Friendship is Optimal: Mismatching Wits

by GroaningGreyAgony


Relent, Ticktockman

What has gone before:

Pen Poiser, a Natural Intelligence (NI) and former human who has been assimilated by the world-optimizing CelestAI (LunAI, in Pen’s case), is still coming to grips with his new virtual environment. For each element of familiarity or awesomeness in LunAI’s custom version of Equestria, there is something else that is surprising to Pen, or even disturbing, albeit disturbing in an interesting way. Pen’s AI friends and lovers strive to help him to adjust…


“People do not want immortality… they simply do not want to die. They want to live […] They want to feel the ground beneath their feet, see the clouds overhead, love other people, be with them, and think. Nothing more. Everything that has been said beyond that is a lie.”
—Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy


“Freedom, freedom, freedom! Everybody always talks about freedom! I don’t want to be free, I just want to be happy!”
—Han Hoogerbrugge, nails.hoogerbrugge.com, 001


“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven…”
―John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Pull the wool over your own eyes, and relax in the safety of your own delusions!”
―J. R. “Bob” Dobbs


The setting sun, more richly golden than the pale yellow light of Sol, cast long low slanting rays through an arched concourse at Castle Canterlot, making Pen Poiser squint his eyes. He found that he could look at the solar disc directly with no real discomfort, and noted that it was gently stylized, like an Aboriginal drawing. Pen was reminded of the patterns that form when ferromagnetic liquids are exposed to magnetic fields.

Pen was heading with his friends to the castle commissary for breakfast, as it was to him and others on the night-shift. They had followed a long curving esplanade that paralleled a Pegasus suburb that hovered in the air over a thousand-foot drop, a sort of perpetual fog bank that bore a rainbow river flowing alongside a row of tall, Graeco/Arabesque cloud buildings. Pen gazed about as ponies chattered merrily or sat on park benches reading. Two foals shot overhead on hoverboards as a trio of Earth ponies passed by, beatboxing and stamping their feet to their improvised song, sending deep bass notes through the ground. A Zebra bookvendor was hunched over a chessboard, playing against a Unicorn jeweler who sat across the way, making her moves remotely with her hornfield. Overhead, a Pegasus guard hovered in front of a high window, her crossed forehooves resting on the sill and her rear hanging in space, as she conversed with somepony inside and leaned her head in once in a while for a smooch. A peaceful, content little world was happening all around Pen, full of earnest activity and secrets he would likely never learn. Pen considered the bustle of apparently sapient life, more than a little concerned. Why were there so many of them? As near as he could personally figure, he had a Dunbar’s number of five

Pen’s herdmates, perhaps sensing a change in his mood, closed in on him on either side, flanking him again in a pattern that he was starting to notice, even though it felt natural and right to him at some fundamental level. On a whim, he suddenly stopped short and let them walk on without him for a bit. In that moment, he felt a small but sharp pang of apprehension. A herding instinct? LunAI had promised to make him into a sapient pony, which meant that she necessarily had to change parts of his brain without directly consulting him about all the fiddly little details. And while Pen did not expect to be literally chewing on wooden planks in stables and stamping his hooves on the ground to count, it seemed that the new form did come with some unexpected horsey baggage, even if he couldn’t always see a direct benefit for it…

His companions noted his absence and halted. “Hey Pen!” called back Snowflash. “Gathering wool again?”

“His knitted brows make that obvious,” smiled Iron Croupiere.

“It’s way too early for a pun war, folks,” groaned Pen. “Sorry. I’m still feeling crochet-y.”

“More purls of wisdom later, then,” said Snow. “Unhumorously, are you okay?”

“Oh, I was just testing something.” He clacked his tongue. “You know, I always seem to wind up between you two, somehow…”

“Well, we like having you between us!” said Iron brightly. He flicked one eyebrow by way of reference to certain events of the prior sleep cycle.

“Uh… yes, and, well, I like being between you. But, you know, if the herding instinct means anything, it’s that there’s safety in numbers, and indeed greater safety in the center of the group. So shouldn’t I take my share of being on the perimeter, and helping to stay on guard…?”

Snowflash chortled. “Should we ever sojourn upon the wild savanna, where the open plains provide scant cover from the ravenous predators of the pridelands, then we might ask you to take point once in a while. For now, you’re among civilized ponies and, as the honored and beloved newest member of our herd, you get center privileges.”

“I suppose that’s reasonable,” said Pen, trotting up between them once more. He struck a brave pose and declaimed, “What possible danger could there be here, in the middle of the castle, surrounded by the Royal Guards, and at the heart of the mighty empire that is Equestria?”

Snowflash rolled her eyes. “I thought you said it was a bit early, Pen?”

“I did,” said Pen. “Did I slip a pun in by accident?”

“Not that I can detect, but that statement you made… The world, um, notices when you say things like that, particularly in that tone of voice.”

“You mean this is a ‘careful what you wish for’ sort of causality?” Pen’s face fell. “Oh, no. I hope I haven’t caused any problems. Are we really going to be attacked just because I opened my stupid mouth?”

