After it was deemed we had done sufficient structural damage to the cake, and consequently detoured for a considerable period through the bathrooms thanks to the punch (little pitchers have big ears but small bladders),  Twilight and I carefully confiscated the still-loaded Party Cannon from a pouting Pinky Pie, and we followed the signs through the museum to the new "Wing of the Humanities." I would have mentioned something about the name to someone, but I supposed it rolled off the tongue better than "the human wing" or "the wing of the humans."

Entry to the wing, however, was naturally accompanied by personal mortification. The archway leading into the wing was flanked on either side by a larger-than-life-size drawing of a human being; male on the left, female on the right, and both naked as jaybirds.

Now I am perfectly aware that this was not Earth. I know that Equestria is the very definition of a clothing-optional culture. I know perfectly well that my group was not human and that it might as well have been two house cats posed there in their full frontal glory. None of that made a bit of difference to the fact that I personally was leading a group of children and young women between two giant paintings of buck naked people. I stood there flabbergasted, babbling for a moment before finally blurting out, in tones loud enough to make echoes ring off the marble halls;

"Oh nobody needs to see THAT!"

The children just looked confused. The girls however were far more merciless. When we had first met, I had been at pains to explain to them that my species had a very strict nudity taboo, and also to explain to them precisely why. I had, in retrospect, probably gone to too much length and too much detail. Back then they had been polite, if amused. By now, of course, it was apparently the funniest joke in Equestria. Rarity had her hoof over her heart and her head thrown back as she let loose gales of laughter; Applejack was pounding on the floor with one forehoof; Rainbow Dash was in danger of plummeting from the air--- Even Fluttershy, the heartless traitor, was giggling behind her hooves, face as pink as a carnation. Spike was, of course, rolling. My stalwart guards were having one hell of a time keeping their faces straight as well.

A curator heard the ruckus and clip clopped hurriedly over to us, obviously expecting to have to deal with some disruptive visitors and radiating huffiness as a consequence. His demeanour however changed radically when he got close enough to see through his pince-nez that the tumult seemed centered on a very large biped with a rather red face. "Oh, Sir Arcturus! What seems to be the... ah... trouble?"

For lack of anything better I pointed my cane behind me at the pictures. "I know you want to be educational," I, quite frankly, whined, "but is this necessary?"

He looked as puzzled as the foals for a moment. "Ohhh, your people have a, ah, clothing... thing," he said. (Honestly, in a world where everyone went unclothed, would 'nudity' even be a concept?) " I do understand and I am certain that nobody wanted to cause any offense to your people.... but Is it really this much of a problem?"

Pinkie's voice came from behind me. "hey, fella, watch where you're poking that thing!" she said in an incredibly bad imitation of a stallion. I looked back and realized that the end of my cane was jabbing the male portrait in a rather awkward-to-explain location. I whipped my cane away, narrowly missing putting out the custodian's eye. The girls howled.

I glared flaming death at all of them and started to say something I would regret, but I felt someone tugging at my pants leg. "Is that how humans really look?" SweetieBelle asked, eyes full of innocence.

I glanced back at the pictures. "More or less," I said drily.

Scootaloo pulled a face. "No wonder you wear clothes all the time," she said. "Gross..." Several of the colts voiced their agreement. This time Rainbow Dash did fall out of the air.

"Not all of us," I grated out, "have the privilege of having everything tidily tucked away and out of --- oh enough already!" I turned to the flummoxed curator, who was regarding our group with a sort of vague horror. "I don't know, how much of a problem do you think it is?" I asked him.

He regarded the disruptive little mob having a hoot at my expense . "I shall have a word with Dusty Tomes," he said with a sigh. "We'll... redo them. or put them away from the main thoroughfare. Or something."

I wasn't paying attention. I was glaring at Rarity. "You're laughing awfully hard for somepony who had to have it explained to her why buttless chaps were unsuitable for public wear---"

 

---

 

 

Once everyone had recovered, we marched on in.  I have to confess to a tremendous curiosity had seized me once I'd heard about the wing. I had no notion of what the Princesses or the Museum staff might have done with the bits and bobs of my world's questionable culture.

I wasn't quite expecting a wing the size of the O'Hare International Airport.

We stepped round the corner and gasps of wonder went up from the foals. I can't say as but I let loose one myself. Ahead of us and off into the distance stretched an enormous hall, wide as a freeway, with an arched glass ceiling high overhead. Ahead of us were hundreds of displays on pillars, pedestals, platforms and plinths, and what wasn't up on a pedestal was dangling by wires from the ceiling. Most of the displays were inert and behind velvet ropes, but there were some where the devices were actually functioning and were obviously meant to be fiddle-faddled with by curious hooves.  I saw what had to be an enormous model of the Earth's solar system, and---

"Good Lord," I gawped, "is that a BIPLANE dangling from the ceiling?"

I looked at the mind boggling number of displays crowding the mind-bogglingly enormous hall before us. I looked at Cheerilee. "We may be here a while," I said.

        Cheerilee chuckled behind her hoof "A good thing we had cake first, then," she said.

"Yeah, cause we would've been out if we waited till AFTER the tour," A bouncing Pinkie Pie said. "And that would've been sad."

I cleared my throat. "Well, let's see what the curators thought was the first thing we ought to see," I said. There were no ropes or cordons leading people along. I realized they would have been pointless when I glanced up and saw pegasi flitting in and out among the hanging displays. It must make things interesting to have to plot out a museum exhibit in three dimensions.

