Lyra’s Journey

by _Undefined_

Chapter 4: Saturday

The next morning, Lyra woke up early enough to head downstairs and actually eat breakfast with “her” human mom and dad. The previous day, she had worked so hard to learn the correct way to hold a pen, she was now also holding her silverware with the same grip. Luckily for her, neither parent noticed the strange way she was eating her scrambled eggs.

“Don’t forget,” Lyra’s mom said while she spread blackberry jam on her toast, “you have to do the laundry and mow the lawn today.”

“Oh, right,” Lyra said. Bon Bon had told her that one of human Lyra’s chores was doing the laundry. Bon Bon had even shown her what to do, and it was pretty easy – just put the clothes in, add some soap, press a button, and let the machine do the rest. After seeing all of the clothes at the mall the previous day, Lyra understood why humans would invent a machine to clean all of them.

However, Bon Bon hadn’t mentioned that the other Lyra also had to mow the lawn. After breakfast, Lyra went outside to see if she could find the lawn mower. She looked in the shed, but all she saw were a wide selection of gardening tools and a couple of machines that she couldn’t identify.

So Lyra went back inside and started a load of laundry. While the machine was working, she went upstairs to the bedroom and tried to think of a way to find out where the lawn mower was without revealing that she was actually a pony from another dimension.

While Lyra was focused on shooing away the first tiny feelings of panic that were beginning to creep in, a peppy tune started coming from the phone. Lyra was startled at first, but then walked over to look at it. The phone displayed a picture of Bon Bon.

It was also displaying two circles: A green circle with some kind of elongated U and a red circle with an X. Theorizing that the red circle was bad, Lyra touched the green circle with her finger. The circles disappeared.

Lyra heard a faint voice coming from the phone. “Hello?” It sounded like Bon Bon. Lyra leaned down to listen. “Lyra, if you’re there, pick up the phone.”

Lyra picked up the phone and held it toward the top of her head. She then lowered it so it was closer to her human ear. “Bon Bon?”

“Good – I was worried you wouldn’t know how to answer the phone. How’s everything going?”

Lyra was a little confused – how could Bon Bon hear her? She answered anyway, quietly so Lyra’s parents couldn’t overhear. “Fine, except I’m supposed to mow the lawn. Do you know where the lawn mower is here?”

“Just so you know, I can barely hear you – maybe try pointing the other end of the phone toward your mouth. But I think the lawn mower is in the shed.”

Lyra moved the entire phone in front of her mouth and spoke into the screen. “I looked in there – I didn’t see anything that looked like a lawn mower.” She moved the phone back toward her ear for Bon Bon’s response.

“I finished our English assignment. I’ll come over and help you find the lawn mower, then there’s some other homework we need to do, too. See you soon.”

“Okay, see you soon,” Lyra said into the phone. Suddenly, the picture of Bon Bon disappeared. Lyra was going to have to ask her what just happened.

After a few minutes, the doorbell rang. “Lyra! Bon Bon’s here!” Lyra’s dad shouted.

Lyra went downstairs, where Lyra’s dad had opened the door for Bon Bon. “I’m here to work on our homework,” she told him.

“Come on up,” Lyra said. Her face immediately, though briefly, registered a look of alarm – was upstairs where they did their homework? Lyra’s dad went back to watching tennis on the television screen in the living room. Apparently, she hadn’t said anything wrong.

The two went up to the bedroom. Bon Bon said, “After I read the chapters, I realized that it didn’t matter if you wrote the essay, since it would just be printed out anyway. So I wrote two essays – one for me and one for Lyra. I just need to print hers out on her printer.” She started to press buttons on some equipment on Lyra’s desk that Lyra hadn’t recognized and therefore hadn’t touched.

“That’s good,” Lyra said. She was relieved she wouldn’t have to write an essay, although she felt bad that Bon Bon was doing so much extra work. “Then we can find the lawn mower, right?”

“We will,” Bon Bon said, “but we have another assignment that I need you to help her with. Do you know anything about algebra?”

“It’s been a while since I had to take an algebra class,” Lyra said. “And I’ve forgotten pretty much all of it. It isn’t anything I’ve had to use since school.”

