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// Chapter VI: Locative 
// Story: Subjunctive 
// by Integral Archer 
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	My first thought was that I should make a motion to revise the dictionaries. The word path necessarily conjured up in the mind the image of a dirt marker, stamped and pressed into the earth by innumerable hooves, paws, and claws; and this word lost all its meaning as I flew across the plains, a terrain no harder to get lost in than a forest, my only bearing the path through it blazed long ago—a path not of earth but of metal, pointing me toward my destination, built solely for carrying that animal I’d encountered earlier (which I would later learn was called a train). Never did it appear that this path, or track, pointed in any direction but straight, but I could tell from the subtle differences in the volumes of my brothers’ and sisters’ shrills in either ear that I was undoubtedly flying in imperceptible curves.

Then there came a moment when, in the distance, the endless plains were pierced with a sharp outcropping, and as I flew toward it, it appeared as though it raised steadily out of the earth, like a vine breathing its first rays. It was an immense mountain. Spires then emerged, reaching even farther and appearing even sharper than the rock into the side of which they were built, and I knew that they summated the structures of a city that would present to me the fantastic sights, sounds, and words I desired so much to experience:

Canterlot. The city garnished its promise of success with its buildings, which sparkled in the daytime. A city that presented its majesty and enchantment from its first sight? A collection of stone and metal molded for the purposes of habitation and industry, more massive than the cliff upon which it was fixed? I believed it. I had no reason not to anymore. It was right there—all around me, as I touched down in the streets of the city.

The city and the race that built it presented to me their culture and language in my first steps, in such a quantity as to overwhelm all my senses at once: to my eyes, it presented its myriad signs, often written in a certain shorthand and often lacking finite verbs. To my ears, a ceaseless droning of voices, emanating from every corner of the city. And the slang! You could have churned it with your hooves, so thick it was. To my touch, the ponies continually bumped my shoulders on the crowded sidewalks. And to my smell, their shops, their food, their pressed clothes, their roads, their sweat. Beneath my feet, the city’s very concrete radiated language—literally: I noticed a manhole on the side of the street which listed the year it was built, the name of the contractor, the name of the city, and the mayor at the time. I could hardly contain my delight: even their sewers were documented painstakingly!

As I stood in the streets, as I looked up at the spires of the city, breathless from holding my head thus and from awe, I imagined some pony architect accepting a wager to build the heaviest structures he could think of in the most improbable and impractical location possible—and he had done it, with that stubbornness and arrogance peculiar to his species. It was the capital, I had quickly deduced, for the head of state’s palace was right in the middle of the city, and all of the settlement’s traffic seemed to be on a permanent orbit around it.

And, as if reflecting the stubbornness of the city, its inhabitants seemed more cold and distant than the ponies I had encountered in Fillydelphia. Many of them walked with their noses held high in the air and spoke with a peculiar accent and grammatical construction, initially baffling to my ears, but I eventually warmed up to it, so far as to learn on my first day that the accent of this city marked its users as belonging to a higher class. The ponies were adorned with a multitude of different garments, the purposes of which I could not ascertain, so I could only conclude that their sole function was to appear expensive. Ostentation and vanity: no species on the planet is immune to their perniciousness! Not that I was complaining, of course, for their concern for appearances, at the expense of everything else, made it easier to steal their purses of money when they weren’t looking.

So much to learn and see! What to do first? Look at these ponies and listen to their conversations; no, look at this building; listen to that sound! Dash here to see where that smell came from! Listen to their argot! How wonderfully vulgar it sounds!—and already it was nighttime.

I spent an innumerable number of days thus. My brothers and sisters, one by one, landed unseen in the city. They called out to me, but I barely heard them and answered with sparse and meaningless dismissals. It was joyfully easy to lose track of time here. How many days had I stayed within this city’s walls? Two? Five? Nine? I didn’t care. I was enjoying myself too much.

Did I ever worry that my ceaseless exploring turned any heads? Never. A smile never left my face, even when it wasn’t justified. A nervous and apprehensive air will instantly make your prey start to wonder why you’re behaving in that strange manner. One needs no reason to be happy, while there are thousands of reasons why one would twitch just in the presence of others—all of which perfidious. If ever I slouched, only then would that be cause for alarm on my part.

To say my race is would be an arbitrary assertion. But to say my race is not would be a non sequitur. By our very nature, we are everything and nothing at all. One day, we assume one attitude; another day, we assume one different, indistinguishable from the last, and we leave no evidence of this past existence or of the change that effected this new state. It is the same with our miens; no two are the same between a string of specified moments: Confidence was the mien I assumed when, one day, while looking up at the palace’s spire, I stepped backward and fell into a chair in front of a table; surprise, when a pony brought me a brown liquid she called coffee; graciousness, when I thanked her; curiosity, as I sniffed the pleasant beverage; anticipation, as I tasted it; satisfaction, when its heat and taste warmed me from the core; and, finally, panic, when some unseen chemical in it seized my nerves with its grasp.

And I loved all of it. If I started to learn one thing, the city would present another one of its aspects I desired to learn and understand and implement into my own behavior, and I would have to file it away for a later date in which I intended to work through the forever-growing queue of ideas being built up. And, every day, I would learn, all the while content with the thought that this was contributing an immense amount to my research and studies, which I couldn’t wait to write about and share with my family.

My brothers and sisters occasionally complained. They came to me with their grievances, which, at the time, I did not follow, nor did I care to. To list a few specific ones: “You’ve done nothing since we’ve been here, Brother Commander,” and “What must we do?” and “What would we tell our sister queen?” To which I would respond: I am a scientist. How must a scientist begin to learn? By observation. And was I doing anything otherwise?

That was how I spent my days before the invasion: when I wasn’t walking around the city, I was sitting at the same table at that café in front of the royal palace, looking at its ramparts, its sentries, the ponies walking around, listening to their conversations, and absorbing this society, its culture, and its language into my own consciousness. I even made idle talk with them, refined my spoken language, learned a bit of slang, and made an effort to emulate them. Eventually, I felt just like them, just like a pony. I ate like them, talked like them, smiled like them; and pretended to listen to the café’s obnoxious phonograph, which spewed the same discordance as the one that had so rudely greeted me in Fillydelphia.

I was a Canterlot bourgeois proper, with his noble air and refined speech, savoring every minutia of his immediate senses, basking in the warmth of Her Majesty Celestia’s summer sun; all the while, listening to and feeling the city, which rose up around him in all its splendor, flowing to every end of his sight and traversing the lands while declaring to one and all that she is the City, and sounding to the world her promise of knowledge and grandeur—her boundaries were an ellipse of exaltation, with him at one of her foci.