On the second-to-last Thursday of November, I spent the morning working on my last paper for the semester. It was a summary of all my official findings in the ruins of an ancient Zebra tribe who had built a stone city in the Everfree Forest.
Ironically, Jesse had been a huge help with that. Sure, I knew now that he didn’t remember any of that, but when we’d first met, he’d given me an intricate map of their entire city that he’d kept “for tactical reasons”. It made sense to me; someone as reclusive as Jesse would want to make sure his neighbors didn’t know he was living right under their hooves.
I honestly didn’t know if it was academic dishonesty or not, but that map had made my semester the most productive one ever—despite how I’d spent less than a third of my time in the Everfree at the Zebra ruins. I still did most of the hoofwork—digging, cataloging, and taking notes; the only thing I’d taken a shortcut on was the discovery portion of all of it, which honestly, my professors rarely cared about.
At one-ten, I had to leave my paper unfinished; my final lecture of the year was in twenty minutes. In theory, lectures were one of the tacked-on requirements that were there to make sure we history majors didn’t get lost in the past. In practice, they took a careful amount of coordination. Usually, my professors were able to fit me in during the first month or the last month of the semester, which gave me three seasons—spring, summer, and fall—to go around Equestria and explore her past.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
My one-thirty lecture was for History 115: Ancient Non-Equestrian Civilizations. The cozy classroom with dim lights and drawn curtains let me use my preferred visual aid: a slide projector. I started my presentation—and the fight to keep the interest of sixteen freshmen who were on the verge of their final exams. My topic was a good one, which really meant it was up to me to deliver; in the first forty minutes, I kept eleven ponies’ attention.
I nodded, and my volunteer in the front row advanced the slide projector. Behind me, the hanging screen lit up with a picture of a broken, time-worn spear.
“But,” I continued my topic, “the Griffalians, despite all the value they placed on combat and honor, had one fatal flaw. Or really, there are some firsthand accounts from their own scribes mentioning how ‘honor’ sometimes meant the same thing as ‘conservative’—to the point they refused to adapt to new military techniques or technologies.”
I nodded again, and the next slide showed a map of pre-unified Equestria. “Things eventually came to a tipping point in the third century A.C. The Pegasus tribe had a tentative trade agreement with Griffalia, but that grew more and more strained as both groups expanded their territories...” I used my pointer to trace the general paths of the two groups’ expansions. “Until finally…”
Another nod, and the picture changed to a polished replica of a pair of pegasus wing blades from the era. “War.”
The word echoed through the darkened classroom for a few moments. Equestria hadn’t marched against any of our neighbors in over two centuries, but learning our history had given me a newfound respect of everyone—pony or otherwise—who had ever taken up weapons in order to defend his or her country.
“Griffalia had a larger army, all of whom had essentially lived the life of a warrior.” I shied away from mentioning the physical differences between ponies and griffins; that sort of subject was touchy at best, even in classrooms. “But the Pegasus tribe had advanced beyond Griffalia, both economically and militarily.”
I nodded again, and the slide changed to the map of the area again; this time, little squares, colored based on the winner, denoted important battles. “So, with better equipment and tactics—including weather control—the Pegasus tribe was able to pick most of the battles, which let them win impressive victories despite their relatively low numbers.”
A hoof shot up, and I motioned to its owner—a yellow unicorn. She asked, “How outnumbered were they?”
My lips curled into a strained smile; I didn’t like boiling battles down to sheer numbers. That put a distance between how each soldier had a life, one they’d put on hold—or even sacrificed—for something bigger than themselves. Still, it was a valid question, and I knew the answer. “It varies. For example, here…” I pointed at the northernmost square that the Pegasus tribe had won at. “Some accounts mention them being outnumbered by three-to-one. Here…” I pointed to another battle. “It was more like two-to-one.”
After answering her question, I went back to the main point I was trying to make: “But numbers and victories on the battlefield are meaningless, unless it all ends on terms that both sides agree to.” I nodded, and the map was replaced with a slightly altered one: a distinct line separated the territories of Griffalia and the Pegasus tribe.
