//------------------------------// // Chapter 30 REVISED // Story: A Journey Unthought Of // by Hustlin Tom //------------------------------// The doors to the blue box closed, and we newcomers were told to hang on. "Hang on," I asked, before we were all knocked to the right. The Doctor looked up at the central column of his machine with worry as he jumped around the console area in a hurry, righting the controls. "Dark pits beloooOOOOOW," Bon Bon yelled out, ending in a scream as she flipped over the catwalk's safety railing to fall into a nest of cables. I turned so that it was the side of my body Lyra wasn't on that crashed into the safety railing. "Aaaah, God," I exclaimed in pain, "I need both of my kidneys working: stop trying to do them in!" "Sorry," the Doctor yelled out to us all as he focused on piloting the strange machine, "Prioritizing keeping us from being annihilated by the disruptions rippling through the Time Vortex!" He glanced at the swiveling monitor, and then his gaze froze on it as he turned to look again. The Countdown was rapidly decreasing now, several minutes flying by relative to the Tardis' interior. The Doctor's eyes grew wide, and without a second's worth of pause he pulled a long handled pump on the console out, threw a black headed lever, and pulled a large handled breaker, "Here's good." With an almighty lurch we were brought to a halt, each of us bracing ourselves in our own way. "Never thought I'd find something worse than public transit," I said more to myself than anyone. "Ah'll say," Vinyl said, apparently having overheard me, "Muh Dad's old wagon was just as bad; didn't look nearly as pretty as this thing's interior does though." "Ditzy," the Doctor exclaimed as he waved her over to join him in front of the console monitor, "Would you come have a look at this?" The pegasus' eyes grew wide as she approached, as the Doctor's tone made her dread what she was about to see. Using her hooves to hoist herself up to a more comfortable viewing angle, her face blanched as she saw the evident change: 1:11:43:21. "We're in sync with local relative time," he murmured softly to her, "We've moved around 30 kilometers and touched down five seconds after the time we left." "Instrument error," Ditzy asked wishfully as she glanced up to him. "I don't think so," he said with a shake of his head, and he looked off into the distance, "Blasted anti-chronons." "Guys," I called out as I set Lyra down on her back, "She's not waking up!" Fluttershy was the first over, and she immediately set about checking her condition. The others began to slowly gather around, holding their own conversations about the problem. Twilight came over just beside her introverted but kind friend and began her own cursory examination. "There's nothing physically wrong with her, I think," the yellow pegasus said as she gently opened one eye, and then the other. "Because there's nothing physical about it," the scholarly unicorn said with a frown as she reached for Lyra's eyelids and opened them again. The eyes beneath were unfocused, and there was a faint red discoloration to them that flickered against the frame of her golden pupils. "She's been put in a magically induced trance of some kind," she said, "There's no telling when she might come out of it." "Can we force her out of it," Rainbow Dash asked. "That wouldn't hurt her, would it," was my question. Twilight shrugged, "It won't hurt her, but whether we can pull her out prematurely I don't know for sure." "Would music help," Pinkie asked, her body suddenly now decked out in an assortment of instruments that I could for certain say were nowhere near her when I last glanced in her direction. "Let's just try and talk to her first," Twilight said with a cautious wave of her hoof. "Right," I said with a nod, "Like she's in a coma or something. That's gotta work." Bon Bon and I moved in a little closer to our friend. Without thinking my arm went around her shoulder as I squatted down to be near Lyra. The earth pony was surprised for a moment, but she allowed my arm to settle where I'd put it. "Lyra," I said softly, as I pulled Bon Bon closer, "Wherever you are in there, we need you to wake up. Shake off whatever's gotta hold of you, and wake up. We need you back." I paused as I started to realize there were deeper feelings involved with my plea, ones that I had not expected to find, and I wasn't sure how to address. "Lyra," I said with no small amount of uncertainty, "I need you back. Wake up." Bon Bon heard my inflection, and she looked up at me in surprise. I glanced over at her, unsure where things were going now or how I was going to handle my declaration. In the depths of Lyra's subconscious the words echoed all around, Lyra, wake up. We need you back. The unicorn winced, and her ear flicked. The words repeated, more clearly but just as soft. Her ear flicked again, and her eyes began to open. She slowly brought her forelegs underneath herself and pushed up, looking around as she did. The place she found herself in was covered in darkness apart from a singular spotlight that shown down on her. She looked up to find the light source, but saw that somehow there was none. With the way the ambient light shown on nothing but her, she felt as if somehow she were sitting in some sort of purgatory designed for stage actors. "Hello," she called out, quiet and nervous, "Is anybody there?" Silence was the response she received. Her resolve grew a little, or at least sounding agitated made her think so, "Whatever you think you're holding me for, you have no case; nothing! Adam is innocent. You have no right to hold us." Suddenly she heard a sound come out of the darkness in response to her. Two beats, spaced too far apart to be hoofbeats, but the sound seemed familiar. As it neared, she could discern that the louder of the two beats had an accompanying faint sound of metal striking a surface. It wasn’t a pony that was for sure. She could count on her hooves all the things in the world she was aware of that normally walked on two legs. Could it be- A bipedal figure's silhouette appeared just outside the range of the light, its features for the most part obscured. Lyra was already spooked by the past few days and her now strange environment. Even though she was certain it wasn't him, she still called out to the figure, "A-Adam?" The figure in the dark didn't move initially, leaving her to stew in her growing agitation and paranoia. It put one leg forward, then the other. A set of dark brown loafers were the first things she saw of the human, followed shortly afterward by a set of brown pinstripe suit pants. A golden tipped cane was in its right hand, its cane head in the shape of an ancient dragon lunging forward. It was carved of what looked to be pure gold, and its inset eyes were blood-like rubies. