FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

I caught up with Twilight Sparkle an hour later, her head down, her rant at Spike long over.

I came alongside and slowed to match her pace.

"Don't tell me I'm not going fast enough." She hadn't even looked at me.

I regarded her. The last thing we want is Discord picking her. If she's a student of magic, she could cause a lot of damage. So let's delay her arrival on the scene a little. Of course if I'd known what 'earth pony' meant I would have realized that she had already been excluded.

I remembered that she'd kind of asked me a question. "No, not at all. So, what's the homework you've been assigned to do, that's so important?"

"Ugh. Important, it's not - not like Canterlot. Just mythology and a dash of history."

"Any chance the mythology is also history?"

"Does it matter? It's long gone anyway."

I backed off, and we walked for a time in silence.

Twilight Sparkle finally asked, "So, why are you here, if not to pester me?"

"Secret mission."

"Right. Why couldn't she send me on a secret mission?"

"She did. It was so secret, she couldn't tell you about it." I tried to say it with a straight face. It was tough.

"That makes no sense."

"She did say 'no hints'. Kind of suggests that there was something important to be found."

"That's a hint."

"Not much of one." But I realized she was right. If it was something she had to work out on her own, she really had to work it out on her own.

But in a minute she pulled out one of her books and began reading.

That night, we reached Ponyville. It was dark and quiet.

I was looking at the sky and noting a complete lack of familiar constellations when I was shocked by a hiss. I looked down and found Pinkie Pie, wearing a black outfit, hiding behind a cart. "Get down!"

We hit the deck without demanding explanation. She gestured over towards the center of town. "They're over there!"

I scooted over to join her, but Twilight stood her ground (well, crouched). Magic gathered in her horn and a searing light illuminated the road. I peeked under the cart, but there was nothing to see. She stood up straight again.

"No!" whispered Pinkie. "Hide!"

"What is it?"

She hissed, "They're from... the other side!"

"You mean ghosts? No such thing."

"No - the other other side! No lights!"

A pegasus pony came flying down the road, alighted next to the cart, and tapped Pinkie. "Tag! Off to jail!"

Pinkie fumed. "I told you, no lights!"

Twilight Sparkle relaxed and the light dimmed and died. "What?"

I guessed, "Capture the flag?"

"Better! Super Double-Annihilation Team-Hunter! It's even better than Double-Annihilation Team-Hunter!"

The pegasus idly tapped me. "Tag?"

"Sorry, not playing - not yet." As he led Pinkie off, I followed, and Twilight followed me. "So, I take it you haven't heard the news?"

"Nope! But did you?"

"What?"

"There's a new pony in town!"

"Oh. Who?"

"Her! With the hyuuge light. Hi there! I'm Pinkie Pie, the official unofficial greeter of Ponyville. What brings you?"

"I'm Twilight Sparkle. I'm here to do homework... and make friends." She incompetently forced a smile.

"Friends? Friends! I have friends." She swooshed up alongside and asked conspiratorially, "How many do you need?"

"Hmm. At least two... let's say three to be on the safe side."

Pinkie Pie stopped and put her head on her hoof in thought. "Threeee friends. Hmm. I'm not sure I can do three. How about twenty?"

"Twenty, sure..."

Pinkie Pie leaped up. "Jailhouse parrrrtteeeeee!"

Twilight Sparkle sighed. "All right then."

We finally arrived in the 'jail', which was the town school.

Pinkie called out, "Anypony here?"

A small "Yes." emerged from the shadows.

"Good! I mean, good that there aren't so many others on our side here. Still, it's not quite party atmosphere here yet. Hmm." She paced about, vacillating between wanting to liven the place up and enforce blackout.

Twilight Sparkle sat down to read, shining a dim light focused on her book from her horn. I went to the board, seeing something unexpected: grad overbarred epsilon mu. The gradient of, what's that? The speed of light? Something like that. What kind of school is this?

My inspection was cut off - "Are you a dragon?" A squeal, and somepony - Fluttershy, was it? I'd hardly met her my first time here - rushed over to Spike. "Oh wow you really are a dragon! I've always wanted to see a dragon - a little one like you, not a big scary one. Can you talk?"

Spike was a little flattered at the attention until she got to that. "Of course I can talk. I can read and write, too...oo...."

Rarity strode in, and dusted herself off. "I do not think I shall play this game again. I'm not certain how you roped me into it, Pinkie."

"That's easy! I jumped up and down and sang outside your door until you agreed!"

"Ah, yes - why, Twilight Sparkle! What brings you to Ponyville? What a time to arrive. We aren't usually like this. In fact, we've never been like this before."

Never? That would be too much coincidence. How did this game start, then?