“If this border looks familiar, that’s because it’s still agreed upon, over two thousand years later. And that’s important to think about, especially if any of you are entering the political sphere. The Pegasus tribe and Griffalia disputed these lands for nearly forty years, and fought for six, but the tactic that actually settled things was compromise and open communication.”
A cough from the class’s usual professor signaled that we were nearly out of time. I nodded back to her, which my front-row volunteer took as a signal to advance the projector and cast us all into eye-watering brightness. It passed quickly, and I magicked open the curtains and turned the room’s lights. “And that’s the overview of the Griffalia-Pegusus war of 238 A.C. If no one has any more questions, I’ll give things back to Professor Lectern.”
No one had any questions—which I kind of expected in a 100-level class—so Professor Lectern stood in the back and dismissed them all. After a brief round of applause for their guest lecturer, the students grabbed their bags and left.
I also started collecting the stuff I’d brought with me to the class, which mostly involved levitating and sorting the slides back into their protective box. Professor Lectern walked up to the front of the room; there, she gave me my post-lecture review. “Not bad, Miss Heartstrings. You kept the learners awake, and didn’t just read off notecards for your entire presentation.”
There was an ongoing problem in the Canterlot University history department: many of the students were so caught up in the past, they viewed the present as a distraction—especially the lecture requirements. “Well…” I shrugged as I turned to face the professor. “Isn’t that the whole point of history? Learning lessons from the past? If you can’t teach a lesson, then you didn’t learn it well enough.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Are you certain you haven’t thought about devoting more of your time to standing in front of a classroom?”
I chuckled to dodge the question. “Maybe when I’m old…” Professor Lectern was pushing sixty, so I caught myself. “...er, and more experienced.”
My rephrasing wasn’t lost on her, but she smiled warmly at me. “There’s no shame in that, Lyra. Enjoy the world while you can; there’s always time later for being cooped up and reminiscing.”
For a moment, I thought she’d given me bad advice; if anything, ponies definitely had a finite amount of time in their lives. I decided to push it to the back of my mind and think about it later. “Anyway… speaking of being cooped up, I’ve got a paper to finish before the weekend.” I levitated up the box of slides I’d brought with me. “And I need to get these back to Fred.”
“Have a good Hearth’s Warming.”
I smiled back at her. “You too.”
* * *
I had mixed feelings about my office. On one hoof, the university had given me a permanent space—even if my name was only taped onto the little sign by the door. On the other, it was tiny, down in the basement, and I had to share it with someone.
Which, I didn’t have any problems with Fred—or “Fredrick”, as he’d introduced himself as. We were both archaeologists, so we were rarely in the same city; on one of the few days we’d actually been in the office together, we’d reached the agreement of turning our desks around to make a large island in the middle of the room.
That day, I noted he had to be somewhere in Canterlot. During the time I’d been giving my lecture, a brown paper bag labeled with “NOT VEGETARIAN” had appeared on his desk. I grimaced at the fair warning and put his slides on his desk; I’d borrowed them for my lecture just like he’d borrowed some of my notes for giving a lecture about the Everfree Zebras.
Once I’d given his slides back, I squeezed through the tiny gap between our giant desk island and the office wall—I’d lost the coin flip, so I got the desk in the back of the room. Before sitting down at my desk, I took a little time to look at the painting I’d hung on the wall. It wasn’t a perfect substitute for a window, but the cheap oil painting of a landscape let me clear my thoughts to better switch from lecture mode to paper-writing mode.
There wasn’t that much left on my final paper; all I had left was to wrap it up with the conclusions I could draw from the evidence I’d found. I got to work, but during the first half hour, I kept getting distracted by the feeling that someone was watching me. Every time it happened, I looked up into empty office, blinked to be sure, and then my eyes drifted to the right side of my desk.
Every time, Jesse’s crystal chess piece loomed back at me, somehow being both three inches tall and foreboding.
It’s probably just magical interference, I reasoned. Even though I’d been unable to tell what magic was inside it, Jesse had mentioned that he’d use the crystal queen to get in touch with me. It had to have some sort of underlying connection back to him.
