//------------------------------// // Chapter 4 - Learning Takes Time // Story: Equestria's First... Russian? // by I Brained My Damage //------------------------------// A/N: Sorry for the long wait, I’ve been pretty busy recently up until now. I’ve had to work on a handful of projects, but I’m almost entirely done with them. Equestria’s First… Russia? Chapter Four Learning Takes Time “A Russian? That sounds like somebody who’s in a hurry all the time!” Twilight said joking with Coal. “No,” Coal said. “Russians are people native to the country of Russia on Earth. I’ll have to try and fill you in later with whatever I know.” “Yeah, that sounds okay. But we have a bigger problem at hoof: what are we going to do with him? He can’t speak English, and we obviously can’t speak his language,” Twilight explained. “The only tidbit I know from his language is that ‘da’ means yes, and ‘ne-eht’ means no,” Coal explained. Meanwhile, Dash was in the other room with Solovyov sitting unbounded in his chair, attempting to give him an apology for what she did. She was being quite rude with him because she was frustrated at how far she came to getting him to speak her language, which was nowhere at all. “Can. You. Say. One. Word. To me?” She asked. Solovyov’s response was a cock of his left eyebrow and a look from one side to the other with his eyes. “Yas dieyoos, (I give up,)” Solovyov said not holding back any annoyance in his voice. Rainbow Walked back to Coal and Twilight who were talking in the hallway outside the room. Twilight noticed her. “Well, how did it go?” “Take one good guess,” Rainbow said. “Not very well, I take it?” Coal intervened. “Nope.” “I suspected that,” Twilight said with a sigh, “Look, you two go home and get your rest. I’ll take this ‘Russian’ home and see what I can work out with him. With any luck there will be something of use in my library.” And with that, Coal and Rainbow left for home, and Twilight walked back into the room in which Solovyov was waiting patiently for anything to occur. “I know you can’t understand me,” Twilight started, while trying to put on the most sincere face she could muster, “But just saying something to you seems like it would help. Neither I nor anypony here mean you any harm. I swear that you will be safe, and hopefully, you can tell us your story soon enough.” Solovyov didn’t buy the face she put on. As she finished, her horn started to glow with a light purple aura. After every couple of seconds, a new magic restraint was placed on Solovyov, causing him to panic and make attempts to break free with no dice. First, his body was ensnared in four purple rings of magic, making him completely immobile. “Kako echshorta tihd deelish sahm noy?! (What the hell are you doing to me?!)” Solovyov began to yell in extreme panic. Next, his mouth was transformed into a zipper, and was sealed to prevent him from screaming for help. And finally, an invisibility spell was placed so nopony would panic if they saw him that way. “This is going to be awfully weird if people see me using magic on nothing… Ah-ha!” Twilight said spotting an old, illegible book in the corner of the room. “Perfect! Now I’ll just pretend I’m reading…” And with that thought, Twilight left with the silenced and restrained Solovyov and her book in tow. * * * * * Twilight and Solovyov exited the abandoned building and she could hear Solovyov wince in slight pain. ”Good God… How long has it been since I’ve seen daylight with my own two eyes?” Solovyov thought to himself. ”The better question: where in the world is she taking me? I might as well just make peace with myself; just in case…” Solovyov thought very long and hard about his life and what he has accomplished in the thirty-eight years that was his life: which didn’t go very far personally after he became a physicist. At this point in his life, he had absolutely nobody to call his wife. He had been seeing a woman a couple of years younger than him, but it never worked out in the end. He turned to My Little Pony: Friendship is magic when his one true friend, a German with which he played online games and took foreign language classes that included Russian, introduced the show and all its magic to him. He remembered every time he felt a glimpse of joy every time he saw his profile picture on a social media website they both used. He thought back to the very day he heard the most devastating news he had ever heard: a four-car car crash had occurred on the outskirts of Berlin, Germany that killed nine people in 2021. He thought it was just another fatal accident to feel sorry for, until he read the names of those killed. And at the bottom of the list, his heart felt as if he excreted it from his body. He read the name of his friend Alexander Schäfer. Even though he was from Volgograd, Russia, Solovyov decided to take a week and a half off of work and attend the funeral/memorial service. The trip there and back, including the services took only four days, but he took off more time because he knew he would need to overcome his grief. Before he knew it, Twilight and Solovyov arrived at the prior’s library, which was a tree. ”I will be with you soon, my friend… I swear on it…” Solovyov thought to himself. As the two entered, Twilight placed Solovyov gingerly on a couch beside a wall on the left on the left side of the library. “Please, don’t move. I’ll be… Oh wait,” Twilight caught herself before she finished her sentence. She walked to a remote part of the library which included several cultural books, along with many books on foreign languages and translating spells. She hauled them over next to the couch on which Solovyov was residing, and started to scan every book around her, which was a total of about fifteen books that she thought would help. Twilight was scanning every book; one page at a time until she nearly lost all hope of finding a spell that would help her in this situation. In the final book titled The Magic of Language: a Guide to the Translation of Languages, she found the one spell that she knew immediately would fix her problem by letting a creature that had the ability to speak to learn an entirely new lanugage, albeit it had a long waiting period of one week for the spell to fully take effect. “Spike!” Twilight yelled for her assistance across the library. “Yeah, Twilight?” He responded. “I