The clack of the cups being placed on the table snapped James out of his musing. He looked up to see Twilight sitting herself back down. Her confidence had returned, having spent a moment pacing in the kitchen to steady herself. She was still nervous but completely ready.
"Thank you," James told her as he picked up the cup closest to him and took a drink. He kept the cup in his hand as he looked her over. It was fairly easy to tell she was nervous, but the determination behind her eyes spoke to how the better part of her curiosity had her. He was actually nervous as well since he still didn't have a solid handle on what Princess Celestia really meant when she had warned him about talking of war. Irregardless, he intended to keep to his promise of trying his best to exercise caution. Twilight had shown herself to be intelligent so he thought he could play it by ear, answering her questions as they came and carefully scaling up or down depending on how she reacted.
He set the cup back down on the table and gently asked her, "Are you ready?"
As if answering to herself, she straightened her posture and looked right back at him. "Yes, let's begin," she said. Taking one more breath, she opened with, "A friend of mine pulled you and someone else out as that thing was falling apart. But then after you were set down..." She delayed as she was having a hard time bringing herself to say the specific words. She had thought about the exact words she wanted to use too, but it was hard to deliver them in context out loud. Saying it almost made it more real.
James gave a large nod to inform her that he understood what she was referring to.
Twilight sighed, then asked, almost painfully, "Why?"
That question was a little less specific than he had hoped. He didn't respond, lacking a good way to answer.
Sensing the stalemate, Twilight tried to add a little detail. "I don't understand why you would..." She was still having trouble with using the words. "Harm..." was as innocent as she could improvise, "... someone like yourself."
That left an opening James felt he could use. "Like myself," he echoed, but shook his head no. "It's more complicated than that. Maybe even more so for you." Placing his hand over his chest with fingers spread he said, "That other man was a human like me." He took his had off and gestured to the side, "But there were still many, many differences."
"What differences could make... what happened... happen?" Twilight uneasily responded.
James wanted to start with trying to explain, "We were enemies," but Princess Celestia wasn't particularly pleased with that idea when he had used it last time. If ponies have a society that doesn't have war and all its implications then maybe that explanation just comes out wrong. It could be like saying, "I didn't like him, so I killed him," which would just sound mindlessly sociopathic. It was still clear that the Princess had understood the concept though. So perhaps it was a matter of context.
"What you're going to have to understand," he said, "is that where I come from, sometimes people get in conflict, and if it gets bad enough those conflicts can escalate to violence. Even lethal violence." Twilight's ears drooped and she didn't seem to have words ready to respond with. James added, "I've been told it isn't like that HERE, but the reality is that is what it's like THERE."
For Twilight, it was a frightening thing to think about. Ponies could get into conflict. But usually it came to heated discussions, sometimes maybe even flared tempers. And if it came to really nasty disagreements there could be a push here and a shove there. But the ponies, and those around them, always looked for a way to settle their problems peacefully. To find a solution that worked best for everypony. To a large degree this even extended to the beings of Equestria beyond the ponies. The absolute worst Twilight had ever seen was a "battle" between a herd of buffalo and a village of ponies, but even then their opposing goals in the physical conflict mostly boiled down to making things for the other side so inconvenient that they would capitulate. She remembered a poignant moment where it looked like one of the buffalo might have actually gotten hurt and that caused the entire thing to come to a stand still for both sides.
What he was saying ran counter to a lot of things she so innately felt. What becomes of a society that accepts that sometimes actual physical harm to individuals can solve problems? Everypony loses. Those that get hurt might not be able to fully give back to the society they are a part of. Nothing is proven through the show of violent force other than how painful the irresponsible use of power can be. Twilight murmured, "Things don't have to be that way. There are so many other solutions that work better for everypony."
"But that's not what I'm talking about," James said. "I'm not talking about what could be. I'm talking about what is." He thought for a second. To avoid pushing things too far maybe he should backpedal a bit. "I don't want to present the wrong idea. There are many, many humans who are against the fighting. It's recognized as the terrible thing it is. But sometimes it's seen as necessary. As the only viable option."
"No! It's nev-" she realized she was being a bit too loud and might wake Spike again so she quickly dropped the level of her voice. "It's never the only option. There are always other ways. Sometimes they're not easy, but everypony has to work together to find them."
