Chapter 7
“YOU’RE TWILIGHT’S DAUGHTER?!” Rarity gasped. “But, how—”
“I’m a sentient memory of a mare long dead and gone,” Daybreak interrupted. “I’m just an imprint, no more a pony than Mother over there. But I prefer to be called by a name, not a copy of a name. So please, call me ‘Daybreak.’”
“No, I mean… Twilight had a daughter?” Rarity explained, her horn igniting as it blasted another robotic arm into smithereens. “I’m so happy for her! She was always so wrapped up in her studies, I was afraid she’d never take the time to start a family.”
“Well she did, and I’d be happy to tell you all about them, as I was there for most of their lives,” Daybreak told her. “But right now, I REALLY think there’s a matter a little more pressing at hoof!”
“I’m well aware of that,” Rarity affirmed, telekinetically ripping one of the metal arms in half and beating the others with it. “But how do we get out of here?”
“I’m working on that,” Daybreak assured, a spell erupting from her metal horn. It blasted over countless arms in a shockwave, each rusting and crumbling into dust at the magic’s touch.
“You mean you don’t know?!” Rarity reprimanded.
“I’m… improvising,” Daybreak stated. “Wait a minute, why isn’t your pegasus friend helping us fight?”
“She’s NOT my friend,” Rarity clarified. “And she’s completely insane. Not only is she useless, she’s dangerous. She almost got me killed on the road to New Canterlot!”
“She what?!” Daybreak turned to face Surprise. “You said you were sent by Pinkie Pie’s Party Supplies!”
“I am!” Surprise piped up. “Er, was. No, will be!”
“She really IS insane!” Daybreak shouted, a look of hopelessness creeping onto her synthetic face. “I only calculated our probability of escape with the factor of three capable ponies! How are we supposed to get out of here with only two and a liability?!”
“I’ve always told the truth!” Surprise insisted. “I don’t have a lie-ability!”
“As charming as it is to watch your idiotic infighting,” Pseudo-Twilight’s voice boomed overhead. “I’m growing tired of watching so many good robotics go to waste. I was prepared to lose some, but if my disobedient daughter and some representative of a useless company are going to get in the way, then I’m afraid I have no choice but to resort to alternative methods of evolving you. First off, though, my daughter and your little pegasus friend need to go.”
“She’s NOT my friend!” Rarity repeated.
“Then I’m sure you won’t mind me killing her.” Twilight’s imprint chuckled. “But first, Daybreak: Override Code 1375-7: Shut-Down.”
Instantly, Daybreak stopped moving, her body frozen. The light in her eyes died, as did the magical aura around her horn.
“No!” Rarity gasped. “What did you do to her?! And you stay away from Surprise! She may be the worst pony I’ve ever met, but she’s too stupid to know any better! She’s innocent in all this!”
“I’ve installed several overrides into Daybreak’s body in the rather likely event she would try to disobey me. She’s little more than a reluctant puppet of mine. And I hardly think the pegasus can be called innocent. She broke into my factory, a crime punishable by imprisonment under even Cadance’s distorted view of the law. My interpretation of justice, though, has a far more fitting punishment.”
The parts of a Sparkle Drone on the end of one robotic arm began to move all on their own. The gears began turning, and the pistons pumped as a large cannon, similar to those on the backs of the drones at the palace, turned and fired a blast right at Surprise.
“Surprise, no!” Rarity shouted, too late and too far away to defend the pegasus.
Surprise looked up from where she’d been making funny faces at her reflection in the crumpled metal of some blasted robotic arms. The blast seemed to come at her in slow motion, the lights mirroring in her widening eyes. Surprise’s mouth opened in a silent scream as she tried to duck, the first sensible thing Rarity had ever seen her do.
An explosion of rock and metal shook the office as the blast drove into the ground. Rarity turned away and shut her eyes, refusing to look at the slaughtered corpse of an innocent. An innocent slain by that… that monster that thought it was better than Twilight Sparkle. That monster who masqueraded as one of the greatest ponies to ever live, yet thought that doing the opposite of everything that pony had stood for was an improvement over the original.
