Twilight should have leapt forward and into immediate action, well that’s what she would have done if she were a complete idiot. Obviously the thing that tried to take control had made plenty of mistakes in trying to do what it did; it didn’t know Twilight very well at all and it made a huge mistake in trying to attack her like this.
“Really that’s the best that it could do?” Twilight muttered to herself as she placed the scissors aside on the counter. She boldly walked up to Fluttershy and hugged her with compassion to whisper in her ear. “Don’t you have a rabbit and an injured bird at home to take care of?”
“Oh my goodness, thanks for reminding me Twilight!” Fluttershy’s eye turned back to their normal adorable color and she faded from existence. This proved to Twilight what she had just figured out, with but a thought the hair on the floor turned into a pink cape. The cape levitated into the air to curl around her and she once again transformed into the hero known as Radiance from the Power Pony comic. It seemed like a fitting thing to do given the situation Twilight was now in.
“Oh this thing has no idea that it’s messed with the wrong pony.” Twilight huffed angrily, she made her way down the stairs into the living room where she saw that Mane-iac had Barb pinned to the wall. Next to her were the two other ponies Twilight had recently met. Rarity and Applejack had their manes taking on an offensive posture towards her as she walked confidently into the room. “You are without a doubt the biggest idiot to try and do this to me!”
“Oh?” Mane-iac said with a hint of an amused smile on her face, before she let out a cackle.
“Yes, because Barb is in a safely lit room, she’s afraid to sleep without light and rarely would anything like you be able to get to her if she is surrounded by light when she sleeps. She also has a little guardian to make sure nothing happens to her, but I’m sure you couldn’t see or even knows she exists could you?” Slowly Barb faded out of existence from the tentacle pinning her to the wall and the Mane-iac looked positively shocked.
“How did you?” As Mane-iac turned back to Twilight, she yelped and jumped away from the unicorn as she was right in her face. She backed away slowly as the two wild haired ponies went and stood at Twilight’s side with matching glares at her.
“Do you really think I’m that stupid? Do I look like I have stupid written across my forehead like you do right now?” Twilight immediately made a mirror construct with Radiances powers and held it up to Mane-iac who did indeed have the word stupid written across her forehead. With a flick of her hoof the mirror disappeared. “Now let’s get down to business and why I’m not scared that my two newest friends are going to suddenly turn on me.”
Pacing around them Twilight looked over Applejack and Rarity closely, she smiled as looked at Applejack’s hair bands and the fact that they were blue. This thing was seriously shoddy in its work, especially if it thought it could muddle her mind long enough to do what it pleased with her.
“Okay to start off, Applejack you don’t know Fluttershy at all and haven’t even met her yet.” Twilight watched as Applejack nodded and shrugged before disappearing as her hair bands turned red.
“You can’t know that!” The thing posing as Mane-iac said decisively. “You even told me not to ask about the tree that fell on the rabbit.”
“Oh, but I do. If you had bothered with looking in on my less important memories that I think inconsequential, you’d be horribly surprised by what you missed. You see, while Tress didn’t ask Applejack about that yesterday… I did that myself entirely out of curiosity after lunch while she was heading out to the orchard. I know Fluttershy hasn’t been around long enough to make the acquaintance of Applejack as when I asked her, she had no clue about what happened with the so called ‘varmints’ that attacked the carrot plantation next door. Besides that Fluttershy is too busy tending to the injuries of a rabbit and bird to have ever had the time to meet Applejack. She only came over the day before we worked at the farm to blow off some stress with her best friends, before swiftly leaving for home to check on the cardinal who broke a wing.” Twilight smiled as her opponent reeled back as if they had been physically slapped and hard. “Even then, that wasn’t the first thing I’ve noticed that was wrong.”
Twilight turned to look at the couch in the living room, yeah like that wouldn’t really be noticeable. She moved over to sit down on it getting a feel for the texture of which her mind made up from how the couch at her parents’ house felt. Yeah, she’d want a couch like this eventually, but first she had to deal with the uninvited fly in her parlor.
“I first noticed something was off when I looked out the window this morning, I didn’t see the library. Haven’t really been in there yet, but I know it’s there. Mistake number one.” The purple pony had to smile as her opponent flinched in pain. Twilight didn’t like fighting, but nothing was said about waging mental trauma war on a being that invaded her personal sanctity. “The second mistake you made was Tress; I think she secretly likes Opal despite how she acts about the cat. She actually despises Opal, but she does like cats in general. She’s my best friend and I think I’d know her better than anyone. Even someone like you, since I already know you’re an imposter and not even really Mane-iac.”
The fake Mane-iac finding herself in pain once again, she tried to lash out with her hair only for most of it to turn into a pile of daisy sandwiches before it could even get close to hitting a smirking Twilight. Twilight simply picked up a sandwich and bit into it slowly savoring the taste as she chewed it.
“You really chose the wrong pony to attack you know. Especially when Fluttershy can’t tell what time it is by the position of the sun, considering she’s lived outdoors for the most of three years and has some pretty good survival skills. Then there’s you skipping me ahead to a time after I’ve seemed to have taken a shower to disorient me, not to mention we currently don’t own a couch that feels like the one at my parents’ house. Though I think it’s a nice afterthought that you somehow managed to get my butt groove down.” The now smug Twilight continued to eat the sandwich as the now bobbed Mane-iac slammed into the wall of the house of her own volition.
