Chapter 14

9-21-13, 1:07 P.M

When Jeremy woke up, Luna was still next to him. She had evidently gotten up and moved, presumably to lower the moon, but was trying to make it look like she hadn’t. Jeremy grinned and hugged her closer, and then blushed furiously at the events of the night before. Part of him couldn’t believe he went through with it, but part of him was so glad he did. Luna turned around to look at him, evidently awake and smiling.

"Good morning, my love," she whispered, and Jeremy smiled - those two words sent a pleasurable chill down his spine.

"Morning, huh?" he asked, looking at the clock.

Luna giggled softly. "We should-" she paused a moment to yawn cutely - "should really be asleep right now... Sorry..."

Jeremy tousled her hair. "Not at all. Sweet dreams, my little moon princess..."

He gently wriggled his way out of Luna’s embrace, tucking the bedsheets further up for her before putting his clothes on – they were in a pile in the corner. Well, at least they weren’t gone entirely, Jeremy mused. That would have been bad.

Just as he was about to go, a movement from behind stopped him. "Wait!" Luna cried. "Thou... thou will come back, yes?"

Jeremy leveled his gaze at her. "Of course I'll come back," he answered, smiling gently. "How could I ever leave you for long?" Luna reluctantly nodded, smiling as well, and went back under the covers.

Jeremy left via the front door – Celestia once again said nothing, but was she glaring at him? She was just far enough away that Jeremy couldn’t quite make it out. Oh well, he thought, and left the castle.

The blustery fall air was refreshing to Jeremy, who had been getting sick of the hot summer days. He headed over to his office, joyfully speedwalking up the stairs into his room. Putting on clean clothes, he took the stairs two at a time and speedwalked his way over to the office.

Chrysalis was waiting, and so was a small, nondescript gray cube on the table. “Finally!” she exclaimed. “What kept you wai-“ To Jeremy’s discomfort, she sniffed the air.

Chrysalis then laughed, long and hard. “By the hive, you actually went through with it!” Jeremy was by now fairly alarmed.

“How the hell do you know?” he asked, irritated already. Once she finished laughing, Chrysalis wiped a tear from her eye.

“I can smell all that love on you – it’s positively intoxicating,” she breathed. Unsure what to make of this, Jeremy tugged at his shirt and went over to the love machine.

“So, anyway… might as well explain how this works,” he started. Chrysalis stopped giggling and paid attention.

“Dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine are synthesized and mixed together in the right ratio. This is then combined with an artificial magic synthesizer – not anything specific, mind you, just raw magical energy – and the whole thing can be either sprayed as an aerosol, or dispensed as a much more powerful liquid. The feedstock for the synthesis can be anything that contains carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur – so, air works pretty well for everything but the sulfur, which I bet can be found in that awful-looking cloud at the bottom of the hive,” Jeremy explained. He picked up the device, and stepped through the portal to her hive.

As soon as he arrived, Jeremy became aware of the stench of hydrogen sulfide – perhaps he hadn’t noticed it last time, but the hive had quite a lot of the toxic gas. Thankfully, it was far enough down the central pit that he didn't need to worry about getting poisoned. He went over to the edge of the cave, overlooking the strange pit of yellow-brown gas, and set up the love machine. It occurred to him that he might need a hose – though the synthesis mechanism sucked in gases and solids on its own, the pit was too far down. “Hold on, I need a rubber hose or something,” he said to the gathering crowd of changelings, quickly walking back to the portal. Searching around the room, he finally found a suitable length of rubber tubing, and attached it to the synthesis port. The other end was dropped over the edge, swinging gently just above the sulfurous yellow haze. Jeremy then placed the battery – a special design involving nuclear fusion and water – in its compartment, and turned the machine on. As it began to spew pink vapor into the air, many changelings took a few steps forward.

Chrysalis in particular was entranced, and took a cautious whiff of the substance. “It’s love, all right!” she happily called back to the rest of the crowd, and they surged forward. Jeremy stayed well back, trying to not breathe too deeply. After she had had her fill, Chrysalis walked over. “Why the reservation? Come join us,” she urged. Jeremy shook his head.

“Can’t – at those concentrations, I’d either keel over from ecstasy, or just overdose and die. This stuff’s toxic in large quantities for us,” he explained.

Chrysalis looked at him curiously, and then shrugged. “Your loss, I suppose.” Jeremy rolled his eyes.

“Now, I believe we had a deal?” he asked. It was now or never - either she'd betray him now, or not at all. To his surprise, Chrysalis nodded, and gave some sort of signal – something like a quiet screech? – to a few changelings who had already gorged themselves. Jeremy went and got his suit on, and a piece of parchment he had drafted up containing the same rules he had outlined to Chrysalis, who was now staring at his suit.

