"Okay class, settle down," Cheerilee says. "I'm sure you all remember TD here from show and tell a few weeks ago."

"Hi, TD!" chants the class happily.

"Hey," I respond.

"Now, I know how much you all enjoyed getting to know him, so I thought it would be interesting to have him guest lecture today on a foreigner’s life, what it’s like, where he lives and so forth. If you could all give him your undivided attention, that would be great. Be sure to take notes, as you may or may not be tested on some of the information he gives you,” she adds with a wink. “TD, the floor is yours."

As I stand up in front of the class, I have to admit that I have a cheesy grin on my face. I have been looking forward to doing something like this ever since the first time Cheerilee suggested it. I was going to be an elementary school teacher back on Earth; this opportunity, of working with children of a culture so radically departed from anything anyone on Earth has ever worked with, is absolutely priceless.

I am just about to open my mouth when the door to the school bursts open and in walks one frazzled unicorn carrying more writing supplies than I have ever seen. "Have you started yet?” Twilight asks while she sits in a chair in the back. “Please tell me you haven't started yet!"

"Uh... I haven't started yet?"

She relaxes a bit with a look of relief.

"Um, well, class, it seems we have another guest with us today," Cheerilee announces a little surprised.

"Y-yeah... quite," I say with a shake of my head. "Anyway, my culture has a lot of history to it, so what do you want to know?"

"EVERYTHING!"

"Uh, Twilight, I don’t have the time or knowledge of everything. That won’t be possible. Why don’t we start with some basic questions and work from there?"

Instantly everypony in the room, except the only rational adult pony, shoots a foreleg onto the air.

I tap my hand on my chin before I point to Apple Bloom. "What was your life like when you were back in your world?" she asks.

"Good question," I say. "Well, it was pretty simple, really: I was studying elementary education with an emphasis in History back on Earth before I came here. I... yes, Twilight?"

"What is Earth? Is it the country you lived in, the continent or what?"

"The planet. It's the name of the planet I live on. The country I lived in is called United States of America."

"America, got it," says Twilight. "So, were both of your parents from America too?"

I groan inwardly. I imagine that she is going to be asking every question today. Maybe I should have her write me an essay on what I've lectured on... No. I am going to do that.

"American father, Canadian mother. Canada being the country to the north of mine."

"Ooh."

"Anyway, I worked at my school's cafeteria, I didn't have a special somepony, and my life, to sum it up, revolved around school, work and TV."

"What's a TV?" Sweetie Belle asks, and with that I launch into the particulars of television. I was never the most technologically minded person, but I think I explain it well enough to give them an accurate idea.

"This is so amazing!" Twilight says, to my irritation. She’s been parroting that same line for over five minutes. "This 'television' sounds absolutely fascinating! What genres did you watch on TV?"

I groan inside. That’s another thing that’s been happening for over five minutes: I didn't come here to answer her questions, yet it is exactly what is happening. "I mostly watched shows like Dexter and cartoons like South Park."

"Cartoons, got..."

She freezes at the word 'cartoons' and begins mouthing it to herself over and over again. That can't be good.

"Uh, Twilight? You okay?"

"I remember when you first got here. You called our world 'cartoony'."

Oh crap, tell me she didn't.

"Does our world look like a cartoon from your world?"

"Uh... yeah," I say after a little hesitation. No point in lying; she seems to have figured out something at any rate.

She frowns at me and examines my face for a few seconds before the ultimate question comes. "Is our world a TV show in your world?"

I stand there, gaping in total shock, and my mind begins to wonder just how to answer this completely fair question. I try to babble out an answer that would satisfy them, but I was never a good enough liar. "Yes, yes it is. It's a TV show called My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic."

The whole class stares at me with open mouthed shock for a few seconds. Dang it, I just broke an entire class of students and two adults, didn't I? Not again.

The ultimate reaction is, however, something that I have to admit I did not foresee. A few seconds after the class finds out that they are fictional somewhere else, each and every one of them opens their mouths and says the same word:

"AWESOME!!!"

Wait, what?

The foals explode into excited chatter. "Ah wonder if Ah'm a main character," Apple Bloom says.

"As if," shoots Diamond Tiara. "Nopony would make a silly blank flank like you the star of her own show. I am quite sure that the show is about how amazing I am!"

