Afraid Of My Shadow

by Deyeaz

XXII - Breaking and Entering (Praxis)

~Afraid Of My Shadow~

Written by CraimerX and ShadowWeaver

Proofreaded by the onlyoneofmeisyou

XXII - Breaking and Entering (Praxis)

Octavia relayed the whole story to me as the doctors carted away Trixie and Riku to one of the emergency rooms. I could only sit and listen in horror at what had happened. Jace was kidnapped... Vinyl was violated... and poor Wubsy was to be traumatised for what I presumed would be the rest of his life...

...And it was all due to the filthy pigs that Umbra kept on long leashes.

“Oh, God.” My heart was clogging my throat, my mind muddied and torn asunder with what happened. Why? What good would come of it? “This is terrible....”

“I know.” Octavia inspected my clothes, which were smeared with ash and slightly scorched in places. She wiped her eyes, the sclera peppered with bloodshot cracks due to the weeping she’d been doing. “What happened? Your attire looks filthy, and Riku and Trixie looked like they were covered in ash and soot.”

I gulped and slouched in my chair, head hung low. “...I don’t want to talk about it.” My voice, barely a mumble, was still heard by her keen pony ears.

“You can tell me, Praxis.” Something hard to the touch was placed on my shoulder. I looked to see Octavia’s charcoal hoof on my shoulder. “It’s okay.”

I raised my head to look into her violet irises. “The same guys who are slaving away for Umbra? They burned my house down, with my son and Trixie inside.”

Octavia gasped, her emotions being a blend of shock, which soon metastasised into sadness. “I’m so sorry for what happened. How long will they be in the hospital?”

“A few days or so, until they manage to get rid of all the ash they inhaled.”

“Oh....” She scratched the back of her head bashfully. “Listen, do you need a place to stay? Since Vinyl moved out of our duplex in the town to live with Jace, I’ve just lived alone there for a while. There’s a second room for you and Trixie, and Riku can bunk with me.”

At the mention of me and Trixie sharing the same room — sleeping in the same bed, mind you — heat blazed throughout my cheeks like a fire was lit in my mouth, and my ears slumped down and pointed to the white laminate tile flooring. “Praxis, is something the matter?” Octavia inquired.

“What?” I shook my head. “Oh. No, I’m okay.”

“Are you certain. You started blushing particularly hard when I mentioned you and Tri–” As quick as a lightning bolt, she gasped again, eyes wider than saucers and flooding with excitement. “You like her, don’t you?”

“Oh, Goddamnit,” I grumbled in defeat.

Octavia’s smile never faltered, teeth like diamonds in the fluorescent light, as she said, “You do like her! Of course, I should’ve noticed the signs: you had been awfully sweet to her since you met her.” I tilt my ears further down and try to ignore Octavia’s words, yet they still jackhammered into my skull, the cartilage of my ears failing to deaden the noise. “So, have you proposed to her?”

“...” My cheeks burn even harder than prior the question.Yeah, I proposed to her, alright. And it was an utter bust....

“What seems to be the issue now?”

“I did ask her out, yes.”

“Did she say yes?” Octavia was still as happy as a clam. Only when she witnessed more silence from me did the smile soon evaporate. Another gasp was elicited from Octavia. “She didn’t say no, did she?”

“She did.”

"Oh, Praxis..." Octavia frowned. “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure she’ll probably come around eventually.”

“Sure” → “probably” → “eventually”. What is this I don’t even....

“Well, right now, we got some bigger problems than love. Where are Wubsy and Jace?”

“Well... Wubsy’s still in the mansion… I-I don’t know where they took Jace…”

“I’ll take some wild guesses then.” I stood and took in a deep breath, walking for the doors.

I started to think to myself then. Where are they holding him? Not in the castle dungeon, that’d be too obvious... Somewhere that’s discreet, that’s so well hidden... I can’t think right now, too much shit on the mind....

“I’ll go see if Wubsy knows,” I said, standing up and knocking my hooves on the tile floors to remove any dirt that had been collected from my run here. “Maybe he’ll know–”

“I-I’ll come with you!” Octavia hopped off of her chair and stood at my side, orchid eyes looking determined.

“Well, come along,” I responded, crouching low for her to hop onto my back. Octavia clambered on, and we both left the hospital as fast as my legs could take us: a relatively fast speed and an even shorter time reaching Jace’s estate, yet I was still tired from Umbra’s Essence Drain, panting lightly at both the speed and distance I travelled. The door was already open when we got there, leaving us both curious and paranoid over what went down at the scene of the crime. I pushed it open wide, and we went slack-jawed at the sight.

The inside was positively ravaged: papers & books strewn across the floor, furniture turned over violently; I think I even saw a scarlet liquid that looked horrendously like blood, splattered on the walls like some macabre painting. ((Holy shit,)) I swore in Arabic, heliotrope eyes scanning the entire grotesque clutter. My ears picked up the sound of crying coming from the kitchen: it was muffled, meaning whoever was crying was hiding behind something. “Stay close to me, Octavia.” A grunt of agreement confirmed that Octavia would perform as she was asked, huddling next to me.

