I follow this clearly insane pony on the completely vain, bizarre hope that she isn’t completely out of her mind. She leads me into what’s ostensibly a laboratory, but more likely it’s an insane asylum, and they’re just really good at convincing the government that they know how to do science. The big, warehouse-like building towers over me as we head inside the giant doorway, and ignoring that, I stop short after I’m inside, staring upward in amazement.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, looking back at me, and then up to the ceiling.

“You have electricity!” I declare, pointing a forehoof up at the ceiling light, which is... a little unsettlingly remniscent of the last electric ceiling light I encountered.

“Oh, yeah we have everything,” she says happily, “There’s a generator out back with enough fuel to last for months. This place was built out in the middle of nowhere, so they had to set it up to function off the grid.”

My eyes widen at that, and I say “Oh, wow, so you have... electric everything?”

“You had some electricity too, didn’t you?” the new pony asks me, with a sympathetic yet confused look, “I had heard they were starting to get infrastructure back online.”

“Not as such,” I reply, toeing the ground, “Oh, but we did get a freezer working, to store the uh... meat.”

She blinks at me. Uh...

Shaking her head, she says, “Never mind that, for now. You need to meet the director! He uh... she doesn’t... just, c’mon!”

The big, warehouse-like building is actually fairly cramped on the inside, with a little hall leading to a small, unmanned reception area. Of course the doorway is twice my height, and there is plenty of room for several little ponies to walk through these halls, but I’m pretty sure if I were a six foot tall male human being, I might be feeling a little claustrophobic in these cavernous halls.

My impromptu friend, a pale, blue unicorn mare with a pink mane and tail, just shambles on past the reception desk, and shakily rears up to stick a key card held in her mouth, into the slot on a security door. It beeps, and she leans back, pulling the door open before falling back to four hooves, one of them stuck in the way to keep the door from closing.

She leads me through there, through another hallway, and then a... computer room, I guess. There is a large metal table in the center, which has some papers on it, but it’s too tall for me to see exactly. There’s a step stool pulled up next to it, I guess so everyone else can climb up there. There are sort of cubicles around the edge of the room, with a bunch of people at them, well... ponies, at least, all giving me varying degrees of wary and hopeful looks. I don’t see any humans. How the heck do ponies operate computers? My hooves aren’t small enough to fit on a single key.

“Hi um... well, I’m Meadowsweet I guess,” I say chirpily, waving one of those forehooves in greeting, and I’m really not sure what to do in this sort of situation. “I was supposed to see your director about... something?”

“...you owe me fifty bucks,” a stallion off to the side says quietly, while the mare in the neighboring workstation to him facehooves.

Before I can question this, I glance down at a foal approaching me, saying in a reedy voice, “I hope your trip wasn’t too terrible. I’m glad you came, after how badly they treated you.”

Uh. This kid is...

“I’m Dr. Peterson,” the little green furred filly with bright pink hair says, looking up at me with big, green, yellow uh... green eyes. Yeah. Green eyes. Her pink hair curls around her big ears like a reverse watermelon, and she speaks in the voice of a child, if that’s not obvious. What is it with authority figures, and becoming heart stoppingly adorable?

“We’ve been hearing about you since the mess with Twilight Sparkle began, and the Aurora Effect, and the world,” she says in a bit of awe, “You seem to be the lynchpin of this whole thing. Sorry I’m... I’m just so happy to get a chance to finally meet you! We’ve all been desperately curious... would you mind answering a few questions?”

“S-sure, I suppose,” I say with a smile down to the filly, “I might not be as... scientific as all of you though. But I do have a background in engineering, sort of. So... what is it you wanna know?”

“I’m not sure if engineering is precisely involved, but that’s good to know,” the doctor filly says, smiling back brightly as she chirps, “What was it like, manipulating space and time? How did you learn to do that? Did Twilight Sparkle teach you?”

...

“...what?” I ask.

“You know, the teleportation, and were you somehow contorting, or was it actual spatial distortion?” she starts to explain, but goes back to excitedly gushing, now fluttering little wings at her side, “I’m surprised they could hold you at all! It seems impossible, that you could just bend reality to your whim, so what was really going on? Are there actual techniques and principles to it, that we could learn from?”

I take a step back from the excited filly... doctor... director, whining desperately, “I have no idea what you’re talking about! I can’t do any of those things! I might have some sort of magic when it comes to weeding a little bit, but where on earth would you get the idea that I can bend reality?”

She doesn’t reply, staring at me in utter, openmouthed astonishment.

“She needs to see the footage, doc!” that stallion from before calls out.

“Right!” the filly yelps, standing up stiffer, and giving me a puzzled and purposeful look, “Come on, I think we need to seriously confirm that this isn’t all some sort of elaborate hoax.”

“A-alright, sorry if I got your... hopes up,” I say, ears going down. She just stumbles in turning, then walks the other way. Everyone in the other cubicles follow to gather around the cubicle of the director’s, as she leads me to an honest to gosh computer workstation, whirring with power.

“It’ll ‘ake me a ‘omen’ to pull i’ up,” the filly says, having climbed up a stool to her desk and bitten down on a pen. She moves the mouse around dextrously with her little forehoof, hunting and pecking with the pen on the keys as she does a file folder search, narrowing it down to a few video files just named by their timestamps and “Anomaly #23” whatever that means.

