A year has passed, Twilight has been having nightmares that border on the edge of reality, Naudia has been having problems expelling hatred, and an unfriendly figure is coming to call in to confirm.
A year has passed, Twilight has been having nightmares that border on the edge of reality, Naudia has been having problems expelling hatred, and an unfriendly figure is coming to call in to confirm. From here Twilight will learn the terrifying truth as to why Luna has to bring the stars out at night, and it will change Twilight.
Naudia stared at the sticky porcelain bowl before her. It was sticky with her sick, the water stained an angry red with hatred. She didn’t want to think about where it was coming from. In the roundabout aftermath of glacial thinking, trying to find something else to look at Naudia couldn’t think about more than one thing at a time right now. Involuntarily she was drawn down that path.
She knew some part of that was from ponies, while her place in rescuing Canterlot was well known, or at least the story of how she put down Chrysalis was, she still “looked evil” according to the ponies. But that wasn’t where more than a tiny fraction of it came from, the majority of it came from the font of hatred that welled up from the depths of that visitor.
Usually most ponies required something to hate, and if you put them in a room that was pitch black they couldn’t muster up very much if any and tended to sleep a lot more. That thing, with it’s stupid hat, and some sort of long coat that made Naudia worried somebody would burst in and think they had invited something like that into the castle, could hate. It could sit in a dark room, silently for weeks, going on months, and by Naudia’s reckoning going on a full year and hate.
It was never there when she looked for it, but she could feel it there in the room, hating. Naudia couldn’t even imagine where that came from, nor how deep down the reservoir went.
Not even Starlight Glimmer hated that much, even though Twilight had defeated her no less than twice now. Princess Twilight too.
Naudia’s meandering thoughts moved on to the other worry that had been worrying Twilight and Starlight for some time now. They wouldn’t tell HER what it was, but it worried them greatly, sitting over their heads like a great sword.
Naudia had gleaned some things, they had traveled to alternate timelines, something bad had happened. Something so bad that even though Starlight was still mid reform and still showed her previous tendencies Twilight and Starlight worried and worked with equal fervor, in a secret lab so as not to worry anybody.
Naudia needed to help tutor Twilight a bit more on social interactions, perhaps she could do it during Twilight’s magic lessons for her so they weren’t entirely wasting their time.
She was brought out of all this when she heard in the other room Twilight having another nightmare. So she flushed the toilet and decided to try and maybe wake her up so they both could get more restful sleep. After all Luna didn't even know they were asleep somehow, they had just gotten back from talking to her and finding out Luna was starting to get very concerned that she never saw Twilight in the dreamscape.
The little beady drop at the end of the syringe, bright lights, and alien figures inside her home.
It hurt.
She could tell every little thing about that dark beady little drop, how the little things in it swirled around, little black unidentifiable flecks. The way it waved around while whoever was holding it talked to somebody in unrecognizable yet familiarly fuzzy words.
She could never remember what they had said, it was fuzzy, it was clouded, drowned out by anesthetics and dull terror. And even with the perfect recollection of the coal black specs in the beady little drop she had enough time to remember other things about the scene.
Everything about it was strange, unexpected, the lamp was clearly wooden, not from her house, and painted hospital non-confrontational pastels, she recalled that the glass or plastic covering the bulb had an unnaturally natural look about them around the edges like it had grown in from the tree itself closed around the blindingly bright light.
The gloved hand was likewise strange, it was elongated like a gibbons and it looked vacuum sealed shut, like it was just a film the hand was dipped in and it flattened out the hair on the back of the black hand.
The body was impossible to tell through the loose doctor’s scrubs it was wearing, but the head was strange. There was a muzzle there, fur gave an impression of a beard, with floppy ears and the glint of nervous eyes just registering that she was awake.
She hurt.
Muscles burned, she could feel the hurt right down to her bones, her sinuses, the tips of her hooves, she hurt.
Unable to even panic she started to thrash about from the pain that lanced through her. She could feel them, whoever they were trying to restrain her and more shouting she could neither remember or hear through the needle sharp pain.
And then the strangest part about the whole experience, dream or no, she could feel a hand wrap around her hoof and squeeze it comfortingly. She looked up into the eyes of that alien as she felt another jab in her foreleg.
She wanted to see sorry in those barely visible glints of eyes, she wanted to believe as she fell again the voice apologized, but she was falling again. Waking up from the dream that had haunted her for over a year.
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The sheets were soaked with sweat, cold.
Twilight stared at the ceiling phantom pains and fear gripped her. Whatever that was, dream, memory, vision, it had happened in this very room. Twilight found herself curled up on the bed alone, highly unusual, shivering she looked to the edges of the bed and could not find Naudia anywhere. She cast her gaze farther from the bed and caught the gaze of a shadow sitting on a chair at the end of the bed.
The shadow had an aura about it, hatred, unmitigated contempt, the aura miasmically sublimated into the air like a gangrenous wound.
The shadow was so deep that she could not even make out any detail, Naudia liked to sleep in the dark. The outline told her it matched that thing Naudia had described to her, wide brimmed hat, bipedal, and felt like the living embodiment of getting slapped in the face with a cactus.
They stared at one another unmoving.
“So.” It said with a voice that made Twilight want to punch it in the face. “You’re still having that nightmare.
“While I regret that, rest assured your physical safety is not currently at risk.”
THAT was a loaded statement if Twilight had ever heard one, as soon as she thought that she could almost hear the thing smirk.
“The infection is finally complete, you believe. I will be in touch, with as satisfactory an explanation as modern science can give.”
With that the thing got up, picked up it’s chair, turned around and blipped out of existence too fast to see.
That was the problem, what could you do to something like that, that you didn’t know what it was, where it came from, what it’s powers were, or how it came and went. Naudia had apparently been seeing the thing for months now and nothing had happened, in the end Twilight decided that it would have to wait til it wasn’t 3 AM.
That was when Naudia entered the room, looking a bit green and sick.
“So. Much. Hate.” Naudia groaned, leaning on the door frame.
Twilight was still processing waking up alone to that… thing, and couldn’t immediately process what Naudia said.
Naudia shuffled over to the bed and flopped down next to Twilight, it was pretty clear she was out of it, about as much as Twilight. Naudia scooted back on the bed until her back bumped into Twilight, grumbling just loud enough for Twilight to hear it.
“Let’s call in sick today, whatever happens I don’t feel like getting up out of bed.”
Twilight snuggled in close to Naudia as the big spoon and mumbled.
“We can’t, that new changeling sundae joint is opening up next to the cakes today.”
Naudia let out a whine.
“We can’t let Anit down can we?” Twilight countered.
“We can focus on not letting Anit down this afternoon, but lets stay here all morning.”
“Ten AM.” Twilight said smiling.
“Noooo, too early, at least noon.” Naudia pleaded.
“Ten Thirty.”
“Eleven, gotta be at least eleven, it’s not sleeping in if it’s not at least that late.”
“Ten Forty Five.” Twilight countered.
“Fine. But we’re starting tonight’s reading session half an hour early.”
“Fine.” Twilight said in mock indignation holding onto Naudia’s barrel like a plush toy.
They lay like that listening to each other’s breathing in the quiet darkness of the very early morning recovering. There was no need to tell Naudia about the nightmare, not again, or again again, or… Twilight had lost track of how many times she had had that nightmare, unsure if it was a memory, some sort of vision, or just a vivid nightmare.
She did have to tell Naudia about that… thing, it’s just she wasn’t sure how to broach the subject.
“Naudia… I saw...” Twilight faltered, “I saw that thing in this bedroom tonight.”
“I know, it’s been here a lot.” Naudia replied. “It’s hard to spot but I’ve seen it out of the corner of my eyes. I’m pretty sure it’s why I’ve been having so much trouble with hatred lately.”
Why couldn’t I see him then? Twilight thought.
“It said something about an infection being complete, and that it’s going to be ‘in touch’ with a ‘satisfying answer’.”
“You sure about that?” Naudia turned her head to face Twilight. “That thing doesn’t look like it could give a straight answer if you asked it how to fold a napkin.”
Twilight covered her mouth with a hoof and put on her best evil voice:
“You must surrender to me your everlasting soul if you want to understand the secrets of napkin folding.”
They chuckled at that, because there wasn’t anything else to do.
“Even still I have a bad feeling here, like that thing is connected to those alternate timelines you and Starlight visited in some way, seeing the way it-” Naudia stopped before she could say something more.
“Seeing the way it what?” Twilight asked.
“Seeing the way it acts, I could just see that thing being responsible.” And Naudia did not add the tidbit of information kept from Twilight all this time, what she felt in that thing’s all encompassing hatred.
Seeing the way it acted puppeting you, I could see it setting entire worlds to a flame with a cold, hollow laugh. Naudia shuddered. And a smile, mad, intense, like it was the most enjoyable thing to watch it burn.
Twilight was awakened by the smell of coffee wafting into the room. She opened her eyes to see Spike with his special wafting paper fan walking into the room with a steaming cup of coffee.
Now Naudia was usually more of an obnoxiously cheery morning person, the kind of changeling who could already be up when you woke up, didn’t need coffee and seemed to suffer no ill effects from losing sleep. Usually, lately she and Twilight had not been sleeping well, Naudia because of the hatred problems and Twilight because the nightmares were coming back.
While Twilight looked at the pre-prepared coffee with a kind of tired relief, Naudia looked at it with a mild disgust. Naudia had tried coffee some time ago and they found out several things about it, changelings were immune to the effects of caffeine, they could taste bitter tastes fairly well, and no amount of sweetening could cover up the bitter taste for her, so now the smell of coffee just reminded her of that unpleasant bitter taste. This had led to another discovery that changelings were also entirely immune to alcohol, and the control subject turned out to be a jovial drunk for not all that long before falling asleep. The control subject was also not fond of the taste of alchohol.
Twilight still would have taken the hangover she had the next morning over the stress from whatever that thing was… watching her. It promised answers but Twilight could only see that going two ways, bad and worse, either it would cryptically dance around the subject brushing up against the truth and Twilight might as well have gone to a timeshare seminar, or it meant something else.
But there was no sense thinking about it now, it was some eldrich entity that popped in and out where it pleased and didn’t so much as leave a hoofprint on the rug at the foot of her bed. THAT kind of thing, in other words annoying, and Twilight wanted to punch it in the face. She didn’t know where that last thought came from.
Twilight decided it was time to get up and enjoy the day as best she could, the alluring waft of coffee was too much of a temptation for her to stay in bed anymore. She cracked her eyes open, stretched and prepared to start her day with a cup of coffee, and then her princessly duties checklist.
The first thing on the list was, paradoxically, check the list.
“All right, that’s the first thing checked off my list for today!” Which always cheered Twilight up a bit in the mornings.
There was a faint shimmering over in Twilight’s periphery, faint enough that Twilight was almost certain it was just the crystal walls. She could almost convince herself of that, almost. Until she looked closer at it. There was a hint of something there, in the doorway, if it wasn’t so large then Twilight wouldn’t have been able to even notice it. It was almost invisible or camouflaged, or refracted light around itself to be unseeable.
However now that Twilight focused on it she could get a better picture of the outline of what was there and it was large. Apparently it had noticed her noticing it and it shimmered away down the hallway it’s silhouette impossible to catch as it dashed off silently with Twilight dashing off after it spilling Spike’s cup of coffee and accidentally knocking over a sleepy Naudia.
“Hey!” “What’s the deal!?” Were the twin cries that followed after her as Twilight started to literally fly down the hall.
The thing had a strange gait Twilight could tell but it was slippery to her magic, like she was trying to grab onto her brother’s shields, but it didn’t have the same texture as that. It was also able to keep up and had frankly a better grasp on navigation than she did around her own castle.
Twilight was focusing too much on the creature and not enough on the hallway in front of her, beating her wings as fast as she could she didn’t see the end of the T intersection until it was too late to air brake. She tried to get her hooves under her to stop faster, and she did… onto a throw rug.
Frankly that could have been an oiled throw rug for all the good it did stopping her.
Twilight slammed into the wall with bone cracking speed, one of her wings was unfortunately placed so that it was a lever between her and the wall. She closed her eye as a brass decorative candle holder headed straight for her eye.
----------------
Naudia racing after Twilight found her impaled through the head on a candlestick holder. She could do nothing but hold a hoof up to her mouth and stare.
Then to her everlasting horror one of Twilight’s eyes turned to face her.
This was it.
Naudia crumpled up, hooves on her head.
This is what would break her.
“Ummm...”
She was already hearing voices, she covered her ears and tried to block them out.
“Hey!” She heard and squeezed her eyes tighter.
“Something is wrong, get me down from here!”
Naudia took a shuddering breath and looked back at the horror she knew she had to face.
Only to find Twilight flailing around as if she was hung up on something, and to catch her as she pushed off from the wall with a *shlurp*. Things didn’t make sense, skulls didn’t move like that, there wasn’t any blood, and Twilight felt… different in her hooves.
The two halves of Twilight’s head wobbled a bit before Twilight pushed them back together and they sealed back up again. As if nothing had even happened.
This is clearly the sign of some kind of breakdown, Naudia thought, I’ll be having little tea parties in a padded cell from now on.
That was when Spike came into the hallway, huffing and puffing.
Naudia tried to turn Twilight away from Spike so he wouldn’t see what happened to her, but Twilight superseded that by getting up out of Naudia’s hooves and staring dumbly at Naudia.
“What just happened?” Spike and Twilight said in a chorus.
Naudia could only turn to look at Spike who seemed a lot less concerned than Naudia thought he should be. Presumably the walls are covered in blood, Naudia thought, and so am I at this point.
Naudia unable to get over her shock pointed at Twilight.
“I don’t get it.” Spike said.
“Can’t you see what’s happened to Twilight?” Naudia asked.
“Well she looks confused, did she hit her head or something?”
Before Naudia could reply, Spike gasped and ran over to Twilight.
“Oh my gosh! Do you have a concussion?! We have to get you to a Doctor Twilight!” Spike then turned to Naudia, “Don’t worry, modern medicine can solve almost any problem, a concussion should be nothing for them.”
Even though Naudia knew Spike was wrong about the… concussion, Spike was the only one of the three talking sense at the moment and it sounded like a good idea. So Naudia lifted Twilight onto her back and dumbly trotted out of the castle following Spike who prattled on what he knew about concussions.
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Twilight was sitting in a waiting room at Ponyville General. Normally this would be a bland experience to say the least, hospitals not being known for excitement. This waiting room was different, it was the “Pie-Belle waiting room” and had been agonizingly designed by Rarity and Pinkie to stand somewhere around “cheery” and “calming.” Twilight’s own contribution had been a book lending shelf, and Naudia’s changelings had made the blue changeling goop table that had a pleasing woodgrain look to it.
Across from Twilight was a motivational poster that stood next to a rack of pamphlets. The poster contrasted to the pamphlets on various conditions in a way that fitted in with the typical starkness of a hospital in Twilight’s opinion.
Right now Twilight was waiting for her specialist practitioner to have an opening, and she and Naudia both were trying to keep their minds off things. She didn’t know the doctor herself, but she did know two things about him. He used to be Celestia’s personal doctor and he had been moved out from Canterlot to here specifically for her and partially for Naudia.
“It says here that ponies in Canterlot have discovered what they’re calling a ‘rat god’ in the walls of their house.” Naudia said from hiding behind the newspaper.
“What?” Twilight said trying to even envision what that would even look like.
“It was apparently some sort of blob that the rats offered food to and there was a sizable colony of them in the walls at that location.”
“Is there a picture of it?” Twilight was very curious about this development, and scanned the paper to see if it was one of those ‘toilet paper rags’ as her father called them.
“Here take a look at it.” Naudia flipped the newspaper over to show Twilight.
The paper among other things was one of the legitimate ones, and in bold CAPITAL letters had titled the frontpage “SCIENTISTS CALL IT: THE RAT GOD”. Below that title was a black and white picture of two nervous ponies posing with a hole in their wall to reveal a blob that occupied all of the opened up hole and stood at least three feet high in-between two wall studs. Strange bits of food and organic matter stuck out of the blob at random intervals, a wooden spoon here with a cracked handle, a tree branch, what Twilight could identify as a cluster of spaghetti noodles.
The caption below it read: “We thought that we had maybe one or two rats in our house, we never suspected that we had a couple of hundred and this.”
Below another picture showed a bent up mousetrap with little claw marks embedded into the wood, and the kill bar snapped in half. Below the picture was another caption: “Rats exhibit supernatural strength!”
With the article going on about how the couple weren’t too concerned until it appeared the rats were breaking their traps and odd items of food were going missing. Twilight frowned as the article went into warped quotes from a scientist who put out guarded phrases to the tone of “we believe they sacrificed food to it.”
“So, Twilight,” Naudia asked. “What do you think of this strange phenomenon?”
“I don’t know if I have anything to think about it, I’d certainly like to go see it, wherever they’ve decided to keep it.”
“Did you see the part with the quote from the homeowners?”
“Yes, it does puzzle me how a couple of hundred rats can be… stealthy?” Twilight remarked trying to make sense of the article and what it could mean.
“No, not that one, here gimme.” Naudia scanned the paper before flipping it over to Twilight again and pointing to a quote.
“We think it might have saved us some money from a water leak in our house.”
Twilight could only laugh at the humdrum attitude to the “rat god”.
That was when the nurse came out to Call Twilight in.
Doctor Horse, as in Healthy Horse, or Healthy as a Horse, slapped down the X-rays in exasperation.
“Well according to this you don’t have any bones or teeth.”
“What?” Came the chorus reply from the couple in the room.
“Neither your bones, nor your teeth show up in this X-ray.”
“But...” Twilight trying to come up with a rebuttal just smiled and made sure to show her teeth.
Naudia peered down at the X-ray and the whole thing was just strange, one could say… alien. There weren’t any bones on the picture, nor even holes where the bones would be, her teeth were just invisible to the X-ray, and it was pretty clear that something was going on inside Twilight but the X-ray showed them only an outline of her head with wispy things underneath.
“I might have an explanation for the teeth at least, Twilight have you ever had a gemstone filling?” Doctor Horse asked.
Twilight shook her head.
“Mind if I check for one?” Twilight shook her head again.
The doctor lit up his horn and suddenly Twilight’s head lit up like Hearthswarning lights. Everypony in the room stared.
“I might have an explanation for this.” Doctor Horse leaned closer to look at the glow, then pulled out a magnifying monocle to get a better look. “And it’s going to sound entirely outlandish and crazy.”
“Are Alicorns made of gemstones?” Naudia asked, unable to follow.
“No, I was Celestia’s doctor for years and I can say definitively that Alicorns aren’t made of gemstones.”
“But it appears to me that you’re made of diamond, some sort of naturally forming diamond fiberglass, since diamond doesn’t show up on X-rays and other gemstones do.”
The doctor shifted the gem detection spell downwards and the situation didn’t change, every part of Twilight’s body lit up the same way.
“What?”
“Okay,” Spike said, moving ahead of the conversation, “if that’s the case how did she get a concussion from running into the wall?”
There was an uncomfortable silence from Twilight and Naudia at this.
“Spike, I probably should have told you this at first, but I thought I was having some kind of mental breakdown.” Naudia tentatively started. “Twilight didn’t run into a wall, she impaled her head on a brass candle-holder.”
“That can’t have happened, she’s right here, and her entire body is made of diamond!” Spike said, “You two were talking about some kind of history mumbo jumbo on the way back.”
“I saw it come out the other side of her head.”
“I had to pull myself off of it and push my head back together.”
“Well then why wasn’t there any… blood, or anything.” Spike said exasperated. “I couldn’t have gotten there more than twenty seconds after you did Naudia.”
“Her head just kind of… sealed back together or something.”
“Can you point me to where?” Doctor Horse asked still wearing the monocle.
Naudia did so and Doctor Horse peered in close looking for any imperfection in the lattice of light glowing from Twilight. After a full minute of this he pulled back, turned off the spell and said:
“I can’t find a single imperfection, this did happen about half an hour ago or so right?”
“Yes.”
“Could Twilight be a Crystal Pony?” Spike asked.
“Having worked on one or two in the past year… no, their gem effect is more magical in nature and isn’t this fine, this diamond fiberglass is extremely high quality, it would take a skilled artisan a year to make a fiberglass this fine even a tiny amount.”
Doctor Horse realized that everypony in the room was looking to him for answers, to which he had none. Acting on autopilot he decided to do something if only to stall for time.
"Have you noticed anything strange about your partner in the last year Naudia? This goes for you too Twilight, but I'm assuming not since you haven't really visited except for that one cold."
"There was that incident with the bathtub."
"I told you, I just dozed off for a couple minutes." Twilight said defensively.
"You were snoring underwater Twilight, that's not normal for ponies, and you were in the bath for almost an hour."
"I'm sorry, what happened again?" Doctor Horse cut in.
"I caught Twilight asleep underwater in the bathtub a month or so back, I have no idea how long she was under there but it had to have been minutes at the least, almost a half an hour on the outside." Naudia paused, "By my estimation you were somewhere between stage 3 and 4 of sleep, just to the point where you were starting to dream."
"How the hay do you know that?" came a chorus from Twilight and the doctor.
"Sirens of the wastes remember? You have to be dreaming so we can make you dream the right things and extract love."
"Okay so what does that tell us?" Spike asked. "Has Twilight turned into a seapony or been replaced by a P-1000?"
Nopony in the room had an answer, so Doctor Horse, more or less on autopilot at this point spoke up.
“Do you mind if I take a blood sample? I don’t know if it’s going to help, but you’re due for one anyways.”
Twilight grimaced as the doctor got a syringe, this wasn’t like in Canterlot where they have a machine that could do things with magic and less blood. She didn’t feel the needle hurt as it went in but she tensed up anyways, keeping her eyes away.
“Well, that’s a new one on me.”
Twilight looked down at the syringe to find it full of a purple material, no blood. As she stared at it the plunger began to push back in seemingly of it’s own accord, Twilight tensed up again and all of the purple gel pulled back into her leg.
“Please tell me you did that doctor.”
“No, and I wouldn’t even if I had a mind to. You don’t want to push air back into the bloodstream, bubbles in your blood can kill you.”
Everypony stared as the needle was pushed out of Twilight’s skin without the doctor’s help and it clattered to the floor. Doctor Horse picked it up, it was clean.
“Twilight, I’m going to ask you a couple questions, did that hurt?”
“No, I could feel it there, but when I tensed up that happened.” Twilight said.
“Would you mind trying to do that again with another doctor in the room so I can make sure that I’m not crazy?”
Twilight grimaced, but agreed.
Ten minutes later the party trick was done again, same results, same clean syringe, same lack of any wound on Twilight. The doctors conferred with one another and decided that now might be a good time to get a skin sample.
There was a little tube, stainless steel that was used to get a “punch biopsy”. The punch went in easily enough until Twilight looked over at it, tensed up and even against the doctor’s magic it slid back out again. Naudia took Twilgiht’s head in her hooves, looked directly into her eyes and said:
“Look at me, relax, it doesn’t hurt,” Naudia said, “I can feel your emotions it doesn’t hurt, and just like the needle it might just heal right back up again, relax.”
This was enough for Twilight to relax long enough to get the sample done. The Doctor Horse put the sample in a plastic container and turned around to put a bandage over the wound to find the wound and any indication on Twilight’s skin that anything had happened missing.
Naudia had been watching though, underneath Twilight’s purple fur was more purple, and it changed colors strangely, she could only watch for a second before the whole wound closed itself.
“Whoa! It’s like you have super regeneration Twilight!” Spike said.
The doctors had other things on their minds though, the sample was moving, sluggishly moving it’s way across the container, towards Twilight. Doctor Horse experimentally tried to close the plastic petri dish on top of the… blob, but it was like closing the lid on top of a pebble, it did not budge.
Naudia feeling dangerous decided to try something a bit crazy, she picked up a pair of scissors from the stainless steel tray.
“Twilight do you mind if I do something a bit crazy?”
Twilight was staring at the petri dish and the blob of her skin reaching out to her, the blob of skin that she could still feel and in some ways control.
“I’m not sure if I can handle more crazy right now.”
“Just trust me, I think I know where this is going.”
Twilight nodded, then fast as lighting Naudia clipped off a lock of Twilight’s hair.
“Dia!!” Twilight Whined, but she didn’t get any farther than that.
Naudia grabbed the lock of hair and smushed it into Twilight's cheek where she felt it give. Everypony in the room watched as the hair slid into Twilight’s face and then in amazement as the lock of hair grew back.
“Well gentlestallions, I can’t think of many real things that do this, but I can think of a lot of unreal things that do this, if we could have that sample back I think we all know who to go talk to about this.” Naudia exuded confidence and a quiet building menace.
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“DISCORD!” Naudia thundered at Fluttershy’s cottage, there were no fires burning in her eyes, just actual fires burning on her person.
There was a quiet “oh dear” from inside the cottage drowned out by something large and heavy falling out of a hammock onto a pile of books. Seconds later the draconequus himself opened the door looking more than a little peeved.
“What?”
“Explain this.” Naudia said.
Naudia snipped off another piece of Twilight’s hair and smushed it into her face like last time, Discord scoffed.
“I can’t explain everything you two lovebirds do, and I haven’t done any pranks today,” Discord said too caught up in his scoff to even look at Twilight re-growing her hair, “Today is my day off.”
“Naudia please don’t do that without asking first.” Twilight admonished.
“But I had to show him-” Naudia was cut off by Discord
“If you two are going to have a lover’s quarrel for... whatever… reason…” Discord was looking closely at Twilight as he spoke. “Excuse me, but didn’t your changeling friend just cut off that lock of hair there?”
Discord seemed to try and look even closer, unsettlingly closer.
“Twilight, have you always been like this?” Discord sounded legitimately puzzled. He poked her horn which wobbled. “This sort of… wobbly?”
“So you’re saying that you didn’t do this then?” Twilight asked.
“Nope.” Discord said back, “And I’m not even sure you completely understand the full extent of what ‘this’ even is.”
“How do we know that you didn’t do this?” Naudia demanded.
“I can show you, but first I do want to mention, if I had turned you into a slime Twilight it would be to watch you wobble around like jelly.”
“And what is the second reason Discord?” Twilight said nonplussed.
Discord rubbed his paws together then threw them out again and something grew up around them resembling apartment buildings in manehatten.
“The second is that I don’t think I could make anything this organized.” Discord said frowning up a the things that loomed like high rise buildings.
Naudia inspected them closely, they were strange, and she thought she recognized them in a way. They had spiderweb-like growths on them that ran from building to building and they looked like they were made of jelly. And it was good she couldn't poke at them because there were a LOT of spiderweb like growths, if she could touch them there wouldn't be anyplace to stand.
“These don’t look like any cells I’ve ever seen,” Twilight said staring around, “It’s weird to have them lined up and built up like this.”
“Where are we, and how did you do that?” Naudia asked.
“We are still exactly where we were, this is just a visualization of Twilight’s cell structure.”
“No, I know what cells look like, these look like plant cells almost, and they don’t have the parts of the cells they should,” Naudia hastily glanced around and realized what was missing, pointing to a cell. “See that one, it’s undergoing mitosis and you can’t see any Chromosomes.”
“I don’t see any mitochondria either.” Twilight chipped in.
“That’s the mystery here,” Discord said. “I don’t like it, I have a hunch about this, but I don’t like where this is going, particularly those strands going around.”
Discord unpinched two fingers at one of the strands and they zoomed in on one of the strands to an incredible degree. Revealing a landscape of hexagons as far as the eye can see.
“Obviously this is more or less a visualization, you couldn’t actually see these because they’re too small.” Discord said.
“Discord, would you mind doing a demonstration like this for Cheerilee’s class?” Twilight said looking up in wonder at the simple molecular structure landscape all about them. “I think it could really help out some of the students.”
“Well there goes Theory #1, this is definitely Twilight.” Discord sagged a bit at that.
“So what’s the point of this, it’s just hexagons.” Naudia said.
“The point is that I’m a master of chaos, but even I couldn’t create lattices and materials that fine.” Discord said pacing back and forth, “While this is clearly the work of a very chaotic figure, I think it was also done by…”
Discord paused for dramatic effect, and to let thunderclouds roll in.
“A Scientist!!” Cue thunderclap.
Naudia deadpanned at Discord as the picture around them zoomed out again to the bundles of cells.
“And?” Naudia groused in a mocking voice, “Are we supposed to go to the ‘scientist store’ and ask for a police lineup of experiments?”
Twilight raised her hoof into the air and spoke with a subject she had quite some authority on, second to none really.
“I keep tabs on most scientific journals, and I have an idea of whats going on behind the scenes from Celestia.” Twilight didn’t look comforted by this. “Nopony, and nobody anywhere else in Equestria would have the tech to do this.”
Twilight turned to discord and pointed to one of the blobs inside the cell.
“Can you give me a closer look at that?”
Discord unpinched again and pulled in on the stringy blob thing, it was huge, dense, and complicated. Layers upon layers of stuff that seemed to always be moving, always working.
“I’ve been watching these cells, they don’t seem to have DNA of any kind, and this blob thing is larger than it should be.” Unconsciously Twilight summoned in a paper and quill to start noting things down. “See! Just as I thought, this is some kind of ultra massive protein.”
Twilight squinted at it, walked around it, and squinted again.
“Current hypothesis is that somehow this one huge protein carries most of the functions of the cell including replacing the DNA. Proteins have certain ways that they fold up and one THIS large could do a lot of things, in fact one this large...”
Twilight tapped her chin as the quill kept scribbling and she began to examine the protein up close. Naudia and Discord leaned in to listen to her mumble, rattling out scientific terms with laser accuracy.
“I think I’m right, and I think I have a pretty good idea of how this cell works. I don't know what that hexagonal stuff is or why it's arranged like that but I can tell you now that it's STRONG. And this.” Twilight tried to poke the protein with her quill which went right through as if it wasn't there, “Was clearly specifically designed and I don’t even want to know how long it took to do it, I cannot even imagine the amount of effort and pony-centuries it took to design just this one protein.”
“So what does this tell us about your situation Twilight?” Naudia asked.
That was where Twilight crumbled.
It was all well and good to examine a new scientific phenomenon, like a blob rats fed food to or some sort of completely unprecedented breakthrough in biology. It was entirely another to realize you weren’t looking outward at something unknown, but inwards at yourself.
Twilight shuddered.
“I… I don’t know.”
“So this is like that point in the comic book where you hide out from the government because of your alien given superpowers!” Spike hitherto just following along spoke up.
That was a new perspective, that was an angle Twilight hadn’t thought about it with before, maybe things could turn out all right.
“I don’t know how that would work, I’m part of the government now.” Twilight said flapping her wings for emphasis. “Thanks for that though Spike, I think I needed that.”
Twilight laughed as a strange thought came over her.
“Judging by today, maybe I could be the one ordering around the people experimenting on me while I’m being experimented on.”
"I don't know how involved in this I want to be," Said Discord, "This is my day off after all, and I don't like this at all. Yes it's a very chaotic thing to do, but it feels so clinical, engineered." Discord flapped a paw about. "I think I shall go back to examining you ponies taste in literature."
----------------
As they came back into the castle they were confronted by a harrowed looking Starlight Glimmer. Even Rarity's best makeup work couldn't completely hide the effect the last year had on her, now that Twilight thought about it the last year hadn't shown up on her at all. She had always chalked that up to being an Alicorn before.
"Twilight I need to talk to you." Starlight Glimmer pleaded.
"All right, I can take the hint, I'll go prepare dinner and you two get up to whatever you're doing."
Naudia walked off and Starlight started almost as a yell before pulling back into herself, lowering her head, and pleading as if she wasn't speaking to an equal.
"You..! You haven't told Naudia yet?! Twilight!"
"I was going to tell her this morning like I promised, but… things happened." Twilight said with only a hint of guilt.
"What could possibly be more important than-" Starlight was cut off by Twilight.
"I got my head impaled on a candle-holder, stuck right out the other side."
Starlight went pale, and she actually began to shake.
"And you used some kind of super reset spell, or Naudia did before anything bad could happen?!"
Twilight explained what happened to the best of her knowledge.
"Well, everything seems to be fine, nothing has gone wrong, yet." Starlight said, but she didn't seem happy about it.
"I think you need a vacation Starlight, you need to get out of the castle and make some friends. All this worrying is bad for you and we haven't made any progress at all as to what is actually happening." Twilight admonished. "What is our #1 theory about all this?"
"That the alternate timelines spell just went wrong somehow."
"Good, and what is the second one?"
"That the alternate Twilight Sparkle's didn't make friends so they couldn't stop one or all of the threats to Equestria."
"Exactly, nothing has happened on that front for a year now, I promise to tell Naudia tonight, if you promise to look after your health and maybe take Rarity up on going to the spa okay?"
"Okay…"
Twilight put a hoof on her shoulder, sympathy in her eyes.
"And I want you think think more of yourself Starlight, you shouldn't keep putting yourself down like this. Go out, make some friends, relax, if you break your back carrying the whole world on your shoulders then it's just going to fall down and shatter anyways."
"I don't know if that's all that comforting Twilight," Starlight said smiling in spite of herself. "But if you don't tell Naudia about this by tonight I'm going to tell her myself with or without your say so."
Twilight was resting back in her room, it wasn't even 3PM yet and she felt done. The best that could be said about today was "maybe nothing had gone irreversibly wrong, if we're lucky." Twilight unfortunately had to tell Naudia about how things could go irreversibly wrong on an incomprehensible scale.
For the moment she was building up to the revelation, resting her head on Naudia's barrel and trying to figure out how to broach the subject. With each breath, each dip of Naudia's chest Twilight relaxed a bit, and with each inhale she was brought back to reality.
"Whenever you're ready Twilight." Naudia said.
Twilight started up from Naudia's barrel trying to figure out how she knew before Naudia tapped her horn.
"Empath remember."
Twilight took in a deep breath and decided now was as good a time as any: "Naudia do you remember when we had that altercation with Starlight?"
"Yes, am I finally going to hear about what actually happened in there?"
Twilight looked for a way to stall a bit, to delay admitting what happened had even happened to another living soul. She found none.
"Every alternate timeline was empty."
Naudia couldn't quite process this.
"So like barren as the badlands?"
"No. Empty, a total black vacuum, the only thing we could find was the Chattler Anomaly, no Equestria, no Sun, no Moon."
"Remind me again what the Chattler Anomaly is?" Naudia looked as troubled as Twilight felt.
"Infrared stars, it's the reason Luna has to bring out stars at night because for some reason all the stars except ours emit in infrared."
"So… just nothing."
"More than that, nothing in all directions for incomprehensible distances, no ground below us, no sky above, no sun, no moon, a black void."
"And you're certain that the spell didn't… mess up somehow?"
"We checked, we double checked, we quintuple checked. We even stole some expensive equipment from Canterlot's astronomy department to check with that as well. In every one of those alternate timelines Equestria is gone."
"So what have you been researching in the last year?" Naudia almost dreaded to ask.
"Why."
"Have you found out anything?"
"Nothing concrete, we've got a couple hypotheses. And they all revolve around me not finding the elements of harmony or failing against one of the threats to Equestria."
Naudia could only sit and stare at Twilight for a moment.
"Are we in any danger right now?"
"No idea, we don't even know why all this is connected to the elements of harmony. That's why I haven't told you beforehand, I don't even know how much we should be worried. There isn't a way to figure out the break in the timeline with nothing to go on."
Once again Naudia could only stare, open mouthed.
"The worst part about it all is that everybody we've defeated in the last couple years since the elements have been active couldn't have done anything like that, so we're completely out of ideas." Twilight sighed. "And we don't want to show up midway through whatever happens, there would be no way to survive."
"I think this is going to take a while to sink in, I can't tell if it makes this morning look like small potatoes or the most important event in the history of Equestria." Naudia said.
"I already feel ready for bed, how about a nap? I feel like I could really use somebody to hold me." Which sounded like a flirt if you didn't actually see and hear it coming from Twilight's mouth at that moment.
"Why don't we hold each other Twilight, I'm more than a little tired and this hasn't settled in yet, I think I'm going to need that whenever it does."
-------------------
Naudia woke up in a warm embrace, like a bath, blearily she opened her eyes and groped for Twilight, but Twilight wasn't there. But it was still warm and she sunk into the warm feeling that wrapped around her.
Idly she pushed a hoof through the warm liquid around her, she must have fallen asleep in the bath, the liquid was strangely viscous and it stuck to her hoof in the most pleasant clean feeling manner. It was strange to say the least.
Gradually Naudia opened her eyes and realized she was still in bed and lying in a puddle of a familiar purple color. A very relaxing purple color.
Assuming she was dreaming Naudia scooped up some of the purple in a hoof and dripped it back onto the bed. It wasn't slimy at all and left behind no residue even though it was sticky. It didn't even seem to soak into Twilight's pillow as it rolled down the side in perfect little gel droplets.
Gradually her senses came back to her and something about the familiar shade of purple clicked, half asleep it was easy for the idea to take hold.
Naudia shrieked and then was sent flying like a rug was zipped out from under her, flipped off the bed and landed on the floor the room spinning around her.
"What?!" Twilight shouted from up on the bed blearily, charging magic without even thinking, head shifting left and right frantically looking for some kind of threat. Nobody noticed at the time but her hair stood up on end and she was actually taller than normal.
There was a long couple minutes of confusion before either of them could calm down. Naudia repeatedly shrieking about corrupted ponies. Twilight literally had to shake her out of it.
Naudia sniffed and wiped tears out of her eyes.
"I thought… *hic* I thought you'd became a corrupted pony," Tears rolling down Naudia's face. "I thought… I might have to…" Naudia couldn't finish the sentence, the thought was to terrible to think about.
Twilight pulled Naudia into a hug, she didn't quite understand but she couldn't bear to see Naudia like this, she could understand after Naudia calmed down from whatever dream she had.
Slowly, gradually Naudia's tears came to a stop but she was still shaking so Twilight began to stroke her hair. It was very relaxing.
That's all that happened for long minutes after Naudia stopped shaking, neither said anything, basking in each other's presence on the floor among the cast off bedding. Relaxing, breathing slowed, leaning into one another.
Then Naudia felt something touch her flank.
It dripped and slid down her flank.
She opened her eyes to the most bizarre sight she could recall.
Twilight was literally melting into her hooves, just as Naudia was watching Twilight's foreleg plopped into her hindleg like a semi-solid gel.
"Twilight," Naudia said, panic creeping back into her voice. "You're melting."
Sensing something wrong Twilight opened up one droopy eye and looked down on her gel form. Almost instantly the eye shot fully open, her other eye shot fully open, her foreleg flipped up and connected itself back up to her shoulder and the melting un-melted back as if somebody had reversed the film. All of that happened so quickly that Naudia could feel the wind from how fast Twilight's foreleg re-attached itself. Just like that Twilight was back to her normal self as if she hadn't been melting into a puddle earlier and hadn't melted back into a puddle last night.
Naudia's mind was working furiously, trying to think of other alternatives than her greatest fear, desperately searching for anything that could push herself from falling into the black despairing thoughts she woke up to. Then her mind latched onto an idea that was so obvious that she couldn't help but laugh.
"Don't laugh, this is serious!" Twilight said peeved that Naudia wasn't taking this seriously.
"I figured it out Twilight, I know what's going on and it's so obvious." Naudia said with a chuckle half amused, half manic.
"You've turned into a slime!"
"Of course not, slimes don't…" Twilight started to scoff.
"Think about it, it all lines up," Naudia giggled, "being able to re-attach parts of yourself, the building block look of your cells, growing your hair back the way you can," Naudia gave Twilight a sultry look, "Melting in my hooves."
The atmosphere lasted all of a second before Naudia burst out laughing again.
"At least take this slightly seriously." Twilight said nonplussed.
"I'm sorry Twilight, it's just such a relief." Naudia confessed, "When I woke up in a puddle of purple goop this morning I thought the worst had happened, the only changelings that can turn into puddles of goop are corrupted changelings. But this, this makes so much more sense."
"Well then how would I have turned into a slime then?"
"I have absolutely no idea, but it fits so well, clearly you can toughen yourself up like we found out yesterday, but now it appears you can melt yourself down." Naudia said. "Maybe you can learn to control whatever 'muscle' lets you do that."
Naudia paused for thought for a moment before saying the magic words that she knew Twilight couldn't ignore:
Saying that was something Naudia thought in retrospect, a whole two minutes later, probably was a mistake. While it did get Twilight's mind off the subject, ironically by getting her mind on the subject, Naudia didn't like teleporting, she didn't like some of the fumes in Twilight and Starlight's lab, and Twilight tended to leave her behind(unintentionally) any time she researched magic very quickly.
Twilight instantly turned this experiment around for Naudia the moment she turned back from her dictation spell. With a kiss.
They spent a time in that delicious slice of happiness before Naudia realized something and broke it off.
"I think we need to be trying to relax you for this Twilight."
"I know, but coming down to the lab I had to start with that," Twilight said with warmth in her eyes. "Thank you, I don't know what I'd be doing right now without you."
What followed was the most surreal experiment Naudia had ever been a part of. It involved cuddling with Twilight inside of an empty inflatable kiddie pool.
"Are you holding up all right Twi?" Naudia asked.
"I don't know." Twilight felt tense in Naudia's hooves. "It's scary, I'm used to not knowing things, That's why I study. But here… It's me, I'm studying myself, looking in the mirror to find out why I'm not the mare I thought I was."
Twilight let out a laugh that was not at all reassuring.
"Why I'm not…" Twilight tensed up around Naudia, any previous softness gone as her limbs were like iron. "Why I'm not… a pony."
"You will always be Twilight Sparkle, my Twilight Sparkle." Naudia said, "And always remember the results of Park Quantum No-cloning theorem, it's impossible to make a perfect clone of an arbitrary set of states. That's why the mirror pool clones you told me about were different. And trust me if there was somebody who would have noticed you had been replaced it would be me."
Naudia began to stroke Twilight's mane again, and Twilight felt less tense than before, emotionally and physically. After a minute or two Naudia decided to try something, she began to gently massage Twilight's back.
Gradually Naudia could feel Twilight's back soften as she fully relaxed.
"Now," Naudia whispered into Twilight's ear. "don't panic, focus on this feeling, try and remember it, see if you can find a… muscle or a feeling."
Abruptly Twilight flops downward and splats into the kiddie pool.
It is indeed a fortunate thing that Naudia can read emotions like she could because a puddle of purple goop has no face nor voice to express panic. Naudia can feel Twilight start to tense up but not reform herself.
"Whatever you're holding onto, let go of it, it should be fine!" Naudia shouted at the puddle as if Twilight might suddenly become hard of hearing.
Naudia could fell the stress Twilight was going through for far too long before the puddle that was Twilight began to move again. Naudia had trouble trying to figure out how to think about the puddle as Twilight as she sloshed about in the kiddie pool unaided.
Then the puddle of slime coalesced on one side of the kiddie pool and slowly Twilight's head arose from it eyes closed in deep concentration. She opens her eyes and smiles up at Naudia.
"I did it!" Twilight shouts, prematurely.
"I'd love to know how you can talk like that." Naudia says as she watches Twilight's head look down at herself as a puddle of slime.
"We don't have to wonder!" Twilight perked up. "I know how we might be able to find out! Go get my ultrasound!"
"Why do you have an Ultrasound Twilight?" Naudia asked.
Twilight still a head sticking out of a puddle blushed beet red.
"To study future changeling-pony hybrid development."
"Oh."
Twilight had a long moment to herself as Naudia went and got the ultrasound. Staring down at the amorphous blob that was her body, it started to get to her a bit. There was nothing in Equestria or the lands beyond that could explain what was currently happening to her. That was the worrying thing, Equestrian scientists had long concluded that life outside of Equestria was impossible because all stars emitted in infrared, dim, huge red giants scattered randomly from here to infinity in every direction.
So where had that thing come from, what cold dead place did it claw it's way out of? And why was something so monstrous here in Equestria and interested in her? It had to have been that thing that did this, but that answered nothing for her.
"Okay start talking and we'll see what we can see." Naudia said as she put the ultrasound up to Twilight.
"I was going to start talking about it once things calmed down…" Twilight left it there, both her and Naudia knew things had never really calmed down.
"You could just say that you wanted kids Twilight." Naudia said. "We have a lot in common between us but we don't need to examine it all through science or a book."
"Well no, of course not." Twilight said back. "We go on normal dates… not as often as science dates or reading snuggle time, but we would be having the first changeling pony hybrid and we will need to make sure our child will be healthy."
"Before this," Naudia said ultrasound still pressed against Twilight's face who grimaced. "I would actually have little doubt about that, changelings were designed to coexist with ponies in the first place."
It took a moment, but then they realized that nobody was looking at the screen for the ultrasound.
Both ponies turned to look at the ultrasound screen only to find it basically dark, like they were ultrasounding a brick wall and not Twilight's left cheek.
"Lets try somewhere else." Naudia said preparing to get more ultrasound gel.
"That isn't going to work, your body is too dense and strong for an ultrasound." Came a voice from behind them.
Naudia and Twilight looked at the doorway, but only Twilight saw that shimmering figure from earlier. Once again so fast that Naudia could feel the air displaced by the transformation Twilight was in pony form and Naudia heard and uncharacteristic snarl that by rights could not have come from a pony's vocal chords.
But the snarl did match the oddly proportioned purple wolf standing beside Naudia now. It's legs were too long, so long that it put the wolf's height above Naudia's now fully grown changeling queen stature. It's fur was lavender with darker purple accents and a pink streak but there was no hint of a cutie mark, and the wolf's fur was a good deal longer and more voluminous than Twilight's. Without a shadow of a doubt this was Twilight, but transformed into some kind of tall fox-wolf.
"What?" The situation was too surreal for Naudia to fully comprehend and her conscious mind flicked off like a lightswitch.
It was the shimmering figure that broke the silence.
"I'm here to call to confirm with you Twilight." The shimmering figure spoke with a mare's voice, and shimmered into full visibility.
It wasn't that… thing that haunted Twilight and Naudia's nights for the past year, it was something else, the figure in front of Twilight was what she could only call a neon blue wolf-like humanoid made up of glowing light.
Or, Twilight thought looking closer, some kind of force field shell that resembled a wolf humanoid wrapped around something else.
The force field itself was very detailed and as it was being examined closely the creature let it's fur blow in the wind even though they were inside. The creature was massively digitigrade and proportioned very deliberately with curves in Twilight's opinion.
"And who are you?" Naudia asked already settled into a fighting stance.
"I'm Gwynn Hall, here to represent the First Administrator," Twilight noted the capital letters Gwynn put around those two words. "I'm calling in to confirm with Twilight, well be taking a rat over to a gourd and on up to Zaohm." At this Gwynn pointed directly upwards.
"What?" Naudia said and, strangely enough so did Twilight whose hackles had lowered a bit.
"I've come to take you somewhere where you can get an explanation for all this, and to deliver a message." The glowing neon wolf said, pulling out a piece of paper from inside it's fur, Twilight could have sworn she saw a shadow from the other side of it's fur hand the paper outwards.
The neon wolf unfolded the piece of paper and read aloud the short sentence written on it.
"Little black flecks, swirling around, in a dark beady drop at the end of a syringe."
Naudia instantly turned to Twilight who before Naudia's very eyes shifted back into being a pony, all the extra hair length and wolf-like features receding into Twilight's again. Naudia could practically feel the chill that ran down Twilight's spine from the emotional impact alone.
"What does that mean?" Naudia asked her.
"That's from the nightmare I've been having for the last year." Twilight shuddered. "Like it was plucked directly out of my head. No, like somebody plucked the description I… I would have given it, out of my head."
Twilight turned to Naudia, her expression said everything and they silently agreed to follow the wolf monster to meet this "first administrator". Throughout the entire trip through the castle neither of them could forget that they were following a glowing neon blue werewolf thing of unknown origin.
The first thing that greeted them outside Twilight's castle was a rat head of unusual size. It was huge, at least as big as a normal pony's torso.
"Hup hup! Frankie, return trip to the Gourds! Come on now." Gwynn said at the rat head.
The rat head sprang to life and a large patch of pavement suddenly uncloaked itself to reveal the rat head's large flat body, like a giant furry rug. The strangest thing was despite being longer and wider than a carriage the huge flat rat gave off the impression of an excitable pet dog as it attempted to rub it's head up against Gwynn. like a well socialized pet dog Naudia noted as it didn't show any signs of hostility to strangers like her or Twilight.
"All right, hop up." Gwynn said.
"We're riding that giant rat?" Twilight said.
"Yep, should be a short flight over to the gourds on Frankie here." Gwynn said patting the flat rat's shoulder.
Twilight was now flying on a giant, flat, invisible rat with some sort of neon werewolf.
It was at this point that Twilight had to consider what she was doing and where her life was taking her. She was supposed to be fighting tangible threats to Equestria, getting married, thinking about having kids with her wife, working on Equestria-Changeling relations. But she was in turmoil, scrambling to find what was causing the end of Equestria in alternate timelines, find out what she was turned into, figure out the monster that visited her at night, and also flying on a giant and importantly invisible flat rat larger than a carriage.
Awkwardly she waved at a passing wall-eyed pegasus, she was not sure if it was better to appear to be flying along while sitting down in mid air and maybe panic the flower girls or to have the rat be visible and panic the townsponies below.
Naudia was the one to speak up at the Gwynn the wolf-thing with a question in their bubble of calm air and silence on the rat's back.
"So do you know about Twilight's transformation?"
"Oh yeah, custom job, really complicated to work with, they brought in The Oracle of Adak for the design job." Gwynn said like Twilight had just gotten a makeover.
"That's a very, casual tone for something so drastic." Naudia put out.
"I keep forgetting." Gwynn slapped her forehead. "Sorry, I had to take a full year's worth of classes for this, but it's so hard to change your common sense.
"Lemme try again, by our standards Twilight isn't strong enough for what she needs to do, timeframe doesn't allow for us to explain beforehand and we're approaching 'do or die' time over in Knicknik."
"Oh that's that town up on the other side of Luna Bay!" Twilight said dispensing a fact before she actually thought about it. "What could be happening up there, it's just a minor logging town."
"I'm not at liberty to say, but I'm here to take you to somebody who is."
"I hear it's so far north that in the summertime the sun can be up almost all night." Naudia said.
That was something that Gwynn seemed to take an interest in if her artificial wolf face was any indication. Naudia tried to put that together in her head, maybe they came from a very equilateral area? Something about it didn't click right. Twilight asked the question he had for her.
"Have you ever been that far north Gwynn?"
They got another strange answer out of her before she clammed up for the rest of the trip.
"This is the first time I've been anywhere like Equestria."
----------------
As the trip got a bit longer flying over Applejack's farm Twilight decided to ask a question she should have asked before.
"Was that you I chased around the castle the other day."
"Yes." Gwynn said. "I got a bit careless because Twilight is the only one who could really see me."
"What were you doing breaking into the castle and going into my room."
"Test results, we needed to see how the-" Gwynn stopped as Twilight and Naudia screamed.
Twilight and Naudia were not used to flying on something like this, so when the rat abruptly stopped flying and started dropping altitude they thought something was wrong. They landed with an audible flumpft, like a large heavy rug being dropped into an open meadow. Only it was a giant flying rat being dropped into an open meadow.
Gwynn just got off the rat giving it's head a stroke as she walked over to an arbitrary spot in the meadow.
"So we're going to wait for a ride here?"
"Nope." Gwynn said and knocked twice on what looked like empty air with her claw. The empty air made a wooden sound before a door opened up in nothing and into something downright bizarre.
The first thought that came to Twilight's head was "there is a watermelon hooked up to tubes on the wall." That was the best way to sum up the inside of the invisible object, like somebody had let an arts and crafts project with plants get about two grocery stores, a sci-fi book, and an intervention out of hand from an interior design artist.
There was indeed a watermelon piped into a wall with equally planty pipes coming out of it, above the watermelon was some sort of plant light fixture hooked up to the watermelon by what looked like a gourd of some kind. It mimicked your typical fluorescent light bulb, but it was a plant glowing a warm yellow color. There were plant hooks on the plant wall, next to flowering orchids that, as your eye followed them down the wall, seamlessly tiled together and transformed into some sort of box readout of unknown use.
"What? Didn't you live in a tree house?" Gwynn asked, she had to stoop so as not to drag her head along the ceiling.
"Not like this." Twilight spoke for both of them.
The inside of the invisible plant thing was not as squidgy as Twilight had been expecting, the floor was basically a lawn and poking at the strange plant pipes on the wall revealed they were very firm. As the door closed behind them the purpose of the flower console became clear as a little view of the outside showed Frankie the flying flat rat walking around the invisible object they were inside.
The absurdity of that moment tried to hit Twilight again but at this point she was resistant to shock, her curiosity and experiences in the past year dampened that. Naudia however mutely followed along with Gwynn into the ship-like hallways made entirely out of plants.
"Go sit down over in there, I have to see to Frankie he gets nervous about traveling." Gwynn pointed at a plant ship door that irised open as they walked close.
Inside was possibly the strangest thing Twilight had seen all day it looked like the inside of a smaller military airship, chairs facing inward into the isle along the wall. And that was the start and stop of relatable bits for Twilight and Naudia. The chairs were made out of giant leaves, the armrests were of a nice finished hardwood with a living plant cushion, there were messages printed in strips close to the ceiling that looked like ads. There were screens at the end of the train displaying ads that shifted to safety information on a timer. And every part of it was organic and made out of some kind of plant, like some mystical forest ponies had taken over Manehatten.
The occupants of the ship were even stranger. There was a sausage cart with a giant shell on it, very organic the umbrella was made up of a banana plant, a giant spider, a couple chickens, and a whole lot of very strange creatures sitting loosely buckled into chairs. All the creatures stopped briefly and looked up at them, the general impression they gave off was "at some point this might have been a ragtag group, and that only really manifested itself as eclectic at this point." And it was a big group at least 20 maybe even 30 different eclectic creatures.
Feeling awkward Naudia and Twilight took the two of the three empty chairs on the farthest corner of the room, the chairs looked like they were specifically designed for ponies if a . They found themselves sitting across from a feathered rat faced creature.
The feathered rat faced thing outstretched a claw for Twilight to shake. It really was a strange thing, raptorish, feathered, but mixed with rat features like it's face, it's ears, it's tail, very rat grey feathers as well. It wore strange clothes as well as a bandeau that covered up the strange bulge or puff of feathers on it's chest but had some kind of standalone sleeves made of a red silk outlined in gold and similarly adorned pants without shoes.
Twilight took it's hand gingerly and it introduced itself.
"Hi! I'm Kuiguk, I'm a Kopiaq." Twilight guessed from his voice that he was male.
And then a huge hairy spider crawled it's way around from Kuiguk's back and into Twilight's view.
Twilight shrieked.
Instantly the room was more alert, it was subtle shift in the air, Twilight could have sworn she heard a seatbelt snap. Looking around the entire cabin was very alert even the animals Twilight was previously ignoring looked like they were ready to fight something.
"S'all right everybody, I've read about this." Came Gwynn's voice from the door, and at the door was… not Gwynn.
The grey-blue lion creature padded over on two legs and spoke with Gwynn's voice once again.
"In genetically dictated societies insects are considered distasteful like mosquitoes are, I think Twilight was just surprised by Kuiguk's Ken'gun here" The lion thing that was probably Gwynn's real form pointed at the beach ball sized spider with a paw-like hand. Contrary to Twilight's expectations the spider thing crawled forward and grasped her finger between the blunt part of it's mandibles and tugged it around a bit making a chittering sound like a raccoon.
"Are you sure that's safe?" Naudia asked.
"Of course!" Kuiguk said animatedly petting the hairy beach ball sized spider, "She's been with me since the day I was born, haven't you girl."
The bipedal lion that was presumably Gwynn Hall sat down next to them and Twilight got her first good look at Gwynn Hall.
Gwynn was some sort of lion thing that wasn't quite right, and it took Twilight a second to get a handle as to why. The lion's mane was there, very voluminous to the point where it was tempting to try and touch it. Certainly had the bodytype for it, empathized hind legs, digitigrade paws, a lion tail, again wonderful grey-blue coat. She wore a lot of bright blue bodypaint in intricate straight lined patterns that shifted into the roots of her mane, and she was dressed in a plain brown loincloth edged in a zigzag of a blue line and a chestwrap in a similar material that left her defined abs on display.
Looking up at Gwynn's face Twilight caught onto the disparity almost instantly.
"Rabbit?" Twilight said out loud, all of this in a row was starting to scramble her brain and she felt she was losing track or falling behind somehow. Gwynn had the face and ears of a rabbit and on closer inspection her other features were hard to tell if they were lion or rabbit.
"Yeah, I'm a amirlu lion, I've been told they were partially based on rabbits and partially based on lions."
"But… why?" Naudia asked.
Gwynn gave them a very blank look, as if they had just said something completely insane. Kuiguk leaned forward to fill in the gap in the conversation.
"Just a tip, it's not polite to ask somebody you don't really know why they decided to be what they are."
"No I mean, why were amirlu lions based on rabbits and lions? How?"
This time a shadowy creature in a farmer's outfit had to answer, there wasn't an inch of visible skin anywhere on his entire body, he was sitting in a corner opposite to Twilight and Naudia holding a chicken on his lap.
"While there may be a different answer somewhere in the past, you should assume a subrace of humans look that way because a designer thought it looked good and contracted the design for the public and it became popular." Then the figure went back to looking out the window.
"Well I think that answers that question Mr. uhh…" Kuiguk said.
"Roshin." the figure in the corner stated, face still obscured he didn't even look back at Naudia and Twilight.
The entire room lit up with murmurs at that, apparently that was a big deal around here.
"Geez, I knew they were bringing out the big guns," Kuiguk stated, "But I didn't think they'd go THAT big."
Twilight and Naudia's faces spoke for themselves to Kuiguk.
"How can you never have heard of-" Got out of his mouth before his brain caught up. "OH, yeah, well Roshin is a Millimus chicken farmer and is the strongest person we know of. He could take any five people in this room singlehandedly."
Kuiguk for some reason even gestured at the sausage cart.
"Chicken farmer?" Naudia asked but was ignored.
"But." Twilight pointed at the cart. "It's just a sausage cart with a snail shell."
That prompted a reaction from the snail shell as a strange slime snail cat creature slid itself out of the shell, the shell itself unrolling segments outward into a tail. Even little patches of clothing came with it and seemed to knit themselves together as if they were made out of slime.
"You were saying?" The cat-snail creature said sitting on the edge of the sausage cart as if this would explain everything to Twilight.
There wasn't a single person in the room that didn't pick up on the fact that Twilight and Naudia were even more confused now.
"Let's just put this down to cultural differences again." Gwynn said, and then spoke to the rest of the group. "Ponies are a genetically dictated mono-culture, they're stuck how they're born, no gene mods different magic."
There was a pitying look in the cat-snails eyes and she looked like she was going to say something but was interrupted by a speaker.
"This is your pilot speaking, please buckle your seatbelts, we will be orbiting in thirty seconds."
"But we haven't taken off yet!"
"Buckle up and prepare yourselves for G-forces." Gwynn said pointing to the seatbelts next to them.
As soon as Twilight had gotten her seatbelt buckled there was a feeling like her entire body was being yanked all at once in a direction she couldn't comprehend.
There was another feeling of being jerked around and all their seats automatically swiveled back facing towards the cabin and giving both Naudia and Twilight a view out the window at a green and blue ball, that they didn't get to examine. There was an audible CLUNK on the hull and they were pushed back into their seats, and it felt like every part of them weighed three times as much.
There wasn't really all that much noise or anything, clearly there weren't any engines firing. They were just accelerating for some reason.
"We just connected to the skyhook, and this acceleration will go on for about three to four minutes while we get up to speed." Gwynn said from behind them.
"How are we accelerating? Some kind of magical engine?" Naudia asked in a noticeably more strained voice than Gwynn.
"We've got a magnetically accelerated cable that's a couple hundred miles long that swung around and snatched us up when we got into orbit."
"How did we even get into orbit in the first place?" Twilight asked.
"With the way our warp drive works it's easier to just warp from ground level to a planet rather than try and use a rocket to shoot out of the atmosphere, since it drops us at orbital height but lacking orbital speed."
Twilight wasn't feeling up to a high acceleration lecture at that time or she would have asked more about the mechanics involved. A voice came back over the intercom, sounding about as strained as Twilight felt.
"Prepare for zero G, we will be disconnecting from the skyhook in thirty seconds."
After what felt like a lot longer than it actually was there was another audible CLUNK and the weight lifted, all of it. It was a very very strange feeling as Twilight's hair began to frizzle out and Twilight floated against her seatbelt. It was then when somebody poked the release on her seatbelt and while there was no retraction that caused her to start floating out into open air.
Frantically Twilight began to try and swim towards the chair as she gently floated away from it. She knew this feeling, and she was beginning to panic.
Nobody else in the room seemed to be panicking, granted Naudia was still belted in.
"Is there something wrong?" Gwynn asked gently pushing Twilight back towards her seat.
"What happened to Equestria!?" Twilight said barely controlling herself.
"Well yeah, that's what zero G's is, we're in orbit around Equestria." Gwynn pointed out the window at the blue sphere Twilight hadn't gotten a good look at before. Out beyond the window took a long second for Twilight to get a handle on, but it was still there, it was all still there.
It was huge, indescribably huge, you could see clouds and ocean and mountains. Equestria dwarfed her, even looking down on it from this distance Equestria imposed itself upon her with it's vast expanse of cloud sheathed green beauty. Ponyville was so small she couldn't even make it out from here, she could barely recognize Canterlot as it started to move over the horizon.
CLUNK
Twilight was pulled out of her stunned silence because she bonked her horn on the window trying to get a better look at Canterlot.
"Is that really Equestria down there?" Twilight asked.
"If you want a better look the viewing area downstairs has opened up." Gwynn said pointing at a ramp that had opened up in the middle of the isle.
Without needing any prompting Twilight went straight over, or would have had her swimming motions gotten her any distance towards her destination.
"No, no no you have to pull or push off something, you can't swim in air even if we're at zero G. Like this." Gwynn demonstrated by perfectly navigating herself through the hole in the floor.
Inelegantly Twilight pulled herself along downstairs, along the way she accidentally bumped somepony with her flank, she turned around to apologize and stopped apologizing, because one look was all it took to tell that there really wasn't any need to apologize to Naudia.
Downstairs was a fantastical viewing platform that would have been impossible to use outside of freefall. The entire floor was glass? Twilight wasn't sure what it was, but it was clear and the seats were on the ceiling.
There really was nothing to say about what she saw outside that viewing glass. If you scratched around you'd come up with edges in to describing it by how you felt about it.
'Humbling'
'Small'
'Precious'
Like the vastness of it could swallow you whole.
Naudia took advantage of the situation and pulled Twilight into a seat next to her on the ceiling, flipped the armrest between them up and held her close.
After a while they started a little game of trying to guess where they were flying over. However that gradually became harder as the ship slowly began to rotate it's belly upwards taking Equestria out of sight in favor of the dark starless abyss of space that loomed above them, devoid of light all except for one point of light.
"That's our destination, Zaohm." Came Gwynn's voice from beside the still seated couple.
That brought to mind one of Twilight's many questions that got swept away in the chaos of today, which all came flooding back with this one at the forefront.
"I have a lot more questions than I think I have time to ask but one I think I really need to ask you Gwynn." Twilight probed out. "What is with that neon blue wolf thing you were inside of earlier?"
"Ahh perceptive aren't you, I was wondering if you were going to ask if I turned into that. That's my werewolf form."
Twilight gave her a skeptical look.
"I can show you," Gwynn said floating up out of her chair. "see!"
The bodypaint in Gwynn's fur began to glow for a moment and then flew up out of her fur and formed into that same creature Twilight saw in the doorway of her bedroom earlier today. Acting on instinct Twilight poked her hoof at the strange glowing fur, it felt like fur for a bit, then her hoof bumped into something as unyielding as a brick wall.
"It's a… shield?" Twilight asked.
"Not quite, can you feel it?"
Twilight focused on it.
"It's alive?"
"Yes, it's a Zoetic Shield, a summoned in living shield that is stronger than you can possibly imagine."
"Oh come now, it can't be that strong, there is a limit to how much magic you can pull out of your body before you collapse." It was Naudia who spoke up.
"That's only if you're doing everything internally, like you ponies do. We manipulate the energy of quintessence."
"So wait, does that mean the standard model is accurate down to Planck distance?" Twilight butted in.
"Huh?" Gwynn looked visibly confused.
"She's asking if the standard model is valid at Planck distances or not, it's a physics thing, we had a bet on which it would turn out to be, and SOME-pony sounds like she might be trying to get out of taking me to John's of Bleecker St. For pizza by using an outside unverified source."
"Sorry, I'm not a physicist, I know how our magic works but I've never looked any deeper into it."
"Either way with that much energy at your disposal you could… create matter." Naudia said.