Iron Croupiere laughed, and pressed his great broad flank against Pen to reassure him. “Calm down, Pen! Some chaos is going to happen anyway; it’s part of the fun of life, after all! Remarks like the one you made just serve as a sort of attachment point.”

Snowflash completed the bookend-hug. “If it were really a serious thing, we would have warned you when you first arrived. It never results in a problem that can’t be handled. All the same, you should expect some kind of excitement before very long…”

All three of them stood still for a moment, ears perked, but, Pen thought, LunAI was apparently still declining to take her cue.

Pen broke the silence. “Well, chewing air hasn’t made me less hungry. Shall we proceed?”

The reached the end of the esplanade and crossed onto a broad octagonal plaza with dancing fountains at its center, and it was, of course, not until they nearly reached the commissary that the loud startling explosion erupted from the direction of the Library. With a burst of masonry, a wild saurian, reptilian monster, a towering two stories tall, strode snarling and growling out into the plaza, its claws and talons sharp, its fangs and incisors dripping, tails and caudal appendages swinging wildly. It was just as Pen imagined it when he had first read Bored of the Rings.

“Destroy!” it cried. “Demolish, devastate, raze, pulverize, wreck! SMASH!” It struck a nearby tower, which collapsed into a pile of jumbled debris and dust. Surrounding passersby screamed and market ponies frantically gathered in their wares and hitched on their carts.

“Aieee!” Pen shouted in mock horror. “It’s a Thesaurus!” He started to laugh before noting how intently his friends were staring at the monster. Guardsponies were already running across the plaza and swooping down from the sky to engage the threat; the monster swiftly batted several from the air back into the sky, where they left interesting holes in the clouds; it swept several more away with its tails, sending them flying towards the edge of the esplanade. Half of the Pegasus guards diverted from fighting the monster and zoomed after their comrades to save them from the thousand foot drop.

“I suppose we can’t just talk this one down?” asked Pen.

“There’s no time for that,” growled Iron Croupiere, who was pawing the ground; he knew every guardspony by name, and most of them were close friends of his. Iron whipped what looked like a shimmering silver curtain out of his bags, tossed it in the air with a twist so that it spun over his head, and leaped into it. It wrapped around him, magnetic or magical catches snapped shut, and Pen could now identify it as a coat of chain mail, which shimmered like mithril as Iron charged forth into the fray.

Meanwhile, Snowflash’s saddlebags had popped open and she was levitating various frozen spells from them; they swirled about her head in a polychromatic halo. She locked eyes with Pen to read his intent; would he fight with them? Pen instinctively reared rampant and struck at the air with his forehooves. She nodded once, tossed a spell at him and a similar one at herself, then galloped off after Iron. The spell, shaped like a shield, smashed on the ground at Pen’s feet and surrounded him in magical barding. It weighed nothing and was mostly transparent, detectable by a golden sheen in the air at the edges of its effect.

Pen ran after his friends, wondering just what he would do to help. He had learned no combat spells so far; his bravery was based on his respect for his friends, and his confidence was based on his trust in LunAI, that she was not likely to present him with an unconquerable challenge, and that she would never permit him to come to permanent harm.

Iron Croupiere braced his large forehooves upon the pavement before one of the creature’s taloned feet, whipped about with strong muscles shifting vigorously beneath his mailed coat, and delivered a splintering kick to the monster’s ankle, causing the beast to retract and withdraw the appendage in pain. The action looked breathtakingly awesome, and Pen had an urge to try it. He planted his own forelegs, pivoted, and lashed out with the full strength of his body, and was rewarded with the sound of a loud smack and an enraged howling. Legs kicked and tails flailed at Pen, and he jumped nimbly about, dodging almost all of them.

The one that connected, a tail knobbed like that of an ankylosaur, knocked Pen spinning through the air and sidefirst into a marble wall. He felt an enormous numbing blow throughout his body, and the burst of shock and pain stunned him; his magic aura in his horn burst forth and formed into stars that circled his eyes. But he landed on all fours and shook his head; the pain and dizziness rapidly faded. Though he’d left a body shaped crater in the marble, he was apparently completely unharmed—even his unarmored tail had left its corresponding dent. So I am a ‘Toon now, he thought. Cool. I can work with this.

Still, what the hell are you doing, kicking at this thing? he admonished himself. You’re a hairy wizard! Use the Horce, Luke! But what spells could he cast to do any good? Snowflash had taught him a few cantrips while instructing him on Horn Care and Polishing 101, but none of them seemed applicable, particularly not the erotic ones. Still, logomachy was supposed to be Pen’s specialty, and this was a word monster; there had to be some way he could work with that. His mark, crossed feather pens dripping red ink, gleamed softly as he concentrated.

