milliways_bar | (no subject)

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The sky over the Milliways outdoors is blue and picturesque and scattered with fluffy clouds. There might be the occasional bird flying around, whether a patron or a forest animal. Also, you know, there's that big dragon gliding by.

Wait. Dragon?

Wait. What? appears to be the dragon's reaction too, at least if anyone around is good at reading draconic body language. It (she) soars in a great and wary circle, surveying the ground before landing warily by the lake.

She's huge, with green scales (properly brushed and polished, thank you) just beginning to go gray at the edges, and three horns (the third, stubbier than the others, in the middle of her forehead), and a quantity of extremely sharp teeth. "Now," she says to herself, "this is new."

(Meanwhile, whether or not anyone's noticed, the Milliways forest just got a little bigger.)

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The dragon stares back! (From a few dozen feet up.)

"What are you, and who put this here?"

It's polite, more or less, but not exactly overly patient.

She shakes her head sharply and regains her composure as best she can. "I am Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria, ma'am. And I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific about what you mean by 'this.'"

...Hmmm.

"And I'm Kazul, King of the Dragons."

She doesn't usually haul out her title -- usually, being a dragon is plenty all on its own, and dragons don't go in for a lot of ceremony -- but meeting tiny alicorn royalty from a kingdom she's never heard of is a particular kind of situation.

"I've never heard of Equestria." Kazul, catlike, manages to make this sound less like an admission and more like a commentary on her objections to the situation. "I mean all of this. It's clearly not part of the Enchanted Forest, but there shouldn't be anything else in the middle of it."

While getting lost in the Enchanted Forest is a hazard for most people, Kazul knows her way around. And has some advantages, like flight and close friendship with the King and Queen of the forest.

"I... wasn't aware that the dragons had a king," says Twilight slowly. "But you're right, this isn't the Enchanted Forest. This is Milliways, the Restaurant and Bar at the End of the Universe. It's a nexus of different possible realities that pulls in beings from all different times and places."

Now that's interesting. Kazul perks right up at the sensible explanation. Her metaphorical raised hackles at abruptly finding a place that shouldn't be in the middle of the Enchanted Forest haven't entirely gone away, but they've subsided somewhat.

"The Dragons of the Mountains of Morning do."

Which is all the dragons who count. (Possibly also all the dragons of her world. Canon isn't exactly clear about that.)

"A nexus of possible realities. Now that's interesting. How does it pull in beings? Can they pull themselves back out again?"

Kazul plans to do so either way, but it'd be nice if it were a simple and well-practiced matter instead of a fight against uncooperative magic.

"Generally, you get out the same way you came in--whether that's by a door or a forest path or what-have you," Twilight explains. "But how it pulls you in to begin with... I have no idea. I haven't had any opportunity to study the mechanism, if there is one."

Kazul unbends enough to settle down on her haunches. This still leaves her a lot taller than Twilight Sparkle, but at least she's not towering quite so high over her.

"I didn't notice the portal spell happening," she admits, "but it's not the kind of thing you look for."

Well, it wasn't. She's sure going to be keeping an eye out for that kind of thing now.

"It's not very noticeable. Usually it superimposes itself over an existing door," says Twilight. "I've been able to get here consistently through a path in the Everfree Forest, but I've also had some success teleporting directly."

"Now that's a useful spell." Not one Kazul has much use for -- why would you want to teleport when you could fly, is her opinion -- but all the same. "I've never met a unicorn who could teleport, but you seem rather different from the usual run of unicorns back home."

Not many scholars among them, for one thing. They're generally tall, shining white or black, and much more preoccupied with admiring their reflections in beautiful pools than testing out spells.

"Well, you don't seem a lot like any dragon I've ever encountered, either."

Dragons in Equestria aren't much interested in magic, or royalty, or much of anything except hoarding treasure and keeping other creatures away from said treasure.

This catches her attention. Kazul, after a moment, lowers herself to a hunkered position that's rather more polite for close conversation.

"What calls itself a dragon where you're from?"

OBVIOUSLY Kazul's kind of dragon is the only kind that counts.

(Kazul has a hoard, but she generally calls it a library.)

Edited 2015-06-29 18:54 (UTC)

"...well, they don't look significantly different from you," says Twilight after an uncomfortable pause. "But I've never heard of a dragon taking interest in magic. Or that they had any kind of royalty. Or enough of an organized civilization to need any sort of authority figure."

The king of the dragons is, truth be told, more like a university chair than what one normally thinks of as a ruler. You get the headaches of cat-herding argumentative know-it-alls, a bit of fancy rank, and some regalia to ignore 98% of the time. (It's an iron crown, made to stand up to being flung in annoyance across caves, because that happens a lot.)

Kazul snorts a tiny breath of flame. "Not as if they listen very well."

Not as if you did either, Kazul.

"So what are ponies like in--what did you call it? The Mountains of Morning?"

Kazul cocks a huge golden eye at her.

"The horses, or the unicorns?"

She just wants to clarify.

"...there's a difference?"

That's new. All the unicorns Kazul knows would be mortally offended by the comparison.

"Horses don't have horns, and they don't generate their own magic. And they're rarely very intelligent."

"Unicorns are intelligent, and magical, and very beautiful. Most of them are quite proud of it."

Most of them are ridiculously vain, in fact, but we'll go for the polite version.

"Ohhh, I see the confusion," says Twilight, nodding. "In my world, unicorns are just a subspecies of ponies. All ponies have some magic, we're just the only ones who can cast spells."

"That is different."

Huh.

"Are they all as colorful as you are, too?"

Kazul is still annoyed at Milliways for appearing, in a background kind of way, but she's been successfully sidetracked now by intellectual curiosity.

"Ponies come in every color," says Twilight. "It's still a little weird for me how... dull everypony is in the human world."

"Humans," Kazul confides, "are very peculiar creatures."

This is... not exactly a secret. To anyone. Except possibly humans.

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