---Twilight Sparkle---
I was lounging in my castle’s private study reading an adventure story. All other interesting reading material had dried up. No textbook, science journals, or anything of that nature was left where I could easily acquire it. Perhaps I should look into a method of sharing information faster across long distance. That would be interesting. Perhaps it could be based on dragon fire?
Suddenly I heard knocks echoing down the hall. Somepony was at the front door. I was split between annoyance and relief at having to save the story for later. It was a story about going to the moon without magic. Who would have thought of that? The knocking reached my ears again, reminding me that I had at least one guest to attend to. I quickly teleported to the front door and push it open with a hoof. All the time the action seemed to take less and less effort. Becoming an alicorn was always paying off more and more. Escaping my thoughts again, I realized I was face to face with one of my favorite authors!
“Oh hello Daring- I mean Miss Yearling, what can I do for you today?” Twilight greeted.
“Nothing much. I'm just in need of a magical expert. You know where I can find one around here?” She asked me with with a knowing smirk.
Excitement filled me at the sound of those words. The famous archaeologist was coming to me! Perhaps she uncovered some sort of ancient magical mystery! And I, Twilight Sparkle, will be the one to solve the mystery and save-
“Um, Twilight, are you okay?” Daring asked me, breaking me out of my thoughts
I quickly turned and gave my best mock salute to Daring. I just couldn’t hold it in anymore. “YES! Anything you need, I am at your service!” I shouted in sincere jubilation.
Daring nodded and pulled a book out of her right saddlebag and allowed me to levitate it out of her grip.
She must have been bored out of her mind. “In that case we might want to go inside. I've got a book I need you to read.” I quickly let her in and led her back to my study. I was doing my best to keep my excitement contained but I suspect daring might have noticed.
In no time we had navigated the castle which I was becoming very familiar with. Daring was giving it a critical eye, probably comparing it to ruins she had explored. We soon found ourselves in a in a comfortable mini library with seating for few and books for many. In no time I had read through the journal. While I had been containing my astonishment, I was also making notes in a journal of my own. The idea of a lost city was familiar and this piece of information had my mind buzzing. Before I got too deep in my mental efforts, Daring spoke up.
“So Twilight, are you interested in helping me find them?” Daring Do calmly asked me. In the midst of my excitement, I couldn’t tell what she was bracing herself for.
I merely looked her way and nodded vigorously. “Of course! A missing city from well over a thousand years back that has never reestablished contact with Equestria? It’s our duty to either open relations with our lost kin or to at least remember their fate. But we will need some very specialized professionals to find them at all.”
Daring blinked at this. “Why would we need anypony else to find a city?”
“Because we need to examine the echos of the ley lines to figure out where it went. Huge magical events linger for a long time and anypony who studies the ley lines can feel them, but they can’t be examined without a known date and a known action. We have both. It can be done.” I explained as I began to pen a letter.
“Are there that many places a city like that could go?” Daring replied.
“Via a teleport powered by thousands of ponies? Anywhere. Combing the world for an extra city would take much more effort than needed, not to mention that it might be in the other hemisphere.” I casually informed Daring as I formed the dragonfire to send the letter.
Daring perked up at that. Perhaps she had plans to explore the southern hemisphere blockaded by the extreme environments caused by the sun being so close to the world. It was quiet for a moment before a new letter letter appeared out of thin air. I quickly unwound the scroll and read it. Daring, who had not paid close attention to the earlier letter looked on with curiosity. “What does it say? For that matter, who’s it from?”
The alicorn practically squee’d in response. “The princess says that we will make the recovery of the missing city a state project. She has asked me to lead the magical division! She has even invited you, although your skills probably won't be needed until we actually find the city.”
“What can I say to that?” Daring said with enthusiasm, “Count me in!”
“Excellent. I need to make preparations and write some letters. Then perhaps I should get my friends involved. Can you handle some of Rainbow’s attention for a bit?” I asked.
Daring Do grinned, I suspect she knew what she was getting into before she even started her journey to Ponyville, “Yup. I even brought a pen.”
One Week Later…
I was standing in a large domed room beneath the Canterlot Palace. There was a busy bustle of ponies moving around the room, examining the magic circle drawn underneath a glass floor of removable panels on a very dark marble floor. Celestia, Luna, Daring Do, along with the rest of her friends were also there, although none of them were actually inside the room, but instead in another room watching through magically strengthened glass.