Then, a movie loads up, and it’s... I scramble back, and my rear end promptly collides with the crowd gathering around us.

“T-t-that sure is my uh my cell, that they uh...” I stammer, staring at a hallway leading to a bulky iron locked door with a slit in it, a horrible, horrible bulky iron locked door. Then the screen flickers, and I... watch myself frazzled and harried, squeezing out of the door’s slit in a total panic, hyperventilating as I land on the floor of the hallway, scrabbling backwards as something strikes the door from within.

It’s horrible. Even on the grainy security footage, I can see how much I struggle to stand on my wobbling, skinny legs. Was I that bad? I can see my ribs from here! I’m... really a pony. I’m standing here on four hooves, watching footage of myself being a pony, and... I remember doing all that. I–I don’t know if I want to remember, but... that’s not a human on that movie there. It’s an animal, a little horse-like creature, trembling and traumatized, stumbling around the hallway as if she were looking for her stable.

“So that was you, right?” Dr. Peterson asks hopefully, “Reports say that you were technically the first to escape from that facility, and you did it all on your own. Then you just... stayed in the hallway.”

“There was no slit on the hallway door,” I say faintly, “I should’ve tried breaking it down though. I just didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t even sure I had escaped.” Trembling, I can’t look away. Have I escaped?

The screen goes dark then, like blackness! Like... oh, like the movie’s ending. Right. As the movie file stops playing, I look at the director fretfully, and say, “That’s not real magic. I was just squeezing through the slit! I had to!”

“I don’t see why that wouldn’t be real magic,” she replies huffily, giving me a frustrated look, “That was a two inch slit at best, so either you had to liquefy your bones, or you had to distort space somehow to get through it, and that’s not—”

“It was not... distorting space,” I reply, cringing at the memory, looking at that black video display rectangle, hardly saying, “There was... just a lot of ...space in the slit that I just... pulled it out so I could fit through it. Okay maybe it was distorting space. I just did a... I just had to get out of there!”

Turning back to Dr. Peterson, I feel a little angry myself as I shout at her, “You saw that... thing hit the inside of the cell! I had to get out of there!!”

Her anger turns to surprise at mine, and she shrinks down, saying up at me with big eyes, “I’m sorry. I just wanted to know how you did it, and if it’s possible to... measure it...”

“Heh heh, sorry, I-I didn’t mean to upset you,” I say with a rigid grin, pulling back from the frightened filly, “I just was in that cell for a while and it was kind of bad and...” I look over my shoulder at the lights overhead in the room we’re in. The lights. The lights overhead.

“...I’m going outside,” I conclude, feeling all kinds of wrong for even being there. I’m not in my cell anymore. I’m not. I’m not. I’m not. But there’s no way I could’ve gotten out of it. How did I do that? I’ve got to get out of here!

I bound through the hallways in utter panic, only sliding to a halt once I’m outside the building, surrounded by wind and sky and trees and earth and oh god am I claustrophobic now? Sinking to my haunches, my heart is racing as the breeze caresses my fur, because I’m not in that cell. I’m outside. I escaped it, I’m free, and I never have to go there again.

For a moment I wonder if Nick had a point, what with these being the... same people who imprisoned me. Why would they show me that, if they were trying to capture me, though?

A few of the scientist ponies come out after a while. “Dangit, we’re so sorry,” a pale green stallion with blue and orange hair says in a nasal voice, shuffling up to me. “We shoulda known you were all uh... PTSD about that.”

“I’m fine,” I lie calmly, as a few mares come walking up to either side of him with equal looks of concern, “Just... a bit much to deal with. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not still in that cell, and dreaming all this up.”

I glance around, but I don’t wake up yet.

“It’s true, there’s no way I could’ve possibly fit through there,” I admit to him and... three others, “It just seemed so obvious at the time. Like I was dreaming or...” Shaking my head, I attest more confidently, “I know I’m not dreaming. It’s just hard to accept sometimes, that... I did... that.”

The filly named Dr. Peterson steps up, asking me, “...do you think you can do it again?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to find out what you can do?” she asks cautiously.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not the only thing you did that was unexplainable by modern science,” she says to my troubled demurity, “We have two other videos from your... unfortunate imprisonment.”

“I just... never thought I was anything crazy or magical or anything,” I say, not quite able to meet her eyes, “I could understand if I was a unicorn, but... I just didn’t even do anything, I just sort of did it. It didn’t seem magical or anything.”

“Well, I think you might be a bit more magical than you realize,” the filly chirps at me with an apologetic smile, “Sorry again for bringing up some memories that are still a bit... raw I guess. We’re just physicists, not any kind of psychologists or... jailors. They just forwarded us the videos, and evidence, and... um...”

She looks around at various ponies moving around, many from our group, then looks back at me, asking, “Why don’t you get yourself situated first, and find where you’re living on the base? You can deal with this later, once you are all settled in.”

“All settled in, right, got it,” I say, feeling more drained standing there than I have this whole trip here. I... I think I need Sue, and Holly. And Lucy.

The four of us end up sharing an apartment, and they actually do sort of have apartments here. The only indoor plumbing we have is a building specifically dedicated to it, with a small water tower connected to it, where they have showers, and sinks, and regular plumbing basically. No flushing toilets though, since what’s been used thus far are just latrines mounted over pits dug into the earth.

