//------------------------------//
// Part Two: Confessions of a Galgonquan 
// Story: The Two(ish) Doctors 
// by The Minister of Scones 
//------------------------------//

Derpy still remembered the first time she had met the Doctor. In fact, it was one of her most treasured memories, one of those that you recall whenever you feel a little down-hearted, and aren't sure why. It had been around a week before Twilight Sparkle and Nightmare Moon had concurrently shown up, and the one had ended up defeated by the other.
She had been in the middle of her morning deliveries, and trying to deliver a letter to, as she called her, The Mare at Number 3. The difficult thing about The Mare at Number 3 was that she owned and, more to the point, kept in her front garden, a particularly vicious pit-bull terrier, with enormous teeth and a fondness for pegasus-a-la-raw. Being quite a large dog, it had no problem with self-consciousness, and therefore expressed this fondness at every opportunity, which, unfortunately for Derpy, was every morning at around 7 'O clock, six days a week.
Derpy would be the first to admit that she was not a technically-minded mare. At school, her woodwork grades had been outshone by those of a colt with three legs, and her every metalwork lesson had ended in total disaster, and twice with the speedy evacuation of the school. Her teacher had, to her dismay, once written on her report 'Give her the job and she'll finish the tools'. Despite these limitations, every weekend she would develop some new mechanical means of getting the letters to the letterbox (which was, as Derpy's typical luck would have it, directly next to the door – that is, past the terrier), which she would then spend the week testing.*
This week, her apparatus of choice was a long wooden pole, attached to whose end was a string, to which was further attached the letter. This, she thought, she could stretch out over the garden, manoeuvring the letter into the mailbox without actually going through the gate. The problem of getting the letter off the string once it was in the letterbox hadn't actually crossed her mind yet, and was one she never actually encountered, for as soon as the letter had reached the half-way point, the pit-bull decided that it was now or never if he was going to get his pegasus, scampered forward, and seized the letter in his teeth.
There is a code of honour among mail-ponies that no letter shall go undelivered, and Derpy was well aware that partial digestion by pit-bull was likely to severely hamper her chances of sticking to this code. So she pulled. The dog, understandably enough, pulled back.** In other circumstances, this cheerful tug of war might have lasted a little longer, but, alas, the strain proved rather too much for the string, which, fed up with the whole affair, snapped, throwing Derpy backwards and into the forelegs of, as the strange fellow later introduced himself, the Doctor.
“Oof!” he said, quite understandably, as he caught her rather neatly.
“Eeep!” she said, leaping out of his grasp and onto all-fours… at least, that was what she was hoping to do, except that two of the four slipped out from under her, causing her to topple, nastily.
“I say, are you alright?” The Doctor helped her to her hooves, smiling kindly.
“Er, yeah, I guess...”
“What in the world were you doing?”
A disorinented Derpy attempted to mime using a wooden pole to get a letter past a dog, over a garden and into a letterbox, and said letter being unexpectedly eaten by said dog. Miraculously, the Doctor seemed to grasp the idea.
“Right,” he muttered, narrowing his eyes. Before Derpy could stop him, he had hurled himself over the fence and into the garden, and had begun a wrestling match with the surprised pit-bull. With a yelp, it found itself suspended by its tail over the lawn, a strange brown pony – who smelled, he thought, decidedly off – giving it a hefty whack on the spine. The dog coughed, and the letter flew out of its mouth onto the grass. The Doctor set down the dog, which scampered off into its kennel, slamming the door behind it.
As Derpy pondered the logistics of putting a door on a dog-kennel, the Doctor posted the letter, and returned to her side.
“Oh, thank you!” she gushed.
“It was nothing, my dear.”
Derpy shook her head violently, bringing the Doctor sharply into focus for a few seconds. It was then that she fell madly in love with him.

She didn't realise this at first, of course. One doesn't always. She was, however, acutely aware of a desire to spend more time with the mysterious stallion, and, to her surprise, he seemed to find the idea quite agreeable. Within a few days in each other's company, they were firm friends. The Doctor seemed fascinated by every aspect of Ponyville life, always taking note of interesting behaviours, asking questions about the local traditions.
For her part, she was anxious to find out more about him – and yet he seemed to withdraw himself whenever she asked him about his past, becoming strangely muted, and taking every chance to change the subject. Eventually she learned to accept that he didn't want discuss his origins, and stopped trying. “After all,” she reasoned, “if he doesn't want to talk about it, there must be a reason for it.” 
Now, she would pop in to see the Doctor at every chance she got, always eager to find out about his latest experiments, even though she didn't always entirely understand them. He had bought a spacious house almost immediately he had arrived in town, and made a modest living as a mechanic and repair-pony. It was he who had developed a new, super-accurate hour-glass that measured time to the tenth of a second, and yet required no magic in its construction. This had made him rather popular with the mayor, who had appointed him Ponyville's official time-turner, a post reserved for only the most knowledgeable and experienced engineers. In essence, his task was to ensure that each and every clock in town was running accurately, never too quickly, never too slowly, telling the time for Ponyville.
In all this time, Derpy had never once confessed her love for him, being sure that it would go unreciprocated.

