“Call the princesses! We are under attack!” Twilight came galloping into the dining hall.
Starlight Glimmer, Spike and the creature were having a peaceful breakfast in the late morning. With the help of the creature, Spike was able to prepare a great meal for everyone. The plate with Twilight’s favorite pancakes was already waiting for her, but everyone was surprised by her sudden appearance.
“Twilight! What happened!?” Spike asked, alarmed.
“I woke up trapped in my room, Spike. Someone tried to kidnap me in my own quarters!” Twilight snorted, looking through the windows in search of the enemy.
Starlight Glimmer went wide eyed and sank a little in her own chair, her ears flat against her skull.
“Oh, no… It could be… Twilight! If someone trapped you, they might be trying to prevent you from getting to the others so they can be easy targets!” Spike answered.
“But that makes no sense! It looks like someone is trying to prevent us from using the elements of harmony, but we don’t have those anymore… The map! Maybe they want to avoid us from going somewhere so they could do whatever they want!” Twilight deduced. “I’ve been a whole hour trying to open the door, the mage who did that was a very experienced one, they put a lot of defenses and protections.”
“But your cutie mark is not glowing…” Spike pointed to Twilight’s flank.
“Okay! Okay! Calm down everypony!” Starlight finally exclaimed.
“What!? Do you know something?” Twilight looked at her suspiciously.
“Well… let’s say that yesterday, when I found the library in such a bad condition and couldn’t find you… And Spike told me that the creature put you asleep…” Starlight smiled awkwardly. “I kind of thought that he was some kind of hostile creature that put you asleep, so he could do whatever he wanted to everypony else… and then I found you in your room, so I wanted to protect you while I was helping Spike and… kind of sealed your door…”
“I told you that he is harmless…” Spike pointed out.
“And… put a few protections on the seal… and shields around your room… and magical protections for those shields…” Starlight continued.
Twilight’s jaw almost hit the floor; Spike just glanced between Twilight and Starlight. The creature just looked around clueless in the tense awkward silence.
“And after that… I forgot and tried to communicate with the creature to see if I could find something about him. Tried some magic and overdid myself… I almost had a magical blackout. And this morning I forgot to come round to undo the seal on your door.” Starlight Glimmer couldn’t look more miserable. She just stared at her own hooves and her ears were flat, her tail twitched nervously.
“You… how could you forget something like THAT!?” A wisp of smoke came out of Twilight’s mane.
“The same way you forgot about sleeping? And eating? And just kept studying for three days straight?” Spike pointed out. Now it was Twilight’s turn to look mortified and ashamed of her behavior. She looked down and pawed the crystal floor.
“Oh… sorry about that, Starlight… I’m supposed to be a good example for you and…” Twilight apologized.
“Nevermind, Twilight. I’m sorry too for not remembering the seal.” Starlight replied.
After exchanging apologies, they peacefully ate the late breakfast. Twilight enjoyed the pancakes as always, and that helped getting her spirits back up again after the rough awakening. She thought that she was behind her schedule, but after the frustrating sessions of studying without any substantial conclusion and falling asleep afterwards, the schedule was probably a lost cause right now. Anyways, she hadn’t had anything important to do, just the regular things. For example, she needed to clean up the library, reorganize it, go buy some groceries, help Starlight with her studies… Oh gosh, she was going to be so far behind her intended schedule after the few days she spent in the research… Wait, the schedule was a lost cause… no, no, no…
“Twilight?” Spike asked, always able to read when the alicorn was about to get into one of her loops.
“Ugh… right… sorry about that. Breathing exercises and… calm…” She shook her head and started with the exercises Cadance taught her. Those helped some and took her out of the loop and back to the present moment.
They finished breakfast and Twilight was able to regain her bearings and in her head there was already a damage control plan to get back into her routine with minimal deviations. No need to panic, after all, all those princess stuff could be taken care of later…
“So… did you find something interesting about it?” Twilight absentmindedly asked Starlight while doing the dishes after breakfast.
“Well… a few things, actually.” Starlight put a hoof on her chin, pensative.
“Do tell, please.” Twilight inquired.
“It’s definitely an intelligent creature, and I know he can talk, but in another language that is so weird that I couldn’t even make sense of a single word.” Starlight told her.
“Could it be a highly trained pet that got lost and came here from very far away?” Twilight questioned.
“Oh, no… not a trained pet. It’s absolutely intelligent. We were exchanging words last evening, he showed genuine interest in learning and managed to repeat a few words.” Starlight argued.
“But that makes him as intelligent as a parrot.” Twilight countered.
“Not at all… we were drawing and writing together, and he learned to write some Equestrian words, and took his own notes in a really weird script. Maybe he comes from a very far away civilization and he is lost here, we could help him.” Starlight Glimmer explained.
“But I have checked all the known civilizations…” Twilight whispered to herself.
“Exactly Twilight, known civilizations. We are not sure about what lays across the badlands, for example.” Starlight added.
