Chapter 35
Chapter 35
Something was wrong.
Kelso thought it was something wrong with her ears, because when the world faded back into view there was no sound to be heard. They were watching as Princess Luna and the rest of Twilight Sparkle’s friends stood over her, poking and prodding the unicorn awake, mouthing words silently to each other.
‘What is going on here?’ Kelso asked, startling herself at the sound of her own voice. ‘Can... can you all hear me?’ she asked, turning to face her friends.
There was a slight murmur between the members of the group, each of them double checking to make sure that their senses weren’t off. ‘I don’t understand what’s going on...’ Hopely said with a frown.
‘I don’t either’, Kelso said, returning Hopely’s frown with one of her own, she turned back to where Twilight Sparkle was lying on the ground, to discover Pinkie Pie shaking Heinrich awake. She watched for a moment before turning back to her friends, unable to hear the conversation as it went along. Kelso opened her mouth to speak again, before they were suddenly caught up in another scene change.
They found themselves standing in a brick and mortar building that looked very familiar to all of them. Kelso turned and looked to each of the walls around her, and recognised where she was immediately. This was the entrance building to FutureTec Headquarters. Unsurprisingly, the room was pretty much identical to what it looked like in the present; the only major difference was the propaganda posters. FutureTec was well known for the posters that it plastered all over the walls of their installations, nonsense about building a better world and what not. One of them caught Kelso’s eye, it was a large poster on the far wall, depicting one of Emerald Sparkle’s combots walking a group of children across the street. ‘FutureTec, Old Friends you never knew you had’, Kelso read aloud before scoffing at the ridiculousness of it.
The messages were basically the same in every FutureTec propaganda poster that was ever made, FutureTec is wonderful, FutureTec is great, FutureTec is your friend, trust FutureTec. Same message in every poster, but as the years go by, the messages just get updated faces.
The door silently slid open, Kelso and company almost missed the silent opening, were it not for someone very important coming through the door.
Sparky turned her head towards the door. ‘Aw fuck, it’s Mister Happy!’ she cried out as a look of terror formed on her face. Kelso turned to face it, to discover the familiar smiling face on a combot’s telescreen; he rolled about silently on the combot’s tracked wheel base, occasionally gesturing with his arms as he rolled along. He was not audible to them, but they could tell he was speaking.
Twilight Sparkle and her friends trotted in after him. The same group that had travelled around the world was now missing Princess Luna, but was joined instead by Vinyl Scratch and Surprise.
Kelso’s eyes fell to Surprise, and she was quickly lost in thought about the strange pegasus mare that had visited them scant minutes ago to give them information that was apparently going to help them out. The meaning of the information given to them had yet to become clear.
‘The eyes are the windows to the soul... the hell is that supposed to mean?’ Kelso asked herself before looking back up at Surprise. The pegasus mare seemed to be off in her own little world, staring blankly into space... or at least, that was what she seemed to be doing, no sooner than Kelso laid her eyes upon her did Surprise snap from her stupor and met the detective sergeant’s gaze, giving her a wink before returning to her own little world.
‘Did anyone else just see that?!’ Kelso said, crying out in alarm at what had just happened. This was memory, and Surprise had just given a direct acknowledgement to their presence.
Viola, Hopely, and Sparky snapped their attention to Surprise, just in time for the pegasus mare to mouth something to them. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll all be over soon’, she said, or at least, that’s what they thought she said, the world was quiet to them, leaving them to guess the shapes that the pony’s mouth had just made.
Unfortunately for Surprise, her antics had not gone unnoticed. Vinyl Scratch glanced over at her, removing her goggles and raising an eyebrow at the pegasus mare. Surprise merely shrugged, and Vinyl Scratch dismissed the incident completely as just another odd ‘moment’ in the life of the world’s oddest pegasus.
To be fair, that was something they could at least agree upon.
…
Pinkie Pie was not happy.
Shocker, right? Not that it should be, considering the fact that she was not really Pinkie Pie. She looked like Pinkie Pie, she sounded like Pinkie Pie, she even thought like Pinkie Pie, but this? This was all a lie. She was a changeling, that had been made apparent to her by the one called the Unknowable Mare.