“Why do you need that?” Chrysalis asked. Jeremy shrugged.

“I don’t know, doesn’t hurt to have it.” With that, the group left the changelings to feed themselves.

The group headed out through the portal, and out of Jeremy’s office into the streets. Several ponies gasped and shied away, and after noticing Jeremy at the head of the group, the royal guards who were patrolling nervously watched them. Smiling, Jeremy led Chrysalis towards the castle, her entourage guarding her from all directions.

The trip to the castle was, as usual, a short one. Celestia immediately jumped off her throne, ready to fight the moment she saw Chrysalis, but Jeremy quickly got between them, shotgun in hand. “Enough. Don’t you remember why we’re here?”

Celestia glared at him, and Jeremy glared right back. “I still think this is a horrible idea,” she stated.

“Since when was peace ever a bad idea? Whatever reservations you might have are based on fantasy and conjecture. There is no reason for your two nations to fight anymore, so why should you continue holding a grudge?” Jeremy retorted. The various ponies who had been mulling about their business in the throne room had by now stopped to watch. Celestia grimaced – most of the ponies were nodding in agreement, much to Jeremy’s pleasure.

“Fine, I will hear your terms,” she replied begrudgingly, and Jeremy handed the scroll to her. “These are… interesting. Very well, I accept,” Celestia stated, and signed with a white quill. Chrysalis accepted the scroll back, and summoned an acid-green quill of her own, signing as dramatically as she could.

And with that, it was done. The two rulers shook hooves, each looking the other in the eye and hoping to find weakness. Jeremy stood off to one side, satisfied – it might be a cautious peace, but it was a victory nonetheless.

9-21-13, 5:37 P.M.

Word spread quickly that Chrysalis had agreed to a peace treaty. Strangely enough, word spread just as quickly that Jeremy was involved, and he hoped this wouldn’t reach Ponyville. The last thing he needed was Twilight coming down on him. He grabbed a quick dinner, and headed back to the karaoke place – he did have an interview or something to do, right?

To his surprise, he found that in its off time, the karaoke place was a regular bar. They didn’t serve any alcohol, but they did serve a variety of fruit juices, some of which seemed to be intoxicative on their own. Maybe they were fermented? Jeremy didn’t know, and he didn’t want to try.

The pony showed up quickly, and an additional journalist was there as well. “Glad you made it!” she called out as she approached, and Jeremy nodded in response. “So, as you know, we’re going to ask you some questions, and just try to answer them honestly.” Jeremy nodded again – sounded legit, he thought. He hoped the questions weren’t biased.

They took a seat at the bar, and waved off the bartender. “Alright, question number one: What is your home planet like?” she asked, and Jeremy was surprised by the straightforward nature of the question.

“Er…” he said, unsure of how to answer. Suddenly, he was gripped by an overwhelming surge of anger at his home. “Awful,” he responded.

The interviewer quirked an eyebrow. “Why is that?”

“Well, on our planet, humans are the only sentient species – other species can make tools, communicate both audibly and inaudibly, and some other higher-thinking traits. But we’re the only ones who have all of that. So, what did we do with that advantage?” Jeremy asked rhetorically. “We took over the Earth, made it our own. The population exploded, and in fact, unless we don’t do something soon we’ll be overpopulated. This wouldn’t be so bad, but that’s just the beginning. We also invented the money system… and it was promptly abused by royalty and the upper echelons from a multitude of nations. Whole lotta people died because of that, both from being too poor, and then from being too rich when the poor decided they had had enough. Eventually, we reached a balance where there existed a ‘middle class’ – neither peasants nor lords, and that’s where I come from. There were also a few wars over religion, which is basically a system of beliefs on why the world is what it is. Some people didn’t like some other people’s opinions, and they decided to kill each other for it. Sounds fun, right?”

The interviewing pony – he just remembered, her name was Starshine –  was by now thoroughly alarmed, but Jeremy hadn’t nearly had his fill. “Yeah. Religious wars alone have probably killed more people on our planet than any other social conflict. Plenty of other types of wars going on, too – mostly political. One such was over some relatively small island ruler who had amassed a lot of power – in fact, he ruled over a few continents by this point. One such continent was so far away, it was called the “New World” – and compared to the other lands, it had only been officially discovered fairly recently. After murdering quite a lot of the original inhabitants with a combination of “land ownership” claims enforced by guns, and disease, the new occupants of the New World decided they didn’t want an overseas king, or really a king in general, because he was kind of being a jerk. They declared war, won, and that was the beginning of our country, the United States of America.” Starshine was furiously scribbling notes. “It was a great idea at first – a democratic constitution, that could be changed by voting that was equalized both between states and population. If we had stuck to the letter of the law, that would’ve been a pretty sweet place to live.” Jeremy stared wistfully for a while.

