//------------------------------// // Acclimation // Story: Resonating Souls // by ScarletRibbon //------------------------------// Twilight's body ached. It wasn't the intense pain she'd been suffering before she lost consciousness, but felt more like a numbness that was gradually fading. The next thing she became aware of was the ground; it was the coldest ground Twilight had ever felt. In fact, the entire room felt rather chilly, and most of her body felt far more exposed than usual. Her eyes fluttered open and she glanced around. The room she was in was completely unfamiliar. To her recollection, just moments before she had been in the storage closet at Golden Oaks Library, prepared to meet whatever fate had befallen her. Now? She was in a large room carved from stone. The walls of the room were clearly marked with the arcane signatures of magical stonecutting. In the middle of the room was a large, metal table and a similarly large bench. Lamps of some sort ran along the perimeter of the room, granting a surprisingly ample level of illumination, and along one wall was a heavy metal door set into a similar metal frame. Was this a prison under Canterlot? Twilight thought back to the small object she had been investigating immediately prior to blacking out. Had it been some forbidden ancient artifact? Was Celestia punishing her for recklessly playing with unknown and dangerous things? That didn't seem to fit with Celestia's normal methodology. Even when Twilight had inadvertently done absolutely terrible things to her friends, Celestia usually just gave her a stern lecture. Imprisonment without trial seemed rather extreme in comparison. Dozens of dark stones littered the floor, prismatically reflecting light from the many lamps. The effect was such that a colorful array of hues were scattered across the walls. They reminded her of the mana battery she had been researching the last few days. Twilight discarded the prison theory. Canterlot prisons were impeccably maintained, even a single stray stone would be removed and scrutinized for magical influences. Besides, the door seemed to be open a crack, and no one leaves a prisoner in a cell without shutting the door. But if she was not a prison, then she had no idea where she might be. The numbness in her body was slowly fading, and Twilight decided it was probably safe to stand. She stopped immediately, feeling her legs bend in ways that shouldn't ever happen. What was wrong with her legs? She tried to crane her neck around to look at them, only to discover that her neck didn't seem to bend properly, doing little more than swivelling on a fixed point. What had happened to her body? Why wouldn't it behave as she expected? Feeling a sense of panic coming on, Twilight closed her eyes and tried to control her breathing. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. She focused on what she knew. First, she was in a strange place, with no knowledge of how she got there. Second, her neck was acting strange and wouldn't bend around like it should. She opened her eyes, and was immediately struck with something she had overlooked before. She had never really paid conscious thought to it, but now the absence was jarring. "What happened to my nose?" Twilight wondered out loud to herself. The sound of her own voice startled her; it was louder than she expected and sounded nothing like the voice she normally heard. Shaking off the strangeness of her voice, she returned to focusing on her face. Twilight tried to bring a hoof up to feel for her missing muzzle. In response to the impulse, her foreleg swiftly moved to where she wanted it to go, swinging up in a peculiar fashion. The unnatural motion startled her a second time, and she watched as her foreleg hit herself in the face. After a moment of recovery from the mild impact, she stared at her leg, momentarily confused by the appendage in front of her. It was clearly hers; she had felt the impact in both her hoof and face, but it looked like a minotaur's hand. She stared at the limb in front of her, turning it one way and then another, trying to understand what she had become. Her eyes followed along the length of her forelimbs, starting at the hairless hands where her forehooves had been. The hands each had four fingers and a thumb, and was attached to a long, slender, and mostly hairless arm. About a third of the way up from the elbow, the flesh was covered in a tight fitting crimson fabric that met up with a larger torso, which was also covered in the same fabric. The torso itself was much flatter than that of a pony, accentuated by two awkwardly placed mounds that made further visual examination of the torso difficult. Beyond those mounds, Twilight could see two more legs. A brief kick confirmed those were, indeed, her hind legs. They were considerably thicker than the arms, and felt much stronger. She also noted that all four limbs growing from