Silver wasn't ready to ask her why she had done this. Maybe before he went home, if he hadn't figured it out by then. For all he knew this was the only time he'd be here, likely. What she had said seemed to indicate that the spell had been hard to do, and her mother had been none to happy about it. He hoped this wasn't what was going to happen, though even this one visit was more than he could have ever hoped for. "How many worlds have you visited?"
Angel paused, and thought about it for a moment. "Many, many cities, but worlds outside of Equestria? Only yours. What was it... Earth? I've only been there a few times, for patients who would have died otherwise. I don't use realm travel unless someone's life is on the line. Until you, that is. You were more of a... project."
"Would I have died?" The thought stunned him for a moment.
She shook her head. "No, no, no! It's just that... all my other patients were so out of it, I couldn't talk to them. I knew nothing about the world I was visiting, and had no way to get answers. You... you were intelligent and coherent. I jumped at the chance to learn about where you came from. Is that bad?"
He shook his head. Well the cat was out of the bag then, and his guesses hadn't been that far off. Her saving him from death, that would have come between them. That wasn't something he wanted. Did they really think he was smart? Yes he got good grades where in school, he liked mystery novels. A pony, with great healing knowledge considered him, a sixteen year old, smart and coherent. It made him feel a little embarrassed. He wondered how he looked to her, a fairly quiet person/pony who offered occasional sentences and showed utter fascination with everything. "No, its not, I'm glad I got to know you Angel."
"Just... be careful when you visit Earth. People there can be really bad." They did have wars here. And they had catastrophes, serfdom, tyrants, magical disasters. However, they didn't have genocide. They had death, but it was different. They didn't have serial killers or rapists. It was hard to put into words, even bad people seemed silly in some way in this world. He wondered if Angel even knew what he was talking about, sometimes she seemed naive about his world. "Not as powerful as... Discord? but worse, more evil, cruel. They wouldn't pity you, Angel, and they could... really hurt you." The thought of her... not captured and imprisoned, but beaten up, cut up or worse... it was too much.
The alicorn sat next to him, something on her mind, but a thought she hadn't voiced. Not until now, anyway. She knew who Discord was, but had not been around for his shenanigans. Angel didn't know about all the bad things on Earth, everything here was unbelievably peaceful. "These bad people... why are they bad? Would they hurt you?" She asked, then added, in a low, hopeful, timid voice. "You don't have to go back... if you don't want to."
How did you explain how all humans could be capable of unbelievable cruelty? He wondered if the knowledge itself would hurt her. They had soldiers, and rarely, they had war with the things that this implied. But would they understand that bullies, mere children, could beat you up? "I don't know if you'll understand, its not something you have in your world". Changelings that drained emotions out of the victims didn't kill them, just made them miserable. The Crystal Empire hidden away in shadows for a thousand years, but the citizens, though demure and despairing hadn't been harmed completely. How would he explain Auschwitz to her. He felt like shrinking away, like he didn't belong here afterall. "Angel… if this gets too much, promise me you'll tell me to stop talking." He wouldn't tell her until she swore on her best honour to do so, and he'd watch her. He wasn't even sure he should, she didn't deserve to know that something as cruel as that existed. His doubts were showing.
She hesitated. "I'm not sure I want to know." She admitted. "If you want to go back, I promise, I will not keep you here, all you have to do is ask. But likewise, if you want to stay, I'll make sure you have everything you could ever need, and I'll help you with everything." She promised. She shook her head. "I... I don't want to talk about this anymore. I don't like it." She said, and began heading for the door to the field.
He felt like a worm. This world was an apple, and he'd chewed a greasy line through it. The ponies here had problems, and they had issues too, they weren't perfect. Crimes took place here as well. And in wars people died. However no matter how bad they were, they were nothing compared to humans. "Angel, do you mind if I spend some time on my own. I need to think.. and.. I'm sorry, Angel." She had probably gotten the idea. Silver didn't know whether she could understand an evil like that even if he had explained it to her, but she'd gotten the idea. Maybe that would protect her. He hoped so.
At his request, she looked confused. "Of course you can." She said gently. "You are not bound to me, you're free to explore all you want. If you need questions answered or become lost, just use your telepathy to contact me. And Silver..." She approached him, and gave that gentle nuzzle again, the one that reassured him everything would be alright. "Be careful." She teleported away, presumably to business, leaving him with only a small bag of bits in case he needed to buy something.
He had some bits. It wasn't that he didn't want Angel's company, he wanted that very much, but he worked most efficiently on a problem when he had some solitude. Finding a way of showing gratitude to Angel was the most important project, but he had no leads to that yet, so he wanted instead to focus on finding his cutie mark. Whatever that was. He hadn't changed too much going here, not that he noticed, his talents seemed the same. So whatever talent he really had, was probably what his cutie mark was. Puzzle solving was his first bet? He asked around for a puzzle shop.