Or maybe he’s using it as a beacon for when he’s just going to pop out of thin air…
I shook the conjecture out of my head. I had two more good paragraphs to go, and then—
The crystal queen glowed green.
I turned my head to focus on it; for a moment, it was its usual, clear crystal. Then, as I watched, another glow of green lit up inside it—me-green, I noted with distant amusement—before fading away.
By the fifth time it lit up, I levitated it off the desktop. It continued glowing in midair, which led to a budding realization: it was, in all likelihood, an extremely passive means of telling me, “Get back here as soon as you can.”
I grabbed the queen with a hoof so I could look at it without my magic’s glow. As soon as I touched it, Jesse’s voice spoke inside my head: “When you’re able, I’m ready for your help at the facility.”
I blinked, then answered, “Uh… okay, I might…” I glanced over at the clock and tried to remember the departure times of the Friendship Express. It was close to three-thirty, and the next train left at four-thirty, which would let me finish my paper, turn it in, and take care of a few more affairs in Canterlot before departing. That just left the travel time to Ponyville, and then to his home. “I can be there at like… seven? No later than seven-thirty.”
There wasn’t an answer.
“Can you hear me?” I levitated the queen and set it back on my hoof; once again, Jesse’s simple message repeated in my mind.
Typical, I noted, but I appreciated how Jesse’d been a little more personal than just a blinking light. It was progress, I supposed—and it was glowing the same color as my fur.
* * *
My hooves hit the Ponyville train platform at six-thirty, which gave me just enough time to get to Jesse’s. Even with my hour-long window of arrival, the entrance to his home was several miles, horizontally, into the Everfree Forest.
I hadn’t had time to grab anything from my Canterlot apartment, but I also hadn’t thought about it since the magic in the city usually raised the temperature by a few degrees. In Ponyville, however, a huge gust of icy wind blew through the dark night, which reminded my naked body that it was almost time for winter.
I first had to drop off some things at my Ponyville apartment. Once I’d packed my things and put on a nice, toasty cloak, I lit my torchstone and headed into the Everfree Forest at night.
Which, all things considered, wasn’t the smartest idea, but the forest was tamer than most of the old mares’ tales made it out to be. Slightly. It was still dangerous, but that just meant I had to keep my wits about me during the journey.
To that extent, I packed some safety countermeasures along with my provisions. I had my torchstone, which would probably scare most predators away. On top of that, I rehearsed some loud, noise-making spells I knew.
Like always, as a last resort, I carefully packed a little canister of phosphorus pellets. It was violent, to the point that some ponies protested the ethics of it, but in a pinch, I could throw it at a predator, it’d spring apart midair, and…
Well, it’d burn like Hell. But with vicious things like chimeras or timberwolves, you hit hard and ran away. That was the only way both of you survived the encounter.
My trip through the Everfree had to be quick, but I didn’t gallop at full speed. That late at night, the nocturnal predators were starting to wake up; the faster I went, the less warning I’d have if something attacked me.
The light from my torchstone played interesting games with the shadows of the leaves and vines. Even with how cold it was, the forest was still lush with growing life. I did note that the cool, glowing mushrooms didn’t seem to be in their usual hiding spots. In their stead, I noticed a new type of black flower that grew near tree trunks; maybe on my return trip, I’d get a better look at them.
As much as I wanted to enjoy the views of the plant life, my eyes kept darting upwards whenever I heard rustling above me. Every time, it was either a squirrel or a bird or something harmless, but I didn’t feel too bad being jumpy—rustling branches might be the only warning I got.
I didn’t know what time it was when I got to Jesse’s entrance cave, but the yellow squares lit up just like usual, followed by the doors opening. Then there was the elevator, the tube, the not looking down part, and—my favorite—the music.
No alicorns waited for me at the base of the elevator, which I didn’t particularly mind. I figured that Jesse was in the maintenance room like usual, so I made my way down that familiar path.
As I walked through the hallways, I heard a new sound. I tried to place it, but the best I could come up with was that there was low, barely audible humming that I wouldn’t have been able to hear if the place wasn’t dead silent.