So there’s no indoor plumbing, but each apartment unit has a bedroom with two beds, a pretty large coat closet, a chest of drawers, a hat rack, basically all the things you don’t need when you’re running around naked all the time. Running around naked is great though, honestly. I hardly even miss clothes. It’s easy to just scamper out of the building, buck naked, and I find myself hardly chilled as the cold hits my thick fur. Wait, did I always have thick fur? I think it might have gotten thicker.

“Had any ideas for names?” Lucy asks later that day, finding me lying there buck naked on our bed, reading a magazine I found, just an article on the history of “The American Dream” nothing really important. Glancing over at my unicorn friend, I let the magazine flop on my quite fluffy chest.

“Not yet, no,” I tell her, moving to stare at the ceiling of our apartment, “We still have a while before we have to think of names for our foals. Mostly, I’m wondering what we’ll be doing here. They found some... some weird stuff that happened to me.”

“Like what?” Lucy asks curiously.

I still don’t really feel like talking about it, but I started, so I might as well. “When I was stuck in a cell, in that... prison,” I say to the ceiling, “They didn’t have to break me out. I mean, Twilight’s ponies didn’t have to. They still had to rescue me, but they didn’t have to break me out. I was already outside of my cell.”

“How’d that happen?” she asks, walking up to the bed I’m laying on, looking at me with an enviously powerful, comprehensible and sensible pink unicorn horn jutting out from her forehead.

“They want me to make sense of cartoon logic, I dunno,” I pout, tail switching testily. “I needed to go through the slit to escape my cell, so I went through the slit. I just... made enough room. I was pretty upset at the time. Like really, really, really upset. I was so hungry, and starving, and... I turned off the light.”

“O-okay?” Lucy says uneasily, “I don’t entirely know what that means.”

“There was a light in my cell that never turned off,” I tell her distantly, “I couldn’t sleep, so I just... snuck up there and pulled out the fluorescent tubes. And it was dark then. Really really dark.”

Lucy’s silent, but her ears are going down, but I’m pretty sure she wants me to continue. “I started... seeing things,” I say, “I dunno. They say I was in there for weeks, it just got so boring, and with the lights out... I–I saw my friends, Nick and Mira, and I... it was just... hallucinations, and I knew it was, but it felt so real. So I was scared there was a... a monster chasing me. I mean there really was, somehow, so I panicked and...

...

“A-and squeezed through the slit.”

“So, you escaped your cell through a... mail slot?” Lucy prompts in confusion.

“Just for ventilation, I think,” I tell her hopelessly, holding my hooves overhead, “It was about this wide.”

“...the width of your hoof?”

“No, the space between my hooves. Like an inch or something. Too small to fit through.”

Lucy’s silent at that.

“I just found some space, off in the... the corner of it. There was lots of space if you looked at it!” I protest disjointedly, “But space doesn’t just come out of nowhere, but it... it did. They showed me footage of me. Squeezing out of the slot. I was just like a cartoon.”

“I don’t think any of us had to do that,” Lucy says solemnly. “Twilight certainly wasn’t making us squeeze through mail slots.”

“Supposedly it means I have magical powers,” I say a little bitterly, “Even though I just... I don’t even know what I did. I just did whatever works, and it worked.”

“Weren’t you wishing for magical powers?” Lucy asks hopefully, “What, do you have magic um... hooves or something?”

“I don’t think so,” I say with a sigh, “But I can kill weeds by stomping on them, so I... I guess that means magic hooves. We all have magic hooves, with how we can hold stuff. I think whatever magic I was doing back then, it isn’t... hooves. It’s... complicated.”

“I just thought you’d be happier,” Lucy replies, somewhat discomfited.

“I am!” I protest, “It’s just I was kind of messed up at the time, and when they showed me the footage I was freaking out a little. I’ll have to go back, and remember that stuff, if I want to... find out about this.”

“Well, you’re talking with me about it, and that’s not so bad,” Lucy remarks, “But it does sound pretty... heavy. Are you sure you want to learn about your... magical powers?”

I take in a breath, then release it, and I’m still a yellow and green pony. Lying on a mattress.

“Yes, if there’s anything I can do that’s a little bit more useful than just being a talking horse,” I say, trying not to roll my eyes, “Then I’ll try to figure out how I did that. It’d be a pretty incredible technique for... escaping through slits, and stuff.”

Okay, I mean, I guess if it has no limits I could just... sneak through keyholes or fit a whole... tank inside a desk drawer or something? I don’t feel like that would work, and I don’t know why. It seems like it’d be some incredible revolutionary thing, but it’s... hard to even think about, much less think of applications for it.

Nevertheless, it turns out earth ponies have magic, too! My attempts to recreate that trick don’t have much luck, other than them having to cut me out of a metal box I got my head stuck in. I try, but... how far am I going to go, in trying to recreate the situation where I did it the last time? Lock myself in a dark cell with no food, very little water, and only a 1.6 inch slit to escape out of?

It actually makes me trust these government scientists a lot more, when they’re horrified at my suggestion, and would rather not know how it works than subject me to something like that again. At least they act like they’re horrified, and maybe I do have to lock the windows and hang cans on the doorknob before I can sleep, but Sue and the girls are... accepting of that, and nobody comes to... take me away or anything.

