Ponyville's newest psychotherapist realizes she'll have her work cut out for her when her first patient in town is a unicorn colt who claims to have been originally a "human".
Ponyville's newest psychotherapist realizes she'll have her work cut out for her when her first patient in town is a unicorn colt who claims to have been originally a "human". He's surprisingly cooperative, even with his delusion, but his lack of parents or guardians makes things a bit more complicated.
This story will be using a pair of odd stylistic conceits: being done entirely or almost entirely in an epistolary style, and, despite being an HiE story, being told almost entirely from the perspective of other ponies around said human.
Also, many thanks to Oh to be Old Again for giving the initial inspiration for this story.
1. From the patient files of Ponyville Hospital, 'Unknown unicorn male', supplemental record; written spring 1377.
From the patient files of Ponyville Hospital, 'Unknown unicorn male', supplemental record; written spring 1377.
The patient presents as a unicorn colt of unknown age, apparently in early adolescence or preadolescence. Further demographic information about him is not directly available due to his condition. His appearance and the results of a preliminary medical examination, along with what appears to be an extensive history of dental work, suggest a generally healthy upbringing with ready access to medical care.
The patient states himself as "a single adult bald ape who works on stuff that you wouldn't understand or give a crap about, unless I'm just crazy, in which case that doesn't actually apply". He claims a lower middle class upbringing with a healthy but high-stress current living situation, and asserts his background as lacking any significant medical or psychiatric history beyond the aforementioned dental work. He has refused to give a name, saying that he has a "human name" that "wouldn't feel right to use", but no "pony name".
The patient is suffering from an extreme delusion of unknown origin. He believes himself to originally be a "human", an apparently invented creature that (by his own description) resembles a large, mostly hairless omnivorous ape adapted for a large range of environments. This delusion includes an elaborate fantasy world that holds humans as the only intelligent species, from which he claims his origin. He is unable or unwilling to supply any information about his actual past, even as a hypothetical.
The patient's general pattern of behavior indicated his delusion as genuine rather than the kind of practical joke that might be expected of a colt of his age. In particular, he shows extremely limited conscious knowledge of Equestrian society, such as an inability to supply knowledge of more than a few cities, knowledge of any part of the structure of government beyond the Princesses, or even trivial knowledge of the sort that would be expected of a colt of his age, such as the names of favored books or musicians. Perhaps most notably, he shows a near-complete lack of knowledge of pony foods, able to name only "hay fries and daisy sandwiches, I guess".
In contrast, his knowledge of his fantasy world is extremely detailed, if in places obviously derivative (for example, the fictional city of "New York", containing the borough of "Manhattan"). This world is inventive and imaginative, showing a mix of positive, negative, and in some cases almost disturbing elements. While sometimes this kind of fantasy may represent an attempt to mentally escape from past abuse, the generally healthy nature of the colt's demeanor and his relaxed attitude tentatively suggest some other reason for his delusion.
The patient's cooperative nature sets him apart from most ponies who have experienced similar delusions, whether purely psychological or magically-induced. While he insists that he fully remembers being human, he has also willingly admitted that he may actually be a colt suffering from a complex delusion (but that, so far, he has seen no evidence that has convinced him to the contrary). He has shown no opposition to physical or psychiatric evaluation, and while he has claimed to be an adult, he readily accepts the role of a colt "on practical merit" in regards to his lack of conscious knowledge about Equestria and displayed inability to use any unicorn magic.
The patient came to the attention of Ponyville Hospital after reporting himself to the Mayor's office in the late evening as a 'missing foal'. He says that he has no memory of life in Equestria before waking up on a bench in the town square of Ponyville slightly after dawn. He claims that all his memories before this are of being a human, with no obvious reason for the sudden transition. The Mayor, who says that he reported himself as amnesiac, brought him to the Ponyville Hospital when he confirmed that he has no memories of an Equestrian family or place to live.
At the Hospital, he was given a basic physical examination as well as a test of his magical ability, the latter of which he seemed disappointed at failing completely despite the lack of magical control commonly shown by ponies his age. After his psychiatric evaluation, given the lateness of the hour, he was remitted to the foal's ward to spend the night.
Given the contrast between the thorough nature of the patient's delusion and the lack of obvious reasons for his condition, it's recommended that he be given a full thaumaturgical scan by a specialist unicorn physician to examine for any magical condition, or physiological condition undetected by Ponyville Hospital's equipment, that may be affecting him.
Barring an external cause for his condition, in light of the patient's apparently stable nature and his cooperative attitude, he seems suited for reintroduction into Equestrian society, supportive reality therapy, and extended observation. His condition presents an obvious complication with the normal process of care for lost foals, as he could become uncooperative with a caregiver or foster parent who doesn't suitably handle his condition.
2. From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377.
From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377.
Ponyville does not, so far, seem to be the madhouse my colleagues would like to claim it as. It is, in every way I can tell, a perfectly charming little town that seems remarkably genuine to itself despite being well within spitting distance of Canterlot tourists.
It's a friendly place, too. Within only minutes of getting off the train I was being greeted by a fast-talking pink pony I presume is the "Pinkie Pie" that Dr. Watts that told me about before boarding the express train from Canterlot to Stalliongrad. I don't understand why he seemed so distressed. While I'll admit this pony's urgency in greeting me made her a bit incomprehensible, there was nothing offensive about her.
Finding a hotel room was easy enough. I lost track of that pink pony somewhere on the way there, presumably once she'd had her fill of saying hello. With a room secured and my luggage put away, I proceeded to the hospital to greet my new colleagues.
Officially, I wasn't due to start work for a few days. Circumstances have accelerated that somewhat. Almost immediately after being shown my new office I was asked to help with a very unusual new case. I had hoped to spend the day learning more of the town and looking at available properties for rent, but I agreed upon hearing that it was a case almost entirely within my wheelhouse.
Apparently late last night the Ponyville Hospital intake handled a foal, unicorn, male, who had originally stated himself as amnesiac, but later began professing an unusual delusion in which he claims to actually be a creature from a different dimension or world who has somehow gained the body of an Equestrian colt. My interview with the colt showed this delusion as far deeper than just a surface fancy.
To be honest about it, the entire situation with this colt is awkward at best. There's no sign of his parents nor of any guardian, and while he can't be allowed to leave on his own, he's far more suited for outpatient care than the kind of round-the-clock treatment and observation that the hospital's psychiatric wing is intended for. After speaking with Nurse Redheart, the hospital's administration will be on the lookout for a suitable caregiver.
I already suspect I may become the colt's secondary point of contact or even personal therapist, should he remain in Ponyville. Putting aside his delusion, he seems to be precisely the sort of colt that prefers not to be treated as one, and at least so far he has shown enough good-natured composure that I see no harm in playing along. With the staff at the hospital he seemed supicious at best despite cooperating with them. With me, though, he's frankly a better patient so far than many of the adult ponies I've had. He did ask The Question, but they all do that. I don't understand why the idea of a pegasus psychiatrist is so hard for other ponies to process.
After the impromptu patient interview, I took the time to follow up on a few leads on homes to rent. To my surprise, the ponies of Ponyville seem far more receptive to the idea of a pegasus living on the ground than the property owners I've dealt with in Canterlot—though, for some reason I don't understand, a few of them asked if I knew a pegasus named "Fluttershy". The name seems familiar somehow, though I don't think I've ever really heard of her. Is she some kind of local celebrity?
The pink pony made her reappearance on the way back to the hotel. I still didn't understand quite what she was talking about—the word "party" stood out a few times, but she vanished again before I got back to my room.
On the to-do list for tomorrow: - check in on the colt again (note to self: pick up books from library? he seemed rather bored) - finalize on a rented home (must have private study, separation of living and work areas) - find an interpreter for the pink pony, if she shows up again - very important! find Neighponese restaurant
3. From the correspondence of L. Heartstrings and O. Melody; mailed spring 1377.
From the correspondence of L. Heartstrings and O. Melody; mailed spring 1377.
Octy,
How's things? Haven't heard from you in a while. Don't worry—I know you're all busy with the Gala coming up. Knowing you, you probably petitioned the Princesses for a time machine and now you're spending twenty-six hours a day rehearsing. Don't overwork yourself too much!
If you need any time to relax, the offer to come and crash here for a weekend is still open. I know you like to be all fancy, but spending a couple of nights away from work isn't going to hurt. You could really stand to meet Vinyl—shush! Shush shush shush! No badmouthing wubs. Oh, you didn't say it, but I know you were thinking it. But, you should really meet her. She's seriously pretty cool. And if there's anything at all that can make you relax a trip to the Ponyville spa would do it.
By the way, the absolute strangest thing happened to me today that's happened in, I guess, weeks. Is it weeks? I'm not sure. Ponyville's been pretty strange lately. Anyway, this blank-flanked colt just came up to me when I was heading to the market and he asked me what I thought of "hands". When I asked him what he was talking about, he seemed kind of sad and he told me that he'd mistaken me for someone else. Later I looked up what "hands" are, and they're those grabby claws like minotaurs have.