need you to stay here by my side; I found a spell that will hopefully help us with an issue I’m dealing with.” “And that would be…?” “This,” Twilight said as she removed the invisibility spell from Solovyov, leaving the magical restraints and zippered mouth alone. “We got another one?” Spike asked with annoyance in his voice. “Geez, it’s almost like they know how to get here or something!” “Just stay here by my side in case something goes awry. I’m going to be using a new spell I found in one of my newest books that will hopefully allow this one to speak English. He speaks a language known in the human world as ‘Russian’,” Twilight explained. “Stand back, this spell looks very difficult and it takes about a minute to fully charge. I don’t know exactly what the results will yield.” As she finished explaining to Spike, her horn glowed in her magical light purple aura, signaling Solovyov that she was about to do something. ”It looks like this is… finally the end. When I realized this was Equestria, I thought this would be paradise. Looks like I was wrong. Mom… Dad… Alexander… I’ll be with you soon.” As he finished his thought, the zipper began to dissipate, and he spoke again with a quiet sigh of relief: “Oht-che nah-sh, soo-scheey nah nee-bee-sah-kh. (Our Father, who art in Heaven.) “Da svya-tee-tsah ee-mya tvah-yo. (Hallowed be Thy name.)” The spell charged quicker than Twilight had expected, and Solovyov was cut off by a very bright beam of light being connected to his skull. Suddenly, a variety of foreign words began to fill his mind to its very brim. His mind could take any more, and he passed out. * * * * * ”Gah… Where… Am I?” Solovyov muttered as he felt the ground making contact with his skin. It was earth like he felt when he first came here, but it was cold and had a thin layer of dew covering it. There was also a very light, calm, and constant breeze wind blowing all around him. Solovyov slowly opened his eyes and blinked twice to clear his vision. What he saw around him was nothing that he expected. He thought that he was going to go to Heaven, but he saw nothing but blackness around him; only surrounded in a dim light that barely illuminated the area around him, and seemed to move to wherever he moved. ”Is this… the afterlife? Was everything I believed a lie?” He thought to himself. He tried to speak physical words, but nothing rang from his vocal chords; almost like they were never there. Suddenly, from out of the blackness, he heard many faint whispers that were speaking a foreign language; English, he presumed. ”Great, even is the afterlife I can’t hear my own language!” Solovyov yelled mentally to himself. His frustration was soon overcome with pain as large gusts of wind began to blow towards his skull, the whispers getting louder evermore. As the winds began to blow at hundreds of miles per hour into his hears, he fell to his knees in pain. ”Sweet… Christ! What did I… do to deserve… this?!” As the winds continued to blow, he could see two very faint silhouettes through his squinted eyes walking towards him at a slow pace. ”Mom… Dad?” * * * * * Twilight sighed in relief. “Spike, can you stay here… and watch over the human? I need to go get somebody…” She said in a weary voice. “No problem,” Spike replied. And with that, Twilight left to her destination. Due to the spell depleting nearly all of here energy, she walked slowly; swaying from side to side at times. ”I know Coal’s going to be busy for a while… I need somebody or pony that can keep him calm for after he wakes up…” Her trail of thought was interrupted as she accidently ran into a colt as he was walking by. “Oh, excuse me, miss,” he said as he continued to walk. This event was enough for Twilight to shake herself out of her mental stupor for the most part. She walked to the outskirts of Ponyville, in the complete opposite direction of Coal’s house, and approached a rather small looking house with light yellow siding and a shingled roof. She approached the door on the front porch and gingerly knocked four times. What would have surprised most unprepared ponies didn’t surprise Twilight as Equestria’s second out of three current human residents answered the door. “Can I help you, Twilight?” The man said in a low, soothing voice. “Yes, I… do in fact,” she started. “Another human arrived earlier, and I may need him to stay with you. I cast a spell on him that, well, made him pass out for a week, but should grant him the ability to speak English when he awakens.” “He doesn’t speak English?” He asked in monotone. “And also, are you all right? Your speech is slurred and you seem to be a little bit tipsy.” “Yes, yes, I’m fine.” Twilight said. “Like most of the others, yes. He doesn’t speak English. We were lucky that you were multilingual, and we didn’t have a problem teaching you an entirely new language.” The man thought about his decision. “Okay; I’ll let him stay here for the next week. I’m kind of busy at the moment; could you bring him to my house?” “Yes; not a problem, Alexander. I’ll have him over here in a jiffy.” As Twilight finished her conversation with him, Alexander closed the door and Twilight left back to her home to retrieve Solovyov. After about another half hour, Twilight returned to Alexander’s home with Solovyov in tow with an invisibility spell and no restraints over him. She once again knocked on his front door four times, and he once again answered his door promptly. He invited her in, and she took a seat on the couch next to the right wall of the living room. So…” Alexander said, “Where is he?” “He’s here. I’m just going to place him on the couch, if that’s all right with you.” “Perfectly fine, but I still don’t see any human.” “Here: maybe this will help…” Twilight said as she dropped the invisibility spell that was placed on Solovyov. Alexander’s eyes grew wide with a wide variety of emotions filling him as he saw the human: shock, amazement, worry, sympathy, and many others. Twilight took notice of this and approached Alexander. “Alex, what’s wrong?” Twilight asked with worry present. “Twilight… I-I know this man. Oh Andrei Solovyov… What in the world happened to you?” A/N: Soooo sorry for the long wait again. And listen, I'm going to be filling in plot holes next chapter. Not to mention I tried writing this trying to dispel a minor bout of depression.