• Published 23rd Jul 2016
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Lost Among The Stars - PostPony



Twilight opens a portal in an effort to find a city that vanished long ago but finds herself stranded on Earth amidst the ponies she was searching for. Her hope now lies in the fledgling space industries of Earth to cross the stars and return home.

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5 - First Steps

Two Weeks Later…

---Twilight Sparkle---

“English is annoying.” I said in English. The language seemed to have many rules and even more exceptions at the same time. Sometimes there were even more exceptions to the rules than words that actually followed the rules! At least I had been able to focus once I got my missing eye replaced.

“I know,” Frosty sympathized, “at least you are learning really fast. Maybe I’m just an awesome teacher.” The adolescent pony had been asked by Prince Spark Eclipse to help me learn the language. She was all too happy to assist the ‘alien cyborg pony.’ It was hard to believe that the filly was the very same pony that carried my out of the crater I made when I arrived.

“Why not keep the old language?” I asked.

Frosty pull out her ‘phone’ device again and did something with it. A moment later she responded. “To make it easier to talk with humans, especially from the United States after that nation was founded, especially since humans can’t make all the sounds we can. This decision was made by Prince Eclipse back in 1822, a few decades after the first Europeans made contact with us.”

Frosty resumed using the device. I still hadn’t met a human, but it sounded like they played a significant role. I had spent my time here distracting myself from my own problems by learning the language, but it was about time I found some other books to read now that I could. I needed to. I needed to keep facing forwards. I-

“Hey, this is getting kinda boring. How about we go see a launch?” Frosty asked.

Glad to have my train of thoughts averted, I tried to understand what the Pegasus just asked. “A what?”

“C’mon,” She grabbed my metal hoof and started pulling me along, “This place has a private loop access terminal. We can be back before congress gets out, but we’ll only be on time if we leave now! Prince Eclipse won’t even notice.”

She dragged me through halls that I hadn’t explored before and down a flight of stairs. The whole area was very spartan in appearance. Nothing adorned the white walls and the carpet was a bland tan. We stopped at a tube shaped object. There was a door open on the side that I was pulled through. I could have stopped the filly if I had the mind to but her enthusiasm told me that she would go without me if I stopped and I was certainly curious. She sat us both down in the seats available.

She yelled to the air, “Destination, Cape Canaveral!”

The vehicle closed its doors and smoothly accelerated forwards. I could feel it gently turning and before long it accelerated more. I felt the magical field wash over us and further acceleration. The objects on the walls lit up. I knew that they weren’t windows but they were somehow showing the outside. We were now above the ground and silently sliding along over trees hills until we approached a tangle of tubes ahead of us. I could hardly focus enough to ask about what I was seeing. The window device showed a number and some letters. I could read it but I didn’t what know what it meant. At the moment it was holding steady at 80 MPH.

We slowed and the number went down as we entered the jungle of tubes that seemed to disappear when we got close. There was a number of other objects that looked like the one we were in, also sliding along. After only moments we were pushed into a tube that was perfectly straight. The number fluctuated quite often, sometimes going as low as 10 MPH but now it was getting higher and the sensation of being pressed into my chair was increasing. The windows showed landscape flowing by. I was completely out of my element.

“Frosty, where are we going?” The number had increased to 322 MPH.

“You’ll see. We will be there before too long.” She happily replied.

I could see the landscape rushing by even faster. Fields of tree farms and forests and rural homes became ever more difficult to focus on. I was becoming scared. It already looked like we were going faster than I had ever flown. The number had increased to 817 MPH and still grew.

The humming I heard suddenly went perfectly silent and I felt myself sink even further into my chair. Frosty had given up on using her device and was paying attention to the trip itself. “I heard that this part actually uses superconductors instead of air pressure to push us along. This is the fun part.”

I doubted her greatly. The number had grown to 1572 MPH and even with my pegasus nature the view was nauseating. The extra weight seemed to fall off as the number stabilized at 1600 MPH.