James didn't really feel like she was understanding what he was trying to establish. He also had no idea if it was him being unable to communicate the idea or if Princess Celestia's talk of ponies not knowing war was such an imposing reality that it was literally incomprehensible. "The view where I come from is that sometimes it is necessary," he tried to explain again.
Twilight just couldn't reconcile the difference of realities. "But, why?" she repeated.
"'Why' again. That's a small word, but it's a big question," he said. "I think if somebody had ever figured out the answer, something would have been done about it a long time ago. That's just the way it is. That's the way it has always been." Wars coursed throughout human history, and it wasn't like people haven't stopped to ask why before. Leaders, philosophers, citizens, poets, diplomats, spiritual men and women, song writers, and so many others. James didn't have anything over all of them that would give him the answer. It was an ever tumbling see-saw of "necessary" war and its lament.
Things weren't really progressing with Twilight, and it made James uncomfortable. Trying to drop the entire subject might not work well as they were already so mired in it, but he had to scale back somehow. Or maybe, he thought, he can try to use her curiosity to get her more engaged. But it had to be something she'd respond to more positively.
He grabbed his cup and took another drink, and then said while setting it back down, "Here, let's try this."
She stirred slightly at the change in direction, raising her eyebrows.
"I'll put the question to you instead. Why? Why is Equestria the way it is? Why is there no war here?" James winced for a second. Whoops. He had used the "w" word.
"War..." Twilight whispered, but then strayed into thought. If you ever heard that word around Equestria it was in a colloquial way, as an abstracted euphemism. When Rarity and her sister Sweetie Belle have a big argument, maybe somepony will say it's a "war". But in this conversation there was no doubt he meant the real deal. War in Equestria. She knew of it, actually. It wasn't common knowledge, though. In Equestria, a lot of history is kept alive through tradition: plays, songs, dances, ceremonies, stories and the like. That's how most ponies learn their history, augmented by some rudimentary history lessons in school. Real heavy history was mostly reserved for those ponies who discovered a special talent in history, or ponies like Twilight who read every book they could get their hooves on. As Twilight recalled, the last war in Equestria would have been an unfathomably long time ago, where the record of history gets somewhat scratchy. Long before the time of Princess Celestia. Long before even the uniting of the pony tribes.
James wasn't sure what to make of Twilight's long moment of reflection. She was silent, but the focus had returned to her eyes. Giving her the question had provided her something to really think about rather than leaving her with something to just react to.
Finally she said, "I think everypony understands Harmony. That it doesn't do any good to fight."
It was too simple an answer. James had suspended a lot of his skepticism so he considered that maybe ponies really did never get angry or upset with each other. However, it seemed like he had already seen enough to doubt that. Twilight was able to passionately disagree with him before. He also recalled the guards of Canterlot Castle. Maybe they never see action now but there had to be some sort of real ceremonial history to their presence and their armor. To be sure, he asked, "There are never any times when ponies don't get along?"
"Well, no, of course there are times when ponies don't see eye to eye," she admitted.
"Alright. What I'm asking is why doesn't that scale up? Why don't things get worse?"
"Because... because no pony..." but she stopped. She recognized that he was poking at the relatively unexplained nature of her argument. When two ponies couldn't get along, did they really look for forgiveness, or stop to mediate, or find a compromise because they thought to themselves, "Gosh, it sure would be horrible if things got violent!" That kind of thought, which admits to even the possibility of awful violence, would never enter a pony's mind. They just naturally seem to seek resolutions to their conflicts in Harmony.
Twilight delivered her conclusion, "Because there's something in the nature of ponies that keeps it from going that far."
James leaned in and shook his open hands in front of him. "And why?", he said, putting a rhetorical spin on it.
She just shook her head. She was reminded of him saying, "That's just the way it is" about his own world. It was a clear role reversal of what he was trying to point out before. The historical records of Equestria, that she remembered at least, didn't really say what changed with ponies after the last war. There was enough written to understand that the fighting stopped and in the period after there was a slow, great effort that eventually brought the tribes together. But there was never a clear answer to "why?"
"I don't think I could answer you any better than you could answer me," James said. He was just a little bit melancholy about this conclusion. It was putting Twilight in a dismal mood and, besides that, it actually would have be interesting to get an answer. To learn what went so wrong for people or perhaps so right for ponies.
There wasn't a part of Twilight that wanted to accept that there was a place somewhere out there like the one where he was from. "That's such a terrible reality," she moaned.