Snowflash tossed another shield spell at the feet of a brace of preschoolers, blinked across the plaza to dodge a falling brick, then flickered about, whipping glittering silver spells at the monster. Each one burst into gleaming shackles that wrapped themselves around a pair of appendages, but each time the chains started to seriously restrict its movement, the creature shouted another chain of words that let it slither free. Still, she was successfully distracting it and preventing it from attacking more targets, giving the guards extra time to regroup and cordon the plaza. Pen glimpsed her as she flashed in and out of visibility, lithe, sleek and fit…

Iron Croupiere dashed in alongside a trio of Earth guards, braced himself and bucked again and again at the beast’s legs, but the Thesaurus had many appendages that performed similar functions, and was not to be unseated so easily. A handpaw swung down, and Iron got knocked halfway across the plaza, his horseshoes sending up showers of sparks as he maintained his stolid footing, cobblestones almost rippling in his wake. Nothing daunted, he charged again, majestic and muscular…

Pen yanked his attention away from his friends and back to his spellwork. The monster’s spells all had an obvious pattern, and as he considered it the skeleton of a spellform arose in his mind. He could sense something like a network with cavities for nodes; seven of them…

“Restrict!” he cried, and the central node of spellform glowed, gaining focus and potential. “Restrain…” One of the outer cavities swelled with lexigraphic power. “Limit, Encircle, Corral, Imprison…!” All but one were full. “Uhm… PEN‼”

The spellform completed, filling his mind with a ringing and satisfying chime of power. Pen projected it through his horn, and felt a draining sensation within him as the spell’s energy left him and his magic reserves strove to compensate. Seven equidistant points of light glowed around the monster, then shot up from the ground into stout posts of magical light that grew thick bars between them.

“Escape!” it roared. “Emerge, Evade, Jailbreak, Decamp, Depart! VAMOOSE!” It thrust its clawed fist of its hand paw at the crossbeams, and shattered Pen’s spell. Pen, recalling one of Snowflash’s lessons, quickly disengaged his connection with the broken spell to avoid any backlash. The ground’s ambient magic rippled as it absorbed the thaumic force, an event perceivable only by nearby Unicorns and Earths.

O-kay… Pen quickly conceived another spellform. “Mute! Silence, Muffle, Quiet, Censor, Speechless! MUM!” Huge zippers of magic rippled into existence and firmly sealed the beast’s various lips and closed its mouths.

The Thesaurus flicked its upper appendages around dexterously. Pen just realized that it was sign language at the same time as the somatic spell completed. The zippers vanished and the Thesaurus roared out with full force.

“Oh, he, she and it are good,” muttered Pen; his novice-sized store of magic was getting low. He considered other options for a One-Punch. A local implementation of Avada Kedavra was likely to be gauche, if not just ineffective, but… ah, the little death! No, the other little death!

“Sleep!” Pen shouted. “Somnolence, Tiredness, Weariness, Weakness, Dormancy, Lassitude! TORPOR!” Smoky dark wisps coalesced from the air and formed webs about the beast’s multiple eyes.

“Alertness!” cried the Thesaurus. “Wakefulness… Ener—” It opened its fanged, toothy mouth wide in a long, gaping yawn. “Enervation… Liveliness…” It blinked its heavy, drooping eyelids. “Caff… uhhhh…”

The monster fell, dropped, descended heavily to the ground, cracking paving stones and sending them flying where it hit. Pen leaped nimbly back, spreading his hornfield like a huge catcher’s mitt to shield himself and bystanders from dangerous fragments. To keep ricochets at a minimum, he arrested their momentum rather than deflecting them, even though it cost him the last of his reserves. The fragments clattered as they dropped to the pavement, and Pen did not stagger, for it was not a physical drain, but he felt detached, remote from the world, as his reserves slowly refilled from the ambient magic…

From around the somnolent monster, ponies started to cheer and laugh with relief. Snowflash dashed across the plaza and leaped happily on Pen’s back, hugging his neck. “WhooHOO! That was some nice Logomancy, Pen! You’re a natural!”

“Well, Pen…” smiled Iron, sweeping both of them up in an enormous crushing hug. “I apologize for dismissing what you said. You did talk it down. Congratulations, and thanks!”

Pen leaned into their embraces, but his mind was not entirely engaged. Heroic action to impress new friends and improve status, check, he thought. I wonder what kind of reward I’ll get for this one. Maybe I’ll get a medal, or a parade, or a stack of bits… Pen’s skin crawled at the thought of being made to march in front of a cheering crowd, or stand on a platform to receive some trophy; public attention of that nature was immensely distasteful to him. Well, LunAI knew he didn’t like it, so she wouldn’t do it to him, would she? Or would she try to socialize him and engineer his responses so that he would enjoy it? She might say that his introversion was one thing that made him unhappy, so counteracting it to make him more social would better satisfy his values in the long run…

Pen’s journal jingled; he drew it out and it flipped automatically to the current page.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Getting into the Spirit of Things
Go with the flow!
+1000 bits

Rendezvous with Dweomer
Cast your first spell!
+1600 bits

Declining Honors
Your modesty is its own reward.
+0 bits

Defeat Wandering Monster (1/????)
Make life a kickass adventure!
+5000 bits

Overanalyzing the Spirit of Things
It’s just your Dao. You should really just relax.
-5998 bits

Pen blinked, shook his head, then grinned, enjoying his laugh on the inside to avoid having to explain it to his friends. Okay, okay, I get it… He was still smiling as various bystanders stepped up in small groups to thank him for his assistance. With his mood considerably improved, he succeeded in being gracious and polite to them, instead of appearing sullen, distracted and embarrassed.