Pinkie Pie, no, she needed to stop referring to herself as Pinkie Pie. As much as she wanted to be, she was not really Pinkie Pie... but what would she call herself? She tried to think back to her earliest memory. Her earliest memory was of Pinkie Pie throwing her first party... but that was the problem, it wasn't hers.
She was a changeling, yes, but she had no memory of her time as part of the hive, whatever FutureTec had done to her, they had wiped her past clean, and now, here she was sitting in Doctor Fontaine's office, looking through the personal files of the mare that had made her this way.
She had taken Doctor Fontaine's MIP off of Viola Auditore two or three hours ago or so, while they were off viewing the past with the Unknowable Mare, she wasn't going to be using it. Pinkie Pie didn't need to go back and view the past, she remembered it plain as day, up to the point when the National Health Service had taken her DNA samples that FutureTec used to turn the changeling that she was into a falsetto Pinkie Pie.
Now, here she was, sitting at Doctor Fontaine's desk, reading the files on Doctor Fontaine's computer terminal, looking for anything related to who she had been in the past. She had found the files on the project, but it didn't give her any insight into who she was. The only mention of who Pinkie Pie had been before was of a changeling dubbed: Subject Epsilon. There was little on the way of information on the identity of Subject Epsilon, who she had used to be.
Then, a thought occurred to her, what if there was nothing here, because there was nothing to say? What if changelings were nothing more than mindless drones taking direction from the queen? Twilight had told her once that changelings were kind of like bees, in bee hives, there are no individuals, and everyone works for the betterment of the entire hive. Were changelings like that?
Pinkie Pie didn't know, but it only made her more depressed. She had already tried to drown her troubles, and that hadn't worked. She glanced over to the three bottles of rubbing alcohol that she'd tossed rather haphazardly onto the floor. She'd chugged all three of them a couple hours ago, discovering that alcohol had absolutely no effect on changelings. Pinkie Pie had calmed down a bit since then, and had started to think rationally again... or, well, at least close enough to rationally that Pinkie Pie could get to; she was Pinkie Pie, after all.
She had to wonder, had she drank the bottles trying to get drunk? Or had she been trying to commit suicide? She wasn't sure what the original motivation had been.
Pinkie Pie let out a sigh and shook her head. What would Twilight have said if she knew what Pinkie had done? She wasn't sure any more, and it wasn't like she could go ask. FutureTec had created her and changeling clones of her friends, but they were not her friends. They were hollow shadows of themselves. FutureTec had somehow created artificial intelligences out of them, and it had changed them completely.
Pinkie Pie had not spoken to any of them, and likewise the AIs of her friends had barely acknowledged her existence. Being around them had made her uncomfortable, particularly around the Rainbow Dash one. Rainbow Dash had always had something of an aggressive personality, but it had since become warped into hyper-aggressiveness, lashing out at anyone who came close to her.
Pinkie Pie turned her eyes back to the terminal; she had just come across a file marked highly confidential. Her interest was piqued, and using Doctor Fontaine's MIP access, she opened the file and read it over.
'Oh my gosh!' Pinkie Pie cried out. She had to see this for herself.
Pinkie Pie pushed open the door to Doctor Fontaine's office, she walked down the corridor to the lift at the end, swiping the MIP at the lift and taking it down to the seventh sublevel. The lift door opened, and Pinkie Pie's eyes widened. She could not believe what she was seeing.
The room she found herself in was a tall one, ten metres from top to bottom. On the far left side of the room was a large black, vaguely pyramid shaped object. Pinkie Pie pulled up the MIP, and took a look at the files. 'The Selena Tetrahedron?' Pinkie Pie asked.
Looking at the files, Pinkie Pie learned that this object was discovered at a FutureTec dig site on the moon, at a place near the Claudius crater on the moon, apparently, FutureTec had conducted a number of experiments on the device, which they figured was some kind of transportation device, it had apparently transported several scientists over some vast distance, and then returned them... burned to a crisp. The tetrahedron had transported seven or so ponies before it burned itself out. There was another file on here that indicated that FutureTec had apparently discovered another one of these devices in orbit of the planet Tartarus and sent a spaceship out to find it, but Pinkie Pie saved reading it for later.