I was breathing heavily but my stomach was settling down. I did nothing but watch for a few minutes. We were entering a mountainous region that had greenery in the occasional valley. We went past the north side of a huge lake and past a decently large city that had an unexpectedly large number of trees for being in a desert. It was behind us in no time and we continued to follow the roads below. The feeling of motion returned occasionally as we curved to and fro but generally took a south eastern path.

It was a while into our trip when Frosty spoke. "Um, Twilight? Can I ask you something?"

The rambunctious filly was almost never this timid so the contents of the question was probably something to be concerned about. "Yes?"

"I was wondering," she started, "why you haven't gone home yet? I mean, I think it's cool here, but I thought you would have gone home already, at least to tell everyone that you are okay. You have been trying to hide it, but I can tell you are very sad."

Well, my worry was justified. I took a deep breath to prepare myself and to buy time to think. "I basically made the attempt a few days ago. The first step is to cast a spell to find your destination and see if it's safe. It was that connection that allowed me to find my way here, but when I tried to make the same thing to go home, it fell to pieces. My theory is that magic has its own space that is like an ocean. When your ancestors came here, it was still and you all made it safely as far as I know. But when that stillness was broken it became violent and wild. That's why all past attempts for you to go home failed. I made it here barely because it had time to settle, but now it's once again too turbulent to travel through. I don't know what to do."

"Oh." She quietly replied. "Hey, what if we had a whole bunch of ponies or even the prince help out? Maybe he could make it work?"

I sighed. I didn't want to think about it. "While I was trying to see if I could go home, I could occasionally sense my mentor's magic reaching out to me, but barely an instant later there would be another storm of magic. I think that the amount of power you would need to use to avoid causing problems is much less than the amount of power it would take to open another portal. I don't see a solution. Can we not dwell on this so much? Please?"

"Okay... sorry."

"It's fine. Don't worry about it." I tried to calm bother her and myself.

It was an hour and a half before we started to slow down again. I had asked Frosty what MPH was and she explained the measurement system concerning distance and speed. Apparently we had been traveling at twice the speed of sound out of The Principality and across the United States. I was incredulous but accepted her words. The vehicle slowed gradually and it was not long before we disembarked into an area that was not unlike the city we had started near. Getting out of the terminal took little time but it was an adventure. I saw my first human then, well, maybe my first fifty. There was a number of tall bipedal creatures with little to no fur except for on top of their heads. There was also a number of ponies too that were bustling about, getting in or out of objects like the one we had just been on. None of the other groups payed any other much attention.

When we got out, the smell of sea salt wafted through the air on a breeze. We quickly boarded yet another transport, except this time it traveled on wheels on the roads I had seen. We were quickly shuttled to the coastline and dropped off. Frosty pulled me along on her two legged gait until we reached the edge of the grassy area that gave way to large boulders leading into the water.

“What are we here for again?” I asked, not seeing much of interest.

Frosty just pointed ahead of herself towards another piece of land a little bit to the north. It seemed to have a couple structures upon it along with a tall tubular object that said SPACEX down the side.

“I don’t see what’s so special. Is something supposed to happen?” I inquried further.

“Oh yeah, we have less than a minute to go. We were almost too late.” She stated intensely.

I looked back again to see that one of the structures had leaned over at least thirty degrees, leaving the central object alone. It was hard to make out many details, much less how large it was. It looked like one of those buildings that Frosty had called ‘skyscrapers’ except it was round and bulbous and had a number of cylindrical structures supporting a fat white part that tapered to a point on top.

“What’s happening?”

“Watch!”

I did as she said just as the bottom seemed to catch on fire. Instead of falling down, it started to go… up. The behemoth object raised itself upon an inferno of light and smoke.

“...What.”

The tower rose and seemed to tilt over. The smoke traced its path upwards as it shrunk to just a spot that receded into the sky until it seemed to be traveling parallel to the ground before winking out minutes later. I had so many questions.

