//------------------------------// // January 11, 2016. 4:05 AM // Story: An Ally Called Preponderance // by Myriad Kay //------------------------------// I was more prepared this time when the call came. When Applebloom told me there were buildings in the distance, I already knew what each of them was. Despite being small, the town was home to a medium-sized Holiday Inn, apparently built back when the town was an intersection of several busy roads. After recent highway construction, the roads (and by proxy, town) had died down considerably, but the local businesses apparently still drew sufficient traffic to maintain themselves. In other words, it was a reasonably ideal situation into which to drag three unescorted extraterrestrial minors. Sweetiebell, I kenned, had been assigned phone-holding duty. From the looks of it, Applebloom and Scootaloo had given up on their race long ago and resigned to being cold, wet, and miserable. At the same time, their eyes seemed bright at the prospect of imminent civilization. Scootaloo flapped what I only now noticed were wings, shaking clinging snowflakes from them before turning to me. "It's gonna be warm there, right? You guys aren't some kind of ice monsters?" I chortled at the thought, though the laughter segued to a sense of respect as I realized the children were beginning to keep an open mind about the dangers of exploring another world. "No, we're not ice monsters. We're sensitive to cold like you are—maybe moreso. I'm surprised you can even stay in the snow like that without any kind of clothing." "We had clothing. Our capes, at least. But I guess it didn't come with us," Apple Bloom said, a bit of shiver noticeable in her voice. I thought about that for a moment. Preponderance, I realized, had been seemingly naked as well during our exchanges. Preoccupied by the fact I was speaking to an alien, I had never thought anything of it—if anything assuming it was a cultural difference. Now, I found myself considering the idea that clothing, tools, or other non-biological objects might not be able to make interplanetary jumps like this. In some ways it seemed nonsensical: the notion that a teleportation process could distinguish a body's nails and hair from clothing. But, then again, the greatest discoveries stemmed from observations of the seemingly nonsensical. I filed Applebloom's note about clothing away for later consideration. At my insistence, Sweetie Belle and I took the lead as I guided the trio along the sidewalk and across some side-streets, moving toward the hotel. From the quiet smalltalk we made along the way, I picked up that their own world primarily relied on manually-pulled vehicles—looking like horse-drawn carriages but being the cultural equivalent to rickshaws. The notion of high-speed vehicles on busy streets was largely foreign, lessening the patronizing feeling as I emphasized the importance of "stop, look both ways, go". Another unforeseen challenge was getting them through the hotel's revolving door. I had never given much thought to revolving doors—to me, they were merely an architectural element. However, looking at them through the eyes of extraterrestrial quadrupeds, I could understand their apprehensions. Firstly, their bodies were longer than that of an upright human. I had never stuck my hand in a revolving door as it closed, but my charges no doubt imagined it having enough force to cleanly bisect one of them should their hindquarters or tail not be pulled fully inside. Secondly, it was effectively a glass cage that only one of them could fit into at a time, splitting them up until they all got inside. And finally, its speed was dependent on how quickly the others were pushing it—one of their group moving too fast, in their eyes, would likely get one of the others crushed. It was only after explaining the concepts to them as best I could that the group slowly worked its way through the revolving door, tails carefully tucked between their legs. Also, after insisting that the phone-carrier go through first, my camera had once again found its way back to Scootaloo. The "ponies", I gathered, came from a culture that was overall smaller in scale than ours. As quadrupeds, their posture meant doors and rooms need not be as tall, not to mention they had a comparatively smaller body than us for a similarly-sized head and brain. I could see my own view shifting up and around as Scootaloo's head pivoted, marveling at the modestly lavish interior of the hotel's lobby. I could see a young attendant leaning back in his chair lazily at the reception desk, a rolled-up hunting jacket tucked behind his head as a pillow while he read something on his phone. The desk itself towered at least twice the height of my charges, but Preponderance's phone had luckily ended up with the group's winged member. With a quick lurch of flight, she landed softly on the top of the desk. I realized, with some amusement, that this was possibly one of the most important moments that had ever occurred with regards to interplanetary relations: the first introduction of aliens to general members of the populace. At the click of her feet on the desk, the attendant looked up from his phone. His expression was closer to shocked confusion than fear—in retrospect, I think it was the phone in Scootaloo's mouth that made the difference. To the attendant, this wasn't a potentially dangerous animal poised for attack. It was a pet offering a present. Facing him directly via camera, I cleared my throat and spoke up with a speech I had rehearsed in my head many times over the last hour. "Hello. I'm Dr. Sydney of the University of Michigan Biology Department. I was contacted by three extraterrestrial travelers looking for refuge. I'm currently stuck in an Icelandic airport and cannot meet them in person, but I'll be sending a colleague to pick them up as soon as possible. For the time being, I want to get them out of the cold and away from potential hazards. Do you have rooms available for the night?" I felt the last bit was important, since it emphasized what I hoped would be an element of normality in the situation. For a moment, the