I guess they're kind of neat, but why would anyone even ask that? I've been kind of thinking about it all day. Is there some kind of secret society I'm missing out on, with a secret "hand"-shake?
I guess that's enough weirdness from me. Don't you even dare kill yourself practicing until you pay me back for that hundred bits you owe me.
Your most very excellentest friend except for any other more excellent ones you didn't tell me about, Lyra
4. From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377.
From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377.
I will need to revise my initial assessment of Ponyville.
This morning, on the way to find the town library, I was nearly run down by a trio of fillies with an out-of-control cart. They failed—barely—to break all of my bones, and so contented themselves instead with leaving me covered from nose to hock with fresh mud and then shouting apologies as they receded into the distance.
I had been planning to try and get a feel for the town by hoof, but after taking my second shower for the day and borrowing the hotel owner's hose to get my saddlebags clean, I decided that the better part of valor indicated wing-travel might be in order. From the air I could see that Ponyville has, it would seem, not nearly so many cloud houses as I would have expected, and that's brought into better focus the lack of confusion of a pegasus seeking hoofside accommodations. At a guess, I might say that the place has social traditions modeled more on those of earth ponies than the other races, and that's guided the town's development; it's hard to play host when your visitors would fall through the floor of your sitting room.
As it turned out, the town also has all its air-traffic markers in terrible disarray. On the way to the library for the second time, a wall-eyed mare nearly flew into me. Avoiding her would have put me head-first into the clock tower's bell if I'd been even a hair slower to swoop out of the way. She didn't even give an apology... she just zipped off, quick as you please, and shouted something about being late.
When I got to the library—they keep the thing in a live tree, that's got to be a fire hazard—it was closed. The sign somepony had put on the door said, and I will quote this for how ridiculous it is: "Busy performing high-energy magical experimentation in Canterlot; back next week." Go ahead and pull the other wing, huh. I wasn't about to go bucking the door down, so with the library out of the question, I got directions from this apple-red stallion in the market square to get to a bookshop.
It was a bit foalish to go purchase a book with my own money, but I've got enough of it, and the colt seemed like the type to appreciate it. Once I got past the bookshop owner—he nearly assaulted me, madly demanding to know when his best customer would be back, and then sulked in a corner when I slapped him—I found a primer on basic magic that seemed reputable enough and then made my escape. Or, I will say, I made my escape from the shop, and then I made my escape from a screeching white cat that blazed past like the fires of Tartarus were set on its tail, and then from the blue-coated unicorn who almost trampled me while chasing it.
With imminent death avoided for the third time in a day, I proceeded to the hospital post-haste. I'm reasonably sure that flight broke my previous wingpower record twice over. I'm also reasonably sure I left the staff in a terrible fright. Once I'd assured them that I wasn't running from ravenous timberwolves or a horde of parasprites—parasprites, really?—I took refuge in my office. Officially it's my going-to-be office, since I'm not really on call for some days yet, but it worked well enough to let my pounding heart relax.
The meeting with the colt went better than the rest of the morning had, given that he made no attempt to trample, attack, crush, spindle, or otherwise harm me. He was having a late breakfast at the time. I think I only saw it in retrospect, but he was less clumsy than he was yesterday. He seemed uncertain with his hooves, still, and embarrassed for me to see it. His reasoning, of course, was that as a "human" he had hands, not hooves. I think it rattled him, though—he was staring at his hooves for some moments—and I left him to eat his breakfast unbothered.
He's shown no real magical talent, but I began to suspect then, and still do, that he may have been a young prodigy before acquiring his delusion. The fine motor skills of colts who have relied on too heavily on magic can suffer, and being convinced that, as a "human", he has no magic could well be enough to prevent his use of it. The book was a better choice than I'd meant it. I might expect him, now, to do remarkably well with it. The sticking point is the lack of a cutie mark. There's a significant minority that lack them even beyond his age, but young magicians, given the difficulty of the trade, almost always find their cutie marks early.
His eyes lit up when I gave him the book, after he'd finished the food. The flat grey of them is distinctive, and the grey-green of his coat is a color rare enough I rather hope it helps find his parents. The book—he thanked me, and he showed more restraint than I'd thought when he put it to the side instead of immediately diving into it. We talked for a little while, just inconsequentials... or, well, I did most of the talking, because he seemed lost in thought.
One of the nurses pulled me aside, before we could get into a proper conversation. That is when my plans for the day went completely off the tracks, for what few tracks had been laid, because Ponyville's mayor was there. I gave her my assessment of the colt—delusional but cooperative, and no real danger to himself or others. We talked. Yes, the entire situation was awkward, yes, the watch and guards of Canterlot and other towns in the area had been alerted to match the colt's description against missing pony reports, yes, referring to him without having an actual name to use was awkward, no, I was not going to make him use one just to make the paperwork easier.
The mayor was flustered at best—apparently the "ponies who usually fix weird things around here" were out of town—and, I am shamed to admit, her attitude was infectious. After a few minutes we were nearly shouting at each other, as she started demanded that I do something to "handle it". I am further shamed to admit that it took the colt himself to break it up. His presence left the both of us silent, along with the nurse who'd nearly begun shouting at us to keep quiet.
"So, when do I get banished to the moon and then locked up in a dungeon on the moon I've been banished to?" is what he said, with this face that was completely serious except for this little sad frown. The look on the mayor's face—I'm certain she thought he meant it, and I just burst out laughing right then, and then he did, too, and the both of us left the mayor completely confused while the nurse went off mumbling something about "being as bad as Twilight". We talked again, then, without any yelling, and came to a rather rough-edged conclusion: given his condition, I would take temporary care of the colt until his parents could be found. He seemed skeptical of the last point, but bore no great objection to the rest.
Acting as the interim guardian of an outpatient minor was certainly not how I had been intending to spend my time, but he needed someone, and by the mayor's panic I suspect she wouldn't have done much better. It was enough leverage, at least, to make her handle the paperwork, and the colt and I left together a little while later, once Nurse Redheart had done the exit papers and confirmed with me she'd put the letter in the mail to get a magic specialist to check on him.
He was, as I had thought he might be, a perfect little gentlecolt while I followed up on a few properties from yesterday and visited a few others. The book helped, of course—he spent most of the time reading quietly and trying to get his horn to glow. Our hosts, as perhaps not unexpected for an adult mare and a school-aged colt looking at homes together, seemed to assume he was my child, regardless of the lack of commonality of coat color, mane, eyes, or race. He found it funny—I think I caught him snickering once or twice, though he had his head back in the book when I turned his way.
I settled on this nice little cottage near the town square. It's distinctive of the town's style—there are three and a half stories, almost spiraling up and out from the ground-room foyer, and it's all built on a steelwood frame that leaves it looking impossibly unbalanced, as though it might fall over in a stiff breeze. The paperwork was remarkably simple. If that's the way it is in all earth pony towns I really need to live in more of them.
"If you're really a human, then why are you taking this so calmly?" I asked the colt on the way to the hotel to get my things. I shouldn't have. It wasn't much more than blind luck that he took it as a puzzle instead of an insult.
"It's the brain in a jar thing, I guess," he told me. It's a philosophical puzzle of his "humans", something a little like the Changeling Question of the old unicorn philosophers. It goes something like this: if you have to use your senses to understand the world around you, what way do you have to know that those senses are correct to start with? You could be that veritable "brain in the jar", being fed false surroundings and experiences.
I chewed on that thought while I packed my things, and I finally asked him his opinion on the subject. "It doesn't matter," is what he said. "If you have no way to prove anything is true, then you might as well just treat it all like it is. I believe I'm from another world, but right now I'm in this one, and it wouldn't do me any good to run around like a headless chicken." Then he gave me this very serious look with raised eyebrows. "And I don't want to mess up things and get banished to the moon," he said, and the way his shoulders shifted left me not quite sure if it was meant to be a joke. I reassured him, of course, that such things were reserved strictly for terrible monsters, and that an ape in a pony suit was probably at the bottom of the list. That got him to laugh.
The home looked rather forlorn, with appliances and my luggage and empty floors. If it had just been me I would have pulled in some clouds to sleep on until my things could be delivered, but the colt... well, I'll admit I had the thought of him sleeping hanging from the ceiling like a wild monkey, but I really don't think that would have worked in practice.
On the way to the shops the pink mare showed up again. She was bouncing, literally bouncing in long hops as she babbled, and kept talking about "parties!" (I must include the exclamation point to make the tone of voice clear) and "not being officially back yet". She was getting far too close, at that, nearly edging me off the street until she finally bounced away. The colt found it funny, so to get him to stop snickering I told him to look at beds.
The way he eyed the prices was too unselfconscious to make me think his claimed upbringing was part of the delusion. He's aware of the value of money, and by the way he proclaimed the first sturdy-looking adult-sized bed acceptable, bounced on it once or twice, and then went back to reading, he's used to living simply. He isn't, however, much good at picking beds—it was sturdy-looking, not sturdy.
