TRANSCRIPT – TELEGRAPHIC EXCHANGE BETWEEN ESA AMICITAS and NASA VESSEL HERMES

AMICITAS: Friendship calling Hermes, comms check, over.

HERMES: Hermes calling Friendship, comms check, reading beeps three by five, over.

AMICITAS: Reading beeps five by five. Johannsen, over?

HERMES: Affirmative, over.

AMICITAS: Need practice keying Morse. Indulge me, over?

HERMES: Of course, Mark. I’ve been practicing too, over.

AMICITAS: How are all of you, over?

HERMES: Fine. We should ask that of you. How are you, over?

AMICITAS: Contemplating hundred days more of taters and hay, over.

HERMES: We’re sorry about that, over.

AMICITAS: Not your fault. Murphy happens. When you guys land, eat a steak for me, over.

HERMES: Will do. Need to get back to work now. Out.

TRANSCRIPT (EXCERPT) – WATER TELEGRAPH EXCHANGE BETWEEN EQUESTRIAN SPACE AGENCY AND ESA AMICITAS

AMICITAS: Amicitas calling Baltimare, use suit SG for response, over.

ESA: Baltimare calling Amicitas, over.

AMICITAS: Have long message consisting of thaumic formulas. Please signal when ready to receive. Also, more urgent we get spell suggestions for airtight cave farm, over.

ESA: Getting Twilight Sparkle now. Why the hurry on the cave spell, over?

AMICITAS: Failure of resupply missions from Mark’s planet, over.

ESA: TS – combine transmutation spell to ceramic and topographical tracing spell. Over.

AMICITAS: SG – Transmute to ceramic? Over.

ESA: TS – it was Trixie’s idea, over.

ESA: Baltimare calling Amicitas, comms check, over.

AMICITAS: Amicitas copies. Tell Trixie good idea, we’ll grow crops inside a giant teacup, over.

ESA: Starlight, really, over!

AMICITAS: Sorry, Twilight, over.

ESA: It’s a good idea. You know Jammy Devil’s Torus Tracer, over?

AMICITAS: No, but I know Inside Leg’s Automatic Measure, over.

ESA: That one should work. Thread the transmutation spell in as an overlay on top of the tracing spell. Don’t do an underlay or else you’ll transmute the crystals in the cave, over.

AMICITAS: Roger. Outside only or else find out if Fireball can eat ten million teacups, over.

ESA: Standing by for formulas, over.

AMICITAS: Message begins…

Nobody spoke during dinner in the Hab that night. Mealtimes in the Hab were never jolly, not since about three days after the first hay harvest. But the news of Sleipnir- one probe destroyed, one stranded in Earth orbit, and only one en route with all sorts of potential failure modes between Earth and Mars- dampened spirits.

Cherry Berry wasn’t so much the best cook of the Amicitas crew as the least horrible cook. She’d held a couple of part-time jobs in kitchens, at least. Starlight’s skills were limited to breakfast, tea and toast. Spitfire hadn’t cooked anything since the last time she’d pulled KP duty as a Wonderbolts cadet. Dragonfly and Fireball had never had any inclination to learn.

Under the circumstances, it surprised nobody that the attempt to adapt the atmospheric regulator’s heating elements to toast hay and potatoes failed miserably. The procedure Mark half-remembered from the Sol 16 Thanksgiving that never happened had been intended for pre-packaged dehydrated and reconstituted stuffing, not for cooking from scratch. It took Mark quite some time to explain the term “Cajun blackened,” and by that time nobody was even a little amused.

Prior attempts at hay and potato soup using the electric burners from the chemistry lab had likewise proved a failure. Other experiments tried and failed including fried hay (without oil), salt-baked potatoes (which left a mess in the microwave), and smothered potatoes with alfalfa (the least inedible attempt, but it could only be cooked one meal at a time). About the only success in the cooking experiments came in the form of a weak alfalfa tea, and that had come from a procedure sent up by NASA.

So, another attempt at variety having failed, and with hundreds of sols of the current menu of slightly dried alfalfa and microwave baked potato staring them in the face, the inhabitants of the Hab ate their meals in silence. Mark, for his part, had tried to salvage the evening by offering up the very last bottle of Tabasco sauce in the Hab’s stores. Nobody touched it.

Mark, the ponies noticed, hadn’t opened a meal pack today. He’d had three potatoes for lunch instead and had kind of chewed on a hay stalk during his afternoon soil experiments.

With dinner out of the way, the mood lightened a little for everyone except Mark. He gave his improvised sample-case lid to Starlight to clean, walked through the rows of potato plants interspersed with small clusters of alfalfa, and half-heartedly toyed with them.

“So, which first?” Dragonfly asked. “The TV, or a couple chapters of Order of the Phoenix?”

“Depends. Can we watch some of that Jim Rockford guy tonight?” Fireball asked.

“More Potter for me, please,” Starlight said.

“You only say that because you’re the best reader,” Spitfire grumbled.

Cherry Berry watched Mark squatting among the plants, idly turning over a leaf.

“Yo, boss mare! You with us?” Fireball asked. “We need a tiebreaker.”

Cherry blinked. “Huh?” she asked. “What tiebreaker?”

“Spitfire and Fireball want to watch TV first,” Dragonfly said. “Starlight and I want Potter first.”

Cherry looked at Mark again, who was turning the same leaf on the same potato plant over again. “How about none of the above?” she asked.

“How’s that?” Fireball asked.

“Mark’s been giving us all sorts of stories from his world,” Cherry said.

“Yeah, and some really bad ones, too,” Spitfire muttered. “’The Adventures of Letterman’? Really?”

“I think,” Cherry said, overriding the grumbles, “it’s time we started sharing some of our stories with him. Past time.”

“Past time?” Starlight asked. “We couldn’t speak his language before!”

“We can now,” Cherry Berry said. “At least, you and Dragonfly can, and the rest of us are catching up. And besides, I think Mark can use the distraction.”

“This is going to be pony stories, isn’t it?” Fireball said. “Dragons don’t do story time.”

Spitfire smiled smugly. “Probably because all your stories would be about ponies kicking your asses.”

Fireball raised an eyebrow ridge, looking down his snout at the pegasus. “Really?” he asked. “Because the way I heard it there are a lot of ponies that tangled with dragons and never told anybody about it, because-“

“That’s enough,” Cherry Berry said sternly. “We’re doing story time. That’s an order.”

As Fireball and Spitfire bowed their heads a little contritely, Dragonfly piped up, “We changelings don’t have stories either. Mostly we have after-action reports.”

“How about I pick the story?” Starlight said. “We’ll start with the Legend of the Two Sisters. All of us know that one, right?”

Even Fireball nodded at that.

A few minutes later, as Fireball guided Mark over to the bunks, Starlight Glimmer pulled out the much-used whiteboards and sketched an image of two elegant ponies with wings and horns. A tiny tweak of magic rendered the two princesses in their proper colors, next to the sun and moon they controlled (according to legend, the exact astronomical truth being more complicated).

Starlight had exchanged emails with several humans on Mark’s planet at this time, and the subject of mythology and legend had come up. She’d been particularly fascinated at the sheer number of Equestrian creatures which didn’t exist on Earth, but which did exist in one legend or another. In the process of researching this via email, she’d learned the proper human formula for telling a legend of long ago.

So, when Mark was settled, his gloomy expression replaced by one of pure curiosity, she began recounting the story of Nightmare Moon’s fall and redemption by saying, “Once upon a time, in the magical land of the ponies…”

Author's Notes:

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