//------------------------------// // Chapter Sixty, Separation Anxiety: Divide. // Story: Airship Mauled // by Darkonshadows //------------------------------// -Tartarus, Maria- Do you ever get one of those days where you have a splitting headache? Well take that literally as Fluttershy said something about getting us back to normal, but I was too dazed to actually pay attention at the time. I blinked and before I knew it the six ponies and small dragon, some of which were our friends, were out the door before it swiftly shut. “What….” I started, everything felt so slow for some reason. “Just…” “Maria, is that you?” My gaze slowly listed to Mara and she was much farther away than should be possible, my neck doesn’t stretch nearly that far. “Something feels… entirely off Mara, our heads must be feeling… all funny.” What I said made her grimace for some reason, it was when she moved in front of me and held up our two massive paws and waved them in front of my face that I started to notice that something was horribly, HORRIBLY, wrong here. “Can you do this Maria?” She waved her paws at me while sitting up and after a moment I sluggishly returned the gesture and blinked to look at the hooves that entered my view. Those weren’t our paws, it sufficient to say they that they weren’t even Mara’s paws and I was moving them. I was personally… moving these hooves… everything was slowly fading. “Mara…. I don’t… feel so…” Why did everything seem so fuzzy? My head felt like there was a strange vice on it crushing my will to live and everything was starting to fade out of existence. “Don’t panic, but um… Marie… Marie you can…! Oh no, I think I know what happened when we were separated now.” We were what Mara? Is everything supposed to feel this sluggish? My thought processes couldn’t keep up with this conversation, is she implying that we were… separate beings? That’s… that is… nothing was right… something was very wrong with us. “Maria, I need you to listen to me sis, do not do make any sudden movements and concentrate on my voice. You need to focus on yourself, I need you here with me Maria!” “I wha… need to do… what? Things… feel like they’re… slipping…” I felt a large paw slap me across the face. It hurt, but that seriously knocked something back into alignment for my brain. “Mara, what’s wrong with... me… us? What’s wrong with us?” “I think I understand what Marie meant before we gave up the magic that bound us together, I really wish I didn’t know this. I think Marie offloaded all of her intelligence into us before we split up!” She did… what… am… I float…. PAIN… the pain brought me back. Oh goddesses, we’re two… three… three separate entities now and in a cave with several other separated creatures. The only difference between us is that we were actually still intelligent, besides Marie who supposedly offloaded everything into us to keep us smart so that we could deal with this ensuing situation. “Focus, I can’t lose you too Maria! Marie already gave up most of her intelligence to us, mostly me to keep me from killing all of us. She saw this coming before it happened, which is why I have… her memories… they’re all in my head!” While Mara was clutching at her head with her paws and having a serious looking migraine, I saw something slinking up Mara’s back leg and then it wrapped around her tail slowly. When the headaches my sister was going through eased up enough, Mara turned her head to look at Marie the mindless snake wrapped around her tail in a less than threatening manner. The snake’s own tail continued to wrap around Mara until it was snuggly squeezing her waist. “I may well have most of the intelligence between us, but at least she still knows where to be instinctively.” The only response Mara received from Marie was a blank flicking of her tongue and to hiss at the stumbling scorpion that tried to come near us. To be honest, Marie looked weird wrapped around Mara’s tail. Weird in that my brain tried to separate it three ways. One way Mara and Marie should be two completely defined entities, another was that the snake should be the tail and lastly, the snake should also be my tail. Only one of those was currently true and… it was… wrong… my head was starting to feel all… sliding… again. The scorpion clacked its claws, but then backed off and went to stand next to the lion that use to be… use to be… a… things were slowing… down…. manti… core… Another slap to the face cleared my head. “Ow, would you quit doing that? You might be giving me brain damage Mara!” Mara glared me in the eyes and I froze. I felt like I was being hunted by a predator, but that wasn’t right as Mara was my sister. She wouldn’t eat me… wait, why did I just become paranoid about someone who’s been connected to me almost all my… oh… I needed… to be… “Slap me… again… please…” Mara swiftly responded and I blinked as my head straightened out, I think… I think I was getting used to being a separate entity all on my own now. Well enough that I could focus on myself at least, I don’t think I liked my current position in life. My sister was big, mean and had claws. There were plenty of logical reasons to fear her, but they were illogical because I know Mara would never harm me. My head was sending me more mixed signals and the input from all this information was causing my mind to burn out, I was at least smart enough to recognize the problem and try to work my head around it. Mara hadn’t used her claws on my head, that would have done some serious damage and I knew Mara was my big protective, loving, sister. She is my sister! Pain was good, pain focused the brain, kept it sharp. Goats were intelligent beings in Equestria… somewhat intelligent beings. I would be considered a step up from them with the level of… intelligence… urgh… with the extra level of intelligence Marie managed to give me before we split apart. Mara wouldn’t hurt me without reason, she wouldn’t, those instincts are wrong… we were once the same entity damn it! Stop telling me to flee, to run from my sister. No, think positive, what’s the upside to this situation? I had my own legs, tail and everything that a goat was supposed to have… except fire breath. The fire breath was a part of the magic that was sucked out of us, I could still eat anything I wanted too. That’s because a goat’s stomach didn’t need magic to work. We did however need magic to keep our minds completely intact and Marie did us a solid while hurting herself entirely in the process. We owed Marie everything for this sacrifice made on our be-halves. I giggled a bit, because that was a seriously bad pun to think for this situation. Marie, she was always looking out for us and she didn’t fail to do so this time either. Not that it helps that I’m now completely a goat and my instincts are screaming at me to run from my sister, especially when I was far safer next to her at this moment. I logically knew this, but my head was blaring quite painfully that everything was wrong with us being this close together. I controlled those instincts and stomped