• Published 9th Mar 2012
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Contraptionology! - Skywriter



When life gives you lemons, make robot monsters.

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18 - The Absolute Value of Friendship is Equivalent to Magic

* * *
Contraptionology!

by Jeffrey C. Wells

www.scrivnarium.net

(with gratitude to the pre-reading powers of Akela Stronghoof and S.R. Foxley)
* * *

Part Eighteen: The Absolute Value of Friendship is Equivalent to Magic

Sure enough, the first thing that happened upon my achieving the real world again was that I got smacked square in the face with a spellbolt coming out from the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie's quicksilver horn, and – Nightmare powers or not – it dang near killed me.

I ain't saying that the sorcery the Nightmare had filled me with was all flim-flam or nothing. Weren't nothing the matter with my dark powers, hear? But this was old magic that Trixie was conjuring, wicked and brutal and like as not forbidden by any number of fancy-pants modern day unicorn conclaves. Disjunction beams? they'd say to themselves. Why in heckfire'd anypony need t'use that sorta witchery? Except them unicorns prolly wouldn't say "heckfire'd". Or "witchery", for that matter. Point is, if the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie had been a member of any respectable guild, that hex she slung at me would have been the end of it. It was a real deal-breaker sort of spell.

Anyhow. As maybe you heard me saying before, everything that is, from rocks to trees to ponies, is made up of tiny little bits of matter just desperately clinging to one another using either ionic or covalent atomic bonds. All Trixie's disjunction bolt had to do was interrupt them bonds for like a second, and the target of her choice would just up and evaporate into the air; and I rightly figured that was her aim with me. I don't mind telling you, having a magic spell try to rip you apart at the atomic level is a mighty powerful level of hurt, but I've been through worse, growing up in the same barn as Apple Bloom and all. So as that blistering pink magic worked me over, I clenched my teeth, bore down hard, and put every scrap of effort I could muster up into the simple act of abiding.

Constancy, I whispered to myself, as the red rim to my vision grew to bright crimson. Never, never, change. As I did so, I could feel all them millions and millions of tiny little bits of me hunker down and hunker down hard, throwing little lassos of dark magic around their compadres and slowing themselves to a dead crawl, clinging together against the cascade of fraying pinkness like they was weathering a hurricane.

It was a real long second.

Then, the storm passed, and Nightmare Delicious emerged unscathed on the other side. I stood there, for a second, smoking wisps of pink energy, legs splayed and knees locked, gasping for breath. Then I set my jaw, got my limbs under me again, straightened up my brand new hat, and fixed the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie with a black stare, a gaze that conjured up the noise of all the howling spirits of Tartarus.

"Y'all," I said, my voice vibrating like a lion's roar, "gonna have to do better than that."

The tiny squawk-box on Twilight's brain-tank crackled to life again. "A—Applejack?"

"No!" I howled, despite myself. "I ain't that creature no more! Name's Nightmare Delicious, wizard!"

Except I am still Applejack, I said, half-pleading, to myself. I'm still here...

Quiet, hissed the part of me that was Nightmare, advancing in slow steps across the plaza toward the unicorn's disembodied brain and her unholy creation, spurs jingling against the dust. Triumph is at hoof.

I nearly screamed at myself, then. Rainbow Dash! Remember why you up and sold your soul in the first place! Rescue Rainbow Dash!

Nightmare Delicious squeezed her eyes shut, and Applejack opened them. For now.

"Right, Dash," I muttered, staggering back a little and trying in vain to blink away the red ring around my eyes. "Gotta... save Dash."

"Hah!" gloated the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie, as she watched me wrassle, literally, with my inner demons. "It seems that even calling upon diabolic powers is not enough to make somepony the equal of the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie!"

That ro-bot was just as insufferable as her real-life counterpart, which meant that turning tail and running would be just as damaging to my pride, but the stakes here were a lot higher than my self-esteem. Struggling desperately against the thunder of blood and Nightmare in my head, I ducked out of sight behind a large pile of rubble that might possibly have been somepony's house once upon a time and then hit full gallop in the direction of Carousel Boutique. As I fled, Trixie's voice rang out in laughing triumph behind me. I did my best to shut it out.

In a twinkling, Carousel Boutique rose into sight, the Lanthorn atop it all dark now. The instant I reached the front door, it flew open in my face, the ferocious sound of buzzing insects from inside drowning out the noise of the little bell. A unicorn leapt through the opening at me.

"BEES!" screamed Rarity, her classy military-style uniform all mussed and frayed and her milky-white face covered in tiny red welts. "AAAUGH! THE BEES! THE BEE—"

Rarity stopped, then, noticing me, and a charmed calmness washed across her face. "Oh, science-darling!" she said. "What a look!"

"Uh, thanks," I said. "Listen, Rarity, you gotta step aside or—"

"No, I mean it!" she gushed. "Very classy. Very avant-garde. And the blackened apple-jewel on that choker-band is just the perfect little accent." Rar lifted a hoof and tapped at the busted Element at my throat, whose supporting necklace was now way tighter than it used to be. "I have to say," she finished, "you take to night colors unexpectedly well. It really does make you look rather taller."