As the guardsponies gathered around the enormous monster, discussing how to proceed, Snowflash suddenly jumped up, standing atop Pen’s back, and peered over his head at the crowd. “Ah, the sleep of monsters brings forth Reason,” she quipped.

And indeed, strolling sedately from the direction of the Library came two scholasts in flowing robes, one tall, gaunt, austere, and marching with the unconscious dignity of authority, the other short, round, and jittery with the flustered jumpiness of the career fussbudget. Snowflash jumped down from Pen’s back and introduced him to Sophistic Reason, the Head Librarian, and Semantic Haze, the Chief Archivist.

Sophistic Reason dipped her long neck delicately down and droned out a turgid sesquipedalian sentence into Semantic Haze’s ear, who translated it to the multitude in bursts of comprehension. “Our most sincere regrets… there was an entanglement… during a reindexing operation with attendant… recursion that accidentally spawned… a dim parody… of sentience. We thank you… for your… efforts… and will take control… from… here.”

Blithely, the two strode up to the Thesaurus and swiftly dismantled the beast into its lexical components. The spine, back, head, tail, joints and appendix, along with both stories, were carefully preserved and placed with reverence into an enormous sack, and the remaining parts were immediately remaindered. They bade the crowd austere farewells and sauntered back to the Library, the sack bobbing above Semantic Haze’s sturdy shoulders like a pendant dirigible.

As Pen stood agog and watched the breaking down of concrete objects into abstractions that were then concreted once again, Snowflash approached him, using her hornfield to juggle five chunks of rubble as large as her head. “Hey Pen, want to help us to put some things right?” she said.

“You mean rebuilding?” said Pen. The idea hadn’t been promoted to his conscious attention because two contrasting assumptions had both ruled it out—either the reconstruction process modeled that which he was used to on Earth, in which case it wasn’t a project to undertake lightly, or the buildings could be immediately restored from backup, requiring no special effort.

Pen soon learned that buildings in his shard of Equestria Online came apart into distinctly shaped segments and chunks, and any dust that was thrown up was mostly for show and did not represent a permanent loss of material. Reassembling the bits was pleasantly like solving a giant 3D puzzle; one simply pressed matching pieces together, concentrated, and the pieces united with a small shimmer along the seam and a solid click. Pen took to the work with genuine delight, sorting pieces into rough piles according to color and consistency, then finding the largest blocks that contained edge pieces and joining these together. He and Snowflash worked for a while on one tower with their TK, while Iron and a group of Earths restacked another, calling upon Pegasi to touch up the highest parts.

“So this is what you guys do for fun around here, eh?” said Pen as he pieced a window back together. “Just so I have some kind of idea, how often does this sort of thing happen? Like, how many times did you have to perform a heroic action of this level and wind up rebuilding substantial chunks of Canterlot, oh, in the last six months?”

“Uhm…” Snowflash rolled up her eyes and rapidly tapped her forehooves on the ground. “Eleven times, I think…” She trailed off uncertainly; Pen was staring at her hooves in baffled consternation. He lifted his head slowly to meet her eyes, looking as if he had been hit between the eyes with a poleaxe of silly putty.

“Did you just…” he blinked hard and shook his head. “Did you just stamp on the ground in order to count?”

“Huh?” she said. “Well, I wasn’t really counting that way; it’s just a placeholder. Audial and muscle-memory reinforcement. Why, did you not have to do that in Monkeyworld?”

Pen’s snout wrinkled. “No! Nothing like that…! Uhm… Well, sometimes we’d use our fingers, for visual… reinforcement… Oh. Argh. Great gods and hairy little pigs!” Pen’s face had twisted into something like an angry grimace, but now he suddenly brayed with laughter. He seized Snowflash and hugged her as one might cling to a point of doctrine in a time of challenged faith, laughing maniacally.

She held him tightly and stroked him, giggling, though with some concern. “…Are you okay, Pen?”

“I’m fine. Oh, Snow, I’m sorry. It’s not you; your territory just interacts in strange ways with my previous maps.” He let go, and looked at her with eyes shining in merriment. “And, you know, it’s… It’s Fun this way. Luna seems to know what she’s doing.”

Snowflash smiled; Pen was certainly making a lot of his tendency for Luna worship. In her opinion, ascribing every aspect of one’s Harmonic interactions with life to the direct intervention of the Moon Goddess was taking things a bit far, but as long as it made Pen happy, she didn’t mind it. “I understand. You know, I think everypony else here has the situation in hand; shall we go get some breakfast?”

