Lessons from Another Dimension

by HolyOrdersOtaku

Chapter 15: Bookworms

Celestia had set the sun as Luna made the moon rise. Bass witnessed the event in real time from a balcony attached to Twilight’s home. It baffled him that such a thing was possible, and yet he felt the sheer awesomeness of its magnificence as he watched the scene for the very first time. Even though he had been in Equestria for several days now, the dawn of the fifth day quickly approaching, he had never witnessed such a thing until now. Even in his wildest imaginations of monsters, magic, dragons, and floating castles, he never once considered the possibility of someone, or in this case, somepony being able to move a celestial body like an entire star. His entire world of knowledge based around gravity and inertia plummeted out of a thirty story window and onto a moving bus that was destined to crash in a ravine filled with acid covered spikes; and he was absolutely okay with it.
But, as always, his thoughts still turned to his original home of science and reasoning that proved magic to be impossible. Sure, his world wasn’t as fantastical as this one, but what had he really done in this new and magical world? He was an earth pony, meaning that he couldn’t use magic nor could he fly. Truthfully, it was entirely possible that his pony race was a correlation to being a human. Humans, after all, are not magical. He had only witnessed a handful of magical things, and while they were fantastical in nature, they were few in number. Discord’s world warping powers, Celestia’s and Luna’s raising of the sun and moon, Twilight’s and Trixie’s general magic, and apparently Spike’s e-mail sending breath. Bass chuckled softly. What I would give just to hear that stupid ‘You’ve got mail’ every time Spike burped a letter, he thought.
“What’s so funny?” came a female voice from behind Bass. Startled by the sudden noise, he quickly turned to see Twilight with a slight bedmane. “Sorry,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s fine,” Bass replied. “I just had a random thought that turned into a joke. You wouldn’t get it, and things are never funny when you explain them.”
“You sure?”
He nodded. “I could give you the basic rundown, but then you’d want to know the finer points, which I could somewhat explain. From there, you’d want to know how it’s made possible, and from there I am completely useless. I’m just an ordinary guy, so I don’t know much about how most of the technology on my world works. I just hope and trust that it does work most of the time, and the stuff I do know about usually works better.”
Twilight smiled. “I suppose I can let it slide for now.” She stepped and sat next to Bass. “Can’t sleep?” she asked.
“Haven’t tried yet. Why do you ask?”
“Because it’s after midnight,” she replied.
Bass was surprised, and sure enough she was right. He had been sitting there for several hours without realizing it just watching the moon move across the sky. “I guess I was a little distracted. The moon looks so beautiful.”
Twilight smiled. “I agree. But it’s rather odd to hear you say that. You’ve been so energetic that I was starting to doubt that you even had a sentimental side.”
He scoffed as he turned to her. “Come on, I’m not that bad. I’m an artist, after all. You have to be sentimental for that to work out.” He looked back to the moon. “It’s a different moon, but it feels the same.”
Twilight looked to the moon, and then back to Bass. “What do you mean?”
“Did I ever tell you why I like to write stories?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Really, we haven’t talked about your stories at all, except for the day we met.”
He smiled gently, remembering the day his inspiration began. “Perhaps I’ll tell the story some other day, but there is another reason besides the primary one. Needless to say, I’ve been writing for quite some time. Even longer still I have been enjoying reading, or even experiencing stories.”
Twilight was about to ask a question, but Bass paid her no heed as he continued. “Roughly fourteen or fifteen years ago, when I was little, my big sister came home with a video game,” he paused.
“We actually have those, though they might be different,” Twilight assured.
He nodded. “It was a video game I had never heard of, and to this day I don’t know many people who have played it. And you know what? It was and still is the most beautiful game I had ever played. The world was the moon of a much larger planet. The larger planet was called the Blue Star, and the moon was called the Silver Star, or more commonly as Lunar. Spelled the same as lunar referring to the moon, but pronounced Lu-N-Ar. The story was so rich and so fulfilling that I can remember every little detail from it. And the most prominent part to the game was that any time there was a shot of the sky shown, the Blue Star could be seen in all of its glory.”
