G4.05: Adopting Change
James jerked awake with a violent start, looking up and around and blinking away the bleariness of sleep. “啊! 我醒了!” she exclaimed, pushing away from whatever had just touched her. Then her vision cleared, and she saw who was looming over her. It was Lightning Dust, her rescuer, looking concerned. She felt herself relax immediately.
The pony reached down, gently prying the pages of the book away from her face, and pushing it out of the way. She said some words, most of which James couldn’t make sense of, except for “aren’t you?” at the end.
“Yes,” she said, a little more confidently than last time. She had three more days of diligent study under her belt, after all. Her… metaphorical belt. The one they hadn’t given her back. “I was reading. It is a good book.” That was all she could manage, simple sentences with a simple subject and verb. But considering where she’d been a few days before…
Lightning Dust’s eyes widened, and she grinned down at her. “Sure… eat book?” She gestured back to one of the folding tables, where a pair of fresh bowls had been placed, along with some plain paper packaging. For the second time, it seemed her rescuer had saved her from hay.
“No eat book!” James responded, getting to her hooves and shaking herself out. Some of her stank wafted out from around her in a cloud, a cloud of wet barn animal and dirty feathers. Not a pleasant scent, even if she was too young for all the sexually mature odors that would’ve made it even worse. “Trying learn to talk good. Working on!”
“Clearly,” Lightning Dust wrinkled her nose. “Ne multe pli. Post tio, vi devas duŝi vin.”
“Too fast,” James responded, bounding over to the table. The pony soon joined her, though she gently slid her own bowl a little further away than it had been before. They ate in relative silence, James far too invested in the bowl in front of her to care what the alien was doing.
She’d had fresh vegetables a few times in the hospital, and each time they’d been a befuddlement. Where had these aliens obtained cherry tomatoes? She was positive she was eating romaine lettuce. Who cares. That’s a problem for the biologists. No doubt when she returned to the probe, the biologists it instanced would bicker about convergent evolution and biological predisposition.
The salad might’ve been more than enough for her if she’d been eating well. Unfortunately for James, she hadn’t tasted anything that wasn’t hay since Dust’s last visit. She finished in just a few minutes, and only then did she look up.
Dust was staring at her. She hadn’t even touched her own bowl. “They don’t… feed you… do they?” James couldn’t make out several of the words, but she managed to understand a few.
“No,” she admitted, looking down at the table. “When I came, I had…” She struggled for words. “I had own food. It was better. Eat hay… want to scream.”
“Yeah,” the pony pushed her own untouched bowl across the table, accepting the empty one instead. “Have mine.”
James stared down at another full bowl, eyes as wide as they’d been when this pony had given her the language textbook. “Why?”
The pony shook her head. “Eat fast. I don't scias kiom multe pli longe I povas resti ĉi tie before I vomi.”
James didn’t need telling twice, and soon enough the second bowl was empty. For the first time in days she felt full, and not in the hollow, gassy way that hay made her feel. She looked up then, smiling at the pony across the table. James felt better, better than she had in days. “Thank you! That was great!”
“Yeah,” Dust muttered, rising to her hooves. “Bought… factory cafeteria. Can’t make weather without a full stomach.”
James frowned a little, wondering if maybe she’d interpreted that last sentence incorrectly. The book had used language like that many times, but she hadn’t expected to hear it in the real world. They had just been sample sentences, fun to say and write. “You aren’t… leaving already?” James stood as well, scratching at the ground.
“Yeah,” Dust said. “You’re coming too. No more…” she gestured with one wing at the dingy basement. “No more of this. Pack as rapide kiel vi povas, I'm going to akiri iom da aero.”
James stared at her retreating tail in shock, feeling a chill as her words sunk in. Lightning Dust hadn’t just brought her a meal, she was rescuing her from… whatever this place was.
Had it been any other alien, she probably would’ve resisted. The last time James had been moved, they’d had to drug her. This time she packed willingly, collapsing her acoustic guitar and tossing it into her bag along with the textbook and all the notes she’d taken so far. The satchel barely fit her handful of possessions, but James made it work. A few more seconds and she’d tossed it over her shoulder, hurrying across the room to the stairwell.
“Ready!” she exclaimed, glancing up the stairs. Dust was nowhere in sight—had she already changed her mind and left?
James hurried up the steps, her heart beginning to race as acid rose from her throat. Had the pony… lied?