“I was afraid of that,” Bon Bon said. “Lyra is going to owe me big time when she gets back. Okay, how’s this for a plan: We’ll find the lawn mower, then while you’re outside mowing the lawn, I’ll be up here printing out Lyra’s essay and starting on the algebra homework. When you’re finished, come back here. We can’t have both of our assignments be in my handwriting.”

“Sounds good to me,” Lyra said. She only had a basic comprehension of everything that needed to happen, so she wasn’t about to try to come up with a different plan.

The two went downstairs. Lyra’s dad was engrossed in the tennis match and Lyra’s mom had left to go grocery shopping, so there was no one to question why they were in the garage.

“No lawn mower here,” Bon Bon said. “Are you sure it wasn’t in the shed?”

“I don’t think it was,” Lyra said. “We can check again… oh! Let me move the clothes into the drying machine first.”

After Lyra did that, the two opened the shed.

“It’s right here,” Bon Bon said, gesturing to the larger, wheeled machine sitting in the middle of the shed.

“That’s a lawn mower?” Lyra said. “I was expecting something smaller, with a handle that led down to a curved blade thing.” Lyra vaguely pantomimed what she was attempting to describe.

“That’s a lawn mower,” Bon Bon confirmed. “Here.” She pulled the lawn mower out, unscrewed a cap on the top, and began to fill it from the gasoline can stored in the shed. After she finished and put the can back, she told Lyra, “Hold this handle down.” Lyra did so.

Bon Bon yanked on the pull cord a couple of times. The lawn mower roared to life.

“That’s loud!” Lyra shouted over the noise.

“Yep!” Bon Bon shouted back. “Keep holding this down – if you let go, the mower will stop and you’ll have to start it again. I’m going to go upstairs. Don’t run over anything!”

Bon Bon left and Lyra began to mow the lawn. This was one chore that was easier back in Equestria – it wasn’t too difficult to find a hungry pony who would be willing to graze on your lawn and keep it looking tidy.

---

“Saturday is when Lyra and I usually go to the market,” Bon Bon said. “Do you want to come with me?”

The two had just finished breakfast. Lyra had volunteered to clear the table so she could pick up more objects with her magic. Now she was levitating a spoon above the sink just for the sake of levitating something. “Sure!” she replied, dropping the spoon. “I can’t wait to see what a normal pony day is like.”

After they delivered the chocolate-dipped strawberries to town hall for the cute-ceañera, Bon Bon and Lyra made their way to the marketplace. Lyra was fascinated to see so many pony versions of her high school friends. Only they weren’t in high school – they all had jobs. She was also captivated by the sight of pegasus ponies casually flying through the air as if that wasn’t the most amazing thing that could ever happen. She wondered what it would be like to fly, but decided not to express those thoughts to Bon Bon. After all, Bon Bon didn’t have a horn or wings.

Lyra found the actual shopping portion of the trip to be a little tedious. The stands were all so specialized – Bon Bon had to make a separate purchase at each one. It wasn’t like the grocery store where you could just put everything into your cart and then pay for it at the end.

While Bon Bon was examining some tomatoes, Lyra absentmindedly reached for her pocket. It was only after she made the motion with her hoof that she remembered nothing was there.

“Huh,” she said offhandedly to Bon Bon, “I forgot that I wasn’t wearing pants, so I couldn’t get my phone.”

“What’s a phone?” asked Bon Bon. “Is it like a phonograph?”

“No, my smartphone – er, telephone.” When Bon Bon didn’t immediately reply with any sign of comprehension, she added, “Wait, you don’t have telephones here?”

“I don’t think so…”

“How do you talk to each other when you’re far away?”

“We send a letter. Through the mail.”

“Like, the paper mail?”

“What other type of mail is there?”

Lyra was stunned. She looked around, and sure enough, she didn’t see anything resembling telephone wires… or even power lines. She thought harder – she had been so preoccupied with being a unicorn, she hadn’t really paid close attention to what was and wasn’t in Bon Bon’s house. But she hadn’t seen a television, the stove didn’t appear to be electric… the refrigerator! No, wait – Bon Bon had called it an “icebox.” Was that plugged in?

