Fun fact: International law doesn’t apply across planets, even if they are connected by sea.
The moment you flew across the northern Canadian border between the two Earths, you were subject to the law of ponies. Coincidentally, the option to operate under the law is universal to both worlds, and it’s a simple process; just don’t fly across the border. That’s the easy bit; the hardest part is finding a ship that can do so.
When most people visit the world of magic—dubbed Equus by mankind—they don’t realize that they’re landing in the southern Zebralands. It’s easy to mistake the green lands of the humid-subtropical south for Equestria itself, but the land of ponies is over a hundred kilometers north of the Zebraland-based interplanetary airport, Harmony International. The establishment of this airport, as well as the Earth-based counterpart Proxima International, were the creations of the first trans-planetary cooperation agreement in known existence. In the first Earth-to-Equus expeditions, it was revealed to both pony and human alike that one avenue of travel between our two worlds was to be banned by the agreement; travel by sea.
Now, when I said crossing between both worlds unnoticed was a simple process, it is critical to understand that it wasn’t always like this, meaning, it wasn’t like we could just boat across an ocean of water and stars; sea-based travel is banned for a reason. You see—or rather, what you don’t see—is the veil separating Earth and Equus. Nobody knows why we suddenly found our worlds connected by a zone north of Canada and south of the Zebralands, but we did eventually learn that between these two worlds was a buffer of sorts. Humanity learned that there were no existing laws in this place, only those brought from between the worlds, and theorized it to be a location where matter slipped between universes. With much less theorizing, the inhabitants of Equus confirmed that the buffer zone was naturally absent of any matter and energy whatsoever. Armed with this knowledge, we concluded that ‘the Void’ could be traversed; energy and matter could enter the plane, and that meant that we could, too.
If our creation stories are to be believed, the Void is the edge of the world. It acts almost as if it were the vacuum of space, allowing energy and particles to pass into its realm from that of Earth and Equus. The Void, however, instead of allowing these foreign contaminants to stay in its thrall, pushes it back into our worlds, which is why we do not constantly leak our atmosphere or dribble endless waterfalls into the abyss; the Void cannot destroy or convert energy, so all it can do is push it back towards the source. From our constant experimentation in pushing the limits of the Void’s grasp, we have ascertained that there is a threshold within the Void, and once you cross it, you are pushed towards the other plane of existence, be it Earth or Equus. While the exact required speed to cross the threshold is unknown due to the lack of constants in maintaining speed, it is a known fact that planes can travel fast enough; boats however, have been shown to be unreliable. On a traditional airliner operated by human governments and Equestria, the Void’s pushback effect can be described as the result of the most powerful consummation of air resistance to ever be recorded. The pushback on a boat, however, can only be described as a devastating super-compressed coil with profoundly fatal speeds.
Ill-equipped travellers aboard these seafaring-vessels have never been recovered alive; all that remains after one of these journeys is the disemboweled and malformed carcass of their chosen transport. This is not to say that airliners are without their problems, and the loss of an occasional cargo aircraft is a problem both Earth and Equus governments actively seek to solve. Humanity was the first to cross the threshold into Equus, and it was by sharing our technology with our magical counterparts that we have come to the commercial consensus of actively flying between both worlds. We ask the question often, of why we continue to take these fatal risks, knowing full well that a passenger airline could one day—will someday lose hundreds of lives to the Void, and there is but one simple word to answer this question; globalization. Just as we reach the peak of our own outreach across Earth, new markets have been breached and opened to our industry, and new markets are the most priceless commodity in the game of globalization, for no matter the trade, be it goods, cultures, or passengers, there is much money to be made.
This is why I study intently the foreign nature of magic. This is why I work as the middleman for the shadows of nations. This is why I cross the ocean of black between worlds.
My name is Clay, and I smuggle across worlds.