Shankar and I worked on figuring out how we stand up ourselves so we could explain it. After watching us carefully for a time, before we'd even figured out quite how we were doing it in detail, Lyra was getting into and out of chairs like a pro, as if you could make money at getting into and out of chairs.
I continued to be amazed by Shankar's disinterest in her lack of clothing, but didn't mention it. So, gathered around the kitchen table, we examined her list. "So. Essays. What do you want to work on first?"
She shrugged. "Seems like mostly stuff I'll pick up just by being here, so I'll write as it comes to me. A library would probably help on the rest." She pursed her lips. "I am supposed to be taking classes of some sort while here, not learn all on my own."
I waved her off. "It's Saturday, so we've got two days before that's a problem. We've got to figure out what your story is going to be right now. If you try to be Rhiannon, you'll fail pretty hard. I don't think we can make you not look like her short of using dark foundation and a wig, and even then it'd be suspicious. And if you just try to be you, that will cause a boatload of trouble."
We mulled that over.
Shankar said, "Lots of trips to where no one knows Rhiannon. Use the library in Somerville or Bridgewater?"
I shook my head. "No need to go that far. I'm pretty sure she's not on a first-name basis with the librarians here. I'm mainly worried about running into her other friends."
"Well. Anyway, in the mean time, I'm thinking, how about we day-trip into New York? See the sights. I've never actually been up the Statue of Liberty."
"Still can't go up. But sure, we can go to the island." (This was true at the time, though I hadn't checked recently)
"Meh. The rest of the city, then?"
"Sure, it's not like we'll come close to running out of stuff to see. Lyra? Can you bear to cover up again? And maybe put on some underwear this time?"
She crinkled her nose. "I can handle dresses. But really, do I need to wear something between my legs? That no one's even going to see?"
I nodded. "At the very least, you'd better get used to it before Tuesday."
"What happens on Tuesday?"
"Our uteruses take out the trash." Shankar, unlike my two previous boyfriends who'd encountered this information, was neither over-the-top disgusted at it nor creepily overeager to hear about it.
She blinked, then sighed in relief. "Oh phew. I was worried I'd have to deal with this the whole time."
"What?"
"Well, if our uteri are emptying out, mating season must be coming to a close."
"Lyra, uh, we don't really have a mating season."
She blinked at me. "Then... what do you have?"
"We ovulate once a month, more or less fertile for about three quarters of that."
She stared in horror. "Once a month? So I'm going to go through this or stronger twice during my stay here?"
I shrugged. Going from 13-year-old pony hormones to adult human hormones abruptly could well be disconcerting, overwhelming. "I imagine you'll adapt."
Shankar asked, "How often do you get these mating seasons?"
"Every seven years or so."
Shankar and I shared a look. "Ponn-Farr!" I said; he added, "Pony-Farr!"
Ignoring us, she amended, "Not that we're locked into that! Some ponies go out of phase, and the astrologers say something funny is coming up. But yeah, for the most part, seven years."
"Maybe it'll be easier if you get dressed?"
She accepted this begrudgingly. She dropped by her room to grab some clothing, and took it to the bathroom.
Shankar said, "'Out of phase'? Now, that reminds me of Deepness in the Sky."
"I was thinking Left Hand of Darkness, but that fits better, unless they only become male as needed, which seems unlikely." I sat next to him on the sofa, and quietly said, "So. You seemed awfully comfortable around her."
He shrugged. "She doesn't mean anything by it, so it doesn't mean anything to me."
"Really." I said, skeptically. "Like, if you were at a nude beach it would just be a beach?"
"When I've been, I wasn't so much focused on the other people, really. Just nice to be there."
I hadn't expected that reply. "You never mentioned that you've been to one."
"Should I have?"
I thought for a moment. "It'd sound like you were just trying to get my pants off."
He nodded. "Plus, it's not exactly a core part of my identity."
Good enough for me. Moving on, I said loudly enough that Lyra should be able to hear, "So. NYC. Should we invite Jack?"
Lyra called from the bathroom, "Yes!" A moment later, the shower started up.
Shankar had him on cell a moment later. "Hi. ... Yeah! ... Oh. Well, hope that goes well. See you. No, we're heading out. All right." To us, "He's got a job all morning. Looks like we're on our own."
