> The Dark Side of The Sun
>  by Nopony of note
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> 1. When We Left Earth
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Celestia waited patiently on the balcony outside her bed chambers for her sister to arrive. It was not unusual for Luna to oversleep at this time of year. In fact, it was expected. As the summer months drew closer, she always began her nights later and ended them earlier. This wasn’t a product of laziness; Celestia did the same thing with her days in the winter. It was a system the sisters had worked out thousands of years ago so each one would have her season of rest. And to be perfectly honest, Celestia didn’t mind having a few more hours to her work day this early in the year. It might not be the case after the solstice, but the extra time gave her the opportunity to produce some magnificent sunsets and sunrises. It was a nice way to reward the hard-working ponies after the ever-challenging Winter Wrap-Ups.

As the sun neared the horizon, the royal alicorn began her work. Celestia was concentrating on this particular sunset more so than most others. She was extremely impressed with the efficiency of her subjects in wrapping up winter that year, and wanted to give everypony something extraordinary to enjoy now that their work was done. She deftly maneuvered her beloved sun around the clouds and far off mountain peaks, creating brilliant streaks of gold that arced across the sky, and painting the clouds vibrant shades of orange and pink. The princess was so absorbed in making the tiny adjustments to the sun’s path as it set that she didn’t notice her sister’s soft hoofsteps coming up behind her.

Luna stopped short in her approach of her white-coated sister. This sunset was a particularly intricate endeavor with the reduced cloud cover after the wrap-up of winter, and she decided it best let Celestia concentrate on her work. Even before her banishment, Luna had never seen her sister invest so much effort in a sunset. When the sun finally disappeared behind the mountains to the west, Luna spoke up.

“T’was a truly magnificent sunset, sister. Without a doubt, everypony in the land was captivated by its beauty.”

Celestia turned to acknowledge her darker sister, whose eyes sparkled in the night, despite the darkness. “Thank you Luna. I thought they deserved a treat after all the work they did wrapping up winter.”

“A treat it certainly was. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you become quite so involved in one of your sunsets in a very long time.” Luna paused, looking up at the remnants of the spectacular sunset her sister had just created. The clouds still had a slight orange hue, and the sky was gradually darkening from the cyan shade it had in the day to the blackness that allowed the younger alicorn’s moon and stars to shine. “But regardless,” Luna began. “You’ve had a long day. It’s time you get your rest, and let me handle the heavens.”

“I suppose you’re right, Luna.” Just thinking about her bed with its soft pillows and luxurious blankets made Celestia yawn in a rather non-royal manner.

Luna let out a small giggle at her sister’s unbecoming display and said, “Good night, sister.”
“Good night,” Celestia murmured dreamily and turned towards the door to go inside. She yawned again before stepping inside, closing the door softly behind her.

With that, Luna began her work. She closed her eyes and her horn began to glow and sparkle as she summoned the moon. When she felt its glow even behind her closed eyelids, she opened her eyes and began to bring out the stars. She let their sparkling light down through the atmosphere and allowed them to shine to their fullest. However, there was something different about this particular night. It was a small thing, barely noticeable against the rich, twinkling array of stars, but there was one small speck of light that was moving, slowly but steadily, across the sea of stars.

Luna was so absorbed in her work that the small disturbance eluded her notice at first. But when the tiny speck wandered into the section of the sky she was focusing on, her keen eyes locked onto it immediately. She eyed the strange object suspiciously, noting its unusual movement. Unlike a meteor, which would shine brightly for a brief moment as it arced across the sky before fizzling out, this thing maintained a constant speed and direction, and did not shine or dissipate.

What is that star doin- Luna thought, but her thoughts were cut short then the object approached the moon. Rather than disappearing behind the moon as all the distant stars of the universe normally did when the moon was out, the strange object seemed to pass in front it, appearing as a small speck against the luminous surface of the moon for a moment, suggesting that it was between the earth and the moon. 

After a few seconds, its movement carried on, and it passed the moon entirely, regaining its appearance as small pinpoint of light travelling steadily across the dark sky. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a normal star. Only shooting stars had ever passed between the earth and the moon before, and certainly nothing had ever managed to get so close without falling into the atmosphere and vaporizing shortly thereafter. It was less noticeable now that it wasn’t directly in front of the moon, but now that Luna had seen the strange object, it had her full attention. There was a newcomer to her night sky, and she was going to find out what it was.

 Luna’s horn began to glow again as she reached out to the object with her night sky magic, but it didn’t respond. Luna’s piqued interest gave way to a cautious suspicion. The list of feasible explanations was rapidly diminishing. The night was mostly clear, so there was no need for any pegasi to be out this late. And Pegasi couldn’t fly high enough to resemble one of her stars in the first place. So what was it?

Luna trotted to the telescope that was normally used to watch over the kingdom, and trained it on the mysterious object traversing her night sky. What she saw aroused a strange emotion that was some odd mix of shock, curiosity and fear.

It was not a star, nor a weather pony. It was extremely high up, barely visible against the night sky. But from the way it was moving, Luna knew beyond any doubt that it wasn’t a part of the night sky. Even though it was far away, she could tell that it was massive. It was a long, tubular, and came to a rounded point at the front end. It had flat triangular wings protruding from the middle of its three segments, and the rear of the segments was longer and wider than the other two, and looks as if four other slightly thinner and shorter tubes were attached to the rear segment and running parallel to the main structure.

Luna’s horn began glowing again as she reached out to the object with her magic, this time trying to sense what it was rather that manipulate it as she would  the light of the stars. What she sensed was a level of enormous mechanical and artificial complexity that she had never known to exist in Equestria before. Whatever this thing was, it was made of thousands if not millions of objects and energies that were constantly interacting with each other. Just trying to imagine it all made Luna’s mind spin.

The last thing she sensed was a presence: a conscious and thinking entity that somehow was in control of every interaction inside the object. But whatever it was it was not a pony; the being had no magical presence that Luna could discern. Even earth ponies had some inherent magical abilities, albeit rudimentary ones compared those of unicorns and pegasi.

At that moment, she finally decided that was enough. Luna backed away from the telescope, still reeling a small amount from the implications of what she had just seen, and went to rouse her sister.
 




Two hundred and sixty-two miles above the surface of the planet, the U.H.S. Enterprise began its carefully calculated orbital insertion. Small rocket thrusters positioned systematically all over its segmented, cylindrical hull fired sporadically, making minute adjustments to the vessel’s trajectory as it approached its destination. Retro-active rocket boosters ignited and slowed the spacecraft sufficiently as it entered the planet’s sphere of gravitational influence from interplanetary space. Even in the weightlessness of space, maintaining the forty-thousand-ton behemoth’s path for an optimal orbit took all seventy maneuvering thrusters and the network of gravitational sensors and supercomputers working at full capacity.

The ship’s calendars said it was May 14th, 2033. The massive vessel had left Earth’s orbit eleven months, three weeks, and five days prior. It had been built in space, and was designed to be the permanent solution to manned exploration of the solar system. The ship resembled most other rockets, with it’s long, cylindrical hull, pointed nose cone, and four booster pods attached to the base. It was powered by four massive liquid-fuel rockets that bulged out from the rear of the three segments that composed the hull. Each rocket was capable of producing just a little more power that the original Saturn V rocket that first took men to the moon. Protruding from either side of the center segment were the two giant solar wings, each extending more than seven hundred feet away from the half-mile long ship. The front segment, which housed the bridge, crew’s living space, along with all the computers, sensors, and critical systems, was the shortest of the three segments, and came to a point in the front.

 It had been a long voyage to get from the Earth to here, but the real story behind the U.H.S. Enterprise and its mission, the crowning achievement of mankind, began with the darkest period in human history; World War Three.

                It all began as an American-led humanitarian operation in the Middle East to oust a genocidal dictator, but secret agreements between governments and hidden political agendas escalated the whole mess until it was blown completely out of proportion, and within six months of the first troops landing on foreign shores, every country with a standing military was taking a side in what was bound to be the most intense and destructive conflict in human history. 

                The major battlefields were concentrated in less developed areas like Africa and the Middle East, but as the war dragged on, nations became desperate and nothing remained sacred. Nuclear strikes became commonplace threats, and even though those threats were never acted on, there were plenty of other means available to any modern nation to wreak havoc upon enemies. In the end, America and her allies managed to outlast the opposition, but not without great sacrifice. Several invasion attempts were made on American soil, and some came perilously close to succeeding.

It was a long and exhausting road to the negotiating table, but soon almost every nation had simply run out of steam. The death toll had managed to cap the dreaded one-billion mark, entire countries had been transformed into barren, scarred battlefields, and even the safest locations were given front-row seats to the horrors of war. Despite there being officially recognized winners and losers, the war really ended because of necessity rather than any one faction’s victory and every nation knew it. Nobody on the planet could sustain the kind of destruction that the war brought on for very long. Even after the fighting was done, the carnage was so great and widespread that it seemed hard to envision anything for the foreseeable future other than a painful, decades-long rebuilding process that would attempt to salvage what was left of a beaten and battered planet.

Only a few short weeks after the end of the war, a glimmer of hope managed to penetrate the bleak vision of the future. A decommissioned deep-space probe drifting just outside the solar system sent back an unusual image, in which Earth appeared on the wrong side of the sun. At first, the scientists who saw the image dismissed the readings as a fault in the aging probe’s computers. They believed the image was either simply upside-down or the probe’s clocks froze six months prior. But everything was checked, double-checked, and triple-checked, and probes on other planets were reactivated and turned their sensors skywards to confirm the findings. The discovery might have been accidental, but by the time the story went public, there was no argument that there was an Earth-like planet on the other side of the sun. And it was relatively close, at least by cosmic standards.

The proximity meant landing a person on another life-sustaining planet wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounded, but there were still an overwhelming number of unknowns. The best images showed the planet as a pale blue dot, not unlike Voyager’s first long-distance photo of Earth. It was a reasonable assumption that the planet had liquid water and an atmosphere, but beyond that, the only thing scientists actually knew was its location. There was no real evidence of intelligence, or any life at all for that matter. Initially, the plan was to send a probe to orbit the planet and survey the surface before any manned mission was attempted, but this plan was quickly scrapped.

Some of the more forward-thinking world leaders decided to take things to the next level. The probe would have been cheaper and more cost-effective for the mission, but people had been sending robots and probes all over the solar system for years, and a human being hadn’t gone further than the upper edges of the atmosphere since the days of the U.S./Soviet space race. Also, because the discovery of a life-sustaining planet came along much sooner than anyone could have anticipated, computers capable of independently carrying out a mission like this just didn’t exist.

Also, as much as most space agencies hated to admit it, the fact remained that unmanned probes didn’t make headlines, and weren’t very exciting to the everyday populace. People got excited when a living human broke records and turned science fiction into reality, not when a glorified remote-control toy landed on another planet. Sending a man to the new planet would be a cause for great celebration, and show the world that there was hope for peaceful advancement of humanity. People simply needed a cause to unite behind, not as a country or state, but as a single, united race working together to achieve a goal that transcended every nation’s border.

One of the more practical main selling points of a manned mission to the new planet was the near- infinite number of mission outcomes. Based on whether or not the terrain was suitable, a landing could or could not be attempted. Then there was the question of life on that planet. There was probably life there based on what the astronomers could tell, but it was impossible to tell if it was intelligent or not. And even if there really was intelligent life, the beings there might be so much less developed than humans that leaving them alone might prove to be the best option.

         There could be a race of sentient beings just as advanced as humans there worth making contact with, or the local inhabitants might still be in their equivalent of the Stone Age. A computer couldn’t make all of these decisions by itself, but a living person could. Rather than sending multiple unmanned missions to gather information, sending a single manned mission equipped with all the tools necessary for every conceivable possibility would reduce the overall cost of investigating the planet.

         Not to mention the people of the world desperately needed something to lift their spirits from the dark and depressing rut that the war had dumped them in, and leaders just didn’t want to wait around until a supercomputer smart enough could be developed or for a probe to get there. Just like the Apollo missions brought hope to America when it was bogged down in the disastrous Vietnam conflict, landing a man on another planet would give the world a much-needed distraction from living hell Earth had become. If mankind was ever going to have a chance to take to the stars again, this was it.

The decision was partially influenced by the fact that plans for vessel capable of making the journey already existed. The Manned Interplanetary Exploration Base, or Star Explorer as it was known by the designers, that eventually became the Enterprise was supposed to be the ship that would carry humans to Mars. Construction began early in the 21st century, but the effort was largely abandoned when the war began.

After the discovery of the new planet and the plans to send a man there began to take shape, the design was modified to follow a new trajectory; one that would take it to the far side of the sun. There was, as always, a few downsides to the plan. Getting to Mars was a matter of launching from Earth at a calculated point in time such that the orbits of each planet would bring them closest together, minimizing the distance to travel between home and the destination. Getting to the far side of the sun was another matter entirely.

         Because this new planet shared an orbital pattern with Earth, there was no opportune moment to launch that would minimize the distance. The Star Explorer could theoretically hold enough fuel to make the trip and return safely, but the space for crew provisions such as oxygen, water, and food wasn’t quite enough. The only solution was to reduce the number of crew members down to one. That change left a very important question; who would go?

Every nation chose a candidate for the mission. Each was a hero in some way or another. Most were pilots, some were soldiers, and others were professional athletes. The selection committee was comprised of every living human that had ever gone to space, and they spent weeks on end deliberating which person would be sent to the new planet, and quite possibly represent the entire human race another intelligent race, should one be found inhabiting the new planet. The man they chose was Captain Maxwell O’Hara.

For as long as he could remember, Captain O’Hara, or Max, as he preferred to be called, was fascinated with anything that could fly, and although being an astronaut wasn’t necessarily his dream job from birth, flight was always something he wanted to learn more about. Just like other people his age, Max missed out on the glory days of the space race because it ended before he was born, but that didn’t stop him from wondering what those days were like. From an early age, he read about times when astronauts were national heroes and celebrities, and when people began wonder just how far they could go, and what they mind find in the depths of space. Even though space travel within Earth’s orbit was pretty commonplace by the time Max was old enough to study it, he still believed it was the most amazing thing people had ever done, and he desperately wanted to be a part of it.

For that reason, Max became a fighter pilot in the Air Force immediately after graduating college. His constant near-perfect performance in training landed him a spot in the Air Force’s top squadron where he quickly gained a position as a flight commander. That was when the war started. O’Hara’s squadron became one of the most decorated units of the war.

With America being the war’s clear victor, there was a brief period of outrage when the selected astronaut was American, but as Max progressed through the international training program with top marks in every category imaginable, it was clear he was the best choice. Max graduated from the Air Force Academy with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering, spoke three languages, and served as one of the ambassadors to the international conference that ended the war. The world knew who he was and liked him. Max was the best there was, and the needs of the mission outweighed any political or publicity concerns.

As soon as the world knew who Maxwell O’Hara was, they liked him. Any doubts about sending this particular person to a new world and possibly representing humanity were quickly dispelled. But perhaps the biggest reason he was chosen for this particular voyage was because of his personality. Of all the qualified astronauts, he was the quiet one. Max preferred to spend what little free time someone training to be an astronaut could find in peace and quiet. While other pilots in his unit would go out and party to relieve the stress that came with fighting a war, Max stayed behind and read a story. Sometimes he would even try his hand at writing one, but he kept most of that to himself. He was unmarried, an only child, and his parents moved to another country after he was done at the Academy. He was the textbook introvert, and the psychologists at NASA believed he would be best suited to live for extended periods of time on his own. And that was exactly what the mission called for.

However, new doubts quickly arose in Max’s mind as he began his orbit of the planet. He had been travelling for almost a full year now, and for almost a year his world consisted of just the clean white interior of the vessel and the stars outside his bedroom windows. For almost a year the Max’s mind had been occupied with his daily exercises and maintenance duties. The media industry had been kind enough to donate a generous archive of TV shows, movies, music and other things to help pass the time, but they were only remedial activities to keep him from losing his mind en route to the destination. 

Now, the reality of his mission began to take shape in the astronaut’s mind. He gazed out the panoramic windscreen of the bridge from the captain’s seat at the dark side of the vast planet before him, and his mind began to systematically list every possible mission outcome based on the information he had been able to gather on the planet thus far.

Below him, the dark side of the planet sprawled endlessly. Something was alive down there, there was no doubt about it. On the vast continents Max could make out the specks of light that meant there was indeed life down there. Whether it was just massive amounts of bioluminescence or artificial light, he couldn’t tell just yet, but there was without a doubt life of some kind down there. With that in mind, the astronaut began to wonder just what was down there. If it was just bioluminescence then it was no real indication of intelligent or sentient life. But if it were artificial light, then the possibilities were endless. If these people were able to create artificial light, they were at the very least technologically savvy, if not just as advanced as humans.

At that thought, Max began to wonder if they were even more advanced than humans. The discovery of this planet had been, after all, a total accident, and it was conceivable that a more advanced race had just neglected to explore the opposite side of the sun, just as humanity had done until now. However, the notion was short-lived in his mind, as there were no signs of other technology besides the light on the surface. There had been radio silence thus far, and the Enterprise was equipped with receivers that could pick up every radio signal physically possible. Max thought the idea of using electromagnetic wave signals to communicate fairly simple, and imagined that any advanced civilization would discover the application, given enough time. In addition, there was nothing artificial in orbit that the ship’s sensors could find. Most of the evidence pointed to the planet harboring no advanced race.

But that didn’t mean that whatever was down there wasn’t intelligent enough grasp the concept of an alien visiting from the other side of the solar system. So the possibility of landing and making contact wasn’t completely ruled out just yet.

After a few minutes of going over possibilities in his head, Max decided that he had made enough life-altering discoveries for one day. He undid the restraints holding him in the captain’s seat, and, using handholds positioned all over the walls, made his way out of the bridge and into the long, empty corridor that lead to the rest of the ship. He could not deny the trip had been an eerie one, living by himself for almost a year on a ship designed to be manned by a crew of no fewer than twenty-five. Sure, Max could be trained to do the jobs of multiple crewmembers, and computers were up to handling whatever he couldn't, but there was something to be said for being quite literally the only living being for millions of miles.

                Once outside the bridge, Max strapped himself into the seat waiting for him just outside the port hole, and pressed the key on the panel attached to the armrest labeled “Commander’s Quarters.” Once he pressed the key, computerized motors sent the chair –and Max with it– whizzing down the hall towards his sleeping room. The speed at which the system flung Max wasn’t quite disorienting or nauseating, but it was much faster than he would have managed by grasping the thousands of handholds built into the walls and manually pulling himself around expansive network of tunnels that connected all the accessible locations of the Enterprise. 

Max sped past the door to the giant centrifuge where he was required to spend three hours every day to combat the effects of microgravity. He passed the unused crew quarters and living space. Max zipped by the health center, where the myriad of odd and intricate workout machines designed for space were stored. He was also required to spend two hours there every day exercising to keep his muscles from deteriorating. The last thing he sped by was the entrance to the center segment of the ship, which housed the bay where the landing craft was stored.

The craft that would allow Max to land on and explore the planet’s surface was the only thing designed and built after the discovery of the new planet, and therefore the trickiest thing to pack into the Enterprise. The requirements presented engineers with many challenges, among them the needs to withstand atmospheric entry, land without a runway, serve as a place for the astronaut to live while exploring the plant, hold any items, materials, and information for interaction with any alien civilizations, attain orbit independently without any launch facilities, and dock with the Enterprise at the conclusion of the mission. 

The solution to all these problems was almost as amazing an engineering feat as the larger space ship it complemented. Its official designation was the Atmosphere-Capable-Exploration Lander, or ACE Lander for short, but Max had named it the Birdie. The Enterprise was named based on a tidal wave of letters from almost every science-fiction fan in the world, but the astronaut had reserved the exclusive right to name the other craft.

The Birdie was slightly smaller than old space shuttles, sleeker, and instead of being powered by rockets, was propelled by six hybrid turbofan/scramjet engines, capable of pushing it to over seventeen thousand miles per hour in the upper atmosphere, which was the speed needed to attain orbit. To reduce its size for storage in the Enterprise’s bay and re-entry, it was equipped with folding wings that could swing back and streamline its profile, but would extend for atmospheric flight. To actually land on the planet, rotating vents would direct the thrust of all six engines straight down, allowing for vertical landing and takeoff from any reasonably flat piece of ground.

After about a minute of whizzing around the ship, the moving chair finally ground to a halt outside the circular door to Max’s room. After undoing the restraints that held him in the chair, Max floated up to the port hole and opened it with the press of another button. He pulled himself inside and immediately went to the compartment under his bunk where he had a camcorder and all of his video journals and mission logs were stored.

As the Enterprise got farther and farther away from home, radio communication became less and less practical. Even at the speed of light, it would have taken a radio signal roughly fifteen minutes to traverse the distance between the two planets, and roughly one month prior, Max passed into the area known as the solar shadow. The solar shadow was the area where the sun blocked any and all radio signals from Earth, and was generally regarded as the point of no return for the mission. In the solar shadow, it was impossible to communicate with Earth without bouncing signals off of probes on other planets, and it just so happened that no planet with a probe on it would be in proper position for such a relay for another eight weeks. This little nuance earned the area a new nickname: the dark side of the sun. Max was now completely cut off from home, and just like the old days, all he could do was make daily mission logs.

The camcorder hadn’t actually been used yet, as a simple written or audio file usually sufficed for daily documentation of activities that were already in planned out well in advance. The only things Max actually needed to record up to this point were confirmations that all mission objectives were being met and all expectations were being satisfied, and a small unexpected change in trajectory to avoid the planet’s moon, which was weirdly similar to Earth’s moon, except that it was somewhat larger. However, the happenings of last few minutes were not described in any of the routines or schedules. The sights Max had just seen deserved special documentation. He turned on the camcorder, positioned it in front of him, and began what was going to be the most groundbreaking news report humanity would ever get.

“Tonight I arrived in orbit of the new planet,” he spoke into the camera. “And what I’ve just seen can only be described as the most monumental discovery in human history. We’ve always asked ourselves, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ and for the first time ever, there is a definite answer. The best part is we didn’t have to travel thousands of light-years to find it. The answer was hiding right under our noses the entire time. And that answer is simple: No way in hell.”


> 2. Be Prepared
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Twilight Sparkle awoke that morning as she did every morning. Her alarm clock began its incessant clatter at precisely eight-thirty, when the first beams of springtime sunlight began to shine through her bedroom window. With a swipe of her hoof, she silenced the infernal device that seemed to govern her life. As usual, before moving again or even opening her eyes, Twilight attempted to remember roughly how late last night, or perhaps how early that morning, she had left her books for her bed. The attempt was in vain, and at long last, the purple unicorn threw aside her blanket and dragged her tired body away from the soft, warm, inviting sheets.

Twilight trudged over to her mirror with groggy determination, yawning twice in the ten seconds it took to reach the dresser where it stood. After blinking for several seconds to clear away the sleepiness that blurred her vision, she peered at her reflection. Her pink and indigo mane was in an extremely disheveled state, and even though a quick splash of water and a few strokes with a brush would make it shine and sparkle as it usually did, the frazzled mass of hair was nonetheless a depressing sight to the slightly woozy unicorn.

Hmph. Just be glad you don’t have a mane like Rarity’s. Although Twilight admired Rarity’s beautiful swirling mane at times, she wasn’t envious of the effort that was undoubtedly needed to keep it in such a state. And with that in mind, her horn glowed slightly, and the brush lying on the table levitated up the unruly mane and began its work.

As she worked at taming her jungle of a morning mane, Twilight mentally reviewed the topic of her studying from the previous night. The volume she had been reading was called Magic of the Three Tribes, and explained the different kinds of magic that Earth Ponies, pegasi, and unicorns used. Although unicorns were the only ones with voluntary control over their magic, the other kinds of ponies had apparently inherent magical instincts and abilities that unicorns did not. This included the ability of pegasi to walk on clouds and manipulate weather, and an earth pony’s great strength and affinity for growing food. 

While spells existed that allowed unicorns to walk on clouds and control weather, they were just a temporary imitation of Pegasus magic.. Also, all Earth ponies were biologically much stronger than the other two kinds of ponies, and had an inborn tendency to more skilled at manipulating things with their hooves. This dexterity allowed Earth ponies to develop the skills needed to cultivate, domesticate, and grow food.

With her mane under some semblance of control, Twilight set the brush down and turned to leave her bedroom. She came down the stairs carefully as she was still a little groggy, and made her way to the shelf where she kept her expansive collection of checklists. Twilight had prepared all her checklists for the week in advance, so all she had to do this morning was pick out the list that was in the current day’s slot on the shelf and see what needed doing.

“Let’s see… Re-shelving time until eleven, lunch with Rarity and Fluttershy until noon, research with Lyra…” Something was missing, what was it? As soon as she realized exactly what, or who, rather, was missing, Twilight giggled softly. Immediately after, she bellowed, “SPIIIIIKE!!!”

It didn’t take long for the purple and green baby dragon to hurriedly stumble down the stairs to the main floor of the library, nearly falling and barely catching himself more than once as he tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes.

“Wha- I’m up, I’m up…” he mumbled as he ran up to Twilight and grabbed the list and quill that she had been levitating. “Did I miss breakf-” he started, but stopped mid sentence as his face suddenly scrunched up in discomfort. A second later he belched out a small puff of green flame and smoke, which floated over to Twilight and materialized in front of her as a rolled-up letter.

Twilight caught the letter in a cloud of purple magic. “Hmm, a letter from Princess Celestia?” she mused. “It’s a little early in the day for this.”

“Tell me about it,” Spike moaned, doubled over. While it wasn’t necessarily painful for the baby dragon to receive letters from the Princess, it certainly wasn’t comfortable, and getting one this early in the morning was no pleasant experience.

Twilight smiled sympathetically at Spike, and levitated him onto a nearby chair. Then, she unrolled the letter to see what was so important to her mentor needed her to know this early in early in the morning.
 
My faithful student,

Last night, an unknown object in the heavens caught the attention of my sister. We need you and the other bearers of the Elements of Harmony to come to the Royal Palace in Canterlot with all possible haste. As far as we can tell, there is no immediate danger, but much is unknown about what Luna witnessed. Please mention this to nopony other than your five friends.

                       Sincerely,
                      Princess Celestia
 
Twilight frowned as she read the letter, and she was done, rolled it back up and trotted to the closet to get her saddlebags. “Spike, will you be okay by yourself here today?”

Spike, now recovered from the unexpected jolt, hopped down from his chair and looked at his friend with a worried expression on his face. “What did the princess want? Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine, Spike,” Twilight said, doing her best to give the dragon a reassuring smile. “The Princess just wants to see me and my friends today.”

“Huh? What for?”

“Something to do with the stars,” Twilight said as she put on her saddlebags and hurried out of the library.      
          
After Twilight was out the door, Spike stood where he was for a few seconds, wondering what the stars could possibly doing that Twilight and her friends had to rush off to Canterlot in such a hurry. One idea began to slowly take shape in his head, but he quickly dismissed it. That kind of thing was impossible, right?





Apparently, the bearers of the Elements of Harmony were not the only ones Celestia had summoned that day. Of course, Princess Luna was in the throne room when Twilight, Rainbow, Rarity, Pinkie, Fluttershy, and Applejack arrived, but there were two others present. One was the Captain of the Royal Guard, Shining Armor. The other none of the friends had seen before.

One by one, the six mares filed into the study and properly greeted the royal sisters with a bow. The two princesses were seated behind Celestia’s desk, the rising sun shining through the windows behind them. Celestia was always happy to see the bearers, but today her joy was tempered by the gravity of the situation. “Thank you, my little ponies, for coming on such short notice,” said the white alicorn.

“We came as soon as we could,” Twilight said reverently. “What happened with the stars last night?”

“Luna will answer your question shortly,” said Celestia. “But first some introductions are in order. I know you all are already familiar with Shining Armor, Captain of the Royal Guard,” Twilight and her brother shared a quick glance and a small smile. “But allow me to introduce Doctor Whooves,” She nodded to stallion standing next to Luna. “Doctor Whooves is head of Canterlot’s Astronomy Department.”

Doctor Whooves was a plain brown earth pony, with a dark brown mane that was spiky and slicked back. An image of an hourglass adorned his flanks, and he wore a simple red bow-tie. “It’s a pleasure to meet all of you,” he said with slight Canterlot accent that sounded intelligent rather than snooty. “Your exploits are well known to me and my colleagues.”

“Now, to attend to business,” Celestia announced, then turned to her sister.

“Fairly early last night,” began the midnight blue alicorn. “A new object entered our night sky. It was not a star, comet, meteor, or any other heavenly body that we have seen before. It seems to have begun to revolve around our planet. It is not something natural that has drifted here from the depths of space. Rather, it is something artificial. I sensed it was unimaginably complex, and carrying a sentient being.”

“Wait,” Twilight interjected. Are you saying there’s a pony out in space?”

“Whatever it is, it is not a pony, Twilight Sparkle.” Luna calmly replied, but the reaction to that statement was anything but calm. Instead, eight shocked pairs of eyes stared back at Luna, and an unnerving silence gripped the study.

The silence was finally broken by Doctor Whooves. “Your Highness,” he asked, slowly and carefully. “Are you saying that we are being visited by-” he paused. “-extraterrestrial life?”

“Extraterrestrial life?” Rainbow repeated, frowning slightly. “Isn’t that the same as saying…um…aliens?”

Fluttershy emitted a small “Eep!” at the word, and Twilight, Doctor Whooves, and both princesses nodded solemnly.
Rainbow’s mind instantly went to the book she had read a few weeks prior, Daring Do and the Ancient Ponies of the Red Planet, in which green, scaly quadrupeds from Mars attempted to take over Equestria. She quickly repressed the thought.

“Well,” Doctor Whooves said pensively, bringing a hoof to his chin. “That certainly creates more questions than answers.”

“I’ll say.” Shining Armor finally spoke. “Do we know anything about what they want, where they came from, or what they can do?”
Celestia held up a hoof to calm the captain. “Like I said to all of you, not much is known about this. The only information we have is what Luna saw and sensed last night. For the moment, all we can do is wait and watch.”

“But we can prepare ourselves for anything,” said Luna. “Twilight, we want you and your friends to keep the Elements of Harmony with you at all times. The last thing we want is a frantic search for them in the middle of a crisis.”

The six bearers nodded, understanding the request. Twice in the span of a year the Elements were needed to save Equestria from a hostile takeover, and both times they were unavailable, either because they were stolen from the vault where they were stored or said vault was overrun by Changelings.                

A golden aura surrounded Celestia’s Horn, and the gem-covered chest floated out from underneath the princess’s desk. “It is my sincere hope that you won’t need to use these,” she said as she levitated each ornate necklace to its respective bearer. Rarity and Twilight caught their pieces of jewelry with their own levitation magic, and the princess fastened the others around the necks of the other four. “But it is better to be over-prepared than ill-prepared.”

At this, Shining Armor spoke again. “Speaking of being prepared, do I put the Royal Guard on high alert?”

“No, Captain Armor,” Luna replied. “There is no danger that we can see, and another high alert would only cause unnecessary panic, as the memories from the last time it was needed are no doubt fresh in everypony’s mind.”

Shining Armor frowned slightly at the memories of the crisis right before his wedding.

“But there are still measures you can take to ensure everypony’s safety,” Celestia added. “Do whatever you can to heighten the Guard’s readiness without raising suspicion.”   

“Yes, Princess,” said Shining Armor and straightened up, glad to have orders he could follow.

Celestia turned back to the six mares that so far had remained silent. “All of you except Twilight are to return to Ponyville at the conclusion of the meeting.”

Twilight blinked in surprise. “Then what am I supposed to do?”

“I want you to accompany Doctor Whooves back to the Royal Canterlot Observatory. You two need to keep a careful watch on this object, and if anything happens, alert me and Captain Armor immediately. And, if needed, you will then return to Ponyville as quickly as possible to unite with the other Elements.”

“One last thing to mention,” Luna said in a very serious tone. “Once you walk out those doors, not a word of this is to be discussed with anypony. Secrecy is of the utmost importance.”

“Can I at least tell Cadence what is going on?” Shining asked, not liking the idea of keeping secrets from his wife.

“She already knows,” Celestia said calmly. “And she has been instructed to discuss this affair with nopony outside this castle, just as all of you have. Outside this castle, none of you can speak about this with anyone, not even each other.” And with that, Celestia dismissed the group. They all stood, bowed respectfully, and filed out of the study.

Once the two royal sisters were alone, Celestia turned and gazed out the window at her precious sun, and a frown of worry darkened her expression.

Luna approached her sister carefully, and touched one of Celestia’s forelegs in what she hoped was a comforting manner. “What is wrong, dear sister?”

The frown deepened, and Celestia closed her eyes. “Luna, I’m afraid I was not entirely truthful to you or our friends.”

Now it was Luna’s turn to frown. “What aren't you telling me?” the dark alicorn asked, fully aware that she might regret doing so.

“I may not know who that being is that you sensed, but I fear that I know exactly what it is, and where it came from.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

“Yes, if you wish. But I should warn you, Luna; this particular story was kept from the records of history for a very good reason.”
 




Spike had always teased Twilight when she paced around the library during times of stress, but suddenly it didn’t seem like such a silly habit.          

Twilight hadn’t come back yet, and it was nearly midday. The baby dragon had managed to keep a level head for about an hour, but after he finished his morning bowl of sapphires and emeralds, Spike remembered the last time all six of his pony friends were summoned to the castle by Princess Celestia with no warning. That was when Discord escaped and practically turned Ponyville inside-out. It was not a pleasant day to remember.

Now, almost four hours later, Spike found himself pacing back and forth in the library as he had seen Twilight do so many times before. His head was tilted down, his hands were behind his back and his claws were interlaced. Spike walked over the same line over and over again, and the number of repetitions was likely in the thousands. Sometime in the past four hours, he vowed never to make fun of Twilight for her nervous pacing again. There was just something oddly comforting about watching his feet as they moved him in the same pattern for what he guessed to be the thousandth time.

