//------------------------------//
// Chapter 27--A Journey Home 
// Story: What You Don't Know 
// by Flaming Pulsar 
//------------------------------//


Chapter 27--A Journey Home

After waking up, I thought I had gone blind because I couldn’t see anything. But then I remembered that it was sunset when we got here so it was probably nighttime now. Once my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, I noticed that something wasn’t quite right. Everything seemed taller than I remembered and my vision was all fucked up. It was like my eyes were in the wrong spot on my face. I lifted my hand to my face to see if I could feel anything wrong and that’s when I noticed that I didn’t have a hand. I had a hoof. I looked at the rest of my limbs and got similar results. Upon further inspection, I discovered that I had wings which I was having trouble moving--probably because I wasn’t used to having those muscles--and a horn.
        	“Twilight,” I called out, “What the fuck just happened?”
        	“If I had to guess,” her voice called from somewhere, “I’d say that Trixie’s spell was supposed to turn her into an alicorn. However, she had one too many lines so the spell backfired. The result was a massive explosion of magic energy. You took the majority of the blast but I got some of it as well. Which would explain why you have become an alicorn and I--” I saw a naked female human shape with a horn crawling out of the shadows that I could only assume was Twilight. “--have taken in your humanness.”
        	“Humanity.”
     	   “What?”
       	 “The quality of being a human is called humanity, not humanness.”
    	    She gave me a blank stare. “I think we have bigger problems than correct terminology.”
      	  “All I’m saying is that if you’re going to be a human, you should know how to describe yourself. In any case, Trixie’s gone and the amulet is here.” She picked up the amulet and put it in the bag.
     	   “Where do you think Trixie is?”
     	   “I had assumed she exploded and then exploded again.”
     	   “Can you do that? Can you explode twice?”
     	   “Shut up, of course you can.”
     	   “Well, it’s highly unlikely that she simply exploded, let alone twice. Magic cannot take a life so I think there’s something else at play here.”
     	   “Well, we can only speculate. I think Discord might have something to do with it.”
     	   “Who’s Discord?”
     	   “I’ll tell you later. Can you still do magic?”
     	   “Well, I still have my horn so…” she used her magic to create a light for us to see by.
     	   “Well, that’s one thing in our favor.”
      	  “You could probably use magic, too, since you also have a horn. You could probably even fly if you had the practice.”
      	  “Yeah, probably. But now’s not exactly the best time to learn. The rules of teleportation say that you can go anywhere that you’ve been before, right?”
     	  “Yeah, what about it?”
     	   “Can you teleport us back home?”
      	  “Theoretically, I could. However, there are a few problems. First of all, after that explosion, the magic energy here is unstable. From what I can tell, it would be extremely unpredictable to use magic within thirty meters of this place. Just casting that light spell was dangerous. On top of that, I don’t know anything about human anatomy so I would feel unsafe teleporting myself.”
   	     “So, we’re gonna have to hoof it?”
    	    “It would appear so. But that raises another problem: I’m not adapted to walking on only two legs.”
     	   “Well, I don’t really have much difficulty walking on all four. Feel free to use me as support.”
   	     After working to get her on her feet and gathering all of our stuff back into my bag of holding, we set off on our way back to Ponyville. After walking for a few hours, I got tired of the silence so I decided to break it. “I can’t tell you how great it is to see another human, especially a naked woman.”
   	     “Speaking of my nudity, this bare skin isn’t very good at protecting me from the cold.”
    	    “Grab my robe out of the bag. I had Rarity line it with wool. It should keep you nice and warm.”
    	    “How did early humans survive the cold?”
     	   “Killing animals and using their fur for warmth.”
“A life for a life.”
“Precisely. Since humans first gained sentience, we had always thought of our race as superior. We were the first species to become aware so we thought that all other life was inferior and only there for our personal gain. Such thinking led to the eventual extinction of more than a few species. Usually it was indirect. We would chop down the forest habitats of some animals to use as paper or building materials. We would mine land dry of oil, leaving it in ruins after there was none left. All in all, humanity was a terrible caretaker of the planet.”
    	    “The races of today use forests for paper and wood as well. Do you think we’ll ever cause the extinction of another species?”
    	    “From what I can tell, the races of today are pretty good at using resources. The griffins use stone for their buildings. The dragons live in caves and volcanoes. The changelings live in caves and use their own chrysalis as building material. I don’t know about any other races but I’m sure they’re just as good at conserving resource.”
     	   “And the ponies?”
     	   “The ponies are most like the humans in terms of resource consumption. However, it will take many centuries before you are at the point that humanity was when I left.”
     	   “Still, though. Centuries is only a few generations for ponies.”
    	    “Shit, how long do you guys live?”
   	     “The average expected lifespan of a pony is 1000 years.”
