[First Person] [Alternating Perspectives] [Equisverse Era 1]
In the year 2199, artificial intelligence has advanced to the point where it is no longer practical to have human pilots. This puts Lyra Heartstrings into a forced retirement. Or rather, it puts Lyra from Earth number 7 into retirement. A Lyra born in the extremely distant past before Equestria as human. Lyra 7, an anomaly of the multiverse.
This Lyra is given the chance to pursue the life of adventure she always wanted when her ‘forced retirement moping’ is interrupted by the arrival of an experimental piece of technoarcana capable of opening portals into other dimensions. Unfortunately for Lyra 7, it’s broken, and her tinkering can’t totally fix it. Unable to set her own destination, or fully charge the device and thus unable make more than one portal per charge. Lyra can only wander from universe to random universe in search of the pony (and the proper version of that pony) who made the Vortex Manipulator in order to find her way back home.
Featured on Monday, April 25th, 2016 at 07:06:21 AM UTC. 
And also on Friday, July 22nd, 2016 at 09:02:52 AM UTC.
And also on Sunday, August 28, 2016, 2016 at 07:37:21 AM UTC.
For my fan’s convenience: This story takes place in multiple incarnations of the Equisverse. Keeping track of what is and is not cannon to it is futile. All of my stories are canon to this, as this story happens ‘episodically’ in multiple Equestrias. It’s a dimension hopping story. However, this is being done in the more serious tone of Beta, the more “serious” timeline.
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Lyra, humanity's first inter-dimensional adventurer, bounce around the multiverse on a space hopper. You have no idea how much I laughed when a found out that was the method you were using.
7157352 You have no idea how hard I was laughing when I came up with the idea.
*favs, upvotes, uber-favorites*
*THEN reads the chapter*
7157384 XD My reputation precedes me I see.
good story so far. cant wait for the next chapter!
7157424 Shouldn't be to far from now. I generally crank out about 40k words per month.
Yay!! New story!! I've been looking forward to this one ever since you mentioned brainstorming ideas for it, Meeps.
Take care of the snake, and they apparently are great pets. All that said, though.....Lyra really should have done more homework beforehand. You should always research any unusual or exotic pet before getting it.
Yeah...constrictors can actually pull off a sort of 'cute'. Used to have a pet California King Snake back when I was in elementary. We had to let her go when we moved, though (she'd been wild in the first place, my brother caught her and brought her home).
Not nice, Lyra! Those folks mean well, even if they can be a bit pushy.
I thought we were dealing with a human Lyra here, not a changeling!
As unreal as this may seem, yeah....some snakes are quite smart and can readily learn things like how to open doors. Cats, goats, rats, and ferrets will all readily learn how to do so, as well (though cats generally don't because lazy balls of floof).
Let's hope this detail doesn't turn prophetic....
This and travelling are about 2/3rds of why I went into the Navy in the first place, with the education benefits I'm currently using being the other third.
Probably to try to keep it a more isolated system. It would be Bad News to have an enemy pilot or AI hack your jet's controls.
heh He sounds like he probably grew up in the mid-twenty-first century....if so then the old timers here are exceeding a century easily. I like him, and it sounds like there's a genuine familial bond there despite the age and outlook difference.
This is a coffee table!? Good lord, do you often have to use your coffee table as cover in a firefight, Lyra?
Hi there, Cheerilee.
heh Starting to wonder a bit if their pets don't have any augmentation. That's a level of problem solving you don't usually see.
Something built with redundant circuitry apparently. The crafter did not want the thing to be unusable if there was ever a single point of failure, apparently. (And I seem to remember something like this vanishing in the last story...)
For ease of maintenance with hooves, of course!
So this little wrist-mounted doohicky is putting out more power than your jet's microfusion reactor. Leads to some interesting conclusions, don't it, Lyra?
heh If only first contact was ever that simple. Great idea, though.
And this is where the idea that a bored engineer is a terrifying thing comes from.
When you put it that way, it's not much of a choice....now is it?
heh And finally we get a hint of the typical 'the aliens are coming to conquer Earth!' rhetoric. Thankfully it seems to be more of a side-caution here and not the initial assumption. I seriously doubt Earth would be worth conquering as anything more than a new place to sell products. Most resources are much more readily obtained in other parts of the galaxy, and I'm fairly certain that finding a planet that is suitable for terraforming and doing so would be less costly than attacking another planet.