The rest of the videos aren’t very helpful either. The scientists don’t show me anything inside the laboratory anymore, but they set up a laptop right outside, on a little folding table. In the most of the other videos, I don’t watch myself at all, but I do watch some armed guards approaching my cell. This was filmed after the rescue, and I’m long gone, but apparently the guards didn’t know if I was, since my cell stayed locked closed, and I’d inadvertently disabled the camera on the inside by turning off the lights.

I have no idea why they’re armed and wearing body armor, just to check on me, but I guess after... other ponies defeated the whole facility’s security, they wanted to be extra careful or something. So they unlock the door to my cell and pull it open. They scramble back as all that ocean water that was in there rushes out of the inky darkness that I never want to return to, but seeing the cell door open and unlocked is actually kind of cathartic. They opened my cell and I wasn’t in there, so I guess it just helps me accept that I really did escape, and I’m not still trapped in there.

Then the camera jitters with static as some huge, bulky thing hurls out of the shadows and pins one of the guards against the wall. Tinny shouting and screaming and gunshots come out of the laptop’s speakers as the whole scene devolves into utter panic. It’s hard to see what it is because all the humans are thrashing around, and blocking the view with their limbs and bodies as they try to shoot the thing, and the creature itself is dark as pitch, and strangely difficult to look at.

“I told you there was something in there with me!” I protest, pointing a forehoof with dismay at the sudden desperate battle on the screen. “Why the hell did you put something like that in there with me?”

“We didn’t,” the director chirps seriously, big, cute eyes focused on the camera footage. There’s no humor in her voice when she turns from it, meets my eyes, and says, “There’s no one who could’ve brought that thing in there... other than you.”

N-no...

The third video is a little more informative, as far as what happened. It’s filming the corpse, which dead and quiescent looks like a huge black wolf with... things sticking out of it, and a strange, gaping mouth. It’s like something out of a horror story, and I... have magic that did that? There really isn’t any other explanation, as the video pans to the now well lit interior of my cell, where part of the stone wall is distorted as if it were melted, covered in a thick, blistering grey crust which a science pony tells me is cooled lava... somehow.

“Yeah, I guess I was... teleporting, on accident,” I tell them, uneasily recalling those strange visions and experiences. “I don’t know where the m-monster came from. I thought the lava tunnels were just a hallucination.”

“And you couldn’t just teleport out of your cell,” a science pony named Curtis says, an orange haired, blue pony who stayed male, “Because you had no control over where you were... going?”

“I was just... thinking about things,” I tell him with a helpless tail shrug. I’m not sure he catches the tail shrug. “And things got crazy. You know what happens when you’re hallucinating. You just think about things that get more real, and start talking to you, and it just gets crazier from there?”

“Still, if you could control it,” Curtis says, giving me an appraising look that makes me wonder if he’s checking me out for how flipping female I am, “Then you’d be the first pony who could teleport, aside from Twilight Sparkle.”

Okay no getting excited over this guy. Not every stallion is focusing on my potential for progeny.

“I wonder if your friends were really talking to you, too,” a greyish green science pony named Dr. Roberts says, one of the ones who didn’t stay male. “You said they were part of your hallucination.”

“Um, Mira should be around here somewhere. She came with us... sorta,” I say, blushing at that particular near-disaster that she caused. “I could ask her if she um... saw me. Like a ghost or... astral projection or something?”

“Sounds good, which one’s Mira?” the filly asks curtly.

“She’s the bat pony with the yellow fur, and blue and pink hair,” I reply distractedly, still staring at the frozen video footage.

“...which one?” Dr. Roberts repeats, with a subtle roll of her eyes.

Out of the roughly four dozen ponies we contributed, and the fifty or so ponies they represent, it turns out there are three bat ponies among us with blue and pink hair, and yellow fur. Of course Mira’s fur is more of an orangey yellow, and Cricket has a more yellow yellow, with a greyer blue, and a pinker... pink. And it’s confusing, but I do recognize Mira by her color, hairstyle, and just... being Mira.

“Hey, Mira,” I ask her curiously, trotting up to the bat pony, “You won’t believe it, they think I can teleport!”

“They’re going to teach you how to teleport?!” Mira asks in astonishment.

“Oh thanks, real supportive,” I say, rolling my eyes, then before she can apologize, I tell her excitedly, “But no seriously, it looks like earth ponies might have magic too! Not like a magic horn, or wings, but...”

Her initial excitement is tempered by how I taper off uncertainly. “But...?” Mira prompts.

“You remember when I was... you remember right after the convention?” I ask her tentatively, “I kind of got... captured, and... kind of messed up?”

“That’s what they tell me,” Mira says cautiously, raising a wing my way. “I couldn’t believe they’d do that. Guess I was right to uh... sneak away.”

“You totally were,” I agree heartily, “But I wanted to ask you if you saw me, about uh... 2 weeks after the convention?”

“You mean when you rescued me?” Mira asks in confusion, “That was at least a month after the convention.”

Shaking my head, I say, “No, like... when I was in that cell, they say I might have... teleported places I was hallucinating about, on accident.”

“You were hallucinating?!” my bat pony sister asks, stepping back in alarm.

“Well you try spending a week in total darkness!” I whine, my ears dipping, “It just gets weird after a while!”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she says faintly, “So you saw uh...”