       	 “Shit, really? Well in that case it could take millions of years before you start to have the population problem that we had. Humans only live about 80 years, 100 if we’re lucky. We had over 7 billion people after only a few millenia.”
    	    “7 billion? I can’t even imagine that many ponies in Equestria.”
   	     “There’s plenty of space, humans just liked having a lot of space to themselves. If you took the entire human race of about 7.277 billion and put them each in a 2-foot by 2-foot square, you could fit them all in a 1044-square-mile area. That’s just bigger than the state of Rhode Island.”
    	    “Based on the map you drew me, Rhode Island was the smallest state of the United States, right?”
    	    “Yep, about 1033 square miles of landmass.”
   	     “And you’re saying that 7 billion humans can fit into that?”
   	     “That’s if everyone was shoulder to shoulder and ass to dick--or pussy.”
    	    “What if everyone were given a house?”
     	   “Well, assuming each person had a comfortable 400 square feet to themselves, then with each house directly adjacent to each other, it would take up an area of about 104,410 square miles, that’s just bigger than the size of Colorado, yet we still had an overpopulation problem in many places in the world.”
   	     “If you could all live in an area the size of Colorado, how could you have such a problem with population?”
    	    “Well, some people wanted to live in warmer or colder climates or in mountains or by the beach or on an island so you have to build roads and shipyards and railroads and airports to reach those people. Just roads alone equated to about 12 billion miles of road. And of course everyone wanted their own yard of about 1500 square feet each. And everyone needs easily accessible food so you need a few marketplaces. And we need places for whatever work everyone does so you build commercial buildings. And you need cars and trains and planes and boats so you make places to build and store those. And speaking of storage, everyone has a bunch of material goods and sometimes they don’t need it for a while so they’ll want to store it. And we also need banks to store our money. And places to buy more material items. And places to provide clean water and electricity and gas. It all starts to add up pretty quickly and I don’t feel like doing the math right now but I’m willing to bet that if we really wanted to, we could all live in a small part of the world but humans didn’t really like each other very much and that’s why nations were made. Nations could separate people based on skin color, religion, language, politics, or whatever and people who agreed more with one nation would move there and some nations would become overpopulated while others were underpopulated and nobody wanted to share the space that they had so it starts to lead to a problem of extreme overpopulation in nations with higher birth rates. The only solution would be to build up or build down but that idea wasn’t very popular and only a few nations saw the efficiency in it so you have to start looking for other ways to deal with the overpopulation and because mankind can’t see what’s right in front of them, they think that the only option is to seek out the slim possibility of there being another planet like ours that we could move some people to in order to reduce the chances of overpopulation. But then when we don’t find any planet, we start building space stations that can support life but then we use up all our resources and die off anyways.”
      	  “So, is that how you became the last human?”
     	   “Well, that last little bit about space is just what many people predicted would happen after some time but we never actually got to that point. But no, like I’ve told you, I became the last human by being the debatably lucky one to be the last to exit his stasis chamber after the incident at CERN.”
    	    “So, what does overpopulation have to do with anything?”
     	   “It has nothing to do with anything right now but it was a major problem for humanity and may become a problem for the ponies in eventual time.”
     	   “But eventual time is immeasurable.”
     	   “True, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything about it before it happens. If you want to prevent overpopulation, I suggest advising your peers to start building up and down rather than out.”
     	   “But can you even have a completely vertical town?”
     	   “It would require a little ground space but it would be possible to conserve a lot of space. It would basically be like stacking every building in a town on top of each other with elevators and hallways between. Theoretically, it should work but as I said, nobody is ever willing to try it.”
      	  “If it means avoiding overpopulation, I’m willing to give it a try.”
     	   “Well, good for you. Good luck convincing everyone else.”
     	   “Can’t you just give your speech that you just gave me?”
     	   “I could, but overpopulation is your problem. I got my own things to deal with.”
      	  “What ‘things’ could you possibly have that are more important than helping us?”
    	    “Well, for starters, I’d like to not be a fucking pony.”
   	     “But you’re so cute as a pony.”
   	     To that, I responded by sidestepping to make her fall on her ass. “You were saying.”
   	     “I don’t know why you don’t like being called cute,” she said as I helped her get back up.
   	     “Because cuteness implies weakness and I can’t afford to be weak in a world where I’m the last of my kind.”
    	    “I don’t see how cuteness is meant to imply weakness but whatever. Do you think we could stop and sleep for a while? We’ve been walking for six hours.”
    	    “I suppose. I’m getting a little tired myself. Let’s camp out for the night and we’ll trek the last half of our journey in the morning.” So we set up our tent and went to sleep for a few hours before continuing our journey home.

The next morning was much like the previous six hours of walking with idle chit chat included. In the light of day, I discovered that I was pure black for some reason. When we finally reached the edge of Everfree, I stopped. “Hey Twi,” I said, “how are we gonna explain this to everyone?”