The first display, at what the arrowed signs indicated was the start of the exhibit, was the enormous orrery I had spotted earlier.  As I got closer I realized that the sun, planets and moons, and even the asteroids, were floating in thin air. (Magics. How do they work?) the detail was magnificent. Directly below it in a display case was the educational poster from God-knows-where upon which the model had been based. It might have been from China, to judge by the lettering. I spent several minutes giving a quick lecture on Earth's heliocentric solar system, and how it differed from Equestria's three-bodied Geocentric one.

The colts and fillies were all impressed--- but what really floored them was the five-foot globe of Earth on the stand next to it. Or rather, hovering above the stand, slowly rotating. It was a geologic model, with relief-indented mountain ranges and deserts--- and actual watery oceans complete with currents, moving clouds, and north and south poles that were cold and icy to the touch, They had positioned it so that the light and heat of the Orerry's sun fell on it, and even shaded half of it with an intangible starry shadow--- a holographic "night."

Good heavens, where WERE they getting the details?

The children were amazed and baffled when I explained to them, to the best of my education, how the Earth's weather systems worked. They didn't have any trouble grasping the idea of uncontrolled weather---The Everfree Forest was known to all of them---- but they were astounded at the notion of a race that did not control the weather at all, and more astounded still when I told them we actively avoided meddling with it. "You mean you just let storms and blizzards and tornadoes and stuff happen?" Snips said in disbelief, poking at some of the drifting cloud fronts.

"We don't have morphic resonance field control --- what you call magic--- like you," I explained to him. "Managing even a small portion of our weather would take incredible amounts of power. What's more, we learned some very important things about what might happen if we even tried." I brushed my hand over the globe, my fingers stirring the clouds and causing new weather and strange storm fronts all around the miniature continents. "It's called the Chaos Effect."

"Chaos? You mean like Discord?" Snails asked.

"Well... no, not exactly. Discord wasn't about what we humans call 'Chaos,' he was about disruption, disharmony, breaking things and making a big mess. There's more to Chaos than that. Chaos, real Chaos, is neither good nor evil. It's change. Randomness. New possibilities opening up. It's as important a part of the Universe as Order." I could see everyone was mulling that one over. so I threw them some more to chew on. "Let me put it this way. How boring would a board game be if the dice always came up the same number?"

"Heh, pretty boring," Snails said.

"Well, chaos is the thing that makes it possible for the dice to come up a different number every time you throw it. Or clouds to have different shapes. Or---" I poked at the globe, changing another weather pattern--- "lets a tiny little change, like a change in air pressure less than the flap of a butterfly's wing, change whether it's going to rain or be sunny halfway round the globe."

"So it means that, uh, tiny little changes at the beginning become BIG changes at the other end, and change the whole pattern?" Snails said.

"Very good, Snails, that's a pretty good summation." Snails grinned goofily. " That's why humans don't mess around with controlling the weather. Our weather is so complicated, we literally can't tell what might happen further on because we fiddle-faddled."

"Then aren't you scared to do anything at all?" Rainbow Dash asked from overhead.

I shook my head. "No... because Earth's weather is a complex, dynamic system. The cycles can wobble one way or the other, but they eventually swing the other way, back toward the center. It's marvelously self-correcting. Though we do try to be responsible about how we treat the ground, the water, and the air," I added. "Sometimes the best thing to do to something is leave it well enough alone. We watch out for bad weather and warn people ahead of time, but other than that we leave it be."

The next portion of the gallery contained a plethora of globes and maps, some showing the basic geography and climates of Earth, others showing the divisions into different countries. What caused the most awkward moments was the map-over-time display; Some clever pony had apparently noticed that many of the maps of the earth, especially those of the nations, were quite different depending on what date the map had been drawn, and had basically made a giant flip-book of maps of the globe... a few dozen simple maps showing national borders on semi-transparent sheets, laid over top of one another. The foals were quick to note that there were quite a few fickle changes between 1700 and 2000, which led to a rather painful recitation of the wars of the past century. I kept it as brief as I could, and kept many of the details as I could to myself--- but everyone was still stunned at how many wars had been fought in the bare space of 400 years, how many lives were lost. "Why so many?" Rumble asked, somber.

I sighed and gave the answer I had come to use most often: "Because there are lots of evil people in the world who want take 'no' for an answer. Even if it means killing everyone that tells them no. That's what all those lines are about... they measure just how far those bad people managed to get before they were stopped." There was a long, sad moment of silence at this.

Understand, reader, Equestria was not a complete stranger to war and violence; there were many who coveted Celestia and Luna's power and Equestria's wealth. they didn't have an army just for the parades, and most of the armor on display in that museum could have been labeled "one owner, well used, may need cleaning to remove stains." But they were in a position that even a hyperpower like the United States would have envied; ruled for close to two thousand years by a  benevolent diarchy that literally controlled the Sun and Moon. There hadn't been a major conflict in Equestria since Nightmare Moon's attempt at a coup, and no major conflicts with any outside enemies since Discord had first been sealed in stone. For all their enemies craved to conquer Equestria, none had dared to wage war on her or press her too far, beyond petty banditries and the like. (Save for three villains who are well known to any brony, as are their fates.)

Still, for a race that had not known total war in thousands of years to suddenly brush up against a race that had known nothing BUT war for just as long.... it made one heartsick.

Then Pipsqueak climbed up on a stool and looked at the map, one forehoof resting thoughtfully on one of those little red lines that had cost so many lives.  "At least there were good ponies that fought back-- that made the bad ones stop, " he said. "Or there wouldn't be any lines at all."

Oh bless your little buccaneer heart. "Yes....there is that," I agreed.