No, that wouldn’t happen. It wouldn’t happen it wouldn’t happen it wouldn’t happen it wouldn’t happen it wouldn’t happen…
James emerged from the stairs, searching for Lightning Dust. She hadn’t ever actually climbed up here, not even when there wasn’t an adult to watch her. Yet instead of something sinister, she only found a rather plain, attractive interior. It looked like the lobby of a public building, with large windows on the walls that opened onto empty sky. It’s just my angle. I’m so low to the ground that I’d be looking up no matter how close I was.
But if she’d been afraid that her rescuer might’ve been lying, those fears weren’t confirmed. She found Lightning Dust waiting by the exit doors, pacing back and forth with an expression of mild boredom.
She turned as James approached, grinning down at her. “I don’t know kiel mi faras. You devus know that, ekde I prizorgis you. Well… trying, iamaniere.”
James hesitated, stopping halfway across the strangely springy floor. “Can’t… be worse than so far.” Not quite a complete thought, but she did her best.
Dust chuckled. “No, probably not. I remember kiam mi estis orfo, kaj neniu prizorgis min. Won’t be like that.” She gestured for James with a wing, and she hurried over. Reading such gestures was becoming easy for her—after all, almost all the aliens had them. After having encountered only one pony without, they had become the standard means of communication between her and the species whose language she didn’t yet speak.
Well, she was learning to speak it now.
“La poneoj en la malsanulejo rakontis al mi that you can’t fly. Is it true?” Dust looked her over, her eyes lingering on the wing-pockets of James’s jumpsuit. “Your weird vestoj ne havas malfermojn por flugiloj. We’ll have to fix that.”
“Can’t fly,” James echoed, doing her best not to sound afraid. “Never learned how. Never needed to. Always just walked.”
The pony shook her head in bewilderment and disgust. “Your parents earth ponies or unicorns?”
James hesitated, then shook her head. “No parents.”
The pony turned suddenly away from her, hurrying to the large entry doors and pushing them open. “For now, I’ll carry you. But lessons devos okazi baldaŭ. Nenio estas pli grava por juna pegasus ol lerni kiel fly.”
Lightning Dust stepped out the open doors, gesturing for James to follow. She did, hurrying along beside her so fast she very nearly walked right off a cliff.
At least, that was what James thought it was at first. Less than two meters out the door the land she was walking on swept away precipitously, a fluffy white abyss that opened into a yawning maw of sky. Far, far below, so far she could make out only the largest details, were the cracked and broken plateaus of land. Like the ones she had been crossing, perhaps the exact same ones. They were too far away.
James felt her limbs lock up on the very edge of the slope, her stomach dropping out from under her. She’d spent several years of her life practically living in the air, if her van counted, but she’d always been inside, with a connection to the Universal Guidance Network to fly her. This… this was something else.
She began to whimper, remembering all these weeks spent living with the aliens. Strange pale materials that formed every building, slightly damp and flexible. The diffuse light that came through every wall and floor and ceiling until night, the way she could bend and shape the ground if she pushed too hard. The strangely fluffy, blurry look to everything she saw.
James began to shake, spinning around in place to look up at the building she’d just been inside. It wasn’t a skyscraper, as she’d initially thought from the views out the window. It was only three stories tall, a building made from firm bits of white resting on a foundation of fluffy clouds.
It was completely impossible.
She lurched to one side, clutched at her guts, then vomited off the cliff. All those delicious fresh vegetables were considerably less delicious when mixed with bile and stomach acid.
By the time the nausea and vertigo had passed, James realized she felt a pair of hooves holding her sides, holding her firmly near the edge of the clouds. Dust looked down at her with a mixture of sickness and sadness, silent. Yet she noticed James’s eyes, and immediately let go. “You good?”
“Ughhhh,” James moaned, getting to shaky hooves. “I’ve been… up… all this time?” She wiped slime away from her mouth with the back of one leg, then rubbed it off against the ground. “Air so thin… heightsick…”
“No, you aren’t.” The softness was all gone, replaced with a firm, self-assured voice. “You’re a pegasus. Kreski surgrunde ne haltus vin de povi senti la aeron nun. It’s just malorientiĝo. You ne estas airsick earth pony. Vi jam loĝas ĉi tie dum monato.”
She began backing away from the edge, her limbs shaking a little more violently with every step. James hadn’t imagined she was afraid of heights… but she hadn’t really known the meaning of that fear until today. Nobody had. I’m standing on a cloud. I’ve been living in a cloud all this time… how is this possible?
