“Oh Spike, I almost forgot, this is Inventor, apparently he’s some kind of.. human?" The lavender mare paused as she turned to look at the human who nodded to tell her that she had gotten it right, the mare's thoughts began to drift, "Though I don’t think I’ve ever heard about such a creature before...” Twilight said.

The librarian's eyes glazed over as she lost herself to her own thoughts, after a moment she came back to reality and finished the introduction. “Inventor, this is Spike, he’s my number one assistant.” Spike blushed slightly under his scales at this.

“Nice to meet you Spike,” Inventor said with a nod toward the purple scaled lizard, Inventor paused for a moment before smiling and with his short barking laugh continued. “How odd today has been when I see a talking lizard with a position as assistant to a unicorn and it doesn’t surprise me.”

“Dragon” Spike huffed as a short burst of smoke exhaled from his nose.

“Right, dragon, my apologies to you then Spike.” Inventor said as he looked to the purple dragon, "I meant no disrespect." He finished sincerly before turning his gaze toward Twilight once again “and my apologies to you as well Miss Sparkle, if I had known that this tower was still in use I wouldn’t have barged in as I did.”

“Oh it’s fine, I’m glad my books could be of help to somepony else. I haven’t gotten a lot of usage out of them recently, what with me living in Ponyville and all.” Twilight stood from the cushion she was laying on and walked toward the shelves “which reminds me of why we came here in the first place...” she was silent as she walked past the shelves reading the book titles scrawled on their spines. Eventually she came to a stop with an ‘aha’ and focused her magic on a thick book towards the top.

The book began to glow the color of Twilight’s magic and it floated onto the table in front of Inventor, The book seemed to be some kind of reference guide on air physics. Twilight grinned, settled back down on the cushion, and began reading the book. The world seemingly falling away from her mind as she became absorbed into the complicated examples of the instructional guide.

Inventor let his chair slowly drop to all fours before leaning over to Spike with a whisper, “Is she always like this?” After the nod of confirmation from the dragon, the inventor shrugged and reached into his bag that sat on the ground next to the chair. From which he pulled out his destroyed handheld, it had mostly stopped smoking though occasionally a puff of black smoke would escape the casing.

Inventor placed the device on the table before pulling a small set of tools from his bag and placing them next to the machine. Leaning forward Inventor took out a set of screwdrivers from the set and began to unscrew the panels from each other. Spike looked curiously at what Inventor had dropped in front of him but opted to remain silent while the techie continued his work.

A couple minutes later when the panels were all unscrewed Inventor set his tools to the side then picked up the top part of the case, he separated the two halves carefully and laid them next to each other, doing this revealed all the wires crisscrossing between them as well as the intricities of the several different mechanisims inside the device. There was a gasp of surprise from in front of him. Inventor looked up to see he had two onlookers watching him work. Twilight blushed a bit as an embarrassed smile crossed her face. “Sorry, I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s so complex and delicate looking.”

“It’s alright, to be honest your magic is quite the marvel to me as well.” Inventor said as he began to critically examine the inner workings of the device in front of him. “Let’s see, if an overload is truly what caused the malfunction then it would originate from the core tracking unit due to the conversion of energy to a pressurized stable state.” he mumbled to himself as he began to poke around the device to look under the wires.

“I don’t mean to interrupt your train of thought or anything.” Twilight said looking at him with an eyebrow raised, “but didn’t you have magic where you came from?”

“Nope, no such thing, however if there is one thing we humans were, then it was resourceful. I mean it was usually to kill each other over petty disputes. But we were still very resourceful. So we made technology, and we advanced technology, it got to the point where we didn’t need to advance tech anymore, but we still did, just because.” As he said this Inventor reached down underneath the wires and grasped his fingers around a small metal clasp, with a click a compartment opened and a puff of black smoke poured out into the open air.

Twilight paused in thought as she began to ponder of what Inventor had just said, out of everything that he had said there was thing that caught her attention even more then the fact that they killed each other. “You said ‘were’, past tense. Why?”

“Because Twilight, they’re all dead and I’m the only one who is still alive.” Silence hung in the air as Inventor dug through his collection of tools, he pulled out a small rod and tapped a small cylindrical object inside the device twice, there was whir and then a click. “There we go, all fixed.” Inventor returned everything to how it had been before and screwed the device shut.

"Fixed? How did that fix it? You didn’t even do anything to it.” Spike was the first to recover from the revelation that all the humans besides Inventor were dead, albeit only through completely ignoring it and being distracted by this new revelation. As the fire breather spoke he looked at the man in front of him with disbelief on his face.

“Quicksilver adaptive tech, the rod I tapped against it reset the basic electronic flow of the metal allowing it to take its basic conductive shape again, I also enhanced it through electronic decisive flow allowing it to be affected by magic without blowing up.”