them into the mud and kept pounding them, I was not a wild animal! I was not a being that let my instincts control me! I was Maria Bloody for crying out loud, one of the three heads of Bloody Maries! My instincts could not tell me what to do, I was not afraid of Mara and I was not afraid of the blanked out Marie on her tail! I was not going to let this fear control me, you hear me world! I may be my own being now, but you were not going to separate me from my sisters symbolically because of species differences! We are spiritually one and the same, we were connected by birth! I was not going to let you make me something I’m not! Suddenly the pressure on my skull eased up a bit… I was Maria. I was a goat. I had been a chimera and would like to be one again. Until then, I would be the goat with a tiger and a snake for sisters with their own separate bodies, one third of a completely broken chimera. I would be okay with this fact, because darn it my instincts weren’t going to tell me otherwise when I was intelligent enough to bash them down by raw force of my very will! “I think… I think I’ve got it now Mara. Thank you for the previous hits sis, they… they helped, like a lot. Just don’t have your claws out if you ever have to do that again unless I ask you to. I’m fighting instincts I didn’t know I had to worry about until now, and they are telling me to get as far away from you and every other dangerous thing here in Tartarus as possible.” I know we’ve kind of lost Marie, but she had a good reason to focus on making the possibly most volatile of us the most intelligent. She kept the instinctual need to be on Mara’s tail and thankfully she wasn’t biting at her or me. “This… this is all really hard to take in, I don’t think my mind was meant handle this alone!” “Look it’s okay Maria, I’m here, we’re still sisters. I will protect you, you can trust me. We’re just having a very bad day right now, it’ll get better soon… I hope.” She wrapped her large body around me protectively and looked at the other wild creatures that were staying near one another, but were otherwise giving into their baser instincts except when it came to the familiar part of their composite selves. The cobra and the chicken were definitely the odd pair. I started crying and, against my screaming instincts, I snuggled up against Mara gently. “Just stay calm and try to keep your focus Maria, stay with me. I… I don’t want to be alone right now and I don’t want to lose you too, Marie obviously couldn’t send enough intelligence your way and it’s causing you extreme cognitive dissonance. You know, I’m now quite thankful that our sister is a huge bibliophile.” “Everything is screaming at me to run away from you Mara… you have no idea how horrible a feeling that is!” When you’re an intelligent being with a three way mental system and then to suddenly have that lovely system horribly disrupted or corrupted like this, things were definitely not going to end well if we couldn’t keep it together and keep our two heads straight. “Cognitive dissonance doesn’t even begin to describe what we’re all likely going through! Maybe Marie has it the easiest, she doesn’t currently have enough intelligence in her head to feel the trauma that we’re currently experiencing!” Well, it felt like I just lost two heads and that the world was now out to get me. As a chimera, we could have compensated and or coped with the possible loss of a head as long as the rest of the body was intact. If we were lucky the head might have dumped the third mind into the rest of the body and we’d have an extra mind for two heads. This… this was actually so much worse. “Just… just stay with me Maria, please don’t go anywhere. I’m here, I love you sis. I know that you still love me and that we both love Marie, we will take care of her until this is fixed or things become easier.” This… this was most certainly not something a chimera was meant to go through Mara, I was being hugged by a fluffy saber toothed tiger. The strongest portion of what used to our body, us. I should feel warm and fuzzy, the only thing I felt was pure horror. “We’ll deal with things as they come Maria.” “How long do you think it’ll take them to solve this Mara?” I asked quietly. “As long as it’ll take, we’ll get through this together Maria, I promise! Though being shunted most of our sister’s intelligence is not something I relish, I would never recommend having this much information stuffed into your head.” Mara’s right paw went to her head and she grunted and pulled me close with her left paw. Marie just circled around use and flicked an aimless tongue into the air. “My skull is on fire, but at least it’s helping me focus on the here and now.” Marie was lifeless and acting blankly on instinct, Mara was literally too ‘painfully’ smart for her own good and my own mind was an utter sink of connectivity issues and completely garbage instincts from out of nowhere. If one of us was messed up, then we were all messed up. We were still together, I don’t think I even know how to walk like this. I’ve never had hooves in front before, Mara never had paws in the back either and the less said about tails without cheerful talkative mouths the better. “We’ve never had tails before, I mean aside from Marie…” I looked back at my tail and then looked at her tail being painfully squeezed by Marie. “Does that hurt?” “Yeah, it’s weird and she’s squeezing my body hard enough to be quite painful. It’s like she’s actively trying to fuse back into me, but can’t. I don’t mind as long as she’s where she needs to be.” Yeah wrapped around our sister’s tiger tail and torso. Mara wasn't looking too hot with all the grimacing she was doing. I glanced around the area. Tirek was still going on about his possible petty victory, the other less intelligent animals were more dazed than we were and we were currently being left to ourselves were we sat. Aside from the scorpion coming near us, nothing bad was happening. Nothing bad was happening yet. I’d rather nothing happened and we get ourselves back together soon. Trying to hold myself together without Mara and Marie was taking its toll on me mentally, I also miss having fire breath. Fire breath is both fun and cool, fire breathing was plain awesome. I am not afraid of my bigger, far more predatory looking, sister. We would be fine, I would be fine, I am completely fine. It was as if the animals that were split up like we were could hardly function sufficiently without their other halves or magic, so it wasn’t just us experiencing this disconnect from the world around us. Only for us it was far worse, likely because we were more aware of what was happening. We're thankful the other animals weren’t being aggressive or trying to attack us, goodness knows what would have happened if Marie hadn’t shunted intelligence into Mara and she went feral with me right next to her. Marie was not very lethal compared to what Mara could do. It was kind of hard to look at Marie and see those cold, blank, snake eyes that didn’t understand the world around her.