Fluttershy opened her eyes and said a name.

She looked up at the wood-carved ceiling of Twilight’s library. No, its basement. There weren’t any windows down here, so the shadows lurked deeper into the corners. Twilight’s science machines provided plenty of illumination, though, with their flashing lights timed up with each beep or whirr. Fluttershy hadn’t been down in Twilight’s basement very often—there hadn’t been a need to—but Pinkie Pie had. She’d told Fluttershy of the time when Twilight had hooked up a number of wires to her head and her hooves, and measured—

Hooves.

Fluttershy lifted a leg, holding it above her face. It ended in a hoof. Hooficured two days ago, yellow fetlocks neatly trimmed. Exactly at it should be.

Exactly as it should be.

“Fluttershy?” Twilight Sparkle poked her head out from behind one of the larger apparatus. Her mouth quickly turned to a smile, gentle and reassuring. Together with the look in her eyes, she had much the same presence as a doctor informing their patient that their wing would be in a cast for a month. Fluttershy fidgeted restlessly beneath the gaze as Twilight approach. “Oh Fluttershy, thank Celestia! I was so worried when you collapsed.” She turned her attention to a nearby machine that was spitting out a waterfall of paper, with a red line zigzagged across its surface. “How are you feeling now?”

Fluttershy returned her stare to her forehoof. “Confused,” she answered after a moment.

“That sounds understandable,” said Twilight. Her voice was gentle. A bit too gentle. She ran her eyes up and down Fluttershy’s prone, blanket-covered form, making the pegasus feel a tad self-conscious. “Any headaches? Memory loss? Inability to focus?”

“I did feel, um...” Fluttershy let her hoof drop to her side atop the blanket. “My thoughts felt all fuzzy when I walked over here. Sort of like right before you drift off to sleep. But, I’m feeling better now. Actually...” She leaned upright slightly and wiggled about until her wings were freed from the blanket, and she stretched them out to their full wingspan. “I feel quite well-rested now. Nothing that a nice nap can’t fix.”

“Yes, yes.” Nodding, Twilight placed a hoof on Fluttershy’s shoulder and gently pressed her to lay back down. “I, err”—her hind hoof tapped the floor, rapid and light—“heard you say a word. Right as you were waking up.”

Fluttershy frowned slightly at the line of questioning. She repeated the word, then said, “Yes. That was his name.”

“His?”

“The creature from my dream. During my nap.”

Twilight looked out of the corner of her eye at a clipboard hanging beside Fluttershy’s makeshift bed. A large graph dominated the page, lines of purple and green and red waving up and down before reaching a violent crescendo. “A creature? So, not a pony, then.”

Fluttershy looked up and to the right, her brow creasing ever so slightly. “He said that he was a human. He didn’t have any coat, like a pig, except he walked on two legs, like Discord or Spike.” She blanched. “Normally.”

“So,” she asked, head tilted to one side, “this creature—this human—appeared to you, in your dream? And spoke to you?”

The makeshift bed underneath Fluttershy suddenly felt very stiff. She squirmed about to find a more comfortable position. “Not exactly. It was more like, our minds were connected somehow, and we could hear each other’s thoughts... a little.”

“Oookay.” Twilight frowned, arching an eyebrow at the pegasus below her. “So, then, you’re saying he was like a voice in your head?”

Fluttershy twisted and rolled, slinking down the table, the edge of the blanket coming up to her muzzle. “That’s... not quite... Um...”

Closing her eyes and holding a hoof to her temple, Twilight said, “But you were still sharing thoughts. So if your minds were connected, and he wasn’t inside your head, then you... were inside...” Her eyes opened wide, her face perfectly blank.

Fluttershy’s head disappeared beneath the blanket. “...eep.”

Wordlessly, Twilight Sparkle’s horn came alight, gently yet insistently tugging the blanket out from between Fluttershy’s hooves. A pair of black, horn-rimmed glasses came to rest on the bridge of her muzzle, while her mane twisted and knotted itself into a pert bun on the back of her head. “So,” she said calmly, levitating a scroll and quill in front of her, “perhaps you should just start from the beginning.”

