“Twilight… what exactly am I looking at here?” Celestia asked, peering closer.

“I’m not exactly sure, princess,” Twilight said. “It just appeared out of nowhere. I was wondering if you knew something about it.”

Celestia chuckled, settling back on her haunches while staring at Twilight in the corner of her eye. “Now, I’m sure this didn’t suddenly appear out of nowhere. Care to enlighten me, Twilight?”

Twilight fidgeted with her hooves, shifting her gaze everywhere except with Celestia’s eyes. “Well, it wasn’t exactly nothing that made this… thing, appear. I was performing a scrying spell.”

“A spell whose sole purpose is for spying,” Celestia said, catching Twilight off-guard.

Twilight’s face grew red, and she was quick to raise her hooves up in the air. “Wh-whoa now, no need to jump to conclusions. I was merely testing my magical abilities is all.”

Celestia arched a brow at her student. “And those abilities included taking sneak peeks at whoever you want, wherever you want, with just a simple spell a foal can pull off?”

“Uh… look, it’s back!” Twilight shouted.

Celestia returned her attention back to the swirling mass of pink, magical energies hanging in the air before her. Inside it, the occasional image would flicker through, though most were unrecognizable or too incoherent to make out. Except this time, an actual image began to surface.

It was fuzzy and out of focus, blurred around the edges, but slowly an image took form in the center of the scrying spell. It was of a dimly lit room, the overall gray and blackness grainy. Two objects could be seen shifting and moving about, though it was hard to tell what exactly they were doing.

Celestia blinked and leaned her head in closer, squinting. “Twilight, what exactly am I looking at here?”

“Oh, my bad. Forgot to turn the sound on.”

“Oh yeah, baby, harder! Just like that!” the scrying spell practically shouted out at full volume. It caught Celestia a-back, causing her to fall back on her rump with eyes opened wide.

“Twilight! You made me come all the way here just to see some ponies having… having coitus?” Celestia shuddered, covering her eyes with her hooves. “That is completely inappropriate and an invasion of privacy! I thought I taught you better than that!”

Twilight tugged at Celestia’s foreleg to free her eyes from her hooves. “No, princess, wait! I swear, this isn’t for perverted reasons at all! Well, originally it was—never mind, just keep watching!”

Hesitantly, Celestia withdrew her hoof from his eye and took a peek at the image again. Twilight had thankfully lowered the volume down, though the background noise of a bed squeaking and two ponies in lust could still be heard. However, after a full ten seconds the noise stopped. This was followed by a sigh Celestia could only describe as bitterly disappointed.

“You know, sweetie, you can at least last longer than my gum,” one of the voices, sounding female, said.

The darkness shuffled, then a bright flash of light broke out of the black. “Well, at least gum doesn’t waste twenty dollars to take you out to some boring-ass movie.”

Celestia’s hooves dropped to her sides while her jaw hung down low. The sudden illumination change had finally shed light on what the scrying spell was trying to project. “What the…”

Twilight nodded her head, a creeping smile breaking out on her face. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought at first, too. But it only gets more interesting as time goes on.”

“But… but what even are those things? I’ve never seen their like on Equestria before. Neither in myths or legends have there ever been something close to them.” Celestia stood back up and tilted her head at the image. “And how do we even understand their language?”

“I’m not sure, princess. They appeared completely out of the blue,” Twilight said, pointing to the creatures on the spell. “But whatever they are, they’re a completely different species we haven’t even discovered yet.”

They were both light pink creatures, almost hairless except for the top of their heads and the chest of the creature on the right. The less hairy one had a stick in her mouth, the end on fire for some reason neither Twilight nor Celestia knew, all while it tapped its opposable thumbs on a mysterious object of some sort.

“You know, if you actually tried to make an effort to do some foreplay, you wouldn’t finish so quickly,” the female creature remarked, blowing smoke out of her nose.

“Is that thing a dragon of some kind?” Celestia whispered to Twilight.

Twilight shrugged, taking out a clipboard she had been carrying and flipping through some pages. “Not that I’m aware of. Multiple observations show these things don’t have scales, claws, wings, or even fire breath like a typical dragon does. If anything, the closest thing we have to compare them to is either minotaurs or monkeys.”

“Yeah, well at least I make an effort to keep this relationship alive, while you’re too busy to even bother!” the male creature said, waving its hands in the air. “For Christ’s sake, Amy, you’re on your phone right after we fucked!”

Amy held up a finger to silence her partner. “Shhh, Stacy just sent me a selfie from the bar. She might go home with Brad if he isn’t banging that cuntwad Bridget.”

“Amy, they’re both—”

The image fizzled out to black and white grains.

“Twilight, what even was that? Could it be something from our world?”

Twilight shook her head, her grin so wide she was practically beaming with joy. “From what else I’ve seen, no, it isn’t. This is a completely other world altogether. One vastly different from ours.”

“But how did you even reach them?” Celestia asked, waving a hoof through the scrying spell. The pinkish, swirling mass of magic dissipated for a moment, then reformed into its previous form. “I’ve never heard of a scrying spell being used to spy on another world before. Is it even possible that it could happen?”