The very moment we stepped outside again, once I'd arranged for delivery, the madness of the town tried to engulf us again. Three steps from the door, a sudden downpour broke open on us out of a sky that had been perfectly clear minutes before. If I'd been on my own I would have flown above it, but with the colt, we bolted for the first promising-looking doorway. It was a little diner with long, low glass windows, and I must have had the funniest expression when I got a look at myself, because the colt burst out laughing and then I did, too, and we sat at a booth at the window to drain and to have a late lunch. It was almost an early dinner by then.
"So, what's a changeling?" he asked me while we were eating. (He'd ordered a monstrosity of a baked potato with a galloping cavalcade of cheeses; my salad was much more polite.) He was playing dumb, by the glimmer of knowledge in those grey eyes, but I played along, and told him of changelings, and the Changeling Question, which has barely anything to do with actual changelings. The philosophers of old had only used them to springboard into the question: if a being could play a false role absolutely perfectly, could that role be considered a new identity in and of itself?
"It's like the Chineighs box," he said, or I think that's what he said. "You have a pony in a room, and you give him this very large instruction manual, practically the size of a city—it's a very big room—and then someone else starts putting slips of paper under the door. They're all written in a language he can't read, but the instructions tell him what to do—if you see this squiggly shape, go over to page 852-B and follow the instructions in paragraph six and then write down this other squiggly shape, that kind of thing. The pony in the room doesn't understand any of it. And on the outside of the room, you've got... maybe a zebra or something, and it's his language, and he thinks he's having a conversation with someone. Now, who is it he's talking to?"
Trying to work over that puzzle left me taken aback, and by the time I'd gathered my wits about me, we'd both finished eating and were watching the rain. It had gotten worse, if anything. I could catch glimpses of a few pegasi out there trying to wrangle ornery clouds, including that wall-eyed mare who seemed to be doing everything in her wildly uncoordinated power to make the weather even more violently acerbic. "If we wait I think we'll be here all night," the colt said, with his nose almost on the windowpane. Neither of us moved to leave.
Then he started singing. "I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner..." I lost most of the words after that, but the dah-dah-dah dah-dah-dah-dah dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah reprise is still in the back of my mind. It was a nice song—a melancholic piece, not the kind of bombastical pageantry most spellsongs, but I could feel the edge of the magic flux tugging at my primaries.
He'd never experienced a spellsong before, according to him. Once we'd run madly through the rain—again—and cemented my first day with a newly-rented home by dripping water and mud everywhere, and then once we'd done what little we could to clean up after that, I told him about the spellsongs I've experienced in Canterlot.
That will have to be enough for today. I believe the bed may have just been delivered. To judge by the noise, it has been delivered directly through a closed window.
5. From the research notes of Lady Twilight S. af Twilight, E.H.; written spring 1377.
From the research notes of Lady Twilight S. af Twilight, E.H.; written spring 1377.
It just doesn't make sense. There was an incredible amount of magical flux in the second trial, but before we could channel it into a reservoir it just vanished, like the whole setup had been grounded somehow. The trials before and after it worked perfectly, and there were no differences in the equipment being used or in the surrounding environment.
The closest thing I have to a hypothesis relates to the Elements' connection to the mental states of their bearers. There's a chance that any interruption of that attunement, conscious or not, could disrupt control of the Elements. The subjective nature of this means that it would be nearly impossible to test effectively. Even the best aura-reading equipment would have trouble trying to pick up on "kindness" or "loyalty".
The Elements have always been benign to ponykind in general, but they've also always had wildly varied effects. Freezing Discord in stone, trapping the Holocaust Roc in a living tree, banishing Princess Luna into the moon... trying to craft an artifact that can manage a fraction of what the Elements can do would bankrupt modern Equestria, even if Princess Celestia and Princess Luna were to personally do most of the work.
I've started to wonder if the power we can access from them might be more like a side effect of whatever greater force they tap in to. Legend places the Elements as forged from the pieces of the original Rainbow of Light, and from what the Princesses have said, the legends of that Rainbow of Light were old even when they were young. The actions of the fully-woken Elements seem almost sardonically chosen. They've never shown any obvious signs of conscious behavior, but there has to be some factor of the sort involved, given that the bearers of the Elements have no real control over their immediate effects.
If the Elements could talk to us, what would they say? If there is any guiding intelligence inside them, would it even care about us individual ponies?
This is the last set of trials for now, anyway. If Rainbow Dash has to stay down in the vaults much longer on a nice day like this, I think she might explode, and I'm pretty sure if anyone let Pinkie get her hooves on a set of suction cups she'd be hopping around on the ceiling. I'll need to schedule another trip to Canterlot for further testing if we're going to have any hope of getting anywhere with this.
6. From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377.
From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377.
My guesses were correct.
The colt and I, after clearing out a passel of less than helpful delivery ponies along with their destroyed bed, did what we could to get the room they'd wrecked into passable condition. The rain had stopped by then, so we went to get a tarp and some things for the household. The colt's better with groceries than with furniture, though he has odd tastes. Trying to get foals to eat enough protein can be troublesome at best, but he gravitated straight towards the tuna... though he did keep giving it this strange look, as though he thought it was going to leap up and attack him.
With the hole covered and room closed off, and enough blankets to make sleeping on the floor a bit less uncomfortable—I wasn't about to make a cloud bed and leave him on hardwood—we settled in for the evening. The colt made himself a nest in the niche of the second-floor landing that overlooks the foyer and, I think, spent most of the time trying to practice his magic and reading the newspapers he'd gotten his hooves on. By the time I went to check on him before bed, he'd fallen asleep himself, and I thought it best to tuck another blanket over him and leave him there.
I had the strangest dream of flying. I wasn't the one flying—I was on the back of a great dragon made of glass and steel. The guy-wires of its yoke and harness were a wind harp, and they keened out complex melancholic melodies as it flew. The colt was there, but he was wearing a crude Nightmare Night ape suit; below us human cities skittered by on a myriad of motorized mechanical legs, fiercely hunting each other in packs.
The wall-eyed mare who's been plaguing me—she was on that delivery crew, too—she had her own dragon, except it wasn't actually a dragon but instead a cloud of bees pretending to be one. The bees promptly took offense to my presence and tried to sting me all at once.
That's when things got a bit fuzzy. I have never been the quickest to wake, and by the time I got my wits about me the colt was nearly bucking me out the door and across the street. From what I was able to put together after, that mare, the same one from the dream, had intended to come apologize. I found the wreckage of the muffin basket later. Somewhere along the line she'd managed to fly into a beehive, and continued like that straight through the tarp covering the missing window.
It's a good thing the colt is one of the sorts who's quick to wake. Any slower and, well, I would have been covered with bees. That mare was, when she stumbled out the door—I allowed myself a brief moment of schadenfreude before I grabbed a passing cloud and bucked it into a quick downpour on her. That was enough to clear out the immediate coterie of bees, though there were still quite a few ricocheting around angrily inside.
The strangest part is, she was, as far as I could tell, perfectly fine afterwards. I was about ready to make a high-speed flight for the hospital, again, but she just shook her head, mumbled this confused apology, and flew off in spiraling loops.
Neither the colt nor I were much in the mood to wrestle with bees, so I found a pony in the market who would be able to clear them out and we resolved to spend the day out and about. That resolve was tested when it promptly started raining, though at least by then the both of us had umbrellas.
The rest of the day went better than the wake-up had. The colt and I—he still hasn't given a name, or even settled on a temporary one to use, and I've started to think he enjoys watching me fumble for words to use—took refuge from market stall to overhang to market stall until the rain broke, then settled in the market square with a fresh stack of newspapers. That red stallion was there again, with a filly I think might be his daughter or sister.
The colt begged a bit off me and went to buy an apple from them. He spoke with the filly for some minutes before he returned. The crux of what conversation I could catch centered on her curiosity about his lack of a cutie mark... and, I will note with some small amusement, his claim that an "ancient magical tradition passed down from savannah sasquatches" forbade him from sharing his name until he had one.
When he'd come back over to me, he sat the apple in front of him and, without another bit of prelude, promptly flared his horn and used his magic to tug the apple into a slow orbit around his head. He wasn't smug about it, like might be expected of most foals. He's not cold—but it seems like he picks and chooses what he lets show through. When he smiles it's almost all in his eyes, and barely in the rest of his face. It's not all that surprising, with his thoughtful nature. He might well over-think it, as some foals and many adults do, and hold himself back for fear of embarrassment.
He did fall into the error that most unicorn foals make, when they have a firm grasp on their magic, and it was only by late afternoon, once I'd had a chance to speak with the local schoolteacher, that he gave the levitation any rest. The schoolteacher, I will note; Ponyville is a healthy little town, but it's certainly a little town, and Amaryllis Cheerilee coxswains the only local primary school. The colt was dubious about taking tests on a Celday but didn't refuse.