Bearing all this in mind, the reader will perhaps understand why, upon discovering his true origins, Derpy was a little shocked, to say the least.
“I'm not of your world,” he explained. “I was born in another star-system altogether. I'm an alien.”
“I… what?” Derpy's ears flopped down, she stared at the Doctor wide-eyed, pleading that this was all a joke; but the look in the Doctor's eyes was totally serious.
“I came here on a brief reconnaissance mission. You know, observe behaviour, gather specimens, that sort of thing. My race are always keen to learn.”
“Doc, I don't...”
“Only thing is, I got a bit stuck here. There's a splinter group of the Galgonquans – that's my race – called the Wirdegens. They refuse to just observe, want to use our knowledge to seize power… and they decided to try and take some researchers prisoner.” He paused to let Derpy speak, but she was obviously too shocked: she was simply staring at the Doctor in disbelief. He decided to press on. “Their idea was to hold us hostage in return for secrets from our great library – they don't have access to it, you see. Shortly after arriving in Canterlot, I discovered that a number of Wirdegens had infiltrated the city and were hunting for me. I realised that if I didn't use any Galgonquan technology they wouldn't be able to track me, so I destroyed all my equipment and fled to Ponyville. They don't know what I look like, so they've never found me.”
“But-” Derpy swallowed, trying to regain control of her emotions, “why didn't you just go back to your world?”
“There was a ship in orbit, cloaked from view. If I had used my portable matter-transmitter to return there, the Wirdegens would have found the ship and captured it and me. I've no other way of getting home. My planet has had no word from me for years, so they've probably given me up for dead...”
“Oh, I...” Derpy rushed forward and hugged the Doctor tightly. “You poor thing.”
“Steady there, my dear. I'm quite happy here. But the real Doctor turning up does put a spanner in the works.”
“R- real Doctor?”
“Ah, yes, well, I should have said; this isn't exactly my true form.”
“So… you're not a real pony?”
“No, not really. You see, when we hatch, we vaguely resemble you ponies, but with fewer features, and… purpler. Once we've completed our final test, we ascend to the next form: just pure energy, with sentience and being, and powers you can't imagine...”
“But you look just like a normal pony,” protested Derpy, who wasn't taking in quite as much as the 'Doctor' hoped.
“That's the test. We're sent to Equestria – we like Equestria, it's normally quite safe – and are allowed to choose disguises. I chose the body of the Doctor. We have many records of him, popping up all over this planet, always saving the day, righting wrongs, that sort of thing; but we don't know who he is, or how he's lived so long. 'Doctor' seems to be some sort of cult title, actually, because there are lots of different ponies calling themselves that. They've always been heroes of mine, so when I got the chance I picked my favourite of the Doctors.”
Derpy sat down with a thump. All these revelations had stunned her into silence. The Doctor stood watching her, waiting for a reaction. Eventually, she spoke, slowly and carefully, as though choosing her words even as she said them: “So, you're not the Doctor.”
“No. My real name is Tarrant.”
“And all this time you let me believe that you were him...”
“Well, I was trying to convince myself, to be honest. It took me ages to get the accent right. All you Equestrians sound very similar to the Galgonquan ear.”
“All this time you've been lying to me...”
“Afraid so.”
“All this time I thought I lov… I thought you were my friend, and now you tell me you were lying… and you don't even think to apologise?”
“Oh, whoops!" The idea clearly hadn't even crossed his mind. "I forgot. Look, Derpy, I'm most awfully...”
But it was too late. Tears streaming down her face, the wall-eyed pegasus had dashed out of the door, slamming it behind her.





“And so, Miss, ah, Roseluck, what exactly is your relation to this 'Doc'?” The Doctor was standing, clipboard in hoof, before a pale-yellow earth-mare with a raspberry-red mane, who, to his annoyance, kept on breaking off their conversation to giggle to herself.
“Oh, call me Rose.” She giggled again. The Doctor winced.
“Very well, Miss Rose. If you wish. Now, if you could…?”
“Oh, yeah! He he! Well, I dunno, we just hang around together sometimes if Derpy's not around. I guess you could say I'm his back-up friend, really.”
“So what do you know about him?”
“Oh, not much, really. He just came to Ponyville a few years ago, fits right in. I think he's a mechanic, or something.”
“Nothing else?”
“Sorry.”
“I see. Well, thank you, my friends,” said the Doctor, nodding to Rose and her fellow flower-stall attendants, “you've been almost helpful… I mean, you've all been most helpful.”
All three of them giggled.

“Beetles!” cursed the Doctor under his breath, as he left the three to their flower-arranging. Nopony seemed to know anything about the other Doctor apart from what he'd learned from Roseluck. Only Mayor Mare (Was that really her name?) had known any more, telling him all about some of the gadgets the Doctor had developed: nothing particularly advanced, but certainly impressive given the age in which he lived and the time over which he seemed to have developed them.
“What I need,” announced the Doctor to no one in particular, “is to find Derpy again. If only hadn't scared her off like that. Perhaps I should just learn to be nicer...” He broke off abruptly, noticing that a number of ponies had started following him, and were casting him expectant glances. “What?” he demanded, turning to face them. Then realisation dawned. “Look, I'm not about to burst into song, you know. I'm not in the habit of it. I just like to talk out loud.”
Once the disappointed crowd had dispersed, the Doctor decided to turn his attention to finding Derpy. “Right. From what I've heard, my best bet would be to follow whatever trails of destruction I can find. Then if I can just...”
And at that moment, Derpy, blind with tears, ran straight into him.

*Some smart-alec reader is doubtless thinking at this moment “Well, why didn't she just fly over?” to which the only answer must be “Have you ever seen Derpy flying?” When she tried this, she would almost invariably fly into the wall of the house, plummet to the ground, and then be set upon by the dog. Nasty.
**Living as she did in an entirely vegetarian society that had never felt the need to develop fishing-rods, the irony of this situation was entirely lost on Derpy. It's quite fortunate that this story is going to be read by humans, who have a better chance of appreciating it.