"Et's the best we could do with wha' we got," Vinyl said as she gestured to the contraption sitting on the Tardis floor, a cobbled together mess of parts; wood, metal, glass, and plastic, probably held together by glue and happy thoughts, "The only way this thing es gonna work es if we can go somewhere that has actual tools an' materials."
"That's no problem," the Doctor said as he stroked his chin idly with his right hand, "The Emporium's got everything we'll need, you'll all have to just keep your heads down and not attract much attention: any residence of the Elements is probably now being surveilled, and since they've seen Ditzy too...You'll just have to grab what you need and run."
The unicorn shook her head and blinked her violet eyes in disgust, "When did this become my country: state police, conscription, the government puttin' their hooves into private lives?"
"I've seen it before," he said wearily, "It's a government run by the scared and ruled by an iron fist. Here's the real question though: if humans were a myth until a week ago, what are those ponies really afraid of that they would have that kind of infrastructure, training, and soldiery in the first place?"
"Ah cain't even begin to imagine," she muttered, and then said to herself as he moved towards the console, "and Ah'm not sure Ah want to."
Ditzy was there waiting for him, scribbling furiously on a notepad as she looked at the time until the Void hole collapse: 1:08:43:17. "We're gonna need something big," she grunted between the pencil in her teeth, "A nasty-big power source."
He looked at her calculations and cringed a bit, "And the nearest steam engine or water mill isn't going to cut it for those numbers."
"Not a chance," she said.
"Alright," he bellowed for all of us to clearly hear, "Here's what we have to do: we need to split up. Some of us have to continue building our Space Cork-" he gestured to Pinkie, "-thanks for the name, while the rest of us have to find an adequate power source for the thing. All that leaves unsolved is one question, a question that's been looming for a little bit now." He then turned to Lyra and asked calmly, "Why the little panic attack earlier?"
"Doctor," was exclaimed by at least three different people, myself included.
"Isn't that just a little bit insensitive," Twilight chided, as she gestured to her, Bon Bon, and I, "These three have gone through a traumatic experience. Can't you show some tact?"
"Perhaps," he said with a slight shrug, "but what has me most curious is what I expect was the very sudden change in attitude towards Adam that we all witnessed. We mention a place where humans supposedly might have been, and she got scared, yet she has been housing one for the better part of the entire summer without any misgivings. What has changed?" He turned to the unicorn and squatted just enough that they could see eye to eye. With a little more gentleness in his tone he asked, "Did you learn something in between being kidnapped and being rescued? Any detail could matter: anything could be significant."
Lyra for her part shifted back and forth from hoof to hoof uncomfortably, and then looked around the room to the other ponies, I guess to judge whether they would be open to what she was about to say. Her gaze lingered on Bon Bon who looked at the Doctor, wordlessly analyzing him, one eyebrow slightly cocked. She then turned to her friend and said aloud, "Go ahead, Lyra. It's not like things can get any worse or weirder."
Lyra unconsciously drew her head back as she began her confession, "Well, when I was unconscious I was...visited by Discord."
The whole room was obviously shocked by this announcement, even the Doctor. I, however, was completely clueless, "Who's Discord?"
"A malevolent trickster entity of some kind," the Doctor said as the others gawked at my apparent ignorance.
Twilight continued, "He almost put all of Ponyville under a perpetual state of chaos: roads were made of soap-"
"Night and day were minutes long," Pinkie blurted.
Rarity cringed, "and the ground was turned into a tacky checkerboard pattern."
"Suffice it ta say: he's bad news," Applejack finished, before she turned to look at Lyra, newly perplexed, "But how's somethin' like him talkin' to you possible? We sealed him away with tha Elements of Harmony!"
"I dunno how," she admitted, "but he said something along the lines of being chaos everywhere or something."
"We're losing focus," the Doctor said firmly but gently, "What did Discord tell or show you?"
Lyra's face blanched a little as she thought back over what she had played witness to, "It was horrible. There were humans, fighting some kind of battle with weird flashlights."
A frown grew on the Doctor's face as he looked up to me behind her. He'd probably seen them before being a time traveler, but I could sure make a guess: laser guns.
"Some lady said the planet's surface was lost, and then-" she shivered, "and then-"
"Go on," he murmured.
The whole room was listening in rapt attention. Lyra finally said with a shudder, "And then they made us."
You could hear a pin drop after that. The ponies all stared at her with mouths agape, and then involuntarily their eyes turned to the Doctor and I.
"Is there any way Discord could have just been lying to mess with her," Bon Bon asked Twilight as she patted her friend's back, "because that was my first thought."