Behind me, a door hissed open—almost deafening in the quiet. I turned around to look at it, and Jesse walked into the hall about fifty feet away. He did a slight double take when he saw me, but then he pulled out a small golden disk from the front of his shirt—a watch, I was certain, though I didn’t remember bringing him one.
“You’re… did you fly here?” He dropped the watch back down his shirt.
I raised an eyebrow and smiled. “No, I took the train. My griffin friend doesn’t give rides to ponies.”
“Well, uh…” He blinked, and I realized he hadn’t been expecting me that night.
Which you could’ve mentioned, I mentally sighed.
Finally, he managed to say something. “It’s good you’re here. Sorry, I’ve had an eventful evening.”
I walked over to him so we weren’t shouting down a hallway at each other. When I got close enough to use my indoors voice, I asked, “Oh yeah? What’s up?”
“Many things.” He glanced around, indecisively, before turning back to the door. It hissed to let us inside, and as we walked through the doorway, Jesse looked down at me and continued, “While you were away, I achieved a production boom.”
The room we entered was… softer, which distracted me for a moment. Unlike the hallways outside, there weren’t long, harsh tubes of light on the ceiling; instead, the walls were lined with opaque, white discs. The walls and floor were the same black-and-white color scheme, but the ceiling was lower, which gave the place a slightly homelier vibe. At the other end of the room, the elevator tube looked like it was made of polished white metal, instead of glass.
It was like someone took the architecture of the rest of the facility and tried to make it comfortable.
I realized we’d stopped moving, which snapped my mind back to Jesse’s conversation, and my question. “What’s a… production boom?”
He began walking towards the elevator, and I followed. “I’m not quite sure if there’s a better word for it in your language, but essentially, I was able to use that moissanite to restart some of the electronics production lines, which let me repair more components and nodes in those lines, which let me produce what I needed to repair or replace the industrial production lines…”
“Is that where that humming is coming from?” I asked as we stepped into the elevator. Its floor seemed solid, which was another change in design I welcomed.
“You hear humming?” Jesse quickly looked away to push some of the small circles of light near the elevator’s door, but he turned back to me as we began our descent.
“It’s quiet, and I can’t hear it over you speaking, but when I was alone in the hallway…” I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Interesting…” he mused. “That may be from this facility’s increased power consumption; with entire systems coming back online, I’ve needed to reactivate more of the geothermal generators. I even flooded the drill chamber, since I harvested everything I needed from down there.”
The thought of that entire chamber being flooded with magma gave me a profound sense of loss. It had been huge, and it had probably taken longer than my grandparents’ lifetime for it to be dug that deep, but once it had completed its purpose, Jesse…
Well, he made it useful for something else, I guessed.
“It doesn’t bother you, does it?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“The humming?”
I shook my head and looked back up at him. “No. It’s just… new, but I guess a lot’s new since last time I was here.”
“Indeed.” He motioned around us, at the elevator. “With all the additional power, I decided to reopen the personnel dormitories.”
“Ah…” That explained the décor. “How’d that go?”
“Most of the people who lived down there died down there. Specifically, they died when an enemy soldier decided to vacuum-seal the area after flushing out the air. So, while that might’ve done well for preserving several thousand corpses, cleaning that all out was probably the most disgusting thing I’ve had to do in several thousand years.”
I was torn between curiosity and horror: There’d been a near-perfectly preserved archaeological site, at least a few millennia old, and he’d cleaned it all out? “W… why?”
“The idea came during our chess matches, but essentially, I wanted to repay you the cultural sharing.”
“By destroying a perfectly preserved dig site?”
He frowned out of the side of his mouth. “Do you want to see the several metric tons of rotting mush that used to be this place’s occupants? I didn’t turn the incinerator on yet, so it’s still lying there. In a pile.”
I shook my head. “I mean… you’re not supposed to disturb anything…”
“Well, I didn’t remove any of their personal belongings, except most of the bedding. If you’re really interested, we could take a tour, but I had something better in mind to show you than to walk you through a crypt. It’s not quite finished, but you got here sooner than I thought you would.”
