//------------------------------//
// Advna In Tera Alina 
// Story: Hc Svnt Equus Pinnis 
// by Masterweaver 
//------------------------------//

	"Wait a minute," Twilight interrupted. "You blacked out?"

Fluttershy nodded, absently holding out a hoof for Lotus to file away at. "Yes. I mean, I did use a lot of harmony magic in one go."

"But that doesn't make sense!" the alicorn protested, her feathers ruffling. "The only time we've ever fainted use harmony magic is the first time we used them against Nightmare Moon, and that was only because our magical signatures were adjusting to them!"

"Well, you see... there wasn't any magic in the other universe."

"...what?"

"No magic," Fluttershy repeated. "In order to fuel a harmony blast, even a partial one, I had to feed my own magic into it. I didn't realize that until after that time on Ganymede, and that didn't happen until over half a year passed for me. All I knew was that harmonizing things took more out of me than it should."

"That... does actually make some sense," Twilight mused. "Assuming you weren't able to absorb ambient magic, your body would have to maintain its own magical system with calorie conversion.... you must have been hungry all the time!"

"Well, until I discovered superfood I was..."

"Superfood?" Pinkie piped. "There's something even better than normal food?!"

"I... wouldn't say better," the yellow pony hedged. "It's packed with more nutrients, yes, but that doesn't make it tastier. Just... more filling. And I wouldn't recommend eating it unless it was absolutely necessary."

"Why would the inhabitants of this other world have food with an unusually high caloric count?" Twilight asked curiously.

"Well you see..." Fluttershy began.

Then she stopped, her eyes dropping to her mechanical leg.

"...actually," she amended, "I think this is one of those things that won't make sense without context."

"So you're going to keep telling us what happened over there?" Rainbow asked.

"Oh, yes."

"Good." She ruffled her feathers. "Cause all this egghead talk was getting boring."

Fluttershy giggled. "Oh, Dash... the egghead talk has only just begun."

The blue pegasus let out a small groan as she continued to tell her tale.





Fluttershy stirred, bleary, a pit in her stomach as she slowly blinked her eyes open. Whatever bed she was on wasn't nearly as soft as her own, and she couldn't hear her animal friends nearby.

"Easy now... you're safe."

The voice was... familiar, but only just. She couldn't quite peg a name onto it....

She looked around as her vision began clear. The room was... white, with blue stripes that ran up the rounded corners and crossed on the ceiling and floor. Light came not just from the fixtures above her, but from small circles embedded regularly in the walls. There seemed to be a small mirror across from the door, but... no, it had strange words and runes running across it, moving even as she watched. The bed she was laying on had a matching one across the room...

...and on the edge of that bed was a strange fox-thing, wearing a uniform.

The memories began to return, the ruined bodies in empty halls, the gray creatures, the wave of Harmony...

"W...what happened?"

"Well, after you did whatever that thing was you did, you fainted. We cleaned up the rest of the manifestations quickly, took you aboard our ship, and brought you to the station."

"Oh." Fluttershy kicked her hoof gently. "Um... thank you, miss...?"

"Sergeant Reinhild Ca'Fo." The fox put on a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "Just doing my job."

"My name's Fluttershy. It's... nice to meet you, Sergeant. I mean, meet you when there isn't danger around," she quickly added. "I mean, we met before, on the ship, but we didn't really talk because of the gray things and--"

"No, I got it." Sergeant Reinhild rolled her shoulders. "Now, I'm supposed to question you before we can let you go. You know, ask how you got on the ship, if you know anything about what TTI was doing there, stuff like that."

Fluttershy nodded. "Um, well... I don't exactly know how I got on the ship. I was watering my garden and then... well, I don't exactly know how to describe it," she admitted. "There was a lot of, um, strangeness. I... I guess it was like one of those gray things, except that it was the entire world that was a gray thing. And when that was over, I was... in a room, on that ship. And I heard you fighting those things and... well, I found a body when I looked around the room and there was glass and broken things everywhere and I didn't know what else to do so I just started following the noise and I collected all the nametags from the corpses I found on the way and I put them in my mane and then I saw you all fighting those things and--"

"Hey." Reinhild had moved across the room, putting a gentle hand on her withers. "It's okay, Fluttershy. You're safe, remember? The manifestations are gone."

"I..." The pegasus felt tears welling up. "I... I don't know why I'm scared now but I'm so scared and I just--"

"It's the adrenaline fading," the fox explained gently. "You had to push back your feelings to survive back there, and now they're coming back full force. It's okay."

Fluttershy sniffed, taking a few deep breaths.

"You going to be alright?"

"...I... I think so." The pegasus blinked the tears away. "I... oh... sweet Celestia, how am I going to get home?"

