“As you can imagine, I was quite pleased with myself after setting those security verification questions on the various computers. Nobody on my staff knew of them, so they only knew whether or not I knew it myself.”
The not quite alicorn looked at Celestia, who was still stuck in the speaker. She tried to speak, but found that she could not. Celestia looked at her guiltily. “Sorry, I really should have put some thought into the way to communicate with your species. You’ll have to make do with all that fancy technology that you supposedly have for that kind of stuff. After all, you’re telekinetic now. Enjoy yourself.” And with that, the strange, and quite sexually satisfied alicorn withdrew her head from the intercom without any kind of problem.
Dexter realized right then that she might have been fooled. Celestia was using her as another source of chaos. She would have to communicate with Celestia at some point to put across her frustration. She smiled, she was locked in a soundproof room with no surveillance, and a relatively well connected computer(relatively because well connected would imply the need for a physical connection to earth, and by extension, the Internet). This machine, she hoped, would be the method that she could use to practice her skill with telekinesis. She thought about that, but realized that if she were to fail, which given her inexperience, and the sense of raw power behind her... horns(including the ones on her back), she would be far more likely to break the computer. There was, to her dismay, only the intercom in the room which would simulate the computer in any meaningful way. Considering the rudeness that might be perceived by the receptionist on the other side of the intercom, she considered that a non option as well.
Looking around the desk, Dexter found that there were many small bits of things such as paper clips that would demonstrate a similarity between the behavior of the computer under force. Instead she had a much more brilliant idea, she worked with her magic to uncoil the small steel paper clips. After causing a few paper clip explosions, and a few glowing paper clips, Dexter found herself able to maneuver the magic well enough to poke the keys on the keyboard with a paper clip.
The next challenge was, naturally, more difficult, the muscle memory of using a keyboard with fingers made this method seem too simple, too slow to make any headway. Moving a paper clip on a relative cartesian plane, as it turns out, is quite difficult when transitioning from a highly unconscious motor control system with a well trained cerebellum to direct the movements of fingers over a keyboard.
After an hour or two ,she managed to log on, having a thirty-seven character long password was painful at this point, she hoped that there would be an alternative.
“What’s a keyboard?” Rita interrupted suddenly, breaking her current mentor’s narrative flow.
“It’s what we used to input information into computers before we had our fancy telepathic input devices. Any other questions?”
“What’s a password?”
“We secured our computers with those before we had our fancy telepathic input devices. Anything else?”
“Not really.”
“Okay, So let me finish this fucking story. I’d rather like to have some sleep within the next cycle.”
“What’s a cycle?”
“Stop it Rita, you know that a Cycle is around a twenty seventh of the time it takes the moon to move around Equis.”
“So an Equis day then?”
“You know that. Why are you asking me?”
“Just so I have my definition straight, after all, these histories might one day become important as a study of the early moon ponies.” Rita was, of course, right. She was a historical student. Unlike Equestria, which had no real early histories written, Lunacre would have a decent history of its founding.
Dexter was able to send a message to the receptionist through email, very thorough, incredibly precise, and citing every single possible shred of information that the receptionist could use to verify her identity. It only took three days.
It was fortunate that nobody really knew the ambassador personally. Even after the recognition of her power over the city, she was alone for the most part. Nobody was quite willing to put any sort of pressure on her, after all, she was the only thing that stood between “those gay horses” and the safety of the human race. Of course, they probably wouldn’t like what had happened or what she had sold them to. Of course, Celestia had promised them that they would be allowed to do whatever they wanted on the moon(including preparing for a war against those earthbound ponies), so that would help the feeling towards betrayal.
She needed to build a trusting base of support for the voluntary transformation. After all, she was a human, and she would continue to treat all of her former fellows as if she still needed to give them the same voluntary choice. She could probably communicate her intentions to them using telepathy, but unfortunately, Celestia was not around to help her, and the thought of going through the same process of trial and error as she did with her paper clips was not too appealing when applied to the human brain.
