It had to be at least two in the morning, maybe later. It was hard to know without a clock. Their entire group huddled together in the center of the little bedroom, hanging on Jacob's every word. He was still a little dazed, his mind turning over everything Sunset had told him in the hall. He had rushed back immediately to share it with his friends—they had as much right to know as he did.
"Before you explain it Jacob, think about how you feel right now." Harley folded her arms, looking stern. "Don't try to bullshit me either, because I'll know. You can't just unlearn something. In our experience, telling people never helps."
"It doesn't matter." Danielle sat on her haunches, staring down at the floor. "It can't make us mutate much faster, can it? Most of us are already close to ponies."
"That's not what I said." Harley turned partly away, propping up her legs on the next cot over. "Nothing supernatural about learning this. Just existential horror, and sleepless nights. There isn't a night princess to watch over your sleep here, little pony."
"I still want to know," Eric said. "I have suspicions, but I want to know what Sunset told you." The others all agreed, closing the circle even closer.
"It's about damn time," Jackie muttered. "I always knew this horse thing was too good to be true. This is the part where you show us how we've actually been working for evil robot overlords, right?"
Jacob shook his head. "The only lies they told were by omission, so far as I noticed. It's not the Equestrians who are the lie, it's Earth. Just… I can only do my best to tell you what Sunset explained. We don't have any way of knowing it's true."
"It is." Harley rolled onto her belly, her face muffled in one of the pillows. "I can't watch. You guys were happy and safe and now you're gonna be afraid and angry and you might never feel normal again."
Jacob didn't disagree. Even so, he knew if he had been ignorant, he still would've wanted to know. "So not everything the show taught us was a lie, it was just sanitized. Discord really did take over, it was just way worse than we saw. More than chocolate clouds and star trek villains making lives confusing. Ponies… and every other kind of life, really… depend on the physical laws staying the way they are to survive."
"Ponies didn't just lie down and take it. Some fought, and they died. When that didn't work, lots got together and searched for somewhere to hide, somewhere with so little magic Discord wouldn't want to follow them. They found Earth, thousands of years ago. I got a little confused by the timeline, but… that's not the most important part anyway."
"Nopony knows for sure, but Sunset thinks that's why Greek mythology seems to have so much in common with the way pony magic actually works. So many of those ancient heroes would make sense as earth ponies in disguise, using their magic to try and help people."
"Why didn't they just live as ponies?" Danielle's voice again, nervous. "If Earth was safe, why would they need to hide at all? It's not like the Greeks would have been much of a threat to a species that can fly, levitate, and shatter buildings."
He had asked something similar, so Jacob was prepared to give the answer. "Earth had no magical life when they arrived, but ponies themselves are magical. If they grew and spread across Earth, it would have eventually attracted Discord’s attention. In the end, it would only give him two planets to rule over instead of one."
"When they came here, there wasn't a mirror yet. Starswirl invented that later on. The instant they arrived, they found the only intelligent species on Earth and worked out a way to join them. The ponies willingly gave up their magic, and made themselves human. Instead of living together, they mixed themselves up with as much of the world as possible, spreading the magic out so Discord wouldn't see."
"Once he took over, Discord discovered what they'd done and started sending all sorts of nasty monsters to wreck things on this side. Even if there wasn't enough magic to sustain him here, he still wanted to ruin the refugees’ lives."
"This is… kinda where ponies had to guess. Discord never came himself, so we don't know what happened back then. All we know is that the former Equestrians still had their powers, though the spell that made them human could only contain so much before it fell apart."
"Well it makes sense." Harley sat up on her bunk, frowning at them all. "Monsters show up at the gates of the city, so of course you get together as many people as you can to stop them. Humans might not have had magic back then, but if any of your history books are true, they were ruthlessly determined. Humans didn't run away and let shit walk over them, they fought until the monsters were dead. Your planet used to have gigantic mega-predators, but your ancestors wiped them out with pointed sticks. Killed every last one of them, and every other animal they thought was too dangerous."
"The Light Tenders," Jacob explained. "An ancient society founded by the original colonists, to make sure the knowledge of how to fight the supernatural survived. Kingdoms fell and empires rose, but the Light Tenders would survive."
"A lot can happen in time. Apparently they survived, even when Discord got turned to stone and the monsters stopped. And all those years, ponies weren't just hiding around humans, but joining their societies. The spell they put on themselves wasn't just an illusion, it was strong enough that they could breed with humans, and their children would inherit it. The nameless spell would feed on their magic, sustaining itself even when magic itself was forgotten."
"But that long ago…" Eric began. "If these colonists bred with us thousands of years ago… everyone would be related by now."
"Not just related," Harley spoke up, as much an exasperated sigh as an answer. "Ponies breed true. Zebra and a pony is a pony. Pony and a changeling, that's a pony. Pony and a Diamond Dog…" She wrinkled her nose. "I'm not sure why you'd want to, but that's a pony too."
Jacob let that sink in a minute. Sunset hadn't given him that chance, so he waited for the others to wrap their heads around what it meant.
Eric got it first. "There might only be a few actual humans left on the whole planet by now. Those far out pacific islands, maybe."
