Lyra Heartstrings - 5th of Megan 17 EoH - Mid AfternoonLyra Heartstrings - 5th of Megan 17 EoH - Mid Afternoon
Multiverse Location: The Prime, Equis #0B
“Yeah, no,” I said decisively. “You talk now!”
Lyra nodded firmly. “Yeah! What the buck, dad? You don’t just drop a bucking megaspell like that and then say ‘Let’s walk for twenty minutes then I’ll tell you more.’!”
The black stallion’s ears drooped in embarrassment. He opened his mouth to reply but was instantly cut off by a swarm of questions from Lyra’s friends. His face went from embarrassed but happy directly to outright panic as the impossible to penetrate wall of questions blasted him square in the face.
The question storm was like throwing a nutrient brick into a pack of gamma rats. Each individual word lost and distorted beyond recognition as all words present in the swarm surged and rolled over one another, making understanding or even recognising even a single one as a word truly impossible. And it went on for at least three straight minutes.
Three minutes of sitting in stunned awe for the first possible moment of silence, with myself, my counterpart, and her father completely silent. Lyra and I shared a look, silently conveying the same question to each other. A question I asked aloud the second the first pause in the storm came along.
“Hey! Shouldn’t she and I be the ones asking the questions?” I asked.
“Well, yeah,” the cream colored mare answered. “But I’m her wife so I think I get to ask some too!”
The white and blue mare nodded, adjusting her glasses with a pulse of magic. “And when it comes to ‘oh hey you may have a long lost interspecies sister’, I’m pretty sure your best friends should be in the loop,” she said.
Lyra nodded. “All good points. Including human me’s. But I have an important one that I need to ask now,” Lyra said before turning to her dad. “How do you know any of this information is legitimate?”
“Good question,” I said.
Her dad took a deep breath, clearly trying to calm himself. What spooked him like that?
“I said I learned it from a seer, didn’t I?” He asked.
“How did you afford one?” Lyra asked suspiciously. “I mean, like, the mine wasn’t doing so well when I left home.”
“I turned it around,” he answered simply. “Without your mother’s little mind games, and once I’d gotten over her leaving it was fairly easy to get everything running smoothly again. Just took a few years hard work. I still couldn’t afford the best seer, but I did get a decent one’s services, and I also had another double check the first’s results.”
“Lost here… From a non-magical civilization,” I said quickly, not wanting to get too far behind in the conversation.
The black stallion nodded. “Right. Sorry. A Seer is a mage who specializes in viewing the past. You know, the opposite of a diviner. Those who don’t work for law enforcement can be hired provided you have enough money… It’s a difficult skill to master. Now, to be fair, their accuracy isn’t the best. But it is better than a diviner’s foresight. That’s why you get another to confirm the first reading of history. Do you understand?”
“Sort of,” I answered frowning slightly. “So like, you just get them to tell you things verbally? Or what?”
“Oh no! No, not at all. If they do just tell you some shit then you’ve been ripped off by a con artist,” Lyra insisted firmly. “I’ve gone to a few before for help with work assignments. Their spell puts you right in the middle of a full replica of what happened… But it’s not like really being there. Colors can be wrong, it might be just all shades of gray. Shapes can be distorted. The sounds of things can be off… It’s a spell that’s more art the science.”
Oh. Well shit. That was pretty damn impressive. “They can construct crude replicas of past events as AR projections,” I said to myself. “That’s pretty cool.”
“Yes, and the picture is clearer if you have objects which were there at the time,” Jack added. “That’s why the guard employs most of them. Even terribly degraded scrying crystal records are better than only logic, detective work, and sketchy testimonies.
“And in this case, while everything was a little hard to see, I did see enough to know the truth. But I didn’t come and get you a few months ago, did I, Lyra? No. I waited until someone who had physically verified that yes, a human named Lyra exists in this reality, was able to get her here. I waited to get actual confirmation. Everything is most definitely true.