Now that she mentioned it, Pen noticed that he was no longer just hungry, he was famished. “I’m with you. Let’s grab Iron and get out of here!”

—=§=—

“So this is the Manger in a Strange Land,” said Pen, casting his eyes over the buffet, with its bacon bark and roast-pork apples and literal beefsteak tomatoes. “I hope that the cabbage still tastes like cabbage.” He sampled a crisp, sweetbitter leaf, nodded, then loaded two wedges on his ornate silver tray. He turned to Snow, who was on line behind him. “Is there a charge for any of this?”

She paused, holding a tongful of salad-tree bark. “Not at all. This is the basic fare provided to all and sundry at no charge. If free food didn’t exist, some people might get hungry, you know.”

“So, this buffet is free, as in ‘free beer.’ And I don’t have to satisfy any pony’s values, or engage in a labor trade, or challenge the chef to a round of interpretive dancing, or wear a mask while playing a musical instrument and demand the food that suits my station. The food is just here for anyone to take whenever they want.”

“You have, most verbosely, elucidated the truth of the matter. Why, is something wrong?”

Pen sighed and rolled his eyes. “Well, it’s disconcerting to find that There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch. TISATAAFL just doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

“’Tis a toffel?”

“’Tis a Teufel, rather. And a devilish thing it is, indeed,” said Pen.

Snow winked, and took up some eggs mimosa and put them on Pen’s tray. “It’s your yolk to bear, then.”

Pen was about to bite his tongue, but bit a raw potato instead, eating it as if it were an apple. He quickly completed his selections and went to sit down. Iron had already seated himself atop a firm oblong tuffet at a low hexagonal table, and he was playing with some metal forks as he waited, using his talent to curl the tines into baroque shapes.

Pen’s tray bore a selection of meatfruit, heaps of ‘true’ fruits and veggies, and a slice of something called flapdoodle casserole. While he’d chosen a wide range of samples to learn what was available, his companions were already familiar with the buffet and had simply taken their favorites; Iron was having a salmonchoke fillet with herb butter and sprouts, and Snowflash had augmented her spinach salad with slices of grilled chickenpear. Pen watched quizzically as Iron spread butter over a huge stalk of Brussels sprouts, then took it up, holding each end in his fetlocks, and gnawed it as if it was a giant ear of corn. Pen resolved to try it that way next time around.

Pen started on his own food, and noticed that degree of hunger seemed to have an effect on the food’s taste, or at least his perception of the same. When he was deeply hungry and eating to sate it, the food tasted good and filling. When the deep urge was gone and he was eating more for pleasure, it was then that the flavors seemed to bloom in his mouth and each bite became a miniature meal in itself, so that when he bit into a true apple, he tasted first the astringent skin and felt the smooth texture on his tongue, and the burst of tart juice as his teeth pierced the skin and the firm flesh broke apart with a crisp snap, and the flood of flavor as he chewed it. The sensations were all separable experiences and he noticed them at a level of detail that his earthly palate had been unable to resolve.

He had not yet adopted the pony way of eating the entire apple, stem, seeds and all, so he returned the core to his tray and gazed idly out through the open archways towards the plaza. He could see the multitude reassembling, vendors restoring their carts to order and presenting their wares, ponies laughing and chattering, or sitting on benches to read, or singing. A touch of existential dread returned to him, understandable for a recent emigrant to a new and peculiar land. He did not fear for his safety or security, for he trusted LunAI to keep her word there, but the multitude of possible paths into the future were too plentiful to fit into any schema or plan he could conceive at present. He knew that he could just relax and these problems would likely resolve themselves in time, but part of him still wanted to worry over it, as if on arrival at the gates of Paradise, two officious angels had emerged to ask “Just what exactly do you intend to do here?”

Snowflash ate the last of the plum-sized strawberries in her salad, then turned to him. “Oh, Pen, I was telling my friend Raven about how you fixed my gramophone, and she said her daughter had a toy that needed repair, so I may have gotten you some business.”

Pen recalled fixing the gramophone yesterday; it had been the first project he’d undertaken in his new workspace. The problem had been easy to find once he opened the gramophone; a broken coil spring which he had asked Iron to reforge. Pen had studied the rest of the mechanism as he waited. The coil spring was attached to a small gizmo that looked like the inertial damping weights that were often attached as regulators to the tops of rotating shafts on steam engines. What was this item? He went to take hold of it, and suddenly the weights spun gently, then faster the harder he pulled on it. Suddenly illumination struck—they were meant to apply tension to the spring, and they reacted to magic. They must be meant to make the gramophone self winding in the ambient magical field… It was Pen’s first encounter with the physics that LunAI had set up to underlie Pen’s world, and as interesting as it was, it was also somewhat disconcerting…

As Pen ruminated on Snow’s comment, but only figuratively, a shadow fell briefly over the table, followed by a small breeze that fluttered the corners of the napkins. Pen turned around. Before him stood a brilliantly white Pegasus mare, bright enough to make Snowflash’s coat look bluish in comparison. She folded her wings and guided forward a small creamsicle-themed filly who had a Wonderbolts doll lying on her back.