"Yeah," Jacob said. "That's why magic always makes ponies out of us. Magic doesn't transform. It just rips apart the spell that makes us think we're human."
"Damn." Jackie leaned back against the wall, her strange bat wings extended on either side of her . "All this time I thought that the pony shit was incidental. But we're just… what, ponies pretending we're people?"
"No," Stalwart spoke for the first time, rising to his hooves as he did. He didn't have a chair or a cot in the circle, he'd just been sitting on the floor. The extra height was the only way they could even see him. "We're people. If Sunset and the ponies are right, and ponies got mixed up three thousand years ago or so, most of mankind's most important developments have happened since then. Jesus, Napoleon, Muhammad, Shakespeare, Lincoln…"
"I don't get it," Katie muttered. This whole time she had sat on the edge of her cot, rocking gently back and forth. She barely even whispered.
"If Sunset's timeline was right, it means that almost everyone and everything we associate with humans had pony blood. I haven't seen a history text in nine months, but I can only think of two people who still have personal influence today who are older than three thousand years. The Buddha himself, and King David. I'm sure there are other important ones whose names we don't have anymore. Whoever invented writing, whoever came up with beer… none of that's the point."
"I see what you're saying." Jacob smiled slightly. "You're saying that most of what we think of as human has always been… whatever kind of half-breed we are. So there really isn't any reason to freak out about it."
"And some people have more of it in their blood than others," Harley cut in. "The propaganda or maybe a few little spells was all you with a great deal of pony ancestry needed. Mostly pony meant you had very little resistance. Your little illusion spell had to work so hard to keep your own magic in check that outside exposure would quickly short it out."
"So aside from the Light Tender questions…" Danni turned, facing where Elise rested in her corner. "Did you ever learn anything about them?"
She shook her head. "Never even heard the name. But… come to think of it, lots of the senior officers had this patch on their uniforms. Like the eye of providence, but the design was a little different. I got one, the day I…" She looked down at her hooves. "They day I got promoted."
Danielle nodded, then went on. "So that only leaves why the ponies didn't leave damn well enough alone. We were doing just fine on our own without ponies coming in to make the world more complicated."
"That's what I said!" Harley exclaimed. "When they told me about this operation. Even the dumbest larva knows not to tamper with something that works."
Jacob waited for her to finish. Harley would probably know the answer, but he had just heard it from Sunset, so felt like he ought to be the one repeating it. If the ponies deserved condemnation, they would at least get it for something they had actually said.
"Ponies come from a pretty peaceful place. Equestria had its problems, but nothing like Earth. Starswirl made the mirror, and so ponies would check on us every now and then. Our world scared them, and apparently they decided that they had the solution to all our problems."
"We were magical creatures without magic. An important part of who we were was strangled by a spell we didn't have any say in making. They started laying the groundwork, testing ways to induce magic at distance. The first few attempts weren't successful… but the last one was. Each one tried to bring useful information about their world, though it had to pass through lots of people first and the truth didn't always make it."
"The original plan was to take it real slow, spread out as much magic as possible at a real low level, so everyone would start getting affected. But that didn't work. Somehow, people already knew the ponies were coming. They were prepared to fight, with knowledge they shouldn't have about pony weaknesses. Instead of the most susceptible people becoming the first recruits, they were locked away to rot. They wouldn't negotiate, wouldn't even hear a surrender, just killed every pony sent to talk. And that takes us to today."
"And it doesn't make sense," Eric said. "The ending part. It doesn't agree with their apparent motivations. If the Light Tenders are trying to protect humanity from supernatural danger or whatever, if they knew ponies were coming and somehow had a way to find them when they got here, why the hell would they let ponies make the TV show?"
He rose, shaking his head. "It doesn't make any sense. Back when it first came out, it wasn't like there was a worldwide web where information could go to live forever. Shut down the studio, and there's no more propaganda. Why not stop ponies then, before they could infect people?"
Jacob's eyes widened. He hadn't thought of that. "Maybe… they didn't notice? The first few attempts were failures. After all that time, they probably didn't know to recognize ponies themselves, let alone in marketing shows to sell children plastic dolls."
"So why not stop FiM then? They must recognize it as a vehicle for magic by now! Why haven't they strangled the fandom by the roots?"
"We were trying." Elise spoke up again, a little exasperated. "But when I left, we thought the television show was only a circumstantial detail. Exposure didn't make mutation that much more likely, but exposure to extranormal manifestations almost always did. With so much of that, we were always focused on eliminating the greater threat."
"We had already strangled the show itself with mediocrity and careful manipulation of a few of the executives. All we had to do was wait for it to fade into obscurity. Trying to ban an idea has always been one of the worst ways to discourage it."
Eric looked uneasy. "I feel like we're still missing something, but I don't know what it is."
"Maybe we are, maybe we aren't." Jacob stood up. In the past, doing so would've made him look more imposing and authoritative. Now that he had gone most of the way into a pony, he was still shorter standing than most of them were sitting down.
He kept going. "We had this conversation before, when we decided if we were going to help ponies or not. I think it might be time to have that conversation again. We need to decide if we still want to help."