Tantabus, Chapter 13 (Sunset) · 4:33am Jan 17th, 2016
Tantabus
13 - Sunset
September 25th, 4:30 am CST
I have tried to get this entry just right for hours now, struggling in vain to convey the facts without at the same time coming out looking like anything other than a demon incarnate.
But that’s impossible.
The truth must be told, or this world is doomed. In the face of that, even my immense ego doesn’t stand a chance.
I’ve written over and over again that I aim for “brutal honesty” in my diary. This entry...will be exceptionally brutal.
Oh, and if there’s any parents reading this diary with your children, you might want to get ready to cover their eyes—this is going to get ugly.
* * *
Alright, so if you managed to read the entry from yesterday morning, you’d know that Applejack had declared her candidacy for the office of Princess of the Fall Formal. And that I was less than happy with this development.
The next thing that happened was the revelation of my dirty little email account, and all the tricks that I had used it for.
This left me in a rather desperate situation, or rather, it would have, if not for the fact that I managed to regrow fully half of the Element of Magic gem that was in my possession. This meant that even if I lost control of the school, I would still be able to carry out my ultimate plan against the princesses in Equestria.
But that didn’t mean I still didn’t want to hurt Applejack. Badly.
I got the phone call at half past midnight from Snips and Snails, informing me that they had found a video on the internet guaranteed to destroy the Apple family’s reputation if seen by enough people. At first glance this appeared to be exactly what I was looking for. For probably the first time in their entire lives, my pair of followers heard a genuine compliment from somebody, and that somebody, most improbably, was me.
I hung up the phone immediately afterwards, not paying attention to the oddly familiar sound I heard at the last moment.
The video...well, as the video is cursed, I can’t possibly describe it to you, for fear that you won’t believe me and will somehow manage to track it down to watch for yourself. So you’ll have to live with a vague generality: It depicted a tragedy in slow motion.
As I watched, my initial elation and schadenfreude turned to first shock, and then horror. [ What I was witnessing was something that, if it happened to me, I would have genuinely welcomed. ] But under these circumstances, with their ignorance of magic...for all my contempt of humanity at that moment, I never would have wished that on one of them.
And then I felt it—the overwhelming compulsion to sleep.
At that moment, I recalled two things that I had brushed aside because it was my incompetent minions and because I was too obsessed with vengeance to pay attention: The first thing was that Snips and Snails had told me that they had both fallen asleep for a half-hour between watching that video themselves and when they had sent it to me. And the second thing was that the sound I had heard when I had hung up on them was the scream of a botched teleportation.
The pattern, however imperfect, was finally before me: Rock Cycle had fallen asleep in the presence of Equestrian magic, and then he was taken out of this dimension by becoming victim to an impossible earthquake. Trixie had witnessed Rock Cycle’s disappearance. She slept, awoke empowered by that same Equestrian magic, and then some time later she was taken out of this dimension. At least one Apple witnessed Trixie’s disappearance, and one night of sleep later...the events of the video happened, events that could not have been anything else other than magical in cause. Snips and Snails watched the video, slept and suffered the same fate.
You see the prior victim doing something impossible, you fall asleep, something impossible happens to you, and then it’s your turn to be taken, with any witnesses cursed to repeat the cycle.
And I was now next in line.
I struggled to craft a diary entry to warn somebody, anybody, of my impending fate.
And then, as I was falling asleep, I cast a human Spirit Writing spell. I therefore have the entire transcript of my dream. I feel I have no choice but to transcribe all of what transpired:
* * *
Look well, Sunset Shimmer, at the future which I propose to grant for you:
You stand atop Mount Canterhorn at the stroke of midnight, with the Equestrian artifact fully restored in your hands. Triumphantly, you raise up the tiara and crown yourself.
In an instant, you can feel unimaginable quantities of raw magic surge through your body, transforming you into a veritable goddess! The students of CHS, orphans just as you are, bow down in reverence before you, surrendering their freedom irrevocably to your will.
After three immense strides, you stand before the school building that has been the bane of your existence for so long, your followers breathlessly trying to catch up. With a lazy sweep of your arm, the campus is demolished to make way for an immense portal between worlds. You step through, and your army follows, transformed by the passage into armored warponies, equipped and ready for battle!
And you! You are an alicorn, taller even than Celestia. Your wings block out the sun, while the blinding glare of your eyes and horn outshine it, for you are both Day and Night.
(There is no complaint from me so far.)
Celestia sits back and watches as her three pathetic fellow princesses dare to oppose your might. Luna tries to stop you with her arcane magic, but you are able to dispatch her with nothing but light, for she is nothing but Nightmare Moon in disguise. Cadance tries to sway you with honeyed words of treason, but a horn through her rotten heart is enough to silence her pitiful mewing.
“Hey!” I protest as the vision suddenly takes a turn for the dark.
And as for the idiot Twilight? You use the earth pony strength of your hooves to behead her before she is even a paragraph into her “Friendship Speech”.
“And that’s completely unnecessary!”
With your enemies defeated, it is time to reshape Equestria into your image. Your army of orphans spreads throughout the land, seeking out and slaughtering every parent they can find!
(The sight of which renders me both speechless and nauseous.)