“Do you not have electricity here?” Lyra asked.

“We have lightning,” Bon Bon replied. “That’s electricity.”

“But what about electric power?”

“I don’t know what that is,” Bon Bon said.

“Okay, wow. This world really is different. How do I describe it… Well, first, a telephone is this little device we have that you talk into. The other person also has a phone, and no matter where they are, they can hear what you’re saying. And they can talk back. It’s like having a conversation, even if you’re miles apart.”

“So telephones shoot electricity back and forth at each other?”

“No, they’re powered by electricity, and they use… signals… well, I’m not completely sure how they work, but they do. We also have e-mail, which is like writing a letter, except when you send it, the other person gets it immediately. My parents used to send paper letters, but no one does that anymore.”

Bon Bon tried to envision what Lyra was talking about, but couldn’t. “You’re right – our worlds are different.”

Just then, DJ Pon-3 walked by. The music coming out of her headphones was so loud, Lyra could hear it from where she was standing.

“Wait a minute,” Lyra said. “If you don’t have electricity, then what’s powering those headphones?”

“Unicorn magic,” Bon Bon explained. “Some unicorns have the ability to produce excess magic, which can be stored and used in gadgets designed to react to it. I have a taffy puller that works on magic, since it’s a lot of work to do it all by hoof.”

“Well, we don’t have magic, so we use electricity. It’s sort of like… less powerful lightning that travels through wires.”

“I guess you have a lot of different stuff over there,” Bon Bon said. She didn’t want to be rude, but if she could get through life without understanding exactly how unicorn magic worked, she didn’t see any need to try to understand the power source of a world she didn’t even live in. She went back to comparing tomatoes.

A couple of hours later, after Bon Bon had finished her shopping, she asked Lyra, “Are you hungry? Do you want to stop at the Ponyville Diner for an oatburger?”

It seemed to be about lunchtime – at least, that’s what Lyra’s stomach was telling her. “What’s an oatburger?” she asked.

“You don’t have oatburgers? Oh, you’ve got to try one!”

Bon Bon took Lyra to the Ponyville Diner. The waitress brought each of them an oatburger, some hay fries, and a glass of ice water.

“Hay fries?” Lyra asked.

“Fried hay,” Bon Bon explained.

“Sorry – we don’t eat hay in my world, so I’m just a little hesitant. Do you have french fries here? Made of potatoes?”

“We have fried potatoes, yeah. But hay is cheaper and more plentiful. And it’s what you usually eat with an oatburger.”

Lyra picked up a hay fry with her magic, dipped it in ketchup, and put it in her mouth. She started chewing – first tentatively, then normally. “I was expecting not to like this, but it’s all right,” she said. “I guess anything tastes good if you fry it and cover it with salt and ketchup.”

“Right – this isn’t the peak of fine dining,” Bon Bon said. “But it’s where a lot of ponies go for an ordinary lunch, and you wanted to see what it’s like to be a pony.”

“You’re right,” Lyra said. “Sorry – I didn’t mean to sound like I was putting this place down.”

“It’s okay,” Bon Bon said. “It’s kind of a greasy spoon. Everypony puts this place down a little.”

After they had finished their food, Lyra fidgeted on her seat.

“I have a question,” she said. “If you all sit leaning forward like this, then why do so many of your chairs have backs on them?”

“You know, I’m not sure,” Bon Bon replied. “Tradition, I guess. There’s probably some reason dating back hundreds of years that only the furniture makers know. The rest of us don’t really think about it.”

“Let me try something,” Lyra said. She shifted backward, kicking out her rear legs. She let them dangle over the edge of her seat while she put all of her weight on her haunches. This caused her to lean backward, resting against the back of the chair.

Bon Bon couldn’t help herself. She started to laugh.

“What? It’s a little awkward, but it doesn’t feel that weird. It actually feels more like the way I sit in my normal body.”

Bon Bon wiped a tear from her eye. “No, no – that’s just it. In my whole life, I’ve only ever seen one other pony sit that way.”

