Tirek laid his hands on the lectern as his eyes swept the room. “Ladies and Gentlemen of the press,” he began, putting the coaching he’d been given to use. Twilight could not deny he had been a quick study. He looked straight at the camera at the back of the room. “And the over seven billion people who now live on the world that I once called home.

“What you have been told is true. I am one of King Minos’ many sons. According to your myths, I met a foul ending in Athens, the details of which are in dispute. The only correct detail was my removal from the world—not by death, but by a mysterious portal, a portal that led to the land of Equestria.”

Twilight couldn’t believe her ears. An actual portal? How was that even possible? Wouldn’t magic flood into their realm from Equestria, causing the catastrophe she had prevented? She could only hope that he would go into detail.

The centaur chuckled. “It wasn’t called that at the time. This was long before the rule of alicorns, when the three tribes of unicorns, pegasi, and earth ponies kept to themselves.

“I did not stumble upon this portal by accident, quite the opposite. Legend speaks of a minotaur my father kept in a labyrinth. That labyrinth was nothing more than myth, but he had most certainly acquired a minotaur. I made it my quest to visit the land of its origin and return with a different fantastical creature. The details of the minotaur’s capture were known to me, so with my half-brother Philolaus and four of my best men, I set out for Athens, where hidden in a cave in the surrounding mountains could be found the portal. We set up camp inside the cave, and the next morning we went through.”

Twilight spared a quick glance at the minotaur guards, curious as to their reaction. If they were bothered by that particular revelation, they were doing a good job hiding it.

“It turned out to be a one-way trip. When we returned to the portal, as night was falling, it was gone. For weeks we remained in the area, hoping in vain for its return. For at least a year it had existed; why now? Desperately hoping that it must have moved elsewhere, we set out to search for it. Never did we find it; and so far as anyone knows, it has never returned. Only recently, by other means under the control of the alicorns, has it finally become possible for me to return to my world.”

What about the portal itself? Was that all he was going to say about it?

“Much has changed since I’d left millennia ago. The machines I see before me, through which you can all see and hear me, are…” He briefly lifted his hands. “Just miraculous to me. Not even Equestrian magic is capable of this feat.”

Twilight frowned. He wasn’t free yet, granted, but he could’ve provided a few details!

“All I’ve ever wanted was to find a way home. I understand that’s not really possible anymore, that the civilization I once knew exists now only in museums. Doesn’t matter; I’ll take it.

“Yet why should you accept my return? Through means that I do not quite yet comprehend, you know of my recent escape from this place, of my attempt to seek retribution for what this realm has done to me—do not judge before you have all the facts. I did not choose to become an ageless centaur. How many millennia must I remain imprisoned here?”

I’m sure Celestia had her reasons. Regardless, that raised an interesting question: if he had not chosen to become a centaur, then how had it happened?

He took a deep breath. “But I do not want or expect your pity. There is much I can offer. You now possess the means of reading the writings of my people, thanks to me, and that’s only the beginning. I can separate history from myths and legends. And now that magic is being introduced to the human world…” He smiled. “Even if I’ll no longer be able to wield magic myself, I still happen to know a thing or two about that subject.

“Nor am I a fan of the princesses, should you want someone like me who can offer a second opinion.” Tirek took a step back. “I will now take your questions.”

And that’s my cue. Twilight crossed half the distance to the lectern and from there levitated a wireless microphone to a raised hand in the press pool.

“Jason Polson, CNN. If not by choice, how did you become an ‘ageless’ centaur?”

Tirek’s jaw set, his head slowly nodding. “Yes, our transformations. Equestria is a land of many dangers, more so then than now. It wasn’t enough that our way home was denied us; it stole our very humanity.

“It happened about a half-year after our arrival. We were passing through a forest. Two of my men had already met their fates by the monstrosities that inhabited that foul place—plants, would you believe it, giant carnivorous plants with vines that ensnare! We came across a glade. We thought it a place of safety, out of reach of any vines, where we could rest.

“In hindsight, there was a sign: the small plants that covered the glade had not been disturbed by the trampling of animals. There were no paths through those plants. They knew better; but what harm could there be in that calm sea of blue flowers? And rest we did, to no apparent harm. After an hour, we continued our quest to find another portal.

