September 19, 2015
Dear Journal,
BREAKTHROUGH!
Yes, I did take the time to write that in capital letters, despite the fact I haven’t had hands for half a year and it took extra time. No, I didn’t rip through the page with my pen this time, ‘cuz I’ve become such an amazing BAWSS.
You might ask what the breakthrough is, because that would be a very sensible thing to wonder about. It has to do with the radio, because we knew that was going to be how we met people. We have ourselves a pretty nice rig now, even if it’s nothing near as nice as what they must be running out of the CMC for a signal to reach all this way.
We’ve been announcing our intentions to found a colony here, as well as advertising the library and its instructions for how to reboot Equestrian society. We didn’t want to start until we had a way to keep the books safe, since making them public almost certainly makes them one of the most valuable things in the world.
You might think that the HPI would be able to provide something similar for rebooting an industrial economy. Unfortunately, you would only be kinda right. The HPI is in a far worse situation than simply losing everyone to keep industry running. For them, the Earth is deadly. They cannot revert to more basic technologies without facing certain death. It’s not about giving up video games or air conditioning, it’s about running the shield that keeps them alive.
What does this mean for us? Mostly that we have to do our own research. Joseph has anything we could care to look up cached on the Kimballnet, and the HPI can get us digital versions of anything from the Library of Congress if we want it. Unfortunately we’re several generations too early to be able to actually reboot anything. With a population this small, it will be all we can do just to keep our existing machines running.
Equestrian industry is radically new, and we have the only guide to it in all the world. Instructions for earth ponies like me to grow crops in a third the time, keeping weeds from choking them out through force of magic instead of pesticides. Instructions for the pegasi on how to create weather. Granted, this seems a little like a luxury good right now, but in the future… can you even imagine the consequences?
Humanity has always been forced to bow before the natural might of the planet, as much as we say we don’t. Even at the height of industry, a storm barreling down the coast meant all we could do was board our windows and drive for our lives. Imagine a world where hurricanes never strike coastal cities. Where if there’s a drought, ponies just bring some rainclouds and end it. A world where we create our own rivers, and thunderstorms only rage away from where anyone lives.
I look forward to seeing that field mastered one day.
And the magic of unicorns? That power almost defies prediction. I know from personal experience the right magic can literally slice between worlds, take back what time has stolen, or change you from one species to another. Levitation is a great substitute for hands, but it’s only the exposed edge of the possibilities ahead of us.
What’s going to happen when we put magic and technology together? Will we see nuclear fusion at last, with magic spells containing the reactions? Flying cars animated by thaumic fields instead of gasoline? If humans had been given access to magic instead of being destroyed by it, it could’ve let us revolutionize our world.
Ponies all over the world will know about the library. Hopefully when Adrian eventually moves on, he’ll be able to find those ponies running the radio and they can get the word out to more than just the ponies in the few hundred miles around us. If I was a magical unicorn and I could teleport the way Sunset Shimmer could, I’d be teleporting myself around with satellite phones to give away.
Guess Adrian won’t be leaving for a little while. He’s walking just fine, but he’s still real tender. You know there are several major arteries in a pegasus wing? Who knew! It’s nothing short of a medical miracle he kept that wing. Medical magic, really. Don’t nopony say earth ponies can’t do magic in our own way.
Riley the changeling doesn’t like that she can’t spend more time with him. Not sure what Adrian thought. I wonder if he realized rescuing her was going to come along with such serious responsibilities. I guess you could say today was another kind of breakthrough with that pony, but that's probably a subject for after talking about the important one.
So, Moriah’s our radiophone. Radio operator. Radiologist- No, that’s something else. Anyway, she’s been in contact with several little groups since we got the radio up and running.
A caravan is on its way up. Several ponies looking for a place to live, plenty of others who intended to stay and study before bringing digital copies of the most important books back with them to wherever they came from. They’re on the clock to get here and learn what they can before winter freezes the roads (not to mention the fuel going bad all over the country). We expect the population of the colony to double if not triple when they arrive.