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry," the figure said in an older stallion's voice, before his face appeared. His face was narrow and tall, and unnaturally gaunt. A grey beard much like that of goat sat on his chin, presumably to draw away attention from his heavily receding hairline. If that was the case it wasn't working however. His red pupils flashed and a smile appeared on his face, exposing a singularly long incisor. "Were you waiting for someone else," he finished. Lyra looked up at the intimidating man with a shocked stammer, "Well, um, I-" "Oh, but my manners have left me," he said, his mouth now returning to a small smile, "After all, neighbors should bring gifts when they come over." With that he brought his cane up and pointed it into the space just inside the palm of his other hand. The dragon's eyes flared to life, and from the ether glass began to form, weightless until the being gripped it tightly. Lyra couldn't help but feel utterly repulsed by him. Something about the way he stood, or the way he bore himself, she couldn't wholly explain it. Standing in this man's presence felt utterly and completely wrong. He simply wasn't meant to be. His mere existence felt as if it were a declaration of war on all of nature. She had never felt a sense of disgust so powerful in her life. With one last flash of residual energy the structure of silica was complete, its shape spiraling round and round like a spring, ending on one end like a beaker, and on the other the structure narrowed and thinned until it could be sipped like a straw. From the bottom a light brown liquid spontaneously appeared, filling the beaker and ascending up the structure until it was filled halfway. The man offered it to Lyra, "Care for a drink?" Aside from the fact that the glass was almost as tall as she was when she stood on her backlegs, Lyra didn't want anything he could possibly give her, and she shook her head. "Hm, fair enough," he said as he instead drank from the glass, drawing the liquid up all in one go to fall back down his throat. He then tossed the obtusely shaped glass to the side, "You have much better taste than I. I don't like repeating material normally." Startled at first by his sudden violence on the defenseless silica, she returned to herself and thought over what he said before asking in confusion, "What?" "Really, it was for the benefit of everyone else, so they know who I am," he said as he now walked past her before muttering to himself, "How original, like chocolate milk is my one and only trick." His cane pointed to the shattered glass and dust nearby and he raised it up; in response the particles flew back together to form a chair bottom with a back but no legs. The man then sat down on the legless seat suspended in the air, his cane tapping back and forth between each shoe and glanced at Lyra, not a bit of mirth in his face. Lyra, still trying to take in the immense amount of strangeness she had been witnessing, was only able to ask, "What are you?" The question brought a deep smirk to the man's face even as his eyes narrowed. " 'What am I,'" he repeated, "How perceptive of you. 'Who's' can be easily answered because they can be put on any old being. What is there for the bigger things? Bigger things have names, but they're 'What's'. 'What's' have a much bigger scale: they get names not to make them familiar, but to set the apart, to set them above others." When Lyra looked back at him with a still confused expression, he sighed, "Maybe you're not as smart as I thought. Just because I put on a different face you forget who I am? Still, you're not the first. I am, and there were hundreds of cultures and languages that gave me names: to the Egyptians, I was Set and Apep. To the Babylonians, I was Tiamat. To the Teutonic tribes, I was Loki, and to the Arabs I was Iblis. To scientists I am Entropy, Inefficiency, and Chaos. I am the Serpent, and I am the craftiest of animals. But I believe you know me by a different name.” The man suddenly made a retching sound, and bright, eerie red light spewed forth from his mouth. Primal energies burst from him, spiraling upward as his body was consumed by ruby fires. Startled, Lyra looked up in horror as she backed away, unable to look away from the spectacle before her. The man’s shoes, feet, legs, cane, then torso and arms, and finally his head were eaten away, or rather, released by the archaic fires that spewed from his mouth and eyes. Writhing above Lyra was a cloud of red energy, that slowly began to coalesce into a coherent form. It was a flying serpent, made and wreathed in smokeless flames and ruby lightning. It opened its mouth to roared silently into the darkness. The dragon was then abruptly pulled to the floor, seemingly by some unseen force, and began to physically materialize, each body part twitching and jerking as it appeared from the red miasma. Its right leg formed into a reptilian hind leg, while it’s left leg took that of a goat. It grew a long red tail with a collection of white fluff on the end. Its torso was morphed into a slender, almost serpentine form, which was covered in brown fur. Its right hand formed into the paw of a lion, and the left into the grasping talons of an eagle. On its back it sprouted one bat wing and the other an airy pegasus wing. A ridged spine of long tough hair ran the length of its back and gray neck, which led all the way up to its goat like head, complete with two floppy ears, a goat horn and the horn of stag, and a long bushy white beard. Its eyes and tooth remained the same as in its human state. He raised his arms, declaring “I am Discord!” He then offered his talons to Lyra, “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance!”