“The next day, when we woke up…” He gestured towards himself. “I had become what you see now. My brother and the two others had changed as well. We had no idea what had happened or how to reverse it. All we knew was that our quest had become futile, for we could not return home as what we had become. We’d have been no better off than that minotaur or whatever creature we had hoped to capture and bring home. We had become the victims of the cruelest of jokes.

“There’s a simple cure for poison joke, of course, but it would be centuries before I learned of it. By then, it was too late—far too late. If the ‘joke’ isn’t cured within a few months, it becomes permanent.”

A few months? I didn’t know that. Nopony would wait that long to be cured, naturally, so perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that fact wasn’t widely known.

“What about the ‘ageless’ part?” Jason reminded him.

Tirek shrugged. “Certain species have long lifespans—dragons, for example. It would seem that this includes centaurs. It’s not always a blessing.”

That answers that question, I suppose. And it certainly wasn’t a blessing, not if you’re serving life imprisonment. How many millennia was enough? It made her feel better about returning him to his realm of origin. She forwarded the microphone to another raised hand.

“Jason Dutt, CBS. How did you escape from Tartarus a few years ago?”

Tirek smiled and looked at the minotaur guards and at Twilight. “Sorry, but that’s a question I’m not going to answer.”

No, you wouldn’t. He couldn’t yet rule out needing to do it again, after all.

“Vincent Kemp, Washington Post. You became friends with Discord. Could you tell us how that happened?”

For the first time, Tirek’s expression soured. “I’d rather not talk about that.”

It occurred to Twilight that Discord could have arranged for Tirek to return to his realm—as a human—any time he had wanted. The centaur seemed unaware of that. What kind of friendship was that?

“Fletcher Dyer, MSNBC. What would you do as a free human, and are you the grandson of the Greek God Zeus?”

Tirek was speechless. “You think my father is literally the son of Zeus?”

“According to mythology.”

“You are not aware that ‘son of Zeus’ is a euphemism, one that I cannot explain in polite society?”

The reporter briefly hesitated. “Uh… that has been lost to history, it would appear.”

He shook his head, then he looked out at the humans in front of him with purpose. “And that leads into the first question. An excellent start would be catching up on thousands of years of history and progress—maybe then I could figure out how defamatory myths like that got started. Regardless, I wish to remain relevant, not be a figurative exhibit in a museum. Other than that…” He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m told there’s something called a ‘talk show circuit’ that might be a good start for me.”

He had said that with a touch of humor and got some chuckles in response.

He does know how to work a crowd. She floated the microphone to the next person.

“Amy Cox, New York Times. If you had succeeded in conquering Equestria, how would it have functioned when all the ponies had been stripped of their magic? Who’d raise the sun and moon?”

That was something Twilight herself had wondered. Tirek didn’t seem like the kind of person who didn’t think things through. Fortunately, nopony ever had to find out what he had planned for victory.

“First of all, I’d say no more than one percent of all ponies had their magic borrowed by me. That’s still a lot of ponies, of course, mostly in a few major cities. But even so, I had no intention of irreparably damaging what I wished to rule. It was a means to an end: to take out the princesses. Once that had been accomplished, I would’ve returned all magic to their respective owners—while keeping the alicorns’ magic for myself, naturally, as they rotted in Tartarus in my place.”

He had smiled at Twilight with that last sentence, eliciting a frown from the alicorn. Photographers captured the moment.

And he had come so close to pulling it off.

“Technically, with that power I could have handled the Sun and the Moon myself, but I think I would’ve returned that task to the unicorns, as before the time of Celestia and Luna. Quite honestly, I’m surprised those two refuse to take the occasional day off. They don’t have to do it every single day without exception. Why they insist is a question you’d have to ask them.

“But all that is in the past. Once I’m a free man in your world, I have no reason to hold a grudge. Indeed, I’ve already offered to work with Twilight Sparkle to investigate the curious similarities between our two worlds.”

“Was the offer accepted?” Cox asked.

The sounds of shutters being released filled the room.

Tirek offered the annoyed alicorn another smile. “Not yet.”

“Why the vendetta against Celestia?”

Twilight yanked the microphone away and practically shoved the microphone into another raised hand.