“Which is why we shouldn’t discuss this in public. I have a nice dinner already paid for… And it could go bad. I um, I really honestly couldn’t find out if you still eat pony food, Ly. So I stopped by a blood bank to have everything available. I would rather not waste all that money if the ice melts…”
“Blood bank?” I asked curiously.
Everypony besides Jackrock and I turned to face the white mare with the blue mane. “Your turn, Vinyl,” he said flatly.
Vinyl nodded. “Yep, I remember. Octy’s next. Mister Heartstrings, we can eat normal food if we want to. Thank you for being considerate, I haven't eaten this week yet. So you know, that’s really cool of you.
“Right, Lyra who is possibly our Lyra’s sister…” She paused for a second to take a deep breath then quickly rambled. “So my dad happens to be the first vampire because of an accident in mage’s college thousand of years ago. I’m his like, actual normal kid. You know, made by banging a mare not by biting somepony. So I grew up from day one as a vamp.
“Then I meet Octy, and we get married. I don't want to out live her, so I turn her. Like you do. She didn’t grow up a vampire, which means she should have stayed in Hollow shades for a few months to get used to everything. But… Yeah… I bucked up there and we went back home. Then a week later we’re having a party, playing some Twister, and Bonbon beats Octy hooves down and goes ‘Ha! Bite me.’ as a victory cry. So Octy did. Because that's what young vamps do. They have poor impulse control.
“Then later that night Bonbon bit our Lyra in her sleep. Personally I think they were boning and the 'sleep' thing is a means to cover up their kinks which won't work because we all know, we've gone camping before and they probably haven't connected the fact that I can't get drunk but fake being drunk to look normal with our friendship's history."
I noticed both the cream colored mare and Lyra’s ears stand up as they both gave Vinyl an alarmed stare of disbelief.
"Oh my Celestia, she's right! She doesn't get drunk!" The cream mare groaned.
Vinyl gave them both a grin. "Sorry, been wanting to point that out to them for a while. Anyways, so I took everypony besides Meep and Cole back to my dad’s for a few months to get their heads straight. Because they’re not vampires, but the rest of us are. Also, we have to explain this a lot. Like, a lot a lot. So please don't ask again. Okay?”
“That seems like a boring enough explanation for a group of six vampires that happen to be friends to be true,” I decided.
“Four,” Lyra corrected. “Cole’s half windigo and Meep’s a changeling. Well, no, wait… That makes them kind of vampires sort of.”
Huh. I’d never thought about anyone being a changeling. I wonder how many people actually were changelings? It had to be a decently high percentage. Also, the fuck is a windigo?
The white and pink mare nodded sagely. “True. I eat emotions, she eats heat… We’re kinda like vampires. A bit. But yeah. None of us are normal ponies. It was pretty hilarious when we- Uh, look, long funny story. But we’re getting off track.”
And no info on what a windigo is. Fuck! I REALLY needed some sort of manual for this world. Badly. Very badly.
“Right. We are,” Jack said firmly. “So if everyone would kindly follow me to the Royal Oats, I’ll explain everything.”
“Well… He does have proof. And this will be an awkward conversation,” I said to the other me.
Or possibly my sister.
She nodded. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
It suddenly occurred to me that this could take a while. I should let Shy know not to worry.
“One second,” I said flipping the VM’s cover open and pressing the key to bring up the HUD. “I should tell my marefriend I’ll be back late. I can’t read your language, does this have a radio?”
“Uh, yeah,” Vinyl said, pressing a button for me. “Who is she? This is the list of people it knows how to ca- Oh. So like, you never linked any other messengers to this. It’s got the default stuff only.”
That meant it would call Sky’s tech support! Or him directly, since it was a prototype.
“Which one says ‘Sky’?” I asked.
She pressed another button for me. The VM hummed a few times then Sky’s voice asked, “Hello?”
“Hey Sky, It’s Lyra. The one with the feet,” I said awkwardly. “Sooo I ran into myself. And maybe my dad. I’m going to be late, can you tell Shy not to worry?”