Reinhild shrugged. "Where are you from?"

"I'm from... Equestria."

The fox tilted her ears. "Equestria, huh? I've never heard of it, but I can run a search through the files." She took her hand off and walked over to the strange rune-mirror, fingers tapping across its surface.

"Oh, thank you, that... that would be nice." Fluttershy managed a small smile. "I guess I was very lucky you went out to the ship."

"Yeah, well, that's what the IRPF does." Reinhild chuckled, still focused on the odd mirror. "MarsCo hires us to keep people safe, and come hell or high water we'll do it."

"Um.... what's MarsCo?"

The fox's hand froze. After a moment, she turned to look at the pegasus, her expression utterly nonplussed.

Fluttershy wilted slightly. "I'm.... I'm sorry, am I asking too many questions? I'll be quiet now..."

Reinhild stared at her for a small while longer. Then she swiped her hand across the mirror, clearing it of all the runes. "I think I need to go get the chief." She walked to the door, pointing a finger at her as it slid open. "You, you stay where you are, I'll be right back."

The door clicked shut behind her, leaving Fluttershy confused and alone.





"Well, that was quite rude of her," Rarity commented dryly. "Leaving you alone after all you'd been through."

Fluttershy gave her a flat look. "Rarity, if you met a pony who had no idea who princess Celestia was, how would you react?"

The white unicorn tapped her chin thoughtfully. "Well... I suppose I would be rather surprised. She's such a fixture in pony culture that to be entirely unaware of her would imply having been raised outside Equestria... oh, I see. I take it this MarsCo was important?"

"Very much so. MarsCo makes everything over there. Well, almost everything. They make the buildings. They make the food. They make the clothes, the tools, the books. They even made the Vectors themselves."

"Vectors?"

"The animal people," Fluttershy explained. "When Reinhild came back with the chief, they sat me down and told me the whole history. Apparently, there was this race called humans that lived somewhere called Earth, and at some point a younger generation got so fed up with the older member's constant feuds that they used their technology to colonize the planet next door--"

"Wait, humans?" Twilight interjected. "Like the ones through the mirror?"

Fluttershy looked at her for a moment. "...You know, I was wondering the same thing, but I don't think so. I saw some pictures of humans on the net and, well... they didn't look like you described. Sort of like them, but not really. Not that many colors. And then I found out about the animal that they called a pony..." She shuddered. "Look, let's just say they might use the same words sometimes, but it doesn't mean the same thing."

"I see..." Twilight nodded. "So, you were telling us about MarsCo?

"Oh, yes. The planet next door was called Mars, so the humans who made the colony named it MarsCo. Then somebody on Earth decided to tweak the genetic code of the animals, and that led to animals that walked on two legs like humans, and the humans on Earth didn't react very well at all to that... so the person who had been fiddling with the animals sent all the data about their experiments to MarsCo, and..."

She rolled a hoof. "Well, Vectors might look a little like animals, but their genetic code is basically human. A little cleaned up, with some animal bits tacked on, and a few extras beside that, but... I have met a skunk who was married to a snake and they had a small bundle of children. MarsCo called them Vectors because they were 'vectoring' the human race down a new path. It was meant to be this grand triumph of science that would lead to a golden age. Then Earth was nuked to death."

"Nuked?" Applejack asked.

"Nuclear bombs. Terrible weapons... the small ones can level cities. And thousands of them were all launched at once..." Fluttershy shook her head. "That was seven hundred years ago. Nowadays, Earth is a wasteland populated by terrifying monsters. Every attempt by the Vectors to look around there has ended in... well, the whole planet is quarantined for a reason."

"My goodness..." Rarity breathed. "That's... horrifying."

"I thought so too. But to the Vectors, it's ancient history. MarsCo saw the death of Earth, the humans that still remained realized their time was almost up, and... well, they did their best to give the Vectors a good future. Of course, a lot of things happened in the seven hundred years after that, but at the time the chief just wanted to give me a basic outline of the world."

"Well, how'd they react when you told them you were an alien?" Rainbow asked.

"Actually," Fluttershy replied with a sly grin, "they didn't think I was an alien. They thought I was an abductee from a simulation Vector colony that TTI had experimented on."

"....what."

"They were totally wrong, of course, but it fit with what they knew. I had strange abilities, didn't know basic history, and believed in crazy things like magical unicorns with wings raising the sun and moon." She shrugged. "A Vector raised in a highly controlled environment with no knowledge of the outside world... apparently it's happened before."

Applejack shook her head. "That's terrifyin' in so many ways, Ah don't even know where ta begin."

"So what happened next?" Pinkie asked, tossing some popcorn into her mouth.

