//------------------------------// // Surprised it Took That Long, Really (First Contact is Magic) // Story: Eakin's Rapid Fire Pony Fics // by Eakin //------------------------------// SURPRISED IT TOOK THAT LONG, REALLY Jeremy stared down at the device on the desk in front of him and continued to hate his job. He glanced up at the clock on the nearby wall. Eleven thirty at night, and complete radio silence for the last three hours. The device, the one that would revolutionize the world, sat there quietly humming away oblivious to Jeremy’s contempt. Not that it was the machine’s fault, really. It was doing exactly what it was designed to, exactly what Jeremy had helped make it capable of: establishing and maintaining the first audio connection to Equestria. While Jeremy hadn’t been there himself, he’d returned from lunch a little after one in the afternoon to find all of his coworkers running around and shouting with excitement. He’d managed to pull one aside and get the complete story. One of the other engineers, who’d been fiddling with a few of the connections when he’d unexpectedly heard a voice emerge from the supposedly-inactive speaker, had grabbed the microphone and on impulse answered. There had been nothing for a few seconds, and then the voice had emerged again, words just barely discernable through a thick accent, but there. For the rest of the afternoon Jeremy had mostly been ignored as Very Important People were called in to speak into the device. He didn’t mind. Sure, there were a couple ponies he texted once in awhile, but his job working on the transmitter had been just that: a job. Time Warner Google had been paying a premium for electrical engineers, and he’d have been an idiot not to take the job, despite the crazy hours. Crazier when your boss is a fucking asshole, he thought bitterly to himself. As day in Equestria turned to night, the ponies on the other end of the connection had gone off to do other things with the promise that they’d have Princess Celestia herself ready to address them by the following morning. Needless to say spirits were high, and the whole lab was going out to celebrate. His boss, Frank, had waited until Jeremy was packing up his things to go with them, waited until the cruelest possible moment, to call him aside and ‘ask’ him to stay with the device overnight. “Just in case one of the ponies needs to talk to us, or it starts acting up,” he’d claimed. So all the rest of the guys were probably having a great time, drunk off their collective asses, while he sat alone in a dark office doing nothing but staring in silence at a device that did nothing except occasionally go ‘ping!’ when it completed some subroutine or another. It was because he’d spilled that coffee all over him at the meeting last week, Jeremy just knew it was. The bastard had been looking for a way to get back at him ever since. His stewing was interrupted when he realized the machine had begun emitting another noise. It was faint, but regular, a sort of raspy buzzing followed by a little hiss, then it would start over again. Jeremy frowned. Bored as he was, the last thing he needed was for something to go wrong on his watch. Frank would just love to find something he could blame him for. “Come on, what’s wrong with you?” he muttered to the the device. “Buck!” Jeremy drew his head back at the voice that shouted from the speaker to his side. It was quickly followed by what sounded like something clattering to the floor. “Buck buck buck buck buck,” repeated the voice as various other scraping noises followed. “Uh, greetings, human!” said the voice. It was high pitched but scratchy, and a series of hacking coughs rang out. “I mean, hello,” it said more clearly. “If you could, uh, just repeat anything you said in the last... four AM? Seriously? Buck my life. Uh, that is anything you might have mentioned in the last ninety minutes or so. We had a... brief loss of communication. Oh, fewmets, Bluebelle is gonna kill me.” The voice stopped. “Is anypony there?” Slowly, the picture in Jeremy’s mind came together. “Did I wake you up?” “No!” it shouted. There was a pause. “Well, maybe a little bit, yes,” said the voice. “I was just... resting my eyes for a spell. I don’t know what time it is there, but it’s pretty late here. If you want to talk to somepony I can go find... well I’m actually not sure who else is here this late, but I could wake somepony up. I’m not, like, a diplomat or anything.” “Neither am I,” answered Jeremy. “I’m one of the engineers who built this thing. My name’s Jeremy.” “Oh!” the voice said, brightening right up. “I’m one of the Equestrian techs. Call me Mayfly. I was running some calibrations on the signal before the... um... eye resting thing. You’re not gonna tell anypony about that, right? I mean, we circuit sisters gotta stick together.” Jeremy raised an eyebrow. “I’m a guy, actually.” “Really?” asked Mayfly. “A male and an engineer? Wow. What are the odds?” Was that sarcasm? “I’d have thought you’d be able to tell from my voice, though,” said Jeremy. “Gee, let me compare your voice in my head to all the