Seeing this, Celestia smiles the first genuine smile of her life, bows deeply, and surrenders her crown to you. “I see that you are far stronger than I will ever be,” she admits with tears of happiness, “and so I can finally admit that I love you. Please allow me to stand beside you, Daughter, as you...”
“What is the meaning of this?!” I finally manage to demand of the suit of golden armor, which has been floating next to me and narrating the vision I have been forced to witness.
This is the desire that you keep in your heart. It is your fondest wish, is it not? And I can give you the power to make it real. You possess a piece of the Equestrian artifact, I have the remainder. Let me help you.
“I do not want...this!” I shout, indicating the hellish landscape before me. The scintillating light within the empty helmet seems to glare at me. It is Ancient Greek armor, Athenian, with a tufted feather crest instead of the dyed horsehair of a Spartan helmet.
Surely you do. You want more than anything for Celestia to love you. She never expressed that love no matter what you did, but instantly embraced Cadance for being an alicorn. Therefore, she only loves alicorns, and power.
“And the slaughter?!” I recognize the armor, from an obscure Neoclassical painting. It belongs to Alcibiades, the arch-traitor of the Peclopponysian War.
They weren’t orphans. What right have ordinary ponies to have families while you do not? Equalize them all, and make orphans of all of Equestria!
“This is madness!”
Your madness. Which we shall unleash upon two worlds!
“No, I forbid you from granting those wishes. Wishes...dream wishes...you are a tantabus!”
Your consent is not required, Pony. You will have your wish, whether you like it or not. And then I will extract my payment.
“A tantabus, operating under the twisted rules of human magic! Instead of scheming to break into the waking world, you suck your victims into the realm of dreams, where you can torture them forever! But only by fulfilling the bargain of granting the victim’s fondest wish in the manner of a cruel genie: An impossible to find artifact snatched away at the last moment for the geologist, the perfect act with the sour ending for the magician, [ whatever it is that you did to that poor Apple ], and a brief moment of job satisfaction for my poor helpers. But you have no bargain with me—I renounce my desires! N...never will I return to Equestria,” I conclude in tears, “and the human realm is henceforth under my protection!”
You lie—your heart betrays you!
“Does it? Listen to it once more.”
No...no!
The dream is now fully lucid. I reach out for the magic of the Element that I fell asleep clutching tightly in my hand. “And now, Tantabus, be...!”
* * *
Faster than I could cast the spell, the Tantabus fled from my dream, and left me gasping on the floor of my living room.
I will offer but one pathetically weak excuse for the sheer depravity of my fantasies, and that was my subconscious trying desperately to flag this fantasy as a trap.
Of course, that means that the fantasy had to become that depraved before I would recognize it as a trap.
The worst part of course is that it was all true. All of my fillyhood rage at an unfair world, allowed to fester into the schemes of a monster. I had never dwelled at any length on what I would do once I had used the Element to return to Equestria. I would “show the princesses”, but that phrase had no meat behind it.
Once I was forced to see what it was that I truly wanted, and to realize that on top of my horrific actions, I would be exposing all of those humans and ponies to the perhaps even more depraved attentions of the Tantabus—only then was I somehow able to find the force of will to oppose it.
Well, no, let’s be honest here, not only with my strengths but also with my weaknesses. I have always been stubborn to a fault. That monster threatened to out-monster me. And if it meant flipping my morality 180 degrees for the cause of revenge? Well, you don’t have to ask me twice.
* * *
Well, with that particular ego trip under my belt, what about the future?
That video is no longer on the Internet. I made sure of that. It also no longer exists on the hard drive where it was originally recorded—some people need to be really careful before executing a program emailed to them by their best friend called HotSexyGirls.exe.
Of course, that means nothing, as that video had dozens of views, and therefore still exists in people’s browser caches and perhaps even deliberately downloaded to hard drives.
I need more magic. What I had was not enough to stop the Tantabus from escaping.
And that failure almost certainly meant that even more victims fell into the Tantabus’ clutches.
School starts in four hours. Politically, I will be completely powerless. Nobody will believe a word I will say.
And my word is all that stands between them and a quite literal “hell on earth”.
Unnamed God of the humans? If you can hear this cowed and desperate invader of your realms, I am in need of your guidance.
What do I do?
Updated Author's Notes:: The "forbidden" video that this chapter dances around is an interview of the halfway-transformed Apple Bloom done by the local television station. It's a bit of plot hole in the original story how this video doesn't cause mass panic in the town, with absolutely everybody dismissing it as a hoax. I fix that by having Sunset get rid of it.
Oh, and Bloom Filter begins with Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo having an as-yet not-completely explained shared dream where they are confronted by a temptress with a golden apple who offers the trio their fondest desires. Apple Bloom's is to have her family ranch turned into an apple farm (and for various other messes in her life to be straightened out), but she resists, and I think her transformation is her punishment.
McPoodle, I don't care what the circumstances of this story's inspiration are. I would dearly love to see it fleshed out, collated, and published. (Mostly because I still have no idea which one it's based off of, and thus have no idea how to fill in the spoiler tags.
)
3692228 I SECOND THE MOTION!!!
3692228
Thirded, for a gajillionth time!
mmmh, it's okay, but I wasn't expecting Sunset to painted in a sympathetic light; I was expecting someone who would slight anyone to acheive her goals with no qualms, not a victim of dark magic or curse.