“Will do. Good luck with yoursel- Wait, your dad?!” Sky asked.
“I’ll tell you later,” I informed closing the cover.
At that point, the reality of the situation came crashing down on me. I had an alien from the future insisting they were my dad, and I’d never known my dad. Like, at all. Nor had my grandparents. It was entirely possible that he could be my dad for all I know. I mean, dimensional travel was totally possible after all. And so was extremely long time travel.
There was a lot of little things left to think about and to review. Just because those few things didn’t make it impossible didn’t mean something else made it an impossibility. I started to play back everything I could remember relating to any mention of my dad back to myself.
The memory searching consumed the entire walk. An impressive feat because Lyra wasn’t being facetious. It did take twenty minutes to reach the large hotel. Unfortunately, the soul searching meant I really didn’t take in much of the building itself. I just sort of walked in and followed everyone down a hallway to a large, fancy as fuck, high-ceilinged, crystal chandeliered, epic fireplace having, dark wood paneled, huge ass dining room.
Judging by the really fucking expensive looking carved furniture, and the fact that this room had actual real physical curtains (an impossibly rare thing in my experience) this place had to be really fucking ritzy. Like, a General’s estate ritzy.
I sincerely regretted not getting a real look at the outside. It had to be beautiful.
Everyone took a seat around the long rectangular table. Everyone but me that is. Because of hight reasons. If I sat down my knees would be at the table top’s hight and it would be really uncomfortable to reach anything on the table. Which sucked because there was a ton of fruit and pies, and other cool looking stuff I had never seen before.
Also a literal IV bag inside a bucket of ice with wine glasses. But I was ignoring that.
As I pondered taking a spare chair and putting it on top of the table to use as a properly tall table, Jack looked over at me and slowly shook his head.
“Kid, just sit on the floor,” He said in a tone that implied I was an idiot.
“Ah, yes. Good plan,” I mumbled, cheeks flushing pink in embarrassment as I moved the chair aside and sat down cross legged on the floor.
Lyra looked over as i sat, frowning curiously. “Uh, do humans not sit like this? This isn’t fictional is it?” She asked.
I looked over, noticing her sitting biped style atop the stool rather than sort of hunching her back legs up dog style and resting atop the chair like everyone else.
“No, we do. In chairs, or on things. This is just more comfortable on flat surfaces,” I explained. Then I turned to face my surprisingly possible dad. “Let’s talk.”
He nodded, taking a breath to get himself ready. “I don’t like talking about her, for a large number of reasons. If you wouldn’t mind, I would like to tell you everything now. Starting with how I met her. Is that alright?”
“So long as explaining how you met my mother doesn't take like, nine seasons and two hundred and eight episodes,” I joked, hoping to ease the tension.
Then I immediately facepalmed, realizing no one at the table would even get that joke’s basic idea.
“Was that a joke?” Lyra asked me.
“Skip it,” I groaned. “Go ahead and tell it. I don’t mind.”
Jackrock nodded gratefully. “Thank you,” he began. “I’ll keep it short. I don't like talking about her either. But it’s important. Please don’t interupt me, this is a hard story to tell.”
I nodded. “No problem,” I said, similar words coming from everyone at the table.
<VI, record everything about to be said, please,> I ordered.
<Writing to permanent memory…> I replied back.
“I was at a very low point in my life,” possible Dad said. “A lot of people find joy in wealth, but I never really did. It never mattered how much my mine brought in for me. To me, well, it’s not the bits, it’s what you can use them on. Even worse, what I wanted to spend them on was a family.
“I wasn’t really wealthy enough to be swarmed by mares, and well, stallions aren't my thing. Back then I lived in Stonebrook, a smaller city. It’s where the mine is. There wasn’t exactly a large population of potential mates, and the ones who responded to my advances always turned out to only be interested in my money. It had been that way for a decade.
“Then, one day, a foreman comes into my office and says there was an explosion in one of the deeper mine shafts. I’m fully braced for a bad day, and I got it. I spent the whole day managing the rescue operation. The whole damn day… It was bad. We lost fifty miners. We never knew what caused the explosion, especially since that shaft had been inspected the previous day.