“Who?”

“My Lyra. Oh, you two really are the same.” She signaled for the waitress. “Have you ever had a chocolate milkshake?”

“Oh, yes!” Lyra licked her lips.

“I’ll get us a milkshake. Uh, I mean, a milkshake for each of us. Sorry – my Lyra and I usually share, and since I’m looking at Lyra…” She shook her head clear. “You know, I think I’m having an identity crisis on your behalf.”

---

After Lyra had finished mowing the lawn, she put the mower back in the shed and went upstairs.

“Need a break?” she asked Bon Bon.

“Sure,” Bon Bon said.

“Can you… help me figure out what to do with the laundry now that it’s dry?” Lyra asked sheepishly. “Sorry – I know I’m asking you to help me with chores.”

“It’s all right,” Bon Bon said. “That’s a lot easier than simplifying polynomials.”

They went downstairs and walked past Lyra’s dad, who was taking a nap in his recliner. In the laundry room, Bon Bon showed Lyra how to fold clothes which never had more than two sleeves. She also helped her identify which articles of clothing belonged to human Lyra and which belonged to her parents. After they finished, they returned to the bedroom.

“Can I ask you some stuff about being human?” Lyra said. She began to shut the door so no one would overhear that she was really a pony.

“Sure, but you can’t close the door. Lyra’s parents say we have to leave the door open when we’re up here in her room.”

Lyra swung the door back and sat down next to Bon Bon at the foot of the bed. “When Twilight was describing what humans were like,” she said, “she told me that you were hairless except for the manes on your heads. But when I was looking at my arms, I can see really thin, light hairs. Is that normal?”

“Yeah – we all have that,” Bon Bon said. She showed Lyra her forearms for confirmation. “I guess we’re ‘hairless’ compared to monkeys and apes because the only long hair we have is on our heads. And men grow facial hair. By the way, we don’t call these ‘manes.’ Since it’s the only hair we have, we just call it hair.”

“Ah, okay,” Lyra said. She looked at her hands. “Oh! I have a question – in the movie theater yesterday, you put your hand on mine, then pulled it away suddenly. What was that?”

“Oh,” Bon Bon blushed. “I’m sorry about that. I was distracted by the movie, and I saw Lyra sitting next to me, and I forgot for a second that you weren’t my Lyra, so I just automatically…”

“No, that’s all right,” Lyra said. “We ponies do a similar thing, only we kind of wrap our hooves around, sort of like this.” She tried to demonstrate with her wrist and her forearm. “Can I at least see… I mean, I’m not going to get to have fingers ever again…”

“Okay,” Bon Bon said. She held out her hand and took Lyra’s. The two sat there, Lyra’s right hand in Bon Bon’s left hand, for a few seconds.

“I can understand why humans do this,” Lyra said. “Can I try one other thing? I really want to see what it’s like.”

Bon Bon hesitated for a moment. “All right…”

Lyra leaned over and gave Bon Bon a kiss on the cheek. Slightly longer than a peck; just long enough for Lyra to register what the sensation was like.

“Uh…” Bon Bon said. She released Lyra’s hand. “This is weird.”

“I’m sorry – I just wanted to know,” Lyra said. “You don’t have any hair on your cheek, and I really wondered what that was like for humans…”

“No, it’s weird because…” Bon Bon tried to find the right words. “You look just like Lyra, and you sound just like Lyra, but I know you aren’t actually the same Lyra, so my brain is getting these different signals… it’s just really confusing.”

“I’m sorry,” Lyra said guiltily. “I shouldn’t have done that. This is confusing for me, too. I’m not trying to make excuses. But even though I’ve always wanted to see humans, I guess I never really thought about the fact that I would see Bon Bon – the love of my life – as a human. And now I’m seeing Bon Bon, but I don’t have those feelings about humans, but you’re Bon Bon… I didn’t mean to make you feel like that. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Bon Bon said. She gave Lyra a small smile to let her know that it really was.

An awkward silence hung in the air. Lyra stared at the floor, then over toward the corner of the room. Upon seeing the black case sitting there, she spoke again.