the torso were set at bizarre angles, which meant it probably moved awkwardly. Where her rear hooves had been, she now sported strange, flat, clawed feet. She closed her eyes and tried to visualize her current form from a third-person perspective. ...Spike. That was the closest parallel she could imagine. Though the proportions were completely different, Twilight was fairly certain she generally had the same bodily structure as her dragon assistant. It wasn't the first time she had suffered a full-body transformation. Twilight had been subjected to such magic once before, at Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns. As Celestia's favored student, the teachers had always singled her out, expecting her to perform better than other students. Due to her standing with both the Princess and teachers, and her consistent placement at the top of her classes, most other students were either frightened or jealous of her. One senior student, trying to get her to quit school, had snuck into the Royal Archive and found a book of forbidden spells, memorized one of the spells, and cornered her during their lunch break and transformed her into a parrot. Twilight had been stuck in that form for two days, and while she was terrified, she had also been fascinated by the experience. The foolish colt had later been subjected to a memory wipe and summarily expelled, but Twilight wondered if she could now apply what she had learned then to her current situation. <><><><><> Rebecca lay face down on the floor, eyes tightly closed. Her entire body was in agony, as if it was rebelling against existence, and yet the pain was the least of her concerns. One sensation stood out about the pain; the curious feeling of the veil settling on her had intensified immensely. As the warming sensation of the veil continued to permeate through her body, she found the pain was slowly subsiding; were the two related? She couldn't be sure. Thoughts of Sarah came flooding back to her. What had happened out there in the hallway? Her mind became occupied with Sarah's screaming, and the horrific crunching sound she had heard outside the door before she blacked out. Even though she'd only known Sarah for a little over a week, Rebecca felt the two of them had been growing closer, and the thought of Sarah having been seriously wounded, or maybe even killed, left her feeling empty inside. She listened intently for any more sounds coming from the hallway. Would any other residents of the facility come to look for other survivors? The silence betrayed no presence. And that, in turn, left Rebecca herself feeling somewhat betrayed. Had they abandoned her here, deep underground, where no one would find her? Rebecca pondered her situation briefly. Would they even need to find her? Maybe she could find her own way out; her body was screaming in pain, but she wasn't disabled as far as she could determine. She slowly opened her eyes. There was nothing but darkness surrounding her. Without any light source this far underground, that was to be expected; the shaking had probably knocked the generators offline. Visualizing the layout of the area in her head, Rebecca decided that if she could just find the door, she should be able to follow the walls cautiously to find the surface. It would be a long walk, and the pain was definitely going to make it torturous, but if the alternative was never getting out of here she was going to suffer through it. Her arms felt rather stiff as she slowly propped herself up to stand. The tactile sensation in her hands felt extremely dulled, as if the floor wasn't really there, even though it was solid and clearly supporting her weight. The strange feeling in her hands unnerved her. Had she sustained more serious injuries that she thought? She didn't recall any. Without any light, Rebecca couldn't be sure what was going on, but something was definitely abnormal. She tried to put her legs underneath her to finish the task of getting upright, but they weren't cooperating. Her legs seemed straight, like they should be, but her body felt wrong; her feet were flat on the floor, and yet her torso felt as if it were still roughly parallel to the ground, and her butt wasn't nearly as high as she had expected it to be if her legs were fully straight. Something brushed lightly against her posterior. She yelped and threw a leg back reflexively, kicking behind her. Her foot slammed into something, and a loud cracking noise filled the room around her, accompanied by the sound of fragments of glass falling to the ground. Immediately, she fell silent, listening for any other sounds. Normally everything in the cavern had some level of echo or reverberation, as the walls reflected sound reasonably well, but the breaking sound had been unexpectedly dry. Furthermore, she couldn't think of anything made of glass in the lab room she had been in. As she listened intently, somewhere off in