Rainbow had spent some time catching up with Daring Do over the past few days while I had been in Canterlot making preparations and recruiting experts in the study of ley lines, transit spells, and circle crafting. All together there were fourteen unicorns with her in the room all dressed in lab coats and goggles.
There was a clock built into the wall on the other side of the circular room that I was watching closely. The experiment needed to happen on a very short time frame in order to work correctly. When it actually started was an arbitrary decision. So I, being myself, planned the start to be noon. Which was only fifteen seconds away.
I tapped my right hoof on the glass floor three times and everything went silent. Five seconds later I tapped twice, not uttering a word. As one, every pony in the room simply lifted their right foreleg, the signal that they were all ready. At five seconds I tapped once more and every horn lit. I was the conductor and they were her symphony. They each held a slightly different spell signature in their mind that should correlate to a teleport spell cast approximately thirteen hundred and fifty years ago. Whichever pony got a strong resonance with the echo in the ley line would be the one to carry them to the next step.
At zero second I tapped once more and they each tuned in to the ley line, trying to hear or feel any reaction at all. Four seconds later, a dull red unicorn across the room from me got a reaction, the first sign that things were on track. The pony fed his spell into a smaller spell circle engraved on a small stone tablet. We all smiled as they felt the magical probe race from the spell work in a vaguely outward direction.
Tension in the room suddenly skyrocketed as the probe, which should have reported back instantly, took a few seconds longer than expected to report a success or failure, but in under five seconds they got a response on the magical frequencies that correlated to safe air, a safe temperature, the presence of land, and a successful anchoring for the probe to that point relative to the movement of its environment. Now the truly time sensitive step came, we had to open a portal.
---Frosty Davis---
“I still can’t believe that you enjoy standing like that. I would be driven nuts! Not to mention how I can only barely tolerate clothes,” Berry Sun exclaimed to me, the icy blue pegasus walking next to her.
“Hey, it clears my forelegs up to do things other than carry my weight. Besides, the leg support braces are comfortable and the shoes make balancing easy. Not to mention they put me on a more even level with some of my friends at school. Same goes for my clothes. You on the other hand always have so much gear strapped to your head I wonder how you lift it some days.” I said to the purple coated, yellow maned unicorn trotting beside me.
On that note, I felt as if something was wrong with my balance for a second but it quickly passed so I ignored it. “Well I like my music and I like the internet. Can you blame me? And they weigh next to nothing.”
A beat passed before I responded, “Whatever, I guess I can’t. But I think the same applies to me. It’s about fitting in. I’ve spent long enough being so different from the people I spend time with and hurting my neck to look up to my step-dad. And both he and mom are supportive so that’s nice. Maybe it would be different if my biological dad lived to raise me himself, things might have been different.”
Berry made no comment as we continued to walk through Arrival Park. I pulled out a cellphone from my pocket and started checking it. Helped in no small part by the standard dexterity enhancement made to my bracelet, and millions of others, that made a pony’s ability to grip things work more like human hands, conductive flesh and all.
Not a second later we both stumbled. It felt as if the ground was swaying. I nearly fell onto my flanks. “Um, are we having an earthquake?”
That was the cue.
The circle formation of unicorns and one alicorn were channeling their magic into the huge magic circle underneath the floor. Once it reached the power requirement it would connect to the anchor and open one side of the portal. Once a pony entered it, it would firmly establish a connection on the other side and create a spherical doorway.
It had been less than a minute since they started and the portal was already almost established. A white light appeared in the center of the room, an unavoidable byproduct of energy leaking from the spell. I cut my flow of magic and looked around. No ponies were giving me a stop signal and the princesses weren’t either. If things went well, the door would stabilize and Daring Do would quickly follow me with the materials in her saddle bags.
I, knowing that I had a better chance of surviving if things went south, had volunteered to go first and now was my moment in spite of my friends’ protest. I rushed forwards into the light and stopped for a second and looked back at my friends.
That was the cue.
In a split second the portal opened around me… and then it snapped shut with a thunderous report, taking me with it.