This one honestly makes more sense. Keep the backwater planet on a 'no visit' list for any number of reasons, or perhaps until we get into extrasolar space on our own.
Ah....glance that she's kind of into a dystopian future there. Hopefully they're working on fixing that. And Lyra has her first look at a new, completely alien world!
Welcome to Neighpone, Lyra! Land of the kaiju, apparently!
So, so good. Cannot wait for the next chapter!
7157437
no fair! it takes me forever just to finish one chapter. I'm ganna steal some of them words.
7157486 Pro tip, unemployment helps :P
7157490 dude, I am unemployed. unfortunately, its called school
7157498 I'm just regular employed, which is why chapters come out so late in the evening usually.
7157509 mind giving me a link to these chapters?
7157479
It's (a) Lyra, and an exotic lifeform. THere's a rule there...
:c noooo....
Yeah, they are seriously the only religion that actualy WILL go away when told "no thanks".
My cat could and would open locked bathroom style doors by vibrating the door until it popped free from the latch. It was amazing.
For the other third, there's MasterCard.
Yup. That kept it a closed system. The jet had zero wifi, everything going out was the pilot's wetware. It was one perk of that system.
He did. Future meds are pretty certain to keep someone born after 2005 alive for a few centuries. Most biologists agree that the first human to live a thousand years will be born before 2200. The old guy may not be gene engineered, but he does have a few artificially cloned replacement organs...
Ten times. Theft via drone is a thing, and some of those drones will shoot at you or explode if detected. It was very common until the cops started installing milimeter wave radar to detect drone flights and see which ones were not authorized.
<Hello unknown user.>
Some do, other's don't.
If your teleport device fails mid use, you'd realy prefer it to not fail COMPLETELY.
Pritty sure the real reason is Sky had four magnets laying arround, and wanted to get rid of them. SO he built a teleporter device to use them in.
Mabey it will be this time :D No. No it will not.
"Cake or death?" "Uh... Death. No! No wait, cake."
Well, in X-Com, what the aliens are after is human genetic material for use in curing the etherieals of a degenerative illness. SO that's pritty realistic IMO.
"My lord!" "What?" "This planet has all ready fallen to the felines!" "HYPERSPACE! NOW! BEFORE THEIR ARMADA DECLOAKS!"
Dystopian via nessessity. In her Earth's timeline, a geo engineering project met to correct global warming via removing carbon from the oceans went very very very wrong and basically dumped almost all of the trapped Co2 into the air. Things are slowly being fixed, but life is impossible in most places which are not isolated biospheres (some natural ones exist, like in mountain vallies). It should be fixed within 300 years though. Teraforming tech exists and was deployed.
Well yeah. It's pony Japan. Japan + Magic + Science = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zhJljblPcY
Japan + Magic + science + my AU's ponies = http://orig12.deviantart.net/9e03/f/2013/175/3/9/nuclear_mane_by_oblomos-d6af391.jpg
7157521 You just red one, he's my editor.
7157521 AHAHAHAHAHA! Noo...
Editor Privilage
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Only one jump and its random... Sliders?
7157535
Yeah....one-way teleportal tends to be bad.
Well sure, that reason is one of few that would be a good reason to go to a life-bearing planet with a sentient species. Conquering a planet for the sake of conquering it....really isn't cost effective.
Equals Pony-Pacific-Rim!
7157693 Sort of like if Dr. Who and Sliders had a kid, and that kid was Rick and Morty.
Great start to the new story!
Yep now this sounds familiar. Even in our day, with my father he will say goodbye and then think of something else to talk about. Then again and again sometimes.
Aaaaaand I forgot what else I was going to say. :P ANYWAY can hardly wait for the next chapter! Keep up the good work. ^,^
7157705 Hopefully you'll like this ride!
7157719
I'm sure I will, you have never disappointed me. ^,^
The good news: Sky's personal teleporter now teleports itself!
The bad news: Sky's personal teleporter only teleports itself!
Here we go again!
I'm loving the immersive AR being an ubiquitous thing. The AR fashion industry must be pretty wild.
