I sat down at the dinner table, a bowl of beef bark stew in front of me. The stew was accompanied by a glass of water, and a small salad. This wasn't my first time eating this meal, this was actually something we liked from a few weeks ago, and saved for later, and cornucopia-ed today for dinner. Man I love the cornucopia spell, it's an ingeniously clever solution to an impossibly hard problem. Just pop a spell on something, and now (for a whole hour) any-pony can come pick up a copy! And like that, scarcity died.
... Well, in here at least. Mom had brought the pony pad over to the table, with her while she ate. I guessed (from experience) that her pony avatar was now mimicking her movements. It'll be funny when she notices. We ate, and I reveled, in the story of our epic fight.
"So, how was the monster?" Star had asked.
"Let me tell you a tale..." I began. Leaf rolled her eyes in a "here we go again" way. "I... actually, got nothing. I shot a laser at it, and it died." I said, anticlimactically. Everyone at the table started laughing. "Yeaaah... it wasn't too heroic. It was actually a weak monster." I admitted. They laughed some more, then, there was a knock on the door.
Mom got up from the table (her pony's movements telling us as much) and she walked (at least in our world) to the crystal in the living room, brought it back to the kitchen, and disappeared. The crystal glowed, and projected a screen on the wall. We saw the view from mom's pony pad.
"Why'd she pick up the crystal?" I asked nobody.
"Did you find the kids?" Dad's voice drifted from the crystal. "Are they alright?"
"Yes... they're fine." Mom said, concerned.
"But?" Dad implied that he knew there was more.
"That's the complicated part." Mom said, her voice getting closer.
"Where are they?" Dad asked, from behind the pony pad's camera. The pad was picked up, and held so that the back was to Dad. We could see Mom's worried face.
"Isn't that... one of those video games the kids play?" Dad asked.
"In a way... it is the kids..." Mom said. Dad was utterly lost.
"What? What dose that mean?" He asked.
"Remember that announcement yesterday? The one on the news?"
"You mean the one about..." He paused. "... They didn't. They didn't! You didn't let them!" He began, realizing what had happened.
"I didn't! They snuck out and..." Mom began.
"But she said they don't offer it in America!" Dad wailed.
"They got on a plane some how..." Mom explained. She put the pad down on the table so that it could see both of them. By now, Leaf and I had gotten up and stood where they could see us better.
"Hi." I croaked.
"Dad..." Leaf said, weakly.
"So... you did it? That's you... isn't it?" He asked, deflated. We nodded.
"Yes, it's us." I said, finding new confidence. I'd done this once, I can do it again.
Dad was pretty tech savvy, so he knew the ins and outs of what had happened. Boy was he mad at first, it took Mom shouting him for him to shut up and let us explain. He asked us a few things (probably to prove who we were was us). It took him a while to wrap his mind around that we had been here for a month, crammed into the span of a few hours. After that, we finally made him believe who we were.
"One last question," Dad said. "Who's Star? Is she like your girlfriend, or mate, or whatever you call it in there?"
"What, no!" I said, starting the chain of sputtering negatives (things such as: "that's crazy!" and, "not at all!"). Celsestia am I blushing right now. "... I mean, not that that would be a bad thing or anything, I mean she's a cute mare and all..." I continued Sputtering. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Star streaming out the same kind of garbage I was, blushing probably as hard, for probably as long... Probably.
"I'm just going to shut up now." We both said at the same time, concluding the flow of words. We both looked at the floor, redder than tomatoes, our ears splayed out on our heads.
"Awww... Aren't they just the cutest with their ears like that!" Mom cooed. I felt my face get on an elevator and hit the button for a few shades deeper in the color red department. Everyone started laughing, except us, if course. We just shrunk into the tiniest ball we could. I even curled my tail in front of my face to hide my shame.
"TELEPORT!" I shouted, teleporting to the library... the golden oaks library... on the other side of town... I'm gonna let this die down before I come back.