Angel was very kind, and was more than willing to do whatever he asked, even if that meant parting company. She was a wonderful companion, but even she could not do everything, and from what he understood, she could not help him get his cutie mark. The ponies he asked were all immensely friendly, and gladly pointed him in the direction of a small shop in Canterlot with an enormous question mark over the door.
More of a games shop by appearance it seemed. Time to test something and there were two possible lines he wanted to check. The first was simple puzzle solving, if not, then building puzzles. He knew of a lot of easily built puzzles. With only hoofs he'd have the added added difficulty of having to do this by magic alone. Not an unwelcome challenge. "I'd like your ten hardest puzzles please." He asked to the shopowner the moment he stepped in the door.
The shopowner, he found, was a pink mare with an affinity for sitting on her head. He found her upside down, and immediately got the feeling that this one did not have all her marbles. She flipped over, and gave him an unsettling grin. "Ooooh, someone's looking for a challenge, it seems." Her eye twitched slightly. "This way!" She leaped off the counter and bolted down an aisle.
Well that was a non sequitor from the beginning. Some ponies exceeded humans in eccentricity. Or perhaps the laws of physics just let that excentricity be more perfectly expressed here. At any rate he followed along with her, hopefully she wasn't sending him on a very expensive puzzle hunt.
She wasn't. Or if she was, it was a terrible puzzle. She began pushing puzzles into his hooves. He found, if he stood on his back legs, he could walk and carry things for very short distances. It was not unheard of here, but it wasn't very efficient. She was giggling. "You're gonna need this one... and this one... and this one!"
"No more than ten." If they were hard, then he'd solve no more than a few of them over the next hours, if they were easy he needed no more than ten to know that. Besides there were no reason to expend too much money. He smirked when he had loaded it up. Walking on his hind legs was especially awkward since parts of him wanted it to work like his human legs. "How many bits?" He hoped it wouldn't be a small fortune.
"Ten puzzles, ten bits." The pony said calmly. Wow, that was cheap. There didn't seem to be any tax here, another plus for this world. Nothing was overpriced, everything so far had been unbelievably reasonable. "You're never gonna solve all those." She made a sudden whinnying sound, for no apparent reason other than she could.
Ten bits wasn't unreasonable. His intuition for how much things cost was off. There were gem stones for certain prices, and he hadn't quite absorbed all that Angel had told him about that. He found the nearest table and went to work, they seemed to be mostly mechanical puzzles, something had to be removed, unscrewed, aligned correctly. Familiar, yet the laws of physics were a little different. Were some of them magical, and required unlocking some hidden arcane power? He went to work carefully. Working first with his hooves and eventually, though more frustratingly, by his horn.
Ten bits wasn't unreasonable. His intuition for how much things cost was off. There were gem stones for certain prices, and he hadn't quite absorbed all that Angel had told him about that. He found the nearest table and went to work, they seemed to be mostly mechanical puzzles, something had to be removed, unscrewed, aligned correctly. Familiar, yet the laws of physics were a little different. Were some of them magical, and required unlocking some hidden arcane power? He went to work carefully. Working first with his hooves and eventually, though more frustratingly, by his horn.
The shopkeeper waved to him, still giving off that unsettling grin. "Good luck, young stallion! And if you get more than three of them, I'll give you another puzzle free! If your friends ask, tell them Screwball sent you!" She said, and went back to sitting on her head. His horn sparked now and again, but it was difficult to get it to work. With a bit of effort, he gradually began to get the pieces to slide on their own. Most of them were just regular logic puzzles, but two were convincingly magic related.
Familiar, a slide puzzle, boring. Aligning the symbols. They were magical so he didn't really have much of an idea in how they should align. Elementary unicorn magical symbols. Angel had shown him them, and he'd memorized some. Wasn't that hard. Just a bigger alphabet. Hiragana and Katagana of Japanese were more than sixty symbols each, and they used both. Wasn't too difficult to solve, if only because he'd seen a similar one. Interlocking rings presented a special challenge because of the lack of fine thaumaturgical motor-skills that he possessed. No Rubiks cube. The magic ones gave him nothing, he wasn't sure how to proceed at all. One was a simple glass sphere, with something that seemed to glitter inside of it. He went about seeing how many of them he could solve.
Out of the ten, within an hour, he managed to solve six. True to her word, Screwball brought over two more puzzles, one of which was magical, the other of which was not, which was fairly easily solved. He had two piles now, a large one off to the side, and three magical puzzles in front of him which seemed all but impossible. Worst of all was one with magic symbols on it, which was nothing more than a box. And despite his hardest effort, it would not open.
He checked his flank just to be sure. There wasn't the feeling of accomplishment and finality. It was just a quick test after all. He expected to find nothing. He also needed to cool off, and get his mind on other things than what he'd wanted to warn Angel of.
His flank was as bare as ever. And he didn't feel any closer. to getting a mark. Angel was a native of Evodia, a pony blissfully naive to the cruelty of the world. War, murder, guns, genocide. Those things just... didn't belong here.