I looked down at the fussy little unicorn, now about a head and a half shorter than my Nightmare body. "It, uh, ain't the color, Rar," I said. "But, listen, none of that's important right now! I gotta save Rainbow Dash! From your infernal contraption!"

"Oh, yes, we're all so busy, aren't we?" said Rarity, breezily. "I, for one, am running from a swarm of angry mutant insects at the moment, and I really must be getting on with that. But I just had to take a moment and give you a good word on your remarkable ensemble."

"Thanks?"

"Not at all!" said Rarity. "Now, if you'll excuse me. Ta-ta, darling." She cleared her throat. "AAAUGH! THE BEES! THE BEES!!!" Rarity took off into the night in the direction of the river, the swarm of butter-bee-bats in such hot pursuit that they didn't even spare me a lick of attention. I snorted and shook my head. Ain't even possible to tell half the time when that mare's laboring under the effects of crazymaking poison or if she's just being Rarity.

My path finally clear without having to buck anypony out of the way – something I weren't real eager to get started on given my Nightmare form's demonstrated lack of impulse control – I charged straightaway into the darkened boutique, and saw with my own eyes the vision that the Nightmare had presented to me earlier: Rainbow Dash, suspended above the gemstone furnace on the hair-thin margin of her own flying powers, her wings achingly outstretched and brushing at the glass walls of the gravity tube as she fought tooth and hoof against the unbelievable pull of its beam. Dash's imprisoning cylinder was now absolutely chock-full of shining prismatic radicals, and even though I ain't a weatherpony, I know me a dangerous concentration of rainbow-stuff when I see it. In small quantities, prismatic radicals are safe as paint. Heck, you can even drink an infusion of the stuff without too much ill effect – Pinkie's done it. But you get that much loose rainbow in that small a space all at once, it gets volatile. R.D.'s ma, for example, was a front-line worker in the prismatic reactors of Cloudsdale during the events leading up to the Waterstone Incident; the calamity that befell the city that day took out a good chunk of the Weather Factory, grounded R.D.'s ma for life, and did some real funny things to her kids to boot, R.D. herself being evidence enough of that. Bucking a whole tube full of prismatic radicals in an attempt to crack it open, well, let's just say that it's the sort of thing to give even a Nightmare pause.

I stood there, hemming and hawing for a second, but then Rainbow opened her eyes a sliver and I saw her notice the shadow of me just outside of the tube; and she did that pleading thing with her eyes, that look of desperate hope. Suddenly there weren't no question no more. Steeling myself in advance against the fallout of yet another stupid decision in a long series of stupid decisions in the past thirty-six hours, I wheeled around and gave the glass a good hard buck.

My hooves glanced off the slick surface of the tube, leaving not so much as a mark on it. Whatever Rarity had used to build that thing weren't apparently glass at all, because it felt like kicking steel. I reared up and gave it another solid wham, to the same lack of effect. A third and a fourth followed, ditto. I've crushed cinderblocks with bucks as hard as I was giving that thing, but for all my power, I didn't get more than a chip out of it.

I snarled in frustrated rage. Inside the tube, the spark of hope in Rainbow's eyes began to gutter, and that tore it for me. I called up Constancy again, the spirit of the Nightmare, and felt its power flood and settle into my muscles like a river of iron. The red glow in my eyes rose to blinding, my sparklestuff mane billowed like a solar flare, and all around me time slowed to a crawl.

I reared up one more time and channeled all the power of the Nightmare into my two hind hooves, and the transparent tube encasing Rainbow Dash shattered to bits, loosing a great conflagration of full-spectrum energy onto the world – and it weren't just Rainbow's amassed stuff, neither. Best as I could figure before the explosion took me was that the raw speed and power of my kick had caused my hooves to actually exceed the speed of sound for one fleet moment, thus giving me the distinction of being the first earth pony in history to successfully perform a Sonic Rainbuck. In the split second before the entire place went up, I threw myself at the falling Rainbow Dash, trying to knock her clear of the opening of the furnace and to shield her from the worst of the blast. Shards of science-glass impacted off my impermeable Nightmare hide, and I felt myself slow and deaden in the currents of time, becoming something like a rock that the universe flowed around. For a moment, as far as time and space was concerned, I was a creature of infinite mass and solidity, the metaphorical Immobile Object. I was Nightmare. I was Constancy. I could not be changed. I could not be moved.

The explosion of the gravity tube gave way to the subsequent explosion of the underground gemstone furnace that had powered the Lanthorn, and the resulting blast pret'near leveled every standing structure in a two-block radius; and I was there at the heart of it, a dark unchanging lump of shadow who had thrown herself protectively over a broken blue pegasus mare who meant the world to her, meant so much to her that she had cast her very own soul to the Wolf rather than lose her.