Theories flashed through her mind, projections about the density of water and a severe overestimation of local gravity. Could it be that the local wildlife, including her biosleeve, was so adapted to the reduced gravity that she hadn’t noticed anything different? She’d really been living on some airy, microworld without even noticing it.
James regretted not digging deeper into the planetary datasheet. If only the aliens hadn’t stolen her damn Computation Surface, she’d pull it out right now and look.
She felt hooves on her shoulders again, and looked up to see Lightning Dust was staring at her. “Hey!”
James was jerked out of her speculation and back to reality. “Sorry. Just… I’ll be better. I wasn’t expecting…”
“It’s fine.” The pony dropped to her knees on the clouds in front of her. “Get on my back, but ne metu ajnan premon sur miaj flugiloj!”
It was a good thing her movements were easy to read, because otherwise James wouldn’t have been sure what she was supposed to do. Her eyes still widened a little, skeptical. “Aren’t I too heavy?”
The pony glanced over her shoulder, glaring at her. “Are you kidding? I’ve seen twigs with more muscle than you. Just get on!”
She did, though her movements grew hesitant and apprehensive as she did so. Had it not been for the realization of where they were, she very likely would’ve refused the request, and told the pony that she could walk no matter where they were going. Unfortunately, there didn’t appear to be a ground for her to walk on.
There wasn’t a saddle either, or anything to hang onto beyond the pony’s neck. At least her own legs naturally wrapped around the pony’s barrel. That ought to keep her secure enough for basic movement. “How far…”
“Not very,” the pony answered, leaping up into the air. James could feel the air blasting past her on either side, see the blur of wings, and she squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Wherever they were going…
Yet she had to know. She opened one eye just a peek, wanting to get a better look at where she’d been staying.
It wasn’t just one building. The doors they’d used might’ve opened onto nothing, but on the other side of the building she saw something very different. It was an entire town built on four or five different terraced layers of cloud, not connected by anything more than thick tethers of braided rope. Each layer seemed to be drifting semi-independently of the others, some with houses, some with shops, but the largest with a single gigantic building, easily as large as the other clouds combined. Huge cooling towers rose above it, and James could somehow feel the air being drawn inside.
“You’re far more industrialized than I thought,” she exclaimed in English, forgetting her fear of heights entirely for the wonder of it. “We never thought to be considering the clouds. This is just like Venus… did you terraform your whole planet this way?” Well, maybe less like Venus. The floating cities there didn’t have citizens walking on clouds.
“I don’t know your language,” Dust said, her tone apparently having relaxed from how concerned and upset she’d sounded when James had first seen the outdoors. “Mi tute ne scias, kion vi diras.”
“It’s English,” she replied. “I could speak Mandarin too, but you don’t know.”
Lightning Dust wasn’t taking them to the factory, or to any of the town’s different layers. A little further off, and not tethered by any visible means, there was a single house, floating on a cloud of its own. It was at least two stories tall, with columns of fluffy cloud stuff and a little fountain of water out front. “Weird. Who taught it to you?”
They were coming in for a landing. The pony flying her had kept her speed to a minimum, moving in a gentle straight line without any sudden curves. Nothing that might dislodge her by accident. Even still, James could feel the power of the one she was riding. She could feel the muscles through her suit, lean and strong. Was this fitness typical of the aliens, or was she an Olympian among them? Guess everyone must be strong if they fly everywhere.
“My—” She couldn’t say parents, not without seeming either confused or wrong. But how much did she even want to say? If she tried to tell the truth, would Lightning Dust put her back in the basement? “You won’t believe. Not secret, but… strange. Words… not good yet. Hard to put right.”
Lightning Dust landed with a slight jolt, bouncing along the fluffy white surface before sinking in a fraction of an inch. She ducked to one side, sliding James off her back and onto the ground in front of the large fountain.
James righted herself quickly, dropping the satchel off her shoulder. She lowered it slowly onto the clouds beside her, afraid it might pass right through. It didn’t, somehow. These aren’t real clouds, obviously. She noticed something else then—there was steam rising from within the fountain, a gentle cloud of it that floated just above the water’s surface. “This doesn’t look like… where are we?”
“Home,” the adult said, looking resolved. “My home. Yours too, until ni trovos viajn parents. If we can.”
“What if you can’t?”