It’s going to change all kinds of things. The community we built isn’t going to feel the same, and who knows how we’re going to balance things with lots more people around. I’m not worried about food, and the water purifier supplying the RVs can handle way more load, but the social dynamics are already getting tricky. We can barely hold together with six, what are we going to do when there are eighteen? Fifty? Thousands?
Obviously, we’ll need a real government at that point. Make ourselves a real city, just like in the old days. Hopefully I don’t have to be a part of it, and I can go back to my farm. Err… my auto shop? Guess we probably won’t need auto shops by then.
I had another dream today, strange enough I thought it might be worth writing down. I’m not sure if dreams really mean anything. You’d think I would’ve taken advantage of my time around Equestria’s spirit of dreams to ask about a question that important, but I didn’t. So many questions I would’ve asked, if only I’d considered them at the time.
I was in a dark and dreary waste. I traveled for the space of many hours, and never saw another face. The wind howled, and I had only crude animal skins to hold against my bare skin and keep out the chill. Snow drifted as high as my knees, and hunger gnawed at me. I grew desperate for meat, but my arm was weak with cold and I could not throw my spear hard enough to catch anything.
When I felt as though I had spent the last of my strength, I collapsed to the snow and resigned myself to death. There was a shape already waiting there, and I nearly tripped on him. It was Huan, though even larger and stronger than I remember. I saw the flash of his teeth against the drifting snowflakes and knew I was doomed to die.
“I see your struggle,” he said. “I watch your crude hunters blunder in darkness, passing easy prey to follow those large enough for you to see. Take me with you; we will be one pack, and hunt together. Swear your friendship to me, and we will triumph together.” So I broke my spear, and wrapped it around his neck (don’t look at me, it made sense at the time), and we were one pack. Together we could conquer any creature. I hungered no more, nor did I fear I would be devoured in my sleep. Together we brought ruin to all creatures who opposed us, hunting many until none survived.
It did not last. The frozen waste dried, and the snow vanished from before my eyes. I stumbled knee-deep through dust, and beside me Huan’s fur became caked with it and his eyes clogged with it. We had hunted our largest sources of food, hunted until we had consumed all and again were left to hunger. The berries and fruits I found could not sustain us. Eventually I could walk no further, and I collapsed in the center of a grassy field to die.
The grass rose up all around me, into the shape of a great woman. “Why do you hunger?” she asked, her voice the whisper of a thousand thousand grains.
“There are too many,” I replied, “and the prey too few. We have hunted and bred and now I starve all over. Dog and I will die. Who are you? Why do you care?”
“I am Wheat,” the grasses said. “I am a rare and feeble grass. My fruit is not large or delicious, and I am too weak to war with all the other grasses. Alone, I will die.” She extended her hand. “Fight for me, and I will feed your starving children.”
I took her hand, and I planted a field that fed the world.
Dog and I starved no longer, though we didn’t hunt anymore. I met many other creatures, and they too struck bargains with me. Those that would not swear had to flee or be trampled into oblivion.
Yet still I was not content. I sat in the quiet of the night and looked up at the stars, and I wondered. I climbed the highest tree atop the tallest mountain, but still I could not reach them. I threw the largest rock I could with all my might, but I could not strike them. I did not understand, and I knew it.
In my despair, I thought I was doomed to die anew. Yet at my feet was the stone, a large black lump that had failed to strike the stars. In my haste to throw it, I dislodged the dirt, revealing a rock unlike any I had seen before. “Why do you despair?”
“We have overcome so much,” I said, of Dog and I, “but there is so much we cannot reach. If the boundaries of our lives are set already, why take the time to live at all?”
“Take me from the ground,” said Iron, extending his hand, “and together we will conquer the world.” And so we did.
