My awareness reformed in a moment, and I was tense - what was she doing to my body, that Celestia did this?
Well, we were waiting for a light at a crosswalk. Jack was holding my hand firmly. Why Ja... BUZZ.
I jumped a little as my cell phone went off, full-power vibrate, right against my hip. I checked - it was a text from the electric company telling me my bill payment had been accepted.
Jack guessed, "Rachel? Did, ah, did the buzz shock you back, or are you still Sunset and somehow intuited how to use a cell phone?"
I looked up. "Nope, it's Rachel. I got here just before it went off." Eyeing a stranger next to us, I added, "My hair donor returned me in a big hurry."
By now, I was an old hand at recognizing when a pony was about to speak through me, so I raised a hand as if a sock puppet as Celestia said through me, "Is everything all right? No one in danger?"
Shankar replied, "No, we're fine. What happened?"
Celestia did not reply immediately.
Jack glanced around and added. "Looks pretty safe. The traffic is creeping. It'll be marginally safer once we're in my car."
I felt Celestia about to speak for a second, but not quite. Then, "It appears that you accidentally claimed a portion of my power in the form of hair. My student Sunset Shimmer's new top priority is to reclaim that."
Created mass -> E = m c squared, and this hair weighs maybe a kilo? Could explain the emergency. "Dang, that could have, umm." The bystander was definitely giving me odd looks. Maybe he wouldn't noticed if I hadn't sockpuppeted. But, the walk signal came, and he went; we remained. "... caused a city-wrecking cataclysm, couldn't it?"
"That is precisely what I acted to prevent."
I want this off my head ASAP! "Just let me hand off a potentially alarming thing." I stuffed my cell phone into Rhiannon's purse. ... that could be what triggered this, if Celestia came due to precognition like Cadence displayed. Her realizing what she had done on her own wouldn't have produced that look on her face or asking if we were safe, I think. "Done. And the rest of you all keep her from freaking out, okay? All set." By the time I said it, though, I didn't feel her connected. "And... Sound recording app, Shankar?"
He provided it in moments, and I took the opportunity to dictate Rhiannon's plan before I had a chance to forget it. That done, I took a deep breath and waited. Ten more seconds later, I made my FIFTH trip between home and Equestria. I was a regular commuter. The sensation was like the first time, only this time I found we were on the other side of the mountain.
Princess Celestia was gone by the time I settled in. I looked in the mirror and took a deep breath and suppressed freaking out over knowing my head had a power supply on par with a nuclear reactor stuck to it, and that I wasn't around to do anything about that.
If she does have precognition, nothing can sneak up suddenly. And... she delegated this to a student whom she trusts is capable enough to handle it. And... that isn't maximally reassuring. Given the hurry she was in, she doesn't have a long warning time. Something could gradually go wrong and mess us up.
I heard hoofsteps behind me. I focused into the mirror, and saw a blue-maned stallion approaching behind me. He softly said, "Hey. Everything okay?"
I blinked. "Umm, well... it's complicated..."
Then he nearly kissed me on the cheek; I shied away. "Come on, you can tell me over a bite to eat."
As he turned to go, I finally said, "I'm not Sunset."
He halted cold, and turned back to me. Perplexed, he asked, "Then... who are you?"
"Sunset is taking a test, and it involves being body-swapped into my body, in a different dimension."
Blinks. "Umm. What? You're..." I repeated myself, and he slowly said, "Oh-kay! Suddenly my orders make sense!"
My stomach grumbled, and I said, "So, we're on for dinner anyway?"
He nodded and, grinning, declared. "Flash Sentry, cadet of the Royal Guard, at your service." He led me down the hall. "So. This is weird, even for you. Her. What's your name?"
"Rachel. Do you, like, change your name when you grow up, or were you Flash Sentry from when you were a kid?"
"Ah... the second."
"Huh." This was partly at our stepping outside. The small palace's side entrance faced an unmistakably wattle-and-daub building... selling dirigibles with lots of shiny brass, and small radar dishes with oversized electrodes attached for no obvious reason. "So steampunk! I didn't see that coming."
