When we woke up, it was already close to noon, and the library still hadn’t been opened. In fact, we only woke up because Bon-Bon knocked at the door, and by "knocked", I mean that she practically kicked the door down. After chewing me out for feeding Lyra’s obsession with humans (Which I felt I kind of deserved), she took her friend by her hooves and dragged her back home.

I lied back down on the couch, staring at the ceiling as though my answers were written there. Spike decided to go fix a brunch for the two of us now that he was awake. As the inviting scent of coffee and cooking onions and carrots wafted into my nostrils, I began to retreat into my mind. In my mind were the answers to my task, I just had to look for them.

Had to analyze all this from a different angle, reach different conclusions that might help.  The stranger was gullible, constantly interested in mares, totally insecure in everything but his cross dressing, possibly a human being at one point, from a totally different place…

Suddenly I sat up. I had an idea—an idea that was on the one hoof odd; odd for the sole reason that when Lyra suggested it, I shook it off without thinking he could help. The other hoof held the notion that the reason I hadn’t gone through with it was that, as mentioned before, I knew he was crazy.

It was then, after breakfast, that I’d decided to visit the local curiosity shop, run by the Doctor (though he never seemed to have his doctorate around). Although she was as deep into this as I was, I decided against bringing Lyra along. She was already in enough hot water with Bon-Bon as it was, and Whooves probably didn’t want to be near her after she practically stalked him.

I remember when he and I had first met, I thought he was merely a kook. I suppose I should have realized that if Pinkie Pie has premonitions that are spot-on accurate, and if Granny Smith’s strange ingredients for making Zap Apple Jam actually work, then Doctor Whooves is able to see and interact with things that might not exist. Even if he was a bit eccentric, if anypony knew about unpredictable magic, it would be him!

“The stranger? You mean that Chris character I’ve heard so much about?” he inquired.

I nodded. I gave him the Interview files and other items from Lyra’s and my study of him. He had gone over them with me, over some tea; and he was as disturbed as anypony else from what he read. Although I caught him grinning at some of the interviews and notes, most of his facial expressions were fairly worried or depressing.

“I wanted to know if interdimensional travel is actually possible at all, and what else may happen as a result,” I asked.

The Doctor looked into my eyes. I never noticed it before, but his eyes were very pretty: a whimsical and curious blue. If the eyes are the window to the soul, his were open to allow in a gentle breeze, and the interior was just gorgeous and inviting. Not that the exterior wasn’t—his caramel coat and reddish-brown mane weren’t so bad to look at, and his turquoise bowtie and fashionably brown tweed jacket complimented his overall physical shape.

Yes, I need to get out more. And maybe get a coltfriend while I’m at it.

“I thought you didn’t believe the Blue Magic Pocket story—and if I recall correctly, you told me to my face, that it was the silliest, corniest, most un-researched, un-learned, and unbelievable theory ever pushed to the Magic Science Council. You then added I should go shave my head as penance.”

He got me there. I fought for words while he smiled at me, his eyes tilted quizzically, waiting for some excuse. Finally, I said “OK, yes, yes, I didn’t—and I was slightly drunk at the time, so I didn’t mean that part about shaving your head. But I can’t think of any other way to explain why he’s here. If there were any other humans around, I could just say that he might have been cursed into a different shape, but there aren’t any humans in Equestria—and there haven’t been for millennia.”

His smile doubled in both its length on his face and its haughtiness. As he sipped his tea in an obnoxiously long, drawn-out way, I could practically hear him hum “I was right and you were wrong, I’m gonna sing the ‘I Was Right’ Song.” While his arrogance was annoying, it’s not like there was much I could do about it; he was the only pony I knew who could fit these pieces together. He put his tea back down, almost quickly enough to make me jump.

“Well,” he said, his Trottingham accent coloring his already attractive voice, “while it’s entirely possible, especially with Blue Magic Pockets, being pulled from one world to the other is an experience that comes at a price.”

Now we were getting somewhere. “Like polymorphism?”

“Polymorphism, lycanthropy, hideous mutations, discoloring of the flesh, growing a second head, pimples, sudden loss of appetite, receding hairline, all of it can happen if one is not prepared.”

An awkward pause as the Doctor sipped his tea again. He motioned for me to try mine. It was hot and sweet, not at all unwelcome. I decided to ask him a question that, if he was right about all this, I felt I should know. “How… DO you know so much about this kind of thing?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors, so I’ll just say it. I am actually from another world, one where I was able to travel through time and space, going anywhere and anywhen. I am both A Time Lord and The Time Lord, from the planet Gallifrey. Pleasure to meet your acquaintance.” I remembered how much I’d laughed at this rumor when I’d read it in the Gabby Gums column; how much I’d laughed at him. I set down my tea, and thought I should apologize to him for judging him.

When I did so, he merely smirked and drank more of his tea. “I’m not surprised,” he said, not coldly, but with enough bite to sting. “It all must sound crackers to you, but I find that out of every group it’s the ‘scientists’  that tend to doubt what’s true, whether natural or magic or what have you.” I fought the urge to slap him for his sudden rudeness, but on the other hand, it wasn’t as if I didn’t deserve a reprimand.