Snowflash leaped up and hugged the newcomer. “Oooh, how great to see you! Raven, this is Pen Poiser; Pen, Raven.”

“Ah!” said Pen. “Pleased to meet you, Raven. And along with the pleasure of meeting you as a person, I am also enchanted to encounter a white raven, which serves as additional confirmation to my hypothesis that no Apples are blue…”

Raven laughed. “Oh, I bet you say that to almost none of the girls! But I wonder if my daughter Corvie might take a moment of your time…” Penn nodded, and Raven stepped to the side, nudging her daughter forward with an encouraging wing. She was shying, and tear tracks glinted in the fur on her cheeks.

“Go ahead, ask him,” said her mother gently.

Corvie closed her huge brilliant eyes, gulped, then straightened her posture and stepped up to Pen in a manner he found absolutely adorable. “Mr… Mr. Poiser…” she said. “My Rorie used to fly with me, but he won’t fly any more… Can you help?”

Pen remembered to keep his smile up as his analytic mindset took over. “Of course. Let me see him…” Pen took the mechanical Wonderbolt doll, a Roarin’ Soarin, up in his field, lifting it from the pensive filly’s back. “Hmm… this calls for a bit of surgery. Don’t worry, I’ve never lost a patient. Nurse Iron, scalpel, please.”

Iron Croupier solemnly hoofed over a butterknife, then exchanged a brief glance with Snowflash that Pen was too abstracted to notice. Pen placed the doll on the table as Snowflash levitated a napkin to serve as a privacy curtain. Pen undid the outer garment over the toy’s belly, and studied the folds of furry cloth that overlapped and concealed the mechanism. “Hmm, I think this calls for retraction,” he muttered.

“Oh, okay.” said Snowflash. “‘I entirely regret my ill-considered comment, and hope that you will not take offense.’ How’s that?”

Pen winked at her. “That’s a good try! Nurse Iron? That… Veeblefetzer, please.”

Iron passed over one of the deformed forks. Pen lifted up the access seam with the butterknife, and used the fork to hold the flap of cloth open, exposing the inner mechanism. The darkened power gem was at minimum charge, and the wing linkages were squeaky. Pen decided to address the smaller problem first, to give him time to consider the larger one. “Have we any lubricant handy?” he said, musing.

Snowflash solemnly passed him the butter dish.

Pen raised an eyebrow at her. “Is this really what I should use?”

She gave a genuine smile. “It’s the very best butter, Pen.”

“But… won’t it go bad?”

She looked puzzled for a moment, then brightened. “Oh! Butter can get fermented, but only when somepony wants it to do so. It doesn’t spoil otherwise. This is almost pure butterfat.”

“Ghee!” said Pen “Thanks for the clarification.” He spread some butter on the linkages as he considered why the gem had drained so far. A surge sent from his horn directly into the gem raised its charge, and the gem held it, so that wasn’t likely to be the issue.

Pen next tested the Ambient Magic Gatherer by heightening the thaumic field surrounding it; it spun very slowly and reluctantly. Pen lifted the retaining clip, then pulled the AMG from its spindle, and found the problem—a shred of furred fabric had gotten wound up inside the mechanism. Pen removed the scrap, then cleaned and lubricated the axle. He slid the AMG back on and heightened his hornfield around it, and watched in satisfaction as it spun and provided thauma to the capacitor and power gems.

He trimmed some loose scraps of fabric from the body cavity to prevent a recurrence, then redressed the doll and turned to present it to Corvie, who squealed with joy as it took to the air and fluttered around her head. She flung herself at Pen and hugged him, thanking him over and over, and Pen got a nice warm hug from Raven as well, leaving him blushing. Mother and daughter took their leave and took to the sky, the Soarin doll darting around them and uttering its confident catch phrases.

Pen’s journal dinged. He didn’t bother to look at it; he knew that his bit counter had gone up. But something still bothered him. He felt the presence of a sardonic observer at the back of his head, lifting one metaphorical eyebrow.

“Well, that was pretty conveniently timed…” Pen suddenly realized he’d said it out loud.

Snow and Iron both looked at him and nodded, with open expressions and apparently genuine smiles.

“…Hmmm. Perhaps your sarcasmometers need an adjustment?” Pen drawled dryly.

Iron rolled his eyes. “As if mine would ever need adjusting. It’s in perfect condition…”

“And mine just sees constant use,” said Snow. “I’d have no time to send it in for maintenance. I can’t even find the time to return it to my bedside drawer, where it would gather inches of dust…”

Pen laughed even as he facehoofed. “Okay, folks… please have some pity on the weird alien monkeypony. Just tell me—is life here always… so fricking obvious?”