In retrospect it's clear why he thought the time wasted: delusion or not, he tests well above his apparent grade level in the maths and sciences, and, entirely as I expected, is horrific with applied civics but reasonably good with the theoreticals. After some talking with Amaryllis and the colt, he's agreed to attend the school for a few hours a day. I've asked Amaryllis to keep me updated on his behavior while there. This is a risk, but being placed into a reality-reinforcing environment in a context that his delusion has no cause to argue against should serve as a kind of applied reality therapy.
By evening the house was clear of bees and we'd gotten the tarp replaced. The colt spent dinner reading and doing more levitation, even after my warning, but by then he'd tired himself out so much in the doing that he was asleep in that nest of his ten minutes later.
On the to-do list for tomorrow: - get a workpony to fix the window; get itemized costs so property owner can invoice store - receive items delivered from Canterlot storage; initial unpacking - get another bed delivered - find Neighponese restaurant!!
7. From the veterinary logs of Lady Fluttershy of Ponyville, E.H.; written spring 1377.
From the veterinary logs of Lady Fluttershy of Ponyville, E.H.; written spring 1377.
It's a good thing that we returned when we did. Daisy, Lily, and Rose did well with helping with most of the animals, but when I came back to my cottage I found them hiding on the roof from Zuri the leopard. Zuri knows ponies well enough to be friendly, but I guess she must have accidentally scared the three of them. She does seem to be awfully sick, so they might have mistaken her unhappy condition for wanting to eat them.
Zuri's condition seems like a case of food poisoning, but much more severe than any of the cases I've treated here before, even for the predators who live in the Everfree. She didn't want to tell me what had happened, but after some talking she admitted that she'd eaten part of an animal she didn't recognize after stealing the kill from one of the Everfree manticores. She only ate a little of the body before she started feeling sick, so it's still in the forest.
According to Zuri, the animal was like a large monkey, or a hairless Diamond Dog. What worries me is that every creature I know of that walks on two legs has at least some fur, except for young dragons of course. Zuri is one of the nicer Everfree predators, but most of them aren't the kind of animals that would be willing to visit a pony for treatment. There may be some kind of disease spreading in the forest that we don't even know about.
I don't like the idea of going into the Everfree, but if there's a threat to the health of the animals of the region, someone needs to investigate. Zuri has already agreed to lead me to where she left the body, once she's feeling well enough again to do more than just lie down. I hope my friends will be willing to help. We may have to try and set up a full survey of Everfree animals to try and discover any spread of illness related to this.
8. From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377.
From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377.
The colt has discovered the consequences of an overworked horn... as I discovered when I found him in the bathroom just after dawn, curled up in the shower and crying, silently, under the hot water. I had planned to travel with him around the town today, if the weather held out, but his hornache was severe enough that he offered no objection to spending the morning together on a few layers of blankets with makeshift horn wraps and, after I made a very quick trip outside and back, hot chocolate.
He was, in keeping with what he's shown before, remarkably cooperative despite the pain. He certainly shows more composure than I ever did for such at that age. That's not to say there was no difference in his attitude. He handles the pain well, but it's still enough to break whatever that resistance is that keeps him from showing what he's feeling. I could see the shame in his face from being fussed over, though of course I didn't let that stop me. He also seemed... not weaker, but perhaps more acknowledging of being weak, as though the hornache had penetrated that certain sense of personal invulnerability he's shown so far.
There was something embarrassing, myself, about acting so much like a mother. My sister's foals are perfectly charming gentlecolts, whenever I have the chance to visit Cloudsdale, but there's always a certain awkwardness there. I suppose it's funny, in a bleak way—that the pony who spends all her time helping others get past their anxieties can't manage one of her own. We are lonely porcuipines when we're together, my sister and I, and if the young ones don't pick up on that I'll buy a hat and then eat it.
I am no spinster, I think, but I've spent so long a step and a half away from other ponies, removed enough to understand them in the way that you can't when you're too close, that it's my every reflex now. I can't as much as date without analyzing every flaw in the stallion across the table. When I was younger, and more foalish, and I couldn't see the way I do now, love came so easy. Meet a handsome stallion; let that blind rush of hormones carry you through; break it off, heart aching, when he's what you can't be. After Shorelight
After Shorelight
After
I will need to continue later. The colt wants my attention.
By noon the colt was feeling better. He still trembled on his hooves, and he let me balance him with one of my wings, but he was well enough to walk and not just lie on the floor. The colt doesn't have the best grip with his hooves to begin with, and he was then fumbling so badly that I needed to help him with eating lunch. He tried his magic, too, but the bright green of it kept wobbling up and down shades that left him cringing in pain. I envy unicorns the horn, sometimes—but not times like that.
In the afternoon my things came, fortunately without that yellow-maned mare being involved with the delivery. There was this particularly muscled white pegasus that caught my eye; he did half the work himself, and he was remarkably pleasant about it for a pony who looks like he lifts weights in his sleep. The colt stayed out of the way but for a few strategic suggestions as to placement. I sacrificed my bed to the room I've given over to him, for the time being—I can make do with a spare cloud.
With furniture in place and bags and crates stacked up and down the rooms, we went outside for the afternoon and evening. From the classifieds I found a craftspony who could repair the window and passed the contact information for the landowner on to her. And then—oh, I could almost feel my wings shaking when we finally found a proper Neighponese restaurant. The colt seemed as pleased about it as I was, and his magic and hooves had stabilized enough to—mostly—manage on his own.
We talked about his humans. There's something clever and frightening about them—the idea of a species driven to greater progress by near-constant minor and major wars. There are some points that stretch belief—managing a trip to the moon on a giant firecracker, without any magic at all?—but the... legendarium, I think would be the best word, on the whole has a distinct and almost obsessive integrity to it. I think writing it down might do him good, though he seemed surprised at the thought. It's real to him, of course, but I think he only just really started to understand then that it's not real for anypony else.
The conversation, and the talk of death and war that came with it, left me in a sort of cathartically dour mood. I spend so much time level-headed that I savor that kind of wicked feeling when I get the chance. The colt understood; he spent the walk back to the house regaling me with stories of nasty human wars and "heroes" who gained the title through manipulation instead of really earning it.
The evening after that was—awkward. I behaved in a manner that I am not at all proud of, though in retrospect I'm only mostly sure that I would have acted differently without that conversation with the colt to prime me. As a more private sort of pony than most, I take a certain comfort in delineating my space. The colt, perhaps, is an exception, but not quite of his own choice, and he's taken some care not to disrupt the tenuous trust that exists between us. He is calm, thoughtful, and more than a little puzzling in an interesting sort of way.
The pink mare I have written of before, on the other hoof, has done nothing to earn my trust or be more than a background nuisance. And
she
was
there
in my house
and she'd somehow crammed some dozens of townsponies into it, along with banners, streamers, balloons...
They shouted "surprise", I think.
The colt must have seen it in my face—the way that in a moment I would have launched into a tirade acerbic enough to send earth ponies flying out through the windows—because he looked at me, looked at the ponies inside, and then slammed the door shut.
"Just give me a minute," is what he said, and when the door was opened from the inside, he bounced inside and closed it again. I stuck my head in a fountain on the street to keep from screeching. There were noises from inside. I trusted the colt, or, rather, I trusted him to behave properly more than myself at the time. I could hear him shout "forever!", faintly, and then the red blur that the evening had become began to fade as he dragged me away from the fountain before I could quite begin drowning myself.
I kept my head towards the grass while they all shuffled out. "I'm sorry," one of them said. The colt told me later that her name was Twilight Sparkle. The name strikes a chord, though I don't know why. "I'm sorry," was what she said, and then: "Pinkie made it sound like it was all right, but I guess she... exaggerated. Your... son? is the first pony I've seen who's been able to talk her down so quickly."
"I'm not her son," the colt said, and, "I'm just a crazy hitchhiker who snuck in one day." Celestia help me, he had such a serious tone about it that I very nearly laughed my wings off. Twilight let out this nervous little laugh and apologized again. There was this other mare with a white coat that made me think of Canterlot unicorns. "You really must let us make this up to you," she said, and the colt shoved an errant sweet roll into my mouth when I opened it.
"You can take her to the spa sometime," he said. By the time I'd gotten a breath around the pastry I had, apparently, been firmly volunteered for a spa session in a few days. Where the colt got the idea for it I'll never know—but it did get those ponies out my mane before they could "help" more. That left the cleaning up. I will spare you the details, dear imaginary reader, save for the colt being far more helpful than any pony of his age has any right to be.
I must decamp once more. The colt's decided to help with the unpacking—I think he takes some pleasure with putting everything away in its proper place—and, by the sound of it, he's managed to get himself stuck under one of the boxes.
9. From the correspondence of Ditzineathra D. H. oka-Everfree and Canaxarasvim oka-Belthuriad; mailed spring 1377.
From the correspondence of Ditzineathra D. H. oka-Everfree and Canaxarasvim oka-Belthuriad; mailed spring 1377.