---Celestia---
We watched as Twilight disappeared. We barely had a moment for our eyes to go wide with surprise before the spell snapped. The collapse of a tunnel through space time was so violent that the black marble floor beneath the glass shattered, and a shock wave spread through the solid floor to the walls and ceiling. Luna and I quickly executed emergency plan A and teleported every pony out of the room along with ourselves.
In an instant we were on a nearby hillside outside Canterlot. Luna took to assisting a pony whose hide had been peppered with glass while I looked back at my city. A moment later we all heard rumbling and I noticed something very bad indeed and turned to my sister. “Luna! The structural wards are coming loose!”
Upon returning from the moon, Luna had been informed on various details on many subjects, including the method that the city used to remain perched so precariously on the mountain. The structural wards were pairs of massive stone slabs that had one in the ground at the floor of the valley and a counterpart embedded in the underside of the city. They were each engraved with powerful levitation magic circles that pushed against each other. This meant that there were basically invisible pillars stretching from the valley floor to support the city.
Now they were coming loose. The wards themselves would never move, but if they were no longer supporting the city, then they would remain still while the city fell down around them. Luna was nearly beset with panic but simply nodded at me instead.
Putting aside my stress and fear for Twilight’s fate, I teleported us both to the valley floor where all eleven wards were anchored. I immediately took a wide stance and lit my horn. The city above us that had just began to tilt over turned a golden color. Luna quickly followed suit and imitated my actions. The glow from each of our horns each grew from a sheath of light to raging maelstroms of magic and while the city slowed, it didn’t stop. We both had to push harder. Our awareness of the universe shrunk down to the need to push as our eyes glowed white and our manes and tails changed from a serene flow to something a normal pony would expect from the winds of a tornado.
It had only taken four minutes from the start of the experiment to reach this point. It would be seven hours before the city was resecured and we were relieved. After which we both immediately fainted.
Berry and I felt the tremors get worse. The trees in the park were shaking and their leaves were falling down. The pony statue in the center of the circular park was suddenly thrust upwards several feet, replaced by a white light hanging in place which suddenly grew to be larger than a pony. Then it vanished with a thunderclap that created strong shock waves that ripped through the ground. While this city was no stranger to earthquakes, a number of the nearest homes and businesses outside the park collapsed in spite of their anti earthquake construction.
Then everything was quiet, if not dusty. I saw Berry push herself back to her hooves in spite of her trembling and looked around. She came over me and helped me back up to my bipedal stance. We each took a moment to regain our senses before we noticed the new crater. Well, half crater. The opening into the ground curved around the foundation of the statue. In fact, the bottom of the foundation was visibly hanging above the bottom of the crater.
I was looking in when Berry pointed into the crater. “Frosty, there’s a pony down there.”
At the sight of the purple body down below, I was filled with confusion and my expression probably reflected that. I took some careful steps over the upturned grass and down the dirt slope as Berry watched me. Then I heard a sound that I didn’t like. I looked up and froze, before shouting, “Berry, the statue is going to fall!”
“What?!” Berry didn’t sound at all sure of what to do, but when she saw me racing down into the crater, she reacted. The statue foundation and the soil around it took on a pale yellow glow as berry simply tried to push it upwards. There was a dim flash of light that neither of us payed any attention.
Using her wings to push myself along, I reached the pony and immediately tried to wrap my hooves around them. I was surprised at how heavy the pony was and wound up wrapping my wings around the pony and trying to carry her out by walking. There was something wrong with the pony. She felt… wiggly even though it was obvious that she was unconscious, wiggly and wet. Regardless I pushed myself out of the crater, relying on the leg braces to carry a lot of the weight. I set the pony down on the grass the moment I was out.
I tapped my friend on the shoulder who was still keeping the foundation in place. Berry’s eyes flew open and once she saw that no pony was in the crater, she let go of the statue. The large block of concrete immediately fell down, impacting the ground with a loud thud as if her magic had been the only thing holding it up.
Berry sagged on her hooves in exhaustion, breathing heavily, before looking at me. I didn’t know her pupils and irises shrunk in fear. My cool blue coat, as I would later learn, was covered in blood. My outstretched red and blue and now red wings made me look like some sort of pony war hero rather than a high school student. My breathing was just as heavy.