"We've got one better on that, we've got Magmatter."
Both Twilight and Naudia looked very impressed by this.
"Well why don't you keep it up all the time? Why isn't this entire ship made out of magmatter?" Twilight asked.
"It's temporary, you need energy to pull energy out of quintessence and somebody needs to maintain that. Don't ask me why, the physics of it are way, WAY above my head." Gwynn shook her head.
Twilight noted that it was actually her wolf head that shook as if that was completely natural for Gwynn.
That was when Naudia poked her shoulder with her hoof, pointing out the window. Their destination was creeping into view.
----------------
The thing they were approaching was huge, huge to the point where it was impossible to get a fix on how big it actually was. Tens of miles at the very least. It resembled a whale skeleton Twilight had seen in a museum once, complete with the otherworldly, seemingly empty skull. The skull resembled three long ribs that met in the center and they looked like they would open up and shoot out some kind of world ending laser. Seemingly built into the skeleton itself was an entire space station with no visible thrusters or things Twilight would normally associate with Sci-fi, the buildings resembled moss growing off of the bones and almost hid the four huge cylinders housed inside the ribcage.
As they came closer the legions of smaller ships coming in and out and blinking out of existence came into view. They looked like flies at first, that only lasted until one of them started approaching them.
The ship that approached them was big, not as big as Zaohm by a long shot but it was very strange to look at. The fuselage of the ship was white but it was plantlike, like somebody had shaped a spaceship out of a tree, there were big panels of leaves in a dark green, strange organic looking attitude thrusters on all sides of the ship jutted out. not a single transparent panel was visible on the entire ship and the closed off and bulky pointed look of the ship was accentuated by what were very obviously batteries of weapons.
"Why does it look so different than this ship? Why weren't we picked up in some heavily armed warship like that instead of this touristy train thing?" Twilight asked mentally comparing it to the ship she was in.
"We actually bought this off of a planetary tourism company, hard to find, and the tech is probably millions of years old at this point as it's just such a small market." Kuiguk had joined them a couple seats down. "Glad they did honestly, now I can tell my kids I've been somewhere touristy like a planet."
"You've never been to a planet before?"
"Nope." Kuiguk replied idly petting his giant pet spider.
"Have you Gwynn?" Naudia asked.
"Never, Equestria is the first planet I've ever even been close enough to see."
Naudia had noticed that more of the passengers from the cabin had meandered in here during the trip.
"Have any of you ever been to a planet before?"
What she got was a unilateral chorus of negative replies.
"Well why not?" Twilight asked for both of them.
"Planets just don't factor much into our thinking, they're cool to look at I'll give you that, but at the end of the day they're just not efficient enough." Kuiguk said.
Unconsciously Twilight and Naudia turned to Roshin again.
"As far as I know Yunguaq migrated to planets, and only occasionally."
Now they were getting close enough to actually make out details of their destination, they were docking on a strand of the strange plant-vine-moss structures next to a much smaller spinning structure. The whole thing was strange, like they were wonky buildings built to look like gigantic greenery, out of gigantic greenery with windows and far, FAR more wood than Twilight would have expected from anything coming from space.
The strangest thing came when they docked, down below where they docked there were people walking around on the surface of another ship that was docked next to them as if it was a beach resort, literally. Everyone there was wearing fashionable beachwear, carrying strange tools and seemed to be having a fine time working in the vacuum of space, in bikinis and shorts.
The other ship was huge and seemed to be undergoing a LOT of work.
"What are they doing down there?" Twilight asked.
"Working, it's your typical maintenance job." Gwynn said.
"Yeah I can see that, but they're in vacuum, how are they working down there, why are they going around in beachwear to do it?" Twilight stared as one of them glooped a thick paste over a section of the plant-hull and spackled over it with a wooden tool.
"The usual way, zoetic shield stuff, as for why they dress like that I've heard two reasons, one to attract people to do that job and secondarily I've heard that the original astronauts had to wear diapers and clunky suits, nobody wants to do that if they don't have to."
Twilight noticed a portable outhouse nearby with a drainage tube and even presumably a hand washing station hooked up next to it.
It finally hit home to her just how alien these people were. She knew almost nothing about them but seeing the strange menagerie down there, the snake-moth creature, a fat scaled rodent, a rat she could swear was made out of jellyfish, the cloudy banded and strange skin of a lizard monster. The gulf between them only seemed to grow wider.
----------------
The first thing Twilight noticed floating through the floating gangway that they was that something was looking at her from a cubby in the corner of the gangway.
At first she thought it was a cat. It certainly looked like a cat, it looked like it had cat ears, two lamp-like yellow cat-eyes, and a calico coat. The first thing that tipped her off that it might not be a cat was how it stared at her, it could stare with the same intensity most people could only manage with a glare, it’s two yellow eyes locked on her every movement.
What really tipped her off that this wasn’t a cat was when it stretched out towards her like an amorphous blob to get a better look at her.
“Eeuuuhhh, what is that?” Naudia said.
“That’s a looking cat, it’s watching your behavior to see if you’re doing anything suspicious.” Roshin said from directly behind them, making them jump. “New inputs, so it’s looking at you for a baseline to learn your body language.”
The looking cat began to oscillate it’s body to “swim” through the air to keep up with them.
“It’s creepy, I hate it.” Naudia said.
“I dunno, I think it’s kinda cute in a creepy way.” Twilight said.
Twilight was pleased and Naudia drew closer to her so Twilight could put a wing around her after they found out there were more, a lot more, waiting down the hall. However that turned out to be a bit much even for Twilight and all the hundreds of lamplike eyes staring at her hurried them through a door which shut behind them silently.
They bumped into each other in the new hallway unexpectedly, and for an unexpected reason. As soon as they were in there the hallway began to move and they were pushed into the padded side of the hallway until things evened out and they realized that gravity, or at least spin-gravity had returned. They untangled themselves awkwardly and looked around at where they were at.
They were in a very dimly lit hallway, like a theater with little lights marking the way forward and only then did they realize they were alone, nobody else had followed them through. An arrow lit up on the wall on either side of them pointing for them to go forward, and it followed them down the hallway along the wall.
The end of the hallway opened up to a cavernous space that was completely dark, they could feel how huge the space was but only one spotlight was lit up. The arrow on the wall slid onto the floor and beckoned them onward into the singular pool of light.
As they reached the center of the pool of light it started.
A spotlight came on small and distant, it lit up only a single violinist who was hard to make out and even hear as they played the opening notes to a song. Twilight was quite disappointed, this was quite a large field she was in and to just have one violin player up far away in some stands playing like that was underwhelming. They would have been much more at home in a tiny restaurant or bar stage.
Then she heard a voice from up above her and following a light caught sight of a single figure flying around on one of those flat rats singing, similarly distant and far away.
She watched the figure on the rat for a moment before she realized there were more instruments off in the distance, looking back at the lone trumpeter she realized a small orchestra was illuminated around them now. The light around them was growing illuminating a larger orchestra and as they were lit up they began to play showing more and more of the stadium.
Above Twilight more flying voices had joined the choir and there was actually a decent sized choir up there now, a menagerie circling in white robes no two were alike.
As the light began to uncover layers of strings and brass lined up she realized why that initial violinist was so far distant in the stands. The light reached the edge of the field she was standing in and she was right as it began to expand outwards around the stadium. A quick look was enough to confirm that this was bigger than any stadium in Equestria, for a single band.
The chorus above was a veritable circling flock and as the light reached halfway around the stadium a great chandelier was revealed above her gleaming, huge, and with an entire choir in it's delicate multi-leveled grandeur.
As the light finally reached the other side of the stadium and the sound became almost overwhelming the stadium orchestra prepared for it's crescendo as great drums played from somewhere underneath Twilight vibrating up through her legs. A set of double doors rose out of the dirt embedded heavily in amber, a masterwork tessellated border told a story Twilight couldn't follow as the amber in the door began to light up, filling like liquid gold.
As the orchestra reached it's crescendo all the lights in the room went out and instantly all the instruments were silenced leaving Twilight to only watch as the double doors ponderously opened to reveal a figure. She could never forget that figure, for even in the dim pool of light they both stood in she recognized that thing, that hateful, monstrous thing.
Just as Naudia and Twilight were about to confront that thing somebody had snuck up beside them and stabbed them with a syringe. Very quickly Twilight lost consciousness.
When Twilight woke up she felt… different.
She was sloshing around in a plastic tub and she could feel that but she couldn’t see anything, everything sounded muffled, and there was a scent of a hospital and a truly remarkable thing, the most generic flowery scent imaginable. That was what really caught Twilight’s attention and she sniffed at it, trying to figure out what kind of flower it was. This was much more complicated than it sounded like because it actually involved forming a nose from her slime form and this was the seed through which the rest of her head sprouted out of her slime form.
“You’re awake, good.”
There was no way she was ever going to forget THAT voice instantly her head turned to face that THING which unbeknownst to her involved growing a neck.
“Good, now before you get too angry you need to remember these feelings, they’re like muscles and they will help you transform.”
Twilight frowned at the thing, she felt like she wanted to punch it in the face and knock off that edgy pair of glasses and edgy fedora, and looking at it’s edgy black duster only made her want to punch it more.
“FOCUS.” The thing shouted. “I’m trying to teach you something important.
“Besides.” The thing smiled. “You will never have a chance to punch me if you never re-form your hooves will you?”
Twilight glared at the thing.
“Turn me back.”
“Considering how much time and effort we spent doing an in place perfect conversion, no I’m not going to do that.” The Thing picked up a clipboard from beside him and held it out to Twilight. “But I am going to sell you on your new body, you have my word on that.”
Twilight angrily wobbled inside her tub at the thing.
“No hooves, how am I supposed to pick that up?”
Just then the thing’s thumb slipped on the clipboard and it began to fall out of it’s hand, but Twilight caught it with a rapidly formed outstretched hoof.
“Like that.”
Twilight glared at the thing again, starting to pick up what was going on.
“What’s this?” She demanded.
“That is the list of benefits you gain with your new physiology, now I would like to ask you to intentionally form your other hoof to leaf through it, it’s an important step in your rehabilitation and it will show me that you can intentionally apply what I’ve taught you so far this session. If you don’t you’ll have to start doing pencil therapy with me.” The thing held up a pencil as if it truly expected Twilight would fail at this.
As if it expected so little of her.
And she did fail the first three times angrily, the third only resulting in a floppy noodle-like hoof.
“You need to focus, remember the feeling of sniffing in the air, turning your head, reaching for the clipboard. This is your hoof and it’s still there, you just need to remember how to use it.”
On her sixth attempt Twilight finally managed to get her left hoof into perfect working order.
What followed was her reading the strangest collection of nonsense she’d ever heard. The clipboard listed out a wide range of fantastical and to Twilight’s knowledge legendary attributes that could never be replicated.
“Immunity to death by old age?”
“Yep.”
“strokes, heart disease, any and all viruses, ‘non-magical’ bacteria, parasites, respiratory diseases, skin diseases, obesity, Alzheimer's, and CANCER?!”
“Yeah.”
“And here it says ‘immunity to death by beheading, stab injuries other than to the brain, total incineration of the body below the neck, any and ‘nearly all forms of bodily dismemberment and scarring’.”
“Well some of those you might need a doctor to get over, but still yes.”
Twilight stared down at the document incredulously.
“That’s the medical document, the physical document here includes some stuff, but to summarize you should be able to lift about 15-30 tons with one hoof, and when properly stiffened up as a slime your skin and diamond fiberglass bones should be roughly 200 times stronger than steel. You should also be able to jump about half a kilometer straight up now.”
“Is this some kind of joke?” Twilight asked.
“No. All of this is really very boilerplate baseline, people these days have lost any sense of wonder about this sort of thing because they just expect this without saying. It was harder than you’d expect to write the contents of that clipboard because even people working on this project kept not putting stuff in there because they just assumed you already had it. Also you’d never find a doctor willing to convert you back because there aren’t any that work with traditional genetics like your body used to use and even we had to buy an exorbitant amount of time on the Oracle of Adak for a conversion process.”
The whole conversation was very strange to Twilight. This wasn’t how this encounter was supposed to go, she wasn’t supposed to just be given physical therapy by a monster and immortality as an afterthought.
“Now physical therapy requires that you demonstrate hand eye coordination by handing the clipboard back to me.”
Twilight prepared to throw it at the thing.
The thing pressed a button on a remote attached by wire to her hospital bed/tub. The bed abruptly tilted sideways and dumped her out of the bed, surprisingly enough she landed on all four hooves, by reforming them mid air which came with the rest of her body.
“Good, now I hope I don’t need to tell you why we did that, or to try and ‘remember the feeling of reforming your body’. Because now I need you to practice that until you get it right from body to slime three times in a row.” The thing said. “I’d advise you not to try anything hostile again for your own safety as that would have… unpleasant consequences.”
Twilight noted the odd design for a hospital room, on the three walls she could see in front of her there were doors, there was even a hatch above in the corner along with a camera on each wall. This was clearly a place that was expecting trouble and was designed to funnel guards in all at once and befuddle an escape with too many options. She could even see the knobs on the doors slowly turn back closed without a click.
“As you can see, this is a place designed to give the illusion of a hospital room to put you at ease. If you did actually get out of this room before you should have we would have immediately jettisoned your girlfriend’s hospital room into space. I’m quite experienced at dealing with heroes, the first thing you need to do is escalate any infraction beyond the point of no return.”
The thing let out a laugh.
“Of course we could also jettison this part as well, in which case you’ll know you’ve become part of somebody else’s story, no matter how brief that story may be.”
“But you’re in this section. How does that sound like a good plan?” Twilight demanded of the thing.
“You can believe that.” The thing said. “By the way I’d appreciate if you started thinking of me by my title, I’m the First Administrator.” It said. “But we’re getting off topic, I need to teach you new skills, so I can teach you new magic, so you can scheme to use them against me, before I put you in a situation so utterly horrible that I can indoctrinate you to my cause by showing you how far up shit creek you and your planet are. So come on now, transform back into a slime and back, I’d like you to be proficient at it within a half an hour.”
“Why are you so mean?”
“I’m not feeling all that mean right now, I’m feeling impatient, every moment that you aren’t working at this problem is like an itch in my mind. A little voice that says ‘We don’t need her. We can get things done faster without a middleman.’ And once you plunge into thinking like that, bad, expensive, halfway solutions with long consequences have merits because they’re quick.”
“So why not then?” Twilight defied it.
“I like werewolves, I want more studies done on werewolves, and the first outside life discovered not only has werewolves, but could provide an outside perspective on werewolves. It is possible to not only increase the types of werewolves, but the number of werewolves, with a side benefit that we could hire outsiders to design new types of werewolves.”
Twilight had gotten the impression that the creature had always been slightly unhinged, or was some kind of demon who dressed like an edgelord. This was the first time she’d ever felt… uncomfortable around it, it was easy to stand up to it, feel angry at it.
“Stop thinking ‘it’ in the interests of mutual cooperation you need to start thinking ‘First Administrator’ and train yourself on that.” It said. “And we need to get on with slime transformation exercises unless you want to have more involuntary physical therapy, we have to taze you to start again in a decent time.”
Twilight glared at the thing as she attempted to transform back into her slime form. The best course of action seemed to be to keep the thing talking and see what she could learn.
“So. What are you going to give me in return for all of this?”
Twilight did manage to succeed this time and plopped down onto the floor in a blob of purple. But she could still hear it talk even in this form.
“Well we were thinking about offering the typical ‘anything your hearts desire’ whatever kinda thing, within reason. I would like however to encourage you to test the boundaries to see what you can come up with even though I can say no.”
The purple blob that was Twilight paused for a long moment. Then Twilight’s head popped up, then the rest of her body popped up pre-flopped on the floor, she looked the thing right in the eye and said.
“I want to be able to have kids with Naudia. Biological kids, not clones, not some kind of vat.”
Twilight couldn’t have gotten a better reaction out of that thing if she’d have beaned it on the head with a rock. It’s mouth hung loosely open and it froze, eventually like it’s mind had started back up again as Twilight heard a phone ring it’s mouth slammed shut and it lifted up a finger.
“One second.” It walked off into a corner and then it pulled out a strange ringing flat bug from it’s coat unfolded it and held it up to it’s ear like a phone.
Twilight scooched a little closer to try and listen in.
"No. Nope. I won’t allow it. We won’t have truck with that kind of thinking around here.”
There was a pause as he listened to whoever was on the other end of the line.
“Now you listen here! If you want to be working here two weeks from now you’re going to cut the crap.” Another pause. “Yeah you convinced me, I’ve rarely heard such a good case to fire somebody, you officially have two weeks.”
It snapped the bug-phone shut with irritation and sat back down in it’s chair.
"it has come to my attention that there are very significant cultural differences between our values and yours, beyond what was expected." It said. "I'm sorry, you're going to have to think of something else."
“It sounds like you just shot that idea down entirely.” Twilight said with a frown.
“I’m not going to set up something we already gave you, as a reward for something you haven’t done. That’s bad business.”
“What?”
“You’re going to have to forgive us in this case Twilight, there are clearly things we missed in the cultural disconnect. After seeing that all four species of normal pony can breed we assumed you were in the same position as us when that is clearly not the case, nobody thought to look into things farther to check if, for example, two males/females of your species could have offspring unaided.”
“I can’t think of anything right now.” Twilight said.
“Don’t worry, the advisor who will have a job two weeks from now has informed me that instead of returning you to Equestria in-between your magical three day boot camp you’ll be staying with Gwynn Hall so you can get an idea of the options we can give you, in addition to us generating a list of possible options for you to choose.”
“Wait! If you’ve been steadily transforming me since that nightmare months ago none of this matters what I choose, how do I know you didn’t implant something so you can just snap your fingers and I obey, how do I know I’m still me?”
“As for the first bit, once the threat of corrupted changelings was over we no longer needed such things, this is test for you and Equestria.” The thing pointed a finger at Twilight. “As for that last bit Judge for yourself Twilight, has anybody noticed anything off in the past year aside from the incidents earlier, has anybody noticed anything different about your personality?”
“Well no, but I’m a biased source, of course I wouldn’t know if anything was different about me, I’m me.”
“Okay then, lets simplify things a bit.”
The First Administrator brought the conversation crashing to a halt with a single question.
“Have you noticed any changes in your prospective wife?”
Naudia woke up in a hospital, and something was wrong, because Naudia was still asleep in the hospital bed, she was watching herself sleep in an unfamiliar form. Naudia got up to go over and wake herself up and noticed she couldn’t move the same way she used to.
Adapting to this new form of strange bipedal movement she walked over on two legs and woke herself up, she was sleeping in a pile of herself. It was the strangest feeling waking yourself up to open your eyes and look at yourself.
The rest of her woke up in short order and she needed to decide what to do with herself, but Naudia needed to get a good look at all of her selves first.
Naudia looked like some sort of big eyed kangaroo rodent with a rat head and longish ears and a bottlebrush tail and long dark black fur with a strip of red down her back and an extra set of bat-wing like arms that were missing any kind of wing membrane to fly with. She could hop or walk around like a raptor.
Naudia could not get over the feeling of looking at herself while she was looking back at herself as well as looking in 48 other directions at once. She wasn’t used to being this spread out, like a hive mind of only one pony.
No, that wasn’t exactly it, she herself was one, there was nothing else in her head except the typical changeling hive mind, but her body was split up. She had no idea how the continuity of the hive mind was maintained considering she was currently 50 rodents, but it was still there.
She looked around at the room she was in, it was a hospital room of some type but she was in a pen, for animals, like you’d keep a rabbit inside of. Instantly searching for an exit Naudia noticed there were tons, and that instantly told her what she needed to know about the facade this room provided.
Naudia finally picked up on what was wrong, what was truly wrong.
Naudia realized that she wasn’t hungry for emotions.
Naudia sat down, all 50 of her.
Naudia began to cry.
It was over, finally, truly, over.
That was when Gwynn Hall stepped into the room, Naudia assumed it was from a dead end room, they wouldn’t leave an exit unlocked in this death trap. She could still feel the emotions from Gwynn, she was still passively siphoning emotions directed at herself back into the hive mind, but she, Naudia, was the first changeling since they were designed and built to not need emotions as food.
Maybe she and Twilight could go and have a hayburger after this, Twilight loved hayburgers.
That was when Gwynn stepped into the hospital pen in an attempt to soothe the pile of crying rats. She sat down and opened her arms for a hug and Naudia hopped over.
That was all that happened for a few minutes as Naudia’s shock subsided.
“Now, tell me what’s wrong.” Gwynn said
“My hunger, the craving to eat emotions, is gone, the cursed design we were engineered with is finally gone.” Naudia said in a squeaky voice, but surprisingly only from one mouth.
“Oh.” Gwynn said clearly not expecting that reaction.
“They put that in assuming that we would never again go hungry.” Naudia gave a hollow laugh. “Perfect soldiers engineered by unicorn science, paid for by earth pony coffers before the unification. Do you know what they did to the unicorn that created us?”
Gwynn shook her head.
“They stoned him to death for the abominations he brought to life.” Naudia was practically beaming with pride. “It’s been so long since then, but I can see the way ahead, the darkness is over and changelings managed to claw their way through to the other side.”
Naudia gave a laugh that if she were not a small rodent would have been a good evil sounding laugh.
She instantly turned to Gwynn and asked:
“So, what else do I get with all this, can I turn back into my old self or is this split up rodent thing permanent?”
Many eyes looked up at Gwynn expectantly, and with none of the emotions she was expecting, there was hope there, there was the happy glow of a brighter future. Even as 50 rats and without the context of actually being an yunguaq that Gwynn knew.
“Well the first thing on the table is teaching you how to reform into your changeling form, then a big version of all these rats.” Gwynn pulled a clipboard out to get at her notes. “You are technically a slime creature like Twilight is, but instead of being a wereslime like her you’re an itumeyuk. The thinking was that being able to split into a bunch of smaller rodents would help you more than a werewolf form.”
“So how do I transform back into my normal self? I’m assuming it’s not like normal changeling magic.”
“You need to concentrate on your body, ever done a dance?”
“Twilight had us practice a slow dance for some big event.”
“That’s not gonna work for this.” Gwynn said, thinking for a long moment. “Okay here is how we’re going to do this. You need to think about scratching your left side with your right hoof, remember that your right HOOF not your paw.”
Naudia got what Gwynn was trying to do and decided to try her own, changeling specific method for this. Focusing her mind she brought herself into view in her minds eye and concentrated on it, she could feel which parts of herself were which rat and from that she managed to put herself back together over the course of a couple minutes.
The effect was strange, watching herself come together like some sort of solid but also maleable creature forming a changeling. The effect was not unfamiliar entirely as creatures born entirely of magic they changed themselves when they disguised. Naudia merged herself back together as one creature and almost got everything exactly right the first time.
“You still need some practice at that, but I’m seriously impressed you barely needed my help with that.” Gwynn said. “How about you take a quick rest, take stock and maybe you can ask me some questions.”
“What else do I get with this body?” Naudia asked.
“You should be able to have an omnivorous diet, lift about 15 tons with one hoof, immunity to most maladies you’re familiar with, oh yeah and you get to learn Yunguaq magic which holds dominion over the vast energies contained within quintessence.”
Before Naudia could even ask the question that was forming on her lips Gwynn answered it.
“Looked it up, planck distance.”
Naudia pumped one of her hooves in the air at that, she was getting pizza, and this time she would be able to taste the cheese, not just the emotions contained within and the “emoti sprinkles”.
“Okay I think you should try and split up again and see if you can reform faster and more accurately this time.”
Naudia did that, she could already see uses for this combined with some of the illusion magic she knew about. There were even thoughts of how this could be useful busking for love as these strange rodents before she realized that was old thinking.
Naudia reformed three times as fast this time but her accuracy didn’t improve as quickly as her speed.
“I have a question for you Gwynn, being familiar with some of the other races of the world who do wear clothes, why do you dress like that, with so little?” Naudia asked looking at Gwynn’s basic loincloth and chestwrap clothes.
“It’s a bit of a funny story actually, I wasn’t always a spy working for the first administration, as a kid I wanted to be more confident in myself.” Gwynn was looking back across who knew how long and in to ancient history, literally as it turned out. “It was a little over a hundred thousand years ago when I was about thirteen and I was watching a lot of spy thriller game shows, you know where they try and sneak something in or out of a habitat, typical white hat spy stuff.
“As I was watching that show one part of it got stuck in my head, a particular werewolf spy by the name of Frida managed to bluff her way through a security checkpoint with the goods through sheer confidence alone. I told myself at the time, that’s impossible, I could never do that, but I kept watching it, kept watching her and I decided,” Gwynn paused for dramatic effect. “I would BECOME that confident, and the clearest way I could see to that was to present confident until you just exuded it from every pore.”
“It almost reminds me of myself in some ways.” Naudia said.
Gwynn tilted her head at Naudia.
“I was never confident in my appearance, I always assumed changelings were ugly.”
“Why would you assume that?” Gwynn said looking Naudia up and down, “You seem to have a ‘dark tall supermodel’ kinda thing goin on. At least for the pony people’s standards.”
“Changelings always disguise themselves to gather love, always, and like I told you earlier the ponies who created us drove us out. That left an impression on me, that was the way things were…” Naudia looked off in the direction where she could still feel a trickle of Twilight’s love even now. “Until Twilight came along.
“She accepted me for who I was, what I was, what I looked like, with open hooves and saved me from the bitterness that claimed my mother. She broke the cycle, and helped build who I am today.”
-------------------
A couple transformations later Naudia had mastered splitting up and reforming herself. She had even learned how to split part of herself away to walk through a little obstacle course while reading the benefits of her new body.
“It says here I can transform into a singular rat form as well.” Naudia pointed out as part of herself rung the bell at the end of the impromptu obstacle course clearly meant for dogs. “I would like to learn how to do that as well, with some changeling magic that sounds useful.”
“Well the first thing you need to do is think about the limbs of one of your split up forms,” Gwynn looked at Naudia’s wings. “It’s helpful that you don’t have the same wings on both as that is a difference you can exploit until you learn the transformation.”
“Wait, those are wings? I thought they were just an extra set of arms with some strange extra fingers.” Naudia said looking at her smaller rat form’s supposed wings as they spread out without any kind of membrane to provide lift.
“Yeah, see those little spinnerets next to the wing joint there?” Gwynn said pointing at Naudia’s split off self. “That’s the replacement for a wing membrane, it’s a massively parallel setup that allows you to make, and then store thin wispy wings on your extra set of arms.”
Naudia instantly started to pull silk out of the spinnerets but Gwynn stopped her.
“Wait until you learn enough magic to cut them then we’ll teach you how to fly with them, otherwise you’ll just end up wrapping yourself or somebody else up in wires about 200x stronger than steel.” Gwynn’s hand glowed and she clipped the silk strands without asking Naudia. “You don’t want to accidentally garrote yourself without a way to cut the strands, even as a slime it’s not pleasant.
“Anyway, merge yourself back together and think about those arms, try and feel your wings being those arms reaching out to grasp something, once you can do that you should be good to go.”
After her first failed attempt Naudia realized something about the conversation she just had.
“Gwynn, you just cut something that’s supposed to be 200x stronger than steel like it was nothing. What is this magic I’m going to be learning?”
“Yunguaq magic is stronger than you can possibly imagine, you already know how we’re tapped into quintessence,” Gwynn demonstrated her magic but summoning in a clear glowing cup, “The things we can summon with this magic is made of mag-matter, it’s stronger than you can imagine.”
“I’ve been thinking about that wouldn’t it just float right through normal matter though?” Naudia asked. “We’ve theorized that it exists and atoms are so spread out it would just ignore normal matter no matter how strong it is.”
“Ha HA!” Gwynn exclaimed. “That’s where we are ahead of the game! And this is more around my level, something I can actually explain to you this time! Thirteen billion years ago we ended the first annihilation war by causing a vacuum catastrophe and that created magic, modified to suit what we wanted to do with it. Magmatter operates on modified physics we designed to suit US.”
“Well that just raises MORE questions, how the hay did you or anything for that matter, survive a VACUUM CATASTROPHE?!” Naudia exclaimed back.
“Our FTL drive blinks in and out of the universe to move between places.”
“Oh.” Naudia seemed a bit cowed after all that. “I suppose I should go back to learning how to transform.”
Now Twilight was onto the strangest psychologist appointment ever. She was sitting in a room with an insane monster who was asking probing questions about her mental state. She wasn’t sure if this was something to bore her out of worrying about Naudia and letting that one question claw at her composure, or if it actually was a psyche evaluation.
"Have you noticed any increased violent tendencies lately?" it asked.
"I generally feel a strong inclination to punch you in the face." Twilight said the first one that came to mind.
"That's normal, anything other than that?"
“There was a time when I first saw Gwynn where I felt very angry.”
“And that lines up with the report you induced your first wereslime-werewolf transformation.”
“I can transform into a marewolf?” Twilight asked.
“No, a WERE-wolf, specifically one based on the maned wolf.” The thing pulled out a picture off of it’s clipboard and handed it to Twilight. “You should be able to turn into that using the same method you used to transform into a slime. That’s your in with the werewolves out in Knicknik, your homework is to master that transformation and your test will be keeping it up for however long it takes to fool the werewolves over there.”
The picture was Twilight in the kiddie pool, her cutie mark was absent but it was clearly Twilight as a tall wolf-like purple furred creature. Any other day of the week she wouldn’t have believed it but, she realized that she would have go to with the flow and the gun up against her head or she would go mad.
Just then her stomach growled at her.
“Now that you and Naudia are done with your initiations there will be a break for hamburgers before you begin magic lessons for your new type of magic.”
Twilight instantly perked up at that, she had forgotten she was supposed to learn new magic.
“But whats a hamburger?”
“Something that’s going to take some explaining, come this way, oh and here are some saddlebags copied from your own, made from a higher quality material and adapted for your pony-to-wolf transformation.” The thing pointed at what on initial inspection looked exactly like her saddlebags, but were clearly not as they looked brand new.
Twilight put on the saddlebags and before she and the First Administrator could walk through one of the doors it stopped.
“I would like to remind you Twilight that while you are here you are at the heart of my powerbase, you will be watched, you will have a great deal more freedom than you expect.” The thing pointed a finger at her. “But you will also be judged by your actions here, if you feel any heroic urges welling up inside of you, you need to remember where you are.
“Now lets meet up with your girlfriend, I’m certain you’re just chomping at the bit to find out how she’s changed.”
Twilight was not eager to go out that door, she looked at that door with a pit of dread opening up in her stomach.
-------------------
Outside the dummy hospital room resembled some kind of movie set, that was designed to be jettisoned into space at a moments notice. Lots of wood, some things Twilight sincerely hoped weren’t made of leather, and outside the hospital room she saw basically no metal at all. The scaffolding around the hospital room was made of bamboo tied together, the lighting had some sort of paper lampshade, it was like if you dropped somebody off in the middle of a jungle and told them “build me a movie set”. In keeping with that there was a lot of greenery around the place as well.
There were a lot of people outside the dummy hospital room, Twilight assumed they were people and there was something strange about everything. It was very hard to describe as she looked from one strange creature to the next, she could… tell things about them, just by looking, things she didn’t know before she looked at them.
The problem was she didn’t know what all these things meant but she learned? Knew? Variations on them whenever she looked at somebody new.
“I’m, seeing things? Knowing things?” Twilight looked up at the First Administrator. “Is this normal?”
“Normal for yunguaq yes, something about the way you existed before was blocking it out. We think it has to do with how Equestria just… is. You’re just going to have to learn how to read these things yourself with practice.”
Twilight gave him a questioning look.
“I’m not going to explain right now. We’ve been working on the best way to try and explain it without misunderstanding and everything about explaining it is going to be miserable if you misunderstand it.”
“Okay…”
That was when Naudia walked into the room talking with Gwynn Hall like they were suddenly great friends and she looked ecstatic about whatever had happened. There was also a large kangaroo rodent thing riding on her back that was looking around at everything as if it was trying to take in as much of the room outside as possible. If Twilight didn’t know any better she would have said “casing the joint”.
Twilight tried to examine Naudia for any changes external and other than the rat could find none, the only difference was in her attitude. It was like a gigantic weight had been lifted off her shoulders, Twilight could tell from the way she moved, before she seemed confident, now Twilight could tell without a doubt that she WAS confident in herself. The difference was undeniably appealing in Twilight’s eyes.
When Naudia actually noticed Twilight she practically galloped over to meet her, clearly very excited. When she got to Twilight she turned to show off the rat thing sitting on her back.
“Twilight look what I can do now!”
“So, uhh, they gave you a pet kangaroo-rat-ish thing?” Twilight looked a bit closer at it. “It looks like somebody combined a springhare with a rat and stuck on some extra bits.”
“Oh yeah, sorry I’m feeling a little bit scatterbrained right now. Here I’ll show you what I mean.”
And then Naudia split into a heap of bouncing happy little rats just like the one that had been sitting on her back.
Twilight froze.
A single hair plinked out of place like a cut guitar string.
The next thing Twilight heard was:
“I think she passed out standing up.” From Gwynn.
“Yeah. I think this all was a bit too much of a shock for her.” Naudia’s voice. “Don’t worry I know what to do here.”
Twilight fully came back into awareness to find Naudia nuzzling her with no strange rodents in sight.
“Wha…?” Twilight asked.
“I’m sorry about that Twilight, I was just so excited that I forgot to explain.” Naudia said. “I was converted into a yunguaq like you but an ‘itumeyuk’ instead of a wereslime, I can split into 50 of those redback rats.”
“We had an easier time working with Naudia’s conversion because she’s a magical creature than we did for yours.” The First Administrator said.
“Buuu…” Twilight tried to fully start up her brain. “But why are you so happy about that? Why would turning into rodents make you this happy?”
“That’s not what is making me so happy, at least not directly.” Naudia said. “The conversion has outright removed the need for me to eat emotions! The world seems brighter!”
“But, you split into 50 rats?” Twilight phrased it like a question.
“If it means I no longer have to eat emotions I will take it!” Naudia beamed with happiness. “I’m already thinking of ways that can be useful as well, you want to know what else I can do?!”
“Lets save that for later,” The First Administrator interjected “I think both of you need to eat something to eat.”
“Yeah.” Twilight said.
“ABSOLUTELY!” Naudia beamed so much she might as well be glowing. “First real food dinner date with Twilight!”
The first administrator gestured off in a direction and as they walked Twilight hung back with Naudia. She needed to talk this latest revelation over with her.
“So, uhh…” Twilight didn’t know where to start. “You seem extremely happy with this transformation.”
“I’m starting to get the impression that you’re not.” Naudia said defensively.
Twilight looked away.
“I don’t know.”
Naudia let her stew a moment with a hostile silence.
“I’ll be right up front with you Naudia, I’ve read communication is key to a relationship and I can’t hide this from you.” Twilight sighed before plunging onwards into the abyss. “I’m not okay with all of this, I was a pony as best I knew last week, you were a changeling and things were mostly going fine.
“But now,” Twilight waved a hoof at everything around her. “We’re stuck up in this against our will and I’m pretty sure we’re on the wrong side of this, and it’s distressing for me to feel like you’re just… ignoring all of this.”
That did stop Naudia, literally, Twilight had to walk back to wait for her.
“I didn’t think of it that way.” Naudia said after a long pause once they started walking again. “The moment I woke up in that room I knew what it was for, whatever organization from space that has the reins right now knows exactly what to do with them. But my gut instinct here is that there is something going on here that we haven’t been told yet, and I can’t fully judge the situation until we find that out especially with how little we know, I mean do you remember how huge that thing we docked with was?
“As for why I’m so happy, I don’t think I can express to you enough how huge it is for changelings to not need to eat love.” Naudia scratched her chin. “In fact I can’t, it’s impossible but I can show you the tip of the iceberg. You remember that carved box I showed you right?”
“The one that glowed to show a profile of a changeling? That was a long time ago now.” Twilight said.
“She and her egg died of starvation because of a bad harvest. They were not alone, some changelings just couldn’t handle the rations we had to give them.”
Naudia let that sink in.
“That’s the situation changelings have been in for over a thousand years. There isn’t much indication to changelings today as to how long this break in the drought will last. They have to trust ponies but this generation likely never fully will, not as a whole.
“But for the first time ever this cycle has been broken. I was right to avoid the path my mother took, and now I can see the path forward out of the darkness of this cycle and we will not only retain how we look but we will be stronger as well, in my lifetime we will see the last corrupted changeling transformation, and it isn’t because we will see the last changeling.”
That left Twilight with a lot to mull over and they walked in silence for quite some time. As they were making their way up some stairs Twilight spoke up.
“I don’t like this situation, Everything about it smells wrong.” Twilight said to Naudia. “But I can’t hate something that has helped you out to this degree, even if the whole springhare rat thing is still…”
There really weren’t words for describing the feeling of “your girlfriend can now split into 50 rats, and you have turned into a slime-werewolf.”
They reached the top of the stairs and into a surreal Manehattan-like subway. The whole thing was set up as if somebody significantly more advanced and more primitive than ponies had set it up. There were stunning signs made up of glowing flowers blinking on and off like any electric light, little hole in the wall shops and stands selling all manner of things, vending machines of odd types listing prices in aci, and plants, lots and lots of plants a feast for the eyes of tropical greenery.
Metal and stone clearly didn’t have much of a place in this world, muscled out by wood, leather, bone, fabric and other natural materials. Twilight eyed the leather and bone with disgust edged with suspicion, it looked wrong in ways that was unusual, it didn’t look like gryphon leather or ancient gryphon bone artifacts should.
Then there were the yunguaq, no two of them were alike, all of them were strange, fruit bat creatures ambled along beside some sort of flamboyant flowering plant rabbit humanoid. Their clothing and what they carried varied massively, anything from beachwear that left most of them exposed to tight cut tailored suits inlaid with a golden amber, and anything, ANYTHING in between. Twilight swore she saw somebody with a cowboy hat, a poncho and a skirt richly covered in designs Rarity would have done terrible things to be able to make.
Some of them were carrying around strange things as well, plates made of banana leaves with food Twilight barely recognized, grass baskets, a bindle covered in ants each an inch long or more. Twilight even saw one of them leading a giant turkey with a saddle and at least six extra transparent glowing heads. There were people carrying and looking at one of those flat bugs the first administrator head the legs folded out to display an even larger screen.
Everything there was just a massive sensory overload and culture shock for Twilight and Naudia.
And if there was any doubt about the identity of who they were following they were utterly crushed as the crowds instantly parted anywhere the First Administrator decided to walk without him even having to say a word. They barely even gave a second glance at the First Administrator as if getting to work was more important.
Now Twilight and Naudia did get odd looks, the yunguaq tried to hide it to some extent but clearly a winged technicolor unicorn and a bug-horse were out of the ordinary.
“We aren’t taking the subway today, we’ll be taking an aerial route, while I know you both can fly I would appreciate if you would refrain until you understand the air space.” The First Administrator said.
They followed him up through another set of stairs and out into daylight and a skyscraper city street.
Twilight and Naudia looked up.
Before they could fully take in the organic skyscrapers around them they were forced to take in that they were looking up at more city space, fields and terrain, as the sky and clearly miles away above them. Along with a great vertical bar artificial sun that ran through the center.
Then they looked down at the canal beachfront tree city they were standing in. Trucks and cars floated above them made of lacquered wood and other organic materials. Gigantic rodents as big as a cart floated by carrying cargo containers. Every material used was obviously organic and obviously purpose grown.
The city in front of them was oddly designed to face the city streets around them with stairway access for the floating cars. The storefronts themselves resembled a mishmash of colors gaudily advertising anything from arcades to clothing stores in grafted wood seamlessly integrated with glass storefronts. This wasn’t some kind of nature preserve that was meant to live in harmony with the trees around them. The trees were put together and shaped like skyscrapers, given lots of unnatural corners and light up signs made of flowers, greenery made in service to the building rather than in concert with it.
And the street itself was strange, since cars flew it was a beach-side canal complete with boardwalk. There were even lots of street vendors standing around peddling anything from t-shirts to Tamales. Planted in the boardwalks periodically were various tropical plants and palm trees. Walking out into the perfect tropical air Twilight understood why there was an abundance of swimsuits and lighter clothes as everybody lived on a beachfront.
Twilight also noticed something that had been nagging at her mind a bit, everybody who passed by them was flawless? Twilight didn’t want to use the word ‘perfect’ here. Thinking about it for a moment Twilight figured it out, everybody walking by her looked like they had designed themselves in some way. Nobody looked too old, nobody had so much as a five o’clock shadow or scraggly haircut that didn’t look on purpose.
Twilight followed the first administrator into some kind of black, wooden flying car with tinted utterly black windows. She recognized the general shape of the car from the other Equestria. It was parked floating next to the boardwalk. Twilight noted that still even on this crowded street everybody gave the First Administrator ample room even if they barely acknowledged his presence.
The inside of the car was strange, there was no drivers seat and it was decorated in that leather material the other Equestria seemed to like. Twilight and Naudia found themselves sitting across from the first administrator and Gwynn Hall and desperate for somewhere to look other than the First Administrator.
They settled on looking out at the cityscape around them as it flew by. Twilight opting to lean into Naudia to get a better view of the outside.
Twilight could not get over how much the cityscape looked like somebody had wanted to say “future” and “tropical” and all they had to work with were plants and glass. The city didn’t have lampposts instead lamps were attached to the side of palm trees with no visible power source. All of the storefronts went up 5-6 stories tall with not only stairs but places where somebody could jump up and down floors, trucks packed mid-air unloaded directly to the fifth floor.
“Why is there so much wood, and plants?” Naudia asked.
“At one point in the past we thought that the future would be metal and robots, skyscrapers made of steel. Then we discovered what we would likely build those robots out of and the perspective changed.” The First Administrator said. “The strongest easy to get a hold of material is carbon, the major component in diamond and graphene, it was then when ‘carbon based lifeform’ and ‘future robot’ began to blur.
“What you see outside is the result of thirteen billion years of development on that technology, the perfect melding of technology and magic.”
Twilight felt the flying car come to a stop. They had parked right outside of what Twilight thought was a hayburger restaurant.
The inside of the restaurant was strange. Everything about it.
It felt like one of those “future world’s fair” exhibits, a look into how the future could be forty years from now, if it focused on rats. The name of the restaurant was “ratburger” and it was advertised as “home of the original rat waiting staff!” To wit the pathway around their booth where three rats came and gave them all menus. Electronic menus with screens that you poked at and options popped up.
Twilight ended up ordering something called an A26 burger with fries under the assumption it was something like a hayburger. That was the strange thing about the menu, the burgers all had designations like that, A26, A15, A30. Assuming the burger’s price in aci was similar to bits it didn’t seem that expensive for eating out. Twilight made a mental note to ask what aci was and what it was based on.
The burger came much faster than anticipated, it seemed like they hardly had time to put down their menus before a line of rats were already bringing it down the walkway on the edge of their booth. The First Administrator got up saying he had to “Talk to the people in the back.”
The A26 burger was meat.
The burger bun had sesame seeds on it, the fries were made of potatoes instead of hay, there was ketchup, lettuce, and all the condiments Twilight and Naudia recognized from back home.
But the burger was made of meat, and it smelled good.
Gwynn looked up from taking her first bite at their expressions.
“Is there something wrong?”
“We’re ponies, this is meat, from some animal.”
Unexpectedly that got a rile out of Gwynn.
“It does not!”
Naudia and Twilight looked back at their burgers, Twilight even lifting up the edge of the bun.
“Yeah it’s meat, from an animal, where else would it have come from?” Naudia was exasperated at Gwynn’s naivete not knowing something so obvious. “Are you people so disconnected that you don’t know where meat comes from?”
The First Administrator was there at the table then, Twilight couldn’t tell if he was just stealthy or had just appeared, she also realized he hadn’t ordered anything.
“I think it’s time I showed you how the hamburger is made. Come into the back, the owner has been most obliging.”
After that ominous statement Twilight and Naudia found themselves in what looked like a brewery setup, for compost. There were leather barrels with hoops made of wood, all of them were labeled with the same things as the menus, A26 and so on. There were also enormous baskets of compost, grass, dead leaves, paper plates, banana leaf plates, potato peelings, lots and lots of finely cut potato peelings.
The owner was a bright red squirrel-plant thing with a bushy flowering tail, he wore an apron and casual clothes you’d see in places with very warm weather. He gave off the impression of being very nervous at having the First Administrator noticing him unexpectedly.
“As you can see these are our meat growth vats, all of our meat is grown on site from all natural compost that has been sourced locally.” He pointed at the barrels and then the baskets of compost. “This one over here was just started yesterday so I can pop open the top and show you the process in action.”
He brought over a step stool for them and opened up the top of the barrel, the leather was apparently boiled to harden like metal. The hinge was also strips of leather glued together to make a solid hinge shape like you’d make with metal and even the again very solid rod was still some kind of leather rolled up.
Inside the leather barrel which Twilight and Naudia cringed away from was very clearly meat growing on compost. The whole inside of the barrel looked like the meat was some sort of bacteria.
“As you can see animals are not involved in the process of making meat, they’re too expensive, too much waste product, and as a bonus bacterially sourced meats are more ethical.”
“What kind of meat even is A26 anyway?”
“Hamburger.” The owner answered.
“No I mean where did… er what was it based off of?” Twilight asked.
That got a blank look from everybody in the room except the First Administrator. Nobody seemed to know. There were a couple answers put ahead about it, mosquito, flatworm, and mollusks. It was pretty clear nobody even had so much as a clue as to where to start.
“Maybe it was artificial.” The owner said.
“I could believe that.” Gwynn replied.
“Yeah, it’s too tasty, too easy to make into hamburgers and other stuff, that’s a sure sign that somebody designed it from the ground up.”
“And that name too, it’s already named after a popular dish, has to be artificial.”
It was evident to Twilight that this wasn’t some grand conspiracy, they didn’t have any idea at all what A26 was based off of. It was pretty clear from what she knew of Gryphon cuisine that they actually wouldn’t even know where to start, the guess of “mosquito” was far too confident. Twilight hadn’t heard anything about flatworms at all from gryphons and it didn’t look like seafood.
Now the problem was if it was okay to eat or not.
It was then she thought to ask the First Administrator who she again noted hadn’t ordered anything.
“Do you know what it’s made out of?”
“I’m afraid the invention of bacterially sourced meat was before my time. There likely were people who knew when I started 13 billion years ago but chances are they’ve passed on by now.”
There was something on Twilight’s plate, hovering over it, that wasn’t there before. It was some sort of spotlight hanging down from the ceiling really close up to her plate. Naudia looked confused about it as well, but she pushed the button on it and it zipped back up to the ceiling on it’s wire.
“It’s a food warming lamp, it’s so that your food doesn’t get cold if you have to walk away for some reason.” Gwynn said.
Naudia had very little hesitation about the hamburger and chomped down on hers very quickly. Twilight on the other hoof wasn’t so sure about things, and lifted up the bun to look at the meat underneath.
It smelled great, really great, better than a hayburger. The temptation was there to just dig in, but was this some sort of slippery slope for her? Would she start craving some kind of other meat now she was some sort of wolf creature?
"Twilight you may be partially wolf now, but you're adapted to eating cooked meat. You're not about to develop some kind of craving for any other kind of meat. Nobody else has and you're not going to be eating any but bacterially sourced meat." Twilight was surprised to hear Gwynn say that.
“No seriously, you should try this!” Naudia said with her mouth full. “It’s great!”
Twilight reluctantly took a bite of the burger.
-------------------
There were two plates in front of Twilight now, two hamburgers had vanished never to be seen again. Twilight noticed however that Naudia was looking at her strangely, probably because Twilight had inhaled two hamburgers right in front of her.
“Looks like you really wolfed those down Twilight.” Gwynn snickered.
“Honestly, it’s weird to have an argument kicked out from under you like that. I thought I would have more time to adjust.” Twilight said, but something felt off to her about her mouth, like she was forming the words differently than she did before.
Twilight noticed what that something was, it effected not only her muzzle but her hooves as well. They were paws with thumbs and her muzzle had a clear wolf-ish look to it.
Gwynn cast a spell and a mirror materialized in her hands, she offered it to Twilight who did not take it.
Twilight and Naudia could only stare at Gwynn mouths agape, their minds had stopped.
“What was that spell?” Twilight asked.
“Uhh, that was just a mirror spell, it summons a mirror.” Gwynn said.
Twilight took the physical mirror in one of her paw-hands as if it might explode at any moment.
“You use a spell to make a physical thing just for that? Just like that?” Twilight was clearly very much more interested in the mirror and mirror spell than seeing what she actually looked like.
“Yeah?” Gwynn said as if she didn’t get the magnitude of what she’d just done. “It’ll go away after a while if I stop feeding it magic.”
“Oh, so it’s just a conjuration?” Twilight asked. “Something fragile and temporary.”
“Temporary, yes, fragile no. Lemme show you.”
Gwynn took the mirror back and summoned a little floating plank of wood that stood still in the air and put the mirror on top of it.
What happened next was honestly terrifying for Twilight and Naudia. Almost faster than the eye could see Gwynn went into her wolf form and in one brutally fast movement slammed a drinking straw, glowing with magic, into the summoned mirror. The force of that blow was so enormous that Twilight thought if the plank and mirror weren’t floating in the air like that the building would have shaken from the blow.
Neither the paper straw nor the summoned mirror were even so much as scratched.
“That’s just your standard magmatter shield summon, you can’t break them with conventional matter because it’s many many orders of magnitude stronger.” The First Administrator said with a smug expression, this was a lever he knew would work from the start. “I’m certain you’re already thinking of applications for it.”
Gwynn handed Twilight the undamaged mirror and one shock became two as Twilight saw her reflection in the mirror. It was that same purple furred maned wolf(not that her mane wasn’t purple, but she was also a maned wolf as well) from before looking back at her, lanky, tall, almost foxlike, opposable thumbs.
She was taken out of her shock by the flash of a camera from Gwynn.
“We’re going to print this out to help you with your homework.”
“I guess you must really like hamburgers if you didn’t notice turning into a wolf to wolf them down.” Naudia said, noting that down for future reference.
“Teach me to change back.” Twilight said to the First Administrator.
“That should be easy, I already taught you how, unless you need me to give you a picture of what you already look like. This is the test.”
Twilight still flinched at the word “test” but it lacked a lot of the impact it normally did coming from somebody she didn’t respect.
It was harder than expected to apply changing from a pony to a slime to changing from a wolf to a pony. The forms were too similar in how they moved and emoted, they were both designed to smile and put their ears down for example. Eventually by keeping an image of herself in her mind Twilight managed to do a slow transformation that worked it’s way down from her head to her hooves.
“Good, now practice that on the way to magic practice, if you can’t get it right three times in a row you won’t be allowed to learn any magic until you do.” The First Administrator said.
-------------------
That, it turned out was extremely good motivation for Twilight. By the time they were halfway to their destination Twilight could already transform without issue, so the First Administrator started testing her by randomly asking her to transform between pony, wolf, and slime with a timer.
The odd thing about this was Twilight was expecting to feel tired after all this, rearranging your body should be more tiring than this she thought, but it wasn’t. Presumably she had gained a lot more stamina as well as strength due to the conversion.
The building they arrived at was a gym, kinda, there were the usual treadmills and some kind of tension weightlifting equipment or other things with flywheels or air pressure. But most of it was set up like a martial arts dojo of some kind, and the whole building had been cleared out for just Twilight and Naudia.
In the dojo, the only other person besides them was a feathered rat raptor thing with the red and gold silk clothes that Twilight recognized as Kuiguk, the Kopiak from the trip up here with the giant spider. Twilight did not see the giant spider anywhere around, but she was still on the lookout for it. At his feet was presumably Twilight and Naudia’s set of training equipment.
“I’m going to teach you how to do magic today, like a yunguaq does.” Kuiguk said. “I don’t know if you remember me from our flight up here but I was one of the guards who was there to make sure you didn’t do anything stupid on the way up.”
“And also to illustrate the variety of races we have invented, don’t discount that.” The First Administrator interjected.
“Yeah, that too. Anyway, yunguaq magic is a science that we created and the easiest way to learn how to channel magic is to feel magic.” He held out a stick with amber inlaid into it. “Put a hoof on this and feel for when I cast a spell with it, try and remember that feeling of magic flowing.”
Twilight wrapped her hoof around one end of the stick and Naudia did so to the other. The spell Kuiguk cast was something that created and dropped some variant of paper cups onto the floor. Twilight could feel the magic with her hoof, it felt like a thin electric pressure passing underneath her hoof, She briefly looked at her hoof to see if it had embossed a pattern onto it somehow.
And Twilight utterly failed to learn this new type of magic.
Again, and again, and again, Twilight could feel the magic, picture the magic, everything, but it just didn’t connect. There was actually a sizable pile of cups on the floor now and there would be more if some of them hadn’t started disappearing.
The galling thing for Twilight was that Naudia had managed to create a wonky, hole filled, malformed cup on her seventh try and by the thirty fifth actually had a cup you could drink out of. Fifty tries in Naudia was good enough that she started to mess with the spell and had added on a handle to make a mug.
Twilight at that point had zip, nothing, nada.
She could feel the strange electric pressure, she even knew in her minds eye what it should look like but she couldn’t figure out how to use it herself.
“ARRRGGGHH!!” Twilight said for the umpteenth time.
It was in that moment that Naudia had a flash of inspiration. She walked over to Twilight, put a hoof on the back of her head and shoved Twilight’s head until her horn touched the stick.
“He-” Twilight got out before she abruptly got the message.
This was when Twilight actually started to make progress for the first time. Although it would be unfair to compare Twilight’s progress to Naudia’s her first cup was a bit more orderly, of course it was a total of seventy tries in. Twilight did perfect the cup and make a mug in good time, before she hit another solid wall of a roadblock.
“Now try and cast that spell with your hoof.” Kuiguk said.
Twilight was utterly walled once again from casting any magic at all.
That was when Naudia’s second epiphany came about, a real stroke of genius on her part.
“Twilight,” Naudia said, “I’m going to do something strange. I need you to relax and just kinda go with the flow, I think you’ll get an idea of what I’m going to do pretty quickly but I need you to make sure you stay calm okay?”
Naudia held onto Twilight’s hoof and gently began to stroke her hair trying to relax Twilight as much as possible. Then as Twilight began to melt into her slime form Naudia pulled Twilight’s hoof off.
“Uhhhhahhh!” Twilight couldn’t quite form rational words at that moment.
“Don’t worry I’m going to give it back, just relax, it’ll make total sense in a bit.” Naudia said holding Twilight’s hoof.
The hoof moved around as if it was still connected and obviously was still controlled directly by Twilight as it wobbled around as if grasping for something. Oddly enough Twilight could even feel Naudia holding her hoof as well.
After Naudia managed to calm down Twilight again she pulled off Twilight’s horn.
“Dia you need to tell me what you’re doing before we-”
Plop.
Naudia plopped Twilight’s disconnected hoof onto her head where her horn was and then slapped her horn on where her hoof used to be. And it worked, both connected, even though they looked very odd where they were at. Twilight’s hoof was even still articulated like normal. Twilight tried to focus her eyes on the hoof sticking out of her forehead.
“This can be reversed right?” Twilight asked in a seriously worried voice.
“Yeah, it’s a party trick for wereslimes.” Kuiguk said. “You just put the hoof back where it was and things will settle on their own.”
Twilight looked down at her horn and wiggled it, then up at Kuiguk.
“Which one am I supposed to try first?”
“Lets go with your horn-hoof, er, the one on your leg first, and see how that goes.”
This turned out to be the key for Twilight to grasp casting this new form of magic from places other than her horn. She was proficient at casting with her horn-hoof inside of ten casts, her hoof horn took a bit longer at 15. But she wasn’t done after switching them back into their proper places, she experimented with casting with her ears, and her other hoof and mastered those as well.
Twilight was extremely proud of her pile of cups after all was said and done and experimentally tried to crush one, it would not budge no matter how hard she squeezed on it with both hooves.
“That’s magmatter, not gonna crush no matter how hard you push, but I suppose that can move us into the next lesson manipulation, then we’ll move onto other spells.”
This time they were learning how to take a cup and manipulate it with magic, the first thing was just to dent it and undent it. Which turned out to be surprisingly easy for both of them. After they had mastered making the plasticy sound of a dented cup they moved on to the real thing they would be learning today.
“Now that you’ve got a hang of that I’m going to be teaching you something else, in a different way.” Kuiguk said. “This is going to be the language through which you learn other spells.”
Kuiguk unfolded and handed them both a piece of paper that had shapes drawn on it in a sequence.
“Now I think you two should collaborate on this one, that seems to get you the best results, and also this is something where you don’t want to take shortcuts. Not because they can’t work, it’s more a ‘show your work so you know where things went wrong’ situation.”
The shapes drawn on the paper were abstractions of what Twilight was charging up in her hooves, not exact but close enough that she could work that out pretty quickly. They were laid out like a set of instructions for a building toy Twilight remembered when she was young.
This was Twilight’s forte, memorizing from a book, well a sheet of paper. She had it right in three tries and got… a mug. Twilight looked down at it in disappointment.
“Oh…” Twilight said when she finally got the spell to work. “Another cup.”
“Yeah, we’re not getting into anything dangerous today,” Kuiguk said. “This is the boring foundation for tomorrow and so that you can learn spells you’re interested in on your own.”
That made it better for Twilight, she also noticed something else about the whole situation.
“That was surprisingly easy to memorize, a lot easier than I expected it would be.”
“Yeah,” Naudia said. “That was always my problem before, but this was far easier than any magic training I’ve ever done.”
“There is actually a good reason for that, your body was designed to cast spells like this from the very start, and the basis of these spells were designed in tandem with your basic biology as well.” Kuiguk explained. “There was no evolution and thus no local maxima putting a restriction on how compatible you may or may not be with the magic.”
“What’s a local maxima?” Naudia asked.
“It’s a limit to what random evolution will give you, a local maximum of fitness where on either side things are less efficient and there may or may not be a better solution beyond the valley on either side. For example trees evolve as wood and use chlorophyll to make sugars instead of utilizing metals and photovoltaics to make electricity because the valley between those two local maxima is too deep.”
“Changelings were more limited by the magical theory and design principals around the time we were created, some adjustments have been made over time but nothing as drastic as this.” Naudia said.
“Anyway, we’ve reached the end of the session today so I’m going to be giving you both a book of other spells to learn, just some day-to-day magic.” Kuiguk pulled two books out of the equipment pile with sterile textbook-like appearances and handed them to Naudia and Twilight.
“Buk!” Twilight exclaimed in joy, here in her hooves now was the start of new magic, an entire new world unknown to ponykind, and she and Naudia would be the first ponies ever to see it. You could practically see her vibrate with excitement.
“Incidentally I do have a bit of a warning for both of you,” Kuiguk said noticing Twilight’s excitement. “You need to get a full night’s sleep tonight and you’re expected to be here by 8 AM sharp, so if you don’t get to sleep on time for that you will be sedated for your own safety.”
That put a damper on Twilight faster than a cold blanket encased in a block of ice.
“What!? Why?”
“Your body is still adjusting to, well, being a new body, and these new neurons need to set themselves up. If you don’t get to sleep and sleep for a decent amount of time we’ll have to repeat today, but it’ll be even longer.” Kuiguk hadn’t noticed up until this point that Naudia already had her nose in the book and wasn’t actually listening to him at all. “That goes double for you too Naudia Sparkle.”
Naudia snapped out of the book which snapped shut like somebody had zapped her with electricity.
“What, no I was listening.”
“So you’re going to make sure to get to bed on time?” Kuiguk asked.
“Yes absolutely.” Naudia tried to stand even more to attention.
“Good because I don’t want somebody to have to sedate you.”
After Kuiguk explained everything a second time to Naudia who actually hadn’t been paying attention they were shuffled out of the gym and back into the car to go to their accommodations for the night. Naudia and Twilight discussed this new magic all the way back and barely noticed that the First Administrator and Gwynn had left somewhere during their magic lesson and hadn’t come back.
Gwynn Hall’s house was large, at least three stories tall and like all the houses around it, anachronistic in design to the rest of the block. It was round and seemed to be built around a single mangrove tree that stuck out the top of the house. This sort of “form a tree” architecture seemed very adept at making rounded things as that was evidenced in the architecture which seemed to be made of mangrove roots. There were also runs all around the tree, set just below things like windows and balconies, where Twilight could see there was something skittering through.
The decorations on the house were mostly flower boxes and vines to go along with the smoothed bark look, as well as wicker furniture. There were awnings made of tree branches carefully set to cover an area with leaves. The lights were either designed to match into the rest of the organic house or these people just could grow lamps, Twilight wasn’t sure which, because they looked like they could go either way. The path leading up to the house was a grass affair between two beds of flowers separating the front walk from the longer grasses of the front yard.
The whole place gave a sorta “tropical” vibe like this was a home shaped out of one of those idyllic tropical island’s growths of mangroves and flowers.
Gwynn met them on the front porch she had taken a separate car that had arrived almost the same time they did.
Twilight and Naudia barely got a chance to look inside before a stampede of spiders jumped on Gwynn, each and every one of them the size of a beach ball. Twilight and Naudia shrieked in terror grabbing onto one another at the horrifying scene of Gwynn being buried alive in giant spiders.
What followed was a very strange moment that killed the momentum, where all of the spiders and Gwynn looked at Twilight and Naudia as if to ask “what’s wrong?” None of this was going as it should, nobody should be confused as to why being buried in giant spiders is a bad thing, and the giant spiders shouldn’t be in on that confusion to any extent.
There was a tired sigh from outside the door, it turned out to be the First Administrator. Nobody had heard him show up, there weren’t any cars flying away, he was just there.
“Gwynn if you could, please take the spiders somewhere else for now, but leave…” The First Administrator’s nose wrinkled up. “Leave Muffin for explanatory purposes.”
Twilight and Naudia clutching at one another and now actually up against a wall watched as Gwynn herded the spiders out of the entryway and further into the building except for one, presumably Muffin.
“I suppose I should explain ken’gun properly so you can understand the importance they hold in the yunguaq’s lives.”
The First Administrator sat down at one end of the entryway with Twilight and Naudia at the other, this kept the huge spider on the other side of the room to them. It was a large entryway designed so that you could get a couch moved into it and through to any part of the house.
“A ken’gun spider like this is an essential part of a yunguaq’s life, they are given these spiders the very day they are born. They are so essential that when you are picking out a kid’s name you will also be picking out a cutesy name for their ken’gun companion. They are not like spiders in your world. In fact I would go so far as to say that nothing here is like it is in your world.”
The First Administrator gestured at the spider sitting next to him.
“As you can see they are designed with mammalian traits without an exoskeleton, while they do have claws like a tarantula they’re not for scratching and their feet were likewise adapted to be more like a two toed tarantula paw. They were actually designed with advanced intelligence that was originally based off of a golden retriever or a black lab, I don’t actually remember.
“I’m giving you this context so you can begin to understand how the yunguaq think of ken’gun, it’s to the point where they were literally named from a word that means ‘best friend’. The reason children were given spiders is the same reason we use them for the police, their webs make them well adapted to neutralizing a threat rather than killing it. So as a child wandered off with their best friend that they trusted couldn’t directly ‘tell on them’, if they ever ran into trouble it wouldn’t be a child holding a trigger to a dangerous weapon, but instead a friend who could keep them safe and importantly tracked.
Naudia and Twilight could only stare at the spider in front of them. It didn’t look nearly so alarming now, it looked obviously sad from it’s posturing.
“I would suggest acclimating yourself to the sight of them to a certain extent. If you can at least limit the amount you flinch when they come near you it would help a lot, if you don’t you might find relations with yunguaq... strained.”
“But it’s a giant spider.” Naudia, the bug horse said.
“I’m not expecting you to get buried under an avalanche of spiders giggling all the way, I’d like you to start out working your way up to being able to be close to them, without shrieking in terror.” The First Administrator said. “It doesn’t matter to me if you do this willingly or if we have to lock you in a room with 20 of them, and not feed you until you complete a 30 minute petting session.”
Reluctantly Twilight and Naudia agreed to let Muffin the ken’gun approach.
“The starting place for your thinking of, and dealing with them should be like they were just dogs.”
“Yeah, just eight legged dogs, with spinnerets, eight eyes and an abdomen.” Naudia said sarcastically.
Twilight and Naudia hadn’t noticed but Muffin had been working on something, two things. As the ken’gun got within about five feet of them it placed the two things on the ground like a peace offering, and then backed up away from the two flat crochet dolls.
Obviously the dolls were made of spider silk, or whatever these people engineered to act like spider silk. It was also obvious what the dolls were even in their simplified state, one was a small purple winged horse with a horn seen from the side, and the other was a familiar looking hole-hoofed bug horse crudely shown from the side. The spider silk was actually dyed as well to match colors with their respective pony.