He asked some basic questions about what that was, and then more generally was going on, and I gave equally basic answers. Then we arrived at the restaurant.
"Hay-burgers."
He looked to me in mild alarm. "You want something a bit more up-scale?"
"No, this is fine. Just, the idea. It's like, umm, something my mom would have made when she was on her experimental foods kick, except more so. Humans can't digest grass, and I don't think drying it out would help. But I'm presently in charge of a stomach that can, so sure."
"What are humans like?"
The waitress skated up alongside the table. "Yer usuals?"
Flash nodded, but, noting that she had two pencils tucked in her pad, I added, "Can I borrow a pencil?"
She levitated it over. Then started the hard work of answering his question verbally while attempting to draw one of us, or anything at all, on my napkin.
Lyra used her mouth. Maybe that would work best. But she knew how to do it already. Hooves seem ill-suited. Levitation would probably be the best way, but I have even less idea how to... I interrupted my halting description to ask, "I know you're a pegasus, not a unicorn, but do you happen to know how I can levitate this pencil?"
He didn't know, so I just closed my eyes and willed it to be in places. I figure that holding it to particular places would not send it flying. Instead, nothing happened. So, I moved on to imagining that the horn's magic was just my hand, and I could grab the pencil. I closed my eyes to help visualizing the hand.
I felt like something was happening, and when I opened my eyes, I found that I was levitating the pencil. In short order, I drew the points of a tiny square. "Well, that was... easier than I expected."
Of course, having said that, I proceeded to ruin the napkin with failures. And the next. I began to reconsider attempting to repeat my cross-dimensional napkin portrait feat when I suddenly got the hang of it and dashed off a first-pass body layout sketch.
I heard a cry of surprise to my side, and looked. A colt was pointing at my butt. "Her cutie mark just changed!" he shouted.
I looked down. I hadn't noted the mark before, but HOLY SHIT I'M NAKED the new one was IN PUBLIC a human-form posing-doll AAAAAH.
"Are you okay?"
I took a deep breath and began hacking:
let A = "This is normal. No one else notices or cares. It's not my body anyway. The one whose body it is actually alieves the previous statements, so I might as well, too."
while ( freaked out ) think ( A ).
"I will be."
I let that self-hack run until I regained control of the pencil, whereupon I began adding details. Once I was focused, I stopped freaking out.
"So you have the head of a sphinx?" Flash was looking at the napkin.
"Umm. Sure, if you want to take it that way. Head of a sphinx, upper body of a minotaur, and legs of a, umm..."
"Ape? Actually, it looks like ape all around, except the details on the head."
"Yes! Ape is it. We actually are a kind of ape. I'm not sure why I didn't think to suggest it."
Then, the food came. I set down the pencil and was about to levitate the food when I realized that Flash was eating with his hooves. My mind came to a screeching halt. How can he do that? Like, he walks on those. And also, HOW?
I lifted my front hooves and looked carefully, flexing everything I could. There wasn't much to work with. I leaned in and looked at his grip on the sandwich. It didn't make physical sense. He had gripped it, kind of, but it should have slipped away.
He obliviously continued eating as I watched his forehooves from about 3 inches away.
And then, a piece of hay slipped off the burger and swung straight to his hoof, like a magnet. I relaxed back into my seat. Ah. A short-ranged inward-sucking force field. He can presumably turn it off, since it didn't pick up all the sand on the ground. And I suppose I have it, too.
I experimented with my hooves, and felt very, very strange. My body was wrong. Weird that it took that long to kick in. Yup, this isn't my body, relax, I'll get the right one back soon. Go back to pretending it's a VR video game.
That... worked. And it got me thinking. It really is just VR, isn't it? If she kills my body, then I die but she just gets booted. Which means, my brain there is doing my thinking? Probably? I wonder what happens if she gets me drunk. Or if only one of us falls asleep.