“Well done.” A voice spoke from behind Berry. She spun around only to find that she was looking at somepony’s legs. We looked up to find the prince himself was standing before us. The cobalt blue stallion with the shining white mane mane and tail were waving in an invisible wind, the only known pony to have both wings and a horn, said to have been alive since ponies first arrived on Earth. He was even wearing an AR headset in front of his eyes, though it was a model I didn’t recognize.
“I’ll be taking you three to the hospital. I’ll have some questions for you once you get checked over,” Spark Eclipse informed us before teleporting all four of us away. Nothing was left behind except the sirens of emergency vehicles, the whirring of drone rotors, a large crater, and a lot of blood.
good story can't wait for more
7416465 I almost obliged you on the spot :P i.gyazo.com/8497f615b2b095136c933bddd3ca5d8b.png
I've been playing around with a similar concept, that the Crystal Empire was displaced to Earth in the thousand+ years it was gone, rather than being displaced in time. So I'm rather interested to see your take on a similar idea of a pony city/civilization displaced to Earth's past. Any specific reasoning for the numbers used?
7416819 In my head I have it where the first alicorns all show up at about the same time so I needed a date reasonably old. I also wanted the pony city to establish itself firmly on the west coast with time to grow enough to be a player on the world scene in modern times as a nation.
And of course I didn't want to use a perfectly round number like 700 AD or some such.
Pah! Special relativity. If you have to even consider special relativity in your starship design, you're not doing FTL travel correctly.
In both the prologue and chapter one there were a handful of times you vacillated between first person and third, sometimes within the same sentence! It’s incredibly jarring. Apart from that? Pretty good so far, though it’s a damn shame Daring didn’t get to go through with Twilight considering she was the one who set the one who set everything in motion in motion.
Well now, this is quite interesting - while I have seen a few stories which displace an Equestrian town on Earth, this has to be the first time I see a town displaced to Earth's past, with all the butterflies and ramifications that would have for present-day Earth. You say Tamarelantis (That's a bit of a mouthful - a shame it wasn't simply called Marelantis) appeared on Earth 1300 years ago? That's actually 800 years before Columbus discovered Americas, meaning the ponies would have been well established and expanded by the time the first Europeans arrived.
By that point they'd probably be considered as much 'native Americans' as the Indians, especially from an outsider's perspective. Probably better developed too - which, I imagine, would account for the seemingly increased technology level we see hinted in the story right now. Especially if, as the summary suggests, space flight is advanced enough to consider practical interstellar travel as anything more than a wistful. fever-born pipe dream. Anyways, ponies having lived there for so long before the Europeans showed up should have all sorts of interesting ramifications for today's political climate and the state of United States (if it's even called that, or exists as an entity) in general - I'm looking towards those things being explored.
And another Alicorn, eh? Assuming Celestia and Luna weren't yet around during the time the city disappeared, Twilight ought to be the first alicorn (besides himself) that the prince has ever seen - his reactions should be quite interesting once it dawns on everyone what Twilight is. And I'm certainly looking towards the realization what her presence (and her story, once she's conscious enough to tell it) means, both for humans and ponies on Earth in general.
I imagine that no attempts have been made at finding Equis(?) because the Prince assumed that the planet is a frozen ball of ice by now, with no signs of life save for angry frost demons, if they escaped before the unification of the tribes drove the windigoes away. Pointless at best, and world-dooming at worst to look for that place. Now they will learn differently though - not only has the homeworld and pony civilization survived, but thrived in the centuries spent apart. A chance to both reconnect with their ancestral home and to establish contact with friendly alien world? Yeah, I can see Twilight's arrival heralding a push for spacebound exploration, now that it's certain there actually is something to be found out there.
The setup clearly has potential, and I'll be eagerly waiting for future updates.