Fluttershy blinked, peering at the popcorn bin. Then she shook her head. "Well, Reinhild was assigned to be my societal adjustment monitor. And we walked out of the station..."





"You know, I never thought I'd be setting up somebody's ledger," Reinhild quipped, her fingers dancing across the rune-covered mirror she had called a smartboard. "Didn't plan on ever having kids."

"Oh, I really appreciate it." Fluttershy blinked as she stepped into the sunlight. "I'm sorry I'm being such a... bother..."

"Eh, it's just paperwork really. Nothing new there..." The fox glanced back at the pegasus. "Fluttershy? You okay there?"

Fluttershy was standing stock still, staring wide eyed at the sky. She'd expected oddly colored clouds. Or a sun or two, or maybe some strange moon. She had not expected the sky to be filled with translucent moving images and scrolling runes.

Reinhild followed her gaze. After a moment, she gave an amused snort. "Right. Simulation-born. Should have figured you'd be surprised by the Lightshow." She waved a hand dismissively. "Right now it's just ads."

"...Ads? As in... as in advertisments?"

"Yep. See, there are satellites around the equator that project holographic images onto particles scattered through the atmosphere--"

"I'm just... astounded that you'd come up with something so amazing and use it for... for business," Fluttershy breathed.

Reinhild stared at her for a few moments.

"...Okay." She held up a finger. "First rule of the real world: Everything is about business. And I do mean everything."

The pegasus managed to tear her gaze away from the Lightshow and give her a sardonic look. "That's a little bit dramatic, don't you think?"

"You were rescued by an IRPF crew, so you're expected to pay a rescue fee. You're standing on a MarsCo brand sidewalk, which means you've agreed to spare a few creds to maintain it. That air you're breathing? Progenitus will tax you to keep their atmospheric scrubbers running." The fox leaned in, her expression sincere and firm. "Everything. Is about business."

Fluttershy blinked. "You... You're completely serious."

"Yep."

"That's... that's just... that doesn't make any sense..."

"I think you'll find it makes plenty of cents. Usually for the corps."

"I--I don't have any money on me," Fluttershy pointed out. "How am I supposed to pay for all this? What happens if I don't pay?"

"That's what the ledger's for." Reinhild held up her smartboard. "It's an automatic stock investment program that trades and sells based on a heuristic algorithm, basically runs itself. You get a small constant income, most of your debts are paid for before you notice them, and almost nobody can hack it."

"...hack?"

The fox rubbed her snout. "Right, no computers.... Hacking is basically finding a way to manipulate digital data to do whatever you want."

Fluttershy looked at the tablet for a moment, before returning her gaze to Reinhild. "...if everything's about business," she asked, "then why are you helping me?"

Reinhild leaned back into a standing position. "Whatever you did on the bioship, it got rid of that manifestation literally half a second before it could slit my throat. You saved my life, and I'm helping you set up yours--that makes us even, in my mind. Plus I'm getting a stipend for every week I help you out," she added.

"...oh." Fluttershy kicked at the ground, her mane dripping over her eyes.

The fox sighed. "...come on, don't be like that. Just cause I'm getting paid for this doesn't mean I don't actually care. Hell, I jumped at the chance when the chief offered. And not just because of the money."

Hopeful eyes looked up at her. "Really?"

"Yeah. I figured you could use a familiar face while you got used to all this."

"Oh." Fluttershy glanced away. "That's... nice, I guess."

"Sure is!" Reinhild tapped a few final things on her smartboard. "And... done. Huh, that was a lot less tedious than I thought it would be." She flipped the thing around. "Now all we need is an eyescan and a handprint. Or hoofprint, in your case."

The pegasus looked at the collection of runes in front of her for a moment. "...I can't read any of this."

"What, seriously?" Reinhild looked at the smartboard herself. "Is the font too small or something?"

"No, I mean... I can't read that language," Fluttershy explained. "It's not Equestrian."

"...right, simulation. A conlang would make sense if they wanted to control you completely..." Reinhild snapped her fingers. "It's decided. Your very first purchase is going to be a neuroplex." She shook her head. "Because I have no idea how to teach somebody to read english..."





"So, a neuroplex is some sort of learning tool, I take it?" Twilight asked.

Fluttershy opened her mouth to reply... then paused, looking at her leg again.

"Fluttershy?" Rarity raised a hoof. "Is... everything alright?"

"...You know, maybe I should just skip ahead to when Reinhild took me to her apartment." The yellow pony smiled faintly. "Neuroplexes aren't really that important, it's just a thing. It's not that important."

Twilight sighed reluctantly. "Well, if you're sure--"

"Whoa, time out!" Rainbow gave the alicorn a look. "You mean you're not interested in some new learning tool all of the sudden?"