With that thought, I realized that if I was hungry, she might be the one who gets lightheaded, so in the interests of my survival I ought to do something about that. I levitated the burger up with some difficulty (it was much larger than a pencil), and took a big bite. It tasted... very, very unfamiliar. Connections gradually grew. I imagined the swapping spell going and trying to figure out what analogues were between the worlds, and wiring my brain into her peripheral nervous system like a 1940's telephone switchboard.
So, after a minute, I decided I kind of recognized celery, corn, and horseradish, but I wasn't entirely sure. It certainly felt spicy, but maybe it was because my mouth felt a little bit like it was recovering from having fallen asleep. I could see why Lyra had been so raptured with her first wings. She might have been similarly raptured to eat tofu under those circumstances.
Flash saw I was done (whoa, I'm done. Guess I was hungry after all, despite having just subjectively eaten lunch), and handled the check. We walked around the mountainside town, looked at the sights, and so forth. It would have been a really nice date, if we were dating.
Eventually the grand tour ended, and we returned to the small palace.
He said, "Well, that was surprisingly... straightforward. If you were Sunset Shimmer, something probably would have caught on fire by now."
"Drama queen?"
"Oh, no, she hates drama."
So, drama queen. Or... magical bad luck? Is that a thing?
Oh. "I should be trying to learn everything I can! This isn't just Rhiannon's job!!"
Flash belly-laughed. "Are you sure you're not Sunset?"
"This is the most interesting - important - thing I've ever been involved with, and I can't just drift through it! How should I find out everything I can?"
"About..."
"Magic. Umm, especially the way magic might work in my world. We, ah, don't really have much at all, I think."
"I'd check the library for that."
"All right, off to... no, wait. I should coordinate with Rhiannon. How do we get to the School for Gifted Unicorns? Or communicate with someone there?"
He considered. "From here? Best to fly." My face fell, until I realized he wasn't saying it wasn't going to happen - it was an offer. This became clearer as he said, "We can use a chariot."
He gestured up with a hoof, and I spotted a chariot being pulled by a pegasus, and supported by nothing in particular. This looked so wrong, I had to remind myself that I had been levitating things continuously for the past hour or so (I hadn't let go of the napkins).
So off we went to the landing platform, and Flash got ready. As I braced myself, I wondered whether getting into a car must have been similarly scary. Then I looked forward and it felt like I had my face in Flash's butt. OMG I'M STILL NAKED AND NOW I'M STANDING UP AND ANYONE CAN SEE... what... is... totally... ordinary... around... here. Deep breath time, Rachel. And also, holy crow - I can't see his actual package, but I can see how long the slit for it is. I can also see why Lyra was chuckling at our condoms.
And then we were off. It was a good thing Flash didn't turn around to take a look at me, or he would have seen me ungracefully wrapping my forelegs around the front edge of the chariot. Which put me in an even better place to look straight down, since I wasn't going to stare forward.
After a moment, that plan changed. Let's not look down, shall we? For one thing, I'd freak out even harder. And for another, I'd probably poke him in the butt with my horn, and even if that didn't endanger us, it would be extremely embarrassing. Hmm. Those are some nice clouds and blue sky up there, aren't they?
I managed to relax a bit as we came in for a landing a mere minute later.
Fortunately, Flash knew where the school was, and once there I was able to ask around and find out where Lyra/Rhiannon was - the library. And further-fortunately, the librarian knew where all of the exchange students were, as they needed frequent help.
When I spotted her, the differences from how Lyra had carried herself were just as striking as the differences had been in Rhiannon's body. Rhiannon was focused, concerned, and frustrated. So very herself. She was poring over a book, others strewn across the large table she'd claimed. I stood next to her, and she turned her head. A few blinks, and she asked, "Rachel, what are you doing here, and how did you get your own cutie mark?"
Wh... Ah. That's how she could tell. "Waiting for the pony I switched with to fix up the mess between Lyra and Shankar. And I drew some humans." I set the napkins down on the table.
She blinked. "It didn't even occur to me that I could replace mine. Exchange students normally don't. Might help. Probably want to try doing a reading, or something."
"Sooo... I was wondering if you wanted a hand carting masses of useful information back home. Anything I could memorize or otherwise transport... whatever."
