It was the next morning, Pete realized as he dragged his aching everything outside, and was promptly blinded by the light that was pouring in from the doors to his right. With a long sigh he scanned the apartment. Twilight was in the kitchen, Fluttershy serving her coffee, while Pinkie started with breakfast. In a surprising twist, Rarity was waiting outside the bathroom this morning, the fashionista usually the first one in causing the others to wait while she styled her mane. With Rainbow sitting on the couch, Luna pushing past Pete to take her own eight hour nap, and Celestia probably on the roof, that left only AJ to occupy the bathroom. Curious, but not quite so curious as to actually ask the mare, Pete waved hello to RD, then exited onto the roof. Once there he looked at the ladder with a grimace.

“Afraid?” Celestia chided from the upper level.

Pete shook his head, “No. My everything hurts.”

Celestia teleported down to his side, with hardly a flash, and raised a brow in his direction. “Pain?”

“I think the after effects of AJ's kick,” he said as he rubbed the spot on his ass where she'd kicked him. “I was fine last night but now...”

Celestia hid her mouth behind a hoof and laughed, “Not as tough as you thought you were?”

Pete groaned loudly, “No, I'm about as tough as I expected. It just didn't show itself as fast as I thought. I figured I'd just be dead last night when I stood up; was surprised that I wasn't.”

Celestia's face fell to a more serious expression. “Speaking of last night,” she said, locking her gaze on the human.

Pete's expression followed the princess' own as he turned around and gazed at the cityscape. Celestia moved beside the human, eying him carefully. Last night's discovery had been interesting, though some parts were much more surprising. She was more surprised than anything at how the attraction to ponies had persisted in the background of humanity like it had.

“They were just pictures,” Pete said pleadingly, “No one knew you all were real, we had no way of knowing!”

“I think there are some things I should explain,” Celestia responded.

“Like what?”

The princess gave a long sigh, “Firstly, though the girls may say otherwise, you should not feel bad for being attracted to them. Humans were not that uncommon of a sight amongst herds, and it's not as though any of them are underage.”

Pete blinked, “Uh, herds? For one, and underage?”

Celestia nodded. “Yes, even by human laws none of us are too young, and by Equestrian laws we're all quite older than that. Equestrian law dictates that a mare may find a companion when she experiences her first heat cycle. Which typically happens around seven years of age. That being another point I wanted to exonerate you of.”

“SEVEN!?” Pete outright shouted, turning to face Celestia, and stepping back in shock.

“Yes,” Celestia sighed, “Our physiology is much different than humans, as are our mating rituals. Applejack's fury, I would speculate, comes from not wanting her sister to grow up. By next spring time she, and the rest of her friends, should have their first heat. Surely you can understand this mentality.”

Pete shook his head, “Sorry, I'm still hung up on seven being the AGE OF CONSENT, apparently!”

“Yes, sort of. Technically it's whenever a mare has her first heat cycle, usually around seven, sometimes earlier, sometimes later. Pete, humans don't have a heat cycle, and while Luna and myself have magic that can nullify its effects for ourselves, it's not so simple for the rest of pony kind. Personally, I wonder how some mares manage without a stallion by choice. To ask a filly to go through years without relief...”

Pete rubbed his face, “Okay, I guess I didn't really think of that, and for pretty good reason I'd say, but actual children aren't my interest. Okay? Fantasy is one thing, reality has always been another. I can draw a very distinct difference between watching an animation and thinking, 'hmm, that Twilight sure has a nice flank' and actually going up to the REAL Twilight and saying 'Nice ass!' I'm not stupid. Well, not that stupid anyway. And aside from that, very few of those images actually were Applebloom as a filly. To take fantasy to another level, most folks, when they drew the younger cast, imagined what they would look like when they were older.”

Celestia nodded, “I understand. All too well do I understand, however Applejack might not.”

“Yeah,” Pete sighed again, “I rather figured that. I don't expect her to forgive me for that stuff. I just want her to not hit me again.” As if to make his point stronger, the man rubbed his sore butt again.

Celestia responded with a light chuckle, but she saw the sincerity in his words. He didn't expect forgiveness, or acceptance, and he genuinely was afraid of being hit again. The princess sighed inwardly, they had made reverse progress. In their week of being around the human they had gotten him to open up, relax. Now, thanks to AJ, he was receding again. Retreating into his shell of self loathing. She wanted to push Pete on this point, find out what in his mind caused this reaction, but she didn't want to push him further away.

Looking away, Pete struggled for a topic change. “Oh, yeah. Herds?”

Celestia shook her head, clearing away her previous thoughts. “Yes. Our society tried at one point to do away with them, but it failed. Birthing has always been a rough ordeal on our kind. From what we've been able to gather of our own ancestors, and coupled with what Twilight has found of horses here, our birthing canals are smaller than our foals, which causes extreme pain during the birthing process. Most are afraid to use magic to alleviate the pain, in case it interferes with the foal, and at one point it got so bad that castrations became common.”

