"(She's purple. Yeah, wings.... horn.)" The man speaking on a headpiece was looking over Twilight as he spoke to some other person. "(I'll check.) You."

Twilight perked up at the recognizable word, and the person was pointing at her. "Yes?"

"Pr-in-cess Ce-le-s-ti-a." He said each syllable separately, clearly echoing a word he didn't know.

Twilight sat up, expression brightening. "You know her?"

George glanced between the two, crammed between two other men in the vehicle. "Who her?"

"Only the nicest, wisest, most fantastic pony ever," gushed Twilight with a complete lack of bias. "Did she make contact? I feel silly now."

The man on the headpiece nodded lightly. "(She recognized it, looks happy. Uh-huh... Alright.)" He lowered his hand from his ear and looked to George. "(Tell her we want to talk about that, when we arrive.)"

George did as he was bade. "They want to talk about her, after we arrive."

"Gladly." Twilight nodded, relaxing into her seat much more easily than she had been.

With strikes off the table for the moment, scouting had resumed. That put him in the seat of a lovely plane as it soared over the frozen lands. He had a specific mission, and it involved the winding rails beneath him. They made lazy curves, avoiding hills where possible, though occasionally going right through them instead. It wasn't hard to keep them in view, being one of the only things around to see that wasn't snow and ice.

They began to rise as he was approaching mountains. Where did that hostile little city get its supplies. He was curious, and so was the brass, hence his mission. Cities could not sustain themselves, and it lacked the suburbs to even entertain it came locally. That railway had to be a lifeline.

He could have attacked it, struck what would certainly be a telling blow, in the long term. But that was not his orders. He just had to follow it, see where it led, and report back. Simple.

The tall and jagged peaks of the mountain range he knew not the name of rose higher and higher, but he was flying higher still, soaring above the cloud line.

A knocking was not what he expected.

He glanced to the source of the noise to see a horse. The horse was lined with frost and shivering, but was keeping up, barely, with the plane, their wings flapping wildly. It knocked again.

What was he supposed to do? Was it an enemy combatant? If it was, evasive maneuvers? None of his training involved something flying that close that wasn't a bird smashing into him. Opening the cockpit felt like an incredibly daft idea. Sure, he was wearing a pressurized suit, still, that could be inviting a hostile to come give him a what for.

It knocked. Its mouth was moving, maybe shouting something? He couldn't tell; not like sound worked very well when one was casually soaring at the speeds he was. It had to compete with the wind roaring past the plane.

The horse grabbed the wing of his plane, hanging there as if that was easier than flying. His controls went crazy with the sudden change in airflow, forcing him to adjust for his sudden passenger. "(Bloody hell... Got a bogey hanging on my wing.)"

"(Could you clarify that?)" came the radio response.

"(One of the horses flew up, somehow, knocked a few times, now hanging from a wing.)"

"(Abort mission, return to base.)"

"(Roger.)"

That horse remained affixed for the entire flight back. When he landed and came to a stop, only then did the horse slip free, flopping to the ground with a pained noise. Soldiers were already there, warned of the situation.

Derpy had not expected such a difficult delivery. "I brought... you a letter." she chattered, shivering with cold. She coiled on herself slowly. The guns were trained on her, ready to blast her apart, but she was ignorant of that threat. The tension ebbed when her snout came out with an equally frosted envelope.

"(For us?)" questioned the ranking soldier there, but Derpy did not know English and just held the letter out. "(Thanks...?)" He gestured towards the mailmare. "(Get that.)"

"(Right.)" The pilot whose plane she had hijacked moved first, snatching the envelope away. "(Never touch a man's plane without asking first.)"

Derpy tilted her head a little, eyes looking off in different directions as they were prone to doing. "You sound angry. I just had to deliver a letter." She stood up and began shaking, sending snow and ice scattering across the area. "I'm cold! Do you have some coffee for a mailmare before she gets back to work?"

Sadly, they didn't really speak Ponish either.

The superior hiked a thumb. "(Get that to intel. Get the horse to a holding cell.)"

Derpy would get no coffee.

The shipping captain had become quite familiar with the route, ferrying things and people to and from Seaquestria fairly constantly. They were just over it, and locals were helping unload. "So," he struck up conversation with one. "What is that, exactly?" He hiked a thumb at the mountain that wasn't very far away. "I see your people flying to and from it sometimes."

The male hippogriff looked up at it. "That's Mount Aris, we live there too."

"Why aren't we delivering to that?"

He shrugged softly. "Wouldn't be any easier; not like we have a dock big enough for you. This ship is huge!" He threw his talons wide for emphasis. "Easier to just toss it all overboard and swim it to where it needs to go. Some of it goes down, some of it goes up."

The captain rubbed at his stubbled chin. "If it works for you, but you have train tracks." He wove a finger along the sight of it. "I thought you didn't 'do' visitors from other people."

