Plants
Twilight was now flying on a giant, flat, invisible rat with some sort of neon werewolf.
It was at this point that Twilight had to consider what she was doing and where her life was taking her. She was supposed to be fighting tangible threats to Equestria, getting married, thinking about having kids with her wife, working on Equestria-Changeling relations. But she was in turmoil, scrambling to find what was causing the end of Equestria in alternate timelines, find out what she was turned into, figure out the monster that visited her at night, and also flying on a giant and importantly invisible flat rat larger than a carriage.
Awkwardly she waved at a passing wall-eyed pegasus, she was not sure if it was better to appear to be flying along while sitting down in mid air and maybe panic the flower girls or to have the rat be visible and panic the townsponies below.
Naudia was the one to speak up at the Gwynn the wolf-thing with a question in their bubble of calm air and silence on the rat's back.
"So do you know about Twilight's transformation?"
"Oh yeah, custom job, really complicated to work with, they brought in The Oracle of Adak for the design job." Gwynn said like Twilight had just gotten a makeover.
"That's a very, casual tone for something so drastic." Naudia put out.
"I keep forgetting." Gwynn slapped her forehead. "Sorry, I had to take a full year's worth of classes for this, but it's so hard to change your common sense.
"Lemme try again, by our standards Twilight isn't strong enough for what she needs to do, timeframe doesn't allow for us to explain beforehand and we're approaching 'do or die' time over in Knicknik."
"Oh that's that town up on the other side of Luna Bay!" Twilight said dispensing a fact before she actually thought about it. "What could be happening up there, it's just a minor logging town."
"I'm not at liberty to say, but I'm here to take you to somebody who is."
"I hear it's so far north that in the summertime the sun can be up almost all night." Naudia said.
That was something that Gwynn seemed to take an interest in if her artificial wolf face was any indication. Naudia tried to put that together in her head, maybe they came from a very equilateral area? Something about it didn't click right. Twilight asked the question he had for her.
"Have you ever been that far north Gwynn?"
They got another strange answer out of her before she clammed up for the rest of the trip.
"This is the first time I've been anywhere like Equestria."
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As the trip got a bit longer flying over Applejack's farm Twilight decided to ask a question she should have asked before.
"Was that you I chased around the castle the other day."
"Yes." Gwynn said. "I got a bit careless because Twilight is the only one who could really see me."
"What were you doing breaking into the castle and going into my room."
"Test results, we needed to see how the-" Gwynn stopped as Twilight and Naudia screamed.
Twilight and Naudia were not used to flying on something like this, so when the rat abruptly stopped flying and started dropping altitude they thought something was wrong. They landed with an audible flumpft, like a large heavy rug being dropped into an open meadow. Only it was a giant flying rat being dropped into an open meadow.
Gwynn just got off the rat giving it's head a stroke as she walked over to an arbitrary spot in the meadow.
"So we're going to wait for a ride here?"
"Nope." Gwynn said and knocked twice on what looked like empty air with her claw. The empty air made a wooden sound before a door opened up in nothing and into something downright bizarre.
The first thought that came to Twilight's head was "there is a watermelon hooked up to tubes on the wall." That was the best way to sum up the inside of the invisible object, like somebody had let an arts and crafts project with plants get about two grocery stores, a sci-fi book, and an intervention out of hand from an interior design artist.
There was indeed a watermelon piped into a wall with equally planty pipes coming out of it, above the watermelon was some sort of plant light fixture hooked up to the watermelon by what looked like a gourd of some kind. It mimicked your typical fluorescent light bulb, but it was a plant glowing a warm yellow color. There were plant hooks on the plant wall, next to flowering orchids that, as your eye followed them down the wall, seamlessly tiled together and transformed into some sort of box readout of unknown use.
"What? Didn't you live in a tree house?" Gwynn asked, she had to stoop so as not to drag her head along the ceiling.
"Not like this." Twilight spoke for both of them.
The inside of the invisible plant thing was not as squidgy as Twilight had been expecting, the floor was basically a lawn and poking at the strange plant pipes on the wall revealed they were very firm. As the door closed behind them the purpose of the flower console became clear as a little view of the outside showed Frankie the flying flat rat walking around the invisible object they were inside.
The absurdity of that moment tried to hit Twilight again but at this point she was resistant to shock, her curiosity and experiences in the past year dampened that. Naudia however mutely followed along with Gwynn into the ship-like hallways made entirely out of plants.
"Go sit down over in there, I have to see to Frankie he gets nervous about traveling." Gwynn pointed at a plant ship door that irised open as they walked close.
Inside was possibly the strangest thing Twilight had seen all day it looked like the inside of a smaller military airship, chairs facing inward into the isle along the wall. And that was the start and stop of relatable bits for Twilight and Naudia. The chairs were made out of giant leaves, the armrests were of a nice finished hardwood with a living plant cushion, there were messages printed in strips close to the ceiling that looked like ads. There were screens at the end of the train displaying ads that shifted to safety information on a timer. And every part of it was organic and made out of some kind of plant, like some mystical forest ponies had taken over Manehatten.
The occupants of the ship were even stranger. There was a sausage cart with a giant shell on it, very organic the umbrella was made up of a banana plant, a giant spider, a couple chickens, and a whole lot of very strange creatures sitting loosely buckled into chairs. All the creatures stopped briefly and looked up at them, the general impression they gave off was "at some point this might have been a ragtag group, and that only really manifested itself as eclectic at this point." And it was a big group at least 20 maybe even 30 different eclectic creatures.
