Nerteln
Twilight woke up the next day and walked around the house like a zombie, she had slept wonderfully, the bed was perfect, sleeping next to Naudia was always heavenly. It wasn’t even the rats in the walls that bothered her, it was reality itself. Reality itself was wrong. She needed to get away from all of this and back down to Equestria where things made sense.
The First Administrator showed up and told them that they were going back down to Equestria and he had to explain how things aren’t going to make sense down there.
It was all Twilight could do not to scream.
She sat through a car ride in a huffy state at the First Administrator, unable to tell if he could read her mind or was just that good at predicting what she would do. She barely looked out at the cityscape as it went past.
They arrived at the training gym again and that was the first time Twilight met Walden. Walden was some sort of bat person, a fruit bat with a fox-like head and whose arms were also wings. He had a nice looking brown and redish coat of fur.
Of all the people she’d seen so far up here in Zaohm it wasn’t the First Administrator that stood out the most, it was Walden. It wasn’t until she’d actually seen Walden that she figured out why.
Walden sat in a wheelchair, and not just any wheelchair a plush reclining wheelchair that looked like it was designed to help him get down stairs on his own and with mechanisms to lock it into place while reclined. Thinking about it Twilight hadn’t seen even so much as a set of crutches anywhere in the city. If he was a pony Twilight would have estimated he was older than Granny Smith by a significant margin. His breathing was labored and sounded painful and uneven. He had some sort of medal or pin on his shirt that looked like a red scar.
He stood out like a sore thumb because he was the only person Twilight had seen anywhere that looked even slightly older and in any way infirm, much less this old looking.
“This is ‘Iron Heart’ Walden.” The First Administrator said in a shockingly respectful voice. “He’s going to be helping me explain to you what you’ll be doing down in Knicknik.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Twilight asked before she could stop herself.
“While I don’t think he’s awake, I would like you to be more polite to Walden than that. He’s here to talk about what could go wrong during your operation down in Knicknik.”
What could the First Administrator be talking about here? These people were so tough that they would intentionally get themselves beheaded to try and get a penalty point for what amounted to a sports game. They had shielding made of magmatter that they can summon in at will, that meant it was 8E35 times stronger than normal matter. What could possibly have happened to Walden that Twilight could run into it down on Equestria?
The First Administrator walked over to Walden and put a hand on his shoulder to wake him up, as he awoke Walden’s breathing became more labored than it was before. Twilight noticed that anytime he moved he had tremors, he could not keep his hands steady.
“Walden, this is Twilight Sparkle and Naudia Sparkle.” The First Administrator introduced them. “They’re the people from Equestria who I told you about.”
Walden eyed them up and down from his reclined wheelchair and at that moment it was clear that whatever the state his body was in his mind was still in top shape.
“They don’t look like they know how to fight all that well.” Walden judged aloud.
“We have... some, time to train them, though not as much as I would like.” The First Administrator said.
Walden pulled a lever to pull the wheelchair upright and adjusted his sitting position to sit up straighter, and prepared to speak to them.
“I’m Walden, and today you’re going to be finding out more about the second and first most unpleasant things that can happen to you, than you ever wanted to know.” It was pretty clear Walden was going to be lecturing them.
However instead of going right into lecturing them he shakily moved one of his hands to the hem of his shirt and pulled it up. Revealing some kine of undershirt with a hole in the left side of it.
In that hole was a plastic tube going directly into his chest where you could see his heart beating in an unsteady rhythm, but that was not the most horrifying part. The worst part was that there was a patch of iron stuck onto the heart that seemed to be decaying, not rusting, physically decaying in a way that looked like it was flaking off and fading into nothingness.
“That’s what a wound from a nerteln does.” Walden said. “It will never heal and cannot be cured.”
Twilight and Naudia could only stare at the unhealthy looking nearly exposed heart through the little glass window into Walden’s chest.
“What is a ner-tell-n?” Naudia asked when she snapped out of it.
“A consumer of souls and a user of soul magic.”
“Why are you showing us this?” Twilight could not move her gaze from the unhealthy looking, iron patched heart beating in front of her face. “Surely you can’t mean-”
“Because a nerteln has shown up on Equestria, a pony. Somebody on Equestria has discovered soul magic and they’re in Knicknik right now.” The First Administrator interrupted.
“And you’re going to be the ones who have to stop them.” Walden said.
Walden looked like he was going to say more, but he started having problems with his heart and had to be taken out of the room for a break and some medicine.
“Anyway, now that you’re paying attention I’m going to start at the beginning, which is farther back than you’d expect.”