... oh, and I made such a mess of it, brother! I had only wanted to apologize, and then there were the bees, and the screaming, and I couldn't bring myself to try again when I thought it might only turn out worse that time. You know the fondness I have for the ponies of Ponyville, and now I can only think that she must hate me for what I've done. Amy's tried to tell me that I'm overreacting, but I'm not, am I? I know you wouldn't mind the sudden delivery of a hive, brother, but most ponies have pickier tastes, and thinner skins, too.
That is the latest trouble, but life in Ponyville remains as wonderful as it ever has. Our respite from the usual strangeness continues, but I think that little potentate, even though he might be playing the fool, is the sign of something new coming. He's really barely even hiding. I didn't have to look at all to tell. I wanted to ask the mare if she knew, but I couldn't stand to be that rude after what I've already done to her.
Oh, how I wish you were with me to experience life here. I know you talk about liking the peace, and it's true that Ponyville is severely lacking in proper lava baths, but I still think you would enjoy yourself. There is always so much going on, even in this little quiet town, and the ponies are just so interesting. Amy and Dinky still want to meet you, you know, and my Timey might act like he's scared of the thought but I know that deep down he'd really want to make friends.
Do tell me how things are going for you, brother. You give me so little of yourself that if you give any less I'll have to come visit you! I can bring the family, and we can set up camp at your door, singing traditional pony songs and dancing traditional pony dances while all the others stare at your in-laws. Maybe we could make it a yearly tradition!
I mean it, brother. Visit, or at least write a nice long letter so that Dinkrineamara and Amethyst can get to know their uncle better. If you don't, I will come to visit you, and you know how that will end up.
10. From the correspondence of O. Melody and L. Heartstrings; mailed spring 1377.
From the correspondence of O. Melody and L. Heartstrings; mailed spring 1377.
Heartstrings—
Re: rehearsing:
I have been provided by the Conservatory with a copious supply of 2-benzhydrylsulfinylacetamide and have not slept in thirty-nine days. This makes my rehearsal regime much more efficient, even after accounting for the time spent chasing away ten-legged shadow ponies before they can steal my instruments.
Re: Ponyville:
I will consider it if I have the time. I almost certainly do not have the time. Really.
Maybe after the Gala.
Re: the inexplicably recurring bane of my existence:
No. Just no.
Re: "hands":
I sincerely doubt there is a grand conspiracy of raccoons and pandas hiding important secrets from you.
The colt may have been interested in your mode of performance. The current fad in Canterlot is to disdain from traditional hoofgrip and mindgrip methods and instead to play strictly mechanistically, whether by hoof or with other aid.
Re: bits:
You still owe me eight thousand four hundred thirty seven bits for the Mareabian cello. Don't think I haven't been keeping track.
—Melody
11. From the correspondence of A. Cheerilee and Dr. H. D. Charm; delivered spring 1377.
From the correspondence of A. Cheerilee and Dr. H. D. Charm; delivered spring 1377.
To: Dr. Charm
First, I'd like to apologize for any awkwardness in the way this is written. It's tricky to write about a student who's not using a name. The other students have decided to nickname him "Sasquatch" for some reason. It's one of the stranger nicknames that I've heard used in the school here, though it doesn't seem to bother him.
So far, taking into account the amnesia, he's been a model student. He pays attention to lessons, takes notes, and asks questions that show a surprising amount of insight for a colt his age. I know that you asked that he not be formally enrolled, but if he was I would have no concerns so far about his performance or potential grades.
I am a little concerned about his behavior at recess. He isn't bothering anypony, but he seems to only use the time to take short naps, rather than play or interact like the other foals do. There are some foals who just like to get extra sleep, but I do want to make sure that he's not staying up too late at home.
He could also stand to use a little more practice with his hoofwriting and mouthwriting. He normally uses magic for everything, and I don't want to discourage that talent, but when he does give it a rest his writing is almost illegible.
I'll keep you updated like you asked, but if your charge's behavior holds up like it has been, I don't think there's anything to worry about in the long term.
Miss Cheerilee
12. From the correspondence of Princess C. Morningstar af Platinum ap Everfree ap Equestria and Lady Twilight S. af Twilight, E.H.; delivered via flamefax spring 1377.
From the correspondence of Princess C. Morningstar af Platinum ap Everfree ap Equestria and Lady Twilight S. af Twilight, E.H.; delivered via flamefax spring 1377.
My most faithful student,
I received an interesting letter this morning from Spike. It was wrapped in one of your scrolls and appeared, at first glance, to have come from you.
The letter inside was in unfamiliar hoofwriting and was unsigned, though it was addressed directly to me. It contained details on events that it claimed were going to happen in the future, along with certain private information that convinced me that this is either genuine or a very involved prank.
I would appreciate your help in discovering the source of this letter. If this is genuine, there may be someone using time travel magic to try and alter the current course of events. If it is not, I would still like to find the sender in order to ask them where they came by the information that it contained.
Your teacher, Princess Celestia
13. From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377.
From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377.
The colt's not a bad cook, even if he has to sit on a chair to see everything properly. I don't think he'll be working in fine dining anytime soon, but he worked up this thick stew with an earthy vibrance and a spicy kick to it that nearly bowled me over. His draw to protein—meat, really—holds through, to judge by his complaints about the lack of shrimp or crayfish to use for cooking stock.
I had thought before that he might be the foal of poor parents, or country traditionalists, but the pieces don't go together. The only ponies I know of with such a taste for meat are griffic freeholders, fishers, and upper-class twits types with too much money and not enough sense. He doesn't fit the part of any of them, not in attitude or accent—he's too contemplative for a freeholder, too intellectual for a bog-strainer family, and too approaching of actual usefulness to be some noble's son.
He sings while he cooks, too. I don't know if the songs are an invention of his like the humans are, but they've got too much of the sheen of old habit for me to think so. (Note to self: find song with "rebel, rebel" in the chorus.) He normally picks and chooses so much of what he says and lets show in his face that the contrast is striking. It's not that he's repressed. There's something, I'm coming to think, almost meditative about it, beyond his years.
He's been having trouble sleeping. His home, he says, is in a city of hundreds of thousands, and with a room to himself he notices nothing with the windows open but the midnight silence of Ponyville. "I spent the last decade living around people all the time," is what he said. Hot chocolate helps, but he's begun to make a habit of waking in the night, wandering for a time, and finally falling asleep in that same nook against the stairs.
He's not the only one having trouble sleeping. Canterlot may not have that population, but it certainly has more ponies than Ponyville, and the three-dimensional maze of the city's busier districts is always full of noise and bustle. Ponyville's silence is deafening by comparison, even in the middle of the day. The rain helps—it's a fierce, shimmery rain when it comes off the Everfree Forest, enough to trick my ears into hearing the things behind it that aren't there at all, and enough for the colt too.
The dreams haven't stopped, when I do sleep, and I feel like I'm sleeping as much out of my bed as he is. Last night I was riding on the back of a huge metal bird that hummed like a steam engine as it caught thermal lifts. There was an ape of contemplative mood there with me, riding the bird, or perhaps piloting it. We were circling over a city carved out of seamless glass and steel. There was a rainbow—I don't remember what it looked like, but I know that it was beautiful, as is the way of dreams.
Work continues to be strange. Stranger. I had thought at first that a colt who thought himself a monkey would be the worst of it, and then, I had thought that a mare who thought herself a dog would be the worst of it, and now, with some realization, I am coming to understand that I will never find the worst of it. The worst, the very absolute worst, of Canterlot was the mare who was convinced she was actually Celestia in disguise—and Morning Star was always so sweetly apologetic about it I could never hold it against her. Ponyville has, in my humble estimation, been infected by some madness that must roll off the Everfree Forest in broad waves. Even the mayor has neuroses on her neuroses.
It's frighteninginteresting exciting, I hope that's the right word because they refuse to come to me. Morning was right. I love Canterlot, but the novelty of it's escaped me for a long time. I look at the sun in the morning, and I watch the Princess raising it from her balcony. Every morning there is a miracle, and the sun rises; every evening, there is a miracle, and the sun sets; every day, a day comes and goes, and my life sneaks by without me even noticing it's passed. Here, at least, I'm doing something worthwhile instead of reassuring too-rich ninnies about things they could handle themselves if they took five minutes to look at their own motivations. Thank you for the advice, Morning.
I dread this spa visit. Will something light on fire, I wonder? Perhaps I will be attacked by animate cucumber slices, or that mare with the wicked lack of coordination will decide to make a tornado in the sauna room.
14. From The Mind and the Mirror by Dr. H. D. Charm; published spring 1380.
From The Mind and the Mirror by Dr. H. D. Charm; published spring 1380.
Almost as great as the common misperception about the nature of changeling intelligence is the lack of true understanding as to the full purview of changeling feeding and parasitism. While it's true that changelings can sustain themselves on love drained from other creatures, the monomaniacal focus on that emotion attributed to them by outsiders is a legacy of the reign of Queen Chrysalis rather than being the totality of that ability. Chrysalis, in her role as guardian against external threats by the conscious races, urged the changelings she controlled into a specialization in collecting love, as she found it the most available—and, with spells to induce comatose idyllic dreams in captured ponies, sustainable—emotion in Equestria.