Then the last remnants of the Wondrous Lanthorn collapsed down upon my head. That, too, I endured.

Eventually the smoke cleared and the darkness faded. Rainbow Dash and me were hunkered at the center of a blackened, rubble-filled crater that had once contained Rarity's home and workplace, now reduced to little more than ash and toothpicks.

I stared down at Dash, breathing hard and willing her to breathe in kind. A few heartbeats later, praise the Grower, she did.

Her eyes flicked open, and she groaned in feeble relief. "Applejack," she wheezed, coughing on the words. "I thought... I thought for a second there..." She coughed again, and spat dust. "Ah, never mind. You came through for me in the end." Her head lolled back against the wreckage. "Now, Rarity, though, she's really gonna kill you."

"Ayup," I said, conceding the point this time, my barely-concealed joy coming out as a chuckle. Still alive, I thought, fiercely triumphant. One more friend, still alive.

I got off'a her, and Dash rose to her hooves, shakily, like a foal. Her busted hindleg was basically useless, hanging there limp while the other three (plus a couple wingflutters) picked up the slack. "Wow," said Dash, taking in the sight of it all. "I mean, wow. A.J., do you realize—"

She stopped cold as her turning circuit of the devastation finally landed on me, and she stared, getting her first real look at Nightmare Delicious. Meanwhile, I was staring back at her, for a quite different reason.

Dash's body was, and I don't know how else to put this, seething, boiling like a kettle. One time, in an attempt to teach us all some science, Twilight Sparkle set a perfectly good apple out to rot, taking one little picture of it every, I don't know, hour or so for about a month. Then she ran the entire mess through that film projector of hers, which allowed us all to see, in great detail, the process of decomposition, sped up to lightning speed. Reactions amongst us friends were mixed. Dash thought it was awesome, Rar thought it was horrid, Pinkie thought it was neat in a kind of icky way, and it made Flutters, predictably, scared. Me? I couldn't make it through that thing. There was something so profoundly wrong about watching things decay at that rate that it literally made me queasy, and it was more or less the exact same thing I was seeing right now.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to shake off the apparitions, but it didn't help. My successful attempt to break the gravity tube had dipped my soul too far into Nightmare-stuff, and now I had its eyes, and saw the world as it saw the world, and it was utterly stomach-turning. I could see the blue hairs on Dash's coat, busily worming their way out of their little follicles. I could see her skin flaking off and boiling up anew from underneath. I could see the feathers of her wings fraying, and new pinfeathers pushing up out of the skin to replace them. Even the sight of her body doing good work, throwing healing muster at her many injuries, made me retch, the sight of coagulating flesh bringing dark bile to the back of my throat.

"Whoa, A.J.," said Dash's body, looking up at me, its eyes glistening with moving currents of vitreous humour. "You got huge!"

"I ain't your A.J.!" screamed the Nightmare, again, trying to shut out the hideous sight of her once-friend, now just a mass of squirming biological tissue. "I am Nightmare Delicious!"

"Oh, horseapples," whispered Dash. "This... this isn't good. A.J., talk with me, here."

"No!" I shouted. "No! I will not talk with you! I will talk at you!" I trembled all over, my knees locking up. "Nay, not even that! I shall command you! Rainbow Dash, I command you to be still!"

"Who's moving?" said Dash, her tongue a grotesque mass of turning cells. "I'm not moving!"

"You are," I said, weakly, slumping to my knees and letting my eyes fall shut. "You have no idea how much you're moving, Dash. Nopony does. Everything's moving, everything's changing, way too fast, and I just... I just want it all to stay put for a spell."

In a moment, Dash was at my side, her forelegs wrapped around my powerful neck. "Hey," she said, her voice shaking. "Hey, it's me, A.J.! It's your pal, Dash!"

"I know," I squeaked. I opened my eyes again, dreading what I would see; but the ghastly portrait of moving flesh was gone, leaving my friend Rainbow Dash in its place once more. I swallowed hard and rose up to my hooves. "Don't you worry about me none, R.D.," I said, not knowing whether to believe me or not. "All this... Nightmare stuff. It's just temporary. It's just until I can retrieve Iggy the Salamander and eliminate Twilight Sparkle."

"Wait," said Dash. "Eliminate... Twilight?"

"Her machine! Eliminate her machine!" I hastily corrected, even as visions of the Metropolis of Canterlot swallowing my family farm swam before my mind's eye. Was I absolutely sure I didn't have the right of it the first time? It wouldn't be hard, after all. She was just a helpless little brain in a jar, now. If it weren't for her blasted technology, she wouldn't even be alive. Maybe she wasn't technically alive, at this point...

It would be so easy, purred the Nightmare in me. It might not even be morally wrong. All you'd be doing is correcting science's mistake...

I gave a bright roar and stuffed a sock in my inner voice. "I can do this, R.D.," I said, hefting Dash up to my back with a startled yelp from her. "I can make this right. But we gotta get you to some shelter first, because when I engage that ro-bot, things is fixing to get nasty 'round these parts."