The First Administrator clicked a button and all the windows shut with blinds and then glowed with some kind of magic. Judging by how any sounds from outside vanished, likely soundproofing magic.
“What I’m about to tell you not only cannot leave this room, but on top of that and more importantly it is EXTREMELY EASY to misinterpret. I’m going to need you to think about what I’m going to be telling you, before,” The first administrator put special emphasis on that word. “you react to it, because even for us this is going to sound crazy, and I won’t be saying what you think I’m saying if you’re only half paying attention. Understand?”
Twilight and Naudia nodded their heads confused by this shift in tone.
“Good, because the point I’m about to make is extremely important to get right, and you getting tripped up is going to prolong this conversation.
“To start at the beginning I’m going to have to start with why Equestria is even here untouched like it is. And then I’m going to have to work my way up from there up to soul magic.”
Then the First Administrator dropped a bombshell on them.
“Equestria was all a dream.” And then immediately held up a finger as if to admonish them for how they reacted to that.
“I mean that literally. Was, past tense, is no longer. One day the universe woke up and Equestria was there, it was always there even though it hadn’t always been there the very day before.”
“Are you saying Equestria isn’t real?!” Twilight said sounding defensive.
“No, I’m saying that until a certain date,” The First Administrator pulled up some sort of transparent piece of paper with a timeline graph on it and jabbed at a peak on it angrily. “Right HERE, Equestria did not exist as anything other than a dream, and then it was never a dream, it was always there, had always been there, without any shadow of a doubt that it was real and always had been, seamlessly as far back in time as any record can go.”
The First Administrator threw the piece of paper away in frustration bordering on anger.
“You have absolutely no idea how much time and money went into proving that one bit of information.”
“So what, you’re saying Luna dreamed Equestria into existence then?” Naudia snarked.
The First Administrator deflated a bit at that.
“I wish. That would make things a lot simpler. Luna is by and large benevolent, we could negotiate with her.” The First Administrator collected himself and continued on. “Up until recently we’ve been able to just pretend Equestria didn’t exist and things worked out. It goes against our strong interference policies, but it’s not hard to tell people ‘don’t go over there’ if they never know where ‘there’ is in the first place.”
“Where is this proof then?” Twilight demanded. “You can’t seriously expect Naudia and I to just believe you when you’re making an absurd claim like that.”
“I was worried you might ask that…” The First Administrator said.
As if on cue Gwynn wheeled in a computer similar to the ones from the other Equestria.
“We didn’t print it out because it would be a waste of paper, but if you want to we can put aside some time for you to read the reports.” The First Administrator sounded annoyed.
“I will.” Twilight said.
The first page of the document was mostly just talking about how records from ships around the great change were different depending on if they were in jumping through something called “Babel” and stuff like that. It sounded well documented and if it was a research paper Twilight would have said it was probably put together by an esteemed professor.
It was when she scrolled to the next page that a little number came up.
“Page two of six thousand?!” Twilight exclaimed.
Twilight and Naudia’s eyes met and they both knew what they had to do.
Hastily Twilight scrolled through the pages with her and Naudia’s quick document checking protocol. Naudia rested her head on Twilight’s shoulder, each of them looking at half a page apiece and seeing if they could find any duplicates of the work. Once they were done they’d thump their hoof as a signal they were ready to move on, the hoof thumps generally came almost at the same time. This was for when they needed to quickly see if a research paper was worth listening to or filled with chaff or stolen work.
“If I might make a suggestion, how about Naudia uses her powers as an itumeyuk to speed this up.”
“That sounds like a great idea!” Naudia exclaimed.
Twilight merely looked uncomfortable at the prospect of being buried in rats.
The first page they checked Naudia got overexcited and so fifty rats thumped their legs all at once, but they eventually got a hang of things and somehow managed to get Naudia situated and coordinated.
Using that method they managed to check through over a hundred randomly selected pages in record time, even for them. The whole process took less than ten minutes and felt like a lot less time than that. Twilight even got slightly more used to Naudia’s kangaroo-ish springtail rodents form, and she had to admit, it wasn’t too bad, it was still deeply weird for her though.
“I didn’t see any duplicates, there were a few places where it went into error checking and some explanations that I would be able to judge better if I could go over them more.” Twilight conferred with Naudia.
“No duplicates or obviously copy pasted work, I did run into a couple parts they called ‘laymans sections’ though so that might be bloating the pagecount, but not to a massive degree.”
“So,” Twilight said turning back to the First Administrator who had been waiting through all this. “Assuming this isn’t the longest buildup to a prank, how does this relate to why you’re at Equestria?”