She caught him by surprise when she said that. In a way he almost resented it. There were good things he remembered about home. The beautiful, like sun rises, waterfalls, or sweeping plains. The artful, like eye opening paintings, moving music, or emotional poems. The personal, like spending time with his family or receiving such kindness from a stranger. But he recognized that Twilight was just getting hung up on one horrible facet, the only one of his world that she had witnessed personally, and he couldn't blame her for it. Then he remembered something she had said to him only a little bit earlier. He repeated it back to her, "Sometimes it's necessary to throw out preconceived notions before stepping into something new, otherwise they might bias your judgment in a way that holds you back."
The turn around bothered Twilight. She had meant it when she said it in such a good way, but now here it was blocking her. The objective truth of it was still recognizable. She had been trying to place her frame of reference over his world even though she had no logical reason to do so.
With a sigh she said, "I guess I just don't understand how you can accept it."
"No, no, that's okay," he said, recalling again Princess Celestia's warning. "I wouldn't ask you to fully understand how I deal with it. I'm just trying to answer your question with the truth." He tried to bring things back to the start. "What happened between me and that other man comes from all that. From that specific reality. When someone comes at you to destroy you, you can either fight back or be destroyed."
Twilight looked at the floor. Within the logic that had been established, what he said unfortunately did make sense in explaining what had happened. When Princess Celesta's letter had first arrived Twilight had fears that maybe she would be meeting a monster but so much of the start of their meeting dispelled that. Now, instead, it was as if he had something monstrous attached to his side, being dragged along with him. The Princess' instructions floated into her mind: to teach him about Equestria. Surely part of that is to show him why this monster associated with him didn't belong in Equestria. And he had to be capable of understanding that. She had to believe that. The idea that there would be no solution could not be accepted. "That's why the Princess has him here now," she thought to herself. She looked James in the eyes, saying, "I still want you to know that isn't how it works in Equestria."
It was a shorter reemphasizing of what Princess Celestia had told him. But in having this conversation with Twilight, he felt like he knew better where she was coming from. With Princess Celestia he somewhat had to take her word for it with regards to the nature of Equestria. With Twilight, there was something much more visceral about seeing her try to reconcile things with her world view that made it seem that much more real. He gave a slow nod to her. "Okay," he said. After a brief moment he followed up with, "I suppose in time I'll get to see that for myself."
There was a quiet release of tension while neither said anything. James took another drink from his cup, looking into it afterwards to see how much was left and giving it a swirl. Suddenly realizing she actually was a little thirsty, Twilight sipped from the water she had poured for herself using a straw she had left in the cup. After she finished, she ended the silence by speaking up, "Let's go on to a different topic and leave this behind for now."
He concurred.
Twilight began to get a little excited. The other things that they had talked about at first were interesting and not nearly as depressing, so she was looking forward to getting back to things like that. It really felt like he was an interesting person, he just had terrible things associated with him. To her, that was a big improvement over the worst of her imagination. And she knew from past experiences not to be so quickly judgmental on others even if there appeared to be terrible things about them. She thought about what she should ask next but then realized she had been driving the conversation with a lot of her own questions. If her task was to teach him about Equestria perhaps it was time to give him a turn. "Are there any questions you have for me?" she asked.
There were two he had in mind. One was a more pressing concern, something he hadn't even talked to Princess Celestia about. He was sure Twilight wouldn't like the topic though, and he wanted to refrain from potentially dragging the atmosphere back down after what they had just finished. So, he moved on to his other concern. "Yes. Do you know where I'd be able to get some clothes?" He held his arms out wide to give a good showing of the makeshift robe he was wearing. "This is only supposed to be temporary."
"I was wondering about that," Twilight said. "It looks like you draped yourself in a table cloth," she giggled lightly.
"Not too far off. The Princess made it for me out of-"
"And it's very nice! And practical for what it is!" Twilight stammered, with a little embarrassment.
He thought the respect she had for the Princess was endearing. "Anyway," he continued, "it's just to hold me over until I can get some real clothes."
"Well," Twilight responded, "my friend Rarity is a seamstress and dressmaker. She runs the Carousel Boutique in town. I'm sure she could put something together for you."
James raised an eyebrow. "Dresses?"
She chuckled, saying, "Relax. That's not all she can make, that's just usually what she does for her business. She's very talented and I know she's made suits for Spike before. She'll be able to make something that's just perfect for you."