He paused with his eyes closed, the moonlight bathing his face. “I think that was what made me fall in love with it.”
“The moon?” Twilight asked.
He nodded. “Any time the moon was full and the sky was clear I would drop what I was doing just to get a glimpse of it. While it isn’t what inspired me to initially write stories, it is my best muse. No matter what I write, the moon has this way of telling me how I should write it. There may not even be a moon mentioned in the story, but somehow it always helps me.” He opened his eyes and turned to Twilight. “That’s what I mean, Twilight. This moon may be physically different, but it still has the same mystifying power over me. It still reminds me that the cosmos is beautiful.” He became solemn. “It also reminds me of that which I can’t have. Magic, the power to explore unknown places, and the strength to be remembered for all time by countless people; all of them are within reach of me here, and I can’t touch them.”
Twilight nodded softly. “I understand, I think.” She looked up to the moon. “Could you tell me more about your world? Maybe about your moon?”
Bass nodded, and chuckled softly. “Most people simply call it the moon, but it actually has a name; Luna.”
“Really? That’s an odd coincidence? Your sun isn’t named Celestia is it?”
“Thank God it’s not. The term solar system is derived from an ancient language called Latin, in which the name for the sun was also derived. Solar is the modern version of Sol, and Sol is the sun’s name. Ergo, I am from the Sol system. But you asked about the moon, not my star.” She nodded.
Bass began again. “Well, for centuries the moon helped calculate a calendar system for the many peoples of the world. Based on its monthly cycle, coupled with the natural changing of seasons, humanity was able to mathematically map out the planet’s yearly orbit around Sol.” Twilight stared at him in confusion. “On my world, the sun doesn’t revolve around us, but the other way around. The moon, being much smaller, does orbit us. As time went on, people were able to use to moon for many different aspects of time keeping, but eventually that died out as science evolved and we were able to keep more accurate calendars. However, fifty years ago, my country did what was considered to be near impossible.”
“What did they do?” Twilight asked, obviously curious.
Bass smiled. It was one of his favorite points in history, so he knew it well. “In the year 1945, roughly eighty years ago, a devastating war called World War II came to an end. The Allied Powers of the United States (that’s my country), England, France, and Russia, as well some minor assistance from other nations, defeated the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The leader of Germany committed suicide, Italy surrendered, and Japan, after dragging the war on for almost another year, finally surrendered after my country bombed them…regrettably it was with the most powerful weapon ever created, and I would like to skip over that detail.
“Even though the Allied Powers were supposed to be allies, not all of them agreed with each other. Russia only helped because Germany invaded them. Once the war was over, the United States and Russia couldn’t agree on ways to keep peace properly, and many feared that another war would break out immediately after one was finished. However, the two countries decided to leave each other to their own devices, but constantly feared each other. The Cold War began.”
“Cold War? They ended up fighting even though they agreed to ignore each other?” Twilight asked.
Bass shook his head. “They agreed to directly leave each other alone, but not ignore each other. The Cold War is the name given not to a real war, but to the arms race that followed World War II. My nation had built a rather…let us say powerful weapon which won us the war, and Russia soon followed with one of their own. Both nations fear each other, and began to improve upon and mass produce these weapons of mass destruction. They were trying to be better than the other, and always trying to stay one step ahead.
“Eventually, they began to try to beat each other in the field of science as well as war machinery, and so began the great Space Race. Russia won first by sending a probe into the Earth’s planetary orbit. My country refused to be beaten. Why send a small piece of machinery into space when you can send a person.”
“A person!? That’s impossible!” Twilight stated.
Bass smiled. “Not quite. Difficult is the better word. In fact, the President of the United States declared that an American…”
“American?”