“I know now… And well, I’ve filed a warrant for arrest. But that’s not important right now. What is important is while I was making sure all the workers had gone home and all of the injured had been evacuated before I left myself, I bump into a mint furred, peach maned mare who seemed a bit drunk. Hard time balancing on her hooves, not using her magic to move the ore cart she was pushing… That sort of thing.
“I didn’t recognise her as a worker, but it’s not possible to know everypony by their face or cutiemark in a large operation, so I assumed she was a worker. I called out, telling her that there’s no need to move things to storage. We’ll take care of it tomorrow morning before redigging the collapsed shaft. She panics, yells something in total gibberish and ducks down like she’s expecting me to lance a spellbolt through her skull.
“I figured she had gotten hit in the head pretty badly, so I got some healer’s attention, they tranquilized her and took her to the hospital. I figured I would never see her again. I was wrong. I saw her again three month's later. Again right at the end of the day. She could speak this time, I asked her if she was doing better, she said yes, the docs fixed her voice and not to worry she’d take care of the loose ore carts in this sector for me.
“I refused to let her do it alone, explained I was the owner, and I wasn’t going to make someone work over time if I wasn’t too. We locked everything up in the warehouse. She seemed pissed so I offered to get her a coffee and… Well we hit it off. Or so I had thought.
“She kept showing up. Once every few weeks. I started buying her trinkets… I liked her. She came across as incredibly nice and caring. She asked me about the mine and my work, but also how I was feeling and about me personally. She seemed sincere… And she seemed to be a hard worker. Always the last one out of the mine. After a while, I asked if she would marry me. We hadn’t even officially been dating, but she said yes immediately.
“I had friends tell me I was an idiot, and she was clearly gold digging, but it didn’t matter. She had me hooked good. The second we were married, she stayed overall nice, but the mind games began. The abuse started small, but ramped up very heavily towards the end of our relationship.
It would range from anything to her insulting my friends to calling me stupid, neurotic, worthless… But she still seemed to like me, fixing me meals she knew I liked, spending time, asking caring questions.
“It’s hard to describe. I think you’d need someone to do it to you. But she made me feel like the problem was me not her. I tried to change to be better for her. But it did nothing. She blamed a lot of things on me even if it wasn't my fault. If I pointed out flaws in her logic or things that she would do that hindered my attempts to fix our relationship problems, well, she would try to turn it back on me. And usually did.
“I got to an emotionally low point where I would go to work sit there, barely manage anything and then go back home and lay in bed until I got hungry or would have to go to work again. Then she said she was pregnant. I was delighted, I thought a foal would turn everything around. Parents have to get along for their kid’s sake, right?
“Didn’t happen. The entire time she was pregnant, nothing but hell. Every single day I was getting her something to try and make her happy, and every time she made me feel like shit for trying, but also like scum if I didn’t try. Then when it came time for her to have the foal, she vanished.
“Gone. Completely. No trace. I spent two weeks in a total emotional breakdown. I was so happy when she came back with a little foal with my mane colors and eyes that I didn’t even care she had left me. I never asked where she had gone. I never asked where all the gifts I had given her disappeared to ether.
“She stayed with me for another fifteen years. And I could see how she really was then. Because of Lyra… Tartarus, kid, you know she used you to make people look on her more favorably as a mother, or to get better seats at events, or discounts on things. Everything was a tool to that… That bitch. Even me.”
Yeah. That sounded like my mom. But plenty of women were like that in my experience…
Jack paused for a moment, taking a deep breath. “She also vanished all the time. Sometimes for months. She called them vacations, and would scream at me whenever I questioned her about them. After a while, I felt it just wasn’t worth asking. I knew she had to be having an affair, but I wasn't mad. I was just sorry for the poor stallion she’d snared.