"What robot?" said Dash, scrabbling against my withers for a second and then lying on them like a wet rag. The girl was positively floppy up there. Dash was tireder than she was letting on.

"Twilight's science fair project," I said, my eyes fixed ahead. "The Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie."

Dash snorted. "She made a robot Trixie? Oh, that's too much!"

"Ain't no laughing matter," I said. "That thing dang near killed me."

"Actually, it kind of is a laughing matter," said Dash, lounging across my back. "Maybe once this is all over with she can use her little project to play make-believe 'Trixie Learns Her Lesson And Becomes A Good Pony' games over and over and over again, because you know she totally wants to. Redemption really gives that mare her jollies."

"Look, would you just shut up for one cotton-pickin' second while I get my bearings?" I said, glancing around at the ruined village and looking for intact, accessible structures. Eventually, my eyes lit on Sugarcube Corner, and I set off toward it in a brisk gallop. "There. The sweet-shop. There's some real sturdy work tables in back, by the kitchen. Once you're inside, get yourself under one of them. I'll try and keep the fighting away from your quarter. Savvy?"

"Savvy," said Dash, nodding. "I mean, I'm not happy at being benched like this, but I gotta admit, coach, I don't think I've got much left. I need a quick breather after that gravity tube."

"Good," I said. "We'll get you that breather. Just... stay safe, hear? I done sold my soul for you, Rainbow, and I ain't gonna let you die on me now."

"Come on, admit it," she said. "You sold your soul for me and a new hat."

We rode in silence for a moment.

"That I did," I said, eventually.

"It is a nice hat," conceded Dash.

"Thanks," I said.

We galloped on.

* * *

I charged into Sugarcube Corner, Rainbow Dash on my back, only to find Pinkie Pie – of all ponies – standing right there in the middle of the mostly cleared-out seating area. Pinkie, for her part, was as wide-eyed and startled as we were.

"Whoa, A.J.!" said Pinkie. "You got huge!"

"Yeah, she's Nightmare Delicious, now," said Dash, still sprawled across my back. "Can you believe it?"

"Pinkie Pie!" I exclaimed. "What on the Grower's green earth are you doing here?"

Too late to stop it, I realized I had just asked Pinkie an open-ended question. The stocky little pink mare took a deep breath.

I practically lunged forward. "Pinkie, w—"

"Oh, I'm so super-duper glad I can finally come clean about this to you girls! My real name isn't 'Pinkie Pie', it's 'Oki-Doki-Loki', a name that means 'Child of the Eternal Party' in the native language of the faraway world I come from originally, a world that was slowly perishing of boredom, and that was a big problem, huge, because my people literally live off startlement and excitement! The Pin'kii, because that's the name we call ourselves, take nourishment from the potential energy found in the difference between what you think is going to happen, and what actually happens!"

"Pinkie!" shouted Rainbow and me, simultaneously.

Pinkie charged on without missing a beat. "So, if you call somepony up to your house and tell them that you just want them to help you with your laundry and all of a sudden you throw on the lights and all their friends are there and they yell out 'Surprise! Happy Birthday!' it generates delicious primal eddies in the fabric of expectation and possibility! We call them 'doozies'! Sadly, everything on our homeworld was just getting way too predictable, so they loaded a bunch of us up into a big cosmic ark and sent us out all across the galaxy to find new sources of surprise to save our dying planet!"

"Now you're just making stuff up to babble on about!" I said.

"Yep!" said Pinkie, proudly. "But if I were a doozy-consuming alien from another world, the surprising revelation that I was in fact a doozy-consuming alien from another world would have been really, really tasty!"

"What are you actually doing here?" demanded Dash.

"Big Blue Monkey," said Pinkie, sheepishly, holding up a worn terrycloth toy with one hoof. "Little Pumpkin Cake was really really sad when she realized we forgot him here at the Corner. I decided I had to throw myself back into a evil science war zone if I ever wanted to see that baby smile again!"

"Can't say's I understand your priorities," I said, "but it's just as well you're here. Rainbow Dash needs somepony to tend to her, maybe help splint her leg back up." I gingerly lowered my injured friend down onto a tabletop. "You two stay low and stay under cover. If things start heating up too bad, consider heading for the hills once Dash gets rested up. But for my money, you're better off in here than out in the open making a run for it. Especially with the entire Canterlot Air Navy up there fixing to keep Ponyville under lockdown."

"Wow," said Dash, rolling her eyes. "What a shocker. Your plan is 'everypony else stay put or maybe run away while I deal with this myself.'"

"What exactly are you on about?" I demanded, the redness starting to claim my vision again. "You told me yourself you needed a rest!"

"What I'm 'on about' is that it's not exactly uncharted territory for you," said Dash. "Just because I'm stuck here for a minute doesn't mean I'm useless to the big picture. Seriously, A.J., since the day I met you, I can count on one hoof the number of plans you've had that actually involve, y'know, planning things, making good use of everypony on your team instead of you turning into Little Miss Let-Me-Handle-Everything all the time."