Lightning Dust shrugged. “Then we can’t.” She walked past James, over to a faint white box resting beside the fountain, and kicked it open. There was a long wooden stick inside, with a huge chunk of soap on the end. A few other scrubbing tools as well. Dust pointed to the water. “You aren’t venanta en mian domon odoranta tiel. Take off your vestojn tiel you don’t get it wet. I had it enchanted so it won't fall tra la nuboj.”
“O-out here?” James gulped, her tail tucking between her legs. True, the tiny floating house was on the outskirts of town, but it was still within sight. She could pick out two dozen of the aliens flying or walking about, and all of them could see her. Not only that, but the fountain of hot water was also only five meters or so from a sheer drop to the void. She’d be able to see the sky all around her while she bathed.
“Yes.” The alien scooped up the satchel, then stood expectantly. “Do you need help depreni ilin off? I could…”
“N-no!” James said, wincing, then started to undress. She didn’t really have another choice.
It still beat eating hay.
* * *
Lightning Dust kept her steps slow as they made their way through the cloud house. For some reason she couldn’t imagine, the filly had started acting strange as soon as she’d taken off her flightsuit. Even stranger, she had barely been able to bathe herself. Dust hadn’t been watching closely—mostly she’d concentrated on preparing the foal’s new bedroom. She glanced out every now and again, and every time the pony seemed to be struggling more.
One thing Dust noticed mystified her: James left the wing-wax and scrubber unused in the box, not giving her wings any more attention than any other part of her coat. They looked pristine when I brought her in. How could her wings be in such good shape without proper care?
At least she didn’t bring a cloud of unwashed stink into the house once she was finally clean. She moved slowly when wrapped so tightly in a towel, but at least then she didn’t seem so embarrassed.
That was good—maybe the pony wouldn’t notice just how little Lightning Dust had to offer. Until yesterday, her home had only had one large room, all built herself. A kitchen in one corner, a desk she barely used in the other, and a hammock hanging over everything else. At one point Wonderbolts paraphernalia had occupied every spare spot in the little cloud house, but now there were only empty walls and empty shelves. Every poster and model was now rotting in the dump, where they belonged.
Even fostering a pony required strict prerequisites be met. Lightning Dust had slaved away to construct the second story, shaping the clouds into something resembling another bedroom. She couldn’t afford to give the filly real furniture, so she made a bed, a desk, and a seat overlooking the large window. Well, not a real window, because glass was expensive too. Instead it was ice, chilled through the same weather magic that kept her food cold and the water in her bath hot. The views weren’t terribly good, warped as they were through ice, but at least it would look like a real house.
I’m sorry I can’t give you more, she thought, as she led the pony through her tiny home, explaining everything it had to offer. There was even a set of stairs up to the second story, since she’d known the filly couldn’t fly.
The bedroom didn’t even have a door. But it had James’s possessions, what little she’d brought. It would have to be enough. “This is your room,” Dust said as she finished the tour, though she was never quite sure how much the pony could really understand. “I don’t know what you’re used to, but I’ve got rules here. No skipping flying lessons, no making holes in my house, and no complaining about what I feed you so long as I eat it with you.” She gestured at the room with one wing. “So long as you can do all of that, I think we’ll get along just fine.”
There was no getting past how much the filly looked like a soggy duckling, particularly with her fur and feathers all lying flat from the moisture. It was only slightly less adorable than it was pathetic. “I can… do that,” the filly eventually said. “I really need…” She hesitated, pausing to think about what she was saying next.
Lightning Dust didn’t rush her. Considering that this pony hadn’t spoken a word of Eoch when she’d been found, being able to speak any at all was a vast improvement.
Eventually she did continue. “I came… to learn how to talk. If I can talk, I matter.”
Dust wasn’t sure what to make of that. Something to do with the abuse this pony had suffered? Dust bent down beside her, meeting the filly’s purple eyes. “Listen to me,” she said, her voice firm. “I don’t know where you came from, kid, but you can forget about whatever they told you. You do matter.” She touched her lightly with one of her wings, before rising and turning away. “You get yourself settled in. I should go to work. Can I trust you not to try and leave?”
“Can’t fly,” the filly said, voice flat. “Can’t leave.”
“Right, Jaaeee…” she trailed off. “Look kid, no offence, but that name… I’m going to bite my tongue off trying to say that. Can I call you something else? Maybe something in Eoch, something that ponies can actually say?”
The child nodded, staring down at the ground. “I don’t have… another one.”