“But even knowing that, and feeling like I did… I couldn’t leave her. I felt like she owned me. Like a possession. Then, my Lyra turns fifteen. Her mom is all excited and makes a huge show of planning a massive party. I knew something was up, but figured she was trying to exploit the milestone birthday for profit. We’d just moved to Canterlot, at her insistence. It was the fancy place to be and I was just her pocketbook… Er, sorry, off point there.
“Her mom never shows up to her birthday party. Or ever again. She vanished. For good. Took half of my savings with her. Physically. As in, went to the bank, got them in cartloads and left. Every trinket, every enchanted item, everything of value I’d gotten her in the last fifteen years, all gone. Took me a long time to get my head on straight again. I’m only recently fully okay… But here’s the part of this that involves you,” Jack said pointing a hoof to me.
I nodded again. “I’m still listening.”
“I finally decided I should go after that bitch, bring the law down on her. So I hired a seer. Asked them to tell me where my ex-wife had vanished too,” Jack said shaking his head slowly. “That seer failed to do much. But he did manage to show me she worked for an company the entire time she had known me. The name wasn’t in any language I knew of… And I still can pronounce it. So I memorised their logo. This logo.”
Jack’s horn shimmered with a gold aura as he projected an image into the air, the magic replicating a hologram perfectly. Hell, maybe that’s how Sky did his holograms. But more importantly-
I sputtered, standing up by reflex. “Okay, yeah, he’s right!” I exclaimed in shock as I stared at the stylized hand-grasping-three-stars logo of Varia Industries.
My mom worked for Varia Industries. At their Mars base. In the no-comms zone. Where they apparently did most of their R&D. To produce next level devices leagues above their competition.
Jack nodded slowly. “I thought you’d recognise it.”
The image vanished. The table erupted into a maelstrom of questions. The roaring boil of words reached a fever pitch before Lyra jumped onto the table, stood up on her hind legs and shouted, “QUIET!”
Turning quickly to me Lyra asked. “Why does that image make dad’s story true?”
“It’s the logo for Varia Industries,” I explained. “They make tech. Better tech than anyone else, and are very secretive about everything. So much so that they use colonies on other celestial bodies for their labs. My mom works for them. And she was almost never around. Gone for months at a time. She basically ditched my with my grandparents.
“Unless your dad’s been dimention hopping, the only way he could see that logo is if seers can do what you say they can. And you know, the time gone adds up. Also I never knew who my dad was, and my mom said he died but it’s okay because he was an idiot and an asshole that I’d never have liked anyways.”
Jackrock’s ears fell so fast I couldn’t see them move. I winced and gave him a sympathetic look.
“I-I’m pretty sure you’re right. But um, I’m going to remain skeptical until you finish the story. But for the record, you seem nice,” I said honestly.
Lyra took a deep breath. “Right, before dad continues… If you asked her a question in a public place, how would she answer it?” Lyra asked.
“To the best of her ability,” I answered. “Let me guess, if you asked her something in private she’d tell you to fuck off and find out yourself? Or purposely tell you the wrong answer, then quiz you later in public just so she could correct you and look like a parent who cared about their kid’s learning?”
Lyra winced. “Luna’s mane. We probably are sisters…”
Jack nodded. “May I finish?” He asked.
I nodded. “Please.”
“I took the logo, and I used it to give another seer a thing to search for besides my memories of her,” Jackrock resumed. “This is what we found out. The ‘mare’ I’d married was not a pony. She was a human working for a company who had stumbled onto one of the rare natural portals linking worlds. Much like ones to tartarus, or other sub realms. Only this one bridges Equis, and her world.
“Like all of these portals, though I don't know the reason, I’m not a wizard, crossing through one transforms you into a member of the species living closest to the other end of the portal. Simply by coming to our world, your mother gained a pony body, and returned to her human form when she went back through. You’d think she would have told her superiors about finding a new world with life on it. She did not.