Twilight Sparkle facetiously replied, "It sure looks like you know how to have fun here, in jail."

Pinkie Pie helpfully put in, "She's here to do her homework, and make at least three friends."

Rarity asked, "Oh! Well, then, what are you reading? Is it interesting?"

"A bit of history, verging on myth. Nightmare Moon."

"A bit out of season, isn't it?" Meanwhile, Pinkie Pie snuck up behind Fluttershy and went "OooOOooh", but Fluttershy had seen her coming and was only minimally frightened.

Twilight Sparkle said, "Actually, no. I'm referring to her banishment, not Nightmare Night. The morning after her banishment was first Summer Sun Celebration, and is the beginning of our current calendar. It's odd that I only found that out this evening." She looked to me, as I'd asked earlier; I nodded acknowledgement.

Rarity said, "I didn't know she was an actual pony, let alone that she was banished. What's her story?"

So Twilight read the passage. When she got to the Elements of Harmony, I recognized the name from when Discord had mentioned it.

Twilight Sparkle paused. "Omar, you look like you'd like to say something."

But I couldn't say what I wanted - the binding agreement kept me from describing the circumstances of my learning that, and I couldn't think of a way to avoid it. "That sounds useful."

"Yeah, well, this volume tends to embellish on the details, and even if they're real, they're very old and very very lost."

"Or they're not so much things as states of being?" Does it count as a hint if it's wild speculation?

"Here's a picture. They look like things."

"Okay. Just a thought."

"So. Using the magic of The Elements of Harmony, princess Celestia defeated her younger sister and banished her permanently in the moon. The elder sister took on responsibility for both the sun and moon, and harmony has been maintained in Equestria for generations since."

"Point of order."

"Yes, Omar?"

"Is this supposed to be the princess Celestia I met?"

"Yes, it is the very same one."

"Waaaait wait wait. You mean to say that princess Celestia..." I began ticking off on my fingers: "is not only actually literally personally responsible for the motion of the fucking sun... and not only has she been holding her sister in_prison_ on the fucking moon... but she is well over a thousand fucking years old?" The first of these had been bothering me since Discord mentioned messing around with the day/night cycle, but it hadn't been an opportune time to ask. And now that I thought back, they had implied that she was in excess of twelve hundred years old.

"Pretty much, yes, I think."

I was coming off of my mini-rant-question, but this piqued me for a moment. "You think?"

"Well, I don't know what you mean by 'fucking'."

I slowed more properly. "As in, how I'm using the word, or do you not know it?"

"I do not know the word."

I wasn't at all sure what to say. They all looked at me expectantly. Very calmly, I said, "'Fuck' is a coarse word denoting the act of mating. It is more commonly used as a particle indicating emphasis, and it can be used as a general placeholder for just about anything."

Fortunately, the calm way I explained the term separated the fact that it was foul language from the manner in which I had applied it to Celestia. If they had already known the word, I could have been in a fair amount of trouble.

Instead, Twilight Sparkle went full-out academic, furrowing her brow. "How odd. Why make that a ubiquitous idea? Or perhaps it's not meant to be ubiquitous. Do humans rely on social pressure to promote or depress reproduction?"

I thought for a moment to parse what she said. She clarified, "What is the earliest age you could have children if you tried?"

"Around 12." That answer seemed to confuse them. Horses are adult at 5, so their confusion makes sense.

Twilight Sparkle continued, "And setting aside whether it's wise, when do you start wanting to?"

"13 or so? Depends. Some sheltered kids don't know about it at all until later."

"Ah. So it is depressed. And what is a typical age it is wise to have children?"

"These days, around 25. Not sooner than 19, anyway."

"So you need to delay reproduction to maintain the society. One strategy is to taboo sex. I'd guess this term is a safe way of pushing back against the taboo. Incidentally, how old are you?" - "21." - "Really? Fascinating." Okay, I don't see what's fascinating about that.

"What about you?"

"We can and do have foals at around 70, but we begin wanting to around 55. I'm 46. Normal ponies can live to 3 or 4 hundred, with a few reaching 6. Alicorns - like Celestia - live over ten times as long. You?"

"My great-grandmother is about as old as people get, at one hundred."

"That... That's..."

"... Horrid!" exclaimed Rarity. "You have only eighty years left?"

"Actually, unless medicine gets a lot better really quickly, or I get lucky, sixty more years would be more typical."

"Sixty?" She was almost ready to faint.

"But wait. How many days in a year?"

Pinkie Pie sang, "One hundred and twenty eight days."

