//------------------------------//
// The Bat and the Believer (part 2) 
// Story: Love Letters Written on the Back of a Star Chart 
// by Dawn Stripes 
//------------------------------//

	Luke dove off the city bus with his head down, stopping only briefly to untangle his backpack from a parking meter. As he passed underneath a lattice of white steel the crowds of men and women his age surrounded him, swirling him deep into the smell—human bodies, fast-food wrappers, tasteless air. Everything to remind him that he was now on Earth.
Tom’s madcap escapades were gone like a dream come Monday morning. Now the break was over. As Luke settled his backpack on his shoulders, he almost chuckled at how he’d berated himself for agreeing to his friend’s blind dates. Things always seemed different from this side. Was it so wrong to choose a little adventure over this greasy greytop grind?
Of course, in a way it still felt queer to be here at school. He wove through a hauntingly familiar engineering department. The math tower leaned over Neil Avenue like a sentinel against fantasy. They were blasts from a past life. Coming here had felt queer ever since First Contact. Ever since Equestria. 
As it turned out, even traveling to an alien world and bringing back the news didn’t exempt him from the need to get an education. Even after playing a personal part in bringing the United Nations into the Equestrian Alliance, the only thing Aunt Tara cared about was the fact that he’d skipped six months of school. And despite turning the world on its head, he would still be out of a job if he didn’t play catch-up to finish his degree.
A disappointment, but he tried not to let it bother him. He’d gotten to experience things most men had only dared dream of. It always struck him as selfish to be anything but grateful for that.
Besides, it wasn’t as though nothing had changed. He could see the fruits of his labors even here, even before the first class of the day. There were ponies on the quad. Five, by a quick count, all unicorns, all in the robes of Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns and all wearing custom saddlebags that mimicked the style of American backpacks. They were hanging around a statue near the library, busily pretending to be nothing but a part of the crowd. Luke couldn’t help but find it adorable—the way they leaned up on the statue, self-consciously chatting as though they weren’t drawing glances from every human being within a hundred meters. Ponies. They could be threatening Luke with a knife, and he still wouldn’t be able to help thinking of them as a beloved child somehow. Maybe that was why Luke and his friends had been able to convince the whole Earth that these aliens meant no harm.
If all mankind was lucky, other universities would begin sending their students to Earth soon. Canterlot University had entered into tentative talks with couple schools in the UK, though these were somewhat hampered by the fact that the nearest plans for a Dimension Gate facility were in London, and those not expected to go up for three years. Really, few of the schools would have been looking so early on if Twilight hadn’t been pushing it. She really wanted Equestrian universities to experience the full benefits of their new allies. To hear her talk, there would be no rest until Equestria was building spaceships and self-flying chariots. No one doubted her ability to do it, either; she was not alone in her quest to pilfer every engineering curriculum in the planet, because for once she wasn’t the only one who saw the possibilities. It was shocking—the number of ideas a Ph. D. in Thaumaturgy could spark just by trotting through a physics building. And so of course Tom loved to talk on podcasts about how magic would cause a new technological revolution. Even Ohio State was getting in on the action; according to rumor, someone was doing their thesis on an attempt to increase the precision of nanotechnology by an order of magnitude via combining magical telekinesis with electron scanning microscopes.
Yes, there was still some excitement in the air. In the early days everyone had been afraid to sleep, for fear they might miss something and awake to a world they no longer recognized. And even now most people were convinced that the Gates would cause a Second Contact any day. It had been several months without such luck, but not for lack of trying. Now that the economic benefits of exploring the multiverse were starting to show up on charts, heavily-funded explorers were tromping blindly into every dimension they could reach. Finding new sentient life was feasible, if challenging. But to everyone’s disappointment, not every alien was as friendly as a pony, or as interested in suddenly becoming close trade partners.
Still, hope sprung eternal. There had been tall blue aliens on this very campus once, Vedalkan if Luke recalled their name, although their attitude had been rather cool—
There was a dark blur and an animal smell. Luke’s hair stood at attention. His head snapped back. He stood rooted on a strip of concrete.
By the time he looked up, the alien had passed him by. She was trotting, by the sound of it, much faster than the average human walk. The corridor of humanity had already slid onto the grass in order to allow her passage down the center of the path. But she’d stepped neatly around an oblivious Luke and nearly brushed against his legs.
What was that retreating shape? She looked almost like a pony, and that almost looked like Royal Guard armor shining on her back. But although it was the most obvious explanation, Luke’s gut told him it was wrong. Those hooves—they weren’t quite right. And those ears—all wrong. They were huge!