Instead, she turned to the right side of the room, where she discovered a very strange looking statue. It was a statue of a tall creature that seemed to be composed of differing parts. It had the head of a pony, the body of a snake, a lion's paw, and eagle's talon, mismatching antlers... Pinkie Pie had seen enough, she knew what she was looking at. Standing there in all his glory was none other than Discord in his stone prison.
Arranged in a hexagonal shape around him were six gemstones, Pinkie Pie recognised them immediately to be the Elements of Harmony. The elements were thought to have been lost after the Fall of Canterlot, that was clearly a lie, FutureTec had to have picked them up during the clearing of the wreckage of Canterlot from Whitetail Wood had hid them here ever since. Every couple of seconds or so, lightning arched out of the Elements of Harmony and Discord, impacting on the Tetrahedron on the far side of the room.
It didn't take a genius to figure out what FutureTec was trying to do, they were using Discord and the Elements of Harmony to try and re-power the Selena Tetrahedron.
Pinkie Pie let out a shriek of terror, and took off back towards the lift, heading back up to the fifth sublevel. Kelso and the rest of her friends needed to know about this.
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I was wondering what happened to Discord and the elements. Guess this answers it.
The more chapters I read the more and more becomes clear...and more confusing at the same time. And in a good way (^_^).
Someday, when the main storyline ends I will take it, print it, maybe with hardcover, re-read it again and put it on my bookshelf.
These idiots just do not know when to quit, do they? Maybe their logo should be an umbrella.
1219653
Psh, if I had unlimited access to funds and no boundaries for science, I would totally sign up for the job. Granted, messing around in certain places usually brings about one's own downfall, so you have to exercise caution...
...which is throw into the wind :D.
Also:
encrypted-tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTKHGg_3t_QMuyLDWRQ-ZHRKrrN-nQiZTu6YO4hY91HM_R_rOIf
1220128
That is what I was driving at.
1220159
It's my job to be:
encrypted-tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRgUghrrgJ3zVyIJcBh9bxSPdOp__74ljyknMcyLCXcApHs9lbhWQ
So now we know what Future Tec is up to, the only question is how do our heroes stop it?
1220465 Pretty hard to beat that speed dl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/emoticons/misc_unsuresweetie_flip.png
(Ye may have come a wee late lad)
1221160
stop it?
Stop it?!
The only real option they have is to contain the damage as best as possible.
After all, if Future Tec burns out the Elements before Discord (almost a forgone conclusion) then he's almost definitely going to break free... with literally nothing to stop him and a world that doesn't just support but runs on and requires order to function.
The official Future Tec Logo: jeepbarnett.com/gallery2/d/14743-3/fanart_portal358.png
Black Aperture Science Labs
1237238 Great, Future Tech has offically doomed all of Equestria, I knew Emerald Sparkle was blinded by rage when she founded that company but I never thought it would do something this foolish, also correct me if I'm wrong but I think that spaceship project is what killed the mane six.
1237502
possibly.
Either that or the incident with that gel they made from the ground-up moon-rocks.
Guess what just happened?sherv.net/cm/emo/funny/1/shit-hits-the-fan.gif ...Yup.
1238425 Is that a Portal 2 reference?
1240343
Maaaybe
Idunno.
1253407 How is it not a Portal 2 reference, I might like to know.
1253735
I'm trying out a new concept, I heard it's called 'sarcasm'.
I think that's a silly name though, and will call it 'nonansweristicism'
1253739 Oh it was huh, I shoudl've known it was too similar to not be.
I was wondering when NotPinkie was coming back.
FutureTec is playing with powers much bigger than they are....
I was just thinking about Discord and the Wedding, as I was thinking "Pinkie should already know all about changelings", then I realized that I have no idea that if, in this universe, the Royal Wedding ever happened. (I'm not sure that any of his blogs have ever covered that, have they?)
The elements of harmony and discord? Something told me that they were still around somewhere
1220128 you read my mind