My Little Clony

by therealfeedback

Act I, Chapter V

MY LITTLE CLONY

Chapter V, Act I
Lunacy, Rationalized

I sat, staring at the clock, not wavering even to blink. My eyes burned from the effort, but my mind was running so rapidly that the only action I had time to do was breathe before my neck spun back to some timepiece. Two short minutes until they arrived. A click. Now one.

As I waited, I still ran through the escape over and over, trying to think if there was any point my copy saw me at. There were none, as far as I could tell. I couldn’t be certain though, and I had to hope if he saw me, he’d assume he was seeing things.

Click. The time was upon me now; they’d be here any minute. I glanced away from the clock, to the wall I had pinned all the photos and notes onto, before shooting back to the clock. Any minute now…

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“It…it was just my mind playing tricks on me, right?” The Caesar in the empty streets spoke to himself in a nervous tone, still unsure of what to make of what he had seen. “It had to be…two of me, that’s…that’s absurd! …Right?”

As he spoke to himself, words echoed through the empty Manehattan streets. “How much farther?” A female voice asked in an exasperated tone. “I’m a magician, not a runner, I didn’t agree to run for miles to get all the way here in two hours, and then walk back to Caesar’s whenever he has some crazy idea when I let him finance the act!” A single word from the whining rung in Caesar’s ears. Namely, his name.

“Will you just shut up already?” Another female voice chimed in. “Cee’s paying for our acts, one evening isn’t a lot to pay for that, is it? Honestly, it’s a miracle somepony like you can stand life on the road at all…” Caesar slowly crept closer, inching his way towards the group to get a better ear, back against a wall.

“Excuse me?!” The first voice came back, exasperation replaced with indignation. “Are you daring to suggest that somepony like you, who’s pass at entertainment is playing with other people’s music, is more capable at tolerating being a performer than the Great and Powerful Trixie?! I’ve never…” The voice trailed off into incoherent yelling, interlaced with obscenities, before there was a loud banging noise.

“Will you shut up?! Some of us are trying to sleep!” The voice this time was male, and came from above, probably from an apartment window of a stallion woken up by the whining. The item that had caused the bang was still a mystery, though not for long, as a few moments later, a metal trash can slammed hard into Caesar’s face.

He hit the ground, stunned a moment from the impact. As he slowly centered himself once more, he noticed his monocle was broken, and his hat was missing.

“The nerve of some ponies…” The whining voice said softly. Caesar glanced around for his hat. It was sitting right beneath a streetlight, its black presence in the center of the yellow light oddly somber.

“Doc, is she always this whiny?” The voice was once again feminine, but this time came from a different pony than the last two. “Somehow, I get a bad feeling so, Derpy.” Another voice, this time masculine, said in response. Caesar caught the hat in the light, running towards it.

“I hate you both right now…” The first voice said. Caesar kept heading toward the hat.

“Can we please all just focus on getting where we’re going to instead of fighting for--” The second voice cut itself off, as Caesar slowed to a stop, picking up his tophat and putting it back on. As he turned to return to his following distance though, he realized an issue. Specifically, he was now in plain view of the ponies he had been following. A sickening silence floated in the air as they stared at each other, not sure how to react.

“…That’s…” A blue pony, and the owner of the first voice, said, before being signaled to be silent by another with a tan coat. “Were you following us?” He said.

“I…well…you mentioned my name, I figured that you—“ He stammered as he spoke, trying to cover his story without being obvious, and at the same time dancing around an uneasiness in his throat.

“We did?” The tan-coated pony said again to Caesar. “Who are you then?”

“C-Caesar.” He answered. “I work as a accountant. I’m sure you mentioned my name?”

“I think it must be a different Caesar then, you don’t look familiar. Two ponies with the same name isn’t that odd, is it?”

“I…I suppose not…” He replied.

“Off with you then, I’ve no issue with a mistake, but I don’t like ponies who follow others around like this.” Caesar nodded, walking off down the street in the opposite direction. “I do need help…” He thought to himself. “Following others, eavesdropping, I need rest…”

A few yards away the tan-coated pony turned to the others he was with. “An accountant, that’s what Caesar said one of his doubles was…maybe it’s not so crazy…”

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There was a knock at my door. It was a half-hour after when the others were supposed to be here, I was shocked that The Doctor of all people was so late. I walked over, opening the door, the four from before standing on my doorstep.

“Sorry we’re late,” Vinyl said. “We ran into a…friend. Said his name was Caesar.” A chill went down my spine as I heard my name. Apparently the look on my face showed my uneasiness, as she nodded in response.

“That’s…interesting. Did anything…happen?” I asked nervously.

“No, he walked off after we explained it was a misunderstanding.”

I nodded, still concerned, but less so. “Alright, come in, come in. We have a lot to discuss.” I motioned to my side, and the four entered.