The dream ended there, though. I’m not exactly sure what it meant. I think maybe I should stop glance-reading through the Harvard Classics. I think they’re doing strange things to my subconcious. When Equestria wasn’t so far away, I used to think that Princess Luna might still be trying to communicate with me, and that every dream I had might mean something. But that universe has drifted far, and might not ever return. Beyond that, I’m not sure how Luna could possibly know any of those things. I never told them the history of my species, not like that. Our conversation couldn’t have been more than four hours, if you count her explanation and then that encounter with her and her sister that evening.
“You are humanity,” they told me. “You are the will and the spirit, the dream and the soul.” What did they mean? They never said anything about what would happen to my memory. Their spell didn’t say anything about being impaled or surviving car accidents. Why does everything about magic have to be so esoteric? Magic needs to be more empirical. There have got to be some fundamental laws at work, right? The laws of physics as we understood them might have been lacking, but I don’t know why very much of it would’ve changed. It’s the same universe. I’m not going to throw out everything I learned in school just because we’d never seen real magic before.
Riley was the only one who saw. She’s the only one who knows; it is our little secret.
Today was a big day; I told her what I’d read about her species, the changelings. I will speak to the others tomorrow, though I fear what their reactions might be. She is (and has been) a literal emotional parasite. Adrian’s weakness, and occasionally my own, is directly explicable because of her being here. It’s never been anything serious, never enough to slow us down, but imagine the paranoia when I tell everybody that she’s sucking on our souls and taking the little bits that float to the top. Okay, that might be a silly way to explain it. Probably not that way.
I’m not sure why I feel like we have so much in common, Riley and me. Don’t say that it’s because we’re the closest in age either, because if you do I’ll break your face with one of these earth-pony hooves of mine. Maybe it’s because we’re both freaks now, though me more because I opened my big dumb mouth and less something I had no control over. Maybe it’s because we both like these stupid, shallow chick movies, the ones with a two dimensional romance and a few attractive actors. Cloudy Skies likes them too; just a little drama but generally super uplifting. She’d never watch anything with me if she knew Riley was going to come along.
But what am I supposed to do? Cloudy Skies is my friend! Riley needs companionship she can relate to better than a 26-year-old stallion. She already lives with him; Adrian needs some time to spend apart or else he’ll explode and we both know it. Nobody else will take Riley. Yeah, I guess she’s twelve. Yeah, I guess she could spend some time on her own… but I’m not sure where.
What’s worse, is that she can get into twice as much trouble. The Changeling section of the big book with all the different things people can turn into was only a few pages long, as I’ve ranted about before. It does say they can use magic, just like unicorns. Those wings aren’t vestigial either, they can also fly like Pegasi (but no mention of being able to kick down metal doors and grow plants, guess you aren’t stealing my abilities!) I told her today, and she looked as excited as a little girl on Christmas. Guess that makes sense: I was “giving” her all sorts of new powers. Well, she’d kinda guessed at the flying thing, but thought that her wings were too weak and holey to actually lift her.
We’ve got one pony who can fly: Cloudy Skies. Chances of her being willing to teach the changeling to fly? 0%.
We do have a unicorn, though! Riley would be much more able to contribute if she could magic things around with her horn. If she could do that, I could use her to replace Joseph! She’s much more fun to be around, actually laughs at my jokes and doesn’t mind it if I decide I just wanna run around and enjoy the day for a few minutes. No judgemental looks like keeping Moriah in the car with me.
Also that would free up Joseph for important-type work with computers. Also it would mean she could actually be useful to the settlement, instead of being just another mouth to feed, literally draining our emotions. Also, Joseph isn’t frightened of her like Cloudy Skies. He never really has been, doesn’t seem to care much about her either way. Didn’t have to overcome it like I did, or if he did there wasn’t much to overcome.