“I’d be happy to answer that question,” Tirek said, preempting the next questioner. “It was nothing personal, at first. This magical land had blocked my way home, then stole my humanity. If it was to be my new home, then the recompense I demanded was that I shall be its ruler, for I was of royal blood. I took on a new name for a new, centaur identity; my brother took on the name Scorpan. When the alicorn sisters came along, they were simply the newest challenges to my rule—and powerful challenges they were. I prevailed only due to my alliance with Discord.

“But then somehow they defeated Discord, turning him to stone. Soon thereafter, I was here, in Tartarus. As the years went by, then decades, and centuries, and then millennia, seemingly forgotten, with no end in sight… How long was long enough!? I think you can figure out the rest.”

The man currently holding the microphone finally took his turn. “Kurt Shearer, Fox News. First, is Scorpan still around? And second: we are already aware of the many, as you put it, ‘curious similarities.’ How would you aid in investigating them?”

“To answer the first question, no he is not. The goat-like creature he became was not endowed with immortality. He lived far longer than any human could have, at one hundred and sixty two years; still, he died peacefully millennia ago.

“For the second question, the answer is by offering the perspective that comes with a very long life. For example: when I first arrived here, nopony spoke modern Equish—which, as you all know, is nearly identical to modern English. Five centuries later, everypony was speaking it. Imagine my surprise when I learned that modern English arose over two millennia later!”

“Could not other immortals offer that same perspective?”

He waved it away. “If you’re referring to Celestia, she and her sister hadn’t been born yet. Modern Equish is their mother tongue.”

“But did not Scorpan meet with the princesses?”

Tirek glared at the reporter. “Why would you ask such an absurd question? Did I not just say that my brother died before Celestia was even born?”

“It was in the season four finale of My Little Pony,” Kurt said, as if catching the centaur in a lie. “Are you aware of that cartoon?”

The centaur paused to choose his words. “I may have heard about it…”

Twilight’s ears pricked. There was only one way that could have happened.

“…but clearly those behind this so-called ‘cartoon’ have gotten their facts wrong.”

“Getting back to my second question, what about Discord’s perspective?”

Tirek grunted. “You won’t get any ‘perspective’ from him, trust me.”

The deep learning algorithm finished processing the updated training set. Meg restarted the speech synthesizer program and looked up at Smooze. The purple blob was finishing off the detritus left behind by the last occupants of Sugarcube Corner’s party room.

“That’s the last of it,” Pinkie said, and left the room.

Fortunately, he could eat and “talk” at the same time. “Repeat the last set,” Meg instructed Moondancer.

Moondancer held up a blue square in her magic.

Two seconds later, the laptop computer said, “Blue. Square.”

The unicorn next held up a green triangle.

“Green. Triangle.”

She then held up an orange circle.

“Orange. Circle.”

Pinkie Pie re-entered the room, balancing a large tray of stale muffins, cupcakes, and other baked goods. The shelf life of Sugarcube Corner’s offerings wasn’t terribly long, being preservative free. She plopped the tray in front of the elemental vacuum cleaner. Smooze grabbed a mouthful, not caring in the slightest about freshness, nor did he worry about putting on weight.

Pinkie took a seat. She watched as they ran through the remaining colored objects.

About ten minutes later, they were done. “Looks good,” Meg said.

Pinkie Pie jumped up and pronked in place. “Is it time for a Smoozie-can-talk party?”

The crystal sensor covering the webcam glowed as Smooze formed his response. “I. Don’t. Know.”

“You’re certainly making good progress,” Moondancer said. She looked down at the computer. “It’d go a lot faster if we could understand how the output of that sensor is being mapped to words. Then we could directly fix the modeling errors.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not how it works,” Meg said. “The billions and billions of calculations it does may uncover the relevant patterns, but it doesn’t tell us how it comes up with them, or why it comes up with the wrong ones. We just have to keep enlarging the training set until it seems to work—but making it too large can be just as bad as not large enough.”

Moondancer raised an eyebrow. “If it learns too much, it may do worse?”

Meg sighed. “It’s not really ‘learning’; that, how should I put it, is ‘marketing.’ It’s just complicated statistics applied to an enormous amount of data. It’s not remotely like how people learn; it has no understanding of what it has ‘learned.’”

The unicorn slightly tilted her head. “That didn’t really answer my question.”

Meg closed her eyes, trying to dig up the answer from memory. “I think over-training makes it more likely to be wrong when presented with something not in the training set.” She reopened her eyes. “How much of a problem that’d be in this case remains to be seen. It’s highly dependent on what’s being solved.”