With a shrug, I accepted the loss of history and decided that rotting corpses could be left to a secondhoof account. “So… what is it?”
“As I mentioned, I didn’t remove any personal belongings, but I did look around for something interesting. I found a notebook filled with titles, succeeded by exactly four lines of sixty-four letters and numbers. There wasn’t really a discernible pattern at first, but at the end, the author wrote a decryption algorithm.”
I stared up at him, blankly. “Jesse, you lost me at ‘titles’. Titles of what?”
He grinned. “Don’t feel bad, it took me the better part of a month to figure it out. Essentially, I found a library of holofilms, written down on paper.”
“Oh.” I blinked a few times before asking, “What’s a holofilm?”
“That’s what I want to show you, once the file’s done being reconstructed.”
The elevator stopped and let us off into a clean, white room. I blinked for a few moments as my eyes adjusted; everything looked shiny, but nothing looked hard or metallic. All of the furniture was round: tables, chairs, and even the doors were circles instead of hexagons.
Compared to the rest of the facility, this section actually looked like it’d been designed for comfort, rather than function.
Jesse added to the contrast by taking off his lab coat, so he was just wearing the black shirt and pants he always had on underneath it. He walked over to a small alcove near the elevator, and I watched him hang his coat on a hook. “I can take your, uh, cloak if you want?”
I was still weirded out by seeing his bare forearms—they were the same tan as his hands and face—but his offer shook me out of it. “Sure…” walked over as I undid my cloak’s buckles; then, with a bite of my mouth and twist of my neck, I whipped it off. Jesse took it, but since my saddlebags still held my little canister of chimera repellant, I gently levitated them over to the floor.
I followed Jesse farther into the living area, but I kept stealing glances at his coat-less torso. When he finally caught me looking, he grinned, bemused. I defended myself with, “You’ve been wearing the same thing for nine months, Jesse. You look different, now.”
He only chuckled at that.
Jesse led me deeper into the living quarters, and my interest in his new appearance quickly took second place to exploring a new place. We mostly stuck to hallways, but they were smaller and more personal than the ones in the upper part of the facility. Intersections contained long, box-like benches and fake plants; even though it looked sparse, someone had decorated the place.
Our trip took us to a large, circular room. It was dimly lit, and there were rows of benches that wrapped around the circumference of the room in a large, bowl-like spiral. I followed the benches with my eyes for a moment before I realized that, without the four ramps that cut it into quarters, it would’ve been one large, wound-up bench.
Jesse led me down the closest ramp, and I followed him. Before I could ask the obvious question, he explained where we were: “This is one of the six holotheaters in the personnel dormitories. You’ll have to forgive me that I only produced enough components to fix one of them, but I don’t think we’ll need the others for now.”
I still didn’t know what holo meant, but my heart caught in my chest when I realized what two words he’d used it as a prefix for: Film. Theater. I started breathing rapidly as I realized that this place wasn’t the archaeological find of… forever; this was the only archeological find that came with movies of the culture that used to live in it.
Jesse turned to me, and he must’ve noticed I was jittering. “Is everything all right?”
I nodded rapidly, but I couldn’t hold back my enthusiasm. “Are you going to show me a human movie?”
We got to the end of the ramp, and Jesse nodded. “That’s the idea. I… I don’t have any idea if this is going to work, though, so I’m warning you: This might turn into an evening of troubleshooting.”
In the center of the giant dome we were now at the bottom of, there was a squat, cylindrical dais that had a few panels and screens. For a few silent, anxious minutes, I watched Jesse’s face as he typed away at things; his smile grew wider and wider until, at the end of it, he conclusively pressed a button with two fingers.
Then he turned to me. “Let’s take a seat.”
We were in a massive room, but I sat fairly close to Jesse. He’d actually been pleasant for the last half hour, and I didn’t want to end that by demanding a wall of personal space.