I don’t even feel weird around her anymore. I don’t see a freaky monster bug, I just see a scared little kid who lost her family. We’re her new family, and we’re a pretty lousy substitute. Doesn’t mean we can’t try, though! Or I can’t try. The big question remaining to me is: how do I get Cloudy Skies to get over her instincts and give Riley a chance?
- Alex
6255068
See? This guy knows what he's doing.
Interesting. That dream had a feeling of a race memory of some sort, of the unspoken contract and bargain that humans and the world around us bore from the time of the first significant agriculture until comparatively recently, when synthetic materials and a booming population increasingly separated humanity from the natural world. Perhaps the Earth is now willing to restore those links and be humanity's... Ponydom's... ally once again. Naturally an Earth Pony would be the one who sensed that.
Alex may have just taken one step closer to becoming the Princess of Gaia.
Cloudy chapters next?
So Alex literally doesn't know just what the Princesses did to her, as opposed to just not mentioning it?
What, saw Alex dream?
Pretty neat dream. I like the message it seems to have of "things change, but we persevere".
6255136
Pretty sure she's talking about that "getting impaled and surviving car accidents" thing she mentioned.
6255136
Judging by the context, Riley saw Alex regenerate a serious injury. It's the second time such regenerative ability is hinted at in the "journals".
I have a theory that the east coast fair much better than the west. You could start there, with farmlands, technological wonders, education and indusrty. Along with cities miles from each other in the northeast, the ponies there would double those from the west. So if you want to spread the word, you could spread the news there
Arg. Alex, tetanus is a thing. You know that whole bunch of drama you did with a medical intervention and all? Yeah, pot, kettle black.
Alex... What the shazbot have you been doing?
In other words, congratulations everyone; we've survived to the second interlude!
And to think, we've survived 6 months of the apocalypse already.
High fives- I mean, two hooves all around!
6255171
bwahahahha!
Here's a thought, have Riley practice changing her form. She gets magic practice and gets to socialize better. That instinct Alex is talking about is probably subverted when changelings masquerade as something else, also Riley gets to have some say in how she looks to others.
6255136
I think she means the fact she can fly and feeds off emotions
Looking at the big picture, poor Alex got saddled with babysitting Earth for the rest of forever. I think after she finishes connecting with the earth... her wings are gonna come in. Just hope she goes full alicorn before the story ends.
Alex confirmed as Wolverine.
The CMC?
About time!
Hell yeah.
Ooooo, and they're already getting incoming colonists and visitors? Excellent.
Considering the dream, I'm inclined to say yes.
Saw what? Something in particular, or just a metaphor? Edit: good suggestions on what in the comments, makes sense.
Joe versus a changeling, the changeling wins. Poor Joe. But seriously, decent plan on how to take care of Riley and how best she can contribute to the settlement.
So the de facto leader is the appointed librarian, Twilight would approve.
“You are humanity. You are the will and the spirit, the dream and the soul.” That words from the Princesses sound omnious, I wonder what they mean...
But the most important bit for me today was seeing Alex finally knowing what Riley has been transformed into (and that she feeds from emotions) and managed not to freak out. One point for Lonely Day.
6255188
I've had a theory, which first occurred to me at the conclusion of Last Pony on Earth. This chapter basically confirms it.
I believe that Alex is going to transform into an Alicorn. The photographic recollection, the race memories being given to Alex in dreams, and (if you are right) her amazing regenerative abilities, it all seems to point towards an eventual ascension to immortality.
This, I believe, is Equestria's main gambit towards preserving humanity. Alex herself will become the Alicorn of Earth, living through the ages in order to collect knowledge, remember, and provide guidance for the society to come. When Sunset Shimmer met Alex, remember that she said she was "looking for a Princess". Well, I think that's what they did, they made Alex a Princess. It'll probably happen over a lengthy period of time, starting with growth spurts and leading to the sprouting of wings and horn.
Just a theory, but I'm pretty confident I'm right.
6255171
This.
That poem is one for the archives.