Rarity’s horn charged, the blue flame in her heart getting its first chance to burn through into the real world. The flame that had been ignited by Pinkie Pie’s ancient murder. All the pain that had been pent up inside Rarity would finally be unleashed, and she could think of no recipient more deserving of her hatred than this Twilight-shaped abomination, including whoever had put her to sleep for a thousand years. But Rarity never got the chance to release her anger. Her horn’s aura blinked out the moment she realized that somepony had beat her to the punch in unleashing their rage. And it came from the last pony she had ever expected.
“You gotta be bucking kidding me.”
Rarity whirled around, preparing to blast the fake Twilight’s precious body into the next ‘epoch of pony evolution’ as a zillion shattered pieces. There on the floor, lifting herself up on shaking legs, was the pony who had just spoken. Surprise’s mane had been mostly burned off, most of what was left scorched and blackened by the heat of the blast. Somehow, amazingly, the insane pony had ducked in time to avoid being erased from the face of Equestria.
And she was furious.
There was a dark gleam, a fire that made the flame in Rarity’s heart want to gallop away and hide, flickering behind the white pegasus’ eyes. Surprise looked more focused than the white unicorn had ever seen her.
What was left of Surprise’s mane had fallen flat, as had her tail. Where once cotton-candy-like puffs of shining yellow had bounced with every movement she made, there were now golden waterfalls of straight hair that cascaded onto the floor.
“You wanna play rough, eh?” Surprise hissed, looking neither at Rarity nor at Daybreak but instead at the office all around her. Her voice carried a different intonation than Rarity was used to. Gone was the lilting joyfulness, replaced with something that made the white unicorn shiver. This was a side of Surprise that Rarity somehow instinctively knew should have never seen the light of day. Whatever was going on here, Rarity suddenly wanted very much to be far away from Sparkle Technologies for reasons that did not entirely involve Twilight’s mad imprint. “Then let’s play rough.”
Faster than Rarity’s eyes could follow, Surprise launched herself into the air. Weaving through the bursts of magical cannon fire trying to correct their first miss, the white pegasus stopped short in the center of the office. The cannons on the Sparkle drone components had expected her to continue to fly upwards and so carried on shooting over Surprise’s head. This gave Rarity a few moments to take in this new side of her partner in action before the cannons realized their mistake.
Surprise hovered for a moment, her wings flapping slowly and fluidly. The fire in her eyes was still there, but for some reason she was positioned oddly. Instead of hovering in a horizontal fashion as did most pegasi, Surprise now assumed an upright posture in the air, her hind legs dangling below while her forelegs reached behind her back.
“What is she doing??” Rarity wondered aloud as the cannons corrected their misfire and turned to aim at Surprise once again. Their dark, empty mouths glowed as blasts of green balefire came roaring out. But Surprise didn’t even try to evade the projectiles. This time, she simply smiled darkly. This time, she was somehow, impossibly, ready for them. “Surprise, get out of there!”
But the white pegasus, as always, wasn’t listening. Surprise’s forelegs whipped out from behind her back. Strapped to them were two identical long and bulky metal objects. Whatever they were, they were far too large to have been concealed behind her back. They might have feasibly come out of the larger-on-the-inside saddlebags Pinkie’s imprint had given them, but Rarity never saw Surprise’s bags open. It seemed that the objects had simply materialized behind her back just before she brought them out for all to see.
The objects turned sideways as Surprise drew them out to point to either side of her, and Rarity could see the additional details that she hadn’t been able to make out from what must have been the bottoms of the things. They had what looked like telescopes mounted on top of them, as well as multiple long, hollow cylinders. The things were narrower at the ends, while nearest to the white pegasus the odd objects were bulky and composed of several metal components. Dangling from the bottoms of the things were strings of connected wrappers containing what looked suspiciously like ‘pop rocks.’
But what struck Rarity as the oddest thing of all was that the giant contraptions were a bright, garish pink. Bright strings of color decorated each, while the unmistakable cutie mark of Pinkie Pie decorated their sides. There was even some writing along the barrels…
“Party Cannon XL,” Rarity read out loud.
As soon as the words left her lips, the room exploded. Blasts that put the mechanical cannons to shame rocketed out of the party cannons, followed by trails of streamers and confetti. The chain of ‘pop rock’ wrappers were rapidly eaten by the machines before shooting back out into the world after a brief trip through the giant cannons, each crashing into the mechanical arms and erupting in what might as well have been miniature suns.