“But no, once again, the people in charge had to have their little bonuses. I’m not going to go into all the details of what they did and are doing, but I will tell you what I think is one of the worst. It’s called “gerrymandering” – and it means this: Politicians can redraw the districts that vote for them, to only include their favored voters. They stay on their political perches forever because of this. And no one cares, or even really knows this is happening.” Starshine frowned. “Wow. That does sound terrible.” Jeremy waved a finger. “Believe it or not, I’m still not even done with how horrible our planet is. You see, when America was just starting out, it needed an economy. Turned out growing plants like tobacco and cultivating corn worked pretty well, so they did that. But they didn’t have enough people to do it themselves – well, okay, they did, but not efficiently. So, naturally, the only solution was to exploit the labor of another continent, called Africa. We took hundreds and hundreds of their population, against their will, and imprisoned them to work for life without pay – the birth of the slave industry.”

Starshine was horrified, and Jeremy grimly pressed on. “As if this weren’t bad enough, justifications started to pop up – our darker-skinned brothers were ‘inferior’, or ‘born of the devil’ because their skin color was different. Even after our nation had a civil war that temporarily tore the country in half before the anti-slavery side won, that prejudice lasted through to just a few decades ago, when someone finally protested these ideas. Even then, racism is still around today – but we Americans love to claim that we support ‘liberty and justice for all’, it’s even in our pledge we make to our flag every morning. Not only that, we also held the notion that males were somehow superior – they owned all the property, could punish their wives as they saw fit, and were masters of the house. Girls couldn’t be educated on practical manners until just a hundred years ago, as at the time, what they needed to learn was cooking and cleaning. Only in the past fifty years or so has any progress been made in that direction.” Starshine twirled a quill nervously. “Please tell me that’s everything,” she replied. Jeremy solemnly shook his head. “Nope, although we’re getting there. Let’s see, I’ve covered wealth, race, war, gender… oh yeah, sexuality. How could I forget?”

Starshine was confused. “What’s wrong with your sexuality?” Jeremy rolled his eyes. “Remember that ‘religion’ thing I mentioned a while back? One of the more popular one’s book got misinterpreted in a certain spot to say that if someone was gay, or preferred same-sex relationships, they should be killed.” Starshine clapped a hoof to her mouth. “Yep. So, that was what they did up until just a few decades ago, when someone had the brilliant idea that maybe we shouldn’t kill someone for their type of love, and that religion really shouldn’t be enforcing these kinds of rules anyway – as it’s supposed to be about love and tolerance? Not only that, recently we discovered that sexuality wasn’t just limited to gay and straight – there’s a whole spectrum. Now we include bisexuals, who prefer male or female, transsexuals, who don’t identify as the gender they were born with, asexuals, who don’t do sex at all, pansexuals, who have no sexual preferences whatsoever, and a few others that I don’t remember. And of course, some people refuse to accept they exist too – which is an insult in itself.” Jeremy sighed, and breathed deeply. “Okay, I’m done.”

Starshine finished her notes. “Wow. Is there anything at all good about your planet?"

Jeremy considered. "We've made a lot of neat things, not having the use of magic of any type. Stuff like atomic fusion, airplanes - those are basically trains that can fly long distances, there's also motorized vehicles that do the same on the ground, electronics, and a bunch of polymer and materials science. In fact, the last decade or two has seen some pretty amazing advancements in technology, some of which are actually bringing the whole world closer together. Like phones - you can dial in a number and your best friend can answer you from the other side of the planet without a problem. Plus, there's the Internet - basically the largest information database ever created, as well as the social hangout of everyone with a computer these days. Communication is instant, portable, and uncensored - that part's pretty awesome. Really, if humans weren't so caught up with hating one another for various reasons, we'd make for an amazing society - although that's to be expected, I guess. And really, the standard of living as a whole has rapidly increased over the past century - at this rate, in a few decades we might see the end of a few of those prejudices from earlier, hopefully for good."

Starshine finished taking notes, then slipped off the barstool, flicking through them with a practiced hoof. “Well, that alone oughta keep us busy writing for a while – can I see you tomorrow too? We didn’t get to discuss any other questions – I wasn’t expecting quite a long answer….”

Jeremy grinned, slightly embarrassed by the speech he had just given - easily the longest he had spent talking to anyone about such a thing. "Sure. Same time, same place?" he asked, and Starshine nodded. With that, they went their separate ways.

Next Chapter: Chapter 15 Estimated time remaining: 10 Hours, 26 Minutes