But none of that made any sense. The only thing he knew was that the alien was female—he couldn’t say exactly how he knew—and that she wasn’t a pony. The most equine thing about her was the tail, a neatly-combed shock of purple hair that hung still as she vanished around a corner.
It was only then that Luke realized he was the last one still staring. Must have been because he was excited about the prospect of new visitors to Earth. It certainly couldn’t be because of the way those hips—or flanks, as Tom would have corrected him—swayed like top-heavy orchids in a zephyr.
Either way, she was gone. The only thing left was a trace of that musky smell, only vaguely reminiscent of Equestria, and the certainty that a girl had just touched his leg. Now, Luke could have given chase to satisfy his curiosity. But the world had only just gotten to the point where a pony could walk in the street without inciting a mob. The only way this whole Equestrian Alliance thing could work—the only way those unicorns could study here—was if everyone pretended, from nine to five, like they didn’t want to badger every alien in sight with unceasing questions. And everyone knew it. Luke, of all people, felt obligated to set a good example. So he put his head back down, setting his feet on the road to class. He tried to pretend that the vision which had stung him was just another student walking by.
But for whatever reason he couldn’t focus on class that day. Calculus was a maze of violins and meaningless alphabets. The politics of Medieval Europe was a game of thrones played by dull and greedy boors. Even theology somehow managed to turn obscure. Normally, Luke was the kind of student who would never skip class. But when even the Monophysite schism failed to lift his head from the desk, he admitted it might be time to make an exception.
He tried calling Lyra before doing anything drastic. Lyra loved to be called. She was a little too proud of being the only pony with a cell phone. And she only got the chance to use it while she was here on Earth, because passing a wireless reception through the Dimension Gates was still only a theory. Her brilliant idea of installing a landline hadn’t panned out, since the cord got sawed in half every time the portal powered down. But for the rest of the month while she and the Element Bearers were here, you could count on Lyra to pick up before the second ring.
On that mark, she didn’t let him down. But to Luke’s surprise, she wasn’t able to help him with his mystery. She had no idea who the alien might be. Apparently the merging of cultures which Tom forever dreamed of was finally beginning to take off. Gate travel was so booked that she could no longer keep a complete list via gossip of every pony who made the trip to Earth. And there were too many walls of secrecy for her to look it up. The UN had really started taking things over. These days, the young men and ponies who had made First Contact hardly got told anything. It was almost as if the nations of the world didn’t want a bunch of kids to be in charge of changing the planet.
He indulged Lyra by chatting about nothing for a while, since it would have been mean to hang up on her right away. After that, there was nothing else to do. So he got an M&M milkshake at the union. He tried, and failed, to do a little homework so that the afternoon wouldn’t be an academic waste. After that fizzled he went for an equally fruitless walk. He even resorted to the pastime of liberal arts majors and watched a movie on his roommate’s Netflix. That seemed to be going alright until he realized the credits he was glancing up to were the ending credits, not the opening ones.
He was almost despondent, then—kicking a pebble down the lane between the tennis courts and the soccer field. It wasn’t because he couldn’t find her, he told himself. She was just one stranger. More because he hated to waste time, that precious gift of life from his creator, and he couldn’t figure out why he was doing just that.
Then there was an animal smell, a dark blur in the corner of his vision.
Luke stood up straight faster than the hair on his neck. There she was, walking around the edge of Morrill Tower. Like a little patch of midnight cooling down the summer day. 
He was pretty sure it was the same alien, anyway. She was moving away from campus, towards the river. Luke couldn’t make out any details from here because she was wearing a bulky harness over her armor, and the harness was hitched to a wooden wagon. The wagon blocked most of his view because it was loaded high with such things as coolers, toilet paper, and a tin pail, all atop a generous cargo of stone blocks. The average earth pony would have been sweating under a load like that.
Luke abandoned his pebble and jogged towards the river.
She must have been going faster than he thought, because by the time he got down there she was far along the riverside trail. He took off after her, alternately jogging and walking. Once or twice he thought about calling out around the bicyclists and roller skaters, but he already felt awkward enough running down an alien over this distance. Dusting off his Equus in a public space was a little too much.
She kept going all the way across the bridge, until the campus buildings started giving way to marsh. The sun was dipping by then. Luke lost it under the treeline. But even in darkness the wagon, which must have been of Equestrian construction, made plenty of noise to be found by. When she turned off the path, it made even more noise breaking limbs and twigs. Luke thought for sure he would catch up then; he put on a little burst of speed to the point where she had entered the forest. He followed his ears to a wide clearing and stopped short. 