Pete cupped his crotch almost instinctively. “For fuck's sake!”

“Eventually, however, we realized something. The decreased birth rate caused a population decline, and with it we noticed that the ratio of stallions to mares was greatly skewed. On top of that, the number of stallions left with functional genitalia was even less.”

Pete relaxed, his eyes fixed on Celestia and filled with worry. “What happened then?”

“We established new laws. Men were made into valuable treasures, the loudest opposition to these changes were arrested and jailed while we balanced things back out. Of course that didn't change the initial problem, pregnancy was still painful, and almost guaranteed for every couple every spring. I put our best researchers on it, and after two years we found our answer. The herds we had previously worked just fine. A mare that is inseminated by more than one stallion has a reduced chance for pregnancy by up to 80%. We were somewhat baffled, but that was what we learned. So the old ways were brought back, and the population started to balance, but barely. The solution to the problem left us still with the issue of repopulation. Even today things haven't recovered. With reduced child births and already naturally low male births, the ration of stallions to mares is very lopsided.”

“So, I guess that it's more of a mechanical, sort of required thing, rather than a desired emotional state?”

Celestia shook her head. “Not really. We don't force herds, and there are a few that choose to be strictly one on one. Herding is encouraged though, often in a size of four, two males and two females. Though it's not uncommon for one stallion to have two mares to himself. The purpose is almost defeated in that case, however, since the idea is to prevent pregnancy by the stallions sperm killing each other.” Celestia paused a moment, then looked at Pete, “I suppose this is all more than a little strange for you.”

“Kinda of? Like … I mean, I haven't really done much dating here. Sure, I've gone out a few times but no ever clicked. No sparks, no chemistry, it was all just kinda … flat.” Pete looked off the edge of the roof to the street below, casually watching the barely visible dots that were people on the sidewalk below. “I can't really judge what I've never seen.”

Celestia stepped up beside him, also looking down. “So could you honestly judge this world?”

“Maybe not,” Pete half whispered.

The moment was then interrupted by the door being flung open and the sound of hooves on the roof. Pete and Celestia turned to see Applejack, panic evident on her face.

“Something's wrong,” the farm pony shouted.

“What's the matter?” Celestia asked, worry crossing her face as well.

“Ah dunno. Pinkie saw something on that computer and now she's just bawling.” AJ's eyes immediately looked at Pete, her expression hardening. Even Celestia looked at the human with a hint of suspicion.

“Hey, I deleted everything on there. I promise.” With just those simple words Pete rushed towards the door and entered the apartment.

Inside he immediately spotted Pinkie Pie, crying as Applejack had said, with her forelegs wrapped around Rainbow Dash on the couch. The pegasus had an expression of confusion, and slight suffocation. Pete made his way to the other side of the room, Celestia and AJ entering as he did so, and to Twilight. The purple unicorn was looking at the screen, her back to the human, but her absolute stillness said nearly everything.

From a distance Pete could see the Facebook color scheme and logo at the top of the page. Pinkie's bakery was getting out mostly via social media, under the condition that she never revealed she was a talking pony, obviously. Later, Pete would discover that she'd let her name slip in a post, which prompted what happened. Someone had left a picture comment, probably intending to be a joke. The first thing Pete noticed was the red, then the light blue, pink, and silvery gray. Then all he could see was red.

With a roar of sheer rage Pete half turned and punched the wall to his right, screaming, “Son of a bitch!” The outburst even woke up Luna, who stood next to Celestia, Applejack, and Twilight at the monitor. Someone had posted fan art of the story “Cupcakes,” the image depicting Pinkie cutting Rainbow Dash up, explaining the pink mare's death hug on the pegasus. The group displayed obvious dismay at the image, the princesses stepping away in disgust, and Applejack becoming once more extremely angry.

“This is exactly why I fucking hate humans!” Pete shouted, punctuating his sentence with another punch to the wall. “As soon as there's something happy, someone, somewhere, has to come along and fuck it up. Make everyone as miserable and sick as they are. We can't leave well enough alone, we have to stick our jacked up world views into every god damn thing we touch. This is the exact type of shit I wanted you all to avoid, and it comes flying right into your faces.”

“Like you're any different!” Applejack shouted, her own temper seeking release.