"Alright, that sounds good, thank you." He grabbed some of the robe he was wearing and stretched it out in front of him, looking down at it. "And the sooner the better. All this white could get dirty very easily."
"Why couldn't you just wash it?" she asked. "It's only a table cloth."
He fumbled a little bit, responding, "Well, I could, but then while it was being washed..." He really should have known. A naked pony and a naked dragon walking about the library; clearly the nature of nudity worked differently here. It couldn't be a lack of use for clothes. Twilight's friend was a dressmaker. She made dresses. For wearing, presumably. Ponies had to have some conception that there was a time and place for clothing. It was just much less reserved than anything he was used to. He struggled a bit with how to explain it until he hit on something. It wasn't a problem for them. It was his problem. He was the only one embarrassed by it. All he needed to do was speak to the truth of the matter. "It's about modesty," he said.
"Modesty? How?" Twilight didn't see any immediate connection.
James explained, "In human culture, or most human cultures anyway, clothing is strongly tied to the idea of modesty. The default is that it's immodest to be without clothes unless the situation specifically calls for being unclothed. So normally everyone is clothed except when you're doing something like..." He bit his lip. "Taking a bath," he said abruptly.
Twilight thought that was interesting. "If everyone had to usually wear clothes there must have been quite a lot of fashion designers to keep up with demands. It sounds like Rarity might have a lot of expectations to live up to."
"I guess you could say that." He recalled a lot of the diverse outfits he had seen over the years, personally or in media. Practical wear for the every day, fancy suits and dresses for formal occasions, rugged and well-worn outdoor clothing, flashy and vibrant show costumes, extremely bizarre wearable artistic statements, and a wealth of traditional cultural wear from the world over. There was no doubt that there was more clothes than people. He wasn't much of a fashion person himself, however. "I don't really have tremendous standards, myself," he told Twilight. "I just need more to wear. And hopefully something that won't get ponies to think I robbed the Princess' dining room."
She smiled. "If clothing helps make you more comfortable here, we can see Rarity first thing tomorrow. I know she'll help." Twilight thought about the few dresses she kept in her own closet. All her clothes spent most of their time there, coming out only as necessary, which was quite different than the mandatory nature he was describing. "I wonder how such an attitude about clothing could come about?" she pondered out loud.
"Hm..." James thought for a second. "There's a practical side to clothing also. Look." He rolled up the part of the robe that was covering his right arm so that it was clearly visible and swept down his arm with his left hand. "There's some hair, but no real coat of fur. The human body is well built to deal with managing body temperature, particularly in hot climates. Cold climates can be more of a vulnerability but that's the beauty of clothes. You can carefully add layers to insulate yourself."
"I see," Twilight replied. "Perhaps that's part of it then. People who lived in colder places were so used to always wearing clothes that they just kept on with it until the habit became very entrenched."
"I'm sure it helped," he said, "but I have to imagine that like many things it's so much more complicated than it seems. There's probably all sorts of social factors woven in over time, for example."
Twilight took that into consideration. With the buffalo recently on her mind, she thought about them. Many of them looked very similar to each other in her eyes, some almost indistinguishable. But their leader, Chief Thunderhooves, for example, wore a special headdress which set him apart. Not all the creatures in Equestria were as naturally diverse as the ponies, with their wide range of coat colors and unique cutie marks. "It really is a more complicated topic than I was giving it credit for," she said. She made a mental note to go over the library catalog later for books on fashion history or clothes outside pony culture. There was a lot of extra reading she suddenly wanted to get done.
"Maybe we should get to any other questions you have," Twilight suggested.
The only other question he had ready could get a little messy. He hadn't even brought up the subject with Princess Celestia so he had no direct experience to go on. From everything seen and said though, he thought he had a pretty good guess of how poorly Twilight could take. It was a real pressing issue in the long run however, so it was best to deal with it now. He just wanted to tread carefully.
"When Princess Celestia fed me at Canterlot I got the impression that the usual pony diet isn't going to work for me," he said.
"Oh! I should have realized," Twilight said. She had offered him a drink but nothing to eat. And she needed to be respectful to dietary diversity because all creatures have different nutritional requirements, some radically so. Spike, for example, eats gemstones. "Are you hungry? What kind of food can I get you?" she asked innocently.