“That’s fine.” Dust looked the little pony over. She didn’t know much about her, but then what parent knew about their newborn? Plenty of foals seemed to come out with names that suggested who they would become. “Lucky Break,” she said. “How’s that sound?”
“Lucky Break,” the pony repeated. Then she smiled. “Oh, I get it! I guess I am lucky!”
“Good.” Dust reached out with one hoof, brushing the filly’s mane out of her face. “I’ll be back in a few hours. I only have a half shift today. Just don’t leave the house while I’m gone.”
“Can I ask something?” the filly asked.
“Uh… sure,” Dust said. “If you think you have enough words. I’m not as good at languages as you are.” Or good at all. She’d never bothered learning anything besides Eoch. Any griffon visitors to Equestria learned it, and it wasn’t as if she ever spent time on the ground. If a pony couldn’t fly, they were scarcely worth her time.
Lucky Break sat still, her face deep in concentration. When she spoke, her words came slowly, as they always did, though moreso this time. “When you saved me… I had… other things.” She touched her body with her hooves at various points, letting the towel fall to her hooves as she did so. “Clothes… hard clothes in pieces. And… different tiny things.” She made a square shape with one hoof, drawing it in the air. “Lots of these. Metal things. Bag on… my hard clothes. I need them.”
“Ah.” Dust grinned, finally recognizing what the pony meant. “I get you. It was hilarious. You’d think a pony who can be a doctor would be smart, right? So, I was watching through the window while they worked on you. They had to cut you out of your armor. Penumbra eventually got you out…” She laughed, her grin getting wider. “You should’ve seen the look on his face when it fell through the ground right in front of him!” She made a gesture with her hooves. “Hole this big, right through the clouds.”
She stopped suddenly; Lucky’s eyes had gone wide and watery, and she’d started to sniff.
Come on, Dust. Think! “Oh.” She paused, reaching out towards the filly again, but the little pony pulled away. “Sorry kid. Wasn’t really the doctor’s fault, honestly. Podunk town like this, most of these ponies haven’t even met a pony who wasn’t a pegasus. They expected your stuff to be enchanted. It wasn’t.”
“B-but…” Lucky stammered, along with some more words that Dust couldn’t make out. Eventually she settled on a few more familiar ones. “And my guitar! If it all fell… through the clouds, how have those?”
“I, uh…” Dust blushed. “I may’ve gone through your things. I wanted to know what a pony like you was doing on her own. They weren’t attached to your armor when it fell.”
The pony wiped the beginning of tears away from her eyes, straightening. “I need my…” The next words weren’t in Eoch. “They’re… magic. They would not break. Fall wouldn’t… not even… can we get them back?”
“Back?” Dust shivered, considering the implications of the request. She was willing to believe the tools could’ve been enchanted, considering how strange they looked. But why wouldn’t the unicorns who made them have a cloudwalking rune just in case? The armor didn’t have openings for wings. “I might… it might be possible. Stormshire moves, but not very fast. If I got a calendar and a map… I know a few eggheads at the factory who could find the general area. Would be a long trip…” she trailed off.
She’d been about to point out how hopeless the quest would be. Even if she could get a map and found the exact area, finding a chunk of fallen armor hidden among the badlands would require sharp eyes and a lot of luck.
But then she saw the filly’s crushed expression, and the moisture trickling down her face. She remembered the basement this foal had been living in for the last few days, and the conditions that would’ve been waiting for her on the ground. “Tell you what, kid. Maybe I’ll go and see what I can find. I’ve got work, but… I could go after my shift. I’m the fastest pony in Stormshire… fastest pony in Equestria!” It didn’t matter what the Wonderbolts said.
“It might take a few more hours… you’d be alone here until dark.” Leaving a flightless pegasus without any supervising adults had to be a safety violation.
The stuffy ponies who made such rules hadn’t ever been the ones who had to follow them. They didn’t understand what really mattered to a foal without a home. Dust did.
Besides, who was Lucky going to report her to? One look at the joy on her face would’ve been enough to melt a blizzard.
“Yeah! If you could… I’d be so happy, Lightning Dust! You don’t… know who… but show you! I could! Learning all the time! Soon… enough to explain! Maybe? Yes, I’m sure!”
“Okay, okay.” Dust bent down, scooping up the damp towel and tossing it over the filly’s back. Dust left the filly in her new bedroom, and Lucky Break didn’t seem in any hurry to follow her back down the stairs. She did have a shift coming up, it was true. But something was bothering her, something she wanted to check.