He motioned for me to follow him to the back of the curiosity shop. I believe I forgot to describe the place, but it was really more of a museum showcasing pieces of a surrealist circus jungle. Masks from places I’d never heard of lined the upper walls (A spiky, heart-shaped purple mask with large orange eyes was especially chilling), alien musical instruments displayed in one corner, and foreign furniture in another. All collectible, yet affordable for the truly curious.

Anyway, the centerpiece of this collection was kept in the back, away from prying eyes. It was a large blue box, almost an outhouse with windows, with a large light on top and a foreign word I couldn’t read written above the door. “This,” he said with a flourish as if the thing were a prize on a game show, “is the TARDIS. Time And Relative Dimension In Space, TARDIS. ‘Tar’ for ‘TAR’, and ‘Dis’ for ‘DIS’. It is what I use to travel, truly nothing like it.”

After looking at it, he invited me to walk into it. He never let anypony so much as touch it before, so being offered to enter it was something I should probably consider a privilege. It was far larger on the inside—more like a house being impossibly fitted into a milk carton—and felt more like a spaceship. After drinking in what I had been exposed to, I asked him if he could still use it.

“Certainly,” he said. “I use it sometimes when I want to take a vacation.”

“To other worlds?”

“Yes,” he said. “Although I take different shapes when I travel from dimension to dimension. I assume it’s the dimension itself trying to make me conform to its Alpha Planet’s ‘dominant species’, but that’s the theory anyway.”

I had gotten even more than I desired. The plan was finally coming together. I could get the stranger to leave even sooner. I then told the Doctor about what I had planned, and after some debate, we agreed to use the TARDIS to drop him off at the dimension he was from—the dimension ruled by humans.

He warned me the stranger’s exact dimension might be hard to find—a small chance, he claimed, but still a chance. While ours, a world ruled by ponies, was in fact an “Alpha” dimension, there were numerous “Beta” dimensions that were more like branches on a tree. While the Alpha was the trunk, the Beta’s were all different versions of the same dimension. The Doctor even claimed that there existed a dimension where the genders were flipped, colts for fillies, fillies for colts. I had the oddest feeling that I may have been there once.

I asked him which dimension he was from. Within the TARDIS, he showed me a large map, seemingly built upon his Dimensional Tree Model he had outlined to me. He pointed to an Alpha marked “Human Dimension”, then slid his hoof to a branch marked “Mine”. “If the lad claims to be from a dimension where the people of a nation called ‘America’ are currently led by a human with dark skin, named ‘Barack Obama’, that would be the Human Alpha Dimension,” he instructed.

“What if he isn’t?”

At this, the Doctor didn’t seem too off-put. “Well,” he said looking at the map more closely. “If a Blue Magic Pocket really DID draw in someone from another dimension, then it’s almost a hundred percent likely it’s from an Alpha dimension, as those are the ‘centerpieces.’”

I cocked my head. “Isn’t this a theory?”

He looked at me queerly. At first, I thought I might have offended him by questioning his explanation. He merely chuckled, “Twilight, my dear, I’ve traveled through enough dimensions and discovered enough phenomena to know nearly a hundredth of everything in existence.” He elbowed me, holding a boyish grin and an impish twinkle in his eye, “Just show me some faith.”

So I tried poking a hole in his theory. “But on your diagram, it looks like your dimension is a Beta. Yet you were drawn…”

And before I could finish, the Doctor chuckled again. He turned around and said, “I’m working under the assumption our subject lacks a TARDIS.” (Not the only thing he lacked, I thought.) “I’m a Traveler of dimensions and planets and time. He was probably just an average guy, minding his own business. I was drawn here because the Blue Magic Pocket attracted my TARDIS to it, not because the Blue Magic Pocket itself drew me here.”

I suddenly noticed a curious device nearby. It was shaped almost like a wand, but it was cerulean and completely alien—much like the TARDIS. I picked it up with my telekinesis, only for the Doctor to demand I put it down. “Sensitive equipment!” he hissed. He took the wand and put it into his coat pocket, as though that was where it usually belonged. “I might have let you into the TARDIS, but that doesn’t mean you should just touch anything!”

“Well maybe you shouldn’t have left such sensitive equipment lying around.”

He looked at me in a maddening, puzzling way, as if he wanted to argue but knew he could not. Instead, he merely muttered something and continued our original conversation. After some more talking, we left the TARDIS and walked out back into the curiosity shop.

I looked at it, still in awe for its unreal wonders, over how so much could have fit in so small a package. In many ways, I like to think it was similar to our stranger, only inverted: not much on the outside, but peculiar on the inside.

I thanked the Doctor for his time (it seemed to sadden him immensely to see me go), and told him I’d come back with the stranger around sometime tomorrow.

The answer seemed so obvious now. I just had to get a few things ready for the operation. I wrote up the plan over the rest of the day, working out some of the kinks, meeting up with the key players for this scheme, going over the details. It was hard trying to convince Rarity to go along with it, but the promise of letting Spike help her with her diamond digs seemed to make her more agreeable.

OK, so I just had to get the information out of the stranger now. With everything else in place, and with surprisingly little effort, I had a working plan. It was time to make the final preparations, and then the next day, my study of this stranger would come to an end—my studies and the continuing terror both.

Next Chapter: 9. Operation GTHO Ponyville Estimated time remaining: 4 Hours, 23 Minutes