Dear Journal,
I found her.
Some of the mystery is solved at last, assuming what I’m being told is true. I found the one who made the runes, I found the one who’s been sending the coded messages. I found the one who’s been looking for us! She’s been looking for us as much as we’ve been looking for her! Too bad she doesn’t know how to use a car, or else she probably would’ve been here months ago and lots of the stress and mystery would’ve been circumvented.
She didn’t try to kill me, or do anything even a little threatening. Maybe the whole world isn’t as empty and bleak as it looked. I’ve learned so much, but everything I’ve learned is just the beginning to what I’m going to. Maybe there’s some hope for humanity after all. Maybe even for the survivors too.
I suppose I should write the whole thing down. She seems to have Joe’s sleep schedule (unicorn thing I guess), so staying up doesn’t seem to bother her. We’re in a locked warehouse, with a campfire burning right on the concrete. Never thought you could do that. Guess so long as we’ve got good ventilation. I already told the others what I’ve learned so far using the phone, I guess I should get it written down too before I try this sleeping bag again as a pony.
The fire is still burning. It doesn't seem to be spreading as far, not devouring the whole state like I’d been afraid of, but the plumes of smoke are still rising. There are refineries in that city that might keep burning for months.
But I didn’t have to get anywhere near the actual fire, because I found one walking towards me. Okay, maybe it’s wrong of me to make fun of the coloring of another pony. It’s not like I look like anything natural.
In all seriousness, she was straight up walking down the freeway, pulling a cart behind her like it was the most natural thing in the world. She wasn’t wearing anything, though with the sun beating down on her she seemed to be pretty exhausted.
As I got close enough for her to notice, she started watching the police cruiser approach, and it looked like her horn started to glow. Unicorn again, because that’s my luck. I guess it makes sense for her though, so I’ll give her a pass.
I started slowing down once she saw me, even though I was on the other side of the concrete median and in no danger of hitting her. I could see the signs of a frightened pony even at that distance, so I stopped about five hundred feet away and got out. I didn't even bring the gun; didn’t seem like there was any point for just one pony walking in the middle of the road. At the time I didn't dream this could possibly be the one I was looking for, just a happy accident I met on the road.
Every new pony for the colony, right? Granted, we’re already running short on stallions even without her. Let’s see if I can remember the exact words of our first conversation. It’ll be hard, since I didn’t have anything to record it all.
“Hi!” I shouted, hopping out of the car. Huan came after me, though he didn’t look very interested. Not like when we encounter other dogs, and he gets all tense and nervous. He was pretty bored honestly. “You know, gas isn’t so hard to find that we have to go back to wooden carts yet! Or did you have trouble getting hooves to reach the pedals?”
She stopped with the horn-glowing after that, and I hurried over to talk. She introduced herself as Sunset Shimmer, which I took at the time to mean she was in the Cloudy Skies school of stupid names. She also apparently came from the nudist camp of proper clothing, which I started to envy almost at once with the sweat wearing leather produced. California had not gotten any cooler just by burning one of the cities down.
She asked some pretty weird questions. Her first one was, “You couldn't be a princess, could you?” I just laughed, because that seemed like the right thing to do. Princess, yeah. That’s exactly what I am. A pretty pony princess. Diggin’ the alliteration though. “And you haven’t gone completely nuts?” That second question I could understand, and I stopped laughing.
I didn’t think the maniacal laughter would’ve been helping my case. “No, I’m not. I’m not sure any of us are completely sane after what happened to the world, but I don’t think I’m certifiable yet.”
We were much closer then, and I could see she had a buttmark. No, not a buttmark. They have a proper name. A completely stupid name, but a proper name nonetheless. A cutie mark (shudder). Can’t believe I just wrote that down. Some swirly, bright sun mark, I’ll draw it at the end.
Her last question was the really weird one, the one that made me think that maybe I’d found the pony I was looking for. “You’re not from Equestria, are you?”
I didn’t quite know how to process the question, and I didn’t want to give anything away, so I asked. “What makes you think I would be?”
“I have to ask,” she said. “I haven’t met very many ponies from here, but not very many are friendly and take good care of their mane.”
“Well, I am from here.” I pointed at the smoke coming up from behind her. “That was my home. Born there, grew up there… even stayed behind when my family left.” I probably sounded a little angry, or like I was gonna cry again. Maybe both. Shut up it’s not my fault! Blame Moriah! I had much more self control before! At least I’m being honest! “Did you burn my city down?”
She told me she didn’t, that she’d been just as surprised as I was and had to nearly exhaust her magic just to get out alive.
At that point, we figured we should get out of the sun to talk. I suggested as much, suggested that she should come with me in the car and we could find a better place to have our conversation than under the blazing heat and standing on asphalt. We could load everything from her cart into the trunk, then tie the cart itself to the roof. What, stranger things have happened!
She wasn’t excited about getting into the car, but I told her I’d been driving almost every day since the Event and it was totally safe. So she levitated, yes, levitated, her entire freakin’ cart right over the median, and I went to get the car unlocked.
That part doesn’t matter really. We drove back out and into a warehouse, like I said. Shared my food and water with her while she told me what she had come to say.
