I looked around. "Well," I sighed, I feel like an idiot."

The Princesses had led me down through Canterlot Castle, well down into the bedrock of the mountain. This was an old, rarely visited section of the palace's structure, once the lecture halls and laboratories of the original University for Gifted Unicorns, apparently now reserved for far more focused and pragmatic research. Specifically, military-related. Which thanks to current events tended to revolve around the equine enigma known as little ol' me.

The room we were in was a large circular chamber, cluttered with what I cannot help but describe as a charmingly eclectic mix of 50's sci fi movie "government laboratory" and fairy-tale wizard's shop. Bubbling beakers and tubes elbowed for room with magic mirrors and stacks of dusty tomes; glowing staves and crystals vied for attention against slate-grey cabinets covered in random blinking lights and spitting scrolls of paper with wiggly lines on them. Ponies in robes and/or lab coats moved about amongst the tables, holding clipboards aloft in their telekinesis and muttering to each other. I took note that the work did not halt in a wave of bowing upon our arrival; few if any of the ponies working, unicorn, earth pony or pegasus, even acknowledged the Princess' presence. This told me just how common their presence was down here, and how seriously their work was taken. (Keep in mind I'd seen ponies dangling from scaffolding pause in mid-task to genuflect to these two. It was almost scary.)

And scattered all over the place were unmistakeably pieces of human technology.

In my brief glance around I saw a miscellany--- tools, toys, a TV set, some computer peripherals, what looked like an automobile engine, several firearms, what looked to be a partially dismantled desktop computer.... those few items that weren't anachronisms to Equestria by function had handgrips, logos, or other clear indications of origin. The pony scientists (or wizards? In a world with a "magic field," was there any real difference?) were treating each item with exaggerated care one would expect to see around scientists investigating the innards of a flying saucer.

I nearly laughed to see two labcoated earth ponies minutely examining a battered See N' Say through mounted magnifying glasses, scowling in concentration as if they were trying to decide either how to decode it or how to disarm it. I couldn't resist. I reached over from behind them and pushed down the lever.

"ThE COW sAyS.... "MoOoOOooo!"

The two jumped back several steps as the machine warbled its classic pronunciation. I think one of them even gave a tiny shriek. I could hear the princesses behind me; Celestia restrained herself to a chuckle, but Luna exploded into smothered giggles. The two discomfited researchers shot glares over their shoulders at the person responsible (me.)  "This must be a newer one," I said conversationally. "The ones when I was a kid had pull-strings. The lever's a nice safety upgrade.... doesn't get tangled around little fingers." I wiggled my own by way of explanation.

I pointed back at the See N' Say. "The arrow's stopped turning. If you want to hear what the chicken says, just pull the lever again."

The older of the two ( or so I assume, he was the one with the grey receding mane) shot me another dirty look and addressed the princesses. "Your highnesses! I must object to your bringing the alien here. We have no way of telling what he might attempt...." ah, one of those, I thought. Almost a cosmic trope; we must encounter at least one high-domed person in the background who mistrusts the strange alien visitor. I'd met several over the course of my stay. I can't say I blame him, considering the circumstances; still it did get annoying.

"The alien," Celestia said, stressing the word noticeably, "has earned our trust. We have deemed him worthy of full disclosure here."

She lowered her head to meet the researcher's eye. "He has also behaved in an exemplary fashion since his arrival-- even when his circumstances were less than ideal," she chided. "It would behoove us all to do likewise. Wouldn't you agree, Professor?" The grey maned pony flushed and nodded. Celestia rose to her full height again. "Very good. We have things we must show Mr. Arcturus. Is the Window ready?"

"As always, your Highness," the second pony said. "We keep it spun up to speed  and under observation 24-7 now." Celestia nodded. "This way, Arthur," she said, and began picking her way through the research tables to the center of the chamber. Luna stepped in behind her, and I trailed along after.

"The chicken says: cluck cluck cluck PukAWK!"

Luna and I smothered our snickers and hurried after Celestia, who maintained her aloof dignity. But I swear I saw her hiccup.