Pinkie’s smile widened. “Smoozie, say ‘party!’”

The sensing crystal glowed. “Platypus,” said the computer a second later.

Pinkie gasped. “A platypus party! That’s a superduperific idea!”

“Not even the same number of syllables,” Moondancer observed, ignoring Pinkie’s outburst. “But we’ve already determined that the mapping is more than phonetics.”

Meg all-too-slowly typed in a note, tagging that sensor data with the word ‘party.’ “It’d sure make this a lot easier if it was just phonetics. I don’t really know what’s going on. He clearly understands us; he ought to be thinking the same words we say, but it just doesn’t come out the same.”

The crystal glowed some more. “Yes.”

Pinkie’s right ear started twitching. “Twitchy right ear! That means somepony’s about to arrive who needs to see me but doesn’t know it yet!”

“Any chance it’s Discord?” Meg said in annoyance. “Maybe he got lost finding this room.”

“Maaaaybe.” She pronked out of the room, closing the door behind her.

Moondancer stared at the closed door. “Is this normal behavior for her?”

Meg scrolled through the log produced by the translator software. “Yes, and for the sake of your sanity you should just accept it. It’s called Pinkie Sense, and you can’t believe how useful it is—literally, you can’t believe it.”

The unicorn was silent for a moment. “Has this ‘Pinkie Sense’ been scientifically studied?”

Meg looked up. “Word of advice: do not ask Twilight that question.”

Another moment of silence. “She tried, didn’t she?”

“Yep, and it wasn’t good for her mental health.”

“Okay…” the unicorn drawled. She looked at the closed door. “You really think Discord got lost finding this room?”

“Of course not! I just hope he has a good reason for missing this session.” He was the one who came up with the sensor crystal enchantments. The thought had occurred to her, more than once, that—possibly—the enchantment being chaos magic might have had something to do with the modeling complications they kept running into.

Moondancer returned her attention to Smooze, who had finished disposing of all the stale baked goods. “What’s the next addition to the training set?”

“Numbers. I’m setting it up now.”

It was another minute of slow typing and trackpad use. “Okay, ready to start. Moondancer, start counting from zero, saying each number in turn. Smooze, you repeat. And… go.”

“Zero.”

A moment later, the crystal glowed. No speech came from the computer. The weird words to which novel words were typically mapped had stopped being funny some time ago.

The glowing stopped. That was the signal to continue. “One,” Moondancer continued.

This continued until they were interrupted by the opening of the door. Lyra walked in, her eyes flicking from one occupant to the next. They lingered on Smooze as she said, “Uh, Meg? Do you have a few minutes?”

“Uh, sure, wait a second.” After the data for ‘thirteen’ was recorded, Meg looked up. “How did you know we were back here?” she asked.

Lyra gave a sheepish smile. “Pinkie told me. Without me asking.”

Figures. “See?” Meg told Moondancer. Turning back to the other unicorn, she said, “I can spare a few minutes.”

“I just wanted some details about the venue I’d be performing at in the other realm. How large an audience, what kind of music I should play, that sort of stuff.” Before Meg could respond, Lyra continued. “Oh, and, uh, Twilight convinced me to stay away from the whole ‘hands’ thing.”

“I’m sure that’s for the best,” Meg said. That’s one potential headache taken care of. “To answer your other questions: Several hundred to maybe a thousand humans. Sound amplification—non-magical, of course—will be present. As for what kind of music, whatever you want to play, however you want to play it. I’m sure they’ll eat it up.”

“I guess that makes it simple enough.” Lyra walked over to the Smooze, who watched her with his enigmatic smile. “Are you talking yet?”

The sensing crystal glowed, uselessly; the voice synthesizer was not running.

“It’s still a work-in-progress,” Meg said. “You know about this?”

Lyra shrugged. “Word gets around.”

True, it was a small town, and they had made no particular efforts at secrecy, but it was still surprising Lyra knew about it. Yet Daring Do knew about it too. At least Lyra lived here.

“I’ve taken up enough of your time. Thanks answering my questions.” Lyra quickly left the party room, closing the door behind her.

Meg sighed, not sure what to have made of that. “Let’s continue where we left off,” she said, turning back to her laptop. “Fourteen’s next.”