The round stone tower that stood there was a good three stories high, made of beautiful grey blocks each bigger than Luke’s head. The university certainly hadn’t built this. Then again, its craggy walls were hardly of an Equestrian architecture, either. They would, he imagined, have been at home on a world of pinnacle hilltops, where lightning strikes were not uncommon.
Already muttering a thoughtless prayer, Luke circled the base of the miniature keep, looking for a door. He didn’t find one; the only holes at all were in the second story, where wide windows cut away nearly the entire wall. But there were several smaller structures littering the clearing, including an outhouse, a stout square with an oven full of cold charcoal, and a wooden tub not far from an electric pump. A small mountain of firewood cords leaned up against the rock.
Something heavy smashed into Luke and drove him to the ground.
He didn’t see what happened right away. His vision turned red because his head bounced on a mat of topsoil, all the breath squeezed out of him like toothpaste. “What are you doing here?” demanded a volatile hiss from the weight atop his chest.
Luke struggled for breath enough to view the creature pinning him down. Her impact had been harder than a rockslide because it wasn’t just hooves that had clobbered him, but her unpainted hoofguards. She was hanging fangs long enough to be kitchen knives over his throat. Distinctly un-ponylike wings flared, black and bony, to either side.
To the extent that he was lucid, Luke wondered why he wasn’t wholly occupied by fear of those fangs sinking into his neck and ripping out his esophagus. She wasn’t a pony exactly, but the body language of her bat-wings was clearly analogous to that of a pegasus. They were at total extension, tilted back to show off their full size. She was making herself look bigger—the universal language for meaning business.
Instead of prudent terror, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of warmth seeping from the point of contact with those cold and heavy hoofguards. Her coat was the grey of lining on a cloud. Her mane was midnight blue, close-cropped. Almost a pixie cut. And the ears were long and notched, their edges twining like the curves of slender leaves.
Vague memories flashed before Luke’s eyes of staying up past bedtime long ago, drinking hot cocoa and 	watching Dracula a dozen times in a row.
“What are you doing here?” She repeated her demand and shook him a little. Luke’s head cleared enough to register the distinctly un-equine hiss.
“I-I…welcoming you to Earth?” he stammered. “I—saw you walking by yourself and I wanted to say hello!”
The ears dropped back until they were buried in her mane. “So you followed me?”
“Uh…”
Luke shrank. He was a little dismayed to conclude that he didn’t have any good answer to that question.
“Do not mistake me for a pony,” she sneered, spitting the final word. “I am a Vespertila. Solitude and I are not enemies.”
That stung even worse. Luke was ashamed to have unconsciously fallen back on the excuse of friend-making that would have gotten him into the clear with almost any pony. It wasn’t fair to this lady to be bothered by random strangers like Luke all the time.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, pulling burrs out of his crew cut. “I just wanted to say hi.”
She held him on the ground another second. Then, abruptly, her hooves left his chest. She kicked him lightly so that he rolled over a few times. “You’ve said it twice now. Your work is done.”
Her wings were already tilted against the air, and her back legs bent slightly, as if she were about to hop. Something about this made Luke panic, so he sprung onto his toes. But if there was anything he’d wanted to say, it perished miserable and nameless on his tongue.
She twisted her head back to see what he was doing, aiming a raised eyebrow in his direction. He must have been a sight just then—in a hoof-stamped cardigan and the distinctly unfashionable khaki pants that he always wore to class so he could blend in.
“I have no business with humans,” she said. With a sudden jerking motion, she was gone.
Luke had to look all around the clearing to find her again. He’d expected her to take at least a little gallop before taking off, but her flight was nothing like that of a pegasus. She shot straight off the ground, and once airborne, seemed to travel in every direction at once. The flight was hot and fast and short. Just as quickly as she’d plowed into him, she disappeared through the windows of her tower.
Luke finished brushing himself off. Peering after her, he could see a few furnishings through the windows, including wall hangings that might have been woven tapestries of the Royal Pony Sisters. But there was no sign of her. If he stayed and stood on his toes to find one he would feel like he was spying on her again. So, shaking his head, he turned to go.
But barely had he taken a couple steps when the wind quivered—broke. She nearly might have knocked him over a second time if he hadn’t dove out of the way. This time she stuck the landing with an audible snap, one forehoof raised. Dull metal rolled out of a fishnet sack and came to rest against Luke.
Because she’d nearly landed on him, Luke was on the ground again for her to loom over.
“If you’re not going to leave,” she said, “then make yourself useful. My armor needs a good scrubbing.” So saying, she opened her mouth to drop an earth-colored cloth at his feet.