“Anyway. So back home, I’ve been trying to figure out what my purpose in life is. I know it has something to do with my ability to play the lyre, but I can’t figure out what exactly. I see that this world’s Lyra has a lyre, too – maybe she knows something that I don’t. Is she good at playing it?”

“I think so,” Bon Bon said. “If you play, too, I don’t know what your standard for ‘good’ is. She plays it better than anyone else I know could.”

“In Equestria, when we find out what our special talent is, we get these marks on our bodies,” Lyra told her. “I have a picture of a lyre as a permanent part of my coat. Assuming that this body is the same as your Lyra’s body, I didn’t see any marks on it, so I wasn’t sure if anything like that happened here.”

“No, nothing like that,” Bon Bon said. She wasn’t entirely sure what Lyra was talking about, so that seemed like an accurate response.

“Would she mind if I tried playing her lyre?” Lyra asked.

“I don’t think she’d mind. It’d be okay if she played yours, right?”

Lyra nodded. She walked over to the corner of the room and took the lyre out of its case, then sat back down on the bed. “Is this how she holds it?”

“With one hand on the side like that, yeah.”

“Okay,” Lyra said. “Bear with me – this is the first time I’ve ever tried to play with fingers.”

In reality, it wasn’t all that different than when she played as a unicorn. Unlike most pony musicians who played plucked string instruments, Lyra used only her magic to pluck the strings of her lyre. She did so by casting an invisible, blob-like field which had multiple tendrils emerging from it – those tendrils were what she used to manipulate the strings. She got the inspiration from her idea of what human hands were like.

So now that she was working with an actual human hand, her approach wasn’t much different. She began to play – slowly and deliberately at first, then gradually faster as she became accustomed to how her fingers were hitting the strings. Soon, she was happily improvising an upbeat tune.

After a few minutes, Lyra finished playing. “Not bad,” she said to herself. Her human fingers didn’t have quite the reach or dexterity that her magic had, but considering those limitations, she was pretty pleased with the result.

Bon Bon just sat there with a shocked expression on her face. “Wow,” she said. “I’ve never heard my Lyra play that well before.”

“Really?” Lyra said, surprised. “I would think that she’d be more familiar with using hands than I am. How often does she practice?”

“Not as much as she used to,” Bon Bon said. “She’s been focused more on other stuff lately. I think she’s addicted to Cookie Collision. Heh… I probably shouldn’t have introduced you to it.”

“So I guess she can’t help me figure out how to bring joy to others with the lyre.”

“No. If anything, you should be teaching her.”

Lyra got up and put the lyre back in its case. Another dead end.

“Well, I guess we should get this homework out of the way,” Lyra said. “What are you studying? Maybe I’ll recognize something.”

Bon Bon showed her the algebra problems she was working on. Lyra recognized the material only in the sense that she could remember seeing something like it years ago, but she couldn’t remember enough details to help Bon Bon in any useful way. Eventually, Bon Bon finished the assignment, then Lyra copied her answers onto a separate sheet of paper. It was math, so it was okay that they each came up with the same numbers. Plus, the teacher already knew that Bon Bon and Lyra worked on their assignments together.

After the homework was complete, the two watched internet videos until it was dinnertime, at which point Bon Bon went home. The rest of Lyra’s night was pretty mundane by normal standards. But because she was occupying an unfamiliar body in a foreign world, even the mundane was fascinating to Lyra.

---

After lunch at the Ponyville Diner, Bon Bon and Lyra dropped off the food Bon Bon had purchased. Bon Bon then gave Lyra a guided tour of Ponyville. It included the assorted shops, Sweet Apple Acres, and looking at the Everfree Forest while standing a safe distance away. As dinnertime approached, they headed back home.

While Bon Bon prepared dinner, Lyra looked for something to do. “I take it you don’t have TV either,” she said from the living room.

“I don’t know what that stands for, so probably not,” Bon Bon replied from the kitchen.

“It’s this flat screen that lets you watch all kinds of shows.”

“You mean like a movie theater?”

“Oh, you have movie theaters?”

