Isaac's Storm

by EquusStorm

5. Lost In Translation

There are worse fates than being exiled to the second story of the Ponyville public library. Still, it was extremely boring, especially to a young man who was used to browsing the Internet or playing video games all day. Neither of these could be found here - just a pony-sized bed, Spike's little sleeping arrangement, a few chests full of various items, and, of course, numerous books. Isaac laid on the floor for a bit mulling over his predicament before deciding to snoop through Twilight's stuff. Clever idea, that.

"Journals... replacement parts for a telescope, apparently... some still-packaged ink wells... an eyepatch... an - I don't even know what this is... geez, there's nothing in here I can do."

It didn't help that the books in the library weren't quite as easy to read as he had first envisioned - despite the titles being more or less in English, he had noticed, when idly flipping through some random book on spells, that the lettering was a bit odd. There were more symbols than letters, and what he thought was English was a strange conglomeration of the language he knew and a cartoonish, ponified version. Recalling the flyer in Sisterhooves Social being similar to the language he found here, and yet the banner in Swarm of the Century being in English, it made very little sense. But these questions, among others, would probably be answered in time.

He had been up there for a couple of hours, long enough to hear a couple of ponies come and go. One had apparently been Rainbow Dash - his favourite pony not too long ago - and the other some unknown pony whose voice he didn't recognise, but he had resisted the urge to run downstairs and see the ponies in person. Or in pony, rather. This resistance, though, was beginning to wear off, and he was out of things to do - despite being in a world that most of us could only dream of. There was only so much to do in Twilight's room.

"Hey Twilight, is the coast clear?"

"Huh?"

"Can I come downstairs yet"

"Isaac, it's still the middle of the day! Anypony could show up at any time. Just stay away from the windows and wait a little while longer."

Isaac sighed. No use in trying to change her mind in that, he reckoned. But the window did seem an inviting opportunity. For some reason, he hadn't thought of watching the streets of Ponyville through the bedroom window. But there was a risk of discovery in such an action. Any random pony on the street that glanced at the window would see an unknown giant bipedal creature staring back at them - and that would probably cause panic. Especially, he mused, if said pony happened to be a member of the flower trio, the three that always panicked at the silliest of things.

The window, then, was a no-go. At least for now. Things would get better, he would eventually be introduced to the town, and he could live out all his dreams in the land of magical pastel-coloured miniature equines. He just had to wait it out. No sense in ruining things by being hasty!

But... boredom! So much boredom!

"How about now?"

"Isaac, seriously, be patient! There are plenty of books to read."

"Yeah, but there's a problem with that."

"A problem? With the books??" Twilight bolted up the stairs to her room before Isaac could even react. Seeming quite worried, she asked "What's wrong with them??"

"Umm, that's not really what I meant - what I meant was I can't read them."

"Oh! That's a... wait, you mean to say you can't read? I thought-"

"No, I can, but most of them seem to be written in another language."

Twilight levitated a book off the shelf and flipped through it. "Another language? These are written in the same language as all the rest..."

"But I can't read that language, for some reason. I don't know how but..."

Twilight looked rather confused. Placing the book on the shelf, she said "Wait, how can you understand what I'm saying if you can't read the language we write and speak here? That doesn't make sense!"

"I don't know. You're speaking in English, but these books are a mix of English and something else."

"English? What the hay is English?" Twilight asked, clearly puzzled.

Equestria was a land of many mysteries. All the blatant puns, ponies speaking in English and behaving like humans, the animated nature of everything - it all seemed obvious that everything here was a cartoon made by humans. How, then, could he be here, and how did any of this make any sense? Time for a long and serious talk with Twilight, whenever time would allow it.

"Yeah, I have no idea what's going on."

"You humans are strange." Twilight looked around a bit in thought, and continued, "You know, even though I've been reading and studying about your kind all morning from what books I have on the subject, it's becoming clear that we know very little about humans. I'm going to clean up downstairs, and I'm going to start asking some questions. For science."

"Err, okay, that's fine." Isaac was totally fine with spending time with his idol.

"It's obvious I'm going to get more information from asking you than I have by reading about humans. And I need a little more information so I can write a report to Princess Celestia as soon as possible. She'll know better what to do with you than I do."