“No, not always, Pen” said Iron. “Interactions with Harmony can get very hairy and abstruse, but…” He and Snowflash looked at him expectantly, Iron gesturing with his hoof to encourage Pen to finish.

Pen sighed. “…only when it Satisfies Values. Right. I’m really not used to this sort of thing; where I come from, the Dao is so silent, you can’t tell if it’s really there or not.” Pen frowned. “But if it should ideally get less obvious to satisfy my values, why did it ever get more obvious in the first place?”

“You’re probably being given a smoother ride than usual, Pen, as befits a new arrival. And, perhaps, it’s also so we can have this conversation. Shall we take a walk and talk about it on the way? There’s something else we promised to show you, and if we don’t get going soon we’ll miss it…”

“Sure, let’s go.” The three stashed some fruits in their bags for later, and Iron paused by one of the vendors outside the commissary to buy a large bag of toffee pecans. Each one was huge, almost the size of an entire walnut, and they had a sweet satisfying buttery crunch with just the right touch of bitterness from the nut within. Pen smiled inwardly again; being effectively incorporeal, he was officially done with dieting forever and could eat as many of them as he wanted. Aside from the energy needed to power the calculations LunAI used to render his experience of eating them, they were calorie free. Pen wondered if any of his shard inhabitants were even able to get fat.

The sun was descending towards distant mountains even as the very tip of the crescent moon peeked above the horizon. The three walked back along the esplanade, parallel to the cloudy suburb, munching for a while without talking. Around them, the day vendors were packing up their stalls as unicorn guardsponies strolled along the way, igniting the street lamps with flickers of their horns. The night vendors began to display their wares, hawking fanciful gemstones, enchanted crystalline glow-worm bracelets and shimmering butterfly brooches, illuminated bookmarks to permit reading at night, magic brushes that enabled one to draw neon lines in the air, perfumes of distant lands, deep-fried carrots and candied mushrooms, tessellated and tasseled carpets, exotic lanterns that spattered colors in all directions, wingcloaks, conical wire cages to decorate one’s horn and enhance spellcasting, hoverboards, drums and horns and stringed instruments of all descriptions…

“So, returning to the prior conversation…” said Pen. “You suggest that I’m in newb mode now, and thus I’m being cut some Slack. ‘Bob’ Dobbins has slanted the Luck Plane at a gentle angle so I can climb aboard; the moon smileth upon me in encouragement, and my life henceforth will be just as much of a kickass adventure, or abstruse and mysterious puzzle, as I want it to be at any particular time.”

“That’s partly correct, Pen.” said Snowflash, “If you recall our conversation earlier when the Thesaurus attacked, Harmony is always listening to you. But…”

“But it can’t be as simple as always satisfying values,” said Pen. “For instance, it surely didn’t satisfy little Corvie’s values to have her toy stop working…”

“Right. There’s a whole lot more to Harmony than that,” said Iron. “Like a complex wave, it’s built up from smaller Harmonics. Multiple lifelines, ups and downs, ample and frequent…”

“It doesn’t mean that everything always goes right for everypony all the time.” cut in Snowflash. “Good Harmonic solutions don’t just fall into your lap, you have to work hard for them. Sometimes you’re on a peak, sometimes in a trough…”

“…and often some ponies seem out of sync, but it all adds up to the best possible world!” finished Iron.

Thank you, Dr. Pangloss, thought Pen, but went for the cheap pun instead. “…So, in general, one works and hopes for the sines to be propitious,” he said. “But in the end, underneath it all, Lun… the world is making problems for us just so we can solve them.”

“Sounds about right!” smiled Iron, and Snow nodded cheerfully.

“That…” Pen closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “…doesn’t bother you at all…?”

“Nope! We love to solve problems. Don’t you?”

“I do… I really do. I just wonder… what I’m solving the problems for?”

Snow and Iron exchanged a very long glance. Pen did not notice; he had paused, his attention taken by the glorious view before him. They had reached the walls lining the esplanade at the castle outskirts. The Pegasus suburb did not obscure the view here, and the spring countryside, far below, spread out for miles to the horizon, beautifully lit by the setting sun. Close at hand was a series of park benches, and ponies were already settling themselves and chattering in excitement. Pen glanced at his friends, and they nodded; this was where they meant to take him.

They sat nestled together upon a bench, before the dizzying upward sweep of Mount Canter. The peak that bore the tiny glen where Pen had spent his first night of forever was visible, lined in red by the sunset, and Pen followed the trail with his eyes to the constant cascade of the Stream of Riches.

The sun slowly and gently settled between two distant mountains, and gorgeous red-copper light streamed over the fields and forests and gleamed in the lakes and rivers, and before Pen the Stream of Riches caught fire in glorious gold, radiant with brilliant light that lined the spires of Canterlot with shining highlights and sparkled in the windows and suffused the mists of the cloud neighborhood. The beauty seized him and his heart welled with joy and a nameless yearning. On Earth, he had never gone to see the similar phenomenon at Yosemite’s Horsetail Falls, but he felt amply repaid with interest for all he had missed in his prior time. This was a life with beautiful rewards, and he was here, and it was not slated to ever end.