“I saw you is the important part,” I say, perking up, “Except you were behind a wall, but I could still see you, or something. It was just a crazy hallucination, I thought. But you said it was good I didn’t say what kind of pony you were. I said we got captured, and Nick asked... okay Nick was there too, but he asked if they got you, too.”

“In the hallucination?” Mira prompts.

“Sorta,” I reply hopefully, “Do you remember seeing me saying that, or... something? Like appearing, like a ghost me or something?”

“No, I didn’t see you at all,” Mira says, pausing in her dish washing to face me, adding perkily “I did hear you though!”

What

“It was... i-it was probably just a dream,” Mira says, half-turning shyly, “I just thought I heard your voice in the room, saying like the military got you, and I tried to ask uh, something. And you just said you promised you’d make things better... somehow.”

...

“Then I woke up,” Mira concludes. “That wasn’t... really you, was it?”

“Oh dear sweet Luna I’m a dreamwalker,” I groan, hanging my head.

“The heck is a dreamwalker?” Mira asks critically.

“I have no idea,” I reply, still slumping.

That still doesn’t explain the seawater, and the creature, and the magma deposits, and the missing sink, and squeezing through the slit, and fitting that water bottle in there, which they uh... recorded on tape. That was not my proudest moment, seeing myself doing ridiculous things with a water bottle on the camera recording. They weren’t sure exactly what I was doing either, so I kind of had to tell them it was... sexual. Yeah things got really quiet then. Thankfully we haven’t spoken about it since.

But all these incredible abilities I supposedly have, they don’t seem like abilities that I have. They’re just things that happened to me. I certainly can’t do anything to the degree that they caught on film. I’d have thought that film was a hoax, if I didn’t remember doing that stuff, myself!

But I can do... things. I may not be able to do all the things, but I can do things. Like... genuinely weird things. Like finding space in places that shouldn’t have that much space in them, which in hindsight makes the water bottle trick kind of obvious. My greatest attempts to teleport just sort of... cause weird things to happen, like one of the computers starts playing a music file on its own, then violently short circuits. We don’t do testing near any of the other computers after that.

Trying to do that ocean thing ends up with me sort of... slowing my fall as I attempt to swim in the air, but no water appears. Oddly though, there’s a salty smell in the air afterwards. It’s all very inconsistent, and not all that useful, but it’s there. I can do magic, and that’s incredible!

Not as incredible as what these people have in the depths of their laboratory though.

“Some of you may be wondering how we know so much about Equestrian technology,” the pink and green filly named Dr. Peterson, says, standing in the front of a meeting room, on a wooden stage that was pretty much erected for sake of the fact that she was too short to reach the whiteboard. “What you’re about to hear may shock you,” she says ominously, “But Twilight Sparkle didn’t come from nowhere at all. In fact, Equestria is real.”

“And you’re in open communication with the authorities, there!” somepony calls out from the audience in excitement.

“What?!” Dr. Peterson squeaks, staring across to that pony, “How did you know that?”

“The Major told us already!” that pony calls back, some mare I haven’t met yet, “That’s why we came in the first place!”

Through a few murmurs of acknowledgement in the audience, the bright-red-faced little filly on stage announces insecurely, “Be that as it may! We do have some limited communication with Equestria.” She stops blushing so much as she gets her rhythm back, clearly heard by all thanks to a microphone clipped into her shoulder fluff, “We have been contacted by their world’s Princess Celestia, and told a different story about Twilight Sparkle than our cartoon show led us to believe. In her world, Twilight is wanted for several crimes against the state, including attempted regicide and betraying state secrets to their enemies. She was a high level um...” the filly hesitates before reciting the phrase, “‘Combat unicorn,’ who became involved in a radical group promoting the superiority of ponies to every other race. Her country, as such, wishes very much for her to return, and they are willing to help us in accomplishing that task!”

Well, it jibes with what the Major said. I can’t help but giggle at the filly trying not to trip on the microphone cord though, as she says with determination, “Twilight Sparkle escaped her trial using a dangerous magical artifact to break this hole into our world, and destroyed the artifact once she’d passed through, closing the portal and presumably rendering her beyond their reach. But in fact that’s not true, because the portal remained open in the form of a tiny wormhole, through which we’ve established a rudimentary sort of communication.”

She pauses to grunt quietly, lifting her foreleg and turning so it can step out of the loop in the cord.

“The Equestrians have agreed to teach us how to reopen the portal,” the filly goes on, “Which is supposedly much easier to open if stabilized from both sides. And in exchange, we assist them in their investigation, bringing Twilight Sparkle to justice. It’s a win/win situation, and except for a few hurdles, I think we can accomplish this.”

She paces back and forth on her short green furred legs, as she says, “Firstly, the Equestrians have not been fully open about their technology, and I think you all can help fill in the holes that they don’t want us to fill, to make sure they’re true in their intentions. Secondly, Twilight Sparkle is... ahem! Not here.”

Oh my god she actually has so say ‘ahem’. That is so adorable!

“They say they will lend trained personnel to aid in her capture once the portal is open,” Dr. Peterson continues, “But until then, Twilight Sparkle must not know a connection to her world remains. If she destroys that, then we have no hope to bring her to justice among her own people, nor our own. She knows more about magic than any of us will be able to decipher in a lifetime on our own. That’s why we need the help of Equestria to ah dammit! ” with a soft thump, the filly falls forward onto her face as her hind leg catches in the microphone cord.

