Into Equestria (Legacy Edition)

by TheMajorTechie

The past still lingers.

Author's Note:

Well, here we go. A chapter a day 'till we run out of the old chapters. Meanwhile, I'm only 700 words into a new chapter 1.

Lisa Garnet sat at her desk, eyes fixed to the screen. It’d been only a handful of years since she left Equestria, and another decade, give or take a year or two, on top of that since she first entered. By all accounts, those were things that were done and gone—left to the past.

Even then, not everything could simply be left behind.

The launcher program flashed a loading bar across the display. She looked over her shoulder, rolling her chair to the door and flipping the switch. Darkness bathed the office. Returning to her desk, she reached over, smiling as the strap of a headset came into contact with her fingers.

“Five minutes,” she muttered to herself, slipping the device over her face. “Just five minutes today.”

She felt her vision go dark for a moment, before fading back in with her new surroundings.

Rebecca Waterman blinked, looking down at the cup in her hands. It took a moment for things to catch up and sync.

“Oh, I was drinking this, wasn’t I?” she chuckled, downing the contents.

Caleb ran down the stairs, stopping at the sight of his older sister.

“Oh? There you are! I was wondering why you were taking so long to get a drink!”

“Kinda blanked out for a bit, that’s all,” Rebecca walked past, ruffling his hair. “You need any help on your homework?”

He shook his head.

“’Kay then. Just ask if you do!”

She climbed the stairs, stopping at the top. Today was a Saturday, she remembered; her parents would for sure be home right now. She rushed back down the stairs, nearly tripping Caleb in the process. She spotted her mom sitting on the couch, and—

“Five minutes,” Lisa whispered, slowly pushing the headset back up. “That was all…”

She shook her head, replacing the headset on the shelf. Even if she was mostly only taking a backseat to her new character’s AI, it was still more than nothing. She had parents. They… they weren’t necessarily real, but all that mattered to her was that it felt real. She could feel some tears welling up in her eyes, and wiped them away before any could fall. Five minutes was all she needed. Five, sometimes ten minutes in her own little reality, where all that mattered was her.

Lisa turned back to her screen, greeted by the waiting eyes of Twilight Sparkle. The light on the webcam turned on.

“Do you feel happier now?”

“…Yes. Yes, I think I do.”

---

Elise felt her eyelids drooping as she scrolled through yet another article. It was yet another one on the strange reappearance of Lisa Garnet after seemingly disappearing off the face of the Earth for almost a decade. The top rumor was that she’d somehow become trapped in her own invention early on, similar to what happened with her friend Samantha a few years following the disappearance. Was that the reason why Lisa acted so strange? Had her mentality somehow been warped by the amount of time she’d spent in the simulation? Sure, there was also this mysterious group of people who supposedly connected early on into the history of the simulations and never came out, but…

She facepalmed. It was so obvious! Lisa was in the simulations! How else would she have returned right after a group of simulations reported a network outage?

Or… maybe that was just how she acted. There were very few articles talking about Lisa’s past directly. Most of them more or less focused on her work, with some featuring the retired Professor Argall alongside some variant of a headline talking about his refusal to answer journalists’ questions.

Elise sunk into her seat. How was it possible that she was the first of three to be picked by such a mysterious woman? She wasn’t anything special. Her grades, sure, were a little above average, but she had… two? Three people she really even considered friends? Surely it wasn’t popularity that’d won her the spot. And she wasn’t even all that into virtual reality, either! She just had a passive interest in science and tech, that’s all. What did Lisa and Samantha see in her that made her so special?

She went back a page, scrolling down and clicking another article link. This one was probably like all the rest—theorizing about Lisa’s origins and past, talking about her ties to the company and its founders, things like that.

Wait.

She leaned closer to the screen, furrowing her brows as she read the headline.

“Her parents are dead?”

Well, that certainly explained a bit. Why wasn’t that ever mentioned in the earlier articles?

Elise shook her head. She was putting too much thought into this. People kept telling her to focus on what mattered, and digging into the life of her idol didn’t particularly matter… nor did really anything else she did, she supposed. Just another face in the crowd, another name in the yearbook—that’s what she was.

Maybe she should take a look at the simulation Lisa was pushing for her to make a character for. So long as she could work by herself, or at the very least only with Lisa, she’d be fine with joining in. Friendship was overrated, anyway.