"Really," I said, glaring at her darkly, a tiny part of me looking on in quiet horror as her coat began to boil again. "One single plan, huh? You want to enlighten me as to what that was?"

"Parasprite herding," said Pinkie, filing at a rough spot on her forehoof with a little emery board. "Season one, episode ten, 'Swarm of the Century', about ten and a quarter minutes in. Still kind of a sore spot for me, I might add."

"Pinkie," I said, turning to her now, "who exactly is supposed to benefit from you constantly talking about our lives in terms of 'parts' and 'episodes'?"

"Fans," she said, offhoofedly, putting away her emery board and pointing straight at you. "Like that one right there. Plus, by being super-random and confusing, I managed to head off that Nightmare growly thing you were starting to do at Rainbow Dash and keep you talking like the normal pony you really are inside!"

I blinked, realizing that she was, of course, right on. "Pinkie," I said, "Y'all got more layers than an onion."

"A big pink onion that makes you smile instead of cry!" she said, beaming hugely.

"Whatever," I said. "Point is, take care of Rainbow. I gotta go get Iggy, and if that means facing down that killer Trixie-bot, well, that's just how it's gonna be."

"Will do, Nightmare Delicious!" said Pinkie, cheerfully. "C'mon, Dash! You're my Big Blue Monkey now!"

"'M not a monkey," grumbled Dash.

"Hoo hoo hoo," said Pinkie, scratching herself under her legpits with her hooves.

I left them to it, heading back outside to the ruined town. Given a choice between facing down a magic silver death machine and being Pinkie's Big Blue Monkey, I know which one I'd choose.

Celestia help you, Rainbow Dash.

* * *

I arrived back at the plaza to the noise of a serious verbal squabble between Brain-in-a-Jar Twilight and the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie, which had presumably been going on ever since I left the scene.

"Look, I don't know how to make this any more clear!" cried Twilight's brain. "You can't use disjunction spells, Robo-Trixie! You just can't!"

"Why?" said the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie, rounding on the little brain-tank. "You can!"

"I can, but I don't!" replied Twilight. "Disjunction is one of the forbidden hexes!"

"Listen to the Master!" hissed Spike, curled around the base of the wheely stand. "The Master is smart!"

"Oh, bite Trixie's shiny metal flank, Sparkle," said the G. & P. R.-T., ignoring Twilight's minion. "Why did you give Trixie these powers if you didn't want Trixie to use them?"

"I was only trying to prove that that body can contain my entire magical capacity! That includes the dark magic I am capable of, but restrain myself from, performing!"

It looked for a second like I was in luck. Maybe with them two all engaged with one another, I thought, I'd be able to sneak past them, retrieve Iggy the Salamander, kill Twilight Sparkle, and be out of Dodge without anypony even getting hurt!

Except... I had just added "kill Twilight Sparkle" to my plan, without even entirely realizing it. I shook my head to clear it and started trying my best to creep forward from rubble-pile to rubble-pile in a subtle fashion, least as subtle as a giant orange-and-black mare with shiny gold hair was able to. Right. New plan. Get into the library, bolt the door, get Iggy, kill Twilight Sparkle, find the cloud-scooter—

"Don't think that Trixie does not see you there skulking across the town square, Nightmare De-Loser!" shouted the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie, over her shoulder. With hardly even a thought, she nailed me with another disjunction hex, causing me to seize up as I threw all my effort and power into shrugging it off.

"See!" came Twilight's voice, through my haze of pain. "See! That! You shouldn't be doing that! Especially not to one of my..."

A wash of light passed over the black surface of the Tourmaline Diadem atop Twilight's brain-tank, and it gave a little purple flicker.

"...friends..."

"Really?" said Trixie. "You don't want me to do... this?" She turned her head and blasted me a third time, sending me into another fit of agony; but each time she did it, it was getting easier to bear as my body got into the habit of staying put and not flying apart into atomic clouds. The ro-bot monster was up and wearing out her best weapon before the tussle even started, and I, for one, was not gonna complain none.

"No!" screamed Twilight, the jewel on her crown flaring even brighter purple. "Stop it, Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie! I am your creator! You must obey me!"

"Why?" said Robo-Trixie, rounding on her. "Trixie is her own mare!"

"You're just a test personality!" shrieked Twilight. "You're only there as a proof-of-concept! As soon as we download you out of there, that gallium-contained alloy body is mine, so I can live in it and be with the Princess forever!"

A slow and dangerous silence passed between the two of them as I struggled to get my hooves under me. "Ah," said Robo-Trixie, eventually. "Trixie understands her role in this, now."

"Good," sniffed Twilight.

"Perhaps, before you eliminate her, you can school Trixie on what offensive magic is morally acceptable to use. What about, say, concussion bolts? Would those be all right?"

