"Oh, hell, I'll do it, myself!" Trevar grumbled, reaching for the gun. 'Pardus, be ready to repel her,' he sent to the panther. Sure enough, Scott rushed to grab the gun before Trevar could, but suddenly she felt herself being pushed away.

Trevar deftly removed the magazine and cleared the round in the chamber, snatching the bullet out of the air as it flew. Scott took that moment to try rushing him again, but once more was pushed away. Trevar barely gave her a glance.

Then, while Trevar was busy rummaging through the drawers looking for tools, she tried yet again, only to be pushed back even harder than before and she finally landed on her butt.

"Do you mind?" Trevar demanded, glaring at her as he clamped a pair of channel locks to the cartridge of the free round.

Scott glared at the panther, suspicious that it was the cause of the telekinetic pushes. But the cat seemed intent on trying to look at both humans at the same time, its head rapidly swiveling back and forth to look at each in turn.

"Are you certain this isn't a mating ritual?" Pardus asked. "Are you the female, playing 'hard to get'?"

Trevar looked up from where he was using a second channel lock gripping the bullet to twist the round apart to see the cat was speaking to him.

"What? Uh, no," Trevar replied, dropping the bullet into the bowl with the other three. "I'm the male, she's the female. Truth is, she's not even my choice as a mate. Like I said, we're here totally by accident."

"What are the odds of me running into two creatures with such strong telekinetic abilities?" Scott finally asked.

"I don't know," Trevar responded sarcastically as he removed the remaining five rounds from the magazine. "What are the odds of two worlds more than fifteen hundred light-years apart each developing warp drives that just happen to link up together while one of those worlds is testing a badly misaligned unit? After today, I'd have to say, 'greater than or equal to one'."

Panthera was cloaked and crouched upside down in the corner between ceiling and wall as the six creatures cautiously entered the corridor. The blue pegasus with the prismatic mane and tail nearly brushed against her, but that was the only moment that risked discovery. Curiously, the other two winged creatures opted to remain on the ground as the troop passed by. The purple winged unicorn seemed to be the party's leader while the pale yellow pegasus with a pink mane and tail was definitely the most submissive of the entire group and brought up the rear. As they passed her hidden location, Panthera floated down to hover in the middle of the corridor and silently followed, still trying to puzzle out the nature of the odd branding marks they sported on each of their hips.

The blue pegasus, who had a white cloud and a tri-colored cartoon lightning bolt brand, was doing most of the talking, reporting on what she had seen, with considerable additions provided by the orange creature wearing the cowboy hat and sporting a trio of cartoon apples on her flanks. After a while, those two began arguing over details and interpretations, during which the discussions got heated. Panthera almost expected them to come to blows a few times, until a word or two from one of the others would defuse the tension for a moment before they would start up again. And it was interesting that not all those calming words came from the purple one, the one who had tried to introduce herself as Twilight Sparkle who was marked with an odd pattern of a large darker purple star surrounded by five small white stars.

Watching and listening, it was clear the blue pegasus was named Rainbow Dash, and the argumentative orange creature was called Applejack. Furthermore, they respectively each had distinct accents. Rainbow sounded like she might have come from the Bronx of New York, while Applejack sounded like she could've been raised anywhere from the rural parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, down to Tennessee or even out to somewhere in the Ozarks of Arkansas and Missouri. The white unicorn with the dark purple mane and tail, evidently named Rarity, reminded Panthera of the Gabor sisters, Eva or Zha Zha, and with each occasion she talked, Panthera leaned more and more toward Zha Zha. She had a trio of playing card-type blue diamonds branded on her hindquarters. The pink creature, called Pinkie Pie, who was marked with a pair of blue and one yellow blobs that might supposed to have been balloons, seemed to be suffering from some form of Hyperactive Attention Deficient Disorder with several orders of magnitude applied to the Hyperactive factor…oh, and with a substantial random generator thrown in for good measure.

The pale yellow pegasus with the pink mane and tail and a trio of—somethings that might be a poorly drawn physics display—or not—on her rear was the most difficult to get a decent reading. When she did speak, it took a considerable amount of amplification to even pick out her words. And most of all of what she had observed speaking was during the time between when Panthera had arrived to observe the group after following the blue pegasus and just before the attack of those wood-puppet dog-things. Panthera had yet to hear anyone mention her by name.

And then there was the purple one, Twilight Sparkle: a very odd and curious creature. She showed substantial telekinetic ability by grabbing and lifting the burning—what was the term they used? Ah, yes, 'timberwolf'—evidently someone's idea of a lame pun. She and the white unicorn had erected quiet sophisticated shields to try and keep her away, and then Twilight tried a grab at her when she left, but Panthera was able to shrug off the tractor beam without even trying.

Watching their interactions, it became clear that Twilight was the most analytical of the six. During the period where Rainbow Dash and Applejack gave her descriptions of Trevar and Lieutenant Scott, Twilight interrupted and produced a holographic projection of several humans to show the two and got confirmation that that was what they saw, although Panthera noted that the images Twilight produced had odd colorations of hair and skin more similar to their own equine set rather than that of normal humans. Furthermore, Twilight as well as Pinkie Pie had even referred to them as "human", surprising Panthera.