In truth, even common changelings can potentially sustain themselves on the presence of any strong, sustained emotion. This is not precisely "feeding" as most other races understand it. Like dragons, changelings are sustained by a powerful magical core. Unlike dragons, they fuel that core not by consuming magically conductive objects like gems, but instead by gathering the ambient willpower that leaks into a creature's surroundings during a strong display of emotion and then converting it directly into stored magical energy. Changelings can eat normal food—but they can no more survive on it alone in the long term than a normal unicorn could survive entirely on magical energy.
This "feeding" process, in its most basic form, is harmless to the creatures around a changeling. However, the temporary magical links created by it can induce strange dreams or secondary sensory phenomena and even actively drain the power out of ambient magical fields. This association with dreams in particular led to an association of changelings with Princess Luna in the early days of the pre-Equestrian and Equestrian kingdoms; certain traditional art even depicts Nightmare Moon as somehow an ascendant changeling noble gone mad with power.
15. From the correspondence of C. Été, R.F.O.E., and Lady Twilight S. af Twilight, E.H.; delivered via flamefax spring 1377.
From the correspondence of C. Été, R.F.O.E., and Lady Twilight S. af Twilight, E.H.; delivered via flamefax spring 1377.
Mlle Chevalière Twilight Sparkle:
I bear to you news of the thankfulness of your Princess Celestia at the information you have been able to gather for her in regards to a recent letter of unknown origin, and her regret that there was not more of it available.
I am Mme Été, a Prench specialist in the field of operational intelligence. As a sign of the trust between our nations, the Equestrian Diarchy has asked me to aid with this situation. I assure you that I will use all due discretion while looking into the matter.
I understand that, with the Grand Galloping Gala happening shortly, you are almost certainly very busy with preparations for it. I will endeavor to, as the saying goes, keep out of your hair during this time.
I will be arriving on the evening train.
With all kindness, Mme Chuchotement Été
16. From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377.
From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377.
The dream was of a dry and dusty land. There was salt ground into the air, from a glassy ocean that had rolled in at the beginning of the world and then gone out again. It was an old land—older than Canterlot, I think, older than Equestria, as though the passage of ages had rolled over it like the tide wearing down a sea cliff. There were buildings of stone and graceful marble caked with mud, and life in all its beauty and filth roared up and down every road and alleyway. There were ponies, so many of them, with worn-down shoulders but these beautifully sharp bright eyes. Even the foals looked tired and old, but they never stopped watching me.
The colt was there, but he was older—an adult, barely, but his mane had streaks of salt-grey stress in it. The both of us were wearing some suits of armor that had been gold-painted once, with what was maybe brass underneath, but age and the dust of the road had left them earth-brown. I think we were on a patrol, maybe. We had hoof cannons with us, terrible black things with bug shells and muzzles that dripped green magic, but the colt carried his with its haft against his shoulder like it was a part of him.
Then I woke up. Something was thumping and clattering and crackling outside, and it wasn't even yet dawn. The colt was awake—he had another hornache, not as bad as the last, and he stumbled down with me to see what was going on and, by what I was certain was an unspoken mutual agreement, to shout at whoever was making the noise to keep it down. There was a gaggle of mares that looked like they'd been run over by a carriage and chewed on by a manticore for good measure. I recognized the pink one and the white one.
They had with them an oversized, overburdened cart with some parts of a metal machine I didn't recognize on it. It was something big, I think—there were protruding things, vanes and curved parts of metal painted in white and blue, but it had been smashed and broken enough that I couldn't put it together with my eyes. The parts shifting as the cart moved supplied the clatter—but the whining, zapping noise came from the rods that had been driven into the mess and were venting occasional sparks of blue-black magic into the air. There was this strange smell coming off it, and off them—nothing I'd ever smelled before, and there was something sweet and faintly bitter about it, maybe. The smell kept fluxing in and out somehow, like an ocean tide shifting, maybe.
The colt and I were the first ones to notice—we might have been the only ones on the street who'd left the windows open for an evening rainstorm. I will admit I was rather relieved by that when he scrambled outside so fast he nearly threw himself out the window in the process. I missed the first part of what he said to them—I was too startled, for a moment, to listen, but when I caught up to him he was screeching about a fire hazard. I really, truly had no idea at the time what had him so upset, but just to see him panic like that—it was real panic, I could see it in his eyes—it shook me.
It shook me, and so when one of them starting trying to talk him down, the orange one—she said something with 'sugarcube' in it, some patronisation of the sort the colt hates—I stepped forward. "Please explain, briefly," I told him, interrupting. The smell was, he said, a thing called 'av-gas'—a liquid fuel made to burn easily. "Somebody clumsy comes out here with a candle and you're all gonna have a bad day," he said.
"Is that true?" the purple unicorn asked me (her name, I will remind myself from a previous entry in this journal, is Twilight Sparkle). I had no idea at the time if it was or not, but the firmness in the colt's tone was—well, I don't know if I believed him, but I knew he was worried. I could see it in his eyes. I decided to trust him. "It's better to be safe than sorry," is what I said, and I moved next to him and put on my best Doctor Authority Face.
The pink one (her name is actually 'Pinkie') was able to supply a metal washtub from somewhere ("in case of laundry emergencies", she said, though that explained nothing), and the colt had the blue one, Rainbow Dash, gather up a few stray clouds to supply a temporary downpour. Sparkle capped over the cart down to the cobblestones with a spell-dome, with just a little opening at the top for those rods to protrude, still venting magic every so often. At the colt's request I retrieved a candle—and I was, I will say, dubious, until I saw half of them run through a brief shower and then he set the runoff in the washtub on fire.
Well, that convinced me that he was being accurate enough, whether or not, I thought at the time, he had his own delusions about it, and at his direction the white unicorn went to fetch kitty litter (she has, I would presume, a cat) to soak up what they could of the slow drip of 'av-gas' that had left a trail on the cobbles. "You don't want anyone drinking this stuff, but you've already got too much of it around to panic," the colt said.
The colt and Twilight and the orange pony and I went along with the cart and the wreckage on it while the others focused on the cleanup. The colt was stumbling—the hornache, I think, was affecting him more than he wanted to show, and he barely argued when I put him on my back for the trip. By then the sun was up, and it was in short order that we had a crowd of ponies following us, caught between fascination at the strange pieces of machine and fear of it. Twilight was worried—there was, she said, some unstable magical field clinging to the metal—and the orange mare (her name is Applejack) went to try and discourage them while I brought the colt along with Twilight and the cart.
She took it outside town—to the farm of the Apple family. "It's a heavier-than-air flying machine," the colt said, once we'd stopped. "Or, some of one. You're missing the whole back of it and part of a wing." He had his eyes closed at the time. "What's with the... things?" The aura of his horn fluttered then green and a deep blue when he opened his eyes and closed them again. He meant, of course, the rods sticking out of the wreck. The horn, at the time, didn't bother me; aura changes in foals who overuse their magic aren't so uncommon.
Twilight was too surprised by his claim to question it, as was I. "It was in the Everfree Forest," she said then. I think she said that, at least, because my attention was on the colt. He still had his wits about him, but his ears were flat and his face was pale. Twilight said something that slipped my mind but for the phrase "temporal flux". It was, I gathered, some issue about the metal of it thinking it belonged to the past and the future at the same time, somehow, and the rods that had been stuck into the wreckage were venting out the contradiction in flares of raw magic.
"So where's the body?" the colt said, and before I could ask him what he meant, one of the flares from the wreckage arced down and touched his horn, and then a second. After that it became something of a panic. Twilight wrapped the whole cart in her spell, magic-spewing rods and all, but some backlash knocked it open. The colt's horn was shining so bright in a starry grey-blue color that he was almost glowing, and I think his eyes were glowing, as the flares of magic grounded into him.
Something happened then that knocked me silly. When I came back to my senses, somepony had gone and knocked the cart and all its contents over and rather rudely peeled half the leaves off the trees in a circle that centered on where the colt had been. Some time must have passed, though it was still early morning, because two of the other mares, the blue one and the pink, were there. The colt was nowhere to be seen. I must have been less composed than I like to think of myself, because at some point between realizing he was gone and deciding to find him Rainbow slapped me.
I needed the slap. I was better qualified to look after Twilight, herself still unconscious, than either of them, and with my wits back about me I promptly lambasted the both of them for moving us and and sent Rainbow to look after the colt before he could get too far. Twilight had an even heartbeat and breath, and woke easily enough from some prodding, though she was clearly concussed. I should note that I was, too. The tinnitus and light sensitivity are still troubling me. Twilight's symptoms were worse; it took some minutes for her to approach coherency.
I had been thinking the worst of things, and Rainbow return with the colt took enough of the breath out of me that I had to sit down. He had been hiding in a shed. But, something was wrong about it—at the time I was too disoriented to see it consciously, but in retrospect I think it was that he was cowering. The colt, before that, never cowered, never acted ashamed for his actions but only his own real weakness. I acted without thinking, and I approached him, and I could see in his eyes that he didn't know me.