"Well," said Twilight, her voice audibly warming at the prospect of a lecture, "attack magic is a dangerous, slippery slope, and should only be used in very dire circumstances. That having been said, yes, a simple focused blast of intense telekinetic energy can be quite offensively efficacious, and it carries with it none of the taint of the darker magics."

"Ha," said Robo-Trixie, "good."

With a harsh whine of summoned sorcery, Trixie's horn flared pink. She lowered her head, pointing it straight at the brain-jar. "So, what you're saying is, Trixie can do what she's about to do with a clear conscience."

"Wai—" shouted Twilight, but her yelp was abruptly cut off as a bolt of bright energy struck her containing tank, knocking it clean off its stand and shattering it into several large pieces on the ground. The little speaker squelched once, gurgled, and went silent.

"No!" screamed Spike, launching himself at Robo-Trixie's leg, which simply turned to fluid metal as he neared it, causing his charge to become a face-flop on the ground. Robo-Trixie seized the little hunchbacked dragon in a telekinetic bubble and held him, upside down, in front of her face.

"Quiet, minion," she said, and then flung him against the outer wall of the library tree. Spike hit hard, tumbled to the ground, and did not move again. Her way now clear, Robo-Trixie advanced menacingly on the largest intact fragment of the brain-jar, now lying crookedly on a jagged piece of rubble. It was the only thing left supporting Twilight's fallen brain, covering it only about halfway with the last remnants of the purple brain-juice, like a mess of poorly-canned pickles.

I growled impotently, watching this scene unfold from across the plaza, willing my body to up and move, already. Meanwhile, the Nightmare in me was in no particular hurry. Beautiful, said the Nightmare. So poetic. The robot doesn't realize she's running off young Sparkle's sense of betrayal. She destroys her own creator, she destroys herself. And you, you spineless cowpony, don't even have to get your hooves dirty. Everypony wins.

I gritted my teeth and put all the strength I could into my voice muscles. "Trixie!" I wheezed. "Y'cain't kill her!"

I cannot believe you! shouted the Nightmare, its voice echoing in my skull. And here I thought Luna was a sop! That lily-livered moon princess has nothing on you!

"And why exactly is that, you pathetic lump of organs?" said Robo-Trixie, raising one shiny eyebrow at me.

The Nightmare roared back into my brain, and I suddenly stood, shaking off the remnants of disjunction like water. My eyes flared red. "Because Twilight Sparkle is mine!" bellowed Nightmare Delicious. The rocks and stones of the plaza began bubbling to my sight, their tiny, unnoticeable processes of decay down into sand suddenly writ across my vision like fireworks. I stamped, snorted, pawed at the ground, and lowered my head at her. "Ain't enough room in this town for the both of us, Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie!"

"You're kidding," said Robo-Trixie. "You're kidding, right?"

"That's my line," I replied, and I broke into a charge.

Robo-Trixie wheeled about and faced me, her vengeance upon Twilight temporarily forgotten. She trotted lazily across the plaza at me, then anchored her hooves in the dirt; and then, as I loomed in close, she blasted me with a fourth disjunction hex, probably figuring that it would crumple me in my tracks again.

The Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie figured wrong. Even regular Nightmare-infused Applejack could probably have shrugged off disjunction after three successful attempts previous, but I was in full embodiment now, the very picture of Nightmare D., and my Constancy was a thing of sheer terror. I carved through that bolt of pink energy like a pegasus pony cutting a cloud, and slammed into Robo-Trixie with the full force of my massive body. Trixie, who apparently needed time and concentration to convert herself from solid to liquid form, gave a surprised yelp and went flying, and just like that, I had taken care of the threat of her. Now to make my way to the library, get Iggy, kill Twilight Sparkle, and then—

Fire blazed across my neck from on high, painfully scoring even my demonic hide. I yelped, stumbled, then turned on a hoof in the direction of the attack. Hovering there in the air, nearly above me, was Trixie again. For a second I thought she had maybe succeeded in the near-impossibly hard act of telekineting her own body, a skill most unicorns lose once they leave infancy. But no, it weren't no unicorn magic holding her up. Stretching out from either side of her back was a pair of shiny silver pegasus wings, beating arrogantly at the evening sky. I didn't frankly know it was possible for a pony to flap her wings arrogantly, but Trixie was sure pulling it off.

"Ha!" said the Great and Powerful Robo-Trixie, flicking her gleaming mane to the other side of her slim, elongated horn. "Trixie has used the fantastic shapeshifting abilities of her liquid metal body to give her a form more befitting her amazing power and talent! From here on, you shall address her as 'The Great and Powerful Princess Robo-Trixie, Immortal Alicorn of Being Inconceivably Better Than Each and Every One of you Hayseed Rubes'!"

"That's one heck of a name to try and abbreviate."

"Thankfully, you won't need to worry about it for long, because in a few moments you'll be an APPLE-FLAVORED GREASE SPOT!" Trixie's horn whined, glowing pink again, and she unleashed a crashing salvo of concussion bolts at me from above. I dodged the worst of them and scurried for cover behind one of the larger rubble-piles.