other human voices I’ve heard over my life. Oh wait, there aren’t any,” she retorted. “Seriously, I don’t even know what your species actually looks like. I have to guess from what I read in your books. Wait, on your planet are the males the ones with the ‘heaving bosoms?’” “We are not,” said Jeremy. “What kind of books are you reading, anyway?” “The mind-your-own-Faust-damned-business kind,” she snapped back, although even through the imperfect connection Jeremy didn’t miss the note of embarrassment. She sighed. “Look, sorry I’m being kind of a bitch. I wasn’t even supposed to be here tonight, before you people managed to bridge the connection all of a sudden. I had a date, finally, and I had to cancel on him at the last second when I drew the short straw to stay and watch this thing overnight. Do you have any idea how hard it is to meet stallions when you’re an engineer? You males have all the luck, it’s so not fair.” “Uh, not really. Why would we?” asked Jeremy. “Oh, I guess maybe it’s different for you on Earth. All my co workers are female, and so was like ninety percent of my graduating class.” “It’s definitely not like that here,” said Jeremy. “Why is it so skewed?” Another pause. “Look, I’m not a sexist, but—” Jeremy preemptively winced “—stallions are just worse at science. They all want the squishy, touchy-feely liberal arts fields or just to find a wife that’ll take care of them so they can sit around the house being a stay-at-home dad and drinking red wine. Even the stallions who were going into engineering were all, ‘ooh, Mayfly, circuit diagrams are so hard. Could you maybe come over tonight and show me how to do them? If we finish early maybe we could even have some fun hanging out together afterwards. Tee hee!’” The last words were probably supposed to be a giggle. Jeremy couldn’t say for sure, but suspected that ponies giggling wasn’t meant to sound quite that venomous. “That’s... uh...” “This one time,” continued Mayfly ignoring Jeremy’s attempt to interject, “oh Celestia. This one time I was talking to a stallion in one of the intro courses, and remember this is introduction to electrical engineering, and I was explaining how capacitors and transistors conduct electricity differently. Not super complicated stuff, I mean we’ve been building our own in Equestria for at least a decade now. So this stallion, and again, he’s enrolled in intro to electrical engineering, he stops me, looks at me and asks, ‘okay, but what’s electricity?’ and at first I kind of laugh like he must be kidding, because he must be, right? But then he just keeps looking at me like he’s expecting an answer and I realize that he actually doesn’t know.” “Wait, seriously?” asked Jeremy. “Yes!” cried Mayfly. “He listened to me talk at him for an hour and a half and he didn’t know what electricity even was! How is anypony that stupid? So then he asks me if I’ll come with him to the library and ‘show him how to do the homework’ which really means ‘do my homework for me,’ and then he has the gall to bucking wink at me and tell me that if I don’t tell anyone I’m ‘helping’ him he’ll give me a bucking wing rub afterwards. So I’m there in the quad kinda staring at him and thinking ‘you smug little brat, how about I fly up, grab a storm cloud, and shove some electricity right up your stupid, arrogant, tight, muscular, well-sculpted...” her voice trailed off, but Jeremy could still hear her breathing heavily through the speaker. “How did he take it when you told him no?” he asked. The ensuing silence was deafening. “Mayfly, you did tell him no, right?” “At least the wing rub afterwards felt good,” she replied, her voice barely rising above a whimper. “It sucks, Jeremy. I’ve been in heat for three bucking weeks now. Tonight I just had to slap on a fake smile and get through a ninety minute dinner with some prettycolt moron who I could ignore while he rambled on about his feelings or whatever, and then I’d finally get some relief. But instead I ended up stuck here. These last few weeks have been...” she trailed off for a moment. “What’s that Earth place? Bad people get sent there as punishment? Really hot? Monsters everywhere?” “You mean Hell?” “Is that what it’s called?” asked Mayfly. She chuckled. “Wow, I was way off. I was going to say Australia.” “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I haven’t had a date in a long time either,” said Jeremy. “In fact I guess my last date was...” his contented grin faded a bit as he did the math, “...wow. Not for a long time. Actually, the gender ratio in engineering, computer science, and a bunch of other fields like that are just as skewed in the other direction. My program was probably about ninety percent male.” There was a moment of silence. “So... you’re literally telling me that for any female engineer on your planet, there are nine male ones for her to pick from?” “Well, I guess that’s one way to look at it but—” he was cut off by the high pitched screech that suddenly came blasting from the speakers. The screech stopped after a moment, to be replaced by an odd rhythmic banging noise. “Everything