"Sounds like a plan."

With that, Twilight headed back downstairs. Listening carefully, he could hear Twilight ask Spike if he would take care of library duties downstairs for the rest of the afternoon so she could do some intensive research upstairs. He also heard Spike groan, before begrudgingly accepting his task. After a few minutes - during which he assumed Twilight was tidying up her little research area downstairs and re-shelving the books - she returned to her bedroom, shutting the door behind her. She also lowered makeshift shades over the window so that the two could have complete privacy.

"Now then. I've got a lot of questions to ask, and I hope you'll be able to help me out by answering them." A quill, inkwell, and scroll magically hovered towards her, followed by a couple of reference books from the shelf. "I assumed we could do this later this evening, but I'm all out of books on humans to read now. And it's pretty important we get to the bottom of this and figure out why you're here and exactly what humans are all about. Shall we begin?"

"Anytime you're ready."

"Excellent!" Twilight's face lit up, in the way that only she could manage. It was adorable. But there was serious business to take care of. "All right. First of all, the language issue." Analysing him closely and readying the scroll, she continued, "You're clearly able to speak Equestrian, yet you're not able to read it. Right?"

"Yeah, I guess. Is Equestrian the language we use here?"

"Yes, yes it is. I presume it's similar to what you said earlier? En-something?" Twilight couldn't quite remember the word she had heard earlier.

"Yeah, English. Our languages are similar but aren't written the same way."

"Very interesting!" The sound of scratching quills filled the room. "We'll look more into that later. Okay, so, you came to Equestria through the Everfree Forest, correct?"

"Well, sorta. I was messing around in the woods behind my house and I found these strange rocks - I thought they looked like the Elements of Harmony - and I was playing around, then suddenly I was lost and there was a deep chasm-"

"Wait, you've heard of the Elements of Harmony?" Isaac had inadvertently revealed more about his prior knowledge of Equestria. Twilight's eyes were as daggers, piercing him to the core. Just begging for him to tell her more about how he knew about Equestrian society. "How could you have possibly known about them?"

"Oh wow." Isaac sighed, and after a pause, replied "I guess it's time to fess up about how I know so much about Equestria even though I've never been here before."

"Yes, yes it is."

Isaac couldn't skirt the subject any longer. The tension from last night was gone - as were the trueberries - so now would be a better time than ever to confess. He hoped it wouldn't ruin his chances of living peacefully here, much less making friends and keeping panic to a minimum. "Okay, well... you see, in our world, there are cart... these things called cartoons, see, and they come on a box thing that projects moving pictures for entertainment. They're made by humans and... um... well it's hard to explain but..."

"Similar to projectors, then?" Twilight wasn't as hopeless grasping some concepts as Isaac had feared. He now remembered the projector in Hurricane Fluttershy. The arcade game in Hearts and Hooves Day crossed his mind as well, which actually led him to wonder if things such as televisions and computers existed in Equestria. He would have to ask that sometime.

"Yes, a lot like that" he replied, "only with more colours and... and, well, it's kind of similar, yes."

"How does that explain anything about how you knew about the Elements of Harmony?"

"Well I'm getting to that. See, your world in our world is a cartoon... I mean, Equestria and all the ponies are in a cartoon, and it follows you and your friends' adventures."

"It does WHAT? How can we be on this... box in your world?"

"I don't know. I'm just as clueless as you are. Until yesterday, I thought Equestria was... you know... fiction."

"Fiction?" Twilight was even more puzzled than before. "But... I'm clearly real, so are you. How could we be fictional?"

"I just don't know, okay? This is all so new to me!"

"Ugh. Well, there's another thing that I'll have to ask the Princess about. How humans are able to watch us, if what you say is true, is kind of creepy." She shuddered a bit. "Okay, so, now we know that humans are into trans-dimensional voyeurism..." she smirked "... so let's move on."

Isaac wasn't sure how to take that, but he returned her uneasy smirk in the spirit of fellowship - and in hopes of dashing any awkwardness. "Yeah, that'd be great. Next question."

