A/N: I will admit that this is a little slow, but I found it necessary to compare the differences and similarities of both universes.
Chapter 5: Parallels
“Care explaining this?” I ask showing her my phone and the video on it. She came closer, using the towel to dry her hair.
“What’s that?” she asked pointing at my phone.
“It’s a giraffe, Isaac Newton,” I said sarcastically. “I can’t get anything out of you today, can I?” I sighed. “My phone.” Again nothing, “Just look at this.” I hit play and she watched the same clip that I had just watched.
I watched her go from relieved to shocked in the matter of a few seconds. The clip ended and she stood speechless. “B-but that’s me. That can’t be me.”
“Well either you’re nuts, which explain why you would claim to have a cartoon character’s name, but that wouldn’t explain the wings or the voice,” I opened the imdb page for the voice actress, “because that’s the voice behind that character and you look nothing like her.”
“Or?”
“Or we’ve wandered into a Twilight Zone type situation,” I finished. “It’s a TV show,” still nothing. “Weird stuff like this happens all the time in that show.” She seemed to understand the ‘weird’ part. “My point is we may have both unwillingly wandered into an alternate universe situation. Have you ever heard of the multiverse theory?”
“No, wait… I think I may have heard Celestia’s student, Twilight say something about it once to another noble at the Gala one year. Something about different realities with subtle or obvious changes,” she replied rubbing her temples.
“That’s it more or less. It’s been explored in many sci-fi shows here. One of my personal favorites being Stargate, but that’s beside the point. The layman’s version of the multiverse theory states that if it exists as fiction here, chances are there’s a universe in which it’s a reality. And then again with minor changes as well. I bet you there’s a version of me back in your universe and that version could even be a girl.” I also muttered ‘And she’d better be hot.’
I seemed to be losing her, “Bottom line, here your universe’s inhabitants are seen as talking ponies in mine, or something similar to that extent. I’m going to ask you a series of questions, answer them to the best of your ability.” She nodded, “Let’s begin then.”
I went back to the wiki page and brought up the episode list complete with synopses for each. Start easy and then randomizing it seems like the perfect plan. “What was the most recent national event you can remember?”
“Well about six months ago Miss Twilight Sparkle was crowned the fourth living princess of Equestria,” Spitfire replied.
“Do you know any of the events leading to why she was crowned?” I said looking at the answer.
“Rumors say that back in Ponyville Princess Twilight performed an unfinished spell created centuries ago that somehow mixed up the Elements of Harmony. The next day the entire town descended into chaos with rampant animals and unruly weather.”
“How long did it last?” I asked looking down at the answer it said a few days.
“I was told it was at least a month if not a little longer.” Ok so it was a little longer than they have written for the show. “I was told that Princess Twilight went into a slight depression before she solved the spell. The other hosts to the Elements of Harmony witnessed her disappearing after she completed the spell as the other five Elements fired on her.
“She reappeared hours later bearing the traits of all the races. A few days later there was an official coronation crowning her princess.”
“This has been bugging me for the last few minutes,” I started, “I know in the show they have earth ponies, pegasi, and unicorns; and seeing your world is a parallel universe what do the races of your world look like?”
“Well instead of pegasi we have ‘angels’ and as you saw on me we have wings and can control the weather. Plus sleeping on clouds is nice so that’s always been a bonus for us. Speaking of which can I get a shirt I can put my wings through?”
“We’ll figure out something later, but continue,” I replied.
“Well the unicorns of my world are called mages. They have intricate tattoo-like marking on their arms that appear around the time they can start absorbing the mana in the air and performing magic. One cool thing about them is that those marking are not only the same hue as their magic auras, but they also glow when magic is used,” Spitfire continued. I nodded at this information signaling for her to move on.
“As for the last of the common races instead of earth ponies we have the “earthborn,” they have immense strength compared to the rest of us. As for the princesses they have all the characteristics of the three main races. You said you had a series of questions, any others?”
I continued going from episodes that she would have either heard about what happened or was involved in directly. One thing I learned was that when an angel hits Mach 1 they create not only a sonic boom, but it also creates an expanding ring of energy the same shade or shades of their hair. Something having to do with inert magic that gets activated in a microsecond and injected into the sonic boom. I would have questioned how this would be possible, but with the record skydive of Felix Baumgartner and him going faster than the speed of sound it seems unnecessary. The only angel capable of pulling it off in recent history without any mechanical assistance was one Rainbow Dash.
I then went back to the two-part series premiere involving someone returning from the moon. It turns out they have a penal colony up there and only the worst of the worst get teleported up there and only the most powerful can even make an attempt to break the time-locked spell placed on them keeping them there. That’s what happened on the summer solstice three years ago for them. The entity known as Nightmare Moon who was possessing Princess Luna got a supercharged boost from the planets lining up for a single day. She broke out and the rest happened like it did in the show, the entity got exorcised and harmony was restored.