The centre of the chamber, an area a hundred or so feet across, was cut off from the rest of the room by a ring of poles and curtains. Without pause Celestia and Luna stepped inside; I hastened to follow. Inside the curtains was a surprisingly bare and quiet space, occupied only by two or three ponies operating film cameras or carefully writing notes. Their attention was focused on some sort of device on a platform in the middle of the room.... an enormous, ornate metal ring, like a gigantic mirror frame, studded with glowing gems and crackling with power. In the center of the ring, where the glass would have been, ghostly images took form and moved about, flickered, vanished, were replaced by others.

Images I recognized. Images of cities, cars, buildings...humans. Images of home.

I waited only long enough to confirm that noone else was nearby to eavesdrop. "So.... how long have you had the portal open?" I asked. "all this time, since I arrived? Or has it been open--- say, the past twenty years or so?"

Celestia blinked. "That is... a very quick conclusion. And a rather specific window of time," she added. "How do you know we did not have it open for far less... or for far longer?"

"Longer is easy," I said. "I didn't see a single thing out there that was older than twenty or thirty years. That See N' Say was probably the oldest thing in the room--- and it's an old toy, but the lever wasn't added to that model till the mid eighties, when I was a teenager.

Shorter? That's a bit harder, but those boys out there don't look like they just started working here last month. They've got some pretty impressive grooves worn in the floor already..... But then again,  they haven't had much time to play with the junk out there. Seeing as how they acted like that toy was a ticking bomb.

"Let me hazard a guess that you've had this portal active for years... and only just recently things started coming through. Including me. Maybe even starting with me.... It's feasible; most of this junk is a couple of decades old, but humans hold on to old stuff for ages, Thirty year old TV sets and car parts could have easily been swept up last week in some neighborhoods. Either way, you got a portal, then you got a lot of things coming through the portal, then you got... me."

"And as a matter of national security you didn't tell me-- after I regained consciousness-- how I got here, or that the doorway back home was still open."

Luna looked at me with sad eyes. "We are truly sorry, Arthur...." But I waved a hand, cutting her off. "So, how much did I get right?" I muttered.

"Much of it," Celestia admitted. "But for certain details. Let me start at the beginning.

"The Window, the device you see here, was originally invented almost two thousand years ago as a means for Luna and I to survey the world--- a tool that would enable the user to see any place in Equestria as they pleased.. The highest mountain, the farthest valley, even the depths of the ocean or the heart of a living volcano, all without leaving the comfort of our home...."

"A magic mirror," I said.

"Exactly. But as you can see it did not work as intended. Instead it enabled us to look in upon your world, the world of humans. Moreover, it... wobbled. The 'eye' of the window wanders, both through space and time--- hovering frequently about the period of time you come from, give or take a century.

Despite every effort, the Window refused to operate as intended, and further refused to function in any other way than it did. The inventor regarded it as a failure, a novelty with little use. We... I....purchased it from him rather than see him destroy it, and kept it to myself... I could foresee that it might prove useful in some unpredictable fashion. And, over the course of years, it did."

"How so?"

"Come now, Arthur," Celestia teased, smiling in spite of the seriousness of the moment. "Did you not wonder about the strange anachronisms in Equestria's culture? The oddly human tools and furniture, the gramophones next to the 'electronic' turntables, quills and scrolls next to printing machines and typewriters, pony drawn wagons and flying machines? Truth be told, they are attributable to you. Over the centuries I took to watching the images of your world, and found the machines and inventions and concepts seen in them to be inspiring. I employed a staff of pony scholars and inventors to try and recreate as many of the ingenious things we saw in your world for ourselves, then "seed" them discreetly throughout Equestria, to be adapted and adopted by the ponies.

"Of course, this has never been a perfect process..."

Luna smirked. "Tis only recently that dear Celestia realized 'twas the ENGINE that was meant to pull the train," she giggled.

Celestia blushed. I couldn't help smirking a bit myself; decades of ponies pulling entire trains, engine and all, by musclepower--- that hernia-inducing mistake had to be a terrible embarrassment. "It wasn't always easy to tell what was form, and what was function," the Sun Princess pointed out. "For lack of better knowledge I had my ponies recreate to detail... even if the detail, in retrospect, was less useful for ponies than for the creatures we saw."