She found the paperwork on the kitchen table, exactly where she’d left it. Packets of information about the foster program, all the different responsibilities she had and the rules she had to follow. Dust hadn’t bothered reading any of it.
But at the bottom of the pile, there was a manila folder, a copy of Lucky’s medical records. Maybe there was something inside, something the doctors hadn’t been able to tell her before. What Dust really wanted to find was the names of whatever ponies had mistreated this filly. Whoever they were… well, she’d sent that letter off to Charcoal. He could dispense a little justice.
But most of the forms were blank. Dust wasn’t much for reading, and Dr. Penumbra’s writing was nearly incomprehensible. She found a few lines in the dental section that suggested something interesting. “Molar erosion nearly nonexistent, age approximation impossible. Either this pony recently obtained all her adult teeth at the same time, or she has lived primarily on a liquid diet.”
She scanned the rest of the pages. A section on the pony’s hooves displayed something similar. “No natural erosion present on any of her hooves. Growths resembling pre-birth irregularities, but of course this is impossible. No time outside?”
Dust glanced up from the table, but the pony upstairs hadn’t left her room. Probably she was still drying herself off. Either that, or back to studying that book. I’ll have to get her a few more. She’s so smart she’ll probably just teach herself everything anyway.
There weren’t many more pages to examine. No medical history from previous hospitals, nothing more than Dust’s own report and the transparent copies of X-rays. Curiously, Dust lifted one of them up towards her window, using the light to illuminate it. She still remembered what the nurse had said.
It was stranger than she would’ve expected. This image was of the pony’s back legs, not the ones that had been broken. Yet it looked as though the filly had two sets of bones. One transparent set in the shape a pony’s bones ought to be, and another far darker outline running around them. Like the scaffolding on a building. Lighting Dust couldn’t be sure, but the flesh all around looked wrong somehow, like the scar tissue the nurse had mentioned.
She checked the rest of the X-rays, and found each one told a similar story. Dark means something hard, she remembered, about the only thing she knew about X-rays. She’d been struck with metal once, and it had looked something like this. Only it hadn’t surrounded almost all her bones, snaking through her body. The filly’s chest was practically full of it, so dark that some of her ribs didn’t have openings like they should.
Dust lowered the X-ray back to the folder, her limbs shaking as she did so. She remembered the filly’s words: You won’t believe. Not secret, but… strange. Now, maybe she believed them.
Somehow, Lightning Dust had found herself a pony with an even rougher past than she had. Had the mayor been right? Maybe she was out of her league with this stuff. Doctors on the ground would make more sense of this. She must be reading the X-rays wrong—no pony could have a second set of bones around their first ones, could they? It must be a shadow, or a trick of the light, or something else that made sense.
Dust put the copies back, then buried the folder under all her other packets of foster-care guides. She didn’t think the little pony could read, but… better safe than sorry.
Dust shut the door behind her, taking off and flying towards the factory. She could still go to the mayor. Changing her mind and giving him what he wanted would probably save herself whatever punishment he had planned.
But the thought of taking Lucky back to that basement… the thought of how excited the pony had been when Dust told her they were leaving…
No, she couldn’t take her back.
I don’t know what happened to you, Lucky… but I’m going to find out. Finding her lost possessions would be a great start. Maybe once she had them back, Lucky Break could finally explain who she was, and what she’d been doing alone in the Badlands.
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8144720
Just experimenting with different posting times.
Is your profile picture by lumineko by any chance? I feel like I recognize his style.
8144854
Yep, it is! I feel like I've gotten popular enough here on fimfiction I should make my own, but I haven't quite gotten around to it yet.
Does this mean .. Moondancer? And does it imply she is a changeling ?
Lightning will become instrumental in the contact and following shenanigans, won't she?
James will sooner or later realise that as a child she has some seventy plus years yet to live. Some hardship is well worth the extra time, I'd say.
I'm guessing this explains a lot of original James' motivations for spending an entire life to get copies out into the universe.
...Dust, she's been learning to speak your language mostly from a book that you gave her, and you're already intending to find her more books to learn from. Might want to think a bit harder about that conclusion.
Im just waiting for jamie to get her stuff back motion with her hoofs and a hologram of basically the printing process and all the information she will need pop up and blow lightning dusts mind
8144870 most likely no to the changeling part however if yes then wow humans have op eyes
I'm still annoyed with Moon Dancer.
8144870
No, Moondancer just had a cloud walking spell.