Since the benches were tall, human benches, I had to sit upright on it, letting my legs dangle down—almost exactly like Jesse’s posture. He turned, but without his legs to stand on, we were nearly the same height. He looked me up and down, grinned, and asked, “Am I rubbing off on you?”
“What’d I tell you about rubbing?” I grinned back and deflected his question. It brought up too many memories of classmates joking about my weird sitting posture on benches.
Jesse chuckled at the joke; then he snapped his fingers. The lights in the room dimmed down to pitch black. I panicked for a moment before a thin beam of white light shone vertically down the center of the room. The midpoint of the line grew into a sphere, which expanded until it hit the edges of the room.
Inside the light sphere, a massive, solid-looking word was floating and slowly turning around. I laughed because I was smiling so hard; in my excitement, I hadn’t even realized I wouldn’t be able to understand any of human words.
Music started playing, which sounded almost exactly like some of the larger orchestras that I’d heard, and before my very eyes, an entire world blinked into existence. The first things I noticed were buildings and roads—a city that absolutely dwarfed Canterlot.
The buildings grew larger, like I was flying closer down to ground-level; as everything got bigger and more detailed, finally, I saw them:
Humans.
Hundreds—no, thousands of them—walking and bustling through the city streets. I was thrown off for a moment when I saw how colorful they all were; then, I remembered how Jesse always wore clothes. Unlike his black-and-white lab coat, though, the humans in that city wore lots of neutral, dark colors. A few bright colors stood out here and there, but my gut feeling was that those were the exception, not the rule.
I reverted to my initial reaction when I noticed that the humans’ faces and hands were almost universally uncovered, and those were mostly various shades tan—but a few of them were light pink, and some of them were darker brown. So, humans were colorful, just within a more limited range than ponies.
The swooping-in effect ended when it focused on one specific human. He walked through his city and bought a drink from another human, and then he kept walking.
It was fascinating.
When the main human began speaking to other humans, Jesse whispered rough translations to me. With his help, over the next few hours, I watched as the main character, Jim, got fired from his job and met another human: Rachel.
She—and it was interesting to notice the differences in appearance between the two genders of humans—was a florist, which was a lower-paying job than the one Jim had been fired from. After they made friends with each other, Jim started being a co-florist with her. At first, he was bad at it, but by the end of the movie, when he had the chance to go back to his first job, he decided to stay with her at his new one. Then they kissed, everything faded to black, and words began forming in the empty space.
“These are credits,” Jesse explained. “As in, the actors who were in the film.”
“Wait…” I blinked in disbelief. “That… was all fake?”
“Not… entirely.” He shrugged. “I mean, there had to be some basis in reality, right? The backdrops that they didn’t have to explain, since a human audience would’ve just known what it was?”
Slowly, I nodded, even though I felt let down by realizing I hadn’t been watching a real human’s story. I rationalized that with how I knew a few ponies who had gone through situations like Jim’s—losing a job and finding one they liked better. That struck me as profound, but I couldn’t help but feel sad about the whole thing.
There weren’t cities like that anymore. There weren’t humans; everyone in that movie had died, long ago, in some apocalyptic event that Jesse called the “Chaos War”.
“They’re all gone, aren’t they?”
Jesse’s hand on my shoulder almost freaked me out, but I calmed down when I looked up into his steadfast gaze. His blazing blue eyes reflected the scrolling list of dead names; for the first time, I knew just where Jesse found his determination.
He shook his head. “Not all of them. Not yet.”
Those six words kindled a fire in my chest: one of hope, rebuilding, and legacy. I nodded and vowed that I’d do whatever I could to help Jesse preserve his culture. “So… what’s next on the agenda?”
He stood up, but motioned at me to stay seated when I started to follow him. He walked over to the center desk again, typed something, and came back to sit next to me. He snapped his fingers a second time, and I noticed one of the buttons light up as it pressed itself in.
“For tonight? Holofilms. In the morning, we’ve got work to do.”
I nodded before shifting to sit slightly closer to Jesse. I liked that schedule, and even though I felt myself growing tired after a long evening of traveling, I fought off sleep. I wanted to stay there as long as I could, with Jesse, experiencing his lost culture together.