6256113
Cheyenne Mountain Complex? Location of
Stargate Commanda big military base/nuclear bunker.6256173 I didn't expect you to convince me but you did. gj.
I love the dream sequence. :'D
6255068 Rofl! Excellent response!
6256346 Oh, duh, that makes sense. Did I miss something before, or was that the first mention of where the HPI is holed up?
So let's all be very very smart and keep little Riley away from Moriah for the near- to mid-term forever. I trust the little emotion-nomming bugpone far more than I do the vengeful hornless unicorn.
6256830
I think the HPI are still keeping their location a secret, so it probably isn't them if Alex knows the location. As a nuclear bunker though, Cheyenne Mountain Complex seems likely to have a lot of very useful after-apocalypse supplies to loot.
Was Alex dreaming about being a human again??? I really can't help but get that impression from that dream section. After being a pony for half a year, I'm surprised she still remembers what being human is like.
6255068 I'd actually expect Moriah to blame the ponies for her magic poisoning in the first place. Then probably go out with a "screw you" and.or flipping the bird.
Or not, because she's probably mostly resentful because of her horn, not the change in general.
I had hoped that Riley and Alex would become friends. Also, given that we still don't know what all was done to Alex, BenRG may be correct, The Gaia dream may be a guidepost for Alex, a hint at what may be in store. The dream itself prompted me to go on an expedition into my personal library in search of a book that I couldn't remember the name of. (That's over 5000 works of scifi and fantasy, and no they have NOT been alphabetized,Twilight would faint if she saw it). The book was Voice of the Planet by Michael Tobias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tobias). In it an ecology professor travels to Tibet to track a mysterious computer hacker. The "hacker" turns out to be the Earth herself, using a computer to communicate. Given that Alex was chosen to be the leader of the new pony race on earth, it's not inconceivable given the amount of magic that saturated the world, that the planet itself may have awoken, and may be trying to help guide her. She is an earth pony after all.
Also...
A thing I keep forgetting to mention is vehicles that run on natural gas. Although the new Honda civic is the only one that's available for the regular public, Gas companies have had them for years, at least on the east coast where I live. https://www.psncenergy.com/for-my-business/natural-gas-vehicles for example. I believe that Toyota had come out with a hydrogen car in San Fransisco this past year as well. Also forklifts and such run on propane. None of these would give Alex the worries that diesel and gasoline would. Now, not being a mechanic myself, I have no idea how hard it would be for Alex to convert a standard vehicle to a natural gas one. But I assume if he raided a gas company's garage, he'd probably find all the info he would need to see if he could.
I like how Alex is always so practical thinking (or trying to, at least). So yeah, Riley's a freaky, scary bug where your initial pony instinct is the most basic fight or flight... but she can fly and she can use magic -very special magic, even- and she isn't even a hungry mouth to feed. She's actually really low maintenance when you're careful. Plus she's easy to get along with when you give her a chance.
Could be worse.
i.imgur.com/6OZR3C0.jpg
Whew, I'm finally back! Oh, it's been awhile. Almost a month?! Wow. But here I am. Before I can continue writing my story, I need to catch up on the main canon. So... let's see what I've got.
*checks story*
Holy...
6255197 Almost certainly true. East coast infrastructure is also a little more robust in certain regards, a balance of an older foundation of civil engineering projects and higher standards for a lot of modernization due to larger population density. Imagine California, except with rain, no earthquakes to speak of, fewer fires, fewer hippies, more sustainable agriculture, better livestock conditions...
Sorry, I'm from a somewhat rural part of New York. I have a bias.
Good, someone is level-headed and rational. Let's hope the rest will stop being hysterical.
Alex is a nice person. I cant believe they've managed to keep that group working so long
6256173
I'm gonna assume you kept reading this series (I feel like I've seen your username on later stories at least...) and just say...nice.
And choke it with heat and waste. Oh well, guess you guys dodged that bullet, too.