“EAT POP ROCKS, MOTHERBUCKERS!!” Surprise laughed maniacally, her voice somehow making its way into Rarity’s ears even over the roar of the flames. Rarity had known that Surprise was dangerous, but she hadn’t thought the clueless pegasus would ever be the direct cause of the danger! This was worse than anything Twilight’s imprint had cooked up thus far. All that shade had wanted to do was give Rarity a new body, whether she wanted one or not. It looked like Surprise was about to completely obliterate her old one, as well as everything else in the office. If pop rocks were more powerful than dynamite, then how could Rarity, Daybreak, and even Surprise herself expect to live through thousands of them being ignited in such an enclosed space all at once?!
Rarity ducked down, hiding her head under her hooves and throwing up a safety spell, knowing full well the fat lot of good it would do when the fire of countless ‘pop rocks’ came burning down on her. But that fire never came. Rarity opened one eye and breathed a sigh of relief. Encompassing her was a magical dome of burning orange, protecting her from the balls of balefire blossoming everywhere outside. Liquid metal from the destroyed robotics splashed against the force field as new explosions burst into being before the old ones even had time to die. Beyond the fire and metallic carnage, Rarity couldn’t see a thing.
But wait, what was casting this force field?
“Don’t worry, great-auntie,” reassured a voice, causing Rarity to whirl around and find Daybreak sitting in a different position than the one she had been frozen in. The robotic unicorn’s horn was aglow, surrounded by the same burning orange aura as the magic of the shield. It seemed that she was equipped with magical strength equal to or maybe even greater than that of the Sparkle drones that had attacked the palace, as her shield didn’t so much as flicker as the racking explosions resounded just outside. “We should be safe in here, and it won’t be long before that pegasus runs out of ammunition. She really must be from Pinkie Pie’s Party Supplies -- they only give out Party Cannon XL and above models to the military and to their own staff. And don’t worry about her protection either. Party Cannons of that caliber are tailor-made to protect the gunners from their own projectiles.”
“You’re alright!” Rarity cheered. “Thank goodness! I thought that… that monster had done something to you!”
“I only played along to fool Mother and give me time to think.” Daybreak chuckled. “It is true that she installed terabytes of override codes into my body, but she never figured I’d find out how to delete them.”
“So you’re not under her control?” Rarity wanted to make sure.
“I am under nopony’s control.” Daybreak shot a glare, but it quickly softened. “Not anymore, not ever again. I may be just a copy of a real, living pony, but I’m still me. I can think for myself.”
“Good,” Rarity said, her reaction surprising Daybreak. “I always thought a mare should have an independent mind, and I’m not sure if I can think of anypony better to be independent from than that thing you call Mother.”
“You have no idea how long I’ve waited to hear somepony say something like that,” Daybreak sighed. “Most ponies believe Mother really is the happy, helpful pony everypony sees on the holographic advertisements. It’s good to finally not be the only one who knows the truth. But more on that later—I think I figured out a way for us to get out of here.”
“How?” Rarity asked immediately.
“Normally, Mother has the factory set up so that I can’t teleport inside it,” Daybreak explained. “It’s not an override code; she’s just set up ambient magic that is charged to be the opposite of my own teleportation spells.”
“How many ponies can teleport in this future?” Rarity wondered. “I thought it was a rather rare skill. And if that monster can stop you from teleporting, why doesn’t she stop you from using any magic?”
“Not many can teleport. The teleharness technology is built into my skeletal structure. And as long as I’m kept locked up in the factory, she can experiment on me with designs for her own body whenever she wants,” Daybreak went on. “She only stops me from teleporting so that I can’t escape the factory. And believe me, I’ve tried. But because you’re here, I think there’s a chance this time.
“As long as the pegasus is letting loose with her ‘pop rocks’, the cancellation magic preventing me from teleporting should be cancelled as well. Even Mother’s spells can’t work under all that raw magical energy. But I can only cast one spell at a time, so the moment I teleport us, the shield drops.”
Rarity nodded, not liking where this was going.
