//------------------------------//
// Chapter 46: Dear John 
// Story: Pandemic: Starting Over 
// by Halira 
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I gazed around the basement and tried not to shuffle nervously as Starlight and I waited. We were standing beside the case with the dolls and had a clear view of the door leading to the cellar area and the cupboard within. Twenty minutes of the hour I allotted had passed, and there were no signs of the humans. 

"You don't need to be so nervous," Starlight said. 

I glanced around at the corners of the ceiling. "I'm not nervous about them. I'm worried that there are more spiders down here."

Starlight raised an eyebrow at me. "You have arachnophobia?"

"Yes," I muttered. "Had a widow get into my tail, and it freaked me out so bad I now jump at every spider."

"Have you tried asking your daughter for help?" Starlight asked. "That's part of her job, helping ponies overcome irrational fears. It's even in her name, Phobia Remedy."

"I don't want to deal with any psychological mumbo-jumbo," I replied. 

"It would seem to me that your fear is mumbo-jumbo," Starlight replied. "Talk to your daughter, give her a chance to help you. I know it has to be embarrassing being terrified of a little spider."

"I—" My response was cut short at the sound of the cellar door opening. 

Starlight immediately lit her horn, and a shield surrounded us. The particular shield she put up would not be immediately visible to most, but I had a good eye for recognizing spell work, even if it were variations I wasn't thoroughly familiar with. The humans would see her horn glowing, but they wouldn't be aware of the shield in these poor lighting conditions. 

The same man from before cautiously came through the door with a shotgun clutched in his hands. He spotted us almost immediately and turned the gun towards us, but not in a position to fire immediately. That could change in an instant. 

Even knowing about the shield, my heart started racing. "Hello again, I assure you that a gun isn't needed. We aren't going to hurt you."

"I'll decide if it is needed," he said harshly. "So what do I call you, mutant? Do I call you Charlotte or Sunset Blessing?"

"Sunset Blessing would be preferred," I replied, then gestured to Starlight. "This is my friend, Starlight Glimmer. She means you no harm either."

He entered with the barrel of the gun at her. "What's she doing? What’s with that glow around her horn?"

"Ensuring our safety," Starlight replied evenly. "Just making sure nothing you do can hurt us."

The man pulled the gun up, so he was ready to shoot if needed. "You're going to have to be a little more specific than that if you don't want to get shot."

Starlight frowned. "It’s a shield, but I’ll make it visible so you can see what I’m doing."

True to her word, her shield shifted from invisible to having a transparent lavender hue. However, the man didn't lower his gun. That was worrying.

I cleared my throat. "You have your gun, and we have our magic. Everyone has their tools to keep each other feeling safe. We won't argue about you having a gun ready to shoot us, and you don't argue about us having a method of preventing you from shooting us. Does that sound fair?"

He still didn't lower his gun. "Talk then."

"Alright," I replied and took a deep breath. "We can do far more with our horns than make shields. It would be no effort at all to disarm you and lock you in place. We can also teleport straight into your bunker and do the same with everyone there, but we aren't going to do that because we don’t want violence."

"You seem hostile to me. You've taken over our house and are intent on forcing us out," he replied through grit teeth. "You could be just bluffing about what you can do."

I licked my lips. "We don't want to have to prove ourselves on that. How about a small demonstration that we can grab things from a distance? It wouldn't be you or your gun or any attack on you or your family."

He shook his head. "You just sit right there. So you’re saying you with the horns on your heads are like telekinetic or something."

"We're unicorns, and we work what in popular nomenclature would be called spells," I explained. "We can convert and use a certain type of energy—what scientists used to refer to as dark energy—into controlled effects."

"Unicorns!" he laughed. "I suppose you shit rainbows too?"

I narrowed my eyes. "We are not a joke."

"I actually met a pony who did that once," Starlight said sheepishly. I turned to look at her, and she gave me an uncomfortable-looking toothy grin. "Don't ask. You don't want to know."

I rolled my eyes and turned back towards the human. "Anyway, since you're out of the loop, unicorns are a subgroup of ponies, and each subgroup we call a tribe. There are five recognized tribes on Earth. Roughly about five hundred million humans on Earth became ponies after the ETS. There are also rehumanized humans—humans that had been in the process of becoming ponies or fully became ponies, but had all or most noticeable physical changes reversed."