“Yeah, but not many. Most ponies don’t like the lifeless feeling of a flat image – it creates this weird sensation of distance, even when you can see the other ponies up close and larger than life. The majority of us prefer live theater – you can sense that the other ponies are actually there, even if they’re pretending to be somepony else.”

“Is it strange that even though I’m in the body of a unicorn with the power to make things fly through the air, the fact that you don’t have television is one of the hardest things for me to wrap my head around?”

“Yeah, probably. One pony’s normal is another human’s strange, I guess.”

“I can’t imagine life without television. Or phones. I know you’re going to take this the wrong way, and I don’t mean it like that, but you don’t know what you’re missing.”

“You don’t have magic in your world – you didn’t know you were missing that until you came here. Which is better: Television or magic?”

“Oh, that’s hard. Well, I’ve been able to get by without television so far. On the other hand, I have to admit that after only two days without a phone, I’m starting to go through withdrawal.”

“It sounds like I don’t want to know what I’m missing.”

Bon Bon continued to make dinner while Lyra spent some more time enjoying her pony body by going outside and galloping a few laps around the perimeter of the house. At first, Bon Bon was worried that it might attract attention, but she decided that it was no more unusual than some of the other things her Lyra did.

When the food was ready, she called Lyra in and the two sat down to a lasagna dinner. Bon Bon gave Lyra a fork to use, but Bon Bon elected to simply eat her meal by leaning her muzzle into her lasagna.

“I wouldn’t do this if it was a formal dinner,” she explained. “But at home, just with Lyra, this is a lot easier than trying to use a fork. And it’s not like I’m making a mess of things.”

Lyra opted to stick with her fork – she hadn’t been a pony long enough to be able to be as neat as Bon Bon. Plus, it gave her another excuse to levitate something. As she levitated her drinking glass toward her mouth, she said, “We don’t go through nearly as many straws as you do in this world, although I can understand why.” She held up her hoof as a visual aid. “I don’t know how I’d be able to pick this glass up without spilling it all over the place. I guess I never realized how useful fingers were for grabbing things.”

After dinner, Bon Bon wrapped up the leftover lasagna and placed it in the icebox. Then she said, “Is it okay if I ask you to help me with the dishes? Lyra and I usually do them together, and it goes a lot faster if I wash and she dries.”

“No problem,” Lyra said. “You’ve been so nice to let me stay here and make food for me – it’s the least I can do.”

Bon Bon filled the sink, washed the first plate, and held it out for Lyra, who had the dish towel floating at the ready. With uncertainty, Lyra wiped at the plate while it was still in Bon Bon’s hoof.

“You need to take the plate, or else I can’t start washing the next one,” Bon Bon said.

“Oh. Um… I’m not sure what to do here. Picking up two things at the same time was a few chapters later in the book – I didn’t get that far.”

Neither Bon Bon nor Lyra trusted Lyra to hold wet plates and glasses in her hoof without dropping them, so Bon Bon started placing the dinnerware directly onto the drying rack, where Lyra was then able to use her towel. As a result, washing the dishes took some extra time.

As the chore wore on, Lyra said, “I wish there were dishwashers in this world.”

“There are, but only the richest ponies can afford to hire somepony to wash their dishes for them.”

“No, I mean… a dishwasher is a machine that we have where I come from. It’s a box that you put all of your dirty dishes into. You just add soap, press a button, and it automatically sprays everything clean and then dries them. Then all you have to do is put them away.”

“You mean no one has invented a machine to put the dishes away yet?” Bon Bon asked facetiously. Lyra gave her a playful shove to the shoulder.

Eventually, the two finished the dishes. It was still early evening. “What’s the plan?” Lyra asked.

Bon Bon thought. “Lyra and I don’t do anything on Saturday nights… well, nothing that I would do with somepony else,” she said. “Tell you what: I have some leftover chocolate from yesterday. How about I make us some candy? While I’m doing that, there’s something that maybe you can tell me about.”

“What’s that?” replied Lyra.

