing and jiggling. There were white silken gloves for the human's multi-digit paws. There were extremely tall boots made of black leather, which Rarity was trying very very hard not to be completely freaked out about. And then there was the... whatever-this-was.

It was... something like a tunic, with a lengthy tail, which would be absolutely normal for a pony tunic but on a creature without a tail, it seemed very strange. The sleeves trailed in a way that would be absolutely horrible on a pony, dragging in the dirt, but on a biped might just work... or might be ridiculously ostentatious. And then there was the collar... how did this even work? The sleeves were partially detached, and there was an enormous high collar that was made of a different, stiffer material, in a completely different color – blue, but not quite the same blue as the leggings. The outer surface of the tunic was magenta, and made of some sort of velvety material, and the inside was pure white and seemed to be some sort of cotton blend. None of the fabrics were anything Rarity recognized, let alone could match; she tried staining a tiny corner of the fabric to see if she could identify how best to clean the blood out, but the material was impervious to any stain she tried, whether mud, dye, bleach, or grape juice. It must have been soaking in blood for quite some time to be as stained as it got, she thought.

In any case, without being able to match the fabric, she couldn't easily repair it, and she didn't know what was safe to clean it with, so she set it aside in favor of making new clothes to the same measurements. The softness of the material told her that the human liked rich, soft fabrics, and the colors gave her some idea what the human would like. She made a nightgown in a blue similar to the legging color, with gold-colored piping, and a plush magenta bathrobe. Twilight came by with the panties the human had been wearing, which was... interesting. Panties, for ponies, were almost exclusively either sexy lingerie or protective clothing for elderly ponies who weren't quite entirely as continent as they wanted to be, but these didn't seem to fill either role. They were cotton and very utilitarian, but much too thin to protect against bathroom accidents. She asked Twilight about it, and Twilight turned bright red.

"Um... huh. So, uh. You know how you feel when you're in estrus and there's a good-looking stallion?" Twilight looked down, pawing at the ground with her hoof in the universal pony expression of "oh dear I'm so embarrassed." "Humans are in, I guess like a pre-estrus, all the time, and... they don't have a tail to keep their, uh, you know, private parts away from their clothes..."

"Oh! Say no more, I fully understand," Rarity said, turning somewhat red herself. Lacking a tail, and standing bipedally... human females would end up staining their clothes every time they experienced desire, which apparently for human females was all the time. She made a dozen of the panties for the human; it sounded like they needed to be washed a lot. 

The hoofgear gave her conniptions. The blood cleaned off the leather fairly well, but that wasn't the point; no one was going to make friends with ponies while walking around with dead cow on their legs. (According to Twilight it was almost certainly dead cow; humans didn't eat ponies or use their skin, as far as she knew. It was all cows. Rarity knew cows weren't intelligent in that universe, but she felt terribly for them anyway.) But, hoofgear for a creature with such incredibly different lower paws – right, Twilight said the word was "feet" – seemed like an exciting challenge. Rarity usually stayed away from making pony shoes; it was more metallurgy than sewing, most of the time.  These would be more like garments. She managed to source some very expensive ethical snakeskin, taken from molts, and made boots to the same shape as the lower part of the ridiculously tall boots the human had arrived in. Hopefully she didn't really need boots to be that tall, because Rarity couldn't get enough snakeskin to make boots that size. She made the soles out of woven bamboo and lined the whole thing with plush, absorbent cotton fabric. Twilight said that "hands" and "feet", the human equivalent of hooves, were much more sensitive than hooves, a lot more akin to a pony's face in sensitivity, so something that felt nice seemed required.

However, an injured person wearing a nightgown and a bathrobe should not be gallivanting about in boots. Twilight didn't know what kind of gear humans wore on their feet when they were lounging around at the spa – did they have spas? Of course they had to have spas, what kind of a civilization wouldn't have spas? – but she consulted Sunset via her book, and reported back about "slippers", which sounded absolutely lovely and Rarity decided then and there that she had to figure out how to make those for ponies. 

"Do you think she'll like these?" she asked Twilight and Fluttershy, showing off the garments she'd made for the otherworldly visitor, who hadn't woken up yet. It had taken a day for her to make all the clothes. She hoped that didn't mean the human was in a coma. In one of the medical thriller romances she'd read, they said that a pony who slept for more than two days might be in a coma, particularly if injury was involved.

"I'm sure she will," Fluttershy said.

"I can't see why not," Twilight said. "Once she wakes up she can tell you what kind of regular clothes to make. I can't believe for a minute that complicated... thing she was wearing is normal clothes where she comes from."

"Has Discord found out anything about where she came from?"

Fluttershy said, "He said he thinks he's found the world, but not why it was generating portals. It's really low-magic but apparently there are some humans with wings? But very, very few of them. They seem to be some kind of squad like the Wonderbolts."