"Like cups with handles," I said. "or hammers. or doorknobs...."

"Try to imagine that prior to this, we were not as avid tool users as humans are," Celestia said. "If it needed built, it had to be built by unicorns--- by magic. If it was to be plowed, it was plowed by brute strength and by hoof. The idea of a hammer and nail, even one we had to hold in our mouths and strain our necks to use, was a vast improvement over gluing things together with magic or moulding them out of clouds or pummeling them with our hooves till they stuck together." She sighed. "And, at the time, our own nature as alicorns worked against us. What began as a gift from the Celestial Sisters became a holy ritual that must not be changed!... and then a sacred tradition, and eventually 'just the way it's always been.' "

"That must seem irrational and strange to you," Luna said.

I grunted. "Less than you would think. Ask me about Qwerty keyboards some time. But how does this tie into my being brought here?"

"On the night of your arrival, we had noted some peculiar behavior from the World Window," Celestia said. "Before our mages and scholars could pin it down, there was an eruption of magic. The Window... it... well, it burped."

"Verily," Luna said. "With this most obnoxious noise, it didst gush a stream of-- of enormous bubbles, as if it were a giant bubble wand blown upon by a titan's child--- that didst traverse the room--" she made a sweeping gesture with her hoof, pointing-- "and pass through yonder wall."

"We followed as fast as we could. Wherever the bubbles landed they popped and something from your world came forth. One floated all the way to Ponyville, and when it popped--- out you came."

"At which point," I concluded, "You had the Elements of Harmony bring me to you, and had me... secured." I stuck my hands in my pocket and turned my back. "And covered up how, exactly, a great big fat alien from another dimension landed in Ponyville."

Celestia nodded. "With more than one good reason.....

"We have discovered that since your, ah, eruptive arrival... the World Window can now work as a portal. After all, we'd seen it happen; from there it was a short step to learning how it was done. Within hours of the eruption, the scientists used it to pull some few random items from your world... and to also send them back." She paused, hesitant of my reaction. "We can send you home. We always could."

The room went still. This entire time? From the very moment they found me?

"So. Why tell me now?"

"Because thou won our trust," Luna said simply. "Your intentions, we could not know. Your motives, we could not know. Your threat we could not assess.... save what we hadst seen through the Window of Worlds, which was not kind to thee. Yet thou didst act gently and nobly to the best of thine ability, e'en in thy distress. And out of compassion for those who were strangers to thee, thou didst labor manfully to give us thy best counsel---thou held nothing back. Thou even labored a night and a day to devise a way to defend us from thine own people."

"You gave us the whole truth," Celestia said. "Even when it might have hurt you. You deserved nothing less in return." She looked away. "Luna and I understand if you are angry with us for not telling you sooner..."

I seethed, but my damned heart wasn't in it.  They were rulers; they had the welfare of their entire race to think of. Deceiving the fat man from dimension X was hardly a sin under those circumstances. Would you tell an alien from another world, with unknowable intentions, that he could escape at any time... and maybe lead an army of his buddies right to your back door?

"I'm not mad at you for withholding the truth from me," I finally said. "You had to do what you had to do." I scowled as the forgotten papers under my arm shifted. "I am a bit annoyed that a certain somepony--" here I shot a gimlet eye at Luna--- "kept me up all night letting me make a fool of myself."

"Me?" Luna exclaimed innocently. A little too innocently.

I turned and looked at them both. "All that brainstorming last night," I said. "All my so-called brilliant ideas for SAVING EQUESTRIA FROM THE HUMAN INVASION!... you two probably had plans like this plotted out for yourselves over a hundred years ago, didn't you?" Neither one met my eye-- but neither one could quite hide a little smirk. "Gah. I feel like a complete idiot. A complete idiot squared. Both of you are older than some mountain ranges, you probably noodled all THIS out--" I gestured with my fistful of notes--- "before ponies invented fire. I'm such a knob..."

Celestia finally burst out laughing. Luna joined in. "Did you HAVE to lead me on like that?" I complained to the midnight filly.