“Don’t we have wireless...?” she asks angrily lifting her head to glare at the human next to the speakers. He shrugs, pointing our way. Looking at her audience (us), the filly blushes again, climbing to her hooves, and sniffling as she wipes her aaaaaaaaa even her sniffles are adorable!

“Point blank, we don’t know if we can trust Equestria, any more than we can trust Twilight Sparkle,” Dr. Peterson says furiously, “We are giving them as little information about our... situation as possible, but they’re giving us little information in return. We need your help to use your lessons you learned from Twilight Sparkle to decipher what they’ve told us, identify how trustworthy any of it is, and if we can’t learn how to undo this... pony transformation ourselves, we need to open the portal enough to gain... aid from them, and to shove Twilight Sparkle through it so hard her ears pop!”

I think my ears pop with the fury behind that filly’s angry squeal, microphone amplified. She pauses at that, shamefaced and droopy eared, and says in an even tone, “S-so if any of you would like to go over what Twilight taught you, we can start to set up some sort of... training schedule, in order to improve our magic—our skill at Equestrian technology, and prepare for when more... open negotiations with them can begin. Are there any questions anyone had regarding that?”

“Huh, what sort of things did you learn about the Equestrian technologies?” a round voiced stallion calls out from the crowd... and since I know three stallions who came with (Sue, Strider and Dusty), he’s definitely one of the nine stallions I do not know.

“That’s an excellent question!” the filly director says, with a bright smile, “It’s been brought to my attention that Twilight Sparkle led you all to think that only unicorns had any magic!”

I think this time, I succeed in not tuning out the entire speech to spend the whole time squeeing at the filly’s adorableness, but what a speech it is. We’re going to learn magic, not just from Twilight Sparkle, but from ponies in Equestria, too! Maybe even Princess Celestia, herself!

The really thrilling thing is, in preparation for the battles ahead, the military are teaching us not just magic, but...

“Now, I know you’re not military personnel, so you won’t be handling the weapons, but I don’t think that matters, because you’re gonna be the weapons!”

Sergeant Browning is not one of the lucky ones. She doesn’t seem to be letting her unasked-for feminity stop her though: a very purple orange haired earth pony mare, with a rank of some sort crudely hung around her neck.

She stands in front of us, declaring in a shrill voice, “You’re all a class above the rest of us right now! You’ve been ponies longer, you’re better at being ponies. You don’t know shit about how to fight, but I don’t care if you all think you’re no good, because by the time I’m done with you, the only thing you’re gonna think is how good do you need to be? It’ll be hard, really hard, and then I’ll make it harder, but you came here to save the world, and you’re gonna do it.”

What is quite possibly the greatest drill instructor I have ever met, fills me with an astonishing amount of hope, as she declares, “We’re the only thing standing between Twilight Sparkle and our world’s future. We are the last hope for the human race. You’re gonna crawl into your beds, and cry home to mommy, and wish that you never met me, but you are going to be ready for whatever that unicorn, or whatever any of those Equestrians have to bring against us. I don’t care if you turned into a little girl, or,” the earth pony spits to the side growling, “An earth pony. You’re gonna do what I say. You’re gonna tell me what I wanna know. And you’re gonna kick Twilight Sparkle’s lilac ass!”

She steps forward then, declaring, “Now I want to see you doing laps around the compound. The whole compound. You’re horses; you’re built for running, so get running, and I want to see you run so hard that you drop!”

I uh... drop. But heck if I don’t run harder than I’ve ever run before. The area cleared around the perimeter fence thumps under my hooves as me and the rest of the... okay fine maybe it is a herd, but us “civvies” who came from Twilight Sparkle’s group, we run together, and I’m straining so hard to keep up with everyone as the chain link fence just blazes by us, and we bound around another corner.

I don’t count how many laps. I just... feel an acid tang stinging in my muscles, creeping up my legs into my chest and rear, and she shouts “Come on! Feel the burn!” as we pass, and I do, I push through it at that and... well, most of us are stumbling, sides heaving as we slow down so much she can actually catch up shouting, “Come on, even I can beat you pansies! Get moving!” And off we go again.

I’m not the first to drop. Middling, maybe. We all kind of run out of steam at once though. First person goes down and then we’re all just... holy crap. The instructor keeps at our heels until we’re all... lying on the ground gasping for breath pretty much, and she totally cheated because she waited until we were so exhausted all she had to do was trot to keep up with us, before she started chasing us.

Then she has us jumping on... stumps, and off of stumps. On, and off, and on, and off. The rest of the day continues something like that, until I feel like my legs and my whole body’s made out of jelly. And... luckily it’s only earth ponies in this group, since the pegasi and others are doing other exercises. Once me and Sue collapse in the apartment, absolutely worn out, a cheeky unicorn named Lucy decides to start getting us up again, through gentle, teasing words, and then head butts, and then actual zaps that jolt me and Sue up to escape the jerking sting of her evil horn.

“Keep moving!” Lucy says cheerfully, having not gone through any of the torture Sue and I are now experiencing, “Or you’re gonna be so cramped up tomorrow you won’t even be able to move!”

She’s right, damn her, but... with Sue and I shambling about like zombies, only given a few minutes by Lucy to lie and recover, it’s... not a fun evening. I don’t feel like eating, but just... munch on grass mostly, and drink greedily from the water piped down from the water tank over the whole complex. And that’s all we do. But eventually Lucy tires of torturing us, and Sue and I end up sleeping like the dead until late in the morning tomorrow.