Lyra stepped out, again in a loose dress - and this time I looked for and found a wrinkle indicating the presence of panties. We had her wear walking shoes this time (they didn't give her any trouble like the sandals had, since nothing was going between her toes). I handed her Rhiannon' purse, and dumped her keys and phone into it. And so we went down.
And when she stepped outside, the first thing she did was look directly at the sun. "Aaah!" Shankar caught her and she spent a minute looking at the ground.
"Yeah, uh, don't look at the sun. I guess Celestia keeps it safe to look at?"
She ignored my comment and murmured something that involved 'lestia' and sounded rather like a curse. But then she got up and we piled into Shankar's car. Driving is one thing I'm happy to leave to him, especially this time - I sat in the rear so I could be with her.
"Now, Lyra - it could occur that we'll be separated. We'll try to avoid that, obviously, but if it does happen, we need to be able to get in touch again and for you to get back home."
She nodded. "I'm watching the route."
"Here's your phone. You can call us using it... focus, Lyra." She was watching Shankar driving, and the houses rushing by.
She blinked. "Sorry. Just, this is really cool! We have self-rolling carts, but this is so much faster and smoother. Not too many ponies could keep up with this thing."
"I'd be very impressed if any could."
"On the ground, that is. Almost any pegasus could outpace this in a heartbeat."
"And almost any airplane could outpace this too. Can we get back on things like how you get home if we're separated? This is your phone..."
She listened, and summarized: "If we're separated long enough to worry about, call you. If phone can't connect, get outside. If that doesn't work, use subways to get to New York Penn Station. Use PATH or NJ Transit to get to Newark Penn station. Switch to Raritan Valley, go to Bridgewater, and retrace the route he just drove. Ask directions if there's any doubt."
We arrived in the Bridgewater train station. I took her to the ticket machine, gestured to it, and offered her enough cash to cover it. After a moment's hesitation, she tried. The touchscreen was very intuitive, and she managed to muddle through, even operating the bill-collecting device.
While the tickets were printing, a helicopter flew by. It wasn't particularly low, but it still was close enough to make conversation inconvenient. She looked hard at us not reacting, and took some deep breaths. "What is that?"
I pointed.
"Awfully noisy way to fly! I thought you said they were fast!"
"That's a helicopter, not an airplane. Planes can go much faster than that. Some helicopters can, too."
Then the train came. As we boarded, she was very impressed. "We have trains, but this is much larger than any I've seen. And so little smoke!"
I was surprised to hear that they had trains at all. "Well... is this one electric, Shankar?" I hadn't noticed; it appeared he hadn't either.
"Oh, electric. That would explain it." They have electricity?
We settled at the end, where two pairs of seats were facing each other.
Lyra knelt on the seat across from us and peered out the window. After a few minutes, she quit and started rummaging around in her purse. "What is this?" she asked.
"A skrunchy. Good for gathering your hair together in a... well, we call it a ponytail."
"Thought so. And this?" She held up a small black bar.
"That's a strong permanent magnet. Keep it away from your wallet. No idea why she has that in there." She held up a pack of tampons. "You'll need that on Tuesday." She grimaced and moved on. "Block of aluminum - no idea, again. Bag of colored chalk. Double-A batteries - they provide a little electricity for a while. Thumb drive - holds a lot of information, accessible through computers. Tarot deck. Mini first-aid kit. Bubble gum. Pentacle."
She recognized the next few items herself and continued, "A bunch of folded-up maps. Toothbrush and toothpaste. Napkins. Underwear." She pulled out a sheaf of packets and read the labels. "Alcohol swab. Pre-moistened towelette. Condom?" She felt it for confirmation and looked at Shankar incredulously. I noted that the packet didn't actually say 'condom'. She knows about that, but isn't 14 yet for the second mating... oh wait. Pregnancy is not instantaneous.
"You just finished up your second mating season, right?"
Lyra nodded but amended, "The one when you're 6 doesn't really count. But 13? Yeah. I survived being shut in a tower with forty other young mares for three months and told to ignore the tower a few dozen yards away with forty young stallions. Not the happiest time of my life."