Twilight looked up from her elementary Naudia doll at Muffin and looked at the spider a bit more closely.
The first thing she noticed is despite the orange and black color scheme Twilight associated with tarantulas it’s hair, or was it fur? Resembled that of a wire haired dog. It’s posturing was astonishingly clear and readable as “shy.” The kind of animal that without it’s owner present would require a lot of coaxing from Fluttershy to even get out from under the bed. You could tell where the spider was looking due to other colored dots that wandered around it’s two exaggeratedly sized eyes to mimic a pupil, it was looking down at the floor.
The spider was moving two of it’s legs back and forth nervously. One thing Twilight noted about them was that they were, taken in on their own, kinda cute, they looked somewhere between cloven hooves and fuzzy two toed paws. But between the each of the pairs of “toes” peeked out a claw like a cat’s claw.
That was a good way to describe this spider in general, fuzzy, like a plush toy version of a spider animated to life with a well groomed dog coat. Exaggerated features meant that it had a large abdomen and a soft look to it, the way it moved strongly implied that it did not have an exoskeleton.
Twilight looked down at the simple Naudia doll it had crochet for her and decided to reluctantly give the spider a pet. The spider felt pretty good to pet, just as soft as it looked and Twilight confirmed it did not have an exoskeleton. Muffin leaned into the pet from Twilight’s hoof and gave a happy little trill sound.
It wasn’t so bad, Twilight had a bit of a realization though, an assumption that she wanted to clear up.
“Hey, if these spiders are given to people on the day they’re born, why does Gwynn have so many?” She asked the First Administrator.
“That’s something you’re going to have to ask Gwynn yourself. Now give Naudia a chance to pet the spider.”
Naudia had a lot more reservations about petting the spider than Twilight did, inching her hoof closer bit by bit, until she finally made contact with the spider fur. She started pulling her hoof away as soon as she thought it wouldn’t be awkward.
“Why are you so scared of the spider Dia?”
Naudia bit her lip clearly very reluctant to answer for some reason.
“…A fortune teller told me that I was supposed to die to a spider about a year ago somewhere close to home.”
“Oh come on, these guys aren’t even venomous, and there aren’t any spiders this big around Ponyville even in the Everfree.” Twilight turned to the First Administrator, “They aren’t actually venomous are they?”
The First Administrator shook his head.
“No, I mean they said I was supposed to die out in the badlands on our trip back from the hive, likely to one of the spider monsters out there.”
Twilight was about to reassure Naudia that was a load of horse-apples when unexpectedly the First Administrator butted in.
“What is supposed to happen and what does happen are very different things. Your world is not governed by destiny or fate in any way, that is why Starswirls book is called ‘predictions and prophecies’ and not something like ‘prophecies of the future’. Anything real in there is a prediction he made.”
“How do you know anything about that?” Naudia asked flabbergasted.
“We have spy cells inside your cities as we speak, I believe you already know about one of them, the so called ‘rat god’ in the paper. It shouldn’t be too hard to put together from what you’ve learned how we’ve infiltrated your cities to learn as much about your culture and DNA as we did. Incidentally your former library in Celestia’s castle has been extremely useful.”
Twilight and Naudia stared at him.
“As you can no doubt guess the cultural differences between us are pretty extreme. I would also like to say something while we’re the only ones in the room, Twilight, Naudia, I would like to ask you not to tell anybody what hamburger from animal sources is actually made out of if you do know. Rocking the boat in that respect could have… consequences.”
That was the end of the conversation. There was simply nothing more to be said of that and the First Administrator took his leave shortly thereafter.
That was when the spell broke and Naudia realized that she had actually been hugging a spider like Muffin was her pet cat. Very carefully pushing aside her knee jerk reaction she gently let Muffin down, and then moments later shivered.
-------------------
“That. That was a blatant test.” Naudia said as they finally exited the entryway. “He knows there are other meats out there, and he’s testing if we’re going to take him exactly at his word, or think for ourselves as to what he really means.”
Entering into the house proper they found something odd. A cat tree, for spiders, and a crazy cat lady living room, for spiders. There were toys built for spiders? Honestly Twilight thought they might have been dog toys, they were treated almost exactly like dog toys as well with two of the spiders tugging on one. The difference between these plushies and dog toys was that elsewhere in the room another spider was sewing up a tear in one with spider silk. There were also runs near the ceiling just like outside where transparent rats were running around carrying anything from food to plumbing supplies. The couch-side table and coffee table had the markings of well trained pets, IE there were things still on it including things like glasses of water and open books.
Sticking out from behind the wicker couch was a gigantic translucent looking tail with tufts of a translucent lettuce looking material sticking out of the top. Twilight would have called it a jellyfish snake on first viewing.
The creature it was attached to was even stranger.
Looking closely at her, she looked like somebody had tried to turn a jellyfish into a half snake half humanoid robot. There were parts of her arms where you could see organic hydraulics, joints like her elbows were obvious as mechanical joints, there were seams in her skin. With those thoughts in their heads the snake tail also looked noticeably machine-like, even though she was clearly all organic. Her eyes were strange as she didn’t have traditional eyeballs, only a light that moved around on her face somehow and the skin behind it lit up to give the impression of pupils. And her hair wasn’t strands of hair, more a combination of round and flat tentacles to imitate a loose untamed hairstyle.
The next thing they noticed about her was her build. She was built like a female weightlifter, possibly literally. Defined musculature, or would it be some other word for a machine? That showed through her sundress, a dress that contrasted against the wild look of her face and hair. Twilight would have said she looked like an immortal who was wild in her younger years, had calmed down and retired.
“Oh.” She said. “Done with the First Administrator already?”
She had been pulling a spider’s pet toy out from underneath the couch, a little plush toy of a character of some kind or another dangled from her hand. She tossed the plush toy away so the three or four spiders in the room went running after it out into a hallway with the notable exception of Muffin who had followed Twilight and Naudia into the room and was sticking close to them.
“I’m Carla Hall, Gwynn’s wife.” She said slithering closer and extending a hand out to them with a smile.
“Oh,” Naudia said taking Carla’s hand. “I thought you might have been a maid or something.”
Carla cocked her head at that.
“Because you’re a robot, I’ve been told everybody in the future would have some kind of robot maid.”
Carla laughed at that, a nice belly laugh.
“Well you’re not too far off as to how eprirmeqs like me were originally designed… billions of years ago. Apparently it was an efficient way to use water weight on a ship and keep crew morale up. Of course since then the tech has exploded, and quite a few other races use it in their basic designs.”
“Huh.” Twilight said, not quite sure how to respond to that.
There was a long moment where nobody was quite sure what to say, Twilight squeaked out an awkward smile before Carla broke first.
“How about we have some tea to break the ice?”
The tea was a raspberry tea and while it wasn’t what Twilight would get with Celestia, nor did she have it with Celestia in a wooden cup, it still felt like a good, firm rock in the topsy turvy world her life had become. She savored the moment of peace enhanced by the smell of tea and just for a bit closed herself off from the barrage of new information and new experiences to rest. Eyes still closed Twilight leaned into Naudia to feel Naudia’s comforting stability in her life.
“So how long have you two been together?” Carla asked.
“A little over a year now.” Naudia replied likewise leaning into Twilight.
“Aww, still in the newlywed stage.”
“We haven’t gotten married yet…”
“Yeah, we just haven’t really had the time over the last year.”
“Oh,” Carla was surprised. “So how did you two meet?”
That was what finally broke the ice, Twilight and Naudia telling of how they met, and their travel through the badlands. That was around the time Muffin tried to get cozy with them Twilight shied away but relented giving the spider’s abdomen pets. Once again Twilight was reminded of petting a wire haired dog, one of those little mustache dogs with the eyebrows.
Trying to keep her mind off that, was when the skittering rats around the ceiling run started to nag at Twilight’s mind. Why were there rat runs in a house like this? Wasn’t that something from the diner?
“Why are there rats in the walls?” Twilight finally asked when she couldn’t figure out an answer for herself.
“Oh, they maintain the house,” Carla said which made some sense, unlike what she said next. “Also you can’t have a house without rats in the walls, people would complain. That’s what they do in prison actually.”
“In prison they-” Naudia started with no idea where this was going.
“Yeah, if you fall out of line they’ll take the rats out of your walls.”
Twilight and Naudia stared at Carla with utter confusion. That was a form of punishment? People wanted rats in their walls? How would a rat maintain a house? So many questions that alienated them from this world.
“I’ve been told that there are very significant cultural differences between us, what does your culture think of rats?” Carla asked genuinely curious.
“Vermin. Pests that you’d sic a cat on. Have too many in your house and that place turns into a dump of rat droppings and nests made of smelly garbage.” Twilight replied.
“Why don’t they just use the toilet? And can’t they de-odor their nests properly?” Carla asked.
Twilight tried her damnedest to judge if Carla was trying to pull a joke on her or not and utterly failed. As best she could tell Carla was completely serious.
“Rats where we come from don’t have toilets and they’re too dumb to know magic or anything to improve their smell like that.”
“Frankly they sound a lot like dragons to me.”
Naudia who could see where this was going asked the question first.
“Are dragons considered vermin here?”
“Oh yes, while they’re adept at camouflage and invisibility the buggers are too dumb to be civilized like a rat, you find holes where they bury their droppings and nests made of valuable garbage just like those rats over where you’re from. Garbage companies actually go into bidding wars whenever we find a big hive of them, to think all of those valuable organics haphazardly used by a creature with a magpie’s sense of values.”
It was the thing Carla said next that really threw off their sense of balance in the world.
“They’re too dumb to even realize that nobody even wants to pick up their gold, even if just to dispose of it.”
“Wait,” Twilight said. “If gold is so worthless what do you base your currency on then, is aci a fiat currency?”
“Nah, 1 aci is 1 pound of potatoes.”
“Potatoes.” Naudia deadpanned. “Why potatoes?”
“Well everything anybody cares about is either a star which we build out of hydrogen, or organic, so a potato is a convenient form to represent an amount of organic work. It also works as a self correcting currency, if the price drops too low people start buying them up for industrial processes, if the price goes too high people start growing them all over the place for easy money.”
“Potatoes.” Twilgiht repeated what Naudia said. “Not like silver, and you’re sure this isn’t a joke right?”
“Yeah, if you use a gold standard where you come from I would recommend trying to shift off that. As soon as fission and fusion forges find out they are going to be trying to make a quick buck buying up all your organics. If they could buy more than a pounds worth of dirt, garbage, or manure for…” Carla rubbed her chin in thought. “I’d say a pound and a half of gold or less they would make a killing.”
Twilight and Naudia stared at Carla in utter shock.
“But why would that be a bad thing for us, we’d have so much gold!” Twilight asked without really thinking about it.
“In a closed economy like on a planet that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, if the people you’re dealing with would accept gold as a currency.” Carla explained. “But here you’d just have quintillions of people trying to evacuate your entire planet of fertilizer and organics before the price of gold dropped through the floor. So on an individual level in the short term it would seem like nothing changed, you’d think you could just buy a lot more fertilizer. But afterwards on a large scale not only would your economy implode due to hyperinflation, more importantly your food production would die out as all your farmers traded their fertilizer, dirt, and come to think of it probably seeds too, for gold.
“Before long people would be trying to figure out what to do with all that worthless gold to see about maybe buying some dirt or food. But everybody would be sold out of dirt and none of the people you traded with before would accept it back, it’s trash.” Carla finished on a rather bleak and scary note.
“I didn’t think about any of that.” Twilight admitted.
“That’s why it’s important you have the backing of the First Administrator here, he can get you onto our currency and keep the vultures from trying to collapse your economy and bury you with garbage.”
“This is too much.” Naudia spoke for both of them. “I need a break from thinking about all this.”
“Well how about I get started on dinner and you can chill out here, maybe you can get more used to those spiders. Play with them like you would a dog or cat, and they’ll be pleased as punch.”
“Okay.” They said, Naudia looked significantly more strained at the prospect than Twilight did.
Twilight collapsed back onto the couch and Naudia followed her very shortly afterwards.
“Everything here is mad.” Naudia said.
“Quintillions. All ready to trade gold for dirt.” Twilight was stunned by the number alone.
Twilight and Naudia just lay there for a while trying to process everything before Twilight remembered the other piece of stability she could latch them onto: New Magic. Twilight was excited because it was a new field of magic, Naudia was excited because she was a lot better at this magic than magic from Equestria. Twilight and Naudia shared intellectual traits but Twilight was more an advanced generalist with a talent for magic. Naudia was more focused into history, politics, and was far more physically adept, the spells she did know were either basic or focused on making her stronger.
The first spell they found in the book was “create cup”.
“Nope.” Naudia said, instantly flipping the page.
The next spell was “step stool” which looked hauntingly similar to “create cup”. This time it was Twilight who decided to flip the page instantly, in fact she turned over quite a few pages of similar spells hoping to find something more interesting. Twilight noted the spell for “fork” which summoned a fork.
“This seems harder than just… keeping a fork around.” Twilight said.
“I guess it could be helpful if you’re stuck out somewhere, but I’d still be looking into making a fork or something.”
She finally found “create glow stick” which sounded useful, it didn’t look too much more complicated than “create cup”.
Less than a minute later they both had glowsticks in the color of their magic, Naudia’s was blue and Twilight’s was a pale purple.
“Is it just me or was I expecting new magic to be… more interesting and a lot harder than this?” Naudia asked. “Like we’d have to have stuff to cast these spells, or draw circles on the ground or something.”
“Come to think of it, did you have any trouble memorizing that create cup spell from yesterday? Or this spell?” Twilight asked.
“No, it was learning how to cast this magic in the first place that was the hard part.”
“I guess this is just another upside from the conversion.” Twilight gasped suddenly in excitement, “Do you think this means we’ll be able to get through this entire book tonight?!”
“I’m certainly willing to give it a try!” Naudia said with enthusiasm, flipping back to the start of the book.
That turned out to be the direction they needed as a bit before dinner was ready there was a pile of summoned objects on the table. They did end making that step stool so they were stacked on top of each other next to the reach extender, and the temporary pillow and blanket, among other similarly banal household objects.
They did however get to the spell that really threw them though, “summon rat”.
“Why is this so early on in the book? We just finished unsummon and temporary blanket. Doesn’t this sound quite a bit more advanced to you Twilight?” Naudia asked.
“Spells like this, for a living thing, this would be pretty advanced stuff for our magic, not to mention hard to cast.” Twilight went from thoughtful to perking up. “Maybe it’s easier for this new magic!”
“Should we be doing this inside though?”
“I have to assume that since they want rats in their walls and cleaning up their house they wouldn’t have a problem with a rat on their coffee table.” Twilight said. “Besides, they gave us this book, I have to assume they want us to use these spells.”
Once again this spell proved easy for the duo and now they had a pair of summoned in rats sitting on the table looking at them expectingly.
“Now what?” Twilight asked.
“How about we take a break just to figure out these rats?” Naudia said putting out a hoof for her rat to hop up onto, which it did without any hesitation at all.
The rats turned out to be… rats, just friendly, domesticated, well socialized, rats. That’s what really got Twilight hung up, because the spell was nowhere near complicated enough to make a rat, and certainly not one that had any kind of inbuilt notions. But there they were, they followed orders, did rat things, the only way to tell that they weren’t “real” rats was that they were made out of magmatter and thus exponentially tougher than anything made out of normal materials.
What got Naudia hung up was that the rats were so lifelike she could completely believe that they were alive. In addition despite being made out of the strongest material she had ever heard of by a wide margin you could still pet and play with them like you would a pet rat. She proved this because she had one on it’s back and was tickling it, the rat squeaking and playing with her hoof.
Clearly there was something else at work here but there were no indications that Twilight or Naudia could see inside of the spell to indicate an intelligence being constructed. Perhaps they were just not knowledgeable about this type of magic to see some kind of underlying pattern, or there was something about their bodies making magic easier that was helping them along. They really just didn’t have enough information to know.
Twilight checked the cover of the book again and sure enough it said “Everyday Spells” and “Government issue”. Certainly summon rat was easy enough to pull off but this just seemed to be a rat, that was summoned that you could command.
“Okay, let’s try something.” Naudia said. “Go get me a snack from the kitchen.”
The rat scurried off not requiring any further instruction as to what that meant, where the kitchen was, or even inquiring as to what Naudia would want as a snack.
“Maybe it can smell the kitchen?” Naudia suggested.
“Okay how about this,” Twilight decided to try with her own summoned rat. “Go get me a pen and paper.”
Again no hesitation from the rat, it climbed up to the rat walkway up near the ceiling and chittered at the other rats for a second and went off on it’s way.
Twilight’s request took longer, Naudia’s rat came back with a baggie of mini pretzels first, which Naudia dug into with gusto.
“Are you sure you should be eating so much before dinner?” Twilight asked.
Naudia looked at her like she didn’t understand what Twilight was trying to say even on a vague level.
“You know, don’t eat before dinner or else you won’t finish dinner?”
Another blank look from Naudia, she couldn’t comprehend what Twilight was getting at in the slightest.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never understood what I meant when I told Spike that when he snacks on gemstones.”
“It doesn’t mean gemstones and daisy sandwiches don’t go well together?”
“No it means you shouldn’t eat before dinner otherwise you’ll be too full to eat dinner.”
“Too… full?” Naudia said puzzled at the concept.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never felt full on emotions.” Twilight said in a distressed voice.
“I’ve been satisfied with how much love I had, in the last year certainly, but you can always feel it ticking downwards. How could you ever… stay full on love long enough for it to matter?”
Naudia didn’t notice Twilight looking at her with an even more distressed look, bordering on horror.
“Any peak of emotion collection is just a temporary thing, a point on a graph that is never peaking high enough, and always divided hundreds if not thousands of times among changelings.”
“What do you mean by that?” Twilight asked puzzled.
“Changeling queens act as distributors of emotions throughout the hive, that’s our primary function on par with creating eggs. So we can tell exactly how much we have left in reserve at all times.”
“That sounds terrible. I… I don’t even know if I could imagine something like that bearing down on you at all times.”
“You can kinda start to understand why I was so happy with this transformation.”
“Yeah ponies feel hungry but you never know exactly how many calories we have left in reserve.” Twilight paused a moment in thought. “Do you think that was part of what drove your mother-”
Twilight stopped because Naudia didn’t look like she wanted to get into this right now.
“How about we get back to the book?” Twilight asked.
“Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.”
The next page on the book was “summon sewing rat”, some kind of rat that could sew clothing and worked exactly as expected. It was a rat that could produce spider silk for whatever reason and sew with it. Once again the spell was so simple that they couldn’t understand how it could be so simple.
The page after that was “summon sausage maker rat” and after that “summon hermit rat”.
“Something is off here.” Twilight said.
“Maybe we’re just in the rat section of the book.”
Twilight flipped over a couple pages at once and found only rats, she flipped through a couple more closer to the end. It became clear they were only halfway through the book, and the rest of the book was just rats. Rats for every purpose ranging from growing berries to reusing trash.
“What the hay is up with these people and rats?”
“Do they expect these rats to do everything for them?” Twilight asked aloud.
“I think I’m done for today.” Naudia said. “This magic study session was supposed to be grounded from all this insanity, but here it’s just drug us right back into it.”
As Twilight shut the book for the night they noticed they were not alone in the room.
At one of the doors into the room was a nefarious figure wearing robes of darkness etched in an ethereal blue light. The robes were finely detailed with embroidery, the kind of thing you might see at a king’s funeral or inside of a tomb, on a ghastly lich. They had pouches that looked like they were portals into some kind of horrible dimension. Twilight and Naudia could practically feel the evil energy from this figure seeping into the air. In one hand the figure held a book of undoubtedly dark magic and in the other…
A wooden cooking spoon.
That sorta made the whole illusion fall apart, because while it matched the rest of the outfit, it was still very clearly a wooden cooking spoon.
Naudia’s eyes had traced the same route around the figure as Twilight’s had and had arrived at the spoon at roughly the same time. There was an audible sound of the couch moving as they jerked in surprise.
“Dinners ready.” Came Carla Hall’s voice from the presumed necromancer.
Twilight and Naudia could only stare.
“I did tell you guys I was a chefromancer right?”
“What the hay is a chefromancer? Somebody who goes around seducing chefs?”
“No it means I use the dark powers of cooking in battle and as a chef,” Carla’s voice began to rise a bit like she was delivering a speech at the end of an adventure. “To humble my foes and also cook the best damn chili you’ll ever taste.”
Twilight and Naudia could only really sit and stare.
“I see those skeptical looks you’re giving me, but I’ll prove you wrong on this, just you wait.” Carla said with confidence in her voice.
-------------------
Carla proved them wrong, it was the best chili they’d ever had.
Twilight and Naudia were sitting at the dinner table now with a big finished bowl of chili with a side of cornbread with Carla and Gwynn. You could see that this room was a bit of a nexus of rats that lead into the kitchen, as there were multiple runs up near the ceiling.
You could tell how close Carla and Gwynn were because even while they were eating Carla snaked her tail so Gwynn could put her feet on it. And now they were in the sorta after dinner conversation period where Twilight and Naudia had to break the ice.
“So how did you two meet?” Naudia asked.
“I work for the First Administrator.” Carla said. “As a cook for extended missions here on Zaohm, in the dormitory cafeteria.”
“And you use your chefromancer powers there too?” Twilight asked.
“Yep.”
“So it turned out you were a chef romancer as well as a chefromancer!” Twilight joked.
They had a chuckle at that, and Gwynn continued the story from her side of things.
“Back when I was first starting out I ate at the cafeteria a lot more often, it was before I owned a house here. Me and Carla saw each other in the cafeteria every day and it turned out we lived in the same dormitory and eventually we were transferred into the same combat training group. After about a decade of being friends we sorta fell into a relationship.”
Twilight was reminded of the question that was burning in her head this entire time.
“Wait a second, why would a chef working on a cafeteria need combat skills?”
That turned out to be the wrong question to ask, only prompting blank looks, as if to ask why anybody would ask a question like that. It was hard for Twilight to figure out where the disconnect between “lunch lady” and “combat training” was in this conversation.
“Why would any civillian role like that have combat applications?” Naudia asked.
“They just do, always have.” Was all Gwynn could say.
“So wait, you’re telling me that even your janitors can be trained to go into combat with their mops?!” Twilight exclaimed.
“Yeah, dandelion root mops are not to be underestimated. You don’t want to be buried in walking dandelions that will try and suck your shield dry of magic with their roots, and then steal and compost the torn remnants of your shield to power themselves.”
They gave Carla and Gwynn a measuring look for a long moment to see if they’d crack and burst out laughing, they did not.
“Here hold on, I’ll show you,” Gwynn said picking up a remote for the TV. “Carla do you remember which of the fights scheduled for today has a janitor or a chefromancer in it?”
“Should be… 752, that’s the big Togo-Guam Alliance vs. Western Oklahoma exhibition match tonight.”
The TV blinked on and skipped through a couple channels with advertising Twilight didn’t have time to get before settling on a battlefield in a tropical atoll. What they saw through that screen was the most intense depiction of violence and death Twilight and Naudia had ever seen. Nothing could have prepared them for it.
Projectiles were flying everywhere, anything from sling projectiles that whizzed by at astonishing speeds, to ring shaped attacks from what looked like a staff somebody had hooked a book up as a magazine and attached a rifle grip to. In the hellish brawl there was total chaos, somebody riding a turkey with eight extra glowing heads stood off against some kind of a priest with eight glowing wings, creating a dividing line of no man’s land for the fight while melee fighters tried to slip around them. On other side of the battle line the ranged characters threw attacks at one another with wild abandon only to be mostly stopped by the two figures standing in the middle.
Everybody seemed to be encased in some sort of clear plastic that bled blue blood. You could see chunks of the plastic and the faux blood splattered everywhere to be collected up by somebody who looked like they were trying to heal somebody with it. That somebody turned out to be the chefromancer they were looking for who looked to be in pretty bad shape. Their body was entirely untouched but their zoetic shield was deepy scarred and they were covered in head to toe in the faux blood.
Twilight and Naudia were then distracted because one of the melee fighters was trapped by some sort of tentacle.
“What’s happening there?” Naudia asked in a horrified voice.
“Looks like Western Oklahoma has won this one, he’s not getting outta that.”
What followed was the first attack that actually pierced through the zoetic shield. The chefromancer conjured a sandwich from bizarre ingredients and somehow used it to cast a spell that was so powerful it knocked the melee fighter’s head clean off.
Twilight and Naudia could only stare in horror, all of this happened in a matter of seconds but it felt so much longer to them.
“Look at that garbage.” Gwynn said really getting fired up and angry. “That should be a penalty for Togo-Guam, he did that on purpose.”
Twilight and Naudia could only stare at the blatant lack of respect for a life lost.
“Yeah, no way that attack could have gotten through, he let his shield down for that one to try and get a penalty against WO there.” Carla agreed with Gwynn.
There was a whistle blown and a referee came out onto the pitch, they agreed that melee fighter got beheaded on purpose and ruled for a penalty against Togo-Guam.
Twilight and Naudia were utterly shocked, they could not comprehend what was happening around them. Gwynn turned off the TV in disgust, that was when she finally noticed Twilight and Naudia’s reaction.
“What’s up? Is something wrong?” Gwynn asked.
“IS SOMETHING WRONG?!” Twilight shouted. “SOMEBODY JUST DIED.”
“Where? Did you see something I didn’t!?” Gwynn almost turned the TV back on before Twilight could elaborate further.
“That melee person, they got beheaded!”
“Oh that, he’ll have his head re-attached and he’ll be ready for another match in… I’d say a day, maybe a day and a half tops, It’ll be three if he really wants to whine about it.”
“So he’s some kind of slime creature like me?” Twilight asked.
“Nah, if he was they would have his head re-attached already, but he’d likely have to take a couple pain pills.”
“Didn’t the first Administrator tell you about some of this stuff in the medical document?” Carla asked.
“Well yeah, but it’s one thing to be told ‘you can have your head put back on’ and another thing to see somebody intentionally get beheaded for, as best I understand it, some kind of hyper violent sports match.”
“To be honest with you Twilight that shouldn’t have happened in a border mangrove exhibition match like that. They’re supposed to be friendly wars-”
“Friendly WARS?” Naudia interrupted.
“Yeah, somebody has to control the output of those places, and it’s likely to change a lot. It would be stupid if somebody died fighting over a weeks output of a border mangrove, so the rules are set up so that people are vanishingly unlikely to ever die.”
“How unlikely is extremely unlikely and what you define as ‘dying’ when beheading apparently doesn’t count.” Twilight asked trying to get to the heart of the problem as fast as possible.
“I’d say you have a death about once a year from something that’s generally that person’s fault and never in a professional match, and dying would mean you can’t bring them back.”
“Doesn’t that seem a bit high to you?”
“Uhhh, hold on a sec, this is a hard question to answer. Lemme get out my phone so I can be more exact.” Gwynn pulled out a bug and spoke into it. “How many border mangrove habitats are there per solar system?”
She flipped the bug phone around so they could see the answer displayed on there. That was a lot of zeroes, it was no exaggeration to say that was an astronomical amount of habitats at war.
“They generally have about one war a week apiece, there are that many habitats per solar system and there are galaxies of these.”
“How are there galaxies of these? All we can see out there is the Chattler Anomaly, just nothing but endless amounts of distant infrared heat sources.” Twilight added when Gwynn didn’t get what she was talking about.
“Does it look at all like…” Gwynn poked around at her bug phone thing for a bit before showing it’s belly to Twilight again. “This?”
“Yeah, that’s it.” Twilight had those infrared pinpricks of light burned into her memory by this point.
“See, you ponies call that the Chattler Anomaly, we call it a map. All of that, that’s us, that’s our civilization.”
The scale of what Gwynn was saying overwhelmed Twilight and Naudia. There were few ponies who could understand the sheer scope of what Gwynn just said, and two of them were Twilight and Naudia.
They were dealing with a civilization on a scale that was unimaginable, incomprehensible in it’s scope. Their minds shrunk away from even brushing against the thought of how utterly outnumbered they were in every possible respect. Outnumbered to the point where every living being who had ever lived on Equestria from the smallest microbe to the largest dragon could have been a rounding error to a civilization like that.
Suffice it to say they decided to go to bed early.
Twilight did not take in the room around her, she merely flopped onto the bed face down next to Naudia who was alreadylying there in a similar state of shock.
“Twilight.”
Twilight grunted in response.
“This is too much.”
Twilight grunted in affirmation.
There was silence.
“Twilight.”
Twilight grunted again.
“I had no idea the depths to which we could be in over our heads.”
Twilight, when she had collected her thoughts more asked the pertinent question.
“Naudia, what the hay does the First Administrator even need us for?”
Twilight woke up the next day and walked around the house like a zombie, she had slept wonderfully, the bed was perfect, sleeping next to Naudia was always heavenly. It wasn’t even the rats in the walls that bothered her, it was reality itself. Reality itself was wrong. She needed to get away from all of this and back down to Equestria where things made sense.
The First Administrator showed up and told them that they were going back down to Equestria and he had to explain how things aren’t going to make sense down there.
It was all Twilight could do not to scream.
She sat through a car ride in a huffy state at the First Administrator, unable to tell if he could read her mind or was just that good at predicting what she would do. She barely looked out at the cityscape as it went past.
They arrived at the training gym again and that was the first time Twilight met Walden. Walden was some sort of bat person, a fruit bat with a fox-like head and whose arms were also wings. He had a nice looking brown and redish coat of fur.
Of all the people she’d seen so far up here in Zaohm it wasn’t the First Administrator that stood out the most, it was Walden. It wasn’t until she’d actually seen Walden that she figured out why.
Walden sat in a wheelchair, and not just any wheelchair a plush reclining wheelchair that looked like it was designed to help him get down stairs on his own and with mechanisms to lock it into place while reclined. Thinking about it Twilight hadn’t seen even so much as a set of crutches anywhere in the city. If he was a pony Twilight would have estimated he was older than Granny Smith by a significant margin. His breathing was labored and sounded painful and uneven. He had some sort of medal or pin on his shirt that looked like a red scar.
He stood out like a sore thumb because he was the only person Twilight had seen anywhere that looked even slightly older and in any way infirm, much less this old looking.
“This is ‘Iron Heart’ Walden.” The First Administrator said in a shockingly respectful voice. “He’s going to be helping me explain to you what you’ll be doing down in Knicknik.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Twilight asked before she could stop herself.
“While I don’t think he’s awake, I would like you to be more polite to Walden than that. He’s here to talk about what could go wrong during your operation down in Knicknik.”
What could the First Administrator be talking about here? These people were so tough that they would intentionally get themselves beheaded to try and get a penalty point for what amounted to a sports game. They had shielding made of magmatter that they can summon in at will, that meant it was 8E35 times stronger than normal matter. What could possibly have happened to Walden that Twilight could run into it down on Equestria?
The First Administrator walked over to Walden and put a hand on his shoulder to wake him up, as he awoke Walden’s breathing became more labored than it was before. Twilight noticed that anytime he moved he had tremors, he could not keep his hands steady.
“Walden, this is Twilight Sparkle and Naudia Sparkle.” The First Administrator introduced them. “They’re the people from Equestria who I told you about.”
Walden eyed them up and down from his reclined wheelchair and at that moment it was clear that whatever the state his body was in his mind was still in top shape.
“They don’t look like they know how to fight all that well.” Walden judged aloud.
“We have... some, time to train them, though not as much as I would like.” The First Administrator said.
Walden pulled a lever to pull the wheelchair upright and adjusted his sitting position to sit up straighter, and prepared to speak to them.
“I’m Walden, and today you’re going to be finding out more about the second and first most unpleasant things that can happen to you, than you ever wanted to know.” It was pretty clear Walden was going to be lecturing them.
However instead of going right into lecturing them he shakily moved one of his hands to the hem of his shirt and pulled it up. Revealing some kine of undershirt with a hole in the left side of it.
In that hole was a plastic tube going directly into his chest where you could see his heart beating in an unsteady rhythm, but that was not the most horrifying part. The worst part was that there was a patch of iron stuck onto the heart that seemed to be decaying, not rusting, physically decaying in a way that looked like it was flaking off and fading into nothingness.
“That’s what a wound from a nerteln does.” Walden said. “It will never heal and cannot be cured.”
Twilight and Naudia could only stare at the unhealthy looking nearly exposed heart through the little glass window into Walden’s chest.
“What is a ner-tell-n?” Naudia asked when she snapped out of it.
“A consumer of souls and a user of soul magic.”
“Why are you showing us this?” Twilight could not move her gaze from the unhealthy looking, iron patched heart beating in front of her face. “Surely you can’t mean-”
“Because a nerteln has shown up on Equestria, a pony. Somebody on Equestria has discovered soul magic and they’re in Knicknik right now.” The First Administrator interrupted.
“And you’re going to be the ones who have to stop them.” Walden said.
Walden looked like he was going to say more, but he started having problems with his heart and had to be taken out of the room for a break and some medicine.
“Anyway, now that you’re paying attention I’m going to start at the beginning, which is farther back than you’d expect.”
The First Administrator clicked a button and all the windows shut with blinds and then glowed with some kind of magic. Judging by how any sounds from outside vanished, likely soundproofing magic.
“What I’m about to tell you not only cannot leave this room, but on top of that and more importantly it is EXTREMELY EASY to misinterpret. I’m going to need you to think about what I’m going to be telling you, before,” The first administrator put special emphasis on that word. “you react to it, because even for us this is going to sound crazy, and I won’t be saying what you think I’m saying if you’re only half paying attention. Understand?”
Twilight and Naudia nodded their heads confused by this shift in tone.
“Good, because the point I’m about to make is extremely important to get right, and you getting tripped up is going to prolong this conversation.
“To start at the beginning I’m going to have to start with why Equestria is even here untouched like it is. And then I’m going to have to work my way up from there up to soul magic.”
Then the First Administrator dropped a bombshell on them.
“Equestria was all a dream.” And then immediately held up a finger as if to admonish them for how they reacted to that.
“I mean that literally. Was, past tense, is no longer. One day the universe woke up and Equestria was there, it was always there even though it hadn’t always been there the very day before.”
“Are you saying Equestria isn’t real?!” Twilight said sounding defensive.
“No, I’m saying that until a certain date,” The First Administrator pulled up some sort of transparent piece of paper with a timeline graph on it and jabbed at a peak on it angrily. “Right HERE, Equestria did not exist as anything other than a dream, and then it was never a dream, it was always there, had always been there, without any shadow of a doubt that it was real and always had been, seamlessly as far back in time as any record can go.”
The First Administrator threw the piece of paper away in frustration bordering on anger.
“You have absolutely no idea how much time and money went into proving that one bit of information.”
“So what, you’re saying Luna dreamed Equestria into existence then?” Naudia snarked.
The First Administrator deflated a bit at that.
“I wish. That would make things a lot simpler. Luna is by and large benevolent, we could negotiate with her.” The First Administrator collected himself and continued on. “Up until recently we’ve been able to just pretend Equestria didn’t exist and things worked out. It goes against our strong interference policies, but it’s not hard to tell people ‘don’t go over there’ if they never know where ‘there’ is in the first place.”
“Where is this proof then?” Twilight demanded. “You can’t seriously expect Naudia and I to just believe you when you’re making an absurd claim like that.”
“I was worried you might ask that…” The First Administrator said.
As if on cue Gwynn wheeled in a computer similar to the ones from the other Equestria.
“We didn’t print it out because it would be a waste of paper, but if you want to we can put aside some time for you to read the reports.” The First Administrator sounded annoyed.
“I will.” Twilight said.
The first page of the document was mostly just talking about how records from ships around the great change were different depending on if they were in jumping through something called “Babel” and stuff like that. It sounded well documented and if it was a research paper Twilight would have said it was probably put together by an esteemed professor.
It was when she scrolled to the next page that a little number came up.
“Page two of six thousand?!” Twilight exclaimed.
Twilight and Naudia’s eyes met and they both knew what they had to do.
Hastily Twilight scrolled through the pages with her and Naudia’s quick document checking protocol. Naudia rested her head on Twilight’s shoulder, each of them looking at half a page apiece and seeing if they could find any duplicates of the work. Once they were done they’d thump their hoof as a signal they were ready to move on, the hoof thumps generally came almost at the same time. This was for when they needed to quickly see if a research paper was worth listening to or filled with chaff or stolen work.
“If I might make a suggestion, how about Naudia uses her powers as an itumeyuk to speed this up.”
“That sounds like a great idea!” Naudia exclaimed.
Twilight merely looked uncomfortable at the prospect of being buried in rats.
The first page they checked Naudia got overexcited and so fifty rats thumped their legs all at once, but they eventually got a hang of things and somehow managed to get Naudia situated and coordinated.
Using that method they managed to check through over a hundred randomly selected pages in record time, even for them. The whole process took less than ten minutes and felt like a lot less time than that. Twilight even got slightly more used to Naudia’s kangaroo-ish springtail rodents form, and she had to admit, it wasn’t too bad, it was still deeply weird for her though.
“I didn’t see any duplicates, there were a few places where it went into error checking and some explanations that I would be able to judge better if I could go over them more.” Twilight conferred with Naudia.
“No duplicates or obviously copy pasted work, I did run into a couple parts they called ‘laymans sections’ though so that might be bloating the pagecount, but not to a massive degree.”
“So,” Twilight said turning back to the First Administrator who had been waiting through all this. “Assuming this isn’t the longest buildup to a prank, how does this relate to why you’re at Equestria?”
“I need somebody to deal with the nerteln to figure out how likely it is that another one will show up.”
“Why are you so afraid of these nerteln if you’ve got all this magic then?” Naudia asked.
“Because nerteln magic, soul magic, is stronger than our magic. You saw Walden there, you know how he said that wound is never going to heal until the day he dies? He was one of the lucky ones.”
Twilight realized she was about to be asked to play the role of hero again.
“Nerteln use soul magic, they consume part of somebody’s soul to cast magic.”
“You’re telling me there is somebody like that down on Equestria?” Naudia asked.
“Would they happen to be a large red centaur?” Twilight asked.
“Yes Naudia, no Twilight it’s a pony. As best we have looked into it the soul magic is being used in relation to werewolves and is currently in the most benign form possible. Meaning that there is just some pony experimenting with eating souls likely for medical reasons.”
“Well that sounds simple then, we’ll just go down there and tell them to stop.”
The First Administrator looked entirely unconvinced by Twilight’s declaration.
“Yeah, simple, why do you need US to do this, why did you need to convert us to do this.” Naudia asked.
“This is another test, I need you to show whether or not ponies can police themselves when it comes to soul magic if I give them the tools. As for if we could just tell them to stop… we can’t.”
“Why?”
“Soul magic pools inside the part of the nerteln’s brain that deals with interpersonal relations, physically rotting it away. They start out saying ‘if it is to save them then...' or 'I can bring them back.' or something like that, and the assumption is that they can withstand it, control the impulses, or sacrifice themselves.
"So when it comes time for your heroic self sacrifice, the saner ones will say 'I can help more people!' then when it comes time again they start saying ‘you’re wrong, I’m helping more people with this’ and then ‘I deserve this because of all the people I’ve helped.’ and ‘I am more important than these people’ around that time they stop seeing other people as people. Even the first toe dipped into soul magic is enough to rot away a nerteln’s brain and create a cycle where soul magic is rotting your brain so you need soul magic to fix your brain.”
“That’s not even the worst of it.” Walden said being wheeled in by Gwynn.
“They aren’t ready to know about that yet Walden.” The First Administrator said firmly.
“You’re going to be sending them in without full knowledge of what can happen?”
They stared each other down for a moment before surprisingly enough the First Administrator cracked.
“Twilight would you mind going over there for a moment while I work this out with Walden?”
Unfortunately they summoned in another one of those soundproofing privacy screens so Twilight and Naudia couldn’t hear or really even try to read their lips as to what they were saying.
“Do you think we can trust them about this?” Twilight asked.
“From what I’ve seen, I think so.” Naudia said. “This is something they take very seriously.”
Twilight agreed on point two, but that wasn’t enough to convince her of point one.
“Have you ever heard of any magic that can do stuff like… that?” Twilight gestured at the wheelchair bound bat.
“Nope, and it sounds like that’s a good thing too, we don’t have the strength to stop something like that on our own. If they have this much in terms of resources and they can’t do anything about even a wound from that magic it’s a good thing we’ve never heard about it up until now.”
“On top of that, those magical shields they have, Gwynn said they’re made of magmatter. Anything that is stronger than one of those has to be nasty.” Twilight added.
“We’ll have to see what he says about it next.”
“How about that ‘Equestria was a dream until it wasn’t’ thing.”
“Can’t even wrap my head around it. Looking at it critically does that matter more, or does whatever dreamed up Equestria in the first place matter more?”
“Obviously the second but the First Administrator said basically nothing about it, seemed to really be trying to avoid that subject.” Twilight scratched her chin. “You think we can use that in negotiations somehow?”
“It would just be a bluff, he clearly knows more about it, so the bluff would just fall apart.”
It was then the soundproof barrier fell and the First Administrator had clearly made an agreement with Walden.
“The worst part about all this soul magic is something I won’t be discussing with you today, as you’re only going on a scouting mission, for the moment. It’s not something you’re ready for.”
“I think we could handle it.” Naudia stated firmly.
“What with the recent conversion I would like to avoid directly damaging your mental state to the extent required for a full understanding. I want to widen the baseline understanding before we build up to the peak of monstrous acts. For now I need you two to make a choice that isn’t a choice, and we can’t have nihilism clouding your judgment.”
The First Administrator put down two documents in front of them on the computer table, one was a lot thinner than the other.
“The obvious wrong choice is that you pick 5000 inhabitants of your world to be saved who have no connection to this nerteln to be converted into yunguaq like you were, and then we melt the surface of your saccharine planet to black jack killing anything and everything on the planet. You turn all governing duties to us immediately and we take direct control of educating the next generation.”
The First Administrator moved his hand from the thinner document and slapped it onto the much thicker one.
“OR, you go down deal with this nerteln, we take over your government and put you in charge of making sure no other nerteln show up and dealing with them if they do and engage in a long term evacuation of every living thing on your planet to be converted like you were and facilitate a slower more controlled takeover of your government such that you retain your automony.”
“Why do both of these options have us leaving the planet?” Twilight demanded.
“I just told you that there is something on your planet that is so strong that it unintentionally brought into being your planet and filled in it’s history backwards in time unconciously. It is not a benign force.”
“Where the hay would we go? Are we supposed to just float around in the empty vacuum for the rest of time?” Naudia butted in.
The First Administrator replied with the most insane thing they’d heard all day.
“We will of course supply you with your own star system either way.”
“Wouldn’t Luna object to you giving us one of her stars?” Twilight asked.
“The stars are mine.”
“No, Luna makes the stars visible at night.”
“She didn’t build the stars, we did, we aren’t going to be giving you an existing star system we’re going to be building you a new star system.”
What he was actually saying finally sunk in for Twilight and Naudia, they could only stare at the First Administrator their mouths agape.
“I beg your pardon, it sounded like you just said that you build stars and were going to build one for us.” Naudia said.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I said.”
“That’s completely absurd, why would you build an entire star system just for us?” She exclaimed.
“You have magic that we don’t have, it’s financially cheaper by many thousands of orders of magnitude than risking the thing that brought you into existence.” The First Administrator listed off some sound reasons. “And most importantly you have werewolves.”
“That last one sounds like a very personal reason.”
“Nope, it’s written into the constitution, ‘Article 12: Any external opportunity to expand the number of types of werewolves needs to be examined, purified and integrated’.”
“And I’m guessing you put that in there.” Twilight deadpanned.
“Yes.”
“Why would you put something like that in there?”
“Because I like werewolves.”
Twilight and Naudia waited for him to say anything else on the subject... he did not say anything else on the subject.
“On the surface Twilight I’m certain this does not seem like a choice to you. Right this second. But that’s why we’re going to delay you actually making this choice until you have more context. Saving everybody on Equestria sounds like the better option, but it’s only the better option if you have the will to make seriously hard choices that I’m not sure you can make.”
“Like what?”
“Could you kill a pony for trying to save their wife? Would you turn them in to be executed? Where does this line of morality lie in your head? Where does your physical and administrative ability to track these people down break? How many times could you do something like that before you give in to the temptation to give one of them a second chance?”
Twilight didn’t have answers to those questions at that moment, they seemed like artificial moral conundrums at first glance.
“Why us?” Naudia asked.
“I need your clout within Equestria as a princess, I need your heroic strength of will to see this through, and I need some sense of ethics down on the ground. You don’t take over a population like this by force, you find an in with them and exploit it.”
“Okay first of all.” Twilight said temper rising. “Why do we have to kill off the rest of the planet if Naudia and I can’t manage what you want us to do? Why only 5000 ponies? What happens if I just say ‘hay with this I’m not playing your games’? And how the hay can we trust you to build an entire star system for us and not just let us out to dry? When are you going to tell us what you’re not telling us about Nerteln?”
Twilight was happy to have found questions this thing seemed to not want to answer.
“The reason there are only two options for you is because option 1 would wake that thing up, the thing that dreamed up your world. Opening up our entire universe to an era of bloodshed and war. Whatever dreams it has matter for nothing, it is ancient, invincible, all powerful, and hungry for either conflict or something new. We’re not sure we have something new.
“With 5000 ponies you would keep away from it’s gaze long enough for it to appease it’s appetite for conflict. And as for if you can trust me to build a star for you, there is only so far I can go to re-assure you about that, we will be going for a tour of sorts before you make your final decision though whatever it is.”
The First Administrator slumped a bit.
“As for that last bit, like I said it will damage your mental state and we need to do some more estimations to figure out how exposure will effect you. At the moment we’re not sure where permanent mental damage starts to take hold, it’s not something people were ever meant to see.”
“Oh.”
That all left Twilight and Naudia with a lot to chew on.
The lesson that day was how to summon in those zoetic shields Gwynn had told them about, a kind of transparent living shield made of magmatter that warped space around you, nearly impenetrable by almost anything. But Twilight and Naudia had trouble focusing on that, they performed excellently as the spell was even simpler than “summon rat” but their minds were elsewhere.
The rat was actually part of her equipment going down to Knicknik. It was called a bagrat. His name was Alke. Alke was a bagrat that would grip onto the back of her neck and give her the powers of a lichenthrope, not a lycanthrope, a lichen-thrope.
You might ask why if Twilight was already a werewolf she was getting something else that allowed her to become a werewolf as well. The answer to that question is that the First Administrator is obsessed and that has infiltrated the society he’s ruled over. So you have many races that are werewolves, and then you have actual jobs that are different types of werewolves. Meaning you could be a werewolf and then use magic to do your job as a different kind of werewolf.
“There must always be more werewolves.” The First Administrator said, you could feel the fixation in his voice, even hidden behind those glasses you could see the look in his eyes.
Twilight’s werewolf form was some sort of legionary slinger that wore a pelt of summoned lichen and flung lichen around with the sling. Then would go full werewolf into close quarters combat with shield and claw using the lichen to have a kind of outer shell werewolf form.
The whole thing sounded absurd to her.
Naudia’s bagrat had a similar sling setup but this one was based on giant bacteria, a Protolycaon. This one had a shell made of some kind of magical bacteria and involved summoning and throwing giant bacteria that would drain away at the target before the werewolf would go in and pop them absorbing the material and growing larger until they could split out a similar werewolf.
“I figure when you have materials and magic like this you can do what you want with it.” Naudia said about the class in question.
“Why slings? Shouldn’t we have something better?” Twilight asked.
“You can lift 15 tons with one arm. Even if you couldn’t the important part isn’t the velocity but the payload.” Gwynn said.
“Speaking of which aren’t you going to get dressed to go down there for combat?” Naudia asked.
Gwynn was still wearing her loincloth and bandeau and they were headed up somewhere north.
“I am dressed for combat.” Gwynn said.
“No I mean some sort of armor or something.” Naudia said.
“What would be the point of that?”
“You know to protect you if somebody say tried to stab you in the stomach.”
“If anything got through the zoetic shield, then it wouldn’t matter if I was wearing three feet of plate steel or nothing at all. The shield is my armor so I might as well try to look my best. On top of that in case you forgot your skin is graphene, something like a steel knife couldn’t even pierce it.”
“But won’t you be cold?”
Gwynn just looked at them like they were crazy.
“We have people working in the vacuum of space in swimsuits, how do you think they do that?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Twilight was surprised to see them move directly from the prep station to the loading dock.
“We will have PLENTY of time to brief you on the way down, and then you’re landing basically in the middle of nowhere.”
“Before you go.” The First Administrator stopped them. “I need you to keep in mind that from the perspective of the ponies down below now you are essentially a god. Your bare skin is tougher than any material you have ever known, your magic is more potent than anything you have ever seen. If you use an offensive bagrat ability on a normal pony, probably even Celestia, they will just die, even if it’s some kind of monster like Sombra.”
“Then why are you giving them to us?” Naudia sounded angry.
“Because if you use them on the nerteln they will not die. Even if you cut their head off and burn them to ash, these bagrats are an insurance policy so you can hold out long enough for support to get there. Once you’re better trained you will have to kill that nerteln, but for the moment that is out of your reach.”
With that they went back into the same ship they came in on and strapped in for what turned out to be a very long fall.
-------------------
The design of the ship was different than what Twilight expected. It wasn’t going to aerobrake to the ground, it was going to use whatever motive thrusters it had to break to the ground. Twilight hadn’t seen anything that looked like a traditional rocket engine on the ship though.
Looking out the window she saw something huge, something so large that it spanned the horizon and vanished off into the distance. Bustling with activity it looked like a ring hanging above the planet. There were uncountable numbers of ships going to and fro on the ring, Twilight would have guessed tens of millions but she could not be sure by the sheer number of them working there. There was a sinking feeling when looking at how the ring vanished over the horizon even this far up that tens of millions was a drastic underestimation.
“WHAT IS THAT?!” She exclaimed.
Naudia and Gwynn crowded around the window next to her to get a better look.
“Oh that, we’re building that so it’s easier to get up and down from the planet.” Gwynn explained to them.
“Won’t the ponies down there see it, especially something this big?” Naudia asked.
“Naaah, we put screens on the underside of it, they won’t even know it’s there.”
“How much traffic do you seriously expect to be going down between Equestria and… up here?” Twilight asked.
“Everything, and we might need to grab some landmarks. I expect you guys would probably want Canterlot put wherever we move you to.”
Twilight and Naudia could only really stare at Gwynn. The sheer magnitude of what was happening was incomprehensible already and then things just got bigger. Eventually for their own sanity they had to just move on, there wasn’t anything else to do against something THAT big.
Once they had some time to recover Gwynn started briefing them on what they’d be doing when they got down there.
“When we get down there you two are going to split up, Naudia you’re going into Knicknik to scout out what is happening over there and Twilight you’re going to infiltrate the werewolves to figure them out.”
“That seems backwards to how I’d do it.” Naudia commented.
“Yeah, Naudia seems better suited for the werewolves, people in Knicknik would now me as a princess, shouldn’t we be supporting the ponies there?”
“We don’t know who is using the soul magic at the moment, but your skillsets are important, the werewolves might go after a small rat, but the people in Knicknik won’t try and eat you. Also Naudia can just change into any random pony to infiltrate the town. As for you Twilight you’re a werewolf twice over, you’d blend in with them better than Naudia would.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Oh speaking of which you have one more werewolf form Twilight, this was supposed to be sorta a default for you as a wereslime, but the way things worked out it’s just an extra form.” Gwynn handed her another sheet of paper. “It should look something like this.”
The image on the sheet of paper was that of a bipedal lanky wolf thing that looked like if you took Twilight’s maned wolf form and made it stand on two legs and gave it paw-hands.
“Huh, well I guess I’ll keep it in mind?”
Twilight put it away in her saddlebags, which took a moment of hesitation because the bagrat Alke was in one of them sticking his nose out of the pack, along with a bundle of lichen.
“Gwynn, do you know why the First Administrator is so obsessed with werewolves?” Twilight asked.
“That’s been a matter of debate for some years now.”
“Nobody has just asked him?”
“Plenty of people have and they’ve even got answers too.”
“Oh, well that makes things simpler, what did he say?”
“That’s not the point of philosophical discussion, it was different for everybody, the unanswered question at hand would be ‘is there something in there because there IS something in there, or because we want to see something in there?’ Is it because you want to see something in the thing that crawled out from below wearing a dead man's face."
Twilight looked at Gwynn with a judging gaze.
"I can believe all of that, but what did he say to you?"
Gwynn bit her lip and was silent for some time.
"He said 'Werewolves change, I have to believe you people can change, otherwise there's no point.'"
Twilight didn’t even bother to question the other things Gwynn said about the First Administrator. They made sense, and they didn’t sound like the kind of thing she would get answers to just by asking.
“What intel do you have on Knicknik and what’s going on down there, who should we be more suspicious of?” Naudia asked.
“literally nothing at all.” Gwynn said. “The First Administrator said soul magic is happening there and explicitly stopped anybody from investigating before you two.”
“That feels like a lot is being put onto us.”
“From what I understand of the First Administrator’s plans is that since you wouldn’t believe him if he told you your hair was on fire. You’re going to have to follow through this whole rigmarole until you understand the gravity of the situation directly, then he’s going to put you in charge of building a taskforce on Equestria to deal with this sorta thing.”
“Okay then, how much support are you guys going to help us with that?”
“I’m not entirely certain, I’ve heard some rumors about this, but from what I’ve heard we’re dealing with everything up here, and you have to do most things down there and we’ll be supplying you with resources.” Gwynn said. “Since you guys have a gold standard it should be pretty easy to just dump gold at you until things can get done.”
“I still don’t get how you guys don’t value gold at all.”
“Fusion changes your priorities.” Was all Gwynn would say.
-------------------
They landed around Knicknik and got out of the ship, Twilight was seriously surprised at what she saw out there.
She knew Knicknik was up north somewhere, and she expected that to be like the Crystal Empire since it was on roughly the same latitude. She was expecting lots of snow, and… igloos or something.
She was not expecting to land in a temperate rainforest so verdant with plants and trees one could almost mistake it for a jungle. There were all kinds of things Twilight normally associated with a jungle out here, just not in the form she expected. Wide leafed plants with bright red berries, ferns, fireweed, and grasses practically exploded to fill out the undergrowth, there were so many trees that depending on where you stood you couldn’t even see the sky. As a forest it was a lot more pleasant than the Everfree, and felt much more alive, like even this far north there was plant life teeming so dense you could practically smell it in the air.
This was what Twilight needed, even if she wasn’t expecting it, this was grounded, this was real, think of it like a cutie mark mission. Unfortunately that brought her thoughts around to him again, the First Administrator which soured things back up.
Gwynn pulled out a device that looked like some sort of futuristic camera and pointed it at the ground, Twilight could feel her charge it with magic from there. When Gwynn let go of it it hung in the air and then seemed to project a hologram, but the… taste? of the magic to Twilight implied that it wasn’t a hologram but merely an extension of the summoning magic she’d been taught. The hologram(for simplicity) was a map of the area which moved at a choppy rate but gave a perfect 3 dimensional map of the area around Knicknik.
“This is the route we recommend you both take to start out, it’s a game trail that will get you back onto what passes for a road out here,” Gwynn poked at a line going through the fully modeled trees which because they were summoned in bent and moved around her finger. “Then you’ll split up, the Werewolves are this direction and Knicknik is that direction.”
The strange rectangular piece of glass in Twilight’s pack vibrated and lit up showing that it was a screen, she pulled it out of the pack to find the 3d map displayed on the screen there.
“You’ll be coming back here to base camp every night since we’re not too far away.”
Naudia buzzed her wings.
“Why don’t we just… fly there?”
Gwynn froze up for a second at that.
“I can’t think of any reason not to, so long as you don’t scare them off Twilight and you don’t blow your cover Naudia, go ahead. The shared walk was put in so you could spend some time coordinating before splitting up but I don’t see a reason you couldn’t do that in the air.
“However,” Gwynn said. “Before you go, you need to demonstrate some ability with those bagrats.”
It turned out Twilight and Naudia underestimated the bagrats, they not only made these new magic spells extremely easy to cast, they also gave them a kind of heads up display with a map and everything. Twilight felt like she would have these spells learned in no time, but she wanted to keep the bagrat around just to be able to do things like track things moving that she couldn’t quite see or have nightvision.
Before they finally got going Twilight had one last question for Gwynn.
“Assuming I make friendly contact with the wereponies, can I promise them some of that artificial meat like we at at that restaurant?”
“Sure, we’ll have a batch cooking up by the time you get back today.” Gwynn said.
Naudia didn’t have anything to ask for and with that they flew off, bagrats gripped onto the backs of their necks and interfaced with their new zoetic shield spells.
-------------------
Twilight and Naudia flew above the forest in silence. So much had changed so suddenly for them.
Twilight felt like she was losing her grip on where all of this started from. Even if it was werewolves she was happy that she was going back out to be among ponies again. It wasn’t the new magic that bothered her, that’s what was tempting her, part of her begging to just lose herself in a branch of magic never before explored by ponykind.
That was the problem, the First Administrator had too many tasty treats to dangle in front of her to ignore. Immortality, a child, new magic, space travel, protection from disease, cancer, famine, a new life for her Dia, a child…
It didn’t help, or more accurately it helped a lot, that this all seemed to be the result of science, not some mad magician, not some ancient spell, understandable, logical, science. It played perfectly into her biases.
All except for the First Administrator himself.
Twilight felt something poke her in the side, it turned out to be Naudia.
“I know we’ve got a lot to think about right now. But we didn’t meet Walden as a joke, keep your head out of the clouds while we’re out here.”
Ironically at that moment Twilight wasn’t looking where she was going and ran headfirst into a small cloud giving her a snow white beard.
That was enough to break the tension and shaking off her faux beard Twilight asked Naudia:
“Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”
“I think we’re being sent down here precisely to figure that out for ourselves.”
Before they knew it they heard a beep from those tablets telling them they had reached the game trail where they had to split up. Twilight hugged Naudia tight before she let her go.
“Stay safe.”
“You too.”
They kissed once before walking down their respective paths, each reluctant to let the other go and watching behind themselves long after the other went out of sight.
-------------------
It was sometime later, and still somewhat distracted walking down the trail, Twilight didn’t notice the ambush coming. That was a problem, for the other werewolf that ambushed her. What was supposed to happen in a situation like this was that the Werewolf would bowl her over and they roll for a bit before they both realize they’re werewolves and calm down to talk.
Instead this other werewolf, who looked pretty young to Twilight, slammed into Twilight like he was slamming into a stone statue. Twilight didn’t even move an inch, her zoetic shield anchoring her in space, if she couldn’t feel him there or hadn’t heard the impact she wouldn’t have known he was there.
The werewolf limped away clearly somewhat injured by the impact and growled at Twilight. She decided it was time to pull out some stops and growl at him back. Pulling out her wereslime maned wolf form Twilight transformed into a tall wolf and that had an immediate impact on proceedings, especially since her wings and horn entirely retracted.
Now that they were staring each other down Twilight had a look at this werewolf. He looked very different from Twilight, for one he still had a horn on him, in fact he looked like a pony who had taken on some wolf-ish traits, as opposed to Twilight, who had transformed into a wolf. His cutie mark was that of oats, and Twilight thought he looked pretty young.
Twilight growling at the Werewolf had an unexpected reaction for her, she was expecting to have to win over these brutes by force, animals basically. Instead once he realized she was some sort of wolf, presumably a werewolf, he spoke to her.
“Whoa whoa whoa!” He waved his paws placatingly, “I’m sorry I didn’t know you were one of us lady.”
“Then what were you thinking?” Twilight growled at him, that was not a friendly pounce. “That could have hurt somepony.”
“It did hurt somepony, me.” The mystery werewolf joked, it fell flat on Twilight though.
“All right all right, I thought you were one of those ponies from Knicknik, things aren’t going so well with them right now. I’ve been told I need to turn away the evangelists trying to pull ponies away from the pack.”
“Evangelists?”
“Some new doctor has a ‘miracle cure’ over there. Only the first trial didn’t go so well on werewolves, we’ve been told it works perfectly fine on everything else. They’ve been sending ponies around here and we’re getting tired of it.” The injured pony didn’t look as injured now, even if the injuries were minor in the first place. Apparently he could shrug off something like a bruise or a sprain fairly quickly.
“I’m Rolled Oats by the way.”
“Twilight Sparkle.”
“Wait, you’re one of the princesses, I didn’t see your horn, in fact,” Rolled Oats looked at her wereslime form’s forehead. “I still don’t. Since when were you a werewolf anyways?”
“That, is a long story. But I’ve been sent here to figure out what is happening and sort this mess out.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve come here from Knicknik, they’ll tell you lies about us over there.”
“No, I came specifically to your pack first.”
“Good. I don’t want your viewpoints corrupted by those damn cultists.”
As things seemed to be more cordial Twilight eased out of her werewolf form and Rolled Oats out of his. Rolled Oats was a unicorn who retained his horn in werewolf form and looked like he’d lost a large amount of weight recently and he looked young, like the weight had been the chubbiness of a teenager likely from living in a bakery. His cutie mark and name didn’t seem all that werewolfy either.
“Hey, how do you get your wings and horn to retract like that?”
“To tell you the truth I’m a different kind of werewolf than you.”
“Oooh one of those southern species, is that why you’re a tall wolf then?”
“It’s called a maned wolf.” Twilight deflected answering the question directly.
They talked for a bit and Rolled Oats agreed to show her to the pack. Twilight knew she had just been attacked by a werewolf, technically, but it didn’t feel like it. If she was asleep she wasn’t even sure she would have woken up and that was worrying.
Just how strong was she now compared to a normal pony? Sure she had some numbers, but “8e35 times stronger than normal matter” is not a useful number unless you’re an astrophysicist. Even they would likely need more context for that. What scared her was that this was apparently standard, a novice’s skill in this.
“Twilight,” Rolled oats asked. “Why do you have a rat grabbed onto your neck?”
“That…” Twilight tried to figure out how to answer that question. “Is a spellcasting rat, it’s a special rat that lets me cast far stronger spells, for example.”
Twilight cast one of her new spells on a tree nearby it had a bit of long charge up time and a lot of safeties, which she thought she had triggered, until the breeze blew through and the cleanly cut tree slowly topped over. Directly onto the path in front of them. It was a very good thing that the targeting on these spells was so accurate.
“Aww, there’s devils club around here, I don’t want to have to go off the path.”
Twilight realized something and smiled.
“Don’t worry I got this.”
Twilight lifted the tree up straight up and off the ground, it felt heavy but well within her range, and with a grunt threw it into the woods by the base caber toss style.
Twilight was happy about that because it was an excellent example of her strength, the strength of the shielding spell keeping her in place, and it gave her an idea of how much she had really changed. It was satisfying to see the tree fly into the woods like that. However once that feeling faded Twilight realized that she was terrifyingly strong. The tree was at least 80 feet tall and decently thick and her spell hat cut through it like it wasn’t there, smoothly, cleanly. She could move it like it was a simple wooden board with a bit more inertia, but even still it was underher complete control. Her shielding spell even wrapped itself around the tree giving her more surface area to grip with automatically.
Rolled Oats was staring at her his mouth agape.
“Alicorn Strength?” Twilight said unconvincingly.
That hadn’t even been one of the offensive spells, it was a safety spell for cutting things like vegetables without cutting your fingers.
Naudia was trying to figure out how to get into town unnoticed. She could just pose as a pony but she could feel the tension in the town right now. The plan died the next moment as she saw a pony walking around with a shotgun. There was also the problem that she didn’t know anything about the town other than the basics. There was never a reason to look into a backwater place like this.
Knicknik was like if somebody had moved an old west town up north, and then farther north along the coast. Wooden buildings that would have fit in Apploosa just fine, shutters, glass storefronts, a distinct and pointed lack of those “batwing doors” you’d see in a saloon.
That was before you started to see the changes the town had undergone recently, wooden log walls had gone up, the windows had bars on them, there was a shaky looking tower made of scaffolding next to another tower that was under construction and looked more permanent. This was clearly a town that looked like it was fortifying for an attack. The important thing was that there wasn’t a gate yet, just some basic fortifications.
All you could see from here in terms of townspeople were Equestrian guards, not royal guards their barding wasn’t as fancy, but clearly Equestria had a presence here.
That was a big difference between Twilight and Naudia here. Twilight would have just assumed things were fine, go to the guard, work with the guard. Naudia didn’t trust the Equestrian government so much. This was about as backwater as you could get she wasn’t sure how fast they would get news out here and how many mouths that news would have had to go through to get here. She wasn’t about to trust some random guards not to pick a fight with a hole riddled bug horse on sight.
It was in the middle of trying to come up with a persona to infiltrate the town when a wild rabbit came up beside her and nuzzled her. She discovered in the trek across the forest that animals tended to trust her more for whatever reason now and she didn’t understand why.