okay over there? I’m getting some weird interference or something.” Instead of an answer, Jeremy started picking up word between the bangings. “Buck. My. Stupid. Bucking. Life. Buck. It. Straight. To. Australia.” “Mayfly? You alright?” Jeremy leaned forward, wondering if he shouldn’t maybe text somepony over in Equestria. But who would even be up and nearby enough to help? “No,” muttered Mayfly’s voice from the speakers. “I’m not alright. I’m just... I’m maybe a little bit lonely right this second. How do human females handle going into heat?” “That’s not really my field of expertise,” admitted Jeremy, “but I’m pretty sure that in humans it doesn’t last more than a couple days at a time.” “Kinda starting to hate your entire species, Jeremy.” “Sorry,” he answered, not knowing what else to say. “No, it’s not your fault. I’m sorry to dump all this on you. At least you’re a decent enough listener.” The office Jeremy was seated in grew quiet, and he started to suspect that she’d fallen asleep again before she spoke up. “You sound like you’re pretty handsome too, y’know. Just for the record.” “Oh. Oh! Gosh, thanks. You, well, you sound pretty... er... pretty.” She laughed. Her laugh said a lot, to Jeremy. Her speaking voice had been prickly and guarded, but that laugh was free. “Pretty pretty, huh? I guess it’s not quite the dumbest compliment I’ve ever gotten.” Jeremy chuckled along with her. That laugh, though, just kept tunneling into his mind. He’d known a girl with a laugh like that, a long time ago. Before he’d gone off to college and buried himself in knowledge and science and learning at the expense of everything else, there had been that one short, awkward little goth girl, the one who he’d almost, almost asked to prom before he’d chickened out and stayed home for the night instead. “I mean I guess you don’t know what humans really look like, so how could you know if I were handsome or ugly?” “You aren’t ugly,” she said with a certainty that made Jeremy believe it himself, a little bit. “I’m the ugly one. I’m not sure how often you humans bathe, but I’m running on three days since my last shower. That’s... somewhat longer than ponies usually go. Heh. I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t go on that date. Who’d want to touch me?” “I would,” said Jeremy, immediately wanting to slap himself as he did. He glanced over at a poster on the far wall, one with a smiling man from the government, who just happened to be his employer, giving a thumbs up with the caption You Never Know! Don’t Say Anything to our Pony Friends That You Wouldn’t Say to Mom. Maintaining Good, Clean Relations is Our Goal! He studied the poster for a moment longer, then turned away from it. “That’s sweet of you to say, really. But you don’t even know what I look like,” said Mayfly, leaving his thoughts scattered and disjointed. “You don’t have to say that sort of thing just to make yourself feel better. Wouldn’t want to get your horn gross.” A little ‘eep’ noise followed the statement. “I mean hands! Hands? Right, humans have those. I guess I was just imagining that you were...” “That I was what?” “Nevermind.” Mayfly’s tone brokered no room for disagreement. “I should... I should go. I can get somepony to call you back tomorrow, if you still have questions. I’m sure my bosses do.” “Mayfly?” There was no answer. “Mayfly, please don’t go.” “...I’m still here.” Jeremy felt a huge, completely unwarranted grin spread over his face. “Hey Jeremy, can I ask you a question?” “I guess.” “What’s the difference between a field-effect transistor and a unipolar transistor?” Jeremy paused, and frowned. “Aren’t those just different names for the same thing?” Mayfly started to giggle. It turned out that pony giggles didn’t sound anything like the one she’d tried to imitate earlier. This one wasn’t hurt and angry, just joyful. “Yeah. They are. They totally are.” “So then why—” “I was just checking,” she interrupted. “...you’d really touch me? I mean, you weren’t just saying that?” There was a long silence while Jeremy processed that. “Yeah. But I—” “Say you’re touching me now.” “What?” The air in the empty office Jeremy was seated in began to feel constricting. He wasn’t sure he was comfortable with what was happening right now. Every fibre of his being was screaming to him to walk away. He didn’t. “Mayfly, is this really okay for us to be doing?” There was another long silence. “I’m... I’m running my hoof down your cheek, as you hold me in your forele... sorry, your arms.” “Look maybe we should—” “Where are you touching me?” Jeremy stood up from the desk as the question lingered in the air. The safe thing to do is to walk away now, said the rational, hell, the sane part of his mind. Nothing has to change if you just pretend this never happened. And then the other part of his mind chimed in. That’s true. The same way nothing changed when you didn’t ask her to prom. “Um...” Mayfly’s voice sounded tiny as it issued forth from the speakers. “Are you touching me at all?” Jeremy closed his eyes for a moment, and then made his choice. “Yes, Mayfly. I’m touching you.”