Nothing happened. Hearthfire glanced around, but nothing continued to happen. She coughed to clear her throat, and tried again, more assertively.
“Three.”
Four... boxes appeared in mid air, in front of the arch. They shimmered into being without warning. Boxes wasn’t quite the right term, perhaps, the walls wavered in the breeze, and were made from a finely woven white fabric.
“Hello?”
No response.
“Am I in the right place?”
With an apologetic pop, a unicorn winked into existence. It was grey; grey mane, grey tail, grey coat. Grey eyes. It was the shape of a unicorn, at least. It looked insubstantial, much like the cloth shapes that floated behind it.
“Greetings. Is this the first time that you have made an application for an entry permit?”
“Uh, yes?”
“That’s fine. We have some good news and some bad news for you.”
“Yes?”
“The good news is that the decision making process has been greatly streamlined, and now most candidates are evaluated six percent faster than was the case ten years ago.”
“All right. And the bad news?”
“Your application is going to be rejected.”
“Uh...excuse me?”
“Oh, we are sorry, perhaps we misspoke. It is almost certain that your application is going to be rejected. Almost all applications are rejected. Here. Complete this form, please.”
It extended its neck upwards, and for a moment its entire head vanished into thin air. When it returned, it was offering a slim sheaf of paper held in its teeth, which Hearthfire took with her horn, with some trepidation, and flicked through. It looked like it had been press-printed, in a plain unassuming typeface. It read like one of those stupid personality quiz, such as the Manehattan Mercury might run to fill space in its centre pages on a slow news day.
“My favourite colour?” Hearthfire murmured, as she leafed over another page. “Starsign! What is this rubbish?”
“All vital to the selection process,” the nondescript unicorn-shaped thing assured her, in its cool, accentless voice.
“No, this is ridiculous. Look here,” she said, pointing to Section 9.2c: Subject’s Favourite Memory of a Summer’s Day.
“Yes?” It smiled a slightly nervous smile, as if she were asking why she was required to provide her name.
“I mean, I’ve crossed hundreds of borders, and normally they want to know if you’re bringing in any dangerous animals, or if you’ve ever been arrested, that sort of thing. How long you plan to stay. Stuff like that.”
“The City is not... like other places.”
“I can see that! Apparently you consider my choice of toothpaste a matter of national security!”
“You are under no obligation to continue the application process if you do not wish to,” it explained. Hearthfire mentally scanned its tone for evidence that it was annoyed with her, but could find nothing to indicate that this was anything other than a statement of fact. She felt like she was being made fun of, but...
She really, really wanted to know what was on the other side of that wall.
“Fine. Can I borrow a quill?” One was produced from the same nether realms that had spawned the form. “What’s with the weird floaty things, anyway?”
“They are our colleagues. They will be collaborating with us in determining judgement.”
“...okay? Why are they hidden from me, and you aren’t?”
“They are not hidden from you, outsider. There are rules: they are not permitted to see each other.”
Hearthfire chose to let that go as probably the best explanation she was going to get, and besides, she had no desire to find out if it was possible to make the grey unicorn angry. She looked around for something to lean on, and settled on stepping around the unicorn and the line of its ‘colleagues’, to hold the form against the smooth surface of the arch while she wrote. It took a surprisingly short amount of time to complete. Each question was brief and straight to the point, and allowed only a small space for an answer, even if some of them made little to no sense, or were phrased like cryptic crossword clues. She answered them as best she could, and when she was done, she offered pen and completed form back to the grey unicorn with what she hoped was a confident smile.
“Thank you for your interest,” it intoned, before accepting both items and vanishing them back into thin air, “Your application will be debated. Please return to the Outer City, and await our decision.”
Without further fanfare, it turned its back on her, and began talking to the boxes in a language that was not only foreign but downright alien to Hearthfire’s ears. As far as she knew, from the few books written by ponies who had been inside the city, there had been no progress made whatsoever on translating the language - or perhaps that should be languages, plural - spoken there. There were even some academics who had written treatise explaining that it was not a language at all, as any other race would understand it, though what that might mean in practice Hearthfire had no idea.
Reluctantly, she turned back towards the Outer City. She had come here knowing the reputation, and fully prepared for it to be a huge waste of time, and in fact had a backup plan, several other points of interest lined within a reasonable journey time that she would re-route to if she had to. But now that she was here... the strangeness of her first brush with the odd denizens of the city had thoroughly wet her appetite to meet more.
* * *
“Well, what did you make of that?” Cas didn’t seem to make much of it. She’d been very quiet since the trip into the clear zone, and Hearthfire was worried that she’d been creeped out by the unearthly unicorn. “Do you think we’ll be allowed in?”
She was propping up the bar in the rough-and-ready restaurant below her rented room. It had something of an officer’s club vibe, despite the plain decor. It seemed to be frequented mostly by the captains whose ships brought cargo in and out of the harbour.
“Hah, no chance of that, Miss.”
“Sorry,” Hearthfire turned her attention to the smartly attired earth pony who had appeared at her shoulder, “Do I know you?”
“Not at all. I just couldn’t help overhearing you talking to your cat, and I know I can save you some time. You won’t be let in, no one gets let in.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“No offense, but if you’ve heard that, why are you here? You don’t look like a captain, you’re definitely not crew...”
“I like to think of myself as an explorer. Though these days I feel more like a tourist, most of the time.”
“Well, if you’re not here to buy or sell, you’re wasting your time. Those who dwell in the inner city aren’t interested in outsiders in the slightest.”
“You’re not telling me anything I haven’t heard before, Mister...?”
“Captain Green Swirl. And you are?”
“Hearthfire. Have you ever made an application to enter the city?”
“Me? No. Ridiculous! Why would I bother?”
“You’re not the slightest bit curious? Not interested at all about what it’s like?”
“Well, I am a bit, I mean, who wouldn’t be? But if you let it get to you, there’s nothing but madness ahead for you. You see them sometimes, academics who come here sure that they’ll be found worthy, they’ll be given special permission to see what no pony else has seen before.”
“And?”
“Of course, they’re turned down. Let me tell you, it’s got nothing to do with worth. I’ve been coming here a long time, and I pay attention whenever someone does get let in, because it’s so gosh darned rare. And I can say for sure, there’s no rhyme or reason to it, and there’s nothing that sets apart the few who are allowed in.”
“So why do you keep coming, then, Captain?”
“There’s no big mystery there, Ms. Hearthfire. They pay better than anyone else, even if the things they import are completely nonsensical.”
“What we always bring. A representative of the inner city puts up a list, and the captains bid to supply what they can. This time, my hold was full of china figurines of farm animals and coke.”
“Coke as in the fuel? That doesn’t seem so odd. Every major technological civilization in the world burns coal.”
“The order required that each lump be as close to a perfect sphere as we could find. Whatever folk live inside that place, they don’t see the same world as we do.”
Hearthfire couldn’t help but smile at the almost-but-not-quite symmetry in their thought processes.
“I know. Isn’t it fascinating?”
“You’re a strange mare, you know that, Ms. Hearthfire?”
“Hmph. That’s uncalled for, Captain. I’m not stupid, I know that getting in is a long shot.”
“Sorry, sorry. No offense meant. If you do get let in, I’ll buy you a drink to celebrate, hmm?”
* * *