Spike had just reached a corner of the library and was about to start back in the other direction when he felt a slight but familiar convulsion in his stomach. He tensed for a brief moment, and then belched out another cloud of green flame and smoke. The cloud condensed into a rolled up piece of parchment, and it fell to the floor.

Anxious for news, he practically pounced on the letter. It wasn’t on the ground for more than a second before the purple dragon scooped it up and unrolled it.
 
Dear Spike,
 
I’m sorry I had to run off so suddenly this morning. I hope you’re not too worried, because it’s no big deal this time. The princess just wants me to do some research at the Canterlot Observatory. I’ll be gone for a few days, so you’ll have to cancel a few of my appointments this week. But everypony else will be back in the afternoon. Rarity will stop by when she gets back to check on you.
 
                                Your friend,
                                Twilight
 
Spike breathed and audible sigh of relief. If Twilight told him not to worry, he wouldn’t worry. And best of all, Rarity would be coming to visit. Just thinking of her sparkling white coat, her swirling purple mane, and her sweet voice almost made Spike swoon. The dragon’s romantic fantasy was interrupted, however, when a loud knocking came from the door. He shook his head to clear it and ran over to the door to answer.

When Spike opened the door he saw a familiar pale green unicorn standing in the doorway. “Hey Lyra,” he said and smiled.

“Hi, Spike,” Lyra said in her usual cheerful sing-song voice. “Is Twilight there?”

“Sorry Lyra, but she got called away to called away to Canterlot for something important. She’ll be gone for a few days.”

Lyra’s ears drooped slightly at the news and she looked down at her hooves. “Oh, well, that’s ok, I guess, but Twilight said she would help me with some research today.”

“I can help,” Spike offered. “I know the library just as well as Twilight.”

        “Could you? That would be wonderful!” Lyra perked up again and smiled hopefully at the baby dragon.

“No problem.” Spike returned the smile and opened the door wider, welcoming in the minty green unicorn.

Lyra stepped into the library, and Spike gently shut the door behind her. “So Twilight told me about a really neat spell she found,” she told him. “It’s supposed to show you who wrote a piece of music when you play it.”

Spike though for a moment, tapping the floor with his foot. “Yeah, she told me about that when she heard of it. Composers and their lawyers used to use it to settle author disputes before the other spells were invented.”

“So do you know which spell book it might be in?” Lyra asked.

        “Yeah, it would be back with some of the old legal books. Follow me.”

        Lyra followed Spike from the main room of the library to one of the smaller rooms in the back. The room reserved for the subject of Equestrian Law was one that was hardly ever used, so the curtains were closed and the room was dark when they stepped in. After Spike moved back the curtains, Lyra understood exactly why it was seldom-visited. As soon as the room was lit, she could see that there were very few normal books on the shelves. Instead, there were was a multitude of dull-looking tomes that were thicker than they were wide, and pyramids of yellowing scrolls that looked like they hadn’t been touched since they were stacked.             

As Spike scuttled around the room looking for the book which held the spell in question, Lyra began glancing at the spines of some of the almost obscenely thick law books, reading some out loud as she skimmed, her eyes getting wider and wider with each title. “Civil Court Proceedings of the Classical Era, Hoofington Building and Zoning Regulations, Municipal Election and Campaign Finance Law, Sweet Celestia, Spike! Does Twilight read all of these books, too?”

Spike, who was pushing a ladder to the shelf where he was looking, had to stop and laugh for a moment. “Thank goodness, no. Even she has limits.” He began ascending the ladder and continued, “Besides, she likes books about science and magic. All this legal stuff is too boring, even for Twilight. The only reason these are here is because it’s required for every library to have them.” 

He climbed the ladder up to a high shelf, and selected one of the few reasonably proportioned books in the room. “I think this is it,” Spike said, and tossed the book down to Lyra, who caught it in a yellow cloud of levitation magic.

“Spells for the Unicorn Lawyer,” she read aloud, and opened the book. After reading the table of contents, Lyra exclaimed happily, “Found it!” She then flipped to the specified page and read the spell’s description. “‘The Author Spell is used to reveal the creator of a work of literature, music, or any other art form. When properly used it creates an image of the originator in the presence of their creation’. Spike, this is just what I needed!”

“Great!” the baby dragon said as he hopped down from the ladder. “Do you think you can do it?”

Lyra read the instructions for performing the spell, and after a minute, she looked back at Spike. “Well, I’m not as great as Twilight with magic, but it doesn't seem too complicated. I think I can manage.”

“Well, the book is yours for a week. Enjoy, Lyra!”        

“Thank you so much, Spike! I’ll see you later!” Still carrying the open book in an aura of yellow magic, she turned and cantered towards the door.

When Spike heard Lyra close the door behind her, he immediately ran from the legal room upstairs to the bathroom, skipping steps as he bounded up the stairs. Rarity would be here any minute, and his scales had to shine.





Lyra’s home was a simple place. She didn’t spend much time at home, unlike ponies that lived and worked in the same place like Twilight, Rarity, or Fluttershy. No, she didn’t need a large or distinctive place; she just needed a place to sleep at night and occasionally eat breakfast in the morning. And so when she moved to Ponyville she bought a small house on the main street that ran through the center of Ponyville. It was a simple dwelling, which contained only a bedroom, a bathroom, and a small kitchen. A few framed photos of her family hung in the kitchen, and there was a chair and music stand in the bedroom, but beyond that, it was a very bare-bones home.

Although Lyra normally did very little in her house, today’s task had to be done in privacy. Still toting the book Spike had given her, Lyra locked her door behind her and headed for her bedroom. Once inside, she closed that door as well, and dove under the bed to retrieve her lyre. After a minute of digging through old sheet music, garbage, and quite a few dust bunnies, she found the instrument and pulled it out. It had five strings, was made of brass, and her family name ‘Heartstrings’ was inscribed on the side with ornate lettering. It was an old family heirloom, and had been passed down through more generations than history bothered to record. An image of that very lyre was imprinted on her flanks.

But today Lyra wasn’t going to simply tinker with an antique. She was going to unravel the mystery surrounding it. When her mother had given her the lyre, she also taught Lyra a simple melody to play on it. It was a slow, sweet tune that was simple, yet melancholy. The melody was even older than the lyre, and also had been kept in the Heartstrings family for so long that nopony really knew who wrote it. Nopony knew, that is, until today. Today, Lyra was going to learn, if not who the pony was that started the family traditions, at least what they looked like.

Lyra carried the lyre to the chair beside her bed and began to play the simple, yet sweet melody her mother had taught her. She, like other non-unicorn musicians, had no problem playing the instrument with her bare hooves. Even though her family had been purely unicorns, it was an old family tradition to learn to play the family lyre with one’s hooves, and that was how her mother taught her.
Lyra smiled to herself, fondly remembering the days of her fillyhood when her mother would try to teach her how to hold the instrument properly, how to pluck the strings, and also how her mother often had to fight just to get the young filly to simply pay attention to the lesson. Each pluck of the strings sent more of the sweet vibrations through the air, strengthening the minty unicorn’s nostalgia and causing her to become even more lost in the memories of her fillyhood.

Eventually, Lyra snapped out of her whimsical canter down memory lane remembered the spell she had been trying to find for days. The mental shift caused a slight hiccup in the rhythm of the song, but she recovered quickly. The book was lying on her bed, still open to the page with the instructions for the spell. She peered at them one last time, and then, without missing a beat in her song, Lyra began the spell. Her horn began to glow, and she concentrated as hard as she could on the spell without losing the sequence of notes on her instrument.

The spell might not have been complicated, but summoning the image of a pony that had undoubtedly been dead for thousands of years was certainly draining. Lyra could feel the spell soaking up more and more of her magic, and yet she had only achieved a making a sparkly but faint outline of a shape that looked nothing like a pony in the air in front of her.

She poured more magic into the spell, and played a little louder. The book said nothing about volume having any effect on the spell, but seemed to be helping, so Lyra played louder still. Whatever the shape was, it was becoming clearer and more defined, but still in no way resembled a pony. Lyra closed her eyes and gritted her teeth, giving the spell every ounce of magic she had. It took significant effort to continue playing the tune, but Lyra had waited years for a way to find out who wrote the music, and she wasn’t about to give up now.

Eventually, Lyra slumped back in the chair and stopped playing. Maybe she just didn’t have the magical ability to perform the spell. Maybe she would find Twilight when the librarian returned from Canterlot and ask her for- hold on a second, Lyra thought. Am I still playing? She was still holding the lyre, but the hoof she had been using the pluck the strings was hanging limply at her side. So why am I still hearing the song?

When Lyra opened her eyes, she yelped and nearly fell out of her chair. The spell had worked alright, but the sparkling, translucent, yellow-tinted image her magic had created was not one of a pony. The young mare’s golden eyes went wide as she stared at the strange being that was standing in front of her.

The image was of a tall, slender creature that stood on two legs, and was wearing a long white robe that covered most of its skin. The skin the Lyra could see was its feet, arms, neck, and head, and was mostly hairless. Instead of hooves, the creature had hands and feet, similar to that of a dragon, but with fleshy, flexible fingers and toes rather than sharp claws. It didn’t have a coat of fur like ponies did, but a long red mane of wavy red hair cascaded from the top of its head. The creature held a lyre, and was playing the very tune Lyra had been playing just a few seconds ago.

Lyra blinked in disbelief a few times as the magic dissipated and the image disappeared and the music with it. It sure wasn’t a pony, but if it wasn’t a pony who wrote the song, who did? The better question was what wrote the song?





That evening, when Twilight followed Doctor Whooves through the door that led to the royal observatory, she couldn’t help letting out a small gasp. The door led to small platform at least twenty feet up from the floor of the giant space, and there was a small staircase down to the main floor. It might have looked a relatively small part of the castle, barely noticeable from the outside when compared to the rest of the expansive royal palace, but the royal observatory was bigger on the inside.

The entire room was a cavernous dome at least a hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet high, with smooth white walls and an enormous telescope occupying most of the space, and that telescope poked up through a rectangular opening that stretched from the base of the dome to the crest. The floor of the dome was mostly empty, save the intricate tower of metal beams and gears that held up the telescope and allowed it to tilt while surveying different parts of the night sky. The eyepiece of the telescope wasn’t at a small end of a large tube. Rather, an internal system of mirrors and lenses channeled whatever the large end was looking at into an eyepiece that was fixed near the bottom of the tower, no matter where it was pointed. Near the base of the tower was a desk that was covered in astronomy books and loose papers, presumably for recording observations.

Doctor Whooves trotted down the stairs that led to the main floor, his hoofsteps echoing in the empty but well lit space. Once at the bottom, he beckoned Twilight, who was still admiring the telescope from the door at the top of the stairs. “Welcome to my humble abode,” he said graciously.

“You mean you live here?” Twilight asked as she trotted after the brown stallion.

Doctor Whooves smirked. “I’ve spent more nights here than where I actually live, if that’s what you mean.”

Twilight smiled back and gave an understanding nod. She herself had spent her fair share of sleepless nights gazing at the night sky through her own telescope at the library.

“Now, to business,” said Doctor Whooves and turned and walked over to the desk where the notes and books were piled high. “According to Princess Luna, the object will appear in a few minutes at the east horizon, and follow this trajectory.” He gave a piece of paper to Twilight with the details of the path the mysterious object would follow across the night sky.

Twilight, who was now sitting right next to the doctor, took the piece of paper in a cloud of magic and squinted at it. To most other ponies, it would appear as a meaningless mumbo-jumbo of lines, dots, and numbers. Thankfully, Twilight was not most other ponies. Thanks to a number of research projects and papers she had completed on the subject, Twilight was well-read on the subjects of celestial bodies and orbital mechanics. “Does the princess know how high up this thing is?”

“Higher up than we've ever been able to go,” replied Doctor Whooves, still rifling through the notes on his desk. “As far as Luna could tell, it’s orbiting our planet in a similar fashion to the moon, but there’s no magic involved.”

“Does that mean it’s just at the mercy of gravity?”

“Luna couldn't feel any magic coming from it, so we assume so. That's also how she knew it wasn't a pony. Although, it seems to have inserted itself into the perfect orbit even without the assistance of magic, so it won’t be falling out of the sky any time soon. And it’s high enough that no pegasi can fly up and get a closer look at it.” He selected a page and took it to the base of the structure holding up the telescope, and began turning cranks and pulling levers. “And that means this telescope is the only way to get a decent gander at the thing.”

“Is it closer or farther than the moon?”

“As far as Luna could tell, it’s closer. And it’s moving much faster. Luna usually moves the moon around our planet about once a day, and the princess said this thing goes around in about ninety minutes.”

Twilight looked back at the sheet of notes Doctor Whooves gave her thoughtfully, chin in hoof. “Are we sure it doesn't just look faster because it’s closer? I mean, if it’s closer, than even at the same speed it wouldn't take as long for it to go around.”

Doctor Whooves poked his head around the structure holding up the telescope to look at Twilight. “You really are as bright as Celestia boasts.”

Twilight responded to the compliment with a small blush.

“Hopefully,” he said, going back to the telescope’s controls and grunting as he struggled with a very large lever. “That’s one of the questions we’ll answer over the next few days.”

With a final grunt and a mighty yank, the chestnut astronomer finally moved the massive lever, and the telescope came to life. Every gear in the tower supporting it began to turn and the lens of massive telescope began tilt downwards. When Twilight looked up through the opening in the ceiling she saw that the stars appeared to be moving, but in reality they weren't. She gasped again a she realized the whole room was slowly rotating, and that the doctor was pointing the telescope at the exact point in the sky where the object would appear.

“Doctor, do we know what this thing looks like?” Twilight asked.

“Princess Luna sent a rough sketch, but it’s not all that descriptive. Whatever we see tonight will be the first good look pony kind gets at it.”

Finally the room and telescope stopped moving, and Doctor Whooves peered into the eyepiece with one eye closed. He didn’t move for a few minutes, and Twilight could only watch anxiously. Suddenly, without moving, his closed eye opened wide, and Twilight could only assume is other eye, still pressed against the telescope’s eyepiece, widened as well.

“Oh,” the doctor murmured. “Oh, my.”

“What is it, Doctor?”

“Twilight, you may wish to come see this.” There was a slight tinge of fear in his voice as he stepped away from the telescope.

With a worried look on her face, Twilight wasted no time in galloping the short distance to the spot where Doctor Whooves previously stood. She pressed her eye against the tiny lens and gasped. Luna’s sketch wasn’t inaccurate, but her smaller spyglass just didn’t reveal the level of detail that Twilight was being treated to on the more powerful machine. It certainly was no space rock, it was artificial. This thing was massive, yet its design was aerodynamic. The doctor must have set the telescope to follow the object’s trajectory, because the stars around seemed to be moving but the unknown shape stayed in the center of the image. “Doctor, is that it?” she asked.

“Well, I think you’d be hard pressed to find anything more unusual than that in the night sky, so yes.”

“It’s huge!” Twilight gasped.

The doctor, who was back at his desk scribbling notes, looked up at his lavender assistant. “Care to be a bit more descriptive?”

“It’s like an airship almost,” Twilight said as she squinted back into the lens. “But without a balloon to hold it up. It’s long and cylindrical, like a candle, but it looks like there are big flat wings coming out from the sides. It’s just so...” She paused to try and think of a way to properly describe what she was seeing. “It’s so alien,” Twilight said resolutely. “Sorry if that doesn't do a whole lot of describing, but I've never seen anything like this before.”

“That’s quite alright,” the doctor said around the pencil in his mouth. “I did catch a glimpse of it myself, and I understand. Whatever this thing is, it’s definitely not from this world.”

Twilight stepped away from the telescope and joined Doctor Whooves at his desk. “Is there any way to tell where it’s from?” she asked him.

“I’m afraid not. My colleagues and I have long thought it possible for planets capable of supporting life to exist elsewhere in space, but we've never actually spotted one. Ours is the only planet in the solar system that can sustain life, and as wonderful as this old girl is," he paused and patted the telescope affectionately. "She can't see planets outside of our system. And even if she could, there are millions of stars that could have planets like ours, and it would take thousands of years to search them all. As I’m sure you know, Twilight, a great many things have to go right during a planet’s lifetime if it’s going to sustain multi-cellular organic life.”

Twilight nodded. “I know a planet can’t be too close to a sun, or solar winds will blast away the atmosphere, and if it’s too far then it’s simply too cold for anything to live.”

“Very good, Twilight,” Doctor Whooves mused. “Perhaps you should have been an astronomer rather than a librarian. But there are many more factors that contribute to a planet’s suitability for life as we know it.”

“Like what?” Twilight asked.

“The atmosphere has to be made up of a very specific combination of gases, and there needs to be an abundance of liquid water. The planet itself needs to be geologically stable enough, or there would simply be too many earthquakes and volcano eruptions for anything to live there.  Also, if anything big enough collides with said planet, say a large comet, asteroid, or even another planet, not only would the collision obliterate any life that managed to pop up, but it could knock the planet out of its ideal orbit around the sun, therefore ruining chances of life coming back at all.”

Twilight was floored. Based on Doctor Whooves’ description, it seemed almost impossible that all the life in Equestria existed in the first place.

Doctor Whooves saw the young mare’s incredulous expression, and said, “Like I said, a great many things went right on our planet. And while it is theoretically possible for another planet to be as lucky, the cards are stacked against it.”

Twilight nodded in understanding, before thinking of another question. “You said we've never spotted another planet that could sustain life?”

“Not that we can tell,” the doctor sighed.

“Well, if whatever is in that thing made it all the way here from wherever it’s from, they had to see us first, right?”

Doctor Whooves raised an eyebrow, curious where Twilight was going with this. “I suppose. Go on.”

“Is there any area relatively nearby that we can’t see, maybe because it’s blocked by something else?”

The doctor thought for a minute. “The only direction we can’t point this telescope is directly at the sun. So if you’re suggesting there is a ‘hidden’ planet in our solar system, I think behind the sun would be the only place where such a thing could be.”

“And what if that hidden planet was more or less like ours, shared the same orbit, had the same distance between it and the sun, had the right atmosphere, had enough water, and everything?” By now, Twilight was getting excited. A semi-plausible theory was forming in her head, and there was nothing to disprove it, so far.

“You know,” Doctor Whooves said, holding his chin in his hoof again. “That might just be the most believable thing I've heard today. And the fact that something is here in the first place means whatever is on that planet could have easily sent something or someone out far enough to where it could see us.”

Twilight got even more excited, before realizing exactly what the doctor had said. “I wonder just how long this thing has been watching us?” she asked with a shudder.

Doctor Whooves, who was still slightly giddy over the extrapolations they had made, already had a quill and parchment out on his desk. “It may be best not to think about that, Twilight. Now let’s get our theories sent to the princesses. They’re going to want to hear this.”



> 3. Contact
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Whoops of joy and shouts of victory sounded through his radio headsets, and even though Captain O’Hara  didn’t contribute to the audible celebration, his mouth curled upward in a satisfied smile. It was hidden behind the oxygen mask he had to wear while flying, but it was a smile nonetheless. The formation of fighters flew high above the clouds and the sky was clear, allowing for unlimited visibility. Despite being physically confined to cockpit of his fighter jet, Max felt as if he had more freedom behind the controls his plane than anywhere else in the world. That feeling of freedom, combined with the adrenaline of combat and pride of victory created an incredible and euphoric sensation that just could not be described with words.

The squadron’s combat mission could not have turned out any better than it did; nearly fifteen enemy fighters were destroyed in just a few short minutes of combat with his team of four jets. The battle had been hectic and intense, but not a single squadron mate was missing at the end. And now that his group of fighters had rejoined with the group of attack planes they had been escorting, pilots from each group were sharing stories of their victories. The attack pilots recounted the targets on the ground that they had blown to smithereens, and fighter pilots described the frantic aerial battle and the enemy jets going down in flames.

While Max didn’t really ignore the elated conversation from his fellow pilots, he didn’t feel the need to partake in the banter. At least, until one feminine voice called him out specifically.   

“Why so silent, Captain?” asked Lieutenant Michelle Hawkins, as she pulled her fighter up next to her flight leader’s plane.

Max twisted around and look at his wingman. (Or wing-girl, as she preferred) Even though most of Michelle’s face was obscured by her helmet and mask, her helmet visor was up and he could see the wild sparkle in her eyes, even through the canopy of her jet’s cockpit.


“Just trying to calm myself down, Birdie,” he replied, addressing his squad-mate by her squad-given nickname.

“And tell me, Sir, why you want to be calm at time like this?” she asked teasingly. “We just stomped some serious Iranian ass! Gloat a little bit!”

“I’m trying to calm down so I can land this kite when we get back. Ever tried getting a plane on the ground with shaking hands and knocking knees?” Max hadn’t planned on revealing the fact, but some of the jitters remained from the harrowing furball of a dogfight he had just lived through. “I don’t know about you, but I had a few close calls back there.”

Michelle tried to give a witty response, but suddenly Max’s cockpit burst to life in a symphony of warning alarms and pulsing red lights. The words every pilot hoped never to see flashed in red letters on every one of his cockpit displays: MISSILE WARNING.

“All pilots, we’ve got surface-launched missiles! BREAK FORMA-” he began to yell into his radio, but was cut off when he heard an explosion off to his right. The shockwave rocked his plane, and he looked in the direction of the sound just in time to see the fighter of Lieutenant Michelle Hawkins burst into flames before spiraling towards the ground, spewing fire, smoke, and debris as it careened helplessly downward.              

Max’s eyes shot open and he inhaled sharply, taking in the sights of his sleeping quarters He was in his room on the Enterprise, strapped loosely to the bed. The window was directly above him, and through it he could see the sun beginning to poke out from behind the planet. Max had been orbiting the planet for a good forty-eight hours now, marking his passing of the one-year mark since his departure from Earth.

It was just a dream, he thought to himself. But it was more than that. Max had just relived the first few minutes of the worst day of his life. Down to the last detail, everything that happened in that dream happened ten years ago to the day. And this wasn’t the first time. For weeks on end, Max had been reliving that awful day in his dreams almost regularly.

Such nightmares were a classic sign of post traumatic stress disorder, a psychological that could have disqualified him from ever going into space. The only issue was that it seemed to surface only after he was already in space and past the point of no return. It wasn’t like Max could just turn the ship around, head home, land in the German runner-up’s backyard and hand her the keys, even if he wanted to.

Of course, he could have contacted home and informed them of what he was going through after the first few occurrences, but he decided not to. There certainly wasn’t anything anyone on Earth could do to help, and Max thought people could live without knowing the one man they chose to represent the entire human race had spontaneously developed PTSD.  He’d been more than a hundred and fifty million miles from home when the first nightmare occurred, and he was getting more than six hundred thousand miles further every day. There was simply no turning back.

Max was just glad that he’d woken up when he did this time, because what happened after seeing his friend shot down was even more traumatic to remember. The nightmare left Max in a cold sweat and breathing heavy as he undid the straps that loosely held him in place while he slept. The memories he tried so hard to bury were now bubbling up to the surface of his mind, and he couldn't push them back down.

Just give it some time. Distract yourself. The words of the chaplain he met with after that day came to him, and today distracting himself would be all too easy. 

Today was the day Max would board the Birdie, open the doors of the Enterprise’s main cargo bay, and be the first human in history to set foot on another world. Having been in microgravity conditions for the better part of a year, Max found it hard to imagine going back to having feet on the ground, but for the sake of distraction, he tried imaging just that as he strapped himself into the chair that would whisk him away from his bedroom and to the cargo bay.

As Max went whizzing past every other room on the ship, he began to think about the planet he would soon set foot on. None of the orbital images that the ship’s cameras had taken over the past few days showed any geological features in the environment that would be overtly dangerous, but they also proved beyond reasonable doubt that there was a thriving, technological civilization down there.

Daytime images taken had revealed many small towns and villages, but there were a few larger collections of buildings that appeared to be comparable to a small or medium-sized city on Earth. There were also what appeared to be railroads connecting almost every settlement. The life on the planet was intelligent, no doubt, and that meant Max could make the call to attempt to communicate at some point or another, but he didn’t want to rush into that just yet.

Max planned to avoid the locals on his first landing, and simply explore the land around his chosen landing spot, which was a large clearing in what looked to be a forest that was far away from any of the larger settlements he had seen while scoping out the planet. There was a smaller village-type gathering of structures and farm fields near the edge of the forest, but that was something Max did not plan on seeing.

On this landing, all he wanted was to see if the environment was suitable for humans. There was a pressure suit and a bio-hazard suit on the Birdie just in case the atmosphere wasn’t close enough to Earth’s, but instruments on the Enterprise showed that the atmosphere was at the very least similar to that of Earth. Of course, those sensors couldn’t see things like airborne pathogens and microbes, so there were precautions. But there was no reason to get involved with the locals just yet. The plan for dealing with alie-

Sentient beings, Max reminded himself as he powered down all the functions and systems on the Enterprise that would unnecessary in his absence. I’m the alien here. 

The plan for dealing with any sentient beings on the new planet called for painstakingly cautious observation before any real interaction. Rather, this would be more of an extended nature walk. In addition to environmental protection equipment Birdie also stored on it things like cameras, survival equipment, and a single .45 caliber pistol with plenty of ammunition, just in case the wildlife turned out to be less than docile, or he accidently stumbled upon a hostile local.

The M1911 handgun Max chose to take with him was an extremely old design, pushing one hundred and thirty years of age, but it was tough and reliable. There were plenty of other firearms he could have chosen that were more modern and complicated, but this far from home, the old war pilot decided simpler was better. And the bigger .45 caliber bullet packed more punch than most other calibers available. Max knew having the bigger gun could prove to be the difference between scaring off a large animal and just making it angry.

This and many other random tidbits of information flowed through the astronaut’s consciousness as he donned his blue flight gear. Once Max was properly outfitted, he entered the cavernous cargo bay that held the Birdie.  He made his way to the open hatch on the side of his lander, using the various handholds that were built into the walls, and once inside maneuvered himself into the cockpit, and strapped himself into the pilot’s seat before placing his polished white flight helmet firmly on his head and pulling the dark visor down over his face.

With the flip of a switch on the instrument panel in front of him, Max closed the airtight hatch behind him and locked it down into place. Once he was sealed inside the Birdie, the cargo bay automatically began to depressurize in preparation for opening the large doors. With his hands firmly on the manual controls, Max gave the yoke an experimental wiggle. He wouldn’t need to actually pilot the Birdie until he was safely in the atmosphere, but the feeling of control he got from manipulating the instrument gave him a small amount of comfort. 

With the Birdie completely sealed and the space around it devoid of air, he flipped one more switch, and the ceiling of the Enterprise’s cargo bay split in two as the giant doors began to open.

Once the doors were open wide enough for him so see outside, Max had to pause and marvel at the new planet as it was slowly revealed to him. It may have been a wonderful sight to see from the window above his bed, not unlike Earth, but now, looking up at the expansive globe above him, he just couldn’t believe how peaceful and serene it looked.

When Max was orbiting Earth before he left, he still thought his home planet looked incredible, but there were areas of land scorched by the all-too-recent war so expansive that they were visible from space. By some miracle, no nuclear weapons were detonated during the war, but most modern nations proved more than capable of doing some horrific damage to each other without them. Vast expanses of Asia, Africa, and South America appeared as dull, charred blotches of land, and even more developed areas like North America and Western Europe did not escape the war without smaller but similar battle scars. 

I should know, the former war pilot had told himself. I helped to create some of them.

But as the bay doors of the Enterprise opened up to show him the new world, Max was awed by how tranquil and harmonious it seemed. There were no other aritificial satellites or other man-made spacecraft to maneuver around, no incessant radio chatter, or anything else that humanity considered ‘progress.’ There was just the beautiful blue and green planet filling up Max’s vision. He imagined the Earth might have looked and felt like this at some point, maybe before the war, perhaps even before he was born, but now it was a planet ravaged by violence and struggling to pick itself up and move on.

 Half the reason I’m out here is just to prove that we can.

The clang of the bay doors locking into their fully open positions brought Max out of his wanton contemplations, and reminded him that he had a schedule to maintain. He pushed yet another button on the control panel in front of him, and the braces holding the Birdie in the bay released one by one, and the craft slowly floated out of and away from the larger space vessel.

Once a safe distance from the Enterprise, small thrusters fired in sequence and rolled the craft so the planet was beneath Max’s feet, and it began its entrance into the new planet’s atmosphere. The view of space became obscured by white-hot tendrils of plasma coming from the heat-resistant skin of the craft as it was superheated by the sudden air resistance, and the plane began to shake violently.

Max never really liked atmospheric entry. The shaking was uncomfortable and there was little to no control of the plane while it was slowing down from hypersonic orbital speeds. He was literally falling like a rock.

Finally, as he slowed down from hypersonic to supersonic speeds, the shaking subsided and the harsh glowing from outside faded and Max was able to see again. The sky above him had gone from the black emptiness of space to a pale blue, and details of the planet’s surface were becoming more distinguishable. He was still hurtling nose-first towards the ground at about twice the speed of sound, and the forest in which we would touch down was looming up at him, but at least those were things he could see now.

His instruments told him he approaching eighty thousand feet of altitude, and that was where the wings would extend, the engines would start, and he would be in control once again. The Birdie screamed past the imaginary line and Max pulled gently back on the controls, knowing the wings would unfold on their own without any manual commands.

               Even with the slow rate at which the plane was leveling out, the phenomenal speed meant the pull-out put nearly seven G’s on Max for an excruciating twenty seconds. He grunted and strained as what felt like the weight of the world pressed down on his head and shoulders. The draining forces of the pull-out quickly receded as the simple yet taxing maneuver ended, and before long Max was flying straight and level, high over an expansive forest.

While planning the landing, Max had been careful to pick a flight path that largely avoided any of the settlements he had observed from space. While he was impressed by some of the things that locals here had built, they didn’t seem to have anything capable of supersonic flight, and the sonic boom he was sure to make would likely cause panic to a being that hadn’t seen or heard one before. The landscape he soared over was vast and empty forest and not a living soul was in sight.

Max slowly reduced the engine power, bringing the plane safely under the speed of sound, and gently pointed the nose of the craft downwards. Gradually, he descended until he was skimming the treetops of the lush, green expanse of forest. It seemed endless, until a small gap in the trees appeared, and if the maps Max made from orbit were correct, that gap was his landing site.

He slowed the plane even more, until the special rotating vents vectored the thrust of the engines downwards and brought it to a hover over the grassy clearing. One last switch was flipped, and the landing gear extended out from under the hovering aircraft. The engines simmered down, and the plane slowly descended the last thirty feet to the ground.

Max felt the gentle impact as the landing gear made contact with the ground, and had stop and savor the moment. He had just flown billions of miles, and literally landed on another planet. It would still be eight weeks before something man-made would be in position in the solar system to relay the ‘live’ feed of data out of the solar shadow to people on Earth, but when people got the news, every human being with a television or computer would see what he was seeing, and celebrations would commence around the globe. He could almost hear the sound of a billion champagne bottles popping their corks all at once.

So what exactly am I seeing? Max lifted his visor, and shifted his focus from the instrument panel in front of him that was gradually going dim. He surveyed his surroundings to the extent the cockpit windscreen allowed. It appeared to be mid-afternoon; perhaps three or four PM by his standard way of telling time, and the sky was relatively clear. Even through the tinted windscreen made everything seem a few shades darker than it actually was, the sky appeared to the explorer just as deep a blue as it would back home.

       The clearing was for the most part circular, perhaps two hundred yards across, and a small river snaked and curved through it. Coincidentally, Max had set his plane down only a few dozen yards from the shore of the river. The ground was mostly flat and grassy, and a dense, thick wall of trees encompassed the clearing on all sides.

Max glanced at one of the displays still functioning after most of the flight systems had powered down and pressed a few keys around it to bring up information from the atmospheric probes. According to the readout, the air pressure outside was well within human comfort ranges, and although it would take a few minutes for the instruments to get an exact chemical readout, there were no toxin alerts going off.

Max occupied those few minutes with taking in his surroundings. He went around to every window there was and took pictures of what he saw. One of the things he had to the foresight to bring with him was a generic digital camera, knowing it would save space agencies the trouble of developing and packing expensive and bulky imaging equipment. He took several photos of the clearing from every window on the Birdie. The ground, the river, the trees, even the pleasantly mild weather warranted a few pictures.

When the atmospheric probes completed their tests, they gave good news. The air outside was virtually identical in chemical make-up to air on Earth, minus the inflated carbon dioxide levels. A little less than 80 percent was nitrogen, twenty percent was oxygen, and there were minute traces of some other non-toxic gasses, but no airborne pathogens or microbes that the sensors could discern.

In theory, Max could breathe the air outside with no problem. But he had long been familiar with the differences between theory and reality, and that made going outside without so much as a simple oxygen mask on a different planet quite the daunting prospect.

Max’s heartbeat sped up as he removed his helmet and left the cockpit, making his way to the airlock. Once sealed inside, he pressed the button that opened the exterior hatch. Max held his breath and shut eyes tightly, even as a pleasantly warm breeze drifted over him.

By the time he worked up the courage to actually open his eyes to look at the grassy clearing, he could feel his heart pounding against his ribcage. Even after his face was exposed to the new world’s air, Max still held his breath for almost a minute. At last, as a slight burning sensation crept up in his lungs, he simply grew tired of the anticipation, and the astronaut inhaled deeply, taking in humanity’s first taste of air from another world.And it didn’t kill him. Rather, the air tasted incredibly clear. 

I guess two hundred and fifty years of industrial pollution really does make a difference, Max thought. 

Satisfied that the air was breathable, Max closed the hatch and went back inside to begin his preparations for his brief first stay on the planet’s surface. Being in a state of zero-gravity for more almost exactly one year didn’t make it that easy however. As he maneuvered around inside the Birdie, retrieving his equipment from the various compartments that held it all, Max couldn’t help but feel a little wobbly on his feet. After all, this was the first time he had actually stood on his own two legs in a year.