"It's, ah," she stammered for a moment, "It's definitely a possibility. Discord has a knack for turning both truths and lies towards whatever his agenda currently is." She sat back on her haunches and brushed down her chest fluff with her hooves, "The thought of it though. What if it's true? Even though the source is Discord, the most unreliable witness as far as witnesses go, IF it were true it would change everything: public records only go back seven-hundred years, and then there's Nightmare Moon. Before that? Everything could be wrong. The Young Earth Theory would be dashed to pieces forever." She looked back to the troubled unicorn, "What do you think, Lyra? Discord touched each of the six of our minds, warping everything we saw and felt until we didn't see reality anymore. Are you sure you weren't seeing an illusion?"
"They are pretty vivid," Rainbow Dash interjected, "I thought a tiny cloud was all of Cloudsdale."
"I saw a human scientist looking at a pony, but it was like looking at those proto-pony exhibits at a museum. It was big compared to our size, and it could barely speak, but the pain and horror in it's eyes..." She shook her head a little to dispel the disturbing image, "If it was real, I want it not to be."
"You mentioned that there was a woman," the Doctor pressed on, "A woman who said the planet's surface was lost."
"Yeah," Lyra said somberly, "She said, 'Tell everyone to pull back to the ships and bunkers. The planet's surface is done for."
The Doctor, suddenly bursting with energy, rushed to the console and brought the monitor around to face him. "Ships and bunkers," he muttered, and then pushed a few buttons, changing the display with the newly input information, "With everything going on I've had my eyes down here on the ground-" He kicked the nearby 3D projector unit back on, which began to fill with a starry image, and he roared in triumph, "-when I should have been looking at THE SKY!"
As the blurred image came into focus all sorts of details popped out at us. Ten concentric rings shown around the projector center, at which there was a surprisingly large amount of nothing. Surrounding the third sphere away from the center were two small, equally sized objects rotating around it, on exact opposite sides of each other. Throughout the image there were weird blue jagged points, the largest being around the fifth sphere.
"What's that supposed to be," Rainbow asked as she looked up at it in equal parts confusion and wonder.
"This," the Doctor said with a small smile, "Is a real-time diagram of a solar system: the very solar system in which we are currently sitting, and it might look a little familiar to you, Adam, because if I am absolutely certain, which I am, then we are all standing on bright, beautiful planet-"
"Earth," I exclaimed in disbelief as I cocked an eyebrow and my head. I then walked closer to it, "No way. I mean, sure, you've got the right number of things going around the Sun, the planets, the asteroid belt-"
"Sorry, Adam, Pluto's not a planet anymore," he corrected me.
I looked at him as I rolled my eyes, "Like that matters right now-"
"It'd be a big deal for Clyde Tombaugh," he quietly shot back.
"Nononono," Twilight said as she waved a hoof, "This can't be Adam's Earth. I can certainly see some similarities from what he described though." She pointed to the next smallest ring over from the group of three made up of the planet and two moons, "That one there? That's Aphrodite, and this one here," she then pointed to the next largest ring, "Is Aithon, the red horse of war."
"Wait," I said as I thought, waving my right hand to grab the attention of the room, "Aphrodite? Isn't that-"
"The Greek name of the Roman goddess Venus, yes," the Doctor said with a smirk. All the ponies in the room not participating just watched us go back and forth, probably getting a good deal of neck strain from all the confusion going on. "Aithon, meanwhile, was one of the horses that drove Ares' chariot. Ares, the Greek name for Mars." He looked back up at the solar system image, "Two worlds, many names, and all the differences basically semantic."
"Alright, I've got a big burning question for you, around which everything else should be revolving," I said in frustration and unintentionally pointed at the image with my bandaged stump, "Just where is the sun?"
"Aw, silly Adam," Pinkie exclaimed with a smile, "You just missed it, but don't worry, it'll be back in a little while!"
I glanced at her suspiciously, "Was that sarcasm?"
She blinked and looked at me sweetly, "I have no idea!"
"Believe it or not it's still there," the Doctor said as he zoomed in on the center of the image. As we got closer I saw that what I thought at first was untrue; there was something there for sure, a small brown clump about the size of a silver dollar now sat in the display. "Oh," he said in surprise, "Oohohoho! Now things are getting interesting!" He pointed to it and jogged around the console to stick his finger straight up into the projection and wiggled it around. "This is a Brown Dwarf, one of the end-lifes of a star. When a sun gets older and begins consuming the last of its hydrogen fuel it eventually expands into a Red Giant. The weight of the waste product of the process eventually crushes the star down to it's core, and in this case causes it to become a low-light emitting mass called a Brown Dwarf. Normally it takes billions of years though, and the inner planets, including Earth, wouldn't even be here anymore to see it get to this state: the explosive Red Giant stage of the Sun's life would either melt or push away the planets beyond the boundaries of the solar system we know. So here's a good mystery: how do you get to a dying star but still have all these planets, even the ones that can sustain life?"