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“You already have the basic idea from before.” I said, walking around the wall I had my theories on. “Hopefully speaking to another me is enough to convince you I’m not crazy. You all saw your pictures, and there are others, but that’d take too long to go through all of, I could ramble about all this for all night. Instead, I’ll cut straight to the point.”

“We’re going to start ‘looking into’ our potential Game Masters. We’re going to need to act quickly if we want to have any chance of success. I have a grand total of five current suspected Game Masters.” At that, I tore an envelope off of the wall, pulling a set of photos out of it and handing them to the four.

“Whoever the Game Master is, based on the actions I’ve been able to discern them dictating, they wouldn’t be able to resist becoming a leader in whatever group they’re in, even if it makes them more suspect. As such, most of these are in leadership positions.”

“The first is a pony way out in Appleloosa named Silverstar. He’s the Sheriff there, and while that doesn’t seem like much, the Sheriff is pretty much singlehandedly the law in frontier towns like this. Match the fact a relatively obscure frontier town is small enough for him to go undetected, but still feel in-charge, and the lack of duplicates there, and it’s the only frontier town that seems like the Game Master could be there.”

“The second Bastion Yorsets, one of the head professors at the School for Gifted Unicorns. The entire staff is actually under suspicion, but Yorsets is second only to the headmaster, hence why they’re under his name here. The power of the position speaks for itself, and if they’re intelligent enough to play the Game Master, they’d be intelligent enough to get around Celestia, they’d have access to the resources.”

“The third is Photo Finish, the photographer. This woman essentially controls the entirety of the clothing industry; the power factor is there, as is the ego. I’ve worked with her in business before, so I can assure you she has more resources than anyone would guess. And I probably don’t know all of what she has, either.”

“Fourth is Princess Luna. This is really as a precaution more than it is for actual investigation – She’s been gone for too long to accurately control the experiment. There’s a chance, if she’s the Game Master, that even on the moon she could control things somehow, but it’s unlikely. Still, she’s second in power only to her sister, and she definitely has access to the resources.”

“Wait a minute.” Whoof chimed in. “Please don’t tell me you’re going to say who I think you are as the fifth?”

“Knowing you, I do believe you’re correct.” I answered.

“The fifth, is Princess Celestia herself. She’s been alive long enough that she never would’ve needed to rely on cloning herself, she has the leadership position, she has the resources, if it weren’t for the fact there’s nothing shady about her, she’d be a perfect match. You shouldn’t be able to keep something like this secret so long with her position though. Or at least without anything slipping out.”

“You do realize that one, and probably Princess Luna as well, is treasonous, right?” This time Vinyl was the one speaking.

“I’m well-aware. But I’d say if they’re the one, I wouldn’t mind backstabbing them.”

“Okay, so we have a list of maybes.” Whoof once more. “Who do we start with?”

“Photo Finish.” I replied. “She’ll be in-town tomorrow. We’ll gather what information we can, and if we can do so discretely, we’ll ask her a few questions.”

“I assume you have some sort of plan? We’re not just going in like an uncoordinated gaggle of idiots?” Trixie was the one speaking this time, annoyance in her voice.

I nodded. “Of course.”

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“Is Doctor Herald in?” Caesar asked at the door of a large medical office. “I know it’s late, but…I think I need help mentally.” A few moments later, a pony with a brown coat opened the door.

“Caesar, what’s wrong?” He said in a concerned voice. “And…why is your tophat damaged? Where’s your monocle?”

“It’s a…long story.” The gray pony replied. “But I don’t know if it’s because of what I had to drink, but I think I’m starting to see things.”

“I…I think I saw two of somepony.” The look of concern on the doctor’s face turned much sterner.

“…Exactly alike?” He asked, to which Caesar nodded.

“Identical. I know it sounds crazy, but…” He stared off into the empty streets as he spoke. As he stared off, Herald reached one hoof behind the wall of the building, lifting a pane of glass and pressing a small, discrete button.

“Come in, it sounds like you’re a little out of your head. I should have something for that.” Caesar nodded, entering the building, closing the door behind himself. A single, fatal mistake. “Right then, I believe what you need…is right here.”

As Herald spoke, there was a stinging sensation in Caesar’s neck; a needle. Within moments, he was on the ground, incapacitated, but still very aware, and very awake. The doctor sighed, shaking his head.

“Poor, poor Caesar...” He said. “I never really like doing this to my patients, but it can’t be helped when you see a copy…I am one of the city’s monitors for any of these mishaps after all, this is a duty above medicine…”

“Truly a shame, you were a pleasant enough fellow. However the Game can’t be interrupted. There will be a group here for your collection and Removal within the hour, please don’t make too much fuss if the drug starts to wear off before then.” The pony on the ground stared up, his expression frozen and unchanged, but the thoughts going through his head clear enough.