Finally Max was ready for his little jaunt into the unknown. He had taken off his blue astronaut’s flight suit and changed into a lightweight nylon shirt and trousers. He also had wide brimmed hat, a backpack with all the supplies he would need for a few hours’ worth of exploring on the planet, such as water, protein bars, and a journal. The last thing Max had gotten out of storage was his trusty old .45 Colt semi-automatic. It was encased in a leather holster with a buckled flap holding it in place, and that holster hung low from his belt. It hung so low that the muzzle of the gun rested just above his knee.

By now Max felt and looked more like a certain fedora-wearing, bullwhip-toting archaeologist than a science fiction hero, and he was just fine with that. He would likely just walk around for a few hours, snapping photos, taking samples, and writing notes in his journal, then return to the Birdie. Satisfied with his preparation, the astronaut-turned-adventurer finally stepped through the hatch, walked down the extended ramp, and took what he believed to be humanity’s first steps on another planet.

That notion couldn’t have been farther from the truth.





For the past two days, Twilight Sparkle had been staying up all night, every night, just looking at the thing in space. And by now, she was beginning to hate it. At first it was kind of exciting, but as the nights wore on, it just became boring. It would be visible for just a few minutes at a time, and then she and Doctor Whooves would have an hour and a half to try to find something to take notes on or theorize about until it showed up again.

They had decided on calling it a space ship, because of its resemblance to an airship, but beyond the set of speculations the pair had made on the first night of their assignment, there just wasn’t much to say about it. The ship appeared precisely on schedule five times every night, traveled the same path across the sky, and looked exactly the same every time it appeared.

Princess Celestia had been a gracious host as always, offering her personal protégé the best accommodations the castle had to offer, but they did little to ease the process of reversing the unicorn’s sleeping pattern.

This night started like most of the others. The sun had just set and the stars were just beginning to twinkle, and Twilight pried herself out of the ridiculously oversized bed in her ridiculously oversized suite after tossing and turning for hours on end without getting a wink of sleep. She didn’t bother freshening up before leaving for the observatory, although the room had no shortage of methods to do just that. The sparkling bathroom, the ornate curtains, the unnecessarily large vanity, the towering window that was now showing the remnants of Celestia’s sunset, and just about everything else was leagues beyond a normal bedroom. 

If Rarity caught me leaving this place without making full use of it, she’d faint, Twilight thought grumpily.

But freshening up would not have made Twilight’s job any easier tonight, and only taken time away from sleeping. By the time she was out of her room, the sun had already set and the castle was closed for business. The only other ponies Twilight encountered as she trudged through the halls and corridors were silent, stoic, guardsponies. She clambered down the stairs from the elevated door to the floor of observatory to see Doctor Whooves already at his desk by the large telescope, looking just as excited as the tired unicorn felt.

“Good evening, Twilight,” quipped the brown Earth Pony, trying to perk up when he heard his companion’s hoofsteps behind him. “Are you ready for another fun-filled night of observations?”

Twilight’s initial response was a lengthy yawn.

“That’s the spirit!” The doctor’s voice had a notable layer of sarcasm in it.

“I’m sorry, Doctor. I just can’t seem to get used to staying up all night like this.”

Doctor Whooves nodded understandingly. “Ah, yes. That problem plagues us all here in the astronomy department at some point or another. Princess Luna seems to be the only pony among us who is truly nocturnal.”

Twilight approached the base of the massive telescope. “What time is it supposed to appear?”

“Just a few minutes from now, actually,” the Doctor replied. “Your timing could scarcely have been better.”

Somehow, knowing that she had spent the maximum amount of time resting did not make Twilight feel any better, and she slumped forward, resting her head against one of the many metal bars holding up the telescope and making a small thump on impact.

The sound made Doctor Whooves look up from his desk, and when he saw his purple assistant snoozing lightly, he smiled to himself. There were many nights of his long career when he looked exactly like she did now, and the memories gave the Doctor a light-hearted pity for poor Twilight. He was glad that tonight he would not have to make any adjustments to the telescope, and let his assistant rest as long as she could.

Of course, there were only a few short minutes before the ship would appear, and for Twilight, they went all too quickly. After a soft reminder from Doctor Whooves, she wrenched her head away and peered into the eyepiece.

“Um, Doctor?” she said after a few seconds.

The older stallion looked up from his desk and said, “What is it, Twilight?”

“Something’s different.” Twilight’s tone had shifted from one of exhaustion and boredom to one of piqued interest, and Doctor Whooves picked up on it immediately.

“Different? How?” He trotted up to the telescope and stood next to Twilight.

“You know those little spots of light up at the front?”

“Yes, yes. What about them?”

Twilight hesitated for a second before saying, “They’re not there anymore.” She moved aside from the telescope to let Doctor Whooves see for himself.

“What?” The Doctor moved in and pressed his face against the instrument. “Hmm, you’re right. It would appear as if our visitor has turned off the lights.”

“Does that mean it’s gone to sleep or something?”

“I’m afraid it might mean something much more important, Twilight.”

“What else could it mean?” Lines of worry began to appear on her face.

Doctor Whooves turned away from the telescope and looked his companion straight in the eye. “What if the lights are off-” he said before pausing dramatically. 

The realization finally struck Twilight, and in a small voice she finished for him, “-because there’s no one home?”
 




Despite starting out so well, Lyra’s week hadn’t really gone as she’d hoped. After seeing the strange creature that had supposedly written Heartstrings family tune, everything went steadily downhill. Immediately after her discovery, she sketched out a rough representation of what she saw and rushed it back to a particular baby dragon filling in for the regular librarian.

They searched for hours in every relevant section of the library, ranging from biology to musical theory, but to the minty unicorn’s dismay, there was no mention of anything quite like the image her experiment produced. What made things worse was that even after her friends got back from Canterlot, Twilight stayed behind. Lyra had no doubts in Spike’s knowledge of the library, but she still would have preferred to work with Princess Celestia’s personal protégé. But alas, Twilight didn’t specify when she would be back, and the research came to a grinding halt.

However, soon Lyra remembered that there was one other pony, or zebra, rather, that knew about things that stumped even a brainiac like Twilight Sparkle a few times. So, that day, with her sketch, lyre, and spell book stowed in saddlebags, Lyra set off into the Everfree Forest to show her findings to Zecora. The forest lost some of its intimidation in the past two years, after Twilight and her friends ventured into it multiple times and come out for the most part unscathed, so ponies weren’t as afraid of it as they were before. However, once somepony actually got lost in it, the forest was very intimidating indeed, especially so at night.

Now, as the crickets began to chirp, Lyra deeply regretted waiting until the late afternoon to venture into the forest. The sun had been shining brightly as the unicorn began her hike, and the bright afternoon sunshine quickly faded into a golden dusk, which in turn became night. Without the sun, Lyra quickly lost the trail that led to Zecora’s hut. Soon she decided to turn right around and try again tomorrow, but the decision came too late. It extremely dark as the dense trees above blotted out any moonlight, and any direction looked the same as all the others. All Lyra knew was that she could see nothing but the trees directly in front of her, and blackness beyond that.

A small but sudden crack reached the timid unicorn’s ears, and she jumped a foot in the air and yelped in fear. Upon landing, she frantically searched her lightless surroundings for the source of the noise with wide eyes and flat ears. Upon lifting one of her front hooves, Lyra noticed a small twig that was broken in two pieces under it.

Okay, Lyra, she thought to herself. Pull yourself together. It was just a twig. You’re not getting eaten tonight.

At the moment the thoughts ran through her mind, Lyra noticed a small pinprick of light off in the distance. By now, she didn’t really mind that she never made it to Zecora’s hut. All she wanted to do was get out of the forest and go home. Her golden eyes were still wide with anxiety, but her ears perked back up as Lyra made off in the direction of the light in a hurried but cautious trot, overjoyed and relieved at the thought of reaching the end of the forest.

As she got closer, she got even more hopeful. The small point of light turned into a pony-sized gap in the wall of trees, and moonlight was becoming visible. As excited as she was to get out of the forest, Lyra was careful to not go too fast. The last thing she wanted was to twist an ankle and get stuck this close to the edge.

Finally, she hopped through gap. Lyra breathed a sigh of relief as she felt the cool grass under her hooves rather than the dead leaves and dirt that existed on the sunless forest floor. Then she opened her eyes, and internally groaned in despair. This wasn’t Ponyville, or anything else even remotely familiar. It was just a simple clearing. It was nothing more than a large patch of grass surrounded by more trees. Lyra’s head and ears drooped again, and she looked down at her hooves sadly. Then, something caused her to look up again.

A big, gray, metal… thing was sitting in the middle of the field. It was the size of a house, but didn’t in any way resemble a house. It looked made of metal mostly, with a few small windows in seemingly random places. The metal sections met in angles that all seemed to be pointing in one direction, as if it were supposed to move in that direction. There were numerous protrusions jutting out from all over. Some looked like big tubes attached to the sides, and others were long, flat, and extended out horizontally like wings. There was a concentration of windows towards the front, where most of the angles seemed to meet. It stood on three small complicated-looking pillars coming out of the bottom that had wheels on the end touching the grass.

Lyra didn’t move at first. She just stood there, staring and occasionally blinking, at the big, curious, well… thing. She didn’t know how else to describe it. There was just this big thing sitting in the middle of a clearing in the Everfree Forest. At some point, a notion entered the perplexed unicorn’s mind to look around the clearing to see if anything else unusual happened to accompany the big thing.

When her golden eyes scanned the rest of the moonlit clearing, she saw something else. It was considerably smaller, and Lyra found that she could find words to describe this one. A few dozen feet from the thing lay an unmoving figure, somewhat indistinguishable in the tall grass and the darkness. And it seemed to be breathing. At least, that’s what a steady rise and fall of its midsection usually meant. It stayed still and didn’t move, but the creature definitely seemed to be breathing. Maybe something was sleeping? It was the middle of the night after all, and most creatures slept at this time.

Lyra crept closer to the smaller thing, trying to get a better look at it. Perhaps there was something, or somepony, sleeping there? And maybe, if it were somepony, they could help her find her way home. But as she got closer, Lyra noticed that this creature was not a pony at all. The moonlight was bright enough that she could see its two long legs stretched out in the grass, and its arms folded loosely and fingers interlaced over the midsection that was rising and falling steadily. She could also see its flat, rounded face with a large forehead, closed eyes, pointed nose, and sharp chin. The closer she got, the more the figure resembled the one in her magical image. It wasn’t identical; this one had short, dark hair instead of the long flowing red mane and was dressed in a tan shirt and pants, but it was definitely the same kind of creature.

As soon as she was sure, Lyra immediately perked up and smiled so big at her discovery a faint squee could be heard, and she crept even closer.

Maybe this won’t be a total waste after all, she thought as she got closer to distinguish its finer features. If only it wasn’t asleep. Then I could ask it what it is.

Lyra tried to be as quiet as she could, but dumb luck had other ideas. As soon as she thought those words, her hoof came down on another twig, breaking it two with a loud crack, and whatever it was apparently woke up at the sound of the snapping twig.

In the blink of an eye it shot up into a sitting position and with its arm produced some sort of metal tube that glinted in the moonlight and made an ominous clicking sound when one of the fingers holding it pulled back a lever at the rear.

Lyra screamed, dropped her saddlebags, and darted back into the darkness of the trees as fast as she could. She dove into a bush, curled up in a ball, and did her best not to move. Maybe I am getting eaten tonight, she thought.
> 4. We Come in Peace
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	The sun was getting low in the sky by the time Max decided to return to the Birdie. It had been a very interesting hike, and Max’s observations were ground-breaking to say the least. The trees here seemed to have the same basic structure as the trees on Earth, as did most of the other flowers, bushes, and shrubs he had seen. There weren’t any plants that mirrored specific species on Earth, but there were some definite similarities that would get biologists back home very excited. He hadn’t seen any animals during his first jaunt, but Max was confident that there were some out there. He just hoped he would see creatures that wouldn’t try to eat him.

But even without seeing animals it was a very satisfying day. He took air samples, water samples, soil samples, plant samples, and samples of just about everything else he came across. Max had already sealed each of his samples in sterile airtight containers, and when he brought them onto the Birdie, and gave each its due diligence in organization and storage. After the labeling and storing was done, he looked up to one of the windows to see that the sun had set and the moon was out. It seemed rather sudden to the astronaut, especially since it was barely twilight when Max brought his samples back aboard the Birdie.

He sealed away the last sample in a small drawer behind the computer chair and exited the landing craft into the moonlit night. Tonight Max wanted to do something he hadn’t done in a very long time. It wasn’t part of his mission because the planet was essentially getting the same view of the stars Earth would get in six months’ time, but it was Max’s opinion that a real astronaut would not have even dreamed of passing up the opportunity to gaze at the night sky from another planet.

He found a nice flat spot in the grass, and lay on his back, marveling at the vast expanse of space above him. After a few minutes of picking out different stars, galaxies, planets, and constellations, his mind began to wander, drifting back to memories of a time when he didn’t have to stargaze by himself. He thought of the last person to be his companion for this particular hobby, and just as an image of her face formed in his mind, Max’s eyes slowly and unwittingly drifted closed.
                
The horrific sight of his wing-girl being shot down hadn’t even registered in Max’s mind before another, much closer explosion sounded somewhere behind him, rocking his plane much more violently than before. The plane lurched and shuddered, and a dark haze blurred his vision. Soon the shaking subsided and gave way to disorienting spinning.As white and blue spun around him outside so fast he could barely distinguish between the two, Max fought the stick in a vain attempt to wrestle his quickly disintegrating fighter under some semblance of control. Conversely, every move he made seemed to jerk the plane even farther out of his control.

          When black smoke began to leak into the cockpit and obscure his vision even more, Max knew there was only one option left. Warning alarms and frantic radio calls of his allies still blared in his helmet speakers, but by now they only told him something he already knew. He had to get the hell out of the plane.        

        Max abandoned the controls and reached for the yellow lever between his legs. When he pulled it, his world literally exploded. The transparent canopy of his cockpit was blown off the plane by several small explosive charges, and then several small rockets stored underneath Max’s seat ignited. His rear end and back were smashed painfully into the seat as they shot Max up and away from twisted, burning wreckage that had once been his fighter.

His eyes were closed, but Max could feel himself tumbling helplessly as he fell away from what remained of the jet. The howling and deafening wind bucked and spun him and his seat like a feather in a hurricane. After what felt like an eternity of the nauseating fall, the parachute deployed, the seat fell away, and the merciless assault on his senses ended as quickly as it began.

Max dared to open his eyes and was greeted by the infinite blue dome of the sky. Off in the distance he could see the rest of the strike force speed away, putting as much distance as they could between them and the enemy missile launchers. Max was glad to see this, and hoped they would make it home safely. Next, he twisted around as much as he could while dangling perilously from a parachute to try and spot Michelle, whom he hoped had just gone through a similar ordeal. As traumatic as the ejection process was, it was preferable to being stuck in a burning multi-thousand-pound mass of fiberglass, metal, and jet fuel hurtling towards the ground at hundreds of miles per hour.

At last, Max spotted another parachute some distance below him. It was difficult to see against the white clouds, but it was there. And that meant Michelle was alive. Max unhooked his mask and inhaled the cold, thin air one finds at fifteen thousand feet above sea level, then let it out in a sigh. Realizing he had a decent amount of time before he touched down, Max decided to sit back and enjoy the view. He thought back to one of his instructors in flight school, and the piece of advice that instructor had given him regarding getting shot down over enemy territory; “Enjoy the peaceful ride down. Because the instant your boot touches dirt, you’ll be fighting the whole damn war all by yourself.”

So that’s what Max did. He tried not to think about the enemies he would face on the ground or how long he would have to survive before friendly forces could rescue him. He tried to think about nothing and simply relax. Unfortunately, it was a futile attempt. Max’s mind wasn’t occupied with the coming struggle of getting home, but his thoughts kept wandering to a certain female pilot about a thousand feet below him. As the downed aviator drifted slowly downwards, he silently hoped and prayed with all his might that Michelle would make it out alive.

Eventually, the ground came into view. The rocky desert loomed up to him as he descended, and Michelle’s parachute was still visible roughly a thousand feet below him. Beyond that, Max could also make out the unmistakable dust cloud in the distance that could only mean one thing: the Iranians were on their way. He estimated they would be three or four miles away by the time he landed, and that gave him at the most five minutes to make himself scarce.

Much to his dismay, Max found himself drifting farther away from Michelle as he got closer to the ground. By the time the bottom of his boots hit the rocky desert surface, he was on the opposite side of a large hill. The pilot wasted no time in getting out of the harnesses and made straight for the spot where he had seen his friend land. Max knew that the Iranians would be on top of Michelle in minutes, and out here, in the middle of a desert, there were precious few places to hide. He clambered up the side of the hill, going as fast as his arms and legs would carry him.

Max began to crawl on his stomach as he approached the peak of the hill, not wanting to expose himself to enemies with long-range rifles. That move turned out to smart in a way that he didn’t expect, because when he peeked over the hill, he was treated to the sight of Michelle, still in all of her flight gear, on her knees, hands raised above her head, and surrounded by at least ten Iranian soldiers all shouting at her in Persian. One soldier in particular, whom Max supposed to be officer in charge of the group, stepped forward and drew a pistol, pointing it at the American pilot’s chest. He was shouting over all the other men, but no more coherently.

Silently, Max drew his pistol. There were seventeen bullets in the magazine; plenty for him to take out every man threatening his friend. Grasping the handle with both hands, he leveled the gun at the officer, and took careful aim at his back.

Less than one hundred feet separated Max from the group of Iranians. At that distance, it would be a turkey shoot. Max’s marksmanship with a handgun was infallible. He never missed anything he aimed at, and he could easily drop half the soldiers before they even knew he was there. Max slowly let out his breath and prepared to pull the trigger, but at the last second something made him hesitate.

        Michelle looked directly at him, her icy blue eyes peering at her superior officer and friend through the stray wisps of blonde hair that made their way out from inside her helmet in all the commotion. The gaze said one thing, and to Max, it was unmistakable. Give 'em hell.

Michelle’s expression turned to one of fiery defiance and she fixed the offending stare directly on the man with a gun pointed at her chest. There was a sharp CRACK of a pistol shot, but it didn’t come from Max’s gun. Time slowed to a crawl and everything else in the world suddenly lost its importance. Maxwell O’Hara could only watch in horror as Michelle Hawkins, his squadmate, loyal follower, and best friend, fell backwards and came to rest at the feet of the Iranian officer that killed her in cold blood.

At that moment in time, Max stopped caring about anything except killing every enemy he saw. The only thing present in his mind was the pressure not to miss. He aimed again, and pulled the trigger. With a satisfying BOOM, the bullet leapt from the gun barrel and buried itself in the officer’s back, knocking him flat on his face. No expression crossed his hard features as he leveled his gun at the closest soldier and fired twice, putting a bullet through each lung.

A few of the soldiers began to search for the source of the shots and managed to turn the source of the gunshots, but doing so only made them a priority target. Any man that so much as tried look at the enraged pilot only received a bullet or two in the chest for his efforts, and the slow ones that didn’t have the chance to turn around just received theirs in the back. Eleven seconds and fifteen bullets were all it took, and every last one of them was either dead or mere seconds from death.

The sound of helicopters came from the direction of the American air base, signaling an imminent rescue. Max left his hiding place and solemnly walked out to the spot where the officer had fallen, and rolled him onto his back with a harsh kick. The fatally wounded officer stirred and groaned in agony before opening his eyes slightly and looking at the man whose best friend he had shot. He had just enough time to stare down the barrel of the American’s gun before Max pulled the trigger one last time.

                The punishing desert heat gave way to brisk night air and the blinding sun was replaced with soft moonlight, but the sudden change in scenery didn’t have much of an effect on the raw instincts of a trained soldier. Max shot up from the ground into a sitting position and his .45 pistol leapt into his hand. In a single, practiced, and near instantaneous movement, Max pulled back the hammer on his weapon and leveled it in the direction of the figure in front of him.

But he didn’t see the speckled tan uniform of an enemy soldier. He didn’t even see a human being. The being standing in front of him didn’t even stand on two legs. Rather, it was a quadruped of some sort that was only about four feet tall, a soft minty green in color, and-

“GAAAAAAHHH!!!”

Before Max could focus enough to get a good look at the head or any of its finer features, the creature emitted a terrified shriek and leapt away from him, scampering back into the forest.

He sat there for a few seconds, trying to mentally organize the past few seconds of his memory. There was the desert, the one-sided firefight, the enemy officer, and then there was night, the grass, the trees, the moonlight, and the strange four-legged creature…

“Oh, no,” Max hissed under his breath as his mind cleared enough to remember where he was and what he was doing. The mission, the spaceflight, the planet, the landing, the forest, and just about every other detail of the past six months came flooding back, and the fight in the desert was categorized as a dream.

The astronaut looked at his hand, still pointing the gun at the spot where the odd creature had stood only seconds before. He pulled his hand back, and put the weapon back in its leather holster and set it back down on the grass. At that moment, the realization struck that, thanks to him, the first interaction human kind had with an animal from another planet was pointing a gun at it in the middle of the night. Max groaned and put his head in his hands. How’s that for interplanetary diplomacy?

Upon lifting his head to look at the spot where the animal was, he noticed something remained in its place. Max had to lean forward squint to make out what it was in the moonlight, but it appeared to be a small set of saddlebags, not unlike what horse riders would sling across the backs of their horses on extended trips. Furthermore, the cloth that saddlebags were made of looked to be a similar hue to the creature’s pale greenish color, and the image of shape that resembled a golden lyre was emblazoned on one of the flaps above the buckle.

                The astronaut’s heart sank as he realized that the creature he had scared away wasn’t just an animal in the forest, but a form of sentient life, quite possibly this planet’s equivalent to a person. And in what was probably the worst imaginable display of mankind’s newfound goodwill towards all other life in the universe, the first thing he did was try to kill it.

Max slowly stood up from the soft grass he had been sleeping on, and picked up the bags, inspecting them closer. Then, a slight rustle in the bush through which the creature jumped caught his attention. He looked over at the bush curiously, put the bags down, and peered into the darkness.  Is it still here? He thought.

“Hello?” Max called out cautiously. “Is anyone there?”

It felt strange speaking out loud to something other than a camera or computer. Max hadn’t spoken to another living person in months, and now he was speaking plain English to a creature that had literally one chance in trillions of actually understanding anything he could say or do. Still, it was better than pointing a gun at it.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he continued in what he thought to be a soothing manner, hoping it would respond in some way to the sounds he was making. It was a little late, but as Max slowly approached the bush, he suddenly wished he had at least kept his gun with him, even if he didn’t want point it at anything again just yet. Step by cautious step, he inched closer. And sure enough, the creature carefully poked its head out to look at him.

When he saw it, Max had to stop and stare. The creature’s body was still in the bush, but now that its head was visible, Max couldn’t help but be awed. It appeared to be similar to a small horse, a pony perhaps, but it had virtually nothing in common with ponies on Earth besides the basic form. Its eyes were disproportionately big compared to the rest of its face, which was made up of a short, round muzzle, tall pointed ears, and a white and green mane. The eyes were nothing like the beady orbs sticking out the sides of a normal horse’s long face, but rather, they looked almost human, with their visible whites, golden irises, and the way they locked onto him.

The whole thing was almost cartoonish in its appearance, with the pastel-green coat and the surprisingly adorable face. It was just so… cute. It appeared as if speaking to it calmed the creature down somewhat. The expression on its face wasn’t one of terror, but one of relief. Of course, Max had no idea if the facial expressions of the four-legged creature meant the same things as they would on humans. For all he knew, it could be ready to kill him and eat him in the next few seconds.

                “It’s okay,” he said slowly in what he hoped was a soothing tone, despite his confusion. “I’m not going to hurt you. Everything’s fine, you can come out of there now.” He knelt down on one knee to reduce his size as much as he could, and lessen any intimidation the difference in size might have conveyed.

“Oh, alright. Being in the forest at night is getting to me I guess,” it said.

Max froze. Did that thing just talk to me in…?  Was that English? Its voice sounded like a young woman’s, and its mouth moved just like a human’s, forming English words. Max could only stare blankly at the animal in front of him, blinking every few seconds.

“Sorry for screaming at you,” it continued, sheepishly stepping out of the bush, revealing its full quadrupedal form. The moonlight illuminated its mint-green coat and caused the large golden eyes to sparkle slightly. “But it’s kinda creepy out, and I’m kinda lost.”

Max was fluent in three languages: English, German, and Italian. He was well versed in all the elements of a spoken language, and how they worked. What boggled his mind was that what this pastel-green pony-type creature from a different planet was saying matched every single element of conversational English. Max had only time to think What the hell? before it spoke again.

 	“At first I thought you were going to eat me or something,” it went on, oblivious to the fact that every sound she made just jammed more and more gears inside Max’s head. “But when I heard you talking to me like that and I thought, ‘No, he sounds nice. He’s not going to eat me.’"

She paused, or at least Max could only assume it was a female talking to him based on the pitch of her voice, and seemed to contemplate her last statement. “You’re not going to eat me, are you?” she asked cautiously.

It took a few seconds for Max to realize that it had asked him a question, and a few more seconds to realize that that a response was required of him. The creature seemed to respond positively to what he said before, so it was a logical assumption that voice inflection and tone was understood, but for all Max knew, just shaking his head to the creature’s question could mean an emphatic ‘yes’.

That was why there was an extensive procedure worked out by teams of communication specialists that called for weeks, or even months of careful, distant observation before attempting to any kind of contact. A friendly gesture mistaken for a hostile one could potentially get him killed and ruin chances for any diplomatic interaction between Earth and this new planet for the foreseeable future.

“Are you?” The creature repeated her question, with a little more caution injected into her voice. At this, Max realized the official plan had effectively gone out the window. He had to quit staring blankly at the stupidly adorable creature sitting in front of him and say something.

“Uh… N- No,” he stammered. “I’m not going to eat you.”

“Oh, okay!” Its worried expression faded away, and it sat down on its haunches. “I’m Lyra. What’s your name?”
              
"Um, I’m…Max.”

“Hi, Max. What are you anyway, and what’s that thing over there? Is it yours?”

“Ummm…” Max didn’t really know how to explain himself. There was an official plan to explain his background and mission to another intelligent race once the communication barrier had been overcome, but by now the plan was effectively shot to pieces, and he was flying by the seat of his pants, so to speak. The only option was to simply dismiss the linguistic mystery until later, and just come up with something.

“I’m a…uh, a human,” he began. “And yes, that thing over there is mine. It’s my, um… it’s where I live right now.” As soon as Max said the words, he was instantly disappointed with himself. Here he was, the best humanity had to offer, during his first interaction with a new intelligent race, and that was the best he could come up with?

No, keep it simple, he thought to himself. Until you know what this thing is, don’t tell her everything.

The more important question was, why was she so calm? Did she know he was coming? Did strange creatures just appear all the time here? Obviously she knew something Max did not.

“So you’re a human!” The green quadruped whose name was apparently Lyra seemed delighted with this piece of information, and her face lit up with understanding. The expression quickly faded, and she asked, “What’s a human?”

“Um, well a human is… uh, you’re looking at one, I guess. We stand upright, walk on two legs, and we have hands and fingers…” Max trailed off, straining to come up with other ways to compare a human to whatever this thing was.

The communication specialists had also written scripts and special presentations to summarize everything about humanity long before Max had even left Earth, but he still had yet to actually read over them, and the fact that he was thoroughly weirded out by the pony-looking talking alien in front of him meant Max wasn’t mentally equipped to explain very much at that point. The only way out was to ask her a question of his own. “What are you, exactly?”

“Me?” Lyra seemed taken aback, as if Max should have known what she was all along. “I’m a unicorn.” She raised one of her forelegs in a way that would have been anatomically impossible for any four-legged creature from Earth and gestured to her forehead. “Didn’t you see the horn?”

 	Max looked again, and sure enough, a short, pale green horn the same color as her coat was protruding through her mane. At this, the bewildered astronaut could only think about what kind of field day the medical examiners back home would have had if he mentioned hallucinations like these during the selection process.

If hallucinogenic drug use or any psychological conditions had even been hinted at in any of his records, he would have been taken off the astronaut candidate list so fast nobody would have bothered to tell Max he was ever on it in the first place. And yet, here he was, in the middle of the night on another planet, having a friendly conversation with a four-foot-tall unicorn. Such an occurrence would normally be classified as a chemical-induced hallucination.

A while must have passed with Max just staring incredulously at the unicorn named Lyra, because she cocked her head slightly and said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a pony with a horn before.”

“I…” he started, not entirely sure how to answer. “Um, I don’t think I have.”

“Silly, if it weren’t for my horn I couldn’t do this.” She appeared to concentrate on something, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment, and to Max’s amazement, her horn began to glow and sparkle a golden yellow color.

The first thing that came to Max’s mind was bioluminescence, and he had almost expected to see something like that on a new planet, but his thoughts were cut short when he noticed a similar glow coming from somewhere behind him.

Don’t tell me there are two of -­ Max began to turn around to face what he believed to be another bioluminescent creature behind him, but instead was faced with the bags the unicorn had dropped when she first encountered the astronaut. Except that they were glowing. And they were floating in midair.

“What the - AAAHH!” Max yelped and backpedaled away from the mysterious glowing objects that had been inanimate a few seconds ago. The sudden action startled the small unicorn, as she yelped in a similar fashion and jumped away from the startled human. The glow of her horn intensified briefly, and the change was mirrored in the glow surrounding her saddlebags, but this nuance escaped Max’s notice; in the same instant, the glowing set of saddle bags were propelled straight into the startled astronaut’s face with a surprising amount of force.

They hit him with a hard SMACK, and the impact put stars in his vision and sent Max sprawling. He came to rest on his back, facing up at the stars in the night sky once again. The stars spun and seemingly multiplied above him, and after a few seconds, the night sky, along with everything else, went black.

> 5. The Right Questions
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	It didn’t take long for Twilight and Doctor Whooves to imagine the ramifications of their extrapolation. A few seconds of eerie silence followed the Twilight’s statement, before the both agreed it was time to tell the princesses. Twilight wasted no time in teleporting them from the large dome of the observatory straight onto the balcony from which the royal sisters controlled day and night. By chance, they materialized right as Luna was coming out to relieve her elder sister.

Both Twilight and Doctor Whooves immediately began to sputter and stammer incoherently, desperately trying to convey the potential gravity of what they had just seen, until silenced by a calmly raised hoof from Celestia. The Doctor then explained as calmly as he could what he and Twilight had seen just a few minutes prior, and what it possibly meant.
Luna immediately reached out with her magical senses once again to the object above them and confirmed it. Whatever non-magical presence that occupied the mystery object was no longer there.

Celestia’s response consisted of only two words; “Find it.” She spoke softly yet so forcefully they evoked no question or response of any kind from Doctor Whooves, Twilight, or even Princess Luna.

The regal alicorn then turned and silently disappeared into her private study, leaving the other three ponies under the quickly darkening sky.

The Doctor and Twilight were slightly confused. Luna, however, nodded with a grave understanding, and turned to address the two other ponies left on the balcony.

“If that thing has now come to the surface of our planet, we need to find where it is and confront it immediately.”

“Princess,” interjected Doctor Whooves. “Do we really want to reveal ourselves to an alien race right away?”

“I understand your hesitance, Doctor.” Luna replied. “But I have no doubt that whatever that thing is has been watching us since it first arrived. It knows we are here, and we must face it on our own terms, for better or worse.”

“But Princess,” Twilight said worriedly. “We still don’t know anything about it. What if…” She paused, scared to finish her sentence. “What if they’re not friendly?”

“That is a good question to ask in these times, Twilight Sparkle. We will merely prepare for the worst, and hope for the best.”

Immediately after Luna’s response, Twilight silently asked herself the opposite question. What if it is friendly? Asking the question out loud, however, seemed all too contrary to the current tone of the conversation, so the unicorn kept it to herself.

“All the same,” Luna continued. “It may be time to call on your brother and some of his companions.”





Within minutes, Shining Armor sent out a detachment of the most well-trained pegasi stallions the Royal Guard had to offer to comb Equestria for anything otherworldly before daybreak. Seeing as how there were no reports of anything strange from any of the guard stations in any of cities or towns, they were instructed to avoid any settlements and surrounding areas, and instead start with the most remote regions of Equestria.

It was only a few hours before one of the patrols located an object that resembled a massive, black and grey bird in a clearing in the Everfree forest. True to their orders, the guard pegasi did not land or even approach it, and instead returned as quickly as possible to report the location to Shining Armor and the princesses. Consequently, they never noticed the two beings in the clearing next to the alien machine; one lying flat on his back, out cold, and the other pacing nervously around the first, wondering what she had just done.

A short time later, news of the discovery reached Canterlot, and some subtle but grand preparations were made for the first contact. Many guardsponies were roused and ordered to suit up, but not told the details of the mission. Before the departure, the princesses requested that Twilight and Shining Armor meet with them one last time.  

Celestia had just broken dawn just a few minutes prior, and now she, Twilight, Shining Armor, and Princess Luna met in the tower of the Royal Palace that housed headquarters of the Guard, and on the table lay map with the location of the alien landing craft marked.

Both royal sisters wore their custom-forged battle armor, which had been largely used as ceremonial decorations until now. Celestia’s golden plates sparkled in the rays of dawn streaming through the window, and the magical purple gem embedded in the center of the breastplate glowed and almost seemed to hum with internal power.

The carefully-forged components fit the princess’s form perfectly. Each chest plate flowed and swept with all the natural curves of her body, making her seem even more beautiful and regal than normal. She also seemed  much more imposing and intimidating than Twilight or her brother had ever seen their benevolent leader. The ethereal mane that would normally billow serenely in an unseen solar wind was now clamped back and protruding out the back of a golden helmet that sported a dangerous-looking spike in front protecting her magical horn.