"Well, I mean, if she doesn't want to talk about it--"

"You're Twilight Sparkle, egghead extraordinaire! You won a medal in your first race because you read about racing! You became a freaking alicorn when you solved some old spell! You've memorized I don't know how many books on science and stuff!" Rainbow flung her hooves in the air. "I thought you of all ponies would be interested in this!"

Fluttershy coughed. "Actually... that's kind of the reason I didn't want to talk about it."

The purple alicorn frowned. "What?"

"It's not so much that I'm uncomfortable with the neuroplex as..." Fluttershy shifted, awkwardly. "Well... as the thought that you, Twilight, might be a touch too comfortable with the concept."

"OOOOooooo," Pinkie Pie breathed. "Twilight tempted by technology totally transported from territory not traveled to terrible and terrific tendencies? Now you HAVE to tell us what a neuroplex is!"

Fluttershy glanced from Pinkie to Twilight. Her eyes roved over Rainbow and Applejack, both trying to hide mischievous grins, and over to where Rarity was rolling her eyes.

"Well, when you put it like that," she quipped, "I guess I have no choice."

Twilight's ears perked. Rainbow chuckled.

"A neuroplex," Fluttershy began, "is a device that reads and reacts to the brainwaves of the recipient, projecting images and information onto their cornea as they sleep. It's a quick way to pick up new knowledge without having to go to an actual class--although there's obviously a difference between 'knowing' something and 'having experience' with something."

The alicorn was writing constantly in her notepad. "Wow. So how does a neuroplex manage to bypass the eyelid while you sleep?"

Fluttershy coughed. "Actually... this is the part I thought you'd be too comfortable with." She pointed a hoof at her face. "I think it's pretty clear my left eye was replaced--the scars and all--but if you look at my right eye... you see how it's grayer than it used to be? The neuroplex is actually mounted to the inner surface of my iris."

Twilight blinked. She peered over her notepad with a frown. "So... let me get this straight. In order for you to have a neuroplex..."





"...you want to cut open my eye?!"

"Zere vill be a zenzory deading vield on it durin ze whole zurgery," the six-armed gecko vector assured her. "You von't veel a zing."

"That--that's not the point!" Fluttershy protested. "You want to cut open my eye!"

"It's not that big of a deal," Reinhild commented, looking up from her smartboard. "I mean, it's not as simple as a hand, but it's not like you're getting a neural connectivity suite or anything. Most people don't even consider the nueroplex a real implant."

Fluttershy stared at her. "...Reinhild, this doctor is asking me to subject myself to radical surgery for what amounts to, basically, a minor convenience. I could probably find somepony--er, somevector who would be willing to teach me english, even if they wanted to be paid. This isn't even a life threatening issue--this is literally asking me to change my body for no other reason than to make my life easier!"

"Yeah. So?"

The pegasus gaped at her. "...so? I--I can't even--why are you taking this so casually?!"

"Perzonalized zurgical augmentation iz quite commonplace in our zociety," the gecko explained gently. "After all, it iz our bodiez, zo vy not chooze to improve upon zem?"

"You saw the chief's antlers, right?" Reinhild gestured over her head. "Completely holographic. Had them cut off and replaced so he would stop getting caught in doorways."

"And you do not zink zat I vaz born wiv four extra armz, do you?"

"Hell, I had my tail removed during my secondary schooling."

Fluttershy blinked, leaning to look behind the fox. "Um... but you still have a tail."

"Yeah, I was born with two. Great for getting laid, but when I joined the IRPF I wanted to be taken seriously." Reinhild shrugged. "Look, the point is that there's nothing to worry about, this is completely normal, and if you really want I can get you a tutor but that's way expensive and would be coming out of your own ledger. This is a one-time payment of a hundred creds, and you can get that paid off fast."

The pegasus looked from the fox to the gecko, her wings curling and uncurling fretfully. "I... can't believe how casual you are about this. I mean, you're asking me to just... be altered, with no concern about how much this changes."

"Change is the only constant in the universe. So why not make it a change for the better?"

Fluttershy stared at Reinhild.

She shrugged. "I can quote ancient philosophers like anybody else."

After a moment, the pegasus looked at the innocuous device standing in the middle of the room. It looked very much like one of the coin operated tower viewers from Manehattan, if the tower viewer had a squarish profile and was made of black plastic and had clamps around the eyeholes and various small lights on its surface.

"...are you sure I'll be okay?"

"Abzoluty," the gecko assured her. "I have performed ziz operation zouzandz of timez. And it vill only take a minute.

"...okay." Fluttershy took a deep breath... and stepped toward the black device.