attendant just stared at me, then Scootaloo, without moving. I could feel the tension in the air, and see my camera move as Scootaloo fidgeted. Gradually, he reached a hand out and ran it through Scootaloo's hair, petting her as though to confirm she was real. At first this struck me as condescending, though I now see his rationale. From the fact that she didn't bite him, he could confirm she was not hostile. From the dirty look she was no doubt giving him, he could confirm she was sapient. With only a slight hitch in his voice, he fell into normal routine. "Will you need one room or three?" My view upended and I heard a clack as the phone hit the countertop. Scootaloo answered for me. "Are the rooms as huge as the rest of this building?" Camera facing upward, I couldn't see desk attendant's reaction. I suspect, from his reply, he was looking at the three small creatures appraisingly. "The rooms are... anything should be big enough for you. Would you prefer two beds and a rollout, or two rooms?" I tried to hurry the situation along, not wanting to get hung up on small hitches. "They're new to the planet and they'll only be here for about a day. They'll take a large suite with two queens and a rollout. Can you accept my credit card information over the phone?" The attendant thought about it for a moment before concluding that, in this situation, it would probably be acceptable, though his computer couldn't do it and he'd have to take it to his boss tomorrow. I gave him my phone number should his boss have any problems with the idea of extraterrestrials in her hotel. In turn, he agreed to keep their presence relatively quiet, at least beyond radioing word to the hotel staff, until my colleague could get there tomorrow. As we spoke, he seemed to warm up to the idea, even asking me if this was first contact. At my request, he even gave the trio a bit of cash for the vending machines, saying he'd charge it to my card later as minibar expenses. Getting the extraterrestrials to their room proved more challenging than I had anticipated. The desk attendant, maintaining protocol even in the most extraordinary situation, said he couldn't leave his desk until break. Every elevator button and door handle, I quickly discovered, was made for creatures at least three times the height of my charges, not to mention with actual fingers. The greatest challenge of all was getting the keycard into the slot on the door, a mid-air feat which took Scootaloo several tries, though she insisted she had now "found the trick". Once finally inside, however, the girls were safe, warm, and ready to tackle the next set of problems. Food and water. The fact that these visitors were even breathing our atmosphere without an air supply of their own was worrying enough—I didn't want our first encounter with this species to end with nothing but three dead children. While Scootaloo's nausea at consuming our plant life seemed to have passed quickly, I was still seeing the occasional ramifications of their choice to drink river water—no sooner had we entered the room than Applebloom had seen the bathroom and rushed to it. They were hungry and at risk of dehydration, but the safest solution I could think of for now was bottled water and mechanically processed foodstuffs. I explained the process of purchasing snacks from a vending machine to Scootaloo as she walked through the hallways, alone—Sweetiebell and Applebloom had opted to stay back in the room to use the bathtub to “wash away the cold”. We discussed options that might be available, finally settling on corn chips and bottled water. After Scootaloo confirmed their species could digest lactose after infancy, I agreed with her assertion that it would be worth the risk to add in chocolate bars as well. For her part, she performed reasonably well at purchasing snacks. However, something about her movements and silence struck me as off. After entering the appropriate code, she would merely stand there and watch with a blank expression as a bag toppled down and she would add it to her pile. Alone with me, I realized, she was not wearing the same face she had put on around her friends, and a heavy tension hung in the air between us. Finally, after a good five minutes of silence as she assembled her ration pile, she spoke. "Are we ever going to be able to go home?" She didn't look at me when she asked it, her attention solely on the ninth bag of chips as its spiral slowly pushed it forward. The sudden question was unexpected, but I answered it as best as I could without lying. "My colleagues and I are going to look at the book you found and do everything we can to get you home. I promise you that." "I know, I know. I've heard you going all 'my colleagues' this, and 'my colleagues' that." She finally turned toward me, and I noticed a squint to her eyes I hadn't been able to make out before. "But you know. You said this planet doesn't even have the stuff to go to other worlds. You're some big-shot science doctor, and even you don't know how to do it!" She swallowed, almost choking on the last word. "I want to know the truth. I'm tough, I can take it. Sweetiebell, Applebloom, they'll break if you tell them the truth, but I can know. I want to know. Are we ever going home?" She took a deep breath and puffed out her chest as if ready to take a punch, and waited. I was a professor, not a mother. I hadn't had a child in my home for fifteen years, and my meager parenting skills had faded with time and given way to teaching and research. But this, I realized, was perhaps all I needed. If I couldn't ease her fears, then maybe I could share with her the spark of discovery that made me excited to merely be a part of this situation, and the hope that I would find something amazing. "Have I told you about Preponderance?" I asked. Scootaloo sniffled, falling back on her rump. She was crying freely now, knowing full well what my dodge meant. She kept her voice steady and answered nonetheless. "I... heard you say a little to the hotel guy. He was this weird alien, the first one to talk to anybody from your planet, right?" I proceeded to tell her everything I could