Stars twinkled in the night sky, forming patterns unlike any seen on Earth, above a balcony adorning a high tower of the Canterlot palace. For all the unexplainable similarities of the two realms, constellations had not been one of them—nor were planets, asteroids, comets, or the Milky Way, never mind other galaxies. Nothing but stars and the moon resided in the heavens above.

On that balcony, Steve sat motionless, eyes closed, his attention focused on the spell to measure the size of the realm, in which the planet he was on truly seemed to be the center of everything.

Sunset Shimmer’s attention was focused on a stopwatch. “One hour. How are you holding up?”

“Great,” he said. “I think I’ve got my second wind—or whatever unicorns call it. I feel like I can keep this up indefinitely.” He smiled. “And it’s about time.”

“‘Second wind’ is what it’s called,” she confirmed. “So you think you can keep it up for another three hours?”

“Probably not, if only because Meg will—” His muzzle scrunched. “That’s odd.”

“Odd?”

Steve opened his eyes and looked at a specific spot in the sky. “That star… I think the spell just passed it and… I sensed something. Is that expected?”

“I don’t believe so, not that I’ve ever cast it myself. So far as I know, there’s no feedback until the spell has filled all reachable space.”

A minute later, his head jerked to the other side of the sky. “There. Another star. Same thing.”

“I’m pretty sure that spell ignores stars.”

He looked down. “That one’s on the other side of the planet. Something is going on with this spell.”

Sunset edged back to the door. “I’ll go see if Twilight’s back. Just keep the spell going.”

“Sure, no problem. I’ll see if I can find a pattern in what I’m sensing.”

Sunset went inside while Steve continued feeding magic into the spell. More and more somethings were sensed as it raced ever outwards. They may have looked like stars, but they couldn’t have been stars—not when the closest was about a light-hour away. That was about the distance of Saturn from Earth at opposition.

No, more like the distance to Jupiter. The magic had to make a round-trip, doubling the time for the data to come back. Even that assumed propagation at the speed of light. As more and more somethings came back, it was becoming clear that this realm had no “real” stars, no balls of hydrogen gas so massive that they fused hydrogen into helium.

Neither was this realm’s sun; he already knew that. But whatever those “stars” were, they weren’t anything like Equestria’s sun either. He had never sensed anything when the magical wavefront went past that magic-powered orb.

Two sets of hooves returned. “Still sensing it?” Sunset asked.

“Like popcorn popping,” Steve said. “It’s coming from all directions, including from the other side of the planet.”

“How odd,” Luna said, stepping forward. “Nopony else had ever reported sensing the stars with this spell.”

Steve spun around at the voice. “Luna?”

“Twilight thought she’d be better qualified to look into this,” Sunset said.

Luna was looking at him, curiosity in her eyes

“Do you know what the stars are?” he asked her.

“I fear not. So far as I know, they’ve always existed, as have the Sun and the Moon. I can move them around somewhat, sluggishly and with difficulty—it’d take many nights to rearrange them—but that’s about it, nor will they stay put either. Several times I tried to bring one down to the ground, but never have I succeeded.”

“And nopony has ever sent a probe up there, because you don’t have that technology.”

Luna blinked. “You do?”

“Yes, but it’s really difficult and expensive. It’d take years, maybe decades, before that could be attempted here—at least without magic. But, right here and now, I’m somehow sensing them.”

Sunset squinted at his glowing horn. “We can safely say it’s not due to the spell you’re casting—not directly, anyway. Could it be your special talent? Piggybacking on the spell?”

My special talent? To sense waves and distortions in space-time?

“That would imply,” he drawled, “those stars are doing something to space itself.”

“Like what?” Sunset asked.

“Like what, indeed.” He could make an educated guess, but how could he prove it? The sensations weren’t strong enough, and they were getting weaker and weaker as the magical wavefront progressed farther and farther away.

Steve fixed his eyes on the Princess of the Night. “I’d like you to bring a star as close to us as possible. Right now they’re all too far away for me to sense much.”

Luna nodded. “I don’t have the time to do that tonight; it takes many hours to get them moving. Possibly tomorrow?”

“That depends,” Steve replied. He turned to Sunset. “I need a modification of this spell, so that I can zero in and track a specific star.”

“I’ll need to consult with Twilight first, but tomorrow should be doable.”

Princess Luna smiled. “There’s no need to disturb Twilight. I believe I can be of some assistance here.”