Suddenly Naudia jerked upright, she had the perfect infiltration plan.
Act as a herd of cute friendly critters that just kinda wander into town. Granted they were black kangaroo rat things with an extra set of arms on their backs and a worrying looking red stripe. Not to mention the venomous sting in the tail, but the ponies didn’t need to know about that.
It required more setup than she expected. First she had to get used to being in 50 places at once, which took a distressingly short period of time, she supposed that her body was designed for that. The problem was that Naudia was still Naudia even split up into 50 rodents, she, all of her because it was still just her alone, still acted like she did.
So, she lost more time having to create an “animal” persona by playing with the rabbit, at least an hour. She got it down though, she couldn’t call herself a changeling if she couldn’t do something as simple as mimic something else.
The final step which she almost forgot was hiding her stuff out in the woods where nobody would find it. Her bagrat would just come with her as just “another rat”.
Naudia finally began her mosey into town.
-------------------
To keep things simple in Naudia’s head, she viewed the entire operation like a command table. Even though it was just her multitasking at an astonishing efficiency, not 50 of her, or something like that. Her mother had trained her to have an extremely good sense of direction and accurate mental maps by using everything from life size mazes levitated out of a fog of sand to tactical games where she only got to see the board once and had to give orders with only reports from changelings as to what was going on.
Naudia had heard the phrase “if I could be in three places at once.” Naudia smirked to herself at that.
The first squad of 10 moseyed into town, Naudia was a master of acting casual, when she was acting as somebody else. It was important if a changeling needed to try and pick up a date. She was gratified to see that there was some interest from the guards but little, they were looking for werewolves not redback rats, which did not even exist on Equestria.
As the first squad closed in, casually, Naudia brought out squads 2 and 3. The important thing she needed to keep in mind is not to panic and use her full strength unless as a last resort. Gwynn had informed her that one of these redbacks could easily exert multiple tons of force into a single kick. Considering their tiny legs and how they would be anchored with zoetic shields, it could get nasty. The mechanism inside her mind for controlling her strength was best thought of as a kind of dial, and she kept it emphatically on the low side.
Naudia noticed a pony guard starting a patrol past the almost unguarded gate and acted.
The plan was to act like she was a herd of the most friendly rodents ponies had ever seen, get close to ponies, want to be close to ponies, and act as extremely well behaved domesticated and above all cute animals.
Squad 1 chirped at the pony guard and all hopped over, where they gathered in front of the pony, looking up at her with rodent eyes and all trying to get her attention. Naudia was extremely careful to make sure that it did not look like she was trying to surround the guard. Meanwhile Squads 4 and 5 of 10 redback rats each plus one bagrat made their way out of the forest.
Naudia was disturbed at how easy this was. She could see through every pair of her eyes at the same time, understand what she was seeing, think about what she was seeing. Move, without it being obvious it was only her in there. It was almost impossible to describe being 50 rodents at the same time outside of the useless phrase “almost as natural as walking.” Naudia was not sure if she should be disturbed by this or not.
The guard for her part was confused to suddenly be surrounded by a bunch of black rodent things with weird wing looking extra arms and a red stripe down their backs.
“Uhh, hey there little guys?” The guard said.
At that Naudia decided to really pour on the charm, she started bouncing into the air as if this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. Like a crowd of little dogs that could not contain their excitement now that their owner had gotten home.
That was when the guard started to notice out of the corner of their eye that there were a lot of these giant rodents just wandering into town. The guard pulled out a whistle with a pea inside from a couple around her neck and blew it in a specific rhythm.
Naudia was worried it was an emergency whistle but she stayed on her bluff and amped up the cuteness, the squads tilted their head at the guard all in different directions, their beady eyes open wide with curiosity.
Then she made one of them do a bouncy backflip, and then acting as if that was the consensus all the squads started doing that.
By the time another guard came around Naudia had convinced this guard she wasn’t a threat, even though there were now 30 rodents right up around her.
The second guard was the most worrying pony Naudia had ever seen, and that included Sombra. She couldn’t tell what it was but he was wrong, like he had fallen into some kind of dark valley.
“Meadow Dispatch, why have you called me here?” Even his tone of voice.
His voice was so disquieting for Naudia that she had moved all the nearby squads behind Meadow Dispatch unconsciously.
Naudia realized what it was about him that she didn’t like. He was unalive.
Not undead, no hatred for the living, nor striving towards life, unalive. Her ability to sense emotions failed at the surface of his skin, to push any farther was to push into a consuming maw that would never understand the concept of hunger.
Abandoning all pretense Naudia bounced away from the two guards. She decided to work with what she had, the squads outside would have to find another way in, possibly digging. The squads inside would vanish around a corner under buildings and in bushes. She didn’t even feel safe with her shields up, there shouldn’t be anything on Equestria that could make her feel unsafe with her shields up, she knew. She realized this unfortunately left the bagrat outside of the city.
Change of plans. Use the bagrat to learn spells outside the city while the infiltrator squads laid low. This was supposed to be a stealth mission but things had changed. She would have to practice on her own shields, but her pool of magic was split up.
Listening in on Meadow Dispatch’s conversation she failed to get the guard to understand anything was wrong. They were looking out for werewolves and the guard pointed out that the rats had ran off almost the moment he showed up. Meadow didn’t have any response to that. Or perhaps she didn’t think any response would phase this guard.
“All right then, you take over for me here, I’m going to find those rats and see what’s up with them.”
Naudia still thinking within the bounds of ponies who were alive, expected the guard to object to that in some way. The unalive did not, it simply started pacing back and forth without another word.
It took Meadow a moment to realize that was a yes.
As Meadow came around the corner, Naudia decided to try and make contact with her.
“Psst.”
Meadow looked around confused, the voice seemed to come from down low. Naudia poked her head out from under the shed she was hiding under and looked directly at Meadow. Meadow leaned down to the little rat creature with a hoof out.
“Hey there little guy.” She said in a soft voice.
“Do you have somewhere we can talk?”
Meadow blinked. That rat certainly hadn’t just talked to her, that would be weird. The problem was that her weirdness meter had been thrown out of whack for a few weeks now, and she wasn’t used to this specific kind of weird. She gave up, the world didn’t make sense so why would a rat?
“Yeah, over here behind the general store.” Meadow pointed towards the loading area for the general store. It was interesting to note that the general store’s back looked like a much more modern construction than its front did.
30 of the rats followed her back there silently, the only way she knew they were there was because she checked for them when she couldn’t hear them at all.
“What do all of you want?” Meadow was suspicious
“Uhh hold on a second, I’m going to try something that should work.” Naudia’s voice was too high pitched for prolonged conversation being so small.
Meadow stepped back in surprise as the rats merged together like clay into one big rat.
“Much better.”
“What in Celestia’s name was THAT?!” Meadow exclaimed.
“I put myself back together so my voice isn’t so high pitched.” Naudia’s voice was more normal than her size would permit.
“What the hay are you?”
“I’m a shapeshifter who was sent down here because somebody in this area has been doing evil magic.”
Meadow sucked in her breath at that.
“Yeah. I could see that. Things have been going to horseapples around here lately.”
“Oh great, do you know who has been doing this then?”
“I wish I could tell you. I mean those ‘equestrian guards’ are obviously part this whole mess but we can’t figure out where they came from and they aren’t… hostile, at least not to us.”
“Do you think the werewolves are doing the evil magic?”
“That’s what Doctor Willow thinks. There have been a lot more of them showing up in the past two years. Then of course Pete goes along with it because he doesn’t like the werewolves.”
“Hol up a sec, I haven’t gotten your name.” Meadow said suddenly changing the subject.
“Naudia.”
“That… that sounds familiar, wasn’t that the name of some changeling princess or something down in Lower Equestria?”
“Things have gotten more complicated since then, but yeah that’s me.”
“That changeling magic of yours, it’s different than I imagined it from reading about it in the papers.”
Naudia thought for a moment. She had already decided that Meadow was going to be her in for the town. The question now was how honest she was going to be with her.
“This isn’t technically changeling magic, this is something I got as a bonus alongside shedding our dependence on love.”
“Ooooh, mad scientist stuff you’re doing with your wife?”
“Yeah.” Naudia said without hesitation. “Okay, back to the question at hand, how do you know it’s the werewolves?”
“Oh that’s easy, we’ve got some ponies out in the woods with creepy black hoods that go around casting magic.”
“And they summoned in these guards then?”
“I don’t think so. What I think is happening is that we’ve got a couple backwoods cults having a fight with our town as the battlegrounds. Because I think it’s not always the same pony with the cloak.”
“And one of the cults is obviously the werewolf one.”
“Got it in one!”
“Thank you Meadow you’ve been extremely helpful!” Naudia said cheerfully. “I need to start checking around town.”
“Be careful, ponies are on edge right now, especially the ones that haven’t been up here as long as I have. They aren’t going to take kindly to things that go bump in the night.” Meadow warned Naudia.
Naudia was about to hop away but then she thought better of it.
“Things around here are going to get… complicated Meadow.” Naudia began scratching a crude map into the dirt. “Do you know where this is?”
“Yeah, That’s the creek into town.”
“Good, if things start to get really hairy you can gather ponies over here,” Naudia poked at a clearing she had noted on the way into town. “And light up a flare or smoke or something and somebody will come to help you, got that?”
Naudia hopped off and then faded into invisibility.
“Well if she could do that, then why did she spend that much effort to sneak into town as a whole pile of rat things?” Meadow said aloud.
-------------------
Things were going well for Nuadia, not only had she found an informant, she had also found out her plan of listening to almost every part of town was a bust, which was a great thing to find out before you even try it. Not directly in the middle.
She was confident Meadow wasn’t lying about anything as well. She struck Naudia as a public minded public servant who put herself into a guard job because she wanted to help.
Naudia noticed that she was leaving behind some footprints in the dirt road here, even though she was invisible. She sat and frowned at them for a while thinking about what she could do. Then she realized that there were still tens of her that she was managing outside the town practicing this new type of magic.
The first thing she did was test out a couple things, do this with the shield, buzz her wings. Then she remembered something, she still did have wings as a redback rat but buzzing them did nothing because they didn’t have a wing membrane. She clearly needed to figure out how to use them, however they were used.
Looking in on the 20 rats outside the city one would have seen a strange sight. They were all trying to fly with empty wings like little baby birds, they could jump very high but their “wings” were just arms, like a bat wing without any membrane and a couple extra pinching fingers.
It took a while but Naudia discovered that those wings each had a silk gland on them, and a kind of instinct took over for her in a way she could only call a tutorial. As one the rats in the clearing spun a set of gossamer thin wings made literally of gossamer. Naudia tried looking at her own wings when she realized she could look at another one of her wings on another of her bodies, and now six rats were doing that in a circle.
Naudia had to sit down for a moment, it’s not that this was hard, or that it was taxing her brain, it was strange to her sense of self. She was looking at herself, moving in perfect unison with herself, like a right and left hand knowing what the other is doing but with dozens of bodies that were all her. She couldn’t have done this a week ago and it scared her to be doing it so naturally now.
Naudia looked at herself and asked: “Was it worth it?”
She didn’t have an answer, yet. The only way to find out would be to keep moving forwards.
Naudia spread her wings and focused her magic without even flapping them she took off into the sky. A pack of redback rats took to the skies all coordinated perfectly with one another, ghosting through the air without a sound. She could see herself up there in an intricate dance, coordinated, the vectors of her flight perfectly calculated, extending and twisting her wings to dive through the air in a perfect dance.
She experienced the wonder of first flight twenty times, all at once, in this serene, silent clearing.
There could be no doubt about her transformation.
But it did leave her with a question, how was she this good, this fast, this perfect, at figuring out trajectories?
Unfortunately that question needed to be shelved so that she could find a place to hide in town and build a set of wings. Hovering invisible without even a ghost of a breeze coming off the wings was clearly the best way to go for stealth.
Now with her new spiderweb, no-flap, wings on a springhare’s body, Naudia was invisibly floating through town. It was a fortunate thing that she could do that because Knicknik was in a bad state.
It wasn’t that the town was abandoned, there were quite a few ponies there, more than there should have been by the emotions Naudia could feel emanating from the houses.
If you were looking at the town exclusively in terms of population you would call it lively, peak of tourist season. If you looked at the huddled ponies walking around town it painted a very different picture. These didn’t look like tourists to Naudia, these looked like dock-workers, sailors, that sort of thing, out of their element and scared.
Knicknik was a small town situated across a river that lead out to an inlet, it was how most of the goods moved inland. Naudia expected it to be busy but the number was suspicious like these boatworkers were just loitering around, waiting, anxious and grouped up.
Moving over to the other end of town where the buildings were less touristy and more “log cabin I built myself” she spotted the other groups of ponies, the pack ponies who were also loitering around. Naudia drew closer to them to listen in and see if she could hear anything significant.
“Those damn sailors.”
Naudia’s ears perked up at that, this sounded interesting. She pulled closer to some grizzled ponies in a huddle with an even more grizzled pony who had a shotgun on his back.
“Won’t sail in, won’t sail out, now they’re eatin up our supplies durin a siege.”
“We aren’t going to make it through the winter like this.”
“Now.” The pony with the shotgun on his back said, and everypony listened. “We can’t be turning against each other. Once this siege breaks we’ll be needing those sailors to either get us outta here or get help, unless you want to WALK back down to Equestria, in which case you should get started now.”
Everypony in the group balked at that notion.
“I didn’t think so. Here is what we’re going to do, I’m going to be supplying a foraging team or three with weapons, now these are very limited I would appreciate if you used them as threats rather than weapons. That should shore things up a bit, then we’re going to start cuttin up potatoes that’re a bit too old and making a garden of em just outside the walls, wherever we can.”
“And also we should put down a patch of cabbage.” One of the ponies said.
“Tartarus damn it I’m sick to death of cabbage, it’s always cabbage this, coleslaw that, if I never smell boiled cabbage again it’ll be too soon.” Another pony in the crowd said.
“We gotta put down at least one field of cabbage.” The shotgun pony said, clearly he had a lot of sway here. “We’re going for bulk food that stores well and grows well, now I know you all are tired of cabbage.”
There was a unanimous affirmation to that.
“But, this is a siege we’re dealing with, we can’t just nip down to Equestria for a bag of oats.”
The ponies grumbled still, but Pete seemed to have clamped down on them enough for them to agree to plant cabbage.
“Thank you Pete for talking sense.” An out of place pony in the group said to the shotgun pony.
“Calva.” Pete said to the out of place pony frankly. “We both know this is going to go badly sooner or later. Those wolves out there are just waiting for it. Our best chance is to fortify up to make sure we come out on top when things do go bad.”
“I just hoped that-” Calva was cut off.
“The guard ain't comin. If they were comin they would have been here when boats stopped going out.”
“But the guards said they’ll be here soon.”
“Those aren’t guards, we can only hope that when things go south those things are on the front lines. I don’t know what they are but even after helping with those walls I don’t think they’re completely on our side in this.”
The ponies around Pete seemed to agree on this point and the meeting broke up. Naudia noted that the ponies all traveled in groups. That seemed to be how all the ponies traveled in town, anypony left alone hurried along as fast as they thought wouldn’t draw attention.
Naudia smiled, it was always nice to have a lever like this, especially if you were on the hunt. She was already coming up with plans that she was more than eager to discuss with Twilight. Silently she flew over the walls and back to the rest of herself.
The best part of all this though was that Naudia got practice in with her new magic while spying at the same time. She couldn’t wait to show Twilight.
Twilight blinked as she abruptly came out of the thick temperate rainforest and into a wide open plain of farmland. Commonly known as “the potato breadbasket of the north” she never expected it to be run by werewolves.
The werewolf settlement itself was… interesting. Twilight didn’t know what she was expecting, perhaps some old abandoned mining town or something or caves in the mountains. Turns out the werewolf town was some sort of werewolf sylvan glen of trees, as well as a farming village dug into the ground, like an earth pony co-op that decided to move underground. Small too, smaller than she would expect to tend to all these fields.
It was exactly the kind of place where she would have expected to see earth ponies shaping trees and growing crops. The only thing she knew about up here was that they grew a lot of root vegetables and had the world record for largest cabbage, she could see why now. Well, not exactly the fields stretched beyond where she could actually see from here, and there were periodic rows of trees that blocked her view, but she could understand why.
She finally understood the reason for all this when Rolled Oats waved for her to head underground. The tunnel wound around like an animal burrow for a while until she came into a much larger cavern with wooden supports. Twilight suspected it was to deal with snow drifts, but she wondered how they deal with the spring thaw.
“It’s built like this because of the snow drifts, with those fields out there you can get them to cover up entire trees.” Rolled Oats explained. “Also the wind, winter storms can get nasty.”
“Oh, you live here year round?” Twilight asked.
“Yep, we have to, the Fang of the First Queen is here.”
Down underground there were tunnels and more tunnels and vent holes and enchanted clouds as air scrubbers, there was even a second layer to this central cavern. It was down in the second layer that she saw the “Fang of the First Queen”.
The Fang was not an actual tooth but a boulder at least ten feet tall covered in glowing runes and shaped like a fang. The stone was stark white like a fang and Twilight could feel the magic inside of it, the magic felt ancient. She could see wisps of magic snake around the fang before floating up and dissipating. Even from here Twilight could tell that this was a powerful artifact.
“Come I think you should meet the queen.”
The ponies in the chamber stared at Twilight, as ponies were wont to do with any alicorn. She, looking back on them noticed that they were different than she expected. She was expected a bunch of scraggly ponies, thin, worn, harrowed by a lifetime living with a monster within themselves. What she got were a bunch of ponies who looked like they got out a lot to work in the fields, had very shiny coats, and smelled like dog shampoo. Even the unicorns and pegasai were significantly more fit and bulky than Twilight would have expected.
Looking around Twilight thought it was probably a good idea that she had put her bagrat back in her saddlebags, as there were quite a few ponies in their werewolf forms, it would be a bad idea for one of them to try and “help” her with the rat on her back. Twilight noted that some of the werewolves did just lounge around in their werewolf form.
They were seated around the Fang of the First Queen like it was some kind of temple or bonfire, no exactly like a bonfire. This was some sort of communal underground meeting room for ponies to sit and talk. Like these ponies were part of a pack, like wolves out in the wild, a big family basically.
Not to be confused with wolves in captivity which are closer to prisoners which form a hierarchy and alpha-beta dynamics. Twilight mentally amended in her head to nobody.
Twilight and Rolled Oats came to a stop in front of a pony and Twilight, ever the walking dictionary of unused, obscure and depreciated words in Equestria, started looking around for the queen. Instead there was just a stallion in some kind of naturey robes.
“Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Equestria, werewolf,” Rolled oats Said gesturing at her before gesturing at the stallion. “Expat Eclipse, Keeper of the Fang of the First Queen, he’s also known as Queen of the Werewolves.”
Expat Eclipse started off with a dignified demeanor like he’d been told Twilight had been coming and was prepared to meet her, albeit just in time. That demeanor fit in well with how he looked, he had a coat of dark grey with highlights of red like the borders of an eclipse, he had a beard as well as little tufts of hair on the tips of his ears, he had topaz eyes and was an earth pony. His cutie mark was of an eclipse. Despite what his coloring would first bring to mind Twilight thought he didn’t quite live up to it, he was trying but his personality got in the way, in her opinion he was too young.
“Isn’t a queen supposed to be a mare?” Twilight asked.
Rolled Oats and Eclipse looked surprised at that.
“Really? I never knew, I thought it was something related to werewolves.” Eclipse said.
“A Queen is traditionally a ruling mare of an independent state.”
“Oh well we don’t really care too much about older stuff like that around here, we’re trying to modernize, bring us up to the century of Princess Luna’s return!”
Twilight realized something, the term Queen hadn’t been used in millennia inside Equestria for it’s original definition, not when the princesses ruled. Not even for Naudia as changelings were all biologically monogender, or would that be a different word for a species that was designed instead of evolved? It was entirely likely the only place where the term still held it’s original definition inside Equestria was literally in the dusty old tome she found it in. To a common pony it was just “a term for royalty for them far off places” like emperor or king.
Eclipse leaned in closer and said to Twilight, “Incidentally if you know of any ways for us to modernize that give us things to do in the winter, it would be deeply, DEEPLY appreciated by everypony here.”
“I might have something like that, get back to me in a week or two.” Twilight said, this place was already feeling pretty welcoming as ponies in this hall got up to see the new alicorn princess. “In reality though I’m here because of how things are going downhill right now.”
“Oh. That.” Eclipse said all enthusiasm draining from his voice. “Yeah. I’ll leave you to discuss that with the keeper.”
“What happened to him?” Twilight asked Rolled Oats.
“He’s been trying to get ponies into town to become werewolves, it’s really hard to do, frankly a pretty thankless job, all that business over in Knicknik blockading the river means that even if ponies did want to come they can’t.”
That was when the Keeper showed up. The Keeper is a pony named Crescent Claw, she is markedly more businesslike than the “queen” and Twilight could tell something about her stance on werewolves instantly as Crescent was in her werewolf form. Her werewolf form had a crescent moon and a potato and she resembled more a bulky wire haired dog with an amber coat than a wolf.
It was nice to find this out before Twilight could suggest changing the title from “queen” to “keeper”.
“So a princess from Canterlot is coming out to the sticks to solve our problem with the cult over in Knicknik eh?” Crescent Claw tried to pull herself up Tall, unfortunately for her Twilight wins out there. Failing to intimidate Crescent says: “And what would one of you Canterlot ponies have done to stoop to talking to us? Lost a bet?”
“Uhh Cress, lemme tell you something.” Rolled Oats says before turning to Twilight. “We’ll be right back okay?”
During the subsequent discussion there are a couple exclamations from the keeper, notably “WEREWOLF?!” and “NO!”. Before mid-discussion she struts over to Twilight seemingly angry now.
“Rolled Oats has told me a very tall tale that I need you to disprove so I can put him on cabbage boiling duty for a week.” She said. “He tells me that not only are you a werewolf, you’re the strongest werewolf he’s ever seen, able to lift up an entire tree like it was nothing. AND that he ambushed you and he got the distinct impression that there was a possibility you might not have noticed if you weren’t paying attention.”
Crescent Claw let out an exasperated sigh.
“You can appreciate how hard it is for me to believe any of this, so I’m going to have to ask you to lay this discussion to rest for me.”
Twilight decided instead of saying anything to just transform instead. Quickly she shifted into her maned wolf form, becoming a tall purple coated wolf.
Crescent Claw’s jaw dropped her eyes froze stock still open staring at Twilight, she was in shock.
“Excuse me princess, but could I possibly ask you to do that again?”
Twilight shrugged and transformed back to pony then back to wolf.
“That,” Crescent sniffed. “That…” Tears began forming in her eyes. “That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Crescent turns away.
“Excuse me,” She’s having trouble keeping it together. “Excuse me, I need a minute. I need a minute all right?”
Crescent aimlessly wandered off and collapsed onto an empty bench in a daze.
“What happened to her?” Twilight asked.
“She likes werewolves, like REALLY likes the idea of werewolves. I would call it an obsession with her. I mean she came to greet you in her werewolf form.” Rolled Oats said.
“I could see that.”
“However because she really, really likes werewolves she’s acutely aware of the downsides of being a werewolf.” Rolled continued on.
“Oh this is actually something I’m interested in.” Twilight clapped her paws together.
“Why?” Rolled Oats seemed a bit stopped up by that.
“Because it’s a distinct possibility that I could help!”
Rolled Oats looked at her sharply, and not altogether in a friendly manner.
“You want to be very careful about how you say things like that around here, all right? Ponies might misinterpret things to imply that you might want to ‘cure’ them.”
Twilight noticed even that passing mention got a distinct negative reaction from everypony in earshot. They started looking around with an alert, hostile glare that percolated out into the room.
“Well I’d need to know more about your situation before I could really specify,” Twilight said. “I suppose if you want general terms it’s possible I could help you become a werewolf like me.”
“I could see some benefits to that.” Rolled said.
“So what are the downsides you’re talking about?”
“Well first we need that fang of the first queen to stay sane. Without it we’d start to go berserk for meat. Then the transformation is a bit… uncomfortable? I wouldn’t call it painful but I would say most ponies aren’t going to transform unless they HAVE to.” Rolled Oats started to ramble. “Don’t even get me started on the winter. Ponies around here start to get a bit stir crazy during the winter to put it lightly, but we need to stay near the fang, and we’ve only got so many amulets to let ponies go down to Lower Equestria.”
Twilight might have thought he was done, but he wasn’t.
“Then there is claw clipping, that’s pretty miserable, and what the transformation can do to your coat and mane, tangles are NOT the worst of it-”
“It sounds like you run into a lot of problems I don’t have.” Twilight interrupted him.
“I could tell just from the transformation alone.” Crescent had come back, still sniffing and with red eyes, but she looked happy. “I’m sorry for not believing you at first, Rolled Oats really got my hopes up there and for once I wasn’t disappointed.”
“I’ll be honest with you I find a lot of what has been happening recently hard to believe myself.” Twilight said. “Right now I’m gathering intel to figure out who is behind those cultists, once the whole situation is resolved I WILL be able to help you out more directly. But what is happening out there right now is more important than it sounds like.”
“By the way, do you need me to prove anything else Rolled Oats said? I don’t want him on cabbage boiling duty for telling the truth.”
Crescent looked Twilight right in the eye and said:
“I don’t even care, that transformation is more than proof enough for me.”
------------------
Now that Twilight had been brought into “the pack” and got glad handed by the keeper in such a noticeable way that the werewolves seemed to all be really friendly to her. She heard them say things like “We had a werewolf princess on our side, who knew?” or “Thank you for coming out here to help us, nopony expected help on this sort of level.”
To which Twilight tried her best to smile and give an appropriate response. It really hammered home to her that she might have a conflict of interests here. Thinking back on the First Administrator, a serious conflict of interests.
I hope I don’t have to talk to Celestia anytime soon. Twilight thought, I don’t think I could handle that.
“Twilight would you like to use the Fang of the First Queen?” Crescent asked.
“What for?”
“To keep down the urge to eat meat and maintain your control in werewolf form.” Crescent looked uncomfortable. “Unless…”
“Unless what?” Twilight asked.
“Have you been eating… meat?” It seemed there was a hard limit to Crescent’s dedication to werewolves.
“I don’t need anything to maintain control over my werewolf forms.” Twilight tried to shift the conversation by dangling that pluralization into it and with that bomb.
Every pony in the area stopped and stared at her. Looking around at them Twilight realized that they were utterly floored by that statement, if they all hadn’t been quadrupedal Twilight suspected that some of them could have been literally floored.
“You’ve gotta be careful saying stuff like that here Twilight, or you could just become our savior before you leave this place.”
“I’ll tell you what, if you have a place to practice combat I’ll show you my other werewolf form.”
“We’ve got a spot up top prepared to practice for when ice devil season comes around.”
“Ice devils?” Twilight asked.
“Think dust devils but instead angry windigo remnants.”
“Oh.”
Twilight was lead up out of the caves and up to a training ground with straw targets of various kinds, most notably one that was behind some boards designed to swing randomly in front of an archery target. As well as a couple sets of chewed up straw training dummies.
She put on her lichen wolf pelt with the bagrat already inside of it and activated her shield, and then pulled out her actual shield, which was a buckler as well as her sling. She could just tell how this was supposed to work through the bagrat, as again tutorial text flashed onto her eyes.
“just a heads up I’m not quite sure how this one works yet, it’s a new artifact, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to break one of your training dummies, which one is going to be replaced soonest?” A pony indicated one of the training dummies. “All right stand back.”
Twilight squared up at the weathered training dummy activated the magic in her sling to summon in a projectile and flung a little ball of crunched up lichen spores at the target, her targeting sphere of magic limiting the scope. The little ball of lichen exploded into a cloud of spores, if you looked closely you could see the lichen already growing on the target dummy.
Twilight leapt at the target with a roar and activated her lichenthrope form. Almost instantly the wolf lichen pelt spread out across her body giving her a bipedal shaggy green werewolf appearance and shifting her into a knuckle walking charge. Twilight slashed at the training dummy with magically charged up wolf claws that, as they cut through the cloud, pulled on it dragging more and more spores into the fresh cuts from her claws in their wake, and causing an intense growth of lichen that only accelerated the growth of the cloud. The second slash pulled even more intensely on the cloud and there was an explosion, the training dummy vanished in a cloud of straw and lichen, and something else.
She stood there a little bit scared of how strong she was now. Despite what the words “straw target” might say to you, this was a densely packed lump for archery and biting, designed to stop arrows dead and be chewed on by wolves. Now it was a diminishing cloud of straw and a growing cloud of lichen.
Twilight instinctively pulled the lichen back to her, which flowed through the air towards her increasing the size of her werewolf coat. With the cloud out of the way there was no sign of the straw target.
She could feel the lump in her stomach staring at the empty space there. This was terrifying, she did that, Twilight Sparkle did that. This wasn’t like Tirek when she needed the magic of four alicorns or something. This was a cloud of death focused down, and from what she understood about it made her magic used against Tirek look like an overpowered sparkler. The thought “magmatter is 8e35 times stronger than normal matter” flashed into her head again, not that that should directly effect the power of the spell but it was a reminder of the inconceivably, unimaginably, strong materials the spell was intended to attack.
Then somepony said something that made Twilight’s stomach drop even further.
“Hold up a sec, where is the piece of railroad track we had it tied to?”
There was evidence of the rusty piece of railroad track, a rusty stump of iron and fragments, that was all that remained.
Twilight let her second werewolf form recede, returning to being a maned wolf with a lichen wolf pelt on her back, a significantly longer pelt than before. It had felt so natural, she would learn that spell from just a couple casts, it was easy, she didn’t feel even a little bit tired. Just judging by her current magic reserves she couldn’t even estimate how many times she could cast that spell before she was too tired to do so. The number climbed and climbed past the point where mental math could handle it.
Somepony was pointing at something and shouting, there was more shouting, and then Somepony touched her shoulder.
“Twilight you all right?” It was Crescent Claw.
“I think so.”
“Great! Because that was the coolest thing I think I’ve ever seen, just like out of a comic book, but here, I got to see it, it was REAL!”
Looking around Twilight saw the other werewolves were not scared by her magic, quite the opposite they were enthusiastic. Twilight saw two of them, in werewolf form bounce up and down in excitement. The excitement finally culminated in a howl and Twilight finally realized why Crescent Claw was so enthusiastic about her werewolf form. Their werewolf forms were all based on dogs.
“Twilight?” Crescent asked, Twilight realized she was out of and had missed something.
“Huh?”
“Boy that must have taken a lot out of you to cast, I said ‘how do you control a spell that powerful it so perfectly?’”
“What do you mean?”
Crescent pointed at the razor thin line in the grass around where the target had been, you could see where each individual blade of grass had been.
“Did you put up a shield around the spell?”
“No, that’s just where the spell ends.”
“WOW! That level of control, I can’t even imagine what it must take.” Crescent was gushing both paws on her cheeks her eyes literally sparkling. “To think that the princess of magic is not only one of us, AND she has this level of control, how many years did you, no wait this was what Celestia’s training was about, to tame the wolf inside of you?”
Twilight looked down at the line in the grass. This was very obviously controlled, extremely controlled and while bits of the straw target and even the rail were outside that circle, the real damaging and dangerous spell stopped at a point Twilight expected she could pinpoint if she knew about how wide the straw target was.
“I didn’t need training to control this werewolf form, but it’s not perfect yet, I think I can do better with control on that spell.” Twilight said to Crescent.
The werewolves around Twilight gasped, she had found the thing they valued the most.
“Really!?”
“Yeah, I wanted to show off a bit with a big spell, but I think I could limit it a lot more than that.”
Twilight was literally carried back underground by a crowd of cheering werewolves to have a celebratory feast. Coming down into the caverns through a different entrance Twilight could already smell cabbage.
-------------------
The feast did not include any meat Twilight noted, which was good, she didn’t want to eat any meat from Equestria. No matter how good a hamburger might be, whatever the ones she tried were actually made out of.
“So Twilight.” Crescent Claw asked, Twilight knew exactly what she was going to ask. “How do you have so much control over your werewolf form? Some kind of magic item? Meditation? Anger management?”
“It comes with the transformation.” Twilight told a half truth, she didn’t quite consider this slime werewolf form to be a true werewolf.
“Wooow.” Crescent was seriously fangirling over Twilight. “How did you get this transformation?”
Twilight didn’t like lying this much but she wasn’t sure what she could say. She decided to deflect again in a way that she knew would work.
“I’m still doing research on this but I’m pretty sure once all this stuff with cultists is resolved I’ll be able to start granting it out to other ponies.”
“WHAT! Well then lets get going, right now!” Crescent shouted, all ready to get up and get going right that second.
“Hold on,” Twilight said grabbing Crescent in her magic. “I was sent here because the situation is actually even more dangerous than it seems right now. I’ve actually been told that stuff like that lichen attack I used might not be strong enough to stop whatever is behind the cultists.”
“You’re kidding right?”
Twilight’s look said more than she actually needed to say.
“Oh.”
Crescent perked up.
“Well this is when you call your friends in and do some kind of rainbow thing right?”
“We don’t even know who to shoot the rainbow at, that’s why I’m here. I need you werewolves to help me figure out who is actually behind all this and what is going on here.”
“Well,” Crescent's demeanor seemed a lot more like the keeper when she first met Twilight now. “Knicknik is denying us supplies, and they’ve got those creepy ‘Equestria Royal Guards’ in town.”
“Equestria Royal Guards? They don’t generally leave Canterlot.” Twilight noted the air quotes.
“I don’t think they’re guards, I don’t know what they are, I’m not even sure if I want to know. But what I think is happening is we’ve got two groups that are fighting here, and I don’t just mean werewolves vs Knicknik. I think what we’re seeing is one group infiltrated Knicknik and is in control and now they don’t want their investment spoiled so they ‘made’ those guards. And another group is out in the woods somewhere, and they seem to want to control the waterways. My guess on the second group is some sort of outside mining company that wants to take over.”
“Why would a mining company want all that? There are plenty of natural harbors around here.”
“Yeah but none of them have a pre-built trail network that leads to a perfectly sheltered natural deep water and also ice-free harbor.”
“Hmm, so it’s either a company with investments in the area, or possibly somebody from across the sea that wants jade exports then?”
“Yep. I mean it could be somebody who wants our potatoes but I’ll be frank, they’re potatoes.”
“What do you think the cultists are after.”
“I honestly don’t know, they seem like the really strange ones here. I mean I can see why Knicknik accepted their guards, whoever is in control and since they put those things up front, that way when things get nasty if all goes well there won’t be any of them left. Hay, I’d dump em all into a volcano for a haypenny.
“But I think those townsponies aren’t getting the whole picture and what they’ve actually done is holed themselves up away from the local food produces, IE: us. And the ponies who might have to put those ‘guards’ down might be us.”
“Why would you and Knicknik fight?”
“Isn’t it obvious? The cultists have clearly taken over in there. We’ve been probing these guards to see what their secret weapon is like but it’s hard to determine anything about them. Some of the wolfpack think that they’re just scarecrows, I disagree, I think they’re some kind of secret weapon.”
They were interrupted when Twilight’s tablet started making a ringing sound. She pulled it out of her pack to look at the screen.
“Oh dear, it’s that late already? I have to meet back up with Naudia.”
“I thought you were going to stay around here, you aren't?”
“Can’t, I’ve got to start investigating whats happening around here and stopping it.”
“Are you sure you can’t stay? I want to see what other moves you’ve got and stuff.” Crescent claw gave Twilight literal puppy dog eyes.
“Nope, but I will be coming back fairly regularly, possibly to get help with the investigation.”
Twilight looked back down at her tablet again and realized that the alarm was actually that Naudia was actually approaching their rendezvous point right now, which meant she had to rush.
“Oh no, I’ve really got to fly now, tell the, uh… queen I’ll be back later.”
And with that Twilight zoomed off to meet Naudia, now they had a place to start investigating and that was the important part of this visit. Good relations with the werewolves was secondary, and she didn’t even have to pull the meat card this time either.
Twilight met up with Naudia back where they started, Naudia was already looking at her very strangely when she showed up. Twilight realized that she was in such a hurry that she’d ran the entire way back, ironically after saying “gotta fly”. So now she was covered in sticky birch sap, leaves, sticky seeds, even twigs in her fur and mane, and she was still wearing the lichen wolf pelt as well.
“Uhh, excuse me a moment okay?” Twilight said her face a beet red of embarrassment.
Twilight went behind a bush to try and figure out how to make herself presentable again. After going through various scrubbing spells in her head she decided to try something else. Summoning in a mirror, Twilight focused on her reflection, looking at all the little bits that were in her fur.
Suddenly all the little chunks rose up into the air away from her fur almost seamlessly. The sensation was strange, but it lacked the hurt that would have come from yanking the twigs out of the tangles in her hair. Then Twilight concentrated on what she knew about this kind of shielding magic to turn it inside out like she was pulling off a piece of clothing, so she could just leave all the detritus on the ground. Incidentally this is where an advanced mathematics background(among others) in an environment without computers really helped her out. Not that she could do that sort of advanced math in her head, she was just used to having to visualize topological problems in her head.
Now visibly more clean than before, however there was a distinct sticky sensation told her that this was not a substitute for bathing, she at least looked presentable. The sticks and stinging nettle on the ground told her that this was however a fantastic substitute for pulling them out of her hair by hoof.
It was strange, she noticed the stinging nettle but it never hurt because it could never pierce her skin. But that was a thought for later.
Coming back around to Naudia sheepishly, especially considering how dirty she still was, Twilight finally, properly met back up with Naudia.
“Did they chase you out of town Twilight? I mean I thought things were bad in Knicknik but I didn’t expect things to be worse over there.”
“No things are doing all right in the Werewolf settlement. It’s just I didn’t want to be late meeting back up with you, so I ran the whole way.”
“There are two things wrong with that.” Naudia said coming up to Twilight.
“The first is this.” Naudia poked one of Twilight’s wings.
“Oh. Yeah, I didn’t think about that.” Twilight reddened with embarrassment.
“The second is why aren’t you at all winded from springing all that way so fast you had twigs embedded into your fur?”
Twilight didn’t have a good answer to that.
“That’s a great question, whenever we get a spare moment I think that calls for an experiment!”
“When. You have time for something like that.” Came Gwynn’s voice from up above.
Twilight and Naudia looked up to see Gwynn standing on a branch above them, in what was probably supposed to be a cool pose. Gwynn was still wearing the same loincloth and chestwrap as before with the body paint, that seemed to be the default outfit.
The problem was that they could see right up Gwynn’s-
“Oh dear,” Twilight said. “I just always assumed you were female.”
“What do you-” Gwynn realized what just happened. “Oh. Oh, damn it!”
“No, no, no, things are more complicated than that,” Gwynn then muttered. “We were supposed to have a lecture about this when we go back to camp, but I just barely managed to blunder in just under that.”
Gwynn jumped down from the tree and walked over to them sulkily.
“Congrats, because I screwed up I have to explain some of the birds and the bees to two grown women today, huzzah. Please try not to make this any more awkward than it’s already going to be all right?”
“Okay?” Twilight said.
Gwynn started without her, attempting to talk like a bored lecturer reviewing the last semester after winter break.
“The first thing you need to do is throw out a lot of the concepts you have because you evolved. Everything about my, and your bodies now, was specifically designed from the ground up.”
“Does that mean you gave yourself-”
“Yes.” Gwynn said, she didn’t seem angry just impatient to get this out of the way.
“Moving on,” Gwynn drew an infinity symbol in the air. “There are four designed genders, Andro, Male, Gyno, Female, and they are on a spectrum that looks like this, if it looks arbitrary, it is, it was literally designed.”
The corners of the infinity symbol lit up with the labels, male on the corner of the line across from gyno, female below gyno and across from andro.
“Am I correct in assuming that Andro is for male secondary sexual traits and female primary and gyno is the opposite of that?” Twilight asked.
“Yes, but that’s not the whole story. Every yunguaq is a hermaphrodite and where you land on the spectrum is about how you emphasize those traits, it means we always have both.”
“Isn’t that just a bit arbitrary?” Twilight asked, “Ponies just kinda decide?”
“The whole thing is arbitrary, there isn’t a single natural thing about us, every surface level thing about my body was something I decided to have.”
“When you say ‘us’.” Naudia stated.
“Yeah, that includes both of you too.”
“Well how come I’m the last to find out about this then?” Twilight was angry.
“We… had it turned off for you so you wouldn’t… get up to anything.”
“How is that your business at all if two grown mares get up to anything?” Twilight demanded.
Gwynn began tapping her foot nervously.
“We know you want to have kids, and we gave you the opportunity to have kids, but, remember Walden? Nobody is going to let you inflict something like that on somebody not even born yet.”
That killed the conversation dead. But Gwynn had to keep going.
“Not only all of that but you basically have to throw out a lot of what you know about normal biology, pregnancy for us is designed to be entirely voluntary, no menstrual periods, nothing like that, you have to want to get pregnant. I think you can understand our reluctance to dump you into that situation when you would think you understand what’s going on.”
“So where are you on this whole spectrum thing then?” Twilight asked.
“Mid-gyno, to be honest I thought you might be able to tell because I’m, well… flat.”
Twilight and Naudia looked at each other in confusion, then they craned their heads around to look at Gwynn’s butt.
“Nope.”
“Definitely doesn’t look flat to me.”
It took Gwynn a minute to figure out what was going on before she facepalmed. It took another couple minutes to explain secondary sexual traits to the ponies.
“Strange, I guess it works?” Naudia said politely.
“Is it like a second butt?” Twilight asked.
Gwynn stared at them across the gulf separating their upbringings.
“I don’t know if I should laugh at you or cry because I have to explain this to you for a test.”
The unfortunate choice of words set Twilight off and it was a couple minutes before they got her calmed down enough for Gwynn to finish explaining.
“Does mid-gyno have any specific meaning here or is that just where you’re at, kinda in the middle there?” Naudia pointed at the point in the middle where the infinity symbol crossed.
“Not really, it’s just there because stuff like ‘tomboy’ and the like started to make a lot less sense.” Gwynn explained. “It’s something that’s displayed on the broadcast system, that’s how you know things about yunguaq by looking at them, they broadcast it to you.”
Gwynn went on to explain that was what was missing from their “broadcast” the parts Twilight didn’t understand. It was there so that people could be whatever crazy creature they wanted to be without having to constantly say “No, sorry I’m a guy” or similar.
It was strange moving over to understanding the parts that had been broadcast to them, just looking at Gwynn she understood now “mid-gyno”. But there were also other things like that she was an Amirlu Lion, and her combat class was just “werewolf”, as well as her preferences. All of this was just kinda there, Twilight understood just by looking at Gwynn without even thinking about it.
“Was the lion’s mane supposed to be some sort of indication?” Naudia asked, it was easy to forget sometimes that Gwynn was a bipedal rabbit creature that looked like a lion.
“Huh?”
“Your lion’s mane, was that supposed to be a hint that you’re gyno?”
“Do lions not generally have these here?”
“Only male lions have manes.”
“Not where I’m from, where I’m from a lion without a mane would basically just be a cougar.”
“But why?” Twilight asked.
“I guess people want their pets to look distinct, nobody would want a lion somebody could mistake for a mountain lion. If you’re getting a lion you want the whole lion experience and that includes ‘big fluffy mane’.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Like I said you have to divorce yourself from thinking in normal biological terms for our society.”
That was a conversation that really gave them something to chew on for the trip back to base, which went noticeably slow because of that. Twilight mulling over the thought about how serious today had actually been, regardless of how smoothly it went.
Naudia on the other hand was thinking about something different.
Changelings were always mono-gender, female by default because they were just magical beings modeled after ponies that lived in a hive. There was no real need for a male or a female biologically, not with the way they were designed. There was only a need only if somebody wanted to be something else.
This all was a new thought into her head, she’d never thought about her friends like Mattar and the like. Ponies had this, but ponies were ponies, she was raised to think of them as “dangerous but necessary food” sources. A thought that not even her time with Twilight could completely dismiss, it still hid in lingering corners of her mind, parts of herself she had not re-evaluated yet.
“Twilight how do you think of me?”
“You’re my girlfriend but, we’re basically married, it’s just never been official. Might as well be, fireplace book date night weekly isn’t something you’d do with just anypony.”
“No I don’t mean that, I mean me, what I am.”
“Well, you’ve got a very tall figure, a…” Twilight paused embarrassed to be complimenting her girlfriend like this. “Cute little crown thing, and while you look intimidating with the holes and such once you get closer you’re a much softer person than you look.”
Twilight looked over at Naudia, who still seemed to be rolling something over in her head.
“Why do you ask? Has this whole situation got you thinking about yourself?”
“It has.” Naudia put out, and just kinda left hanging there.
“Well what are you thinking about it then?”
“I’ve just never really considered where I stand on all this, changelings are by default female and I’ve never questioned that, anything for a disguise was just that, for a disguise, an act. It feels like I’ve never really looked in a mirror before.”
“Well I can think of a simple solution to this, you’re a changeling. Change into a changeling.”
Naudia stared at Twilight for a long moment, before laughing out loud.
“It’s been so long since I’ve had to disguise myself that I honestly forgot. And what it’s only been a year or so now, how could I forget so quickly.”
As they walked back Twilight put up a mirror spell(one of the new summoning spells) and Naudia posed around looking like various different variations of herself. The interesting thing was that these were harder than a normal disguise for Naudia to come up with as there wasn’t any precedent for a changeling king or a mid-male changeling king, and it was basically impossible to figure out what could be tweaked for an andro/gyno build.
There was really only one thing they both agreed on though, none of them really fit as well as her default. Naudia felt most like herself, as herself.
-------------------
When they got back to camp one of the officials told them that it was time to “learn about the birds and the bees”. To which Gwynn stepped forward.
“Sorry, I just barely manged to squeak under for this and I had to explain it to them already.”
“Oh, then we can just move onto the test then, that’s nice.”
Twilight raised her hoof.
“Umm yes?” The official(a goat looking person with long floppy ears) said.
“I think we would like to review for the test anyways.”
Gwynn put her head in her hands and groaned.
This turned out to be much, much worse than a talk with Gwynn. It wasn’t that they didn’t learn anything, there were things Gwynn left out, minor things she obviously didn’t think about. The problem was that it was the ultimate “show that your teacher brings out because they don’t want to explain anything” the supreme embodiment of that concept.
Twilight and Naudia’s faces unbeknownst to them scrunched up in embarrassment, scrunching so much that their muzzles began to sink into their heads from cringing backwards. Their slime anatomy allowing them to do a decent job of hiding their faces without moving their hooves.
There was one advantage to this though, it was extremely memorable. They were not going to forget that anytime soon.
Naturally Twilight and Naudia aced the test, it was short, only 5 pages front and back and Twilight and Naudia as a couple were allowed to collaborate answering questions, but the last page was strange. It was a contract, about having kids.
“Excuse me, what is this?” Twilight asked Gwynn holding out the contract.
“That is a contract, you have to sign it.”
“But why?”
“Every single person in the future is biologically immortal, populations do not naturally age or die, ever.” Gwynn said. “It’s an unfortunate reality of that we need population control.”
“But with all those stars on the Chattler Anomaly there should be enough resources for-” Twilight was cut off.
“Every single one of those stars is at carrying capacity for life hundreds of quadrillions if not quintillions, there are multiple layers of habitations living off of waste heat from one another all the way out until they trade in hydrogen rather than potatoes. The only reason you’re allowed to have kids is because we’re actively building more stars.”
“I want to know, but I don’t think I have the mental energy for it.” Naudia said. “I want to save that for discussing what to do next with Twilight about what is happening down here.”
“I’m starved, I think we’re going to have to talk about it over lunch.”
“Yeah, when is it time for lunch anyways?” Naudia asked.
The goat man looked at his tablet.
“Eh, I’d say in about twenty seconds.”
“What-” Twilight was cut off as a fireball came screaming out of the sky.
Twilight barely had time to react as something at a very high velocity used some very angry blue-glowing thrusters to land significantly closer than something like that was comfortable to land. The whole thing looked angry, like somebody had rage taped the thing together out of garbage and hate during a drunken rant about the price of more cheerful paint colors.
One side of the boxy structure flipped down to reveal a restaurant that matched the outside. It looked like it was made out of junk, the place inside didn’t have any place to sit, it was all cooking area, instead chairs and tables were brought out to sit on the wall that had just flipped down.
Twilight thought she recognized Carla, Gwynn’s wife, in there, but it was hard to tell. All of the cooks were wearing what Twilight could only call “a necromancer’s cooking robes”. It was the kind of thing that would have been described as “metal” what with the flames and whatnot. It’s just that they were all pasta chefs, there was one using eldrich and dark powers to boil water, over there one of them was making a red sauce with some kind of terrible shadow monster from beyond time and space on their shoulder. The monster was peering into the pot like it could see things mere mortals could not.
It was all just normal cooking done in what could be described as an “evil” looking manner. It confused Twilight and Naudia to no end.
Sitting down Twilight and Naudia were served spaghetti, not evil spaghetti, it had meat in it but they knew where that came from. Just normal spaghetti, it tasted good, great even, but that just begged the question as to why even more. This wasn’t spaghetti that you would have to sell your soul to get a hold of or something like that it was just “spaghetti that was good”. They didn’t even think about how the noodles were shaped into cute things like bows and stuff, that was over their limit for strange today.
As the area turned into a cafeteria Twilight and Naudia got down to business.
“Okay so how are things going in the werewolf village?” Naudia asked.
“Things there are… interesting, I think it’s going to be trivial to bring them over to help us figure this out, but the whole place seems loose. There are too many entrances, too many places where it would be easy to just slip out if somebody wanted to coordinate against us.”
“So they’re on our side, but they might not all be on our side?” Naudia asked spraying food everywhere.
“Yeah, the whole place is too big, I think they dig for just something to do in the winter, that’s why it’s so easy for somebody to just go off somewhere.”
“Sounds good to me, being able to trust their leadership-”
“Naudia, please don’t talk with your mouth full of food.”
Naudia blinked, chewed and swallowed her food.
“I’m sorry… I really never thought about that.”
“Really?”
“I knew it was rude for ponies to talk with their mouth full but, well changelings eat love. That’s either a liquid or a gas, at the very best it’s a gel that just dissolves in your mouth.” Naudia explained. “Talking with my mouth full has never been something I had to think about before outside of a disguise.”
“Outside of a disguise? How would that change anything.”
“Well, when you’re in a disguise you’re a pony, we’re trained to think like a pony. It’s always separated in our minds, it has to be, Naudia needs to be separate from whoever.” Naudia said. “Because I might do this, but, I dunno, Rainbow Dash might not do that.”
“I guess you’d have to do something like that, I never thought the division would be that steep.”
“That’s why I’ve been having to take remedial lessons on it while you’re in your lab with Starlight, the whole stunt I pulled off while impersonating Luna kiiinda made Mattar a bit angry.”
“What? You’re kidding.”
“Everything turned out great, better than that, amazing, eventually, but it was an extreme risk, that wasn’t the kind of thing I should have been doing with all those changelings depending on me.”
After that Naudia explained what she saw in Knicknik, and the inkling of a suspicion began to form in Twilight’s head, nothing concrete, nothing she was going to say out loud, but a seed of doubt was planted in her head.
“So you’re pretty sure we aren’t getting any support from the town leadership over there then?”
“Yeah, and just so I don’t have to go back there I think we should investigate outside of town tomorrow, try and track down a lair or two to see what’s up.”
“So who do you think is operating outside of town? Cultists or some greedy corporation?” Twilight asked.
“Can’t it be both? I wouldn’t put it past some underhanded scumbag trying to starve a town out like that to work with anybody.”
“Even those weird guards?”
Naudia’s mouth opened and close a couple times, she really wasn’t sure about that at all.
“I’ll be honest with you Twilight, I really don’t know.”
“Are they THAT bad?”
“I think I can say without a shadow of a doubt that they are that bad.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“It’s difficult to describe, the best thing I’ve had to say about it is that they feel… unalive.”
“How would you say that they compared to the First Administrator?” Twilight asked.
“Terrible comparison, he’s a hateful bugger, just looking at him you can feel it rolling off him.”
Naudia thought for a moment.
“Quick diversion for a second Twilight, do you remember what the First Administrator looked like? At all? Because I don’t.”
“Sure, he’s got that stupid fedora, those glasses, and that trenchcoat he probably thinks looks cool.”
“No I mean what did his face look like? What did his hands look like? What did HE look like?”
Twilight tried to think about that but was completely drawing a blank.
“I honestly couldn’t tell you.”
They honestly couldn’t think of anything else to say about that.
“So those guards would you say they’re like a puppet or a robot?”
“No, that’s not it, I don’t want to say ‘unnatural’, it was like…” Naudia paused, it was hard to remember and exactly express how she felt. “The best I can give you is that I couldn’t detect any kind of emotions in them at all but they were…” Naudia was searching for a word other than alive. “animated, you could see them breathing but there was nobody there. Just looking at them made you feel uncomfortable.”
“That sounds nasty.” Gwynn said from her table next to them.
“Do you think that’s our indication of soul magic here Gwynn?” Twilight asked.
“I wish it was that simple but looking into Equestria’s records it could just be necromancy of some kind. And then Nerteln’s and their soul magic is... different depending on the individual it depends on how they see the world with their addled minds. It gives them immense power but it needs some kind of outlet, something about them inside their minds to pool against and burst.”
“So we’ll be able to find out who is behind this by figuring out who might be able to create these things?”
“I guess, there tends to be some line of logic behind them, but in my experience it always seems to be backwards, you look at the effects after finding the cause and that’s the link. But most of my work on this has been in high population areas.” Gwynn thought for a second. “One thing you need to keep in mind is never assume it’s just one mastermind behind all this. Nerteln like to fight, but once they’re done they form into a firm, absolutely controlled pecking order of mind control.”
“So can we get them to betray one another?” Naudia asked.
“Why would you ask that?” Gwynn was a bit taken aback, “It doesn’t matter how many there are, they all have to die.”
“Well changelings have… ways to control certain ponies, even if I don’t know them, couldn’t we pit them against one another then attack whoever is left over?”
“There is something you need to understand about nerteln Naudia.” Gwynn was dead serious right now. “Nerteln magic is by normal Equestrian standards absolute. If they get their hooks into you that’s it, they would literally rather die than betray their new master.”
“So that’s why we have to use yunguaq magic against it then?” Twilight asked.
“Yep.” Gwynn said. “And good news for both of you, you’re going to be learning more yunguaq magic today!”
Twilight and Naudia looked excited at that.
“For combat.”
Twilight deflated a bit and Naudia looked even more excited.
The problem it turned out was that while Twilight had started to practice her lichenthrope spells, Naudia was way ahead of her in terms of the basics of both the combat spells and combat in general. Naudia could split up and Twilight couldn’t. As such Twilight had to practice while Naudia demonstrated what she knew to Gwynn.
Gwynn had set up a target for them to attack, a log with a doily looking talisman attached to it made out of spiderweb, that gave it a shield and held it in place.
Naudia covered herself in a furry looking gel-like material, pulled out a sling and flung a chunk of it at the log. She missed in a very deliberate way, but the chunk course corrected and landed exactly where she wanted to with its cilia.
Then the chunk began to pulse where it was stuck like it was sucking something out of the shield, it was joined by two others that Naudia tossed out. Finally Naudia made a move.
She looked like some sort of gel-wolf, you couldn’t actually see her inside there, and the cilia of the oversized bacteria coating she had moved on it’s own. Twilight noticed something else now that Naudia was showing off moving towards the target.
Naudia was moving very strangely, in an otherworldly way, turning quicker than she should be able to. It was like her feet barely needed to touch the ground. Naudia capped off the showy approach with some kind of mid-air spinning attack that burst the sling thrown bacteria with her claws and left deep gashes in the zoetic shield around the log. The gashes bled blue but closed up and appeared to grow even more bacteria inside them like the shield was infected now.
The giant bacteria that Naudia slashed burst into a bunch of buzzing microbes that resembled an acorn with two cilia rings on them. They moved erratically and very fast, they were hard to track with your eyes as they kept juking in strange directions. Some of them stuck around Naudia’s head and over half of them slammed back into the log with their acorn nozzle things to leech more from it.
Naudia turned back to Gwynn, this was clearly the end of the demonstration.
“Good, you’ve got the basics down with bagrat assistance, now I want you to practice them, that log’s shields will recover and I want you to specifically attack it, but without targeting it with your spells. Once with the bagrat, once without, then start staggering it out, until you no longer need the bagrat to assist you with the spells at all.”
Naudia’s skillset as a protolycaon were strange to Twilight. They made sense but it was like looking into another world of her version of a werewolf. Naudia still used a sling to throw projectiles, there wasn’t anything super special about the sling other than being good at channeling magic and being made of some strong material.
“Okay Twilight, since you aren’t as experienced with your spells we’re going to be training you on them next.” Gwynn looked over Twilight’s combat ready form and asked a bit of an awkward question. “Where is your shield?”
“I have it on” Twilight said, the Zoetic Shield was very easy to maintain.
“No I mean your Scutum, you know rectangular, convex, made of water magic?”
Twilight looked blankly at Gwynn.
Gwynn growing frustrated pulled out one of those bug phone things which she poked at for a bit and finally turned it to Twilight.
“Like this.”
On the bug phone’s belly was a picture of an ancient shield design clearly made out of some kind of water magic as you could see right through it. It was convex, tall, rectangular, and Twilight didn’t know it’s proper name, only that ponies stopped using that kind of shield a long time ago.
“Oh one of those ancient sorta shields.”
“Yeah, convey to your bagrat the idea of ‘Scutum Shield’ and it should come up, it’s an important part of your kit.”
Twilight managed to summon in the strange watery shield, it felt VERY solid and clearly wasn’t ice, and of course she could see directly through it. The surface of the shield ripped like the top of a still pond.
“The reason it’s made of water is so you can aim your sling without exposing yourself. See if you focus on a part of the shield, the distortions will clear up and you can look through basically perfectly.”
Twilight did just that and sure enough the ripples cleared up from that spot, the world was tinted but she could clearly see everything while still behind the shield. It even had some kind of targeting interface for whatever reason, presumably to help her with her sling aim.
“Naudia’s protolycaon is more of an agile class, she’s going to try and run directly up to the enemy dodging attacks and such. Your Lichenthrope class is more of a straightforward class, your job is more to hide behind the shield and either tank, blocking attacks for the rest of your party, or make a shielded approach on a target slinging lichen at them, then tear them up in melee.”
“Oh yeah and you can use the shield to make water attacks to help your lichen out.”
“Whoa whoa whoa, hold up a second.” Naudia interrupted making a T with her hooves. “How would a ‘water magic’ attack effect something like the shields we got? Aren’t they made out of magmatter? What the hay kinds of pressures are we going to be using here, and what is the minimum safe distance and how do you survive being inside of it?”
Gwynn stared at Naudia for a second, it wasn’t that she didn’t hear what Naudia said, Gwynn was looking at Naudia like none of those questions registered at all. Like Naudia had asked a boatload of safety questions about operating a nailgun as if it was some kind of weapon of mass destruction.
“I’m just going to demonstrate the spell and then Twilight can practice it a couple times on the stump.” Gwynn said.
Before Naudia could stop her Gwynn summoned in a scutum shield like Twilight’s and used it’s offensive attack on the shielded stump. There was a spike of water, a pop sound and the shield around the stump had a neat little hole in it with liquid around it that was dissolving some of the shield.
Naudia, after a couple long seconds of nothing happening opened one eye and peeked out from behind her hooves. The hole in the log’s shield sizzled a bit and nothing much else happened.
“That isn’t water, I don’t know of any water that does that.” Twilight said.
“Nope, it’s called water magic to make it easy, it’s easier than calling it all the things it does. I mean it can be an acid, heal zoetic shields, a base, carry other spells in liquid forms, sublime into gaseous forms, act as a feeder for other spells, too much to list.”
“Wait so that’s all magmatter too?” Naudia asked.
“Those are mostly chemistry terms.” Twilight pointed out.
“I don’t know all the details but the way magmatter works is similar to normal matter so a lot of what we do is just chemistry, but with magmatter. But yes, anything we summon in is magmatter and generally most magics are part of some kind of elemental standard to make them easier to understand and categorize. Then once they’re done they dissipate.”
“If you can just summon in the stuff anywhere I suppose that makes more sense than trying to do things the normal way.” Naudia said.
“wouldn't that release HUGE amounts of energy” Twilight asked.
“It does, but since we did this by modifying physics, the stuff we summon in goes back into quintessence and the difference is too small to even notice.” Gwynn said. “To be honest with you I’m glad you’re asking these kinds of questions, I’ve had to cram on this sorta stuff because we’re pretty sure it would help keep you motivated, it’s nice to know that the effort isn’t going to waste.
“Anyway, now the chemistry lesson is over, it’s time for you to do combat drills.”
-------------------
The problem Twilight ran into was that she had a hard time turning her brain off for these combat drills. She kept hesitating, stumbling over her own hooves and none of what she was doing felt natural. A small part of her took comfort in knowing that these combat styles were almost as alien to Naudia, and her practice hadn’t put her very far ahead of Twilight.
The hardest thing to get used to was the difference in thinking. Previously combat meant that you wanted to dodge most everything, getting hit was bad, as even an arrow could be deadly. Things change a lot when your base assumption is that you are absolutely going to be hit.
For example Twilight was expected to just get used to really dangerous things slamming into her transparent watery shield, inches away from her face. A shield that Twilight could push her hoof through if she wanted to because it was made of water, which was an unfortunate thing to discover when you can’t turn your brain off thinking about it. Naudia had it even worse as she needed to get used to seeing blue zoetic shield blood, and lumps of bacteria get hit and fall off. Even worse than that for both of them, the feeling of those parts of the shield getting hit and falling off, as that was how you knew where to repair the shield.
It wore on Twilight, it wore even harder on Naudia who had gone through a lot more combat training, and for that matter actual combat. When Twilight was done she needed to sit down, when Naudia was done she flopped down putting her head up against Twilight.
“I never thought I would be bleeding for combat training again.” Naudia said. “One of the upsides to defecting to Equestria is that you don’t do that.”
“Was it really that bad with Chrysalis?”
“It had to be, you had to use every trick in the book to conserve love, otherwise we would have died of attrition hundreds of years ago instead of lasting as long as we did.” Naudia looked up at Twilight and said. “I shouldn’t have said that last bit.”
“You never talk about the hive to me Naudia.” Twilight said reproachfully.
“I don’t like talking about it to you, it makes you sad.” Naudia could feel the stir in the air, the emotions were turning sour.
“So what, I’m just a meal ticket then?”
“You aren’t just a meal ticket to me Twilight, when you’re sad I can feel it, directly. I don’t like that, it… hurts to feel that from you when it came from me. I don’t mean that in a ‘hurts my feelings’ sorta way, it’s a negative influence I have to try and block out from a source I’m open to.”
“I’m sorry.” Twilight said. “But we’ve had arguments before, should I be worrying about those?”
Twilight’s tone indicated that she really needed to know this.
“Changelings are well designed enough that gets blocked off basically automatically, it’s when I open myself up to you and then put you in a bad emotional state that is the problem.”
“But that’s going to be less and less of a problem as time goes on then because we’ve been changed right?”
Naudia opened her eyes and stared up at Twilight mouth agape.
“I… hadn’t thought about that.”
“I hadn’t either not until just now.” Twilight said.
“I guess we’re going to have to learn about how we’ve changed.”
“Together.” Twilight placed a hoof on Naudia’s
“Yes.”
-------------------
“Normally I would say you should be practicing on logs for at least another week, minimum, but we’re putting you two on the fast track.” Gwynn said when their break was over. “That means we’re going to be doing live combat exercises.”
Twilight and Naudia instantly replied with something along the lines of “isn’t that really dangerous?”
“Without the right equipment it could be deadly. You will be wearing these regulators.” Gwynn held out a set of neck and wrist strap things. “These will regulate your offensive magic to a safe level. NOW, this does not mean ‘to a level that isn’t deadly without a zoetic shield’.” Gwynn barked. “Your magic when targeted correctly is a deadly weapon, and will always be a deadly weapon. If I see one of you even hinting at screwing around there. will. be. consequences.
“Now, these training bands have a set of lights on them, they go from green, to yellow, to red. When they reach red that means you lost, in a real combat situation you would likely be dead. This also means that when you and your opponent know those lights are red you STOP COMBAT. This is a restricted live fire training exercise and continuing to attack when the lights are red will land you in deep shit. IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?”
Twilight and Naudia nodded, neither of them were at all convinced this sounded safe.
At that point Gwynn demonstrated to them something completely unique to Yunguaq magic, targeting. To put it simply Yunguaq magic only worked inside of an area that you were targeting and taking partial control over. Without a target it would do nothing, demonstrated by Gwynn shooting out some magical fire that failed to even touch a dry stick. Twilight actually got to pick up the magical flame, the fragile gassy substance looked exactly like flames but since it wasn’t targeted to burn anything, wasn’t burning, wasn’t even warm, it felt like a wisp of cotton on her hoof.