Well, to be fair to Diamond Tiara, we do have a lot of TV shows about stuck up brats, so, maybe in enough time...

"Hey, do you think they know about when we brought the Ursa to town?" Snips wonders.

"I wonder if they saw me when I got my cutie mark!" Twist says.

"As if," repeats Diamond Tiara. "I'm sure that--"

"The show's about Twilight!" I interject loudly.

All noise is sucked out of the classroom like air out a spaceship’s airlock. "No. Way," Scootaloo whispers to the other Crusaders.

"M-me?" Twilight blurts out after a second. "The show is about... me?"

"Well, you and your friends, but yes, you are the protagonist as far as I gathered. I didn't actually watch the show aside from the first few episodes."

Twilight closes her eyes for a moment, deep in thought. "That explains how you knew about the princess," she says after a moment. "This explains so much."

"So much?" I respond. "What do you mean? I hardly watched the show and I hardly know anything about you guys!"

"Well I guess you seemed to have a good grasp of our personalities from the very beginning that I found perplexing. It came out in the way you interacted with us from the very start."

I open my mouth to respond but I close it again when I realize that I don't actually have a response. Still, I feel like I should say something. "Uh...I didn't just shatter your whole reality, did I?"

"Of course not," declares a white colt in the back of the room – Featherweight, if I remember. To my surprise, he sounds exactly how I always imagined a young Alan Rickman would. "If there truly are parallel universes, then there would be a lot of them, yes? Possibly infinite. Taking that hypothesis into account, I find it hard to believe that our perception of reality could change that drastically based on what you have just told us.

“If somepony from your world can imagine our world exactly like it is and believe it is fictional, then that still doesn't make our world any less real to us even if it is fictional to you, much in the same way that if somepony switched the roles and imagined your world down to a T, and called it fictional, it is still reality to you. If not, all the infinite parallel universes would be fake, because they would be featured as fiction in another infinite number of parallel universes.

“And if they, including us, are fake, how can we exist?”

A cricket chirps outside. "Yeah, what he said," Sweetie Belle nods.

"Upbuhwha?" I respond oh-so-wisely.

The colt sighs but resumes his insight without a hitch. "What I'm saying is, just because our world is fictional to you, that does not mean that we see it as any less real. If your world was fictional to us, would you see it as any less real?"

"Uh...I guess not." I turn to Cheerilee with a look of utter bewilderment on my face.

She gives me a bit of a smirk. "He does that."

I rub my temples a bit to clear my head. Why is is that I give them an existential bombshell but I am the one who ends up more confused about the nature of reality than they are?

"Well, that gets that out of the way. So, shall we move on?"

I have to hand it to those kids; they are pretty darned well-behaved for the most part. I have to imagine that a normal class of youngsters would want to just focus on the fact that there is a TV show about them out there, but these kids accepted that and moved on to the next topic. Don't get me wrong, I imagine that I'll get a lot of questioning about it later, but they accepted that the time for talking about it had moved on and that there would be other times to discuss it. The time for the next topic came along even if we didn't get as much of a chance to talk about it as we liked.

Overall, I definitely have to call the day a resounding success. They all absolutely adored everything that I had to say, and to be completely honest, I really enjoyed it too. We played hide-and-go-seek-tag a few more times during recess – turns out I have just as hard of a time avoiding some of them as I do catching them – and they ate up everything about my world that I told them to the point where Cheerilee and I are going to get together to discuss plans for more lessons, especially specific events. There's only so much about the moon landing that I can stuff into one class day. I’m happy to oblige, of course.
Twilight is bound to get involved again. I know she already wrote a letter to Celestia about today.

At any rate, I find myself currently watching the parents and siblings of the students coming to pick them up after the day; I actually manage to meet a few more townsponies that way. They all seem nice enough – one promised to bake me some 'hello I just met you' muffins –, or maybe that’s me learning to relax a bit around large crowds of ponies.

Eventually though, the crowd of parents and students disperses for the day. I can’t blame them; as much as I enjoyed the field day, the idea is quite appealing to me as well. I need a nap.

Before I can achieve that particular goal, I feel a poke on my right leg and a pony behind me clears her throat. I turn around to see Scootaloo standing behind me, looking thoroughly uncomfortable.

"Hi there. Do you need something?"