"I don't think he wants that much detail, Sunset," Starlight said. "You're going to put him to sleep with your lecture."

"I'm trying to be open and honest about the situation," I replied. 

"How about you let him ask the questions he feels are important, and then you can fill in the gaps after everything is done?" Starlight suggested. She looked over to the human. "I have a question for you. I know we can look up the information from the old deed information, but can you please let us know your name so we can stop referring to you as the bunker human."

"When did that start?" I asked.

"When you were passed out all night and most of the morning, before your parents and little brother showed up," Starlight answered. 

I snorted and looked at the human. "Did your family raise a fuss at you for our little meeting yesterday? Mine sure did. They went so far as to stage an intervention." 

"My wife and daughter gave me hell," he responded. I noticed the gun barrel dip just slightly. Was he relaxing a little? I wasn't sure. Time to switch up tactics and continue to talk to him like he was just my neighbor who I was venting to, rather than a possible hostile force living under my floor.

"And it is completely unfair!" I proclaimed. "Look at me. I'm old and sluggish, a grandmother. But that doesn’t mean I need to have someone watching over me. They honestly think that I'm in mortal danger just having a conversation. I clearly knew you were there before you opened the door yesterday, so what harm was there in opening the door? There wasn't any!"

"That's what I told them," the human replied. "You knew I was there, so there was no point in hiding. I had my gun on me. They still got on my case. Everything was under control."

"See! A complete overreaction on everyone's part," I replied. "No one got hurt. You didn't draw your gun on me, and I never lit my horn. Yet they treat us like we lost our minds."

"Nothing worse than being called crazy," the man muttered, his gun dipped a little more. He then lifted it back up towards Starlight. "But her horn is glowing right now."

"And you've got a gun pointed right at me," Starlight replied dryly. 

"There's two of you and one of me," the man said, keeping his gun locked on Starlight. "If you were human before, you know what I am capable of with a gun, but I have no clue what you two can do. I am at an unfair disadvantage here."

It was time to take a gamble. I hated gambling.

I took a deep breath to steady myself. "Do you want her to leave so we can talk alone?"

"Sunset, no!" Starlight objected immediately. 

I ignored her. "Starlight is a powerhouse—one of the strongest, if not the strongest, unicorn there is. I'm not even fully sure what all she is capable of doing. I'm weak. A thousand unicorns of my stature couldn't match her in sheer power. You're right. Her being here puts you at an extreme disadvantage."

The man motioned with his gun. "She needs to go. Then we'll talk."

"I'm not going anywhere," Starlight growled. She then glared at me. "You just told everyone you would stop putting yourself in unnecessary danger."

I endured her glare with a calm look. I felt anything but calm because she was right, but I needed this guy to start to trust me. "Do you really think he would shoot me, knowing that it would have everyone up above on the warpath to come to get him if he did? This gentleman—" I looked at the human. "I'm sorry, I still haven't gotten your name."

"John," he answered, his gun still trained on Starlight. 

I turned back towards Starlight. "John here is not crazy. He is just being reasonably cautious. Teleport back upstairs and wait for me. I'll be just a few minutes. You'll hear it if a gun is fired."

With both John and me insisting that she go, Starlight was not in a position to refuse. She could, but Starlight had to know that would cripple any chance of peacefully talking things over with the humans. I hoped I was right that he wasn't crazy enough to shoot me. He was a conspiracy nut, but conspiracy nuts you could appeal to if you pampered their egos and insisted they weren't nuts—regardless of the truth. In truth, they were some of the easiest people to control if you were willing to do reprehensible manipulation. Starlight had a history of manipulating others with cult-like ideas; she should understand this. It was how the game was played. 

She grimaced. "Will you at least put up your own shield before I go? I'll feel better knowing you have some protection in place."

I nodded and lit my horn. A moment later, a much smaller shield surrounded me within Starlight's larger and more powerful shield. I could tell by her eyes she knew the truth about my shield. It wouldn't stop a bullet—at best, only slow it down. Although, that could be the difference between sustaining a severe injury and a fatal one. If we were optimistic about it. 

"You be careful, Sunset," Starlight instructed before giving me a brief hug that ignored my shield somehow. She then vanished with a small flash. 

"Holy shit, you can teleport!" John exclaimed in shock, lowering his gun completely as he gaped before bringing it back up, now focused on me.