Twilight just looked at him and pointed to the bright point of light near the third planet, "What's this then?"
"The other Sun," he blurted, "Your Sun. Sun Jr. Or rather, Sol 2.0: made after the original one burnt out I reckon. Most importantly, this sun is impossible. It is physically too small to actually be a sun: the process by which solar fuel is burned should not be able to take place anywhere near this size."
"Almost like it were magic," I said flatly.
The Doctor meant to add to his thought, but then as he heard what I said a single finger of his right hand came up to his mouth and he scowled at me slightly. "It seems we have more questions now than answers," he finally said.
Applejack blew out her lips and simply declared, "Eeyup."
It was only a minute or so later that the Doctor had brought the Tardis to life once again, and we flew up out of the forest back towards town. At this point the stars were already out, and most of the homes were shut up for the night. The Doctor set us down with a small thud right on the spot the blue box had always appeared to have rested at. Ditzy Doo peeked out one way, then the other before giving us the all clear signal. Leading the way she quickly escorted all the other ponies through the back door, with Twilight gently carrying the mishmashed device in her aural glow. While the others were focused on moving out to the Emporium, and I was looking once again at my bandaged arm, unable to truly look away from it or focus on anything when I remembered I'd lost it, Bon Bon and Lyra were just inside the swung out doors, speaking in low tones.
"You can't talk me out of this," the unicorn said, her tone incredibly final, "I have to go. I have to find out why I think Adam is different."
"Even if you traumatize yourself further," her friend hissed, before she said in defeat, her hoof raised, "Fine. I, personally, have had enough adventure to last me for as long as I live, but if you don't think you've had enough, by all means. As for your curiosity, I think we both know what the answer is."
"What are you talking about?"
Her frustration melting somewhat, she looked to her friend and just shook her head, "I'll admit it took me a while to see, but take a look back at the past few months and how he's been around you, the way he's acted. Now imagine he was just a regular colt. You're a smart filly: do the math."
Lyra's eyes drifted a little as she thought about her and Adam. They enjoyed their time together, they got each other's humor. He always listened when she played or when she wanted to talk. He'd gotten in a fight and lost an arm to a Timberwolf for her, but all he really seemed to care about was that she was alright. Her eyes grew wide. Did he feel that way?
Bon Bon wrapped her hooves around her to give her a send-off hug, and said softly into her ear, "Keep each other safe, and don't do anything too stupid."
"Right," was all Lyra was able to say as she walked away towards the Emporium. Her mind was still locked into the cycle of memories she had been thinking of, both good and bad. Did she- She wasn't sure if she felt that way, or if he did to her. Bon Bon seemed to think he did. She turned back towards the center of the enormous room, a resoluteness in her eyes.
The Doctor was about ready to take-off again when he noticed there was still an additional passenger. I saw her pass in front of me as I leaned against the safety railing examining my stump. Her presence immediately brought me back to focus on the reality around me. She turned and sat down on her haunches just at my right side.
"I'm staying," was all she said at first, before she looked up at me and smiled slightly, "Someone's gotta make sure you're safe."
The Doctor looked back and forth at the two of us before he shrugged, "If you say so. I wouldn't divide a horse and her boy for the world." Realizing what he had let slip he immediately followed it up with, "Ah, pardon the language."
She seemed to take it in stride I guess, though I couldn't be sure why she was looking so distant. I had to smirk a little at what she had said about keeping me safe though, and I said softly, "Thanks for the offer."
She looked to me and gave a quick smile, "No problem."
Without even consciously giving it thought as we took off I began to run my fingers through her mane. I first realized what I was doing when I felt Lyra freeze underneath me, and I started to withdraw my hand. Before I could put it back at my side though I felt resistance, and i looked down to see her magic field surrounding my hand. She then gently guided me back down to her mane and she smiled up at me again. Understanding it was okay, I resumed my gentle brushing, and I felt her slightly lean into me.
With a slight lurch the express engine came to a stop at Ponyville station. In an instant a door on the side of the second car slid up like a garage door, and a squad of six ponies in armor, led by Lieutenant Swiftfeet, jumped onto the platform. Surveying the structures and land surrounding them, he mentally locked in the quickest path to their destination, and declared, "Move out," before he galloped away. The other five formed up and rode hard in pursuit of their field commander, wherever he might take them.