The fact that she hadn't yet picked on the direction he was about to take things made it that much harder to deliver. He still tried to proceed cautiously. "No, I'm not hungry, thank you. I ate what I was given at the castle. What I mean is... there were a few fruits and vegetables but a lot of sugary confections. That will keep me from going hungry, but over time if I stick to that I'd get very sick."
"Alright. So what do you need?" she asked. There was a slight pulling back of her voice, as if she could feel something coming her way.
"You're not going to like it," he told her.
Twilight tensed up. "Not going to like what?"
"You're really not going to like it." He was trying to give her that moment to brace herself.
She had a panicked instant where she thought he was going to tell her something truly wild or frightening, like the final sting in a ghost story. There was a flash of an undirected thought, "He's going to tell me he can only eat young, studious unicorns!"
"Meat," he said.
"Well, it's not unicorns," she immediately thought with some relief. "Oh. You're a carnivore," she said to him in a very straight manner. Then it caught up with her. That really wasn't all that much better. "Uh... you're a carnivore?" she tried to verify with some trepidation.
Technically "omnivore" would be the case. He nodded his head with some reservation, saying, "Somewhat..."
Twilight dug herself in. There had to be some reasonable solution to this. She actually noticed he was being more restrained with this topic than when they were talking about war, so she gave him the benefit of the doubt. He must have been seeking a reasonable solution as well. She told him, "That's going to be... very hard to accommodate."
He easily responded, "I imagined so. But there might be another way."
She eased up and looked at him expectantly.
"You see," he said, "not all people eat meat. Many do, but there were some who chose, for varying reasons, to not do so. And because we're actually omnivores, they were able to get by." Holding up an index finger, he said to her, "So, if the right things are available, it should be possible to have a working alternative diet."
Twilight felt completely relieved. This is precisely what she was talking about when she was saying there are always other solutions. She was determined to make this work. "Okay, then. What do we need to get?"
James tried to recall the specific details. He had never followed any form of vegetarian diet himself, but he has had friends and associates who have. "The key idea is that we're getting all the nutrients, proteins, vitamins, and so forth that I would usually get from meat from other sources instead." There were a few things that came to mind but the most important component he remembered was diversity. "Vegetable variety is going to be the big thing I think. A really broad range is needed to get everything. If I stick to too small a pool there's bound to be some nutrient I wouldn't be getting enough of."
"Ponyville grows a reasonable mix of its own vegetables," Twilight said. "And we bring in more from the outside, often in exchange for the excess apples from Sweet Apple Acres."
"Apples..." he mumbled. "Fruit is fine in regular amounts. Maybe we want to diversify there too, just in case."
"We can check the market stalls tomorrow to see if there is enough variety," Twilight said. "I think I can also special order in anything else through Canterlot since its a big center of trade." She looked around the room for a second. "I should probably be writing all this down!" she realized. She spotted a ready quill and some paper neatly organized on a table just across the room. A small light gleamed from her horn as the quill, its ink bottle, and a piece paper radiated a small glow before quickly lifting up and moving across the room to her.
James clasped a hand over his face and rubbed his closed eyes. He had thought he saw some things floating along earlier in Canterlot Castle but this confirmed it. Whatever. Reduced skepticism, right? One thing at a time. He could ask Twilight about that next.
The paper floated in front of Twilight as the quill swooped about in the air over the parchment, writing out her thoughts and dipping into the floating ink bottle as necessary. "I'll go ahead and make this a whole 'to do' list," Twilight said, writing a reminder that they needed to see Rarity about clothing. "Anything else with regards to the food?" she asked.
"Right, right," he said, bringing his attention back. "Some dairy foods are going to be important too. Milk, cheeses... eggs, if that's acceptable. Things like that." With all the cakes he had seen earlier he hoped eggs would be acceptable. Then again, maybe right now it wouldn't surprise him if she told him they grow the cakes in a garden.
The quill kept scribbling away as Twilight diligently took notes.
"Some grains... seeds, beans, nuts..." he honestly couldn't recall at this point which of these things started falling into other categories that he might have already been mentioned.
Twilight noticed his trailing out. "Is that all?" she asked.
"Yeah, I guess," he said. "Once I get a look at everything available I think I'll remember the specifics better." He added after a moment, "It's probably worth making a note about all those sweets and sugars. That has to be limited." Staring at Twilight, he thought that cake being a regular part of a colored horse's diet seemed like another one of those things that made its own weird kind of sense. He decided not to ask about pony nutrition though, in favor of getting to his next question.