Trixie laughed at me again, and the noise was like frothing acid. "What's the matter, Apple-Slack? Unable to bear the unmitigated potency of Princess Robo-Trixie?"

"Nah," I said. "Just lookin' to find a big enough rock back here to chuck at you."

"Wha—" said Trixie, as the desk-sized boulder streaked towards her. Thank y'kindly, Nightmare earth pony strength, I thought, spitting gravel out from my teeth. Trixie went liquid, dropped through the air like a blob of mercury, and reformed a couple meters beneath her original position. "Ha!" she said, watching the rock sail past her and crash to earth at the far side of the plaza. "You missed Trixie!"

"Yup," I said, this time from atop the rock-pile. "Got you looking at it, though, didn't I?"

Trixie whipped around just in time to see my flying leap straight at her. I connected this time, impacting her still-solid metal body with a crunch, and shoved her before me as I fell, with the aim of slamming her to the ground in front of me. At the last instant, Trixie's horn flared and she teleported up just far enough to reverse our positions; I hit ground first and immediately took a hard hoof to the back of the neck. I flipped over and got my forehooves under me, raising my hindhooves for a real iron-bending haymaker kick, but Trixie was ready for me this time, and she just kind of glooped around my blow. My followup spin-around forehoof cuff went down the same way, and just like that, our little duel became a hoof-to-hoof scrap, right there in the shadow of Town Hall.

A strange sort of dance followed, a tiny little version of the eons-long struggle between our two immortal patrons. As champion of Constancy, I had strength, stability, and relative impermeableness on my side; but Robo-Trixie, just like Change, was faster and trickier and more, uh, amorphic. Trixie's horn apparently needed the crystallization of her solid form in order for it to touch the Stream and sling spells at me, and so long as I kept her on the defensive in her more liquid configuration, she couldn't throw any real unnatural decisive magic at me. On the other hoof, it meant that none of my blows could even connect, and unfortunately, striking blows at her was about all I could think of to do. Not that I had any illusions of being able to injure a critter without organs or discernable anatomy or any kind of vulnerable spots whatsoever, but if I could just beat her down, push her to her heel bulbs long enough, I could get over to the Library, kill Twilight Sparkle, and then—

The intrusive, recurring, Nightmare-spawned idea of solving all my problems by murdering Twilight broke my focus for just a second, but that second was all that that dang Robo-Trixie needed. Face shining with malice and victory, she promptly shaped one of her forehooves into an impossibly-sharp molecule-wide blade, crystallized herself again, charged the spike with a flare of deadly magic, and proceeded to plunge it into my side, piercing the links of my chainmail duster like it weren't even there. I howled in rage and pain like some sort of infernal bull and staggered down to one knee as Trixie hopped back to watch me twitch for a while. Then she summoned up a wide, bright plane of sizzling magic from her horn and whipped her head around, literally carving the Town Hall pavilion above us in two. One good solid shove of magic sent the entire top half of the building rumbling down at me like a pony-made avalanche.

So much for physical combat: victory, Robo-Trixie. If I was gonna live to see tomorrow, I thought, I was gonna have to cut myself deep and try something new; and even as I thought this, I felt the Nightmare in me quail – foal-like – at the idea of damnable innovation. I ignored its pleas, closed my eyes and summoned up a massive well of power. If I was going down here, I resolved, I weren't gonna go down as a fighter. I was gonna go down as the pony I really, truly, fundamentally was...

...an orchardmare.

The tree that came of my will did not "grow". Growth was a tool of wicked Change. Instead, it was as though the tree had always been there, and I was just making it real. Grim and dark and cannon-metal smooth it was, just like the trees I had seen in the Nightmare's realm, but on a far greater scale. It reached up toward the sky, a branching structure of absolute mathematical symmetry, crowned with perfect dull-green leaves and clusters of shining golden apples. I did not need to crush one of them fruits open to know for certain that they was black as night inside. The tree, that simply was, caught the wreckage of Town Hall, arresting its tumble toward me as tight as a dam holding back water. It rustled and trembled, and a hoofful of fruits dropped from its branches, but it was a tree of pure Constancy and could not be shaken long.

I raised my head to Trixie. "Hey, Princess," I wheezed, coughing up ichor. "How... how d'ya like them apples?"

Trixie sniffed disdainfully, giving her alicorn wings a lazy little flap and fluttering back over to my position. "A cute little gambit, you petty hick-town troglodyte," she said. "Congratulations. You've saved yourself from having a building fall on you, only to meet your doom at the hooves of Trixie's blade. Trixie hopes you enjoyed your extra thirty seconds of existence."

With that, she sent another flare of killing energy down the length of her leg-blade, and raised it to strike.

The blow fell, and impacted Nightmare-wood inches away from my neck.