Panthera counted herself fortunate to be an artificial life form. If Trevar had been there when Rainbow Dash recounted what she saw when Pardus had decloaked, his howls of laughter would've certainly ruined their hiding behind this group. That was the point at which Rainbow explained she had left to come report to Twilight. And damn, that little pegasus was fast and agile as all shit! Hell, the thing even left a glowing rainbow-colored contrail! And lucky for her the creature did! Some of those turns were so sharp, that Panthera wondered if she could've flown that course using just her own senses without crashing into something. But that prismatic contrail gave her just enough warning of the variety of turns as she had fought to keep the blue pegasus in sight.

"They should get here in a couple of months. It'll be a few days yet while they prep it for launch," Trevar told Scott as he played the gas welder on the bullets and the lead cores quickly flowed out of the steel jackets to pool together into a single puddle at the bottom of the crucible.

"Too late to help me, I take it?" Scott asked.

"Sorry, but we couldn't help you even if we wanted," he replied, using a spare screw driver to flick the empty steel casings out of the bowl and shut off the flame. "Your quarks are already decaying temporal energy. The cascade will catastrophically affect your biology when your atoms finally normalize."

"Anyhow, the speeds we get from the drives are an exponential ratio based on the power needed to be pumped in for light speed," Trevar continued his explanation about how his ship utilized their warp coils. Quickly grabbing a pair of tongs he had at the ready, he picked up the bowl and brought it over to the remains of the nuclear round.

"It still takes a tremendous amount of power just to break light speed," he was saying as he poured the molten lead into the cavity leading to the rest of the plutonium sphere buried deep inside the device. "The ships are designed to function up to factor eight, which just is a little over three ninety-six thousand times light speed. But we're still early on our production. It takes a while to bake the warp coils to ensure they can run at that load. At present, we can only safely run up to factor seven point forty-seven only for short periods, a few hours at most. But we've done test runs out to eight hundred fifty light-years at seven point one-one-five for well over a month. At that speed, the ship should take about fifty-seven or fifty-eight days to get here."

When the lead froze inside, it would permanently prevent the cone from ever being able to complete the sphere which would've caused the chain reaction and detonate the device. Sighing in relief, Trevar set the crucible down on the top of the tool box and picked up the plutonium cone. Then he began the arduous task of reassembling the components, sans high explosive or blasting cap.

"What's the top speed? Theoretically?" Scott asked.

"The speed of gravity," he replied.

"Wait! The speed of gravity is the same as light speed! Einstein proved it!" she protested.

"Uh-uh," Trevar responded. "Einstein theorized it, while your physicists tried to prove it. But they botched the job when they accepted data that's essentially useless and discarded evidence that didn't fit their bias. But you do know about inflation? The force that caused the universe to expand during the Big Bang?"

"Of course," Scott replied. "And inflation will eventually rip the universe apart."

"Perhaps," Trevar muttered. "But the important thing is that inflation had to act much faster than the speed of light, otherwise, the moment gravity decoupled from the other three forces, the universe would've instantly re-collapsed. Correct?"

"Not at all!" she argued. "The expansion was already going faster than light at that point."

"The Standard theory had gravity decoupled from the only a few Plank-minutes after inflation began, but the size of the observable universe was still way smaller than an atom."

"That's true," she agreed.

"Now, let's look at it at another direction: if you put the mass of the entire Milky Way and compressed it into the size of Pluto's orbit, you'd get a black hole, would you not?"

"Of course," she replied.

"The problem is the point at which gravity decoupled was well within the size of an atom!" Trevar said. "Even when the inflation was supposed to have slowed back to less than light speed, it was just ten centimeters across. Still well within the Schwarzschild radius of the Milky Way, and we're talking the mass of every other galaxy tossed in as well! It wouldn't matter how fast space was expanding if everything in existence was so far beneath the event horizon, It should never have escaped! But it did!"

Scott had no adequate response and remained quiet, waiting for Trevar to continue.

"Except gravity isn't a real 'force' like the Electromagnetic, Strong and Weak forces," he said, resuming his point. "Gravity is the distortion of space-time due to the effects of mass, and inflation is simply the negative aspect of the attractive force of gravity. So if inflation is capable of making space expand at speeds far greater than light, then so too must ordinary gravity be able to affect objects with superluminal reaction speeds! Besides, that's the only explanation for the Inertial Paradox as well as how gravity can affect the paths of orbiting black holes and neutron stars that are moving at relativistic speeds. We know it's not infinite, but based on the calculations we used to build our drives it's at least twenty-five billion. However it can just as easily be much more. Perhaps as much as eighty-seven billion or so."

"Really?" Scott asked incredulously.

"The very fact that we've just stepped through a warp tunnel over fifteen hundred light-years long which was created by those rings proves it!" he paused in his work to glare at her. "That warp tunnel was a purely gravitational field punching a hole through space-time."

Scott blinked at that then sat mostly in sullen silence while he continued to work. In about an hour, Trevar finished replacing the outer covering and securing it down.

"Will that aid in getting you home?" Pardus asked, continuing to role-play a potential native.