“This is our greatest advantage, this allows us to engage in unrestricted usage of all of our most powerful magic in a group without having to worry about collateral damage or friendly fire.”
Twilight found herself in a live combat situation facing off against a Yunguaq who looked vaguely familiar, in a kinda “might have seen them once at an event for work” sorta way. He wore a bandeau and silk sleeves and pants in red and gold.
Then Twilight remembered who he was, even if she didn’t remember his name. He was the first yunguaq she met with a giant spider, and he was the one who let the spider hang around on his back, like a backpack.
“OH I remember you, you had that giant spider!”
Just as she said that it crawled around from his back and waved at her.
Twilight knew what the spider was, and knew it was very friendly, but while her conscious mind could process that, something deeper down was screaming “beach ball sized hairy spider!!!” at the top of it’s lungs.
“I’ll be honest I didn’t expect you to remember my name.”
Twilight tried to think past the giant spider.
“Kopiak?” She hazarded.
“Nope, sorry it’s Kuiguk, but I could see how you’d get that confused, that is what I am though.”
“So how do we do this?”
“Well Gwynn gave you the run down already so I think we should just square off and fight so I can give you some pointers afterwards. We start when I say ‘go’ and we end when either your collar beeps red or I say ‘stop’.”
Twilight squared off against Kuiguk whose collar and wristbands turned green, the spider busily working on his back to spin threads that could be attached to his sleeves. Twilight summoned in her shield and put on her lichen wolf pelt.
Kuiguk seemed pretty happy where he was so Twilight realized that she would have to make the first move. Twilight made her approach from behind her shield slowly and slung a piece of lichen targeted at him. He dodged it and responded by shooting out some of those long spider silk strands which where hard to see but easy to dodge because she could feel him targeting her. The threads of spider silk each as long as his forearm where shot off in rapid succession, at least ten at a time like arrows.
Twilight, quick to catch on, waited til the last instant to target her spell on the lichen and came a lot closer to hitting Kuiguk this time. However he did have to move because of the cloud of spores gathering behind him from her missed lichen, this brought him closer to Twilight which was what she wanted.
They repeated that same sequence a couple times Twilight creeping closer from behind her shield. Then Kuiguk forced things out of control and Twilight realized that she had made a mistake. Kuiguk had his own tricks at work against her.
Kuiguk shot at her feet forcing her to dodge backwards, and then Twilight realized something. Those threads that had been missing this entire time weren’t aimed at just her and her shield, which hadn’t even been hit once so far. They were also aimed at the ground so they could be used to set up this trap for her.
She backed into an explosion of even more spiderwebs that latched onto her, seriously limiting how she could move, and gluing her in place with thousands of threads of spider silk. From the smile on Kuiguk’s face he knew this was coming, and Twilight knew she couldn’t dodge his next attack.
Desperately Twilight tried to think of a way out of this until she came up with something that sounded a bit crazy. She summoned in a larger clump of lichen and dumped it at her feet doing her best to target the strands of spider silk that held her there. This was exhausting as it was not only a very specific spell but a LARGE spell.
That was enough to maneuver her shield to block Kuiguk from shooting her from the side, the strands of spider silk sticking out of her shield. But she was trapped now, there was only one option available to her now. She needed to advance so he couldn’t control the flow of combat.
As she was advancing the strands of silk embedded in her shield exploded. They left a cloud that blinded her and did a lot more damage to her shields than when they had landed. She swore that she saw a brief bolt of electricity before they exploded.
When the cloud cleared Kuiguk was standing smugly still, like he had already won, which was a mistake on his side of things, because it caused Twilight to actually look before charging in. All along the ground between him and her were little bundles of spider silk, all ready and waiting to end this match in devious ways.
“Damn it, I bet tonight’s karaoke that you’d fall for that.” Kuiguk said. “Well then, as a melee combatant I suppose you should learn how these work and once you’re done with that we’ll call the match over and we can discuss things.”
Kuiguk made a “come on” gesture with his hands.
Twilight decided to go all in, since this was just practice, and charged Kuiguk.
The first bundle detonated on her shield breaking it, Twilight activated her lichenthrope form to lope along at Kuiguk even faster.
The second bundle didn’t detonate at all, it did nothing.
So, Twilight thought, he’s playing mind games with me.
Twilight snarled and passed over the third bundle of spider silk threads, slashing at it as she went.
This turned out to be a mistake. The thread exploded into thousands of inch long threads of hardened spider silk that impaled her shielding. She could feel them pumping something into her shields, that was slowing her down, by a LOT.
“Okay. Stop” Kuiguk said.
“But I can still fight!” Twilight protested.
“Yeah, but the next attack I was going to make would have ended things.”
It didn’t feel right but Twilight had to just go with what her instructor said, and settle down from the fight.
“Okay so, you did a lot better than I expected you to Twilight.”
“I have fought before you know.” Twilight said.
“Yeah, but this sorta yunguaq fighting is a lateral change in thinking. Dropping your lichen on your own feet is a great example of that, do that with normal fire and you’ll just burn yourself to death, do that with yunguaq magic and you can burn away your bonds without touching yourself.”
Somebody brought over a tablet and Twilight was able to watch what happened from multiple angles. It was a lot more clear what Kuiguk was doing behind her, it was also clear to her that she was making the right moves initially approaching him and not hanging back. Looking at it Twilight thought Kuiguk might have expected her to try and retreat away or dodge backwards, and when that didn’t work he forced it.
“I’m really impressed with how well you’ve instinctively adapted to this style of fighting. You get a passing grade.”
Twilight perked up a bit a that.
“For a start though, now here is what you did wrong.”
Then Kuiguk started grilling Twilight as to how she could improve in the very short term for combat.
Naudia was being treated differently because she had combat experience and training. Her sparring partner was Roshin.
Roshin was strange, he was a chicken farmer, and that showed in how he dressed, overalls, straw hat, that sorta thing. And he was technically the same race as Naudia, an itumeyuk, but he opted to walk around as a pile of rats instead of forming into one humanoid rat. That wasn’t even what made him special, Roshin was, apparently, the strongest in the employ of the first administration.
He just looked like a pile of rats in a farmers outfit with a splitting maul to Naudia. He did have a giant chicken but so what? It’s a chicken.
“I don’t think I need to tell you how these bands work, it should be pretty obvious so long as you don’t get too caught up in fighting.” Roshin said, his voice was probably what the yunguaq thought of as ‘gravely’ but ended up to Naudia’s ears as ‘gruff’. “So I’ll tell you what, if you manage to get one hit in on me, not my chicken fortress, I’ll say you’ve passed and you don’t need any more training in combat.”
“I’ll take you up on that one!” Naudia replied enthusiastically.
Without another word Roshin climbed up onto the giant chicken next to him, raised his splitting maul into the air and summoned in a lot of normal sized chickens, Naudia estimated about 16. They glowed with a strange green light. The largest chicken, what Naudia would later find out the class was named after, the chicken fortress also began to glow.
Naudia summoned in her overshield-giant bacteria and squared up against Roshin her sling at the ready.
There was no signal for them to fight, Roshin simply attacked and Naudia had to answer.
The attack was strange, the chickens shot glowing green pellets at her, just all of them at once. Roshin was clearly hoping to end things very quickly.
Tracing their trajectories in her mind and acting with the cilia on her bacterial shield, Naudia contorted out of their line of fire. She moved unnaturally and unpredictably as her wolf-like shield allowed her to use it’s entire area to move her in mid air.
Roshin did not let up however as she dodged that barrage another was already in the works. As one of the projectiles barely slipped past her head she could feel a strange sort of heat radiating off it.
Naudia knew she had to respond, and now, or else she would be stuck dodging forever. Dumping power into her sling, thankfully it was a short sling unlike Twilight’s long sling, Naudia immediately went for one of the summoned chickens whipping her sling with as much force as her magic could muster.
The chicken didn’t dodge, instead Roshin’s chicken fortress slapped the projectile with it’s wing. Which is where Naudia first learned the importance of targeting. The projectile did nothing because she only targeted that chicken, and not say Roshin’s magic.
The second lesson was on battlefield debris.
Her now useless projectile was swarmed by chickens who ate it and Naudia noticed that their green glow intensified from their bacterial meal. That was the downside to ranged attacks, you had to target enough and if things went wrong you can’t re-target a projectile that far away. Melee didn’t have that sort of issue.
Naudia was a fast learner for this sort of thing however and her next shot targeted the entire line of space inbetween her and the chicken she threw it at. This one DID stick into the chicken fortress’s wings when it blocked, sticking into some kind of similar, green glowing metallic substance as the bullets.
“Good.” Roshin said. “I like somebody who can learn by doing like this, it makes them easier to teach.”
Naudia said nothing and instead started slinging faster, with a short sling it was one continuous motion, a new projectile was summoned into the sling as the first one was flying towards the target. The sling worked differently like this having a sort of quick release and Naudia having to bring the two halves of the sling back together as they were spinning around with magic, after they released their projectile.
Naudia was happy to say that she was preventing Roshin from firing back at her at all. In fact some of his chickens were busy shooting down her projectiles. Naudia figured out that Roshin, at least at this moment, was acting as more of a defensive guard against her, probably to teach her something.
She decided to take advantage of this and make her approach to get her hit in on him. Deciding to be sneaky she pulled out her trump card and split off part of her shield. Now there were two protolycaon running at Roshin from different angles, both throwing bacterial lumps at him.
Naudia would like to think that he panicked a bit at this or at least was surprised, but she couldn’t really measure the reaction on a pile of rats wrapped up in as much clothing as he wore. He was forced to take his chickens entirely from offense to defense and start shooting down her projectiles, but it wasn’t entirely effective, it blunted them, but it couldn’t fully stop them, and one of her bacteria was a lot more dangerous than one of Roshin’s bullets.
That gave Naudia plenty of projectiles that got through onto Roshin’s chicken fortress, ripe to be popped.
Smiling to herself Naudia ran in from opposite sides to her bacterial wolf counterpart to slash at Roshin.
However Roshin had two chicken wings to block with, that Naudia had already filled up with bacterial targets to pop. Out from the oversized bacteria popped a swarm of didinium, the acorn shaped double cilia ringed microbes buzzed around angrily ready to attack anything in sight. There were so many Naudia didn’t have great control over what they attacked, only what general area they attacked.
Catching a glimpse of one of the didinium Naudia had the time to be momentarily disappointed that they didn’t attack the way they would in the microscopic world. They stabbed with their snout instead of opening wide to consume with it.
There was no time for that however as She realized that she had one thing over on Roshin, his chicken only had two wings, and she now had four claws to attack with. As one Naudia and her Bacteria-wolf counterpart swung over the chicken fortress’s blocking wings at Roshin directly. Which turned out to be a mistake.
Roshin brought out his splitting maul and blocked the swings with one of his own, Naudia’s symmetry working against her as Roshin only had to block at one point to catch both arms.
That was all the time allowed to Naudia by her attack, but she had got a very good hit in on his shields, there was blue zoetic shield blood everywhere now. She had to retreat now, or else risk melee attacks from Roshin and being blasted from all sides by the smaller chickens.
However on her way out Roshin swung at her legs with his splitting maul and tripped her, and her mid-air mobility worked against her, causing her to spin fully around in mid air and slowing her down just enough to start letting the other chickens start to get hits in with their projectiles. The green projectiles sizzled as they tore into her shield hitting it many times.
Naudia used one of her escape abilities, a particularly draining one that involved summoning in a lot of extra cilia and burning them out to move away faster. She shot away from Roshin like a cork from a bottle, uncontrollably coming to a stop. But Naudia wasn’t out of tricks yet.
She brought her cloned wolf in front of her to block to give her a moment to breathe, which Roshin took advantage of to feed his chickens with a bucket of feed attached to his saddle. The smaller chickens whose green glow looked to be fading returned with full force and the damage Naudia did to the chicken fortress’s wing armor refreshed itself. But very little of the damage she did to the actual shielding itself actually fixed itself, it was more of a thinning out to close up holes.
Roshin was not like Twilight’s trainer, he didn’t call off the fight before he won.
Lifting up his splitting maul all of the chickens around him shot at the head which caused it to stop glowing green and now start glowing a bright angry blue. A green glowing lump at the hilt of the maul rose up to the head causing it to glow even brighter.
Naudia knew this was bad, this was his killing stroke.
With surprising speed the chicken fortress took off after Naudia, faster than she could move out of the way in this drained state. Desperately she sent her cloned wolf out to intercept, but it was merely swatted aside by the chicken fortress, it was only a temporary summon that was already supposed to have joined back up with Naudia, it had nothing left.
Roshin brought the splitting maul down in a burst of blue light and the head of the splitting maul exploded violently scattering glowing shards around that stuck to Naudia’s shield like hot iron.
Naudia’s collar blinked red and beeped to indicate she had lost. Instantly all of the summons and shrapnel stopped hurting and began to evaporate.
“For your first showing in yunguaq combat I’m impressed.” Roshin said.
“Really?” Naudia was skeptical considering how badly she had lost.
“The collars are an equalizing factor in terms of strength, but considering your inexperience with this sort of thing, I would say you did very well.” Roshin sounded genuine about that. “Now, come, Twilight should already be done and we need to discuss how both of you can improve.”
-------------------
“That was great!” Gwynn said a huge smile on her face. “You both did much better than was expected of you.”
“But we both failed the test.” Twilight said.
“You weren’t supposed to win against some of the First Administration’s most experienced fighters, not only that, both of them were deliberately set up to put you at a disadvantage.” Gwynn still seemed overjoyed with their performance. “Kuiguk was a linebacker, he’s a natural counter to a slower moving tank melee DPS like you Twilight, and Roshin is a tank, agility melee is going to have a hard time doing anything to him outside of a group.”
“Excuse me, what kind of magic was Roshin using against me?” Naudia asked.
“Oh that, standard chicken fortress stuff, probably some kind of radioactive shot. Its particularly effective at point defense because of it’s high mass.”
“So that green stuff was… radiation, those chickens were radioactive?”
“Yeah, if you’re already using radiation magic, you might as well power your summons with it.”
Naudia thought she knew where this was going.
“So is my punishment going to be digging radioactive slugs out of the ground?”
“Equestria has slugs that are radioactive?” Gwynn asked puzzled.
“I mean Roshin’s shots, the ones that missed, we can’t let that into the groundwater.”
Gwynn kinda caught onto what Naudia was saying, and Twilight already caught on that this was another disconnect.
Gwynn picked up a bowl of snacks and placed it in front of Naudia.
“Okay, this is easier to show than to explain. I want you to target your magic here,” Gwynn pointed elsewhere on the table. “And then throw one of your little bacteria blobs here.” Gwynn pointed at the bowl of pretzels.
Naudia did just that, the lump of bacteria just sat there in the bowl of pretzels doing nothing. It was a good model of a microbe of some sort, and then to her horror Gwynn picked up the armed spell with her bare hands and tossed it directly into Twilight’s lap.
Naudia was halfway through a shout before she realized the spell did nothing, and there was just a lump of bacteria bouncing out of Twilight’s lap and onto the floor.
“Targeting yunguaq magic is everything, if you miss the only thing the spell has is kinetic force and other normal forces. And then once a spell is done, even if it was targeted and armed, if it doesn’t reach it’s destination, it-”
Twilight and Naudia watched as the blob simply faded away like it wasn’t even there.
“-just fades away, eventually, you can generally set the time on that to be longer, if you wanted to.”
“So that’s how Kuiguk’s trap webs worked against me!” Twilight exclaimed. “So even an armed spell can be just harmless if it misses.”
Gwynn clapped her hands twice in joy and looked even more enthusiastic than before.
“That! Is why I love having enthusiastic students. After we’re done here I’ll provide you with footage of your respective battles and you can discuss with each other what you’ve learned from all this.”
Twilight and Naudia watched back through their own battles on their “tablets” the first thing Naudia said upon watching Twilight’s battle was:
“Gee, this would have been a lot easier if we were working together.”
“I think that’s why they picked these types of werewolves for us.”
Naudia seemed more than eager to work with Twilight on this, their roles seemed to slot together almost perfectly.
“I think I could have gotten a hit in on Roshin if you were there backing me up.” Naudia said.
“But then it would have been two on one.” Twilight said.
“No I mean even if Kuiguk was there, I think we could have tied down Roshin to defense and Kuiguk doesn’t look like he’s that good at attacking multiple targets. I think we would have had a much better chance.”
“I haven’t seen exactly how you fight yet, so I don’t really have an opinion yet on that.”
As they watched the rest of the video Naudia wasn’t AS sure, seeing how Twilight was finally taken down by the spiderweb trap was something she would have had the same “only bad answers” problem. Not that she didn’t have answers, but sloughing off parts of her bacterial shield to get away would not be ideal, for a number of reasons.
Twilight on seeing Naudia fight was actually a bit jealous.
“I wish I could move like that.” Twilight said.
“It takes a good bit of energy to do that, I don’t think I could maintain a water shield AND move like I do.” Naudia thought for a moment. “Okay maybe if I just didn’t attack I could.”
“No I just mean in general, do you know if it would be possible for me to get something like that for just… fun?”
Naudia realized Twilight was thinking of her fledgling days flying as an Alicorn.
“I’ll admit I can’t think of one directly, it just seems like… magic, but I’m not an expert at this new magic yet.”
After they finished talking strategy and reviewing the footage, they picked up where they left off with planning for tomorrow and scouting out the werewolf town for leaks. They were interrupted by Gwynn.
“It’s time for you to go back up and meet the First Administrator again.”
“Why? We’ve only been down here a day.” Twilight said.
“I wasn’t told exactly why.”
“There isn’t going to be another presentation like last time is there?” Twilight asked.
“I doubt it, we sent those performers back home almost immediately after that.”
“And you’re not going to knock us out again?” Naudia asked.
“No reason to, as far as modifications are concerned you’re done. Even if he’s bringing you back to check on your magic, which I suspect he is, that’s all done while you’re awake and casting.”
“All right, lets get going.” Twilight said. “The sooner we get started, the sooner this will be over. Now where is the ship?”
“We aren’t taking the ship this time, we’re taking the train.” Gwynn said.
“Train? We’re going back up into space right, how is there a train to space?”
“Well it just got finished being lowered down.” Gwynn pointed at something that was clearly some sort of elevator.
“That’s clearly an elevator.”
“Well yeah, but we can’t call it a space elevator, that’s something that already exists.”
The “train” looked like somebody had attached a bootleg fancy glass elevator somebody made in a forest out of plants and wood to the top of some sort of squat rocket booster platform, that somebody else also made out of plants and wood. There were lots of yunguaq coming and going loading and unloading stuff from the industrial part.
As Twilight watched a particularly interesting group of yunguaq moving something that looked like a sunflower that had literally gone nuclear, a staircase was rolled out to meet them.
As they got into the train somebody else with another glowing sunflower carried it in, dropped it into an open vent on the floor and slammed it shut.
Twilight realized what the sunflower reminded her of, the sun, it glowed like the sun.
“That’s the power source for the journey up.” Gwynn said before either of them could answer.
“And the barrier currently being built around the train?” Naudia asked about the shielding going up from the platform the train had rode in on.
“That’s an acceleration bowl, it’s there to shield the camp from the rocket booster.”
“Rocket booster?” Twilight asked as she buckled herself into the seat.
Twilight didn’t have time to get an answer asalmost the instant they were all strapped down, it sounded like there was an explosion below them and they were slammed backwards into their seats by an enormous force. It felt like there was a weight on their chest, and their limbs felt like they weighed 10 times as much.
About thirty seconds later the weight lifted momentarily, then their chairs flipped upside down and there was an explosion on the roof. The train had begun decelerating, at the same heavy rate.
Another thirty seconds later gravity had returned and Twilight and Naudia were not feeling so great. To put it lightly Twilight was feeling stressed, and Naudia didn’t take the trip much better.
Gwynn, who had already left the train popped her head back in.
“Are you- Never mind, we can wait a minute or two.”
The buckles automatically disengaged after a bit and Twilight and Naudia both flopped onto the floor. To tell the truth it was more a splat for the both of them.
“Oh come on, it wasn’t that bad.”
“We weren’t expecting it.” Twilight said.
“Why would you belt in a slime creature?” Naudia asked.
“Because you should be more than able to stand that kind of pressure.” Gwynn said ignoring Twilight’s answer. “Whatever, while we’re waiting for you two to recuperate, I did have something to say to you.”
Twilight and Naudia blearily turned their heads to Gwynn.
“You both did extremely well today, examining the fight I would say that Twilight did particularly well for being completely untrained, and Naudia’s practice has helped her un-learn some of the thinking patterns of standard fighters.”
It was extremely hard to take a compliment while you were oozing on the floor as a puddle of slime, so Gwynn just continued on.
“Once you two internalize that it’s not only okay, but necessary to take a couple hits. I think you’ll both be fine.”
“How are we supposed to do that?” Twilight groaned.
“Easy, next combat we’ll be assigning you both a healer. Now come on, enough of this lying around on the floor, the First Administrator is expecting you.”
“We only took a minute to get up here, he can wait a minute or two.” Naudia said laying her head back down, so it sunk beneath the surface of the slime.
“Oh no you don’t, I know how to get a lazy slime out of bed.” Gwynn said and picked Naudia up and rolled Naudia off her arms, which resulted in Naudia automatically reforming herself into a standing position before she hit the ground, a bit dazed but still standing up.
Twilight looked up at Gwynn.
“Do I have to?”
“Yep. You need to go in and tell the First Administrator about your meeting with Rolled Oats and the lot.”
That did kick Twilight up a bit, but only just, something about it Twilight just couldn’t put her hoof on. She didn’t have a lot of time to think about it though, as she wanted to avoid what just happened to Naudia.
With that they got their first sight of the new orbital ring that had been built around Equis.
The orbital ring defied scale. It was so incomprehensibly gigantic that it stretched off beyond the horizon in both directions. So wide you could plop a city down on it, so long that it encircled the entire planet. And they did plop a city on it, they did more than that they plopped a lot of cities on it.
There was nothing to say, nothing Twilight or Naudia had ever experienced had prepared them for a construction on this scale. Nothing about it registered inside their heads, it was impossible to fit in there. Not the time scale, as to how something THIS large was built this quickly. Not the pony scale, as to the sheer amount of living space provided by this ring. Not the material scale, as to how much raw materials went into constructing something like this.
They could see buzzing around like bees in the distance ships, hundreds of thousands, if not millions all working on the orbital ring. Trees shaped into houses, each taller than a Manehatten skyscraper with small parks on every branch filled up the space like a literal forest. Twilight and Naudia could not think clearly at the moment, but if they had they would have realized that this singular orbital ring out-populated Equestria many times over.
And the whole thing was just sitting there, hanging over nothing, a stationary mindbogglingly gargantuan structure had been hanging above their heads, and camouflaged in some fashion. They had seen some of it on the way down but it was now brought into focus and scale to them.
They knew the scale of the First Administration in theory. But it had never been demonstrated in such a physical way before. Twilight and Naudia actually had to be wheeled out of the train by a handcart because they were taking too long.
“Come on you, the First Administrator needs to hear about Meadow Dispatch.” Gwynn said.
That kicked at something in Twilight’s brain again, the suspicion that had been growing clicked in with the sheer amount of ponypower available to the First Administration and gestated inside of her mind. They shouldn’t have known about that yet, Twilight and Naudia hadn’t told them yet.
It must be that First Administrator. Twilight thought.
Bringing his face into mind again, Twilight hated it.
And there he was, the First Administrator. Standing there with his stupid looking hat, edgelord looking coat, mirrored sunglasses. Just looking at his face again Twilight wanted to punch it.
“So, have you started to decide the fate of Rolled Oats and the Rest?” The First Administrator said.
Which turned out to be what was needed to set Twilight off.
She snarled at him, going full wolf form in a fraction of a second and slashed at his face, and then backed off to fight back against the guards that would be there to restrain her.
There were no guards, nobody was trying to restrain her, everybody, even Naudia at this point, was backing away, all eyes locked on the First Administrator behind her.
Twilight realized what she had just done and could feel something strange from her right paw. Looking down at it she saw that it was covered in a thick black substance.
And then Twilight realized it was dripping out of his face. Inside the cut that Twilight had made, there was no blood, only a liquid as thick and black as crude oil. And she would have gone the rest of her life thinking it was as such, except for the way it pulsated and formed little tendrils that tried to reach out for her.
Twilight tried to meet The First Administrator’s eyes but found them entirely missing. One resembled a charred hole that still burned like charcoal, and the other was simply a gash with an onyx black gem sticking out of it.
The gem... called to her "Give up." Twilight could almost hear inside her head "Give in." It became the focus of her entire world "They sleep." Twilight could hear the voices now they cried out for her and she reached out a paw to catch them.
"Forevermore." the voices in her head spoke ever louder even more seductively calling out a beautiful and vile siren song that begged her from a thousand directions at once. "In silence." It promised the embrace of an endless nothing to hold-
Then it stopped, the voices stopped, and he stopped Twilight's hoof with his hand mere inches away from the shard.
Twilight could only stand there shaking, breath coming in short gasps, staring at the single smoldering hole that met her gaze. Her mind stretched to it’s absolute limit, she blacked out.
-------------------
Twilight woke up feeling like she had been run over by a train, everything hurt, her brain hurt, her soul hurt.
She was not however in some kind of prison, she was inside of some kind of medical facility and hooked up to a disquieting amount of medical equipment, and underneath some kind of clear dome. She could recognize some of them, like the ventilator, but a lot of it was foreign to her.
Blearily she moved her gaze around the room until it came upon the changeling queen in the next bed over.
Naudia wasn’t hooked up to nearly as much stuff as she had been, merely an IV drip and some monitoring equipment.
Twilight tried to move her right hoof but found that she couldn’t feel it, like her whole right arm was deadened.
The truth was her whole arm wasn’t even there.
Her mind was in no fit state to process that at the moment, so it drifted around to other things. Twilight was like that for a long time, thoughts were hard to get a handle on, her situation was hard to keep in place in her head. she tried to think, and that was as far as it went.
Eventually she began to wake up and realized there was a tube going down her throat and began to violently choke on it. The ventilator tube needed to come out, hell or high water. After a particularly nasty coughing fit the entire tube was sitting on her chest, but she didn’t spit it out, her slime anatomy had allowed her to force it out through her throat and skin and now she was wearing a mask with the tube awkwardly pressed against her chin.
This finally caused a doctor to come into the room along with Gwynn Hall. They briefly talked to one another before the doctor came over to Twilight. They were both wearing some sort of hazmat suit. Twilight couldn’t see their faces but could tell one was Gwynn.
“How are you feeling? Can you understand me?” The Doctor asked her voice coming through a speaker behind Twilight.
Twilight nodded, she couldn’t speak, not right now.
“You have had extreme levels of exposure to Camna, your right arm had to be amputated and incinerated.” The Doctor said gravely. “It will take a while for a new arm to grow in for you, and in the meantime you will have to use a rune setup.”
Twilight looked down at the stump that was all that remained of her right arm. There was a dull terror in the back of her mind, but it was dull, this wasn’t real, this was a dream.
The doctor had to operate some sort of remote arm to remove the ventilator from her face. The doctor removed most of the machinery she was hooked up to, including something that seemed to be cycling her blood through it.
“Particles have dropped to acceptable levels, we’re going to have to depend on your kidneys to get rid of the rest.” The doctor said removing a bag from the machine that looked extremely nasty, and even felt nasty from this distance. “When you go to the bathroom from here on out, use these bags and activate the runes on them that will incinerate them with plaguefire, make sure they completely burn up, do so for two weeks.”
The doctor did not remove the number of IV drips that had been put into her remaining arm. He explained them to her, touching each one in turn.
“This is for the stimulation of white blood cell growth, cultured stem cell delivery, titan protein monitors to revive damaged cells, parenteral nutrition, and also targeted antifungal, antibacterial and antiviral solutions.”
Once the doctor was done with her list Gwynn Hall came over wearing a grave expression.
“Camna has spared you from Cam’umek.” She said. “Some more fanatical people would say that you have been gifted to gaze into the Ryladite, I would say you are gifted to even survive seeing it.
“I would like to ask you not to try that again. But I can’t stop you if you surprise me like that. If Camna hadn’t stopped you, you would have touched the crystal.”
Twilight remembered the crystal.
“I take it that will not happen again.”
Twilight slowly shook her head. Twilight remembered the crystal.
Slowly, agonizingly she turned her head towards Naudia’s bed.
“Is… She…?”
“She will live.”
Twilight tried to relax, but she remembered.
“Go back to sleep, you’re no longer in direct mortal peril. The First Administrator will see you when you are better.”
That made it much harder to go to sleep for Twilight.
-------------------
Twilight awoke again from unpleasant dreams where she remembered. She didn’t know what time it was, and it took her a second to remember where she was.
But her head was a lot clearer now and at least the clear dome above her bed had been removed. A “lot” being a relative term.
There were less things hooked up to her IV at this point as well.
This might have been a good time to reflect on what had happened. Twilight shied away from that thought, there was nothing to reflect upon, no further consensus could be reached. Only a litany of “what ifs” stretching back in time.
She turned her head to Naudia who was awake now.
“You… alright?” Twilight managed.
“I think so.” Naudia said, she sounded scared.
They sat like that for a bit.
“That… whatever that was, I think if I was still a normal changeling, would have killed me.”
“Even… from there?”
“Yeah.”
Twilight’s body was feeling much better, she felt like she could run a marathon, if she could bring herself to get up out of bed. If she could use her right...
“How long… have I been out?” Twilight asked.
“I would guess… fifteen hours.” Naudia replied.
“So we finally found out his name after all this.”
Naudia sat up a bit to look at Twilight.
“Camna. The First Administrator’s name is Camna.”
“But what does that even mean, how-”
“The one down below.”
Twilight and Naudia turned instantly to the door into the room.
“My name, that’s what it means.”
The First Administrator strolled into the room followed by a doctor holding some sort of case. Inside the case was a prosthetic right arm for Twilight. A hollow looking thing made of wood, inlaid with amber that glowed. It had some sort of anchor attached to it that looked like it would go inside of Twilight, but resembled more of a handle.
“Why do I need that? Can’t I just…” Twilight made a gesture with her remaining arm. “Uhh, bloop out a new arm somehow?”
“The downside to making your entire body 200x stronger than steel but still slime-like by avoiding omni cells, is that your limbs take time to grow back. We’ve actually stopped your arm from growing back-”
Twilight audibly protested.
“-until the one in our lab is finished and we can just attach that one.”
Twilight realized she should have expected that they could do that.
“How are you going to attach it? That handle doesn’t look terribly comfortable.”
“We don’t attach anything, you just… grab onto the handle and channel magic through it.”
Twilight wiggled her stump at the doctor angrily.
“With what?”
“You’re a slime right.”
“She has only been a wereslime for a matter of days.” The First Administrator said, which shut up the doctor extremely quickly.
As if, up until that point, he had forgotten who he was in the room with the Doctor became a lot more polite and a lot more understanding. Whether he remembered Twilight or the First Administrator was not apparent.
The prosthetic hoof for Twilight was strange, she had to put it next to her shoulder and then “reach” out to grab the handle and pull it into her shoulder. At which point the arm flopped about on it’s joints uselessly.
“You have to channel some magic through it.”
Doing so caused a shield to develop around the arm that made it look like a real arm, if you didn’t look too closely, and it allowed her to move it around. It didn’t feel right, but it looked okay.
Getting up Twilight could feel a bit of a drain on her walking around with it.
“I would like you to avoid trying to rest with this prosthetic.” The First Administrator said. “The more you use it the more you’ll build up your magical power.”
“What are you.” Twilight stated.
Naudia and even the doctor looked at The First Administrator at that.
The First Administrator stared at them with the eyes Twilight knew he didn’t have.
“I am Camna, the one down below. Potentate of the Camkut.”
The First Administrator stared at Twilight a moment longer.
“You have recovered enough. get used to walking on that leg, because in half an hour I will take you to Kana.”
Before he walked out of the room he said.
“Steel your mind.”
“But-” The doctor tried to say.
“They are ready enough for this. They need to understand. They need to be reigned in before they do anything else so, stupidly suicidal.”
The doctor shut up but they didn’t look happy about it at all.
“Umm… pace around the room a bit to try and get used to using your leg like you normally would.”
“Should I try to pick anything up with it?”
“If that’s what you would normally do with your leg, just don’t go over five tons since it’s a prosthetic.”
The distracted doctor left the room.
Twilight began to pace around the room, this was annoying, she would have much preferred to pace down the hall.
“Why did you reach out to the shard Twilight?” Naudia asked.
“Because it called to me.”
“But, it’s so… vile.”
“Yes.”
Twilight knew she would remember that crystal for the rest of her life, possibly longer.
“Was it’s pull really that strong?”
“It doesn’t have any pull, none at all.”
Twilight paced back and forth.
“It was like walking into a room where we were back then, a year ago, nobody believed me and all I could see was a gilded prison and everything had gone wrong.”
“Then why did you reach out to it?”
“Because it felt like a better place than there.”
There was no doubt in her mind. The crystal would remember her.
The First Administrator showed up early the next morning, along with the same doctor again, they got checked up from top to bottom. Twilight’s leg was working to the point where she could almost forget it was there.
“Today I am going to show you my hometown, come meet a lot of people I know.” The First Administrator said in a dead tone that lacked any of his usual personality. “See the sights, you know.”
“That sounds… fun?” Twilight said, because she read that was what you were supposed to say to that.
“It won’t be.” He said in that same voice.
The First Administrator seemed deflated, slow, lost. It made Twilight wonder if this was just some bad impersonator.
Until he raised his hand and Twilight could feel a taste of that same power as yesterday. She felt something behind her, and realized that she had backed into the wall.
To say that the portal was wrong didn’t go far enough. In Twilight’s opinion the word “aberration” didn’t go far enough. Naudia who hadn’t had a direct exposure to the shard thought the word quite apt.
The portal sat there, flowing, dark as liquid death.
That was when Twilight realized two things, it was blocking the door, and there were no windows.
“Well.” The First Administrator said. “Heroes, are you ready to face your great trial?”
“No.” Twilight said.
“Don’t worry.” The First Administrator said. “It can come to you.”
The portal split in half and faster than they could react, it enveloped Twilight and Naudia.
-------------------
The air was dead.
They walked.
No false sliver of hope could pierce them here.
The air was dead.
They could feel the eyes of the dead gods above, like stars, cutting into them with little more than pity to give.
They walked.
They could not even think of the others around them, to do so would be to let their thoughts consume them, and then they could not walk.
The air was dead.
The ash stirred up floated serenely down again as if there was nothing there. That was a comforting fancy, that there could be nothing there, that they were alone.
They walked.
And as they walked they could feel something coming closer, like a warming light, hatred walked among them.
The air was dead.
The air was deader than could be imagined, bereft of warmth or cold, bereft of taste, smell or weight.
They walked.
As they walked they could feel the warmth of hatred coming closer to them, they began to stir from their stupor.
The air was dead.
They walked.
Finally they could see hatred coming towards them radiating like a sun, they could see Camna, the one down below. He held out a hand for them.
They took it.
-------------------
It was like waking from a nightmare, into a nightmare.
They were still there, in Kana.
The eyes of dead gods crowded the sky, glaring down at them like stars. The sand and air were dead, unpleasant to touch and feel.
And those were the only two things that could distract them from the camkut.
They walked. From here to the horizon. An endless tide of spent souls, every imaginable shape and size from rats to unrecognizable monsters.
Twilight knew of no possible word to describe them.
“Is there a way to make them stop?” Twilight asked aloud.
“Stop what?” The First Administrator asked.
“Existing.”
Camna laughed at that.
“You have no idea.”
“Why do they walk?” Naudia asked.
“Because that is all they remember how to do.” Camna said. “So I send them on a pilgrimage. I don’t think they understand but...”
“Does it help?” Naudia asked.
“I have no idea, but I’d like to think that it does.”
Camna stopped walking suddenly.
“I just realized, I haven’t properly shown you around,” He said with a tone of fake joviality. “Welcome, to Kana, my home, this is where I ‘grew up’ as somebody like you would say.”
Twilight and Naudia stared at him.
“Oh be careful, don’t step there.” He pointed at a place in the ground with two footprints that the camkut avoided.
“What’s there?”
“That’s where they found me standing, some people consider it consecrated ground. It’s nonsense in my opinion, but it’s easy enough just to step around it.”
They were beginning to approach something in the distance, it was easy to see because it was the only landmark as far as the eye could see.
“When you say all that, you don’t mean you were born then.” Twilight said.
“No,” The First Administrator pointed at an obelisk that they could just barely make out. “The souls see that, and they pour their hopes and dreams into it, dedicate their entire being to it, hold that in their minds to the exclusion of all else. That is how I was created.
“And then the people who found this place, found me standing there, and I delivered them from here, and delivered them from the nerteln. And they have served under me ever since. Those were the first of the yunguaq.”
“Why are you showing us all of this.” Naudia demanded.
“Haven’t you put it together yet? I Camna, am the god of entropy, god of the camkut, the drained remnant souls who thirst for the end of all things.
“And the total extermination of the nerteln who discarded them here.”
As they finally came to the obelisk, the procession of camkut stopped for a moment and looked up at the obelisk. And there, just for that instant they almost seemed like people, before they turned away to start the cycle of their pilgrimage again.
Twilight and Naudia’s gaze was naturally drawn to where they were looking, to the corpse crumpled up at the base of the obelisk.
It was wearing a stupid looking black duster, an edgy felt fedora, there were a pair of mirrored sunglasses lying nearby, the hat was tilted so you couldn’t see one eye, but the other one, the visible one looked like it had been burned out. The corpse looked, untouched, as if somebody had just set it down there.
Twilight and Naudia instantly turned to Camna.
“We don’t know who that is, we just call him ‘the cast’.”
“Really.” Naudia said.
“Similar holy object situation, nobody wants to touch it.”
“Then why does it look so… fresh.”
“Things don’t rot here, nor do they age. Scientists say it’s because of the camkut, I’ve always thought it was a punishment for them.”
Twilight and Naudia began to feel this place gnawing at their minds even with the influence of Camna. They began to feel the compulsion to walk with the camkut, having seen the obelisk it was now time to walk back to the end of the line, however far that might be.
“Can you feel it? That feeling like you want to go home now. But I am home now.”
Twilight looked at Camna but it felt like sinking into a pit, so she looked away.
“I think. That is enough.” Camna.
-------------------
Twilight fell onto the floor, desperately gasping for air, eyes wild as she touched back down to normal ground and normal air once again. Scrabbling with her hooves she huddled herself into a corner, only to find it was already occupied, not caring who or what it was she clung to them desperately.
It took a long time for the world to reorient itself to her. To grow a distance between her and what she had just experienced. It would never be reconciled in her head, only pushed away.
It was only at this distance that she realized that she was hugging Naudia in a corner of the hospital room, and Naudia was doing the same, there were tears on her face. Twilight realized she had been tensing up, her slime skin going diamond hard to try and protect her from the camkut, she tried to relax.
She would never forget the camkut, those abandoned ones down below. Not the way they were, not the way they walked, and not the way they looked at that corpse.
The First Administrator sat down in a chair across from them.
“I take it you understand more about the peril Equestria is in, and also why we have spent so much effort showing you that.” He said.
“Why?”
“Without knowing why you might fall for the lies of a nerteln. A scientific mindset like yours could seek to tame that power. Saying to others ‘more research needs to be done, the safe amount of nerteln magic has not been tested enough. Think of all the benefits to all ponykind.’ With this magic you could fix the sun in the sky, fix the wrongs of the world, fix the errors of your creation, fix the problems of others, fix the others, of their problems.”
Twilight and Naudia were huddled even farther into the corner.
“Under your rule with this magic there would be no war, no hatred, people would, want,” There was something in the way he emphasized that word. “Nothing at all.”
The First Administrator, no Camna reached out a hand to them. They could push themselves no further away from that hand, away from that other self they saw reflected in those glasses.
“And all it would cost, for this total freedom, would be to expand the ranks of the camkut.”
Twilight stared at that hand, inviting her into a pit for which there could be no bottom, she could only see the camkut in front of her, staring up at her from the bottom of that pit.
“No.” She and Naudia said in unison.
The First Administrator sat back into his chair.
“Good. That was the answer I was expecting, but it never hurts to be sure.”
“W-, Why did you have to ask?” Naudia spoke up.
“There are people out there who, even knowing all of that, see nothing in their future. They have said yes. And even monsters as they are cannot be rid of the camkut. You know what must be done to them now.”
Twilight, clinging to a last bit of hope managed to croak out.
“Can’t we talk with them about this? Help them out?”
The First Administrator centered himself, taking a deep breath as if to calm some kind of inner anger.
“These aren’t addicts Twilight, they can’t go cold turkey, the parts of their brains that deal with interpersonal relationships are physically necrotizing. They need soul magic to understand why they can’t use soul magic and once they have soul magic the re-healed neurons get weaker and weaker inside their brains. You would need to create camkut to even keep them where they’re at.”
“There really is no other way Twilight.” Naudia said.
“The best way to stop nerteln is to prevent nerteln.”
After a moment the First Administrator slapped his knees and stood up. “Well, I think after that and your exemplary grade on this test, you two deserve a break. I’ve set something up with Gwynn that I think you’d like and can act as a contrast to… all of this.”
Once they had collected themselves, which was a long, unknown amount of time for them, Twilight and Naudia got up and followed him out the door. They never strayed away from touching distance to one another.
-------------------
The inside of the limo back was filled with spiders. Gwynn had brought them along for “emotional support”. Twilight and Naudia were too harrowed and numb to be scared of beach ball sized spiders.
Twilight found herself leaning up against Naudia while hugging a giant fuzzy spider. To their credit the spiders seemed to pick up on their state and were acting like any pet does when you’re in emotional distress.
In the kengun spider’s case it was to make Naudia and Twilight little things out of spider thread, like hair scrunchies and in the case of five of them working together a scarf for two. The accessories were all colored and the design of the scarf was set up that it could seamlessly split up or attach back together.
Twilight lay there on Naudia and across from Gwynn, recovering, soaking the warmth of the atmosphere up into her spirit. The past seemed to be farther and farther away. She could never forget what she had seen today, it was stamped onto her in a deeper level than mere memories.
“It’s important for you two to keep perspective of the First Administrator in your heads. Some people say he’s incorruptible but that isn’t wholly the case, the only thing he cares about is exterminating both the nerteln, and the camkut. That isn’t the same thing as being incorruptible.” Gwynn said to them.
“What is the difference?” Naudia asked.
“It means his sense of morals is exclusively grounded in that. He’s got a little earbud talking away in his ear, telling him what would a ‘normal’ person think of this situation, that’s the only way he’s as… human seeming, as he is.”
There was a pause in the conversation as skyscraper tall trees passed by outside the window and cars and trucks made out of wood and watermelon traveled like flocks of sheep floating through the air. Down below them was a layer made up of mostly of little flying moped bicycle things before you reached street level and the canals. It was strange but there were a lot more little bicycle things than there were cars, most of the cars were either buses or delivery trucks. And even strange looking moths flying along carrying boxes every which way, all labeled with the logos of stores she could see passing by.
Everything was so dense here, buildings, well trees that were buildings, many many stories tall. It felt like an alien world built up around vaguely familiar things. That over there, looked like a Manehatten skyscraper, but it was a tree, and there were lines going down the building that people would routinely clip onto and zip straight down to the street below. She even saw somebody jump, not down from the building, but up from the sidewalk to a balcony tens of stories up.
The cars were like carriages but they were likewise alien, driverless, designed around alien needs to be made out of entirely organic materials and to fly around on dissipating lines of glowing magic they left in the sky.
“Have you gone there Gwynn?” Twilight asked.
“Yes.”
“Is it always this bad?”
“I don’t think somebody would be allowed to work under the First Administration who didn’t feel something going into that place.”
“Is it…” Twilight hesitated, but she had to know, it was a terrible thing to think about but it was not optional. “Real?”
“Yes, Kana is real, nobody wants it to be, but it is.”
Twilight hugged the kengun closer to her chest. The spider like any good pet merely let it happen, acting as a living hug toy for Twilight.
“Good news is I’ve got a bit of a surprise for you two when we get back to my house, nothing big, but when I’m feeling really down I like to watch something uplifting and I think I might have found just the thing for you two!” Gwynn said trying to sound upbeat in the face of Twilight and Naudia’s current state. “And then after that it’s a psych evaluation and counseling for you two.”
“Oh.” Twilight said.
The conversation died after that.
-------------------
Getting back to Gwynn’s house, tree, mangrove thing, there was a projector out front with some lawn chairs lined up. It felt weird, like this was some normal neighborhood gathering and not staged by an organization with enough manpower to move planets.
“Move and operate with thrift and efficiency.” Gwynn said.
“What?”
“That’s what the First Administrator keeps saying, that’s why we’re using lawn chairs I already had rather than say, hiring a bunch of people to get a one use outdoor seating setup. Same reason why the first time we came in to pick you up it was in a decommissioned planetary touring vessel.”
“But the giant concert to play one song, those original hospital rooms we woke up in.” Twilight said.
“The concert played once and it’s entire purpose was to impress on you how important the First Administrator is, those hospital rooms were entirely modular, they’ve since been taken apart and the borrowed beds have been put back where they came from.”
Twilight realized that was also the reason they had been bunking at Gwynn’s house, practicing with wooden targets made on site, and had gone to some random burger place. Twilight wasn’t sure if she should be insulted by how cheap the First Administrator was overall or not.
As they sat down on their lawn chairs, Twilight and Naudia got a double wide one so they could sit together, Twilight tried to forget about what happened today. The kengun(Twilight had stopped thinking about them as spiders) had followed them here and had piled on with Naudia and Twilight, trying to sneak bites of their popcorn away with hairy spider paws.
That was the thing about Kengun, Twilight thought, they’re like cats, they even have little paws with claws and even paw pads, that you could easily mistake for a cat paw.
The show they were watching was strange to Twilight. She wondered if it was intentionally made so as to bridge a gap between Equestria and these yunguaq.
It was about a filly, well girl, who, by learning about friendship utilized her powers as a werewolf to fight and reform evil monsters called “nuna tarneq” that tried to take over normal places like parks and buildings. Parts of it reminded her a lot of what she and her, other friends, did on the other side of the mirror. It was hard to think about what the show actually thought of the First Administration itself, on the one hand the girl’s primary contact was somebody inside that organization, but on the other hand it was explicitly shown that these evil “nuna tarneq” were showing up because of mismanagement from lazy people also inside the First Administration.
She got into it a lot and about halfway through she realized that two of the girls were using the same werewolf powers that Naudia and she used. It was just hard to recognize because they were prettied up, the blue one that used Twilight’s version of a werewolf had a much nicer looking water shield and her werewolf form moved almost delicately, but effectively.
Naudia’s equivalent in red, which was sorta the leader, looked completely different, they shimmered with beautiful color as opposed to Naudia’s more pedestrian bacteria look, they even had designs of red delicate looking spines in places giving the appearance of a skirt.
Naudia noticed that the fighting there was real fighting, no choreographed pretty fighting that used movement to trick the eye like on the other side of the mirror. They were fighting like they genuinely wanted to kill each other and had been trained to it.
Once again Naudia and Twilight’s minds were flowing with new possibilities for magic after watching that. And they liked it a lot, despite it feeling strangely familiar to what they’ve already done. They went to bed with that swirling in their heads, chasing away the dreams of things that walked in a desert under the pitying eyes of dead gods.
“I can’t stand this.” Twilight said pacing about the room, followed every step by adoring spiders.
Before Naudia could even finish opening her mouth Twilight moved on.
“I can’t be up here right now, we need to be back down there. Taking a break right now just feels bad, I hate it.”
“Do you really feel up to going back down there so soon?” Naudia asked.
“After what we saw, could you imagine staying up here?” Twilight asked back.
Naudia knew the correct answer to that question.
Nothing was said.
Twilight walked out of the room.
-------------------
“Gwynn,” Twilight growled. “I need to see the First Administrator.”
“Your werewolf traits are showing, may I ask why?” Gwynn said guardedly.
“I can’t stand sitting around right now. I need to be back on the ground in Equestria pushing forwards in this investigation.”
“But Twilight-”
“Don’t wanna hear it right now Naudia.”
Twilight and Naudia had a huffy flight over to the First Administration offices. The offices were not what Twilight was expecting. She was expecting something gaudy, something that oppressed. She was not expecting a multi story tall tent-ish building that looked like it could fold up complete with creases where things like the windows were designed to fold closed.
The First Administration headquarters was built around a tree and inside the feeling like all of this was designed to just be packed away and moved out overnight was still there. Like this was a seasonal store. Walls weren’t walls, instead they were partitions, inflatable office chairs, stand mounted ceiling fans.
“Twilight if you’d just let me-” But Naudia was cut off this time by the cacophony of sound coming from the actual First Administrator’s office.
The desks here were a lot nicer, or at least more expensive, being clearly set up to still fold up but being made out of more expensive materials and fold up more neatly, storing screens and chairs inside all in one. There was a huge variety of different yunguaq at work here, a bio-luminescent rat woman, some sort of goat thing with long floppy ears and a pair of intricate connected horns that moved to hold objects. Twilight watched as a moose-man made out of jellyfish split himself up instead of walking around another hurrying aide.
Underneath all this scurrying about were hundreds of rats carrying little packages between desks, some of them not even meant for this room, just using it as a temporary shortcut.
Twilight and Naudia followed Gwynn to the desk at the end of the hall where the First Administrator was working. His desk was almost entirely boring, there was no picture of somebody, or any kind of indication other than documents that this desk had any owner at all. Behind him on the wall was a giant clock that wasn’t accurate to the current time.
Gwynn walked around the desk to whisper into the First Administrator’s ear. After drawing a line through another document he looked up at Twilight and Naudia.
“So.” His voice cut through all the sounds around them as clearly as if through a totally silent room. “You want to get right back to work again Twilight.”
“Yes.”
“And you Naudia?”
“She’s having second thoughts.” Twilight said before Naudia could say anything.
The First Administrator shot a glare at Twilight who felt a chill run up her soul.
“And you Naudia?” He repeated. “Having doubts?”
“YES!” She blurted out. “We’ve got more than the entire population of Equestria up here as best I can tell, why don’t Twilight and I have backup? Why are WE having to risk everything?”
The First Administrator sat back in his chair.
“The first reason as I’ve already told you is that this is all a test to see if Equestria can even handle governing itself and catching Nerteln on it’s own.”
Twilight nodded, Naudia had forgotten this.
“The second is because disrupting Equestria too much will awaken-”
The clock behind the First Administrator ticked once, Twilight noted that the time was less than a half minute til midnight.
Twilight suddenly realized that nobody and nothing in the room was moving. She could feel the slow head turn as everybody in the room dragged their eyes up to the clock on the wall. She thought she could hear herself breathing.
The First Administrator very slowly turned his head to the clock on the wall as well. Then he turned his head back to the still frozen aides.
“Well. Get on with it, the longer it takes you to order and design city lifting cables the longer we’ll be here.”
The room full of people started working again and Naudia could taste the fear in the air, fresh, sharp, like somebody had spiked the room with lemon.
“That, is the reason I can’t send down much more for you guys than I already have.” The First Administrator said. “I’ll be honest I’m pushing it with how much I’ve already done, and I’ve had to push back against a lot of pressure to just let things play out how they may and hope it doesn’t effect the Awakening very much.”
“Awakening? What the heck could you guys be worried about waking up?” Twilight said exasperated.
“Remember how I told you Equestria WAS, all a dream, then it wasn’t, backwards in time? This clock tracks the next time the Vatermorder that dreamed you all up will wake up. So until certain conditions are met I have to keep interventions to a minimum, until we are ready to go all out and frankly be out of Equestria inside of an extremely short period of time for what we have to do.”
“So why can’t we just wait it out until you’re ready?”
“By our own laws letting a nerteln take over too much means we have to nuke the place. It was generally meant for habitats but since people don’t tend to live on planets like this, an oversight means that we would have to…” The First Administrator picked up that Twilight and Naudia didn’t know what nuke meant. “Cleanse the surface of the planet of all life.”
“So that’s the hand we’ve been dealt?” Naudia said aloud. “Stuck between a soul eating psychopath, something with the power to warp reality and you guys?”
“If I had to choose I would choose to keep Equestria intact, but the risk of the Vatermorder waking up sooner than if the planet was empty or evacuated of life, or a third war against the nerteln is too great to the universe at large.” The First Administrator turned to the clock on the wall as if he expected it to tick again. “So what I need you two to do is take one of those out of the equation, and since there is exactly a 0% chance of killing the Godbreaker I need you to find and kill the nerteln. Once you do that we can start making big moves.”
“How do you know it’s impossible to kill the Godbreaker?” Naudia asked.
“There have been more attempts to kill the Vatermorder than there are possible combinations of atoms in the observable universe.”
“Oh come on, I’m an astrophysicist I’m not that gullible.” Twilight protested.
“He has outlived an unknown number of universes before this one and there are no restrictions on his power. But he encourages any and all to try and kill him, the entire culmination of universes have been put to the task and failed, again and again and again.” The First Administrator said. “But that is not your concern, unfortunately it’s mine and why I can’t change things inside of Equestria too much.”
“From what you’re saying I think it’s even more imperative that I go back down there and keep working then.” Twilight said.
“Very well,” The First Administrator waved over that jellyfish moose thing Twilight and Naudia saw earlier. “Tell my aides at the Food service workers union and the potato farmer’s union that I need to cancel my appointments today, things are accelerating.”
“Are you coming down with me?” Twilight asked Naudia.
“Yes.” Naudia said with a hint of shame in her voice.
“Don’t get too discouraged, in any kind of reasonable situation you would be following behind an army of specialists in killing nertlen. Unfortunately you were born on the most unreasonable planet I can think of.” The First Administrator said. “The best I can do for you right now is listen and watch through those tablets of yours.”
Twilight and Naudia were significantly taken aback by that.
“Anyways, go to the Werewolf village, look around there for evidence of the nerteln. We’re pretty sure that isn’t their main base, but you need to root out any boltholes before you pull the noose shut.”
“What are we even looking for?” Twilight thought to ask.
“Those guards are too overt an example, we think the nerteln is using rune magic instead of hardcasting, so you need to look for places that you can feel are wrong.”
Naudia opened her mouth to ask, but Twilight had already caught on.
“Like those poor souls in Kana right?”
“Yes.”
-------------------
“Why do you trust him?” Naudia asked as soon as they were out of the room.
Twilight had to think about that one for a moment.
“It’s hard to put into words.”
Twilight did her best to try and put herself in Naudia’s horseshoes for a moment, try and trace back this thought to the disconnect between them.
“You didn’t look into the shard.” Twilight said.
“No, I looked right at it, I just didn’t try and touch it like you did.”
“Then you didn’t look INTO the shard.” Twilight shivered despite herself. “I… understand what is going on here, I understand it far more than I would ever want to. All of this to you is something outside trying to creep it’s way in.”
Naudia took a step away from Twilight.
“You might understand what is happening, but there, looking into that shard, it feels like it has infected me. I can feel it coming up behind me.”
Naudia looked behind them, there was nobody there in the temporary hallways.
“Whoever is down there, for whatever the reason they chose this magic, they must die. To let them live would be an indescribable tragedy.”
Naudia tried to think of something else to say after that. Down the stairs, into the car, all the way til they had to go down to the line to Equestria where they came up.
Any argument she could have against that was stomped flat anytime she remembered the camkut. What if this nerteln magic could kill that godbreaker thing? Camkut. Are we sure there has been enough research to prove it’s always unsafe? Naudia could feel the thought slide out of her head, pushed aside by memories of the camkut. Fight off the First Administration? Even if it this nerteln magic could be that strong, the camkut.
Eventually Naudia had to give up, it wasn’t healthy to remember the camkut that much. She had to think of something else.
“How are you adapting to that leg Twilight?” Naudia asked.
“Just walking around? It’s fine, I don’t even have to think about it. But… it feels unnatural.”
“How so? I’ll admit I’ve had to use a prosthetic once or twice do to monsters out in the badlands, but I’ve never talked to another changeling about theirs.”
“You did?” Twilight asked incredulously.
“Yeah, changelings just grow limbs back. There is nothing worse though than having grown an inch back on your hoof and having a wooden leg that hasn’t been adjusted yet.”
“I’ve always known you had a hard childhood, but I could never imagine it was THAT bad.”
“Well changelings were designed for war in the first place. So naturally the first order of business was to make sure that we could lose a fight and then get back up from that.”
“I’ll never get used to that.”
“So what’s so weird about your leg if walking around is so normal?”
“I’ve gotten used to having a slime body. Simple things like reaching for a bottle of ketchup that’s just a little too far away, squishing a bit to walk around things, stretching upwards to peek over something. Small things I don’t even think about until one of my legs just can’t do it anymore.”
“Yeah, a lot of these countertops just aren’t quite short enough for-” Naudia stopped walking. “What the hay is that?”
They had been interrupted in their journey to the line back down to Equestria by a petting zoo. It took Gwynn a good couple seconds to figure out what they were actually talking about and why they would be concerned.
“Oh that, that’s just a petting zoo, I was certain Equestria had something like that, but I could be wrong. It’s just a place where you can go to pet and sometimes ride animals.” Gwynn explained.
“But… but it’s like… the things there look dangerous whatever they are.” Naudia said.
“But that’s a… NO, you are not allowed to be ignorant about this, we have to stop here, NOW.” Twilight demanded to Gwynn, before leaning in close and asking, “They are safe right? Just a normal foals petting zoo right?”
Gwynn nodded, confused as to why Twilight would ever be concerned about something as tame and child friendly as this.
Hesitantly Naudia reached her hoof out to touch the creature, slowly, slowly.
Until it got tired of waiting and pushed itself against her hoof.
“This, is a T-rex Naudia.”
The T-rex gave a happy little rumble as Naudia began to pet it, gradually gaining more confidence. It was a feathery creature with a jaw much larger than she was comfortable with, but the way it leaned into her hoof was just adorable, especially with the way it waved it’s little arms around.
It was abundantly clear this was an exceptionally tame and gentle animal.
“The T-rex had an astonishing bite strength which at the time allowed it to even crack bones and get to the marrow inside!” The guide who was herding this walking dinosaur exhibit said.
“What really?” Naudia asked.
“My wife has never heard of dinosaurs before now.” Twilight explained.
The guide’s mouth dropped open for a second as if he couldn’t quite process that information properly.
“Well then, now is the perfect time to learn, and just this once it’s on the house, Nobody should go through life without at least having ridden on a T-rex.” He said enthusiastically
-------------------
There was a kind of child-like joy in Naudia’s eyes right now. Even though her changeling education had severely neglected natural history, as they didn’t have a natural history. There was something completely magical about riding on top of a small-ish T-rex that was universal. It was the kind of joy one should never grow out of.
The guide for the petting zoo, turned out to be some sort of charmingly chubby looking skunk creature that Twilight found out was actually some sort of insect mimicking a skunk. Unfortunately there were allosaurus to be pet and she couldn’t dig into what was going on there.
“The reason they have feathers like they do is because we had to re-engineer them from birds, specifically chickens.” He said. “As you can see they very much look the part, even if they likely aren’t even remotely similar under the surface.”
Twilight and Naudia, scholars that they were, had their ears glued to this sort of explanation. This was some sort of ideal for them. A real, living piece of history was right there, and they could pet it, ride around on it, it wanted to play with them. And then right over there was somebody ready to dispense facts about these wonderful creatures. And there were so many creatures, Twilight had been nuzzled by an allosaurus, touched the sail of a spinosaurus, ran alongside an alioramus.
History was here, and she could touch it with her own two hooves.
“I think I needed something like this.” Twilight said to the guide.
“Aww, don’t cry little pony, it’s not like you’ll never see another mesozoic petting zoo again.” The strange skunk-bug guide patted her hoof.
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of actually.”
-------------------
As they were being strapped in to the launch vehicle Twilight had a thought to ask Gwynn.
“How do we even survive something like this? Wouldn’t the forces just liquefy our brains?”
“Uhh, okay it’s a bit harder to explain for you guys since you’re slimes, but basically you no longer have organic brains.”
“Wait, so we’re running on a computer now?!” Naudia exclaimed.
“Yes, but likely not one you’re familiar with.” Gwynn seemed impressed at how fast they caught on. “Your brains are a type of multi-system isentropic computer.”
Twilight and Naudia’s jaws dropped.
“Could… could you just say that one more time? I think my ears aren’t working right.” Twilight said.
“Your brains are a type of multi-system isentropic computer?” Gwynn restated.
“That’s what we thought you said.” Naudia said after her mind had re-ordered itself slightly.
“Isentropic.” Twilight stated at Gwynn.
“Yes.”
“So our brains run without entropy by using adiabatic processes?”
“Yes, and they are quite reversible too.”
“I think the both of us have massively underestimated how advanced you guys are.” Naudia spoke for both of them.
“Well the way they work is they are a combination of light based, mechanical, and magmatter based computing to maximize the amount of computing able to be done in a space. Yours is obviously a bit more complex because of your slime biology, there are… workarounds to transmit information.”
“Mechanical computing, what? Even we’re past that.” Twilight said aghast.
“How do you even do computing with light?” Naudia asked.
“You can look up more of the details yourself.” Gwynn said. “But basically the mechanical parts are very tiny, measured in atoms and transparent to light, they’re for kinda slower stuff like accessing memories. The light based stuff just goes through stuff like magmatter and graphenite, and that’s for your quick reaction sorta thinking. And the magmatter is so small it can work around and even inside of the atoms, so that is used for your short term day to day thinking.”
Twilight and Naudia just sat in silence contemplating the implications of such computing technology working on themselves, in themselves.
“I hope you’re appreciating all this educational stuff about yunguaq, I had to study up on it pretty hard. We thought it would really help you guys keep going.”
“I can’t say it’s not helping, but it feels like I’m a cave-pony walking into downtown Manehatten most of the time.” Twilight said.
“Good, now that you’re all strapped in, it’s time to head back down to the surface.” Gwynn said.
Twilight and Naudia instantly tensed up.
Even with the foreknowledge of what was going to happen it was still an unpleasant minute down to Equestria again.
“Well Twilight, you really are a trailblazer.” Naudia joked at Twilight.
Twilight tried to be annoyed, but only managed to fix her face halfway between keeping in a laugh and looking annoyed.
They had just passed by an old rotten tree that, up until the point where Twilight had passed through, had been standing up. Now it was shattered into a couple pieces, a lot of splinters, and with just a stump left behind. This was the first major sign of the trail Twilight had left behind in her rush to get back to meet up with Naudia. Other signs included hoofprints on trees, holes in the underbrush, trampled over collections of willow saplings, and very deep hoofprints in the forest floor.
This was a wild forest, unmanaged, and it was VERY dense with plants everywhere. This was exactly what the north had as an answer to more tropical jungles. It shouldn’t have been possible to just “run through” this forest like Twilight had.
“What I don’t get is how I could just… push over saplings like this.” Twilight said. “I know I’m strong enough to now, but there should be deep furrows in the ground or something. I shouldn’t be able to just blast right through them like this.”
“I know why, you’re pushing with your magic, onto it.”
“We can do that?!” Twilight exclaimed.
“Yes, and it’s so basic I don’t even think they thought to teach it to us.” Naudia pointed a hoof at a cluster of dense willow saplings that had been crushed over. “You clearly already can do it.”
“The other thing we can infer from all of this,” Twilight said as they went around a hill. “Is that we now have an extremely good sense of direction.”
Naudia realized what Twilight was talking about. The trail around the hill they just passed by was almost perfectly set up to keep them on course to their destination. She knew, far too well, that normally ponies would end up going in circles without a reference point, especially in a place like this dense forest… or a desert.
They continued on through what Naudia called “Twilight’s wake of destruction” until they actually reached the werewolf settlement.
“So while the etymology of the word ‘werewolf’ should probably be something like ‘marewolf’ as it would be today. It’s actually based on an older word ‘werwulf’, ‘wer’ meaning pony, but the interesting thing about it is that no matter where you’re at ‘wer’ or ‘were’ always refers to the locals. For example over in Griffonstone they say it refers to the griffons. So no matter where you are the etymology of the word remains the same.”
“I think changelings would be similar, if we had werewolves out where we were at. Instead we had legends more similar to your vampires, stories of changelings that if starved for love for long enough would suck the blood of their victims and wander the world as creatures of the night.”
At that point they came into sight of the fields around the werewolf settlement and were treated to it’s signature blasts of wind coming off of the run up from the fields and fields of crops.