“Like I was saying yesterday, everypony used to assume that humans were mythological creatures. Lyra has a lot of books with fictional stories about humans, and I’ve read a few of them out of curiosity. I’m sure that most of it was just ponies making things up, but I was wondering how much wound up being accurate.”

“Oh, sure,” Lyra said. “It would be interesting to see what you all thought we were like without ever having met us.”

Bon Bon went upstairs and brought down a couple of books: Humans in Manehattan and Teleported to the Human Dimension. Bon Bon thought the latter seemed especially appropriate, given the circumstances. Lyra agreed, and began to read it. Bon Bon went into the kitchen, took the chilled leftover chocolate out of the icebox, and began to form it into little balls about half an inch in diameter.

A few minutes later, Bon Bon was stirring a mixture of sugar, water, and corn syrup on the stovetop. This didn’t require much of her concentration, so she began to reflect on the conversations she had had that day with Lyra from the human world.

There sure are a lot of strange inventions in that world, Bon Bon thought. Television, automatic dishwashers, some kind of electricity mail… well, it would be nice to have a machine that washed my dishes for me. And being able to immediately get a message to a pony when they’re in another city could come in handy on occasion.

I’ll bet Lyra is having the time of her life over there. She’s getting to see all the humans she could ever hope to see and she’s getting to use their inventions. I guess I’d better get ready to listen to her go on and on about all of the things the humans have that we don’t have in Equestria. This human Lyra sure can’t stop talking about them. Just two days without a telephone and already she misses it? How addictive is using a telephone?

Bon Bon almost didn’t notice that the sugar had already dissolved into the mixture. At the moment, there was nothing for her to do except place a thermometer into the pot and wait for the temperature to rise.

Is my Lyra going to become addicted to the telephone? Is she going to be dissatisfied with oatburgers and hay fries? Is the human world really so much better than Equestria?

Bon Bon looked at the thermometer. The temperature had barely changed. This wasn’t surprising, since it usually took about ten minutes, but she was trying to find something to distract her from her thoughts.

Lyra has seemed so restless lately, wondering what she’s supposed to do in this world. What if… what if she finds out that the reason she didn’t know what to do in this world is because she finds her purpose in the other world? She’s the only pony I know who was convinced – not just open-minded to the idea, but utterly convinced – that humans were real. She’s always wanted to know what it was like to be a human. Now she’s doing it… what if she discovers that her destiny is to be with the humans?

Before she left… she never answered me when I asked if she was coming back.

Bon Bon stared through the thermometer, gazing at nothing. She heard laughter coming from the living room. She abruptly snapped back to attention and went to see what was so funny.

“This is a dramatic story, but you’re right – it isn’t very accurate,” Lyra said. “Humans are a lot cleaner and capable of forming complete thoughts. And if a sentient pony showed up, we wouldn’t try to kill it – we would welcome it and want to become friends. Don’t worry – your Lyra is completely safe in my world. I’m sure she’s fitting right in.”

Lyra’s assurances did not put Bon Bon’s mind at ease.

Comments

[superfun]

There's only one solution to the identity crisis that human Bon Bon is having: A foursome involving the two pairs.

But on a more serious note:

“Is it strange that even though I’m in the body of a unicorn with the power to make things fly through the air, the fact that you don’t have television is one of the hardest things for me to wrap my head around?”

That is one of the most amusing fanfic lines I've ever come across.

[Emperor]

It's beginning to look a little bit like the two Lyras aren't really encountering much of a culture shock yet. Pony Lyra is at least open-minded enough to apparently be wowed by all the new things, rather than nervous and jitterish at how advanced human technology is. If anything, it's Bon-Bon who's worried that her Lyra won't want to come back, and it might end up being the same for the human Bon-Bon too. And they still haven't realised the portal has been deactivated, too.

[Autumn Colors Fall]

"While the machine was working, she went upstairs to the bedroom and tried to think of a way to find out where the lawn mower was without revealing that she was actually a pony from another dimension."

It's lines like this that remind me why I read fan fiction.

[Pr1deM0rn1ngstar]

I agree she's fitting in relatively well however sooner or later somebody's going to catch on and with her luck it's probably going to be sunset shimmer and she is not going to be happy about any of this