       	 “I was assuming we would just tell the truth.”
      	  “What exactly is the truth?”
     	   “We went to a magic duel against Trixie. She botched a new spell and the result is what happened to us.”
     	   “What about the amulet?”
     	   “We’ll have it looked at by the Unicorn Tower. They should be able to determine what it does and how it works.”
     	   “What’s this Unicorn Tower I’ve heard nothing about?”
     	  “It’s a guild for all the highest level unicorns. They are the best magic researchers in Equestria. They research anything and they’re usually open for suggestions.”
       	 “Open to suggestions, eh? I think I have a few suggestions for them.”
     	   “Like what?”
     	   “Well, for starters, this.” I made a gesture at the two of us.
      	  “Besides that.”
     	   “That’s need-to-know info, some of which is included in the explanation of Discord. The other part is confidential.”
     	   “Whatever. Shall we go home?”
    	    We started walking but Applejack found us before we left the orchard. “I thought I heard y’all’s voices. Wait a minute, somethin’ ain’t right here. Síor?” she asked looking at Twilight.
    	    “Yo,” I said from my pony mouth.
     	   “Then that means--”
     	   “Hi Applejack,” Twilight said.
     	   “Wow Nelly! What in tarnation happened to y’all?”
     	   “We’ll explain it all when we get the whole group together,” I said. “Meet us at the library in an hour. Spread the word.”
     	   “Who all should I tell?”
  	      “Zecora, Pinkie, Flutters, Dash, Rarity, anyone else you think might need to know sooner than in the course of time.”
      	  “Right. See ya in a while.” She galloped off into town, presumably to tell everyone. We continued walking to the library.
     	   Once there, Twilight called out for Spike. “Twilight! You’re home! Wait, something seems different about you two.”
     	   “We’ll explain when everyone gets here,” I said. “Can your magic fire breath send things besides letters?”
     	   “Wait, is that you Síor?”
     	   “Yeah, answer the question.”
     	   “Um, yeah. But it has to be something small like a letter.”
     	   “That’s not a problem. Follow up question: can you send to anyone besides Celestia?”
     	   “Well, Princess Celestia is the default but I can send to anyone as long as I know who.”
     	   I pulled out the amulet along with a note asking for it to be analyzed. “Could you send this to the Unicorn Tower?”
     	   “Sure. Twilight used to go there all the time when we lived in Canterlot. We know the receptionist pretty well.”
     	   “Great. Do that. Twi, how long until everyone’s supposed to be here?”
   	     “About 45 minutes.”
  	      “Well, maybe in that time you could explain to me how to use this skewer on my head.”
  	      “Learning magic takes years of practice. But, I could probably teach you a simple levitation spell.”
  	      “That’ll be enough for now.”
   	     She started explaining how levitation works and how it’s a little more than using the Force. After the 45 minutes were up and everyone that I told AJ to bring, as well as the Doctor who somehow knew to come, was there, I had gotten the levitation thing down pretty well. Also in that time, we had Spike draw us some flipchart pictures.
   	     “Alright, everyone,” I said, using my new skill to levitate a pointer for the flipchart. “As I’m sure you noticed, Twilight and I are rather different from the way we were when we went on our journey.” Pinkie raised her hoof excitedly and bounced in place. “Yes, Pinkie?”
   	     “Where’d you guys go?”
     	   “That’s the first part of the explanation.” I flipped the chart to reveal a picture of Trixie. “Most of you will remember the self-proclaimed Great and Powerful Trixie from her visit to Ponyville a few months ago. Well, she sent a duel summons to me an Twilight. Due to the rules of magic duels, if we refused the summon, Trixie would get to do what she wanted with us--” The picture for this was the three of us having a tea party. “--which would probably be worse than a tea party, Spike.” He smiled sheepishly. “Anyways, we responded to the summon and went to meet her at an abandoned castle--” shown on the flipchart “--somewhere in Everfree. She had become much more powerful than she was when she was here in Ponyville and we think the cause was this amulet.” Shown on the flipchart. “She had summoned a familiar to help with the battle.” Shown. “Which looked more like a leopard than whatever dog-like creature that is. At some point in the battle, she encased herself in a wall of ice--” shown “--and started to cast a new spell. However, she had 8 lines in the spell instead of the magic 7 so the spell went haywire and caused an explosion.” Mushroom cloud picture. “The result of this explosion was that Twilight became a human and I became an alicorn.”
  	      “Cool!” Pinkie said. “And you already know magic! This is fun!”
    	    “If by fun, you mean not fun then sure.”
   	     “Ah, come on Sísí, I think you’ll learn to love it!”
   	     “Let’s hope I’m not stuck like this long enough to find out. So, now that you all know the situation, we’re going to see Celestia to get this thing sorted out.” That said, everyone went to do their things and Twi, Spike, and I got ready to go to Canterlot.