about the creature that called itself Preponderance. At every opportunity, I tried to share with her my elation—the wonder and awe at meeting something so different from myself, and the thrill of adventure I felt as I tried to discover the strange knowledge it had almost tauntingly kept from me. I told her about the things I learned, the scientific discoveries its small comments facilitated, and its strange fascination with what I perceived as pedestrian elements of human life. I even told her about Preponderance's apparent fear that grew with our every conversation, just because she told me she was brave enough to hear it all. My excitement about the topic was contagious, and as I spoke I could see her energy slowly returning. Finally, I explained that this was why that notebook was so important: Preponderance had left something behind, and from the small bit I had heard it sounded like it was meant to help aliens who ended up stranded on this world. We had been talking for at least an hour. While I worried that her friends may have grown concerned about our absence, I knew this exchange was important to Scootaloo, and she'd rather they not see her like this. Her tears had dried and her demeanor had brightened considerably since we began. She smiled as she spoke. "Do you think that's what this Preponderance guy does? Like, travels around between worlds, leaving stuff to help people get back home?" "I don't know," I said truthfully, "but I hope to find out." The answer was sufficient for her. The alien scooped up her new pile of loot onto her back and spread her wings to stabilize it. She briefly eyed the coffee vending machine, asking if any drinks besides water were safe, though I told her I didn't know. Picking up the phone and key in her mouth once again, she walked down the winding hallways back to her room, catching only a brief stare from a nearby maid. When we got inside, Applebloom and Sweetiebell were lying on the bed in wait, wrapped in towels and with still-damp hair. From a tear-stained-yet-accepting look on Sweetiebell's face, I had suspicions that they had a similar conversation in our absence. Scootaloo wasn't about to show weakness in front of her friends. "Dinner is served!" she said, hopping onto the bed and lowering one wing, bags and bottles rolling off to her side. Realizing I had not eaten in a good many hours myself, I made my own trip to a vending machine and joined them. "Thanks again for all your help, Dr. Sydney," Applebloom said. Opening the bag of chips without fingers had been difficult for her, but afterwards she had no trouble reaching her snout in to eat. "Without your help, I reckon at least one of us would've gotten mighty sick by now—if not worse." Sweetiebell swallowed a gulp of water and gazed up uncomfortably. "Please don't say that. Let's talk about something happy." "Sydney told me all about this thing she met back when she was less old called 'Preponderance'." Scootaloo sat back on her haunches, gesturing with her front limbs excitedly. "It was some kind of alien traveler who knew way more about science stuff than her, and she thinks it wrote that book we found. It's probably going to have some kind of secret spell or directions to build a machine we can use to get home." Sweetiebell seemed pleased with this revelation, but I saw a pensive look on Applebloom's face. She spoke up. "I still think it's right weird we're apparently the first ponies to end up here. Dr. Sydney, you said the 'ponies' on this world are just animals, right? Do you still have unicorns and pegasuses and the like?" I took a sip of my lukewarm vending machine coffee—decaf, since I hoped to catch some sleep while the aliens did. "Nothing of the like." I thought about my answer for a moment. "Except in old myth. Hundreds or maybe thousands of years ago—I'm not certain—there are stories that reference unicorns and pegasi." "What happened to them?" It was Sweetiebell who asked the question, and it was an interesting one. Up until then I had assumed the creatures to be entirely mythical, but I was currently speaking to two extraterrestrials that fit the description to a 'T'. Was it possible that their species had in fact visited earth centuries ago? Interplanetary travel was clearly not an established part of their current culture, but a lot could happen over centuries of time. "I don't know," I admitted. "All we have are stories that they might have been here at one time. Perhaps they were just visiting, and went home." "Maybe they drank the water and pooped so much they died," Scootaloo said. Applebloom snickered at the joke, but I inwardly noted that such an explanation—or at least, its underlying implications of survivability on a foreign planet—would be rather reasonable. Sweetiebell interrupted my thoughts with a gaping yawn. I could tell the weight of the day was beginning to reach the three of them; Applebloom, having hungrily devoured three entire bags of chips and a chocolate bar, was moving sluggishly and with drooping eyelids. "I know you wanted to see the book your friend wrote, Doctor Sydney, but I'm plum tuckered. Would you mind if it waited until morning?" As much as I craved to delve into that book, Applebloom was right. Sweetiebell looked ready to collapse, while Scootaloo was flicking through the remaining dollar bills, probably thinking ahead to breakfast. I couldn't say no. To be safe, I asked them to call me immediately if any one of them began to suffer adverse reactions from the food they had eaten, or any other emergency came up. I let them know that I'd be leaving a message for Dr. Arbeck, who could hopefully get there sometime tomorrow, before resting myself. With everything settled and accounted for, the three of them tucked into one bed curled up by the pillow. Sweetiebell reached over to the phone and clicked it off, leaving me back at my airport. It's been a long day. I'm far from the only traveler stranded in the airport for the night, and while writing this I've even had a few others move into my quiet wing for rest. I'll be leaving my message with Dr. Arbeck now, and with any luck be woken up by her response.