Luna’s armor, conversely, seemed to be made for the sole purpose of striking fear into the heart of any and every enemy. Her pale, moon-colored plates covered more of her body than Celestia’s armor, and shifted silently with her movements as she entered the room. Similar to her elder sister, Luna wore a helmet that displaced her starry mane through the back, although her mane flowed a bit more freely than her sisters. Instead of a tall spike, Luna’s helmet boasted a curved crystal blade to protect her horn.

Both Twilight and her brother knew they had nothing to fear from either princess, but both of them couldn’t help but be floored by the sheer power exuded by the appearance of the alicorn sisters and bowed humbly as they entered the room.

“Be at ease, my little ponies,” Celestia said softly, and the siblings straightened up. It seemed strange to Twilight to hear the soft voice of her kind, gentle teacher coming from such an imposing figure. The unicorn had known her teacher to be a wise, caring, fun-loving, and even prankish pony at times, but now, Celestia had no mischievous sparkle in her eyes, and no kind smile. She was all business.

“Captain Armor,” the royal alicorn continued. “Your guards did well, finding our visitor so quickly.”

“Thank you, your highness.” Shining Armor was just as intimidated as his sister by the atmosphere Celestia and Luna created, but he was simply well-trained enough to hide it.

“Whenever you want to make contact with it, I have several fresh companies of guards to go with you. If there’s any danger, we’ll be more than prepared to deal with it.”

“Thank you, Captain,” said Celestia. “I also want you and Twilight to be there.” Seeing the flash of panic cross her student’s eyes, the princess quickly added, “You two will stay back and observe. If things appear to not be going well, I need you to immediately go to Ponyville, gather your friends, and use the Elements to deal with any threat that we may not be able to handle on our own.”

“Princess,” Twilight spoke up, thinking of the question she had kept to herself the previous night. “I understand being prepared for anything, but it feels like we’re getting ready for a war.” She paused, trying to find the best way to ask her question. “What do we really know about all this?”

Celestia inwardly sighed. She knew how bright her personal protégé was. She should have known Twilight would catch on immediately when things didn’t quite add up.  The golden-clad princess promised herself that after this mess was over, she would tell her student everything. Twilight, of all ponies, deserved to know what really happened so many years ago. But for now, there simply wasn’t time.

“That is the problem, Twilight.” Celestia had to squash a pang of guilt that came from lying to her faithful student.  “We know absolutely nothing about who this is, what this is, or where it’s from. That’s why we have to be so careful. There could be no danger whatsoever, or this could be worse than any of us can imagine. Until we know for sure what came down from that thing, we must be prepared for the worst, and hope for the best.”

Although Twilight didn’t press the matter any further, Celestia knew her student well enough to know that the inquisitive young unicorn wasn’t satisfied with the standard answer she had no doubt heard many times before. The creeping guilt the princess felt only strengthened her resolve to tell her student the entire truth when this crisis was over. That was, if Twilight didn’t somehow manage to find out on her own. And that something Celestia believed her student fully capable of.

“Come on, Twiley,” said Shining Armor as he put a foreleg around his little sister’s shoulders. “We've got a ride to catch. I have to go suit up, so wait for me at Blaze’s chariot. I’ll only take a few minutes.” The stallion led his sister out the door and closed it softly behind him.

As soon as the door clicked shut, Celestia let out the sigh she had been holding in. Her shoulders visibly drooped, and her head hung in exhaustion. “This lying business is more trouble than it’s worth,” she remarked to her sister.

“It was you who said all this remained hidden for a good reason,” Luna calmly replied. “But I share your concern. Ponies won’t have to be as smart as Twilight to see the connections, and sooner or later, they will demand answers.”

“And the one pony that is that smart was able to guess exactly where it came from.” Celestia had to sigh again. “I don’t know whether to be proud or frightened.”

The royal sisters stood and approached the door, and as they walked side by side, a question popped into Luna’s mind. “Do you think ponies are ready?” she asked. “Are they ready to know what really happened?

“I fear whether or not they are ready will soon make little difference,” the elder princess replied grimly.

        “Do you think they will still view us in the same light after finding out what our parents did?”

        “I’ve tried hard to preach love and tolerance ever since the Nightmare, Luna. I certainly hope that they will. But I can’t say for sure that I would in their position, so I cannot expect any more of them.”





The soft chirping of birds was the first thing to penetrate Max’s mind as he slowly regained consciousness. It was followed by bright sunshine streaming through his still-closed eyelids. He raised a hand to shield his eyes, and then dared to open them.  He was lying on his back in the grassy clearing, and the sun was just starting to poke out over the tree line. The small stream that wound its way around the clearing flowed serenely a few yards away, making a pleasant, relaxing bubbling noise. The Birdie was sitting a short distance away from him, sunlight glaring off of some its polished metal surfaces.

Max slowly sat up in the grass, groaning in the process, and tried to sort out his fuzzy memory. He thought of the successful landing and the other events of the previous day, going through his initial exploration of the forest, and then he remembered stargazing.

A flash of panic rose in Max’s gut as he realized he had fallen asleep outside of his landing craft. Any number of things could have gone drastically wrong if he let his guard down on a strange planet at night. A curious predator could have stumbled upon an easy midnight snack, or he could be spotted by a wandering local before he was prepared to-

Max flinched as a spot on his forehead began to throb painfully. He reached up and gingerly touched the spot that was the source of the pain. When his fingers gingerly brushed the spot, they found a small but still very sensitive bruise. The light contact sent a dull pain coursing through Max’s head, and he flinched again, sharply taking his hand away from the injury. He thought, When did that happen?

Almost as if on cue, a chipper, female, sing-song voice from behind him quipped, “Hey, you’re awake. Is your head okay? ”

“AAAHH!!” Max screamed in surprise and scrambled to his feet, simultaneously whirling around to face the source of the voice.

And there sat the unicorn. She had been sitting a few feet away, just looking at him, but when the human in front of her leapt to his feet, she did likewise. “Whoa, what’s wrong?!” she asked frantically.

“Wait, what?” Max’s mind took a while to process what he was seeing. The memories from the previous night trickled back bit by bit, and all Max could do was stare at the unicorn while she stared back at him, as if she were waiting for him to say something. The nightmare in the desert, the gun and the shriek, the one-sided conversation, and then the smack in the head-

“Wait, where’s the other one?” Max said and looked frantically around him, searching for whatever had clobbered him in the face the night before.

“The other what?” the unicorn asked. “It’s just you and me out here.”

“Then what hit me in the head?” The astronaut gestured to the bruise on his forehead, and forgot all about the supposed language barrier. “You seem friendly enough, but something out here is NOT, and it hit me, hard!”

“I’m sorry! It was an accident, okay?” said the green unicorn defensively.

“Wait, what?” Max stopped his frantic search for a hostile alien and looked quizzically at the creature.

“It’s like you've never seen a levitation spell before.”

“A levitation…what?”

The unicorn rolled her eyes. “You freaked out at my levitation spell. I just picked up my stuff and you started screaming.”

“Wait,” Max stopped her. “That was you? The glowing, and the floating things was…you?”

The unicorn sat on her haunches again, and looked at Max pensively. “You’re not from Equestria, are you?”

“Well, I…” Only one word came to Max’s mind: Busted. “No, I’m not.”

“So you’ve never seen a unicorn before.”

“Nope.”

“Have you ever seen a Pegasus?” she asked.

The word ‘Pegasus’ sounded vaguely familiar, but Max wasn’t about to try and pretend he knew anything about what the green unicorn in front of him was saying. “Um, no,” he said flatly.

“How about Earth Ponies? You have to know about Earth ponies, at least.”

When she said the words ‘Earth Ponies,’ Max did a double take. Of course he had seen ponies on Earth, but that was Earth, and this was, well, not Earth. This was the complete opposite side of the solar system.

Then, Max had a thought he would later be very proud of. The original definition of the word ‘Earth’ wasn’t the planet; it simply meant the solid ground. After it was discovered that people were living on a planet floating in space instead of a flat piece of land, people started calling the planet ‘Earth,’ after the ground they walked on. So, Max reasoned, the ‘earth’ that this pony was referring to wasn’t his home planet; it was the just the ground. Proud as Max was of his deduction, all it led to was a simple answer to the unicorn’s question: “No.”

“Do you even know what Equestria is?”

The word ‘Equestria’ also sounded familiar, but once again, Max thought it best to play dumb. He certainly wasn’t going to learn anything about this planet or its inhabitants by pretending he already knew something. All he could do was shrug.

Now the unicorn began to look just as weirded out as Max had been the other night. “Are you from another planet or something? How could you have never seen or even heard of ponies or Equestria?”

At this point, Max was satisfied that there was no hostile alien waiting to clobber him again, and sat down facing the unicorn. “Yes,” he said seriously.

“Wait, what?” She continued to look at Max like he was from another planet, and that something Max considered progress, since he actually was.

“Listen, um, you said your name was, uh, Lyra, right?”

Lyra nodded, and slowly said, “Yeah…”

“You asked if I was from another planet,” Max began slowly and deliberately. “And the answer is yes. I am from another planet. I’m an explorer, and this is the first time my kind has ever been here. So I have no idea what this Equestria is that you’re talking about, and I don’t know anything about unicorns, pega…um, Pegasus-es…” Having never really used the word ‘Pegasus’ before, Max didn’t know what the plural form of ‘Pegasus’ was.

“Pegasi,” she corrected him.

“Okay, so it’s Pegasi. I know nothing about them, or these ‘Earth’ ponies, either. I just got here last night, and I've only seen a few of the plants here. Also, you’re the first thing to talk to me in about a year, so I’m not exactly sure we’re speaking the same language. If you can understand everything I’m saying, just say yes.”

The unicorn’s expression hadn’t changed, but she slowly nodded. “Yes, I can understand you.”

Max breathed a sigh of relief. If this creature could understand everything he just said, it was likely that the local language was close enough to English that they could speak normally, and hammer out any potential misunderstandings as they came up.

“So…” she said cautiously. “You’re like a, um… an alien?”

“That’s one way to put it,” Max said, glad that he had finally shared some sort of meaning with another sapient creature, without the use of fancy procedures, decodings, or elaborate non-verbal communication. In the back of his mind, he imagined rubbing this in the communication specialists’ faces.

For the first time, the unicorn actually understood. “Ooooh, okay. That explains a lot.” After saying this, she looked as if she suddenly remembered something, probably the negative connotation of the word ‘alien,’ and asked, “It’s just you, right? And you’re not here to invade or take over or anything like that?”

Max actually chuckled at her question, and mentally noted to ask at some point if there was a science fiction community here like the one on Earth. “No, I’m all alone. And like I said, I’m just exploring.”

“Well that’s actually pretty cool,” she said happily. “So what is that thing over there, really?” Lyra raised a hoof and pointed at the Birdie.

Max had to think for a bit before describing the modern marvel of engineering that was the ACE Lander in simple terms. “Um, that’s a flying machine. It’s kind of how I got here.”

Lyra’s eyes widened at his statement. “You mean that giant thing can fly? How does it do that?”

“Yeah, it can fly.” Max actually smiled at Lyra’s disbelief. “It’s really complicated, and I had to train for months to learn how to fly it. For now, let’s just say it involves a lot of science.”

“Well, if that thing can fly, do you think you could help me get home? I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but I’m kind of lost out here.”

Now that she reminded him, Max did recall her mentioning that she was lost in the forest, but it was before he believed what his eyes and ears were telling him about the planet and the pony, so the notion didn’t really stick in his mind. Even so, there was no way Max was going to let a creature from this planet on the Birdie yet, and it was even less likely that he could be convinced to fly it over any sort of population center unannounced.

“Well, there’s a reason I landed out here,” he said, a sympathetic expression painting itself his features. He wanted to help the adorable little unicorn, but he still had a mission. “That thing is really loud, and it moves pretty quickly for something so big, and I don’t want to scare anyone into thinking I’m dangerous, so for now it has to stay here. And it’s probably a good idea if I stay out here for the time being as well. I don’t know how the rest of your kind will react to an alien walking around.”

Lyra stared back at him pleadingly, and said, “I really don’t want to spend another night lost in the forest! It gets scary and dangerous when the sun goes down.”

When Max dared to look Lyra in the eye, he learned just how persuasive a pouting unicorn could be. Her already disproportionately large eyes seemed to grow slightly, and became many times as adorable as they had been just a few seconds prior. That, in addition to her flattened ears and the almost imperceptible quivering of her bottom lip completely robbed the astronaut of his ability to even think about saying no.

Back on Earth, Max prided himself in his ability to resist the puppy-dog eyes that children could give him, but a human child’s crocodile tears were quite literally child’s play compared to the almost-tangible cuteness that the astronaut was being bombarded with now. He could feel a few of his internal organs beginning to slow down just from watching the deadly-adorable look on the unicorn’s face. Max fought it for all of five seconds before he gave in, fearing a heart attack if he resisted any longer.

“Um…” he said, surprised at how quickly and thoroughly Lyra’s face had disarmed him. “Wait here.”

Max got up and briskly walked up the ramp of the Birdie, and disappeared through the hatch. Lyra waited where she was patiently, a little confused, but less worried about being lost in the Everfree Forest for the rest of her life.

After a few minutes, Max emerged from the Birdie once again, holding the backpack he had taken with him on his initial exploration.

“While I was flying in, I saw the whole area from above, and I made a few maps,” he said once he had returned to the spot where Lyra was waiting for him. He opened one of the zippered compartments and withdrew a few of the maps he had printed out on the Enterprise.

“We are here,” he said, pointing to a spot on a map after unfolding it. “And if where you’re from is this little village here-” he pointed to another spot on the map at the edge of the forest. “Then it’s a couple hours’ worth of walking in that direction.” Max then pointed north.

“Oh, thank you!” Lyra said happily before getting up and trotting over to where her saddlebags lay. She would have levitated them onto her back, but she remembered how Max had reacted to her magic the last time, and decided to do things manually, at least until she had properly explained magic to him. She gripped the strap in her teeth, and with a flick of her neck, Lyra tossed the bags back onto her back.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea!” she said running back over to him. “Why don’t you come with me?” I can show you Ponyville and introduce you to all my friends and-”

“Hold on,” Max said, cutting her off. “I said it’s better if I stay out here for now. I don’t think it’s a good idea for a big alien like me to just start walking around town.”

“But…” Lyra involuntarily began to put just a tinge of poutiness into her voice. “I don’t think I can make it back by myself without getting lost again.” She began to make the face again, and, wary of an impending kidney failure, Max caved.

“Okay, I’ll walk back with you so you don’t get lost, but I should stay out of sight when we get there, alright?”

“Okay,” Lyra agreed happily, and began trotting in the direction Max had pointed out.

The astronaut sighed in defeat, and, after slinging his backpack over one shoulder and picking up the gun belt that had been lying in the grass since the previous night, trudged after his new friend. In the back of his mind, he began to plan out his report on the apparently universal cuteness factor, and how potent of a survival mechanism it was proving to be.
> 6. Take Me to Your Leader
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	They walked for little bit, and Lyra pointed out the few plants in the forest that she could recognize while Max scribbled them down in the notebook he had dug out of his backpack. Max would have been happy if things stayed like that the whole way, but Lyra was no botanist, and eventually she began to ask some of her own questions.

        “So,” she said, after about a minute of awkward silence. “Of all the places to land, why did you land out here?”

        “Well…” Max was wary about explaining too much about his mission to a random pony wandering around in the forest, since there were still things about it that were too classified for most humans to know. He was just going to have to choose his words carefully.

        “Remember what I said,” Max began, pausing to step over a large log lying in his path. “My flying machine is really loud, and really fast. Most humans would completely freak out if something like that just appeared over their hometown and an alien walked out. I just want to stay far away until I can present myself in a manner that’s a little less, um, alarming.”

        Lyra thought for a second before hopping on top the log that Max had just hoisted himself over, bringing herself to eye level with her taller companion. “Well, I guess that makes sense, but this forest is really weird. It’s not like the rest of Equestria.”

        Max turned around and gave Lyra the same curious look she had been giving him since he arrived. “What do you mean by different?” He was suddenly worried about the ten-billion-dollar aircraft he had parked in a clearing in the forest that was apparently not the same as the rest of the planet.

        “Well, everything about this place is weird. We can’t really control the weather, things grow here that ponies didn’t plant, and animals here are wild.”

Max’s ears picked up a few things that were seriously wrong with what he heard, but it took him a few seconds to realize exactly what was said, because Lyra had said all right things, but in the wrong way.

“Wait, what?” Those two words were becoming something of a catch phrase for the astronaut.

“You’ve been saying that a lot lately, you know that?”

Max scratched the back of his neck sheepishly. “Yeah, I noticed. But what’s wrong with this place again?”

Lyra hopped down from the log and looked up at Max seriously. “I said this place is kind of dangerous compared to the rest of Equestria. We can’t control the weather here and-”

“Hold it!” Max cut her off before she could reiterate the rest of her confusing statement. “Did you say you can’t control the weather here?”

Lyra nodded slowly. “Yeah, that’s the scariest part of this place if you ask me.”

Max had to turn the statement over in his head a few times before logic lead him to a rather illogical conclusion. If not being able to control weather was scary…  

“Then that means you control the weather everywhere else,” he said slowly, not really believing what he was saying.

“Well, unicorns can’t, but pegasi can. They’re the ones who control the weather.”

Max responded with a skeptical stare.

Lyra was taken aback. “Can’t you control weather on your planet?”

“Well, no, actually. We can’t.” Max might not have been a meteorologist, but being a pilot meant he had to understand weather better than most, and he highly doubted that weather could be controlled by anything or anyone. Meteorology was a natural science, after all, and its principles should have applied to any planet with an atmosphere. Although, now that she mentioned it, Max had noticed a distinct lack of adverse weather over most of the continent during his flight…

“How can you guys survive without controlling the weather?” Lyra asked as they resumed their walk.

“Well, for one thing, most humans wear clothes pretty much all the time.” Max paused to gesture to his nylon pants and shirt.

“Ponies usually only wear clothes for fancy parties and stuff like that.”

“Well, you have a fur coat.” Max rolled up his sleeve to expose the skin on his arm. “Underneath all this, it’s pretty much just skin.”

“And wearing clothes all the time solves everything?” Lyra asked.

“ No,” Max said seriously. “Weather can get pretty bad when you don’t control it.”   
    
        “How bad?”

“Um, do you have hurricanes or blizzards here?” Max asked.

“Yeah, but they take a lot of work to build up, so the pegasi don’t make them all that often,” Lyra explained. “In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a storm that big.”

Max still didn’t quite believe Lyra, but he didn’t try to argue science with her, and instead just explained things as he knew them. “Well, weather can be a big problem in some places, so we build dwellings tough enough to keep bad weather out. But there are some other places on Earth that have weather so bad no one wanted to live there until we could build something tough enough to stand up to it.”

                	“How can you build something tough enough to survive blizzards and hurricanes?” asked Lyra.

                	“Oh, we can get pretty creative. But almost everything we build nowadays is made of steel and cement, so it can hold up to almost anything nature can throw at us.” Max was careful to add in the word ‘almost,’ having seen enough freak storms, earthquakes, and other natural disasters to know Mother Nature would always final say in whether or not anything humans built remained standing or crumbled to the ground.

“I guess that makes sense,” the unicorn said thoughtfully.

“Speaking of which,” Max said, seizing the opportunity to ask a burning question of his own. “How exactly do you manage to control the weather out here?”

“I can’t control weather, I’m a unicorn,” she said quickly. “But pegasi can. They live in the clouds, manufacture all the weather, and move it all over Equestria.”

“Um…right,” Max said slowly, hoping that there was more to what this unicorn knew than that. “And how do these pegasi live in clouds and make weather?”

                	Lyra shrugged. “It’s just part of the magic pegasi have in them,” she said nonchalantly.

“Wait, did you just say…magic?” Max stopped in his tracks and stared at the unicorn in confusion.

Lyra turned and looked back at him curiously. “Yeah, haven’t you ever heard of – Ooooh.” She suddenly remembered Max’s startled reaction to her levitation spell the night before, and decided a proper demonstration was in order. “I’m gonna show you something, but you have to promise not to freak out, okay?”

               	 “Okay…”

“You see that rock over there?” Lyra pointed to a medium-sized rock laying a few feet away.

“Yeah…” Max said cautiously, not entirely sure what the unicorn was meaning to do. He watched as her horn began to glow and sparkle, and when he looked back at the rock, it was surrounded by an identical aura of light. His eyes widened in disbelief as the rock was slowly lifted from the ground, and, suspended in midair, floated the short distance between its original spot and where Lyra and Max stood. As soon as it was hovering in front of Max, the glowing and shimmering disappeared, and the rock fell to back to the ground, hitting the dirt with a hard thud.

As soon as Lyra released her magical grip on the rock, she looked up at Max to see his reaction. True to his word, the astronaut had refrained from freaking out as he did the previous night, but it was taking visible effort on his part to do so. A strained expression that was a mix of shock, disbelief, and a small amount of fear had painted itself on his face, and his hands had suddenly gotten slightly fidgety. His eyes darted back and forth between Lyra’s horn and the rock that been dropped at his feet.

“So…” he said with notable strain in his voice. “I assume that’s what you call magic.”

“Yeah, that’s magic,” Lyra replied, hoping the astronaut would keep his head on straight.

To Max’s credit, he handled the undoing of physics as he knew it better than most other humans with his level of education would have, but wrapping his mind around what he just saw was still a bit of a stretch. “So that’s also how you hit me in the face last night,” he stated simply.

“That was an accident. You just scared me while I was holding my bags,” Lyra told him, gesturing to the saddle bags that rested on her back. She watched Max carefully, hoping she wouldn’t have to knock him out again.

It took Max a few seconds, but he finally regained control of himself. Alright, Max, he thought. Calm down. You knew anything was possible. You’re on another freaking planet for crying out loud! That planet just happens to be populated by magical, English-speaking, four-foot-tall, telekinetic ponies. Stranger things have happened.  

Max contemplated his thought for a second. Okay, I take it back; this one probably tops the weird charts. But still, get a grip!

He let out a slow, calming breath through his nose and stopped wringing his fingers together, before saying, “Well, I’m convinced.”

Lyra also out a breath that she didn’t know she was holding in, and the pair resumed their hike.

“So this magic you guys have lets you move things without touching them,” Max said to clarify, and Lyra nodded. “And it also lets pegasi control the weather.”

“Yeah, now you’re getting it!” Lyra said happily.         

Max thought for a moment, before asking, “Is there anything else magic can do that I should know about?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Lyra replied. “Magic can do all sorts of things. There’s a spell for almost everything, and some ponies know a lot of them, but most unicorns can only do a certain few that pertains to their own special talent. But that levitation spell is like the easiest one, and pretty much every unicorn can do it.”

Max contemplated her last statement. Telekinesis and weather control alone meant that these ponies were leaps and bounds ahead of humanity, and if those weren’t the only tricks they had up their sleeves, then Max didn’t even want to try and fathom what they were really capable of.

“Is everything okay?” Lyra asked, snapping Max out of his thoughts.

“Yeah, everything’s fine,” he said quickly.

“You got pretty quiet there for a while,” she told him.

“Sorry,” Max apologized. “But this is all pretty hard for me to believe. You’ve probably guessed this by now, but we don’t have any magic where I come from. Not only that, but these things you just told me about are considered impossible.”

Lyra gasped in surprise. “Impossible?” she repeated.

“It’s so impossible for us that it’s not even something we’re trying to learn about.” Max went on. “We’ve found ways to keep track of and predict weather fairly reliably, but we’ve never seriously tried to control it. And this magic you just showed me is something we don’t even consider realistic. So when you tell me that this is commonplace here, it’s a bit much for me to take in.”

Lyra was a bit taken back by trying to imagine the world without magic, but she nodded understandingly. “I guess that kinda explains why you freaked out the first time you saw me levitate something.” She laughed sheepishly. “Sorry if I scared you before.”

Now it was Max’s turn to laugh. “Of all the crazy things I never thought I’d see, the friendly magical unicorn is the one to make me freak out.”

At this, both the human and the pony laughed again, and Max decided to change the subject while he could do so on a positive note. “So, what do ponies have for a government or established leadership?” he asked.

“Oh, that’s a good question.” Lyra perked up, happy to talk about the kind and beloved leaders that were the Princesses. “Equestria is run by two magical princesses, Princess Celestia and Luna. Celestia is the one who raises and sets the sun every day, and Luna controls the moon and stars at night. They’re kind and benevolent, and they’ve done a great job maintaining peace and order throughout the kingdom for thousands of years.”

If there was one thing Max remembered about how he had been taught to deal with other civilizations, it was that he should avoid conflicts at all costs, and given the kinds of fights that different religious beliefs had sparked on Earth, it was a topic he would have been happy to leave alone. But the idea of a thousand-year-old princess controlling the day and night sounded an awful lot like a fanatic religion to him. His skepticism was partially fueled by the fact that both planets shared the same sun, so everything he knew about it should have still applied.

“Uh-huh,” he said in a disbelieving tone, which Lyra picked up immediately.

“What?” she asked. “You don’t believe me?”

“No, no, I believe you,” Max said quickly. “It’s just like I said. We don’t have magic back home, so the sun and moon kind of…um… raise and lower themselves.” Although, she was able to lift a heavy rock like it was nothing. Could something like that be done with this planet’s moon?

“I can’t imagine a world without magic,” Lyra mused. “We use it for almost everything in some way here.”

“That’s because you’re used to having it handy for everything,” Max countered, actively trying to steer the conversation away from his previous question. “My planet has never had anything like it, so it’s hard for me to imagine a world with magic, and you know, talking ponies. And yet, here I am.”

“Do you have ponies on your planet?” she asked.

“Yes, but they don’t look like you at all. And they don’t talk like you or me. I don’t even think that they can think like you or me. They’re just animals.”

Lyra gasped. “You mean ponies can’t talk or even think where you come from?”

“Exactly,” Max told her. “Come to think of it, only humans can talk where I come from, and there are only a handful of animals intelligent enough to work with.”

“Do humans ever get lonely, being the only thing on the planet that can talk?”

Max chuckled. “As a whole, no we don’t. There are plenty of other humans, and there are thousands upon thousands of separate countries, cultures, races, ethnicities, and any other sort of community you could think of.”

“How many humans are there on your planet?” the unicorn asked, her curiosity driving her to learn everything she could from this human.

“Well, that’s kind of a touchy subject back home,” Max explained. “Some people think there are way too many of us, and that the planet can’t sustain the population for much longer. Others think we should just keep on expanding. But here’s a question, how many ponies are there in Equestria?”

Lyra paused, and put a hoof to her chin in thought. “I don’t really know,” she said after a minute.

“Okay, then how many ponies are there in the town where you live?” the astronaut asked.

“Oh, I know that. Ponyville is kind of a small town, and we only have a few hundred ponies there.”

“Alright, then picture this. Where I come from, a town with a few hundred people would be so small that it wouldn't even be on most maps. The city where I lived had about three million people in it while I was growing up, and that’s considered a pretty average size.”

“That’s like twice the size of Manehattan!” Lyra said incredulously with wide eyes.

Max blinked a couple times. “Sorry, did you just say ‘Manhattan?’”

“No,” Lyra replied. “I said MANE-hattan. What’s this Manhattan?”

“Well, our biggest city right now is called New York City, and there’s a district in it called Manhattan.”

“Huh.” Lyra shrugged. “That’s funny.”

“Yeah, real uncanny, isn’t it?” First they speak English, and now this? Something is going on here...

 Max was seriously beginning to doubt that all this was coincidence. But the implications of any similarities not being purely coincidence were sure to crumble the very foundations of everything he knew about humanity, so Max decided not to think about it. Perhaps if he ever got to meet these ‘magical’ princesses that supposedly controlled day and night, he would ask them. But for now, Max decided he would just keep up pleasant conversation with his new friend.

“So if this New York City is your biggest city, how many humans live there?” She asked after a few seconds of silence.

“Well, when I left, the population was about to hit forty million. But that was a year ago. I think it may have passed that number by now.”

                	Lyra gasped again. “That is a lot of humans! How do you feed them all?”

                	Max let out a brief chuckle, before answering, “Lots of people back home are asking the exact same question. It’s one of the reasons some think there are too many people in the world. It’s a problem we call overpopulation.” He decided to leave out the detail that the recent war had dramatically reduced the population of a few of the less fortunate nations, giving the world an awkward and morbid respite from the population crisis.

“So if that’s just one city,” Lyra began cautiously, as if the answer to her next question might be frightening. “How many humans are there total?”

“When I left, we were looking at a global population of about nine billion people. It’s still going up, though.”

Lyra was shocked. She had never even heard of anything that needed the word ‘billion’ to be counted.

Max was about to say something else, but he noticed the forest canopy overhead was beginning to get a little less dense, and there was light coming through the trees ahead. “Hey, I think we’re getting close.” he said.

 	“Yeah, I think you’re right,” Lyra said after looking around.

Sure enough, the edge of the forest was in sight. The net of tree branches above their heads had thinned out, and the mid-morning sunshine was beginning to stream through. When Max and Lyra reached the edge of the forest, they paused for a brief moment, looking at the field that lay between the forest and the town. Across the hills, Max could make out some wooden structures and their straw roofs.

“Are you sure you can’t come into town and meet some ponies?” Lyra asked. “I’m sure nopony would have a problem with you. You’re not the evil or mean kind of alien or anything.”

“I appreciate the offer,” Max said. “But I really don’t think that’s a good idea. In fact, it might be best if you held off mentioning me to anyone else for the time being.”

“But…you’re coming back later, right?”

“Yes, I’ll be back. Just don’t come looking for me. If you ponies are anything like us humans, it will be a very big deal when I decide to make an appearance. You’ll probably hear about it in some way or another.”

“Okay. Well thanks for your help,” Lyra said gratefully. “And when you make your appearance, just ask for Lyra Heartstrings.”

“I’ll do that,” Max told her and nodded.

“Good luck with your mission and everything!” Lyra said, waving back at Max with her hoof as she exited the forest and walked towards the town. 

Max waved back and watched her go, and for the first time, he noticed that she had some sort of mark on her hind flanks that resembled a lyre.

Yep, this definitely tops the ‘weird’ charts. He turned away from the town and began the long hike back the Birdie.

 During said hike, Max mulled over what Lyra had told him about the ponies that inhabited this world. He had been thoroughly convinced that these unicorns had some strange kind of telekinetic ability thanks to their ‘magic,’ as it was hard to argue with the demonstration the green pony had given him, and even her claims about some other kind of pony called a Pegasus being able to control the weather were making a little more sense, but the statement about the princesses bugged him.

There was absolutely no way anything could possibly manipulate the sun, as people on Earth would have detected any such anomalies long ago that physics couldn’t explain. Everything he knew about the sun complied with the laws of physics, and therefore applied everywhere in the solar system. He could fathom some ridiculously powerful unicorn using telekinesis to move the planet’s moon small amounts, but not the sun. It would take a being with power of biblical proportions to do anything to the sun.

That train of thought led Max to the next problem he had with Lyra’s claim about the all-powerful princesses. She claimed that they had ruled Equestria for thousands of years, and nothing he knew of lived to be that old naturally. It was conceivable that this ‘magic’ ponies commanded could extend one’s lifespan beyond its natural length, but very few animals on Earth had ever lived longer than a hundred and twenty years. Even the undersea invertebrates on Earth were only estimated to be few hundred years old.

According to Lyra’s description, these princesses sounded like gods, and whenever rulers on Earth tried to convince their subjects that they were gods, there were nothing but melodramatic and power-hungry tyrants blowing hot air and trying to wring every bit of admiration and loyalty they could from other people.

Max definitely did not like the idea of the established authority on this planet being classified with the likes of some of the most evil and hated leaders in human history, but that was what it sounded like to him. He much would have preferred the kind and benevolent magical goddess story, as it sounded like something straight out of a fairy tale or a little girl’s fantasy, but the tyrannical monarch persona was much more likely based on what Max knew about Earth’s history.

It didn’t take as long to reach the landing site as it had to get to the village, and Max chalked that up to not having to stop every and stare questioningly at a unicorn every time she said something confusing, which was almost every time Lyra spoke. It was just after noon when the explorer neared the clearing where he’d left the Birdie, and his mind was still occupied with the topics he’d discussed with Lyra during their early-morning jaunt.

Consequently, he didn’t notice that the birds that woke him up were all gone. In fact, the faint sound of clanking metal and gruff male voices barking orders could be heard as he trekked through the slightly familiar landscape that surrounded the clearing, but it went in one ear and out the other; he had a few other things on his mind.

So when Max broke through the wall of trees and found a small army of armor-clad ponies populating the area, all he could do was stop and stare. There were maybe a hundred and fifty of them, and not all of them were walking on the ground. Perhaps a third of the ponies Max could see were hovering in the air, flapping wings that were attached to their backs. He suddenly remembered where he’d heard the word ‘Pegasus’ before.

Right, ancient mythology, he thought. A pegasus is a horse with wings. Got it.

What was even more surprising than the sizable fraction of the group that was flying was their equipment. Every pony in the clearing was wearing a shining suit of metal armor; some looked to be made of brass, and others steel. They wore helmets that resembled what knights from fairy tales would wear into battle, and they all carried lances with razor sharp spear points.

For about ten seconds, Max did absolutely nothing. He just stared at what had formerly been his landing site, which had apparently been transformed into a medieval military outpost in his absence. He could just make out the Birdie on the other side of the clearing, surrounded by a ring of armored, armed ponies on the ground and a group of similarly outfitted pegasi hovering in a dome-like fashion over the craft. It was quite the sight to behold, with platoons of armored ponies bustling all about and squadrons of pegasi circling overhead, but Max’s status as an unseen observer was short-lived.

One of the ponies shouted, “There it is!” and all movement ceased in an instant as every set of eyes in the clearing turned and focused on the hapless explorer.