We both trudged through the wreckage, getting closer to the source of the crying. “That’s Wubsy, alright,” Octavia murmured as we entered the kitchen. Swiveling my ears to track down where the crying was coming from, I found that Wubsy was hidden away inside the pantry under the sink. Sure enough, I opened the pantry doors to discover the white, gold-maned colt weeping viciously into his hooves. At the sight of us, he tackled Octavia in a huge bear-hug, almost squeezing the very life out of her.

“Aunty Taviiiii-i-i-iii...!” He wailed into her chest, sniffling and hiccuping as he cried. “T-They took Daddy! The-They took Daddyyyy-y-y-yyyy!”

“Shhh... it’s okay, darling,” Octavia reassured the blubbering colt, who was sobbing into the mare as hard as he could.

“Wubsy...” I crouched down low to meet Wubsy’s eye level. “Look, I’m going to need to do something. This won’t hurt a bit, and when I’m done, we can go and get your father back, alright?”

Wubsy sniffled as he looked at me with bloodshot, puffy eyes. “Ok-okay,” he whimpered. Octavia let him down to face me, and I slowly went to place my hand on his forehead.

“Praxis, what are you–”

“Not now, Tavi,” I said to her. “Now, Wubsy, could you please concentrate on what happened?” Wubsy, despite the reluctance that betrayed his face, nodded, and shut his eyes to make the reminiscing easier. I lowered my palm onto the colt’s forehead, and the eye on the back started glowing it’s bright cerulean hue. From my point of view, it felt like I was traversing at millions of miles per second, the way black tunnels formulated around my eyes as my vision faltered and died. In an instant, though, my eyesight returned; however, I was at a much shorter height than earlier, and in a different location, indicating that I was gazing through Wubsy’s point of view during Jace’s abduction.

I was peering through an infinitesimal crack in between the pantry doors. Off in the distance, I can hear crying, from a female: undoubtedly Vinyl. I watched through Wubsy’s eyes as two large, hulking black ponies started to drag Jace off toward the door. “Wow, this fucker’s heavy,” one of them muttered.

“Don’t worry: once we get him to the Factory, it’ll all be worth it…” The other readjusted his faltering grip on the human body before taking him out the door. The crack between the pantry doors closed shut, leaving a shaking and sobbing Wubsy inside to mourn in the dark what had went wrong.

Even though the pitch darkness was unpierceable, I sensed my vision becoming black once more, as well as my subconscious travelling at light speeds like before: the memory was coming to a conclusion. Sure enough, I was back to looking at life through my own eyes. Unfortunately, I wasn’t standing up like I was earlier: instead, both me and Wubsy seemed to have spilled over, lying the ground.

“...Why the hell am I on the floor?” I said in confusion, until I remembered what happened at Nutmeg’s cafe back in Canterlot, when I met Trixie.

“Well, both of you–”

“–Went glowy-eyed, hovered a few feet of the floor, and I was talking in a strange language?” I finished for Octavia, who was dumbstruck by my answer.

“Well... yes. How’d you know that?”

“It’s happened to me before.”

“Ah.” Octavia helped both me and Wubsy get to our hooves, the latter still shaken up from having to bring up such an awful memory. “So, what did you see, Praxis?”

“I saw them taking Jace somewhere — a factory, they said.” Octavia’s eyes contracted to pinpoints at the word “factory”, and her lip quivered like quicksilver. Her face had dread written all over it. “Octi... you know exactly what I mean, don’t you?” I said, suspicion creeping into my voice.

“Th-they took Jace to... the Rainbow Factory,” she confessed. I knew what she was talking about. So, the Rainbow Factory — a horrid facility where Pegasi who failed their Cloudsdale flight exams would be grounded up in the machines of the factory and became part of the rainbows that flourished today.

Umm... allow me to explain. According to the actual fanfiction by AuroraDawn, a thousand years ago, when Celestia banished Luna from Equestria and sent her to the moon, she was charged with three tasks. She originally was in charge of raising the sun, and showering the land with rainbows. But, with the moon being an additional task, she had to hand down the responsibility of rainbows. Celestia entrusted the Pegasi of Cloudsdale to make the rainbows for her, from them on. For the first dozen years, the Pegasi of Cloudsdale were given powerful unicorns to help create Spectra, the pure pigment or colour that exists in all things, but cannot be harvested because of the impossibility of separating colour from objects.

But then Cloudsdale’s top engineers made a breakthrough: they discovered a way to extract pigment, and it was so easy even a simple machine could do it; however, it couldn’t be done with just anything. The conditions had to be right. So, they decided to harvest the Pegasi that had failed their flight exams.

“Quick, Tavi.” My heart was racing in my chest, pounding against my ribs like a hammer to nails. “We need Pegasistance.”