the distance was the sound of a rooster greeting the morning. It caught Rebecca completely off guard. Roosters don't belong on arctic islands, and they most certainly wouldn't have been audible this far underground. The sheer incongruity of the situation confused her. "What?" she asked aloud to herself, and then recoiled at the sound of her own voice. "What in the ...?" Her voice wasn't normally so high-pitched or soft. Distracted from the rooster, Rebecca began to talk to herself, trying to figure out what could have gone wrong. The odd, dry quality of all the sounds around her became clear when a light suddenly flickered to life above her, bathing the room in a soft glow. She wasn't in the now-familiar cavernous lab she had last remembered. Instead, she was in a small, square room that appeared to be carved out of wood. Rebecca was no carpenter, but the lack of apparent seams in any of the walls, floors, or corners was a testament to the skill of the artisan. She glanced around. The lamp above was shaped like a typical gas lantern, though it appeared to be cosmetic. The light within didn't waver like a gas lamp, and the way it had flickered to life was much like power being restored after a storm. A shattered mirror stood against the wall behind her, several of the fragments scattered on the floor, resolving the previous mystery of the breaking glass. Apart from the mirror and lantern, the only notable feature was a door that served as the only exit, filled cleanly to the top with boxes. The boxes themselves sported a company logo and stylized letters that spelled out "Strings and Things". There wouldn't be enough room to squeeze through the door without moving the boxes out of the way somehow. As she finished looking about the room, she realized she was still poised to crawl around. The position was surprisingly more comfortable than she expected, which probably explained how she had stuck there so long without noticing, but given the height of the ceiling, she was confident there would be room to stand. She tried to push herself upright, but the incongruous feeling in her limbs came back to her mind. Rebecca glanced down to her arms and suddenly became aware of her own condition. A sense of terror began welling up in her mind as she gazed upon the body she was trapped in. She shook her head and swallowed hard, trying to quell her rising panic. The head shaking movement in the shattered pieces of the mirror caught her attention, drawing her eyes to her reflection. A strange lavender creature stared back at her; its body was roughly the shape of a horse, but with wildly inaccurate proportions. What stood out the most was how its neck was too short, legs too thick, and the head and eyes far too large. A spiraled horn appeared to sprout from its forehead, the same color as its coat, while two similarly colored ears and a darker purple mane sat above the horn. Two adjacent streaks accented the creature's mane just off center, one a lighter shade of purple, and the second nearly pink. Moderately large feathered wings lay dormant on either side of the torso. At the rear, a tail colored like the mane hung limply, the most likely cause of the sensation that had caused her to panic in the first place. Rebecca blinked a few times, trying to clear her vision, but the strange creature was still there. She turned her head to the side, and the creature's head moved with her. "What ... What the hell?", she asked aloud, an unsettling feeling washing over her. She sifted through her memories for anything that explained the creature in the mirror. A horse with a horn would be a unicorn, that much she could remember, but unicorns didn't have wings. Rebecca frowned, noting the image in the mirror frowning with her. A winged horse? She couldn't recall the name, but there was one of those in some classic mythological story. Was it a Roman story or a Greek one? Mythology was never her strong suit, and she had always confused the two. In any case, she couldn't remember the name of that horse either. She shook her head. Again, the reflection in the broken mirror emulated her movements, and her eyes widened in recognition. This was really happening. Everything seemed too real to be a dream, especially the pain she had felt. Was she actually dead? Could this be some sick and twisted afterlife? If so, how could she have possibly become some sort of horse? What cruel god would do such a thing? <><><><><> It rapidly became evident to Twilight that this body hadn't been designed for quadrupedal movement: The limbs didn't move right, making it uncomfortable and awkward. In hindsight, she also realized the clothing clearly wasn't designed for it either. Whatever body this was, it obviously stood on two limbs, not four. Twilight tried to remember back to her time as a bird; she had walked on two legs then. Would this be the same? In her short time spent as a parrot, Twilight