Starswirl the Bearded Wing, Canterlot Archives
Canterlot, Equestria 5:52 PM February 21, 2 Anno Regis Filiae

“The Archives will be closing in ten minutes,” the archivist stopped to tell Twilight Sparkle and her companion.

“Thanks for the warning Mr. Spark,” she replied. Turning to her study partner, “Sounds like that's our queue to wrap things up here. We should take what we can back to the castle, no sense wasting good study time now that we've got you talking and reading.

Traveler began collecting the research materials they had been referring to, scooping them into his saddle bag. He had had a very complicated week, starting with his arrival in Ponyville. It had turned out that whatever law of dimension hopping converted his body to breathe the air and operate with new laws of physics stopped short of giving him knowledge of the local language. Being confronted with the most talkative and extroverted of Ponyville's residents had been... interesting.

---

Ponyville, Equestria 3:47 AM February 15, 2 Anno Regis Filiae

“Oh my gosh! I've never seen a pony appear out of a box that appeared out of thin air before, but you totally just did that!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed. The Traveler regarded her with a blank expression. He could hear the words, but their meaning was entirely lost on him. He instructed the Machine to begin recording her words to dissect later.

While he was giving commands, Pinkie Pie had continued to run at the mouth, mostly oblivious to his apparent lack of comprehension. However, it was not for lack of noticing. She knew she had that effect on ponies, and it was usually good enough to just toss them in the verbal deep end and wait for them to catch on.

She was surprised, however, that she had gotten past the mention of her pet alligator and how much he would just love the Traveler and into talk of what recipe she was going to use for the punch without a single interruption from her audience. He hadn't even objected that the party be held aboard an airship. He just stood there, staring at her. Slowing down her rapid-fire party planning, she put down the fondue kiwis and looked into his eyes.

All she could see written on his face and reflected in his eyes, in how he held himself, betrayed his terrible loneliness. It was the countenance of someone who had lost hope so long ago, they could not remember how it felt. Pinkie had personal experience with what this pony seemed to be feeling. She had felt the same way when she thought her friends had abandoned her. Seeing this pony... seeing his pain... Pinkamena Diane Pie vowed that she would make this pony in front of her smile.

But first she would have to figure out what was wrong.

Calming down and shutting off the Welcome Wagon's music box, she took a hesitating step towards the Traveler.

What is she doing? Is she capable of hurting me? the Traveler asked the Machine.

Danger is minimal, it dutifully replied. Recommend no interference, study would advance cultural analysis.

Seeing no outward response from the stranger, Pinkie Pie slowly walked forward to within hoof's reach.

“Hey,” she said softly. She reached out a hoof towards him. “Where are you from, new friend?” The Traveler regarded her with the same pain-etched face, saying nothing. Pinkie began getting confused, normally a pony would have reacted to at least one of her antics by now. She placed her extended hoof on his shoulder and began petting it with slow, comforting strokes. The Traveler flinched each time she renewed her touch, but remained in place. Seeing his reaction, Pinkie changed tactics, rubbing in circles.

The Traveler's mind was racing. This was the first time another living being had touched him since before his trip began. He had forgotten how good the friendly touch of another felt. It was electrifying, as if he had been asleep the whole time and suddenly woken up just now.

He looked at the pink pony next to him with freshly opened eyes, the tiniest hint of a spark glittering in them. Pinkie Pie saw a subtle change in his expression, a brief twitch of a cheek muscle here, an eyebrow shifting there. She watched him intently, like one would study a closed flower just before sunrise.

Quite some time passed, the sky becoming lighter as dawn approached, the two ponies standing in the frigid predawn air. One stared at the other, waiting for the change she hoped would come. The other stared back, paralyzed with overwhelming nostalgia for days gone by. In his heart, something stirred. Pinkie Pie felt an itch in her ankles, a twitch in her tail.

Obeying her instincts, Pinkie Pie quit her rubbing and wrapped her forelegs around the Traveler in a hug. As if on queue, the first sliver of the sun peeked over the horizon, lighting the sky. The corners of the Traveler's mouth turned up a bit, leaving him with a weak grin. Pinkie Pie squeezed him tighter, and whispered in his ear, “Please don't be sad.” Though he didn't understand her words, he felt that he had understood their meaning.

I'm not home yet and I might never get there, he thought to himself, but I think I could be convinced to stay here for a while.

---

Embarkation Lab, Temporal Research Institute
Canterlot, Equestria 9:14 AM Trot 23, 2 Anno Regis Filiae

“Remember you two, if anything goes wrong tell us right away and we'll reel in the time car,” Twilight Sparkle advised the time-travelers-to-be. “If Traveler and I are right you won't be able to change the past, so you will have to be sure to do things carefully. We'll send you back, you'll grab the artifact, and we'll pull you right back.”