Silence...

“What?” Spike asked in confusion as he scratched the top of his head.

“Hard to explain.” responded Inventor waving his hand back and forth to dismiss the notion.

It was at this point that Twilight recovered, “So... you’re alone?” she asked hesitantly, Inventor nodded. “Well, we need to do something about that don’t we Spike?” Spike smiled and bobbed his head in confirmation. Inventor looked at the two with a confused look before Twilight continued, “Would it be okay if we were to be your friends?”

There was a brief pause where the man recovered from this unexpected question. “Nothing would honor me more then to have the two of you as my friends Twilight, Spike.” Inventor said with a smile as he nodded to each of the two when he spoke their names. As he leaned back in his chair once again the madman slid the handheld device back into his bag, he doubted it would help him anytime in the near future but stranger things had happened.

Twilight smiled back as the purple draconian approached the madman and patted him on the back, “Welcome to the group of friends buddy.”

The intelligent mare’s eyes sparked wide and she spoke. “Oh we have to have you meet all our other friends, they can all be a little... odd... at times but who isn’t right?” Twilight said. “We were planning on going back to Ponyville tomorrow, if that’s alright with you that is.”

“Sounds perfect Twilight, but first” Inventor smiled as he reached into his bag and pulled out a small metallic orb, “want to see what one of my inventions can do?” Twilight’s eyes sparkled at the prospect and she nodded. “Alright, first, Spike, would you like to try it out?”

Spike spoke with a lot of joy and impatient anticipation obvious in his words. “I would love too, ooh what’s it do? Does it give me a moustache or does it make me glow or, or..” He was interrupted as a beam shot out of the orb and hit him, Spike closed his eyes in fear of what was going to happen, when all he felt was a brief feeling of weightlessness he opened his eyes about to ask what happened, what he saw made him laugh with joy as he began to look around wildly. “I’m floating, this is amazing, its like gravity is gone and I can just float away.”

As Spike began to laugh and enjoy himself Twilight looked over at Inventor. “How did you do that?” She asked. When Inventor didn’t respond Twilight began to worry and looked closer at Inventor, beads of sweat were beginning to pool on his forehead and he slowly crouched to a doubled over position.

“Can you get Spike to come down please?” Inventor whispered through clenched teeth. A small worry formed in Twilight’s mind as she called for Spike to land. The dragon obeyed, the smile quickly disappearing from his face, and Inventor tapped the device twice, and Spike felt his gravity return. Inventor exhaled a held breath and stood up again. “Thank you.”

“What was that?” Twilight asked, the worry she felt was slipping into her voice.

“Anti-gravitational beam, it works by use of the universal law of balance. It utilizes a plasmoid core to remove the gravitational pull on one object, however by doing this the gravitational pull on the user is doubled. Because you see, laws of gravity are multiplicative rather than additive.”

That explanation earned him a confused look from both of his new friends. “Someone weighs nothing, Someone else weighs double.” Both Spike and Twilight looked at each other with understanding.

“So why did you do that? If you knew it was going to hurt you so much?” Twilight asked returning her attention to Inventor. She was worried about the health of the person she had just invited to meet her friends. If he had died during that last stunt what would she have told her friends when she saw them the next day? ‘I saw an alien kill himself in front of me yesterday’?

“Did you see the look of joy on his face when he found out that he weightless, that made it all worth it.” Inventor said with a smile, “I haven’t seen someone smile like since everyone died off. I can handle a little pain if I get to see someone smile like that again.”

“But I never would have enjoyed it if I knew it was causing you pain Inventor,” Spike said speaking up somewhat indignately. “Real friends can’t have fun if it’s causing their other friends pain.” Spike shook his head at the notion as he talked. Twilight looked at her assistant with a new found respect, he had grown up a lot these past few years they had been in Ponyville.

“I..” Inventor paused as he tapped his finger to his chin, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Well," Twilight said interrupting the man's musings. "I think we’re all thoroughly worn out by this point that we can go to sleep for the night.” Twilight said nodding her head to a second floor window where the full moon shone in. “C’mon Inventor you can take the guest room, Spike can sleep in his bed in my bedroom.”

“Time flies” Inventor said as began to trudge his way up the nearby stairs. Upon reaching the guest room he saw that the bed was actually about his size. Assuming that such a large spare bed had been set aside in case one of the princesses decided to come over for a visit, Inventor carefully set himself into the bed with all his clothes on. The comfort of the bed was immensely satisfying in comparison to the junkyard mattresses he usually slept on.

He was swiftly pulled deep into the oblivion of his sleep with his mind running through advanced and near impossible mathematical equations all the way into his sleep and deep into his dreams. underneath which nightmares curled and waited for a moment when they could get past the human's mental defenses, that moment never arrived, Inventor had been doing this far too long for it to ever even be considered.