I nodded. "Yeah, we can." I then let go of my magic and let the shield drop, which visibly shocked him again. "I'd rather not waste the effort on it. Don't tell anyone I let it drop. I'll never hear the end of it."

I then laid down on my stomach, facing him. It was supposed to display that I was relaxed and non-aggressive, but it had the ulterior motive of making sure my legs didn't start shaking where he could see.

John gave me a puzzled look. "You aren't like her. You're less paranoid."

This human was going to talk about other people being paranoid? It took everything I had not to laugh. Still, it was encouraging. He seemed to be getting to where he could trust me a tiny bit. 

"ETS made me better at being less paranoid and reassessed my old biases since I had so many humans looking to me to help keep the peace," I explained. "I was living in the Charleston area of South Carolina at the time. Have you ever been to South Carolina?"

"Can't say that I have."

"It's hot and humid most of the year, at least in the Charleston area," I said casually. "During the winter, it rains and rains and rains, but only snows once every few years. Most years, you can wear summer clothes on Christmas day. I spent so much of my life down south that coming back to Colorado was a big adjustment—totally different climate."

He lowered his gun most of the way. "I thought I heard a little bit of an accent in your voice. You saying this ETS made you less paranoid?"

I smiled. "I'll have to give some background information. During ETS, almost everyone that was transforming in my area were in shelters. During the last days of it, the transformations happened at an accelerated pace, with the last day moving through the stages at lightning speed."

John interrupted. "You said no one has caught it in years, but you also said it only lasted a few weeks. How did they stop a major outbreak like that in just a few weeks?"

"This might be hard to believe if you didn't just see what we can do, but there was this massive light show, like a worldwide aurora and ETS just stopped— completely gone, no more people transforming," I answered. "The thing was, it didn't reverse what had already been done. A quarter of the country was ponies."

"It just stopped, all at once, with no inoculations or vaccinations anything?" John asked skeptically. 

“The flu may have carried it, but it was magic,” I nodded. 

"Magic from where?" he asked.

"Turns out, it was an alien terrorist behind the whole thing, as in an actual out of this world alien trying to take over the world, trying to turn the entire world into beings of her species. It also turns out that she was a criminal among her kind, and they came looking for her. She eventually was gunned down by the government when she refused to stop her plan. The aliens helped bring an end to ETS, even if they weren't happy that they couldn't take her into custody."

"I'll believe in aliens when I see one," John grumbled. 

I chuckled. "You already have. I may have been born human, but Starlight Glimmer is one of those aliens."

John looked doubtful. "She's an alien."

I nodded. "One of the very ones on the team that came looking for the terrorist. She frequently is invited to visit our country on official business and has a good relationship with the government. You should almost be thanking her. You’d be one of the last humans on Earth if not for her. She helped stop the attempted genocide of the human race when it would have benefited her more just to let it happen."

"I still don't believe in aliens," John asserted. "Or at least, I don't believe she is one."

This baffled me. He was a conspiracy theorist. Telling him this was the work of aliens should be nothing but validation for him. "Why don't you believe it?"

"Your eyes," he replied, taking one hand off his gun to point at me. "I was an evolutionary biologist, and eyes like that are strictly mammalian, even if yours and hers come in odd colors. I can accept an alien might develop a four-leg and tail in a bilateral body, but those eyes seem like a stretch for something that would develop in a completely alien world."

That was an interesting observation. I had heard others comment before about how it seemed impossible that biology developed so similarly between Equestria and Earth, even producing the same species in many cases. I knew there was ongoing research into whether random portals had been seeding Equestria with Earth's wildlife for millions of years. Still, there was no verifiable proof yet, despite the fact it seemed impossible life could develop to such an advanced stage and so mirrored to ours on Equestria with how young their world supposedly was. However, that was mostly aimed at things like both planets had things like blue jays, bunnies, brown bears, apple trees, and numerous other things. Ponies were typically treated as entirely alien and unique to Equestria, but if he was right, maybe the Equestrians had an Earthly ancestor. Humans and ponies could share a common primitive rodent ancestor back when dinosaurs walked the Earth.

"Our worlds may have a connection that stretches farther back in time than you can imagine," I responded. "There are ongoing studies of how closely related the ecosystems are and why. I'm not fully versed on these, so I can only say for sure she was not born on Earth. Officials from our world have gone to hers and can verify it is very similar, almost impossibly similar, to ours. If you come out of the bunker, you can look at these studies yourself. There are even videos. I have a computer you can use if you come upstairs."