Twilight’s lit her horn, the light glowing the same hue as the vortex as she increased its spinning pattern and made it illuminate even brighter. Just like before, another image started to shimmer into focus.

“I’m not sure about that either, princess. I made some modifications to the original spell for some improvements to… well, help with the image quality, but as I kept on pouring magic in there, I noticed a bubble start to form on the spell. Like more and more magic could be stored into it, but eventually it’ll pop. So I… did just that.” Twilight’s smile turned sheepish while she rubbed the back of her head, a faint blush on her cheeks. “Not my smartest moment, all things considered, but at least the spell didn’t backlash in any horrific ways.”

“Except for a scrying spell that apparently leads to other worlds with completely different creatures,” Celestia mentioned. “Actually, what are these creatures like? I’ve only seen a… well, less than ideal visual of them.”

“Oh, there’s a whole lot more about these creatures than you’d ever think,” Twilight said. The image inside the vortex finally took shape, in the form of city the likes of which Celestia and Twilight could never have imagined.

“Amazing,” Celestia whispered. The city was basically an island, completely covering its surface in skyscrapers and buildings that reached the heavens themselves. Billboards lined the streets, those strange creatures from before flooded the sidewalks, while strange vehicles stayed permanently jammed in impossibly long lines that had no end. “I thought that Manehatten was big, but this… this is beyond anything I could possibly conceive. It seems like it goes on forever.”

“Well, only for a few miles. Actually, in some of this world’s cities, they go on for huge tracts of land, encompassing miles upon miles just in a single city.” Twilight rubbed her hooves together, a spark flicking in her eyes as she leaned closer to the vortex. “Anything we ponies have pales in comparison to the likes of which these creatures have built. To power all those buildings alone is decades beyond what we’re capable of. Even their plumbing is more advanced than anything we can produce!”

“This is crazy. How many of these creatures are there?”

“I’m… still struggling to get the specifics in that area, sadly,” Twilight admitted. The image changed to a vast ocean, then a sweeping mountain range that parted the clouds like a sea, followed by an endless desert of hilly sand dunes, ending in an awe-inspiring view of a waterfall roaring in a rainforest of some sort. “Most of the creature population seems to be in higher densities in more urban areas while in rural their numbers are still spread out. But if I was to make an estimate… a ton.”

“A ton?”

“Yes, a ton.”

Celestia mulled this statement over, her eyes scanning the unending sampling of various images the vortex produced from the depths of a world, maybe even a dimension far beyond her own. “That’s not very specific, is it?”

“Well, nothing about these creatures is specific. If anything, they’re more random than even Pinkie Pie!” Twilight settled on a viewing of a bustling street somewhere in a highly populated city.

There, dozens upon dozens of the creatures walked past one another in an endless tide of shoving bodies and pounding feet. It was like a living river, which flowed with the earth yet at the same time had its own pattern and destination. Some of the creatures were tall, some small, some fat and others lean, some white, brown, yellow and even… golden? Well, that was only one of them, and he seemed to be standing perfectly still holding out a can for people to deposit change into it. Strange cultural customs, it seems.

“We ponies usually have our manes or coat colors to differentiate amongst ourselves along with the separation of the three races, but these creatures have so much more,” Twilight explained, expanding the vortex for Celestia to get a better view. “For one thing, they all wear clothes, and depending on race, ethnicity, gender, and even where they live they wear something different. Every single day, too! Going naked in public is completely taboo to them!”

“How queer,” Celestia admitted, already noticing the differences among the creatures. The females had on dresses, of course, yet others wore pants. And the males dressed in suits and shorts while others, for whatever strange, wore their pants sagging low to the ground without support of a belt, instead choosing to hold it up with one hand while their undergarments were clearly visible. “Even queerer…”

“And just look at this!”

Now the image reflected upon various creatures seated around a table, pigging out on a plethora of food items before them. One of the more popular ones had a resemblance to hay burgers, while the traditional foods to ice cream and soda were quickly being guzzled and slurped.

Celestia grimaced and averted her eyes. “and Twilight, you’re beginning to develop a habit with showing me disturbing images of other species I’d rather not see.”

“But princess, they’re eating meat!” Twilight said, sticking her tongue out and gagging at the greasy, messy, and leading cause of adult onset diabetes images. “These creatures eat endless tons of meat daily! It’s just… just…”

“Natural for their species?” Celestia guessed, holding a hoof to her temple.

Twilight opened her mouth, stopped, then covered it with a hoof and squinted. “Or that. Yeah, definitely that.”

Sighing, Celestia rolled her hoof in the air. “You mind moving along with these images, Twilight? I’d rather have something that doesn’t make my stomach twist up into a knot when it comes to world-breaking discoveries like this.”

“Well, then you’re not going to like this.” Twilight backed away, shielding her eyes with a hoof. “I would advise backing away in a five foot radius, just to be safe.”

The image flickered to life, depicting the enormous, bulging, flabby, and overall unappealing stomach of a beyond an obese creature. Twilight couldn’t tell whether it was a male or female, while Celestia who in their right mind would wear a belly shirt while being that fat.