The speaker behind her crackled to life again, with the sound of Celestia’s voice. “Oh yeah, I can probably tell you how to use telepathy, that would be useful wouldn’t it?”
The voice intruded into the mind of the future queen. “Ahh yes, that’s better isn’t it? Too bad that you’ll have to improvise a bit when you convert all of your humans into their forms, they won’t all like the intrusion into hteir minds, not to mention the fact that there is a low probability that they will ever learn how to use telepathy... unless they are moonicorns, right?”
“Sure, whatever, can you just tell me how to use it, I’d rather not have to leave here with guns blazing as it were.”
“You don’t have a gun. ANyway, I’m sure that you’d love to avoid violent confrontation whenever possible, so here’s how you do it?”
“So Celestia randomly realized that she could make your life easier than it was by simply telling you a magic trick?”
“I don’t really understand to this day, but my conversations with Twilight have typically come to reveal that Celestia was showing all of these tendencies that were more typical of Pinkie Pie than the sun ‘princess’ herself.”
“I never really bothered asking.”
“Does that disturb you?”
“That I was being manipulated by a goddess having a psychotic break? I would say that feeling upset by that was the only option.”
Dexter figured out sign language, then began her attempt to communicate with the humans.
“All you’re going to say about creating an entirely new sign language is that you did it? How did you come up with it?”
“Being a goddess means that I have a bit more than the non standard immortality, the constant energy, and massive amounts of magical power to go on, it also gave me the ability to think quite a bit faster than normal.”
“Are you going to go into the sign language at all?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t matter. It was difficult to come up with signs for virtually all the words in the English language.”
“The sign language only shows letters though.”
“Shut up already. I told you that I don’t want to be berated by a creature that is an infant compared to my hundred or so years.”
“I’m eighteen.”
“Sucks. I’m one hundred and eighteen.”
Dexter broke out of the room(calling it leaving wasn’t doing it justice due to the way that the door exploded). The not quite alicorn cursed neatly in the back of her mind. Setting off an exploding door in any setting would be bad, inside of a government building, it would earn the creature that Dexter found herself as a reputation for being dangerous, and the lack of an ability to speak would earn her an incredibly short life span, especially in the biology obsessed FDA.
Even back when she worked in the more sane parts of the government at home, Dexter had heard tales of the FDA, its rigor in testing has led to more than a few failures that were wont to cover up. The time that it had weathered so far in this new world had the already near pathological normal to become a true obsession.
Dexter shuddered as she thought about those experiments, trotting through the absolutely normal concentrations of people in the FDA facility. The absolutely normal number of people in this part of the FDA building was around zero to two, so she wasn’t likely to be spotted, not until she left this part of the building, the one with the rooms where sketchy human experimentation was carried out without regard to human life.
It was not long until Dexter found herself at the security gate. It was an unusual security gate because it worked on both sides, and prevented anyone inside from escaping in case of fire. A rather morbid biological containment method, perhaps when Dexter had gained recognition of her rightful power over the humans she would make the fire code universal, that is, if she actually had to worry about fire in space, without oxygen, or anything else that would allow a fire to burn.
Anyway, she considered simply breaking through the door, but what would the guards think? Well, they would think the obvious, a strange, not-quite pony walking through the frame of a restricted area which had a massive metal door, what could they think? Other than the obvious invader-worst-case-scenario that would instantly pop into their heads as they found themselves grasping at their guns and shooting her to no great effect, bullets ricocheting off of her shield, hitting them in the shins, nowhere else, as they were forced to prostrate themselves to her.
“Princess Dexter? What the hell! What would cause you to do that?” The moonicorn’s eyes were wide.
Of course, Princess Dexter thought, the video games that she played were just as violent back then, they were just cooler, being powered by moon-pony magic and technology, but she had exceeded the bounds of most of them in that single thought. “If you had listened you would have heard me say that I was imagining what they would think when I came through the door in the most dramatic and overblown way possible, causing them to despair at what made them men.”
“So you aren’t the most badass princess-god ever?”