One of the werewolves working in the field, in full werewolf form waved at them. Twilight couldn’t tell which werewolf it was, and it struck her how much she was relying on just being able to tell things about a yunguaq just by looking at them and having the information broadcast into her brain.
Twilight began to pick out that this was actually Expat Eclipse, the werewolf “queen”. Which itched at her etymology brain, but she just had to accept that Equestrians didn’t really understand what that term meant as it hadn’t been used inside Equestria for over a thousand years.
He bounded towards them with a kind of childish-doglike joy, tongue lolling out and even when he reached them it was like he just couldn’t stand still.
“The newest Royal Couple!” Eclipse said, emphasizing the capitol letters. “It’s just so good to see you both!”
Naudia stared at Eclipse for a second before asking Twilight.
“Who is this?”
“This is Expat Eclipse, the queen of the werewolves.”
Naudia looked Eclipse up and down suddenly.
“You ponies do know what ‘Queen’ means right?”
“Nope, the only royalty that’s been in Equestria for the past thousand years has been princesses and princes.”
“I know I’ve said this to you before Twilight, but your government system is weird.”
Eclipse chuckled at that.
“It’s so nice to hear you banter like that, would you mind doing a show of walking around the colony? It would help to dispel… rumors.”
Naudia did not even miss a beat.
“I imagine the next words you’re going to say are something like ‘changeling, pod, mind control,’ or ‘political marriage’.”
“Well I would never…” Eclipse talked like a true politician at times. “Imply that to you directly. Others that believe the tabloid trash we get up here might be more forward.”
“Yeah.” Twilight and Naudia said. “We know.”
With that Twilight and Naudia were led, well more, toured through the fields to the center of “town”. It became apparent that Eclipse while also very enthusiastic about being a werewolf was also very enthusiastic about potatoes, and cabbage, and Twilight and Naudia had to stop him from bypassing the town to show the irrigation of the spinach field.
Not for a lack of interest from Twilight and Naudia, but the spinach fields wouldn’t have an escape hatch.
They moved down into the tunnels and Twilight felt as if teeth were closing in around her, looking to her side she noticed Naudia shiver from the feeling as well. That had not been here the last time she visited these tunnels.
“Excuse me for a moment, I need to check in with something.”
Twilight pulled out the tablet and poked it on with her magic, levitating it with her magic in front of her she felt somebody behind her. It was Eclipse staring at the strange glowing device that had icons on it.
“Is that some new tech from Canterlot?” He asked.
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Wooow, I hope we get something like that up here soon.”
Twilight pressed the button that would call up Gwynn and described what she felt entering into the caverns.
“Yeah, that sounds about right, I would say that’s definitely a sign of soul magic. Remember Twilight that Bagrat only has one reserve shield for you, if that activates your shield is down and you are near death.”
Twilight only managed a nervous fixed smile, but it was an audio only call. There really was nothing else to say. Twilight had to steel herself but it felt like she was picked by needle-like teeth just being here, and she didn’t know who could be working for this soul consuming, mind dominating monster.
Looking to her side Naudia had been in on that call as well and looked to be holding up better than her. Nevertheless they both brought their zoetic shields up she was thankful that the bagrat could be hidden inside her and Naudia’s hair and that casting a spell with this new “sovereign magic” did not light up her horn or make her initial, non-werewolf shield visible.
It still felt weird to be walking around armed like she was and with a lichen wolf pelt though. Ponies around her noticed her more as “that pony with wings, a shield and a grass wolf pelt” as she walked by. Nopony knew what to make of her.
Naudia on the other hand was given a very different greeting.
“So can you transform into a ponywolf?”
They were surrounded by an excited crowd of Werewolves in the main hall and they were all over Naudia. Everything from her tallish gothic look, to her changeling ability to transform, a rumor that she was a werewolf like her wife, and her royal wife Twilight herself.
“Is your position as ‘queen’ based on werewolf queens?”
“Are you as strong as Twilight?”
“How do you think your political marriage to Twilight can benefit werewolves?”
Naudia frowned at that one.
“Twilight and I’s relationship is not political in nature.” Naudia stated very firmly. “It has political consequences, but those are tertiary.”
“We would be together regardless of whether or not Equestria approved of it.” Twilight chimed in.
“Sorry about them, we get news essentially third or fourth hand out here.” Eclipse nervously said.
Throughout their tour they discovered nothing really actionable, Naudia showed off her own specific werewolf form. Twilight was intrigued to find out that Naudia had implemented some of the things they’d seen last night to make it blue like the color of her hair, and to give her a sort of hackled mane.
The werewolves for their part were astonished at this strange new type of werewolf in front of them that could split and multiply like a bacteria. Even with the wide variety of werewolves around here they stood out, even though Twilight could have swore one of the assembled werewolves was actually a wererat or something similar.
Still the feeling of jaws closing in around them didn’t relent, as they went deeper it only increased. Twilight could immediately tell that none of these werewolves were involved here because the crowd that followed them around stuck with them and the feeling only got worse the deeper they went.
Finally as they were looking through one of the exceptionally well engineered cold storage rooms Naudia snapped. As if she had triangulated the feeling with her head she ran over in a flash and bucked one of the walls.
“What are you-?!” Eclipse shouted, he and some of the werewolves were already preparing to make a run for it in case of cave in, half inside their werewolf forms already.
The wall had turned out to be hollow, frozen permafrost dirt caked onto a wooden door which buckled like balsa wood under Naudia’s hoof. Beyond it lay a tunnel that was dark, just wide enough for one pony to walk through.
“Know anything about that?” Naudia asked Expat Exclipse.
They didn’t even have time for Naudia to get an answer as suddenly every werewolf in the room except for Twilight and Naudia put their hooves or paws over their noses.
“Oh Celestia NO! It’s that smell again!” Expat managed to say.
Even though Twilight couldn’t smell it, it was pretty clear none of the werewolves were involved with this tunnel because one or two of them had to be drug out of the room. By Twilight and Naudia as the werewolves almost passed out or just did, just from taking their hooves off their noses.
Twilight consulted her tablet phone again, this time the reception was a lot worse than it had been.
“Is there any way we could block out this smell from this tunnel?” Twilight asked Gwynn.
“You should be able to make a semi-permiable barrier you could walk through, with your magic, attach a spiderweb talisman to it and it should power itself.” A blip showed up on her screen, “I just sent you the spellform for that.”
“Why don’t we smell anything here?”
“Yunguaq are the natural adversaries of the nerteln, you’re prepared for a fight, while everything else is prey to a nerteln. That ‘smell’ is every part of their werewolf half screaming at them that danger is near.”
Twilight and Naudia put up the spell around the tunnel entrance, it had a strange jello appearance to it. The spider silk talisman just kinda hung inside of the spell off to the side. Twilight realized that spell was likely some sort of temporary airlock, likely for hull breaches, Naudia thought that it was a moisture-lock for desert living.
They left the cold storage room to find Expat Eclipse and a couple other werewolves(that were still conscious) flopped out on the ground.
“What in Tartarus was that?” Eclipse could not even stand up to ask them.
“That was a tunnel dug by whoever we’re here to deal with, I’m assuming for the moment that they aren’t involved with the werewolves, yet.”
“How in the world do you think we even could get involved with something like that!?”
“The other way around, you wouldn’t have a choice in the matter.”
“Have you smelled this stuff anywhere else?” Twilight asked Eclipse.
“We smelled it down here occasionally, just horrible, like a burning sulfur.”
“I started getting wiffs of this sorta thing downtown in Knicknik, around that Doctor Willow’s place.”
The werewolves demeanor changed at that name, one of them even spat letting out a curse under her breath. Twilight and Naudia glanced at one another.
“Who is this ‘Doctor Willow’?” Twilight asked for both her and Naudia.
“The damn doctor has been trying to cure lycanthropy. And there isn’t anything that’s happened in this town worse than what he did to Pomo.”
It was almost like those words had sucked any of the warmth out of the room, none of the other werewolves could even meet Twilight’s questioning eyes, finally she just had to ask.
“What happened to Pomo?”
Expat Eclipse looked around and realized that nobody else wanted to speak up, finally drawing in a deep breath he began.
“Pomology Pear,” He seemed to be choking up just going that far. “Pomo was one of our early members, she was with us when we discovered the fang of the first mother. She was the one who hybridized the pear trees at the south pasture.
“One day a… ‘doctor’,” Eclipse spat the word. “Came into town, said he was here to help us cure our lycanthropy, and some of us were on board so we let him stay, he got close to Pomo. Said he’d discovered something new that would help ‘fix’ her.
“We thought she was okay with it. We stopped hearing from her after that, thought she’d headed off somewhere down south.” Eclipse looked down in shame. “The only way we found out what happened was that a handyman told us he’d been having to replace a lot of doors over at Doctor Willow’s place.
“It turns out whatever treatment he’d given her had driven her mad. She’d been smashing at the walls and the door until she’d knock herself out. But the doctor was always there to… make sure she was still alive.”
Expat Eclipse took in a shaky hiccupy breath.
“And then one day she was fine. Just fine. She didn't remember anything about being a werewolf, why would she ever want to be a werewolf." Expat Eclipse gave a hollow laugh. "I don't know who that was, but she was just 'fine'."
All of the werewolves were looking down in shame now.
“I’m pretty sure that means we’re here to stop this Doctor Willow. I can’t say for certain but from the sounds of it he’s done something worse beyond your understanding.” Naudia said.
“How do you know?” Expat said wiping away a dribble of snot.
“If it is what I think it is. We’ve seen the aftermath.” Just the way Twilight said that got the werewolves to stare at her.
Twilight and Naudia faced the tunnel, they knew whatever lay inside of it was likely their target, or some tendril of his influence. It felt like the jaws closing in around them were needle point clear.
-------------------
Twilight and Naudia had one advantage in the tunnel that no other fighting force on Equestria had ever had. Their spells could be targeted to slip right through the walls without even leaving a scratch, as if the walls weren’t even there. Twilight and Naudia both had sat through a long lecture about how this was a property of magmatter being so small compared to normal matter. However they had only a vague idea as to why the targeting of magmatter meant that it could slip right through one thing and hit something else on command.
The tunnel was the worst place for the feeling they had, now it was like the jaws were prickling at their skin, and their tablets could not contact anybody down here at all.
Twilight was walking along up front with a summoned in glowstick stuck into her shield, this tunnel was unpleasant. It took her a while to realize why. There was no evidence of animals or insects or anything in this dirt tunnel. They passed under a tree root but that was very clearly dead, half rotted, but even the rot had died down here.
That was when they came into the natural chamber this tunnel had linked into, a crevasse where you could see up into the outside world, the sun pale and dim shined down upon a stallion standing in front of a plank of wood.
The stallion was clearly some kind of sailor and didn’t even acknowledge Twilight and Naudia’s presence despite Twilight’s glowstick. The stallion was surrounded by wisps of magic that were drawn into the rune engraved on the plank of wood. The magic was an unpleasant to look at off-brown color, but that didn’t even compare to the wave of disgust that washed over Twilight and Naudia.
“Good, you’ve discovered the source vector for soul magic in the werewolf compound.” Came the voice of the First Administrator from Twilight’s tablet. “This is clearly not the final target though. Kill him.”
“WHAT!?” Twilight jerked the tablet out of her saddlebags and found herself locking gaze with the First Administrator.
“Kill him. It is the only mercy you can give to one such as him.”
“But…” Twilight looked up, the stallion hadn’t even acknowledged their presence he sat there smiling peacefully at the plank of wood.
“He is a living battery for soul magic Twilight, forced to devote his entire being to this spell, and his master has made sure he likes that.
“Do you think a pony would enjoy burning away their memories of their family and life in a hole where nobody will ever find them?”
“But there has to be something we can do for him.”
“I’ve already told you what you can do for him Twilight. If there was an alternative we would have found it by now.”
Twilight put the tablet away.
Twilight picked up a rock with her magic.
She couldn’t look, she didn’t want to remember the sound.
“Twilight.” Naudia said in a warning voice.
Twilight opened her eyes and looked at the stallion she had just smashed in the head with a rock. He was getting back up, his head was putting itself back together, he was turning towards Twilight. The brown wisps of magic were leaking from the cracks in his head, like he himself was slowly leaking out of his body.
Both their tablet’s spoke up with the harsh tones of the First Administrator’s voice.
“Use the goddamn magic I gave you for the purpose which it was created for.”
That was enough to shock Twilight and Naudia out of their stupor of seeing a pony’s head un-dent itself and prepare for battle.
Twilight hated the feeling of that thing in front of her so much that she didn’t even wait for it to get up fully. She started slinging lumps of lichen at it as fast as she could with her sling.
There were other things she was supposed to be doing in that situation, spells that would block incoming attacks, reinforcing her water shield to protect Naudia. But she just used the first spell she could think of rapid fire to kill this thing.
“If you’re going to use your toolkit that way throw in some accelerate infection in there, otherwise you’re going to run out of juice before he’s dead.” Came the voice from her tablet again.
Then from Naudia’s tablet.
“Naudia wake. up. Think of this as one of your corrupted changelings, what do you do to corrupted changelings?”
It was like a switch had flipped inside of Naudia’s head. She had been doing roughly the same thing as Twilight, flinging blobs of bacteria at the thing in the hopes of killing it quickly.
Just for a moment the cloud of lichen cleared up enough for them to see the creature they had been fighting. There was a barrier around it now and their attacks were slowly eating into it, far too slowly for how much they had put into that.
Naudia instantly went into an actual combat stance and started to remember what she should be doing in this situation. Naudia’s actions far more resembled what a protolycaon should be doing in this situation.
She armored herself up, her bacteria shell turning into a cillia surface, and just in time too, a bolt of that ugly magic flew around Twilight and headed straight for her. Naudia tried to dodge but the bolt just homed in on her almost perfectly, as it hit she felt a major hit to her shields, and a huge splatter of blue zoetic shield fluid.
“Naudia!” Twilight turned to her in a panic.
“FOCUS ON THE ENEMY TWILIGHT!” Both Naudia and the tablet screamed.
And just in time too, another bolt was just barely able to be blocked by the top of Twilight’s shield, blowing a chunk out of it as well as the glowstick embedded there. Twilight now covered in a splatter of blue as well as glowing green got the message.
Twilight remembered what she was actually supposed to be doing now and hastily put up a cloud of lichen to either side of herself to shield Naudia and began regenerating her shield. The next shot went low trying to sneak in a hit at her hooves and blew another nasty hole out of her shield.
“Dia I can’t keep this up forever!”
That was around the time that Naudia blasted past her in full werewolf form snarling and getting the attention of the possessed pony in front of them. And then another werewolf form identical to Naudia’s passed by her snarling.
“I guess I didn’t have to wait too long.”
This was Twilight’s signal to go on the offensive. The sailor was covered in some sort of shield and that shield was being battered by the lichen Twilight had thrown as well as being sucked dry by a variety of strange giant bacteria that Naudia had thrown. He showed no indication that he had any kind of self preservation instinct at all, in fact he seemed to be attacking whoever seemed most threatening and Naudia was taking advantage of this by alternating hits between herself and her protolycaon doppelganger.
Twilight went full lichenthrope form and started slinging in spells that would accelerate her lichen to attack the possessed pony even more. His shielding was starting to thin out and seriously showing damage, some of the places where Naudia had gotten bacteria to stick were moments away from touching the stallion’s fur. Twilight knew that might not be the end, this thing had to die, whoever this pony used to be they needed to be laid to rest, even if there was nothing left to bury.
Twilight and Naudia managed to coordinate their attacks so all three of them hit at the same second. Twilight slashing through a cloud of lichen spores, dragging them in to eat away at the last bits of the stallion’s shield in a devastating heavy swipe. Naudia slashed at the bacteria stuck to his shield with two sets of hooves causing them to explode ripping away part’s of the stallion’s shield and Naudia’s attack was the first one to hit the stallion directly, cutting into his shoulder and neck.
Twilight aimed her shield at the stallion’s head and cast her ultimate spell a huge cavitation bubble formed inside of it and pushed a spike out the front of the shield. Twilight saw it as if in slow motion as she was pushed back from the force of the blast, there was a momentary blast of heat.
The stallion was dead now.
Twilight could tell because the feeling in the air was just gone, like it had never even been there. That was the most disturbing part of all, like that feeling was fake, unexplainable.
Like Twilight had just killed a stallion in cold blood.
She heard a buzzing up above as something she didn’t quite get a good look at buzzed out of sight. It was clearly artificial and Twilight didn’t need two guesses as to who it belonged to.
Twilight walked over into a corner and threw up. Naudia was there patting her on the back.
“Well done Twilight. Your second kill and I didn’t even have to tell you to do it.”
“What are you…” Twilight took a moment to pant before turning to face The First Administrator. “Talking about.”
Twilight didn’t even question how or why he was already here when he had been speaking over their radio moments ago. He certainly didn’t come through that tunnel, and he didn’t drop down from through the crevasse up above.
“The first time I had you kill was that nightmare, Chrysalis I think it was.”
“No, Naudia…” Twilight realized that memory was fuzzy, like it wasn’t there, the specifics weren’t there, like she had heard about it secondhand.
“Twist the knife, aim for the heart.” He said exactly as the words entered her mind.
Twilight remembered… everything.
Twilight turned to Naudia.
“But… you… you…” Twilight couldn’t find words.
Naudia shook her head.
She could remember the knife, she could remember the rock she had gripped in her magic, as clearly as if it had just happened. Twilight collapsed onto the ground.
“Why are you doing this?” Naudia demanded.
“She needs to get used to killing these victuals, and now when we are in a relatively safe place away from others. She won’t have this kind of luxury when you’re actually in Knicknik.”
The First Administrator walked over to Twilight who was openly weeping on the floor.
“That was not a pony. That was a victual.” He said harshly. “A living battery for an enslavement spell, a pony with their free will ripped out to serve a master’s will and no other.”
He kneeled down to speak to her more closely, she was caught his gaze now.
“He was forced into this by another, a foul monster who will consign him and any others he can get his hands on, to Kana, to walk the sands as a camkut. That was his fate from the moment a nerteln first drank from his soul.”
Twilight felt even more sick now than she did before, but it was being forced down by something else, a righteous anger, a burning hate that came up through her throat like bile. It was like she could see the camkut reflected in Camna’s glasses, walking. Somepony was so evil, that they would consign somebody to Kana. There was no possible justification for that atrocity.
“When you doubt yourself walking along this path.” The First Administrator was speaking to both of them now. “Remember your time in Kana, remember the camkut.”
Twilight was sitting down and watching a surreal sight, what amounted to an alien police crime scene that she had just caused, more or less. She honestly had no idea what to say to Naudia who was sitting next to her.
The yunguaq were dressed in uniforms and were a mishmash of different equipment sets. Some of them had briefcases with a surprising number of combat features, giving them a suave spy look. Some of them looked like soldiers except a major part of their kit was a shovel.
“So…” Twilight started but then stopped.
The ones working directly on the soul magic site seemed to work with some sort of grain two handed flail thing, Twilight thought they were oats. They were calling in rats from bunches of grass they had summoned in, to throw grains at the soul magic board, the oats burned with a purple flame as they hit. The rats danced with joy in a circle around their strange colored bonfire.
Naudia was clearly going to let Twilight say whatever she was going to say.
“Do you hate me for… for what happened in Canterlot?”
Naudia took a deep breath.
“No. What happened was necessary.”
“I suppose I can understand why you’d think like that.”
“I was just hoping that you wouldn’t find out what you did.”
“Why?”
“I want to live in the pony world Twilight. I want to live where most foals live to adulthood, and don’t have a monster kill count before they’re out of their teens. If given the chance for a Twilight Sparkle that hadn’t killed anything other than monsters, I wanted to take that. For that Twilight to lead us into the future.”
Naudia gave a little laugh.
“I don’t know if that sounds like a good reason or not to you. In retrospect it feels rather selfish for me to decide that for you, at the time it seemed like a good way to get back at…”
Naudia gestured at the First Administrator.
“And keep you happy.”
They watched as the agents with the briefcases finished up by pressing a button on the briefcase and dousing the area in green fire. When the fire went out various evil looking rats with strange wing-like appendages(without actual wing membranes) on their back crawled out of the dying flames.
“I wanted to blame you for keeping this from me.” Twilight said. “But thinking back on the last year I can’t think of when would have been a good, calm, time for you to actually tell me about it. Tirek, going back to a missing Equestria, working with Starlight Glimmer, nightly visits by the First Administrator. There just weren’t any gaps where we could have sat down and dealt with this properly.”
“So like now.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t count on things calming down anytime soon.” The First Administrator said to them.
Both of them started as they hadn’t heard him walk over.
“Your showing in combat today was bad. It’s clear you know the spells, so we’ve made progress, but things around here are going downhill faster than anticipated. My analysts are examining the similarities between your magic and soul magic and it looks like our models are off, they’re more compatible than we thought they were.”
“What do you mean by THAT?” Twilight said offended.
“Nothing as… evil as you’re thinking, it just means that what the nerteln learns about magic in Equestria helps whoever it is out more with soul magic more than previously thought. Whoever this Doctor Willow is, I believe his background in medicine is probably psychological in nature, with magic training that puts him in the far upper bounds of actually utilizing and learning soul magic.”
Behind the First Administrator Twilight noticed that the briefcase agents were walking a circle around a summoned lump spewing that green fire at it.
“Moving on from that, we need to accelerate your combat training much more than anticipated.”
A very large rat climbed out of the fire.
“This is a hellion rat.” The First Administrator said stepping back. “Kill it, or die.”
The rat was strange, it had an extra set of arms on it’s back that were positioned like they were wings, but without any kind of membrane or feathers to give it lift. It was huge, standing at least as tall at the shoulder as Naudia did at the shoulder, and it had a set of what looked like glowing gold moose antlers giving it even more height. It’s eyes likewise glowed gold from within, as it stood up out of the fire more and more patches of it’s fur likewise began to glow gold with a frightening intensity.
Twilight realized that the moose antlers were articulated, flexible like they had no actual solid component, and likely what the hellion rat used to cast magic. It was not going to wait for them to be ready before it started this fight.
Twilight barely managed to get her zoetic shield up before a strange bolt of magic slammed into her, she wasn’t able to block it with her water shield. The magic was there on her foreleg looking like some sort of golden cloth with lines and circles traced into it that Twilight could feel were conduits of power. A power that was already starting to eat away at her shield. It didn’t hurt, not exactly, her shield couldn’t feel pain, but she could feel her shield like it was her skin.
All of this had passed in less than a second.
Twilight immediately went on the offensive trying to remember more of her training and the spells she had access to.
“Remember your role Twilight, protect Naudia so she can initiate the attack.” Gwynn hall shouted off from the side.
It was hard to concentrate with that attack eating away at her shield like it was, but Twilight reigned herself in and took up a defensive stance. She slung lichen to her left and right creating clouds the hellion rat would have to shoot through if it wanted to attack Naudia, and she readied her water shield against the monster.
The monster tested her defense, blasting at her shield and the clouds of lichen with that golden magic it had. Unlike her personal shield Twilight had an answer to damage on her water shield, sloughing off the front of it to refresh the surface and give her a clear view ahead.
“Good Twilight, remember to feed your lichen clouds with water from your shield.”
Naudia for her part was preparing to attack the hellion rat from behind Twilight. Filling her sling satchel with large gooey bacteria and building up her shields for the attacks that were inevitably going to come her way on the approach.
Just then Naudia noticed something emerging from the hit on Twilight’s foreleg. It looked like a floating mass of the chunks of Twilight’s shield that had been damaged, between the rotating floating chunks there were constant shocks of static electricity. It had no shape, it was just a mass of debris that floated and sparked on itself.
The static thing separated from Twilight’s shield leaving a large pit and began to make it’s way back to the hellion rat. Naudia instantly figured out why, it was hoovering up the zoetic shield debris and fluid from the battle and was bringing it back to it’s master.
“Twilight, take that little static thing out!”
Twilight’s eye’s caught onto the little thing and it was the work of a moment to redirect her short sling to slam it with a lump of lichen. The little static thing exploded, it was apparently very weak if such an attack would destroy it like that.
Naudia was ready and finally began her assault on the rat thing.
As she made her approach on it the rat started blasting at her with it’s flexible antlers and Naudia did her best to dodge the attacks. However she did get hit a couple times in a nasty way. In return Naudia was pelting it with bacteria which stuck onto the rat’s shields. The bacteria pulsed as they attacked the shield, growing in size as they fed on it, you could see them multiplying inside ready to split and spill out to bolster Naudia’s shields.
“Remember Naudia, cook the bacteria, like a grenade.” Gwynn shouted at her from the sidelines.
Naudia didn’t know what a grenade was, but she knew what it meant in this context having read up on her combat abilities. She was actively feeding the bacteria in her pouch to grow them bigger from her own shields. And she was throwing bacteria that didn’t do much damage but instead linked other bacteria that were stuck to the hellion rat together, these accelerated the infection.
Finally as she got close to the Hellion rat Naudia played her trump card. Naudia sloughed off the outer layers of her shield that had been damaged and dropping the parasitic patches of golden magic the hellion rat had hit her with.
Naudia heard a snarl from behind her as Twilight was on the offensive now as well.
-------------------
They managed to kill the summoned hellion rat which faded away rather quickly.
Twilight immediately turned to the First Administrator and Gwynn who had been standing at the sidelines watching them and shouting advice the entire time. As if this was just some sort of game.
“What the hay was that?” Twilight demanded
“Combat training.” The First Administrator said.
“I get that, what was with that ‘kill it or die’?”
“We need you to get used to life or death combat, you’re going to be in it very soon. I don’t think you’d like to end up like Walden.”
Twilight grimaced at the thought, she could still remember seeing the bat’s heart beating inside of his chest with the little iron patch.
“Besides, that hellion rat was using ‘hack’ magic, effective on shielding and computers, useless on everything else, it could never have killed you with that magic.”
Twilight could understand that point of view, but they just weren’t getting what she was saying.
“That’s not the point, why did you make us kill that rat?”
Even the First Administrator had his face in his palm at that comment. It was Gwynn massaging her temples that answered.
“You didn’t kill that hellion rat, it was a summon, you can’t kill a summon because they’re summoned. They’re already dead.”
Twilight and even Naudia stammered around for a while at that.
“So that was necromancy then?!” Naudia managed before Twilight could get over it. “Who did you raise up to make that rat?”
“We don’t know, the best answer I can give you is that it was somebody or other’s pet of some kind, we think.”
“That’s even worse!” Twilight exclaimed.
“I think we can clear this up to your satisfaction Twilight, but it’s going to take some explaining.” The First Administrator said. “It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
Twilight and Naudia did not look convinced at all.
“A long time ago, in a time before the universe you know today, the Vatermorder was bored because the universe was without life in it’s earliest days.”
“That’s the thingy you’re so afraid of on Equestria isn’t it?”
“Yes. Anyway, he decided to keep an entire star as a pet, one of those red dwarf stars. This was the first Nuna Tarneq, a land spirit. We know it today as ‘The Faithful Star’. Because the Vatermorder is callous and distanced from the universe when he grew bored with the Faithful Star he abandoned it. We think that’s because life was beginning to show up in the universe and the Vatermorder was going to force them into wars.”
Twilight noticed that somebody had brought over what looked like a model star. Or at least what stars looked like if you looked at them through a telescope that drastically reduced the amount of light they output, and let you see the texture and look of the star without burning your retinas out. The Faithful Star looked small, and oddly enough for a ball of burning gas, subdued compared to Equestria’s sun. Twilight didn’t know where she got this impression but it looked lonely.
-------------------
The Faithful Star was alone.
In all the vast universe around it there was nothing but tiny islands of dead rock.
The Faithful Star awaited it’s master’s return. As it had for what felt like forever. It tried to reach out to those islands of rock, but it was too weak.
Then all at once the universe changed, violently. Spacetime itself attacked the Faithful Star as a wave of vacuum decay ripped everything apart, leaving nothing in it’s wake. Abruptly the Faithful Star even felt the familiar tug of those empty and dead islands of dead matter vanish as they were annihilated from existence.
The Faithful Star felt this wave of change wash over it, try and tear it apart, but it endured the change in the universe, imposing it’s own great will upon this new order. That was all it could do for the longest time, holding on, commanding the physical matter which made it up to stay as it was. Eventually the universe around it settled, and once more the Faithful Star was alone, even moreso than before.
But in enduring this change to the universe the Faithful Star had felt a change in itself.
The Faithful Star reached out into space, and reached into somewhere else, and commanded something into being so that it may have a friend. Nebulous and indistinct this was the first intelligent summon. The Faithful Star had created summoning magic that could bring into existence an intelligent being, from nothing.
Then as the Faithful Star rejoiced at it’s creation, the creation faded away, back to wherever it came from. This saddened the Faithful Star, but it could feel it’s command over the universe now, so it commanded another being into existence, and this too faded away.
And so it repeated thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, millions of times, the Faithful Star understood this creature it had summoned was always the same one, brought forth from some kind of other place. So once the first was stable and the Faithful Star came to understand what was happening. That it had given life to something that had been dead, from some leftover universe that came before, even before the universe it had been created in.
So the Faithful Star summoned another creature, giving it a different, more concrete form than the first, and another, and another, until the Faithful Star had summoned many of these things and it began to understand their nature. These dead things that had been given life by the Faithful Star were like it was, those who were without their master and they exuded a simple joy of a pet that had a master once more.
So the Faithful Star existed for the longest time like this, bringing into being creatures who exalted at being alive once more, who had something hanging unfinished on this side of death.
-------------------
“And that is when we discovered the Faithful Star, learned summoning magic from it and built a matrioshka brain around it. Originally the Faithful Star was quite close to where yunguaq split off, not that many light years away so it didn’t take long for us to find it.”
“So what’s the moral?” Twilight asked.
“Huh?” The First Administrator looked surprised.
“Stories like that usually have some kind of moral to them, what is the moral there?”
“History, while it has many things we can learn from, doesn’t always have a moral lesson to teach us.”
“So you’re telling me that out there, somewhere, is a living star that taught you yunguaq how to summon dead pets?”
“Yes.”
“What I don’t get is why this makes it okay to summon it in just to kill it.” Naudia said piercing to the heart of the matter.
“Think of it like this, do your shields feel pain?” The First Administrator asked.
“No of course not, that would make them worse than useless.”
“These summons feel about as much pain as your shields do and they are only temporary, even if you do tend to get the same ones when you call intelligent summons.” The First Administrator explained. “They are here to serve you, they are ecstatic even to have a new master in the physical world. They don’t view going to be de-summoned in battle and then resummoned again any different than if you were sitting on a couch with them or making them haul your luggage. They want to be useful, they demand to be useful.”
Twilight and Naudia still looked doubtful.
“Okay put it this way, you’ve had a dog before right?”
Naudia shook her head, and Twilight said:
“My mom was always more of a cat person and Spike doesn’t count as a dog.”
“I know about dogs though.” Naudia said.
“Okay, would you hesitate to train a dog to sit, or say, or heel?”
Naudia and Twilight could kinda already see where this was going.
“With summons and the way yunguaq think sending a summon in to be de-summoned is fine, it’s not lethal, it doesn’t hurt the summon, and it can keep them safe. They will inevitably be de-summoned anyway as summoned things are always temporary.” The First Administrator explained. “I can see why this is all strange to you, you’re still at the stage in civilization where war is something dangerous, some place people go expecting to die for their country or whatever. Yunguaq going into combat don’t expect anybody to die, nerteln excepted.”
Twilight remembered that show that Gwynn was watching during dinner, and could kinda get a glimpse into the way a yunguaq thought about things.
“I think I can understand it.” Twilight but the whole way of thinking was alien to her.
“Think of it this way, we are so advanced that the bar that we consider to be ‘peaceful’ moved up until people can have an actual serious fight without worrying about even hurting one another. That extends over to things like wars and such.” Gwynn said.
“And, if you’re not convinced later we can take you to the longest siege.” The First Administrator butted in.
“The longest siege?”
“It’s a siege that has been going on for about ten billion years, it’s a popular tourist attraction.”
“Yeah nobody has died there in the last 3 billion years.” Gwynn explained.
“I kinda hate that guy who died 3 billion years ago.” The First Administrator said. “The only reason he did it was to put a break in that record, ran out into the field of fire with no shield up or anything, and they revived him two days later. He was the kind of ass that causes new rules to be invented, and frankly the world could do without those kinds of people.”
“Wait if they brought him back does that mean you have some sort of resurrection magic or did he just not die?”
“That’s a bit of a… complicated question. A yunguaq can come back from just about anything that doesn’t destroy their brain.” The First Administrator explained. “Soul magic being an exception, but bringing them back isn’t magic, it relies on their brain surviving and basically the body healing itself the way you’d heal a cut. It still counts as death though because a yunguaq brain can only survive for so long like that before you start to lose the person inside.”
“And our brains are more… computer-like than a totally organic brain.”
“Anyway.” The First Administrator said. “That’s enough of a break for now, it’s time for you two to fight again, and we’re going to be making the breaks shorter after that as well.”
Twilight and Naudia stared at the First Administrator as he walked off and pointed at the guards he’d brought and said:
“Lets have them fight two this time.”
-------------------
Twilight and Naudia eventually worked their way up to fighting 5 rats at the same time, which turned out to be a disaster. It was thanks to the skilled guards command over the rats that it managed to be a learning disaster. There were all different kinds of rats as well, ones that used purple plaguefire, petals of pink holy magic, ones that used seed attacks that would sprout and dig into their shields, little hard to hit ones that ran on two legs and used shanks.
Apart from having to learn how to fight very quickly Twilight and Naudia also learned that if needed a yunguaq like themselves could essentially refuel on a rice like substance they called “ras”. Ras was rather strange, it stood for “Rice Adjacent Substance” and while it looked a lot like cooked rice the name made it feel… strange to Twilight, like it should be something else.
Twilight and Naudia collapsed into bed that night, exhausted. They had, by Twilight’s count, fought fifteen rounds against whatever kinds of rats could be summoned to fight them. And just as they were learning to fight the rats, the rats had been learning to fight them.
“Round five went well.” Naudia said optimistically.
“But they had already caught on to our strategy by round 6, I couldn’t smokescreen them out with my lichen spores after that.”
“I have a nasty suspicion that part of that was the rats holding back before then as well.”
They lay in their bed where they had flopped down.
“You’ve had to learn how to fight before, Did we improve over all that Naudia?”
“More than I would have expected from a changeling training program.” Naudia didn’t sound optimistic though.
Twilight took the massive effort to turn her head to Naudia.
“Changeling training programs take years, and despite my best efforts to numerate performance… well that turned out to be a bad idea overall. I can’t say objectively how much we improved, but it worries me that they’ve moved over to this from more normal teaching methods.”
“It does feel like they’re just throwing us into things to let us learn how to swim on our own.”
“What do you think of all this Twilight?”
“While I have been known to schedule everything out in advance, the downside to that is unexpected or forgotten things. Celestia sprung a test on me with only a days notice, and I stayed up late that night cramming to study.” Twilight winced at the memory. “There is only so much cramming can do to make up for proper studying. I don’t know if that carries over to actual fighting, but the First Administrator moving over to this I think says a lot more about what he thinks of the situation than he would want.”
“Do you think they’re more spooked by the nerteln, or that clock?”
Twilight glared at the guards on the wooden wall surrounding Knicknik.
They were abominations, the word just leapt to the forefront of her mind ahead of all the technical information she had about them.
There were plenty of forbidden documents that Twilight had access to throughout her later schooling under Celestia. It was a mark of pride that Celestia and her teachers had considered her responsible enough to know that she should never use them. And these guards represented the antithesis of everything she believed about magic.
An uninformed eye would have called them “an advanced form of necromancy” and left it at that. But Twilight could see, she could see the strands of magic in the air leading back into town. These weren’t some dead things risen up and puppeted through magic, nor were they some soul brought over from the other side and bound.
These guards were the pieces of a still living pony’s soul embedded into some kind of horrible construct. Whoever they were a part of was still alive, and likely chained up somewhere in town.Or maybe they weren’t.
Twilight didn’t know the exact details of this spell, it went beyond what the libraries of Canterlot would allow to exist, it went beyond what should exist. This was a new invention somebody here had borne into the world. She could guess some things about them right off the bat.
They would regenerate until they completely consumed the soul of whoever they were connected to. They could use whatever powers of the pony they were connected to, possibly multiple ponies. And Twilight guessed they could use all of the spells that their master knew.
Twilight could feel a hatred for them and whoever created these abominations burning in her chest. She could find no words to describe how she felt about these things and their creator. There technically weren’t any rules against these things, because no pony and nobody else on the entire planet would have wanted to create them.
Twilight tried to focus, but it was hard, those constructs were like a rash in her brain, they encouraged her to take rash actions.
“Twilight!” Naudia admonished. “What has got you so angry, you’re not even listening to me, calm down, your werewolf traits are showing.”
“I can’t, those… those things.” Twilight growled gesturing at the guard constructs on the wall. “They make me angry, it’s like my special talent just rejects their existence.”
Naudia hadn’t seen anybody in town react as harshly to those things, and they had to live in the same town as them.
“Okay, okay, I know how to deal with this, deep breaths, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13…”
Naudia let her go on like that for a minute, this was the most extreme “calming session” she’d ever seen out of Twilight. She’d only ever heard about this type from Cadance. Twilight’s wolf-like appearance did not abate.
“…1229, 1231, 1237, UGGGGHHH, this isn’t working.”
Twilight in the end had to turn away from the town entirely to focus on what Naudia had to say.
“Just to confirm with you again Twilight this is the signal.” Naudia cast her magic and Twilight could hear a staticy buzzing in her ears. “If that happens you have to enact Escape Plan A, all right?”
“I should be fine, I’ll… I’ll just see what you can do with these tablet things in the meantime, I don’t actually have to watch the town that closely do I?”
“So long as you can hear this signal.”
Twilight nodded, still not looking back at the town.
“Good.” Naudia didn’t seem entirely convinced. “I’ll be off then.”
-------------------
Naudia snuck in, this time she was cloaked, and she had a general idea of where this “Doctor Willow” lived. However it wasn’t really that simple and she couldn’t exactly ask for directions. She was left with no choice but to split up.
The town was disturbingly empty and quiet.
The first place Naudia visited turned out to be a restaurant, but it’s pretty clear it had been closed for some time. It was dusty, it smelled but not of food or moldy food just an enclosed space, it felt like an abandoned building with a scattering of tables and chairs in it. Naudia didn’t like places like this, it was like seeing a farm that lay fallow with neglect. Back home in ponyville Naudia knew changelings would pay good money to have the “(blank)-est restaurant in town” this was the kind of place that would erupt into some kind of themed restaurant serving “changeling specialties from the frontier” (Usually some kind of existing pony recipe changelings adapted).
Outside Naudia noticed something strange, the hoofprints in the dirt were… weird. It was like ponies walked entirely in single file along some kind of pre-determined line and just branched off whenever they got to where they were going. There were no hoofprints going to the restaurant she just left.
The next building Naudia visited was somepony’s home. But there was nobody home, it didn’t feel like a home. The walls were covered with aimless drawing, so were the floors, there was a stepladder that had been used to draw on the ceiling. The photographs on the mantle had been pulled out of their frames so somepony could draw on the backs, and the drawings were just left there where they finished drawing.
It took Naudia a good while to figure out why all of this made her feel uneasy, and when she did she wanted to leave immediately. All of the drawings were odd, things ponies wouldn’t normally try and draw. Somepony had drew a cork coaster on the wall in precise detail, but it had no shading, it had no style, Naudia didn’t even get the impression that a pony had intentionally drawn this. Next to it on the wall was a drawing, of the patch of wall to the side of the drawing. On the back of one of the photographs was a drawing of a corner of the empty photo frame the photo had been taken out of.
It felt like the house had been hollowed out from the inside.
Naudia left rather quickly, there wasn’t even a hint of emotional residue like you would get on something like a photograph in the entire household.
The next building she checked that wasn’t like that house was a warehouse.
This was not the place.
Naudia knew this was not the place before even setting hoof inside, but she had to see what was going on in there.
This was some sort of draining facility, where ponies were sitting lined up, unrestrained, and you could watch their souls drain away. There were more of those sailor ponies managing things here, like the one back at the werewolf settlement Naudia didn’t get any kind of impression that they could think for themselves. Naudia’s eyes were drawn back to the foul off brown substance that was a pony’s soul being drawn from their still living body into some sort of pool. There were strands flowing up out of that pool but they faded away after going a couple feet.
Everypony looked so… happy. Like a piece of abandoned furniture that lacked even a hint of emotional residue.
Naudia shook herself, she realized that she had been staring, the ponies hadn’t even reacted when she opened the door. She was tempted, just for a moment, to go up to one of them and see what would happen if she poked them in the ribs. She didn’t, but she had a strong suspicion of what would happen if she did.
The next building Naudia entered was grim. It was the general store, apart from being looted the shelves were still very orderly, Naudia suspected that the bits in the register and the safe in the back were probably still there.
But Naudia did not go very far into the general store, there was some sort of bean plant that had overrun the store. It was huge, it fruited unnaturally and grew in an orderly manner. The store’s windows had all been boarded up and not even a single shaft of sunlight entered into the building. Naudia had some idea as to why this plant had grown so large.
Naudia left, trying to avoid looking at the large round object wrapped in roots, it was stark white.
-------------------
Meanwhile outside of town Twilight was trying to find a way to avoid looking at the town itself while still trying to listen for Naudia’s signal.She couldn’t focus on the tablet.
She had to keep thinking up new ways to keep herself distracted, ways she wouldn’t become distracted from.
She started by sniffing around at the ground, just to see if she could find out what dogs saw in that. She almost thought she got the idea of it when she ran into some animal dung, and decided she couldn’t really see the appeal.
So she tried digging a hole, dogs seemed to like doing that. In the heavily root matted forest where she was at it wasn’t that fun. She kept running into roots, while her claws could cut through them like butter it would have been better if it was just dirt.
Twilight tried pacing around, back and forth, but she kept getting glances at the town whenever she turned around the wrong way. That did not help at all.
She tried counting all the plant species she could remember from her textbooks, and that was great, absolutely perfect actually. There were a lot of different kinds of plants around her, but she ran out of plants, then trees, and she hadn’t studied up on moss.
Twilight could feel her gaze being drawn back to the town and the-
Twilight jerked her head back away with a feral snarl.
Twilight thought that she shouldn’t feel like this, but those things, they were so terrible that Twilight skipped over every other emotion and moved straight on to rage. Something that looked like a pony should have given her some kind of sympathy for them, but they weren’t ponies, they weren’t even alive. She couldn’t pin it down in her head but any time she thought even slightly sympathetically about them she’d look over at them and something primal in her head screamed at her that they were bad, not alive, fake, not pony! And then her training in magic would give her all kinds of terrible, terrible facts about them.
Just looking at the town also reminded her of Appleloosa, the way it was built, the way it was laid out. Waiting around that caused her to make up scenarios in her head, what if one of those things on the wall was feeding off of Braeburn?
Twilight eventually had to sit down back herself against a tree and agitatedly wait. She didn’t want to admit it, but she was hoping that Naudia would send off that signal.
-------------------
The next building Naudia found was at least better than the last few, it was a bar that had been boarded up, and judging by the boards it had been broken into a couple times. The place practically exploded with emotional energy.
It wasn’t happy, it wasn’t useful energy, but the ponies inside here would still probably be alive.
Naudia heard the voice of that prospector pony she’d seen talking earlier as a leader, Meadow Dispach, probably.
“They’re picking us off!” It was nice to see that one of the guards wasn’t corrupted by all this.
“I know that, but remember what they did to Petzite when he tried to run?” Naudia only vaguely recognized that voice, she drew a blank on the name.
“We’re only about 50 feet away from the walls, y’all shouldn’t be arguing when you could be diggin’.” That was Pete, he seemed to be the leader.
“Pete, they’ve already broke in here three times. I’m pretty sure they know about the tunnel, they’re keeping us here intentionally so they don’t actually have to build a jail or something. They know where we’re at, they don’t need to see us to know where we’re at.”
Things escalated from there, and what was when Naudia decided to step in. She slipped underneath he barricaded door which looked like it had been broken down a couple times already
Inside the boarded up bar Naudia saw three ponies arguing. One was Meadow Dispatch like she expected, the other was Pete, and the third was a pony Naudia had only vaguely remembered from her first excursion into town, Calva or something. Things were quickly getting out of hand and Naudia couldn’t wait for the rest of herself to catch up, so she ended up decloaking as a roughly beach ball sized redback rat.
The building was filled to the brim with ponies that looked unhappy, ponies with dirty brown stained bandages, and even a few that were in much worse states lying at the back.
The arguing ponies did not notice Naudia, but a few of the ponies hanging around at the sidelines started to.
Naudia decided to speed things up and thumped at the floorboards to get their attention.
The three arguing ponies stopped arguing to turn to whoever had interrupted them only to find a giant rat standing there looking at them.
“That’s the most venomous looking little bugger I ever saw.” Pete said noting the black appearance and red stripe along Naudia’s back.
“It’s got wing, thingys?” Calva said confused by the wings without membranes.
“Naudia!” Meadow Dispatch said, “Did you come back here to help us?”
Naudia mulled over that one for a second, to be honest she hadn’t thought of these ponies at all since she left town the first time. She debated with herself if she should be honest for a second.
“I didn’t come into town for that,” Naudia could see Meadow Dispatch noticeably sag at that. “But I think now that I’m here, we can help each other.”
That deflated Pete who seemed to have been puffing up in anger at Meadow.
“What’s the situation around here?” Naudia asked.
“Doctor Willow has gone mad because of some new spell he cooked up. Every day or so they break in here and take ponies away.”
“I know that, what is the situation here, now, why haven’t you guys ran away?”
“Anypony who tries to run gets zapped, those guards are unnaturally fast. They don’t even need to hit a pegasus to knock them out of the air.” Pete explained. “So we’ve been digging a tunnel to hopefully get that out past the wall and escape that way.”
“The problem with the tunnel idea is that we’re still a long ways from even reaching the wall, and it needs to be a ways away from the wall to reach the woods outside of town.” Calva explained.
“How many ponies do we need to get out of here?” Naudia asked.
“Well there are about 50 of us in here, and they’ve caught almost double that. I think they have at least that many sailor ponies.”
“Anybody they caught is already dead.” Naudia stated grimly.
“So… only 50 ponies left in town then.” Pete and the rest of the ponies in the room looked down.
Naudia looked around at the ponies in the room, they looked like they hadn’t eaten too well in a couple days. They were all running on fumes, and they’d been enduring random incursions by those monsters outside.
Naudia was having to think about this, which caused her to unconsciously wave her bottlebrush tail around.
“Okay so, here is the deal-”
Naudia cast a spell to create a miniature lay of the land on the floor. But she had to stop because the ponies all started by it.
“Calm down, it’s just an illusion, anyways, I came in from here, and that’s where I’m planning on leaving from. I’m going to make a big, BIG distraction from here, keep an eye on the outside and you’ll know when it starts. I need all of you to try and sneak out on the opposite side of town, get into the woods and meet at this spot. There will be somebody waiting for you when you get there.”
“So you’re telling me you think you’ve got something that can distract these things long enough for us to escape?” Pete asked. “Because I’ve tried shooting them, it don’t do nothin, but they just get back up, they don’t even bleed.”
“Trust me I know what we’re fighting. If you run into trouble yourselves, fire that shotgun off into the air and I’ll come running as quickly as I can.”
“We can’t just leave right this instant.” Calva said. “We’ve still got ponies down in the tunnel and we haven’t packed up any kind of supplies.”
“I still have something in town that I need to find, where is Doctor Willow’s house?”
“Are you sure you want to go there, uhh little rat thing?” Pete asked.
“I have to see it for myself.”
“Are you absolutely certain you can make it out of there alive? I mean it’s one thing to go up against those guard… things, but some lads tried to take him out when all this went south. Didn’t even flinch, he doesn’t feel like a pony anymore.”
“Is he one of those guard constructs as well.”
“Oh no, he’s alive, he’s definitely alive. But he can suck all the warmth right outta a room just by walking through the door.”
“I never thought somebody could just get up with a spear in his chest like that.” Calva said. “Damn necromancer.”
“I don’t like werewolves.” Pete said. “But this Doctor Willow and his ‘cure’ for them is about the worst thing I could imagine.”
“He hasn’t even talked about curing werewolves for months.” Calva said, turning his nose up. “It’s all been about his ‘special project’ I’d bet my last dollar he’s why we’ve had so many ‘wild animal’ attacks recently.”
“I’ll never forgive him for what he did to Pyrite, healing a broken leg my left hoof.” Pete spat on the floor.
“I think I actually have all the info I need here.” Naudia said. “But I still need to start up the distraction away from where you are so you can escape. And I want to see what’s inside of this house myself. Where is it?”
“Are you sure?” Pete asked. “You’re doing us a lot of good here, I don’t exactly want to have to try and put you down or something once Willow gets his hooks into you. I barely know you.”
“I’ll be fine.”
The ponies explained to Naudia where Doctor Willow’s house/clinic was, it was clear on the other side of town. So it was fortunate for these ponies that Naudia had started her search where she did, or else she might not have run into them.
With that she scrambled under the barricade to head out.
“Y'all come back alive now!”
-------------------
Naudia arrived at Doctor Willow’s house. The whole thing was very much intact, looked almost untouched. There was a greater concentration of “ponies” here than back where she just came from. Doctor Willow’s house looked like your typical wooden desert western style construction.
Inside the front door was a waiting room, there wasn’t even a pencil out of place, the walls seem to be newly painted. But here and there Naudia could see that there were glints of gold, a golden pen, a golden picture frame, enough that she could notice it.
Through the back was a treatment room, nothing special, a golden stethoscope hung on the wall and the scale in here was accented with gold. Everything was perfectly in place, the syringes in the case were alphabetized.
Naudia noticed a glint when she opened the door, the deadbolt into the backrooms was made of gold.
The candle lights in here revealed to her that one of the nails on the wall was made of gold as well. This was some kind of office, there were a couple gold paperclips inside a pile of normal ones. Another golden pen, this time with a golden ink stand.
The next room was a living room, one of the legs on the couch was made of solid gold. There was a chicken leg on the coffee table, it looked to be coated with gold.
The hallway leading away with the living room was littered with piles of gold, they looked like somebody was going to either clean them up or sell them off “one day”. Naudia carefully stepped around the piles of gold spilled out on the floor.
The stairs leading up Naudia noticed something, a pip of gold, stuck to a hole in the wallpaper for whatever reason. Then another, a bigger one with a bigger hole. This one appeared to have eaten through the wall behind it.
In the upper hallway the walls and ceiling were just covered with these small growths of gold, eating away at the building itself, they had things like pieces of paper or wood stuck over them. All of it was slowly being consumed by gold.
Naudia stayed as far away from the walls as she could, she was being drawn to one of the rooms. The room with a metal door.
The metal door was entirely unlocked, like it was just like any other door in the house. The other side of the door had lots of scratches on it. It was a very heavy door.
The inside of the room looked to be freshly wallpapered, but you could see long indents underneath the wallpaper. The window was barred, and the bolts look to have been stressed.
Here is where the concentration of gold was the greatest, growths of it teemed along the walls. They watched you as you looked around the room, drawing your eyes like a spiraling whirlpool, deeper and deeper where their concentration grew greater and greater.
Until you had to look at the green mare sitting in a chair in the corner of the room. She had Red hair without a lock out of place. Her features were arranged to be stunning, like a bouquet of silk flowers. Her expression was that of serene peace, as if she would never want anything ever again.
Naudia couldn’t make eye contact with Pomology Pear.
“What a curious creature. I wonder what it tastes like.”
Naudia turned around to find Doctor Willow was standing in the doorway, staring at her, there was a strange kind of hunger in his eyes. On the ground in front of him was an unmoving squirrel, seemingly untouched but to Naudia it felt like it had been drained out.
Naudia gave a shrieking squeak, popped up into the air, and kicked Doctor Willow square in the chest.
Doctor Willow, for his part, flew straight out of the building through a couple walls.
He might have even crashed the next building over on the first floor like a ragdoll. But Naudia wasn’t paying attention to that, she was in full on blind panic mode, sending off the signal to Twilight and tearing at the bars on the window. If she’d have thought about it it would have been much easier for her to just rip them out of the wall, instead she broke the iron bars with her little rat paws, and scrambled through the window to shoot off at a dead run towards where Twilight was going to be.
She knew that wouldn’t have killed Doctor Willow.
Nothing that horrible, nothing that wrong, could have died for good just being kicked through a couple walls. Who knows maybe it did kill him, but it wouldn’t put him down for good, he would be up after that.
It was like Naudia could feel him behind her as she raced through town, knocking over lamp-posts and kicking off of buildings so hard she left a dent in them. The feeling of that thing was physically making her shake, it was actually hard to concentrate on bringing the rest of her back with her main body to gather up.
“I need to calm down, CALM, down.” Naudia said to herself. “It’s probably going to take a bit before Twilight can get here.”
Naudia sat there panting, feeling the cold sweat drip off her back.
She could still remember his eyes, bright green, but there were hints of that off brown creeping in through the veins. His cutie mark, a bundle of willow bark, was fading away. Almost everything else about him was perfect, from his facial features to his teal fur, not so much as a hair out of place. Naudia had felt emotions from him as well, strong ones, deep ones that seemed to claw their way out of an abyss to reach out to her, daring her to just take one bite, and all her problems would be over.
She couldn’t go and find Twilight now, she had to calm down. CALM DOWN.
The way he talked, the way he existed.
It did not help her mental state to have seen inside that thing.
She was grooming herself with her little rat arms, trying to stop herself from shaking.
By the time Naudia managed to collect herself she could already hear Twilight’s distraction at work, even halfway across town. She could already see some of the outer guards making a run for that side of town.
She gathered herself up, it turns out she had bolted and spread out all over town in a panic. It wouldn’t help if she linked up with Twilight when her left hoof was still hiding in town as a rat somewhere. The was one advantage though, she spotted the town ponies sneaking away away from the commotion towards the now emptied parts of town.
As a changeling again she stopped thinking so much like a rat, and stopped feeling like she should groom her hair to calm down. Which warranted further investigation, but not now. She didn’t feel any less chilled or shaken than before the transformation though.
While she was trying to calm down still she was hit in the head by a board with a nail in it. It actually took her a good long second to realize what had happened because it didn’t hurt at all. It was a weird thing to feel the point of the nail on her zoetic shield in a way her brain told her “this should hurt” but it didn’t, at all, not even so much as a scratch, the nail instead was bent flat.
Naudia stared down at the shattered board, part of which had broken in half over her horn and then looked up. She looked up in time to catch a spray of broken boards, shingles, and glass before they fell back below the roofline off in the distance.
Twilight was doing some serious work over there, which was great, it would give the ponies more time to escape. But this didn’t look like the sort of thing that would be easy to pull back from once Doctor Willow gets back up from what was happening. Naudia knew they weren’t ready to fight him yet, she could feel that in her bones. She could only pray that they had something for Twilight and Naudia to practice with before things came to a head here.
Naudia finally managed to get herself under control, and managed to dodge another piece of flying lumber, a broken window frame this time. She had to go warn Twilight about what was happening.
Naudia cloaked herself and began a careful approach to the commotion, it seemed that all the guards had moved over there automatically. An indication that they might be smarter than expected, possibly even pony level intelligent.
She was abruptly cut off from that train of thought when she arrived at the scene where Twilight was fighting.
It was disgusting in a way that Naudia had never personally experienced before.
Twilight’s zoetic shield blood was all over the place, that was a watery blue, that was difficult to actually see as blood. However there was a worrying amount of it around.
But the other stuff was… off, strange, it wasn’t blood, it was alive, it crawled. The pools of that offputting drab vomit brown viscous liquid creeped around of it’s own volition back towards the pieces of the fake guards.
The fake guards which had broken like a low quality glassmaker’s experiment. Their eyes whirling in their heads, teeth gnashing, and hooves scrambling with rage, even as they lay shattered on the ground like the hollow shells they were.
And at the center of all of this, in the middle of a destroyed house was Twilight in her full lichenthrope form. It had sounded a bit funny before, hah ha, lichenthrope made of wolf lichen, but here it didn’t look so funny. Twilight bristled with the greenish hair-ish lichen and emanated a raw fury even as she stomped a fake guard’s head flat, as it tried to flop around and bite at her. Clouds of spores fell off her like a cloak, and the guards that had stopped moving showed the most evidence of the lichen infestation.
Naudia’s eyes were torn between these two images, the horrible shattered guards, and her mare-friend having probably caught up to her in combat prowess. It was a strange mix of a new type of deep disgust, and a burning changeling pride in Twilight, who despite everything seemed to be doing pretty well.
Only “pretty well” though, she was clearly running out of steam here, Naudia sprang into action.
Naudia could use her summoned in bacteria to heal a target, and with all this battlefield debris from Twilight’s spells she would be able to get her back to tip top shape really quickly, hopefully before another set of guards could come in.
As Naudia was doing this though Twilight called her on the bug-phone-thing that as Naudia understood it was sorta like that tablet thing, but not as good at operating with hooves. It took her a couple seconds to actually answer the bug phone.
“Naudia? Where are you at?”
“What?”
Naudia took her head away from the bug-phone thing and waved at the lichen werewolf shouting:
“Hey, Twilight, over here, I’m right here!”
“Twilight” didn’t respond, didn’t even acknowledge her.
“Wait, Naudia, are you still in town?”
-------------------
Naudia marched up to Twilight who had been waiting for her in the forest far outside of town.
“What was that?!”
Twilight looked confused.
“I sent my lichenthrope pelt in there as a distraction?”
“You could have told me you were going to do that!” Naudia tried not to shout.
“But it was a perfect distraction, completely without risk.”
“But if I don’t know about it, then it looks like you’re in SERIOUS trouble. What would have happened if things had gotten worse than that, what if I ran into your pelt right as Doctor Willow got to it, I would have thought you died.”
Twilight cringed back at Naudia’s admonishment.
“I’m sorry.” She said in a small voice. “Gwynn told me about this when they heard we were doing a distraction, and I just didn’t think about it, it sounded so perfect in my head.”
“I’m sorry Twilight, it’s just that in an operation like this communication is key. Fighting against something like Doctor Willow isn’t going to be a walk in the park. I… I don’t want to lose you and if… if I thought that monster had…” Naudia was too choked up to continue.
Twilight wrapped Naudia in a hug until Naudia stopped crying.
“Does it really feel that hopeless to fight against him?” Twilight finally asked.
“I can’t describe the terror I felt on meeting him, I could feel it, he was standing over me, above me, like a cliff made of hollowed out chitin, I couldn’t take it, I kicked him through the wall of the building and ran in a blind panic for I don’t know how long.” Naudia barely paused, her eyes frantic, pupils small as she remembered the experience.
“I’m certain the First Administration has something that could help us stand up to him.” Twilight said rubbing Naudia’s back.
Naudia looked up at Twilight.
“You don’t think… this is a suicide mission, do you Twilight?”
It took Twilight a second to answer that.
“I never thought about it that way Dia, it’s just something that needs to be done.”
Twilight stroked Naudia’s hair to calm her down and organized her thoughts on this.
“When I looked into the Ryladite, that crystal in the First Administrator’s left eye, I saw, er, understood things. There was a war with a civilization of nerteln, a long time ago whose scars have never fully healed. The yunguaq call it the Second Annihilation War. I think you have an understanding of how strong a yunguaq is at this point Naudia.”
Naudia nodded at Twilight.
“This Second Annihilation War was so much worse than the first, the yunguaq had time to build up again, expand again, there were so many stars. And then three in four to three in five of everybody who was alive, died in that war against the nerteln. I cannot express to you how large that number is, it doesn’t fit into the pony mind or any conventional amount of things that any pony has ever dealt with. Stars torn asunder, galaxies left barren and dead where once every single star had as many yunguaq as there are insects on Equestria.”
None of this sounded real to Naudia, but she realized the numbers would line up with what they’d seen of the Chattler Anomaly, that great mystery of why the stars all shined in the same shade of infrared.
“I’ve never thought about this mission too much beyond getting it done because the consequences are too massive to think about. However I don’t think that the First Administrator would directly send us on a suicide mission after spending the last year converting me, in place, into this werewolf slime yunguaq.” Twilight wobbled one of her legs around for emphasis.
Naudia looked around awkwardly.
“I don’t know if that makes me feel better or not Twilight.”
“I feel confident that what we are doing is not hopeless, Doctor Willow doesn’t know about yunguaq magic, he’s starting from scratch. We aren’t fighting some kind of monster made before the universe was created, we’re fighting somebody finding their own way that has gone too far.”
“All right Twilight, I don’t know if I can trust the First Administrator on this, but I trust you.”
They left for where the ponies would be gathering, but they were careful to watch and make sure none of Doctor Willow’s monsters were following them there.
-------------------
When they did get to the meeting place that Naudia had set up they found it empty.
“They couldn’t have missed it could they?” Twilight asked.
“How? It’s the part of the creek with the rotted wooden bridge, there can’t be that many rotted bridges around here.”
There could have been ponies here, but it was hard to tell where they went as it was just a smooth rock beach, not counting if they had been pegasus, or if earth ponies had just forced their way through the creek.
“Or if one of the unicorns knew a rain boots spell.” Twilight said.
“How likely do you think that would be?” Asked Naudia.
“It is in the fourth grade book of unicorn spells.”
“So probably then?”
“I have no idea, I remember the spell… but I don’t know how many ponies would still know it from fourth grade.”
“I still know most of the stuff I learned in fourth grade.” Naudia said.
“The rain boots spell was in the back of the book, in the spell dictionary.”
“Oh, well I’ve never tried to read through a dictionary though.” Naudia said. “I did read the supplemental files for ‘Stable Supreme’ though.”
“Wasn’t that the power p-”
Just then Gwynn Hall stepped out of the bushes, muttering to herself.
“Damn GPS, can never judge distances right on it, looked like it was just over there- Oh, Twilight, Naudia! There you are, we need you back at the camp, things have gotten worse.”
“WORSE!?” Twilight exclaimed. “Were the ponies in town captured?”
“What no, we sent somebody to fetch them and send them on their way to the werewolf village.”
“Who?”
“Somebody trustworthy.”
-------------------
Earlier:
Meadow Dispatch, the defacto leader of the survivors of Knicknik was staring at a strange sight. It was a lizard creature standing upright and trying to communicate with her.
The lizard seemed to have a permanent mild smile on it’s face, a long chubby tail, soft looking paw-pads, and a flowery look about it. As in it’s scales looked like wild rose flower petals, It’s back legs were oddly long and had flaps as if they were supposed to be wings feathered again with flower petals. On it’s back was a kind of sail colored the same as it’s petal scales and entirely opaque, the kind of sail that Meadow had seen on some ancient creature in a museum.
The strangest thing of all was how it was trying to… communicate with them. The dragon had created in the air what looked like a crayon drawing of a field with a couple lines of trees, rows and rows of cabbages. There was a prominent werewolf waving at them and werewolves walking around inside in the distance. It was obviously supposed to be the werewolf village.
Below the crayon looking picture that had been created out of thin air, was a series of pictographs, rather like road signs or bathroom signs. The best Calva, Pete, and Meadow could work out was that this strange creature wanted them to go to the werewolf village.
“I guess we can trust it?” Meadow said looking at the awkward cartoonish creature’s mild smile. She was speaking half to it and half to Calva and Pete.
The creature squeaked, like one of those dog toys, and then set off at once to lead the way with a waddling enthusiasm.
-------------------
Twilight decided not to press the matter with Gwynn.
“I wish you would have left a sign or something to tell us that.”
“We didn’t want to leave any signs for Doctor Willow to follow.”
“Then why didn’t you call us on these, bug, phone, things?” Twilight asked.
Both Gwynn and Naudia failed to meet Twilight’s eye.
“I forgot about those.” Gwynn mumbled.
Gwynn perked up almost immediately.
“In in the interests of speed I came here so we could fly back on the back of Frankie!”
Naudia and Twilight looked at Gwynn blankly.
“Don’t tell me you already forgot flying on Frankie? You know, big flat rat?”
“OH!” Twilight and Naudia said in unison remembering the large flying rodent they rode on like a magic carpet when Gwynn had first met them.
Twilight and Naudia looked around expecting Frankie to abruptly show up.
They stood there waiting awkwardly for a long while, trying to make small talk and dance around the obvious fact that Gwynn was using this to cover up the fact she forgot Naudia and Twilight had portable phones. They did not bring up that it might actually have been faster to run back to camp at some point.
Finally after that agony of waiting, Frankie showed up oscillating above the tree line, and settling down to float above the creek in front of Gwynn. Again Frankie acted like an excited pet dog in front of Gwynn, the rat looked like somebody had seen a flying squirrel and a magic carpet and decided that the two should be combined, as a rat. It had a large head with a strange neck, it’s tail had fins on it, and it was still huge. The creature felt larger than Twilight had remembered, like Naudia and Twilight could have laid down on it’s wide flat back and stretched both of their hooves all the way out without bumping into one another.