7157817
If Rarity existed in that time piriod, she wouldn't sew. She'd actually be modeling, animating, and preforming other 3d sculpting tasks, and selling the models to people. Most clothing is very plane looking nanomaterial jumpsuits (resorse scarcity), the AR systems let people set their 'clothing', so other people see you in say, a leather jacket, kacki cargo pants, and boots. Or if you want to be more interesting, anything at all.
Why hello there super pipboy when did you get here? Awww. You already have an owner? Nuts. You don't look quite as, well, durable as some of your elder brethren. Be careful out there.
7157943 I am so glad that Fallout has eclipsed Dr. Who in terms of what people think of when they think "wrist computer" ^>^.
7157954
But if a quick Google search is any indication I don't think that a wrist watch for a computer makes too much sense without a decent holoprojection or just plain being bigger than a wrist watch. Some things are better once they have been miniaturized but in my opinion you can only make something so small before it causes more problems than it solves. So yeah. While a tad retro looking (or a lot really) the general size of the pipboys we see from the games seems just about right to me. Small enough to carry around yet big enough to be easily manipulated. The fact that you don't have to squint or smash your face into it to understand what's on the screen is a plus too.
Well as often as I tell myself I am going to sit down and watch those series' I never actually seem to get around to it.
7157989 Quite true... but there is one actual watch that makes prefect sence as a portable computer. This one Because it makes this happen upon voice command. When your watch's only app is "Summon Big", I think it beast all the other wrist computers.
7157996
Now to quit distracting myself talking to you and distract myself by actually reading the story you have oh so kindly written. 
A watch, who's only application is to summon a giant robot on voice command... I can get behind that.
7158034 And not just any Giant Robot, but Big motherfucking O.
7158039
Guess what? Featured.
Anyway. Storywise, Sliders that don't want to go home and actually have the tech to open the portal themselves. Also, kaiju, mecha, magic, and a relatively large snake. Sounds like a good time.
That cover art is somehow giving me nostalgia.
I think Meep is putting illegal addictive drugs into his stories.
That is the only explanation.
Lyra gonna Lyra. Awn Bonnie snake. I'm calling it, sneks in the future. Not thinking too much right now. Need moar soon.
7158590
Fuck. I was wondering which gender Meep was. I had a 50/50 chance and I fucked up.
LYra was already borked when she started using devices that can move you without working navigation never end well
well, it is when it's 84 inches
funny cuz it's tru :P
fucking cash grabbing money stealing companies
pfft, just a little radiation, no biggie
godzilla drank powerthirst?
ha! cheerily, she teaches XD
7%, eh?
that's fuckin' sexy
There were simply too many feels and awesome in one chapter for words to describe!!!!!
Well we know where the VM came from, I laughed so hard at the laser etching XD
I'm actually supersized that she didn't think about Bonbon II before using the VM, if she was planning to use the thing you would think she would consider her pet before leaving, but I guess it was a "do-this-now-before-we-loose-our-nerve" moment.
Question though, are we going to meet a Bonbon in each dimension now? Cuz if we are that is going to be bloody hard to keep track of! Also I hope we find out what happened to the "orignal" Bonbon from Earth 7.
I love your world-building. Not only in this story - in all of them.
And somehow her implants start malfunctioning and she has to use some sort of dialogue system like Mass Effect for translation
7157996
7158034
To be fair, Roger's watch is also a voice and video communicator, fires I microfiber grappling hook, can remote control his car and its weapons systems, and oh yeah, summon motherfucking Big O!
How is this Lyra?
7159384 it's alternate timeline human anomaly Lyra. There will be a few other lyras before this is over. Including but not limited to Beta Lyra, Alpha Lyra, Canon Lyra, this human Lyra (Lyra-7), and possibly more...
7158283 Actually, they are designer drugs that are technically legal as they are not specifically illegal yet.
7159384 It's *A* Lyra. This is a Multiverse Hopping story. Constants and Variables.
7159151 As a fighter pilot, Lyra was frequently out of range of the network. As such she has a lot of utilities stored locally. DNA makes for a great hard disk with insane amounts of storage (No, seriously, we're realy doing that right now IRL).
7158725
Which is why I dont plan on her ever meeting more than three of any specific person... Besides key characters.
Someone actually already figured it out. All the biggest clues are in the first chapter.
7159382 It's an amulet of "Summon Bigger Fish" all other uses are unimportant.
7158702 I have no idea why you think that, but I find myself wishing to know.