“I’m sure that you’ll want to hear how this part of the story ends.” The princess gave her a strange smile, causing the moonicorn to blush. “Odd, that wasn’t my seductive smile.”
After few hours more, Dexter had come up with a few more options that had the potential to result in things that were not so gory. This time it included using her horn to cut through the door.
“Seriously? That took you several hours?” Rita rolled her eyes, her moon-pencil stopped scratching on the page, causing Princess Dexter to cringe from the sudden ceasing of her favorite white noise in the background. Of course it wasn’t really noise, so much as a natural, magical awareness of her surroundings’ movements, quite frustrating because Celestia never gave her the means to produce the subtle movement of speech.
“What? When you’re immortal, you find time to think about things more slowly.”
“How did you come up with all that sign language then?”
“What? Oh yeah, no, that already existed, for mute people who lost their fingers.”
“I’m going to have to change that-” Rita glanced down at her page, her pencil, and whatever else she had lying around. “I guess that you’ve changed history, especially since I don’t have an eraser.”
“So I hear that rations are going to be cut again.” One guard said to another, rolling his eyes. He wasn’t particularly concerned, he earned a bit more ration stamps than most security guards due to the essential nature of his duty. That didn’t mean much though.
“Yeah. I can’t blame her, who put an Ambassador in charge anyway? She’s done a good job so far, but what gave her position the power to take over like she has?” another guard said. He was concerned for his friends, a few of them couldn’t keep their jobs after the disaster.
“Some kind of bullshit emergency power act. I can’t even imagine why congress would push for something like that.”
“Wait what? What’s a Tasergun? I mean, I know what a taser is, I know what a gun is, but what is a tasergun?”
“Something sold exclusively to the FDA. They commissioned it for that ‘Monster making division’ that they expected to create back on earth.” The princess shrugged, “It had something to do with completeness in the round of defense. In case the bullet didn’t work, the taser might, if the taser didn’t work, the bullet might. They were actually mostly right.”
The door fell outwards. Steam billowed out of the hallway. A shape moved behind it. The guards tensed up, they knew that their horror-movie filled training had prepared them for this. A single hoof struck out of the steam, a horned head thrust forwards, covered in the auburn hair of the Ambassador. “Shit. I think it ate the Ambassador.”
“Maybe we can still save her. I mean like Red Riding hood or something.”
“It’s worth a try.”
While Dexter heard this, she almost smiled. It was worse than she could have expected, who would have guessed that hiring idiots to guard the FDA was actually a good thing.
“This is for the ambassador!” One of the guards shouted, running towards the creature with his tazergun. Dexter didn’t move, she didn’t really think that anything bad would happen if she let him close.
“You monster! I’ll save the ambassador from you.” The guard said, desperately pushing the tazergun to Dexter’s head. The ambassador thought about the best way to handle this situation. Unfortunately, her speech skills were currently useless, and she didn’t really feel like knowing whatever sordid thoughts were bouncing around inside the guard’s head. The guard took out a rather large knife, and took it to her stomach. The ambassador thought about how the last few days, or was it hours? were so unpleasant.
The guard leaned near where he perceived that the stomach should be. “I know you’re in there ambassador, I’ll save you!” The guard looked at the Ambassador in the face, “You however, are going to be surgified!”
He began to push the blade into Dexter’s stomach. Much to Dexter’s horror, she barely even felt it. Instead of cutting into her, like a proper knife should be able to, it shattered. Astonished, the guard backed up. “Okay then.”
He lowed his tasergun at me and then-
“He shot me four times.” Dexter finished her story without putting much effort into signing. Her expression showed how exhausted she was.
“So I presume that you survived?”
“Oh really?” The princess appeared right in front of Rita, startling her. Her eyes were open wide, too wide in fact. “Thank you for your confirmation of this fact.”
The bullets sort of stung, Dexter was unimpressed. The electricity accomplished its goal though. Dexter fell to the floor, spasming. Spasming due to a taser, was, in fact, quite unpleasant. After this, she reconsidered her decision not to use her telepathy. So she screamed into the mind of the guard. Something simple, something that would have sounded a lot like a plea for the guard to stop tasering her. Of course, the guard looked at the spasming body of the creature. “Maybe we shouldn’t be so hasty Todd. This thing might not have anything to do with the Ambassador.”