Fluttershy let that comment hang in the air for a moment. She tried to look straight up at the ceiling or off to the side, anywhere but at Twilight sitting beside her, unmoving, waiting patiently. With a relenting sigh, she looked down at the folded blanket and idly smoothed out its surface with her forehooves. “It started this afternoon, when I was in my garden.”

“What started? Specifically, I mean.”

“The hum. That was probably the most overwhelming thing. It felt like my whole body was fading away, right before the first time I passed out, and Angel—” She bolted upright, turning to Twilight with ears perked. “Angel! Oh no, what happened to Angel? He was—”

Twilight held up a placating wing. “He’s upstairs. He was getting a bit too fidgety while you were”—frowning, she took a light nibble on the quill that levitated before her—“unresponsive. He kept trying to rouse you, so Spike volunteered to watch after him.”

The tension slowly left Fluttershy’s body. She laid back down. “Oh, I see. That was quite nice of Spike.”

“Was volunteered,” Twilight amended with a cough. “Anyway, auditory hallucinations, followed by impairment of motor function and a sensation of fading consciousness. Does that sound about right?”

“Yes, I guess so. I fell asleep right outside your home, and by the time I woke up, you had carried me down here.”

“Mmm hmm.” The sound of Twilight’s quill scratching across the parchment filled the gap in the conversation. “And while you were asleep, you had a dream about this human.”

Fluttershy tugged sharply on the blanket but, alas, Twilight had had the foresight to pin the corners down with magic. After a few moments of futile tugging, she relented and looked away. “I had a dream that I was in a bedroom, by myself. It was really dark so I couldn’t see much, but I knew it wasn’t mine, plus I could still hear the humming from before.” She ran her hoof in circles on the blanket’s top. “And I, uh... wasn’t quite myself.”

“Your consciousness was inhabiting his body. In the dream, I mean.”

Fluttershy turned her head upright and lifted a hoof above her muzzle, taking a moment to stare at the appendage. “It turns out that humans have fingers, like Spike does. That was, um, quite an unusual sensation.”

Scratch scratch. “So, you felt as though your body was that of a human?”

“Yes. No.” Scrunching her eyes shut, Fluttershy brought a forehoof to her temple. “My ears felt normal, except it felt like I didn’t have a muzzle anymore. Not really. And all of my hooves had these ‘fingers’, but my tail felt normal but only sometimes, and—”

Fluttershy felt a hoof on her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” said Twilight. “I can imagine how disorienting that must have seemed. You don’t have to go into full detail right now. I’ll just put down ‘proprioceptive cognitive dissonance.’”

“O-Okay then,” said Fluttershy, taking a few slow breaths. “Thanks. I think.”

“And you’re saying that he talked to you. Inside his head.”

“Y-Yes.” Fluttershy blushed sharply at that. “The entire thing felt a bit unusual at first—”

“Does seem rather inappropriate.”

“—but he was really nice about explaining things. Well, sort of.” She turned to Twilight Sparkle and gave a slightly embarrassed smile. “It was only a dream, so I was drifting in and out, and I couldn’t always hear his thoughts that well. But he was a human, and he knew my name, and he said that he’d been looking forward to talking to me, so he was really excited.”

“Really.” Twilight’s quill jotted down a few more notes. “What else did you discuss?”

She tapped a hoof to her chin. “Nothing, really. We both noticed that I couldn’t really feel my wings that well.” She instinctively spread the appendages in question. “He seemed to be thinking about that quite a lot, so I tried thinking about it too, and that did help a little. Oh!” With a start, she lightly tapped upon the table with a hoof. “I also trotted around inside the bedroom. Just for a tiny bit. I couldn’t see very well, after all, and besides, I still felt really sleepy.”

Twilight looked up from her notes and gave her a gentle smile. “Actually, you would just say ‘walked’, not ‘trotted’. A trot is a specific gait that requires four legs, so for bipedal creatures, like Discord or a human, you’d say ‘walked’ instead.”