He chewed on his lip for a second before speaking again. "Videos can be faked, but you were saying how you worked for peace."

"Yes, I was getting to that," I replied. "During ETS, everything shut down, and I mean everything. Interstate travel, stores, you name it, it was closed. This led to severe food shortages. Now, those of us in the shelters had been supplied with lots of donations of food. After the threat of ETS was over, the government had to let us out of quarantine. I began a food drive for the humans in our area. Collecting all the canned goods that were donated to the shelters and dispersing them to the humans."

"What did you eat if you were giving all the food away?" John asked in confusion. 

I stuck my tongue out in disgust. "Hay. The government had tons of the stuff and could produce it quickly. It tastes exceedingly bland, but it is nutritional enough for ponies. The important thing was everyone was getting food. The government saw my efforts and took an interest in me as a local leader who could help them integrate ponies back into society. I got lots of funding and support from the government. I helped set up communities, businesses, industry, and even became a mayor of a rapidly growing city for a while. For a time, I was the most politically powerful pony in the south."

John considered this with a skeptical look. "If you are so big and important, why are you here, in my house?"

"Was," I corrected as my ears sagged as I laid my head down on the ground. "I made some huge mistakes trying to push our new magic too far, and it led to a major disaster. I’ve been in seclusion since then. I'm disgraced and swept under the rug. The person who houses me and pays my bills sent me here after she was afraid yet another scandal involving people who used to work for me might make the news."

"For a post-apocalyptic world, this sounds like the same old stuff," John commented dryly. He didn't seem to doubt I was a disgraced politician kept out of the spotlight, but I guess that ran well with someone who believed in government cover-ups.

I shrugged. "The world has changed, the apocalypse was averted, but people are still people. The world has settled into a new normal, adapted, and moved on. I'm sorry that you were hiding down there for years for essentially nothing."

He scowled at me for that, but didn't say anything. 

I stood back up. "I'm going to head back upstairs before they start to worry. Talk it over with your family, and decide what's next. If you want your house back, I'll advocate for you and help you all get your lives back together, but you can't keep living in that bunker. That's no way to live your lives. Think of your children's future."

"Why would you do that? What do you have to gain from it?" John asked in a suspicious tone.

I lowered my head. "I have made a lot of mistakes in my life, John, mistakes that hurt a lot of people. I want to be a good person. I want to say I did some things right when I face my judgment before God. You have a family that you have done everything you can to protect, no matter how drastic it might have seemed, and I can empathize with that. Do you wish to speak again later? I know we covered a lot in a short time, and will need time to think about it."

He shuffled his feet. His gun had long since been put at ease. "Yeah, give me a few hours. Maybe, around six? Here again?"

I nodded. "Six it is. You've done a good job hiding over the years, and I need to commend you for that. The groundskeeper says he checks this place over nightly, but never noticed you."

"That other pony? The one with no horn and the sparkly fur?" 

"Yeah, that's Malcomb Tibbs," I replied. "He's a crystal pony, which is another tribe. I want to give him grief about not noticing after years, but he wasn't living in the house itself. We might not have noticed for a while if not for whoever knocked over the groceries in the kitchen."

John huffed. "That was my daughter; she went up without permission and was trying to raid your food. She was so scared she vomited right away when she got back. Her mother and I yelled at her for about an hour."

"Well, you can tell her that after our meeting yesterday, I flopped on my back and let my life pass before my eyes while my family and friends yelled at me. I also had a panic attack over a spider yesterday," I said bitterly. I looked up at him. "By the way, what is up with the dog barking in the tower?"

"Dog barking in the tower? I don't know what you are talking about."

I pointed hoof upward in what I hoped was the general direction of the tower. "One of my colts swears he heard a dog barking up there when he ran upstairs. Third story tower room, the side that doesn't have all the stuff in it."

John shrugged. "I don't know. If he is a kid, maybe he just has an active imagination."

I couldn't detect any deception in what he was saying. He seemed honestly confused about it. Maybe Líng had just been imagining things as I supposed initially. 

"That's probably it; he is very young," I agreed. "I will see you again at six. It was a pleasure speaking to you, John."

"See you again at six, Sunset Blessing," John replied, and we both retreated from the room at an unhurried pace.