Feeling awkward Naudia and Twilight took the two of the three empty chairs on the farthest corner of the room, the chairs looked like they were specifically designed for ponies if a . They found themselves sitting across from a feathered rat faced creature.
The feathered rat faced thing outstretched a claw for Twilight to shake. It really was a strange thing, raptorish, feathered, but mixed with rat features like it's face, it's ears, it's tail, very rat grey feathers as well. It wore strange clothes as well as a bandeau that covered up the strange bulge or puff of feathers on it's chest but had some kind of standalone sleeves made of a red silk outlined in gold and similarly adorned pants without shoes.
Twilight took it's hand gingerly and it introduced itself.
"Hi! I'm Kuiguk, I'm a Kopiaq." Twilight guessed from his voice that he was male.
And then a huge hairy spider crawled it's way around from Kuiguk's back and into Twilight's view.
Twilight shrieked.
Instantly the room was more alert, it was subtle shift in the air, Twilight could have sworn she heard a seatbelt snap. Looking around the entire cabin was very alert even the animals Twilight was previously ignoring looked like they were ready to fight something.
"S'all right everybody, I've read about this." Came Gwynn's voice from the door, and at the door was… not Gwynn.
The grey-blue lion creature padded over on two legs and spoke with Gwynn's voice once again.
"In genetically dictated societies insects are considered distasteful like mosquitoes are, I think Twilight was just surprised by Kuiguk's Ken'gun here" The lion thing that was probably Gwynn's real form pointed at the beach ball sized spider with a paw-like hand. Contrary to Twilight's expectations the spider thing crawled forward and grasped her finger between the blunt part of it's mandibles and tugged it around a bit making a chittering sound like a raccoon.
"Are you sure that's safe?" Naudia asked.
"Of course!" Kuiguk said animatedly petting the hairy beach ball sized spider, "She's been with me since the day I was born, haven't you girl."
The bipedal lion that was presumably Gwynn Hall sat down next to them and Twilight got her first good look at Gwynn Hall.
Gwynn was some sort of lion thing that wasn't quite right, and it took Twilight a second to get a handle as to why. The lion's mane was there, very voluminous to the point where it was tempting to try and touch it. Certainly had the bodytype for it, empathized hind legs, digitigrade paws, a lion tail, again wonderful grey-blue coat. She wore a lot of bright blue bodypaint in intricate straight lined patterns that shifted into the roots of her mane, and she was dressed in a plain brown loincloth edged in a zigzag of a blue line and a chestwrap in a similar material that left her defined abs on display.
Looking up at Gwynn's face Twilight caught onto the disparity almost instantly.
"Rabbit?" Twilight said out loud, all of this in a row was starting to scramble her brain and she felt she was losing track or falling behind somehow. Gwynn had the face and ears of a rabbit and on closer inspection her other features were hard to tell if they were lion or rabbit.
"Yeah, I'm a amirlu lion, I've been told they were partially based on rabbits and partially based on lions."
"But… why?" Naudia asked.
Gwynn gave them a very blank look, as if they had just said something completely insane. Kuiguk leaned forward to fill in the gap in the conversation.
"Just a tip, it's not polite to ask somebody you don't really know why they decided to be what they are."
"No I mean, why were amirlu lions based on rabbits and lions? How?"
This time a shadowy creature in a farmer's outfit had to answer, there wasn't an inch of visible skin anywhere on his entire body, he was sitting in a corner opposite to Twilight and Naudia holding a chicken on his lap.
"While there may be a different answer somewhere in the past, you should assume a subrace of humans look that way because a designer thought it looked good and contracted the design for the public and it became popular." Then the figure went back to looking out the window.
"Well I think that answers that question Mr. uhh…" Kuiguk said.
"Roshin." the figure in the corner stated, face still obscured he didn't even look back at Naudia and Twilight.
The entire room lit up with murmurs at that, apparently that was a big deal around here.
"Geez, I knew they were bringing out the big guns," Kuiguk stated, "But I didn't think they'd go THAT big."
Twilight and Naudia's faces spoke for themselves to Kuiguk.
"How can you never have heard of-" Got out of his mouth before his brain caught up. "OH, yeah, well Roshin is a Millimus chicken farmer and is the strongest person we know of. He could take any five people in this room singlehandedly."
Kuiguk for some reason even gestured at the sausage cart.
"Chicken farmer?" Naudia asked but was ignored.
"But." Twilight pointed at the cart. "It's just a sausage cart with a snail shell."
That prompted a reaction from the snail shell as a strange slime snail cat creature slid itself out of the shell, the shell itself unrolling segments outward into a tail. Even little patches of clothing came with it and seemed to knit themselves together as if they were made out of slime.
"You were saying?" The cat-snail creature said sitting on the edge of the sausage cart as if this would explain everything to Twilight.
There wasn't a single person in the room that didn't pick up on the fact that Twilight and Naudia were even more confused now.
"Let's just put this down to cultural differences again." Gwynn said, and then spoke to the rest of the group. "Ponies are a genetically dictated mono-culture, they're stuck how they're born, no gene mods different magic."
There was a pitying look in the cat-snails eyes and she looked like she was going to say something but was interrupted by a speaker.
"This is your pilot speaking, please buckle your seatbelts, we will be orbiting in thirty seconds."
"But we haven't taken off yet!"
"Buckle up and prepare yourselves for G-forces." Gwynn said pointing to the seatbelts next to them.
As soon as Twilight had gotten her seatbelt buckled there was a feeling like her entire body was being yanked all at once in a direction she couldn't comprehend.