“Really? Pegasistance?” Octavia scoffed.

“Shut up, I’m having an internal conflict going on right here.” I was worried sick to my stomach about what was happening, and I couldn’t help but worry: that memory could have been constructed several minutes or even hours ago. Just the thought of seeing a peach-coloured rainbow constructed from Jace’s flesh gave me a full-blown case of the heebee-jeebees. “But how can we get to Cloudsdale? Last I checked, none of us could can walk on clouds like Pegasi and griffins can.”

“And Cloudsdale is just an hour’s jog away to the northwest!” Octavia was the one worrying now. “How can we get there in time?”

“We?” I reiterated. “You’re not coming: I don’t want another friend in harm’s way. And an hour away to the northwest is just a cakewalk, even with this Essence Drain I’m under.” I tapped the three dark scars on my body to show Octavia what I was talking about.

“But–”

“No ‘buts’. If you get injured because of me, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.

“Fine... as for getting in there, you can just ask some unicorn for a charm to walk on clouds,” Octavia suggested.

At that moment — as if a lightbulb turned on over my head — I had the answer to our problems. “And I know just the unicorn....”

---

Only a few moments later....

---

It had taken a few moments of persuasion to get Twilight Sparkle, the most talented unicorn I know, to perform the Walk On Clouds Charm on me so that I can get into Cloudsdale without failure. At first, Twilight had been extremely skeptical, saying it was dangerous and that I could get killed. Lies were told, strings were pulled, and bribes were made, but I had finally been given the spell.

Still, I was gonna regret getting up at the asscrack of dawn to do all of Twilight and Spike’s errands after this blew over....

“Okay... let’s do this...” I muttered to myself, jumping out of the hot-air balloon I had nicked from Twilight while I was at it. I landed on the cumulonimbi of Cloudsdale with a soft, muffled flump, as if I had just stepped on a mountain of pillows. This would make sneaking in pretty easy....

“Hey!” A slightly scratchy voice called, making me jump.

“Rainbow Dash!” I hissed as I turned around to face her, her loud entry quite possibly almost blowing my cover. “What are you doing here?”

“I followed you here, dude.”

“Why? You know what I’m about to do is dangerous.”

“I-I know, but... Look, I just wanted to make sure you get here in one piece, is all.”

“...Alright. Well, thanks, RD. That means a lot.”

“Don’t mention it, P,” Rainbow Dash said nonchalantly. It felt odd, saying goodbye to a character who is actually the manager of the factory I’m trying to break into. It’s slightly paradoxical, since she should be in there and not out here, according to how the Rainbow Factory fiction should work.

Before I could leave, however, I heard her clear her throat, and as I turned around, I see her stick out her hoof. I thought she was expecting a handshake, but the angle it was at, the way the leg was out straight....

It was official: I had just given Rainbow Dash a brohoof that she requested, something that I’ve been longing to do since I discovered My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. She grabbed my hand and pulled me into a quick hug. “Just... be careful in there, Fluffy,” she said worriedly, rubbing my back. Okay, now I felt my brain coagulate from how incredible this was. She smelled like the sky before the brewing of a rainstorm.

“Relax, Skittles,” I told her, pulling away. “I’ve got this under control.” I watched her snicker at the stupid nickname and fly back to Ponyville. I turned to face the factory, took a deep breath, cracked my joints, and made my way towards the wall to the left of the gates. While breaking and entering wasn’t really my thing, I didn’t have a choice right now. “Let’s do this....”

I unsheathed Tsubaki and cut a few eye holes into the cloud wall, peering around for any guards. Only four were patrolling the perimeter, and the balcony that led to the inside wasn’t that far of a leap for me. Once the holes were covered back up, I extended my magic arm onto the wall’s lip. I lowered myself, letting my arm grow taut like a rubber band before catapulting myself through the air, high above the head of the patrols. Even though I was out of range of the balcony, I slung my magic arm to the rim of the balcony and pulled myself up, checking behind me to see if I alerted any guards. Nope, they were still clueless.

Phase 1 complete.

As quietly as I could, I snaked inside the factory and around the guards watchful gazes, the shadows blessing me with invisibility. Minutes snailed by as I navigated through the factory, looking for my friend, and I watched as the Suits worked the conveyor belts, sawing apart the colour-depleted bodies of the failed Pegasi as they fall into a grinding pit. ‘Jace, can you hear me?’ I thought in the vain hopes that he wasn’t cut off from his magic as I continued sneaking around.

‘Yeah... I can hear you... But I want you to do one thing for me, Praxis...’

‘What is it?’

‘...Run.’

~End of Chapter XXII~

Comments

[lolz anonymous]

oh shit!

[the other sans]

And thus the Rainbow Factory is real... in this world... time to grind some shadows with irony But that would just make black bows... I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE!!

[kitsuneito]

Jace you bastard.

[Gigabyte]

It's like the spy from tf2, " can I make a suggestion? Run."