In that moment, Fluttershy really wished that she were a unicorn. Then she could dispel this pesky magic from her blanket and hide beneath it.

Twilight Sparkle’s smile slowly dissolved, while her quill came back to live. “Uh. Right, then. Trotted.”

“After that... I woke up.” She looked back at Twilight and tittered. “It may not have been the most exciting dream, and perhaps more than a little bit strange, I admit, but it was certainly curious, don’t you think?”

Twilight didn’t make eye contact, instead jotting away on her scroll. She punctuated her last sentence, tapping the period over and again while she mulled away. With a heavy exhale, she turned toward Fluttershy proper, a bleak look to her face. “Okay. Fluttershy.”

“Y-Yes?” The wooden tabletop felt scratchy against her back once more.

“I’m going to tell you something which is probably...” She groaned and shook her head. “No, it is going to freak you out, but you deserve to know the truth. So please, wait until I’ve finished explaining before you react.”

Fluttershy forced her throat to swallow. “I’ll try.”

Twilight Sparkle closed her eyes and folded her wings against her body. With a slow inhale, she said, “That wasn’t a dream. It was real.”

Fluttershy blinked once, twice. She sat up in bed and twisted about, so that she could fully face Twilight. “Really?”

“I could feel it as soon as you approached the library, and my lab equipment certainly confirmed it.” She waved a hoof at the nearby printouts and charts. “Via whatever means, you were being targeted by a fairly high-level summon spell.”

“Summoned...” She looked down and to the left.

“Not physically, of course,” continued Twilight. “After all, you never left this room. But somehow, that spell was able to disassociate your conscious entity from your physical being and channel it into an alternate dimension, whereupon your errant conscious spirit bound—albeit temporarily—into a receptive host to cohabitate with his own extant ego.”

Fluttershy nodded slowly for a few seconds. “Oh.”

Twilight Sparkle tittered and scratched at her neck. “Uh... Basically, he summoned your mind into his head. With magic.”

“Oh!” She smiled in recognition, looking at her own back. “Well, that makes sense, I guess. Since I was feeling sleepy and couldn’t feel my wings, he must have been working on the spell to help me feel more comfortable.”

“That,” she said, taking a step back and looking askance, “does line up with my hypothesis, and also, you’re taking this news way way better than I thought you would.”

Fluttershy gave a demure shrug. “Well, I mean, I suppose you’re right. That it wasn’t very considerate of him to summon me before asking if it was okay, or if now was a good time. But still, he seemed nice.”

Twilight brought a hoof to her brow for a moment before leveling her gaze. “Fluttershy, Discord made it rain chocolate milk and brought your gravy boat to life. He ‘seemed nice’, too.”

“Exactly,” Fluttershy calmly returned. “And tomorrow, Discord and I are going to go uphill-sledding together.”

Twilight opened her mouth a few times, before finally snapping it shut.

“He seems like a nice creature, even if we don’t understand much about him,” Fluttershy continued with a small nod. “I’m sure that if I talked him some more, we could—”

“Oh, no. Absolutely not.” Twilight Sparkle waved both her forehooves, her brow furrowing tighter. “There is absolutely no way that I’m going to stand by and let somepony from another dimension cast spells on my friend in order to hijack her mind.”

Fluttershy brought a hoof gently underneath her own chin. “He seems like he just wants to talk.”

“Princess Celestia would never allow this!”

Fluttershy locked eyes with Twilight. The two stared at each other in silence for a bit, a moment, a while. Fluttershy tilted her head.

Twilight Sparkle grunted. “Spiiike!”

Angel Bunny nuzzled against Fluttershy’s face as she laid beside him. When he was first let into the basement, he was nothing but excited squeaks and frantic displays of emotion. Now that the situation had calmed down, he seemed content to rest beside her. Good bunny. He could still stand to be nicer to his bunnysitter; Angel was still giving Spike the occasional baleful glare.

The bunnysitter in question tapped his clawed foot against the wood flooring, crossing his arms and pouting at Twilight Sparkle. “Come on, Twilight! Do I really need to be down here still?”