Twilight didn’t do a single thing to cause that but logic bomb the ever loving tar out of her even slightly wily opponent. She still had plenty more to go as she almost now knew what her opponent exactly was by how it was reacting to her fighting back.
“As for my other newest friend Rarity, you may as well have almost gotten away with that one.” Twilight turned to the resemblance of another friend she had recently earned sitting next to her daintily eating a sandwich. “If I didn’t know she likes to do her own mane and is quite meticulous about it. If there was ever a mare that would want to do something even related to the words ‘quality time’, she would have been the first to volunteer not Fluttershy. Rarity hardly had any friends she can relate stuff to, she had two ponies she was acquainted with but she doesn’t know them that well. In the end she would have suggested we all do something together as a group, this probably would have us all at the Ponyville Spa at her expense no less. It’s a place she’s talked about a lot that I’ve never been to in Ponyville yet and you can’t very well recreate what I haven’t seen from the inside. The fact that Fluttershy was even excited about going first in anything was too much a tip off to ignore and by that point I had to learn what I was dealing with.”
Rarity smiled and hugged Twilight before fading away as well; Twilight thought she needed more ponies to spend time with her for who she was and not what she could do for them. The fake Mane-iac’s mane and tail just started falling out and she started looking pale. A second Mane-iac walked into the room, sat down on the couch and simple lay on her back with her head in Twilight’s lap. As Twilight started to lean back and began to pet the super villain, she pointedly stared at the pale balding imitation.
“You have the ability to look at my memories but are incapable of altering them. You’re currently in my dreams trying to usurp control of my sleep from me and give me nightmares. The reason why you haven’t left or escaped yet is very clear to me. You can’t get out now that I’m aware enough to keep you here indefinitely.” Twilight continued to pet the Mane-iac in her lap and she listened to the sweet purring noise from the wondrous mare that slowly morphed into Tress Ravel who nuzzled her softly. “There were some telling things about this being a dream. One was the fact that I couldn’t read the labeled shampoo bottle, so I didn’t bother too hard trying to do so. There were other small things like all the books being missing to the fact that I just acted like I was using my horn. I haven’t actually lit my horn once since this all started either.”
“So what, unless you can claim to know what I am, you still have no true hold over me. I will just escape when you eventually wake up.” The smirk slowly edged off the hairless Mane-iac as she saw a wide smile on Twilight’s highly amused face.
“I wouldn’t count on that... tapir. First time I’ve ever been attacked by a dream eater really, I’m almost impressed.” Twilight indulged in the look of absolute horror that crossed the now hairless Mane-iac’s face.
The false Mane-iac slowly warped and crumbled into a different form entirely. The end result looked vaguely like a pig, with a slight elephant like nose, black and white fur, splayed four toed hooves and a short tail end.
“How… how did you know I was a…” The tapir said slowly in complete and utter shock at having been found out and discovered, not to mention captured. Tapir’s weren’t known for being good at confrontations unless they were the ones creating them. When they lost the fear factor of their dream eater abilities, they became downright harmless.
“There are two questions that you really should answer. First, did you know about the existence of Smart?” Seeing the dumb look on the pigs face Twilight decided to elaborate. “I’ve once read about how tapir’s are thought to be nearly extinct because they weren’t very bright when choosing targets. In particular, you looked at my memories and since Smart is created from my own memories, you probably wouldn’t be able to recognize her as separate from me. You might have even considered me mentally weak in some way, thus it made me seem like an easier target for you to snack on. Another thing about this is, I just got off a very tiring day of work and you like to eat dreams with a side of magic. You must have thought I looked particularly appetizing considering I sleep in the dark and was quite weakened by my long day.”
The tapir glared indignantly at being called stupid, but it didn’t voice its concern that such things like Smart actually existed. Twilight was right though, he had chosen her because she looked like a most appetizing easy target. Something really bugged him about this line of questioning though.
“Which brings me to my second question, do you know zebra’s exist and can you actually see them? If what I know about you is true then the only zebra around here really made sure this dream eating went poorly.” Twilight knew the look on the tapir’s face wasn’t very hard to confuse with anything else, it was abject terror of hearing the word zebra.
“One of them is here! No... You mustn't tell that zebra I’m here!” A tapir was a dream eating creature. They tended to avoid things they couldn’t safely eat the dreams of, and or something that would confound them endlessly. Only because Twilight told this particular tapir of a zebra did it actually know one was around. Accidentally dream eating a zebra was a big fear of a tapir; they usually didn’t survive doing it and the ones that did were never the same afterwards. They usually lost their ability to dream eat and slowly starved to death.
A long time ago a tapir went and began to dream eat a zebra foal, then as a result of what happened the zebra’s immediately became invisible and hostile to them. They were even invisible even in other beings memories and dreams, thus a tapir had little warning as to when they’d run into one and tended to stay very far from places another tapir has never returned from.
The zebra foal involved was perfectly fine from the event if highly traumatized by what that particular Tapir did to it, but continued on to live a long fulfilling life. Equally on the other side of things, the tapir that did it was traumatized by the sudden loss of its ability to engorge itself on dreams and didn’t go on to lead a long fulfilling life. Though it could have survived by eating normal plants and food, it had been too stubborn to change its ways. It went out with a whimper and a warning to the rest of its species.
You just don’t mess with zebras.