"Doctor Charm?" is what he said, and just the two words tripped over each other. Rainbow couldn't see the difference in the way he spoke... like a child, for once, instead of a soft-spoken adult, or instead of like a child trying to sound like one.
"Are you all right?" is what I said, when I should have said something better, and he nodded with a strict hesitance while Rainbow rushed over to check on her friend. "Who are you?" I asked, finally, while I tried not to let the concussion send my head into the grass. My words were at least clear, and I knew that he knew the answer before my addled brain could even process the frightened look he wore.
"My name is Silversheen," he said. The coltSilversheen is so different from the colt as I have known him. The colt, before, acted with such measured certainty, but when he did act he never allowed any embarrassment or unease to come into the matter. Silversheen is not like that. He stumbles, he flinches... he acts, quite frankly, like an unsure child. He acts like all the things the colt has not at all been. "Why do I know you?" he said then, and the way his mouth tightened and his jaw trembled and his breath wavered made my stomach almost heave. I don't know if I know how to describe it, diaryjournal, but it was as though I was watching him balancing at the edge of a cliff.
'Does it matter?' is what I would have asked the colt. He would have thought it through, twisted the logic to preserve himself, and decided that it didn't. Silversheen was not that pony, not by the whites of his eyes, and instead of talking I pulled him to my side with a wing so that he could hide his face and take unready breaths. While I was worrying Rainbow Dash left and returned with the others, and I walked with him to the hospital like that while they herded Twilight.
The name was in the stacks of open-case summaries I have been receiving since it started. The colors matched, but Silversheen, missing for some four years, had had a cutie mark of a crucible. I do not think that I do not judge my patients, but I must understand them. My understanding is that he is not Silversheen, or that if he is, some greater magic is at work that renders any attempt at understanding irrelevant. No colt, the last scion of an old and noble house drifted into dust and misheld wealth, would vanish into a fire and appear again four years later, unaged and missing his cutie mark.
By the time Twilight Sparkle had a clean bill of release, Silversheen had gone from uneasy breaths at my side to sleeping on my back, and he didn't wake for the uneasy morning fast-breaking the group of us made once tetrominoed into my office. I could offer them no more explanation than that the colt somehow knew more than he should, and that I thought it best not to press him on it in his current state. They took me at my word, though I think it might have perhaps been from the stare I had been trying not to aim at the pink one, and they at least took it at some reassurance that whatever had happened with the wreckage of the machine had not happened in the middle of town.
The spa visit was, needless to say, replaced with a rain check, and when they had left (joined by my exhortation that they at least keep an eye on Twilight), I left the coltSilversheen in my office while I finally got looked at myself. I am no great master of diagnosis, but concussions are a simple enough thing, and with steady pupils and breathing I took the time to tell the nurses to reschedule my appointments, close in my office, draw the shades, and take a nap next to the cSilversheen.
He was awake before I was, some time just before noon, and his breath tensed when I got up and stretched. "Are you feeling any better?" I asked him, because I would have not had to have asked the colt. 'I wasn't feeling any worse,' the colt would have said, or he would have shrugged and said that it didn't matter. And Silversheen was uncomfortable in the dark. It's not a fear—not something so primal as that—but I let up the shades enough to put him more at ease.
"Not really," he said, but his eyes were not so wild as before and his shoulders not so unsteady. He sat in the middle of the rug—he doesn't share the colt's favoring of tight spaces. "It feels like somepony's gone in my memories with a whisk, Miss Doctor. I want my parents but they're dead, aren't they?" Silversheen was an orphan for the two years before his disappearance, cared for by a distant relative who was, by the record, a fair and dutiful if not particularly loving caretaker.
"Yes," I said, and he covered his eyes with his hooves. I pulled my wing around him, and he hid his face again. "You've been missing for a long time," I said, though there had been no one looking for his return.
"It's all wrong," he said. "I know you but I don't know why I know you. Why don't I know?" He didn't care for an answer, not by the uncertain edge in his voice, and instead of answering I pushed him to his feet and shepherded him to the cafeteria. Lunch was a simple thing, with none of the colt's thick starches, and after that we went outside, and then a blonde-maned gray pegasus nearly crashed into me.
It was not the same pegasus. I will repeat this: it was not the same pegasus. There are two of them, by my best guess brother and sister, and the new one is not wall-eyed but is, if anything, even more severely clumsy. By avoiding me he simply succeeded in hitting a tree instead, and while I was busy shielding Silversheen with my body the other joined him in contemplation of bark hats, shouting the whole way down.
I thought it best that we make a quick exit after that. On the way to the house, once I had gotten myself a pair of sunglasses, we passed Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash and that coterie, and Twilight was madly brandishing some letter at the rest of them with enough energy that I hurried Silversheen along before they could notice us. The walk had put him on edge, but he relaxed inside, though only once he had taken a long look at each room to have a reason to know them.
Silversheen hid behind the couch when, in short order, one of them knocked at the door. Rarity—that is the name of the white-coated pony—enjoys, for the record, care for caravan tea, though Silversheen, in the contrary to the colt's preference, doesn't seem to like it. She was, of course, there to talk about the machine, while "Twilight panics about the Princess, again" (what that unicorn has to do with Princess Celestia, I don't know).
Silversheen could offer no knowledge about the flying machine, despite his best attempt at a squinting-eyed thoughtful face, though he was discomfited at knowing in the first place what she was asking about without needing to be asked. The others had, Rarity told me, gathered up the wreckage in a barn and set a guard on it to keep any others from getting into trouble, though apparently the worst of the excess magic had vanished with the explosion.
Privately, she told me that they had found it in the Everfree—and that it must have been there for some time, as the foliage had grown over and around the wreckage. How the colt could have known of it, well, I had no answer, and after she had confirmed arrangements for that spa for next week and left, the poor thing apologized for not being able to tell me! He acts scared, nearly, though not for any reason he can explain. "It just doesn't feel right," was the best he could offer.
By evening has was feeling a little better. Of course, as my luck has gone in this town, by the time he had stopped jumping at shadows enough to look at the colt's books—Silversheen seems to be quite magically adept for his age, if not so self-celebrating as the colt is about it—that group of mares was knocking at the door again and they had somepony else with them. She is gorgeousa species I've never seen, like a fox in red but with the long steps of the tallest Canterlot unicorns, and she has a Prench accent like a flowing river. Note to self: legs black to ankles, black muzzle, large ears.
By the time they had gotten inside and settled down the coltSilversheen was nowhere to be found, and I can't blame him, because ShushotamChushomontCh this new mare somepony (note to self: find more suitable indefinite pronoun) had come wanting talk to him in the wake of the earlier trouble, according to her and to the others with royal authority behind her. She is as slick as an oiled snake, and I am no xenophobic, but I am quite certain she was giving me the most odd looks whenever the others were less than half paying attention. I had no great desire to go hunting in the attic or under the crawlspaces for a colt scared that the foxdog canine would eat him, and neither did I have any intention of allowing them to press the issue with him in a clearly unstable state of mind.
Well, my diaryjournal, that is when there was some great crash and calamity outside and—for once I may feel grateful about that wall-eyed mare, because before things could come to enough of a head for me to demand the set of them to leave, she was knocking at the door while her brother (?) busied himself in what I could only surmise was a game of chasing about some foals who'd put themselves under laundry tubs with plungers stuck to them. The mare fumbled her way into an apology that sent a half-squashed cake straight over my head (Applejack has, I will give her, sharper reflexes than I would have expect), and by the time she'd stopped trying to accidentally wreck my home Chuchatemon the canine had halfway escaped out an open window and the others were nearly balancing on the bookshelves.
I did what seemed only appropriate and invited the mare in. Everypony but her made their quick excuses to escape—MedemiselleMadomn Miss Etee faster than any of the rest—while I made a quick mental inventory of my renter's insurance and tried to steer the blonde-maned mare towards soft things. She was almost crying. Once I'd gotten her calmed down I realized the colt had snuck back in from somewhere or another, and he brewed a new pot of caravan tea without having to ask anything. I knew, the moment I heard him put the pot on, without having to think about it.
Well, once I had forced a cup of tea on her and thanked her for the cake, the blonde-maned mare made an exit almost as quick as the mares she had scared away... but she bowed to the colt in the doorway. With the name "Ditzy"—she managed to cough it up while I was trying to convince her that I would not, in fact, hate her forever, so long as she didn't repeat the business with the bees—I had not at all taken her for the sort of pony to have an inexplicably theatric attitude.
"I got nothin'," is what the colt said when the door was closed, and he shrugged and sat on the couch.
Once he had had some tea, he admitted he thought he might be going slightly mad, because he remembered nothing between the wreckage at the farm and watching Ditzy awkwardly angst from the kitchen. He took the story of the day and the suggestion that he might have some disassociative identity issue with the sort of aplomb I've come to expect from him. "I could actually be a spooky ghost possessing... me," he said, and he seemed almost disappointed when I pointed out that he bore none of the otherworldly symptoms of a trauma-borne paranormal possession.