The image backed away, thankfully, to a large crowd of equally obese and badly dressed creatures, most of which were missing numerous teeth and were drinking yellow colored liquid in great abundance. Also, most were wearing camo, even though they were nowhere near a forest.

Soon, it became clear there were literally thousands of creatures sitting in stands around a stadium of some sort. It was oval shaped, with a grey track running around the edges with a green field in the center with unfamiliar symbols in the center.

Tilting her head at the view, Celestia whispered, “Twilight, what am I looking at?”

“I believe it’s called NASCAR, better known as Non-Athletic Sport Concerning All Rednecks.”

“Oh, so we finally have a name for these strange creatures. Rednecks…” Celestia hummed under her breath and tapped her chin. “Also, why is this called a non-athletic sport? Doesn’t the inclusion the sport make the participants athletes?”

Twilight shrugged. “Nah, these rednecks aren’t really what I consider the athlete variety. For a race, they don’t even actually race in it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just watch,” Twilight said, pointing to the vortex. It had closed in at the beginning of the track, where instead of badly, out of shape rednecks at the starting line, there were loud vehicles with numerous obnoxious advertisements on the front and sides. Oh, and the badly, out of shape rednecks were still there, except in the vehicles themselves. Eventually, a starting signal counted down from red to green, and the vehicles roared and took off at breakneck speeds.

“So… they’re racing, but they’re not really racing?” Celestia scratched the side of her head with her jaw hanging open. “But that’s… that’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard! Racing is based upon skill and superior health and lower body muscle mass! But this just has vehicles doing all the work!”

“Well, I suppose some skill is involved,” Twilight said uncertainly. “I mean… they have to make sure to do a left turn.”

“But the entire race is just left turns! Why would an entire stadium be built just for left turns?”

“Some of these rednecks travel thousands of miles to come to these races. Others pay ridiculous amounts of money just to see the race. But all of them get out of their minds drunk at the races and get involved in huge mobs and fights.” Twilight shuddered. “It is both strange and pathetic, but most of all, pathetic.”

“Twilight, I think I’ve seen enough,” Celestia said. She gladly sighed in relief when the vortex dissipated to a shimmering, pink cloud.

After a few seconds of silence in the dim illumination of Twilight’s basement without the light of the spell, Twilight coughed into her hoof. “So, princess… what do you think we should do?”

“I’m not exactly sure, Twilight. This news of an entirely different and strange society of creatures known as rednecks can shake the foundations of pony society as we know it.” Celestia sighed again, this one much more drawn out. “It’s my responsibility to protect everyone from things out of their control. Would withholding this type of information from the Equestrian ponies really be beneficial? Do we have anything to gain by spying on these rednecks further?”

Twilight perked, looking to Celestia with bright eyes. “Actually, there might be something I could do.”

Celestia arched a brow.

Twilight raised the scrying spell once again, the vortex appearing before them. “See, I always noticed something unusual about this spell, even with the viewing of another world. I don’t know whether it’s because the planets are aligned or I tweaked the spell to something completely different, but I think I can actually reach this other world.”

Celestia’s eyes widened. “Truly? But how?”

“The more magic I put into the spell, the more of this world I am able to view. I’m thinking that if I put enough, or get your help, I should be able to not just view this world, but also step into it. Create a portal of sorts.”

Celestia nodded her head. “So, you could create a hole to this world, so we can actually speak and interact with these rednecks?”

Twilight nodded her head, shifting her gaze to a suburban residence the vortex was currently projecting. “I believe so. If I get the correct spell going, it shouldn’t be too difficult to pull off. That is, if you want to.”

“I could offer the hoof of friendship to these rednecks. Ally ourselves with them. Maybe even learn from them their superior technology.” Celestia’s smiled widened as her eyes twinkled with a new light of endless possibilities. “This could become one of the most important events in Equestrian history!”

“Although… there’s also the fact we’d have to deal with the redneck’s own slew of problems,” Twilight reminded her, counting off from her hoof. “War, famine, diseases, plagues, politics, reality television, religious flame wars, overpriced movie food, long wait lines at the DMV…”

“By the gods, these poor bastards are living in Tartarus itself,” Celestia said. “There’s no way we can risk exposing ourselves to them. It’d be like catching a really nasty sex disease.” Celestia coughed awkwardly into her hoof. “Not that I know about any of those, of course.”

“But still, there has to be something we can do about this situation,” Twilight said, pointing to the vortex. “I mean, isn’t there any way of using this is a profitable way?”

Celestia hummed and scratched her chin, raising her hoof with her horn glowing a bright yellow as a grin appeared on her face. “I got it! We can film these rednecks and make a show based off of their antics. We can call it ‘My Stupid Redneck: Drinking is Magic.’ We’ll make millions off of it!”

“And sell plushies and cheaply made factory merchandise for ridiculous amounts of money!” Twilight added.

Celestia patted Twilight’s head and smiled. “I know you’d make a great student one day, Twilight. Now, let’s get those cameras and a heartless corporate children’s show company on the line.” Next Chapter: Chapter 2: Because The Looking Glass Is Looking Back Estimated time remaining: 11 Minutes