Max’s first thought was to run away, and possibly find a nice place hide. In the brief moments of stillness while the army of quadrupeds stared at the newcomer to their planet, an image of Lyra flashed through his mind, and he suddenly regretted not taking her up on her offer to show him Ponyville.

In the time it took Max to take a tentative step backwards, every single pony with an unobstructed path, ground-bound and otherwise, rushed towards him with a frightening amount of speed, and what felt like a hundred spear points suddenly crammed themselves into the area directly in front of his face. He froze, his brain went into overdrive. Old instincts from military training kicked in, and Max’s hand reflexively reached for the firearm hanging from his thigh.

But before he could so much as wrap his hand around the grip of the pistol, a booming female voice thundered throughout the clearing, and said, “YOU ARE OUTNUMBERED AND OVERWHELMED. IF YOU DECIDE TO FIGHT, YOU WILL BE DEFEATED.”

The source of the nearly-deafening voice was nearby, but Max was having difficulties thinking about anything but the multiple spears mere inches from his face and the gun mere millimeters from his trembling fingers. Some of the pegasi hovering in the air above him parted slowly without lowering their weapons, and when Max looked up into the gap in their formation he saw a very interesting sight indeed.

A glaring, golden light shone down on Max through the break in the net of pegasi, and at first he thought he was looking directly at the sun. The explorer quickly averted his gaze, but upon looking away, he remembered the sun being almost directly overhead when he first returned to the clearing, and slowly looked back at what was shining so brightly.

It was not the sun, but rather a flying, four-legged creature that was significantly larger than all the others. It flew on a pair of majestic white wings that moved through the air powerfully, and it was adorned in golden armor that glowed and sparkled like the sun itself. Instead of hair, the mane and tail looked like they were made of a tangible rainbow that billowed in some non-existent wind. Upon her head was a tall pointed horn, and the tip of it seemed to be the source of the light that had just so blinding a few seconds earlier. The creature’s eyes glowed an intense white, and their haunting gaze fell square on the astronaut.

Max had a sinking sensation that this was the magical and all-powerful goddess/princess Lyra had mentioned, and all of his skepticism of the little unicorn’s description melted away in an instant. That skepticism was replaced with the fear that came with the undivided attention of such an imposing figure. The twitching fingers next to his weapon suddenly froze.

“IF YOU SURRENDER, YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED,” it said just as loudly as before.

For five long seconds, the only movement was the powerful beating of majestic wings. The glowing creature hovered where she was, the spears in front of Max’s face held steady, and his fingers itched to snatch the gun from its holster. The tension in the clearing was so tangible that if one of the spears so much as twitched, Max was sure he would see the atmosphere around it quake. But none of the weapons so much as quivered, and his frantic mind could only come up with one course of action.

Slowly, steadily, Max took his right hand away from his weapon, and raised both hands above his head. 

> 7. No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	When Max had been chosen for the mission to the far side of the sun, he didn’t know what to expect. He tried not to imagine too many specifics, but he did go as far as to suppose a few things during the rather lonely and dull year it took to get there. He supposed that, if there really was intelligent life on the planet, there was a possibility of civilization. He further supposed that, should the local population be civilized, he would eventually try to make contact and communicate.

That led to the question of whether or not they were advanced enough to understand where he was from and what his mission was. Humans would have first been able to grasp the concept in the mid seventeen hundreds, when they began to look to science rather than religion to explain the world around them. If the inhabitants weren’t quite past that point themselves, and religion dominated science, there was a possibility that that Max could be mistaken for some sort of god, or worse, some sort of devil. To avoid such catastrophic misunderstandings, the locals were to simply be left alone to develop and advance on their own if that were the case.

On the other hand, should whatever or whoever populated the planet be scientifically aware of space and the solar system, and practical communication was possible, Max would become less of a daring explorer and more of a diplomat. A real exchange of scientific and cultural information would take place, and Max would be the man responsible for planting the seeds of an interplanetary civilization.

Of course, none of what was predicted or even supposed had really panned out. The course of events over the last twenty-four hours did not follow any scientific theory, nor did it bear anything in common with any science fiction stories Max was aware of. Things had been under control for the most part, with the orbital observations confirming an intelligent and technological civilization and green-lighting eventual interaction, but as soon as that pony appeared in the middle of the night, everything steadily went downhill, all culminating in his current situation, which was much less than ideal.

Max sat huddled in the corner of a stone cell in what appeared to be a medieval dungeon. In addition to the cast-iron bars that made up the front wall of his cell that were, in his opinion, more than adequate to keep him from going anywhere, a shimmering, sparkling, translucent force field of some kind also blocked his exit. Outside the bars on the opposite wall hung a lone torch, its flickering yellow light tinted purple in the glowing magical barrier.

As far as Max could tell, the cell was no colder than outside, but he still couldn’t stop himself from shivering every now and then for two reasons. The first being the cold stone floor and walls of the cell, and that would not have even bothered him if it weren’t for the second reason; he was stark naked.
 
Two hours earlier…
 
Upon being caught in the forest by an army of armored and flying ponies, Max did not need much convincing to surrender. His opposable thumbs and single firearm would have done next to no good against more than a hundred ponies, even with their archaic garb and weaponry. And if any of the ponies possessed the telekinetic abilities that Lyra had demonstrated that morning, it would have certainly negated any advantage that the dexterity of his thumbs would have afforded Max in a fair fight. That, combined with the flying, glaring one above him whose eyes were glowing and capable of shouting at decibels no living thing on Earth could create made a fight a very unattractive prospect. In addition, unless he was being subjected to actual injury, Max had strict orders to avoid any semblance of violence.

So he surrendered, and upon doing so, Max found himself very suddenly blindfolded, enveloped in an immobilizing telekinetic aura, lifted off his feet, roughly dropped into the back of what he guessed to be one of the chariots that had been scattered around the clearing, and carried off. While certainly no efforts were expended to make him comfortable, he wasn't being injured in any way as far as he could tell, and so Max decided not to resist until he was.

During the ride, he’d been stripped of just about everything he had. It was difficult to tell if one of the soldier ponies was actually taking his equipment from him or if more telekinetic magic was relieving him of his effects, but Max did his best to cooperate within reason, hoping his compliance would get the message across that he did not want to fight, just in case raising his hands in the universal gesture of surrender wasn’t convincing enough.

He gave up his backpack and other supplies readily enough, but when he felt a tugging at the firearm strapped to his thigh, he began to worry. Max tried not to openly resist the efforts of whatever was confiscating everything he had, but he still did his best to vocalize the caution one needed while handling the weapon, and how dangerous it could be if mishandled. There was, however, no verbal reply, so he could only hope that he’d been understood.

Max really began to worry when he felt his shirt, pants, and shoes being tugged off. Max instinctively grabbed for waistline on his pants, trying hold them on, but the tugging merely intensified. After a bit of a struggle, the question as to whether or not it was telekinesis holding him down was answered. Max felt a warm tingling all over his body before his limbs were forcibly straightened out, and next came the cold wind on his now bare legs, torso, and shoulders. The last articles of clothing left on him were his underwear and socks, and Max prayed they would leave him like that.

Unfortunately, those last luxuries were soon taken away as well, and had Max not been bound motionless by some mysterious force, he would have tried to double over, hug his knees, or do something so he wouldn’t be completely exposed. He was no doubt blushing madly, and could feel the hotness in his cheeks starting to heat up the fabric of whatever was blindfolding him.

Little changed until they arrived at wherever the ponies were taking Max, and the only indication he got was the sensation of slowing gradually and stopping. He still couldn’t see a thing, or so much as twitch a muscle, but he could feel himself being levitated out of the chariot, and then, based on what he heard, moved indoors. The clip-clop of hooves and the clanking of armor could be heard as Max felt himself floating down hallways, around corners, and down flights of stairs. Finally he heard the creaking of an iron cell door, before the warm tingling sensation finally stopped, and Max found himself unceremoniously dumped on a cold stone floor.

The iron door slammed shut with a mighty clang, and a faint crackling hum could be heard as the luminescent force field appeared. After a few seconds, Max finally reached up to pull sack off of his head, and when his vision returned it only confirmed what his hearing had told him earlier. He was in a cold, dark, stone-walled cell trapped by both iron bars and a glowing force field.

After making the observation, Max remembered that he was naked. He promptly sat up, hugged his knees to his chest, and briskly scooted into a corner.

Why would they take my clothes? The question bounced around in Max’s head a few times before a vague answer began to take shape.

Lyra did say that ponies don’t normally wear clothes… Maybe they thought my clothes were … Unnecessary?                	

Whatever the case, Max made the executive decision that he would not go anywhere until he at least had his pants back.





“Shining, this doesn’t feel right,” Twilight told her brother, irritation dripping from her words. She paced up and down her brother’s private quarters, where she and Shining Armor had been instructed to wait for further instructions by Princess Celestia. Late afternoon light shone through the windows, casting slanted rectangles of light on the checkered tile floor.

“What is it?” the older stallion asked, his voice full of concern.

“Why are we locking it away like this? It hasn’t done anything bad yet!”

“The Princess said it was a precaution,” Shining replied. “And once we’re sure it’s not hostile, we’ll let it out.”

Twilight responded by angrily stomping a hoof on the tile floor. “How does the princess expect it to prove it isn’t hostile while locked away in a dungeon?!” Twilight asked incredulously.

“Well…” Shining Armor didn’t really know how the princesses planned on determining the alien’s intentions, and up to this point had only relayed to his sister what he had been told. “Maybe if it doesn’t try to break out…?” he offered meekly.

“Why is the Princess so scared of this thing?” Twilight continued as if Shining Armor hadn’t spoken at all. “It hasn’t hurt anypony, it hasn’t scared anypony, and it hasn’t even talked to anypony!” She paused as she turned around to pace in the opposite direction again. “What makes the Princess so sure we need to assume it’s evil? And why use the Royal Canterlot Voice on it? I thought she did away with that hundreds of years ago!”
        
        “Um, maybe-” Shining started, but those two words were all he got in before his sister continued her rant.
        
        “It’s like she decided, ‘Hey, and alien race! Instead of meeting it peacefully in a diplomatic setting and extending a hoof of friendship to visitors from space, let’s send an army to arrest it and throw it in prison!’”
        
        “Twilight, have you considered-” Shining tried again, but Twilight was having none of it.
        
        “I know she kept telling us ‘Prepare for the worst, hope for the best,’ but this isn’t just preparing a plan for the worst, this is executing the plan for the worst! She didn’t even give the best a chance to happen!”
        
        Finally having had enough, Shining Armor charged up his horn briefly and teleported from his spot next to the window directly in front of his sister, cutting her off mid-rant as well has halting her hundredth lap of anxious pacing. She bumped into his strong chest nose-first, and bounced back onto her haunches.
        
        “Twilight, just listen for a few seconds, okay?” he said, exasperated with his sister’s venting.
        
        The smaller unicorn looked up at her big brother’s intimidating frame, nodded, and let out a meek “Mm-hm?”
        
        “You’re right, something feels off about all of this,” Shining Armor began, thankful that he finally had Twilight’s attention. “And I’ve noticed Princess Celestia hasn’t been acting normal since that morning we all met in her study. You might not have noticed since you’ve been up all night for the past few days, but the princess is legitimately scared. She’s ended court early every day since then, and outside of that she’s barely left her study. Luna’s been trying to compensate for her and keep all the rumors at bay, I think that Celestia knows a lot more than she’s letting on.”
        
        At this, Twilight frowned. “But she said herself that she knew nothing about this whole situation. Are you saying the princess is… lying to us?”
        
        “I’m not saying that,” Shining replied cautiously. “But based on what the princess told me and what I saw, I would have done things very differently today.”
        
        Twilight stared up at her big brother. “Shining, what exactly are you saying?” she asked.
        
        “I’m saying that if what Princess Celestia told us is really everything she knows, then she’s acting very irrational. And you and I both know the Princess is never irrational about anything.”
        
        “But why would Celestia not tell us everything she knows?” Twilight asked.
        
        “I don’t know,” Shining Armor replied seriously. “But if the princess is keeping secrets, it’s got to be pretty serious.”
        
        “But what about this thing could possibly scare the Princess? You saw the alien surrender after just looking at her.”
        
        “I think the only one who knows the answer to that question is probably Princess Celestia herself.”
        
        Twilight let out an exasperated growl and stormed toward the exit. She grasped not just the knob but the entire door in purple magic and threw it open before leaving the room.
        
        “Twiley, where are you going?” Shining Armor said as she trotted off in a huff.
        
        “Somepony has to show this thing more that there’s more Equestria than just armor and spears,” Twilight tossed over her shoulder as she broke into a full gallop.
        
        “Twilight, wait!” Shining Armor called after her. “If the Princess is scared of this thing…” He trailed off as he saw his sister disappear around a corner. “Don’t you think we should be to?” he asked to no one in particular, before letting out a sigh and giving chase.        
        
        The staccato beat of four hooves pounding on the marble floors of the castle echoed throughout the halls and corridors, and was amplified by the tall vaulted ceilings as Twilight made her way to the dungeons. At first, she had to take extreme care not to plow into the occasional noble or working pony that milled about the castle as if nothing was awry, and on multiple occasions she had to mumble a quick “Pardon me” or “Watch it” as she barreled through a particularly crowded passage.
        
        But as Twilight got closer to her destination, there were less and ponies to dodge. The dungeon of Canterlot Castle hadn’t been used in centuries, and was tucked away in a remote section of the palace where few ever had business.
        
        When she finally arrived at the entrance to dungeons, Twilight was immediately stopped by the two royal guards stationed at the large iron gates. Without even looking down, they crossed their lances in front of her, cutting off her path.
        
        “Halt,” said one. “As per orders of the princess, nothing and no one is to pass through these gates.”
        
        “I’m sorry, let me introduce myself” Twilight said. “But I’m Twilight Sparkle, personal student of the princess, and-”
        
        “Yes, we know who you are,” the other guard stated tersely. “But our orders are to keep everypony out until otherwise directed.”
        
        “Do you even know what you are guarding?” Twilight asked angrily.
                
“That information is on a need-to-know basis,” said one guard stoically.

The other guard grumbled out the side of his mouth, “Apparently we didn’t need to know.”
        
        “And neither do you, Miss Sparkle. Move along.” The guard had much more force behind his voice when he repeated the last instruction, and Twilight finally began to back away.
        
        “Oh, ok,” Twilight said and turned around before trudging back the way she came, occasionally glancing over her shoulder. The two guards didn’t move until she rounded a corner and was out of sight, at which point they simply uncrossed their lances and returned to the position of attention. Once she was out of the guard’s sight, Twilight did a quick look-around to make sure nopony else was would see, then, with her teeth gritted and eyes clenched shut, she charged up her horn.
        
        It began to glow and hum faintly, but as Twilight poured more and more raw magic into her horn without a particular spell in mind, the corridor soon lit up in a dazzling and almost blinding light show of raw magical energy. Flashing purple sparks buzzed and crackled loudly as they jumped out of Twilight’s horn and danced around the hall, before dissipating and being replaced by more.
        
        A small smirk tugged at the corner of Twilight’s lips as she heard the beat of hooves on marble and the clanking and scraping of metal armor as the two guards came running from their post to see what the commotion was. Just before the stallions could round the corner, Twilight put one last burst of power through her horn and disappeared in a flash of violet light.
        
        When the pair of armored guardsponies finally did come to the spot where Twilight had been, they found absolutely nothing. The junior guard looked quizzically at his superior, who simply shrugged and turned to return to their post. By the time they returned to their original positions, Twilight had long disappeared down the dark spiral staircase behind the iron gates they were supposed to protect, and neither guard had the faintest idea of what had really happened.
        
        The two guards barely had time to assume the position of attention before Shining Armor came galloping down the hall. He came to rest in front of the senior guard panting, and took a second to catch his breath before saying anything. Twilight was in much better shape than he thought. So that’s how she almost won that Running of the Leaves race two years ago, Shining thought before straightening up and addressing the guard in from of him, who was looking at his commander very strangely.
        
        “Did Twilight *pant* come this way?” he asked between breaths.
        
        “Yes she did, Sir,” replied the guard. “But we sent her away, just like the Princess ordered.”
        
        “Oh, and did anything happen *pant* after that?” Shining asked, knowing Twilight too well to believe she would give up after only one try.
        
        “Well, after she left somepony was doing a lot of magic down that way,” said the younger guard, gesturing with a hoof to the hall where the spectacle had occurred. “We went to check it out, but there was nothing there. So we came back here immediately afterwards.”
        
        Shining Armor brought a hoof to his face and groaned. “Alright, I’m going through,” he said impatiently.
        
        “But Captain, the Princess ordered-” the senior guard started, but was cut off by his boss.
        
        “Don’t even try it with me, Corporal,” Shining said, and with a blast of violet light from his horn he opened the magically sealed gates and galloped right past the two bemused guards, telekinetically re-sealing the gates behind him.
        
        The junior guard raised an eyebrow at the corporal and asked, “You think we should…”
        
        “Nope.”
        
        “Okay.”





There were situations and possibilities that Max had been trained to handle before leaving Earth. Scientists and analysts from every discipline had predicted multitudes of possible scenarios for an astronaut going to another planet, and Max had been trained for every single one. Unfortunately, somehow the analysts had neglected the one thing that actually managed to happen.

Max was cold, defenseless, huddled in the corner of a stone cell, and stark naked. On top of all that, he was starting to get hungry. He guessed that he’d spent maybe two or three hours in the cell, and the blind-folded ride took what felt like an hour, and the last thing he’d eaten was a protein bar while he was walking back to his landing site after helping Lyra out of the forest. Based on that math, Max calculated about six hours since he’d last consumed any type of nourishment, and five since he’d drank any water.
       
        The thought of his landing site introduced a whole new line of thought concerning the Birdie and what these ponies might be doing to it. That thing was the only way to get back to the Enterprise, and if something rendered it inoperable, Max would not be getting home any time soon. He quickly decided there were better things to think about while in solitary confinement.
       
        The thought of Lyra brought back memories of how she described the magical princess that supposedly ruled the land with kindness and benevolence. If Max had to guess, he would assume the flying creature that shone like the sun and demanded his immediate and unconditional surrender was this magical princess, as none of the ponies that were flying had horns, and the few ponies he spied with horns had no wings. Not to mention, she could yell louder than any living creature on Earth.
       
        Hmph, kind and benevolent Princess rulers indeed, Max thought bitterly. First she has me blindfolded and arrested, then robbed and stripped nude, then tossed in prison. What kind of government does that to visitors?
       
        At that point, Max suddenly remembered that, until recently, any human government would have probably done the exact same thing to some living creature that suddenly dropped out of the sky and landed in their territory. In fact, he could name a few nations that probably still would, the United States included. This thought allowed him to quell most of the bitterness at his treatment, but the fact that he was naked was still rather distressing.
       
        His train of thought was interrupted by the sound of hooves on stone coming from somewhere outside of his cell. They were slightly muffled by the magical barrier that complemented the iron bars, but the sound was unmistakable. Max also noted the lack of clanking armor, but there wasn’t a whole lot he could do with the information. All he could do was try to scoot farther into the corner and hug his knees closer.
       
        The sound got closer and closer, and soon the blurred form of another pony was visible behind the humming force field. A spot on its forehead glowed briefly, and the force field disappeared. It took a few seconds for Max’s eyes to adjust to the much dimmer light conditions, but when they did, he saw a unicorn, similar in shape and size to Lyra. Max supposed this was also a female, and The supposition caused the mortification over his current state of undress to return with a vengeance.
       
        However, the size and shape were where the similarities ended. This unicorn’s coat had a rich lavender hue, and her indigo mane was straightened with neat bangs hanging just above her eyes, through which her purple horn protruded.
       
        The unicorn cleared her throat, and said in an official manner, “Greetings. My name is Twilight Sparkle, and I would like to welcome you to the beautiful land Equestria.”
       
        Max, still huddled in the very back corner of the cell, eyed the unicorn questioningly despite his embarrassment. After a few uncomfortable seconds, he said flatly, “Hi, Twilight Sparkle. I’m Max.”
       
        Twilight smiled, happy to have finally communicated with an alien race that did not appear hostile. “Well, um, it’s nice to meet you, Max. And you can call me Twilight. Now, you’re probably wondering why we had to put you down here.”
       
        “Yes, Twilight,” Max said, trying his best hide his irritation. “I am wondering why I was thrown in prison since, to my knowledge, I haven’t done anything to make your kind scared of me. In fact, I was going for quite the opposite. I’m not here to take over or start a war. I was just exploring. But before we get into that, there’s something else I’d really like to know.”
       
        “Oh, what is it?”
       
        “May I have my clothes back? Please?”
       
        Twilight blinked in surprise. “Your clothes?” she repeated.
       
        “Yes, my clothes,” Max replied tersely. “I’m sure that you and that small army that arrested me earlier have figured out by now that I’m not from around here. You see, where I come from, we always wear clothes. It’s kind of a modesty issue. In fact, it’s considered very bad taste to not wear clothes outside of one’s home. Now, based on your voice, I’m assuming you’re female. And where I’m from, it is considered awfully rude for a male to not wear clothes in the presence of a female. So before ANYTHING else happens, I would REALLY like my clothes back.”
       
        Twilight’s eyes widened with understanding. “Ooooooooh,” she said slowly, and then chuckled sheepishly. “That kind of explains why you’re sitting in the corner like that,” she added on, a slight blush creeping into her cheeks. She averted her gaze and took a tentative step away from the bars, and that was precisely when Shining Armor charged in.
       
        “Twilight, what in Celestia’s name do you think you’re doing!?” the white stallion scolded his sister, ignoring the human huddled in the corner. “Do you know what the Princess will do if you’re caught down here talking to it? Do you know how dangerous this could be?”
       
        “But I-” Twilight was about to say something in her own defense, but before she could finish her sentence, Max felt the need to pipe up.
       
        “Um, excuse me,” he said, just loud enough to be heard. “I don’t really think I’m a danger to anyone while I’m in here. In fact, I’m about as exposed as I can get right about now.”
       
        Shining Armor turned around slowly to face the lanky, pale, relatively hairless creature in the cell. The last thing the Captain of the Guard expected was for the alien to speak, much less in a manner that he could understand. “Wait, you can understand us?” the stallion said with a confused look on his face.
       
        Max had to mentally tell himself not to roll his eyes. “Trust me; I’m even more surprised than you are. Can I have my clothes back now?”
       
        “Why do you want-” Shining began to ask, but he was cut off when Twilight magically yanked his head down her level and started whispering in his hear. After Twilight’s explanation, his eyes widened with understanding much like Twilight had done just a little over a minute prior. “Ooooooooh,” he said slowly.               
       
        There was a brief, awkward silence between the three beings. Max stared at the ponies outside his cell hoping he had possibly convinced one of them to return his garments, and the two unicorn siblings tried earnestly not to stare back at the naked human. No one in the room was met with any degree of success.  
       
        Finally having had enough, Twilight cleared her throat nervously. “Ahem, would you excuse me and my brother for one moment?” she asked, pushing the older stallion away from Max’s cell.
       
        “Okay,” she said in a hushed tone when they were out of Max’s sight. “He’s not dangerous at all. He told me he’s just here on an expedition, and doesn’t want to hurt anypony. Although, he’s probably scared and a little annoyed that we took all of his stuff and threw him in prison.”
       
        “Point taken, but even if he is telling the truth, how do you intend on convincing the princess?” Shining whispered back.
       
        “I’m not sure about that just yet,” Twilight admitted. “But we should at least give him his clothes back. I think he’s going to stay like that until we do.”
       
        Shining Armor thought for a moment, and said, “I think I can get to the place where his clothes are, but the rest of his stuff has to stay. And only I can go. You’ll have to stay here.”
       
        “But Shining,” Twilight hissed. “He said being naked in front of a girl is really bad manners where he’s from!”
       
        “Sorry Twiley, but if those two guards see you walk out of here, we’ll both be in trouble, and that won’t help anyone.”
       
        “But…” Twilight began to protest some more, but her brother was having none of it.
       
        “And no teleporting, either. Too much of that is going to look suspicious. He’s just going to have to suck it up for a little while longer.”
       
         Twilight realized her brother was right. The guards were probably watching out for more of her tricks, so she couldn’t use the little teleporting trick again without raising some suspicion. She was just going to be stuck down here with Max until Princess Celestia was convinced he was not a threat.
       
        “Fine,” she grumbled.
       
        “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Shining assured her before trotting back up the stairs that led to the gates. Once he reached the top, he opened the magically sealed gates again and strode through, as though there was nothing unusual happening. When he passed the two stallions guarding the entrance, the younger one addressed him.
       
         “Uh, Captain?” the stallion said primly. “Is everything ok? What’s going on down there?”
       
        “Don’t worry about it, Private,” Shining said reassuringly. “It’s above your pay grade.” Without saying anything else, he continued his trot down the corridor and disappeared around a corner.
       
        The private turned to his partner again and asked, “Are you sure we shouldn’t-”
       
        “Eeyup.”
       
        “Alright, then.”




       
        Back down in the dungeon, Twilight decided to make the best of the current situation, and learn as much as she could from Max while she was stuck in the dungeon with him.
       
        “Hello again,” she said as she trotted back to Max’s cell, trying to sound more optimistic than she felt.
       
        Max, who was still huddled in the corner of the cell, did not say anything.
       
        “Don’t worry about your clothes. My brother went to go get them,” she said, hoping the news would cheer him up.
       
        “I appreciate it,” Max said. “But until I’m wearing them, I’m going to worry about them. I can’t really help it.”
       
        “Sorry. They’re coming, I promise.”
       
        “Thanks.”
       
        Yet another awkward silence resonated in the dungeon, and while Max would have been happy to let it stay, Twilight had a burning curiosity.
       
        “So where are you from?” she asked.
       
        With the elephant in the room finally addressed, Max inwardly groaned. It looked as though his clothes would not arrive before questioning.
       
        “Alright, how would I explain this…” he said to himself, but loud enough for Twilight to hear him. There were many methods to explain the position of the Earth, each for a different level of understanding of space. Based on Lyra’s statement about a goddess-like-princess controlling day and night, he might have to go with the barebones version. But Max figured, without the language barrier gumming things up, he might as well just ask.
       
        After a second, he said “Okay, let me ask you something. What do you know about space?”
       
        “Oh, ummm…” Twilight didn’t expect Max to answer her question with one of his own. She knew plenty about space, and even more now than a few days ago thanks to nights spent studying with Doctor Whooves. “Actually, I know a lot about space. More than most ponies, but why do you ask?”
       
        “I’m just asking to see if you know enough to understand where I come from,” Max replied. “What do you know about planets and stars in particular?”
       
        “Oh, I know plenty about that,” Twilight said happily. She loved to talk science with anyone, and talking science with an advanced alien race was probably a once-per-lifetime opportunity. “The planet we’re on revolves around the sun, which is the nearest star, and there are a few other planets orbiting–”
       
        “Wait, say that again?”
       
        “Do you mean the part about the other planets orbiting the sun?” Twilight asked confused.
       
        “No, the part about this planet orbiting the sun,” Max corrected.
       
        “Oh,” Twilight said and frowned. If he doesn’t get that concept, they might not be as advanced as we thought, she thought disappointedly. “Our planet is orbiting the sun, which is the closest star,” she finished.
       
        “I thought you guys believed your magical princess controlled the sun,” he said, realizing too late the implications of the statement.
       
        “Well, she doesn’t actually… wait, how did you know that?” Twilight’s eyes narrowed and she looked at Max suspiciously.
       
        Max silently cursed himself and his big mouth. “Ok, Twilight, I should probably tell you that you’re not the first pony I’ve talked to.”
       
        Now Twilight was genuinely confused. “Huh?”
       
        “Okay, here’s what happened,” Max said, and launched into the story of how he met the lost little unicorn in the forest. He started with the initial exploration of the forest and how she stumbled upon him sleeping in the clearing, and continued with the unicorn accidentally knocking him out with her saddlebags. He mentioned how he helped the unicorn find her way back to her hometown just that morning, and made mistake of the saying the word ‘Ponyville.’
       
        “Wait a second,” Twilight cut off Max’s story, holding up a hoof to silence him. “You’ve already seen Ponyville?! That’s where I’m from! Who was this unicorn you talked to?”
       
        “Um…” The last thing Max wanted was to get Lyra in trouble. She’d found him completely by accident, after all, and she’d been pretty nice to him, ignoring the incident where she accidentally hit him in the face and knocked him out cold. But then again, almost anything would be nice compared to the treatment he was getting right now.
       
        “Well?” Twilight demanded, and Max realized there was no avoiding the question.
       
        “Okay, her name was Lyra Heartstrings,” he said finally, and quickly added, “She won’t get in any trouble, will she? It was a total accident! She was just lost in the forest and I helped her out! I didn’t even go near the town!”
       
        “LYRA?!” Twilight nearly exploded. How could that bubble-head have gotten to talk to the alien before me?!
       
        “What’s going to happen to her?” Max asked pleadingly, hoping Lyra wouldn’t be put into a situation similar to his.
       
        “Nothing, nothing,” Twilight responded irritably. Then, in a more even tone, she said “I won’t tell anypony. In fact, if I get caught down here, I’ll be the one in trouble.”
       
        “Oh, that’s comforting,” Max said, unable to resist rolling his eyes this time. However, the gesture was lost in the dim lighting of the dungeon and Twilight got back to the topic at hand.
       
        “Anyway,” she said after smoothing out her proverbial ruffled feathers. “Princess Celestia doesn’t actually move the sun. She does control the planet’s rotation and its day and night cycles, so to most ponies it appears like she raises and lowers the sun.”
       
        “Fascinating,” Max muttered. In his head, he added, Makes sense, but it’s only slightly less mind-boggling. “Anyhow, it sounds like you know enough to understand where I’m from. I come from another planet, which happens to be orbiting the same star as this one. But we’re kind of on the other side of the sun, so up until a few years ago, we had no idea this planet was here.”
       
        “I knew it!” Twilight exclaimed and pumped a hoof in the air.
       
        “What do you...?” Max said bemusedly, but before he could finish his question, Twilight answered it.
       
        “Well, we kinda saw your ship in the night sky, and after we pointed a telescope at it all we could do was guess where it came from, and I was right!” She accentuated her last statement by excitedly clapping her two front hooves together. “Just wait till I tell Doctor Whooves!”
       
        “Doctor who?” Max said with a raised eyebrow.
       
        “No, not Doctor Who, Doctor Whooves,” Twilight corrected him.
       
        Any further discussion was cut off by a brilliant flash of purple light and a loud POP coming from down the hall, and Shining Armor reappeared in the dungeon carrying a bundle of clothes in a purple cloud of levitation. He stumbled towards Max’s cell and Twilight, slightly woozy after using an advanced spell he didn’t have much practice with.
       
        “Woah, that one’s not as easy as you make it look, Twiley,” the older stallion said and tapped one side of his head several times with a front hoof, causing a few excess sparks to fly out of the opposite ear. “Going across a room is one thing, but it’s something else going through multiple layers of stone and marble.”
       
        “What.” The word came out of Max’s mouth not as a question but more as a statement of utter bewilderment.
       
        “Teleportation magic,” Twilight explained briefly, before turning to her older brother. “I thought you said no teleporting!” she hissed angrily.
       
        “I thought about it, and those two guards up there would catch on if they saw me walking in with this guy’s stuff, wouldn’t they?” Shining Armor hissed back. “Besides,” he added. “I did it as quietly as possible.”
       
        “Shining, how many times have you teleported more than a few feet before today?” Twilight asked him.
       
        “Uh…” Shining racked his memory to come up with an instance that fit his sister’s criteria. “Once?” he said sheepishly.
       
        Twilight would have gone on berating her brother, but the sound of Max noisily clearing his throat brought her back to immediate issue. “Nevermind,” she said irritably. “Did you get everything?”
       
        “Yeah, I think so,” Shining replied and sent the bundle floating between the bars of the cell before releasing it right next to where Max was huddled.
       
        Reaching out with one hand, Max sorted through the contents of the pile. His mood improved dramatically when he found that the pony named Shining Armor indeed had managed to get everything, including his underwear, socks, and boots. He was finally about to get up from the uncomfortable position he’d been stuck in for the past few hours when Max noticed the two siblings still looking straight at him from behind the bars of the cell.
       
        “Um, would you mind?” he asked.
       
        “What?” Twilight began to ask confusedly, but her eyes widened when she realized exactly Max meant. “Oh, right. Sorry. Come on, Shining,” she said, once again pushing her bewildered brother away and out of sight.
       
        Breathing a sigh of relief, Max finally stood from where he had been huddled for hours. After stretching out some muscle kinks and popping the joints that needed it, he at long last began the process of getting dressed.




       
        “Sister, is it really necessary to keep the human locked up like this?” Luna asked her sister.

The Princess of the Night was seated in one of the floor cushions facing Celestia’s desk in the elder alicorn’s study, while Celestia herself was pacing nervously back and forth in front of the tall window behind the desk. Both princesses had removed and stored their battle armor upon returning to the castle, and now appeared as they would on any normal day, save the anxiety that seemed to saturate the air between them.
       
        “I don’t know, Luna,” she replied anxiously, without looking up from the path she walked. “I really don’t know.”
       
        “You are obviously very troubled by this, dear sister. I have not seen you pace like this in…” Luna thought for a moment, trying to remember another instance where her sister had shown this particular behavior. She came up empty.
       
        “I don’t think I have ever seen you this anxious about anything before,” Luna finished, new lines of worry crossing her face.
       
        “This is really the first time I’ve been at a complete loss as to what I should do,” Celestia said miserably.
       
        “Well, something needs to be done soon,” Luna said forcefully. “We cannot just keep an alien locked in the cellar like this and worry about it day in and day out. Your daily duties as Princess will only handle themselves for so long.”
       