“Where is it going?”

Frosty seemed happy enough that the… object had caught my interest. “It’s carrying the Alpha Point probe into orbit. Where it will spend a few days doing systems checks and then rocketing off to study the Alpha Point.”

I blinked. “I don’t know what you said.” I stated plainly.

Frosty finally seemed to realize that I was nowhere close to being on the same page as she was. “Okay, why don’t we talk about it on the ride back. If I know anything about you, I think you’ll love it!”

Once again she was urging me to get a move on. I ordered my legs to cooperate and they behaved like I would have expected real legs to. I could almost forget about what I was missing. It was not long before we were traveling again. The other seats were as vacant as last time.

Before we could even leave the city I made a mistake. “I wish my friends could have seen that.” That was all it took before the fresh wounds reopened and tears began to escape. The thought of all those that I was dead to led to restrained sobbing. This wasn’t the first time that I had broken down in front of Frosty. She reached over to put a wing behind me, granting all the comfort she could. The vehicle accelerated faster like it had before yet my emotions hadn’t stabilized.

I heard a pop, but not really. I was too distraught to notice. The vehicle was soon moving at a constant rate and I had recovered. I made sure to lean forward slightly from the upright position the chair held me and and was confused when Frosty never moved her wing.

I looked back and too my horror I saw wing bent in a manner that wings shouldn’t bend. While we were both pressed back into our seats by the G forces of the acceleration, her wing was pushed forwards by the contours of the chair. It looked as if some of the bones were dislocated.

“Ah! Frosty, sorry!” I quickly cast an anesthesia spell before doing my best to right her wing. I resorted to casting Inner Sight. Normally, it would be used by a unicorn to see their heart-like carbuncle generating mana and pumping it through the mana capillaries. I had to adapt it to seeing into another pony on the fly but I managed well enough.

I reset the bones. Meanwhile the only time I heard I a peep out of her was when I put the bones back. With a pop, she had use of her wing once more and she released a breath she was holding. A trickle of fell from the bite marks on her lower lip.

“I’m so sorry, are you okay?” I quickly followed up, concern for Frosty overriding my personal issues.

“Yeah,” she took a deep breath, “I’m fine. I should have known better.”

I sat back again in relief. “Perhaps it would do us some good to get both our minds on a different track. So you said you would tell me where that thing was going?”

A ghosts of a smile returned to the lips of the pegasus. “That story starts about ninety years ago back when the US and the USSR got into something called a cold war…”


---Celestia---

I walked down the length of my throne room towards my sister and past the line of petitioners arrayed down the room. I made no fanfare and did little to acknowledged the sighed stares directed at me. Perhaps it was the state of my crown, peytral, and shoes. Rather than the shine of brilliant gold plating, they were dull and scratched like a poorly maintained brass instrument. Perhaps it was the state of my hair. My mane and tail are still floating in the way they do, but were tied back and weighed down with debris. My coat was even worse. Where once there was sweat or tears, now there were disruptions and tangles held together by salt and dirt.

I stopped when I was beside Luna, “I just need to tidy up. Are you fine holding the throne for an extra hour?”

Ignoring the murmur of the crowd, she smiled lightly, “Nay, I will stay for the remainder of this day. It isn't hard when you realize that you can just intimidate the nobles. It lets me get to the sensible petitions faster. You should try. Tomorrow. Rest today.”

I gave a fatigued smile. “Thank you, sister, I will take your advice.” I continued on, I was not in a big hurry so I had yet to exit the back of the room when I heard Luna speak again.

“Today will be different. Instead of scaring all of you off, I want each of you to secure me a package of coffee. The one that brings me the best coffee will secure my patience enough that I will hear your whole petition before kicking you out. Wait, not regular citizens, just the nobles…” I had shut the door behind me but her actions had left some thoughts lingering in my head. Perhaps there was a way to wield the minds of the nation to help me find Twilight.

I felt spark of flame return to my heart. Maybe I can still have hope.