learned something about bodies that she hadn't known before. A parrot simply knew how to walk and fly instinctively, and while she hadn't done well at first, her body had automatically taken over when she tried. If this body was the same, then maybe bipedal movement wasn't going to be impossible. Twilight concentrated, visualizing Spike getting up in the morning. She tried to emulate the motions as best as she could, but it didn't work; the proportions weren't right, and the range of motion of the limbs wasn't anywhere close to the same. The table in the center of the room might be helpful, Twilight thought to herself, crawling across the floor. As she moved, she noted a side effect of moving around with this body on all fours: it hurt. The rough ground dug into the soft, hairless skin, and the knees bore the weight poorly, which stung quite badly. Once she was at the edge of the table, she reached up to grab the edge with one of her new hands. The fingers naturally grasped the edge with little effort. Twilight smiled triumphantly; her body was working on its own, she just had to think about what she was doing instead of how she was doing it. Getting a firm grip on the table, she pulled as hard as she could. As she had hoped, the effort pulled her entire body upward. Slowly and laboriously, she continued to pull herself higher while trying to get her other limbs beneath her. It took time, but eventually she was standing flat on her body's feet, though her weight was still heavily supported by the table. Now standing, she once again stopped to take stock of her situation. The table was covered with more of the stones that littered the floor. A particularly large one rested on the near side of the table next to a hammer, and two chisels. Looking around, it occurred to Twilight that this body stood extremely high. The ground around her was rather distant compared to what she was used to as a pony, and she was sure that if she wasn't used to flying at low altitudes with Fluttershy since she became a Princess, she probably would be suffering some form of vertigo right now. She closed her eyes again for a moment to relax, getting her breathing back to normal after the effort of pulling herself upright. Could she walk? Due to her height, basic physics suggested that a failed attempt at ambulation would lead to an uncomfortable high-velocity impact with the ground. Probably not as bad as crashing during her flying sessions with Rainbow Dash, but certainly not comfortable. Twilight steeled her nerves and focused on the far wall. First, she needed to stand without the assistance of the table. She carefully released her grip. The lower legs seemed remarkably strong, and held up her weight without any complaints or issues. Her balance felt off slightly, but she was otherwise staying upright. "So far, so good," she said aloud to herself, once again bemused by the sound of her own voice. Keeping her focus on the far wall, she willed herself to walk, trying not to think about the motions or how comically out of balance her body should be. As she had surmised, her body understood what to do. Twilight tried not to think about the movements that were occurring in the lower limbs of her body, for fear that she would take conscious control of what she was doing and foul up the process. Her body continued to walk on its own without any input beyond her desire to travel, but the wall she was focused on was approaching far more rapidly than Twilight expected. She tried to will herself to stop, but her shifting weight continued to propel her forward, her body tipping toward rapidly approaching wall and allowing gravity to take over. She slammed into the wall and hit the floor hard. It hurt. <><><><><> The boxes in the doorway hadn't budged. Rebecca had spent nearly an hour trying to find a way to move them, but it was clear that they were jammed against something, and they couldn't be pushed out of the way no matter how she tried. It had also become clear that kicking at them wouldn't help, and the beaten condition of some of the boxes indicated that someone else may have already tried that before. Pulling would have been the perfect solution, but she couldn't find any way to pull on the boxes with her current form. Trapped. That was Rebecca's ultimate conclusion: She was trapped. Trapped in this twisted body. Trapped in this strange room that teased at escape but offered none. Rebecca simply laid down and sighed, awaiting whatever would come next. Over time, she became aware of a bustle of activity off in the distance, muffled, but generally cheerful. Wherever she was, she wasn't alone. Should she scream for help? If she herself wasn't human anymore, who - or what - lived here? She pondered the state she was in, locked in a room with no exit. Was she imprisoned by those outside? She scoffed as she realized she was being held in by an impossibly simple method: a stack