        “I know, Luna,” Celestia conceded. “But what would you have me do?”
       
        “Perhaps we try to talk to the human?” Luna offered. “Did you ever consider the possibility that revenge is not on his agenda? Even if it is, he seems to be woefully unprepared for it.”
       
        Before Celestia could reply, the double doors to the study burst open, and a Royal Guard galloped in. He stopped before the princesses and bowed respectfully.
       
        “What is so urgent, Lieutenant?” Luna asked and the guard stood.
       
        Lieutenant Storm Cloud removed his helmet and faced Celestia. “Your Highness,” he said gravely. “My guards posted at the armory reported Captain Shining Armor entering, but never coming out. They claim to have heard a teleportation spell, and upon investigating, several of the artifacts recovered from the excursion this morning were missing.”
       
        Celestia and Luna exchanged horrified glances. The memory of a certain captain under mind-control trickled into the elder alicorn’s thoughts, and she sprang into action. Without so much as a moment’s hesitation, she leapt from her pacing circuit to the space between Luna and Storm Cloud, clearing her desk with assistance of a powerful stroke from her wings. Upon landing, she charged up her own teleportation spell, and with a brilliant flash of golden magic, both princesses and the officer vanished from the room.
       
        They materialized in the dimly-lit stone hallway of the dungeon, and right in front of the cell where the alien was being held.
       
        Before her eyes adjusted to the low light, Celestia’s keen hearing picked up three distinct yelps of surprise. Two of the voices she recognized as Twilight Sparkle and Shining Armor. There was only one possible source of the third.
       
        “Stop where you are!” the princess commanded in the direction of the third voice, coming dangerously close to the Royal Canterlot Voice for such a confined space. She charged up her horn, ready to unleash the full fury of the sun on whatever was threatening her personal student and the Captain of the Royal Guard.
       
        As soon as the words left her mouth, Celestia’s equally keen eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she was treated to the sight of a partially clothed human in what seemed to be a compromising position.
       
        It was hunched over and raising one leg in the air, and seemed to be in the process of putting its pants on. True to the orders it had received, the human froze in this position, but with one leg raised in an attempt wiggle into the curious garment, it quickly lost balance.
       
        “What- D’oh!” the human exclaimed as it pitched to one side. The hard thump that resulted when its head impacted against the unforgiving stone wall made everyone in the room cringe, including Celestia, despite her being ready to reduce the human to subatomic particles mere seconds before. It then fell the remaining distance to ground, landing in a crumpled, unconscious heap with crossed eyes and a dazed expression on its face.
       
        The three newcomers to the room stared at the incapacitated creature for a few brief moments, before remembering the other two voices. In unison, Celestia, Luna, and Storm Cloud all turned their heads to look at Twilight Sparkle and Shining Armor, who were sitting on their haunches a few feet down the hall.
       
        They did not appear to be under the influence of any kind of mind control. Rather, the siblings looked very normal, were it not for the furious blushing in their cheeks and the ways their eyes darted about to avoid the questioning stares being sent their way.
       
        Finally, after what were without question the most awkward few seconds of silence that day, Twilight met the dumbfounded gaze of her mentor smiled sheepishly before saying meekly, “Um…we can explain?”
> 8. Past, Present, and Future.
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	When his scrambled brain finally began to reboot, Max thought he heard chirping birds, somewhat reminiscent of the last time he’d been knocked unconscious with a blow to the head. However, he realized this was impossible when his memory began to work again, and according to that part of his mind, he was still locked in a stone cell inside of a medieval-style dungeon.

The next brain function he regained was the one that recognized pain, and Max immediately wished he could turn that off again. Now, he noted, not one but two spots on his forehead were painfully throbbing, and the bruises were complemented by a splitting headache that he didn’t remember plaguing him before. Apparently his skull could only handle one instance of blunt-force trauma every twenty-four hours before real damage started to occur.

When Max’s attention began leave the subject of pain and wander to some other senses that he was slowly regaining, he noticed his ears were ringing so badly that he couldn’t hear anything that was going on around him, and he was lying in an awkward, crumpled position on the cold stone floor. Normally he would have tried to sit up after regaining consciousness, or at least shift into a more natural position on the ground, but the painful throbbing in his head convinced Max to remain motionless.

After a few seconds, the ringing in his ears started to subside, and he could hear muffled voices making their way into his muddled consciousness. He concentrated on the voices, and soon, he was able to make out the speaker as Twilight Sparkle, the purple unicorn pony that he had been conversing with before. She sounded as if she was timidly trying to explain something to someone, and upon opening his eyes, Max learned just who that someone was.

It took roughly a second for his eyes to regain focus, but even before they did, Max immediately recognized the shape, color, and flowing ethereal mane of the pony that demanded his surrender in the forest, whom Max had assumed to be Princess Celestia. She wasn’t wearing the golden armor, and there was no blinding light coming from her eyes or horn, so she appeared slightly less intimidating than before. Just slightly, though.

His vision continued to sharpen, and soon Max was able to see her expression. During his conversations with Lyra and Twilight, Max gathered that he could read facial expressions on ponies as easily as he could those of any human. And right now, the expression he saw told him one thing; Twilight was busted. The smaller unicorn continued her sheepish explanation, which Max could now fully understand as the events of the past few minutes, but the princess that dwarfed her did not seem to like what she was hearing. With every word that came out of Twilight’s mouth, Celestia’s expression darkened and her critical frown deepened.

“Twilight,” she said condescendingly after her student finished explaining. “What could have possibly come over you to do something like this?”

At the sight of the second being on the planet to speak to him without threatening to kill him get a dirty look from the being who had threatened to kill him, Max decided he had to do something. However, one of the other ponies in the room took action first. This pony was definitely larger than the average pony, but still not quite the size of the white one. Her coat was a dark blue, and she also had a rippling, billowing, ethereal mane, except that that looked like it was made of the night sky, with its deep blue color and the twinkling points of light scattered throughout it that resembled stars. Based on the black chest piece she wore and the crown on her head of a similar hue, Max decided that this was the other princess, whom Lyra had identified as Luna.

Twilight was about to answer the princess, but that was when Luna spoke. “I hate to interrupt you, Celestia,” she said softly. “But I believe our visitor is awake.”

Before he could so much as scramble into a more natural position, all five ponies in the room turned and locked their eyes on the hapless human. Two pairs of eyes, belonging to Celestia and presumably a bodyguard of sorts, narrowed with suspicion. Princess Luna’s eyes remained remarkably neutral, while Twilight’s and Shining Armor’s widened in panic.

Celestia’s eyes began to glow fiercely again as she flared her wings and took several menacing steps towards the iron gates that Max was suddenly very grateful for. “Who are you, and how did you find this planet?” she asked, and while her voice hadn’t increased in volume that much, she put every ounce of force she could behind each word.

As she approached the bars, Max finally got an appreciation for Celestia’s real size. Ponies like Twilight and Lyra were roughly the height of his waist, not counting the four or five inches that the horn added, and Shining Armor looked like he might come up to Max’s chest, but Celestia truly dwarfed both pony and human alike. If Max ignored her horn, which easily added a foot to her height, the towering princess looked as if she would stand a full head higher than Max, had he been standing.

As it were, Max was still lying on the ground with his legs tangled hopelessly in the fabric of his pants, and the sight of the Celestia advancing on him with her glowing eyes and flared wings, along with the intimidating tone she spoke with sent him scuttling pathetically back into his corner, dragging his pants along with him by the one foot he’d managed to force through before he’d fallen against the wall.

Once he’d put as much distance between himself and the princess as the stone cell would allow, Max finally addressed the governing power of a new civilization.

“Please, you don’t need to hurt me,” he said evenly, straining to keep his fear from shaking his words. “My name is Maxwell O’Hara, and I came here alone on an exploration mission. I don’t know anything about where I am, and my people don’t even know there is anyone on this planet, and we didn’t know that another planet was even here until we saw it completely by accident. I’m not a danger to anyone.”

If he’d been watching himself, Max would have been very impressed by how calmly and collectively he’d managed to speak, given how the closest thing he’d ever seen to a goddess looked like she was about to vaporize him.

Celestia’s posture didn’t change, but her scowl disappeared at Max’s confession. Even though he’d managed hide the fear in his voice, the rest of him told the whole story. The human looked genuinely lost and scared. Also, having borne the Element of Honesty for upwards of a thousand years, she had developed something of a sixth sense for deception. After all, one did not simply rule a kingdom for thousands of years without hearing a few lies, and it had been a very, very long time indeed since anything had successfully lied to Princess Celestia.

“You… You mean that you know nothing about ponies?” Celestia asked as her blazing eyes faded back to normal.

"Well, excluding the things that Twilight Sparkle just told me a few minutes ago, no,” Max said, his fear giving way to confusion, a transition that was facilitated by the princess’s diminished intimidation factor.

“Then how did you find this planet?” Celestia asked, her voice containing its own odd mix of confusion and suspicion.

“Like I said, we found out this planet was here totally by accident,” Max said. His tone of voice and posture was gradually becoming less anxious as Celestia seemed less bent on killing him.

He continued, “Based on what Twilight has told me, you won’t find it hard to believe that there’s another planet capable of sustaining life in this solar system, one that you can’t see because it’s on the other side of the sun. That is where I come from. Twilight also said you were able to see the vessel that I used to get here. My kind has sent many similar space vessels out to explore the solar system, and one was tasked to take pictures of the inner system. It showed this world, in a place all our theories said was impossible. Closer examination of the readings suggested it was a living world. Obviously, we wanted to explore it first hand, and that is my mission.”

Second after tense second ticked away as Celestia processed Max’s explanation. Four ponies and one human anxiously awaited her next move. Finally, Celestia asked, “Are there more of you coming?”

“No,” Max answered quickly. “I came here all by myself, and I haven’t had contact with home for weeks.”

“And your sole intention is to learn what you can about this world,” Celestia said for clarification.

“That is correct. Interaction with any civilization I found here was a possibility that was planned for, but you, um…” Max paused, trying to come up with a diplomatic way to describe his apprehension earlier that day. “Happened upon my landing site–” he said after a moment. “–Before I was prepared.” 

The room was quiet once again as Celestia pondered what she’d heard. She closed her eyes in contemplation, and suspense dripped from each second of silence, since the fate of a human and two ponies would likely be sealed for better or worse with the Princess’s next sentence.

At long last, Celestia opened her eyes and regarded Max with something other than hostility. “Very well, Maxwell O’Hara,” she said, her tone lighter than it had been in days. “You will have to forgive the less-than-ideal circumstances under which you were initially met. They were simply precautions.”

Smiling for the first time in hours, Max replied, “I understand, Princess. It’s not every day an alien drops out of the sky and lands in the middle of your kingdom. I believe many of the people back home might have done worse had something like this happened to them unexpectedly.”

Celestia actually managed a small, sheepish chuckle, also the first gesture she’d made of its kind in days, before Max spoke again.

“Now, I explained this to Twilight before, but where I come from, it’s really not acceptable to be in the presence of others in this state of undress.” Max paused to gesture to his pants that were still coiled around one ankle. “Before I go anywhere, could I have a moment to finish putting my pants on?”

This seemed like a very strange request to Celestia, and she raised a questioning eyebrow and said, “What do you mean by–” The Princess stopped midsentence, however, when Twilight stood up on her hind legs to whisper a quick explanation of the request in her ear.

“Oh,” Celestia said when Twilight finished, and an almost imperceptible blush crept its way onto her face. “Very well then… We’ll go discuss some, uh… things, and be back momentarily to release you. Come along everypony.” With that, Celestia swiftly turned and left the dungeon, followed by her bodyguard, Luna, Shining Armor, and lastly Twilight, who gave Max a small, unsure smile and a shrug as she filed out.

Breathing a heavy, final sigh of relief, Max stood up, stretched out his muscles again, and finished putting his pants on.



            

With a heavy clang, the large double doors to Celestia’s private study slammed shut, leaving both princesses alone in the room again.

After releasing her telekinetic hold on the doors and slumping down onto the cushion behind her desk, Celestia miserably said to her sister, “I cannot imagine that going any worse than it did.”

“Whatever do you mean to say, dear sister?” Luna asked as she retook her position from earlier. “The humans apparently still remember nothing, and this one’s intentions appear to be peaceful.”

“That’s not what I mean, Luna,” Celestia replied coldly, staring at a spot on her desk.

Luna regarded her sister with a concerned expression. “Then what is so bad about what just happened?”

“Perhaps it could be we sent an army to arrest a single, innocent being?” Celestia suggested, irritation rising in her voice. Before Luna could say anything, the elder princess continued, “Or maybe that we blindfolded it, robbed it, and cast it into the dungeon?” she said with increasing anger. “Or that the only pony to give it a chance to prove itself had to disobey my direct orders while I simply paced in my room, fretting about everything and unable to make a decision? Does this sound like how a princess should act to you?”

 “Celestia, there’s nothing to be upset about,” Luna said calmly. “Like the human said, this is no commonplace occurrence. How else could a leader be expected to act when suddenly and unexpectedly confronted with an alien being, especially given the unwritten history that we have with beings who drop out of space like this?”

“Oh, I don’t know, perhaps like Twilight did?” Celestia mumbled. “Perhaps I could have not let my fears control me and try to extend a hoof of friendship instead of sending three entire companies of the royal guard to arrest a being that means nopony any harm?”

“Twilight doesn’t know everything you do. She didn’t have anything to be afraid of. You, on the other hoof, had very much to be afraid of.”

Celestia simply sighed sadly, and continued not to look directly at Luna. “Well, she should have known. I should have told Twilight and all the others on that first day. They should have known what happened to the humans the last time they dropped out of the sky like this, and why I expected them to be hell-bent on revenge if we ever saw them again. I should have told everypony long before now; especially you, Luna. I should have told you a thousand years ago. You deserved more than anyone else to know. I’m sorry it’s taken something so dire for me to come out with the truth.”

“There is no need to apologize, dear sister,” Luna chided. “It was not an easy tale to hear, and I feel that, had you told me before my little pilgrimage to the moon, I would not have been mature enough to have taken it as well as I did a few days ago. And I’m sure it was no easy tale to tell, either.”

Celestia stood from her desk, and slowly walked to tall window at the back of the room. From there she stared whimsically out at the waning sunlight of the late afternoon sky. Unsure of what to do in the gaping silence, Luna got up as well and stood quietly next to her older sister. After a few minutes, Celestia finally spoke.

“Do you remember our mother?” she asked quietly.

“Very vaguely,” Luna responded. “Like you said, I was but an infant when she and Father sacrificed themselves in their plight. I’m afraid the only memories I have of her are just images and feelings, really. And why ask me? Surely you remember her better than I.”

“I’m afraid not, Luna,” Celestia replied sadly. “Ruling the kingdom alone for one thousand years was rather hard on my memory, and regrettably all I remember of either parent is the day we lost them, and the story they asked me to pass on to you when the time was right. Please, Luna, tell me what you can recall.”
“I remember more of Mother than Father,” Luna said wistfully. “She was …” Luna had to pause while she searched for the correct word. “She was radiant. Her mane, wings, and tail shone like the sun, and she always had a loving and gentle smile that was just as bright as the rest of her.”

“And what do you remember of Father then?”

“He was a bit darker, and a bit more mysterious,” Luna answered. “But he was kind and compassionate whenever he could afford to be.”

“How do you think they would have handled today?” Celestia asked. Her voice was barely louder than a whisper.

“I don’t know. You said they knew humans had the capacity for harmony, which is why the Elements didn’t destroy all of them outright, but this one is nothing like the humans you talked about. I think they might have something other than vengeance on their minds, and deserve a chance to prove it.” Luna smirked slightly before adding, “Besides, nearly two hundred thousand years of an existence without a spark of magic or an inkling of your true origins makes my incarceration on the moon sound like a slap on the wrist.”

“Yes it does Luna,” Celestia said glumly, the humor not cheering her up in the slightest. “Their crimes and the actions of Nightmare Moon compare in the same manner.”

After seeing her attempt at a self-deprecating joke fall flat, Luna thought hard on something else she could say to make her sister stop sulking. Finally she said, “Celestia, look at the bright side. Had you told Twilight everything about the humans before now, she might not have had to courage to go down there and talk to him.”

Celestia sighed in defeat. “I suppose you’re correct again, Luna. I just wish I could have done something that didn’t require my prized student to lose faith in me to do what she did.”

“A reputation with a friend can be repaired easier than relations with another race,” Luna said. “If you handle the rest of this entire fiasco in a better manner, I think Twilight’s opinion of you will return to its lofty position soon enough.”

“And how do I go about doing that?” Celestia asked. She wasn’t being sarcastic or condescending to Luna; she really valued her sister’s input on the matter. Celestia had noted over the course of the past few days that the younger princess had managed to stay relatively calm and level-headed, and as Celestia felt the sequence of events drive her closer and closer to the edge of panic she found herself relying on Luna’s counsel more and more.

“Well, releasing the human, returning his belongings, and returning him to his vessel were excellent starts,” Luna said, her words being about a third jest and two-thirds serious. “And sparing Twilight and her brother punishment for the time being was a good move. And I dare say appointing a pony as bright as Twilight to be Equestria’s representative while he’s here was a stroke of genius.”

“I get it, Luna,” Celestia interjected tiredly. “Please stop trying to cheer me up and just answer the question.”

Luna sighed in defeat, and said in an all-serious manner, “Celestia, remember what you told me, and what this human told you. The humans have no memory of this world or what happened all those years ago. To them, none of it ever happened. Perhaps it’s time we start acting as if it never happened as well.”

“It’s not that simple, Luna. You don’t know what it looked like, what it felt like, watching your mother and father just disappear in a brilliant flash of light, and knowing that everything you loved and hated in the world is just gone. And then, thousands of years later, realizing that’s all you remember about them.” A solitary tear ran down Celestia’s cheek, only to be wiped away tenderly by Luna’s hoof.

“I know it’s different for you,” Luna said quietly. “I know that I didn’t have the kind of connection that you did with Mother and Father. To me they’re just fuzzy memories. But now, the fate of both worlds that revolve around your namesake relies on you. The past doesn’t define the future, Celestia. You do.”

For a moment, Celestia said nothing. She continued to gaze out at the sky while thinking hard Luna’s words. After a few seconds of contemplation, she said, “Luna, there must be something in our moon dust. One thousand years ago, I was the wise one.”

Luna giggled at the compliment in disguise, and said, “A thousand years of thinking can do wonders for a pony. You ought to try it sometime.” With that, the Princess of the Night turned and quietly left her sister’s study, closing the door softly behind her.

Once she was alone, Celestia allowed herself the first genuine smile she’d experienced in days, and muttered to herself, “There are days when I wish I could, Luna.”






Earlier that day, when he saw Lyra walk towards the little village on the edge of the forest, Max had been under the impression that he had maxed out the weird factor for the day. However, the rest of the day had proved him woefully mistaken and literally taken the weird factor to astronomical levels.

In the span of a little over twenty-four hours, he had become the first human to set foot on another terrestrial planet, met and spoke with a sapient creature from the planet that just happened to be a magical unicorn, watched that unicorn nonchalantly toss multiple scientific principles out the window, managed to get himself arrested by an army of ponies that blindfolded, robbed and stripped him before throwing him in a dungeon, and somehow managed to negotiate his release with a four-legged goddess. The last thing on the list took much less effort than Max had expected, given the situation, but he was willing to hold off on questioning his quick release for the moment.

Now, Max was adding a yet another new object to the list of things he never would have considered possible, but ended up happening within forty-eight hours of touchdown. Princess Celestia had seen it fit to release him from prison as soon as he was dressed, and allowed a chariot to take him back to his landing site. He was riding in a flying, golden chariot pulled by two pegasi, (fully clothed, this time) accompanied by the unicorn Twilight Sparkle. The sun was just beginning to set, and according to Twilight, that meant that the Princess was hard at work making it happen.

Looking out at the sunset, Max just had to let out a sigh. It had been one hell of a day.

“It’s a nice sunset tonight,” Twilight said. She was sitting on the opposite side of the chariot, which was designed to hold four ponies, which was roughly equivalent to one pony and one human. “Sometimes the Princess will make these miniscule adjustments to where the sun appears in the sky when she’s ending a day, and make some spectacular vistas.”

“No kidding,” Max replied, and said nothing more, allowing the silence between him and the unicorn sitting across from him to return.

“Max?” asked Twilight after a few seconds, breaking the silence. “Is… um, is everything alright?”

“Yes, yes. I’m fine.” Max said, snapping out of his thoughts. “It’s just been a bit of a strange day for me is all. But, considering where I was an hour ago, everything is actually pretty good.”

“Heh, yeah, I guess so,” Twilight said and laughed nervously.

“Please, Twilight, don’t feel bad about anything. To be honest, the only part that surprised me was having all my clothes taken away. Where I come from, we’ve been making up stories about what would happen when humans finally met a civilization from another planet for more than a hundred years now, and a lot of those stories ended much worse than today did.”
       
        “So is that what you call yourselves?” Twilight asked. “Humans?”

“Yes, but there are a few different terms we use. Mankind, Humanity, the human race, and people are a few.”

“So if not all the stories went well, what happened?”

“Well, the in worst stories, we didn’t leave home at all; civilizations from other planets come to our planet and try to colonize, enslave, or just destroy us.”

“That sounds awful!” Twilight exclaimed.

“Yeah, most stories like that were pretty bad,” Max said with chuckle. “But there are plenty of other stories where we leave our home planet and found other places, kind of like what I’m doing now.”

“And how do those stories go?” Twilight inquired.

“Most of them go pretty well. In some of the better stories we find other civilizations that are more or less like ours, communicate with them, and establish friendly relationships. But a lot of stories go further, and humans find many other civilizations. We get along with some, others not so well. But the best stories are about the grand adventures of whoever is brave enough to go out and explore the universe. We call those stories science-fiction.”

“Those kinds of stories sound exciting!” Twilight said. If humans managed to combine her two favorite things in the world, science with reading, maybe they weren’t so bad after all. “Have you read all of these stories?”

Max actually laughed at the question. “No, not even close. There are thousands of stories out there, and some are so long and complicated that they take dozens of books to tell. And then someone else likes the story so much that they write their own stories to go with the original one, so you could have hundreds of little stories branching off of the first one. Eventually, some people create entire fictional worlds.”

“It sounds like you humans tell a lot of stories,” Twilight mused.

“Humans have been telling stories for as long as anyone can remember,” Max responded. Then remembering a mental note he made earlier regarding science fiction in pony culture, he asked, “You have fictional stories like that here too, right? You know, stories about you meeting life from other planets?”

“Well, I think so,” Twilight said, tapping her chin with a hoof thoughtfully. “But there aren’t enough stories like that to name a whole sub-genre after it. In fact, I can only think of one story like that off the top of my head. You make it sound like humans take it seriously.”

“We really do,” Max said and chuckled. “Some people take it a little too seriously. Humans have gotten really good at coming up with stories, and you’d be surprised how many people prefer the worlds in their books over the real world.”

“Actually, I used to be like that myself,” Twilight said, ignoring Max’s inquisitive expression.

“What do you mean by that?” Max asked.

“Well, I told you I was from Ponyville, right?” she said, and Max nodded. “Well, I wasn’t born there. I was actually born in Canterlot, the city where we just were. And I’m Princess Celestia’s personal student, so I spent a lot of time studying, reading, and learning everything I could about magic. It got to the point where I was spending so much time studying that I never spent time with other ponies.”

“Hmph,” Max chuckled. “Sounds like my first two years of college.”

“College?” Twilight repeated with curiosity.

“It’s our general term for additional, specialized education for a specific career,” Max explained. “Humans take their education very seriously, and I had to go through some especially rigorous education to be qualified for this mission.”

“Oh, that sounds kind of like what I’m doing right now,” Twilight said thoughtfully. “Except I got a bit too involved in my studies while I lived in Canterlot, so the Princess sent me to live in Ponyville where I could make some friends.”

“You were kicked out of school for being TOO studious?” Max said incredulously.

“What? No, no. It’s nothing like that,” Twilight clarified. “I’m continuing my studies of magic and other things in Ponyville. In fact, now I’m studying the most powerful kind of magic.”

Max raised an eyebrow questioningly. They already control the weather AND planet’s rotation! What on Earth could possibly be more powerful than that? he thought nervously, and then reminded himself that he was not ‘on Earth,’ and in fact was as far from Earth as anyone had ever been. “And what exactly is the most powerful kind of magic?” he asked, almost scared of what Twilight would say.

“It’s the magic of friendship,” Twilight answered proudly.

For a second, Max thought he’d misheard the unicorn due to the wind. But even though they were in an open chariot flying at least a hundred feet above the ground at what Max guessed to be somewhere between thirty-five and forty miles per hour, there was very little wind noise. Before, Max had decided that this was simply some kind of magic that hadn’t been explained to him yet, an assumption he’d been applying to almost everything he’d seen today that should have been impossible, like the flying chariot itself.

“Sorry; did you say the magic of friendship?” Max said, leaning towards Twilight slightly as if getting closer would make her say something that made sense.

“Yes I did,” Twilight said just as proudly as before.

First it’s weather control and telekinesis, then planetary rotation and lunar orbits, and now this? Max thought to himself. The first four uses of magic at least were at least concrete functions that Max could imagine, but something as abstract as friendship requiring magic was something of a stretch. “Is everything here powered by some sort of magic?” Max asked.

“Pretty much,” Twilight answered plainly.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve been able to figure this out by now, but on my planet we don’t have any magic, so this is all kind of new to me.”

“Oh, we knew that before you even landed,”Twilight said casually.

“How did you–” Max began to ask incredulously, but caught himself. “Wait, don’t tell me…magic,” he deadpanned.

“Max, I think you’re starting to get it,” Twilight responded happily.

“I highly doubt it,” Max mumbled to himself.

Although it had escaped Max’s notice, the chariot had been flying over the forest for quite some time, and as soon as those last words left his mouth, Twilight pointed excitedly to something behind him with a hoof.

“Look, we’re here!” she said, and Max twisted around to look where she was pointing. Sure enough, he saw the clearing in the forest and the Birdie parked exactly where he’d left it earlier that day. The sun was just starting to dip below the tree line, and they were casting their elongated shadows on the spacecraft.

“What do you call that thing again?” Twilight asked as the pegasi pulling the chariot began to descend.

“It has a lot of names, but for simplicity’s sake, you can just call it a space ship,” said Max.

“No way, that’s the name we made up for it!” Twilight exclaimed.

“You don’t say…” Max deadpanned again.

By now, the chariot was getting ready to land, and Max grabbed onto the sides to brace for the landing. Surprisingly, the touchdown was very smooth, and the pegasi were flying so slowly that they were able stop in just a few yards. When they were completely stopped, Max grabbed his backpack and gun belt, which had been lying on the floor of the chariot next to his feet during the flight, and hopped out. As soon as he was on the ground, he turned back to Twilight.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea for me to move this thing to Ponyville? It’s big, loud, and can be kind of frightening to someone who hasn’t seen it or anything like it before.”

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Twilight said reassuringly. “Right now, guards are going door to door telling everypony in town what’s going on tomorrow, and as long as you’re on time, Pegasus guards will escort you in. We’ll even mark a place for you to land with flashing arrows and everything.”

“Okay…” Max said, still a little hesitant about taking the Birdie and parking in plain view of hundreds of ponies.

“What’s wrong?” Twilight asked, her voice laced with concern.

“Nothing’s wrong, really,” Max replied, scratching the back of his neck nervously. “It’s just that this is all moving pretty fast compared to what I expected. I planned on just hanging back and, well, observing until I knew how to talk to you and was sure I wouldn’t scare anyone. I’d planned to spend days, even weeks doing that, just to be cautious, but things didn’t exactly go as planned.” Max shrugged with the last sentence, emphasizing his point.
       
        “Hey, everything worked out in the end, right?” Twilight told him optimistically.
       
        There are two hundred million miles and a sun between me and home, Max thought. This is nowhere near the end.

He almost said his last thought out loud, but the words caught in his throat. Max just couldn’t bring himself to say anything contrary to Twilight’s infectiously sunny attitude. The unicorn’s bright smile and wide lavender eyes weren’t quite as potent as Lyra’s lethal pouting, but they still didn’t leave much room for argument.
       
        “Yeah, I guess they did,” Max conceded. “And tomorrow, I believe some proper introductions are finally in order.”
       
        “I’m looking forward to it!” Twilight said excitedly. “Just don’t be late.”
       
        “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Max said, and then let out a lengthy yawn. “Speaking of dreaming, it’s been one wild day for me.”
       
        “I know the feeling,” Twilight said, and then yawned herself. She wouldn’t tell Max, but she hadn’t exactly been sleeping well ever since his space ship appeared in the sky.
       
        “Well, Twilight, Sparkle, I will see you tomorrow morning,” Max said with a tone of finality. He swung his backpack over one shoulder, turned around, and walked towards the Birdie. As he approached the ramp that led up to the hatch, he turned around and waved. Twilight returned the gesture, and as soon as she put her hoof down, the pegasi pulling the now-almost empty chariot began to gallop away. As they took off, Twilight had to strain her eyes in the dimming light to see Max as he walked up the ramp and disappeared into the hatch.
       
        When she could no longer see the human or his vessel, the exhausted unicorn slumped into her seat tiredly. “How long until we reach Ponyville?” she called out to the guards pulling the chariot.
       
        “About half an hour, Miss Sparkle,” one called over his shoulder. “We’ll be going quite a bit faster without all that extra weight.”
       
        The prospect of even just a thirty-minute snooze was just too tantalizing to resist for a pony who had gone days without a proper night’s sleep. Twilight allowed her eyes to drift closed and her head tilt downwards, and spent the next half-hour in a restful state that wasn’t quite sleep, but was definitely a far cry from being fully awake. In this state, the part of her mind that kept track of time was powered down, and it felt as if only a few minutes passed before Twilight was pulled out of her trance by the gentle jolting of        the chariot wheels touching the ground.
       
        “Here we are, Miss; Golden Oaks Library,” said one of the guards.
       
        Twilight yawned, stretched, and carefully clambered out of the chariot and on the ground. “Thank you, gentlemen,” she said dreamily, and after nodding politely, the two guards galloped off, pulling their chariot back into the air. While she was snoozing, the sky had completely darkened, making way for a clear, crisp spring night. Twilight turned and watched as the chariot took off again and soared into the sky, headed for Canterlot. When she could no longer distinguish it from the multitude of twinkling stars, she turned and lazily meandered back towards her front door. Light coming from the windows illuminated the surrounding ground with rectangular patches of light, and the faint sound of clanking dishes and running water could be heard coming from inside.
       
        When Twilight pushed the door open and stepped inside, she a familiar “Whooo!” as Owlowiscious swooped down from his perch on a tall bookshelf to greet her. She extended a leg for the bird to land on and nuzzled him affectionately.
       
        “I missed you too, Owlowiscious,” she said, and the owl flew back up to his perch just as a particular baby dragon came bounding out of the kitchen.
       
        “Twilight! You’re back!” Spike said happily, and wrapped his arms around Twilight’s foreleg and immediately began pelting her with questions. “How did your research go? What were you researching? What happened with the stars? What are all the guards for? What did they mean when they said–”
       
        Twilight put a hoof over Spike’s mouth, and hugged him back. “Everything is fine, Spike, and something incredible has happened.” She paused to yawn again, and said, “But I’ll explain everything tomorrow morning. I am positively exhausted right now.”
       
        “Oh, sorry,” Spike, said, releasing Twilight’s leg and backing up a step. “Do you at least want to hear what happened while you were out?”
       
        Twilight highly doubted that anything more interesting or noteworthy had occurred in Ponyville than what had happened in Canterlot, but she decided to humor her faithful assistant. “Of course I would, Spike,” she said kindly, but before the baby dragon could say anything, she added, “On the way to bed.” Twilight gestured with a hoof to the stairwell, and slowly began to trudge in its direction.
       
        Spike quickly caught up with her and began to relate the events of the past few days. “You remember that research session you arranged with Lyra last week?” he asked, and Twilight nodded silently. “Well, she came by after you left, and she wanted to know about that author spell you found a few weeks ago.”
       
        Twilight nodded again, this time adding on a contemplative “Mm-Hmm” as she dragged herself up the stairs. She vaguely remembered coming across that particular spell and casually mentioning it to Lyra in passing a few days later.
       
        “I got the book and loaned it out to her,” Spike continued. “And the next day she came back with these weird drawings of some strange image that the spell created.”
       
        Twilight had just reached the top stair when finished the last sentence, and despite her sleep deprivation, she found her interests piqued by her assistant’s last statement. Whatever Spike was talking about was more likely than not connected somehow to reason Lyra had gone off into the forest the previous night, and that was something Twilight had been dying to know ever since Max brought up her name. She turned around to face Spike and said, “What strange image?”
       
        Spike, who was still a few stairs behind her, suddenly found himself looking up at a unicorn that, thanks to the steps between them, appeared twice as tall as she normally did, and her sleep-deprived, slightly bloodshot eyes stared down at him questioningly. It was not a pretty sight “Heh, maybe you really should be getting to bed, Twilight,” he said nervously. “You don’t look so good.”
       
        “Spike, this could be important,” Twilight said sternly. “What happened with Lyra?”
               
The baby dragon hopped up the last few stairs to level himself with Twilight and remove some of the intimidation, and said, “She said the spell showed her something really weird that wasn’t a pony when she played an old family tune, and we both looked for hours, but we couldn’t find anything like her drawings in the library.”
       
        “Did she leave any of the drawings here?” Twilight enquired, suddenly very awake and very interested in what Spike had to say.
       
        “No, but I can tell you sort of what they looked like,” Spike offered. Twilight’s sudden change in demeanor had him somewhat worried, and very curious as to why exactly she was so keen on knowing what Lyra had been looking for.
       
        “Then what did they look like?” Twilight pressed on, getting a little anxious.
       