“Of course I'm not!” Pete roared back, turning around. “You already saw that! Ever since you all got here its been one of my problems after another messing you all up. I tried to keep it as simple as possible, keep our worlds as separate as I could, but that clearly failed. I'm just as bad as the rest of them! That's why I …”

Pete stopped, his fist slowly unclenched, and his head hung low. Applejack watched, her eyes like daggers, as the human slowly walked towards the couch. By the time he got there most of the room was watching as he slowly sunk down to his knees. Without looking, he reached forward and wrapped his arms around the sobbing pink mare, pulling himself close to her body.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered, “I'm so, so very sorry. You didn't deserve to see that. None of you deserved to see any of this.”

“I would never hurt Dashie!” Pinkie sobbed, her face still buried in Rainbow's shoulder.

“I know,” Pete said, his tone still soft. “I know that you'd never hurt anyone intentionally. None of you would.”

“It's just stupid,” Twilight said, her eyes still on the screen.

“Exactly,” Pete expanded, “It's just some dumb thing that an idiot thought up because he thought it was cool. People do dumb stuff because of 'cool.'”

“Yeah, like Gilda. I mean, whatever this picture is it's probably pretty bad, but it's like how Gilda was so mean when she came by. She thought it was cool, but it's not. She was just acting stupid,” Rainbow Dash chimed in, putting a wing over her friend.

Feeling the feathers touch his hand, Pete pulled away from his hug and stood up. He looked down at the pair of mares, Pinkie's sobbing starting to quiet. The touching scene in front of him was quickly swept away, however, as he remembered the image was still around. His face returning to anger he turned towards the computer.

“What a played out joke,” Twilight said, Pete noticing that her tone was very neutral.

“Uh, Twilight? What are you saying?” Pete asked, cocking his head to the side.

Twilight jumped slightly and turned. “I'm reading these comments,” she replied, “I mean, there's a couple of people saying stupid stuff, but mostly it's people saying the image is dumb, or that the 'joke' is 'lame' and old. I mean, there's folks here that are almost as upset as you. Some of them are military and threatening to kill the guy that posted this!”

Pete's rage fell immediately into unhindered laughter. “Those aren't real! Trust me, those are not real. Those are people that think it's cool to copy, word for word, some threat that someone wrote. Let me guess, there's several guys claiming to be snipers with a dozen black ops missions under their belt, right?”

Twilight blinked, and blushed, “Uh, yeah...”

Chuckling lightly at how stupid that copy paste was after all these years, Pete walked over to the computer to see these comments for himself. There were, as Twilight said, several people posting absolute stupidity. Not even constructive or amusing stupidity, just lost of cussing and threats. On the other side though, there were many people insulting the image, some of them even going into actual details about how the art was, posing, shading, and legitimately ripping it apart. Others were seemingly exasperated with how such a “schlocky story” had survived well past the end of the show. Pete, the princesses, Twilight, and Applejack stood around and watched as slowly comments were deleted due to people flagging them for spam, or reporting them as abuse, along with the eventual removal of the image entirely. This was followed by the start of a new comment chain, wherein the people from the now removed comments talked about their favorite parts of the show.

“People may spread around their 'messed up world views,'” Celestia said, her words spoken to the air but clearly directed at Pete, “But when the darkness becomes too much they will always bring in the light. Ponies are much the same way.”

Pete continued to stand and stare at the computer screen, reading each comment filled with happy memories. What Celestia had just said slowly sunk into his mind, and the man braced himself internally. He knew that, but he could never hold onto that glimmer, and he knew that too.

“These last few days have been … stressful, to say the least,” Pete said loudly after a few minutes. “I think we need something to unwind.”

“Like what?” Applejack said, half wary and half wanting.

Pete smirked at the mare. “A party.”

Suddenly Pinkie was there, bright eyed and bouncing. “REALLY?! REALLY REALLY?!”

“Yeah. Why not?” Pete shrugged.

“Oh BOY!” Pinkie shouted, bouncing around harder now. “I'll have to get ready! We're gonna need lots of party food! OOH! And drinks!” She turned back to Pete, then hopped up to his eye level, holding herself there by digging her back legs into his sides and placing her forelegs on his shoulders. “We need booze,” she said almost deadpan.

Pete blinked for a moment then gave an awkward shrug. “O-okay, I guess. I don't drink myself though so you might have to be a little more specific than that...”

Within moments Pinkie rattled off a dozen names, followed by a general description of how they tasted, once Pete reminded her that the names probably wouldn't be the same, so he'd have something better to work off of. This was then followed by Pinkie pronking away as a list was levitated into Pete's face. He took the list, filled with everything Pinkie had just spouted off and gave Twilight, the obvious writer of the list, a grateful smile.

Pete might not have been big on booze, but he managed to track down at least some equivalent of what Pinkie wanted, and in large amounts that didn't break his wallet again. As he walked back into the apartment, music blaring, ponies dancing, and spirits somewhat lifted, he hoped that this would be the last time some part of his world interfered with the ponies'. And maybe, just a bit, he hoped that things would lighten up between the two species again.