“Geez Twilight, how many times have we gone over this plan already?” asked Rainbow Dash with an exasperated roll of her eyes. “We just ride the box back to when Daring Do dropped the Queen's Crown, pick it up after she leaves, and come back. It couldn't be easier. Can we go yet?”

“Don't worry, Twi, I'll keep mah eye on her,” Applejack reassured the Unicorn. “I still don't half trust this time travel business, but I trust yah and it's for a friend.”

Twilight was still just a little on edge. She knew it was mostly unfounded. Rainbow had memorized the plan against all bets, and had even learned the message code they would be using to communicate. Applejack had agreed to, as she put it, “go mucking about trying to fix what ain't broke.” But still, Twilight Sparkle worried.

“The gondola is ready,” Traveler announced. From her vantage point on the command catwalk, all Twilight could see of him was his pale blue hindquarters, adorned with a broken hourglass, and his golden tail sticking out of the depths of the modified Machine. “I can have Machine begin the excursion at any time.”

“Right,” Twilight acknowledged. “Spike, can you hand me the pretravel checklist?” Spike obliged. “First things first, pretravel checklist. Check!” Twilight began making her way down the list, checking in with all the ponies staffing the assorted control and monitoring consoles in the room.

Even with the tremendous amount of processing power Traveler's Machine possessed, they would still be required in this capacity. When the gondola was pushed back in time, the whole of the Machine's processor would be dedicated to correcting potential drift across time lines. Any errors or delays in its corrections would result in the gondola taking a dangerous detour through another time line. Given that the Traveler had gotten to Equestria from Limbo in just one transit, it meant potentially dangerous universes were close at hand. For this reason, anything that could possibly be removed from Machine's responsibilities was removed. This meant life support, communications, air and water would all be handled by lines run through the gondola's excursion arm from the Embarkation Lab and into the cabin. When Machine applied the time travel drive correctly, the gondola would be pushed back in time while still leaving the vital link to the present for it to follow on the return trip.

The team had already experimented with cameras, but none of them volunteered to be the first to ride on it themselves. It wasn't until Rainbow Dash heard of it that anypony volunteered. Given the prospect to be the first time traveling Pegasus, she jumped at it. After a week of wheedling and cajoling she had eventually gotten Applejack to agree to accompany her.

The two prospective time travelers now sitting in the machine could not have had more wildly varying attitudes, however. Applejack had been slightly nervous at first, but as the preparations and briefing stretched from minutes into hours, she had grown bored. Rainbow Dash, on the other hoof, had shown up wearing a pith helmet and an ear-to-ear grin. The more she heard about it, the less she could contain her growing anticipation. She was nearly bouncing in her seat with excitement as Twilight ran through the final checklist.

“That looks like everything.” Twilight checked the last box off on her list. “Machine, we're ready for the transit. Give us a count down.”

“Understood, Miss Sparkle,” the cool synthetic voice of Machine responded. “Countdown will commence when the flux condenser is charged.”

“Very good,” Twilight replied. The time machine, Machine as a lot of ponies thought of it, was at the same time both a fascinating and unsettling thing to her. It had an intelligence that outstripped many ponies she knew, but it had little in the way of personality. Traveler had explained to her that Machine had not always been as smart as she, Traveler's pronoun, not Twilight's, was now. Over the course of his exile Traveler had made many modifications and upgrades, trying to produce a more useful companion for the situation he found himself in. The nanomachine payload he had originally carried had eventually been repurposed to this end as well. He had put the nanomachines under the computer's control, and directed it to use them to make itself more efficient. The result had been Machine, a near-sentient, self-repairing computer that existed to serve Traveler and anticipate his needs.

Twilight couldn't help but wonder, sometimes, if Machine might be more alive than machine, with how Traveler described her workings. Either way, in the last month or so that Twilight had been working with her, Machine had shown nothing but perfect loyalty and obedience to Traveler. If she did have a will or desires of her own, it didn't show.

“Flux condenser is charged, transit will commence in fifteen seconds,” Machine piped up. “Transit in ten, nine, eight...”

In the gondola, Rainbow Dash had quit fidgeting and was now grinning madly. Applejack was not so enthusiastic, however, and appeared to be sweating bullets. Her hooves were hooked tightly over the support bar in front of her seat, her earlier boredom forgotten.

“...five, four...” The hum of the time drive increased in volume and pitch as energy was poured into it. The gondola's arm extended outwards, and observers all around the room saw it bend and continue extending directly away from them, no matter where they were situated.

“...three, two...” As the end of the arm continued away from the observers' perspective, it seemed to fade into invisibility.

“...one, zero. Transit has begun.” As the countdown finished, the gondola lurched into motion along the arm, following the track away from the room, and into the past.