//------------------------------// // 4. From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377. // Story: Silver Eyes and Rainy Skies // by Roadie //------------------------------// From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377. I will need to revise my initial assessment of Ponyville. This morning, on the way to find the town library, I was nearly run down by a trio of fillies with an out-of-control cart. They failed—barely—to break all of my bones, and so contented themselves instead with leaving me covered from nose to hock with fresh mud and then shouting apologies as they receded into the distance. I had been planning to try and get a feel for the town by hoof, but after taking my second shower for the day and borrowing the hotel owner's hose to get my saddlebags clean, I decided that the better part of valor indicated wing-travel might be in order. From the air I could see that Ponyville has, it would seem, not nearly so many cloud houses as I would have expected, and that's brought into better focus the lack of confusion of a pegasus seeking hoofside accommodations. At a guess, I might say that the place has social traditions modeled more on those of earth ponies than the other races, and that's guided the town's development; it's hard to play host when your visitors would fall through the floor of your sitting room. As it turned out, the town also has all its air-traffic markers in terrible disarray. On the way to the library for the second time, a wall-eyed mare nearly flew into me. Avoiding her would have put me head-first into the clock tower's bell if I'd been even a hair slower to swoop out of the way. She didn't even give an apology... she just zipped off, quick as you please, and shouted something about being late. When I got to the library—they keep the thing in a live tree, that's got to be a fire hazard—it was closed. The sign somepony had put on the door said, and I will quote this for how ridiculous it is: "Busy performing high-energy magical experimentation in Canterlot; back next week." Go ahead and pull the other wing, huh. I wasn't about to go bucking the door down, so with the library out of the question, I got directions from this apple-red stallion in the market square to get to a bookshop. It was a bit foalish to go purchase a book with my own money, but I've got enough of it, and the colt seemed like the type to appreciate it. Once I got past the bookshop owner—he nearly assaulted me, madly demanding to know when his best customer would be back, and then sulked in a corner when I slapped him—I found a primer on basic magic that seemed reputable enough and then made my escape. Or, I will say, I made my escape from the shop, and then I made my escape from a screeching white cat that blazed past like the fires of Tartarus were set on its tail, and then from the blue-coated unicorn who almost trampled me while chasing it. With imminent death avoided for the third time in a day, I proceeded to the hospital post-haste. I'm reasonably sure that flight broke my previous wingpower record twice over. I'm also reasonably sure I left the staff in a terrible fright. Once I'd assured them that I wasn't running from ravenous timberwolves or a horde of parasprites—parasprites, really?—I took refuge in my office. Officially it's my going-to-be office, since I'm not really on call for some days yet, but it worked well enough to let my pounding heart relax. The meeting with the colt went better than the rest of the morning had, given that he made no attempt to trample, attack, crush, spindle, or otherwise harm me. He was having a late breakfast at the time. I think I only saw it in retrospect, but he was less clumsy than he was yesterday. He seemed uncertain with his hooves, still, and embarrassed for me to see it. His reasoning, of course, was that as a "human" he had hands, not hooves. I think it rattled him, though—he was staring at his hooves for some moments—and I left him to eat his breakfast unbothered. He's shown no real magical talent, but I began to suspect then, and still do, that he may have been a young prodigy before acquiring his delusion. The fine motor skills of colts who have relied on too heavily on magic can suffer, and being convinced that, as a "human", he has no magic could well be enough to prevent his use of it. The book was a better choice than I'd meant it. I might expect him, now, to do remarkably well with it. The sticking point is the lack of a cutie mark. There's a significant minority that lack them even beyond his age, but young magicians, given the difficulty of the trade, almost always find their cutie marks early. His eyes lit up when I gave him the book, after he'd finished the food. The flat grey of them is distinctive, and the grey-green of his coat is a color rare enough I rather hope it helps find his parents. The book—he thanked me, and he showed more restraint than I'd thought when he put it to the side instead of immediately diving into it. We talked for a little while, just inconsequentials... or, well, I did most of the talking, because he seemed lost in thought. One of the nurses pulled me aside, before we could get into a proper conversation. That is when my plans for the day went completely off the tracks, for what few tracks had been laid, because Ponyville's mayor was there. I gave her my assessment of the colt—delusional but cooperative, and no real danger to himself or others. We talked. Yes, the entire situation was awkward, yes, the watch and guards of Canterlot and other towns in the area had been alerted to match the colt's description against missing pony reports, yes, referring to him without having an actual name to use was awkward, no, I was not going to make him use one just to make the paperwork easier. The mayor was flustered at best—apparently the "ponies who usually fix weird things around here" were out of town—and, I am shamed to admit, her attitude was infectious. After a few minutes we were nearly shouting at each other, as she started demanded that I do something to "handle it". I am further shamed to admit that it took the colt himself to break it up. His presence left the both of us silent, along with the nurse who'd nearly begun shouting at us to keep quiet. "So, when do I get banished to the moon and then locked up in a dungeon on the moon I've been banished to?" is what he said, with this face that was completely serious except for this little sad frown. The look on the mayor's face—I'm certain she thought he meant it, and I just burst out laughing right then, and then he did, too, and the both of us left the mayor completely confused while the nurse went off mumbling something about "being as bad as Twilight". We talked again, then, without any yelling, and came to a rather rough-edged conclusion: given his condition, I would take temporary care of the colt until his parents could be found. He seemed skeptical of the last point, but bore no great objection to the rest. Acting as the interim guardian of an outpatient minor was certainly not how I had been intending to spend my time, but he needed someone, and by the mayor's panic I suspect she wouldn't have done much better. It was enough leverage, at least, to make her handle the paperwork, and the colt and I left together a little