“My country’s full name is the United States of America, which is on the continent North America. I think I mentioned part of that at some point, but whatever. The President declared that it would be an American that would first walk on the moon. ‘We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard,’ or something or other is what he said. Sadly he was assassinated, but the work towards the moon continued. Finally, in 1969, almost fifty years ago, an American space craft landed on the moon carrying three or four men. I can’t remember exactly. It is considered the greatest achievement of humanity during the 20th Century…or at least one of them.”
“Wow,” Twilight said. “Your people actually went into space and walked on your moon. That’s amazing. I mean, technically we have too, but not in the same sense.” Bass gave her a confused look, so she explained what she knew (which she admitted had little confirmed fact to the story itself since it passed into legend) about the rise of Nightmare Moon, how she challenged Celestia over control of the sun, and how Celestia was forced to banish her own little sister to the darkness and cold of the moon.
“Damn,” was all Bass had to say. “The moonlanding only lasted for an hour or two before they began their trip back home. The whole journey took days all so they could spend a short time on the moon. I’d hate to imagine being stuck there for a thousand years.” Then another thought struck him. “Are they really that old?”
“Older even,” Twilight said. “We, my friends and I, are responsible for redeeming Luna and cleansing her of the Nightmare’s energy. She is now one of us, if not a little behind the times.”
Bass chuckled softly. “I just felt a lot more respect for her. I still don’t like that she almost blew out my eardrums, though.” He went deep into thought again. “Kind of reminds me of the vampire stories. The ones about good vampires, of course.”
“Like vamponies? Bloodsucking night monsters?” Bass nodded. “I’ve never considered the possibility of a vampony being good. All stories here about them they are inheritably evil.”
Bass smiled and began speaking in an accented voice. “When the last vampire is extinct who will mourn our loss? Will she? Will anybody?” he quoted. “Mire Link, from the story Vampire Hunter D. In the story, D, a half vampire, is hired to kill Mire for kidnapping a young woman. Turns out that the woman and Mire are lovers, and she agreed to run away with him. D’s orders were to kill Mire or bring back proof of the girl’s death. When she died at the hands of an evil vampire, D took her ring and told Mire that he no longer had a quarrel with him. Mire takes her body and runs away into the cosmos, and presumably dies of his wounds. A very touching story.”
“And D let him go? You imply that they fought furiously for Mire to die of his wounds,” Twilight said.
“Well, we don’t actually know if he died or not. It’s presumed because D beat the living hell out of him. Of course, he may have survived, as vampires in the story have remarkable healing powers. D could have killed Mire when he stabbed him with his sword, but he purposely missed his heart. I think that he sympathized with Mire, but a job is a job.”
Twilight giggled. “Sounds like you have very good taste in stories. What genres do you read?”
Bass shrugged. “I much prefer fantasy, but I also read mysteries, science fiction, and slice of life. Occasional I delve into the romantic side of things, but that is very rare, and I don’t usually enjoy those books.” He turned and met her gaze. “What about you?”
“Well, I usually read non-fiction, as you know, but I like mysteries, adventures, fantasy, etc. Almost anything really. I actually can’t stand romance novels, which both surprises and bothers Rarity.”
“Rarity reads romance books? Why am I not surprised?” The two laughed for a moment. “I forgot about adventures. To me they tend to blend in with the fantasy genre, so it’s rare that I read an adventure story that doesn’t have its own fictional world with fictional monsters and stuff.”
“You should read the Daring Do books. I have all of them in the library if you want to read them. That is, if Rainbow Dash hasn’t checked them all out again.” Twilight sighed. “That mare needs to buy her own Daring Do books.” Twilight yawned and bid Bass goodnight. Bass nodded, replying with his own goodnight, before laying down on the couch to sleep for the night.
The next day, the dawn of Bass’s fifth day in Equestria, he woke up and ate his breakfast. After eating he went to the adventure section of the library, found the first book in the Daring Do series, and started reading.