8144870 I think that's just because Moondancer is a Unicorn rather than a Pegasus, and therefore can't gesture with wings she doesn't have. Also, Lightning mentions in this chapter that she doesn't think a lot of the population of the town has ever met a non-Pegasus.
Wow, I absolutely love Lightning Dust's characterization in this. So emotional and believable.
I love when a story puts a different take on her and shows that she isn't necessarily as bad as the
show made her out to be.
I wonder if more humans are coming?
Interesting, the accelerated healing previously mentioned suggests some manner of medical nanites; but it now sounds like James' is packing more chrome than your average Shadowrun Street Samurai. I assume just about all of these implants are medical or body hardening related?
MOAR NOW PLEASE!!!!!!!!! PLEHEHEASSSSSE!!!!!
Ooooo, it's getting good...
8145226 Likely a scaffold for the bone and flesh to grow on and adhere to.
8145365
whats been described in this chapter is gross overkill for simply being tissue scaffolds, current medical science is already playing around with ways to make tissue scaffolds for organ printing, made of organic materials that become part of the finished organ; whats been described here, sounds distinctly similar to "Bone Lacing" (artificial bone and ligament reinforcement).
Someone somewhere in Equestria definitely knows more than they've been letting on...whoever that someone is, I believe they understand far more about James's true nature and origin than either James or Lightning realize at present time.
Of course, I realized this chapter that James was found in the Badlands, same area the changelings are known to hang, so there might be some incorrect assumptions by somepony higher up being done in relation to that...but that doesn't add up enough for me, so I'm favoring other theories a bit more. It's hard to really know what conclusions are safe to make, because this is clearly not quite the same Equestria we know from the show (it seems a bit more...politically and socially troubled in the background of things) but the differences haven't been made entirely clear yet, hinted at, but not yet revealed in full detail, so I can only guess at what all of these differences, if even existent, might be.
Whatever the case, I feel there is definitely some sort of Equestrian conspiracy going on here, trying to cover up something that is related to James. Whether directly or indirectly though, there hasn't been enough details given to make it clear.
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That's what I'm thinking. I believe I recall James mentioning having body-enhancing nanites at some point in an earlier chapter, or at least having high-tech body enhancements reinforcing her body that a normal body wouldn't have. Whatever is showing up on these x-rays is likely related to that. In which case, it'd be perfectly normal for James, but understandably mystifying for the average Equestrian.
You know what this story needs?
A Psionic/Psychic in the body of an Alicorn foal.
8145398 Check for retractable claws!
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I'm fairly sure Lightning Dust would have noticed those in the X-ray slides if such concealed weapons were present; though i wouldn't be surprised if the vital organs have a bit of strategically placed sub-dermal armor around them. Also, an array of emergency medical implants are likely present (beyond just the nanites); after all, being able to recover from injuries or other mishaps in the field would be invaluable to interstellar explorers.
not only Dust but a lot of pony's are going to be shocked as this all plays out.
the more of this story I read the more I am loving it.
This chapter was really great. I'm loving Lightening's characterization, and the worldbuilding is well done too. Barring any imminent bad things happening to them, I think some serious progress is about to be made by Lucky, now that she has a stable home and caretaker who'll help her.
There's the part that wants to go "lol, Changeling" to the second bone thing, but I'm pretty sure it's some sorta wet-ware body strengthening thing.
Uh, actually light means something hard, I think?
X-rays expose photo film turning it black. Dense stuff blocks X-rays, leaving the film white. Of course you could just use a computer to invert black and white.
I need a bookie to give me betting odds on James getting kidnapped while Lightning Dust is away on the search.
New comparison: A Wonderbolt Candidate with a flightless foster sister, RD with Scootaloo vs LD with Lucky Break.
A while back, I had an idea very much like this story's description.
Then I saw this story's description.
Welp.
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Have you ever seen what the earliest x-ray images looked like? Soft tissues become creamy and transparent and hard, dense tissues are dark.
metrouk2.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/gettyimages-51313424.jpg?quality=80&strip=all
History, yo! I can't speak for the method of their production, but they all look like this. I figured if primitive x-rays looked like this on Earth, they'd look like this in Equestria, too.
this is a good story.
enjoying.
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that would be the hand of Rongerton's (spelling) wife. Discoverer of X rays and unintentional inventor of the first X ray machine.
the wedding ring is a dead giveaway.
history, yo!
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Yes indeed. I didn't include the background in my post because that wasn't really related to the question being considered, but you're right of course.