while later, once Nurse Redheart had done the exit papers and confirmed with me she'd put the letter in the mail to get a magic specialist to check on him. He was, as I had thought he might be, a perfect little gentlecolt while I followed up on a few properties from yesterday and visited a few others. The book helped, of course—he spent most of the time reading quietly and trying to get his horn to glow. Our hosts, as perhaps not unexpected for an adult mare and a school-aged colt looking at homes together, seemed to assume he was my child, regardless of the lack of commonality of coat color, mane, eyes, or race. He found it funny—I think I caught him snickering once or twice, though he had his head back in the book when I turned his way. I settled on this nice little cottage near the town square. It's distinctive of the town's style—there are three and a half stories, almost spiraling up and out from the ground-room foyer, and it's all built on a steelwood frame that leaves it looking impossibly unbalanced, as though it might fall over in a stiff breeze. The paperwork was remarkably simple. If that's the way it is in all earth pony towns I really need to live in more of them. "If you're really a human, then why are you taking this so calmly?" I asked the colt on the way to the hotel to get my things. I shouldn't have. It wasn't much more than blind luck that he took it as a puzzle instead of an insult. "It's the brain in a jar thing, I guess," he told me. It's a philosophical puzzle of his "humans", something a little like the Changeling Question of the old unicorn philosophers. It goes something like this: if you have to use your senses to understand the world around you, what way do you have to know that those senses are correct to start with? You could be that veritable "brain in the jar", being fed false surroundings and experiences. I chewed on that thought while I packed my things, and I finally asked him his opinion on the subject. "It doesn't matter," is what he said. "If you have no way to prove anything is true, then you might as well just treat it all like it is. I believe I'm from another world, but right now I'm in this one, and it wouldn't do me any good to run around like a headless chicken." Then he gave me this very serious look with raised eyebrows. "And I don't want to mess up things and get banished to the moon," he said, and the way his shoulders shifted left me not quite sure if it was meant to be a joke. I reassured him, of course, that such things were reserved strictly for terrible monsters, and that an ape in a pony suit was probably at the bottom of the list. That got him to laugh. The home looked rather forlorn, with appliances and my luggage and empty floors. If it had just been me I would have pulled in some clouds to sleep on until my things could be delivered, but the colt... well, I'll admit I had the thought of him sleeping hanging from the ceiling like a wild monkey, but I really don't think that would have worked in practice. On the way to the shops the pink mare showed up again. She was bouncing, literally bouncing in long hops as she babbled, and kept talking about "parties!" (I must include the exclamation point to make the tone of voice clear) and "not being officially back yet". She was getting far too close, at that, nearly edging me off the street until she finally bounced away. The colt found it funny, so to get him to stop snickering I told him to look at beds. The way he eyed the prices was too unselfconscious to make me think his claimed upbringing was part of the delusion. He's aware of the value of money, and by the way he proclaimed the first sturdy-looking adult-sized bed acceptable, bounced on it once or twice, and then went back to reading, he's used to living simply. He isn't, however, much good at picking beds—it was sturdy-looking, not sturdy. The very moment we stepped outside again, once I'd arranged for delivery, the madness of the town tried to engulf us again. Three steps from the door, a sudden downpour broke open on us out of a sky that had been perfectly clear minutes before. If I'd been on my own I would have flown above it, but with the colt, we bolted for the first promising-looking doorway. It was a little diner with long, low glass windows, and I must have had the funniest expression when I got a look at myself, because the colt burst out laughing and then I did, too, and we sat at a booth at the window to drain and to have a late lunch. It was almost an early dinner by then. "So, what's a changeling?" he asked me while we were eating. (He'd ordered a monstrosity of a baked potato with a galloping cavalcade of cheeses; my salad was much more polite.) He was playing dumb, by the glimmer of knowledge in those grey eyes, but I played along, and told him of changelings, and the Changeling Question, which has barely anything to do with actual changelings. The philosophers of old had only used them to springboard into the question: if a being could play a false role absolutely perfectly, could that role be considered a new identity in and of itself? "It's like the Chineighs box," he said, or I think that's what he said. "You have a pony in a room, and you give him this very large instruction manual, practically the size of a city—it's a very big room—and then someone else starts putting slips of paper under the door. They're all written in a language he can't read, but the instructions tell him what to do—if you see this squiggly shape, go over to page 852-B and follow the instructions in paragraph six and then write down this other squiggly shape, that kind of thing. The pony in the room doesn't understand any of it. And on the outside of the room, you've got... maybe a zebra or something, and it's his language, and he thinks he's having a conversation with someone. Now, who is it he's talking to?" Trying to work over that puzzle left me taken aback, and by the time I'd gathered my wits about me, we'd both finished eating and were watching the rain. It had gotten worse, if anything. I could catch glimpses of a few pegasi out there trying to wrangle ornery clouds, including that wall-eyed mare who seemed to be doing everything in her wildly uncoordinated power to make the weather even more violently acerbic. "If we wait I think we'll be here all night," the colt said, with his nose almost on the windowpane. Neither of us moved to leave. Then he started singing. "I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner..." I lost most of the words after that, but the dah-dah-dah dah-dah-dah-dah dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah reprise is still in the back of my mind. It was a nice song—a melancholic piece, not the kind of bombastical pageantry most spellsongs, but I could feel the edge of the magic flux tugging at my primaries. He'd never experienced a spellsong before, according to him. Once we'd run madly through the rain—again—and cemented my first day with a newly-rented home by dripping water and mud everywhere, and then once we'd done what little we could to clean up after that, I told him about the spellsongs I've experienced in Canterlot. That will have to be enough for today. I believe the bed may have just been delivered. To judge by the noise, it has been delivered directly through a closed window.