        “It was some weird kind of animal,” Spike said thoughtfully, trying to recreate the images in his head. “It was kind of tall and skinny with only two legs, but it also had arms and these weird claw-type finger things, but without the claws. The head was kind of small too.”
       
        Twilight could only stare at the baby dragon in bewilderment. Spike had just described the basic shape of a human, and the only human she’d ever seen had just dropped out of the sky the just over twenty-four hours prior. “When was this?” she asked.
       
        “This was all two, maybe three days ago. Twilight, are you sure everything’s okay? You look really worried about all this.” Spikes eyes widened in worry and he asked, “Lyra isn’t in any trouble, is she?”
       
        Twilight sighed, allowing her drowsiness to overtake her once again. Whatever was going on with Lyra merited serious investigation, but if she or Spike was going to get any sleep tonight, this would have to wait until morning. “No, Spike. She’s fine, and I am too. I’ve just been staying up late researching every night for the past few nights, and I really need some proper sleep.”

Twilight turned and headed for her bedroom, but before she reached the door, she felt a scaly pair of arms encircle one of her forelegs again. She looked down so see Spike hugging her again.

The tiny dragon looked up at her, his eyes full of worry. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. “You can tell me whatever’s going on.”

When Twilight saw how concerned Spike was for her, her heart almost melted. She reached up with her other foreleg to pat him on the head tenderly. “I’m fine, Spike. And soon there won’t be any explaining to do. You’ll see everything tomorrow morning, I promise.”

Spike finally seemed satisfied with the answer, and let go of Twilight. They entered the bedroom silently, and entered their respective sleeping arrangements. Spike crawled into his basket and curled up under the blanket, and Twilight flopped down on the comforting, familiar sheets of her bed. Once she was properly snuggled up with all of her blankets and pillows, she called out softly, “Goodnight, Spike.”

“Goodnight, Twilight,” he called back, and promptly began snoring.

Twilight had to suppress a giggle at Spike knocking himself out so quickly, but once she was sure he was totally asleep, darker thoughts began to creep into her mind. If Lyra had somehow stumbled upon something mentioning humans, or at least detailing what they looked like before he even set foot on Equestrian soil, then there was certainly more to know about them then everything she currently knew. And that line of though all but confirmed her brother’s suspicion that Celestia knew more than she was letting on. But what could be so terrible that a ruler as open and caring to her subjects as Celestia would keep secrets from them? The better question was, why wouldn’t Celestia tell everything to the select few that she chose to inform about Max’s arrival in the first place?

By now, Twilight could see no reasonable doubt that this wasn’t the first time a human had set foot in Equestria. But as her exhaustion finally pulled her into a deep sleep, three questions echoed throughout her consciousness. When were they here? Why did they leave? Why don’t they remember?




> 9. Splashdown
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	

The days when Twilight would wake up before her alarm were few and far between, but thanks to the erratic sleeping schedule she’d been forced to follow for the last few days, she found her eyes flickering open just a few minutes before her alarm clock was set to go off. Hardly moving, she watched the extra seconds tick away, and when the clock finally did begin to ring, a lavender hoof shot out from under the covers and silenced the clatter before it could last more than a second.

Because Twilight had managed to turn in at a reasonable hour after returning from Canterlot and slept in her own bed for the first time in a very long time, she had managed to fall into a deep and heavy sleep that she so desperately needed. That meant, even with all the questions bouncing around inside her head from the hectic events of the previous day, the unicorn actually felt well-rested for once and did not find the prospect of getting up to be as arduous as she normally would.

When Twilight sat up in her bed and surveyed the familiar surroundings of her bedroom, she saw Spike still tightly wrapped in his blanket and still snoring contentedly from his small basket bed in the corner, and decided he would prove slightly more resistant to waking up than she had been.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Twilight vaguely recalled that something important was going to happen today, and as she swung her legs off the bed and sat on the edge facing the window, she racked her brain to recall whatever it was that she had apparently been too tired to write down on a checklist or schedule before going to bed. When the realization struck her, it struck with such force that the poor unicorn was nearly knocked back into her bed.

“Holy horsefeathers!” she exclaimed out loud. “Max is coming TODAY, and I haven’t said a word to my friends!”

Spike snorted and turned over before being grabbed in a cloud of Twilight’s violet magic and violently yanked out of bed. “What’s – WHOA!” he yelled as Twilight magically threw him onto her back and galloped out of the bedroom and down the stairs. “Wh-what’s g-g-oing on?!” sputtered the dragon as he bounced up and down on Twilgiht’s back as she bounded down the library stairs.

“Max is landing in Ponyville TODAY!” Twilight exclaimed, making a beeline straight across the main floor of the library with her assistant in tow. “And I have to go tell my friends everything that’s going on before he gets here!”

Spike had just enough time to utter “Who’s Max?” before Twilight magically threw open her front door, prepared to flat-out gallop to each and every one of her friends’ houses.

Instead, she stopped in her tracks before even setting a hoof outside of the library. Standing there in her doorway were five very colorful, familiar, and slightly startled mares. Applejack stood at the head of the group with one hoof raised in the air, as if she were about to knock on the door that was suddenly no longer closed.

“Oh, uh, hi there, Twilight,” said the orange farm pony, putting her hoof back on the ground.

“Hi, everypony,” Twilight responded, her eyes darting nervously back and forth between each of her friends. “I was just, uh, coming to see all of you about some…um, things.”

Now it was Rarity’s turn to speak up. “Yes, well, yesterday evening, royal guards were going around Ponyville with some very curious news, and the gentle-colt that stopped by my boutique let slip that you would be back this morning, so–”

Rarity was very suddenly cut off by Pinkie Pie, who jumped up, and landed directly in front of Twilight’s face, and said, “So we all decided to get up super-dee-duper early and head to the library as early as possible to see if you were really back and if you weren't we’d just go home and wait for you to get back but if you were we’d throw you a Welcome-back-to-Ponyville-and-we-hope-the-aliens-won’t-take-over-the-world party!”

“Hold yer horses there, Pinks,” said Applejack calmly, firmly nudging Pinkie back so Twilight could have some breathing room. “We really came over to see what all went on while you were in Canterlot. And with what those guards were sayin’ last night, we figured there might be a few things we oughtta know.”

Twilight sighed with relief before gently setting down Spike, who had been suspended in violet magic ever since he woke up. It looked as if she wouldn't have to go galloping all over town to tell her friends what happened.

“You’re right, Applejack,” she responded. “There’s a lot I need to tell all of you before something really big happens today.” Twilight opened the door a little wider and stepped to the side, inviting all of her friends inside.

Each of the five mares gratefully and quietly filed in, except for Pinkie, who bounced in happily and emitted some strange springy squeak with each bounce.

Twilight closed the door softly and turned around to face her friends. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s what happ–”

“Oh, before you start darling,” Rarity interrupted her. “You've an awful bed-mane. Let me fix that for you,” she said, leading Twilight to a nearby sofa and sitting down next to her and magically summoning a brush from the upstairs bedroom. The rest of the ponies and the dragon in the room all gathered around the sofa and looked at their frizzy-maned friend expectantly.

And so with Rarity working on her mane, Twilight related the events of the past three days as completely and accurately as she could, going into as much detail as she could remember. She began with the observations that she made at the observatory with Doctor Whooves, and then went through the nights she spent staring through a telescope at a shape in the sky. The last part of her tale Twilight managed without interruption was the excursion to Max’s landing site the previous day.

“Did you actually see the alien?” Fluttershy asked timidly.

“Yeah, I did,” Twilight answered her.

“What did it look like?” Fluttershy asked, suddenly very interested in the new creature.

“Um, he was really tall,” Twilight said thoughtfully. “He was almost as tall as Princess Celestia, but he was bipedal, kind of like a Minotaur, but without the horns and the lower half of a goat. He wasn’t as big as Iron Will, but he had arms and hands and fingers and everything.”

“So it wasn’t green or scaly or anything?” Rainbow asked.

“No, nothing like that,” Twilight answered. “He didn’t have much of a coat, either. Except for the top of his head he was pretty much all pale-tan-ish skin.”

“Was it a nice alien, or a scary one?” Fluttershy inquired, and at the thought of a scary alien in Equestria, her face retracted into her pink mane in a manner not unlike how a tortoise’s head would disappear into its shell.

 “Don’t worry, Fluttershy,” Twilight reassured her. “He’s really nice and considerate. I even talked with him for a while. He told me-”

“Hold on,” interjected Rainbow. “If the Princess sent three companies of armed guards to arrest the thing on sight, how in Equestria did you get to talk to it?”

“Well, after he was taken back to Canterlot and thrown into the dungeon, I kind of, um, broke in.”

All five other ponies in the room, including Spike, stared at Twilight with mouths agape.

“So the princess throws an alien into a maximum security dungeon and you bust in just to talk to it?” Rainbow repeated disbelievingly. When Twilight timidly nodded, all of her friends just stared at her incredulously. Even Rarity halted her grooming to and looked at Twilight in disbelief.

“That’s almost as nutty as Spike chasing after bunch of giant scary dragons after the migration,” Rainbow deadpanned, and then after raising an eyebrow in Spike’s direction, she added, “Almost.”

“Now, Rainbow, there’s no need to be rude,” Rarity chided, resuming her work on Twilight’s mane. “Twilight is right here in front of us, safe and sound. I’m sure everything turned out alright.”

“Rarity’s right,” said Applejack. “If Twi’s here, alive and well, she musta known what she was doin’.” After a brief pause, the farmer asked, “Ya did know what you were doin’, right Twi?”

“More or less,” Twilight answered, conspicuously avoiding eye contact with her friends.

“Well, which one was it?” Rainbow prodded. “More or less?”

“Less,” the unicorn admitted quietly, and quickly added, “But he wasn’t dangerous at all. He told me that he’s an explorer from another planet, and even told me where he’s from.”

Pinkie Pie saw an opportunity so mention parties, and did not hesitate to do so. “So where is he from? Do they have parties there? Can we throw him a party? Can it be a ‘Welcome-to-Equestria-and-we’re-happy-you’re-not-here-to-take-over-the-world’ party?”

“Maybe later, Pinkie,” Twilight said. “Right now we've got more important things to do. Now, the guards all told you about a large flying machine landing near Ponyville today, right?”

“Yeah, and they said it would be carrying some kind of creature on it that’s new to Equestria,” Applejack added. “Most ponies think it’s from some faraway land or something like that, but we all kinda got the hint that all this had something to do with everything that went on with the Princess a few days ago.”

“You’re right, AJ,” Twilight conceded. “The flying machine landing in Ponyville today is going to be carrying that magic-less being from outer space. But like I said, I’ve already met him and I know he’s as friendly as an alien can be.”

“Well, that really is a relief to hear,” Rarity said, putting down the brush. “But what are we to do with the Elements now?”

“I guess we don’t need them anymore,” Twilight answered happily. “I’ll just collect them all later and return them to the Princess when I can. Speaking of the Princess, she gave me a very special job for today.”

At this, Fluttershy poked her head out of her mane in curiosity. “And what is that special job, Twilight?”

“We are to be Max’s guides to Equestria!” Twilight announced proudly.

All five of the other ponies in the room responded in unison, “Who?”

“That’s his name,” Twilight said flatly. “The alien’s name is Max.”

“That’s kind of a boring name for an alien, don’t you think?” Rainbow deadpanned.

“It’s not his full name, and he’ll tell me his full name when he gets here today,” Twilight clarified. “And speaking of which, we need to be prepared to give him a proper welcome when he lands his space ship.

“Hell-oooooooo?”Pinkie interjected again.“That’s when my Welcome-to-Equestria-and-we’re-glad-you’re-not-here-to-take-over-the-planet-and-enslave-us-all’ party comes into play!”

“Pinkie, dear,” Rarity said with exasperation in her tone. “I hasten to remind you that the general populace is not yet aware of our guest’s origins, and might not find such an aptly-themed party very reassuring.”

Finally realizing she wouldn't get to throw a party for a friendly alien before the day was out, Pinkie visibly and audibly deflated. “Oh, alright,” she said dejectedly with drooping ears.

“Don’t worry Pinkie,” Twilight told her. “We’ll throw him some kind of party before he leaves.”

At this, the pink party pony perked up immediately and said cheerfully, “Okie-dokie-lokie.”     

“Glad we got all that cleared up,”Applejack said with finality, and then asked, “So what are we supposed to do with this ‘Max’ feller when he shows up?”

“According to Princess Celestia,” Twilight responded. “We need to show Max the best of Equestria.”

“Well that’s easy,” Applejack said proudly. “Ah can just bring a few Sweet Apple Acres treats for him to munch on. Granny Smith always said the best way to any critter’s heart is through its stomach, and there ain't any apples in Equestria better than the ones we got here.”

All the other ponies in the room voiced their enthusiastic agreement to Applejack’s statements, and when it was quiet, Rainbow Dash spoke up.

“I think we all know who the best flyer in Equestria is,” said the Pegasus with a cocky smirk. “A few of my stunts and a quick sonic rainboom would be sure to blow his socks off.”

“As much as Ah hate to stroke Rainbow’s ego, she’s got a point,” Applejack said and nodded her agreement.

“Does he even wear socks?” Pinkie asked thoughtfully. “Because we say that all the time but I've never seen a pony wear socks, so a sonic rainboom can’t really blow a pony’s socks off because we don’t wear them. But if Max wears socks then Rainbow Dash probably would blow them off with her amazingly awesome sonic rainboom. But if he doesn't wear socks then he’s in the same boat as we are.”

“Actually, Twilight,” Rarity said. “Pinkie raises a valid question. Does this Max character wear anything? You did say he didn’t have a coat like us, and I know without my coat I would feel awfully exposed.”

Twilight actually burst into a fit of giggles in response to Rarity’s question, drawing yet another round of strange looks from her friends.

“What’s so gosh-dern funny, Twi?” Applejack inquired with a raised eyebrow.

“Oh, heh-heh, nothing,” Twilight responded once she got her laughing under control. “It’s just, when Max was taken back to Canterlot, the guards took everything he had on him, and I mean everything.”

“Still not sure where you’re going with this…” Rainbow said bemusedly.

“Sorry, let me explain,” Twilight apologized. “Yes, Rarity, he wears clothes. And he said his kind wears clothes all the time, so when the guards took his clothes…” Twilight trailed off and gave her friends a few seconds to draw their own conclusions.

When Rarity connected the dots, her eyes went wide with understanding. “So what you’re saying is that you spoke with this creature while he was, um, naked?” The fashionista lowered her voice as she said the last word, since it was not only something of a taboo topic, but exactly how taboo of a topic it was could be considered in of itself another taboo.

“Well, um, yes, but I really didn’t have much of a choice,” Twilight said primly. “But he kinda stayed hunched over in the corner of his cell until my brother went and got his clothes for him. It was actually kind of funny now that I think about it.”

“Hold on,” Rainbow said again, holding up a hoof. “Did you just say your brother was in on this?” she asked, and when Twilight nodded, the Pegasus scoffed and said, “You’re both nutty.” Upon a receiving an annoyed glance from Rarity, Rainbow quickly added, “The good kind of nutty. Just like Spikey over there.”

Just as the words left Rainbow’s mouth, Twilight suddenly remembered another pony she believed to be particularly nutty that she needed to have a talk with. “Hey, what time is it?” she asked to no one specifically, and glanced at the clock on a nearby wall. When she saw exactly what time it was, the unicorn drew in a sharp breath of shock.

“What’s the matter now?” Fluttershy asked quietly, her gentle voice laced with concern.

“Nothing, nothing,” Twilight said as he hopped off the couch and made her way to the door. “There’s a certain somepony that I need to have a serious chat with before all this starts.” The door glowed violet briefly as the unicorn exited the library, and quickly shut itself once she was out.

Through the window, the remaining ponies and reptiles in the room watched as Twilight broke into a full gallop, in heading for the center of Ponyville. They all stared at each other for a short while, wondering exactly what had just happened.

After a few seconds of silence, Applejack said, “Uh, Ah guess we’d better follow her.”
 



 
Apparently the appearance of a new creature in a new flying machine was a significant event to denizens of Ponyville, and yet again Twilight found herself bobbing and weaving through groups of ponies that all decided to rise early and witness Max’s arrival. Of course, there were only two ponies out and about that knew this new creature wasn’t from anywhere close by, and one was galloping about the town in search of the other.

Twilight’s first stop had of course been Lyra’s humble abode, and when the dwelling turned out to be empty, Twilight’s next stop had been the musician’s instrument repair shop. Unfortunately, the shop was closed for the day. Finally, the poor unicorn had to resort to simply gallivanting throughout the town and sorting through all of the ponies that were milling about waiting for something exciting to happen, hoping she might find Lyra sometime before Max showed up in his space-ship.

As Twilight darted through the crowd, she had to quickly mumble “Pardon” or “’Scuse me” multiple times after bumping into or nearly bumping into another pony, not unlike she had done just one day prior while on a similar mission in Canterlot Castle. She noticed that a few of the local food merchants decided to capitalize on the crowds being out so early and opened up their stands to the ponies loitering about the town. One such stand was selling various types of candies, gumdrops, lollipops, and any other type of snack that was completely composed of sugar and dyes.

“Hey, Bon-Bon!” Twilight called to the candy-maker when she saw her cream-colored coat and blue-and-pink mane.

“Hey there, Twilight,” Bon-Bon responded after recognizing the voice that called out her name. “You heard about the new creature arriving today, right? Isn't all this awesome?”

“Yeah, yeah, really exciting,” Twilight said hurriedly as she approached the candy stand. “Listen, have you seen Lyra around yet?”

Bon-Bon thought for a moment, and said, “Actually, no, I haven’t. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen much of her lately. I really thought she would turn out for something like this, but I haven’t seen her at all yet today.”

Twilight groaned in frustration. “Ugh. I already checked her house and her music shop. Do you maybe have an idea of where else she could be? You are her best friend after all, right?”

All Bon-Bon could do was shrug. “Sorry, Twilight. I got out here kinda early, and I figured she was just somewhere in the crowd and would stop by when she got hungry, but – hey, there she is!”

Bon-Bon pointed with a hoof to somewhere behind Twilight, and she snapped around to see where the other pony was pointing. Sure enough, a few blocks away, there was a pale green unicorn near the park behind Town where the space ship was supposed to land, attempting to chat it up with a royal guard who was supposed to be keeping curious passerby away from the landing area. Lyra seemed to be greatly enjoying the conversation, but she also seemed to be doing most of the speaking. The guard just stood stoically at his post without moving a muscle, save the occasional irritated twitch at the corner of his mouth.

“Alright. Thanks, Bon-Bon,” Twilight said and hurried off.

“Come back if you want some saltwater taffy!” Bon-Bon called. “They’re on sale today!”

To Bon-Bon’s disappointment, the chatter of the crowd drowned out the offer, and even if Twilight had been able to hear Bon-Bon, she had already stopped listening and was charging single-mindedly towards Lyra and the guard. When she got close enough, she was able to tune into the one-sided conversation.

“So either you’re saying you can’t tell me where this thing came from,” Lyra said smugly with a smirk on her face. “Or you’re not important enough to know.”

The stallion was managing to remain stoic and motionless, but seemed to be taking some effort to do so. “Anything other than what was announced last night is on a need-to-know basis,” he recited monotonously. “Information regarding the visitor will be released to the public as it becomes available.”

        “So you’re saying nobody knows,” Lyra said with mock skepticism.

The guard stallion said nothing.

“Oh, how about this,” Lyra said excitedly. “If I guess it right would you tell me?”

The guard stallion continued to say nothing and stared straight ahead.

“Ok, so what if I guessed that this fella is from-”

Lyra was cut off by Twilight, who exclaimed rather loudly, “Oh, there you are, Lyra! I have been looking all over the place for you!”

As soon as she saw Twilight charging towards her, Lyra’s self-satisfied smirk dissipated and gave way to wide-eyed anxiety. “Oh, um,” she stammered. “Morning, Twilight. You found me, I guess…”

“Yes I did, and now you’re coming with me,” Twilight said forcefully. “There’s something we need to talk about.” She began to walk off, and Lyra knew better than to ignore Twilight Sparkle and nervously trotted off after her. The guard stallion, finally alone again, let out a sigh of relief.

Once she had caught up with Twilight, Lyra asked, “Okay, so what exactly is going on?”

“Oh, I think you know exactly what’s going on,” Twilight responded without breaking her stride or turning to look at the other unicorn. “In fact, I think you know more than just about everypony in town about what’s going on.”

“You don’t mean…”

“Yes, Lyra, we found him too. And I talked to him. And he mentioned you.”

“Ponyfeathers…”

“Don’t worry. Right now I’m the only one who knows you found him. You’re not going to prison or anything. But what you will do is tell me exactly why you were out there and what you said to him. Word. For. Word.” Twilight accentuated the last three words of her demand by stomping on the ground solidly with each word. She wasn’t angry at Lyra, but she was trying to communicate the extreme gravity of the situation.

“Well, you see Twilight, what happened was–”

“Not now, Lyra. Max is going to land any minute. Later though, you will tell me everything.”

Lyra sighed, and said, “Okay, Twilight.”

At this point, the rest of Twilight’s friends finally caught up with her, and most were panting heavily.

“How…does…Twilight…run…so…fast…?” Rarity said between ragged breaths to Spike, who was even more out of breath than she was. His stumpy little baby-dragon legs could only carry him over the ground so fast, after all.

“I…have…no…idea,” Spike told her, leaning forwards with his hands resting on his knees in an attempt to catch his breath.

“Oh, good,” Twilight said and turned around to face her friends. “You guys made it just in time. I think Max is going to land in…”

She trailed off when she heard a distant rumble coming from the direction of the Everfree Forest, almost like thunder, but instead of booming and then quickly dissipating, the rumbling was constant and steady. Every head in the area turned towards the sound, and sure enough, off on the horizon, there was something big coming. It was too far off to see the shape or any of the finer features, but Twilight and Lyra instantly recognized it as the alien craft they had seen in the forest the previous day. Every pony that was watching stood still and silent, watching the mysterious flying machine get closer and louder with each passing second. As it got closer, it’s sleek shape, swept wings, and metallic skin became clearer and distinct. One could also make out the dozen or so Royal pegasi guards flying alongside, staying in a tight V-formation.

The distant rumble graduated into a roar as the spacecraft slowed and passed over the outskirts of the town, but it did so high enough that the noise wasn’t deafening. However, the roar of the spacecraft was powerful enough that everypony in Ponyville, whether they turned out to see the arrival or not, knew that it had arrived. Those who did leave their homes saw an enormous flying ship, easily the sized of two fully-grown dragons, lazily cruising at just a thousand feet over their rooftops

It circled the designated landing spot once before it began to hover directly over the field, and slowly the engine noise began to gradually diminish, and the great behemoth of a machine began to descend. It started quickly, but as it got closer and closer to the ground, it went slower and slower so that when the wheels unfolded from the bottom and made contact with the ground, they touched down gently enough that any sound the impact would have made was muted by the noise of the engines, which was substantially quieter now that they weren’t keeping the ship in the air.

The pegasi guards around the ship continued to hover around it, and the unicorn and Earth pony guards formed a ring around the ship keeping any other ponies from getting too close. For a few minutes, there was silence from the crowd of ponies gathered around the field as the engines continued to simmer down, and with each passing second, the anticipation in the air grew tenfold. After what felt like an eternity, but was in reality only a few short minutes, one of the panels on the side popped open with a mechanical ker-chunk­ and slid aside from its closed position with a the sharp hiss of pneumatic pumps. A ramp extended from the opening, and out stepped Maxwell O’Hara, wearing a blue flight suit adorned with patches to represent his home country, his home country’s space agency, and specially designed to represent the entire human race.

He had been unsure of how the general populace would react to their first time seeing a new creature casually step out of a giant alien flying machine, but he wasn’t exactly surprised by the reaction he got. All eyes were on him, and hardly a sound was made. By now the anticipation from the crowd of colorful ponies was dripping from the air, and Max felt as if the weight of the world was resting on his shoulders. This is probably the closest that has ever been to being literally true, he thought.

 From his elevated position on the Birdie’s boarding ramp, he could see hundreds of ponies, each one seeming to have his or her own unique color scheme. The sight almost looked like someone had spilled the world’s largest bag of Skittles on the central plaza of a rustic, fairytale-like town. Slowly, he began to descend the ramp, taking slow, easy strides in attempt to appear calmer than he felt. As soon as his boots made contact with the soft grass, he heard a small ruckus from somewhere in the crowd of ponies staring up at him wordlessly.

A few seconds later, a familiar purple unicorn elbowed her way through the crowd, and the line of guards briefly broke ranks to allow her passage. Now the eyes of the crowd were split between one of their own, and the tall, strange creature they had never seen before.

Max knelt down to be on eye-level with Twilight, and offered his hand for a human-style handshake, and for a moment, Twilight only looked at the appendage, unsure of what to do with it. Then she remembered that Max had explained what the gesture meant the previous day while discussing details of moving the Birdie to Ponyville.

She said “Oh, right,” then quickly extended a hoof and put it in his hand, shaking it gently. She then said loudly, “Greetings, I am Twilight Sparkle, and welcome to Equestria.”

Even though Max and Twilight were already acquainted, perhaps more intimately than Max would have preferred, the previous night they agreed to a public, formal introduction for the benefit of anyone watching.

“Thank you, Twilight Sparkle,” Max responded, returning the hand/hoofshake. “My name is Captain Maxwell O’Hara, and I look forward to learning everything I can about your beautiful land.” He spoke loudly as well, for the sake of the various cameras on the Birdie that would be recording the historical moment from at least three different angles.

Finally, the two representatives let go of the hand or hoof, and Twilight said, “Well, we can’t wait to learn all about where you come from as well.”

For a few seconds, there was silence. Then, the sound of a lone hoof stomping on the ground echoed from somewhere in the crowd. It repeated, grew louder, and soon, the thunderous sound of stomping was joined by cheers, whoops, and shouts.

Now this is how humans should react when a strange creature drops out of space, Max thought happily. 





Some time later, Twilight had convinced the guard to move the meeting to library and what seemed like the entire population of the town was crowded around the hollowed out tree. Several guards stood at the entrances to make sure the meeting could proceed in peace, but they did not bother to stop the denizens of Ponyville from peeking in every window to try and see what was going on. Unicorns and Earth Ponies crowded around the ground level windows, and several pegasi hovered around every other window the library had, regardless of whether or not it actually gave them a view of what was going on.

                Max was hard at work in Twilight’s living room trying to set up the battery-powered projector he had carried in from his ship, and Twilight was absolutely fascinated.

                “What is that thing?” she asked, gesturing to the white box with a hole in one side and several small buttons on top.

                “It’s a projector,” Max answered. “It will project moving images onto that screen I just put over there.” He pointed to the flat white screen he had also carried in from his vessel. The chore of hauling his equipment around made him sorely wish he had the telekinetic abilities that seemed so commonplace to ponies.

                “That looks nothing like a projector,” Twilight said, confused. “How does it work without a film reel or light bulb?”

                Max paused his fiddling and looked at the purple pony in front of him. “You guys have film and light bulbs?”

                “Yeah, we have film covered in a magic dust that records the image it sees when exposed and light bulbs that convert raw magical energy into light.”

                “I should have known,” Max mumbled to himself, counting the times Twilight said the word ‘magic’ in the last sentence. “We used to use things like that,” he said loud enough for Twilight to hear. “Our kind of film was coated in a special light-sensitive chemical dust that recorded images it was exposed to and our lights convert electrical energy into light. But that was decades ago. This one is way more complicated.”

                “How so?” Twilight asked, hoping that this was piece of alien technology she might be able to understand.

                “There is a light bulb in here, and that works pretty much the same, but instead of a film reel, there’s a single frame in here that can change the image it projects in response to different kinds of electric signals. And I don’t have time to explain how it does that. For right now, dim the lights and you’ll learn more from this little presentation than you ever could from me.”

                With a quiet hum and a shimmering horn, Twilight magically tinted the windows of the library and plunged the room into darkness, much to the dismay of the scores of ponies desperately trying to see the action. The collective moan of disappointment could be heard throughout the town, but the two occupants of the library expected as much and simply ignored it.

Before Max could push the button that would power up his projector and start the presentation, he heard something outside that he really did not expect and could not ignore. A muffled but unmistakable female voice came through the door, and despite the muffling effect of the magically sealed entrance, Max and Twilight distinctly heard every word.

“I’m telling you, I know this guy!” the voice said pleadingly. “Me and him go way back! I even saved his life once!”

Max sighed tiredly and Twilight face-hoofed in exasperation. “Is that who I think it is?” Max asked, already knowing the answer.

 “Sure sounds like it. I can have her forcefully escorted home, if you like,” the unicorn offered.

“No, we should let her in. After all, she is the first friend I made here.”

Twilight was about to argue some more, but when she heard Max refer to Lyra as a friend, she gave in. The whole point of all this is to extend our friendship to him, she thought. Maybe, against all odds, Lyra actually helped the situation.

“Fine, fine,” Twilight said, and headed for the door, with Max close behind her.
 



 
                Outside Ponyville’s library, a certain green-coated, golden-eyed unicorn had just finished a masterfully crafted argument detailing why she should have been let into the library a long time ago, but the guard stationed there was having none of it.

        “I don’t care what you say, Miss Heartstrings,” he began, repeating the same sentence he used when Lyra first pushed her way through the crowd and demanded to be let in. “Unless somepony inside opens this door and tells me to let you in, you are not getting in!”

The instant the guard finished delivering his ultimatum for the umpteenth time, the library door swung open to reveal Twilight and Max, the latter crouching on one knee to be visible in a doorway designed for creatures half his height.

                The guard immediately turned around and snapped to attention. “Is there, uh, anything you require, Miss Sparkle?” he asked.

                “No, thank you, Sir,” Twilight said with a forced smile. “But you can go ahead and let her in.” Twilight gestured to Lyra, who smiled so big she emitted another faint squee.

                The guard looked at Max incredulously, who only smiled and shrugged. “I, uh…” the armor-clad unicorn stammered, not knowing what to make of the situation. But orders were orders, especially from a pony as important as Twilight Sparkle, so all he could so was stand aside and allow Lyra to enter.

When they saw the guard step aside, Max and Twilight turned and headed back into the main room of the library, and Lyra gratefully trotted after them. As soon as she was inside the door, Lyra turned around and blew a raspberry at the guard, whose eye twitched menacingly before the door was promptly shut in his face.

On the other side of the door, Max turned to face Lyra and cocked an eyebrow. “So you saved my life once, did you?” he said sarcastically, but smiled to let Lyra know he was happy to see her again. “I’d love to hear how it all happened.”

“Hey,” Lyra said defensively. “You can’t just lay there unconscious in the middle of the forest. Something that’s not as nice as me could have come along and found a midnight snack.”

“I would have been fine,” Max countered calmly. “I’m a light sleeper, remember?”

“I did everything I could to wake you up, I’ll have you know,” Lyra shot back teasingly. “As I remember, you were out cold.”

        “And who do I have to thank for that?” Max asked as he gestured to one of the now-healing bruises on his forehead.

The first inter-species friendly banter in human history was interrupted by Twilight noisily clearing her throat. When she had the attention of the other two beings, she said, “I really hate to interrupt what's probably the first inter-species friendly banter in human history, but Max, weren’t you about to show me something?”

“Oh, right. Sorry Twilight.” Max then turned back to Lyra and said, “Since you were the first pony I met, you should probably see this as well.” He led the two unicorns back into the main room of the library, where the all the windows remained magically tinted, and once they were all properly situated, began the show. Dozens of videos were made to explain Earth’s position relative to the newly discovered planet, each assuming a different level of communication with the local populace as well as their scientific understanding of the solar system. The one Max was putting on was the best-case-scenario option, and assumed that a common language had been established and whoever was watching had reached a similar scientific understanding of the solar system to that of humans. Naturally, it was something that Max never really expected to use, much less on the third day of his expedition, but by this point, the sheer improbability of everything that was going one ceased to bother him.

When Max’s projector cast its image on the screen, Twilight and Lyra could only watch in awe. At first, the image appeared to be one of the night sky, being mostly black with stars dotting the picture. After only a second or two, the picture panned across to show the sun and a computer-generated representation of the Enterprise rocketing through space.

Eventually, the digital Enterprise reached Earth, and instead of a computer-generated image of Earth, the makers used satellite images of earth to create a real-life graphic of the slowly rotating planet. And then, as countries came into view, videos played of their current leaders offering greetings in both English and their native languages. The first person to appear was King William of England, with Big Ben and the Tower Bridge in the background. After his greeting was through the Chancellor of Germany appeared in front of the Brandenburg Gate and gave his own greeting. This was followed by the President of France in front of the Eiffel Tower. Various other European heads of state appeared and offered their own greetings in front of national landmarks.

When all the European nations were through, the image of the Earth filled the screen again and rotated until it displayed a view of North America. Then the Prime Minister of Canada appeared in front of Parliament Hill, Followed by the President of the United States with the Capitol Building in the background. This repeated for every country on the planet, and some nations had opted for natural instead of man-made landmarks. By the end of the fifteen-minute video, Twilight and Lyra had seen The Great Wall of China, the Sydney Opera House, Mt Kilimanjaro, the Egyptian Pyramids, the Greek Parthenon, Victoria Falls, the Russian Kremlin, the Taj Mahal, and almost two hundred other famous sites from every country on Earth.

When Max finally powered down his projector and Twilight lifted the spell that darkened the window, both ponies in the room were speechless.

“How many humans did you say there were again?” Twilight asked quietly.

“When I left last year there were more than nine billion people on Earth,” Max replied.

Twilight could only remain in a slack-jawed stupor. It had been a while since her studies had required her to look at the census figures for Equestria, but she knew that the population of ponies was nowhere near even one billion, let alone nine billion. Even when creatures from other places like the Griffon Kingdom and Saddle Arabia were counted, the numbers just did not compare.