The Canterlot wedding was more or less the same as it was in the show, except there were a few civilian deaths as well as quite a few guard deaths when they were fighting the Changelings. Spitfire had been in Cloudsdale preparing for the parade that would have proceeded to the wedding reception, but of course the attack happened. By the time they had received the SOS telling them to come to assist Princess Cadance and Shining Armor had already expelled the threat.
“Ok so when there was a dragon attack on the small town of Ponyville, you and your team were asked to intervene-” I started.
“I don’t want to talk about that one,” she quickly cut me off.
“Ok then. Well I guess that about covers it, no wait there’s one more. This one’s more of a personal curiosity.” Spitfire nodded in response. “You know Luna’s guards right? Do they actually look sort of like vampires or is that an enchantment on their armor?”
“Luna’s guards? The ones with the bat wings?” she asked and I nodded in reply. “They’re called nightkin. While their name sort of hints at they’re night people, they can be both seen at night and at during the day depending on what jobs they hold. I know this one guy in Cloudsdale that owns a breakfast restaurant and is up every morning making his family’s traditional biscuits. They do like to ingest blood, but usually get rare meat to get rid of that craving.”
“Interesting,” I trail off looking at the clock. A little after 11pm. “Have you eaten anything?”
“Well I didn’t take anything out of your fridge, if that’s what you’re asking,” Spitfire replied.
“How would you feel about pizza?” I say grabbing my phone.
“But isn’t it a bit late to go out to a restaurant?”
“They deliver,” I reply and by the look on her face she looked shocked. I guess they don’t have delivery back home. “How do you feel about pepperoni?”
“I’m ok with it.”
I called a local place and made the order. I walked over to the TV and turn on the news, “I’m going to go take a shower. If the delivery guy shows up give him the cash on the counter. The tip is included, just tell him to keep the change. Feel free to use the TV.”
***
Spitfire flipped the channels with the remote pointed out to her before Andrew went into his bedroom. The TV was so thin and in color. Back home she only had a boxy black and white TV, and that was for those with money to spend. She saw snippets of movies as she flipped past them. But she stopped on one channel in particular, the History Channel. They were showing a program called “Dogfights,” a show about aerial plane fights from different eras from this world’s history. She sat there listening to old pilots talking about what they did and how they felt in the heat of the moment. She must’ve been sitting there for a good fifteen minutes because she didn’t even notice Andrew coming up from behind her.
***
I walked out of my bathroom and put on a random loosely fitting shirt and pajama pants. Oh God how I missed not only a long, hot shower but also dressing this relaxed. I walked back out into my living room to see Spitfire watching the History Channel.
“Pizza here yet?” I asked, which apparently startled her. That’s the magic of TV kids, tuning out anyone you should probably pay attention to. I looked at the table and saw a severe lack of pizza, “I’ll take that as a no then.”
“Sorry, but this show is just so interesting,” she replied turning back to the boob tube.
I pressed info on the remote. What I saw was an old favorite of mine, Dogfights. A smile crept onto my face as I had a nice little flashback of my dad and me watching this years ago. Good times, good times. “I wouldn’t have guessed,” I said with a hint of sarcasm. “So what did you do during your free time back home?” I asked taking a seat in my recliner.
“Well flying was my life. Whenever I wasn’t asked to fly some new aircraft I would fly around just to fly. Feeling the wind beneath my wings is the greatest feeling I think anyone can ever experience.”
Right then and there, somewhere in the multiverse, there was a sex pervert that said “Giggity.”
“Anything else? Surely that’s not the only thing you did?” I asked.
“Well… Occasionally I would frequent a local bar with my team and would drink. Sometimes until we blacked out. There were a few odd mornings the next day, I’ll tell you that,” Spitfire replied and I nodded. I remember some crazy times like that one St. Patty’s Day a few years ago. “What’s wrong with your arm?” she asked looking at my stitched forearm.
“The spoils of war,” I replied mostly without thinking. No response, I guess I wasn’t clear enough, “Shrapnel from a grenade. Passed right through my arm right between the bones,” I showed both sides of my arm, the stitches in equal lengths on both sides.
“What is that on the underside of your wrist?” she asked while touching it, while also avoiding the injury.
I looked down and saw she was gesturing at the image, “Oh, that’s just a tattoo that I had done a few years ago. It’s an insignia from a game called Assassin’s Creed. Speaking of ink who did yours? It’s pretty damn good.”
She blushed slightly at the compliment, “Well it’s not ‘ink’ or a ‘tattoo,’ it’s a cutie mark.”
“Say what now?”
“You know, a cutie mark,” she said and I just stared at her like she was on meth, which would have been a legitimate thought if those wings weren’t real. “The image that shows others what your special talent is.”
“So yours is-?” I trail off looking at her ink. I refuse to call it a ‘cutie mark’ because it looks pretty badass rather than cute. Bunnies and puppies, cute. Flaming birds of immortality, badass. “Lighting stuff on fire?” She looked at me like I hit a kitten with a semi-truck. “What?”