She stared at me and smiled. It looked natural on Lyra's face. After about four seconds that seemed a good bit longer, she said, "That's really nice of you. Unfortunately... I got nothing. I've been here for what, a day? I don't know what I might need help remembering later. Anything you'd bring would be random, with no context. If you could come on the last day, that would be golden. As it stands, I have no idea how to use it."
Sigh.
"Thank you." she added. "How are things with Gwyneth?"
"Bad. She denies the existence of magic. What's the deal with that?"
Rhiannon's face fell. "Oh." After five seconds, she said, "I think she tried this before, and it didn't work. No one responded."
"This - as in, applying to an exchange program?"
"Yes - she's where I got it. She might have tried to apply in Latin or Celtic or something, rather than the language that she knows best. And if she got the feeling of certainty that comes with its working, and then nothing happened?"
"Or, if someone out there replied with a feeling of 'this is nonsense'?"
"Yeah."
It's a theory. "Any ideas on bringing her around?"
"It all depends on energy. I completely blew my stash on this, but just being here... it's like I saved up four years for a postage stamp and now I have a thousand dollar per diem."
"Lyra said she was all charged up after she stood on the third rail. Also, Sunset was sent to my body partly to recover energy that Princess Celestia left behind by accident."
"Yeah, we don't want hers - not that there's anything wrong with it, but it's not ours. But if Lyra can work something out that would be good. Just, I wonder... wait, third rail? I guess that amulet got upgraded. I made it to mitigate touching an electrical socket, not thousands or millions or whatever third rails carry, and I don't think it would have absorbed energy. That... could be useful. Anyway, I never kept energy in me. I'm not sure how to absorb it. And I'd rather not that you mess around with my blood with experiments."
As she pondered, I backed off, looking around the room at the various titles for a while, and then Sunset suddenly announced, "All done."
Flash suddenly looked at me. "Sunset?"
I suppressed her startled reaction of 'Flash?' and asked, "Yes. Any caveats, advisories, or other warnings we need to be aware of, Sunset?"
A pause. "Don't play around with lightning again. That should do it."
Rhiannon said, "Really? You're all done? My method would have required them to spend all of tomorrow apart, at the very least."
I could imagine an almost Malfoy-ian smirk on my own lips as she replied, "With the power I had to hoof? It was so easy that I think it ruined the test. I... could really get used to this."
Rhiannon suddenly said, "How did you use magic in human form?"
There was a pause, and Sunset said, "I just did it like usual? It was a bit awkward. I don't know how to describe it."
A deep breath, a last look around, and I said, "All right. So, how do we get back?"
Sunset said, "I just end the sp..."
My return was again the abrupt yank, and I was in the back seat of Jack's car, between Lyra and Shankar. We were in a parking lot.
"Hey all. So... what did I miss?"
The three of them pursed their lips, each hesitant to be the first one to say it. A further glance around showed that the parking lot was surrounded by a highway - we were on the segment of route 22 with stores in the median.
A thought struck me and I unbuckled my belt and yanked my pants down a notch. A moment later, I glanced down... and found the top half of a red and yellow sun peeking above my pants as it faded away.
"Whoa." Lyra, Shankar and I said in unison. Jack craned his neck and said, "What? What?"
As it vanished, there was a little flash of light and the posing doll appeared in its place.
Lyra squealed. "You got a cutie mark! What's the rest of it?"
I pulled my pants up. "Later."
As Jack asked and Lyra explained cutie marks, I realized I felt utterly exhausted. I moved to gather my hair up, and... "Did she get me a haircut? This is shorter than I remember."
Shankar said, "Oh, right. Jack?"
Jack nodded and said, "Mind if we hit a store on the way home to get a charged fire extinguisher?"
And with that, my chances of falling asleep were pretty shot. Seriously? I should have expected it. Her boyfriend says she can't get through a date without setting something on fire.
But since the thaumonuclear pilla (that play on words worked better in my head) on the back of my head were gone, I was able to calm once more and drifted off.