There was a silence from “Todd” as he considered what his friend was saying. “What gives you that idea? Ambassador Dexter was last seen in that part of the building. And that would be the area where something like this creature would be made. Besides, seriously, you see that thing, it would definitely eat the Ambassador, get real Fred.” Todd was an idiot.
Dexter winced, she was still on the ground. Listening to these idiots carry out what sounded startlingly like her orders. Irony was in fact a bitch.
“That thing spoke to me. It sounded a bit like the ambassador.” Fred said. It was odd, because Celestia’s voice did not carry over at all when she used telepathy.
“Are you sure that thing talked? It doesn’t even seem to be breathing.”
Wonderful, they knew that she didn’t breath. Dexter briefly considered turning their brains to pudding, that would be easy enough. Of course, the CCTV cameras around the building would see her killing them, or see them dying inexplicably with her walking away slowly. So that course of action was out of the question.
Alternatively, she could destroy the taserguns, but that would leave her sense of vengeance unfulfilled. Dexter frowned at the thought of her righteous vengeance going undone. No, that would have to wait.
Nemesis could not wait. It would not do for her to kill either the guards or the cameras. She couldn’t leave them here, and walk away, the tasers would ensure that, but of course, there has to be a better way. Dexter had a flash of inspiration, there was always the actual act of conversion, bring them into her race.
“So you changed their species at this point?” Rita rolled her eyes, nothing could be that easy.
“Yes, in fact I did.” Dexter signed in a clipped manner, quickly. “They also died from trying too hard to breath, so...”
“Really?”
Dexter shrugged. “That would be a fatal flaw in our evolution if the search for a diaphragm could result in death.”
Flustered, Rita made another obvious question. “We didn’t evolve.”
“Yeah, but Celestia is actually really good at making species.”
The scratching on the paper intensified.
“If they didn’t die from trying to breath, then what happened to them?”
“That’s a story for another day.” Dexter squinted.
“So they don’t join you?”
“No, they left the city to do something else in Equestria.”
“Out from the island?”
“They made it. I don’t know how they made it, but they did.”
The two former guards walked out through the door, turned around to face Dexter and waved before galloping off over the hill outside the FDA building, towards the edge of the barrier.
It was certainly a tempting proposition to follow them, but this was her city, her people, and as their former/current/default leader for this time, it was her duty to keep them safe and fed and whatever else they might do.
“Could you actually get moving along a bit, I mean, I’ve been so bored so far with your story that I’ve drawn a hundred pictures of frogs so far, and I’ve barely reached three thousand words.” Rita did an exaggerated yawn, which considering her lack of lungs, meant that it was a learned habit picked up from humans who had not yet come to terms with their own lack of lungs. Either way, it still signalled that there was a significant lack of adaptation in terms of gestures. At least it wasn’t as out of place as giving someone “The Hoof”.
“Sure. Actually there was absolutely nothing important between transforming the ridiculous guards and using the water supply to transform the city.”
“That sounds interesting.”
“It actually was.”
Dexter galloped valiantly through the sewer, dodging rats, bullets, and lumps of shit. Behind her, what appeared to be the entire police force of Longmeadow City chased her with their various dogs and such. Apparently, she had done something wrong. A three way split branched out, the various viaducts of raw sewage spread out just ahead of Dexter. She considered using some kind of illusion, but realized that she could use the cardio anyway. She was, after all, immune to small caliber bullets.
A few minutes later, and as it turns out, a full five circuits around the same split, Dexter was beginning to wonder if she hadn’t prepared enough to accomplish her mission. After all, the sewage system was far more complicated than she could have imagined. Either that, or her lack of sense of direction was acting up again. Knowing her, it was more likely to be the latter. Then again, the police force following her wasn’t figuring it out either. Then again, Longmeadow was not, in fact, known for its police force, not that it was known for anything in general.