of cardboard boxes. Did this pass as a prison here? As she lay on the bare, wooden floor, she stared at the broken mirror. Most of the fragments in the lower right quadrant of the mirror had fallen out of the frame, scattered on the floor, but the vast majority of the mirror remained in place, held together by the pressure from the other pieces. Cracks radiated from a single impact point, a clear hoof print just right of the center. Rebecca idly wondered if the mirror could have been some sort of portal back home; a portal she had broken on accident. The idea seemed ridiculous, but it crushed what little hope she had left. Tears began forming in her eyes and she put her head to the ground. For the first time since leaving for college, she began feeling homesick. She wasn't sure how long she had lay there longing for her mother's cooking, but after a while, a voice interrupted her misery. "Twilight?" It was much more clear than the distant voices she had tuned out already, and it sounded like it was coming from nearby. The voice sounded young, almost child-like, and Rebecca couldn't tell immediately if it was male or female. "Twilight? Where are you? The whole town is outside cleaning up after last night's storm." She could hear a soft patter of footsteps growing closer. Should she respond? If she was a prisoner, would speaking out be bad? On the other hand, it sounded like a child. Perhaps she could get it to help, even if she was supposed to be locked in here. "Excuse me? Can you help me out?" Rebecca called. "I'm stuck behind these boxes. Can you move them out of the way for me?" The footsteps pattered closer, and she could see something purple through the crack in the doorway. When it spoke again, it sounded agitated. "Not funny, Twilight. You know as well as I do that you're not trapped in there." "No, really, I am stuck. I can't find a way to move these boxes. Please, can you help?" "This isn't the time for games." The voice sounded angry now. "Twilight, we need your help outside, but if you're just gonna sit in there, fine. Use your magic to get out of there, or something. I'm sure you can manage at least that much on your own." The pattering of feet started to grow more distant. Magic? Rebecca sighed with frustration and worked her way back to her hooves. She walked back to the boxes and turned around, bracing her front hooves against the floor. With a fierce kick, she slammed a rear hoof into one of the boxed in the door. It didn't accomplish anything, but she felt better. Rearing up, she starting kicking at them repeatedly. The kicks were solid and satisfying, and while she didn't feel she was making any progress, it was helping her burn off the irritation that was welling up within her. It didn't take long for the voice to respond. "Whoa, whoa, Twilight, what are you doing? ... Calm down, alright?" Twilight. That wasn't the first mention of the name. Who was Twilight? The question bothered Rebecca, giving her even more agitation to channel into her kicks. The child's voice seemed to be growing genuinely concerned. "Twilight ... Are you sure you're okay? You seem really out of it." The owner of the voice was really starting to get on her nerves. "NO!" Rebecca snapped. "I'm not okay!" She reared up for one last kick, lashing out angrily, and her hind leg smashed through the side of one of the boxes. Immediately, a flash of inspiration struck. She turned her head to look behind her - an action, she noted, that was far easier with her long, flexible neck than it would be normally - and saw that her foot had broken through the second box from the bottom. Could she hook the side of the box and pull the whole stack out? Rebecca pulled her hind leg out and turned to face the boxes, shoving a foreleg into the hole, where it was trivially simple to hook her leg to the side. Fueled by her rage, she yanked backwards, toppling the entire stack of boxes into the small room she had been confined to, several of them crashing on top of her own head. As they fell, one box impaled itself on her horn and stuck there, weighing her down awkwardly and straining her neck. The weight of the box on her horn added an immense pressure on her skull, giving her a sudden onset migraine that dwarfed any headache she'd had before. The footsteps were approaching more rapidly this time. "Be careful with those boxes, would you? Rarity is supposed to be stopping in soon to pick those up." Rebecca ignored the child, thrashing about underneath the pile of boxes that had just toppled over onto her. Once she finally had freed herself of all the boxes, she cautiously tried to find stable footing, struggling with stray fabrics that gave little purchase against the smooth wooden floor. Once she had managed to get her feet solidly on the ground, she gingerly used one of her forelegs to push the box off the tip of the horn, which was accompanied by a release of pressure that