Scootaloo remains embarrassed look for a few more moments before she finally works up the courage to respond. "I was wondering... I was wondering if you could walk me home today, TD. My scooter needs to get fixed, it’s a bit far to walk and, well, my parents can’t come get me."

"Oh, sure, kid, just point me in the right direction and we'll get going."

She nods and points to the left. I begin walking in that direction with her right behind me. The journey is mostly a quiet affair, me in front and the filly trotting by my side.

We enter a part of Ponyville I've never seen before. Some buildings have clearly seen better days, others are in even worse disarray; a few are practically ruins, where only squatters would even think of settling. The streets have so many cracks and potholes, it looks like it would take years to fix all of them, even with magic. Inside every other house we pass, there are ponies inside, arguing, yelling or something along those lines.

This is clearly a lower-class neighborhood – scratch that, it's an outright slum, almost a favela. Does Scootaloo really live here? If so, I'm not sure I'm going to like her parents, even if we do meet in a nice day like today. These are no conditions to raise a child, no matter what. "Is your house close?"

"Around here,” she mumbles. “Just through these trees."

"Trees?" Sure enough, we have come to a wall of trees surrounding a small pathway. It's not the Everfree Forest, that's on the other side of town, but it still looks dangerous for a filly to be living in. Still, bringing that up with her at the moment won't solve anything, so I keep quiet as we move down the path.

To my surprise, Scootaloo's mood improves vastly now that the slum is behind us. She's smiling and her minute wings are happily spread like she doesn't have a single care in the world. I frown in confusion at her sudden shift. "Sorry I was so down back there," she justified, "I just don't like walking through that part of town. It depresses me, seeing ponies living like that."

"Uh..."

My witty reply is cut off by the birds chirping happily in the trees and the sounds of a charming little brook cutting the land. After a few more steps, Scootaloo and I come up to a bridge that allows us to cross.

“Here we are!” she announces.

I have to admit: based on the neighborhood we just went through, I wasn't expecting this. This house looks like something out of an old fairy tale, like one would imagine the Dwarves' house in Snow White would be. "This...this is your home?"
"Yep," Scoots says with a gigantic grin. “Mom and Dad bought it a few years before I was born. They said that they wanted to get a place close to nature or something."

"Only the best for our darling Scootaloo!" says a male voice to my left.

I turn and end up facing an orange pegasus stallion with blue hair and a football (or I think they call it ‘hoofball) cutie mark standing next to a yellow mare, a pegasus as well, with jet black hair and a trio of bumblebees as a cutie mark. "Hello there, you must be TD.” The stallion smiles at me and extends a hoof. “It's a pleasure to finally meet you. I'm Hard Hitter, and this is my wife, Busy Bee." She waves amiably.

Good gravy, ponies can have some...unique names at times. "Pleasure to meet you," I respond, taking the hoof and shaking it.

"I'm sorry for the trouble," Busy Bee apologizes. "We were both swamped today; as you can see for yourself, we didn't even make it home ourselves until just now."

"I get it," I say with a nod. "Work does that to people. Just what do you two do?"

"Mom and Dad run a fitness company for professional sports teams!" Scootaloo beams proudly.

"Indeed we do," Hard Hitter says with a grin. "Everypony, from the Canterlot Hoofball team to the Wonderbolts, comes to see us."

"Wait, the Wonderbolts? You're the fitness trainers for the Wonderbolts?" I may not have hung around Rainbow Dash too often, but even the little contact we had was enough for me to know their reputation.

"Amongst others," Busy Bee says, wiping a hoof in good-natured dismissal. She turns to her daughter. "Of course, that's not something to be proud of when it interferes with our family life..."

"Mom, don't get sappy," Scootaloo whispers, embarassed. I can tell she appreciates the affection all the same.

“Thank you again for walking her home," Hard Hitter resumes. "Can we get you a drink or something before you hit the road again?"

"Uh...I'm good, thanks," I respond. "Right now, what I need is a power nap."

"We understand," Busy Bee smiles knowingly. "We know all about long workdays. You just go home and get some rest, then; we thank you properly when you're up for it."

“Uh, sure," I nod before looking back down at Scootaloo. "I'll see ya later then, kid."

"See ya, TD!" she says happily.

"Have a good day," says Hard Hitter after I turn my back.

I give the trio a small wave before starting the journey back to Ponyville. My bed is waiting for me.