“He looks bigger than I remember him.” Twilight said.
“Yeah, a good deal bigger.”
“Well he had to fit into the cargohold of that ship, we didn’t want him to be too cramped down there. He’s actually operating on the same slime tech both of you are, so he just left most of himself home for that run.”
Twilight and Naudia stared at Gwynn for a second before deciding that it wasn’t worth bothering about.
They got on Frankie and flew off to the First Administration’s camp.
-------------------
Back in the village, standing amongst the wrecked houses.
As Twilight and Naudia reached the encampment things seemed to be accelerating there, everybody was packing up. It was very strange, nothing had looked temporary, but all of it was very temporary. The whole camp couldn’t have even been here a week.
Time felt different for Twilight and Naudia, everything had been happening so fast that Twilight had actually forgotten what day of the week it was. She hadn’t even thought of trying to make a schedule today, or yesterday, and she couldn’t check her schedule to see when she’d missed last making a schedule.
Twilight just had to stop for a moment and realize how much this whole thing had consumed her life. Even when she and Naudia were out in the desert, she had privately sketched out a schedule in the sand.
It was time to eat, they sat down on different tables than they had just this morning.
“The table and dinnerware have been summoned in, they’ll dissolve in one hour.”
And with that, while they were eating the dinner container-ship thingy packed up and blasted off back into the sky again. It still used those thrusters that Twilight was curious about. The question burning in her head Twilight flagged somebody down.
“What did that flying restaurant use to fly around with?”
She had asked a strange bird creature whose broadcast system had identified as a “harpy”. His feathered face had opened up to reveal a fox face underneath the false feather face.
“Oh, that, I believe the Oily Flange normally uses cilia but since we’re in an atmosphere it was adapted with open cycle fission rockets.”
Twilights eyes bulged out.
“Isn’t that… dangerous? Like really dangerous?”
The fox-harpy just tilted his head at her.
“Isn’t that thing just spewing out uranium gas in it’s exhaust everywhere?”
“Well yeah, but mag-uranium dissipates less than a second after it leaves the nozzle.”
“But it’s dissipating that into the air, everywhere.” Twilight gesticulated wildly.
The harpy began massaging his temple.
“The, mag-uranium, dissipates into nothing, magically created materials are…” The harpy looked at Twilight as if measuring her. “Do you know what a virtual particle is?”
Twilight nodded.
“Well our magic works basically like that, all virtual particles that we have set up to perfectly annihilate themselves at a designated time. The mag-uranium gas doesn’t dissipate into the air, it dissipates into nothing.”
“But if you’re using the mag-uranium to do work then shouldn’t the work you’re doing with it cause some sort of problem? It’s offsetting the balance of the virtual particles.”
The harpy knitted his brow.
“It basically doesn’t matter if there is extra energy left in quintessence, it’s too large and dense to be effected.” The harpy looked to be stretching his knowledge a bit. “Sorry while I am a spell researcher, some stuff, like that, just doesn’t come up. It’s just not worth looking into optimizing because it’s always going to be different, you know because of the quantum fluctuations in the sub-atomic scale area we pull our magic from.”
Having enough shop talk the harpy walked off, and Twilight and Naudia finished their lunch, mulling over and discussing what they knew about this strange new branch of magic and science.They ended up with a lot of interesting questions they wanted to ask later.
When they looked up from their lunch they saw that a tent had been set up, the whole thing looked weird. The tent was dark blue and the cloth looked thick, and extremely heavy, like it had been stuffed with lead.
“It’s lined with lead.” Said Gwynn Hall coming up next to them.
Yunguaq were circled around it with menacing looking equipment to set up some kind of geodesic dome over the tent as well. Other yunguaq were casting spells to create plates to slot into the dome covering the tent.
“What is THAT for?” Naudia asked.
“Your baptism Naudia.” Gwynn said. “Everybody in the First Administration recognizes how hard it is to stand up to a nerteln, so we galvanize those who must fight against them. I can say no more about the process, but we are ready when you are.”
“Is it going to hurt?” Naudia asked.
Gwynn had to consider that question for a minute.
“I honestly don’t remember.”
“Why aren’t I getting baptized?” Twilight asked.
“Because you technically already got an uncontrolled one when you slashed at the First Administrator’s face.” Gwynn frowned at Twilight.
“Is it seriously going to be THAT bad?” Naudia asked having seen Twilight in the hospital bed next to hers.
“Twilight was exposed to Camna’s blood, that is NOT part of the process. In addition her aggression towards him triggered a defense. Today will be far less destructive, far more… controlled than that. There will be no element of ‘luck’ as to if you survive or not.”
“Well, if you’re certain that you can face down the nerteln without it, we can skip it.”
Naudia’s mouth scrunched into a thin line. She shrank back into herself.
“Remember if your courage fails you, then Twilight will be fighting the nerteln on her own.”
Naudia’s eyes had met with the ground.
“I’ll… I’ll go through with it.” Naudia said ashamed.
Gwynn placed a hand on Naudia’s shoulder.
“There is nothing wrong with being afraid to fight a nerteln. They are monsters, abominations that should not exist in this world. Nobody should be put into a situation where they have to fight one, that is what the First Administration is for.” Gwynn’s expression turned into a scowl. “That’s why it’s so frustrating that we have to work at the whims of some sleeping cosmic entity.”
Gwynn looked up at the empty sky, seemingly at something Twilight and Naudia couldn’t see.
“But we have a plan for that.”
-------------------
The inside of the lead lined geodesic dome was empty. Twilight and Naudia’s hooves clanked on a metal floor that seemed to be full of water for whatever reason. It wasn’t dark, but the environment was very dim. The whole thing was small and contained two plush reclining chairs with restraints, and a set of rolling cabinets. Naudia noticed that the restraints clearly meant for a horned head included some sort of enchantment.
“For your own safety your magic will be blocked for the duration of the baptism.” The First Administrator's voice came from behind them. He had not been in the room when they looked around. “Also please remove your bagrats and place them in here, they will be returned to you.”
Naudia had honestly forgotten that she had a rat hanging around with her somewhere in her hair. Sure it was a nice warm feeling around the back of her neck, but things were so hectic that she had forgotten it wasn’t just part of herself split off. She and Twilight placed their bagrats into a cage where they were quickly whisked out of the dome.
“What is all of this? What is going to happen to us?” Naudia asked.
“I will be imparting you with a fragment of my memories. An understanding of nerteln. This will involve you looking into the Ryladite, so for your own safety you will be restrained.” The First Administrator smiled at them. “By the way, as for one of your rewards, should you survive all of this, I have arranged for you two to meet with The Oracle of Adak.”
“The what?”
“The Oracle of Adak is the most advanced isentropic computer ever constructed. I have arranged for 3 hours of time with Adak for you two as well as a data repository for your personal use.”
Twilight didn’t quite understand.
“She is a wellspring of knowledge beyond anything you could possibly imagine. If there is a known answer to a question Adak can answer it. The data repository should be larger than the collective of all Equestrian knowledge.”
Twilight’s eyes grew wide, Naudia’s jaw about hit the floor.
“You’re joking right?”
The First Administrator scowled.
Naudia realized how stupid that question sounded being directed at him.
“Moving on, we should begin the baptism, I would like to ask you two to strap yourselves down in those chairs with magic, then we can turn on the anti-magic field and begin.”
Twilight and Naudia reluctantly got into the chairs, they were quite comfortable, like these chairs were designed for them. There was even a spot for Twilight’s wings. It felt very strange to be strapping yourself down into a chair like this.
“For your own safety we will be suppressing your magic during the procedure, exposure to the Ryladite should have no lasting consequences.” The First Administrator glared at Twilight. “Unless you do something stupid. This procedure has been done trillions of times and the only points of failure have been people holding out knives and such to cut their bonds to try and TOUCH the Ryladite.”
Naudia could feel something turn on in the chair behind her, and suddenly it was like somebody had put a blanket over her magic.
“Are you ready?” The First Administrator asked.
Naudia tried to nod, but her head was strapped in.
“Then we can begin.”
-------------------
In the beginning the universe was a single point of chaos, a catalyst for the great reordering, but it existed as such for only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second before it exploded outwards at the speed of light. This was not the beginning of the universe, as there was a universe before this universe, and possibly one even before that.
The old universe had matured for 13 billion years until a race called humans developed a method to alter the laws of reality. The dream was to create a mythological force called “magic”. But the procedure went wrong, this magic was malformed, and thus were born the nerteln and all the evil that comes with them.
The nerteln expanded outwards, their unassailable influence sinking and entrenching deep within the star system Sol. Until one day, a resistance group operating around the moons of a planet called Jupiter, were pushed far enough into a corner that they activated the Briggs Machine.
True magic was born as well as the new universe. In that destructive moment the entire old universe died, consumed by the great reordering. The nerlten were supposed to have died, their very existence torn apart by the violent birth of the new universe.
But the Yunguaq, those that separated themselves from the monstrous humanity who had lost their naklekun, their compassion, survived. They surveyed the empty universe before them and the first spell of sovereign magic was cast.
-------------------
Camna put on his glasses. It was over.
Naudia lay limp in her chair, her breath coming in shallow gasps. She knew things now, like the things Twilight had told her, and more. She understood the depth of the horror of the nerteln, something she could only glimpse at with her emphatic abilities.
It helped to know all this, know they could be fought, Doctor Willow no longer seemed unassailable. But she could feel it taking a toll on her mind and body. She lay there, just trying to recover, trying to straighten out her head.
An eternity of mentally scrabbling to pull herself together later somebody was removing her binds, she didn’t even think to try and remove them with her magic. Doing something with her magic felt beyond her at that moment.
As soon as her left hoof was free she reached out to grasp Twilight’s hoof and held on. An anchor in a world that was still spinning, reshaping itself around the revelations she had just experienced.
Eventually Naudia began to feel slightly better. It was like waking up from a terrible reality.
She realized that she and Twilight had pulled their chairs up next to each other.
It took Naudia quite a few minutes after that to fully recover, or at least it felt like that. She never let go of Twilight’s hoof the entire time. About halfway through somebody came in with some snacks to help them back up onto their feet.
Even though they had more or less recovered Naudia didn’t feel up for much, she and Twilight leaned on each other they both felt like going to bed.
“Now that is out of the way, I think it’s time to dangle the carrot in front of you two.”
Naudia slowly dragged her gaze up, until it could meet with the First Administrator again.
“It’s not going to be as exhausting as that last one is it?”
“Far from it. It’s as easy as looking at a tee-… A picture. It should actually be very relaxing after what you just went through.”
Gwynn was holding two things that looked like they went over Twilight and Naudia’s eyes. They looked a bit hacked together, like the hole for their horns was still covered with black duct tape.
“If you put these VR helmets on, we’ve put something together to show you the future I have planned for you. A prophecy and a promise.”
Standing up straight to put on the helmet, at first Naudia could only see darkness, like she had put one of Rarity’s sleeping masks on. After a moment there was light, and she was somewhere else.
She was standing in front of a window. Outside the window was space, but a space like she’d never seen before. Close by, or not, it was hard to tell because the thing looked huge, Naudia recognized it as one of those huge rotating drums they visited like on Zaohm. The habitat had lots of other facilities attached to it’s living wooden surface as well, places where spaceships were being built, places where you could see in and there was everything from farms to ski slopes. The habitat was practically buzzing with activity.
Then there was another one along ways off, and another one, shining dots, littered the sky in orderly lines slowly orbiting around the sun. They looked like stars.
Then the view from the window began to move with no sensation of movement. Naudia realized Twilight was standing beside her because they both let out an exclamation as it looked like they were going to crash into the side of the rotating habitat. But nothing actually did happen, and they were inside of it now.
Inside was a city, a lot like Manehatten, and like Manehatten there were ponies there, pegasai flying about managing clouds, unicorns walking around levitating things in their magic, Changelings buzzing just above the crowds, earth ponies flying around on various things that looked a lot like a folding camp chair with wiggling hairs on sticks that seemed to move them along. There were all kinds of street vendors, and lots of changelings, Naudia could even spot a couple yunguaq wandering the streets as well. The middle of the street was a canal, surrounded on the sides by a beach and a boardwalk, there were little fillies and colts playing in the clear waters.
The ponies even exhibited traits that Twilight and Naudia’s new bodies had, that sort of werewolf transformation, the slime-ish stuff they could do. It was a lot like the city they had seen inside of Zaohm, but filled with ponies.
It looked so real, like they were there, looking over an actual city. She turned to the side to look over at Twilight who was staring out at the cityscape mouth wide open.
The view from the window moved out of the rotating habitat and away from the city inside the drum and to another drum, this time orbiting the outside of the drum habitat. The view took them through the various places outside of the habitat, the ship maintenance places, something that looked like a camping ground around the entire circumference of the drum. There were farms, factories, what looked like a docked cruise ship, and a water park.
All inhabited by ponies and changelings.
Eventually the view pulled back to look at the solar system at large and Naudia got an idea of how uncountably many habitats like that there were around this star. There were so many that from certain viewpoints they looked like a fog that blocked view of the star entirely. These tiny points of dust that made up an opaque fog around a star were all habitats with at least the population of Manehatten, possibly more. The scale of this pony civilization was staggering, utterly incomprehensible in scope.
Naudia could find no words to describe this, there was nothing to say.
She turned to her side to see Twilight gazing out across the seemingly endless expanse of pony civilization.
Naudia sidled over and pressed her side against Twilight and looked out the window, they were flying through another habitat full of ponies.
-------------------
Eventually they took off the viewing “Vee Arrr” helmets as the First Administrator called them. It was strange taking them off, they were exactly where they were before with a couple cameras having been set up on tripods in front of them.
Naudia’s mind needed to adapt to the idea that they weren’t flying through space, a pair of ghosts looking at a huge pony civilization though a window. She almost fell over at first because she had lost her bearings.
Looking around the geodesic dome they had been “baptized” in was already being taken apart. Even as she was looking around, the rolling table they put their helmets down on was already being wheeled away. She could already see outside as some of the triangular dark metal plates had been taken off.
The First Administrator was reading a book in one of the chairs they had been sitting in, and there was a question burning in Naudia’s mind as brightly as a star.
“Was that… real?” Naudia had. “Is there someplace really like that out there?”
“No. There is no place like that out there.” The First Administrator said. “Think of that as an advanced concept blueprint, me showing you a possible future for your species. If things go well with my plan that WILL be the future of ponies, changelings and all races on Equis.”
All of that, Naudia could not even begin to imagine how much ‘all of that’ could even be the scale would not fit inside her head, for ponies.
“I would also like to apologize for not being able to fully establish the scope of this civilization to you, we were only able to really put together something that showed the scale of the primary rotating habitat layer and not the outer system colonies, solar polar collectors… Tell me, did you notice if they had time to put in the starlifting operation?”
“What? There is more? How could there possibly be more than what we saw? What is ‘starlifting’?” Twilight buzzed with questions.
“You know, starlifting, mining a star.” The First Administrator said as if that explained everything.
Twilight and Naudia could not even comprehend what he meant, they could only imagine trying to land on a star with a bucket and a shovel to “mine” it.
“You use rings of magnetic field satellites to compress the star’s outer layers causing matter to fly off the top of the star. You filter out all the hydrogen and dump it back into the star and use everything else.”
“OOOOOH.” Twilight and Naudia said simultaneously, that made sense. Then it hit them the kind of scale an operation like that would have to exist on.
“No, we didn’t see anything like that.”
“A pity, I’ve always liked how they looked.”
It took them a while to shake that shock off, when they finally did they noticed that the camp was seriously starting to empty itself out.
The only thing seemingly not being touched was a set of what looked like camping chairs, the fold up ones that Twilight had considered bringing to Rainbow Falls. Except they didn’t look normal, below the arms were at pair of sticks with… a hairy broom? Sticking out the back. And the chair legs looked like they were wearing fur ruff bell-bottoms.
It took a second looking at them to realize what they were. The sticks were obviously some kind of weird organic looking broomstick or mop, and the bell-bottoms were decidedly rocket nozzle shaped. Naudia could only conclude that these were meant to fly, but there was no place for any sort of power pack or something like that.
Gwynn Hall ambled over to them to explain. She was holding Twilight and Naudia’s bagrat cages.
“These are your new transport methods, broomsticks, we’re going to need you to move something kinda large at a moments notice. When we’re done here you can keep them.”
“I guess they kinda look like a witch’s broomstick.” Naudia said.
“It’s based on historical yunguaq broomsticks, over time the name never changed but this turned out to be the best folding design to carry around and be comfortable on.”
To demonstrate Gwynn placed a hand on one of the armrests and activated the strange moldy sticks. The moldy sticks sprung to life in a way that would look sort of like a broomstick if you’ve only had one described to you in a hurry. The strange mold-looking strands that were supposed to be the broom head wiggled around in the air and glowed blue. So did the strands around the rocket nozzle bell-bottoms.
-------------------
Twilight watched as Naudia was flying through the air on a folding camp chair attached to some sticks with glowing mold. It was a moment where she just had to sit down and take stock of the situation.
She had been turned into an immortal hermaphrodite slime-werewolf, had been given combat training as a different type of werewolf, she was going to be fighting a soul eating monster in the next twenty four hours. And she was watching her fillyfriend fly around on a camp chair like it was some kind of roller coaster.
The broomstick didn’t seem to be super duper fast, she was sure Rainbow Dash could do better, and so could some pegasi. What it seemed to really beat them at was agility, it could do tight loops, corkscrews, fly upside down, fly sideways, outright spin in place in the air. Twilight was certain that even Rainbow couldn’t have pulled off as tight a helix as that chair. Naudia always seemed to be very much in control as well, almost like the chair reacted to her intent and was working WITH her, particularly with how she managed to dodge that tree.
Eventually, after much yelling, they managed to get Naudia to come back down to earth.
“That was SO MUCH FUN!” Naudia exclaimed, her face was beaming, Twilight hadn’t seen her enjoy something THIS much since they met Daring Do.
“You can keep the broomsticks when you’re done with all this by the way.” Gwynn said.
“REALLY!?” Naudia was right up next to Gwynn like a foal unable to stand still.
“Yep, and now it’s your turn Twilight.”
“Uhhh, well… I don’t know if I want to do all that, that looks a bit much for me…”
“You just have to learn how to fly the broomstick, not do tricks on it.”
“I’ll tell you what Twilight, I’ll fly my, broomstick,” Naudia had wanted to call it a chair. “Right next to you the whole time and you can take it as slow as you’d like at first okay?”
Hesitantly Twilight agreed.
Her first flight on the broomstick was a shaky thing, prone to pitching in the direction of one of the chair legs and then jerkily stabilizing back to level. It took her far longer to get the chair even a couple feet off the ground and she dug a few holes in the dirt doing so.
The problem wasn’t that she lacked control, Twilight realized, it was that this chair had too much control. It was like she was over-mashing the buttons beyond what they should be able to do with the strength of her magic. That was a theme that seemed to carry through with her bumbling exploration of how to fly this broomstick.
Naudia could do tricks, Twilight had power and speed. Naudia could dodge in and out from between the treetops, Twilight accidentally knocked the top off of a spruce tree.
Coming down, spitting spruce needles Twilight was deemed “good enough to fly above the treeline.”
That was when Gwynn started filling them in on the plan they had for dealing with Doctor Willow.
The Werewolf Queen Expat Eclipse was having a tiring day. He was both a werewolf and a pony so a lot of days could be tiring, he wanted to be a werewolf, werewolves were cool. But he was also a pony and that caused problems, ponies couldn’t digest meat in any great capacity, I mean sure salmon tasted great, and once you got them open crab was also great. It was extremely important to keep his diet working around specific things.
The few rumors he’d heard about werewolves overseas were that Griffons didn’t suffer from these same problems at all. Their problems were more related to going from beaks to no beaks.
Ah well, he mentally sighed, The grass was always greener.
Moving back to the problem at hand he was fulfilling his duty as a cabbage farmer, trying to pull in an early harvest to help out the poor souls who had staggered in from Knicknik. Eclipse would have never even dreamed of asking them to do anything right now, even the ones who looked like they were functioning were just barely managing to keep it together.
He was however, looking forward to later when he could act as an emotional support werewolf.
It was when he was loading up cabbages from the basket, a very nice grass basket that he made himself, into the wagon when he noticed something up in the sky. It wasn’t a pegasus, and at first he couldn’t make out what it was, once the two objects got closer he had an idea but it was still strange.
It was Twilight and Naudia floating over on a pair of folding camp chairs each carrying a large wooden box behind them. It was the strangest thing he had seen all day, which wasn’t saying much because Eclipse was wrapping up an invigorating day inspecting and harvesting cabbages.
Naudia landed gracefully, her chair and box gently settling to the ground with ease. Twilight attempted to do a pegasus walking landing, which ended up with her tumbling end over end, thankfully the box she was carrying simply thudded to the ground and scraped to a halt. Eclipse could feel it hit the dirt from where he was standing, it probably could have hurt Twilight. Thinking about what she had done the other day though, maybe not.
Hastily he helped Twilight get up and clear the mud off her face. Unfortunately she had the poor timing of crashing into the cabbage field post watering.
Sputtering and spitting dirt Twilight said: “First learning how to fly as a pegasus, and now this, I wish I had more time to learn, or that anything I learned carried over.”
“I don’t know what to say Twilight, it’s just easy for me to fly these broomsticks.” Naudia quipped.
“That’s because they fly like an insect does, hovering, tricks, not like a normal pegasus does.”
Then Twilight did something strange, the air around her shimmered for a second lifting all of the mud off her skin. Then in an orderly fashion all of the dirt and mud flowed around her to the ground as if carried by a stream of water.
“I don’t suppose you could teach any of the unicorns here how to do that spell, could you Twilight?” Eclipse said gesturing with a dirt splattered hoof. “it would make working in these fields so much more pleasant.”
“Sorry, not right now, we came here on business.” Twilight said, not looking happy about that.
“Doctor Willow is heading this way.” Naudia said grimly. “And he’s bringing an army with him.”
“Oh,” Expat Eclipse said. “Oh buck.” As he felt his heart sink into his hooves.
Looking at the two, he glanced over at the two large wooden boxes they brought over.
“I suppose those are some kind of way to help us escape, like more of those… uh flying chairs?”
“We aren’t going to be running. Doctor Willow dies here.” Twilight said in such an easy matter of fact way that it gave Eclipse chills.
“Where did he even get an army? Did some big group from down south come in?” Expat Eclipse asked.
“He managed to figure out one of my spells, so he spent a lot of time summoning monsters made out of lichen.” Twilight frowned as she said that.
“That’s why we have to kill him here. The powerbase he already has is too large, so to aid in that we brought you guys some... partisan weapons.” Naudia cracked the lid on one of the wooden crates and pulled out something that looked like two wands with a rifle grip. “Ever fired a gun before?”
“Yeah, we got timberwolves up here,” Eclipse said. “They stay away, most of the time, but just past the fall storms they start to try and come after us. Lots of branches get knocked off trees, see, so that means lots more stick wolves.”
Naudia tossed Eclipse the “partisan weapon”, instantly he could tell a lot about it. It was designed after a double barrel, over under, break action. Fiddling with at it with his hooves he got it to open up revealing an empty box where presumably the… ammo? Went, it was a “gun” with wands instead of barrels so he had no idea how that would work.
Looking at the outside of the wand-gun thing it had a kinda boxy-straight line filled filigree in some sort of amber gemstone. The wood was fine though, probably the cleanest woodwork he had ever seen, like the whole thing was made from a single piece of wood, not even carved, like somebody had found some kind of naturally shotgun-shaped wood suitable for making this magic wand-shotgun.
Looking over the crate was full of these things all folded up, tied together with strange coiled up living vines and what were obviously leather ammo pouches, but only two cube shaped ammo things per gun. There were also other things in the box buried beneath the strange shotguns.
“We don’t have a whole lot of time, you need to get anybody who can hold a staff or a gun up here so we can get them ready for Doctor Willow’s arrival.”
-------------------
Twilight was surprised by how many ponies were here to fight from Knicknik. They looked scuffed, beaten, hungry, but there was a fire in their eyes. These were frontier ponies who lived in a place that didn’t have anything as big or as scary as a hydra or a star beast, but she realized it made up for that with and abundance of things like spruce timberwolves, cast off windigo fragments, and the lantern scorpions luring cold travelers to their doom.
There were also more weapons in the crates than just the shotgun, but they were more familiar to ponies, well familiar-ish. The first was the “resistance pistol” it was a “pistol” built as simply as possible, didn’t even have a barrel, the “bullets” were little flying rings like it was a toy, and you fired it by pulling on a string at the back of the gun which spun up the rings. It was cheap, slow to fire, but when it hit it ignited in a green flame which summoned a little rat to attack the target. A space efficient emergency weapon for ponies on the backline.
The last weapon in there was the staff, it was a similar ring rod setup as the shotgun, but the staff looked ceremonial. The paper cartridges were instead two long bundles of ribbon-like paper strands attached to the head of the staff. The head of the staff had a gemstone that had a strange blown glass like look to it, but when it was activated it left a trail in the air. Looking into it tended to make ponies turn back to find that there was nothing behind them. The staff itself was wrapped in fireweed and had a set of locking dials on them.
Twilight didn’t like those dials.
Sure there was an explanation and whatnot for them, a history of yunguaq children forced to be send off into space, raised by a couple animals, an AI, and importantly an atusaaq rabbit.
Twilight still didn’t like that the staff summoned in a shield around the user in the shape of a rabbit in a maid outfit. That was what those dials were for, adjusting the summoned in… well maid rabbit shell, anything from a halloween costume to something that actually looked like a work garment. Basically, she was told, what an atusaaq rabbit would wear. And the one with shorts instead of skirt, in her opinion, ruined the whole look too.
Twilight had not yet been able to get Naudia to dress up like one of the Canterlot Castle maids. She just couldn’t get Rarity to make a second-
Anyway, the staff was the most complicated to use, and it was fortunate that it came with an inbuilt tutorial on how to use it. It was surprising how many of the werewolves, mares and stallions gravitated towards the staves once they knew what they did.
“They’re werewolves Twilight, they like change.” Eclipse told her. “I’m sure you noticed that not all of their transformations match their pony forms.”
“What? No I haven’t.”
“The werewolf form you’re given doesn’t always match the sex of the pony underneath.”
“But… then why aren’t you guys looking for a cure?” Naudia said puzzled.
“Every werewolf here is here because they want to be a werewolf. Those that don’t head down to Canterlot or Manehatten to get cured.”
“Then why the hay was Doctor Willow looking for a cure?!” Twilight exclaimed.
“The cure works with harmony magic. It only works on a werewolf who WANTS to be cured.”
Eclipse spat onto the ground.
“Doctor Willow was looking for a way around that.”
Twilight and Naudia cringed back in horror.
“How was that even allowed?”
“Small town, thick walls, maybe you show up one day with some scratches and say a werewolf attacked you, completely out of control. Enchant a garden hoof rake and leave some claw marks on the wall, show ponies that door where you’ve got a really angry werewolf and in the right light, to the right ponies word spreads. Turns out he was behind all that cultist business right?”
Twilight and Naudia nodded.
“Well then it turned out it was very easy to get us to stop talking to one another once that started up. That’s how things got so bad out here.” Eclipse’s gaze dropped to the ground. “We never did find out what he was doing until it was too late. Thought Miss Pear just lost it for some reason.”
There wasn’t really much more to say after that. They turned back to watch the ponies and werewolves practicing with their yunguaq provided equipment.
-------------------
Doctor Willow looked out at his army and smiled. These lichen wolves were perfect servants, cheaper to maintain than one of his fake pony guards, cheaper to create, and they seemed stronger to boot.
He had spent all of yesterday and last night creating enchanted discs that would create them. each ramshackle enchanted wagon wheel “disc” had been working since he had finished them, and they were working now still growing the numbers for his army.
The werewolves, they would feed his research, they would help him understand the limits of this new magic. Creation, destruction, the fabric of the universe itself was at his command. There was nobody else that deserved this power, this honor, this responsibility to reshape ponykind.
-------------------
“This is chandelier actual, bandit burner you are cleared for immediate launch. I say again, this is chandelier actual, bandit burner you are cleared for immediate launch.”
“Copy that.”
Gwynn Hall felt the acceleration of the small craft push back on her as they lifted off from the cloaked chandelier city hanging down from space. She didn’t even blink as they blasted through the launch bay which seemed to instantly close behind them.
Their ship’s cilia thrusters were specifically positioned for atmospheric flight, working with the shape of the hull to destructively cancel out any noise. It cut through the air unseen and silent, like a ghost.
Gripping onto the ceiling handholds Gwyn turned around, she was in her full combat werewolf form, she looked the part of the high ranking assassin that she was. Coming back into the main compartment of the ship to the three elite military squads sitting anxiously.
This wasn’t your typical special forces mission, this was against a nerteln. The only people who wouldn’t be nervous about that would be too stupid to make it into a group like this.
“ALL RIGHT.” Gwynn barked. “When we touch down there shouldn’t be anything out there but vegetables and tenders. Redback squad, I want every tender dead within five minutes of touchdown. Centimus squad I want you right behind them planting charges. Mark down any location we will have to use a Rod Cavitation Warhead on.”
Gwynn turned to the other side of the room.
“Unglu squad, I want you to do a flyover around and outside of the town, find any remnants we might have missed, we do NOT want to come back down here. Tractor Tanks, I want you between us and the enemy. They come back and you WILL hold the line until we are ready for evac.”
As they touched down in Knicknik Gwynn got a taste of the air here, it was technically clean air, no smoke, no pollution. But there was something much more foul that she could feel, it made her hair stand on end. Everybody getting out of the transport felt it too, they were all in attack mode as soon as they left that door.
You never got used to it. People who got used to it either quit, or they died.
The blanket of stress on the group caused all of them to lower their voices, they were somewhere they should not be. In whispered tones they began to carry out their tasks with one eye over their shoulders.
-------------------
Twilight was watching the atuusaq rabbits at work, well the werewolves with the atuusaq rabbit shaped shielding. There was a wide display of different ones out on the field, but they all had a few things in common, their ears were wreathed in pink flames that resembled, fireweed stalks, similar to the pink flames coming out of the top of the staves.
They also all had a gathering of 8 similarly dressed little rabbits that they summoned in. The little rabbits all held one of those pink fireweed flower flames in their hands like a candle. All of the rabbits were shawled in a ghostly aura that dangled off them like cloth, with colors like blown glass. It seemed to not just drift behind them, but to lag behind them as if multiple things in the same place were catching up to reality.
And then there was how they fought. Twilight was wondering why she and Naudia weren’t given such staves at first because these inexperienced ponies very quickly figured out how to use them. They had a rotation of attacks down flawlessly sending pink flames at their targets as well as other attacks with that ghostly aura within minutes.
The rabbits were commanded to attack in one of two ways, spraying that pink fireweed magic at a target, which resembled a snake of fireweed flowers in pink fire. That spell tended to leave a stalk standing out which went to seed and blew cotton spores onto another target. The other spell seemed to take advantage of that weakness to send a ghostly slash at that damaged point which caused many more ghostly cuts to happen.
Most of what they were doing in the background was making sure that the rabbits could keep doing this, granting them plantlike wings, stoking the pink flames they had, and occasionally granting them MUCH stronger attacks.
That was when Twilight realized what was wrong, and why she and Naudia had been taught what they had been taught. These ponies with staves and their tutorials were not only weaker than Naudia and Twilight, they were inflexible. In five minutes these ponies had gone from the skill floor to the exact skill ceiling of how to use these partisan weapons.
And that worried Twilight. She knew that right now she was a big fish in a small pond, the scale of how strong she was compared to any antagonist she had ever faced at this moment was incomprehensible. Chrysalis wouldn’t be able to so much as touch her mind, Discord’s magic would be utterly ineffectual, Tierek could blow away a mountain, but even if every ounce of force he had was concentrated into a single spot on her shielding it wouldn’t even leave a scratch. She had command over space itself, time magic could not effect her.
And there was a monster coming this way lineaged from a type of magic so powerful, that a single planet worth of them brought a multi-galactic empire to the brink of extinction.
A monster who, presumably on examining fragments of her lichen wolf torn off in the city, had created an army of them. No, more than that, he had enchanted some old wagon wheels to constantly spew out more and more of them.
Caught between that monster Doctor Willow and an incomprehensible eldritch god sleeping below Equestria, she was working off of a plan she didn’t entirely trust.
“Drop this glyph onto the ground, put some magic into it, and protect it until it fully charges up.”
Twilight looked down at the folded up, printed shiny cardboard, glyph. And she frowned at it.
It wasn’t even anything cool, it was just a white square with a bunch of square black dots on it. It didn’t mean anything as far as she knew, the black dots didn’t have any pattern, and if you considered it the other way around there wasn’t any pattern in the white spaces either.
She was trusting Naudia’s, all the werewolves, and her life, on this enchanted square of printed cardboard as some kind of gambit to get her out from in between the strongest monster she’d likely ever face, and something below that had dreamed Equestria into existence known only as “The Godbreaker”.
Oh yeah and they would know if this was a failure if a heavenly pantheon of dead gods descended from the sky to herald a war upon the entire universe.
-------------------
Naudia was watching the recruits a lot more closely than Twilight, she was in charge of placing them around. She was far more concerned about how to actually use these ponies. This was almost exactly like that time she and a squad of wounded changelings had gotten stuck inside a cave with antlion-bears burrowing in.
There was only so far that she could trust these ponies to work and they had to protect on two fronts, below in the colony, and up above here in an open field.
Down below it was the nightmare of protecting unarmed ponies from something snaking it’s way through the rats nest of tunnels down there. It was obvious how to use the tools they had but it still was just as stressful as always to lay them out.
Naudia would be keeping the bulk of the ring rod shotguns down below, they seemed particularly well set up to create choke-points and loopholes to fire out of. The whole situation down there would have to manage itself, as Twilight and Naudia would have to remain up here to face down the nerteln directly.
She was going to place them down in the main hall. It was a bad spot to defend as it was two stories high and it had many small entrances as well as a few large ones they could not block off. She was going to collapse those smaller tunnels, and then plant the extra ivy barricades that came with the shotguns there. Then she was going to turn those larger entrances into funnels filled with shotgun loopholes and firing squads of those pistols.
Unfortunately this meant that the important defenders, the ponies with staves, would have to cover two doorways at the same time, they had the summons to do that, but it was far from an ideal situation.
That was the nightmare down below, the nightmare up above was worse.
This was where the bulk of their ponies were and there were no non-combatants unless you counted cabbages. That was the only upside she could think of for their situation up here.
Defending these open fields of vegetables was going to be an utter nightmare. Down below you could create these nasty chokepoints full of intersecting firing lines. Up here? It wasn’t just that this was a wide flat field, it was a wide flat field going up against opponents who might be able to fly. And it NEEDED to be in this wide flat field for the glyph to work.
The thing about being up here was that the shotguns, were going to be great. They had a decently tight spread and they were loaded with some sort of magic that summons in these disposable little electric-y orbiting clouds of debris, her broadcast system called them static demons. They sucked a bit, but they would all be attempting to either distract the enemy or bring back battlefield debris to re-fuel the shotguns.
Plus as it was very evident the shotguns had more than one shot in them, there were 5 shots loaded onto the wands and more in the magazine? It was made of a stack of enchanted paper so she called it a magazine.
“Hey Twilight.” Naudia said.
“Hmmm?” Twilight said distracted.
“When all this is over, lets get married.”
“I always thought you didn’t really want to do a formal wedding.”
“We were always just too busy, but after this I want to take a break and have a wedding, a big wedding.”
“I thought you wanted a break.”
“Organizing a wedding doesn’t count.”
Naudia stared out at the ponies practicing in the field, trying to decide when it would be a good time to have them stop.
“And the First Administrator is going to pay for the wedding.”
Twilight chuckled.
“A big wedding right? A REALLY big wedding.”
“The largest and most lavish changeling wedding ever held, there will be a fountain of liquified joy, punch bowls filled with emotions.” Naudia blue skied.
“The wedding cake will have to have seven tiers.”
“Every other tier will be geled emotions, topped with strawberries.”
“And the other tiers will have candied roses.”
“Do you think that they could have some of those… what were they called?” Naudia rubbed her hoof on her chin. “Those hamburgers, like we had at that one restaurant.”
Just then their computer tablets beeped at them, pulling them out the message said that Doctor Willow’s forces were on the way.
Rolled Oats gripped onto the staff he was holding, was that sound just a bit of rock settling? Was it one of his fellow ponies nervously settling in. He scanned the cavern from the vantage point of being a tall two legged rabbit creature. Well controlling some sort of magic construct from inside, it felt so natural he had forgotten, probably because he was used to being a werewolf.
He was honestly not sure if he was happy or not that he was the one that found Princess Twilight first. It was getting him noticed in ways he wasn’t exactly happy with.
Like right now where he was one of only a few ponies in charge of guarding the scared refugees and nervous ponies huddled in the main hall. There were two walls in front of the two tunnel entrances he was guarding and they were both set up to funnel whoever would be coming out through there directly at him.
And he was standing there as an “atusaaq rabbit”, some bipedal rabbit thing wearing a maid outfit with 8 rabbits and a staff with less than 15 minutes training and he was expected to fight. The maid outfit was honestly fine, he was able to customize it enough so that it was fine, it just didn’t feel that… safe.
The ponies around him who were also expected to fight were all behind those conjured walls with loopholes in them to fire out of. That felt safe, that looked safe, you only had to take one look at the glowing transparent wall to think “That looks a lot safer than standing around as a rabbit in a maid outfit waiting for something to come tear your throat out.”
The absolute worst part about all this was that he knew that just after 15 minutes of practice, after never ever seeing it before in his life, he was already essentially capped out as to how effective he could be with this strange weapon setup. There really was nothing more to learn about how to use the staff.
He should have known from the very start. There never could have been a good reason for a Princess of all things to come out here, even if she was a werewolf like them.
That was when the first of Doctor Willow’s monsters shambled out of the darkened tunnel and into the cavern. All anypony could do was stare at it. They had all seen Twilight’s werewolf form, and Twilight’s other werewolf form, the one made out of lichen.
This was clearly something trying to imitate that second one, but it was wrong.
Staggering forward the thing had seven thighs, three feet, five shins, four hips, an unknown number of heads, and maybe three tails? The whole thing looked like somepony understood vaguely how to put together a wolf made of green lichen and then they had been the manager for 12 ponies who didn’t. The things made no sound other than their shambling scraping footsteps as it tripped and flopped into the cavern.
Rolled Oats honestly could not tell if the thing had a head or not, or if it did, how many heads it had, or how many faces. There were things that looked like heads, things that at the right angle could have been faces, they had the shapes of those things but it was hard to tell. There was nothing you could say definitively “that is a snout” without somebody else coming in and calling it an ear, or maybe it was supposed to be fluff on the side of their faces.
That was how the monster was put together, but all over, it’s entire body was like that. The only recognizable thing about it was that there was a dead branch stuck through it’s torso.
After what felt like an eternity staring in horror, trying to make sense of the monster it made eye contact? Mouth contact? It met Rolled Oat’s gaze, stiffened up and then let out a disgusting mockery of a howl, as if it’s mossy insides were as confused as it’s outsides.
Then somepony blasted it in the face with one of the shotguns.
An angry red infinity symbol shaped loop exploded into it’s face and shattered, the red shards glowed as they shredded into the hollow lichen creature. It’s mossy hide falling apart as if those glass-like shards had sliced through the connecting seams holding it’s empty plant-like body together.
That was when another one of the monsters shambled in out of the darkened tunnel, and then another. Judging by what he could hear Rolled Oats was pretty sure they were coming out of the other open tunnels as well.
-------------------
“Operation dreamshaper is a go.”
There was a massive flurry of activity inside the chandelier city hanging down from the orbital ring. The whole thing was cloaked from the ground by coating the underside in tens of thousands of miles of screens, and they were going to take advantage of that now.
“Bandit Burner has completed their mission, no sign of any forces called back to Knicknik.”
The First Administrator frowned at that. Either Doctor Willow was dumber than expected, less developed in his soul magic, or he knew something was up. Either situation had significant problems for his plan.
“Are the redback squadrons ready?”
“Yes, all redbacks are prepped and awaiting your orders.”
“How about the number 3 infinity mirror burner? I know we were having problems with that one.”
The aide didn’t know the answer to that and instantly turned to their display to start questioning maintenance crews. The First Administrator turned to another Aide.
“Is the glyph in place where it should be?”
Looking at the screen he could see the cardboard glyph in place exactly where it should be. Of course it was all theatrics, but that was the entire point. They were there to take the focus of the godbreaker away from the peaceful ponies, put him in a deeper sleep for as long as possible with visions of a universe filled with endless wars.
He glared down at the screen that showed the approaching Doctor Willow and his shambled together army of half-assed lichenthropes.
Regardless of the consequences, he was going to find a way to get back at this “Vatermorder” for this. Forcing him to choose between the stability of the universe and lettering a nerteln exist. Even if it took until the end of time.
-------------------
There was a delay between Doctor Willow sending the wolves to clear through the crevasse entrance to the werewolf compound and realizing that something was going on up on the surface that required his direct attention. Naudia was happy about that because it let the glyph charge up more.
The first horrible mockery of Twilight’s lichenthrope form stumbled out from a willow thicket and had only the time to get it’s bearings for a moment before it’s head exploded into a cloud of lichen. Twilight had nailed it with her sling from her place all the way out in the middle of the cabbage field.
Naudia took a sidelong glance at Twilight who was staring off into the treeline to see if she could catch any more of the creatures. Her expression was intense, she was wearing that lichen wolf pelt on her head, and her body was in full werewolf mode, her wolfen face twisted into a snarl. She looked angry, she felt angry to Naudia, and she had already summoned in another projectile into her short sling.
Naudia pulled out her own sling, and slotted in one of her bacteria, it struck her for a moment that a highly advanced spacefaring civilization was having her fight with a sling, as a weird bacteria based werewolf. But they were just strange overall.
“Huh,” Naudia said as another lichen monster shambled out of the forest. “I guess they’re just kinda bad at navigating.”
This lichen monster was far to the left of the previous one, like way far, not far enough to escape the wrath of Twilight’s sling, but still a full cabbage field away. While they were focused on that Naudia caught movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to see one coming out almost the same distance to the right. Naudia had this one.
After nailing that one and watching it shrivel away being sucked dry by Naudia’s bacteria, which began to lazily cilia it’s away through the air back to her. It became apparent why they were showing up on such a wide angle from each other.
That’s just how many there were, the lichen monsters crowded out of the forest across a huge part of the cabbage fields. There were just so many that they had to spread out across that huge distance. They were clumsy things, inelegant thrown together monsters.
The ponies behind the barricades could only stare at the malformed abominations.
Sure Twilight and Naudia took one down each time they hit one, an easy feat as the dull creatures did not bother to dodge, but there were hundreds. Naudia estimated there likely would be thousands.
Then it was like a switch was flipped inside the monsters heads, as if the barricade of ponies with shotguns, ponies inside of summoned rabbit bodies, and the two strange werewolf ponies finally came into view for the thralls. The monsters closest to the front pulled back their heads and let forth some sort of gurgling antithesis to coherent speech, like somebody was trying to strangle a drowning wolf.
And then they charged.
-------------------
Rolled Oats realized something about these monsters, despite their malformed looks, and how easily they fell apart when hit by these partisan weapons, they were essentially invincible to conventional attacks. One pony threw a rock the size of a watermelon into the group and it bounced off the wolf like it was made of paper mache.
They made up for their twisted bodies with sheer strength to push themselves forward faster than they should have been able to move, digging furrows into the dirt as inefficient legs scrabbled them along like bugs. Unable to even stand fully upright they were uncontrollably weaving back and forth at the mercy of their own malformed legs.
Rolled Oats cast another spell with his staff, it flared to life with pink flames which passed itself along to the atusaaq rabbits under his command. It arced onto their rabbit ears and breathed new life into the fireweed shaped flames they held in their hands. Their leaf-like wings thrummed with power.
The rabbits took advantage of this buff which seemed to accelerate them. They pumped their arms back and forth punching rapid fire snakes of burning fireweed flower stalks at the approaching wolves. Each stalk as soon as it landed burrowed and burned into a lichenthrope like a blast of fire. The end of the stalk would remain there seeming to make the fires burn brighter.
With 8 rabbits firing off at the same time he had a bit of a realization. Despite everything he was a lot safer here than the ponies behind the barricades were. The ponies with the shotguns and the ripcord pistol-ish things, they were gap fillers, a wall that was expected to shoot occasionally. HE was the main force, the ponies lined up with those strange shotguns were depending on HIM to hold the enemy back so they didn’t get overwhelmed.
Deciding to take a more proactive role Rolled Oats pressed one of his other buttons that was green, he liked this button, he’d only had that button for less than an hour, but it was already his favorite. He really wished he could use it more often.
The staff he was holding flared to life, the twin bundles of paper ribbons glowed as the spell charged up, all of his summoned rabbits ducked down. The monsters used this opening to shuffle closer, panicking the ponies behind the barricades started blasting away with their shotguns, and he could see even a couple of the pistol shots whirr out and set the monsters alight in green fire.
Now though his staff flaring to life with pink flames Rolled Oats swept it across the monsters as it billowed out a jet of pink flames. He could feel the heat of the flames from where he was standing as the monsters crackled and writhed, falling apart as they burned.
Rolled Oats smiled as these stolen mockeries of Twilight’s werewolf form smoldered, they had lost quite a bit of ground just from that one attack he had made. But then he stopped for a second puzzled.
One of the monsters in the back was dragging off the fallen remains of one of the monsters that has been blasted apart by a shotgun. He wasn’t quite sure what the hay was going on until he saw some of the other monsters coming out of the tunnels which bore unmistakable scorch marks.
-------------------
“They’re putting themselves back together!” Roared Twilight, her anger showing through as she was in full werewolf form.
They had stolen her spell, badly, these monsters were trampling on proper spellwork and learning. Oh yes, she could see it back there almost hidden in the shadows off to the left, her eyes snapped to it like a hawk as only a glimpse of it peeked out between the shadowy treeline. Those horrible, shoddy, wagon wheels that birthed these monsters. Before she didn’t think she could get angrier at Doctor Willow, but this new anger seemed to pull a snarl from her very being.
Collecting herself for a moment, Twilight decided that she was going to show these artless monsters true spellwork. Something they would NOT be coming back from.
Twilight’s watery shield rippled and stabbed forward at one of the monsters that was making a clumsy slash at her. The monster fell apart, but Twilight wasn’t done, she slammed it with a summoned ball of lichen which burst into a cloud of spores. The spores began to eat into the monster’s empty plant-like husk fueled by the remains of Twilight’s watery attack.
The feeling of being inside the spore cloud was strange, Twilight wasn’t experiencing it herself personally, she was experiencing it through the lichenthrope pelt she wore on her head. But it was like breathing in a calm winter forest, she could feel herself leeching power from the remains of the monster, banking up for something BIG.
Another monster down and it was feeding into her lichenthrope pelt. Another monster tried to interfere, but it too was cut down. She could feel it, it was ready.
Twilight shifted into lichenthrope form, raised her head to the sky and howled. After a second she was not howling alone, three more lichenthropes had summoned in from the husks she had infected. Putting on a wolfish grin with her werewolf form inside the lichenthrope shell Twilight charged forward into the crowd of monsters.
Loping along on two legs Twilight shredded through the mockeries of her lichenthrope form. The difference in power between her spellwork and these monsters was readily apparent. Twilight could feel how easy it was to just tear one in half with her claws, it was like she was hitting pinatas with her claws as they burst into clouds of her spores.
These spores would drift together and create lesser lichenthropes, they didn’t have nearly the power that the ones she had created at the start did. But compared to what she was fighting now it was almost impossible to tell the difference.
It felt like only seconds had passed for Twilight, but looking back she had cut a wide swath in the monsters that was slowly widening thanks to her own summoned monsters.
As she got further to the back she realized two things.
The first was that the magical muscle she had used to pull that stunt was tired now, she was going to have to wait before even thinking about doing that again.
The second is that as she got closer and closer to the back the monsters were becoming more coherent.
-------------------
Pete was accustomed to holding a shotgun, that was his big hangup about this shotgun. A break action that has a sizable magazine, it just went against all of his instincts with a shotgun. He had to physically stop himself from reloading after every two shots, something he was, to be frank, quite the expert at.
Apart from this shotgun this whole situation was exceedingly familiar, the only thing missing was the smell of fall leaves. And well the smell of cordite, timberwolves for what they were didn’t smell all that much, wasn’t that they didn’t smell at all, they just didn’t smell at woodwolfshot range.
He poked his weird gem filigree shotgun out of the loophole and blasted five of the lichen monsters. The problem was that despite blasting them in the face, or knocking off a leg or two, these things had started to keep going. He thought it might have something to do with how their extraneous limbs seemed to be more organized now.
The thing it reminded him of the most though was about ten years back when the big storm rolled in after the army bark beetle infestation. The year he and the rest of the townsfolk had to sail out of Knicknik entirely on a luckily timed supply boat and rebuild most of the town next year. That was back when the werewolves had a tunnel over to Knicknik for the winter.
He turned to Calva who was behind the barricade next to him and asked:
“Calva, is this,” He poked his gun out and started blasting. “Starting to remind you of back in ‘93, what with the beetles?”
Calva peeked over the barricade at the seemingly endless crowd of monstrous plant wolves.
“Which part.” Calva shouted back over the din.
“Well, when all this started, these things,” Pete shot one for emphasis sending it’s mutated front leg skittering across the floor, “Fell apart like a paper nightmare night costume when you hit them.”
Calva grimaced.
“They aren’t getting up as well as those ones did, see that one?” Calva gestured at a hollow monster who seemed to be half fiery fireweed stalks, and then blew it apart for emphasis.
“Yeah, but something that far gone shouldn’t be able to get back up again, even in the state it was in.”
As Calva leaned behind the barricade to swap out the magazines for his ring rod shotgun he heard something scraping on the barricade. Hastily finishing his reload he found one of the monsters had managed to reach the barricade in that brief window of time, and it was already clawing away at it.
Fast as he could Calva unloaded into the monster, he fired so many shots that monsters behind it started to fall from just the shrapnel leftover from his shotgun blasts.
Eventually his shotgun blasts burrowed past the thing’s plant-like head, into it’s body where the hollow creature was shredded to bits from the inside out. Flakes of magic from Calva’s shotgun embedding themselves into the dirt and nearby monsters, he could even hear one or two ping off of the barrier he was sitting behind.
There was a frozen moment in time where his eyes focused on one of the shrapnel shards that had made it’s way back to him and landed directly on top of his muzzle. To be more accurate on top of the shielding from the “bagrat” as Twilight had called it, that encased his muzzle.
He had felt something actually hit his eye during all of that, well the shield over his eye, it didn’t hurt so he had assumed it was a piece of dirt. He could only stare at the shard for a moment before he remembered something, then Calva started to laugh.
Calva threw back his head and laughed hard and long.
“What?” Pete seemed nervous.
“You remember what they said about this ‘sovereign magic’, you know ‘it will only damage the things it’s targeting’ and all that.”
“Yeah, I remember that load of horse apples.”
“Well Pete, considering how one of those shrapnel shards just hit me in the eye, I think that might actually be right.”
-------------------
Naudia didn’t like these more advanced lichenthrope thralls. They were tougher, they weren’t much smarter, but most importantly there weren’t any less of them. It was disturbing to see the quick change from shambling mutated monsters into stronger and stronger monsters.
That was when she saw him.
Walking inside a formation of those not-pony guards, Doctor Willow was there.
Instantly it felt like an icy hand reached around her heart.
Doctor Willow with his bark brown fur and fading cutie mark of strips of willow bark. His gaze was locked onto Twilight with a frightening intensity. You could feel where he was looking as his eyes swept across the battlefield.
Naudia didn’t notice it but she was already breathing hard.
He was walking alongside two of the guards who were holding up a shoddy broken wagon wheel. Naudia could see his magic at work on the wagon wheel which pulsed and glowed with a pattern of light. His magic felt sickly, gross, unpleasant, like a rotten smell even from this distance.
Her mouth dropped open when she found out what the wagon wheel was for.
The wheel glowed abruptly and a thrall popped out of the top and dropped out of the bottom at the same time. These thralls were exactly like the first ones that had attacked them, malformed. And then after they had rolled limply to a stop they began to abruptly snap and pop back into a more normal form, shedding extra limbs, heads, tails, even a second torso, all dropped limply to the ground.
And then another, and then another.
Naudia looked over at Twilight, mere moments had passed since Doctor Willow had walked into the battlefield. As she met Twilight’s eyes she felt a new feeling growing within herself like a thorny vine.
Hatred.
She understood what Doctor Willow had done, and she hated him. The feeling stabbed into her heart like a fire, demanding action, demanding justice.
Instantly she knew what she had to do here.
Pulling from her list of spells she summoned in a bacteria that absorbed the leftover spell debris that her bacteria had been bringing back. And she plopped it onto Twilight’s back.
“Naudia!” Twilight shrieked. “What the hay?!”
“It’s there to reduce the cooldown on that big ability you just used, it’s apparently one of the things healers do.”
“Wait, your weird bacteria-wolf thingy can be set up for healing?” Twilight questioned in-between spiking a thrall dead with her shield. “The one that shreds things apart with claws, while draining them dry with giant bacteria?”
“Yeah, it revolves around basically slapping people with those same bacteria and slicing off the enemy’s spells.” Naudia said while clawing at the legs of a thrall and muzzling it’s face with one of her oversized bacteria.
“These yunguaq creatures are weird.”
“What gave you that impression? Was it when you woke up as a puddle of slime on the bed, or when you went to Ratburger?”
“Harr harr.” Twilight said back sarcastically.
Naudia checked back on the cardboard glyph, the pulsing lines of red magic were nowhere near the center. It looked like it was going to be quite a while before the spell was actually ready. She hoped it would be something significant, they would need something really significant if things kept going the way they were going now.
There was already a wave of these new and improved thralls approaching, overtaking the slower and dumber monsters. They were also much better at pulling back the shredded thralls for recycling.
It reminded her of the time she and a squad of changelings were ambushed by corrupted changelings out in the desert. But then a clump of lichen flew past her vision into the crowd of monsters. She had Twilight with her now, no matter the odds she would stand up tall against these abominations.
It wasn’t that their weapons were ineffective, Rolled Oats’ rabbits were extremely effective, and the strange shotguns were also effective. The problem was that these more organized thralls were steadily becoming more and more effective as time went on.
Case in point: It did nothing good for morale to discover that these barricades were made out of something that could bleed a sort of blue blood-like substance.
Rolled Oats could still see the gash in Pete’s shield where one of the thralls had clawed a larger hole into the barricade and slashed him over his right eye. It wasn’t a real wound, Pete himself wasn’t hurt in any way, but he was covered in the strange blood-stuff and the slash over his eye had started growing lichen.
It was just so easy to think of these shields as part of yourself, Rolled Oats could feel through it, he could feel when it was hurt even though it didn’t hurt. His mind had adapted to this extra set of senses, he had to mentally stop himself from thinking like Pete had actually got a cut across his eye.
The lichenthropes had started crawling their way up the walls of the cave to try and hit them from new angles. It wasn’t that the shotguns couldn’t hit them from that angle, it was that they were smart enough at this point to realize who the real threat in the room was.
They scrabbled along the walls perfectly adapted to each of their uniquely mismatched sets of limbs, heads, eyes, mouths, claws, teeth, Rolled Oats could swear he saw one with either a tusk or a horn made of lichen before it was blasted off the wall. He himself scorched the fallen monsters with pink flames growing little sprigs of glowing magical fireweed from their corpses. When he did this he couldn’t help but smile, because he could tell when he was doing a good job, the thralls didn’t even try to pick up those corpses and gave them a wide berth.
They knew.
It was actually quite unfortunate that the thralls knew… for them. because seeing them try and avoid the clumps of fireweed actually reminded Rolled Oats what he should actually be doing with those.
He placed his staff on the floor and began casting a spell.
Instantly all the atusaaq rabbits surrounding him fell to their knees holding up their little fires of fireweed in supplication. The twin bundles of ribbon-like paper on his staff began to glow, and suddenly, before the lichen thralls could even react the spell was complete.
The ponies around him didn’t even have time to react to the rabbits collapsing to the floor before they were instantly jerked back to the battle at hand. The sprigs of fireweed that Rolled Oats had been casting began to erupt, spraying gouts of pink flames at the thralls.
It was like the fire knew.
Not a single ember even landed on the floor, they all floated down and landed on the thralls like bright glowing flower petals. They burned brightly, brighter than the lights in the cavern Rolled Oats was guarding.
There were thralls on fire everywhere, they dropped from the ceiling like flies, and the fires caught onto the thralls below. They rolled on the floor, gurgling and howling, but the fire stuck to them. They tried to scoop up dirt and smother the fire, but the fire needed no air, and the fire knew. Eventually they tried to use these flames against the barricades themselves, trying to rub up against them and catch them on fire too.
But the fire knew it’s true enemy.
By the time Rolled Oats was done not a single inch of the cavern was so much as scorched, but an entire wave of thralls were nothing but burned lumps. They didn’t even smoke, they let off no heat at all, the fire destroyed these monsters as it was created to do.
“Celestia’s beard.” Pete said staring down at his shotgun. “Where the hay did Twilight get these weapons?”
“I’ve never seen anything like that before.” Calva said. “That’s the kind of magic I’m not even sure if it should exist.”
Rolled Oats looked out at the gap in the enemy lines that he’d created, piles of scorched bodies of thralls, then back down at the staff he was carrying. That wasn’t him, he didn’t cast this magic, it was this staff and the strange base station embedded in the ground behind him. Then it struck him, Twilight had brought multiple staves like this, these were manufactured weapons. He could feel the texture of the staff with the rabbit-shaped shielding it had given him, these were worse than even that, they were mass-manufactured weapons.
-------------------
For Twilight and Naudia things were beginning to take a turn for the worse. Twilight would use an ability, then they could feel Doctor Willow’s gaze fall upon them, and then a nearby thrall would copy that ability. They were bad at it, at first, the thralls had no inherent knowledge of these abilities and they seemed to need to learn how to use them. Usually a couple times when they first used an ability they just wouldn’t get it, if they figured it out in the first place.
Like with the ability that shielded Twilight from ranged attacks, the thralls attempted to use it offensively, spraying a gout of spores at her. It obviously did nothing, but now periodically there would be puffs of defensive spores that could catch and dampen(but not fully block) incoming spells. Or Twilight’s ability to accelerate an infection of lichen on a target, make it nastier and more damaging, they didn’t seem to be able to actually get that one.
The one that Twilight had regretted using the most though was one related to her water shield.
She had used her water shield to shear off a lump of thrall lichen that had leeched onto Naudia’s strange bacteria shielding. It physically removed the damaging clump and pasted over the wound in the shielding with water that was absorbed, healing Naudia’s zoetic shield.
They learned about this one VERY quickly, it wasn’t useful on the attack, but the thralls were now working against their ranged attacks. Some of them were even staying back to effectively end the duo’s ranged attacks for good. This obviously didn’t help that much with the magical shotguns blasting at them from the barricades, but the true threat, the real damage dealers here were Twilight and Naudia, it wasn’t even close.
But Twilight picked up on something first, faster than Doctor Willow did. These thralls, they were weak, and while they were learning skills they weren’t getting any tougher, or anymore energy. Whatever skills these things had, they were disposable, limited. Which gave Twilight an idea.
Mentally marking a slower thrall Twilight started focusing on it, pelting it with triple slings of lichen, small cloudbursts of spores, and small explosive spikes of water.
Sure enough the thralls focused on keeping that one alive, expertly slicing off and healing every wound Twilight carved into the mossy monster.
With her gaze she followed one of the monsters that had used up it’s healing spells and then charged it’s away after her snarling and holding up a copy of her water shield.
There was a sharp explosive sound as Twilight caved it’s head in, straight through the shield with a spike of water from her own liquid shield. This was so much easier, their weakened shields broke like paper, and the hollow monsters snapped like dry twigs.
“Naudia!” Twilight shouted.
Naudia couldn’t turn away from her battle but Twilight saw one of her ears flag up. Naudia was currently shredding a thrall with her werewolf claws, the thrall covered in her giant bacteria that was visibly sucking it dry. As the battle went on Naudia had gathered a larger and larger swarm of bacteria around her.
“These thralls have a very limited amount of magic in them, we need to fight them by working around that. It takes a lot for them to cut one of our damaging spells off them, try and use the most efficient spells you have that stick around.”
There was a slow grin that grew on Naudia’s face, and Twilight soon realized why.
These bacteria she was attacking with didn’t just fall to the ground like Twilight’s lichen clumps, they flew back to Naudia on their own. And she could refresh them and use them again.
“Twilight!” Naudia shouted back, “How is the summoning glyph or whatever doing?”
Twilight used a spell that caused her lichenthrope pelt to start attacking on it’s own, a fairly expensive spell, one she couldn’t use that often. The kind of spell where she could physically feel the part of her that cast it tire out. But she needed to know how the glyph was doing.
The strange square glyph was lighting up, there was no doubt of that, but there was no pillar of light coming from it. The lights that moved through patterns on it had started to move, albeit slowly, but they didn’t look nearly as dim as they did when the glyph was first activated.
She was told that the final activation would be rather abrupt, but this didn’t look like it was going to activate anytime soon.
As she turned back to the battle at hand her voice caught in her throat for a moment, just a moment, it was so short nobody else even noticed, but that moment was etched into her mind, captured like a photograph of carnage.
Naudia stood there inside of her bacteria based werewolf form, visible as if floating inside of some kind of giant transparent microbe edged in cilia. Twilight could see the determination on Naudia’s face through the splatter of transparent glowing blue liquid that the zoetic shields bled. Naudia was slinging a large bacteria with her short sling.
Around her floated a flock of semi-transparent bacteria, there were tons of them floating around waiting their turn for another go round. A lot of them didn’t even go through the sling and were swarming any thrall that got too close sucking the monster dry, and lifting them off the ground to thrash them about like a pack of wild dogs.
The real terrifying ones though were the ones that were supercharged by Naudia's sling, you could watch any of those that didn’t get removed visibly suck the life out of these fragile thralls. Great patches of the lichen simply draining of life and color as the hollow monsters were fed upon by these wolf-like protozoa.
Anything that got too close to her was slashed down by her claws. The scene of Naudia fighting was almost enough for Twilight to forget the numerous withered clumps of lichen that she had been hit with. Naudia showed no signs of slowing, yet, but her shielding was pockmarked by blue bleeding holes.
Standing next to Naudia on the pile of dead thralls was Twilight’s shadow, a well groomed and complete lichenthrope standing above the frail and malformed copies in all of it’s wolfen glory. It’s teeth were shredding apart a thrall while periodically it’s shield would spike outwards to take off the head of a nearby thrall. Occasionally it would use one of it’s free paws to infect a thrall with a spray of lichen that was trying something further away.
It too was bleeding from many small wounds both fresh and old like Naudia, seemingly unstoppable it ignored them. Some of the shriveled up pieces of lichen were already falling out, revealing fresh zoetic shielding underneath.
This battlefield was burned into her mind, this was what she and Naudia were to an outsider. Unstoppable forces of nature that commanded terrifying and new magic standing atop a growing mound of fallen monsters with no signs of slowing.
-------------------
Expact Eclipse, queen of the werewolves felt small. He wasn’t used to feeling small being the local mayor and religious leader rolled into one. He was used to people looking up to him as an example. He had to watch himself, he had to be careful as to what he was saying because he was the bridge between this farming settlement of werewolves and the rest of ponykind.
He wasn’t sure he liked Twilight and Naudia right now, he could never say it to anybody, or anything like that. But he was jealous and scared out of his mind of them at the same time.
Yeah he was carrying this staff thing, yeah he felt pretty strong slinging spells with it and powering up his little gang of rabbits. He had his own respectable little pile of those strange hollow thralls around.
All of this paled in comparison to what Twilight and Naudia could do to those thralls.
He could have trouble with the thralls, he could have trouble hitting them, he could have to use more than a couple spells to take one down. He couldn’t tear their throats out with a single swipe of his hand.
These spells he had were incredibly powerful, nothing but a direct attack from one of the thralls could so much as touch him. The thralls had tried throwing a boulder at him when he was distracted and it couldn’t even bend his rabbit ears. The problem was that the thralls were the same way, they were both on a level with each other in that respect, and it was disturbing to think that he was far closer to these thralls in power than to Twilight or Naudia, strange and fearsome werewolves that they were.
The thralls were even starting to catch onto that too.