“And I can only teleport things I have some sort of magical contact with,” Daybreak finished. “I’ll need you to telekinetically grab onto Surprise when I say ‘go,’ and not a nanosecond too late. Otherwise, she’ll be left here, and Mother will kill her.”
“Got it,” Rarity affirmed, her horn warming up. She lifted her head back and peered as best she could through the blinding torrent of fire, but unsurprisingly, she couldn’t see anything but the monstrous maelstrom outside the shield. “Wait, I can’t see her!”
“Then you’re going to have to make a good guess,” Daybreak muttered, her eyes closing as she too concentrated. The android’s horn was glowing brighter than ever. “In three… two… one… GO!”
Next, several things happened at once. The shield dropped. It didn’t fade out like a dying flame as most force fields did when they were dispelled, but instead burst outward to push the fire back as much as possible. Rarity silently thanked Daybreak for giving her additional time as the flames rushed inwards. An orange glow surrounded the fashionista and the android as Rarity prepared to grab Surprise.
There was just one problem. Rarity couldn’t see Surprise. The flames were closing in as if in slow motion, even though she knew it was more like a few nanoseconds before she was fried.
“Ironic,” Rarity chuckled darkly to herself. “If Surprise weren’t trying to kill everything right now, she’d probably make the connection that if I was a marshmallow than this is where I’d become s’mores.”
The flames pressed in, Rarity able to feel the searing pain on her bare flesh. She wouldn’t be in pain for much longer though, as her body was beginning to fade along with Daybreak’s.
“No, no, no…” Rarity frantically repeated to herself. “I may hate you, Surprise, but I don’t want you to die!”
Then, just as the white unicorn was about to give up hope and surrender to the spell, some odd tide in the ocean of flames all around them swerved. There was an opening, if brief and miniscule, through which she could see—
“Surprise!” Rarity gasped, a bolt of blue magic shooting up from her horn and latching onto the dangling leg of the pegasus.
Flash.
Rarity cried out in pain, and then sighed in relief as the group appeared outside of the factory. They had all landed in a rather deep puddle, freezing cold and undoubtedly filthy enough to appall her under normal circumstances. But, of course, these weren’t normal circumstances.
Steam hissed off of the scalding metal body of Daybreak whilst the cooling water soothed Rarity’s burns. Surprise, her guns having disappeared, jumped out of the water with her teeth chattering. She had fallen in face-first.
“Cold!” the white pegasus gasped, landing on the cobblestones near the puddle and shivering. Scrunching her eyes tightly together, she shook herself, spraying Rarity and Daybreak with yet more water. “Cold! Cold! COLD!”
“This feels so good,” Rarity breathed, lying on her back and letting the filthy water splash against her coat. After a moment or so, she opened her eyes and screamed. Her body was covered in cracked burns, each one leaking a little bit of hot blood into the water even as the water seeped in. They hurt if she so much as twitched, but the water took care of that for the most part. The thing that got to Rarity the most wasn’t the pain, though. “My coat! My beautiful coat! Do you know how long it took me to brush this?!”
“I’d count yourself lucky,” Daybreak laughed. “Most of the time, Mother’s a murderer. All she did to you was the job of a shoddy hairdresser. Though I would get out of this puddle, if I were you. We don’t want your burns getting infected.”
“Infected?” Rarity echoed, leaping painfully out of the puddle and gasping when her overheated hooves landed roughly on a drier part of the street. “With the Contagion?!”
“No, no, nothing like that,” Daybreak said. “The Contagion is transmitted through direct contact with one of the Contagious. That doesn’t mean you getting infected with a lesser disease will help us get out of New Canterlot, though.”
Before Rarity could say anything else, Daybreak’s horn glowed and wrapped her two companions in orange light. The screaming in Rarity’s flesh ever since she’d jumped out of the water began to calm, the rips in her flesh melding together as her coat resumed its normal appearance. A gasp from Surprise made her look over to see the mane growing back on the pegasus’ burnt head, the scars healing and closing just as they had with Rarity.
“Thank you,” Rarity breathed with a sigh of relief. “How many spells do you know, anyway?”