It surprised her even more that a lot of the humans she just saw looked awfully similar to one another. While individual ponies differed in color, Twilight noted that every human’s skin was some shade of tan, brown, or pinkish white, and their hair was either white, black, brown or gray. Some of the humans didn’t even have any hair. Twilight estimated just the appearance of humans and how they could tell each other apart would get quite the lengthy report if she ever got the chance to write one.

And then there was the matter of all the locations she just saw. “Was every single place we saw its own country?” Twilight asked.

“You saw one place from every country,” Max corrected her. “Most countries have a lot of famous locations and landmarks, but for this little presentation, each country had to choose just one.”

         “And did you humans build everything we saw?”

         “A lot of them, but not all of them,” Max answered. “I’d say the most impressive things you just saw were all naturally formed, but that’s my personal opinion. Anyway, you mentioned before that you had a few presentations of your own?”

         “Oh, yes.” Twilight snapped out of her amazement and trotted for the door, with Max and Lyra following close behind.

> 10. A Human and Pony Show
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

     By the late afternoon, Max could not tell if everything he’d seen so far was business as normal for this planet, or if the inhabitants were putting their best foot forward. Either way he was impressed.

        After his presentation, Max was given a quick chariot tour of Ponyville and the surrounding area. After that he was taken back to the library and given a brief description of Equestria and its cities, whose names still weirded him out. But it was a mystery he would file away and try to solve later. Right now he was sitting on a tree stump on a field on the outskirts of the town, munching on one of the most delicious apples he’d ever bitten into, courtesy of an orange Earth pony who had introduced herself as Applejack.

        Of course Max had to run a few simple toxin tests on a small chunk before actually taking a bite, but he wasn’t surprised to find that these apples had pretty much the same chemical makeup and nutritional value of apples from Earth. After verifying the snack was safe, he began patiently waiting for something Twilight had described to him as an “aerial demonstration” by a Pegasus named Rainbow Dash. Some of the same cameras used to film Max’s official first meeting with Twilight were now set up to record whatever would happen in the demonstration, so all he had to do was sit back and watch.

        “How’s the apple?” asked Twilight, who was sitting on her haunches in the grass next to him. 

        “It’s better than any of its counterparts on Earth I’ve ever tasted,” Max replied and promptly took another bite.

        “I still can’t believe they have apples on your planet. Aren’t you a little surprised?”

        “Honestly, Twilight,” Max said after swallowing. “If I let myself be shocked by every uncanny similarity I’ve seen so far, I’d probably be in a coma right now. In fact, that’s pretty much what happened the first time I ran into Lyra, remember?”

        Twilight chuckled as she imagined Max’s first encounter with ponykind, based on his account of the event.

        “Now, when is this Rainbow Dash friend of yours going to show up?” Max asked around a mouthful of apple.

        “She was warming up for her demonstration last I heard,” Twilight replied. “She should be showing up any minute.”

        True to her word, it wasn’t long before Twilight prodded at his leg with one hoof and pointed out towards the horizon with the other. Max put down his mostly-eaten apple and squinted off into the distance. It took a few seconds to see what Twilight was pointing at because the pony’s coat was only a few shades off from the sky, but as the pony got closer, Max could make out her rainbow-like mane and tail.

        So that’s why they call her Rainbow Dash… Max thought. Soon Rainbow Dash was directly over the field, and that’s when her demonstration commenced. Max watched in awe as Rainbow performed a myriad of stunts, including but not limited to loops, barrel rolls, corkscrews, and even a few acrobatic maneuvers he recognized from his days as a fighter pilot. This was all impressive enough, but when Rainbow Dash started to incorporate the clouds into her antics, his mind was really blown. 

        Max had accepted the fact that weather could be influenced by pegasi, but this was the first time he had seen a Pegasus directly manipulate it. The way Rainbow danced around them and molded their shapes made it seem as if the clouds were solid floating balls of fluff instead of water vapor condensed around airborne particles like he knew them to be on Earth. But by this point, it was just another interesting quirk to add to his mental list of physics-defying magical phenomena to investigate at a later date.

        After just a few more minutes of science-busting stunts, Rainbow seemed to shoot off into the distance with astonishing speed and entered a near-vertical climb. Max had to bring up a hand to shield his eyes from the sunlight to see her, and as the Pegasus became smaller and smaller, Max turned to Twilight and said, “Well, you can color me impressed. That was some of the most mind-blowing flying I’ve seen anything do without the assistance of jet propulsion.”

        Twilight cocked an eyebrow at the words ‘jet propulsion,’ not knowing what kind of human invention Max was talking about, but said quickly, “The show’s not over. You’re going to want to see what’s coming next.”

Max turned his attention skyward again and was just able to pick out the distant specks of red that were Rainbow’s mane and tail as she began to dive back towards the ground. She gained considerable speed in the dive, and when she leveled out again, Max estimated it was only a few hundred feet above treetop level. But what astonished him even more was that the pony continued to accelerate. Soon a white cone of vapor formed around her, nearly obscuring the blue Pegasus from view.

        “No way…” Max muttered to himself. He stood up from the tree stump he was sitting on and took a few steps towards the approaching Pegasus. 

        “Um, Max? You might want to stand back…” Twilight warned, but it was too late.

        Before Max could process what he’d heard Twilight say, Rainbow Dash broke through the cone of vapor and the air around her literally exploded. There was a thunderous CRACK as Rainbow’s speed seemed to double in an instant and a ring-like shockwave emanated from the spot where the she shattered the sound barrier. But, as Max quickly learned, this was no ordinary shock wave, if such a thing could be considered ordinary in the first place.

        The ring seemed to blaze in every color of the rainbow as it spread from its point of origin, and literally became a multi-hued, rainbow-like ring of fire. When the shock wave slammed into poor Max the force nearly knocked him flat on his back and he went stumbling backwards in a vain attempt to stay upright. Twilight, who knew what to expect, had taken cover behind the stump that was previously occupied by Max.. 

        “What was that?!?” Max asked when he finally regained his balance.

        “It was a sonic rainboom,” Twilight said coolly after coming out from behind the stump. “It’s one of Rainbow’s signature tricks.”

        “A sonic… a what?” Max suddenly found himself at a loss for words. It looked as if the Pegasus named Rainbow Dash had just gone supersonic, and Max could distinctly remember the moment in orbit when he decided that whatever the inhabitants of the planet were, they didn’t have the technology for supersonic flight. And yet, a pony just broke the sound barrier right in front of him seemingly without any technological assistance of any kind, and with explosive results that he’d never seen before. His mental list of magical mysteries to solve later was finally full. This merited immediate investigation. 

        “A sonic rainboom

        Twilight, who had extensively studied the sonic rainboom phenomenon since Rainbow Dash had been able to perform them reliably, was all too happy to give one of her signature scientific lectures.

        “You see, Max, Pegasi don’t fly by the physical lift their wings produce alone. The same intrinsic magic that allows them to control the weather allows their wings to generate more lift and thrust than they normally could. And with your being a pilot, I don’t think I need to tell you that it takes a lot of power to go faster than the speed of sound. There’s nothing magical about that.”

        Max nodded, having broken the sound barrier countless times himself. He followed what Twilight was saying, so far.

        “There’s also nothing magical about that fact that the closer you get to the speed of sound, the more resistance you get not just from air resistance, but from the shockwave building up around whatever’s going that fast.

        Max nodded again, as this scientific fact held true on Earth as well. 

        Twilight smiled, happy that she had established some scientific common ground with Max and that her lecture was understood so far. She then continued, “And it just so happens that the point at which a Pegasus has to use more magic than physical strength to accelerate is roughly the speed of sound. And when Rainbow breaks the speed of sound and all the resistance from the shock wave disappears, she has a lot of excess magical thrust to burn off. Some of it just propels her even faster, which is why you saw her speed roughly double, and the rest is released in that rainbow ring of fire, as you so eloquently put it.”

        Max took a few deep, relaxing breaths, mentally processing Twilight’s explanation. “I guess that makes enough sense for now,” he said after a few seconds of mental gear-turning.There’s one law of physics they haven’t broken yet.

 Then he said, “Well, at this rate, you’ll probably manage that before we do.”

        Twilight beamed at the compliment, and took some pride in the accomplishments of her friends. That was precisely when Rainbow Dash decided to make her entrance. She swooped down seemingly out of nowhere and touched down at the edge of the field, but her momentum carried her all the way to where Max and Twilight were standing, and when she came skidding to halt, she left a trail of multi-hued flame in her path.

        “Hey there,” Rainbow said with a haughty grin. “The name’s Rainbow Dash. How’d you like the little demo back there?”

        “Nice to meet you, Rainbow Dash,” Max said. “I’m Maxwell, but you can call me Max. And that little demo over there was pretty impressive.”

        “Yeah, well that was all the simple stuff. I am one of the best flyers in all of Equestria after all.” 

        “I’ll believe it,” said Max. “Now Twilight, is there anything else you’d like to blow my socks off with?”

        Rainbow and Twilight started laughing, remembering Pinkie’s earlier tangent about socks, and the awkward conversation that followed.

        “What?” Max asked. “I hope the expression ‘blow your socks off’ means the same thing here that it does back home…”

        “Don’t worry, Max,” said Twilight after she stopped giggling. “I’m pretty sure it does. It’s just that one of our friends said the same thing this morning.”

        “So what’s so funny?” Max asked again. 

        “Don’t worry about it, dude,” Rainbow answered him. “If you ever meet a crazy pink pony who’s constantly on a sugar high you’ll get it.” 

        For the sake of his sanity, Max secretly hoped he wouldn’t meet a crazy pink pony who was constantly on a sugar high.

        “Seriously, Max,” said Twilight. “Don’t give it a second thought. In fact, I think that’s all we have to show you for today.”

        Max looked down at his watch, which he had calibrated for the planet’s day and night cycles before landing, and realized it actually was getting late in the day, and the task of properly documenting everything he’d seen would likely last well into the night.

        “That’s probably a good thing,” he said. “After all this I think I have a lot of archiving and organizing to do.”

“Oh, I can totally help with that!” Twilight exclaimed. “After all, I live in a library, remember?” Secretly, she hoped to get a peek at whatever data storage system theBirdie was packing. If the movie she saw earlier was contained in the little box of a projector, who knew what other treasure troves of information could be hiding in the giant spacecraft.

        “I appreciate the offer Twilight,” said Max, who was not fooled by the offer. “But since I’m the only one on this planet who knows how to operate the extremely delicate equipment on the Birdie, it’s probably best that I be the only one to touch any of it.”

After somehow suppressing the heart attack he felt approaching as a result of the unreasonably adorable display, Max felt the need to partially concede to Twilight’s request. “Ahem, but I guess it wouldn’t hurt to show you the inside of it at least once before I head home.”

        Twilight perked back up at the prospect, and said, “Oh, I’d love that! I’ll hold you to that promise, Max.”

        Max didn’t remember saying the word ‘promise’ or even a word with a similar meaning, but he decided to go with the flow. “Alllrighty then. Tomorrow I’ll have something else to show you, if you’re interested.”

         “Cool! What?”

        “You’ll find out tomorrow,” Max said and smirked, considering the small bit of suspense revenge for the multiple heart-attacks he’d been forced to fend off in the past two days.



        Later that night, all seemed peaceful. Max was fast asleep in his bunk aboard the Birdie and under the impression that all was well. His craft was no longer parked in a forest that was notably more dangerous than the rest of the world, the magical pony princess was no longer bent on killing him, and he was not sleeping on a cold stone floor in the dungeon of a medieval-style castle carved out of the side of a mountain. For the astronaut, things could scarcely be going better. 

        Twilight, who was similarly optimistic about the situation, still had one loose end to tie up. And that loose end had pale green fur and a knack for causing Twilight more than her fair share of headaches. She looked up at the night sky as she trotted through Ponyville on her way to Lyra’s house, and saw the moon just starting to poke up over the horizon. The half-moon wasn’t quite as bright as the full moon from the night Max and his flying machine first appeared in the night sky, but it was plenty bright enough to let Twilight see her destination clearly. The lights were still on and once she was at the doorstep she could hear faint lyre music coming from somewhere inside, so she stepped up to the door and knocked gently a few times.

        The lyre music came to an abrupt and clumsy halt, and about a minute later Lyra cracked open the door timidly.

        “Oh, uh, hey there, Twilight,” she said, opening the door a little wider. “How’s it going?”

        “Oh, everything’s going great,” Twilight replied. “And now I believe you have a little something to tell me.”

        Lyra sighed and looked down at her hooves. “Alright, Twi. Come one in.”

        Once inside and seated on a sofa across from Twilight, Lyra told the whole story. She began with explaining how the song went back farther in her family than any official records did, and how she used the spell book Spike helped her find to try and find where the song originated. She then described the first time she performed the spell on her song and the human-like image it created. The last thing Lyra told Twilight about that she didn’t already know was the ill-fated venture into the Everfree to Zecora’s hut and the events leading up to Lyra’s first encounter with mankind, and while Lyra’s story lined up almost exactly, Twilight still let her tell her perspective of the things she and Max talked about.

        “Okay, so let me get this straight,” Twilight said when Lyra was done with her story. “You initially didn’t freak out when you saw Max in the forest because of that spell you performed on your song.”

        Lyra nodded. “Yep. He didn’t look exactly like the thing I saw, but he wasn’t that different.”

        Twilight smiled and said, “Lyra, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

        “I don’t know what you’re thinking so I don’t think so…” Lyra said with one eyebrow raised cautiously.
        “I’m thinking that if you can play that song and do the spell for Max and show him what you saw, we might be able solve one of the greatest mysteries in Equestrian history less than a week after it’s been discovered!”

        “You… you want me to… what?” Lyra stammered nervously, directly contrasting her confident and snarky mannerisms from earlier.

        “It’s simple,” Twilight said happily. “All you have to do is play your song for Max while performing the spell-”

        “I can’t do that,” Lyra cut her off. 

        “What? Why not?”

        The answer to Twilight’s question was not something Lyra was particularly proud of. “You see, I have this thing about playing in front of other ponies…”

        “You have STAGE FRIGHT?” Twilight nearly exploded. “We are standing on the brink of the single most momentous and significant discovery in the history of ponykind, one that could lead to an ancient link between us and a race from another feathering planet, and you’re going to let a little thing like STAGE FRIGHT be the one thing that keeps you from being the pony that makes it all happen?”

        After Twilight’s outburst, Lyra could only stare back silently at her with wide eyes and ears flattened back against her head. She heard Twilight could get worked up about some things but she’d never been on the business end of one of Twilight’s outbursts.

        It took a few seconds, but Twilight calmed herself down and said, “Sorry, but this is a big deal. You’ve got a chance to be a part of history here. If I were you, I’d be jumping at any chance I got to be a part of all this.”

        Lyra sighed and hung her head. “I know Twilight, but I’m just no good at performing in front of other ponies. Why do you think I opened a shop in a quiet little town like Ponyville instead of joining some ensemble?”

        “But I heard you playing before I came in. You sounded great! And besides, Max isn’t even a pony. He’s a… uh… oh, what did they call themselves…” 

        “Humans?” Lyra offered meekly.

        “Right, thanks,” Twilight said quickly. “He’s a human, not a pony, and there’s only one of him. There’s no reason to be afraid.”

        “Oh yes there is,” Lyra countered. “He’s been acting like an ambassador ever since he touched down here. You heard him say how many humans there are back where he comes from, so whatever he thinks of what he sees is going to be what he tells all umpteen-billion humans back on his planet! There is no way I can do a performance with that kind of audience!”

        Twilight knew from experience with Fluttershy that there was no point to pointing out the flaws in Lyra’s logic and no way to talk a pony out of stage fright in just one night, but this was something that Max absolutely had to see if they were ever going to solve the mystery behind all the impossible similarities between Equestria and Max’s home planet. 

        “Look, it doesn’t have to me, right? The spell should work if anypony does it,” Lyra said almost as if she knew what Twilight was thinking. “It’s a pretty easy song to play, and you should have no problem with the spell. So you can get somepony who’s an actual performing musician and do the spell yourself.”

        Twilight wanted to argue more, to find some way to convince Lyra to be a part of solving the great mystery, because she thought the normally sassy and rambunctious musician really deserved to be a part of the historical moments that were sure to come in the next few days after everything else she’d managed to get involved in, but there was no way to force the issue.

        “I guess I could write a letter to Princess Celestia tomorrow,” Twilight said dejectedly. “She probably can send the one of best musicians in Canterlot to help out.”

        “I’m sorry Twi,” Lyra apologized. “But I just can’t do the whole performance thing. A professional musician would probably do a lot better than me anyway.”

       “Alright. See you tomorrow,” Twilight said before walking out the door a closing it softly behind her.


                
                “Are you sure Lyra can’t make it?” Max asked Twilight the next day.

                “Yeah, I’m sure,” Twilight responded, her voice containing a bit more contempt than she meant to let through.

                Her tone of voice was not lost on Max, and he asked, “Is everything okay?”

                “Yes, she’s fine,” said Twilight. “Just a little too busy to be a part of the greatest moment in pony history.”

                “Ooookaaaay…” Max said, and got back to work with his demonstration for the day. He requested a large open space that backed up to a hill of sorts, and there was no shortage of places like that in and around Ponyville. The most convenient spot happened to be a field near the Birdie’s landing area.

                “So what do you call this thing again?” Twilight asked as Max finished cleaning the components of his pistol that were laid out on the folding table he brought from the Birdie and began to re-assemble the weapon.

                “It’s a pistol, or handgun, whichever you prefer. It’s a kind of firearm.” Max had already explained the term firearm, which Twilight had an easy time understanding after a quick chemistry lesson. After all, it wasn’t that different from fireworks or Pinkie Pie’s party cannon, although Twilight doubted she would ever completely understand the latter.

                “Oh, and Applejack,” Max said to the other pony standing next to Twilight. “Thank you for letting me use some of your apples for this. I did tell you that you won’t be getting them back, right?”

                “Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing, sugarcube,” said Applejack. “I got whole orchards of these things back on the farm. There’s plenty more where these babies came from.”

                “Great. You may want to cover your ears” Max finished assembling his weapon before putting on some hearing protection of his own, inserted a loaded magazine, racked the slide, and took aim at the five apples lined up on the fence roughly thirty yards away.

                 Twilight and Applejack put their hooves over their ears right before a loud, harsh, BANG rang throughout the empty field and reverberated a few times before dying out. Twilight switched her focus between Max’s pistol and his target apples for the remaining four shots, and every time Max pulled the trigger and she heard a loud BANG, she either saw the pistol jump slightly in Max’s hand as it emitted a puff of smoke or she saw an apple disappear in a small explosion of apple chunks and juice.

                Hitting the apples at thirty yards was no challenge for someone with military training, and Max managed to hit every apple close enough to center mass that they all exploded rather impressively instead of just being knocked over like they would if a bullet simply grazed one. All it took was five shots in as many seconds, and the apples that were sitting on the fence posts were no more. After hitting the last target, Max removed his earmuffs, took out the magazine, and set down the gun before turning to look at Twilight and Applejack, who simply stared back at him slack-jawed.

                “Where did the apples go…?” Applejack asked quietly.

                “They’re in little pieces that are probably scattered on the ground around the fence,” Max answered.

                “Exactly what was coming out of that little contraption o’ yours again?”

                “This little contraption fires a little piece of metal that goes faster than the eye can follow, and it carries enough energy that when it hits the soft apple, well, there isn’t much of an apple left.” As he explained the basics to Applejack, Max began to disassemble his weapon as his new friends seemed a bit uneasy after seeing what it really did.

                “I’d hate to see what would happen if one hit a pony…” Twilight mused.

                “I’ll be honest, this was designed as a weapon of war, and when a bullet hits a human it usually causes serious injury or death.” When Twilight’s expression turned into one of horror, Max quickly added, “But you don’t have anything to worry about. I brought this along purely as a defensive tool to deal with any predatory creatures I might have encountered, and usually just the sound is enough to scare away any animal on Earth, never mind actually shooting something. Also, I’m guessing most people back home would find ponies much too adorable to wage any kind of war against you. So you’re safe.”

         “It’s just…” Twilight said uneasily. “It’s just strange to think that you humans can hold the power to kill somepony, er - somebody in your hand like that.”

         Max had anticipated a comment, and had a response prepared just in case.

        “Let me ask you this, Twilight,” he said. “How many ponies are alive today?”

        “About two or three million, I think.”

        “I already told Lyra this, but I might have forgotten to mention it to you. Right now there are more than nine billion people on Earth. That’s about three thousand times more than the pony population here. And one thing we’ve learned about having so many people on one planet is that the more people there are, the more likely they are to disagree about things that are pretty important. People disagree over what resources belong to which countries, which system of government works best, who should be in charge of a country, and plenty of other things.”

        “That makes sense, I guess…” Twilight said, as she was beginning to see where Max was going.

        “Probably the worst thing people disagree on is just how far it’s acceptable to go to prove who’s right. When one person decides to go too far to prove they’re right, they force everyone else to do the same just to defend themselves. And we believe, just like you ponies, all people have the right to defend themselves. But unlike you ponies, we have no magic spells that turn bad guys into statues or sends them to the moon. That means defending yourself against someone who has gone too far can mean either killing or being killed yourself.” 

                “You told me all about the times something has tried to invade, take over, or otherwise terrorize Equestria, and how you and your friends managed to win every fight with some sort of magic,” said Max. “Well, I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that we don’t have magic back home. But the only other difference is that in the absence of evil monsters we just have some genuinely evil humans. And in the absence of some magical artifact that turns the bad guy to stone, they can do some pretty awful deeds. Having tools like this gives people a way to defend themselves if necessary.”

                “But surely there has to be a way to do that without killing!” Twilight protested.

                “Let me ask you this, Twilight. What would have happened at your brother’s wedding, if ponies had no magic?”

                “I… I guess the changelings would have won.”

                “Then what if I gave you one of these?” Max gestured to weapon that was now lying in pieces on his table. “If you had to choose between letting them win, and taking a life?”

                Twilight tried her best to come up with something that would have beaten Chrysalis without magic, and for a few seconds she honestly thought there was a way. After all, she had been deprived of magic before and still she and her friends had managed to come out on top. But the more she thought, the more she realized every time she had a real villain to face, even one that took her normal magic or even the Elements of Harmony away, it was all a matter of either getting her magic back or simply using a different kind. Twilight looked at Applejack for help, but her friend could only look back with the same conflicted expression.

                After a few moments of silence, Twilight hung her head in defeat. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I really don’t know.”

                “Hey, no need for the long face,” Max said. “Not knowing is a good thing. Even with humans, it’s not easy to even consider taking a life. Until someone is put in a situation like that they can’t really know what they would do. The upside to all this is that back home situations like that are getting less and less frequent. We’re to the point where I’d assume more than 90 percent of humans alive today have never had to make that choice. It sounds like those kinds of situations never happen here, thanks to your magical powers, you’ll probably never have to know. I’m just trying to help you understand why we need weapons like this on Earth a bit more than you would here.”

                “I know, it’s just that all this makes Earth seem so… I don’t know, barbaric.”                       

                “There are some parts of humanity that are that way,” Max conceded. “I spent most of my life in the military so I’ve seen the worst humanity has to offer firsthand. And it’s easy for a lot of people to focus only on the evil they see just because of how bad it can get, and not really how prevalent it actually is. But people who do that lose sight of all the good things we’ve done, and there are just as many if not more redeeming examples of humanity than condemning ones. One of the great things about the military is that while you see the worst parts of humanity, you also get to see the best.”

                “Really?” Applejack said harshly. “ ’Cause to me it sounds like you humans have no problem puttin’ each other in these kill-or-be-killed situations.”

                The farmpony’s comment stung a little bit, and Max’s first instinct was to say something to mankind’s defense or his own defense, but somehow he managed to repress the notion and came up with a better way to get his point across.

                “Tell you what,” he said calmly. “I’m no history or ethics teacher, but I’ve got another tool that is.” Max picked up one of the equipment bags he brought with him and pulled out a touch-screen tablet computer and a stylus. Twilight and Applejack, having never seen one before, regarded the device curiously.

                “What kind of contraption is this?” Applejack asked suspiciously.

                “It’s not another weapon, if that’s what you want to know,” Max said as evenly as he could. “This is merely a device that can access and display information,” he explained as he demonstrated how to turn on the tablet and navigate through its menus.

                “It’s almost like a little library,” Twilight mused as she watched Max pull up encyclopedias, historical databases, media databases, and do keyword searches.

                “That’s exactly what it is,” Max responded. “In fact, this little tablet and other devices like it are how I kept myself from going mad with boredom on the lonely year-long trip out here. It’s remotely connected to the data storage systems on the Enterprise, so there’s more than just raw information here, but also the vast majority of fictional stories, music, and motion pictures humans have produced. This thing will even tell you how it and all my other stuff works, down to the laws of physics they use to do what they do. Essentially, you have here a one-year-old copy of the World Wide Web.”

                “What’s the World Wide Web?” Twilight asked as she took hold of the device and they stylus in a cloud of her telekinetic magic and imitated Max’s motions, getting the hang of how it worked.

                “It’s pretty much the largest collection of information in the history of mankind. Also, if you have a question this thing can’t answer, you can use it to send messages to me on the Birdie. And as long as you don’t try contact me in the wee hours of the morning, I’ll respond as quickly as I can.”

                “Are you sure you humans don’t have magic?” Twilight asked, turning the tablet over a few times and inspecting it. “Because I don’t see any way else this tiny little thing could do all that.”

                “No, no magic is involved,” said Max as he packed up all of his things. “At least, not your kind of magic. We humans have our own brand of magic we call imagination and ingenuity. If you take a look through what my little tablet can tell you I think you’ll understand.”

                Twilight said, “I’ll definitely try. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s research.

                “Great. Now I’ve got to get back to the Birdie and check up on some of its instruments and sensors. If you need me you know where I’ll be.”

                Max slung his equipment bag over one shoulder and headed back to the Birdie. As Applejack and Twilight watched him go, Applejack said to Twilight, “Suddenly Ah’m not so sure about this fella. He seems nice and all, but if these humans really need inventions like that apple-blaster of his, maybe Equestria is better off leaving them be.”

                Twilight looked down at the tablet Max gave her and said, “I know what you mean, AJ. Hopefully some research on this little library device will show me some more redeeming aspects of his kind.”

                “And if it doesn’t?” Applejack asked.

                “If Max said humans have done better things than wage war on each other, and I believe him. I’m just going to have to find out what.”

                “Ah sure hope you’re right, Twi.”
            

 
                No sooner had Twilight returned to her library from Max’s apple-busting showcase than a golden chariot swooped out of the sky and landed right in front of her doormat. A grey mare with a long black mane and a pink bow tie dismounted, carrying a wooden cello case on her back. She bade the Pegasus stallions pulling the chariot farewell, and watched them take off and fly back in the general direction of Canterlot. She then turned around a knocked on the library door. The knocking slightly startled the librarian inside, who had only returned a few minutes prior.

                Spike came bounding down the stairs to answer, but Twilight, who hadn’t even left the foyer, waved him off. “Don’t worry about it, Spike. I’ll get it.”

                When Twilight opened the door, she was greeted by the gray mare with the pink bow tie and cello.

                “Good afternoon, Ms. Sparkle. My name is-” the mare started in a refined, proper Canterlot accent.

                “Octavia Philharmonica?” Twilight finished for her. “You played at the Grand Galloping Gala two years ago, right?”

                Octavia’s ears suddenly flattened back and the corners of her mouth turned down in a frown. “Yes, that would be me. And thanks to some ruffians  my ensemble wasn’t invited back the next year. You’ll have to excuse me, it’s a rather sensitive subject for me.”

                Twilight put on her most innocent smile and said “Well I’m sure it wasn’t your fault… um… maybe I can talk to the princesses about that…”

                “Oh, that would be much appreciated, given your stature with Princess Celestia.”

                “Yeah, I’ll get on that. So, what brings you to-”

                Before Twilight could finish, Spike tapped her shoulder and held up a scroll. “Uh, this just came for you from the princess,” he said.

                “Excuse me for one moment,” Twilight told Octavia, who nodded patiently.
 
 
                Dearest Twilight,
 
I received your request for a professional musician, and I think it’s a wonderful idea to share with Mr. O’Hara some of Equestria’s finest classical music. I’ve arranged for a visit from one of Canterlot’s premier cellists, and she should be arriving this afternoon. She can play any piece you might have on hand at the library and quite a few more from memory. I hope all is going well with our guest and would like to hear of your progress soon.
 
                                                                    Sincerely,
                                                                    Princess Celestia
 
PS -  If she asks you about the Grand Galloping Gala, tell her I am very much aware of her predicament. I had Luna speak with the Gala staff and after a bit of ‘convincing’ they agreed to allow her and her ensemble back next year.
 
                “Good news I hope?” Octavia asked when Twilight looked up at her from the letter.

                “Yep, everything’s great. Just great, So you’re the cellist Princess Celestia sent?”

                “Correct, Ms. Sparkle. Now, I’ve heard much about this guest of ours, but I haven’t actually seen him yet. I saw what I believe to be his means of transportation from the air, and I must say it was quite impressive.”

                “Just wait until you see the thing fly. Would you like to come in?”

                Twilight stepped aside to allow Octavia into the door, and the cellist gladly stepped in. Once the door was closed behind them, Twilight explained the situation with Lyra, the song, the spell and the ghostly image it produced, and finally Lyra’s bad case of stage fright.

                “I see why you needed a performing musician on such short notice,” Octavia said when Twilight’s story was over. “But why didn’t the princess mention any of this before?”

                “Well, I haven’t really told Princess Celestia about any of this yet…”

                Octavia’s jaw dropped briefly. “And why not?”

                “I dunno, I guess I don’t want to make a big deal of it until I see it for myself, and Celestia has been kinda overreacting to a lot things ever since Max got here, so...”

                Octavia’s shocked expression didn’t change.

                Twilight sighed and looked hard at Octavia. “Look, Princess Celestia made me responsible for what’s going on here, and I’m going to handle everything I can myself before I go to her for help. As soon as I see what the spell does firsthand, I’ll decide if it’s worth reporting back to her.”

                “I guess if the princess put you in charge I should trust your judgment,” Octavia said finally. “Where’s this song you need me to play?”

                “It’s right here,” Twilight said as she magically grabbed the sheet music Lyra transcribed for her earlier and held it out for Octavia to see.

                “It seems to be a simple enough melody,” Octavia said, bringing her hoof to her chin pensively. “I hope you can say the same about this courtroom spell of yours.”

                “It won’t be a problem,” Twilight said, retrieving the book that Lyra had returned from a nearby shelf. “But still, let’s do a practice run so we know what’s coming.”

                “Excellent idea,” Octavia agreed and began to set up her instrument. After a minute or so of tuning, she was ready to play. Twilight nodded and Octavia began to move her bow across the strings, filling the air with the sweet silky tones of the cello. Twilight poured on the magic and was surprised to find the seemingly simple spell to be incredibly taxing. But Twilight Sparkle wasn’t about to let a spell get the better of her, so she kept channeling more and more power into her efforts.

                With a furrowed brow and beads of sweat forming on her forehead, Twilight asked, “Is…anything…happening…yet…?” through clenched teeth.

                “There’s a floating purple blob and not much else, I’m afraid,” came Octavia’s concerned response. “Maybe you should take a break and try again later?”

                “Nope, I’m going to get this right,” Twilight said and tried even harder. She’d never seen a simple spell take this much effort, and she could tell she wasn’t making any mistakes with the thought patterns, but still Twilight just couldn’t force the blob of magic into an image. Finally, Twilight had to give up. When her horn stopped glowing and her head drooped, Octavia stopped the playing.

                “I don’t get it,” Twilight said, panting and a little dizzy. “I’ve never had a spell do that to me before.”

                “Perhaps you need to check the book again?” Octavia offered.

                “No, I was doing everything right, but the spell just wasn’t working.”

                Octavia thought for a few moments, and said, “You know, I may not be an expert on magic or anything, but I think I’ve seen a few other spells like this fail before.”

                “You have?” Twilight asked, surprised that an earth pony, even one as sophisticated as a professional cellist from Canterlot, would know anything about such an obscure spell.

                “I have indeed. Spells like this use the magical connection between the creator and his or her creation, but that connection gets weaker over time, so…”

                “So if this song is really as old as Lyra says it is, then the connection must be almost totally gone!”

                “Exactly.”

                “But if the connection is gone, how is it Lyra could make the spell work and I couldn’t?”

                “Sometimes the spell can be easier to use for ponies who have a connection to the one who wrote the song, like a descendant or a close friend, but that would mean…”

                “There is no way Lyra’s part human,” Twilight interrupted. “It’s not… well, it’s just not scientifically possible.”

                “The only other possibility is that perhaps one of Ms. Heartstrings’ ancestors was a close friend to the human that wrote this song. And even that would be a bit of a stretch.”

                “How do you know so much about this spell, anyways?” Twilight asked.

                “It’s not as obsolete as some sources might lead you to believe,” Octavia responded calmly. “When I was little and my mother had a dispute with another pony over a symphony my grandmother composed, this spell was the only thing that proved her right. Some of the attorneys had the same trouble you did and had to bring in a unicorn relative from both parties to actually use the spell.”

                “But why wouldn’t any of this be in the book?”

                Octavia couldn’t help but chuckle a bit at Twilight’s question and answered her, “A book doesn’t always tell the whole story, Ms. Sparkle. Sometimes you just had to be there.”

                Octavia’s suggestion did seem to be the only viable explanation, but at this point it was all speculation. All the speculation, however, only did more to prove Twilight’s earlier deduction  correct; humans must have been to Equestria before. All the clues pointed to it, but it was just so far-fetched. Something like this surely would have changed the course history if it happened before, and humans surely would have made some sort of record about interplanetary travel, if what Max said about humanity’s history was true. So the three questions that troubled Twilight when she first got home from Canterlot resurfaced in her mind.
                When were they here? Why did they leave? Why don’t they remember?