"No, but I've fixed it to prevent anything living here from losing their home as a result of this device," Trevar said.

Panthera patiently sat and watched the equine-like creatures keep an eye on the humans and Pardus. The azure, purple and orange individuals had stacked one on top of another to poke their heads around the corner, while the other three sat back and nervously fretted. Well, except for the pink one, who didn't seem that much concerned as she played with rolling a small rubber ball between her hooves that she had pulled out from someplace and sometime that Panthera had somehow failed to catch the moment or the means. It was very odd, since the panther's senses normally recorded at super-high speeds and definition. She was taking considerable computational processing to try and analyze the phenomena, and had even enlisted Pardus with trying to isolate the moment of the incident.

"Wha' dya think thar up ta, Twilight?" Applejack whispered.

"I don't know," Twilight replied softly. "Something about that device they're working on. He seemed to imply it's somewhat dangerous."

"You know, it's all rather odd," Twilight spoke up when it looked like the human stallion was finally finished working on the device.

"Whuz'zup?" Rainbow whispered.

"Well—you told us that cat had just introduced herself to the humans when you ran back to us," Twilight whispered. "But then she must've been hot on your tail in order to be there just in time to save our flanks from the Timberwolves. But after checking us out and then completely losing interest in all of us, she just leaves, only to come back here to sit and watch these humans…for how long? That just doesn't make any sense." The pink one, hearing this, put away the ball and cautiously poked her head around the corner to look for herself.

"Oh! That's because the female's been behind us the whole time!" she said in an annoying loud voice. "That's not the same cat at all! That there's a Tom!"

After visibly cringing at the volume, the others all instantly looked back to where Panthera sat. With her cover evidently blown, Panthera decided to drop her cloak. "Meow!" she said using both vocal cords at once as she did so, one high pitched the other deep bass. And except for the pink one, they all screamed and bolted.

The canary yellow one, who was nearest to Panthera, screamed the loudest of any of the others and shot past them all only to bounce off the wall, but was still out into the chamber before any of the others, moving faster even than the blue one.

Panthera was left alone with Pinkie Pie, with the panther wondering, where did the ball go?

With the sound of a loud voice coming from a darkened passageway, Pardus, Trevar and Scott all turned and looked there. A fraction of a second later, a loud chorus of screams sounded as a yellow blur shot out of the darkness to rush toward Pardus, instantly followed by a rainbow shooting out and up into the heights of the chamber as well as an orange blur shooting off to the left side at the same moment, then a purple blur along the ground that stopped halfway between Pardus and the entrance, followed by a white blur that collided with the purple object.

The yellow blur resolved itself into a horse-like creature, stopping just inches from Pardus, then screaming, shot straight up into the air. The orange blur resolved itself into another small horse-like creature and the collided pair was a tangle of white and purple legs and wings.

Then a pink bouncing creature emerged from the darkness of the passageway, followed by a laughing Panthera, who was also sporting a set of wings. The bouncing pink creature looked a bit like a horse, with all its hooves held together as it hopped.

'I take it these are the real natives?' Trevar sent.

'Uh-yep,' Panthera and Pardus both returned, both of them giggling.

'Be careful of that pink one!' Panthera warned. 'She seems to have perceptions able to detect me even when cloaked!'

"THAT'S NOT AT ALL FUNNY!" a voice from above yelled, as a rainbow-colored streak swooped down to halt just in front of Panthera. The figure turned out to be an azure colored pegasus with a rainbow-colored mane and tail.

"Do it again!" Pardus laughed. The pegasus whirled about to glare at the other panther and advanced on him as the cat continued to laugh.

"Unngh—Rarity? Are you okay?" another voice spoke up.

"Sorry, Twilight, you got in my way!" yet another said as the two combined figures managed to finally separate. Trevar saw they were a white and purple unicorn. But then he noticed the purple one had wings.

"What would you call that one, I wonder? A winged unicorn or a horny pegasus?" He asked Scott. She shrugged her shoulders. Hearing her being discussed, the purple one looked at the two humans, and then looked about at the shadowcats.

'A unisus, unisi for the plural, according an article in Dragon Magazine,' Panthera sent to Trevar.

"Rainbow! They don't seem aggressive," the purple one called out. "I think we just got pranked!"

"Really?" the blue pegasus asked, now glancing back and forth between the two laughing cats. Then she finally settled on Pardus. "Well, then, you should know: this means war! I'm so-o-o getting back at you!"

"Looking forward to it," Pardus purred with a toothy grin, not at all intimidated.

"Is everypony okay?" the purple one called out. "Applejack?"

"Ah gotta find me sum place ta plant sum road apples!" the orange one sardonically called out.

"You and me, both! Fluttershy?" the one named Twilight called out. "Fluttershy?" she called again after not getting a response. The blue pegasus looked about, and finally looked up.

"She's up here!" Rainbow called out as she flew back up into the darkness.

"Pinkie—? *sigh*—never mind," Twilight started her call but then interrupted herself. Finally, the creature approached Trevar and Scott.

"Erm—uh—Hello? My name is Twilight Sparkle," the creature said, introducing herself. "Welcome to Equestria!"