That this was a power of 2 did not evade my notice, but I didn't know what to make of it, so I let it be. "Ah. Well, see, for us it's 365. If we round that off as 3 times as long... So in your years, I'll live to something like, oh, 240. I'm around 64 or so, and you're around... 15 of my years. You, uh.... I don't think the scales really match up at all. You made more sense as 46 than as 15."

Twilight Sparkle said, "Thank you. How did you know to ask about the length of the year?"

"As Celestia said, we have a different moon than you. Plus, she's personally responsible for moving it about, which given our sun and moon would be... superfluous."

Twilight Sparkle raised an eyebrow. "So you just... let it happen. We take a more managed approach."

"If you were expecting it to be managed, then why wouldn't I ask? Seems like it could vary widely."

"Because one hundred and twenty eight days is the ideal length of a year. You don't need to be able to do it to understand the reasons, too, they're pretty elementary. You should look into fixing that."

I couldn't help laughing. We should fix the length of our year. Yeah.

"What's so funny?" Twilight Sparkle asked.

Pinkie Pie added, "Yeah? What's so fucking funny?" Then, "Did I do that right? Could I have some more examples?"

That helped me calm down. If Twilight Sparkle was right and there really was no need for such a taboo around here... "The Sun and the Earth are fucking huge, and we've got fuck-all that can do anything to them. If by some fucking miracle we did speed up the year it'd be by bringing us closer, which would make it so fucking hot we'd be utterly fucked. Why would we fuck ourselves over like that? I suppose we could put some fucking huge mirrors at L1 or something to protect us. That's just begging for a clusterfuck, and even if we succeeded, it would still fuck up the animals and plants, who'd be left wondering, 'What the fuck?'."

Rarity winced. "Please stop."

"All right. Is the word bad after all?"

"It's bad where you come from. Also, I don't want to associate mating with horrible grammar!"

"Sorry. I will attempt to restrain myself."

Fluttershy timidly said, "Miss, could I ask a question?" - Twilight Sparkle nodded, saying "Please." - "Is Nightmare Moon the Mare in the Moon?"

"Of course n... wait. That's an interesting question." She levitated another book out of her pack. "Mare in the Moon. Dum de dum. Yes, the story sounds awfully simila... uh-oh."

Fluttershy squeaked, "What?"

"... Legend has it that on the longest day of the thousandth year, the stars will aid in her escape and she will bring about nighttime eternal. That's next week."

Rarity said, "Surely, that part is just a legend?"

"I was sent, in the middle of a crisis, to Ponyville, the site of the thousandth summer sun celebration to do this particular homework, and make friends. That's a hefty conjunction. Three of them and I might not notice, but all four? There's no way around it - Princess Celestia knows Nightmare Moon is about to escape. She knows that the Elements of Harmony are around here. I need to make friends to recover them and bring them to her." She took a big breath. "Does anypony have any clue where they could be hidden? Any really old buildings?"

Rarity said, "The town is only around 400 years old."

Twilight Sparkle absorbed that and continued, "So they wouldn't be somewhere in town - assuming they were lost soon after the banishment. Any separate ruins around the town?"

Fluttershy said, "Not in the fields. I could ask the birds, but I don't think so."

Pinkie Pie took on a look of grim determination, "That leaves the fucking Everfree Forest." Shoot. She's using it like I did 'frell' for a while back in the day. She seems to think it's funnier than 'Belgium'.

Attempting to deflect her from excessive usage, I put in, "Or perhaps the Blue Valley, where I came from. It's not too far from here, just the opposite way from Canterlot."

Twilight Sparkle said, "Maybe. Is there a library or archive here, with local maps and histories?"

I nodded. "I know where that is." As soon as I'd said it I realized the last thing I wanted to do was drag Twilight Sparkle away from three potential friends. If I hadn't said that, I could have made her bring at least one of them with her.

Twilight Sparkle said, "Who's with me?"

They each hesitated. I was cursing inwardly, but then Rainbow Dash skidded up to the door and threw it open. "Game over. We won."

Pinkie Pie shouted, "All right! Sure, let's go." Fluttershy stepped up alongside.

Rarity sighed. "You believe her? Oh all right. I guess it would be a bit much of a coincidence."

Rainbow Dash looked more carefully. "Oh, hi, Omar. And... hi."

"I'm Twilight Sparkle. I'm searching for a powerful magical artifact that could save Equestria from catastrophe."

"And you took time out to play Super Double-Team Hunter-Annihilation? Yeah."

"I wasn't playing; I was gathering help."

Pinkie Pie put in, "She's super-powerful. Remember her fucking big light? That was her."

Rainbow Dash looked at her friends, and then to me. Fortunately we were all very serious. "Oh yeah, I remember her... 'fucking'... that... big light..." She realized from reactions that she'd misused the word somehow, and tried to move on to business. "What can I do?"