Trixie blinked. I grinned back at her, weakly. Trixie's blade was stuck up against a second tiny apple tree of my will, jutting up from the ground right where it would have otherwise hit me. The ro-bot alicorn frowned, reared up, and lashed out with her blade again to the exact same response, its killing edge glancing off a third small tree that simply sprang into being at my direction. A fourth and a fifth followed.

"What... what is this?" said Trixie.

"It's me beating your sorry rump, is what it is," I replied, staggering to my hooves. "And I don't mind telling y'all, I'm finding the experience to be powerful satisfying."

Trixie bared her silvery teeth at me and backed away, only to come up against hard and Constant applewood at her backside; a sixth tree, this one a nice healthy strong one. She dodged left, and hit a seventh. Right, an eighth.

Her eyes widening in panic, Trixie shifted into fluid form and tried to dart out of the radius of my brand-new grove of dark apple trees, to no avail. Everywhere she slipped, everywhere she flowed, she was met with two or three more new impermeable trees, until the entire structure began looking like a palisade or a log bunker around her. Squealing in rage, the blob of gleaming metal crawled skyward, toward the only opening left, only to have it close above her in a tangle of fractal branches. Soon, she was lost to sight, trapped within a smooth, perfect cylinder of indestructible wood, and as the last opening closed, even her screaming fell to silence.

And then it was done.

Or, rather, not done entirely. Even as Nightmare, I guess I ain't a totally cruel beast. I would never leave a critter trapped and suffering forever. Might take a few days, but soon enough the Great and Powerful Princess Robo-Trixie would realize that while the branches above her were a solid mass, the roots underneath weren't so much. A little tunneling, a short while of liquid metal glooping, and she'd be free. By then, I hoped this whole mess would be long over, for better or for worse.

Stumbling slowly and stiffly, my injuries dogging at me more than I'd care to admit, I began the long trek across the plaza toward the Ponyville Library. I was in a sorry state. The huge expenditure of dark powers required to bring all them trees into existence had almost burned me clean out; and what's worse, the aftereffects of calling on that much Nightmare had left my soul near to completely consumed. It was all I could do to keep myself from vomiting at the horrendous sight of everyday natural processes, things I would have ignored or even relished if I'd been in my right mind. Every little growing bud on the looming library tree called up a fresh wave of nausea, every little twinkle of the stars above drilled at my eyes like an awl. And greater than even the hurt of my physical wounds was a long, slow, insistent ache, the feeling of what it was to be the creature known as Constancy.

To put it in terms y'all might understand: more than once in my life I've gone too long without food and then tried to pack a little too much hay away at one time in my eagerness to get my belly full. And sometimes when that would happen, that hay would get stuck in my gullet, all wadded up in a wet knotty mass. I could feel my throat working at it, trying to push it down into my stomach but it just wouldn't move for love or money, and I had to run out to the trough and suck down water to try and force it where it needed to go. Difference here was that there was no drink at all that could ease it, no relief in sight. And that, fillies and colts, is what being Nightmare'd actually feels like. It ain't really delicious at all. It's a quiet, weeping, iron-bellied agony, a sense that everything that should be moving, progressing, in your body just ain't.

And the biggest, loudest thought in my mind, even above all that, was the inescapable commandment that I destroy Twilight Sparkle and stop the ghastly Changes that mare would soon bring about.

I dragged myself forward, forcing my way through the waves of pain and insistent demand, finally reaching the library door.

Get Iggy the Salamander.

Kill Twilight Sparkle.

Get Iggy. Bring him to the Discord grove. End the science curse. Kill Twilight Sparkle.

Unable to stop myself, I glanced wearily at the shattered brain-tank, at the last remaining piece of a unicorn I once called friend, pulsing with Change and slick and shiny under the starlight.

I... stepped away from the door, hardly even realizing I was doing it. I took a step toward the brain-tank.

Kill Twilight Sparkle.

I thought of Canterlot City. I thought of levelers, clearing the trees of my farm to make way for a faceless, loveless warehouse store.

Kill Twilight Sparkle.

My knees buckled under me and I collapsed to the ground. Behind me, there came a great roar of moving earth. "Might take a few days", my hoof – the Great and Powerful Princess Robo-Trixie had discovered the weak point in her applewood prison in a matter of minutes. The streaking flood of silvery metal burst up through the ground and rose into the form of a galloping mare, fresh and uninjured and full of deadly intent. All that wrath, and she didn't even realize that the only thing that was giving her power was Twilight's own sense of betrayal. Kill Twilight, and Trixie falls. Don't kill Twilight, and die here on the library stoop. Kill Twilight Sparkle. Preserve your life, now. Preserve your home, forever.

There was no time left. Trixie was upon me. Once again, she raised her shining hoofblade.

I thrust my hoof forward into the shattered mess of Twilight's tank, dipping it deep into the purple goo that was just barely keeping her alive.

"Hey, Twi, guess what," I whispered. "Brain-hug."

With one last feeble pulse of Nightmare power, I made the world around me vanish.