“No,” she brushed it off, “it’s flying fast. Fast enough to blaze trails of fire in the sky. I just really love to fly.”
“Yeah the wings didn’t give THAT away at all,” I joke. And on cue to cut Spitfire’s response off the doorbell went off. I walk to the door and sure enough it’s the pizza guy. I pay him and even give him a little tip for his trip all the way out in the boonies. I walk into the kitchen returning with two plates and the box and put them on my coffee table in the living room. “Soup’s on,” I say opening the box, revealing the delicious cheese and meat riddled pie inside.
I turned the TV over to the news while we ate.
“-and the construction on the 202 will end sometime this December according to the Department of Public Works,” the male reporter finished his story.
Then the camera shifted to the female anchor, “Still no official word on the cause of the odd explosion over the desert north-west of the White Tank mountains three days ago. An unofficial report from the Air Force reports that it was a drone that went haywire and were forced to shoot it down. We will keep you posted as we learn more. And now it’s time for weather,” she finished, handing it off to the weatherman.
“Hey Spitfire, you said that your plane was propeller driven, right?” I asked between bites. She nodded. “Well that cover-up makes sense,” I said taking another bite.
“Why?” she asked, mouth full of pizza.
“Well some of our old drones are propeller driven and would have made a similar droning sound that your engine would have made,” I explained taking a bite. “Adding into the fact that we’ve had some issues with hacking in the past and the public eats it up as the truth.”
“Hacking? Like cleaving meat or something?” she asked with some concern. Oh God how I love innocent questions like that. Well sort of.
“Do you have computers back home?”
“Those machines that take up an entire room?” her eyebrow was raised.
“Hold on I’ll be right back,” I stood up and went back to my room. I went to the gun safe and took out my gaming laptop. Yes I’m paranoid enough to lock an expensive computer away with several guns next to it. It’s called ‘healthy paranoia.’ I came back into the living room and placed the computer on the table.
I booted it up to have my personalized log-in screen greet me. “THIS IS A COMPUTER?!? It’s so tiny!” Spitfire exclaimed. Had she been any closer I swear I might have started to hear the tell-tale signs of tinnitus, which at this time I swear I might have.
“Yes it’s my computer, and yes I know it’s tiny,” I reply. I enter my password and open Visual Basic and open a project I was working on before I was sent overseas. “Ok so this is an example of coding inside of a computer program. Now the layman’s version of hacking is basically exploiting holes in the coding and manipulating it to benefit the hacker.” I grabbed another slice, “Usually it’s done through exploited websites and corrupted data downloaded from the internet.”
Spitfire pondered this for a second, taking in all the information.
And in another universe there was a teal armored soldier that looked up from his computer screen and said, “Bow-chicka-bow-wow.”
“What’s the internet?” Spitfire asked. Well I sort of expected this question to pop up sooner or later, but you’re never ready for that question. Just like the innocent child asking his or her parents for the first time about where babies come from.
“Well,” I sighed trying to remember everything I had learned in a required networking class. “The internet is a network of networks where millions of users can access information on the other side of the globe almost instantaneously. In fact,” I started a thought accessing an email, “here’s an email from my sister.” I say opening the photo attachment of my 3 year old niece with Mickey Mouse at Disney Land. “And that’s my niece.”
“She’s so adorable,” she cooed. “But how do you have pictures here instead using film?”
“You have cameras back home that use film, correct?” I asked and Spitfire nodded. “Well the camera that took this image, like the one in my phone here work on the same principle, but instead of film the images are preserved as data. Then the data is read by a computer or the camera’s display and each 1 and 0 of the binary code is transcoded into an image that we can see. Does that make sense to you?”
“Binary? As in base two?” I nodded. “I may not be a scientist but that’s incredible! Our scientists would have never thought of building technology off of that system.”
“Well I’m sure that they would have eventually. It took our scientists almost one hundred years before we had our first computer, and another thirty before we had something similar but not as small as my laptop there. Fast forward another twenty and we have experimental nanomachines being used in hospitals and on the battlefield.”
We talked for a good while longer about computers before we jumped from topic to topic comparing our two worlds. They had radio shows that were broadcasted across the nation like Little Orphan Annie was back in the 50’s and 60’s. We have similar sports in mind, mainly football and basketball, but they don’t have baseball. They have cars, but the way they were all described they sounded like classic 1940’s era cars. I looked outside and saw that the sun was starting to rise and jetlag being what it is has finally caught up to me.
“Well that was a very interesting discussion, but I’m going to call it a night, or morning in this case. I noticed that you don’t have any casual clothing, and it sounds like you’re going to be here a while. So later today why don’t we go shopping and get you some?” I ask.
“Really? Spitfire replied with surprise. “But wouldn’t that cost a lot?”
“Don’t worry about it. Before I shipped out I made some investments and a few paid off nicely. If you want you can use my bed, I’ll just sleep out here,” I say taking a blanket and pillow out. “‘Nite, or whatever,” I say settling into the recliner. Spitfire wandered into my room and I passed into a peaceful sleep.