“I need somebody to deal with the nerteln to figure out how likely it is that another one will show up.”
“Why are you so afraid of these nerteln if you’ve got all this magic then?” Naudia asked.
“Because nerteln magic, soul magic, is stronger than our magic. You saw Walden there, you know how he said that wound is never going to heal until the day he dies? He was one of the lucky ones.”
Twilight realized she was about to be asked to play the role of hero again.
“Nerteln use soul magic, they consume part of somebody’s soul to cast magic.”
“You’re telling me there is somebody like that down on Equestria?” Naudia asked.
“Would they happen to be a large red centaur?” Twilight asked.
“Yes Naudia, no Twilight it’s a pony. As best we have looked into it the soul magic is being used in relation to werewolves and is currently in the most benign form possible. Meaning that there is just some pony experimenting with eating souls likely for medical reasons.”
“Well that sounds simple then, we’ll just go down there and tell them to stop.”
The First Administrator looked entirely unconvinced by Twilight’s declaration.
“Yeah, simple, why do you need US to do this, why did you need to convert us to do this.” Naudia asked.
“This is another test, I need you to show whether or not ponies can police themselves when it comes to soul magic if I give them the tools. As for if we could just tell them to stop… we can’t.”
“Why?”
“Soul magic pools inside the part of the nerteln’s brain that deals with interpersonal relations, physically rotting it away. They start out saying ‘if it is to save them then...' or 'I can bring them back.' or something like that, and the assumption is that they can withstand it, control the impulses, or sacrifice themselves.
"So when it comes time for your heroic self sacrifice, the saner ones will say 'I can help more people!' then when it comes time again they start saying ‘you’re wrong, I’m helping more people with this’ and then ‘I deserve this because of all the people I’ve helped.’ and ‘I am more important than these people’ around that time they stop seeing other people as people. Even the first toe dipped into soul magic is enough to rot away a nerteln’s brain and create a cycle where soul magic is rotting your brain so you need soul magic to fix your brain.”
“That’s not even the worst of it.” Walden said being wheeled in by Gwynn.
“They aren’t ready to know about that yet Walden.” The First Administrator said firmly.
“You’re going to be sending them in without full knowledge of what can happen?”
They stared each other down for a moment before surprisingly enough the First Administrator cracked.
“Twilight would you mind going over there for a moment while I work this out with Walden?”
Unfortunately they summoned in another one of those soundproofing privacy screens so Twilight and Naudia couldn’t hear or really even try to read their lips as to what they were saying.
“Do you think we can trust them about this?” Twilight asked.
“From what I’ve seen, I think so.” Naudia said. “This is something they take very seriously.”
Twilight agreed on point two, but that wasn’t enough to convince her of point one.
“Have you ever heard of any magic that can do stuff like… that?” Twilight gestured at the wheelchair bound bat.
“Nope, and it sounds like that’s a good thing too, we don’t have the strength to stop something like that on our own. If they have this much in terms of resources and they can’t do anything about even a wound from that magic it’s a good thing we’ve never heard about it up until now.”
“On top of that, those magical shields they have, Gwynn said they’re made of magmatter. Anything that is stronger than one of those has to be nasty.” Twilight added.
“We’ll have to see what he says about it next.”
“How about that ‘Equestria was a dream until it wasn’t’ thing.”
“Can’t even wrap my head around it. Looking at it critically does that matter more, or does whatever dreamed up Equestria in the first place matter more?”
“Obviously the second but the First Administrator said basically nothing about it, seemed to really be trying to avoid that subject.” Twilight scratched her chin. “You think we can use that in negotiations somehow?”
“It would just be a bluff, he clearly knows more about it, so the bluff would just fall apart.”
It was then the soundproof barrier fell and the First Administrator had clearly made an agreement with Walden.
“The worst part about all this soul magic is something I won’t be discussing with you today, as you’re only going on a scouting mission, for the moment. It’s not something you’re ready for.”
“I think we could handle it.” Naudia stated firmly.
“What with the recent conversion I would like to avoid directly damaging your mental state to the extent required for a full understanding. I want to widen the baseline understanding before we build up to the peak of monstrous acts. For now I need you two to make a choice that isn’t a choice, and we can’t have nihilism clouding your judgment.”
The First Administrator put down two documents in front of them on the computer table, one was a lot thinner than the other.
“The obvious wrong choice is that you pick 5000 inhabitants of your world to be saved who have no connection to this nerteln to be converted into yunguaq like you were, and then we melt the surface of your saccharine planet to black jack killing anything and everything on the planet. You turn all governing duties to us immediately and we take direct control of educating the next generation.”