Yes, she had been the one looking for us, the one sending the radio transmissions. In her cart, aside from a tiny bit of food, was a machine that looked like it’d been made in some steampunk factory. Brass and wheels, with all sorts of electrodes and weird crystals coming off of it. She said it was a “Thaumic Arc Transmitter”, and she’d been using it to send messages home. I asked her if it used lots of magic, and she answered that it had to be powerful enough to send a message that would reach other worlds, so that meant using more magic than any individual pony could possibly generate.
Home, to a place called Equestria. The place she’d come from. She explained her mission to me in no uncertain terms, for which I was grateful. I think I’ve had enough of mystery these last few months. Sunset Shimmer said that she’d been sent here after the Event (my word, not hers), to see if any ponies had survived. If they did, she was to find “a princess, or the closest thing you had.”
Only there were far fewer ponies left than she had thought, and they were so spread out that she hadn’t seen any for a long time. Only when she had thought to try listening using her transceiver had she heard our message from Los Angeles and thought that she might have finally found “somepony” she could actually talk to.
She found something bitterly ironic about it, because she had started in Los Angeles, and met a pony on her very first day. She’d even spent the night with her, and suggested a new pony name. You wanna guess who it was?
Who is Cloudy Skies? You’re right! You’re the next… Jeopardy? However that game worked. I never actually watched it.
She hadn’t been looking for lone survivors though, she’d been looking for a community. A group, so that once she gave her knowledge, she could be reasonably sure that it would persist. At first she had wanted a whole city, though it was clear enough that there were less ponies than she had expected, and she'd been forced to scale down her goals progressively over time.
She had to say that I “looked a little young” to be a leader, because of course she would say that. I told her I wasn’t really much of a leader, we didn’t have anything formal like that, but we did have a community and we’d made it out of the city when the fire hit without losing any animals or ponies.
“Good; then you’re just the pony I’m looking for.” Of course I am. Just the pony. Not just the person. Just the pony. Because you have to put “pony” on everything even though “person” doesn’t specify a species.
Actually, she wasn’t quite that confident. It was more like “I wish I had the time to keep looking for a princess, but our window is closing. If I waited much longer, I’d have to stay behind, probably for the rest of my life.”
She couldn’t tell me what happened. She couldn’t tell me why. What she could tell me was that “the one who sent her knew.” Because that’s great.
It gets better though. She wasn't entirely mysterious. See, the one who sent her, someone she called a “Princess,” had known the trouble we would be in. She wanted to make sure that our rebooting society had all the tools it needed to be successful. She had a repository of knowledge prepared, a seed of the tree that might grow into our future society. It contained things like “spellbooks” for unicorns and “weathercraft manuals” for pegasi. What the hell is weathercraft?
I didn’t actually ask. Under the circumstances I had bigger questions. Why couldn't she just give it to me now? Because the princess wanted to tell "somepony" (yuck) in person what had happened, since she had “bad experiences with letters.” If I was willing, Sunset Shimmer would take me with her, I would meet this princess, and she would tell me everything.
Would I come back? Yes, she insisted. I would be sent directly back when it was done, so I could bring all that knowledge and my species wouldn't be left in the dark for the rest of forever.
But time is short. She’s actually not sleeping herself; going to be spending all night preparing this magic to get us to her world. She explained how the travel works, but it went over my head. Just that our worlds are drifting apart, and it might be a very, very long time before they come together again. Thousands of years, if not more. In order to make sure I wouldn't get stuck in her world, we would have to leave soon. Just before dawn, in fact.
The others aren’t happy, but I didn’t exactly give them a chance to object. I just explained everything and hung up before they could argue with me.
I know, it wasn’t a very friendly thing to do. I know they’re all worried about me. This is a pretty stupid thing to be doing, even ignoring how insane and impossible it all sounds. Completely impossible. Travel to another world, sure. That’s a thing that can happen. Because other worlds are a thing.
Sunset Shimmer told me a little about Equestria; a country very much like mine, only filled with ponies instead of people. A whole society all made of horses. I told her I might’ve seen it, and described the circle and my experience with it.
She confirmed that yes, in fact, that's exactly what I’d seen. That had been her doorway in, and she had expected a little of the magic to linger. I didn’t tell her it had exploded me.
Tomorrow then; tomorrow I’ll be going to Equestria. I’m going to be meeting the one who knows what happened to my species. Maybe she has the ability to reverse it! Maybe this is my chance to fix everything. It’s got to be as close as I’ll ever come. If these creatures, ponies, can do “magic” like travel between worlds, maybe bringing every vanished human back is also something they can do.
I didn’t ask the unicorn, she wouldn’t be the one to do it anyway. I’ll ask this “Princess” when I see her.
I’m sorry, Sky. I hope you’ll forgive me. But you lied to me! You've known me for three months, and never said a word about meeting this pony! I'm going to have a word with you about that when I get home!
-Lonely Day
PS: Set out all the water bottles I brought in one big bowl, along with all the rest of my food. Huan’s smart, and we talked about it. He’ll keep watch for me here until I get back. He’s not happy about it, but the unicorn says it might not be safe to bring him.
Here's what she looks like. She says I could probably get a drawing cutie mark if I wanted to work really hard for one. Call it that, and I don't think I'll ever want one, but thanks anyway.