"But thou wert so sincere about it," Luna said with an affectionate smile. "Twas so darling I could not bring myself to...."

So you aren't angry that we manipulated you?" Celestia asked.

I gave her my best deadpan. "Oh, woe is me, you tricked me into living in a luxurious castle, waited on hand and foot for weeks on end, oh, the ignominity of it all," I said dryly. "how shall I ever recuperate?" Luna let out a most unprincesslike snort.

I let out a puff of air. "Of course I'm upset you manipulated me. But I'll get over it. I know why you did it and no matter how much it honks me off, you were still right to do it." I shrugged. "You've ruled a country for over a thousand years. Any plan that isn't completely Machiavellian probably feels spur-of-the-moment by that age." Celestia gave me a raised eyebrow , but said nothing.

"Do understand, Arthur," Luna said, "Thy advice was seemly and timely-- and truly insightful. Our familiarity with thy world's ways and tools have been scattered, piecemeal at best, till only fairly recently..."

"Most of what you see here came through shortly before and after your arrival," Celestia said. "The Mirror seems to be narrowing its sweeps to the modern era, in which you live. And what little we have seen of that time has left us... intimidated.

"Your advice," she stated firmly, "was more informative than you know."

"So, wilt thou return home now?" Luna asked. "We can send thee to thy world e'en this very instant, if thou wishest. Or would thee prefer to tarry a day or so to make your goodbyes?"

There it was. THE question. As luck would have it, the one question I was ready to answer ages ago. "Absolutely not. With your Highness' permission, I'm staying right here in Equestria."

My answer startled them profoundly. "What?" Celestia asked, wings flared in surprise.

"May I stay?"

She stumbled a moment. "Why- I-- yes, of course," she finally said. "But-- your friends, your life---"

Hah. I flabbergasted CELESTIA. "My life is where I take it," I said. "You know, Princess, a lot of Bronies back on earth, when they write stories about traveling to Equestria, when they get to this point the protagonists always hem and haw and have a massive internal conflict about whether they should stay or they should go. Well horseapples to that.

I thought this through, long before I came here or before I even became a Brony. What would I do if I traveled to another world and was given the opportunity to stay? You know what my conclusion was?

"It was 'I'm on another world, what kind of question is that?'

"And it's not just about being selfish or wanting to escape reality to some utopia or any of that-- though if I got dropped on a Utopia let me know because I'd be stupid to pass it up. Even if this world were a blasted, barren wasteland filled with evil road-warrior biker dudes, I could never go back.

Do you know how many people in my entire species have made it off our world? Fewer than you have sitting around your dinner table. They barely made it out of our atmosphere, left a few footprints on our moon, and came back. But just doing that was worth everything they sacrificed... and some sacrificed everything. I have ancestors who crossed oceans on rickety boats on the blind chance of running into new lands. Some never came back. But they knew that might happen and they went anyway.

Me, I don't even have the excuse of the risk of the journey. I'm already here.

"What kind of option is going home after this? To just turn away from an entire new world, walk through a magic door and go back to my old life and spend the rest of my life either being thought insane or pretending that none of this ever happened?  To hear opportunity knock, open the door, and then slam it again in her face? To spend the rest of my life wondering "what if?" Even if I never see my family or friends again, I would never forgive myself for passing up something astronauts and explorers died dreaming of. There will be things I'll miss, but there's always things you miss when you move on. It's a part of living. And if I go home, I'll have things-- and people-- I'll miss here.

"Princess, I have literally gone boldly where no one has gone before! And once you've gone there, you can never go back."

Celestia regarded me with astonishment. "You are an unusual creature, Arthur," she said.

"I'd like to think so," I replied.

Celestia smiled and mantled a wing over my shoulders. "Then, Arthur... let me welcome you to Equestria."

Luna spread her own wing over my shoulder. "I am glad that thou art staying, Arthur Arcturus," she said. Her smile faded a bit. "but I should let thee know one more detail of thy arrival that thou misseth. And I know not what it heralds, but I suspect... something perilous."

"Really?" I asked. "What?"

Luna looked at me worriedly. "Thou misunderstood us," she said. "Thou wert not pulled into Equestria."

"Thou wert pushed."