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Nope. Neat!
Oh, I think it's not an X-ray thing, but a photography thing. It's a pre-existing convention in photography to invert the photograph, otherwise, your photos would show the dark parts light, and the light (exposed) parts dark. That's why they call the film coming out of your camera "negatives."
Early X-rays worked by stimulating a film of phosphorous atoms, which unlike photographic film do glow brighter where the X-rays reach, and darker where X-rays don't. The thing is, Röntgen then took a photo of that glowing phosphorous film, and that would have swapped it around by the nature of photographic film. The glowy phosphorous would have made the film darker, resulting in the bones and ring being lighter. When he sent that photo to be developed though, the developers treated it like a photo negative, leaving the dense parts darker in the final product.
...also apparently scientific journals were short on dark ink, so they prefered images that had a light background.
Modern X-rays work in much the same way, but they skip the extra inversion that we do to normal photo development, and just use the negatives directly, thus dense parts are lighter.
Oh! A longer chapter this time! Yay! And it was awesome.
Now that Lightning Dust knows something is fishy with the body, let's hope she believes 'Lucky Break' without much hastle. I'm so excited for next time!
A good chapter.
Poor James, so convinced that humanity knew everything there was to know about the mechanics of reality. A bit surprised she didn’t try the ‘weak gravity’ rationalisation back when she discovered that pegasi, horrifically un-aerodynamic creatures with a pathetically puny wingspan, can fly.
So… did Moondancer not look at those medical record? Is she even less acquainted with anatomy than a barely educated courier/factory worker?
LD is very well characterised. She is genuinely a good person… but is still something of a jerk.
I’m curious as to whether the suit will have been locked out when James was assumed dead.
I love the half-Eoch, half-English sentences in this chapter. Well done! Makes me feel like we're learning with James.
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I, for one, hope your next avatar is of more Twilight being adorkable. My favorite of your old avatars was Twi dressed as Starswirl. HINT HINT
Nice story you have here. Have a fave.
Not sure if it was already pointed out, but locking the devices in lead boxes also disconnects them from the probe, right? I think that is the main reason for doing so.
No idea why they treat Lucky Break the way they do, though. Moondancer could have just said she takes her to Canterlot, and then proceeded with shipping her off wherever. They seem to *want* to let her rot in an orphanage. Are orphanages secretly run by changelings who feed on the kids or something?
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I'm sorry, but I had to
8145755 I like it!
OOOOOOOHHH It's getting goooooood!
I'm really getting into this! 
Don't you mean "Foster Parenting Change"?
In any case, this is a great feel-good chapter. James is out of the basement and becoming aware of just how strange this world really is. There's hope now. Though I have the distinct feeling that Lightning will find a lot more than she bargained for when she goes looking for James's stuff...
Nice scene covering the missing gear James wants. It's a reinforcement of the overarching story theme of attempting to live and grow without a thing which was previously considered vital (which is also reflected in Lightning's own situation). It follows logically from the materials falling through the cloud, which itself follows logically from the entire setup. It's a character moment for Lightning; we learn she cares more about a child's feelings than following rules. It sets the stage for future scenes where James gets hold of it (or at least almost does). It's potentially a plot driver if the items prove difficult to retrieve, or if the exploration computer tracks their location and attempts retrieval, or the removal of a surplus James. And it sets up even more future conflict/drama if the local bureaucracy hears that Lightning left Lucky alone for several hours to go on a hare-brained quest for 'toys', or let her play with things which could be dangerous.
Give that scene a beer and a raise!
Shouldn't that be "vanilla?"
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_folder
8155012 I stand corrected. I've always known what those are, I just had no idea they were called that.
This should be interesting, when they finally have that talk about where's she's from. Lol
Given the stuff surrounding "Lucky"... I'm rather afraid she won't be there when Lightning gets back. The mysterious slime, the unusual accomidations, the whole Moondancer ordeal... This is real fishy. Lightning would be smart to go on a sudden vacation with her.
"She remembered the filly’s words: You won’t believe. Not secret, but… strange. Now, maybe she believed them. "
I actually lol'd at this. Darn straight.
cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/22499496/theres-something-fishy-going-on-here.jpg
It seems I was correct! I had a feeling that something was amiss with all of this. The thing is, though, that since we know why Lucky is like this, I have to say that my observation still stands that maybe the computer cannot do a great job. Maybe this technology is still relatively new, no matter how advanced the technology overall.