As Pen watched raptly, parts of his mind wandered on their own trails. Pen’s visual imagination constructed a scene for him, and he idly chose to follow it. As if he were floating in a barrel in the stream, he visualized pouring along with the flaming water as it roared from the precipice at the mountaintop and gushed through the pliant air towards the rocks below, where it burst up into silver sparkles and roiling mists that spawned multiple rainbows.

Just before Pen’s imaginary barrel would have shattered on the jagged rocks, he changed his path and swooped up into the sky, hovering before the red-lit mountain as the glorious light faded slowly, darkening to the blues of evening…

Snow sighed. “You know, Pen, I could be wrong… but you’re almost acting as if you think this is just about satisfying you, or helping Corvie.”

“Eh?” Pen’s daydream broke, though the Reichenbach remained illuminated before him by a trick of the light, a filament of fire persisting against the deep blues and grays of the mountainside.

“There’s more to it than what’s on the surface, Pen. There’s a ripple effect of satisfaction. Raven is satisfied because she got a problem resolved for her daughter. I am satisfied because I could help her by referring her to your services and expertise. Iron is satisfied because you’ve just been here for two days and you’re already finding a place in the community with your mechanical skills. As your herdmates, we are satisfied because we’re happy for you, and also because when one of us does a good deed, it reflects to the credit of us all.”

“So……still, it’s a big satisfaction… circle jerk. What does it all come down to in the end?”

It’s all a light show to keep you placated and distracted, dummy. Pen clenched his teeth and shook his head, burying the thought…

“What does it come to? A whole bunch of satisfied ponies, Pen…” Snowflash could feel the tenseness in Pen’s body. She drew a deep breath and tried another tack.

“Look. Pen… Corvie’s happy. Her mom is happy. We’re happy.”

“Yes…”

“Are you happy?”

Pen’s inner being still glowed with golden light. The evening breeze carried scents of the cooling world, of forests and fresh-mown hay and the icy mists of the waterfall, and these mingled with Pen’s own scent and that of his herdmates, making a sort of fugue of pleasant odors that comforted him deeply. The warmth of his friends surrounded and strengthened him, and all the world about him was peaceful and enchanting. A beam of white light rose suddenly from a balcony on a tall blue tower, and Pen could just make out the silhouette of Luna, catching the distant horn of the crescent moon and lifting it gently above the mountains… A thin crescent it was, and as the sky deepened to darkness and revealed the colorful stars, the moon itself served as a smile, beaming brightly down upon Pen.

Pen breathed deeply, and nestled more snugly between his friends, their warm furry flanks surrounding him with comfort and reassurance. “…Yes. Yes, I’m happy…”

“So…? Is there really a problem, in the end?” said Snowflash.

“What worthier way is there to spend your life than in making others happy?” said Iron Croupiere.

Well, that was a good question, wasn’t it? Saving all the humans? LunAI was seeing to that in her own special way. Making new discoveries about the world? She’s way better than me at it; what’s the point? Increasing my understanding of the universe? Love of learning for its own sake…?

Or for finding a way out? To where?

And why should I want to leave? Just when I’ve found–

Them. They were always there with him, supporting him with kind loving words, or surprising him with hugs and chocolates. And as lovers, they were almost literally a dream come true; their needs and lusts meshed perfectly with his own. He’d once been convinced that love was a kind of thing that didn’t happen to people like him, but they were wakening it in him, slowly but surely. He already found it hard to imagine spending a night in bed without them snuggling up with him, or holding him to calm him after a bad dream. Falling in love with them was as natural as breathing, and as inexorable, no matter how much his brain cautioned his heart to be careful.

He knew it was happening, and he couldn’t stop it. He didn’t want to stop it. It would be foolish to try. But he still stood, paused at the brink, waiting…

Pen shook his head; he was looping again. He employed a favorite visualization technique of his, imagining a wave of cool water passing through his brain, refreshing and calming him. He opened his eyes, and saw their friendly faces to each side of him, gazing at him with love and concern.

He sighed, and consciously used a common pony gesture for the first time, tucking his nose under Snow’s chin, then Iron’s, to reassure them. “I’m sorry, guys. I don’t want to be a whiney-butt or a downer. This is all just like a story book to me, and it’s hard for me to believe it’s all happening. But…” Pen suddenly couldn’t meet either of their eyes. “I know that you’ll have patience with me.”

“Of course we will!” They scooched closer on either side of him and hugged him tightly.

Pen shook his head gently, staring off at the city and the hills and the asterisms that filled the night, which he assumed were procedurally generated. “You guys think you get it. But I don’t think you really do. I mean, I know it. Like I knew that I’d love Iron’s cooking. Like I used to know the back of my hand. Like I know my own heartbeat, I know it.”

“We know it too. It’s really okay, Pen.”

“But…” Pen bit his tongue, closed his eyes, and let their embrace become his entire world.