"Already have it written down," Twilight noted. "You said it would get you sick." She glided the paper, quill, and ink bottle onto the table next to their drinks, and the glow emanating from the objects and her horn stopped. "I really think we'll be able to get everything you need. I'm glad we found a reasonable alternative."
For the most part, James was too. One problem solved was one less thing to be worried about. Not that he wouldn't miss the meats he enjoyed eating, but he understood that, like a lot which had already happened, he didn't have much of a choice in the matter. In a funny way, because he was holding off so much on processing his deeper emotions at the moment, meat was currently the thing he was most remorseful about losing.
Taking another sip of her drink, Twilight asked him if he had another question.
He jumped right to it. "How did you move those items around without touching them like that?"
"This?" she said, levitating the paper up again. "Unicorn ponies like myself can actively use magic to move things about." She demonstrated by swishing the paper back and forth.
Magic. He was just rolling with it now because he had dropped his skepticism. But it was still remarkable in how it explained everything and nothing at the same exact time.
Twilight set the paper down, knowing immediately from the way he phrased his question and the way he was still looking at her that the answer wasn't really sufficient for him. "This is one of those things," she said, "that's different in your universe, isn't it?"
"It's like dragons," he replied. "The idea of magic exists, but it's not a real thing." At this point he imagined things were pretty open. Magic could be some supernatural force like it is in stories, or maybe "magic" was just the word ponies used to refer to some kind of telekinetic power the Unicorns have. In either case he still felt safe going with the dragon comparison because the idea held: whatever it was, it wouldn't have been considered real back home.
Her reaction was mostly subdued surprise. Just as James had been sliding along by suspending his disbelief, Twilight was now getting accustomed to not having what she considered universally familiar to serve as a base for him. She still had a hard time swallowing the idea of a world where magic was absent, but she was able to take him for his word. "Magic is an incredibly essential part of Equestria. It's really difficult to imagine a world without it," she said.
To him that sounded like more than just telekinesis. "Essential in what way?" he asked.
"Maybe the biggest example is in maintaining the balance of the world," she explained. "For example, the Pegasi have a passive magic that they have used to influence and control the weather for a very, very long time. They keep the seasons in order with it." Realizing that he hasn't gotten a chance to personally talk to a pegasus yet, she turned to an example from someone he knew. "Perhaps more importantly, for a long time Princess Celestia has been responsible for raising the sun to light Equestria using her magic."
That confirmed to him that she was speaking of something extremely supernatural. Supernatural to him, at least. "That sounds pretty important. Which makes it strange for me because nothing like that has ever been necessary before," he said.
"Which is what really throws me for a loop," she followed up to his sentence.
Going right into an explanation, James said, "Nature had a way of maintaining its own balance, without intervention. Maybe one could even say nature WAS balance." Since raising the sun sounded pretty impressive he started there. He didn't really want to go into gravitational forces and orbit in case the theory of gravity wasn't really a pony thing (or his memories of those particular school lessons fail him), so he hoped a poetic but nevertheless true explanation would suffice. "The sun would raise every day because that was the equilibrium it struck with the world. The world turns while the sun waits. And when the world faces the sun as it turns, the sun would shine its light on the world. They do those things on their own and, because no being in the world has the power to change that, they stay that way. In balance."
The idea was intriguing to Twilight. She wondered what would happen if Princess Celestia didn't raise the sun. Conventional wisdom would say that it would remain night until the sun came up, and with the way ponies use magic now maybe that is true. But perhaps, a long time ago, that wasn't always the case.
Not fully satisfied with his explanation, James tried making an example of weather. He still wanted to keep things simple while striking the core idea. "Or rain," he said, "which comes when there's an imbalance of moisture in the air. If there is too much the sky has to let some of the water go in order to restore balance. That water comes down as rain." He grabbed his cup from the table. "It would be like if the natural state of this cup was to be half full. If you put more water into it, then it has too much and wants to return to its state of balance." He started tilting the cup to the side slightly. "Eventually it will get to a point where it must dump water to return to balance." A little bit of water drooped out as he turned the cup, but he caught it with his other hand. It was an exceedingly rough description, but not altogether inaccurate.