“What?” he cried, scrabbling away from the metal edges. “I don’t have to do that!”
At once the Vespertila seemed to flinch. Still staring at him, she left rings in the ground by fiddling her horseshoes. When she stepped over the shards of metal to get closer, her expression was so pitiable that Luke was sure she would apologize. But then Luke reached up a hand to meet her halfway; all at once she snapped to attention.
“You’re right,” she said just as quickly. “Forget it. You can go home. Good night.”
Luke shuffled his feet. Unless Vespertila culture and social scripts were well beyond his understanding, this made no sense. Not that he understood what either of them were doing here anymore. All he knew was that he had embarrassed himself enough. He ought to get out while he still could.
The sun was all but gone, but this spit of unflattened ground was barely large enough to be called a forest. The lights of the city were visible in all directions. Luke would be able to get home with only a minimum of scratches from unseen branches and briars. 
So it was a bit of a surprise when he said, “Sure,” and crossed his legs to sit down.
With her standing over him, he grabbed one piece of metal at a time. The rough wool cloth pulled away black specks of dirt and stain, slowly working the dulled armor to a shine that a Royal Guard might possibly deign to wear.
The Vespertila hardly moved at first—though Luke looked up every now and then, at the way the muscles in her wiry legs stood out against failing light. He felt a delightful shiver—perhaps from the cold, or perhaps from her irises, which were like broken red daggers permanently fixed on him. He even made a game of looking down and then back to her, just for the chills.
He thought he could read her facial expression much as though it were a pony’s. She looked surprised.
This carried on for a short time. Night fell. There was a lot of armor, so Luke just kept on working through piece by piece, folding a sleeve over his hand when the metal felt cold to touch. When he was struggling with a particularly difficult spot of rust on the peytral, she finally moved. A twitch.
“Don’t worry about it,” she muttered. “That’s a pretty fine cloth. You won’t get it.”
Then she flitted away again. Luke sensed it by sound, and by the nuzzle of disturbed air against his cheek. By this time the only real light left was a small fire-flicker from inside the tower. He could hardly see anything, though he doubted the same could be said about her.
The Vespertila returned with something fragrant held in her mouth. Her face leaned towards him from the shadows, and Luke’s breath caught in his throat. He found himself carefully accepting one of two meat shishkabobs which seemed to be roasted mice. He was careful not to let his fingers brush her mouth—it wouldn’t have mattered to a pony, but he wasn’t making any assumptions.
In two more trips, she moved down a platter of grapes and a wide candle for Luke to see by.  They ate in silence. The mouse proved to be edible as long as Luke didn’t try too hard to imagine what it would look like in better lighting.
That quiet should have been distinctly uncomfortable. Luke believed—as he guessed she believed—that silence was an important way to grow closer to one’s self, an art lost to a world full of people who were afraid to be alone with themselves. But even he was susceptible to awkward pauses. He’d just barged into her home, and she in turn had nearly knocked him senseless. Could they possibly just forget all that? Even if Luke wanted to, there was no way she would go along. Why did he even want to?
“I apologize for striking you,” she blurted.
“It was nothing,” he breathed before the words were out of her mouth.
A short pause. “So what brings you to my little corner of the multiverse?”
She sunk one fang into a mouse and swallowed it whole. “Nothing a human like you would care about.”
Luke twirled an empty skewer between his palms. “Try me.”
Another raised eyebrow. She shrugged.
“I am one of the Night Guard. We serve as—”
“Guards to Luna! Oh, yes, I’ve heard of that.”
“Princess Luna,” she hissed. Her upper lip slid back to reveal her fangs again, and Luke leaned ever-so-slightly back until she stopped herself short. “We aren’t bodyguards. The Avatar of Night does not need the protection of mortals. I am a fifth-rank Novus who has served the Guard for ten full years. And—” She shuffled closer on her folded legs. “You?”
“I serve the creator of this whole universe,” Luke said openmouthed. “He who made the heavens and the earth, whose name is above all other names.”
He’d always been hard on himself for not having the guts to introduce himself that way. But he wanted to be courageous around her.
“Er—my name’s Luke, by the way.”
“Chlkthata,” she answered with the ghost of a grin.
“I should…probably go.”
“Yes.” She broke off eye contact. “Probably.” 
“So…” 
Luke scooted a little closer to her around the candle. She did the same.
The candle, though it burned warm, illuminated almost nothing but their faces. “What does a fifth-rank Novus do?”
“Mostly, I act as a guide for my people, and for those ponies who have a special devotion to the Star-Spinner.” 