7417261 Okay, with a dose of magic involved :P Special relativity will be obeyed here as much as it is in the book series I linked to in the description
7417325 At a point a few chapters later I decided I wanted the whole thing to be in first person so I went and changed everything. All errors will be fixed when I become aware of them. Sorry about that/
7417710 I'm glad you feel that way! I do want to point out that the math from the description points to the year 2048. As much as I want to explain everything, I wont be telling any spoilers. I will say that while I wanted the pony nation to have little effect on the development of much of the world, my own research shows that that may have happened on its own. The natives might have spread legends n such, but the location of the original city on the inside of the San Francisco bay would not have been discovered by explorers until only a few years before the revolutionary war since explorers of the area frequently missed the bay for centuries. The ponies mostly expanded into the Californian central valley and had little interaction with explorers until the late eighteenth century. By then most of today's eurasian political entities were established apart from the major changes that would come from the world wars if I'm not mistaken. I'd think on this more but I need to go to work :P
The brain may be a 30 watt super computer, but it's still not good enough to really model the world and its interactions without undue effort. I don't want this story going the way of the story The Island In the Sea Of Equus where the whole US appears on an island in the middle an ocean near Equestria. I wish that one would update more but it is probably dead from being far too complex.
If my math is right this is set in 2,048 so 32 years in the future? If you want them to be in modern day time just change it to 658 AD arrivel or are you playing with the "20 years in the future" rule to get away with some other changes?
Reading the story I've seen you're having a hard time staying in 1st person view point. Maybe you should consider keeping in 3rd person? You can still show what's going through the characters heads like that and it's easier to read the character interactions.
7418905
7418846 I needed to push to a more reasonable date to have some important technological differences from today.
7418325
True, getting bogged down in minute details is something to be avoided - especially as those geopolitical differences, while interesting from our "meta" perspective, don't have any frame of reference or importance to the characters in-story, as this is the only reality they have ever known. And if the story is largely going to be about getting Twilight home via a spaceship, then it's probably best not to dwell on things that run the risk of derailing the main plot. Which is to say - I expect the discovery and long-since established presence of another sapient species to have a pretty profound impact in how the world has been shaped, but those should probably be only touched upon in broad strokes in the story proper.
As for this part:
I have a feeling that a few hundred years of contact with another friendly species that you cohabit with would do far more for technological differences and advancement, by pooling the different schools of thought and ways of approaching problems and their solutions together, than a mere few decades of time ever would.
I mean - the very upcoming premise of the story, that of realistically achievable and practical interstellar flight, hints at some pretty major changes that have been brought about by the mingling of the two species (and perhaps some incorporation of magic in technological solutions). Because if we take just the humanity as it is today, and add a couple of decades of time on top of that ... well, that wouldn't leave us any realistically closer to viable interstellar spaceships than we are now, which is to say not at all
Beware my prophetic powers:
By comparison I'd expect the Transmarelantians to be rather far behind Equestrians (or Twilight specifically in this case, I guess - though you could hardly ask for a better individual on the topic) in pure magical research, understanding and application, owed to their thousand years of isolation and in comparison absolutely minuscule population pool of unicorns and institutionalized knowledge to draw from, which would have naturally limited and stunted their magical research and development.
Hmm, makes me wonder if it's some of Twilight's magical knowledge, when combined with what the earthers can do, which would ultimately enable long-range spaceflight ...
7419586 Yes.
The geopolitical stuff is not likely to see the light of day beyond the comment section, but you've hit on some of the decisions I made so kudos to your deduction. Would you kindly spoiler your last statement? :P
7419656
And done
Though to be fair your story description is rather spoiler-dense itself. You might want to trim it down a bit if you don't want to reveal some of the upcoming plot elements too early, because as-is it tells a fair deal about what's likely to come.
7419541 While that's fine jumping between multiple 1st person viewpoints is hard on the reader. It's just me but I fine it flows better with either a single 1st person viewpoint or in 3rd person. Starting off as Twilight then now I'm Daring, now Luna, wait who am I now? takes away from immersion into the story.
This is an interesting story and I'll be waiting how different is this Earth considering that the Tamelantis is at the San Francisco area since the 630 AD.
On the other hand, whose blood was spilled?
7419807 That's something I'll try to think about. I believe I'll try to minimize the frequency of that happening within the chapter. I will not change the chapters I already have written (although I believe it tones itself down anyway) else my story will go back into developer hell.
7419818 Twilight's
7419782 Hmm, I may tone it down maybe but I still want it to be clear what kind of story it's going to be without going the most boring route of just saying 'there'll be spaceships!' I currently don't know how to accomplish your suggestion without crossing my own line.
Good idea and concept, executed poorly
7487215 what makes you say that?