"So, at the rate we're going... it should only be something like five more hours until we get close enough to the surface to try and find where we want to land," Kevin said. He was pacing back and forth in the centre of the cockpit; Scootaloo, leaning against the metal wall on the left side of the ship next to the porthole, watched as he paced. "The main problem is... pretty much right after we get in range, the Bureau ponies will be able to sense the ship and, if we're not careful, take us into custody."

Scootaloo raised an eyebrow. "But what do we do, then? They're just gonna catch us as soon as we get there?"

"Well, we're gonna need to be quick," Kevin replied, still pacing. His hoofsteps made soft clinking noises on the metal floor. "If we can manoeuvre away from the cities in time... we just might have a chance."

"Might?"

"It's the best we've got, okay?" Kevin snarled, stopping in his tracks. He sighed. "Ugh, I'm sorry. I'm not any less worried about this then you are."

"Wha—worried? Eheh... I'm not worried." Scootaloo stuck her tongue out. "I just was wondering if there was anything else we could do to not get caught."

"Well, the only other thing I can think of is if this ship has a cloaking field. Does it?" he asked.

"Hmm... I wouldn't know. Check the dashboard."

Scootaloo watched as Kevin trotted over to the pilot's seat and jumped on top of it, disappearing from view behind the back of the chair. She waited several moments in silence, presuming that the colt was looking through the controls for anything of use.

"Argent, I've never seen anything like this..." she heard Kevin murmur.

"Is that... a bad thing?" Her tone came off a little more defensive than she had meant; the ship was her main link to her home, after all.

"Only in that I don't recognise anything up here. Whoever built this ship didn't even use any of the Bureau standard symbols!"

Scootaloo sighed and walked across the cockpit to the centre of the front where Kevin stood on the edge of the seat. As he came into view, she could see his brow furrowed in concentration.

"Here, lemme have a look," Scootaloo said as she approached, hopping up alongside the colt onto the chair. He twitched as her side brushed against his; immediately, they both shifted apart so that their bodies no longer made contact. "Whoops, sorry."

"No problem," Kevin said, not looking at her. "Anyway, have a look at these." He pointed with a foreleg towards the controls on the dashboard, and the labels underneath. "This is all just gibberish! I don't even recognise some of the letters."

Scootaloo leaned in to get a closer look. Had some malicious cosmic burst of magic turned all of the dashboard labels to meaningless nonsense? Had she simply imagined words on the labels before, driven to hallucinations from only being able to eat Gamsco's? But no, the labels lay there clear as day, each with a little phrase written on them. Sure, some of the wording was a little weird in places—in particular, Scootaloo would never be caught dead saying a Twilightism like "Headlight ignition toggle"—but even an inattentive schoolfilly like her could get the gist of almost all of them.

"Hello? Kindred planet to Tangerine?" Kevin waved his hoof in front of Scootaloo's face; the filly blinked. "You've been staring at 'em forever."

"Yeah, um, I'm a little confused. You can't read them?"

Kevin's eyes opened wide in surprise. "You mean you can?"

"But you can understand what I'm saying? You understand Eques—um, the language I'm speaking?"

"Most of the time, though sometimes you mumble some weird things in your sleep about an 'Apple Bell' or something..."

Scootaloo blinked. "Nevermind that, not important right now. Hold on." With that, Scootaloo hopped off the chair and galloped out of the cockpit and down the hallway, out of sight.

Kevin sat there, confused, for a minute or two. He gazed forward out the front window at his home planet, slowly but surely getting closer and closer by the second. From here it seemed so small...

His thoughts were interrupted by the return of the orange filly who came bounding into the room. Kevin noticed that she now held her notebook and a small writing implement between her teeth. Once Scootaloo reached the chair, she hopped back onto it and spat the notebook and implement out onto the plasticky surface in front of Kevin.

"Use this pencil and write something. Your name. A sentence. Anything," she panted. She raised both her eyebrows eagerly.

"Pencil? What's a pencil?" Kevin asked, looking down at the open notebook page and the pencil which lay on top.

"Uh... that little stick right there that ponies use to write?"

"Oh, a graphick?"

"Huh?"

"You know, a graphick. This little thing," Kevin said, pointing to the pencil with his hoof.

"Why do you call it a graphic? Isn't that a fancy name for a picture?"

"Well, it sounds like that too, but this one has a K on the end when you spell it out. It's short for graphite stick. 'Cause it's a stick that's got graphite in it."

"Oh, I guess that makes sense..."

"So then why do you call it a pencil?" Kevin asked.

"I... erm... I'm not sure." Scootaloo laughed nervously. "Anyway, write something!"

"If you insist." Kevin enveloped the pencil in his evergreen magical field and lifted it perpendicular to the page. Then, he wrote.

Scootaloo understood what Kevin meant, based on his description of Equestrian writing; there were some familiar letter shapes (though not necessarily in the direction she remembered them facing) but overall the fragment was fairly incomprehensible.

"What does that say?" she asked.

"You can't—?"

"Humour me," Scootaloo said, cutting him off.

"It says, 'Hi. My name is Kevin.' Two brief sentences with two periods. Five words."

"Interesting..." Scootaloo murmured. Before Kevin could do anything more, the pegasus had flipped the notebook to face her and leaned over to grab the pencil between her teeth. Kevin flinched as she wrested the thing from his magical grasp; having a spell forcibly ended was an unpleasant thing indeed.

Scootaloo bent down and, pencil between her teeth, copied Kevin's sentence, except this time in the alphabet that she had known since she was very small. She made an effort to match up her letters right underneath his, and was relieved to find that there were exactly the same number of letters in each of their words. The sentences were exactly the same, down to the spacing and the periods; the only difference was in the letters they used, and not even all of those were different.

"What did you write there underneath?" Kevin asked, eyeing her scribblings.d

"Same thing as you: 'Hi. My name is Kevin.'"

"But your name isn't Kevin."

Scootaloo giggled. "You don't know that—I don't think you've even asked my name!"

"What is it, then?"

Scootaloo laughed again. "Definitely not Kevin, that's for sure."

Kevin rolled his eyes. "So what you're saying is that even though we speak the same language, we write down the words differently?"

"Yep. And, as you can see, there are the same number of letters for each word in both my alphabet and yours, so based on that I'm guessing that it's probably true for the rest of the language."

Kevin nodded. "And it looks like some of the letters are even the same, too. Or almost the same. Like, look at that! Your K is backwards, and your Y is upside down."

"Yeah, that's pretty weird..." Scootaloo trailed off, looking at the paper still. Then, she looked up at Kevin. "I have an idea: how about you write down your alphabet, and I do mine! Then we can both know both alphabets, so you can read the stuff on the ship and I'll be able to read stuff on the Kindred planet."

"That sounds great. Now, if you'd just gimme that 'pencil'..." Kevin said with a wink.

"What, this 'graphick'? Here ya go," Scootaloo replied, winking back. She tossed it in midair and Kevin caught it in his magical field, brought it down to the paper, and began writing.

As Kevin and Scootaloo sat there, looking at each other's hoofwriting and alphabets, learning about this part of each other's culture, cloaking fields momentarily forgotten, the Kindred planet loomed larger and larger in the window ahead.