“Lucy! You said I wouldn’t be cramped up!” I moan that morning, on my side, unable to straighten my legs, much less stand up.

“No I didn’t. I said you would be if you didn’t keep moving,” Lucy says practically, taking a towel in her magic and... doing magic with it. She lifts my leg up with the towel and... wiggles it in a way that just gets the blood flowing with tingles and stings of pain. “And you’re never gonna talk to that drill instructor again,” she concludes, in sage vehemence.

“But she said we should report back today,” I protest weakly.

“Meadowsweet, shut up we are never doing that again,” Sue groans from where he lies prone on the bed.

“You’re not gonna get yourselves hurt right after coming here!” Lucy protests, tsking over me as she rolls a broom handle wrapped in a towel against my ow ow ow ow ow ow, “She doesn’t know anything about what ponies can or can’t do!”

“That’s... why she was... ahtss...” I say with difficulty as the rolling pressure makes pain erupt wherever it touches. “Trying to... see how hard we could...”

So... Lucy’s kind of... right. And apparently she’d once had a job as a massage artist. (Who knew?) I’m certainly in no shape to move after that incredibly terrible stunt we pulled. But I really don’t wanna make that drill instructor feel like she pushed us too hard! I’m technically walking around by the next day, and my right inner thigh keeps giving out, and I think I pulled something in my shoulder, but the rest of it manages to fade into simple grindingly painful muscle soreness.

I approach the purple instructor mare again, once I feel good enough to really move, walking up to her, my own aching ears drooped down apologetically, as I tell her, “I’m so sorry about missing your training the past couple days.”

“Training? What training?” she asks in bewilderment, “I haven’t trained anyone since... oh no you were one of the civvies on Tuesday!”

“Well I am sorry you had to just stand around then,” I tell her, “I just couldn’t even move. I didn’t know I could push it that hard, and I guess it was too much.”

Her head sinks at that, and she turns her body, hunched, to face me, saying incredulously, “You’re apologizing? You didn’t just half cripple the earth ponies on your entire squad, because I didn’t know when to call it quits.”

“You were just trying to...” I try not to wince as I lean too much into my bad shoulder, “...find out what we were capable of. I should’ve known when to call it off—”

“No,” she interrupts, walking around to face me head on, “It’s my responsibility, and even if we’re these weird fantasy ponies, I shouldn’t have thrown a bunch of civilians into day zero boot camp.”

Blinking, I ask, “But... aren’t all soldiers just civilians, on day zero?”

She gives me a look. It doesn’t last long though, before a laugh rises up in her, and she turns away, saying, “Fine, fair enough. But you’re not all twenty year old men, who you can push until they drop, and they’ll be back for more the next day. You know why?”

Why what? “...no?” I offer cautiously.

“Because twenty year old men are wimps!” she declares hotly, stepping in my direction, “I never saw enthusiasm like that! You would’ve been bitching and moaning if you were one of the new guys, not kicking up and running again like your life depended on it. That’s why you can push new recruits, and they don’t... all end up incapacitated for the next two days.”

She starts to turn away at that, and I quickly say, “So, you think maybe we can try again, in a few days?”

And here comes another look. One of thoughtful appraisal.

“How about you tell me how ponies work?” the instructor asks, “You all... moved better than I ever managed to do, like this.” She looks down at her own bright purple forelegs, the back up to me, “This is the craziest situation I’ve ever been in, so uh, now don’t go telling anyone, but I’d really like you to... show me how you do that cool horse thing.”

“...cool horse thing?” I prompt cautiously.

“Yeah, you know,” she says, walking in an odd stumble forward, “When your... legs go all weird and you move... faster?”

“Oh, trotting?” I declare, “That’s easy! You just only have two feet planted at a time. Uhhh hooves. Like...” I jump forward, landing on my front right hoof and back left, pausing to say, “This? And...” then I hop to the opposite hooves, pulling my other two hooves in. “And it sort of...” I hop back and forth, trotting briskly forward, then stumble to a halt again. “Goes from there. You just keep pushing it and it keeps going.”

“Neat!” she says, looking at my legs with interest, “So like how walking only lifts one hoof at a time...”

“Trotting lifts two, yeah!” I tell her happily, “No, the real tricky one is cantering.”

“What’s cantering?” she asks curiously.

“Someone back at the farm showed me,” I tell her, “You start on one hoof like this,” and I jump forward, landing on my left forehoof. “But you’re still pulling in your hind legs, see, so you push off to land on the other forehoof.” I demonstrate, saying, “And now you can...”

And she’s already giving me an astonished look, “You know what, I am tired of getting all these looks!” I whine at her in frustration, “What did I do?”

“H-how are you staying balanced on just one hoof like that?” she asks in envious exasperation.

...

“I... don’t know,” I reply, looking down at my hoof planted there.

As I continue to recover admirably from almost killing myself on accident, elsewhere in the base, the Trouble Trio should be pretty busy helping the other servicemen who turned into foals. That doesn’t stop Whisper from dogging me for advice, while Flitter keeps following me around like a nervous puppy, and Flint follows those two. So in other words, these three are not nearly as busy as they should be.