“The notes… I want to take a look at its… err… his notes.” Twilight asked. “Because it’s a him, right?”
“He always wears clothes, and maybe their females have beards, who knows, I’ve been unable to check it.”
Conveniently enough, the creature had brought the books and all the parchment he had written the previous night, probably he wanted to ask some questions. Starlight gestured towards the items and slowly took them away from him, making sure that he didn’t interpret her action as something hostile. Once Starlight had taken the notes away, she did a gesture to thank the creature politely and offered them to Twilight.
The young alicorn examined the notes for a while, taking special interest in the little lines of tight script that the creature had written in his foreign language. There were definitely repeated symbols and an apparent pattern. She could almost imagine the words there if she wasn’t paying attention to the fact that she had never seen those symbols before. In addition, the symbols were designed to intertwine with each other in a pleasant and almost hypnotic way; the end of one of them was almost always the very beginning of the next one. Some calligraphers in Equestria could do that with Equestrian script, but it was hard when you were taking fast notes.
There were some drawings and a lot of schemes. By the look of it, he had been trying to do his own research about ponies. Twilight couldn’t believe what she was seeing. It was so fascinating and at the same time unnerving to be researched like she was doing with him.
“We still need a way to communicate with him.” Starlight interrupted Twilight’s reverie.
“Fluttershy understands him, we can ask her when she comes back from Las Pegasus.” Spike suggested.
“We could start with something simple… MATHS! They say mathematics is a universal language, if we can teach him our symbols for the numbers, we could establish some kind of communication!” Twilight smiled broadly, proud of her own idea.
“Of course, something simple…” Spike rolled his eyes.
***
Purplesmart cleared a patch of the messy library and prepared a workspace similar to the one Smartylocks had put together in my room, although the table was way bigger and the number of books… well, we were in a library after all, and when you can wingardium-leviosa a seemingly unending number of objects with your horn magic… You can imagine. And Smartylocks was helping her…
This is getting out of hand, now there are two of them!
Quills and paper ready, and I was more amused than anything that my calligraphy skills came in handy with those dip pens, the purple horned and winged equine started to draw a list of symbols, then adjacent to them drew exactly one dot near the first, two dots near the second, three dots… WAIT!
Numbers! Those were the pony numbers!
*One* Purplesmart said in her language.
*One* I answered, trying to reproduce the little rhythm and tune that was so simple that it was difficult to get it right at the first try.
Of course, we spent half an hour just to get the first three symbols right. Then I wrote my own 1, 2 and 3 near those, and added a zero near an empty spot. That threw them for a loop until they figured out we humans had a number for nothing. The purple mares seemed delighted when they solved the mystery, and added their own symbol near mine. Then we added words identifying the place of each symbol in a three-digit number, units, tens and hundreds…
Zero is a very important number for human math, and if they already knew the concept, that meant their math was probably advanced too, and not just a bunch of symbols to represent quantities.
Purplesmart took a few notes and reproduced the symbols carefully on her notebook. From there, we worked in concepts like ‘few’, writing the word near a few dots, then ‘many’, writing the word near a lot of dots. After that, we used a glass of water to represent ‘little’ and ‘much’, or ‘empty’ and ‘full’, there was always a little unknown component in the translations. In addition, a short line and a long one was drawn to learn the words about length. Some geometrical forms to represent big, medium and small. The little horses’ language was almost like music whenever a few words were combined correctly, and it was kind of catchy, like if it was meant to be easy to learn. When we reached the point of talking about day, week, month and year I got a little bit lost, but nonetheless I had an idea.
Pointing at one of the sets of drawings that were a nice-looking house, a small tree and a little pony compared to a deteriorated house, a big tree and an adult pony that I deduced were for the concept of ‘new’ and ‘old’ asked Purplesmart a question.
*Much… new… old… you?* I asked, pointing a finger to her. The catchy song didn’t happen, which could mean I had just butchered their grammar, but I hoped the message was clear.
We spent a few seconds like that, me pointing at her with a triumphant smile because I had managed to formulate my first question and she looking at me in puzzlement. Purplesmart grimaced at the sound I produced, then scrunched her muzzle, then tilted her head for a moment and finally… Her eyes went wide, like if she had just registered the meaning behind my question.
She suddenly blushed and looked down, tracing circles on the floor with a foreleg. Oh, my… Seemed like the statement ‘Never ask a lady about her age’ applied to those little equines too. I had a moment to experience the instant regret after my question.
“Neigh whinny snort… *old* Snort… *few than… two centuries…*” The purple mare mumbled for herself.
It was hard to piece together the word “century”, we had barely scratched the surface, and I had to check my notes where there was a number of three digits, ‘210’ and below the symbols were the individual names in their phonetic script, and then another script below. Units, tens and hundreds I assumed. Half remembered the sound and half remembered the script, but it was there, their word for century.
Two centuries…
Wait… what!?