"How very strange," Rarity said. She looked down at the visitor. "Well, please do tell me when she wakes up. I can't wait to see what my creations look like on her. I've never designed for a human before."

"We really do all need to take a trip to Sunset's world one of these days," Twilight said. "You guys should get to try being humans for yourselves. I mean, we were all seaponies, and I turned us all into Breezies that one time, but human bodies aren't shaped like pony bodies at all. It's a real experience."

Rarity agreed. She'd love to meet her young human counterpart and give her some advice. The other Rarity didn't own a boutique yet, since she was either technically a child or just barely an adult, Rarity wasn't sure.




When Twilight showed Applejack the sleeping human, Applejack gazed down at her for a long while. "Something ain't right," she finally said.

"What do you mean?" Twilight asked.

"I don't know," Applejack said. "She feels real enough." She touched the human's arm with her hoof. "But when I look close at her, I feel like... I don't know. Double vision, but not quite. Like... there's something underneath what we see, but I can't see what it is."

"Do you think it's dangerous?"

"Anything could be dangerous, but it's important to give folks the benefit for the doubt. She ain't a Changeling or Discord would know. Right?" This was addressed to Fluttershy.

"Um, yes, he says he can detect different kinds of magic, so he'd know if somepony was a Changeling."

"So... I don't reckon there's any way to know if she's dangerous or not until she wakes up, but she's recovering from being half dead, so I don't figure she's dangerous now, anyway." She shook her head. "Just wish I knew what I was looking at."




Rainbow Dash didn't want to seem like she was really curious, or upset, or especially not scared, because none of those things would make her look cool, so her reaction to Fluttershy showing her the human was to shrug. "Another weird creature, yadda yadda," she said. "We met a lot of freaky looking folks when we were trying to defeat the Storm King. Human's a thing Twilight's seen, at least."

"Well, yes, but the friends we made while we were fighting the Storm King are from our own world. This human's from a portal to another dimension," Fluttershy said.

"Yeah, just like the other humans." Rainbow shrugged. "She's cool and all. Lemme know when she wakes up. Also I wanna talk to Discord, can you get him to come here?"

"I, sure, but, um... you want to talk to Discord? That's, um, unexpected."

"Hey, he's our friend now, right? And I talk to friends. So why not?" She shrugged again. "Sometimes we have flying contests. He's pretty good when he grows his wings out. I kick his butt every time, but he's not bad."

Fluttershy apparently had a candle that, once lit, could transmit letters to Discord the same way Spike could send them, as if the candle was dragonfire somehow. She wrote a note to Discord, and he popped in five minutes later. "Rainbow Dash! I hear you wanted to talk to me. My life is now complete!" He was suddenly wearing a ballroom gown, standing on a stage with a microphone, with paparazzi that also looked like Discord all around taking pictures. "You like me! You really like me!"

"Yeah, I don't wanna bug Fluttershy's patient so let's step outside," Rainbow said casually.

"All right, though I confess I'm just dying to know what you have to say," Discord said, and then vanished. Rainbow hovered through the door, and there he was.

"Listen, I didn't want to talk in there because I don't wanna worry Fluttershy and you don't either so I want you to be honest. How dangerous are humans?"

Discord stroked his beard. "An interesting question. Humans are inherently a much more disharmonious species than ponies. The ones Twilight encountered are... how to put this in layperson terms... their universe is connected to ours, and they're within the range of the field of Harmony that radiates through Equestria. So they're much more harmonious than the average human. This one is much more likely to be from a world where humans behave... violently."

"And you're leaving Fluttershy alone with her?"

Discord scowled. "Yes. Humans aren't particularly dangerous to ponies without their weapons. She may be bigger and stronger than Fluttershy, but Fluttershy can fly and she can't. Fluttershy is experienced with dangerous animals and knows how to keep from being attacked. Also she has a house full of animals who would lay down their lives for her. Also she has abilities that border on mind control. Also the human is naked and was nearly dead when she got here." He considered. "They're good at throwing things. I should warn Fluttershy about that. But I don't think she's capable of being much of a threat right now, or for a while after she wakes up."

Rainbow frowned. "I still don't like it. You're leaving Fluttershy alone with an animal that's as smart as a pony but more violent."

"They're like griffins, if griffins were unable to fly and didn't have beaks or claws and were significantly weaker in proportion to their size. They're not murder machines, Rainbow. They're just greedy and unpredictable."

"I'm gonna keep an eye on her anyway. You make sure Fluttershy tells me when she wakes up, and I'm going to keep my weather patrols centered around Fluttershy's house."

"And how do you expect to control Ponyville weather from a point that's as far from the center of Ponyville as you can get and still put Ponyville on your return envelopes?"

"Simple." Rainbow grinned. "I'm awesome."