Twilight wondered whether maybe the lack of magic had some relation to the nature of war in his world. The power of Harmony helped keep ponies together in their worst of times. Maybe the humans' lack of control over their world somehow came to manifest itself as conflict. Maybe that's what had happened in the olden pony times to change things. Maybe magic came along. But Twilight recalled how she and James had talked about the nature of clothing and how a society's attitude towards something even as basic as clothing needed a more complicated explanation than just "it was often cold", so she didn't feel too sure about her theory. She also didn't want to bring up the topic of war again tonight, so she let those thoughts be for now.
"I think I understand and that's actually very fascinating," she told him. "Many things work differently through magic here. There's a lot to learn about magic if you're interested."
"I guess I should be," he answered, "since it sounds so important." He thought about what it might mean for him. "So, only the unicorn ponies can directly use magic?" he asked.
"Amongst ponies, only the Unicorns can cast spells. There's ambient magic in the Earth Ponies and Pegasi. For the rest of the creatures of Equestria, it varies," Twilight explained.
"Spells. From floating objects all the way up to raising the sun?" He just wanted to get a feel for what unicorns like Twilight were really capable of.
Twilight elaborated, "Each unicorn pony's skill and ability is different, so it depends individually on that in addition to how much they study and practice magic. Princess Celestia raising the sun is a very exceptional example. Levitation of objects is a very simple spell that nearly all unicorn ponies learn. But there are all sorts of different spells with lots of uses." She glanced around quickly and then settled on the candle on the table. "For instance, watch the candle." Twilight focused intently on the candle. A spark flashed from the tip of her horn and a flame flickered to life on the candle. "That's a fairly basic spell too, but there will be some unicorns who aren't skilled or practiced enough to be able to reliably cast it."
James rested his back against the wall a bit more. The complexity of the situation was increasing more than he ever imagined it would. He remembered when Princess Celestia had told him, "There is much you may be able to learn". Now it reached beyond just philosophical differences in the way ponies think and feel that gives them a warless society, all the way to the existence of a supernatural force that may permeate all creation in this universe. He reflected on Twilight's observation, "What can actually be known about a place you've never been to or heard of before?" Her advice was to throw out your preconceived notions so you can avoid a biased judgment. He wasn't sure if he was even capable of preconceived notions anymore.
"It sounds like there's a lot more to try and understand than I ever would have guessed," he said. "Not just about magic. About Equestria."
The Princess had given Twilight the task to help him to understand and she was ready to put everything into that. She remembered how some time ago she had arrived in Ponyville under the Princess' orders to study friendship and she didn't know anyone besides Spike, who had come with her. It was with the help of the new friends she made that she learned to understand friendship. Even more, she learned to understand her friends and, in many ways, also to understand herself. She remembered how wonderful it all was. How wonderful it still is. How much she is still learning and understanding.
Twilight was adamant that things could be repeated. Things may be more difficult because he was from a much farther away place. The farthest anyone had ever come from. But there had to be a solution. She knew it. "I think we'll really get to understand each other in time," she told him, smiling. "Some cultural differences and some clothing isn't going to get in the way of that."
"What separates us is much more than just simple cultural differences and clothes, Twilight," he said.
"I'm not going to believe that just yet," she said optimistically. "I think you'll see." She beamed with confidence.
They had covered a lot of ground already. Neither felt particularly tired yet and there was enough fascination with new, unknown things that they kept their conversation going for awhile longer with new questions and answers.
Spike made his way slowly down the steps, heading for the bedchamber door. He yawned and tried the rub the sleep from his eyes. There was enough sun streaming in to make it early morning. He checked a clock on the wall to be absolutely sure. It was a little past seven o'clock, which meant he was on schedule to make it to Rarity's when he wanted to. Before he left the room, he looked back up at Twilight, who was rolled out on her bed under the wrinkled covers, sleeping soundly.
Closing the door outside the bedchamber, he looked around just to remind himself that he had in fact taken care of all the chores before turning in last night. He jumped for a moment when he saw a pile of pillows and blankets sprawled out on the floor, annoyed that someone had left a mess for him to clean up. That's when he remembered what happened last night and Princess Celestia's letter. He move a bit closer to get a better look and, sure enough, he saw their guest laying over the pillows, wrapped amongst some of the blankets, asleep. James was close to the wall next to one of the small tables. Two empty cups had been left out, one with a straw. The only other thing on the table was a candle that looked like it had been burnt down a few inches before someone had snuffed it out.