"Nor the most productive, I imagine."
She coughed and blushed. "Moving on!" Back in the bag, she riffled around for more. "Compass, other kind of compass, pens, pencils, ruler. A stencil for the letter 'F'. A half-full mini-notebook. Glass beads. A tiny half-full flask. A damaged figurine of a human. And I don't know what this is."
Shankar held out his hand and she handed it to him. "Swiss Army Knife!"
As he demonstrated, I snagged the plastic army man. Why did she have one of these in her purse? I tossed it back in. Why did she have half of that stuff in there?
Lyra took the knife back and experimented with it for a minute, then dumped it back in the bag and stared out the window while silently playing air-lyre. After two minutes, she said, "It just keeps going and going! There's no gap between towns at all!"
Looking, I saw we'd reached the area where that was true. "Not around here, there isn't."
She pulled some maps out of her purse. "Philadelphia... Baltimore. Sounds oddly familiar... Ah. New York." She spent a while looking the map over. Chuckled at 'Manhattan' for some reason.
When she looked up, I asked, "Is electricity synonymous with magic?"
"It's magical, but synonymous? No. See, magic has neat things like electricity, and messy things and some pretty crazy things."
"Like?"
"Well, last summer when I got home from the academy, there was this new earth pony filly in town, my age. She took a minute, no less, to say hi to me and get to know a little about me and tell me about herself. I found out later that she had done the same to every single one of the other eight thousand-some ponies in town, before dinnertime. There aren't enough minutes in a day. Not even close. You can't even do that with the mirror pool."
I asked, "With the what?"
She laughed sadly. "The mirror pool is a bit of wild magic out in the Everfree forest that can make and absorb imperfect copies of a pony. Like, my best friend back in Ponyville is always short on bits, so every year at Winter Wrap-Up, she gets a good half-dozen of herself and puts one on every team she can, to work all day. At the end of the day, she gathers them and sends them back into the pool, where they're happy to go because they're bored and/or exhausted and that's all they know. And she pockets their pay." She gave a wicked little grin, which faded to the echo of exasperation.
"At least, that's the plan. But one time she couldn't find one of them. So that copy got to see what life was like when she wasn't being drafted into unskilled uncompensated labor, which made her not want to go back. What's worse is, like most mirror-pool copies, she's flighty, stupid, and rude - quite insufferable. At least we convinced her that she was really her identical second cousin, Empty Wrapper."
Lyra sighed. "Even after that, she still does it every year. If they ever got halfway organized about it, she'd have to quit."
Shankar waved his hands. "So wait. You guys live near a source of crazy-powerful wild magic, and you use it to pick up a little cash?"
"Well, it's forbidden magic, and as I said the mirror ponies aren't exactly the most helpful sort."
"Oh yeah, like forbidding something ever stopped everyone from using it. Just say no to mirror pools!" Lyra pouted as Shankar appeared to be ignoring the part where she'd said it was a bad idea to use it, but fortunately he continued, "Well, if it's clearly a bad idea, I guess that helps. Is there anyone, what was it, 'flighty, stupid, and rude' enough that they don't think the difference is all that bad, and narcissistic enough they want more of themselves?"
Lyra thought on that for a moment. "Not yet, anyway. It's also in the Everfree forest. That deters most. And of course it isn't exactly common knowledge. And you need to know the rhyme."
I pointed out, "Security by obscurity isn't so bad when you haven't got crawlers and botnets around."
Shankar asked, "If it takes a rhyme to use, how did anyone even figure out that that it works in the first place?"
"Probably some talented earth pony intuited it. Maybe a unicorn investigated it, but I'd bet on the earth pony. I mean, Zap Apples. Just..." she looked up as if asking the sky, "How would you ever think to do all those random things?" She looked down to us again. "So. What about you two? Any wild stuff you know of?"
Shankar replied, "The laws of our world have been remarkably consistent, to the point that until Celestia's hair began acting up, I still thought it was reasonably probable that this whole unicorn business was bogus."