"I do know my head's been hurting all day, but I don't know how I know that," he said, and I helped him with another set of hornwraps. "The fox lady is freaky," he added while I was running them through with hot water, and then he took on almost the same uncomfortable, twisted face Silversheen had when dealing with his knowledge-without-memory. "Nobody should be allowed to give me vibes so bad they stick between personalities."
It's quite bluntly bizarre—not that I told him that—but I was almost of a mood to agree with him. Certainly none of that sextet of mares had seemed to notice anything off about her, but I could feel it plain as day that she was looking for something, and I don't know if it really had anything to do with the colt or not.
It has been a long day, and my head hurts. The colt is not, at least, talking to himself or setting anything on fire. I shall run a hot bath for myself, and hope very dearly that there are no more bees or explosions or flammable materials or multiple personalities or insane party mares or Prench canines with firm attitudes and questionable legal authority.
Note to self: why did Ditzy know my first name?
17. From The Mind and the Mirror by Dr. H. D. Charm; published spring 1380.
From The Mind and the Mirror by Dr. H. D. Charm; published spring 1380.
The second stage of the process begins with repeated or lasting exposure to source of concentrated magic of considerable intensity. As the changeling's core captures and stores as much of the magic's energy as it can, it undergoes a dramatic transformation.
During the span of this change, the pre-noble changeling is intensely vulnerable. Its mundane and magical organs must adapt to and recover from the new magic surging through them, leaving the changeling weak both physically and magically, and though its internal magical reserves are flaring brighter than they ever has as a common changeling, the pre-noble has only the barest of methods available to disguise the presence of that magic.
Among their own kind, changelings in this state are almost always intensely protected by the rest of the hive. The rare pre-noble changeling that has managed to begin this ascension without the assent and aid of the reigning nobles might flee or even provoke a sort of civil war to preserve its existence, securing the aid of common changelings that have decided the pre-noble would better perform noble duties than the existing leadership.
A pre-noble that has somehow begun the ascension process without its normal entourage of common changelings is driven towards whatever sanctuary it can achieve, often using the most helpless-seeming or personally attractive of its practiced personas in order to achieve the sympathy of members of the other races. By imitating a pony, griffon, or other being, and displaying only incomplete if any control of magical ability, it can try to pass as a civilian of normal or vulnerable demeanor while avoiding the more in-depth magical examinations that would reveal its true nature.
However, any attempt at disguise during this time finds the pre-noble's own ascension working against it. While the changeling's magical core undergoes the change that will eventually lead into the third stage of the ascension and eventually the realization of a new noble changeling, the changeling itself is mentally separating from its fellows and beginning to develop its own distinct personality.
During this time the changeling draws on the most vivid, practiced, and knowledgeable of its copied personas, mixing their natures to serve as a template for its mental development. As this blended but more permanent adjustment to the changeling's psyche comes to a balance, the changeling shows contradictory and sometimes bizarre behavior, even drastically changing attitudes and behaviors between the scope of its forefront personas.
As the changeling's magical and mental changes stabilize at the terminus of the second stage of the ascension process, it begins to gain full control of its expanded magical reserves, as well as a rudimentary grasp of the unique abilities that only fully blossom after it has become a noble changeling. Most importantly to its survival, as it enters the third stage of the ascension process and declares its own identity as more than just a common changeling, the pre-noble changeling is no longer casually vulnerable to the magical examination that might before easily pierced its disguise.
18. From the correspondence of B. B. Drops and O. Melody; written spring 1377.
From the correspondence of B. B. Drops and O. Melody; written spring 1377.
Dear Octavia,
I know we haven't really talked, but Lyra's mentioned you, and it's always been as a close friend. You went to school together in Canterlot or something, right? Please say you know enough about her to help. Please. Please!!
Let me put it out there straight: Lyra's acting weird. Weird even for her. I mean, I don't know how weird she was in Canterlot, but this is way off the top of the weirdness scale. If her usual weird is a five out of ten, this is at least a twelve or thirteen.
It all started with her having these dreams about raccoons. I don't know why it was raccoons, but she hasn't been sleeping right for two weeks now and when I finally got her to talk about it yesterday she said she was having nightmares about raccoons chasing her around a desert with green muskets!
And she's obsessing about playing music without using her magic. Last week I found her trying to figure out how to pluck a banjo with her teeth, and then when she gave that up she started working on hoofpick earrings or something. I have no idea what's going on now but she's pretty much barricaded herself in the basement. The Grand Galloping Gala is tonight! Lyra should have been thinking about nothing but that all day but instead she's making like some crazy supervillain.
In the whole time I've known her in Ponyville she's never acted like this. She thinks about music, not about making things, and oh Celestia now there's this scary thumping noise coming from the basement like someone started up a steam engine in there! I am really seriously pretty sure that the entire time I've been roommates with Lyra we have not had a steam engine in the house, and if she somehow snuck one down there without me noticing I am going to be even more freaked out.
Please help! I have no idea how to handle this!! A really seriously panicking Bon Bon!!!
20. From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377.
From the private journals of Dr. H. D. Charm; written spring 1377.
I had the strangest feeling this morning that I had some kind of dream but forgot about it. As it was, I overslept quite severely, and it took me some time just to get out of bed once I was awake. It was... embarassing. I haven't slept through an alarm like that for years. It's well enough that I only had a single appointment today, because once I did get out of bed the concussion headache kicked in at what felt like full strength again and I almost flew out of the bathroom window while trying to brush the tangles out of my mane.
I don't know how I got down the stairs without rolling head-over-flank and bumping my head on every step on the way down, but when I did the colt was cleaning the kitchen. From what I could gather he dropped a hot pan while cooking and the contents of it went everywhere. I must have been so deep asleep that the noise didn't wake me up at all. What he was doing trying to rely on his magic again so quickly after yesterday's events I don't know, but once I had devoured some coffee I helped him get the oil scrubbed out of the grout.
He was terribly nervous at first. Whatever's going on in his head—frankly, at this point, I doubt I could make anything like a sensible diagnosis beyond just labeling the whole situation as some kind of magic-induced shizophrenia—I think he spent the whole morning with the two personalities he's shown starting to bleed together, and that fumbly worry of Silversheen's was showing through the whole time. His accent shifted twice before it settled on something almost but not quite like what the colt had started with. A few times while we were talking over breakfast, this time cooked by myself, he stopped like he'd forgotten the word he meant to use.
I'm will admit to myself that I'm thinking that there must be some truth to his humans. But how do the pieces come together? There must be some magic at work here, some way to explain Silversheen and the lack of a cutie mark, but I don't see what it is. If it was solely for the strange knowledge, I might suppose by now some genuine but embellished contact with another world. But this... it seems almost too absurd to think about, either some great transformation or some transfer of knowledge or memory. I've written letters to some of the specialists I know in Canterlot—and a formal complaint to the palace, for whoever thinks they can get me to break confidentiality because someone's flashed a royal seal at me.
Of the canine there has been no sight today. I encountered Rarity while shopping for groceries, and after she had finished commenting on how haggard I looked (how she can be always so immaculate, I do not understand), she mentioned that the one with the name I can't manage to spell properly left on an early train to Canterlot. It must have been only a few minutes after I finally woke up. I can only think that she realized she wouldn't get anything out of me. Once I had gotten Rarity detached from her incipient unease as regarded my appearance—I wonder if she wouldn't have tried to bodily drag me to that spa if she didn't seem to have her hooves full with something else—I took a nap and tried to get a little more awake for my appointment.
S.L. remains one of my easiest patients here, despite thinking of herself as a dog half the time. It is, after all, a very straightforward problem. She becomes increasingly functional with each session, even when she's having an episode. I doubt she will be "cured" for some time, if ever, but she has responded quite well to even the few meetings we've had so far. Soon she may even be able to go outside without a handler from the hospital to make sure she doesn't suddenly start chasing after carts.
The colt's half-day at school went well enough, by his own estimation, despite a few moments where (I will quote his words) "Silversheen almost woke up, and then hid again". We had an early dinner of Neighponese food and he was able to offer little to clarify the situation, at least with the gentle prodding I was willing to use. He was, at least, willing to talk to that group of mares again about the machine, and about the "body" he had mentioned, but when we went out into town we couldn't find a trace of them. The six of them are spending the night at the Grand Galloping Gala, according to an orange filly called Scootaloo by the colt. The library was even closed again—whoever runs that place must really be slacking.
Scootaloo has some interest in his lack of a cutie mark, something he's rather more blasé about himself, and has invited him to her friends' "cutie mark crusading" tomorrow—her term for attempting to find ones' special talent. I've given it my tentative blessing, so long as he's feeling up to it. It should make for a convenient time to try and gather those mares, given Scootaloo's professed familiarity with Rainbow Dash and the others. So long as the balance of his condition remains stable enough, he could use more social time... after all, what's the worst that could happen with a few foals?