“You really want to call yourselves the Trouble Trio?” I ask the three foals I rode with here at one point during our regular mealtimes.

“It fits!” the blue haired, purple pegasus named Flitter asserts, “We are totally trouble. Plus it’s an alliteration.”

“The Totally Trouble Trio,” the pale blue unicorn Whisper says to herself with a quiet giggle.

“Yeah, because we’re,” Flint says proudly, the green haired, tan-furred earth pony colt of the group, “You know... doing stuff?”

Oh I forgot to mention that Flint loves making me blush horribly.

I’m not sure why these three are sticking with me so much, but it probably has to do with the fact that I caught them having sex, and didn’t flip my lid. The three of them share one room, but Flitter leads me into it eagerly, saying, “C’mon, I want to show you how it’s gonna work!” and such like that.

“I’m kind of not... feeling all that up to...” I say weakly as Flitter trots ahead of me and doesn’t look back, and Whisper head-butts me from behind, startling me into their apartment from the poking of her horn.

Not comfortable with this at all, I let them force-mosey me all the way in. The pegasus stands on the floor beside the bed, eyeing the window above and declaring, “See, you can’t even see us on the floor from the window! So we can totally have sex in here without anybody knowing!”

“Well, good job, I guess?” I say, looking from her to Flint coming in, and the colt says to me,

“You wanna watch us have some right now?”

God fucking dammit he is good at making me blush. “I really don’t think I need to...” I say leerily, but Flitter saves the day, saying,

“Flint is talking out of his ass. We’re just foals!”

Wait.

“Yeah, I won’t be able to uh,” Flint blushes, “Cum anything, for a while now.”

“You remember, when you were a kid, right?” Flitter asks me hopefully, maybe a little self consciously with how her wings are spread. “I mean I wasn’t a girl, but guys have to seriously hit puberty before you can get it up more than once every other week or so.”

“And ponies are the same?” I ask curiously.

Flitter tailshrugs, saying, “Same-ish? The weird thing is he ejaculates, but... yeah we’ve been sticking to once a week or... two.”

“Then why did you bring me in here, and act like you were going to?” I ask in exasperation.

“Because now you know we trust you,” Whisper says, “If we just told you we weren’t doing it anymore, you’d feel like we were afraid to tell you we were.”

“How do you know?” I ask, “Is that a pony magical ability of yours?”

“No, you just seem like... a bit of a worrier,” Whisper says with a bashful smile.

“You saw us right in the middle of it, and it was just... seriously bad timing,” Flint says with an even gaze, but ears drooping in regret, “Anyway, we couldn’t tell you that in public either, so... that’s why we brought you here. Sorry.”

“It really is okay,” I assure him, “It’s nice not to have sex once and a while.”

“So does it really hit you that hard if you’re an adult pony?” Flitter asks curiously, “Like... what’s it like?”

“It’s actually a lot like being a human adult,” I tell her, “You look at people you’re attracted to, and if you have hormones, you want to have sex with them. Gets all tingly back there, you know? But uh... scent is a lot more important. Like I can smell when someone’s aroused, usually. That’s why I was surprised at you three.”

“Yeah, but... you know, how you get all crazy and uninhibited and stuff?” Flitter asks.

“M-maybe a little,” I admit, “It’s like trying not to scratch an itch sometimes. You don’t go... crazy, but you’re right on the edge of—you know... lifting your tail and going for it? Like what happened with Blaze.”

“Have you ever... done what Blaze did?” Whisper asks shyly.

Smiling, I flump against the bed while the foals cluster around, saying, “Yeah, did you hear the one about me and Nick, on the way to Baltimore?”

So I tell the story that everybody already knows, and Flitter tells a story of how she was talking with a mare, who just cut off mid-sentence to go bounding after a stallion she saw. “They were probably already together,” I suggest, but Flitter shakes her head, saying,

“She could’ve still waited then. It was driving her crazy, I tell you.”

“Like an itch you can’t scratch...” Flint agrees thoughtfully.

They try to be nonchalant about it, but it isn’t long before I have three foals lying against me again, telling stories about stuff and using various parts of my body as pillows. Flint likes my thigh.

“Why aren’t you feeling it anymore?” Flitter asks me curiously, and I feel an odd sort of shameful smugness, admitting,

“It’s because I’m pregnant, actually.”

Whisper lifts her head off my belly then, looking at it and saying apologetically, “Oh, sorry if I was lying on your um... baby.”

“It’s fine, I’m not even showing yet,” I tell her, “The most signs I’ve seen so far are morning sickness, and not being as horny.”

“You’re still being a little horny though?” Flint asks hopefully.

“Oh, yeah I... did it with Sue the night before last,” I admit shyly, “It really is nice, once and a while.”

So me and the trio talk, and then I head to my apartment for the night, finding Sue, Lucy and Holly all curled up together on the bed. They don’t wake as I lightly hop up there, turning in a circle to make the mattress comfortable, then settling down with the rest of them. As I drift off to sleep, I think about the three foals, sleeping together but by themselves, and I wonder if they’d want to sleep with us. It’d be nice to have some foals around...

Author's Notes:

See, first you thought I’d psyche you out in the previous Trouble Trio scene, and then you thought I wouldn’t in this chapter, but it was I, Dio!

Yeah, these three are pretty much the main characters at this point. I’m sure they’ll be extremely relevant and mentioned in many chapters to come.