“Yes.” Twilight Sparkle, meanwhile, was stacking together some of her charts and data, and writing notes on a scroll that was getting lengthier and lengthier by the second. “We’re waiting for the Princess to reply.”

“Um, duh? You told me that when I sent her your letter.” Spike jerked his thumb at the staircase leading to the main foyer. “How about I go upstairs, get back to the cleaning, which is supposed to be your chore this week, and then as soon as—”

She rolled her eyes upward. “Please, Spike, this is important! The Princess’s letter could arrive any second now.”

“Seriously? In the time it could take for me to walk up the stairs and back down again,” he said, pantomiming the action with his fingers, “you honestly think that the Pri—” Clutching suddenly at his gut, Spike released a rumbling belch. A flume of green dragonfire illuminated the room, producing a tightly-rolled parchment wrapped in ribbon, along with the faint odor of sulfur.

“Ah, perfect!” Twilight Sparkle reached out to the scroll in midair, unfurling it in front of her. “And in the time it took you to gripe about how long it was taking, the Princess wrote back to us.” She looked away from the scroll for just a moment and gave a pacifying smile and a wave of her hoof. “Thank you, Spike. You can get back to... whatever you were doing earlier.”

Grumbling and scratching at the side of his face, Spike started his climb back up the staircase to the main floor. Fluttershy watched him intently as he climbed, studying his actions. She noted how each of his clawed fingers dug and scraped along his face. That probably made it lots easier to deal with an itch.

“My dear Twilight, thank you for your detailed letter. I am...” Twilight read aloud in a soft monotone, her voice fading in and out as she reached certain lines. Fluttershy broke her attention from Spike and watched as her friend’s face grew more and more concentrated. “...understand your apprehension... powerful magicks targeting... well-being of your friend... need for—” She jerked her head back and boggled a moment before rereading an excerpt in an incredulous tone. “While it is very compassionate for you to be concerned for the well-being of your friend, I do not feel that there is need for immediate alarm. So long as Fluttershy feels safe, then this could indeed prove to be a terrific chance for discovery. I trust that Fluttershy will inform you should anything trouble her, and that you will be able to take the appropriate actions. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any further concerns. Yours, Princess Celestia.” Twilight Sparkle lowered the letter and stared straight at Fluttershy, her expression unreadable.

Fluttershy looked down and to the side almost immediately, her brow scrunching lightly. “The Princess thinks that this is ‘a terrific chance for discovery’?”

“I can’t believe she’d just allow this kind of magic to occur,” Twilight said, her voice hollow. “Completely unregulated? Source unknown?”

“We would just be talking,” she said, frowning slightly at Twilight. “It should be safe, so long as—”

“—so long as we take proper precautions.” Twilight jammed a thermometer into Fluttershy’s mouth under her tongue, before pushing her back onto the tabletop. “That means some protective counterspells, a full array of biometric and thaumaturgic recording devices, thorough psychological profiles both before and after...”

“Ah ke doi nah.”

“What?”

Fluttershy pulled the thermometer out of her mouth. “I can’t do it now. I think. I mean, I can’t hear the humming, so...”

Twilight gently reinserted the thermometer. “All the more reason to take proper precautions. We’ll get some baseline measurements now. But you need to promise me, as soon as you start to feel that spell’s effects kicking in, you drop whatever you’re doing and come straight here, okay?” She looked down at Fluttershy and gently smiled. “I just want to make sure that we can properly monitor you, while you’re... you know. Away. Make sure that you’re safe.”

“Okay, I promise, Twilight,” she said, once she had removed the thermometer. She looked up at the ceiling and blinked a few times. A new person. A new type of creature, in fact. Reaching out from a different dimension, just so that he could talk to her? The thought made her a bit self-conscious—why choose her, specifically, out of all the creatures in all of Equestria—but all the same, he seemed nice enough. Maybe they could become friends? She smiled at that. It’s always nice to make a new friend.

Twilight Sparkle stuck the thermometer back under her tongue.