"All right. Let's see... oh! Science! Yes! It's been so long since we had humans here, it would be great to know what kind of scientific discoveries humans have made so we can compare notes!" Twilight's demeanor rapidly changed to that of excitement, realising the prospect of sharing knowledge with another intelligent race. "How about astronomy? What kind of discoveries have humans made? Well, assuming humans even study astronomy."

Isaac wasn't a scholar of astronomy. These questions had quickly gone further than his knowledge would carry him. Why couldn't a scientist who knows what he's talking about have fallen into Twilight's house instead of someone as stupid as me, he mused. "Uh, well, we... we went to the moon a few times. That was pretty neat."

Isaac immediately realised what he said, and knew what was coming next. After a bit of laughter, Twilight retorted, "The moon? That's nothing! Princess Luna was there for a thousand years!"

"Haha, interesting." Time to play ignorant, to try to avoid more 'how did you know' questions. "I'm not much of an astronomer, but I do know some about weather, if that's something relevant."

"Meteorology, huh? All righty then, how do you humans control the weather?"

Isaac, in his excitement to be here, continued to forget these little things that he knew about Equestrian society. Another awkward question and an equally awkward answer. "Err, well, we don't... it just happens. We're able to predict it usually, but we aren't perfect at doing that just yet."

"That's weird. Ponies control the weather here. Well, over most of Equestria at least - the Everfree Forest's weather works on its own. Everything else there works on its own, too. Pretty dangerous place."

"So I've heard. Seems like there are a lot of scary and unusual things in that forest." Time to change the subject a little.

"Yes, all kinds of dangerous creatures. Manticores, cockatrice, you name it!"

"Heh, in our world we don't have creatures like that. At least as far as I know."

"So you mean to say..." Twilight eyed him, "... that the weather controls itself, people watch our world on a magic box, and there are no monsters roaming around anywhere at all? Your world is a bit strange."

Isaac looked around him. Before him sat a magical talking purple unicorn, in the sky was a sun controlled by a tag team of pony princesses, surrounding him were books written in an odd half-English language and comprised of puns based on familiar terms, and he was on the second story of a library carved into a still-living tree almost more massive than any tree on earth in the middle of a village full of magical ponies. "Yeah, Earth is strange."

Author's Note:

Now with better paragraph formatting for easier reading! Expect 1-4 to get the same treatment... eventually.

The Equestrian written language issue is one that I wanted to address from the very beginnings of this fic. On the show, most written things are shown to be a combination of letters and glyphs (sans the banner from Swarm of the Century, perhaps others) most notably on Sisterhooves Social and Ponyville Confidential. Thus, I went with the idea of Equestrian language being English in speech, as it is on the show, but with non-English in writing, as it is on the show. This means Isaac has to learn how to /read/ Equestrian, though he can speak it. This is important to the plot, by the way.

This chapter contains the level of detail I want to add in the re-write of the first four chapters: Chapter Five only covers a few hours at most and is quite in-depth regarding Twilight's interrogation. After Celestia gets her letter a few hours after the events in this chapter, the story is finally going to pick up and get more interesting. I'm still just laying the foundation of the story and set up the events to come. Watch this space.

I wrote this chapter today, spurred on by positive reviews and people being interested in reading this rambling dreck. Don't expect two chapters a day in the future - I had the time to sit down and write this morning, and the chapter came along quickly (plus it's pretty short) so don't worry about me rushing this. Frankly I am humbled that I'm not being torn apart yet in reviews! As I write this, I've gained three watchers and seven thumbs-up. I fully expected an equal number of thumbs up and down - and some criticism - by this point, but I'm quite pleasantly surprised by the response so far. Thank you all so much, and remember to tell me if you think ANYTHING needs to be improved - I'm always eager to better my skills!

Comments

[EquusStorm]

2011767

Wheeeeeee, thankyou! Hah, if I found myself in the Everfree suddenly, I'd be squealing like an obsessed fanboy... which I totally am anyway. XD

[MyLittleBurger]

Looks like blueberries, tastes like blue berries, smells like blueberries, sounds like blueberries must be blueberries.... nope trueberries.... makes me wonder if there is some variation of the the strawberry and the like in the everfree forest.