“She lied, told everyone it was a dead world, but there were ruins in the distance, unfortunately she also lied, the portal seemed unstable so it wouldn’t be wise to send more than one person through it. Her employers allowed her to go back in, and she spent some time exploring… Eventually finding my mine. Apparently, gemstones are much more abundant in Equis than her home. Because she started stealing small amounts of gems, taking them back.
“She stole a bit of charged quartz, a thing my mine is known for. Basically natural occurring mage gems. Her employers wanted more of it, and offered her a commission per piece. She said she could get it but would need explosives to clear rubble. They gave her some. She caused that explosion in the mine to create enough chaos to make it off with a whole cart load of the stuff.”
I shook my head slowly. “No! She couldn’t have. She’s not that fucking evil!”
“She did,” Jack said bitterly, looking like he wanted to spit in disgust. “If you don't believe me, I can show you a recording of the events as captured by the seer later… It's in my safe at home. I should have brought that. Buck!”
I felt I was pretty good at spotting a lie. Plenty of practice over the years. The anger and look of ‘I can’t believe I didn’t think of that!’ on the stallion's face had me very sure he honestly did forget it.
“Look… For now, I am sure you can believe she would steal from an ‘alien’ mine for her own gain. Right?” He asked.
I nodded. “That, I can completely believe.”
Mom was the definition of self-interested.
“She spent two weeks in the hospital,” Jack resumed. “Her employers thought she had died and were getting ready to send someone else through when she came back. They were shocked, and she had stolen a simple healing charm from the hospital. She told them she fell during a landslide, but managed to make her way back and had picked up the charm in a tomb she found along the way. They bought the lie, or didn’t care because they had the first enchanted item your species had ever seen.
“She promised them she could get more, but got them to agree that only she could go through. Not only did she know the risks and the terrain, but she had been very successful thus far. And she wanted the glory to herself. She got it because she slept with her boss to seal the deal.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I knew she did stuff like that,” I muttered.
He didn’t need to finish. Aside from the terrorist bombing, yeah… This was my mom. To a T.
And a dark thought in the back of my mind did have me realizing I didn’t know much about what she did at work. That bombing could be in her character and I’d never know… Maybe I just didn’t believe she would do that because she was my mom and thus biologically I wanted to love her because instinct. The rest of his story fit spot on.
“That’s why she married me. Every last little gift I got her, all of it, she turned over to them for cash,” Jack sighed. “When she got pregnant… Well… iI just so happened she had twins. And realized that your world gives parents additional resources. So does ours, and both our worlds offer extra social standing to parents. So she split the two of you up. Left you there with her parents, and brought the Lyra I raised back to me to keep milking me for gifts.
“She’s still on this world somewhere. She left me when Lyra turned fifteen because she knew I was getting close to kicking her to the curb. If I knew where her portal was, I’d have it staked out… But that’s something for the future.
“I had no idea of what to do with this information. So I told everything to my friend Chance, he’s always good at giving me advice on what to do. He told me that Discord had put up one favor as a prize for a radio call in contest, and if I won it I should use it to get to meet my other daughter. I called in, and to my shock, I won! I asked the favor, and it took a long, long time, but here we are.
“Right now, I’m just happy to meet the filly I never knew I had,” he finished with a shy but genuinely happy smile.
I sat for a few moments after he finished talking. Thinking everything through. Trying to tell if I believed him or not.
His story did add up. And he did know the logo of my mom’s company. But there was more to it than that.
With the HUGE time range the VM had, it’s possible I was in this universe before, but in the distant past. If I had been, that might explain why Moonbutt’s universe had felt, well… Like a home to me. It would also explain what Starswirl had said about me.
It would explain why I was ‘time displaced’. Because I had been raised and lived way way way before I was conceived. And if natural portals transformed you when you went through them, then I would definitely be completely genetically human because on Earth, there were only humans…
Yeah, it all added up pretty solidly.
“So, sis,” Lyra said awkwardly, “are you aware that lie detecting magic is a thing?”
I nodded. “Yeah, It’s been used on me… He didn’t lie once, did he?”