The First Administrator moved his hand from the thinner document and slapped it onto the much thicker one.
“OR, you go down deal with this nerteln, we take over your government and put you in charge of making sure no other nerteln show up and dealing with them if they do and engage in a long term evacuation of every living thing on your planet to be converted like you were and facilitate a slower more controlled takeover of your government such that you retain your automony.”
“Why do both of these options have us leaving the planet?” Twilight demanded.
“I just told you that there is something on your planet that is so strong that it unintentionally brought into being your planet and filled in it’s history backwards in time unconciously. It is not a benign force.”
“Where the hay would we go? Are we supposed to just float around in the empty vacuum for the rest of time?” Naudia butted in.
The First Administrator replied with the most insane thing they’d heard all day.
“We will of course supply you with your own star system either way.”
“Wouldn’t Luna object to you giving us one of her stars?” Twilight asked.
“The stars are mine.”
“No, Luna makes the stars visible at night.”
“She didn’t build the stars, we did, we aren’t going to be giving you an existing star system we’re going to be building you a new star system.”
What he was actually saying finally sunk in for Twilight and Naudia, they could only stare at the First Administrator their mouths agape.
“I beg your pardon, it sounded like you just said that you build stars and were going to build one for us.” Naudia said.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I said.”
“That’s completely absurd, why would you build an entire star system just for us?” She exclaimed.
“You have magic that we don’t have, it’s financially cheaper by many thousands of orders of magnitude than risking the thing that brought you into existence.” The First Administrator listed off some sound reasons. “And most importantly you have werewolves.”
“That last one sounds like a very personal reason.”
“Nope, it’s written into the constitution, ‘Article 12: Any external opportunity to expand the number of types of werewolves needs to be examined, purified and integrated’.”
“And I’m guessing you put that in there.” Twilight deadpanned.
“Yes.”
“Why would you put something like that in there?”
“Because I like werewolves.”
Twilight and Naudia waited for him to say anything else on the subject... he did not say anything else on the subject.
“On the surface Twilight I’m certain this does not seem like a choice to you. Right this second. But that’s why we’re going to delay you actually making this choice until you have more context. Saving everybody on Equestria sounds like the better option, but it’s only the better option if you have the will to make seriously hard choices that I’m not sure you can make.”
“Like what?”
“Could you kill a pony for trying to save their wife? Would you turn them in to be executed? Where does this line of morality lie in your head? Where does your physical and administrative ability to track these people down break? How many times could you do something like that before you give in to the temptation to give one of them a second chance?”
Twilight didn’t have answers to those questions at that moment, they seemed like artificial moral conundrums at first glance.
“Why us?” Naudia asked.
“I need your clout within Equestria as a princess, I need your heroic strength of will to see this through, and I need some sense of ethics down on the ground. You don’t take over a population like this by force, you find an in with them and exploit it.”
“Okay first of all.” Twilight said temper rising. “Why do we have to kill off the rest of the planet if Naudia and I can’t manage what you want us to do? Why only 5000 ponies? What happens if I just say ‘hay with this I’m not playing your games’? And how the hay can we trust you to build an entire star system for us and not just let us out to dry? When are you going to tell us what you’re not telling us about Nerteln?”
Twilight was happy to have found questions this thing seemed to not want to answer.
“The reason there are only two options for you is because option 1 would wake that thing up, the thing that dreamed up your world. Opening up our entire universe to an era of bloodshed and war. Whatever dreams it has matter for nothing, it is ancient, invincible, all powerful, and hungry for either conflict or something new. We’re not sure we have something new.
“With 5000 ponies you would keep away from it’s gaze long enough for it to appease it’s appetite for conflict. And as for if you can trust me to build a star for you, there is only so far I can go to re-assure you about that, we will be going for a tour of sorts before you make your final decision though whatever it is.”
The First Administrator slumped a bit.
“As for that last bit, like I said it will damage your mental state and we need to do some more estimations to figure out how exposure will effect you. At the moment we’re not sure where permanent mental damage starts to take hold, it’s not something people were ever meant to see.”
“Oh.”
That all left Twilight and Naudia with a lot to chew on.
The lesson that day was how to summon in those zoetic shields Gwynn had told them about, a kind of transparent living shield made of magmatter that warped space around you, nearly impenetrable by almost anything. But Twilight and Naudia had trouble focusing on that, they performed excellently as the spell was even simpler than “summon rat” but their minds were elsewhere.