I put in, "So, our 'wild things' are going to be more in the 'people doing stupid things' line and less of the 'our universe is utterly inexplicable' line. Like, okay, two days ago. I'm at work, and this lady calls in an order for a box of makeup. How she got my number I don't know - I do graphical design for internal publications. No conceivable connection. So I tell her that if she wants a box she can call a store, but she doesn't want to hear it. Every time I send her off to customer service she hangs up on them and calls me again. Eventually I got permission from my boss to just hang up on her, but she didn't let up, just had it ringing off the hook. And I'm probably going to have to explain a whole bunch of what I just said."
"Do you think she was just lonely?"
"Maybe. There are better ways to deal with that than call someone who's trying to do something else."
"It's a sad story. I don't think she was all right."
Crud. "It is, and you're right." I was at work, though! I didn't have time to be her personal free therapist! But... "I took her number down so I could screen it. I can give her a call, when I'm not at work, find out what's up."
"Let's do that."
I inwardly groaned. Dealing with a crazy woman's problems just didn't seem all that appealing.
Then we came to Newark Penn Station. As we got off, the noise and the crowd were pretty intense, even for me. Lyra began hyperventilating, and clung to me. It finally got to her? I guess everyone has limits. Shankar and I guided her down to the quieter and not-very-crowded concourse. She sat down on a bench with us, hung her head, and took deep breaths.
"I'm not afraid." she clarified after a minute. "It's just very unpleasantly loud. Does it get worse?"
Shankar hedged, but said, "No, no worse. There's a little that's as bad as that was."
I added, "If we don't take the subway to Battery park where it screeches like crazy, we should be okay. Want to go on, or go back?"
"Just a minute, then we can go on."
After a few minutes, we headed up, waited in silence, and caught the next train. On board, she took a nap on my shoulder. NY Penn station strained but did not break her equanimity (equine-imity?).
And then we stepped out into Madison Square Garden. Her jaw dropped and she looked to the sky. She teetered and we caught her.
"Is she all right?" an approaching young man asked without slowing down; he noted my nod just in time before passing by completely.
"Wow. Tall."
Shankar laughed. "This is nothing. Now, a few blocks over..."
I nudged him. "Don't taunt. Do you want a good, wide view, from high up?"
"My dormitory room back in Equestria has a thousand-yard vertical drop off the balcony."
Eye-blinks. Shankar's mouth hung open. "That's... way taller than the tallest building we've ever built anywhere."
I clarified, "It's on the side of a steep mountain."
"Ah." Either it didn't occur to him to ask how I knew that, or he figured I'd seen rather than having directly gained some intuitive knowledge of Equestria's capital city.
"How about we go see the Natural History Museum?"
Lyra clarified, "What's the tallest building around? If this isn't as high as it gets, I'd like to see it, if not go up."
I almost reflexively said 'The Twin Towers'. They were just so ingrained into my psyche that seven years of their absence couldn't take them away. As I pushed the memories away, Shankar said, "The Empire State Building - it's a few blocks over."
We set out with an idle walk, looking around. Lyra abruptly noticed my expression. "Rachel? Are you all right?"
What kind of answer could I give to that? I shrugged. Shankar put a hand on my shoulder and gripped it gently.
Lyra pursed her lips and fiddled with her protective amulets nervously. "Is it something I need to worry about?"
I shook my head. Though if it were to happen again, the Empire State Building would be a target... but it won't happen again.
And then, though we weren't to it yet, there it was, looming even higher than the other monsters around us. We could see it as clearly as one could from so close, anyway. While Lyra stared and tried to count floors, Shankar took my hand and quietly asked, "Where were you?"
I whispered back, "Visiting a friend at NJIT. We were close enough to smell it. Let's talk about anything else."
"Sorry." A little squeeze.
Lyra gave up and we began walking back to Penn Station. I said, "Whatever we do next, we'll want to take the subway. Up for more trains?"
Lyra nodded, and I guided her through getting us our three day-passes, this time using my debit card (I handled the PIN, though. No need to swallow that can of worms). We followed her as she went down to the nearest track to see an A train leave.
Shankar and I started planning the rest of the visit. He started, "Empire State Building, check. Cloisters?" - "Meh. Natural history. Or Guggenheim?" - "Let's not throw her in the deep end." - "All right, not the Guggenheim. The Intrepid? The Met? MOMA?"
"Oh shit!"