Luke’s smile opened wide. “Wow. You know, I always wondered. I met a pony in Ponyville who prays to Celestia, but nopony ever talked about Lu—I mean, Princess Luna quite the same way. I always wondered if there were ponies who revered her.”
Chlkthata downed a couple grapes, eyeing him skeptically. “Most humans don’t seem to grasp the concept of reverence.”
“Oh, no, that’s not true at all!” Luke clapped his face and sighed. “Maybe you haven’t met the right humans. I don’t know. I don’t blame you for being a little put-off, I mean, some of us have a pretty different image of Luna—Princess, Princess Luna.”
Her gaze dropped for a second. She examined his shoes, and traced his legs back up to his face.
“It was difficult coming here,” she admitted. “Many ponies have not yet offered Forgiveness for the Fall, either formally or in their hearts. I spent much of the past few years in training to rebuke those who still blamed her and show them the truth. Here I find that your people hardly hold an anger to forgive, but insist on making unforgivable comments about the Mistress of the Moon’s physical form.”
Luke chuckled and leaned back. The feeble candle flickered in a wind escaping the distant maze of skyscrapers. But a little more light joined them when a cloud pulled back from a corner of the moon.
“Ah.” Luke squinted upward. “Speaking of the moon, there she is now.”
Chlkthata was looking up at it with open eyes, holding still, the way one might stare down a dangerous animal. “Maybe,” he heard her growl.
Luke stroked his chin, mind racing. “Ah. I see. Not the right moon, is it?”
Her head swayed dolefully. “I am alone, without a single friendly star. Infinity on every side surrounds me, and on the inside only cold.”
It sounded like a quote. “Your Princess say that?” Luke guessed.
“This untamed night has thrown the more…dogmatic portions of our Guard into disarray. Some of them are certain this whole world is a plot to destroy them. Some would like to offer homage to the second moon. Others have had their faith shaken.”
“I’m sorry,” Luke said as sincerely as he could. “Oddly enough…I can relate. You’re a bit of a challenge too, you know. And ponies. The presence of real sentient aliens has turned the college of cardinals on its head. Oh, you should see those old men go back and forth about whether ponies have immortal souls.”
Still looking into the candle, the Vespertila chuckled darkly. The sound came out predatory enough to send Luke into a delectable spine-rolling shiver. “Souls. Hah! You do us credit. Few of the High Vespers credit you with being any more than animals.”
Luke leaned against her tower. “Ah, don’t worry about it. Sometimes I’m not so sure myself.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” she added, “animals are still granted a crucial role in the cycle of life under the Royal Pony Sisters.”
“I’m flattered.”
“But what is so challenging about ponies to the devotees of your…creator? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
A tongue-click. “Oh, it has to do with a few things. I don’t hold much truck with it myself. Think it really boils down to an antiquated need to feel like humans are more special than everyone else. You see, we’ve been alone for so long, and when we started out we had no reason to think there was other intelligent life. And if you really want to know how the whole thing works…”
They spent the night discussing divine incarnations, moons, alternate realities, and immortal souls. He finally managed to learn that Chlkthata was mostly here to investigate the strange new night of Earth, but that she held a quiet disdain for the quarrels of ‘the old stallions’ as she called them. Though it was technically impossible to reconcile Earth’s existence with the idea of Night itself as an ontological entity both created by and entirely subsumed within the presence of Princess Luna, she somehow managed to wave her hoof at the whole affair when Luke pressed her to get right down to the heart of the matter. What she told Luke, but wouldn’t have told her fellow Night Guards, was that Luna remained undiminished, since she was still the sole sovereign of Equestrian Night. The presence of this Earth night was a whole new entity, which, rather than subtracting from anything, provided an exciting new reality to explore and new splendor to discover. Chlkthata had gotten herself onto the front lines of that discovery. She had been on Earth for some months now, though she mainly came out at night and wasn’t usually out of her tower when classes were in session at the university.
Neither of them noticed the time pass, but Luke’s body eventually reminded him with a tumultuous yawn. If he didn’t stumble home soon, he would be tucking himself in under a light sky.
He rose reluctantly then—and bowed, because it somehow felt appropriate. “Chlkthata, I’d—like to learn more about Princess Luna, if that’s okay. I don’t want to interrupt your sleep or your work, but maybe in the early night sometime you won’t be busy. Could I come here again?”
She cocked her head and fixed him with her dagger-eyes. “You,” she said slowly, “are not one of her own. But still you wish to learn. So come even at daybreak if you wish. I would be happy to teach you of the beauty of the immortal Night. Perhaps you can tell me more of yours."