brought her much-needed relief. The offending parcel fell to the ground with a with a soft thump. In front of her, staring wide-eyed, was a small purple reptile with green spines. It appeared to be trying to hold in laughter, doubled over and shaking, and she could make out a grin plastered across its face. She scowled. "What's so funny?!" she demanded. The reptile exploded into giggles. Rebecca was not amused. <><><><><> "Rebecca, are you okay? We're all stuck outside the security door. Can you let us in?" Twilight was starting to feel confident with walking when a soft, clearly male voice came from down the hall. It was quiet and distant. If the area hadn't been eerily silent otherwise, Twilight was sure she wouldn't have heard it at all. Still, she needed to find somepony to help change her back to her normal form. Or maybe just contact Celestia; the Princess could probably do it herself. Cautiously, she called out to the voice as loudly as she could, "I'm in here. Can you help me?" She listened intently, but the owner of the voice seemed to ignore her. Instead, it repeated the plea. "Rebecca, please be okay! If you can hear me, we need you to let us in. All you need to do is go to the Communications room and press the Intercom button to talk to me. I can walk you through everything else." Unable to rationalize any reason to stay where she was, Twilight walked toward the door, subconsciously pulling it open wider with her magic as she approached. The effort was considerably more difficult than Twilight had expected it to be, but the door slowly swung open. Stepping into the hallway, she found herself in a slightly sloped and curved tunnel hewn from the rock, the arcane signature of magical stonecutting still clearly marked in the walls. It stretched off in both directions, curving out of sight. Off to the left, a blood trail started about fifty feet away, trailing up around the bend. Off to her right, a cave-in blocked the majority of the passageway, though she was fairly certain she could climb over the blockage if she needed to. She looked up and down the hall and listened intently again, hoping to hear the voice. "Rebecca? Are you there? Oh, why didn't they give me the over-ride code for this door..." The voice was coming from the left, beyond the curve. She started walking that way, being careful not to step on any loose rocks as she went. The blood trail continued along with her as she walked, pooling thicker in some areas. Every time Twilight came to another door, she stopped and listened for the voice again, which was getting louder and more desperate as she went along. Each door she passed had a strange inscription on it: Drake, Lance, Joseph, Talia, Lab 1, Medical. Twilight wasn't sure what to make of the doors. One was clearly related to dragons, and one was obviously the knight that would fight it. Joseph might be Donut Joe, but that seemed extremely unlikely. What did Joe have to do with dragon slaying? She also had no idea what 'Talia' meant. Lab 1 and Medical seemed self-explanatory. Twilight continued walking. The next door said 'Communications', and it was standing wide open. She stopped and waited, listening to hear the voice again. When it finally sounded again, it was from within the room. Twilight stepped inside. "Rebecca? Can you hear me? Please come to Communications if you can! Use the intercom button to talk!" The voice seemed to be coming from a control panel on a low, black table in front of her. Many devices Twilight didn't recognize spread out before her on the table. There was also a small reading lamp shining brightly over the control panel, the only source of light in the room. She couldn't make any sense of anything on the panel. Scanning the various controls and toggles, she found a key that was labelled 'Intercom', sitting right next to a display that showed several figures moving about, whom Twilight immediately recognized them as members of the same species she was now. Something very, very strange was going on. Clearing her mind of the distraction, she tried to poke at the intercom button with her fingers, but realized that fine motor control wasn't something she had mastered yet. Reaching out with her magic, she pushed the button softly. A small light illuminated the 'Intercom' label. "Yes, yes! You found it! Okay!" Twilight heard the sound of some cheering in the background. Twilight couldn't figure what to say, so she fell back to her own thoughts. "Who are you?" After a longer than expected pause, the voice replied. "Who am I? This is Drake. I figured you would have recognized my voice by now. Anyway, we've got everyone out here but you. Talia is seriously hurt and we need to get her to Medical. Can you open the door, please? I can walk you through the process." She had no other leads to go on right now, and this situation didn't seem like it would be resolving itself. "Okay, what do you need me to do?"