This whole situation left a pit in Eclipse’s stomach. These forces were sitting there trading advantages and new techniques, and Twilight and Naudia were VERY strong. It’s just that these thralls never seemed to let up, and they had some method to talk to each other, to learn from the thralls that had already died. He didn’t think that his side of things would be able to keep up in this little information trade.
-------------------
Up in the chandelier military base hanging down from from the great orbital ring central command was in a frenzy processing data and organizing forces.
“Subject’s learning rate is on par with nerteln leverets encountered in the past, elevating threat level.”
“Thrall production speed is above expected amount, get bandit burner to investigate.”
“Defense team’s performance is operating at above expected combat strength.”
“Unexpected movements of local star and moon, please advise.”
“Thralls have less total energy than expected, they seem to be spread a bit thin.”
“Militia combat units holding up as well as can be expected, no casualties.”
In the middle of all this chaos was the First Administrator, as he stalked about the room he was coordinating people. Connecting seemingly unrelated pieces of information together with the practiced eye of somebody who had coordinated attacks like this for billions of years. The chaos in the room in his eyes was actually a finely controlled thing that he plucked on like a guitar string.
Perhaps that’s why he had been complacent with a nerteln. Made assumptions about a nerteln.
Perhaps it was that damn Vatermorder, unconsciously he glanced up at the indicator clock on the wall. It had moved backwards by a second or two.
Just then his ears picked up on a report from bandit burner squad.
“Chandelier actual come in, this is bandit burner, we have a situation down here.” Came Gwynn Hall’s voice over the radio. “We’ve been unable to find the initial thrall, I repeat we can find no sign of Pomology Pear.”
It was like the world had suddenly turned cold. Every one of the First Administrator in the room stopped dead, and they were all looking at the same spot. Nobody could see more than one of him at a time but a huge portion of the amphitheater sized command room stopped what they were doing as well.
Just like that the First Administrator was behind the panicked radio operator shouting into his microphone. Abruptly people got back to work even more frantically.
“Bandit burner this is the First Administrator get your ass up here immediately, we could be dealing with a prime ghoul. I repeat possible prime ghoul return to base immediately.”
-------------------
Doctor Willow had figured something out, Twilight could occasionally feel him looking out here at them, his gaze sweeping across them like a cold wind.
Twilight had noticed something as well, the wagon wheel summoning devices had gone quiet, coming towards them in the next wave of thralls was a gap, the first such gap she had seen in this entire battle. The nerteln had stopped summoning in more thralls.
And then all the thralls on the battlefield were dead.
Twilight and Naudia stood trying to catch their breath.
Expat Eclipse came up behind them and asked.
“Is it over?”
“It’s not going to be over until Willow is dead.” Twilight stated. “He’s got something else planned here.”
“What do you think he’s going to try next?”
“I have no idea.”
There were about eight wagon wheels and they looked to be in worse condition than they should have been. Some parts of them were obviously scorched, and whatever the summoning circle was had started to look a bit fuzzy, indistinct. It was pretty clear that these wave tactics the nerteln had been trying weren’t going to work for much longer without starting to break the circles.
Naudia went back to her saddle bags and came back with two food bars that looked dense, chewy, the kinda thing somebody would sell you to try and replace breakfast with.
“Here, eat one of these.” She hooved it over to Twilight. “Gwynn said we should eat them if there is ever a gap in the battle.”
“Why?” Twilight asked. “I mean I get that it’s food and all, but is there like some kind of special reason?”
Naudia chuckled.
“Yeah there is, you know Spike plays O&O right? They have those magic potions and whatnot.”
Twilight could almost see where this was going.
“These food bars are roughly the yunguaq equivalent of like a mana or stamina potion, they’re basically the same thing because everything relies on magic, cast from us.”
Twilight took a big bite of the peanut butter flavored food bar. She did feel better afterwards.
“I’ve been told there are liquid variants of it, but those are mostly based on how fast you can chug.”
Naudia turned to Expat Eclipse.
“By the way, if any of your shields start to turn red or glow red whoever that is need to retreat from the battle immediately.”
“I know that, you told us during training.”
“And I’m mentioning it again because you should understand these shield things better now. If your shields break, you are dead.”
“Naudia, why aren’t we attacking Doctor Willow right now?”
“Up here we’re stalling for reinforcements.” Naudia glanced meaningfully at the glyph. “We’re fighting him up here, so that he doesn’t focus his attacks down where all your people are.”
The glyph in question was glowing significantly brighter and there was a column of light growing out of it, but it was small, not even half a foot high yet.
“I’ve accepted that we’ll get reinforcements because I trust you, but seeing how this battle has been going… We are going to get them right?”
“Yes. Once that thing goes off the battle is over, and there isn’t anything Doctor Willow will be able to do about it.”
Both of them cringed backwards, they could feel the icy gaze of Doctor Willow settle upon them. Turning back to the battlefield Naudia and Eclipse saw that nine thralls coming there way. They looked healthy, they flexed their extraneous limbs with a practiced air of a monster that knew how to use them.
And inside the ninth thrall, at the head of the party they could see the thousand mile empty stare of Pomology Pear. She smiled like everything was going to be all right, everything was already all right, and the confidence that she could do the same for you, even as she tested out her lichen werewolf claws dragging deep gouges into the ground.
You couldn’t assign an emotion to the thousand yard stare of Pomology Pear the prime ghoul. There was no anger there, no pity, no happiness, her gaze was empty, and it saw right through you in a calculating way that told you there was something behind you, beyond you. And the second you did look behind you, she would claw out your throat.
That wasn’t even counting the deformed maw of the lichenthrope thrall she was poking her head out of. These thralls were no longer simply badly made spells in Twilight’s view, they were genuinely some sort of offshoot lineage of spells that had stabilized in this horrid state. They didn’t have a consistent number of heads, or limbs, or tails, but whatever number they ended up with they knew exactly how to use them perfectly. They were so well put together that they could pull off an intimidating strut.
It was then that Twilight realized that the eight thralls behind Pomo weren’t hollow anymore, they had those strange “guards” in them, which were themselves hollow. But this was not a good sign for Twilight’s group. She could already tell that these monsters were a far cry from the paper thin and limited things they had been fighting so far.
As a test Twilight slung a clump of lichen at Pomo, who effortlessly slapped it out of the air, her extra limbs allowing her to not even break stride. She didn’t even flinch, but her unfocused eyes met with Twilight’s. The seemingly fluid and boneless extra limbs starting to weave about like snakes.
After they reached a certain point away from each other the group of monsters stopped. Twilight’s group wouldn’t move, they were dug in here and here is where they would stay.
They stared at each other. Twilight had already mentally put the defensive line out of action, they could fire as much as they’d like into this battle but she already knew this was beyond them. It was Twilight, Naudia, and nine malformed monsters honed to a fighting edge with magic stolen from her skills in combat.
Oddly enough for Twilight they had been fighting so long there was a kind of clarity in her mind. She had started off this fight far too angry, and over the course of time that had cooled off to a dispassionate hatred. She WOULD win this fight, and the next one, and however many fights she needed to, to ensure that the nerteln on the other side of the field died.
As they crossed an invisible line Twilight knew that this was the time to start pelting them with ranged attacks. But Naudia wasn’t willing to wait.
With a feral insectoid snarl Naudia charged after the abominations. Twilight felt herself pulled along behind Naudia, she couldn’t just let her face these new monsters alone.
The first blows of the battle were struck by Naudia, who Twilight realized had not fully grasped onto the situation. Twilight couldn’t see her face but it was clear that she wasn’t thinking this through. The attached bacteria were effortlessly sliced off and these monsters had plenty of energy to spare.
Naudia for her part only got away being hit 3 times by their first barrage of attacks, a lucky thing too. Two of the three lumps of lichen were part of a group of weaker attacks meant to all hit at once. Unfortunately the third attack was a water shield bash from Pomo and that left her off balance, an easy target for follow ups.
This all happened extremely quickly and it was only as more attacks were sailing at Naudia did Twilight finally make it into the battle. Nearly every one of the attacks hit Naudia, Twilight for her part sliced off one or two of the hanging lichen infections as she blasted past to engage Pomo in melee. She couldn’t use any of her big abilities yet, those parts of her were too tired. So she was forced to try and be the shield for Naudia physically.
Twilight traded blows with Pomo, doing her best to dodge incoming attacks from the other thralls and Pomo’s extra arms. For her this was a brutal fight as the group she was fighting seemed to be exceptionally well coordinated. They weren’t as strong as her or Naudia, but the gap had closed significantly, and there were nine of them.
Out of the corner of her eye she spotted Naudia finally pass her to come into the battle, she had cooldowns to spare. The horde of bacteria that she had build up latched onto the thralls and started to pulse and quiver. Inside of the bacteria you could see strange acorn shaped things swimming about.
The bacteria suddenly opened up releasing a horde of acorn shaped hoof sized microbes. Swarms of them, far more than should have fit inside the bacteria they were in. They were buzzing around like flies snapping at the enemy group with their acorn stem-like mouths.
Twilight recognized them as being based off of didinium, their mouths were called a cytostome, that little acorn stem on the front. The little things were extremely fast and hard to keep track of under a microscope because of their two rings of pectinelles. And they were known to eat things many times larger than themselves.
All of these traits were demonstrated here as they moved almost too fast to hit, nipping and snapping away chunks of lichen shielding, their bacterial insides starting to grow with a green blob of snipped off lichen. The thralls were so distracted that Twilight managed to get in some very cheap shots. The thralls were also distracted from the bacteria that had spawned the didinium slinking away back to Naudia almost entirely unopposed in the chaos.
This sort of attack would have killed most of the “normal” weak thralls several times over by this point. These new ones had none of their frailty, Twilight noted that Pomo in particular only seemed annoyed by all this. You could turn your head away from one only to find that when you turned back the snipped off piece of lichen was already growing back.
Suddenly the oversized bacteria pulled back, and Twilight felt the pressure of combat back on her again as she was being attacked from multiple sides as the thralls mechanically switched back to her on losing their distracting bug-like targets. Even while she was being savaged by these monsters the gears in her head were turning, trying to find the time in between getting beaten down as to what these monsters were and how they thought.
Things abruptly let up once again as Naudia came back into the fight, it turned out those biting ciliates were only one part of an attack from her. Now Naudia was flanked by several bacterial wolves(it was difficult for Twilight to count while Pomo was trying to tear her throat out, but it was a least four) that had suspiciously green lumps inside what could be called their stomachs.
Once again the thralls started mechanically attacking what was in front of them. They seemingly effortlessly pulled off attacks that Twilight had done, but there was no thought behind it, no technique. They even tried attacks Twilight had accidentally messed up, or tried attacks that didn’t make sense to use right now. It seemed like the nerteln behind all this had reached some sort of limit as to how fast he could learn how to fight.
The problem with all this was that there were nine of these monsters and they were far closer in terms of how tough they were to Twilight and Naudia than the thralls previously. Probably even on par with them, there wasn’t really time to check when she was dodging a cavitation spike of water at her eye.
That was one thing they were good at, Twilight thought as another attack attempted to go after her throat. They were good at making shots at what WOULD have been a vulnerable point on a pony, and out of reflex she acted like it was. But it was just a shield, it looked alive, and it bled, but Twilight didn’t need her shield’s throat anymore than she needed it’s eyes.
The one constant throughout this was Pomology Pear’s smile, her expression never changed so much as a muscle, as if she never needed to blink, as if she never needed to breathe.
-------------------
From an outside perspective Twilight and Naudia’s fight with the monsters was almost too fast to follow. Chunks and shreds of that shielding were being torn off from places that would have been fatal to a living body. The things that were flying off were basically just chunks of plants and bacteria covered in blue food coloring.
Expat Eclipse noted something though, Twilight was learning how to use these shields a lot better than the thralls were. The thralls kept going after her throat, her eyes, vital points like that, things that a pony needed to protect. And with every pass Twilight was taking advantage of that. Even from here Eclipse could see the nasty bite on the back of her neck closing up already, healing over like it was never even there in the first place. He also noticed the rat draping itself over the back of her neck underneath the shield. He wasn’t sure what that was for.
In contrast Twilight was using one of the werewolves clamping down on her throat to get in some devastating hits in.
“Oh dear.” Expat said out loud as Twilight’s claws finally pierced through the shield of the lichenthrope. The ghoul inside shattered like glass, his lichen shield falling apart where he stood.
There was no place for Eclipse in this brawl, and none of the other ponies here had the skill to lob an attack into the brawl without hitting Twilight, Naudia or one of the harassing bacteria Naudia was sending in.
-------------------
While Twilight was adapting to this new fighting style masterfully Naudia was having a lot of trouble with it. She was traditionally trained to fight, the kinds of fighting where if something clamped down onto your neck it was over.
And she had fought lots of things that would clamp down on your neck, or your leg, or could bite down on her entire barrel. So her fighting style meant that she was going through her bacteria friends way faster than she normally would have. It wasn’t one sided, they were injuring these monsters, but Naudia was coming out behind in these vicious exchanges, and it didn’t help she was outnumbered four to one.
It was very probable that she was doing just as much damage as Twilight was. The way the bacteria bit back when they were bit was surprisingly effective. Against any kind of normal enemy that level of damage inside their mouth would put them out of commission very quickly.
There was a juicy crunch as the lichen making up the lichenthrope’s mouth was infected, it’s watery teeth cracked. And while the wolf was crushing the bacteria in it’s mouth Naudia could generally get in some nasty attacks in on it’s head. She was more than able to avoid the amateurish swipes of it’s claws.
The problem was that she was relying on hitting these vital areas to try and wear her opponents down, precise strikes and all that. She was beginning to realize that wasn’t effective in anything but the short term, especially not when they could just rotate out the worst damaged among them. It’s just that she was realizing this too late.
Naudia tried to focus even harder to make up for her depleted number of bacteria, to squeeze every ounce of skill she’d gained fighting monsters for any edge she could get.
She dodged another attempt to get at her throat and punished the ghoul with a bacteria infection at the back of his neck. But that was a feint, they were coordinating, and she stepped directly in line to catch a lichen projectile from the one they’d switched out to heal.
Even with all her skills she was used to fighting as a group, in a formation with other changelings. Her frontline position as the strongest generally meant she was fighting a bit more alone than the rest of the changelings, but four on one was well beyond her capabilities to control this battle, even with the strength disparity between her and these ghouls.
She was just barely holding her own when the fourth ghoul came back into the fight, no trace of the injuries she had made to it’s face. It wasn’t fresh, they couldn’t fight forever and it wasn’t rested, but it’s shields were fully intact, even an arm that was dangling before was grown back.
The ghoul went directly for one of Naudia’s legs while she was looking away and for the first time Naudia felt pain on her body as the watery teeth pierced through her bacterial shield.
-------------------
The First Administrator was distracted, he kept glancing up at the clock on the wall.
“Sir?”
The clock mocked him, hanging there on the wall and in the back of his mind like a sword.
“Umm Sir?”
He honestly wasn’t sure if the clock wasn’t actually mocking him, Vatermorder artifacts were like that, powerful enough to have a life of their own.
“What?”
The aide flinched back feeling the gaze of the FARVP snap back at him from all directions.
“Princess Naudia was injured in the fight.”
His attention bored into the display monitor to see Twilight trying to fight back at the minions of the nerteln. There were only seven left but she clearly wasn’t doing that well. And then he felt his gaze being pulled back to the clock.
-------------------
Eclipse just had to try something, these weapons he knew could target things, so he was going to try and not target Twilight. There really wasn’t anything left for him to actually do or try. He started letting loose blasts into the edges of the fight to distract the monsters or shave off parts of their lichen fur.
Naudia was down and Twilight was not doing well against those seven remaining monsters.
And then something changed about the fight. It took him a long while to actually notice it but Twilight seemed to be doing better, much better, dramatically better.
She started dodging attacks like she could read minds. As if this entire fight was planned out beforehand and she had already won.
Renewed with confidence Eclipse shouted:
“Fire! Take those monsters down!”
And they did fire, and he was right, their weapons couldn’t damage Twilight.
-------------------
The First Administrator was standing still, an island of seething angry stillness in a sea of panicked chaos. Staring, raging up at that clock.
“Sir!” A panicked aide almost seemed on the verge to try and touch the First Administrator.
“WHAT?”
“Twilight Sparkle has entered into a dea-, er a martial trance!”
The First Administrator’s head moved slowly to turn to see for himself, his empty eyes met the screen.
“FFFFFF-”
-------------------
Naudia was in awe, she had never seen fighting skill on this level in her entire lifetime. She had never HEARD of martial skill like this. People didn’t even tell tall tales of themselves on this level. Twilight Sparkle was fighting seven on one, and her enemies were learning from her, actively, every exchange was more precise, more perfect than the last.
Twilight could see through these monsters like she was fighting a training dummy, her focus set, they would attack and she would respond perfectly. They would learn from her and copy her and once again Twilight would respond even more perfectly once more.
There could be no greater peak of martial ferocity than this. This perfect form tore at Naudia's heart... Because it wasn't enough.
Twilight pulled ahead of the ghouls, the gap between them was growing larger and larger. One shattered, and then another. It was only five on one now. The attacks thrown in by the ponies from behind their barriers didn’t help nearly as much as they had against the thralls.
But it just wasn’t enough, even sprinting ahead in skill like she was now Twilight could not keep this up forever. Even if the ghouls had stayed like they were at the start of the fight this wouldn’t have been enough.
Twilight was grazed by an attack from Pomo and it was positioned directly where another attack was just barely healing up. As Twilight just barely dodged that attack there came another, three even pincering in on where she had dodged to. She defeated one, even a second, but the third caught her directly.
Twilight pivoted on her right hoof to dodge an attack and Naudia’s heart stopped in her chest.
-------------------
Twilight lay on the ground disoriented, staring up at the sky.
It took her the briefest second to figure out what had happened.
Her artificial leg couldn’t take the maneuvering she had done and had snapped at the knee.
She could see Pomo’s face come into view above her. Doctor Willow felt like the type who would want to savor this moment. Rub things in.
Turning her head she saw him approach horn glowing with magic.
“I should thank you, that little stunt you pulled there has taught my minions quite a bit.” He said. “Should I keep you though, that’s the question.”
Entirely unfazed by the cacophony of fire coming from the ponies behind the barricades now his ghouls blocked every shot effortlessly. They were of no consequence on this battlefield anymore.
“You look like a mare who can appreciate prowess in magic.” Willow seemed to be on his own little tangent in his head, like there were conversations with other ponies happening somewhere else. “Yes the spells I’ve been working on should get me a doctorate, you should appreciate that Twilight, even a seat on the medical board.”
His eyes finally met hers.
“STILL NOT IMPRESSED ARE WE?!” He screeched at her, horn flaring. “WELL HOW ABOUT NOW?”
The shattered pieces of the ghouls started to glow that sickly brown-green color and re-assembled themselves into those ghoul guards, mismatched pieces forming together to fill out the cohort. Immediately they started summoning in their lichenthrope armor.
Those guards were back at full power, Twilight could tell just by looking at them, despite their mismatched jigsaw pottery look they were whole again where it counted for combat.
She didn’t have time to think about that much though because a pillar of bright red light shot up from inside the group of ponies. It was clearly the glyph reaching full power.
Everypony’s attention was instantly drawn to the glyph, even the ghouls and their unfocused stares couldn’t look away from it.
There was a slow commotion growing as ponies started to notice something on the horizon.
A moon was rising, huge, alien, the crystalline moon rose over the horizon and into the sky like an omen. And then the light of another crested the northern horizon then again in the south and the east. Each alien moon loomed huge in the sky.
As Twilight looked upwards to where the moons were going she could feel a pit of dread forming in her stomach. The moons were rising towards the point in the sky where the glyph was pointing.
As they came closer to that dim red point Twilight was worried that they would crash against each other. But when the first alien crystalline moon approached that point it began to stretch and warp as if it was being forcibly pulled into some deep pit.
The entire moon vanished into that single red point of light.
And so did the other three unknown moons, vanishing without so much as a trace into the endlessly hungering darkness that glowed red around the edges.
All who witnessed it could only watch in dread for what could come next.
Then the sky tore open.
-------------------
Celestia walked out onto a balcony, her chariot wheelchair making no sound as it’s perfectly oiled wheels carried her healing back legs behind her.
Something was going on, the sun… felt strange to her, like there was a delay that wasn’t there before. This feeling had been following her around for a while time now, she couldn’t quite figure out when she had picked up on it though. It was like she was seeing the sun as it was a little while ago, not just because the sunlet was orbiting Equestria, but as if the sun itself was lagging behind where she wanted it to move even moreso than it used to.
Celestia honestly couldn’t recall a time when she wasn’t used to moving around the sun, only that there had been one in the far distant past.
There, on the horizon, thin red line, it seemed to go up, and up, forever, it terminated in a single black point wreathed in red as if something had burned a hole in the sky. As if the sky was slowly being pulled into a hole.
By the time the moon rose she had woken Luna up.
“Is that- did you-?” Celestia could barely find words at the crystalline moon rising above the horizon.
“Nay, I feel nothing from this alien moon sister.” Said the changeling queen.
They watched in horror as the four moons fell into that point of emptiness. And then the sky tore open.
A great rend in the sky, terrible in it’s depths, immense, it stretched from horizon to horizon. It made no sound, but Celestia could feel a drop in her stomach just looking at it.
The edges of the chaotic portal burned as if reality itself had been set alight. Inside the great portal there was only metallic fractal chaos. It looked almost familiar, like she had seen it before.
Looking up at the machine reflection of mountain Canterlot was perched on she realized this was some reflection of Equestria. A terrible machine barrens that stretched from the mirror Canterlot across the entire sky.
She felt that if she stared up at the mirror Canterlot for long enough she would see some terrible reflection of herself there looking back at her unblinking.
She began to see the things, too small to be made out at this distance, but there were easily hundreds of thousands of them, little dots crossing over from the other side of the portal over Equestria.
Celestia stared up utterly speechless at the spellwork above her. There were no words in the face of it.
Staring up at the mechanical chaos that filled the entire sky Twilight was shocked. That was what the spell did?
That.
To add fresh horror things were pouring through the hole in the sky, uncountable numbers of things. Little dots that were flying down towards Equestria from the infected mechanical wound in the sky.
I did that. Twilight thought.
I… did that.
There was no way to look away from the sky encompassing tear in her mind. It’s glow had replaced the sun. It’s cold fury had blotted out the entire sky.
Twilight tried to follow one of the little dots as it swooped closer, but she was distracted by the gigantic swirling pillar of wind and fire that was falling down towards them like a great stone of destiny. Moving impossibly fast the conflagration of hellfire stopped above them, swirling with hateful fire.
And then it opened up, inside the swirling hellfire was an endless tunnel of fire that seemed to go on for infinity, beyond the sky and into some other place.
From that lesser portal four enormous flying rats began to slowly fly downwards, each holding a rope connected to a throne. Upon that throne, unmistakable even at this distance sat the First Administrator.
She couldn’t meet his eyes. She was a part of all this. Her gaze turned to the side to see the nerteln, Doctor Willow, staring up at the sky along with all of his abomination progeny stunned.
Vulnerable.
His throat exposed as he looked upwards, unbeknownst to his coming doom.
-------------------
Naudia was staring up at the sky awestruck at what she had taken part in. There was no event in history she could reference that was as terrible as what she had just done.
She had been staring far too long when there was a bright flash of light from where Twilight had been knocked down by the nerteln. She jerked her head to look over at it and Twilight wasn’t there anymore.
Doctor Willow wasn’t there anymore either. Niether were his ghouls.
Instead was a bubble of reality that looked a little bit like Canterlot. A miniature Canterlot.
She felt a gravitational pull towards the bubble, and while the ponies around her were able to brace themselves on their barricades Naudia and her injured leg were not fast enough.
Naudia fell into the strange bubble of reality.
-------------------
Expat Eclipse stopped holding onto the barrier for dear life, the pull stopped and the building sized evil canterlot snowglobe seemed to stabilize. You could see tiny little ponies going about their day inside of it.
He didn’t have much time to focus on that because in front of him the throne carried by the giant rats had finally touched down and he could see the… thing sitting on that throne. It was obviously a throne but just barely qualified, if you chopped off the bottom half and added a set of wheels it could have easily passed for an office chair.
But the thing that sat on that throne. Eclipse almost felt like he should defend himself from it, like it wanted into his head, like it was already inside.
It stood up and was flanked by those giant rats, Eclipse instantly knew that they were called “Redback Behemoths” he had no idea how he knew though. They weren’t exactly rats, they were obviously rodents, but they had squareish muzzles, a gait like a kangaroo walking on all fours, bottlebrush tails, obviously a strip of red down the back of their golden retriever-ish coats, the patch glowed with an angry red light. Looked something between a kangaroo and a rodent.
The thing that made them stand out was their wings, the wings weren’t wings, it was an extra set of arms and where the fingers would be on bat wings to hold the skin steady were small prehensile claw-things. The actual membrane of the wing was wispy, barely even there, a spiderweb thin membrane to catch the air for these rodents that were easily the size of a covered wagon, if not bigger.
The thing at the head of the procession of rats spoke.
“Where is Twilight? Or Naudia?”
Nobody wanted to speak up against that thing. The way those rats moved, they moved like apex predators, absolutely confident, and it was a certainty they were trained for war.
Eclipse caught the mirrored glasses of the monster, and was unable to look away.
“They… They fell into that globe over there.” Eclipse stuttered pointing at the miniature world.
The thing’s face scrunched up like he had tasted something particularly foul.
“Great, Naudia is injured and Twilight’s prosthetic leg snapped, and now they’re inside a night terror.”
“What are you?” Eclipse asked.
“I am the First Administrator. I’m the benefactor that gave you those weapons, I set things up so that you could defend yourself from the nerteln.”
Eclipse had a hard time believing that for even a second. It probably showed on his face because the First Administrator responded.
“There are powers here beyond your knowledge, had I not intervened the nerteln would be using you as either a meal or cannon fodder.”
“I can… maybe believe that.” Eclipse’s eyes were drawn towards the snowglobe canterlot, which brought him back to reality, and the tear in reality above him.
“Why are you even here? Why do you care about any of this, when you can…” Eclipse gestured up at the sky.
“My hatred for nerteln has burned for billions of years. It will burn long after the stars have gone out. I thought I had stamped them out once and I will NEVER make that mistake again.”
What Eclipse had said had clearly set this strange thing off because the First Administrator started rambling a bit.
“Take that night terror that just formed there, that’s an indication that Doctor Willow is further along than we thought, a lot further along. He shouldn’t be able to do this, just like they were supposed to hang back with you guys in a defensive battle against those flimsy thralls.
“But now we’ve got a night terror to deal with, which we can deal with this, but Twilight and Naudia have made everything so much more complicated.” Once again he veered off topic. “You can see it can’t you? The megalomania inside that sphere, that isn’t the Canterlot you know is it? Look closely, the layout is different, ugh, he’s got the castle repainted in his coat colors, yellow and brown. If you know what to look for these are always the same.”
“So this is some kind of peek inside his mind? He never seemed this… ambitious when I knew him.” Eclipse said walking a bit closer to the sphere.
“Nerteln are all the same, the magic pools inside their brain where it processes relationships, eats away at it. No matter what reason they start out doing soul magic the parts of their brain that anchor them to their naklekun rots away.”
“Naklekun?”
“It means compassion, I suppose you’d say… Equineinity? Something like that. But you can crack a nerteln’s skull open and start to find parasitic lifeforms growing inside the cavities adapted to feed on their contaminated blood. Soul magic will keep you alive even through that, but it won’t let you keep your naklekun.”
Eclipse grimaced at the implications there, trying not to imagine it.
“If this night terror is supposed to be a look inside Doctor Willow’s mind, wouldn’t you want to see what is going on there? Get to know your enemy?”
"Rest assured my pony friend there is nothing new inside that mind, nothing to learn. It's a stagnant and dead pool of memories. Whatever fragments are left of Doctor Willow is in the process of being burned off.”
“Shouldn’t you be going in there anyways though, to rescue Twilight and Naudia.”
The thing gave Eclipse a strange look.
“I’m already in there, I’ve been in there this entire time.”
-------------------
Twilight looked around her. And then again.
This was Canterlot, but it was not Canterlot.
She knew this spot, it was “prime reading spot #45, Canterlot Castle grounds” one of the castle outbuildings. It was inside of a kind of “barrier building” that separated the castle grounds from the main concourse of Canterlot itself. Great place to read, nice statue with a sturdy block base to lean up against, big windows that caught the sun in the right way, calming muffled sound of ponies walking about outside, thought provoking view of Canterlot itself. Bring a pillow and a book and nobody will ever bother you here.
The whole place was wrong.
The sounds coming from outside were wrong, rhythmic, hoofsteps in sync, voices in inaudible whispers. A crowd of ponies walking step by step choreographed in sync in random directions. They stared straight ahead ramrod straight and moved like ants to and fro to their predestined destinations.
The sun was wrong, like somebody had put a filter over the sun, it’s color was wrong, the very light it gave off made her feel uncomfortable. The moon was up as well, and they were both fixed where they were, lifeless. Twilight could see the rays of light faded directly into the wood.
The statue was wrong, there was some pony there, obviously some kind of doctor. Now there were plenty of doctor statues in Canterlot, she remembered one of a kindly old looking pony dedicated to curing some disease hundreds of years ago. This one the heroically proportioned doctor was holding up a syringe like a holy object with twisted wolf-like entities at his hooves.
“Quite the contrast isn’t it?” Came a malignant voice from behind the statue.
The First Administrator, Camna stepped out from behind the statue, as if he had never been there.
“Nobody forgets their first visit to a nerteln night terror, especially since it’s usually some place they’re familiar with.”
“Is this some kind of personalized vision then, made just for me?” Twilight asked. “Is this the afterlife you go to after opening up that giant tear in the sky.”
“Don’t worry about the tear in the sky Twilight.” The First Administrator said.
Twilight gave him a withering look. He returned it with a calculating gaze.
“We’ve established that Equestria is going to become uninhabitable in the near future right?”
“When the hay did we establish THAT?!”
“When we made a deal that you’d work with me and we can get your entire population off planet otherwise you’d only get to pick 5000 of them to live.”
“That feels… like so long ago now…”
“Vatermorder is going to be waking up soon. Depending on how he’s feeling when he wakes up we might have to glass the entire planet with him on it to get him feeling better.”
“Glass?” Twilight asked, it didn’t sound good but she had to know.
“Burn the entire surface so that it turns to glass. Anyway, since you’re working with me on this plan you need to be able to keep secrets, can you?”
“I suppose?” Twilight could already tell she wasn’t going to like this secret.
“Are you at all familiar with the phrase ‘smoke and mirrors’?” The First Administrator asked.
Twilight REALLY could tell she wasn’t going to like this secret.
“Good, the entire portal in the sky up there is the underside of an orbital ring that we’ve put a bunch of screens on to make it look like it’s a portal. There is no portal, there is no danger from the portal, or anything that could be going wrong from it.”
Twilight’s first thought was anger, she remembered seeing the orbital ring going up, the endless city hovering above Equestria. That quickly transitioned into fear, and awe, and terror as the impossibility of the scale of it all finally sank in, or rather failed to sink in because it was impossible to comprehend something that large.
“You built that, all of that,” Twilight pointed out at the sky which did not have any portal or orbital ring in it. “ALL OF THAT, up there above Equestria, to fake a magic trick?!?”
“Well yes, and if I do say so myself it is a very economic use of resources too.”
Twilight’s disgusted expression said a lot.
“You and I both need to evacuate everbody on Equestria. EVERYBODY. You know why we need to do this, the Vatermorder, keep his ‘dream’ entertaining and he won’t wake up. But we can’t exactly go spreading that around because somebody might decide to go try and wake him up early. Somebody wakes him up early and he’s in a bad mood I’m legally required to burn the surface of this planet down to bedrock as a pre-emptive attack to cheer him up.
“SO, we build an orbital ring in the sky and pretend there is a giant portal that’s endangering Equestria so we can evacuate everybody BEFORE he wakes up. Orbital ring lifts up cities and towns wholesale into space. You get to keep ALL of your cities plopped down inside rotating habitats. We ship them off and start converting all you ponies into yunguaq, you all get immortality and all the benefits of being a yunguaq, you get your own dyson sphere to live in with all it’s rotating habitats.”
He pointed a finger at Twilight directly.
“And you don’t have to choose which parts of Equestria we have to scurry off with before burning every trace of your civilization to ash to appease some petty monster who might wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and start causing interuniversal wars.”
He seemed to calm down a bit from his rant.
“Ever wonder why I had you stab Chrysalis in the back?”
“Yes, because I only found out about that just recently.”
“I’ve known this was coming for a long time now. I’ve been preparing for it for a long time now, plans upon plans upon plans. Prefabricated orbital rings, landing vehicles that weren’t surplus from tour agencies, advanced materials for lifting cities. And then what happens? A civilization killer shows up, a god damn soul eating nerteln shows up.” The First Administrator tries to punch a wall but it leaves no impact and makes no sound. “And I know him, I was watching that clock, he hates nerteln almost as much as I do.”
There was a moment of silence while Twilight had to mull over what the First Administrator was telling her.
“What are we going to do now? I mean.” Twilight lifted up her snapped prosthetic leg.
The First Administrator let out a very heavy sigh.
“I’m going to have to teach you some new types of magic, but first we need to get you on two legs.”
Twilight’s ears perked up at that, surely there was some kind of advanced emergency healing magic.
The First Administrator gave her a withered look.
“I’m not a very good teacher Twilight, I’ve never used yunguaq magic. So you’re going to have to bear with me while I conference with people outside. Tell me, have you ever tried to troubleshoot something over the phone?”
-------------------
The First Administrator was not a very good teacher. It was like he had twenty people shouting in his ear at all times telling him different things to do.
“Okay so you should stand up, er no, focus on having only two legs? Or is this the 1.2.1 revision, perhaps you should try reaching for something with one of your forelegs.”
Twilight had a very strong urge to facehoof, she couldn’t but she was tempted to go so far as to conjure a magical hoof with which to facehoof with. In the end she waved her broken artificial limb at him for emphasis.
“Yeah something like that, I think?”
Eventually after another minute of contrary instruction and things like “patch 1.3.1r” Twilight was able to transform into a werewolf and stand on two legs. She wasn’t exactly tottering about like she expected to be, but she wasn’t going to be running a marathon either, not unless she wanted to experience the wonders of a marble floor directly with her face.
“No, no, that won’t do, nope.” The First Administrator said looking at her. “Tear down one of these curtains and drape it over yourself to make a toga or something. Your… everything is hanging out.”
Twilight looked down and there was significantly more sticking out than would be on a mare or a pony. She finally understood what Gwynn meant when Gwynn said she was “flat”.
“No, don’t poke those, you need to get dressed pretty quickly, we’re already losing time here. We aren’t in danger YET, nerteln hasn’t fully awoken so he’s still in some kind of slumber, but that’s not going to last very long for what we need to do.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll get dressed. Jeez, you’re as bad as Rarity in the dressing room.” Twilight grumbled.
One bent nail, a curtain, and a re-adjustment to cover her whole chest later Twilight was wearing an expensive gold trim toga.
“Now we need to get you ready to rescue Naudia. First we have to…” He deflated a bit and spoke aloud as if to somebody else. “Nobody trained her on simusound?”
He rubbed his temples and waved his hands, as if telling an invisible audience to be quiet.
“Sorry Twilight, I’m talking to a great deal of people outside of this pocket universe, could you grab your bagrat for me real quick? You know the emergency rat on the back of your neck there?”
Twilight had honestly forgotten about the little guy, only just remembering he was there as a kinda “reserve shield” in case she got injured or something like that.
“Okay Twilight, we’re going to have to have you learn some stuff on the fly here, and this is the most important one. It’s a technology in your shielding called ‘simusound’. Bagrat enable simusound training module one.”
The rat jumped off her outstretched paw and scurried off behind her.
“What is simusound?”
“Simusound is a tech that lets your shield look around for you, a basic AI inside it will look for specific things and project a sound so you can hear them. Say somebody is sneaking up on you, or you’re in the vacuum of space, with simusound can hear an explosion or somebody behind you readying a knife.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Try and listen for an enemy behind you. Oh yeah and make sure your zoetic shield is up, doesn’t work without that.”
“So I’m listening for a rat scurrying around?” Twilight asked.
“No, you’re listening specifically for an enemy trying to sneak up on you, keep that in your head, enemy sneak attack.”
Twilight tried to focus on that, but it was too vague, so she imagined some pony mugger walking up behind her with a knife. She wasn’t quite sure what this would accomplish, but then she heard it, like somebody was walking up behind her drawing a long knife, firm audible footsteps, and a distinctive knife draw that she could pinpoint exactly.
She spun around and there was nobody there, the sounds were obviously coming from the bagrat holding one of the nails that held the curtain rod in.
“What?”
“That’s simusound, your shield watches out for you and plays a distinctive sound that you can listen for and pinpoint exactly. It was originally designed for hearing inside of space, the sensors could see things you couldn’t like air leaks, or see behind you. It’s been hacked and modified and changed so often that you can have it watch for almost anything or play any sound.” The First Administrator gave a sour face. “For kids learning it too many of those sounds are fart noises, but what matters is that they learn how to use it.”
“How do I change the sound?”
“We’re going to have somebody actually train you how to do that later. For now all you need to know is that the sound changes based on the context. Somebody with a gun would have maybe a charging sound or a click, somebody running up to you faster might play some sort of alarm sound.”
“Why wasn’t I trained on this before, this seems extremely useful!”
“The intention was that you would be fighting those weak thralls in a formation. Nothing could sneak up behind you, and in a defensive battle there wasn’t anything that could really threaten you in such a way.” The First Administrator sighed. “Unfortunately things didn’t work out that way, Doctor Willow is better at learning soul magic than he really should be, he wasn’t supposed to have anything as strong as Pomo.”
“So what, you made me walk on two legs, put on a toga and hear things behind me and you’re just going to send me out to sneak around this city looking for Naudia?”
“No. First we’re going to summon you some backup, you’re going to be fighting in a group.”
-------------------
Twilight was following behind the bagrat, who was inside of a summoned form to act as a tank, and there were four “slime rats” as the First Administrator had called them. They didn’t look like they were made of slime, but Twilight didn’t look like she could fill up half a kiddy pool and slosh around inside of it.
The three slime rats were all different sizes, and the First administrator had applied different labels to them.
The big one was the size of a goat, used rat poison magic, not specifically rat poison, rat magic and poison magic. It was supposed to try and get more spell per spell with something called “afterspell”. It was there to infiltrate the enemy formation and sabotage their efforts. It had patches of fur that glowed with white light as well as a kind of poisonous looking mohawk of fur down it’s back. Somehow the rat came with it’s own little mage staff and walked on two legs.
The middle rat was using laser trash magic, again lasers and trash, as elemental magic. Somehow this was to help it set up traps so it could nail targets with large but inaccurate attacks that had nasty secondary effects. It was summoned in with a trash bag it carried around and it had alert looking satellite ears colored a laser ruby red.
And the small rat was using rhoallim and ghost magic, some sort of specific buffing paladin magic and ethereal magic that hits multiple times respectively. It was banking on getting large critical strikes against the enemy from range buffed up by those support magics. It resembled a hollow suit of armor meant for a rat, but the armor was made out of a paladin white soap sudsy feather substance, and inside was a ghostly blown glass shape that played tricks on your eyes.
Her bagrat had taken on a lichenthrope look, Twilight could see it there floating in a glass-like shield, a hunched over rat made of glass imitating her lichenthrope magic with a rat at it’s heart, as it’s heart.
Twilight was there to heal and support them, her spells could be used that way, but it felt very strange to her that the spells used to heal were essentially the exact same spells she used to infect thralls. The difference seemed to be the targeting profile and the spell’s effect was shifted around towards more working over time.
Effectively Twilight had a small group of rats summoned up out of nowhere to fight. She didn’t wonder why they hadn’t done this from the start though. The bagrat had sapped her shields and her magic felt noticeably weaker, and she felt the potency of her magic’s secondary effects burn away with each of the slime rats. She could just tell that those larger hits that had given her an advantage during the last fight would be happening dramatically less often while these slime rats were around.
Looking down at her artificial stump with the dangling pony hoof though Twilight realized she was going to have to stick to the backlines anyway. She was networked in with the bagrats with her magic so that she would know when one of them needed support. The interface for this was strange though, the indication that somebody badly needed healing was obviously red, nothing strange there. However the indication somebody was at full health was violet, the interface moving up through the color spectrum to indicate their health.
The whole situation felt very ramshakle, enhanced by how she felt weaker than she normally did with a broken arm and those rats actively sapping her magical strength for their own. This made Twilight almost paranoid, she was constantly looking around at the twisted version of the Canterlot castle grounds.
Hiding behind another statue Twilight looked up at it, and the statue seemed to… fade into existence as she looked at it. She couldn’t tell what it was commemorating, it was another heroic statue of Doctor Willow, this time she noticed that it was entirely lacking a cutie mark of any kind. She had to hand it to the artist though, it had got the slow infection of the ugly brown-green soul magic in his eyes spot on.
She suspected that apart from the heroic looking resculpt of his body the artist in question lacked any kind of artistic drive. She could imagine many of these same metal statues being melted down until the listless artist reached an acceptable level of out of place heroic musculature on the otherwise average looking pony doctor.
“What is this statue even for?” She asked aloud.
“Look at the plaque.”
She looked at the plaque and it faded into existence in the same way as the details on the statue, like it had always been there, like it had never been there. The plaque read “Doctor Willow eradicates rinderpest”.
“What? Rinderpest? That was eradicated a long time ago now, and I KNOW he didn’t have any part in that.”
“How do you know that?” The First Administrator asked, mostly out of curiosity.
“I did a research project on it, interviewed the ponies responsible for the vaccine.”
“That’s the nature of a nerteln. They will poach the achievements of others. If he had any chance of surviving today, he would likely try and catch those ponies, and brainwash them into giving him credit as the real brains behind it.”
Twilight gave off a picturesque look of absolute disgust.
“He would do that? But he’s a doctor, other doctors would know.” Twilight protested.
“The chaff victuals that exist in a society governed by a Nerteln wouldn’t care. They would exist only for him.” The First Administrator looked ahead at the group of ponies walking down the hall. “We don’t have to be stealthy around these, just act casual. These victuals won’t kick up a fuss.”
Twilight looked at the ponies walking down the hall. She recognized one of them, it was Expat Eclipse the queen of the werewolves, he looked wrong. They all looked wrong. It was hard to recognize them but these were all werewolves she’d at least seen around Knicknik.
Their eyes were unfocused, glazed over, his mane was shaved, and so was his face. This was so that a steady stream of greenish-brown unpleasant looking liquid could drip down from the corners of his eyes and from his listless open mouth. The cut of his shaved fur diverted the liquid down to his chin where he kept his head tilted just so it that would drip into a bowl mounted around his neck.
“I would say it’s likely these are all ex-werewolves going to give thanks to the statue commemorating Willow’s extermination of lycanthropy.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“The way nerteln work in their governing structure is very predictable. Such victuals would never be allowed to meet with him directly. So they would be instructed to drag themselves over to the relevant statue and give thanks to their god-ruler. Unless you’ve heard about one of these ponies having rinderpest that’s the only place they’d likely to be going.”
“But is that really Eclipse over there? Did he fall into this place as well?”
“No, this is rather like a dream from a powerful creature, it’s what the nerteln WANTS the world to look like, not what the world is. That’s why it fades into existence when you look closely at the details. It’s not really real, but it’s very much real enough to kill somepony.”
“Why aren’t you going to help fight then?”
"You don't believe I could help you fight, and neither does anybody else. I don't know what tips people off to that but everybody gravitates to that same conclusion. I think they can feel the presence of the shard."
"What does that even MEAN?" Twilight said exhasperated.
"That deep down you believe the second combat starts I'm going to step behind a pillar or something and vanish until the dirty work is done."
"And will you?"
"You know what I am Twilight, you've known it since the very first moment we met. Your primal unconscious mind raged at the intrusion, you filled up that figure with things you recognized, and things you hated, and here I am. Did you ever wonder why I had the face of a pony? Did you ever ask Naudia what I was? Whose face do you think Gwynn sees when she looks at me?"
Reality rang like a bell.
During the vibration everything seemed to become more concrete, more fixed and real. The gold trim on the windows organized itself, the curtains grew a layer of velvet. The ponies outside had clothes vanish into existance, as well as things like carts. The world grew more alive like it had ever been alive in the first place.
Every change highlighted the stark deadness of this faux world.
The decorations seemed random, as if somepony didn’t understand what they were putting up, the clothes seemed like ponies had dressed themselves in the dark. Even the curtains were draped wrong on their rods.
"This is the first time this damn nerteln has been behind schedule to our advantage." The First Administrator said.
“What? What’s going on? Is this reality settling in or something?” Twilight had been particularly unnerved by the sudden, and unpleasantly organic looking, sprouting of velvet on the curtains.
Naudia clung to the ceiling, shivering, huddled behind a grand arch in the tower she had woken up in. She was a part of all this. She was one of two ponies responsible for all of this. Whatever this new Canterlot was she didn’t notice it, couldn’t register it.
The sky was burning, space was burning, the mechanical hellscape was burning inside her mind. It was like a loop, she just kept coming back to it, it kept coming back to her.
I did that.
Sinking further Naudia didn’t know what had happened to Twilight. Maybe she’d never know what happened to Twilight.
“Hey.”
She was injured, a dull distant pain like the sky that was burning overhead. Naudia averted her eyes from the windows and into a darker corner of the room.
“HEY!”
Shivering she started to calm down a bit, force herself to calm down a bit, stop putting it off and take a look at the injury on her leg.
Quite frankly it was the cleanest looking injury Naudia had ever seen, barely any blood, the wound already closing up in a strange and unique manner. A manner that showed her exactly how deep the wound was. The wound itself was like if somebody had taken the sharpest knife ever made, carved it into a tooth and stabbed her with it, the wound was almost perfect in precisely illustrating the biting monster’s mess of teeth.
It didn’t hurt exactly, she knew she was hurt and she wasn’t going to be able to walk on that anytime soon. But it didn’t hurt like injuries had hurt before.
“HEY NAUDIA QUIT MOPING AND GET DOWN HERE!”
The voice snapped her awake, like it had come from inside her head. She turned her face to look down at The First Administrator
Her head uncoiling from her hunched over posture on the ceiling like a snake Naudia was making disturbingly insect-like movements. Her wings buzzed in an angry tone, and her head never stopped tracking the First Administrator.
He gave her a flat look as she made her way down the wall in the most threatening bug-like manner. He let out a sigh when she looked like she might try and pounce on him.
“Do you really… REALLY? Think that is going to work?”
Naudia stopped, she remembered the last time she saw somebody try and attack him. When Twilight had to have her leg…
“If I was that easy to kill somebody would have done it a long time ago. We both know what you’re thinking about doing isn’t worth it. Think about where you are. You have bigger problems right now.”
“Where am I then?” Naudia hissed at him.
“You are inside of a nerteln night terror. Doctor Willow will be undergoing apotheosis soon.”
That explained little to Naudia, so she looked around to find Canterlot all around her. Dead Canterlot.
There were ponies walking around inside Canterlot, but they were white noise. Canterlot normally had an air about it. She didn’t quite like it at first, but over subsequent visits Canterlot’s emotional taste was almost comforting at times. On one Canterlot date with Twilight she had ended up just sitting on a park bench with Twilight, eyes closed swaying with the emotional tides, wings buzzing in tune with the city. It was nice to be reminded there were all these ponies around, it made a nice break from Ponyville.
This Canterlot was like a ghost of the real one. A vast ebbing and flowing sea of emotional flatness.
She felt herself immediately drawn to the window to look out at it. Looking down from the tower she was in she saw a gathering of artists. They were all artists here, they stood out from the white marble and the black dots on the white marble. They were all lined up, almost shoulder to shoulder, as close as you could pack them in. Some of them even had smaller easels, or were pressed up against walls with little more than a clipboard.
Naudia squinted her eyes at the figures three stories down. They weren’t painting, they were drawing with lumps of charcoal, not like a pencil or other art tool, it was like they had picked up a piece of half burnt firewood and decided to draw with that. And then the chimney caught her eye.
Following the black smoke of the chimney down she was just in time to see an artist with a finished charcoal painting open up a slot into the firebox. The slot was conveniently set up so that the artist could dump their finished canvas directly into the fire, pick up a new canvas and mechanically return to their spot without so much as a backward glance.
Another one did the exact same thing, picking up whatever new easel was closest. Looking back at the crowd she was pretty sure one of the ponies down there was actually dead, but nopony noticed. They didn’t care, they didn’t care when one of them died, they didn’t care when their painting was burned, they were like emotional ghosts. The only time they did care was when they were painting, that feeling burned with a poisonous passion, not of somebody driven, or passionate, but of somebody who had been set on fire. It was like Naudia was watching ponies burn themselves to ash alongside those paintings.
“What are they doing?” She asked aloud.
“Generating experiences, chewing cud like good nerteln victuals. They think, they breathe, they exist for him.”
“What IS this place?”
“You are inside of a nerteln night terror, the last of Doctor Willow’s self is burning off and he sees around him, creates around him a little world of what he wants to see, what flavor of little nerteln tyrant we’re going to get.”
Naudia looked down on the poor souls below.
“Are they real, is this place real?”
“Yes and no. This is a nerteln vision. If you’re asking if those are real ponies down there, well some of them might be based on real ponies, but they aren’t the real ponies. If you’re asking if they’re real enough to kill you, oh absolutely.”
“And what about the horrible tear in the sky, why isn’t it here?”
“This is a vision. Besides the tear in the sky was a fake. It’s all the underside of an orbital ring. It’s there to convince ponies they need to leave the planet.”
“Because of that Vatermorder thing?”
It took Naudia a long moment for the monumentous ideas to finally touch together in her head.
“That, all that, cities that stretch above Equestria to the horizon, a lightshow across the entire sky. To convince ponies on some no-name planet to leave?”
“We would prefer to have positive relations with ponies, however if there is even the slightest chance that somebody would try and wake up the Vatermorder early...”
“What can he even do? What is so scary about him?”
“How well do you know your cosmology, particularly around the beginning of the universe?”
“Decently well as anypony does, a couple extremely short and hard to study epochs at the very start, stuff like that.” Naudia waved her hoof vaguely with the air of somebody who had been drug through a mile of current cosmology textbooks.
“During the first instant the universe came into being, somewhere between the grand unification epoch and before the inflationary epoch the Vatermorder arrived in our universe.”
“Wait, that’s less than a quectosecond after the universe came into being.”
“Yes, your cosmology is ahead of where I thought it would be, good job.” The First Administrator seemed genuinely surprised at that. “Anyway, at that time there was some creature already forming in the newborn universe analogous to fate. The Vatermorder disposed of it, which caused the inflationary epoch.”
Naudia stared at the First Administrator.
“He’s going to wake up eventually whatever we do, so I would prefer to lie about why you ponies need to leave rather than have any risk that somebody might get him up early.”
-------------------
“What even is the Vatermorder like anyways?” Twilight said tearing off a chunk of a fruit based “smoothie bar” that had been in her saddlebags.
“Lazy, jaded, alone, his power is limited only by his ability to think and understand. People always want something from him, try and be friends with him for that. He’s a slow burning furnace inside a barrel of gunpowder.”
“Why would he be so touchy about that if he’s all powerful?”
“Imagine you had a friend that only wanted to be your friend because you’re a princess. Frustrating right? Imagine that happens a thousand times, that’s a tiny fragment of what he’s been through. The Vatermorder has outlived many universes before this one.”
“Shouldn’t some kind of all powerful being like that be more…” Twilight chewed on the dried strawberry bar but couldn’t quite find the word to say.
“As best we can tell before all of this he was just some guy, and he’s just never stopped being some guy inside his head. Chained to the obelisk in the valley of death, something broke in him, and he broke the universe.”
From outside there came an unearthly howling, rising and falling it echoed off of the sky. Whatever it was, it was bad.
“What the hay is that?!” Twilight shouted over the sound.
“Keep your shields up Twilight. That’s just a warning siren.”
The siren stopped for a second and an announcery voice spoke, very loud before the siren came back on, it said:
"This is not a drill, First light in T minus thirty seconds."
“A warning siren for what! First light?” Twilight was starting to get worried and it showed in her voice.
“Your vision will darken a bit if you have your shield up, that’s your shielding’s natural protection against bright lights.” The First Administrator looked bored, but he finally picked up on Twilight’s agitation. "The First Administration is obligated to announce when we are nuking a city, technically"
“Nuking?”
Just then rockets shot into the air from the other side of Canterlot, a good number of them that burned an angry red, they flew around like a swarm of bees. It took Twilight a second to realize that they were coming towards Canterlot Castle.
“We won’t be inside the-”
Twilight was cut off as the first rocket hit Canterlot proper and detonated. The world dimmed down except for the massive pure white light over Canterlot Castle. The castle wasn’t even visible, just a stark white light that burned itself into the floor, and then another, then two more, a constant stream of sun white fusion light.
The first shockwave hit, all of the glass blasted away, the curtains evaporated, the stone cracked around her. Another shockwave and the stone buckled and began to melt and burn, the fires a dim haze under the tremendous light around from the explosions above the castle.
The world was oddly quiet around her as a pillar thrown by the blast and half melted smashed itself in half against her head and flew on by. Melted chunks of stone were pressed against her shielding, before they evaporated under the sheer pressure and heat from the ongoing explosion to where Canterlot Castle used to be.
Eventually the heat and pressure fell off, it felt like ages before it did, and Twilight could see around her, technically. There was a massive dust cloud in the shape of a mushroom that blocked out the sun, glowing an angry red and dimming down, and all around here was dust and smoke from what the castle grounds used to be.
She turned around and saw her shadow physically burned into the ground behind her. Blinking her eyes in shock she realized that this had to be a dream, she hadn’t felt almost anything from that, she hadn’t heard anything from that.
“Maybe I died.” Twilight said deliriously looking around at the ruins of Canterlot city. “Maybe I died and I’m a ghost now.”
“If something like that could kill a yunguaq, or for that matter a nerteln, I’d have to ban some of our cheapest signaling lasers.”
Twilight’s head turned in the cloud of dust to the First Administrator, her mouth agape, the glowing specs of dust stuck to her shielding over her eyes gave him an otherworldly look. He stood there, untouched by the chaos and destruction around them, sparkling with the flames stuck to her eyes.
“But… so much destruction… so much, why? Why would you do that?”
"Well if you want to get somebody's attention, a couple pounds of hydrogen isn't that big a cost now is it?”
Twilight felt a foul wind upon her, and became aware of a clicking sound around her, like small rocks were clicking apart.
“What’s that… sound? It sounds like rocks… Is that the ground cooling after the explosion?”
“No, that’s your simusound at work again, it works as a Geiger counter. It means this area is irradiated so keep your shields up, it’s nothing that would kill a yunguaq, but it’s nothing that would even effect a yunguaq with shields up.”
Twilight’s eyes were drawn to the mushroom cloud reaching the maximum height for the pocket of reality they were in, she turned just in time to see the cloud swept away into nothing as if by some great hoof… or horn. From the epicenter came a great voice, amplified a thousand times by the forbidden magic that gave it’s caster life.
“YOU DARE TO INTRUDE UPON MY PERFECT WORLD?!” Doctor Willow raged like an angry god. Twilight could feel his gaze sweep over them, drinking them in as if they were prey, delectable targets to a predator. And then the gaze swept out of the city to where the rockets had come.
The next words he said were incomprehensible and spoke of a creature so paralyzed with fury at the lesser beings that dared. THAT DARED. DARED to EXIST in such a way, DARED to do so without his permission.
His rage split in two directions so effectively Doctor Willow had to make a choice. And then with a wave of his hoof Doctor Willow returned the city to a livable temperature for pony habitation. The clicking in Twilight’s ears went away, the ground flawlessly cooled down to a normal temperature without so much as cracking. As it was ordered to, the radioactive wreck of a city became a place where you couldn’t burn an egg on the smoldering concrete, or fry your lungs with the air around you.
“Looks like Doctor Willow has made his decision, we’d better meet up with Naudia.”
Tumbling down from the remains of a tower Naudia dropped in.
“Damn it, you get a grip on a concrete wall the consistency of jelly and then it cools down to a brittle husk.” Naudia brushed the glass-like chunks of concrete off the sole of her shielding. Then she looked up to meet AN’s gaze. “Hey, weren’t you just.” Naudia looked back up at the tower and then back at him, and decided not to press the issue.
She didn’t have time to press the issue because Twilight ran over and abruptly stopped right in front of her, dancing on her tippy-hooves, bending down in an uncomfortable way so as to not bowl Naudia and her wounded leg over. All of her built up almost military stoic-ness broke upon seeing the dried blood on Naudia’s leg.
“Are you all right?” Twilight asked Naudia, and then she instantly turned to the First Administrator. “Is she all right, is she going to need a replacement leg? How about blood loss, do we need to feed her some of those smoothie bars? Would that fall have hurt her, did that fall hurt you Naudia?”
It took a while to calm Twilight down from fussing over Naudia. While Naudia wasn’t exactly fine, she wasn’t in any kind of dire straits. Not in any shape to get into a fight though.
“Oh thank Celestia.” Twilight said. “I wouldn’t want her to have to get a replacement leg like this.” Twilight wiggled the snapped prosthetic leg dangling from her arm stump.
“Why did that break so easily?” Naudia asked. “Shouldn’t you guys have some kind of super materials for this?”
“To be frank most yunguaq don’t have… you know hooves. So while we were able to make something that acted enough like your real leg minus the slime stuff. However making it as quickly as we had to the priority was on combat effectiveness and not acting like a gymnastics leg.”
“But it snapped during combat.” Twilight pointed out.
“No, it snapped during a martial trance. It should have been fine for normal combat, but a martial trance is well beyond what anybody was expecting from you Twilight. There is a reason yunguaq tend to call them ‘death trances’.”
“Death trances?” Naudia asked concerned.
“They tend to show up when the need is greatest, they give people astonishing martial combat prowess. The problem is that with how yunguaq fight ‘when the need is greatest’ tends to be in situations where a martial trance just doesn’t give you enough. Yunguaq tend to perform their last stands under such a martial trances like that.”
Twilight remembered how things turned out in that fight. She could see what he meant.
As they chewed over that something caught their eyes, a bright glow just out of their vision. Twilight and Naudia got on top of a rock to see what it was.
Off in the distance Canterlot was coming back to life.
As in it was literally coming back from being a smoldering radioactive wrecked mess.
They watched as buildings glowing with a brownish green light sprang up out of nothing. Popping into existence in such a way that made Twilight and Naudia shiver even from this distance. They couldn’t quite explain it.
Maybe it was how dead the buildings still looked as if nobody would ever live there, maybe it was the empty ponies standing motionless as if waiting for orders, maybe it was the absolute lack of light from the windows.
Most likely though it was the lingering glow of soul magic. The glow died down until only the ponies’ eyes remained glowing a faint foul light.
The ponies turned as if they had received their orders and began to march towards the First Administration forces.
“What are those?” Twilight asked pointing at the strange box-like contraptions that were leaving a static glowing trail as they flew through the sky.
“Oh those, farming equipment, farmers use tracked propulsion drones to monitor their crops from inside their tractor tanks.”
“Tractor tank? Why would your forces be using some ad-hoc shambled together concept like a tractor tank?”
The First Administrator looked at her as if he just didn’t understand what she was saying. Twilight looked at the drones as those strange static trails of light zipping down directly into the nerteln forces where they exploded.
“Why are you using, on the front lines, farming equipment adapted for war?” Twilight clarified. “Shouldn’t you have an actual military for all this?”
“Essentially all of our civilian jobs have military purposes. Every one of them.”
“Yeah, what is the civilian purpose of my combat class then? What use is a lichen werewolf skirmisher?”
“The specific type of lichen is called ‘wolf lichen’ it’s used in manufacturing dyes.” He responded as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Lichenthropes are mostly involved in the dye industry.”
“Naudia’s class then.”
“Cheese making.” The First Administrator responded instantly.
Twilight decided to approach this from another angle.
“Okay then stock investors, do they have a combat role?”
Once again the First Administrator looked at her as if she’d grown a second head.
“Of course they have a combat role, they’re the ONLY combat class I can think of without a civilian role.”
Twilight decided not to get into that.
“Fast food workers?”
“Boilerplates are used in heating up cheap food and are very useful as a phased array beam weapon.” The First Administrator explained. “Very popular, means you’ve got this sci-fi looking flat plate on the end of a gun that can aim itself. Technology invented before pre-sliced bread, but it still tends to impress people today.”
“How about Roshin then, what civilian role does his flock of radioactive chickens have?”
“He’s a chicken farmer Twilight, that’s just what chicken farmers do.”
The whole situation felt alien, more alien than anything she’d seen from these yunguaq before.
“Why did you even give me a class related to cheese making of all things?” Asked Naudia.
“Because it’s a werewolf.” The First Administrator answered.
Twilight was very tempted to ask if that was because they were going to infiltrate a werewolf settlement, or if the First Administrator just really liked werewolves. Thinking upon herself and the people she’d met recently, she was guessing it might actually be the latter.
“Anyway, you two should be resting up and preparing for combat. Try and eat another smoothie bar if you can, especially you Naudia.”
“I thought all of Doctor Willow’s forces were heading down to fight your forces, over… off over there.” Naudia waved her hoof vaguely in the distance. “You know, your city destroying distraction worked and hopefully they’ll take him out.”
“While that did divert basically all his forces to fight ours that’s not enough. I’m expecting him to send Pomo after you directly.”
“We have to fight… that thing again?” Naudia irked. “We’re in no shape to do that.”
“No, YOU’RE in no shape to do that. Twilight is already rested up, her shielding never broke, just her fake leg. You’re thinking in mortal terms, your shield is your life.” He turned to Twilight. “Do you think you’re up for fighting Pomo again, should just be Pomo this time though.”
“How do you know this?”
“I’ve been fighting nerteln for a very long time Twilight. Are you prepared?”
Twilight looked over at her strange rat buddies that she had summoned in, like pets they came over inside of their shielding like pets, like she’d had several dogs. Several very strange dogs.
“I think so.”
“Good, now I need you to practice with your pets, we’re going to be having you gang up on Pomo.”
“Why didn’t we just do this in the first place? If I can summon all of these extra rats to help me, why not start with this?”
“Because we already started with this, all those partisan weapons you passed out. Doctor Willow was supposed to show up a couple stages behind where he actually was and get blasted in the face by a firing squad.”
“No, I mean why not have me just summon in these guys to fight for me from the start, why did I have to go in there and fight?”
“You could feel it right Twilight? The class you’re working with isn’t designed to fight with summons, fighting with summons requires more skill, more skill requires more time. Every one of those summons you have now makes you weaker.”
He pointed at the goat sized rat poison slime rat, glowing with a poisonous mohawk along it’s back, and presumably eyes glowing with white rat magic.
“So long as that slime rat is out he’s leeching away your magical strength directly.” He pointed at the middle rat with the trash bag and ruby red eyes. “The laser trash rat is sapping away your own afterburn.” He pointed at the last rat, the one that encased it’s transparent glass-like form in a feathery-foamy armor. “The Rhoallim ghost rat steals away your ability to critically strike.”
“And the bagrat?” Twilight looked over at the bagrat which was imitating her own lichenthrope magic.
“The most dangerous to you out of all of them.” Camna said gravely. “That rat is supposed to be your lifeline, when your shields go down, his shields are supposed to be how you surrender, or run away. It’s there as a safety net to prevent the worst from happening.”
“So how am I even supposed to fight Pomo with all this pulling me down?”
“In your current state you’re getting more out of being the support here than the rats are pulling you down. I wouldn’t normally recommend this, giving the enemy more targets generally just means area of effect attacks are more effective, but you and Naudia aren’t even a full group.”
Far off there was another explosion, and then the First Administrator talked into his ear for a second.
“Oh HELL, he’s coming this way.”
“Who?”
“Doctor Willow. You did a good job pissing him off, he sent Pomo off to fight my forces, he’s coming here because he wants blood.”
Twilight looked down at her stump and dangling broken prosthetic arm, over at Naudia who wasn’t bleeding, but wasn’t exactly ready to run on that leg.
“So should we fly out of here?”
“He has a limited knowledge of the future, nerteln are strong enough to break through yunguaq immunity to time travel to a degree. You need to fight.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The reason he’s coming here is because he knows he’s got you backed into a corner, to watch you squirm. If you run he’s going to blast Naudia out of the air. He’s seen the future, to an extent, he knows my forces are well tied up right now, you aren’t getting reinforcements. That’s why he’s here, to make you squirm, and he sees himself being able to get away afterwards.”
The First Administrator turned to face Twilight.
“He sees the you that broke your limb out there and thinks he can kill you.”