She shook her head. “Nope. So yeah…”
The cream colored mare shook her head. “For the six of us, this is pretty normal. Long lost sister in another dimension,” she said to the oddly quiet room. “But what’s really weird here is Lyra isn’t hugging the crap out of her human sister so hard she injures her.”
“I’m holding it in,” Lyra admitted, voice admittedly sounding a little strained. “You should hug dad first. Cuz I mean, shit… Three seers is expensive.”
“Not sure we’re at the hugging stage,” I said outloud, instantly regretting that as I saw the words smother the soul right out of the poor stallion.
I heard a fork drop to the floor. The room had gone deathly quiet.
That look, that totally emotionally destroyed look. Oh god, I could only ever feel that bad if I had hurt grampa’s feelings. I stood up.
“Now I’m sure,” I said.
I walked around the table, knelt down, and wrapped my arms around the stallion in a tight hug. “Sorry um, old man? Is that okay to call you?” I asked.
He pulled me close with both forearms. “It’s more than okay to call me that,” he answered.
“This doesn't feel awkward,” I said sincerely. “We’re definitely at the hugging stage.”
Hopefully that would cover that social blund-
I felt another pair of arms wrap around me, basically squeezing my guts into a single solid block of compressed tissue.
“Urk!” I gasped.
“I have a sister!” Lyra squealed in delight. “Oh my gosh you need to tell me all of the things! All of them! We should have a sleepover and just talk and all sorts of stuff! I’ll have Bonbon make candy, and um, you're my sis, so it’s a bit weird but would you mind if I tried some of your blood? To see what human tastes like? Oh! You’ll need to meet all my friends! Their names are Bonbon-”
“I have,” I gasped, “a sister, named… Bonbon. And a marefriend. We're moving into our new home… Tonight.”
Dad’s ears stood up in surprise as he let go of me and took a step back to a conversation appropriate distance. “You do? Would you like a house warming party? I can arrange one soon as you want one,” he offered.
“That would be cool,” I gasped. “Lyra… I don't know if you need to, but I need to breathe…”
Lyra loosened her grip. Slightly.
“Better?” she asked.
“A bit,” I gasped.
“So where do you live? And who are you with?” Dad asked.
“Emerald Hive. Sky got me a place. Alternate universe's Fluttershy. She’s nice… And also an android. Which is hot,” I said because the being squished had my brain just a bit fuzzy.
Lyra let go of me and literally skipped excitedly around the room chanting. “Yes! Yes yes yes yes!”
“Wait did she say she was dating an android?” Someone asked.
I turned to her Bonbon, frowning awkwardly. “Um, why is she doing that?” I asked.
“She’s been wanting to go there for years, Sky said no. He’s a head of engineering, so he has the authority to ban ponies from the Hive. They’ve got a frenemies thing going… It’s dumb. Point is, Sky’s a dick but not an asshole. He’s not going to keep her ban up if she has a sister living there. Great, she’s going to be like this for-”
“At least ten minutes,” dad finished for her.
“Yeah,” Bonbon agreed. “She’s lucky she’s so cute.”
I shook my head, and watched my newfound, actual sister, ‘happy about’ for lack of a better term.
“It’s okay,” I announced a sure fire plan for getting her to calm down a bit. “I’ll get her to stop.”
I whistled sharply, Lyra snapped her head around to look at me. “Huh?”
“Check this out,” I said, deploying my wings with a loud metallic click.
I never saw her move. I did feel myself hit the floor as I was tackled. “That is amazing! How do they work? Holy crap these are attached to you! Who did this? How fast can you fly?”
That was a terrible plan! Fuck you, brain.
Dad snickered, then laughed. “Yep! Definitely Lyra’s twin. Well, while that happens, everypony else, let’s finish off this food. Once we’re done, they should be done, ish, and we can pick my little girl up some household goods for her new place. Sound good?”
“Sounds great,” I answered. Suddenly I felt something bite my right wing tip. “OW! Lyra those are tied into my nervous system!”
“Sorry!” she apologised.