“Theoretically,” Daybreak began. “All of them. I’ve read every book on magic ever written. Now we should get going before Mother—”
“ATTENTION ALL SPARKLE DRONES,” boomed a voice. The group looked up to see the billboards atop the skyscrapers flickering. Ones that advertised Sparkle Technologies switched from displaying drones to showing the pleasantly smiling face of Twilight’s imprint. Each billboard in the city, it seemed, followed suit. Even the ones advertising different companies became hijacked by the not-Twilight’s image. “OVERRIDE CODE THREE-FIVE-SEVEN-THREE-EIGHT-NINE-ZERO: CAPTURE FUGITIVES ALPHA, BETA, AND GAMMA IMMEDIATELY!”
The impostor’s face disappeared to be replaced by images of Rarity, Surprise, and Daybreak. Under each picture were their designated codenames, each flashing in red.
The sound of breaking glass echoed off of the buildings down the street, many pedestrians turning in shock to see what had made the noise. They screamed and began galloping away when a single Sparkle drone, armed with a back-mounted magical cannon, zoomed through them and darted towards Rarity and her companions. A single pony galloped up behind it, a middle-aged mare, panting for breath from trying to keep up with the tireless automaton.
“Rusty, what are you doing?” the mare wheezed. “You know you’re not supposed to leave the apartment without one of the family! Now get back home and clean up that mess you made when you jumped through our window!”
The Sparkle drone didn’t so much as look at the mare, its cannon swiveling on its mount before firing a single blast. The mare slammed into the side of the nearest building before toppling over with a sickening crunch, her corpse flaming with magical fire.
“That MONSTER!” Rarity roared. “I’m going to make scrap metal out of you!”
“No time—” Daybreak tried to say, her horn igniting. Rarity quickly counteracted with her own magic, throwing the burning orange glow off of her.
“We can’t just let those buckets of bolts murder innocent ponies!” Rarity protested, her horn charging in preparation to give the drone a taste of its own medicine.
“They’re only killing ponies who get in their way in their attempt to get to you!” Daybreak hastily explained. “The moment we’re gone, they’ll have no reason to chase us, and no reason to turn on their masters. But we have to teleport out of here before more of them show up!”
As if on cue, a door of the building to the group’s left exploded outwards, a Sparkle drone’s cannon steaming as it galloped towards them. The sound of windows breaking assaulted their ears as yet more of the things leapt from the heights to land unharmed on the streets below, and before Rarity knew it, she was surrounded. Each cannon pointed directly at her, the deadly magic inside humming as they threatened to fire.
“Now that I have your attention,” announced the unmistakable voice of Twilight’s imprint, booming from the open mouths of all the drones present. “Hold still while Ricochet pinpoints your position so that she can pick you up with the teleharness. Otherwise, there won’t be anything for her to pick up.”
“Indeed there won’t,” Daybreak spat, her horn blaring faster than the automatons could react and plucking the group from reality. Their programming compelled them to react at the first sign of action, even if there was now nopony left to fire at, the Sparkle drones let loose their blasts and blew each other apart in a ring of fire.
When the group landed, there was no cool puddle of water to greet them this time. Instead, a thick cloud of dust swirled up as they touched down in a pile of trash in the remains of an unkempt street. Rarity coughed, looking around and waving her hoof to try and fan most of the pesky particles away from her mouth. Everywhere she looked, there were the broken ruins of a once grand city, one she recognized all too well even in its death.
“Before you say anything,” Daybreak broke into the unicorn’s thoughts. “This was the only place I could take us to keep Mother from recapturing us. By the time she can lower any drones, we’ll hopefully be long gone. I had planned on getting to the Great Steps of the new city before Mother caught us, and then teleporting us to safety from there, but this will have to do for now.”
“Old Canterlot,” Rarity whispered, a tear welling in her eye all over again. “What happened to this place?”
“Nopony knows. One day, everything just exploded in a blast of powerful magic,” Daybreak answered. “But let’s make a run for the exit before a sub-city patrol find us, or—”
“The Contagious?”
“Yes, that,” Daybreak agreed, surveying their surroundings to try and find the best possible escape route. “Alright, this way.”
But Rarity didn’t follow the android, who turned in annoyance to see what was stalling her great-auntie. Daybreak’s eyes grew wide when they saw the reason.
Standing there, not a hundred yards away, was what could only be one of the Contagious.
. . .