"We don't." He shrugged softly. "Might be a train through once a week at most. We only got that going fairly recently at that. You can blame the ponies for that."

The same ponies that were killing people? "Ponies forced you to run the trains?"

"Well, I mean, forced is a strong word. They're nice creatures, like humans I guess." He looked over the captain. "I mean, it's like us."

"Us? Oh." Humans had lived quite happily alone in the universe, than the seaponies happened, and that didn't work out too badly... "So you get along with them, but you're not rushing to say hello to the neighborhood."

"Exactly." The hippogriff hefted up a small box and got to attaching it to a harness he had been wearing. "Feel free to visit, by the way. You could always stop in there if you don't want to try being a mer human." He inclined his head towards Mount Aris, then casually stepped off the ship, hitting the water in the form of a seapony and darting away.

"Sir?"

He looked over at another hippogriff, though they were a special one. That one worked for him, had a green card and everything as an alien worker, emphasis on alien. "What's going on?"

"We're about done offloading. Men report a delay in having the cabins ready for the passengers, about half ready on that front." He directed talons towards the problems. "Should we start loading them?"

"What's the delay?" He huffed and walked off with his curious shipmate. They had cargo to move, living or not.

"I'm very proud of all of you," spoke the teacher at the front of the class. "We will be speaking only Ponish in this class. To assist with us, we have a very special guest." He waved to the door that opened, permitting a hippogriff to step in, wearing a school uniform that draped awkwardly but functionally over her form.

"Hello." She dipped her head towards the class. "I am Head Stream, and it's nice to meet you all. I'm still learning (English), but I get to practice that in all the other classes, so just one where I can speak Ponish is nice."

"Please sit at that desk." He pointed the way. "She will be paying attention and taking the same tests as you, simply reversed. Outside of this classroom, I ask that you assist her, and approach her for assistance. Let's help each other come together and understand."

"Hello Head Stream," the class echoed together, curious eyes on her alien lines, filled with unspoken questions on what made their new classmate tick.

"We need better metal."

"Much better." Flam frowned at the results, their poor mangled gun. "How do they manufacture this so precisely..." To say nothing of the exotic blends of metals they could only loosely approximate.

Flim shrugged softly. "Still, we have learned."

"Undoubtedly."

They both picked up the one working model they had. Flim gestured at it. "At least we can say we've pioneered an automated cannon fit for pony use."

"A proud event, surely!" Flam nodded softly. "But it's nowhere near as rapid as the model it was adapted from. The stress is too much."

"Far too much." Flim huffed softly with frustration.

That letter was carefully defrosted, opened with all the care one might save for a bomb, and then deciphered. Would it be an attempt at surrendering? A call to peace negotiations? Death threats? No one could be certain until it was properly translated, one word at a time, into English.

The envelope was translated first, by merit of having far fewer words to figure out.

To: The Scary Aliens

From: Bright Morning

It was stamped and postmarked, though they didn't know the pony way of tracking dates and time, so that was not helpful.

Hello,

I did not use your name because I do not know it. Sorry. I am Bright Morning, hello! Please stop hurting ponies and yaks. I know yaks are hard to get along with, but they should not be hurt. Can't we be friends? I live at (an address) in the Crystal Empire. If you promise not to hurt anyone, maybe we can have tea?

Thanks,
Bright Morning

The entire letter was crudely fashioned, not typed clearly. Even if one assumed handwriting (They didn't have hands...), it was sloppy.

The man reading over the translation shook his head, glancing to the original in its child-like scrawl. "Some... kid just wrote a letter to us, and they delivered it?"

A woman nearby shrugged. "That makes our prisoner a courier. Should we let her go?"

Attempts at interrogating Derpy had gone... poorly. Even with a dictionary in hand, the horse seemed to have not even the faintest clue what was actually going on. She was not a spy, or the greatest spy ever, one or the other. The letter pointed at her being some kind of postal worker that put way too much effort into her job than could ever be considered healthy. "Let her go, with a reply."

He got a piece of paper and got to writing. His writing of Ponish was not that much better than hers, if only due to a complete and utter lack of practice. He had to look up basically each word as he went.

Hello Bright Morning,

We got your letter. Hurting people is not a good thing. Why are ponies and yaks hurting us? Do your parents know you are writing these? They should be proud of you.

He had to smile as he wrote that. He'd be damn proud of his own kid...

Can you get a pony or yak that is in charge to send us a letter? Maybe we could stop hurting each other.

With Hope,
Major

His name didn't have a translation. He was sure it had a meaning, which could be translated, but he never learned what that meaning was, besides being his name. His rank would have to do. He folded it neatly, stuffed it in an envelope, and addressed it back to the little child that had sent it to him. "Give this to her and send her on her way."

Author's Notes:

Derpy, this story was missing you...